at the Court Theatre or His Majesty’s you are
looking through a window; an unusually large window.
But the advantage of the small theatre exactly is
that you are looking through a small window.
Has not every one noticed how sweet and startling any
landscape looks when seen through an arch? This
strong, square shape, this shutting off of everything
else is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the
essential of beauty. The most beautiful part
of every picture is the frame.
This especially is true of the toy theatre; that,
by reducing the scale of events it can introduce much
larger events. Because it is small it could easily
represent the earthquake in Jamaica. Because
it is small it could easily represent the Day of Judgment.
Exactly in so far as it is limited, so far it could
play easily with falling cities or with falling stars.
Meanwhile the big theatres are obliged to be economical
because they are big. When we have understood
this fact we shall have understood something of the
reason why the world has always been first inspired
by small nationalities. The vast Greek philosophy
could fit easier into the small city of Athens than
into the immense Empire of Persia. In the narrow
streets of Florence Dante felt that there was room
for Purgatory and Heaven and Hell. He would have
been stifled by the British Empire. Great empires
are necessarily prosaic; for it is beyond human power
to act a great poem upon so great a scale. You
can only represent very big ideas in very small spaces.
My toy theatre is as philosophical as the drama of
Athens.
XXIV
A Tragedy of Twopence
My relations with the readers of this page have been
long and pleasant, but—perhaps for that
very reason— I feel that the time has come
when I ought to confess the one great crime of my
life. It happened a long time ago; but it is
not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse to reveal
such dark episodes long after they have occurred.
It has nothing to do with the orgies of the Anti-Puritan
League. That body is so offensively respectable
that a newspaper, in describing it the other day,
referred to my friend Mr. Edgar Jepson as Canon Edgar
Jepson; and it is believed that similar titles are
intended for all of us. No; it is not by the
conduct of Archbishop Crane, of Dean Chesterton, of
the Rev. James Douglas, of Monsignor Bland, and even
of that fine and virile old ecclesiastic, Cardinal
Nesbit, that I wish (or rather, am driven by my conscience)
to make this declaration. The crime was committed
in solitude and without accomplices. Alone I
did it. Let me, with the characteristic thirst
of penitents to get the worst of the confession over,
state it first of all in its most dreadful and indefensible
form. There is at the present moment in a town
in Germany (unless he has died of rage on discovering
his wrong), a restaurant-keeper to whom I still owe
twopence. I last left his open-air restaurant
knowing that I owed him twopence. I carried it
away under his nose, despite the fact that the nose
was a decidedly Jewish one. I have never paid
him, and it is highly improbable that I ever shall.
How did this villainy come to occur in a life which
has been, generally speaking, deficient in the dexterity
necessary for fraud? The story is as follows—and
it has a moral, though there may not be room for that.
