Even the women of the town are dainty. They might almost be Dresden china shepherdesses (which would be bearing out the original suggestion of a Newgate “pastoral” very literally). For the sordid _milieu_ is so remote from us as to have become fantastically unreal; the Peachums and the Lockits are no longer ugly men, but have been turned into grotesque gargoyles; the rabble round Tyburn Tree has lived to see a Russian ballet and learnt to move in its elegant arabesques. It is a Hogarth retouched by a Shepperson—or rather, to speak by the card, by a Lovat Fraser. GRAND GUIGNOLISM Dandin, the judge in Racine’s comedy of _Les Plaideurs_, offers to amuse Isabelle by the spectacle of a little torturing. “Eh! Monsieur,” exclaims Isabelle, “eh, Monsieur, peut on voir souffrir des malheureux?” and Dandin, in his reply, speaks for a by no means negligible proportion of the human race: “Bon! cela fait toujours passer une heure ou deux.” Dandin was a Guignolite. We all have our Guignolite moments, moments of Taine’s “ferocious gorilla” surviving in civilized man, when we seek the spectacle of torture or physical suffering or violent death; but we are careful to æsthetize them, refine them into moments of poetry or art. The pleasure of tragedy is æsthetic. Nevertheless, tragedy involves violent death, and without that would be an idle tale. So Rousseau was not altogether wrong when he said we go to a tragedy for the pleasure of seeing others suffer, without suffering ourselves. Your true Guignolite simply prefers his tragedy “neat,” without æsthetic dilution. But I think it is unfair to charge him, as he is so often charged, with a love of the horrible for its own sake. I think, rather, that he is moved, a little more actively than the rest of the world, by curiosity.