At 1 A.M. the rehearsal is over. "Things are fairly satisfactory." It has lasted since 5 P.M. For three more days and nights the same task will be gone through, so that the "first night" may be perfect and the first-night audience may have no hint of the labour that perfection has cost. It is all very fine; in a good producer's hands very artistic. But is it "dramatic art" in the full sense of the word? The question arises more insistently when the "production" is not that of a philosophical treatise in the form of a drama, which must be freely and splendidly illustrated if it is to "sell" at all, but of a Shakespeare play. Sir Herbert Tree is a great producer of Shakespeare; and he illustrates dramas of noble passion and lofty thought with the same elaborate care as he lavishes on a play like _False Gods_, or some "patriotic spectacle" of snippets and fustian. There is another school of "producers" in London, aiming at strangeness, perhaps a little more than at simplicity. It is, in a sense, a school of revolt against elaborate production. I do not think that either school is destined to save or to condemn dramatic art. [Illustration: WESTMINSTER AND THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT] Meanwhile, the theatres in London (and in the provinces which reproduce London successes, and also bring, with the aid of their Repertory Theatres, a valuable addition to the current of dramatic life) can be always trusted to offer something amusing to all tastes, from the serious to the gay and the raffish. A very well-defined type of London theatrical entertainment is the "musical comedy," a taste for which has spread to America, and is now invading France. It grew out of French _opera-bouffe_ by way of burlesque, and of the "comic opera" type which Gilbert and Sullivan made famous. "Musical comedy" has to be bright, tuneful, inconsequential, and illustrated by charming women in charming costumes. Its aid to the happy digestion of dinner is one of its chief claims to popularity, and it strives to amuse without making undue demands on the intelligence. The explorer in the theatrical life of England must not miss the music halls--the smaller ones usually owing part of their attraction to the fact that they are the resort of people whose chief business in life it is to be gay, the larger ones much more regardful of British Puritanism. Yes, perhaps in reviewing the whole situation in painting, music, drama, Art is not so kind to England as Nature; or rather the Englishman does not give so much loving care to the arts as he does to his gardens and parks. Nevertheless, England is not a land altogether of Philistines. CHAPTER XII POLITICAL LIFE IN ENGLAND