Theatrical art begins as the holding up to Nature of a distorting
mirror. In this phase it pleases people who are childish enough to
believe that they can see what they look like and what they are when
they look at a true mirror. Naturally they think that a true mirror can
teach them nothing. Only by giving them back some monstrous image can
the mirror amuse them or terrify them. It is not until they grow up to
the point at which they learn that they know very little about
themselves, and that they do not see themselves in a true mirror as
other people see them, that they become consumed with curiosity as to
what they really are like, and begin to demand that the stage shall be
a mirror of such accuracy and intensity of illumination that they shall
be able to get glimpses of their real selves in it, and also learn a
little how they appear to other people.
For audiences of this highly developed class, sex can no longer be
ignored or conventionalized or distorted by the playwright who makes
the mirror. The old sentimental extravagances and the old grossnesses
are of no further use to him. Don Giovanni and Zerlina are not gross:
Tristan and Isolde are not extravagant or sentimental. They say and do
nothing that you cannot bear to hear and see; and yet they give you,
the one pair briefly and slightly, and the other fully and deeply, what
passes in the minds of lovers. The love depicted may be that of a
philosophic adventurer tempting an ignorant country girl, or of a
tragically serious poet entangled with a woman of noble capacity in a
passion which has become for them the reality of the whole universe. No
matter: the thing is dramatized and dramatized directly, not talked
about as something that happened before the curtain rose, or that will
happen after it falls.