Art and Artlessness

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Benjamin_Wilson_-_David_Garrick_and_George_Anne_Bellamy_in_%22Romeo_and_Juliet%22,_Act_V,_Scene_iii_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

A clergyman once asked Mr. Garrick, why a church congregation was seldom brought to tears, when the same persons placed in a theatre would be worked up to grief by a fictitious distress. ‘The reason,’ answered Garrick, ‘is obvious; we repeat a fiction as though it were a truth; you repeat a truth as though it were a fiction.’

— Annual Gleanings of Wit and Humour, 1816