lights and cheese-cloth are not art? Schubert’s piano trio, op. 99, is art, and a pianoforte is a mere wooden box containing a number of little hammers that hit an equal number of steel and copper wires. What if I can read a full imagination into “Romeo and Juliet” and thus people it and make it live for me, without going to the theatre? So, too, can I read a full melody into the manuscript of a song by Hugo Wolf and thus make it sing for me, without going to a concert hall. But why? Is there only one way to appreciate and enjoy art--and since when? Wagner on a single violin is Wagner; Wagner on all the orchestra is super-Wagner. To read a great drama is to play “Parsifal” on a cornet and an oboe. The object of the theatre is not, as is habitually maintained, a shrewd excitation of the imagination of a crowd, but rather a shrewd relaxation of that imagination. It is a faulty axiom that holds the greatest actor in the theatre to be an audience’s imagination, and the adroit cultivation of the latter to be ever productive of large financial return. As I have on more than one occasion pointed out from available and acutely relevant statistics, the more a dramatist relies upon the imagination, of an audience, the less the box-office reward that is his. An audience fills a theatre auditorium not so eager to perform with its imagination as to have its imagination performed upon. This is not the paradox it may superficially seem to be. The difference is the difference between a prompt commercial failure like Molnar’s “Der Gardeofficier” (“Where Ignorance Is Bliss”) which asks an audience to perform with its imagination and a great commercial success like Barrie’s “Peter Pan” which performs upon the audience’s imagination by supplying to it every detail of imagination, ready-made and persuasively labelled. The theatre is not a place to which one goes in search of the unexplored corners of one’s imagination; it is a place to which one goes in repeated search of the familiar corners of one’s imagination. The moment the dramatist works in the direction of unfamiliar corners, he is lost. This, contradictorily enough, is granted by the very critics who hold to the imagination fallacy which I have just described. They unanimously agree that a dramatist’s most successful cultivation of an audience lies in what they term, and nicely, the mood of recognition, and in the same breath paradoxically contend that sudden imaginative shock is a desideratum no less.