“Well—­and now tell me what you thought of it all.  What impressed you most about the whole affair?”

“I think,” said Austin, speaking very slowly, as though weighing every word, “that the general impression made upon me was that of utter unreality.  I cannot conceive of anything more essentially artificial.  The music was pretty, the scenery was very fine, and the costumes were dazzling enough—­from a distance; but when you’ve said that you’ve said everything.  The situations were impossible and absurd.  The speeches were bombast.  The sentiment was silly and untrue.  And Sardanapalus himself was none so distraught by his unpleasant dream and all his other troubles but that he was looking forward to his glass of whiskey-and-water between the acts.  No, he didn’t impose on me one bit.  I didn’t believe in Sardanapalus for a moment, even before I had the privilege of seeing and hearing him as Mr Buskin in his dressing-room.  The entire business was a sham.”

“But surely it doesn’t pretend to be anything else?” suggested St Aubyn, surprised.

“Be it so.  I don’t like shams, I suppose,” returned the boy.

“Still, you shouldn’t generalise too widely,” urged the other.  “There are plays where one’s sensibilities are really touched, where the situations are not forced, where the performers move and speak like living, ordinary human beings, and, in the case of great actors, work upon the feelings of the audience to such an extent——­”

“And there the artificiality is all the greater!” chipped in Austin, tersely.  “The more perfect the illusion, the hollower the artificiality.  Of course, no one could take Sardanapalus seriously, any more than if he were a marionette pulled by strings instead of the sort of live marionette he really is.  But where the acting and the situations are so perfect, as you say, as to cause real emotion, the unreality of the whole business is more flagrantly conspicuous than ever.  The emotions pourtrayed are not real, and nobody pretends they are.  The art, therefore, of making them appear real, and even communicating them to the audience, must of necessity involve greater artificiality than where the acting is bad and the situations ridiculous.  There’s a person I know, near where I live—­you never heard of him, of course, but he’s called Jock MacTavish—­and he told me he once went to see a really very great actress do some part or other in which she had to die a most pathetic death.  It was said to be simply heart-rending, and everybody used to cry.  Well, the night Jock MacTavish was there something went wrong—­a sofa was out of its place, or a bolster had been forgotten, or a rope wouldn’t work, I don’t know what it was—­and the language that woman indulged in while she was in the act of dying would have disgraced a bargee.  Jock was in a stage-box and heard every filthy word of it.  Of course he told me the story as a joke, and I was rather disgusted, but I’m glad he did so now.  That was an extreme case, I know—­such things don’t occur one time in ten thousand, no doubt—­but it’s an illustration of what I mean when I say that the finer the illusion produced the hollower the sham that produces it.”