Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/243

 the theme of a tragedy, Ettarre. Men are condemned eternally to bore one another. Two hundred years and more from to-day—perhaps forever—man will lack means, or courage, to voice his actual thoughts adequately. He must still talk of weather probabilities and of having seen So-and-so and of such trifles, that mean absolutely nothing to him—and must babble of these things even to the persons who are most dear and familiar to him. Yes, every reputable man must desperately make small-talk, and echo and re-echo senseless phrases, until the crack of doom. He will always be afraid to bare his actual thoughts and interests to his fellows' possible disapproval: or perhaps it is just a pitiable mania with the race. At all events, one should not laugh at this ageless aspersion and burlesque of man's intelligence as performed by man himself

"The comedy is quite new. A marquis, with wonderful canions and a scented wig like an edifice, told me it is by an upholsterer named Coquelin, a barnstormer who ran away from home and has been knocking about the provinces unsuccessfully for nearly twenty years: and my little