Overruled | Page 6

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 that
conjugal infidelities always produce tragic consequences, or that they
need produce even the unhappiness which they often do produce.
Besides, the more momentous the consequences, the more interesting
become the impulses and imaginations and reasonings, if any, of the
people who disregard them. If I had an opportunity of conversing with
the ghost of an executed murderer, I have no doubt he would begin to
tell me eagerly about his trial, with the names of the distinguished
ladies and gentlemen who honored him with their presence on that

occasion, and then about his execution. All of which would bore me
exceedingly. I should say, "My dear sir: such manufactured ceremonies
do not interest me in the least. I know how a man is tried, and how he is
hanged. I should have had you killed in a much less disgusting,
hypocritical, and unfriendly manner if the matter had been in my hands.
What I want to know about is the murder. How did you feel when you
committed it? Why did you do it? What did you say to yourself about it?
If, like most murderers, you had not been hanged, would you have
committed other murders? Did you really dislike the victim, or did you
want his money, or did you murder a person whom you did not dislike,
and from whose death you had nothing to gain, merely for the sake of
murdering? If so, can you describe the charm to me? Does it come
upon you periodically; or is it chronic? Has curiosity anything to do
with it?" I would ply him with all manner of questions to find out what
murder is really like; and I should not be satisfied until I had realized
that I, too, might commit a murder, or else that there is