And I think realism will have to be the mainstay of the Grand Guignol programmes. There is another “shocker” in the bill, _Private Room No. 6_, by a French author, M. de Lorde, which seemed to me not half so effective as the other because it was largely tinged with romance. Here again was an attempt to gratify curiosity about an unusual experience. The incident was distinctly “private and confidential.” How many of us have had the chance of seeing a fiercely-whiskered Muscovite kissing and biting a (conveniently _décolletée_) lady on the shoulder, subsequently swallowing a tumblerful of kummel at a draught, and presently being strangled by the lady’s glove? This, you may say, was realistic enough, but what made it romantic, theatrical, was the obviously artificial arrangement of the story, the “preparations,” the conventional types. You knew at once you were in the theatre and being served with carefully calculated “thrills.” That is to say, your curiosity was solely about what was going to happen next in the playwright’s scheme—the common interest of every stage plot—which is a very different thing from curiosity about strange, rare, experiences in actual life. You felt that Mr. Berkeley had really shown you “what it’s like.” You felt that M. de Lorde had only shown you what his skill in theatrical invention was like. And there, I suspect, we reach a limitation of Grand Guignolism. The art of drama at its best—shall we call it grand art, as distinguished from Grand Guignol art?—does not exist to gratify curiosity. The best drama does not provoke the spectator’s curiosity about what is going to happen so much as excite in him a keen desire that a certain thing shall happen and then satisfy that desire to the full. The Greek tragedians did not scruple to announce their plot in advance. Lessing, in his “Hamburg Dramaturgy,” maintains that “the dramatic interest is all the stronger and keener the longer and more certainly we have been allowed to foresee everything,” and adds, “So far am I from holding that the end ought to be hidden from the spectator that I don’t think the enterprise would be a task beyond my strength were I to undertake a play of which the end should be announced in advance, from the very first scene.” The truth is, in the fine art of drama we are seeking what we seek in every fine art—beauty, a new form and colouring to be given to the actions and emotions of the real world by the artist’s imagination. But even on the lower plane of realism Grand Guignolism has ample scope. The one-act formula has a clear technical advantage in the single scene and strict coincidence of supposed with actual time, great helps both to unity of impression. (One counted the minutes in _Eight o’Clock_ almost as anxiously as the condemned man did.) And it has the immense fun of theatrical experiment, of seeing how far you can go, what shocks the public can stand and what it can’t, the joy of adventurously exploring the unknown and the _inédit_.