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Hence the general theatre-goer is seldom aided, even by the professional interpreters of theatric art, to arrive at an understanding and appreciation, for its own sake, of that share in the entire artistic production which belongs to the dramatist and the dramatist alone.
The last theatre-goer has disappeared inside his hall door, the last dull roll of the brougham, with its happy laughing load, has died away there is not so much as a single footfall. The cropped holly hedges, the leafless birches, the limes and acacias are still and distinct in the moonlight. A few steps farther out on the highway the copse or plantation sleeps in utter silence.
The public that filled the coffers of the Bijou Theatre was paying its money not so much to see a play by the author of A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler as to see a performance by a clever and tricky actress of alluring personality, who was better advertised and, to the average theatre-goer, better known than Henrik Ibsen.
"It's a long time since I went to see a musical performance. More than twenty years. When I was up at Oxford, and for some years afterwards, I was a great theatre-goer. Never used to miss a first night at the Gaiety. Those were the days of Nellie Farren and Kate Vaughan. Florence St. John, too. How excellent she was in Faust Up To Date! But we missed Nellie Farren.
Being a play-writer and constant theatre-goer, his mind was full of theatrical reminiscences. He remembered at that moment to have noticed that peculiar twitch, that odd expression of countenance, in Sarah Bernhardt when she was acting the part of a profoundly jealous woman. It had then meant, "Go to my rival, to her whom you love, and be comforted do not come to me!"
It was evident that she was glad to see him. She told him so at once. Her husband, she said, had wanted her to go to the theatre, but she had been every night for so long that she was tired of it, and had just decided to stay at home. Was Mr. Dallas then such an infatuated theatre-goer? Noel asked. Oh, yes, he always wanted to go every night, she said.
When I am up in town, I am generally content with looking up a few friends, or playing bridge at the club. I never have been a theatre-goer. "I wonder," she asked, as they seated themselves at a small round table in the restaurant which he had chosen, "I wonder why every now and then you look so serious." "I didn't know that I did," he answered.
And the way to bring out these responses? There is a mass of fine literature to-day wherein love shines clean and noble. There is art telling fine stories. There is a possibility in the Theatre. Probably the average of the theatre-goer is under rather than over twenty-two. Literature, the drama, art; that is the sort of food upon which the young imagination grows stout and tall.
The lamps were now but like furred patches of yellow laid on a dead grey background, and a mud-bespattered crowd rolled in and out of the darkness. The roofs overhead were engulfed in the soot-coloured sky that seemed to be descending on the heads of the passengers. Men passed carrying parcels; the white necktie of a theatre-goer was caught sight of.
Performances of Pippa Passes and The Sunken Bell exert a very unpropitious influence upon the mood of the average theatre-goer. These poems are not plays; and the innocent spectator, being told that they are, is made to believe that poetic drama must be necessarily a soporific thing.
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