Part 4 (1/2)

Auberon. Oh, art, art--don't talk about art!

Amicia. Mercy, we must talk about something!

Dorriforth. Auberon hates generalizations. Nevertheless I make bold to say that we go to the theatre in the same spirit in which we read a novel, some of us to find one thing and some to find another; and according as we look for the particular thing we find it.

Auberon. That's a profound remark.

Florentia. We go to find amus.e.m.e.nt: that, surely, is what we all go for.

Amicia. There's such a diversity in our idea of amus.e.m.e.nt.

Auberon. Don't you impute to people more ideas than they have?

Dorriforth. Ah, one must do that or one couldn't talk about them. We go to be interested; to be absorbed, beguiled and to lose ourselves, to give ourselves up, in short, to a charm.

Florentia. And the charm is the strange, the extraordinary.

Amicia. Ah, speak for yourself! The charm is the recognition of what we know, what we feel.

Dorriforth. See already how you differ.

”SO!”

What we surrender ourselves to is the touch of nature, the sense of life.

Amicia. The first thing is to believe.

Florentia. The first thing, on the contrary, is to _dis_believe.

Auberon. Lord, listen to them!

Dorriforth. The first thing is to folio--to care.

Florentia. I read a novel, I go to the theatre, to forget.

Amicia. To forget what?

Florentia. To forget life; to thro myself into something more beautiful more exciting: into fable and romance.

Dorriforth. The attraction of fable and romance is that it's about _us_, about you and me--or people whose power to suffer and to enjoy is the same as ours. In other words, we _live_ their experience, for the time, and that's hardly escaping from life.

Florentia. I'm not at all particular as to what you call it. Call it an escape from the common, the prosaic, the immediate.

Dorriforth. You couldn't put it better. That's the life that art, with Auberon's permission, gives us; that's the distinction it confers. This is why the greatest commonness is when our guide turns out a vulgar fellow--the angel, as we had supposed him, who has taken us by the hand.

Then what becomes of our escape?

Florentia. It's precisely then that I complain of him. He leads us into foul and dreary places--into flat and foolish deserts.

Dorriforth. He leads us into his own mind, his own vision of things: that's the only place into which the poet _can_ lead us. It's there that he finds ”As You Like It,” it is there that he finds ”Comus,” or ”The Way of the World,” or the Christmas pantomime. It is when he betrays us, after he has got us in and locked the door, when he can't keep from us that we are in a bare little hole and that there are no pictures on the walls, it is then that the immediate and the foolish overwhelm us.

Amicia. That's what I liked in the piece we have been looking at. There was an artistic intention, and the little room wasn't bare: there was sociable company in it. The actors were very humble aspirants, they were common--