one hand was the playgoer, always seeking pleasure, paying
exorbitantly for it, suffering unbearable discomforts for it, and
hardly ever getting it. On the other hand was the Salvationist,
repudiating gaiety and courting effort and sacrifice, yet always
in the wildest spirits, laughing, joking, singing, rejoicing,
drumming, and tambourining: his life flying by in a flash of
excitement, and his death arriving as a climax of triumph. And,
if you please, the playgoer despising the Salvationist as a
joyless person, shut out from the heaven of the theatre,
self-condemned to a life of hideous gloom; and the Salvationist
mourning over the playgoer as over a prodigal with vine leaves in
his hair, careering outrageously to hell amid the popping of
champagne corks and the ribald laughter of sirens! Could
misunderstanding be more complete, or sympathy worse misplaced?

Fortunately, the Salvationists are more accessible to the
religious character of the drama than the playgoers to the gay
energy and artistic fertility of religion. They can see, when it
is pointed out to them, that a theatre, as a place where two or
three are gathered together, takes from that divine presence an
inalienable sanctity of which the grossest and profanest farce
can no more deprive it than a hypocritical sermon by a snobbish
bishop can desecrate Westminster Abbey. But in our professional
playgoers this indispensable preliminary conception of sanctity
seems wanting. They talk of actors as mimes and mummers, and, I
fear, think of dramatic authors as liars and pandars, whose main
business is the voluptuous soothing of the tired city speculator
when what he calls the serious business of the day is over.
Passion, the life of drama, means nothing to them but primitive
sexual excitement: such phrases as "impassioned poetry" or