It cannot be said that the desire to "_ébouriffer le bourgeois_" often leads to valuable results so far as the works intended to accomplish the feat are concerned, although it is possible that some of them have otherwise had a beneficial result. Another French phrase, "_pour activer la digestion_," contains a hint that such an attempt may indirectly render service to art. Our popular ideas of medical treatment have never adopted the theory suggested by the foreign phrase, which is that when the digestive apparatus is sluggish it is advisable to eat something violently indigestible so that the stomach, summoning all its forces to deal with the intruder, may be aroused to a state of activity. This is a kind of theory to be tried on the dog--not your own dog, of course. Yet it may be that an occasional slap in the face of the public in respect of artistic matters awakens it from the complacent state of lethargy in which it lies with regard to most questions of art. The young English dramatist has very few opportunities of making the hair of the Philistine stand on end or activating his digestion; he is worse off than the youthful British painter who, as those that have haunted the English studios and the ateliers on the Surrey side of the Seine well know, can give a kind of birth to his insults to the taste of the churchwarden. Once down upon canvas a picture is at least half-alive, whilst nothing is more pitifully dead than the audacious play in manuscript. The Théâtre de l'Oeuvre gave to French revolutionaries in dramatic art the chance of setting the Seine on fire, but the Censor has allowed our playwrights little scope. The evasion of his authority by means of nominally private performances has brought into brief life on the boards very few pieces in my time in which one can really see evidence of the youthful desire to shock the Philistine. In _Ghosts_, _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_, and _Monna Vanna_, though all three were prohibited by the authority, there is no sign of the particular element in question. The first two are serious, sober studies of social problems, not intended to shock or startle but to educate the orthodox. The prohibition of the third was simply an official blunder in relation to a dignified work of art.