We see it often asserted that Continental play-goers are incapable of the gross stupidities ascribed to English and Americans, that they dilate with correct emotions at correct moments, that they laugh, weep, tremble, and even faint in perfect accord with the situations of the drama they are witnessing. When Maeterlinck’s “Intruder” was played in Paris, women fainted; when it was played in Philadelphia, they tittered. Perhaps the quality of the acting may account for these varying receptions. A tense situation, imperfectly presented, degenerates swiftly into farce--into very bad farce, too, as Swift said of the vulgar malignities of fate. The Dublin players brought to this country a brand of humour and pathos with which we were unfamiliar. Irish comedy, as we knew it, was of the Dion Boucicault type, a pure product of stageland, and unrelated to any practical experiences of life. Here, on the contrary, was something indigenous to Ireland, and therefore strange to us. My first experience was at the opening night of Ervine’s “Mixed Marriage,” in New York. An audience, exclusively Semitic (so far as I could judge by looking at it), listened in patient bewilderment to the theological bickerings of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. I sat in a box with Lady Gregory who was visibly disturbed by the slowness of the house at the uptake, and unaware that what was so familiar and vital to her was a matter of the purest unconcern to that particular group of Americans. The only thing that roused them from their apathy was the sudden rage with which, in the third act, Tom Rainey shouted at his father: “Ye’re an ould fool, that’s what ye are; a damned ould fool!” At these reprehensible words a gust of laughter swept the theatre, destroying the situation on the stage, but shaking the audience back to life and animation. It was seemingly--though I should be sorry to think it--the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.