There are people so foolish as to think that nobody can like what they do not; also so fatuous as to consider that no one ought to like what they do not; but to jump from this to alleging that the professed admirers of ambitious works are humbugs is outrageous. The butcher boy enjoys _Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street_: why should he disbelieve my statement that others get pleasure from a performance of a _Hedda Gabler_, which would hardly appeal to him?
Large numbers of playgoers have been kept away from able and ambitious dramas, written by dramatists with a true artistic aim, because of the oft-repeated allegations by newspaper writers, who did not like them, that everybody was bored; also the wholesale denunciation of the lighter forms of dramatic and musico-dramatic forms of entertainment by some of the critics has weakened their influence, has led the man in the street to think that if Mr X. or Y. or Z. can find no pleasure in what he likes that he will get no entertainment from what they admire. One supposes, at least hopes, that dramatic critics of all kinds and grades have an honest desire for the advance and success of British Drama. They will hardly be successful in their wishes unless on each side a little more tolerance is shown for the opinions professed by members of the other.
In some criticisms on certain demi-semi-private performances given in London by a well-known French actress and her company there seemed to be a note not often discoverable in English articles dealing with the theatre. It appeared as if several of the writers had a kind of fierce exultation in the thought that the play represented was likely to shock a good many people--people presumably entitled to have their feelings considered seriously. In the annals of English art there has been rather a scanty exhibition of the desire to do what may be most easily described by two French phrases, "_épater le bourgeois_" or "_ébouriffer le bourgeois_."
It is, in fact, noticeable that we possess no recognised English set phrase, such as "to startle the Philistine" or "to ruffle the hair of the Philistine." Indeed, before Matthew Arnold imported the term Philistine from Germany, as equivalent in art matters to the French "_le bourgeois_" or the later expression "_l'épicier_," we really had nothing at all to correspond with these terms. For to shock "Mrs Grundy" is quite off the point. This is the more remarkable because the _bourgeois_ feeling--treated, by the way, admirably in Balzac's short story "Pierre Grassou"--has long been the curse of English art, and, as represented by the Royal Academy, still remains a paramount power for evil.