as enjoying intensely the performance of the king in Hamlet
because anybody could see that the king was an actor, and
resenting Garrick's Hamlet because it might have been a real man.
Yet we have only to look at the portraits of Garrick to see that
his performances would nowadays seem almost as extravagantly
stagey as his costumes. In our day Calve's intensely real Carmen
never pleased the mob as much as the obvious fancy ball
masquerading of suburban young ladies in the same character.


HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE.

Theatrical art begins as the holding up to Nature of a distorting
mirror. In this phase it pleases people who are childish enough
to believe that they can see what they look like and what they
are when they look at a true mirror. Naturally they think that a
true mirror can teach them nothing. Only by giving them back some
monstrous image can the mirror amuse them or terrify them. It is
not until they grow up to the point at which they learn that they
know very little about themselves, and that they do not see
themselves in a true mirror as other people see them, that they
become consumed with curiosity as to what they really are like,
and begin to demand that the stage shall be a mirror of such
accuracy and intensity of illumination that they shall be able to
get glimpses of their real selves in it, and also learn a little
how they appear to other people.

For audiences of this highly developed class, sex can no longer
be ignored or conventionalized or distorted by the playwright who
makes the mirror. The old sentimental extravagances and the old