over night.  But the management declined, to prosecute when it was represented to them that the man had lately seen McKEAN BUCHANAN at the Peoria Academy of Music, and that he could not help testifying his gratification that LESTER WALLACK behaved so differently, and he was discharged.  He went back to Peoria, and told his neighbors that there was a place in New York where they got up a yawning match (this coarse person called it a “gaping bee”) every night between the stage and the audience, and the stage always won.

Now we know, that is those of us who are in good society, that what this uncouth rustic mistook for indifference is the air of society.  TALLEYRAND said, or somebody said he said, that the use of language was to conceal thought.  Go to WALLACK’S and you will see that the art of acting is to suppress emotions.  Everything is below concert-pitch, except perhaps the orchestra, which insists upon playing lively and popular music, instead of doing the Dead March in Saul for a funeral procession while the audience files out dreamily to drink, and empties some dull opiate to the drains.  The entire audience are making heroic efforts all through the play to prevent each other from seeing that they know they are listening to the most finished acting to be seen anywhere, and looking at the prettiest stage pictures ever set.  All the actors are all the while trying to conceal the fact that they are doing any good acting.  The whole theatre is in a condition of sweet repose, like the placid bosom of a mill-pond on a summer afternoon, when STODDART shoots the Dam.

Well, when you have society theatres, where they do this sort of thing, you must have society plays.  The recipe for these is different from the gallon of gore and the ton of thunder which make up the other sort.  You must have your actors representing people who are always bored to death, if you wish to maintain the respect and patronage of a society audience, whose ambition is to seem to be always bored to death in real life.  You must have what the sweet but-not exemplary SWINBURNE calls “the lilies and languors of virtue” at WALLACK’S, to balance “the raptures and roses of vice” which you get at the sensational shops.  People may fall in love, in a mild way, as they do in society, but they must not undergo the ravages of that passion, as it is exhibited out of society.  They are, so to speak, vaccinated for love, and they are safe from the virulent confluent or even the varioloid type of the original malady.  They may also transact business, of a high-toned sort, and sometimes they get out of temper.  But their main employment is to wander about and yawn, or to sit down and sneer.