LVIII
We hear a great deal of the American drama’s failure to hold the mirror up to nature. This is nonsense, nothing more nor less. The trouble is not with the drama, but with the mirror! The American drama tries to reflect nature in one of the little mirrors women carry in their vanity-boxes. Some day it may learn—as the French drama has learned—that when there’s any reflecting of nature to be done, you’ve got to use a pier glass. We like to believe, we Anglo-Saxons, that all drama lies in mortals’ faces, and that drama’s purpose is merely to reflect, as in a shaving mirror, men’s tears and smiles. The French, a wiser people, know that drama reposes alone in men’s bodies.