It is customary to talk of curiosity as though it were essentially ignoble. Children, women, and savages are said to have most of it. It accounts for “fortune-telling,” prophetic almanacs, spiritualistic _séances_ and other forms of alleged communication with the dead. But the truth is, curiosity, the desire to enlarge experience, is a highly valuable, or, rather, indispensable, human attribute. Without it there could be no science, no progress, and finally no human life at all. And you cannot restrict it. It must crave for all forms of experience. Some of us will be sweeping the heavens for new stars, and others will want to peep into Bluebeard’s cupboard. More particularly we are curious to know what is already known to others. We desire to see with our own eyes what others have seen and reported to us. That is why so many people have gone to _Chu Chin Chow_. We wish to realize for ourselves, by the direct aid of our own senses, “What it’s like.” And the more difficult it is to see, the greater the secrecy, the intimacy, of its actual happening in life, the greater our curiosity to see a picture or other representation of it. Hence the vogue of stage bedroom scenes, newspaper portraits of “the victim” and “the place of the crime,” and Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. I believe that is why “cela”—the horrible, the dreadful, the gruesome—“fait toujours passer une heure ou deux” for your Guignolite. It satisfies his curiosity about an experience which in real life it is rare or difficult to obtain. For instance, they have been showing at the London Grand Guignol a representation of a criminal’s last half-hour before execution. Time was when you could see that for yourself, follow the prisoner in the cart to Tyburn, and offer him nosegays or pots of beer. In that time, enjoying the real thing, you wanted no mimic representation of it. For stage purposes you only cared to have it fantasticated—as in _The Beggar’s Opera_. To-day you cannot (unless you are a prison official or the hangman himself) enjoy the real thing; the Press is excluded; so you seek the next best thing, a realistic stage picture of it. “Realistic,” I say. That is the merit of Mr. Reginald Berkeley’s _Eight o’Clock_, wherein there is not a trace of staginess or imported sentiment. He gives you what you are looking for, the nearest substitute for the real thing. You are shown, as accurately as possible, “what it’s like.” You see how the warders behave, and how the chaplain and how the prisoner—with the result that you feel as though, for that terrible half-hour, you had been in Newgate yourself. You have gone through an experience which in actual life (let us hope) you will never have. Your curiosity has been satisfied.