But the stage presents much more shocking phenomena than those of sex.
There is, of course, a sense in which you cannot present sex on the
stage, just as you cannot present murder. Macbeth must no more really
kill Duncan than he must himself be really slain by Macduff. But the
feelings of a murderer can be expressed in a certain artistic
convention; and a carefully prearranged sword exercise can be gone
through with sufficient pretence of earnestness to be accepted by the
willing imaginations of the younger spectators as a desperate combat.
The tragedy of love has been presented on the stage in the same way. In
Tristan and Isolde, the curtain does not, as in Romeo and Juliet, rise
with the lark: the whole night of love is played before the spectators.
The lovers do not discuss marriage in an elegantly sentimental way:
they utter the visions and feelings that come to lovers at the supreme
moments of their love, totally forgetting that there are such things in
the world as husbands and lawyers and duelling codes and theories of
sin and notions of propriety and all the other irrelevancies which
provide hackneyed and bloodless material for our so-called plays of
passion.