What spasms they would have if such themes were handled to-day.

It all depends upon the treatment, the depth, the sanity. Morality is more safely based upon intelligence than on 5 prudery. The superficial, sentimental appeal does small good to any one. Go to a melodrama in which the heroine, passing through impossible adventures and impossible rhetoric, keeps her robe unsoiled. Who responds most emotionally to such appeals? Who but the ladies of a type the 10 direct antithesis of the heroine whose virtue they applaud? In the theatre you do not elevate people by preaching to them. You may do so by educating them. similar to our school and college systems. school are separate. We believe in general education in this country. We believe that the way to elevate the whole character and life of the people is to feed and stimulate their intelligences. We do not read them sermons or teach them ethics in school. We train and store their minds.

15

It is exactly Church and

Intelligence then, and art, are what the stage most needs, 20 superior minds writing plays, a public which enforces high standards.

How does the actual situation correspond? In Cincinnati what do you have that adds to the education of your children or the intellectual pleasure of the cultivated? Some things 25 may be encouraging as happy straws, as faint signs of the future, but obviously they mean no constant exhibition of important works of literature, of new thought or old tradition, constituting part of the intellectual life of the intelligent, as the drama does in Paris, Berlin and Vienna, where the young 30 receive much of their training in the theatre and the old much of their satisfaction.

Is the situation different in New York? The great metropolitan successes in recent years have been largely musical burlesque, which frequently contains pretty girls and much 35 cheerful idiocy, which is better than bad plays, but hardly takes the place of good ones. The most original development

of the theatre in America is in the line of pure distraction, and the best illustration of it is Weber and Fields. The theatre legitimately offers all grades of entertainment. It is not a misfortune that Weber and Fields are popular; they deserve to be. The misfortune is that other grades are 5 completely ignored. It is as if in music we had good comic songs and no symphonies or grand opera; as if in painting we had good newspaper cartoons and no landscape or portraits; as if in books we had an excellent collection of jokes, and no history, biography or literature.

ΙΟ

The weary business man goes to a comic opera or to Weber and Fields, and is happy. Let him go there. It is the place for him. He would of necessity be bored at a play which asked his tired mind for thought. It is the penalty he pays for being tired; for giving all his mental 15 activity to earning money. It is the favorite place also of the fashionable rich, next to their boxes at the opera. They dine late and ask of the theatre but an afterpiece to dinner which shall rescue them from the ennui of conversation. In their class, however, recruits for the higher drama are to be 20 sought, for the first requisite of artistic enjoyment is some amount of leisure, superfluous energy instead of fatigue. Every year finds more of the rich who welcome the superior drama, even if it forces them to dine at seven. The progress is slow, but progress exists.

25

Now, what else is there in New York to-day? On leaving the city I put a newspaper in my pocket, and read the announcements. Being no longer a dramatic critic I had not seen all the "offerings," but I had seen enough. A few days before a friend had asked me what was worth seeing. 30 "Do you know German? I asked. He did. "Well," I said, "go to the Irving Place Theatre any time. Now and then you will see a bad play, now and then a careless performance, but on the whole you will find there the only real dramatic atmosphere in America, the only substance and 35 manner that make you feel as if you were in presence of the

best; that make you feel as you do when you read Shakespeare or hear Beethoven, rather than as you do when you read comic papers, the Fireside Companion or the almanac."

But let us be fair. On this New York list of plays most 5 were comic opera, musical comedy, farce, variety, but on it also was Everyman, one of the noblest revivals of our day. To be sure it was imported, but the fact that Mr. Charles Frohman, who, I imagine, hardly knows a morality play from a Methodist revival, cared to import it merely because he 10 wished the praise of enlightened people, such as he had heard given to it in London, indicates an advance. The present race of managers can never do much that is interesting. They are too untutored and too mercantile, but even they will do better, and their endeavors will find a public 15 with more exacting demands. To be sure, nobody in New York went to see Everyman. It has been less of a success than in London. I met a man just after he had been to see it. "There were nineteen people in the house," he said. "Du Barry is crowded. That shows New York and the real 20 level of our civilization. Boston would do better, Chicago I would do better. New York," he went on, "is an almost hopeless city. It is Sodom. It is Babylon." Everyman, however, did better as people learned that the city contained something really beautiful, and in its two remaining weeks I trust it may do better still.

25

For the mediocre condition of the American drama the Theatrical Syndicate has been widely blamed. Much blame it certainly deserves, but not always of the kind that is applied to it. The mere love of cheap melodrama, French 30 farce, and musical comedy which characterizes these managers, their ignorance, bad taste and mechanical conception of acting is not the worst side of their influence. Commonplace amusement will always be demanded. It exists in Germany, it exists where the drama is high, but it exists side 35 by side with better things. The most evil aspect of the Syndicate is its power, its controlling influence. It is so

nearly a monopoly that producing outside of it is an under

taking so hazardous that few will venture.

This is an age of combinations. Even in business they are in many ways a menace. In art they would be fatal. In the drama nothing would do more good than the disin- 5 tegration of this Trust and the variety that would result. Leaving each star and manager free to follow his own nature would inevitably work toward more effort to meet the tastes of the educated minority. Therefore the new organization headed by Mrs. Fiske, Mr. Hackett and Miss Cros- 10 man, designed to loosen the hold of the Trust is worthy of all encouragement.

66

At this point it may perhaps be excusable to clear away a misunderstanding. When I decided, a short time ago, to abandon dramatic criticism, I was struck by the manner in 15 which the press and my personal friends agreed in attributing the change to the hopelessness of the present theatrical situation. "To be sure," said one, "why waste your time on such idiocy?" What," said another, "is the sense in writing reasonably about plays that have no reason in 20 them?" And so on, from every side. I totally disagree with that point of view. The time when much good can be done by protest is exactly now, when the situation is so obviously, so ridiculously inappropriate to a country so much alive to educational and intellectual opportunities as ours. 25 I abandoned the theatre because I had other work which required all my attention, but this seems to me a time when any writer of conviction can do much good in the field of dramatic criticism.

Our country is most genuinely interested in education. 30 An observant Englishman remarked to me recently that no matter what topic he began, with a cultivated American, the conversation speedily shifted to some problems of education. "Well," said I, "why not? It is the most important group of questions confronting us to-day." Materially, our civili- 35 zation is a success. In matters of trade and money compe

tition we are victors.

proved our strength.

In the race for wealth we have But we have other tests still to meet. You remember the famous question of Sidney Smith, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, 5 or goes to an American play, or sees an American picture or statue ?" He spoke those words in 1820. It is less true now, but still true, that in the ideal world we are scarcely competitors. Mr. Carnegie offers his contribution toward the solution, with his myriad libraries. Mr. Morgan shows 10 his sense of responsibility in large purchases of works of art. President Eliot sets the whole country talking about the effect of our lower grade schooling on conduct. President Wilson makes an equal stir about the same time, and President Butler goes Harvard one year better in favoring 15 the cutting down of the traditional discipline of education for the newer and more practical theories. In industrial education we are surpassed only by Germany. In the South we are face to face with terrifying problems of race. Politically we are struggling to lift our people beyond standards 20 which are satisfied by Tammany Hall. Thus everywhere, in every form, thought about American conditions leads to thought about education.

The theatre, in its modest way, deserves to be considered with this same scope, as an influence on general thought, on 25 public feeling, on the whole standard of education. Schiller believed that no one of the other arts had so wide an influence. Clergymen everywhere are beginning to make statements even more radical. In our country, therefore, where education, in all its branches, is taken so seriously, is it not 30 an anomaly that this popular art should be excepted? The theatre should have a function beside the museum, the opera house, and the library. A superior drama is one of the ornaments, perhaps even one of the requisites, of a complete civilization. A people is not properly enlightened until its 35 amusements are part of its enlightenment. It has not won

the ideal elements until its art, its idealized thought, is part