Theatrical art begins as the holding up to Nature of a distorting mirror.  In this phase it pleases people who are childish enough to believe that they can see what they look like and what they are when they look at a true mirror.  Naturally they think that a true mirror can teach them nothing.  Only by giving them back some monstrous image can the mirror amuse them or terrify them.  It is not until they grow up to the point at which they learn that they know very little about themselves, and that they do not see themselves in a true mirror as other people see them, that they become consumed with curiosity as to what they really are like, and begin to demand that the stage shall be a mirror of such accuracy and intensity of illumination that they shall be able to get glimpses of their real selves in it, and also learn a little how they appear to other people.

For audiences of this highly developed class, sex can no longer be ignored or conventionalized or distorted by the playwright who makes the mirror.  The old sentimental extravagances and the old grossnesses are of no further use to him.  Don Giovanni and Zerlina are not gross:  Tristan and Isolde are not extravagant or sentimental.  They say and do nothing that you cannot bear to hear and see; and yet they give you, the one pair briefly and slightly, and the other fully and deeply, what passes in the minds of lovers.  The love depicted may be that of a philosophic adventurer tempting an ignorant country girl, or of a tragically serious poet entangled with a woman of noble capacity in a passion which has become for them the reality of the whole universe.  No matter:  the thing is dramatized and dramatized directly, not talked about as something that happened before the curtain rose, or that will happen after it falls.

FARCICAL COMEDY SHIRKING ITS SUBJECT.

Now if all this can be done in the key of tragedy and philosophic comedy, it can, I have always contended, be done in the key of farcical comedy; and Overruled is a trifling experiment in that manner.  Conventional farcical comedies are always finally tedious because the heart of them, the inevitable conjugal infidelity, is always evaded.  Even its consequences are evaded.  Mr. Granville Barker has pointed out rightly that if the third acts of our farcical comedies dared to describe the consequences that would follow from the first and second in real life, they would end as squalid tragedies; and in my opinion they would be greatly improved thereby even as entertainments; for I have never seen a three-act farcical comedy without being bored and tired by the third act, and observing that the rest of the audience were in the same condition, though they were not vigilantly introspective enough to find that out, and were apt to blame one another, especially the husbands and wives, for their crossness.  But it is happily by no means true