"It will be known better yet, won't it? when the essentially brutal nature of the modern audience is still more perceived, when it has been properly analysed: the _omnium gatherum_ of the population of a big commercial city at the hour of the day when their taste is at its lowest, flocking out of hideous hotels and restaurants, gorged with food, stultified with buying and selling and with all the other sordid preoccupations of the age, squeezed together in a sweltering mass, disappointed in their seats, timing the author, timing the actor, wishing to get their money back on the spot--all before eleven o'clock. Fancy putting the exquisite before such a tribunal as that! There's not even a question of it. The dramatist wouldn't if he could, and in nine cases out of ten he couldn't if he would. He has to make the basest concessions. One of his principal canons is that he must enable his spectators to catch the suburban trains, which stop at 11.30. What would you think of any other artist--the painter or the novelist--whose governing forces should be the dinner and the suburban trains? The old dramatists didn't defer to them--not so much at least--and that's why they're less and less actable. If they're touched--the large loose men--it's only to be mutilated and trivialised. Besides, they had a simpler civilisation to represent--societies in which the life of man was in action, in passion, in immediate and violent expression. Those things could be put upon the playhouse boards with comparatively little sacrifice of their completeness and their truth. To-day we're so infinitely more reflective and complicated and diffuse that it makes all the difference. What can you do with a character, with an idea, with a feeling, between dinner and the suburban trains? You can give a gross, rough sketch of them, but how little you touch them, how bald you leave them! What crudity compared with what the novelist does!" "Do you write novels, Mr. Nash?" Peter candidly asked. "No, but I read them when they're extraordinarily good, and I don't go to plays. I read Balzac for instance--I encounter the admirable portrait of Valerie Marneffe in _La Cousine Bette_." "And you contrast it with the poverty of Emile Augier's Seraphine in _Les Lionnes Pauvres_? I was awaiting you there. That's the _cheval de bataille_ of you fellows." "What an extraordinary discussion! What dreadful authors!" Lady Agnes murmured to her son. But he was listening so attentively to the other young men that he made no response, and Peter Sherringham went on: "I've seen Madame Carre in things of the modern repertory, which she has made as vivid to me, caused to abide as ineffaceably in my memory, as Valerie Marneffe. She's the Balzac, as one may say, of actresses." "The miniaturist, as it were, of whitewashers!" Nash offered as a substitute.