There is an old saying that it takes two to make a bargain or a quarrel; and, similarly, it takes two groups of people to make a play,—­those whose minds are active behind the footlights, and those whose minds are active in the auditorium.  We go to the theatre to enjoy ourselves, rather than to enjoy the actors or the author; and though we may be deluded into thinking that we are interested mainly by the ideas of the dramatist or the imagined emotions of the people on the stage, we really derive our chief enjoyment from such ideas and emotions of our own as are called into being by the observance of the mimic strife behind the footlights.  The only thing in life that is really enjoyable is what takes place within ourselves; it is our own experience, of thought or of emotion, that constitutes for us the only fixed and memorable reality amid the shifting shadows of the years; and the experience of anybody else, either actual or imaginary, touches us as true and permanent only when it calls forth an answering imagination of our own.  Each of us, in going to the theatre, carries with him, in his own mind, the real stage on which the two hours’ traffic is to be enacted; and what passes behind the footlights is efficient only in so far as it calls into activity that immanent potential clash of feelings and ideas within our brain.  It is the proof of a bad play that it permits us to regard it with no awakening of mind; we sit and stare over the footlights with a brain that remains blank and unpopulated; we do not create within our souls that real play for which the actual is only the occasion; and since we remain empty of imagination, we find it impossible to enjoy ourselves.  Our feeling in regard to a bad play might be phrased in the familiar sentence,—­“This is all very well; but what is it to me?” The piece leaves us unresponsive and aloof; we miss that answering and tallying of mind—­to use Whitman’s word—­which is the soul of all experience of worthy art.  But a good play helps us to enjoy ourselves by making us aware of ourselves; it forces us to think and feel.  We may think differently from the dramatist, or feel emotions quite dissimilar from those of the imagined people of the story; but, at any rate, our minds are consciously aroused, and the period of our attendance at the play becomes for us a period of real experience.  The only thing, then, that counts in theatre-going is not what the play can give us, but what we can give the play.  The enjoyment of the drama is subjective, and the province of the dramatist is merely to appeal to the subtle sense of life that is latent in ourselves.