Overruled | Page 4

convention that a man should fight a duel or
come to fisticuffs with his wife's lover if she has one, or the convention
that he should strangle her like Othello, or turn her out of the house and
never see her or allow her to see her children again, or the convention
that she should never be spoken to again by any decent person and
should finally drown herself, or the convention that persons involved in
scenes of recrimination or confession by these conventions should call
each other certain abusive names and describe their conduct as guilty
and frail and so on: all these may provide material for very effective
plays; but such plays are not dramatic studies of sex: one might as well
say that Romeo and Juliet is a dramatic study of pharmacy because the
catastrophe is brought about through an apothecary. Duels are not sex;
divorce cases are not sex; the Trade Unionism of married women is not
sex. Only the most insignificant fraction of the gallantries of married
people produce any of the conventional results; and plays occupied
wholly with the conventional results are therefore utterly unsatisfying
as sex plays, however interesting they may be as plays of intrigue and
plot puzzles.

The world is finding this out rapidly. The Sunday papers, which in the
days when they appealed almost exclusively to the lower middle class
were crammed with police intelligence, and more especially with
divorce and murder cases, now lay no stress on them; and police papers
which confined themselves entirely to such matters, and were once
eagerly read, have perished through the essential dulness of their topics.
And yet the interest in sex is stronger than ever: in fact, the literature
that has driven out the journalism of the divorce courts is a literature
occupied with sex to an extent and with an intimacy and frankness that
would have seemed utterly impossible to Thackeray or Dickens if they
had been told that the change would complete itself within fifty years
of their own time.
ART AND MORALITY.
It is ridiculous to say, as inconsiderate amateurs of the arts do, that art
has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist's business
is not that of the policeman; and that such factitious consequences and
put-up jobs as divorces and executions and the detective operations that
lead up to them are no essential part of life, though, like poisons and
buttered slides and red-hot pokers, they provide material for plenty of
thrilling or amusing stories suited to people who are incapable of any
interest in psychology. But the fine artists must keep the policeman out
of his studies of sex and studies of crime. It is by clinging nervously to
the policeman that most of the pseudo sex plays convince me that the
writers have either never had any serious personal experience of their
ostensible subject, or else have never conceived it possible that the
stage door present the phenomena of sex as they appear in nature.
THE LIMITS OF STAGE PRESENTATION.
But the stage presents much more shocking phenomena than those of
sex. There is, of course, a sense in which you cannot present sex on the
stage, just as you cannot present murder. Macbeth must no more really
kill Duncan than he must himself be really slain by Macduff. But the
feelings of a murderer can be expressed in a certain artistic convention;
and a carefully prearranged sword exercise can be gone through with
sufficient pretence of earnestness to be accepted by the willing

imaginations of the younger spectators as a desperate combat.
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