The interest in the matter lies mainly with the audience, with the human beings greedy for pleasure and entertainment, with the traveller who, after a happy evening at the Comédie Française, endeavours to get taken to the abattoirs of Paris, or risks his life in a visit to the outer Boulevards in order to visit some pestilential Café de la Mort where he will see crude horrors contrived by looking-glasses, drink bad beer out of _papier-maché_ skulls, and receive, in change for his money, base or demonetised coin from waiters dressed as undertakers. And, again, our traveller, after getting a headache at the Louvre and vainly trying to find the Mediaeval improprieties at the Maison Cluny, will refresh himself by a visit to the Morgue, to say nothing of Le Musée Grévin. Why, then, do we go to the theatre? Why does the theatre exist? Why do the enthusiasts rage and profess that it ought to be endowed? Well, upon reflection, one sees that there are two bodies of playgoers, both, no doubt, in search of pleasure: and, speaking very broadly, the one is the little group whose curiosity concerning life is almost entirely intellectual, and the other is the vast body of sensation-hunters, to whom the latest showy play, the newest musical comedy, the divorce case of the moment, the freak in vogue, are the means of real excitement--an excitement which they want to obtain with the minimum expenditure of time, trouble or thought. A remarkable thing to the observer is the hostility of the sensation-monger to intellectual amusement. If a play has a gloomy ending it is promptly denounced as painful by the people who welcome an entertainment consisting of biograph pictures representing some awful catastrophe, and by persons who revel in a good series of animated photographs of somebody being guillotined, or tortured in a Russian gaol, and do not care to waste their tears over the sorrows of people in a play, though perhaps a really roaring farce would entertain them, if it included a good deal of knockabout business. The uncivilized people who consider that practical joking is permissible are as a rule bitterly hostile to serious drama.