No, the pit will not adore her at all, for say what you will, it is the clothes that sway the earnest and indiscriminating lover of the drama. For once put virtue in a gossamer _peignoir_, the clinging, fascinating kind, and slip her number six feet into a number three satin slipper, and how the pit will rise at her as one man, as they have never done before, and take her to their hearts, for human nature is as yielding as putty to grief that wears nice clothes and is well scrubbed. Unfortunately the world is full of undramatic tragedies that are all the more tragic because of a dire need of soap and water.
As the educator of a public swayed by the eloquence of a slipper and moved to tears by the pathos of a petticoat, one can but beg and implore our dramatists, even at the risk of making their dramas less thrilling, to give virtue a tiny bit of a chance--for a change.
Never has mediocrity been so triumphantly successful as now, and that is the reason we take ourselves so seriously. Never before has it attained such a high level of excellence, and if, for that reason, we miss those grand and lonely peaks that represent the supreme glory of the past, we can at least cheer ourselves by the comfortable reflection that we are each a glorious little peak. That being conceded it goes without saying that, occupied as we are with ourselves, we really have too much to do to bother about the greatness of our friends.
In the past the great man was surrounded by a band of ardent worshippers who circled about him and trumpeted forth his praise. In these degenerate days if there is a great man, he is not surrounded by satellites, for the satellites are practically employed circling about themselves. So the great man girds up his loins and wisely proclaims his own greatness.
Then, too, it is a bother to chant another man's praises if you are quite convinced, and you are probably right, that he is no greater than you are, so you abstain from the folly of it and devote all your energies to blowing your own little trumpet with seraphic vigour. In the past the little bands of ardent worshippers were quite disinterested, a merit to which the occasional ardent worshipper of the present cannot always lay claim. Our modern attitude is one of doubt, and so when we hear a pæan of praise we close one eye and ask "Why?" The fact is we decline to take anyone else seriously, but we make up for that by taking ourselves with redoubled seriousness. In previous ages there were no newspapers who took upon themselves the role of Fame, poising aloft a laurel wreath ready to drop it on the head of the best-advertised genius. In those blissful days, so little appreciated now, when the world could neither read nor write, hero worship was so popular that the lauded one found it unnecessary to take himself too seriously, for others kindly did it for him.
