snatch up the outer cover with the _feuilleton_. If only the Englishwoman, in the mass, could learn to take some pleasure in thinking and to bear thinking in taking her pleasure, the artistic standards of this country would be raised immeasurably. We should have better plays in our theatres, for one thing, and—how badly we want it—better actresses. The stage minx who has a few tricks and looks pretty might disappear before the disapprobation of her sex, and learn before she reappeared how to speak and walk and stand still on the stage. We might evolve again a really great tragic actress or even a comic one. We have neither of them now. We might, impossible as it may seem, make some artistic use of the cinema, for that, if anything, is the haunt of women who find that it saves them even the trouble of reading. It is well, perhaps, for one’s peace of mind that one does not stop to imagine the possible appearance in all its nakedness of the soul to which the bulk of modern films appeals. Would it not be a distorted impish little thing, with vacuous goggling eyes, a slobbering mouth and a receding chin? Would it not have a woman’s form to wriggle in ecstasy as a gigantic tear squeezed out of Mary Pickford’s magnified eyelid? It is a monstrosity unworthy to exist, and yet it now thrives amazingly upon its ample diet. In thousands of halls in towns, villages and cities it is fed every afternoon and evening with variations of the same crudity which never palls upon its unregenerate palate. Who can speak of art in England with this vast daily sacrifice to its negation drawing millions to the unedifying rites?