and I can willingly believe this, for I have myself often felt very curiously stirred when listening to the jazz-band at young people’s parties.
[5] I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism, page 143.
The naming of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas as it used to be called, brings me to the perfumes, which, I learnt, were led along each row of seats by what I had taken for hot-water pipes. This again, Fabian said, was a legacy of the third (1914–1918) Great War of European Settlement, and he gave me to read an account I have since recovered of a gas which caused “the most appalling mental distress and misery.”[6] Of course the means had been much refined, and the fairfusser could at will set free gases which brought about sorrow, fear, joy, shame, the love of glory or of animals, and indeed any emotion, all without the least risk of harm; though it is true that some serious mishaps, especially in the early stages, had unluckily happened.
[6] J. B. S. Haldane, Callinicus.
The combined result was that almost any feeling, and any required degree of that feeling, could be produced by the fairfusser, and this the government found of the greatest use at times of political or European crisis, when wars were to be declared or averted, or any controversial measure passed.
I was bound to utter my high admiration of the lengths to which the art of the drama had been carried, and made so salutary an influence, though I could not help doubting whether such a tool in the hands of rulers might not be a little dangerous: but I was assured that this had already been foreseen, and that the national theatres were closed during the period of a general election, and of debates of high moment, such as those on the budget.
I asked if there were no theatres in which human beings came upon the stage and strutted and talked after the manner of common life, as they do to-day, and I was told that there were many kinds: but that before going to see them I would be taken to the Dramatic Academy, which had been handsomely endowed by an Anglo-Caucasian millionaire. I thought I should learn more of the trend of the art by going there than by attendance at a number of theatres, and gladly consented to the proposal.
II
THE DRAMATIC ACADEMY
This academy is not an entire single building, but a continuation of several houses on both sides of a street, which growing waste (owing to changes in fashion), was purchased and applied to that use. I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the academy.