The tragedy of love has been presented on the stage in the same way.  In Tristan and Isolde, the curtain does not, as in Romeo and Juliet, rise with the lark:  the whole night of love is played before the spectators.  The lovers do not discuss marriage in an elegantly sentimental way:  they utter the visions and feelings that come to lovers at the supreme moments of their love, totally forgetting that there are such things in the world as husbands and lawyers and duelling codes and theories of sin and notions of propriety and all the other irrelevancies which provide hackneyed and bloodless material for our so-called plays of passion.

PRUDERIES OF THE FRENCH STAGE.

To all stage presentations there are limits.  If Macduff were to stab Macbeth, the spectacle would be intolerable; and even the pretence which we allow on our stage is ridiculously destructive to the illusion of the scene.  Yet pugilists and gladiators will actually fight and kill in public without sham, even as a spectacle for money.  But no sober couple of lovers of any delicacy could endure to be watched.  We in England, accustomed to consider the French stage much more licentious than the British, are always surprised and puzzled when we learn, as we may do any day if we come within reach of such information, that French actors are often scandalized by what they consider the indecency of the English stage, and that French actresses who desire a greater license in appealing to the sexual instincts than the French stage allows them, learn and establish themselves on the English stage.  The German and Russian stages are in the same relation to the French and perhaps more or less all the Latin stages.  The reason is that, partly from a want of respect for the theatre, partly from a sort of respect for art in general which moves them to accord moral privileges to artists, partly from the very objectionable tradition that the realm of art is Alsatia and the contemplation of works of art a holiday from the burden of virtue, partly because French prudery does not attach itself to the same points of behavior as British prudery, and has a different code of the mentionable and the unmentionable, and for many other reasons the French tolerate plays which are never performed in England until they have been spoiled by a process of bowdlerization; yet French taste is more fastidious than ours as to the exhibition and treatment on the stage of the physical incidents of sex.  On the French stage a kiss is as obvious a convention as the thrust under the arm by which Macduff runs Macbeth through.  It is even a purposely unconvincing convention:  the actors rather insisting that it shall be impossible for any spectator to mistake a stage kiss for a real one.  In England, on the contrary, realism is carried to the point at which nobody except the two performers can perceive that the caress is not genuine.  And here the English stage is certainly in the right; for whatever question there arises as to what incidents are proper for representation on the stage or not, my experience as a playgoer leaves me in no doubt that once it is decided to represent an incident, it will be offensive, no matter whether it be a prayer or a kiss, unless it is presented with a convincing appearance of sincerity.