The fire-tender.  I suppose Mandeville would say that acting has got into a mannerism which is well described as stagey, and is supposed to be natural to the stage; just as half the modern poets write in a recognized form of literary manufacture, without the least impulse from within, and not with the purpose of saying anything, but of turning out a piece of literary work.  That’s the reason we have so much poetry that impresses one like sets of faultless cabinet-furniture made by machinery.

The parson.  But you need n’t talk of nature or naturalness in acting or in anything.  I tell you nature is poor stuff.  It can’t go alone.  Amateur acting—­they get it up at church sociables nowadays—­is apt to be as near nature as a school-boy’s declamation.  Acting is the Devil’s art.

The mistress.  Do you object to such innocent amusement?

Mandeville.  What the Parson objects to is, that he isn’t amused.

The parson.  What’s the use of objecting?  It’s the fashion of the day to amuse people into the kingdom of heaven.

Herbert.  The Parson has got us off the track.  My notion about the stage is, that it keeps along pretty evenly with the rest of the world; the stage is usually quite up to the level of the audience.  Assumed dress on the stage, since you were speaking of that, makes people no more constrained and self-conscious than it does off the stage.

The mistress.  What sarcasm is coming now?

Herbert.  Well, you may laugh, but the world has n’t got used to good clothes yet.  The majority do not wear them with ease.  People who only put on their best on rare and stated occasions step into an artificial feeling.

Our next door.  I wonder if that’s the reason the Parson finds it so difficult to get hold of his congregation.

Herbert.  I don’t know how else to account for the formality and vapidity of a set “party,” where all the guests are clothed in a manner to which they are unaccustomed, dressed into a condition of vivid self-consciousness.  The same people, who know each other perfectly well, will enjoy themselves together without restraint in their ordinary apparel.  But nothing can be more artificial than the behavior of people together who rarely “dress up.”  It seems impossible to make the conversation as fine as the clothes, and so it dies in a kind of inane helplessness.  Especially is this true in the country, where people have not obtained the mastery of their clothes that those who live in the city have.  It is really absurd, at this stage of our civilization, that we should be so affected by such an insignificant accident as dress.  Perhaps Mandeville can tell us whether this clothes panic prevails in the older societies.

The parson.  Don’t.  We’ve heard it; about its being one of the Englishman’s thirty-nine articles that he never shall sit down to dinner without a dress-coat, and all that.