"Comedians and entertainers" I said just now. You are all that, all you public characters. You depend upon the crowd, you are too near them. You are in dread of falling back, and also you are aware that the size of a man can only be gauged at a distance, and you have to contend with the charlatan. A better comedian you may be, but he has not your scruples, your sensitiveness, and is therefore more dexterous at drawing the crowd's attention. . . . Again I turn with relief to my puppets; they have no temptation to insincerity; they obey the strings, play their parts, and are put back into their boxes. They need no bread for body or mind. They have no life except the common life of the stage, no individuality and no torturing need of fulfilling it. But you comedians--writers, actors, politicians, divines--are raised above the common life by the degree in which you have developed your individual lives, including your talents, by work, by energy, sometimes deplorably by luck. The validity of your claims is tested by your ability to break with the common life, and pass on to creation and discovery which shall bring back into the common life power to make it more efficient. I must define. By the common life I mean the pooling of energy which shall provide all members of the community with food, clothing, house room, transport, the necessaries of existence, and such luxuries as they require. Its concern is entirely material. Where it governs moral, ethical, and spiritual affairs it is an injurious infringement, and cannot but engender hypocrisy. How can you pool religion, or morality, without degrading compromise? The world has discarded kingcraft and priestcraft and come to mobcraft. That will have its day. Mobcraft is and cannot but be theatrical. In a community of human beings who are neither puppets nor men there is a perpetual shuffling of values among which to live securely there is in all relations an unhealthy amount of play-acting;--take any husband and wife, father and son, mother and daughter, lover and lover, or, Panoukian, schoolmaster and pupil. Life is then too like the theater for the theater to claim an independent existence. And that, I think, is why there is no drama in England. That is why the play-actors have columns and columns in the newspapers devoted to their doings, their portraits in shops and thoroughfares, their private histories (where presentable or in accordance with the public morality of the common life) laid bare. That view of English life so freezes me that I lie back under my umbrella and thank God for the Italian sun.