It may be that in earlier ages, when men were personally familiar with the horrors of a barbarous ethical system, while at the same time they had the culture and refinement belonging to a high development of aesthetic civilisation, the presentation of a great terror immediately suggested the concomitant horror; and suggested it so vividly that the visible definition of the result—­the bloodshed, the agony, and the death-rattle—­would have produced an impression too dreadful to be associated with any pleasure to the beholder There was no curiosity to behold violent death among a people accustomed to see it often enough in the course of their lives, and not yet brutalised into a love of blood for its own sake.  The Romans presented an example of the latter state; they loved horror so well that they demanded real horror and real victims.  And that is the state of the populations of England and America at the present day.  Were it not for the tremendous power of modern law, there is not the slightest doubt that the mass of Londoners or New Yorkers would flock to-day to see a gladiatorial show, or to watch a pack of lions tearing, limb from limb, a dozen unarmed convicts.  Not the “cultured” classes—­some of them would be ashamed, and some would really feel a moral incapacity for witnessing so much pain—­but the masses would go, and would pay handsomely for the sport; and, moreover, if they once tasted blood they would be strong enough to legislate in favour of tasting more.  It is not to the discredit of the Anglo-Saxon race that it loves savage sports.  The blood is naturally fierce, and has not been cowed by the tyranny endured by European races.  There have been more free men under England’s worst tyrants than under France’s most liberal kings.

But, failing gladiators and wild beasts, the people must have horrors on the stage, in literature, in art, and, above all, in the daily press.  Shakspere knew that, and Michelangelo, who is the Shakspere of brush and chisel, knew it also, as those two unrivalled men seem to have known everything else.  And so when Michelangelo painted the Last Judgment, and Shakspere wrote Othello (for instance), they both made use of horror in a way the Greeks would not have tolerated.  Since we no longer see daily enacted before us scenes of murder, torture, and public execution, our curiosity makes us desire to see those scenes represented as accurately as possible.  The Greeks, in their tragedies, did their slaughter behind the scenes, and occasionally the cries of the supposed victims were heard.  But theatre-goers of to-day would feel cheated if the last act of Othello were left to their imagination.  When Salvini thrusts the crooked knife into his throat, with that ghastly sound of death that one never forgets, the modern spectator would not understand what the death-rattle meant, did he not see the action that accompanies it.

“It is too realistic,” said Mr. Barker in his high thin voice when it was over, and he was helping Margaret with her silken wrappings.