I have sat for hours in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, watching the people. The most heterogeneous collection of persons imaginable assemble there. Washerwomen, soldiers, artisans, clerks, clergymen, navvies, all classes and ages. Some wander aimlessly about, some stand petrified before one picture for a quarter of an hour, some look only at portraits, others search for familiar landscapes, others again are attracted by historical interest. There is hardly one of them that would not probably earn the contempt of Mr. Clive Bell if he were to give Mr. Bell the reason of his enjoyment; but I assert with all the emphasis I can command that there is not one of them who has not gained by even ten minutes within that building something impossible to value and precious, beyond estimation. Can any human being go out of the dirt, the indignity, the ugliness, the noise, the formlessness of the modern city into the serenity, the colour, the dignity, the peace, and the beauty of the rooms of the National Gallery without a quickening of the spirit, however imperceptible? What is there in Trafalgar Square apart from the National Gallery which in any degree witnesses that man is more than an animal? True, there is St. Martin's Church, but the associations of the church--irrelevant if you will--adulterate and weaken its spiritual influence on men's minds to-day. But the National Gallery exerts a completely catholic and irradiating power on all who enter.
So does the theatre, even exactly as it stands to-day. I am in profound disagreement with those who raise up their hands in horror at the present state of the theatre where it exists. What causes me to join the chorus of Jeremiahs is the scarcity of theatres, their complete and utter absence in hundreds of large towns where they should exist, and the smallness of their numbers in our largest cities. My mention of Mr. Clive Bell in connection with the National Gallery was doubly relevant, for there is a set of high-brows connected with the theatre who have set their eyes so fixedly on an unreal and abstract perfection that they have become blind. They talk about Serious Drama in the same solemn, pompous and hopeless way that the Calvinists used to talk about salvation, and the mass of the people, cheerfully ignoring them, continues to go tranquilly to perdition. Ask anyone of these apostles of Serious Drama to show you one serious drama, and the odds are that they will say, _Man and Superman_ or _Ghosts_ or _Justice_. Well, there is something to be said for the authors of these three plays, although not one of them is a really first-rate dramatist, the equal of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Euripides, or even Racine, but for their followers--the dealers in the doleful realism of Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the London suburbs--there is in the main nothing to be said whatever. Their works are for the most part immeasurably inferior to the average London Revue, and to accuse the theatre of sinking into degradation because it prefers the wit, humour, beautiful dressing, vivacious dancing, and high spirits of an Ambassador's, Vaudeville, Pavilion, or Alhambra Revue to a serious, machine-made play by Mr. Sutro or two hours of mechanical dulness from someone I had better not name is simply to accuse it of preferring life to the undesirable "seriousness" of the tomb.