The National theatre which I have described was not, of course, the only kind, though it had many imitators; and I shall now pass to some others, beginning with that which I think will most interest readers of the present day, but which was rarely mentioned in the polite society of the age. This was the Cathartic Theatre, where people went to be cured of the passion of love. In our day, as has been for many generations past, we often refer to love-sickness but it is half in jest, and there are few of us who do not think the undoubted pains of the state amply repaid with its joys. Its dangers, however, now only beginning to be recognised, were fully taken into account in 2,100, for it was seen that the claims of society were incompatible with an emotion then relegated to the songs of derivative poets. Already we know that the battle between the self and the ideal social self gives rise to the most frightful diseases, but in our day we only try to cure the unhealthy symptom instead of going to the root of the matter and abolishing the cause. At this time, though the malady was well in hand, its approaches were so insidious that patients going to a doctor for what they thought was one sickness would often be surprised by a diagnosis which convicted them of love, and would later be seen entering the Cathartic Theatre with shamed faces or that air of studied indifference we assume when we do not wish to be noticed, thinking that by this method we shall appear to have no face at all. The theory of this theatre was very simple; and this too, I was proud to think, had been foreshadowed by writers of our own time, one of whom had written, “We have lost the orgy, but in its place we have art,”[7] and another “Poetry acts as a physician.”[8] The aim of the performance was to break down the obstacles we wrongly oppose to our thoughts in rude attempts to fit ourselves to social life, and so allow to drain away those impulses which in any really harmonious nature should never be set up. I must warn the reader of this age not to confuse the method with one of ‘sublimation’ as we say, for this involves the ‘will,’ a fiction of which the futility had long been exposed. It is true that I did not very clearly grasp these matters, which are too far beyond our time――just as Dryden would, perhaps, have found it hard to grasp the true subtleties of Expressionism――but I hope I do not err in saying that an element of vicarious fulfilment also entered into these dramas, on the ground, which no one will contradict, that it is the function of art to provide what everyday life denies us. The name of the theatre, I found indeed, had arisen from that reading of Aristotle which confuses the meaning of Catharsis with that of ‘purgation by excess’: for even in those days the Faculty of Medicine was not always happy in the names it chose for the ills and remedies it invented. [7] Havelock Ellis, _Affirmations_. [8] Robert Graves, _Poetic Unreason_.