Nevertheless it was not legitimate, partly because the circumstances are rare when it is permissible to present madness on the stage, partly because some of the mad people were repulsive to the eye, and partly because horror was the sole means and end of the piece. Many condemned _The Monkey's Paw_, yet a line can be drawn between it and _The Soothing System_--not a nice sharp line, but one of those blurred lines so faint and so uncertain, that even if their existence be admitted, there is always room for a fight on the question whether a work lies on this or that side of it. Speaking roughly, one may say that _The Monkey's Paw_ is legitimate because there is nothing in it repulsive to the eye, and for the reason that horror is not the sole means and end of it: the story, like its prototype folk-lore tale, "The Three Wishes," has an obvious moral. It belongs to art because the emotion caused is due to a stimulus to our imagination by the force of an idea and not of a thing exhibited. If an effort were made to show us any ghastly creature knocking, the work would be out of court. To illustrate the line of definition already indicated, a few instances of the horrible presented on the stage in our time may be given usefully; it must be added that most appear to lie on the wrong side. Shakespeare's adventures in the horrible are legitimate, with an exception in the case of one play of doubtful authenticity, _Titus Andronicus_. On the other hand, _Sweeney Todd; or, The Barber of Fleet Street_, would probably find no defender; whilst a historical drama I once saw in the South of France, where the hero was put upon the rack in front of the footlights and squirmed and screamed, was quite unendurable; and this is rather a pity, since there is a very powerful dramatic scene in Balzac's _Notes sur Catherine de Medicis_, which in consequence of this objection should not be used. There is a mitigated form of the torture business in _La Tosca_ that caused great discussion. Perhaps those who deem it illegitimate are somewhat supersensitive; it would be more polite, and perhaps accurate, to call them hyper-modern. _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_ presented a very difficult case. I can remember nothing so "creepy" and "shuddery" as the first appearance of Mr Mansfield at the Lyceum in the character of the evil doctor; the house gasped at the half-seen image of a sort of obscene beast at the conservatory window, and there was the silence of breathless horror when it bounded into the room and seized its victim. Until the impression wore off the Mansfield Hyde was almost as horrible as the fantastic things born of the cruel imagination and brilliant pencil of Mr S.H. Sime, whose work is sometimes so richly embellished by imagination as well as by superb technique that one cannot deny its claim to be regarded as art.