"The Play and the Public" An essay by Clyde Fitch

I make no pretensions and have no illusions concerning myself or the subject I am about to discuss. I am only a sincere, straightforward person, and what I have to say is only a simple straightforward talk,--not too idealistic--not profound --not meant to be either--but, on the other hand, neither is it pretentious nor bunkumistic. It is, so to speak, an address in words of one syllable about the theatre, to an audience whose interest and experience must necessarily be youthful, compared with my own old age in the subject. It is besides, a heart to heart and hand to hand talk, by a man who at least loves both the theatre and the public, and spends most of his time, his strength, and his enthusiasm in doing the best that he can for them.

I've never yet met anyone who dreamed their brains were too small to adequately and completely discuss the theatre, but I've met a great many persons who thought their brains were too big. I don't remember ever having met anyone entirely ignorant of the theatre, who hesitated one moment to walk right in and criticise wholeheartedly, where an educated arch-angel of the drama would perhaps have side-stepped mentally, and felt his way.

Nothing is too good for the drama as intelligent and useful discussion of the theatre. But unfortunately there is on the one hand too much ignorant, or misinformed, or impracticable discussion, too much bunkum "press work," advertising lies, printed and repeated and accepted as true propaganda by amateurs of the drama; and on the other hand there is often a too idealistic or a too iconoclastic point of view by those same sincere and best meaning amateurs, I gladly own. It is difficult to strike a golden mean. Intellectual discussion of the theatre is too often,--I don't say always, mind you, but too often--inclined toward a too narrow and too individualistic point of view--when not actually influenced by ignorance as to the conditions, or unwittingly deceived by false information or flamboyant advertisement. The theatre in America cannot be rightly discussed from any one individual point of view; but only on the broadest basis and from a universal point of view--perhaps a composite one. For the composition of the audience must be remembered: how it represents every grade of intelligence; and it is only by an appeal to the emotions common with all human nature that this naturally unwieldy body is moulded into one great sounding-board. The emotions of this body are the traps by which we try to take their minds.

It is absolutely necessary for the theatre that the public take a sane and sensible view of the theatre's province--I should say provinces! And, in attempting to define its limitations, the public must recognize its own unlimited area of opinion. By this I mean it is more than nonsense to say that the theatre should do one thing--because it should do MANY! Individual bodies and individual men lay down the law, ignoring the other individual bodies even at their elbows. And this is another of the reasons for much useless discussion about the theatre. There are girls and boys in the same family, and blondes and brunettes; and in the theatre as a whole there are plays to amuse and plays to instruct,--say a girl tragedy and a boy comedy! A blonde to entertain and a brunette to interest, and so-called "musical" concoction by way of a red-headed progeny!

But it is the duty of one and all of these plays to be honestly and clearly what they pretend to be. And if each one is this, then it is the duty of their audiences to accept each one for what it is, to criticise it where it fails by being untrue to its own pretensions, but not to criticise it for not being what, perhaps, they wish it were, but what it never pretended to be. I have heard of people who went to see a fine tragedy and came away saying they hadn't been particularly amused! And I have known other people who went to a gay little comedy, meant only to tickle the mind, and who cam away saying the play had not serious depth! I knew a literary man who, when living, was a real figurehead in the more intelligent life of New York, and he said to me once: "I never go to the theatre because there's nothing fit to see." "How long is it since you've been?" I said. He answered: "Twenty years!" "Then how do you know?" I naturally replied.

The public must go to the theatre and CREATE its own demand, and not only as a matter of its own pleasure, but as a matter of social duty. For depend upon it, if the good public doesn't go, the bad will, and does! I think it is more or less of an economic law that the demand creates the supply, and no amount of supply creates its own demand! Ever since the beginning of civilisation, the theatre has been the one great popular form of entertainment and of relaxation. It has changed in form and in kind, but so has its public, and we may take it for granted that the demand has had something to do with the supply. How many people, I wonder, realize the enormous power of the theatre! As a well-known, very much liked, high and broad-minded clergyman in New York said from his pulpit a few years ago: "Eight times a week the theatres get a congregation, two, three and for times as large as I can get once or twice a week; and I think what an opportunity to move the better emotions of people, stir their deeper instincts, leaving out altogether the heartsease, and the rest, of good, healthy entertainment." As a matter of fact, a list of what the theatre can do would be almost endless. It can breed patriotism! It can inculcate the love of truth! It can show the disaster inevitable which follows the breaking of the law: moral and civic. It can train the mind to choose the victory of doing the right thing at any sacrifice! It can teach ethics of life, little and big, by example, which is better for the careless multitude than by precept. It can and it does do these things. And it can do much that is less heroic and yet fully as useful. It does not belittle the theatre to say it can send an audience away comforted and refreshed, and this by an appeal to all its better instincts and emotions; nor is it a thing not to be grateful for, that the theatre husbands our twentieth century endangered ideals. It gives to the humblest and the highest of us that touch of romance which, after all, human nature loves, but fore which there is little time or opportunity for most of us in the rapid-fire existence and more material life of to-day. But when all is said and done, I repeat, just how great a power the theatre may become is primarily in the hands of the public. It holds in its hands the remedy, the reward, or the punishment. It can come or it can stay away. Those who have the highest interest of the drama in their hearts can offer the best and the truest in them--from grave to gay, from sublime to ridiculous; but if the public allows itself to be ruled by that untamed faction which demands the bulgar, is satisfied with the puerile, or riots in the licentious, then it will probably get what this faction wants, and some of us will retire with our sincere, if practical ideals, to the closet and the bookshelf. Of the theatre, the public is the true censor, and the final critic.

There are two principal divisions of all plays--the Good Play and the Bad Play. Then these divisions are divided into two again--the Bad Play that draws and the Good Play that does not. Then there are countless subdivisions, and the divisions "on the side." Then by itself, in lonely grandeur stands the Play That Is Too Good For The Public. Don't you believe it! The Play That Is Too Good For the Public is making the woman's excuse of "Because." The true Bid Play makes the universal appeal to the plush minds downstairs and the unupholstered hearts in the gallery. The intellectual play can be good in its kind,--so can the melodrama; you pay your money and you take your choice--unless you are a deadhead. A deadhead, as perhaps you know, is a person who does not pay, but is admitted free. The professional deadhead has, naturally, therefore, no point of view. He sees only the plays that are not good enough to attract whole paying audiences by themselves. I have heard of one honest unprejudiced, fair-minded deadhead who, after sitting quietly through two very bad acts of a play, himself silent in face of the jeers and sneers of his fellow-audience, finally, in the second entr'act, went out and bought a ticket and his freedom, so that he might hoot and condemn the third act to his heart's content. Alas, the poor deadhead! He is the line-line thrown to a play drowning in a flood of public abuse!--the stomach pump used on a play poisoned by the critics!--the stimulant given a play frozen by the public cold shoulder; and sometimes--the medicine does save a life that's worth while.

To return to the play; the great play, of course is the one that appeals to both the mind and the heart. Certain great men have done this. Certain other great men have done half; then their appeal is halved. They satisfy the intellectual on the one side and the rest on the other. Shakespeare did it all--Moliere almost--certain Germans a great deal. Goethe, Schiller, and later, Hauptmann and Sudermann for instance. Today, Ibsen, with his wonderful fundamental ideas, pleases the intellectual crowd, bores the romanticists, and angers the beauty lovers. Maeterlinck drugs the senses, and delights the mind, and puzzles the popular opinion, and outrages the conventional attitude. Hauptmann and Sudermann satisfy and stimulate the intelligence, and pretty generally put a cogwheel in the box-office--where the tickets are printed in English. All these are of course, the boldest, the best known examples and instances, and I am using them for that very reason, because I take the fact for granted that I am not speaking to people, the majority of whom have made any very serious and exhaustive study of the present conditions of the Drama. I am also speaking of these plays in relation to our own general audience--not any special one, of either extreme,--but the typical group of people we find in any or all of our large cities; people who as a whole go to a serious intellectual, much discussed play, once, perhaps, because it is discussed--and who like it, or those who don't, and wish it thought that they like it, or else at least wish to join in the discussion,--and then go to a successful musical comedy twice, to have, as they say, a really good time!

Besides this regulation mainstay audience, there are two others; the small eclectic company, who, as I have already said, are not to be depended upon. They cry out that the theatre is no longer any good and staying away, take their own word for it! They demand literature in the theatre, at all cost, ignoring the fact that the first requisite of a play is that it be some form of drama. For instance, at two different times such a group of people secured backing and started in New York a series of performances which should be literary plays. They secured comedies and dramas from amiable short story writers of deserved repute. They went to the monthly magazines and the publishers for their popular authors, to give them their material. Why? I really don't know. Both series failed, I am honestly sorry to say, and the cause of a truly artistic and literary theatre was immensely damaged. "If these plays are literature," cried the bored public, "deliver us!!" In the first and most solidly backed venture of the two, which began with a really fine, serious audience by subscription, out of the seven performances of long and short plays, with one exception the short ones were too long, and the long ones not nearly short enough,--and the only play which they produced that lasted and lived as a play was by a professional playwright. I am not holding a high tariff plea for my profession--we have notable instances of literary men who are real dramatists. Take Barrie for instance. But many more dramatists write plays that have value as dramatic literature, than do literary men write plays that are good drama. This same audience has often for its war-cry, "Give the intelligent public which has been driven from the theatre a mental allurement, and they will flock to the standard." I wonder! Bernard Shaw was originally put forward as literature. His first play, "Candida", had to fight for its life through weary, unheeded weeks, till Fashion, hunting about during Lent for some penance to do, took it up, and the general public followed. Then Bernard Shaw reigned as a "fad" for a season. We all thought then the success was sincere, but, the next Autumn, "Man and Superman" was produced to one of the smaller opening audiences of the theatre-crowded month of October in New York. It was the general public, who, finding the play entertaining, took hold the second and third weeks, and made of that comedy a tremendous success. While it was the notorious Mrs. Warren, with her profession, who drew the first big premiere audience for Shaw, which fact speaks wonders all around, as well as the incident of the lady who went to buy a ticket for a later Shaw production, "Cashel Byron's Profession"--Cashel being a pugilist--but when told at the box-office in answer to her query that "Cashel Byron's Profession" was not the same as Mrs. Warren's, demanded her money back and left without buying.

There is still another audience, an audience that seems to come from the bowels of the earth. It is only a certain kind of play that brings these people forth. They pack the theatres where The Christian" played. They flocked in unaccountable numbers to "The Little Minister." They took unorthodox delight in "The Shepherd King." They are still the loyal adherents of "Way Down East" and "Ben Hur." They swell to uncountable numbers the audiences of "The Servant of the House," and are the mainstay of the Ben Greet Players. One wonders where they come from, and where they go to. It is a long-distance trolley audience. They are a class of people who do not habitually go to the playhouse; they are the old-time lyceum lecture bureau. They search for sermons in dramatic stones. It is a fact that a couple of this ilk who went to the Knickerbocker Theatre when "The Christian" was playing there, in handing their tickets to the usher, absentmindedly asked where their pew was! And, when another play had followed at this same theatre, a man demanded at the box-office two tickets for "The Christian." "But it isn't playing here now," said the ticket seller. "Where is it?" he was asked. "In Newark." "Well, give me two tickets for there!"

The typical general audience, such as I have spoken of, leavened with a little of every class and kind, is the one that the manager dearly loves. They pay for their tickets and demand only a just return. It is a composite gathering, difficult to please from all points of view; a gathering anxious to be amused, satisfied to be interested, willing to be moved, but absolutely intolerant of being bored. I think it would rather, in the bulk, be entertained by a worthy medium than an unworthy, and it stops to differentiate just about that much. At any rate, it is sincere, this audience, which is more than I can say for some of its managers, actors, actresses, and authors. It says frankly, in effect, that it wants to be entertained, interested; if in an artistic way, so much the better--as witness the great triumph generally of good plays artistically done. But it will not be bored by "art for art's sake," if that art is bunkum and really talk about art for business' sake! This audience is, to use a slang term, "fly." Moreover, it does not pretend it is the only or the ideal audience. It openly confesses there is the big intellectual play for some, but not for all of it. It only asks for itself to choose what it wants. In return it gives you an honest medium to work upon generous in its approval and applause, when it gets what it wants.

After all, this audience has the right to demand respect and consideration. It has a good disposition, and it doesn't really mind being taught something, either, so long as you sneak in your lesson. Don't let it know what it is taking till the lesson is down, remembering always that the theatre in our day is principally to entertain. To instruct, we have our universities and schools, our lecture,--even hospitals, clinics, and insane asylums--for certain branches of dramatic instruction. And we must remember, in comparing the modern stage with the old, that in the old days the theatres were the public libraries, but in our time the Carnegies attend to that! You know it is not only in America that this general audience rules. In London, it is even more pleasure-loving; for every one theatre where "prose drama" is given, there have often been five playhouses where the Tune and the Girl reign in successful revolution.

A few years ago Sir Henry Irving, who did more for the artistic development and adornment of the drama, and more for the popularizing of Shakespeare, than any other Englishman living today--a few years ago, Sir Henry Irving found the noble, splendid following which had encouraged him and supported him in his work in London, lagging behind, drifting away, dwindling down. And today, the famous Lyceum Theatre, where he reached his zenith and crowned his career, after a few years as a variety hall, is housing cheap melodrama, while Irving, during the later years of his life, played short engagements in London, and not even every year. France has much the same story to tell, the same complaint to make, as to the public taste. In Paris, Antoine, who had made a reputation for himself in his little theatre, has made a failure in his management of the large Odeon, the second subsidized theatre of France, producing plays which he thought would succeed from the literary or artistic ground of appeal. Jeanne Granier, with Lavallaire, and even Pollaire (only several years ago a music-hall star), and the theatres of the Boulevard draw the real crowds. Rejane, with her positive genius, having passed through a period of immense popularity in tart, satirical comedies of life of the demi-monde, and comedies of the demi without the monde of late, in more serious plays has found it impossible to stay out a season in Paris. Sarah Bernhardt, supreme artist even in her golden age, in her home theatre has had to depend largely upon foreigners and provincials to make her audiences worth while; and to meet the expenses of the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, she voyages to far countries where French is little understood and less spoken! She has within the last two years produced at least three literary failure, including "Sister Therese" by Catulle Mendes, one of France's best known poets. To be sure, new actresses are taking new places in popularity--notably Madame le Bargy, for whom most of Bernstein's women roles have been written, but she is a neurotic type of actress, of extraordinary talent,--still a success above all else of individuality, of something different, something biting to the jaded palate. It is an indisputable fact that the classics at the two state theatres of France draw their largest audiences on fete days when the public is admitted free! The Francaise of late years has even "hustled" to add to its repertoire amusing, satirical pieces; several seasons ago giving one comedy which was accused by the critics of being almost a musical comedy. I mention these French and English instances to show that those of us here who love the more serious theatre must not feel that we are so much worse off than Paris or London, so far as the temper and disposition of our audiences are concerned. In Germany and Austria it is different. There they have a big, serious-minded audience which goes to the play at seven o'clock, with a rested stomach and a free mind. And in Germany they do keep alive the fine plays, and create a living repertoire of great ones.

But we are not Germans. It is almost impossible to get us into the theatre before half past eight. Our minds are preoccupied--and so very generally is that other portion of us; the serious task of the theatre is doubled with us. I have heard men complain, metaphorically speaking, that we did not have pepsin in our plays.

And still, all the same, because, perhaps at the present time more people prefer amusement to serious entertainment, it is no excuse for the futile cry which is constantly being raised that the stage isn't what it used to be. If you take the trouble to search, you will find that cry has always been raised in every age! It was always the Banshee of the Drama! Each period has its fluctuations in taste--each period has its detractors. But in spite of all, the Drama has lived and prospered down and up the centuries!

Do not misunderstand me. I do not in the least mean that I am satisfied with the conditions either as to the Play ort he Public. It is almost too obvious to say when any worker is satisfied his work is over. He is finished! He is an objet d'art of the Drama! A museum number in the theatre! He is done for! He had better go to the Dramatist's coat-room and hand in his check!

What I mean is that I think it is fair and a better to take an optimistic rather than a pessimistic view of the situation. I mean the theatre is not in a bad way; it is on a good way!

Fifteen years ago there were only two American dramatists writing plays with any distinction. Today there are at least six times as many, worthy of dignified consideration and serious criticism, and at the same time successful. I think that speaks for itself and is sufficient cause for my optimism. It is in less time that our universities and colleges have taken up the serious study of the theatre, including its modern literature; and in less time still that clubs and societies with more or less intellectual aims are giving serious consideration to our subject, such as was unheard of a Play Baker's dozen years ago!

I do not say the theatre's task is not difficult,--almost the most difficult I can conceive; but at the same time I am not sure that fact is not in itself the best thing for the theatre. The easy thing to do is seldom the thing worth while. It is the difficult thing, done so well as to make it seem easy of accomplishment, that deserves the real reward. Exercise and struggle are as good for the Drama as for man.

As to a National Theatre, I cannot imagine how there can be any discussion about the value of a playhouse whose aim is to do for the public, what, in the present absence of this theatre, I am begging them to do for themselves. A theatre whose work it would be to bring out and foster the best the Drama is capable of, would be the most splendid, practical and not merely ideal thing, that could be done for the American stage. There can't be any honest or sincere argument about it. But there is the question of who will direct the fortunes of this theatre: who will design its record, and by whom will that record be made!

There is a new plan now on foot in New York, actually matured and under way, with men at its head who can command our intelligent adherence to their idea, and inspire us with hope for its realization. That is the best help we can give them. The scheme is the surest we have had yet, and not for the least reason because it is practical. That much is up to them, and I myself am for them, and full of hope for their success, in spite of the enormous practical difficulties which I think they only half foresee; but, granted they succeed in starting, then, after all, it is still up to the Public. Yes, as the old-fashioned writers used to say--"Dear Public, it is up to you! If the New Theatre gives those among you who are discontented what you want, will you go and be content? If there are not enough of you to make it pay, will you proselyte for the building, and help fill the orchestra seats at two dollars per with your friends?" For, believe me, the Germans would not give their audiences psychological discussions without action, nor the French their public the long ethical themes, divided into conversational acts; but that each public wants what is given it, and pays for it. A millionaire's pocket, unfortunately, generous as it is in our country, lacks one splendid quality, that which was possessed by the poor widow's cruse.

To prove the really great play, there is no test except time. For great plays may have faults which at first blind us to their greater merit. It is their faults that make great men human, and why shouldn't it work so with plays? No man can say--true, some do!-- this play will last, that will not, --for the power of prophecy went out with the days of the sibylline leaves. And the price our journals pay for knowing the news of a moment is the news of the future.

The plays that have LASTED are valuable to us as literature and as documents. Technique never has kept a play alive through the centuries. Technique alone is machinery, and we improve all machinery year by year. Outside of their literature, outside of their history, imaginative and not scientific, many of Shakespeare's plays are documents of hourly life and manners; and if you are interested in knowing what life was in town and country before and during the Reformation, read Wycherly, Congreve, Beaumont and Fletcher. You will find there the small human document you won't get out of history per se. So Sheridan and Goldsmith reproduced the social Georgian era, Wilde the late Victorian; and in France Lavedan, Hervieu and Capus and Bernstein are giving the Paris and France of the twentieth century for future generations to reproduce for themselves, if they wish.

And the public in America is making that same demand of us. Give us our own life, they are saying in general. We get enough lords and ladies, perfect and imperfect, from England. Give us a man and woman of our own. German provincial life doesn't interest us. See how we welcome and take to our hearts any true reflection of our native country existence. France has played us every tune on her social triangle, till husband and wife and friend have become the barrel-organ of our drama. Show us our own social predicament, and see how we will welcome it. WE have troubles of our own, they say. Play us that tune and we will whistle it quickly into popularity. And in the last few years the men who are writing in our country, still digging up the dramatic soil, still laying foundations for the national drama, have responded, and with so much zeal, so much enthusiasm, so much truth, that today, in eight cases out of ten, it is the play of our own life that, each year, takes its strongest hold on the public.

In the modern play, I feel myself very strongly the particular value--a value I can't help feeling inestimable--of reflecting absolutely and truthfully the life and environment about us. Be truthful, and then nothing can be too big, nothing should be too small, so long as it is here, and there. Every class, every kind, every emotion, every motive, every occupation, every business, every idleness! Never was life so varied and complex; what a choice of material then! Take what strikes you most, in the hope that it will interest others. Take what suits you most to do--what perhaps you can do best--and then do it better. Apart from the question of literature, apart from the question of art, reflect the real thing with the true observation and with sincere feeling for what it is and what it represents, and that is art and literature. A play which reflects modern life today should be written in the simplest language, with the clippings and cuttings jof words habitually made; even perhaps grammatical errors, for only as it truthfully represents modern language can a play of everyday modern life become literature. In every art, in every profession today, the highest standard is truth, and nowhere more surely so than in the Drama--where imagination is truth's ally, not her rival.

If you inculcate an idea in your play, so much the better for your play--and for you--and for your audience. In fact, there is small hope for your play, as a PLAY, if you haven't some small idea in it, somewhere and somehow, even if it is hidden--otherwise your play becomes only an entertainment, and nothing beside. But the idea must, of course, be integral. Some ideas are mechanical. They are no good. These are the ideas for which the author does all the work, instead of letting the ideas do the work for him. One should write what one sees; but observe under the surface. It is a mistake to look at the reflection of the sky in the water of theatrical convention. Instead, look up and into the sky of real life itself.

Of course one can do all this and still have no play. There must, first and last and in the middle, always be the PLAY. That is what the writer who has not his technique misses. The other thing, on the other hand, is so often missed by the technician. The greatest example today of the technician and the idea-ist, working together, was Ibsen. But that doesn't mean Ibsen is a great popular dramatist. He is both with the elect, but not with the general body, because of the other thing he lacked. Wilde was not flawless in his technique, but each play has its inherent idea, and each reflects absolutely in matter and manner that modern social life it represents. Bernard Shaw--well, Bernard Shaw speaks for himself, and PREFERS TO! Pinero has proved himself a master of technique, and so has Henry Arthur Jones, and both men love a play with an idea. Both have, however, been more or less unlucky of late in choosing too often ideas which they liked themselves, but for which the public very frankly did not care, or in which they refused to be interested. This is one thing a dramatic author has to look out for. He is apt sometimes to become selfish and think only of his own pleasure. Of all the arts and professions, there is none which more strongly demands unselfishness of its followers. The painter may pint a picture which delights himself, and keep it, and have joy in it; it is finished, complete. But there is no such joy for the dramatist who can keep his play! For without production it is incomplete, unfinished--a lifeless thing--still-born; it can never be a joy to him. But to go on with our authors, no one of the dramatists at the present moment is getting the essence of his environment in thought, word and deed, more than Hervieu, Lavedan, Donnay and Capus, in France. Hervieu with an idea for the basic principle--the idea serious; Lavedan and Donnay, the idea social; Capus, all sorts of ideas together!--any old idea!--so long as it is always life--especially the life superficial, with the undercurrent really kept under. Bernstein stands apart from this group; he is the twentieth century Sardou; that is, he adds to masterly technique a psychological influence in the development of his plot. Mind you a successful play can be built which is false to life, misrepresenting it, maliciously or through ignorance. But it will not be literature and it will not be art--poor, bedraggled word! It has begun almost to take on the shoddy hues of the word "lady." "Lady" we have replaced with "woman," but our language is not rich enough to give us a word or phrase even to use instead of much-abused "art." She has become the boarding-house keeper of our vocabulary, who has seen better days.

The term "melodrama" is another sufferer. It has become the personification of the poor, misunderstood person. A mistaken idea prevails, thanks to a too narrow view of the subject in defining what is true melodrama. The term, centuries ago, and not so long ago as that, was applied to a play of violent emotions, as much as violent actions, and was a technical term implying neither blame nor belittlement. Today it is applied ignorantly as a term of reproach, to plays of violent emotion, and of belittlement to plays of violent action. If "Macbeth" had been produced yesterday the bloody fingers of his noble but over-ambitious lady would have traced the word "melodrama' all over the criticisms of the play in this morning's papers. And I dread to think what would have been said of "Hamlet." But I can see in my mind's eye some such headlines, "The New Play--Barring too much talk--thanks to a hero who ought to have been in the Utica Asylum and a bunch of murderers in the last act,--makes a bully Bowery melodrama.

And let me give you an example of the difference between real melodrama and the false. A business man of good position gets hopelessly lost in financial difficulties, and shoots himself. On the cheap stage, everybody rushes on and shouts and screams, the persecuted hero or heroine gets arrested for murder, and the curtain falls. In real life, and on the true stage, the last loud sound is that of the pistol shot. The family choke back their cries, and even the servants softly obey whispered orders to close the house and keep out all intruders. It is the absence of the "My Gawds!" and the noise complications of the "butting in" actors, the non-beating of the theatrical drum, that mark the difference between bathos, crude dramatic emotion, and the real thing. The latter instance is melodrama in the old meaning of the word, but does not deserve the sneer of today's interpretation of the term. The incidents, the events of every day life in a big city are more melodramatic than anything that was ever put upon the stage, but they do not occur with a crescendo accompaniment! They do not have "curtain." There is scarcely a family of importance in any big city that Tragedy has not in some way laid its compelling hand upon, and still the members of the family do not shriek to high heaven when the crisis occurs. On the contrary, they act like human beings; and it is just that same difference which exists between true melodrama of the stage and the cheaper kind. The former is not to be despised, but to be honored. Remember, it is picturing your life of today, just as surely as is the quieter domestic drama, and the comedy of character and manners. One cannot live twenty-four hours in any of our cities followed his own inclinations in his new environment, precisely as if it were a living being and without any effort whatever, whether of memory or of invention, on the part of his creator. I know by experience one may have serious difficulties with one's characters. Sometimes they will not do in the second act, or in the third act, what was planned for them and expected of them while writing the first. Once a character is clearly created, once it becomes a fixed entity, it dominates you and your plan, and must be allowed its own way. It must be consistent. In my plays I endeavor that the action shall develop from inward outward. The development is the natural result, as far as my equipment can make it so, of the impulses which lie in the hearts and minds of the characters as they have been conceived.

For those who wish to place life as they find it and see it on the stage, the great practical power, a necessity, is the faculty of observation. But this power alone makes photography. The palette and brush are tools of a higher art than the Kodak. And it is the power of Imagination which makes the difference--which scales the heights. So it is with playwriting. Observation will press the button and Imagination will do the rest.

Of course every writer of novels or of plays works in his own way. I do not believe that any writer of value can work in any other man's way, or according to any other formula or method than his own. The mental process is too complex and hereditary; individuality and individual experience play too large a part. Dumas fils prefaced nearly every one of his plays in the published edition with an elaborate foreword telling how he had written it, and discussing the artistic and social questions to which it gave rise. Many other authors and playwrights, in printed interviews or books, have tried to show the mental machinery of their invention. These personal confessions, or revelations, are possibly more interesting than instructive. They are like the "experiences" related on the front bench of a revival meeting, each of which is so different from its fellow experience, and creates interest accordingly. But if their value is autobiographical rather than educational, they still establish the principle that each man reaches success in his profession, or salvation in religion, in his own particular way.

And the play's moral! It should grow out of the play's theme. The moral should never be pasted on like a label. No author should dogmatically preach; the artist is the man who suggests to those who have ears to hear and eyes with which to see. The moral should not be the cause of the play; it should be the result of the play. I hope my distinction is plain to you, because I think in it lies the whole question of the morality of the stage.

No severer test should be applied to the theatre than to the library. We have the Press interested in the theatre, and it is a fair and popular guide. The Press chaperones and protects the "young person." Certain subjects, certain things are not tolerated in any decent society, and the stage is a part of that society; but to condemn a play because the subject of immorality is seriously treated in it, is false morality. Does the result of the play sicken and disgust you with the wrong thing, frighten you with the inevitable result of breaking the laws or the commandments? If it does, it is a moral play, even though it may not be an ideal vade mecum for the matinee girl. She believes in youthful love, ideals, self-sacrifices, and I want to. She believes in romance in real life--I want to. And she is no fool. She is quick with her ridicule, ever ready with her discernment of what is true and what is stage pretense. But granting all her charms and her intelligence, Is till do not think she should rule the playhouse. As a matter of fact, she is growing to be an obsolete character! Conditions are such that it is more often mother and father who go to the matinee now; she goes in the evening!

For my part, I believe the true moral of the theatre consists in this: that the audience shall get from a play the mental and moral "lift up," instead of the "let down." And to this end, not only theme and plot, but also character creation plays a strong part. By that strange law which makes one note in the piano sing in response to a vibrating tuning fork many feet away, the hearts of the audience vibrate in unison with the vibrating hearts across the footlights. The sweeter and truer and more exalted the note struck upon the stage, the more readily doe the audience respond. This is the great force exercised by fiction in which the drama shares. And to arouse these feelings in an audience, even for a short period, has, I believe, a better, more practical, more salutary effect upon them as men and women, than can be obtained by any philosophic appeal made to their intellects in the cut and dried form of a presented theme or moral. It is a goal worth striving for.

To tell a story which shall stir the deeper emotions, stimulate the intellect, and tend to ennoble the mind is a higher goal still. And as to "Art," there have been many definitions, but the untheatrical Wordsworth said: "That is good art which makes the beholder wiser, better or happier."

This may be regarded as a somewhat vague definition of theatre, but is it not good enough for all of us to go on with?