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 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE
 
 THE 
 
 FUTURE OF THE 
 THEATRE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN PALMER 
 
 LONDON 
 G. BELL & SONS LTD. 
 
 1913
 
 
 • • • • • • 
 
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 i 
 
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 TO 
 
 GRANVILLE BARKER 
 
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 38S823
 
 A POSTSCRIPT LETTER OF DEDICATION 
 TO GRANVILLE BARKER 
 
 " My dear Granville Barker, — I will publish 
 only one reason, among many, why I have asked 
 you to accept this dedication. In the pages that 
 follow I sometimes rather ostentatiously disagree 
 with you. Might it not therefore be concluded 
 that I do not love your work ? This would not do 
 at all. 
 
 " I wish you could have been induced to write 
 this book yourself. It is no use putting us off 
 with excuses as to a busy life. You, who have 
 everything to do, can iind time for everything. 
 That you could easily find time for as good a book 
 as has yet been WTitten about the modern English 
 theatre is shown by the present condition of my 
 proof-sheets. My sensations on receiving them 
 could only be comparable with what poor Diabelli 
 must have felt when Beethoven returned him his 
 funny little waltz in C major with thhty-three 
 gigantic variations, including a double fugue. 
 
 "You cannot see my theatre of the future with 
 rents at ;^8ooo or ;^io,ooo a year, plus ;^5ooo a year 
 for advertisements. But I said I was going to be 
 very hopeful, and to see what I wanted to see ; and
 
 iv LETTER OF DEDICATION 
 
 I have most carefully prepared for the financial 
 prosperity of good work by bringing into our 
 theatres of the future the really educated public 
 which at present avoids them. As you say, it is 
 all a question of numbers and prices. I see the pro- 
 fitable numbers ; and you, soberly refusing to ' pawn 
 your experience to your present pleasure,' do not. 
 
 " As to a missing chapter upon actors, and your 
 entirely reasonable defence of yourself as the inter- 
 pretative producer — well, of course you are right. 
 Here I am fain ' to shuffle, to hedge and to lurch.' 
 Do not bind me too strictly to the letter of this 
 wilful exaggeration of a good case. Take me as 
 uttering here no more than a vigorous protest 
 against producers who aim at being creatively 
 important, and against dramatic authors who are 
 so far out of touch with the theatre as to be com- 
 pelled to leave to others the task of fitting their 
 plays to the resources and personalities of a 
 particular cast. I allow that, after an author 
 has written all that can be written, there still 
 remains the job of adapting a particular repre- 
 sentation to such players and scenes as are at 
 hand. If the author himself can do this (owing 
 to the long divorce between English letters and 
 the English stage he seldom can), so much the better 
 for his play. You say yourself that ' a producer 
 is only necessary when the author cannot or will 
 not do the job himself.' This is all I ask. 
 
 " You wonder that I say nothing at all about 
 Masefield. I admit that it is a conspicuous omission ; 
 but I firmly believe that the less we say about
 
 LETTER OF DEDICATION v 
 
 Masefield at this time the better it will be for the 
 English theatre. Masefield must not be made self- 
 conscious by too much talk about him. Let us 
 not prematurely insist he is a genius, in opposition 
 to those who prematurely insist he is merely a very 
 clever fellow. His work, so far, shows that he may 
 equally well be one or the other. I should like to 
 see Masefield accomplish the prodigious literary 
 feat of Hauptmann. who forced into the service of 
 poetic vision the naturalism of his German con- 
 temporaries. Parts of Nan and of Pompey show 
 that Masefield is quite possibly upon the track of 
 this achievement ; but he cannot yet be fitted into 
 a dramatic history of the next ten years. If 
 Masefield came, at all naturally, into this critical 
 study of forces now at work, it would be as a 
 further illustration of what you yourself so admir- 
 ably typify in your naturalist-poetic productions 
 of Shakespeare and in your uneas^^ hovering 
 between Anne Leete and The Voysey Inheritance. 
 
 " Wycherley, remembering La Rochefoucauld, 
 has said that people who compose dedications but 
 begin the praise of others which ends in themselves. 
 Perhaps that is my real motive in addressing you. 
 I would have my readers know that you approve 
 of me warmly enough in general to differ from me 
 seriously , in particular. Therefore I argue with 
 you coram publico, and very proudly subscribe 
 myself. — Yours ever sincerely, 
 
 JOHN PALMER. 
 
 " London, Covent Garden, 
 October 1913."
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION . 
 
 I. COMPETITORS . 
 
 II. THE FUTURE OF 
 
 III. THE FUTURE OF 
 
 IV. THE FUTURE OF 
 V. THE FUTURE OF 
 
 VI. THE FUTURE OF 
 VII. THE FUTURE OF 
 VIII. THE FUTURE OF 
 IX. THE FUTURE OF 
 X. THE FUTURE OF 
 XI. THE FUTURE OF 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 . 
 
 ix 
 
 . 
 
 I 
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICS . 
 
 i8 
 
 THE PUBLIC . . . . 
 
 30 
 
 PRODUCTION. 
 
 43 
 
 THEATRICAL HABERDASHERS 
 
 57 
 
 REPERTORY . . . . 
 
 74 
 
 THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN 
 
 92 
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 
 
 112 
 
 MR. BERNARD SHAW 
 
 132 
 
 THE PRESENT DAY . 
 
 • 155 
 
 ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 174
 
 INTRODUCT ION 
 
 To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. 
 Creeps in this petty pace from day to day. 
 To the last syllable of recorded time ; 
 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
 The way to dusty death. 
 
 POSTDATING history is well enough in 
 conversation with a friend. To publish 
 your predictions, to put them solemnly upon 
 record, is another matter. But the game un- 
 doubtedly appeals. It is a game of chance, wherein 
 the harder it is to win the more one is tempted 
 to lose. The darker the future the more one is 
 set upon reading it. The future of the English 
 theatre is dark indeed. No better temptation 
 could be offered a sporting prophet. Nobody has 
 the faintest idea what the state of the English 
 theatre will be five, ten, or twenty years hence — 
 the dramatic critic or expert least of all. Some 
 of us have our ' systems,' whereby we hope, as 
 every practised gamester hopes, to cheat the bank 
 and come out on the credit side. But it is well 
 established that the gamester with a system is the 
 soonest and most thoroughly ruined. He it is of 
 whom the public will get most fun for their
 
 X INTRODUCTION 
 
 shilling. The merely sensible outsider might 
 conceivably keep his head, and withdraw without 
 being deeply committed. The expert will probably 
 go mad. He will prophesy. He will stake his 
 reputation ; and the onlookers will enjoy a vicarious 
 excitement. 
 
 Ascending one's tripod a few lines of personal 
 explanation may be in order. I might conclude 
 each stage of the ensuing argument with wise 
 regrets that the evidence, being inconclusive and 
 contradictory, does not admit of any clear fore- 
 telling. But a prophet should not play for safety. 
 I intend in this little book to make as many 
 statements as possible as to which there is 
 almost a moral certainty that they will all be 
 conclusively disproved within the next ten years. 
 The underlying principle of these predictions is 
 that in prophesying one can only hit the single 
 chance in a hundred of being right by bravely 
 incurring the ninety-nine chances of being wrong. 
 Table-turners summon spirits from the ends of 
 heaven to tell them that potatoes are scarce, or 
 that flannel next the skin is an unnecessary 
 irritation ; but this sort of thing has always seemed 
 to me a needlessly roundabout way of arriving at 
 the obvious. When one looks into the invisible, 
 it should be with a fixed determination to see 
 something out of the beaten way. A prophet 
 should really be delirious and see things. 
 
 What precisely do I intend to see ? It seems 
 absurd for a person who is going to live in an
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 imaginary future not to make the most of his 
 peculiar advantages. I have decided simply to 
 see what I would wish to see. This is an essay in 
 the optative mood. When one can make happen 
 anything one pleases it is false economy to be 
 bounded in a nutshell. There are, of course, 
 limitations. Aristotle says somewhere that only 
 an unreasonable man desires the impossible. I 
 hope I am not unreasonable — that the things 
 here devoutly to be wished are rationall}'' likely to 
 occur. If you find these prophesyings fantastic, 
 and are tempted to wonder whether the author 
 is always as serious as he seems, seriously ask 
 yourself why you are reading a book on the future 
 of the English theatre.
 
 THE FUTURE OF 
 THE THEATRE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 COMPETITORS 
 
 Is not a comedy a Christmas gambol or a tumbling trick ? 
 No, my good lord. It is more pleasant stuff. 
 
 WHAT precisely do we mean by the English 
 theatre ? How shall we define it ? Are 
 we to include the palaces of variety and the kine- 
 matograph ? Have we, perhaps, to prophesy that 
 the theatre of the future is a music hall or a picture 
 house ? What is this drain of the public, of which 
 we hear so much, from the legitimate to the variety 
 theatre ? What is this panic among our contem- 
 poraries that the modern public is incapable of 
 sustained attention ; that plays must give way 
 to ' turns ' and sketches ; that in a few years from 
 now our theatres will be run by electricity ? 
 
 The theatre is, by statute, a building licensed for 
 the performance of stage plays. What is a stage 
 play is a delicate and difficult question, only suscep-
 
 2 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 tible of definition in a court of law. It need not, in 
 these pages, trouble us very much. A rough idea 
 will do. For our purposes a stage play is the sort 
 of thing presented in the West End of London by 
 Sir Herbert Tree, Sir George Alexander and Mr. 
 Granville Barker. The future of music halls, the 
 future of variety, the future of picture palaces, 
 the future of ballet, the future of musical comedy 
 — these are topics of extraordinary interest ; but 
 they have very little to do with the future of the 
 theatre. There will always be a public for stage 
 plays. There is not the slightest reason to suppose 
 that the English people, who for three hundred 
 years have steadily asked for stage plays, and paid 
 for them, will not continue to do so. Shakespeare's 
 business manager doubtless prophesied there would 
 shortly be an end of stage plays. What with my 
 Lord Leicester's masks and revels, the fascinations 
 of the bear-warden and the travelling ' motions ' 
 of the countryside, Cuthbert Burbage must often 
 have reflected that stage plays, though con- 
 ceivably they might last his time, were not long 
 for this vulgar world. A century later Farquhar 
 complained that Gallic heels were too quick for 
 English heads ; that English comedy might as well 
 go weep, the public having no further use for it. 
 Yet the stage play lingered. A century later 
 Macready complained of beasts and ballets, wonder- 
 ing how long the stage play would be able to stand 
 up against the increasing frivolity of the people. 
 Let us be quite clear as to this question of com-
 
 COMPETITORS 3 
 
 petition between stage plays and other forms of 
 public amusement. Does this competition really 
 exist ? Put the case as between stage plays and 
 their most dangerous rivals, the theatres of variety. 
 Put it to yourself as an intelligent member of the 
 public. Is there the least competition in your 
 mind between the attraction of the Coliseum and 
 the attraction of the Kingsway ? You know 
 perfectly well there is not. As a person of divine 
 discourse looking before and after you book seats 
 at the Kingsway several days ahead. You intend 
 to go to the theatre, to amuse yourself for a definite 
 three odd hours with a stage play. Your evening 
 is surrendered to this particular form of enjoyment. 
 Going to the theatre has associations and memories, 
 hopes and fears, conditions of the soul and of the 
 circulation, quite unlike any other piece of social 
 ritual. It is part of the fun that you cut yourself 
 off from the normal comforts of civilisation. You 
 jam yourself into an uneasy chair ; you are de- 
 prived of fresh air ; you spend the intervals of 
 scene-shifting in wondering whether you are 
 sufficiently in training as an athlete to be able to 
 get from your seat to the door ; you are not allowed 
 to talk, smoke, or fidget ; it is useless wearing 
 a champagne-coloured waistcoat because nobody 
 can see you, or even desires to see you ; nor are 
 you able yourself to see who's who in the theatre. 
 To compare this place with the Tivoli or the 
 Coliseum is obviously absurd. You have come to 
 the play ; and the play is so emphatically the
 
 4 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 thing that an English audience would resent the 
 smallest innovation which interfered with its tradi- 
 tional discomforts and disabilities. 
 
 The theatre is no more in competition with the 
 music hall than with the House of Commons. 
 The mood in which one goes to a music hall is 
 no more like the mood in which one goes to a 
 theatre than the mood in which one goes to a 
 Pleasant Sunday Afternoon. The idea — not always 
 the reality — of a music hall is of a club-room 
 where conversation and the appreciation of a good 
 cigar may be stimulated by entertainment. The 
 best advertisement for a music hall is that it has 
 a movable roof ; that it is the only cool place 
 on a hot day ; that it is comfortable, with a 
 reasonable tariff for wines and spirits. The im- 
 portant thing upon an evening given to the music 
 hall is an excellent dinner well digested in agreeable 
 company. The utmost one requires of a music 
 hall is that it should help one to appreciate in 
 retrospect and in present physical pink of condition 
 that one has dined. 
 
 Let us look into these palaces of variety for a 
 moment. Though we are not to be intimately 
 concerned with them in discussing the future of the 
 theatre, we must at least justify our refusal to regard 
 them as competitors of the stage play. In 1912 
 there was a revolution ; and it was predicted that 
 this revolution would react disastrously upon what 
 is technically known as the ' legitimate drama.' 
 " Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land," said
 
 COMPETITORS 5 
 
 the proprietors of music halls ; and Edgar flew into 
 a panic. The revolution of 191 2 had to do with 
 the performance in music halls of sketches or stage 
 plays short enough to be part of a variety bill. 
 For years the Lord Chamberlain would not license 
 stage plays for performance in a London music 
 hall ; and, as everybody knows, no stage play can 
 be performed in Great Britain till the Chamberlain 
 has licensed it. People prophesied that, if the Lord 
 Chamberlain allowed these little plays to be given in 
 music halls, there was an end of the theatre. He 
 was told that the music hall and the theatre were 
 in competition ; that the music hall licensed for 
 music and dancing had many advantages over the 
 theatre licensed only for stage plays ; that signing 
 a licence for the performance of a play at the Palace 
 or the Tivoli would be signing the death-warrant of 
 English drama. It is not possible here to tell the 
 story in detail — how the music-hall proprietors asked 
 for licences ; how they were refused ; how they defied 
 the law ; how they were sued by the ' legitimate ' 
 managers ; how they made illegal compacts wherein 
 it was agreed that prosecutions should not be brought 
 so long as the plays were very short ; how at last 
 the Lord Chamberlain's hand was forced by the 
 County Councils ; and how in January 1912 he 
 began to license stage plays as part of a variety 
 programme. The only aspect of this amazing 
 tale which here concerns us is that in 191 2 there 
 was this theatre-shaking revolution — that the Lord 
 Chamberlain began to license plays for performance
 
 6 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 in the principal music halls, and that thereafter 
 everything went on exactly as before. 
 
 For the prophets were confounded. What did 
 this revolution really mean ? Music halls and 
 theatres were thereby put legally on a level. 
 Theatres might relieve the tedium of legitimate 
 drama with entertainers from the music hall ; 
 music halls might dignify their programmes with 
 stage plays. Obviously, it was said, the distinction 
 between the two would tend to disappear. These old 
 competitors fighting for one another's public would 
 combine in their respective programmes all the 
 more attractive elements of both. The music hall 
 would become a sort of theatre, the theatre would 
 become a sort of music hall. But nothing of the 
 kind has happened. The fallacy of all this melan- 
 choly prophesying was that it assumed a competition 
 which did not really exist. There is a large public 
 which never goes to a music hall : it is not in its 
 character to do so. There is a larger public which, 
 for a similar reason, never goes to a theatre. 
 There is a public still larger that goes sometimes to 
 one, sometimes to the other, but with a different 
 intention, and in a different mood, in each case. 
 If there were no music halls, and you wanted to go 
 to a music hall, you would not go to a theatre 
 instead ; nor, if there were no theatres, and you 
 wanted to go to a theatre, would you go to a music 
 hall. 
 
 Many things will here be objected. Have not 
 Sir Herbert Tree, Sir George Alexander and Mr.
 
 COMPETITORS ; 
 
 Granville Barker appeared on the music-hall stage ? 
 Did not the English public first hear of Schnitzler 
 at a music hall ? Did not Professor Reinhardt 
 make his English debut at a music hall ? Have 
 not Sir James Barrie, Mr. Max Beerbohm, Mr. Henry 
 Arthur Jones and Mr. Bernard Shaw written plays 
 for the music hall ? How, then, can it possibly 
 be maintained that the future of the music hall has 
 nothing to do with the future of the theatre ? — 
 that the music hall will not drive the theatre out of 
 existence ? 
 
 First let us reassert the difference between a 
 theatre and a music hall, beginning with the simple 
 fact that a music-hall programme has usually a 
 dozen items. Take the now classic example of the 
 first appearance in March 1913 of Sir George 
 Alexander in vaudeville. He appeared at the 
 Palace theatre. The play was by Mr. Max Beerbohm. 
 It was timed for about half-past nine in the even- 
 ing, and it lasted half an hour. The rest of the 
 programme was suited to varying degrees of taste 
 and intelligence, but it was fairly obvious that 
 the only item which really challenged com- 
 petition with the theatre was Mr. Max Beerbohm's 
 play. 
 
 Mr. Beerbohm's play was, in fact, a typical 
 instance of the settled policy of the big theatres 
 of variety. It was in the bill for the same reason 
 that Mr. Granville Barker and Professor Reinhardt 
 had previously been there. It is clear from the 
 mere examination of a bundle of variety programmes
 
 8 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 that the first principle of a music-hall entertainment 
 is that there may be something for everybody. 
 Every degree of taste and intelligence has to be 
 satisfied. Usually the main part of the programme 
 is frankly of the music hall — * turns ' which quite 
 clearly are not in any sense intended to compete 
 with legitimate drama. But it has lately been 
 the pohcy of the best managers to introduce into 
 the second half of the evening an item intended 
 to draw cultivated people — the latest ideas of a 
 continental producer, a short play by a celebrated 
 author, potted drama from Sicily and so forth. 
 These are the items which give plausibility to an 
 assumption that music halls compete with the 
 theatre, and improve at the theatre's expense. 
 But there is no real justification for this view. 
 These ' turns ' for the cultivated are invariably 
 timed from about nine o'clock to ten. They are 
 intended for people whose important function of 
 the evening was to dine ; people who come in 
 late to ' end up at a music hall.' The public for 
 which Mr. Beerbohm's short play, or Mr. Granville 
 Barker's ' Anatol ' sketch, was intended was 
 not a public which had deliberately measured a 
 stage play at the Palace against a stage play at 
 the Kingsway, weighing the artistic attractions 
 of a variety programme against the artistic 
 attractions of legitimate drama. It was a public 
 which wanted to round off the evening somewhere 
 — preferably at a place where it could be sure of a 
 good thing after nine o'clock. In a word, it wanted
 
 COMPETITORS 9 
 
 a music hall. The idea of a theatre had not entered 
 its head. 
 
 Actor-managers know this. Sir George Alexander 
 has always supported free trade in amusement. 
 All the most prominent actors have already 
 appeared on the variety stage. They know well 
 enough that no such competition exists as the 
 alarmists describe. Sir George Alexander would 
 not have appeared at the Palace had he thought 
 that thereby he was aiming a blow at the St. James's. 
 He knows that there will always be a public for 
 an evening at the play which no music hall can 
 take away, even though he himself is fitted into 
 a music-hall programme. The managers' idea of 
 the real relation of the music hall and the theatre 
 is well illustrated in the statutes of the revolution 
 of 1 91 2. Each party saw that the whole question 
 turned upon smoking in the theatre. The 
 legitimate managers, with infallible good sense, 
 saw that the contrast between music halls and 
 theatres, the psychologic rift, was in this question 
 of smoking. A music hall was a place to which 
 people of all sorts came to be comfortable, to 
 attend to the things that appealed to them, and 
 to tolerate with half a mind the things which did 
 not. A theatre was a place wherein people were 
 bent upon the play, where the audience was united 
 in its attention. The rules of a theatre or music 
 hall are not arbitrary fiats of the manager. They 
 are an interpretation of the wishes of the public. 
 Smoking is allowed in music halls, because a
 
 lo THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 music-hall audience is in the mind to smoke. 
 Smoking is not allowed in the theatre, because the 
 audience is in the mind to abhor anything so degage. 
 The regulations as to smoking, unimportant in 
 themselves, are excellent symbols of a frame of 
 mind. 
 
 Let us further pursue this root distinction between 
 the playgoing and the music-hall habit of attention. 
 It will explain why some of the best work upon 
 the modern stage is done at the variety theatres 
 and enable us to measure the probable influence 
 of the variety theatre upon the future of dramatic 
 art. The music-hall programme, as we have 
 seen, is intended to appeal in its respective items 
 to different sections of the public. Only one 
 thing is required of the candidate for admission. 
 The aim of the impresario is to be sure that 
 everything is the best of its kind. The play- 
 going public does not smoke. It requires 
 illusion, and illusion requires you to be intent. 
 The music-hall public does smoke. It does not 
 require illusion, but entertainment. They are not 
 intent ; they are detached and critical. The 
 items are a successive exhibition of technical 
 virtuosity, whether it be juggling with a dozen 
 oranges, playing tunes upon a cigar box, or eating 
 a pack of cards. The public looks keenly for the 
 perfection of craft. 
 
 This holds not alone of the distinctively music- 
 hall items ; but of productions legalised at the 
 revolution of 1912. Already Europe is ransacked
 
 COMPETITORS li 
 
 for its latest and best. Mr. Granville Barker 
 naturalises Viennese comedy at the Palace ; 
 Professor Reinhardt and his men from Berlin, 
 with a revolving stage specially constructed, deliver 
 to the English public their last word upon the 
 art of production. The music-hall impresario is 
 alert, experimental, bold in innovation, continually 
 feeling his way \\ith a critical public — or rather 
 with a number of critical publics, each wanting 
 to be competently entertained. That his audience 
 is not homologous, that he is appealing to different 
 sections in different ways, makes him readier to 
 take risks, to adventure more boldly than the 
 purveyor of legitimate drama. This accounts for 
 so many new and important movements and in- 
 fluences coming into the legitimate theatre by 
 way of the music hall. We need not fear that 
 the future of the theatre is thereby threatened, 
 that its identity is in danger of being lost owing 
 to the competition and influence of the music hall. 
 The legitimate theatre will doubtless borrow from 
 the music hall anything it requires for its ends 
 and puiposes, as it has already borrowed Herr 
 Schnitzler and Professor Reinhardt. But the 
 fundamental distinction remains. There is a music- 
 hall atmosphere and a music-hall public. There 
 is a playgoing atmosphere and a playgoing public. 
 Each institution accurately fits a need of the com- 
 munity and a mood of the visitor. If playgoing 
 should ever decay in this country, it will not be 
 owing to the competition of an entirely different
 
 12 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 institution ; nor, because a new music hall is 
 opened, does it follow that an old theatre will be 
 shut. 
 
 This equally applies to musical comedy. There is 
 equally a gulf between the moods and requirements 
 of a musical comedy audience and the legitimate 
 playgoer, as between the legitimate playgoer and the 
 frequenters of a music hall. The disjecta membra 
 of a musical comedy are distinctly analogous to the 
 variety programme (particularly since the variety 
 programme has taken to including the musical 
 revue) ; and though to smoke is not the custom 
 at Daly's and the Gaiety there is a rough identity 
 of mood between the public at a music hall and 
 the public at a musical comedy. There is no real 
 competition between Daly's and the St. James's. 
 Legitimate drama is virtually unaffected by the 
 fact that there exists an enormous public regularly 
 supporting musical comedy simultaneously in half 
 a dozen London houses. If musical comedy were 
 next week utterly to disappear from London, the 
 legitimate theatre would hardly be conscious that 
 anything of importance had happened. This does 
 not mean that the musical comedy public is a 
 water-tight section of the people which nowhere 
 coincides with the public for legitimate drama ; 
 but it does mean that visiting a musical comedy is a 
 different thing from visiting a play. It supposes 
 a different mood and a different intention in the 
 visitor. 
 
 Musical comedy has even less influence than the
 
 COMPETITORS 13 
 
 music hall on the legitimate theatre. The music- 
 hall entrepreneur, raking the world for artistic 
 novelties, occasionally nets an idea that has an 
 enormous influence on the progress of legitimate 
 drama. But musical comedy has contributed 
 nothing of value. It occasionally happens that 
 players pass from one metier to the other. Many 
 talented players — Miss Ethel Irving, for instance 
 — have done so. It also is painfully true that 
 much of the expensive vulgarity of a method of 
 production already virtually exhausted has crept 
 into the legitimate theatre from the musical comedy 
 stage. The production, for instance, of Shake- 
 speare at West End theatres owes much to 
 musical comedy at the Gaiety and to its Christmas 
 varieties at Drury Lane. But there is no funda- 
 mental connection, no regular artistic give-and- 
 take, between the two. Musical comedy can be 
 neglected with even less apology than the music 
 hall in looking into the future of the theatre. 
 
 There remains the kinematograph. It would be 
 quite unnecessary even to mention the kinemato- 
 graph were it not for the very serious nonsense 
 this topic has inspired. What are the facts ? 
 The trade in electric pictures is an especially tempt- 
 ing kind of speculation. Buildings of all sorts and 
 sizes can be run up, films rented, the few necessary 
 operators and attendants paid, with an expenditure 
 ridiculously small compared with the ordinary 
 prices in this country of a music-hall entertainment. 
 There has been a rush — which still continues — of
 
 14 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 small men and big men to share in a very profit- 
 able traffic in cheap amusement. Speculating 
 in electric pictures is no more reprehensible than 
 speculating in skating rinks or patent medicines ; 
 only these people must needs talk. First they 
 talked philanthropy. Desiring to speculate for 
 seven days a week, they persuaded the London 
 County Council to allow them to work on Sunday. 
 The arrangement was that Sunday profits should 
 go to charitable institutions after Sunday ex- 
 penses were paid. But, when the time came for 
 balance-sheets and reports, it was found that the 
 kinematograph companies, laying up treasure in 
 heaven, had contrived to lay up even more treasure 
 upon earth. Some of the more reputable charitable 
 institutions withdrew from the arrangement in 
 disgust. 
 
 Then the companies talked morality. Mr. G. A. 
 Redford had just resigned his post as censor of stage 
 plays. People were asking at the time why, if 
 stage plays had to be inspected and warranted free 
 from indecency, blasphemy, libel, and so forth, and 
 why, if music halls had to be licensed and controlled 
 by local authorities, picture houses should escape. 
 The kinematograph proprietors accordingly invited 
 Mr. Redford, late Examiner of Plays for the Lord 
 Chamberlain, to become their chief inspector of 
 films. Mr. Redford, at a reasonable salary, became 
 guarantor to the public that all things offered in a 
 picture{)alacewere respectable, clean, reverent, whole- 
 some and morally elevating. No more was heard
 
 COMPETITORS 1 5 
 
 of a public censorship of electric theatres ; and we 
 were soon assured that the relations between Mr. 
 Redford and the film proprietors were admirably 
 harmonious. Mr. Redford had had long practice 
 as the Lord Chamberlain's examiner in accurately 
 measuring the functions of a public censor. He 
 now had an even better opportunity for censorcraft. 
 It had been his duty through calumny and mis- 
 representation for the best years of his life to stand 
 before the public of the Lord Chamberlain's theatres 
 as the salaried guarantor of their respectability. 
 He now resumed his good offices on behalf of a 
 wider public. The pretences were similar, though 
 they were less discreetly veiled. 
 
 The companies next talked art and education. It 
 was even suggested that the kinematograph should 
 be used in public schools to stimulate the imagina- 
 tion of young people. This, as to which a good 
 deal was very pertinently said at the time by 
 Dr. Lyttelton (to the immense indignation of the 
 speculators), is rather beside the future of the theatre. 
 But the kinematograph as theatrical fine art is more 
 to the point. No one has suggested that the 
 phonograph or metrostyle has added to the arts. 
 They are admirable machines for recording and 
 reproducing the achievements of an artist ; but 
 no one has ventured to suggest that these instru- 
 ments are artistically creative. Nevertheless, the 
 claim is seriously made for the kinematograph. 
 Possibly the speculators took their cue from Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw's ingenious defence of photography
 
 i6 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 as a fine art, in whose appreciation of Cobum's 
 pictures is matter and impertinency mixed. 
 
 The claim is based ultimately not upon the 
 kinematograph's ability to reproduce enacted 
 scenes or events of history, but upon its ability 
 to create false illusions — carefully invented absurd- 
 ities arranged by means of pictures ingeniously 
 faked. A motor-car will jump a precipice of a 
 thousand feet, plunge into the sea, and be converted 
 into a submarine or a flying-fish. These pictures 
 are often enormously clever and diverting, but 
 their manufacture clearly bears no relation to the 
 activities of an artist. We are interested in a 
 surprising per\''ersion of the laws of matter — in an 
 exhibition of scientific conjuring. This equally 
 applies to faked pictures of heaven and hell and 
 to the contorted mummery whereby the story of 
 Christ is flung upon the screen. 
 
 "' Ten years hence it would not be necessary to talk 
 at all about the kinematograph. But, in the present 
 boom, when actors are in a panic of starvation, and 
 when critics are talking nonsense about art of the 
 film, it is strictly necessary to dissociate the future 
 of the theatre from the future of kinoplasticon. 
 There is no competition. The picture palace has 
 tapped a vast public looking for cheap amuse- 
 ment. It threatens to slay utterly the travelling 
 show, nigger minstrels, the panorama and circus. 
 It has won a permanent place for itself as an item 
 of vaudeville. But we shall in a few years hear 
 little of its competition with the theatre. Nor will
 
 COMPETITORS i^ 
 
 these stuffy and stupefying picture palaces be able 
 for long to maintain themselves in their hundred 
 thousands. The limitations of this form of enter- 
 tainment, already eked out in the larger palaces 
 with music-hall varieties, will soon appear ; and 
 the interest even of the threepenny public be 
 exhausted.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE FUTURE OF DRAMATIC CRITICS 
 
 The censure of the which one must in your allowance o'er- 
 weigh a whole theatre of others. 
 
 NOWHERE is the English habit of disguising 
 harsh reality with agreeable pretences so 
 admirably illustrated as in the English theatre. 
 A whole etiquette of polite understandings has 
 been ingeniously contrived, not of course with 
 intent to deceive the simple public, but from a natural 
 human desire that the harmless necessary sepul- 
 chres of modern life may be decent and fair. 
 Fictions which enable whole thousands of estimable 
 people to play their several parts with dignity and 
 self-respect have an undoubted moral value. They 
 are the spiritual assets of a commonwealth. There 
 will always be rude facts, vulgar and uncomfortable, 
 at the bottom of every civilisation in all its stages. 
 The political and social genius of a people consists 
 in the successful discovery of beautiful conventions 
 whereby rude facts are ignored. Indeed, it some- 
 times has happened that, by the mere virtue of 
 ignorance, the facts themselves have disappeared, 
 pretence usurping reality. 
 
 i8
 
 THE FUTURE OF DRAMATIC CRITICS 19 
 
 It is agreed that actor-managers are men of 
 art, living only to express themselves beautifully ; 
 that with infinite pains they seek out the finest 
 plays of their time ; that, having completed their 
 arrangements to produce one of these plays, they 
 invite to the theatre a number of gentlemen recog- 
 nised as experts on all that touches dramatic art ; 
 that these gentlemen pass upon the play in question 
 independent, fearless and extremely valuable 
 opinions ; that these opinions are intended to 
 help the manager in the progress of his art ; that 
 they are received by him in chastened gratitude and 
 a modest poverty of spirit. It is a very beautiful 
 fiction. The critic who receives without an access 
 of sincere emotion the familiar note in which this 
 manager or that " has the honour to invite his 
 presence " at a first production ; who does not attend 
 first nights with a sense of dignity, responsibility 
 and general elevation of spirit, has no right to the 
 gibus of his profession. 
 
 But in a serious discussion of the future of the 
 theatre it is not possible to linger on these admirable 
 pretences to the exclusion of quite another group 
 of facts, not entirely irrelevant. Theatrical pro- 
 ductions cost money. Sometimes the money 
 actually belongs to the producer or man of art. 
 We may assume without cynicism that the person 
 who finds the money will not be disappointed if 
 the investment turns out to be a good one. Sir 
 Herbert Tree quite frankly asked the Censorship 
 Committee of 1909 to regard him not only as a
 
 20 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 man of art, but as a man of business. How far 
 it is possible to combine business with art, to 
 produce theatrical masterpieces and to make 
 money out of being a genius, is not a question to 
 detain us here. The point that now concerns us 
 is that actor-managers have something to sell ; 
 and that they advertise it. 
 
 Let us, then, pretend (it is unreasonable to 
 pretend only what is beautiful) that managers 
 are business men ; and that proprietors of news- 
 papers are not averse from receiving revenue. Let 
 us put the worst possible construction upon this 
 hypothesis. We will be sordid. What would be 
 likely to happen arguing from the assumption that 
 proprietors of entertainment and proprietors of 
 newspapers are each anxious to obtain the greatest 
 possible amount of worldly advantage out of their 
 relations with one another ? 
 
 The position of an editor or proprietor of a news- 
 paper is delicate and difficult. He likes to receive 
 revenue from the advertisements of a theatre. 
 He also likes to be invited, in the person of his 
 dramatic critic, to the first performances of plays. 
 For a mysterious reason not yet investigated the 
 report of a dramatic performance is good copy. 
 The public likes to read an account of new plays 
 as they appear. It does not greatly matter that 
 these accounts should be well written, or wisely 
 conceived, or contain anything beyond bald re- 
 sumes of the plot, with a few perfunctory nomina- 
 tions of the players. The public will read any
 
 THE FUTURE OF DRAMATIC CRITICS 21 
 
 sort of paragraph about the theatre, and it is the 
 business of a competent editor to print as many 
 of these paragraphs as he can find a reasonable 
 excuse for writing. Definitely he does not, as a 
 business man, want to quarrel with the actor- 
 managers if he can avoid it. He desires to lose 
 neither a permanent source of revenue in advertise- 
 ments, nor a permanent fount of copy in per- 
 formances of plays, programmes, plans for the 
 season, personal reminiscences and occasional 
 banquet celebrations. It is to his interest that 
 the relations between himself, his representatives, 
 and the actor-managers should be harmonious and 
 agreeable. 
 
 What is the position of the actor-manager, 
 likewise regarded as a simple man of business ? 
 As a man of business he wants first of all to induce 
 the public to come to his theatre. To this end 
 he inserts in all the principal newspapers an 
 advertisement of his play, with particulars as to 
 the time and place of performance. Imagine his 
 feelings, still as a simple man of business, if on 
 the day after the first performance of his new 
 play he reads, in the journal of a proprietor he has 
 actually paid to advertise it, an eloquent half 
 column of advice to playgoers on no account to 
 visit his theatre ! It will here be objected that 
 he has invited criticism upon a work of art, and 
 that he is only too happy to be helpfully corrected. 
 But for the time being we are leaving this out of 
 account. As a man of business he has invited
 
 22 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 representatives of the press to his theatre, intending 
 that they shall be favourably impressed with the 
 quality of his entertainment. He wants a half- 
 page or quarter-page advertisement of his play in 
 return for a free seat at the theatre. 
 
 What would be the natural consequences of a 
 purely business relation between the newspaper 
 proprietor and the actor-manager ? What is likely 
 to happen, supposing all questions of high art, 
 personal delicacy and polite convention are put 
 aside ? 
 
 First, we should not expect any very violent 
 quarrel between the two august parties — the 
 theatre manager and the newspaper proprietor. 
 Neither, as a simple man of business, could afford 
 it. A manager must have his advertisements in 
 all newspapers of a respectable circulation ; and a 
 newspaper proprietor must not offend the public, 
 which looks for descriptive reports of the theatre. 
 Nevertheless, we should expect occasional friction 
 — perhaps occasional ill-feeling. The representative 
 of a newspaper might not invariably agree with 
 the actor-manager as to the merits of a particular 
 play ; and though the agreeable pretences already 
 described would not be so far ignored by the actor- 
 manager as to make him regard his critic as a 
 paid advertiser and panegyrist, yet he m.ight, as 
 a man of business, quite justifiably grumble, 
 and even darkly protest that his hospitality had 
 been abused. He might even go to the extreme 
 of shutting out a pertinacious defamer of his ware ;
 
 THE FUTURE OF DRAMATIC CRITICS 23 
 
 and, in a fit of irritation, he might threaten to 
 cut off advertisements and tickets. Throw back 
 your memory for the last three years. Have you 
 never read articles, letters to the editor and inter- 
 views with managers, wherein these grievances 
 and threats have broken out into public print ? 
 While we are thus inquiring into the relations of 
 actor-managers and the proprietors of newspapers 
 as simple men of business, it is not irrelevant to 
 recall that just these probable results of just these 
 vulgar considerations are common knowledge of the 
 reading pubhc. 
 
 How, conceivably, could friction be minimised 
 between the two august parties to this likely 
 quarrel ? A great deal would seem to depend 
 upon the choosing of critics and upon their manage- 
 ment. The proprietor of a newspaper, as a man 
 of business, would naturally choose a critic who 
 was unlikely to be too exacting, too far uplifted 
 from the level of the public whose wishes he was 
 expected to interpret, too remote in his mental 
 attitude from the actor-managers whose work it 
 was hoped he would appreciate. Critics full of 
 awkward ideas about art, critics with a fierce 
 missionary zeal, would tend quietly to disappear 
 from newspapers of enormous circulation. We 
 should expect the sincerest criticism, not in daily 
 newspapers with enormous circulations, but in 
 weekly reviews. Men of mind who happened to 
 find themselves upon a daily paper of influence 
 and distinction would probably refuse to be very
 
 24 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 serious, concealing their contempt for this or that 
 thing in modern dramatic art with a playful 
 indifference. Reasonably we might assume that a 
 newspaper proprietor would count himself happy in 
 a dramatic representative who without being too big 
 a fool for his public was unlikely to be troublesome 
 to an actor-manager. Have these reasonable ex- 
 pectations no relation with facts as the intelligent 
 public has observed them ? 
 
 What, on the other hand, should we expect of 
 actor-managers, as simple men of business, in 
 their dealings with the critics ? It would clearly 
 be agreeable to all parties if dramatic critics were 
 personally known to actors and actresses, if they 
 were not altogether excluded from the Green-Room 
 Club, if they occasionally met at dinner the people 
 with whom they should never very violently 
 disagree. Actor-managers of superlative distinction 
 would probably regard newspaper-men as poli- 
 ticians and most people of reputation regard 
 them — as a convenient nuisance. They would 
 not, in self-respect, seek them out, or attempt 
 deliberately to corrupt their judgment. But they 
 would not be unnecessarily rude. Little courtesies, 
 not costing them too dear, would not be omitted. 
 
 Perhaps it is now conceivable how a compromise 
 between art and business, between the polite fictions 
 with which we started and the vulgar reality sug- 
 gested as a possible small ingredient, -is in practice 
 arrived at by the parties. 
 
 What will become of this compromise ? What
 
 THE FUTURE OF DRAMATIC CRITICS 25 
 
 is the future of dramatic criticism ? In 1920, 
 about four years after the opening of the National 
 Memorial Theatre, it will be realised by the directors 
 that the intelligent public yearly attracted in ever- 
 increasing numbers to the best plays of the best 
 authors have neither use nor respect for newspaper 
 reports of their proceedings. Some unusually out- 
 rageous press campaign will precipitate a crisis, 
 and there will be a revolution. Mr. Granville 
 Barker — say — will stage a comedy by William 
 Shakespeare, and be flatly accused in the newspapers 
 of wilful oddness and uncouth perversion of the text. 
 Some one, perhaps, will take the opportunity of a 
 Strindberg festival to proclaim the morbidity of 
 the Scandinavian mind ; and begin a press agitation 
 in favour of the revival of the censorship of the Lord 
 Chamberlain. (The censorship of the Lord Cham- 
 berlain will have been statutorily abolished by a 
 Unionist Government in 1917.) Whatever the 
 immediate occasion, the directors of the National 
 Memorial Theatre will lose patience ; decline to 
 continue their polite understanding with the press ; 
 and lay it down as a principle that critics must 
 come to the theatre as ordinary members of the 
 public. They will point out that they need no 
 further advertisement of the National Theatre than 
 a simple publication of the time and description of 
 its performances ; that they will be very grateful 
 for public or private criticism of their methods, 
 plays, players and producers ; but that they wish 
 definitely to put a term to the convention that
 
 26 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 regular newspaper critics of the old school are any- 
 thing but a nuisance to the managers or to the 
 public. There will be an uproar. Every one will 
 predict the bankruptcy of the National Memorial 
 Theatre ; and for a short time the chief proprietors 
 of newspapers will refuse to insert their announce- 
 ments. But the public will protest against the 
 newspapers ; the National Theatre will fill more 
 persistently than ever ; and the press, as its function 
 is, will accept the popular view. Thereupon all the 
 more self-respecting managers will follow the direc- 
 tors of the National Theatre in excluding representa- 
 tives of the press ; and all the more self-respecting 
 authors will make it a condition of the performance 
 of their plays that no free tickets are issued for the 
 first performance. It will soon be quite obvious 
 that dramatic criticism (old style) was a waste of 
 the public's time ; of the newspapers' money and 
 space ; of the theatres' accommodation — besides 
 entailing unnecessary mental suffering and degrada- 
 tion upon a thoroughly respectable, intelligent and 
 conscientious body of men. 
 
 By the end of 1921 dramatic criticism, as we 
 understand it to-day, will have disappeared. There 
 will be a new school of critics. Newspapers and 
 reviews will keep in touch with the theatre as with 
 every other sort of artistic achievement. Dramatic 
 criticism will be written by men of leisure, not, as 
 journalism, in the hurried small hours of the morn- 
 ing, but as essays in reflection upon the tendencies 
 of the modern stage, considered in relation to the
 
 THE FUTURE OF DRAMATIC CRITICS 27 
 
 whole body of English fine art. It will no more 
 be considered necessary by newspaper proprietors 
 to notice a play the morning after production than 
 it is considered necessary to notice a book on the 
 day of publication, and no more necessary to notice 
 all the plays than it is necessary to notice all the 
 books. 
 
 The change will not be affected without noise and 
 scandal. There will be three main bodies of opinion. 
 First, there will be the old brigade, honestly believing 
 in the old polite fictions of to-day. Second, there 
 will be a group of moderates who think the old 
 system should be continued with safeguards. 
 Third, there will be the root-and-branch abolitionists. 
 The first group will be utterly disabled from the 
 moment it is perceived that the National Theatre 
 continues to fill despite its quarrel with the press. 
 The big fight will be between the Centre Party and 
 the Extreme Left. 
 
 In the height of it will issue from the literary 
 adviser of the National Theatre (an ingenious man 
 of peace) a pamphlet entitled Via Media : A Plea 
 for the Decent Restraint of Critics. Briefl}^ he will 
 propose that critics should continue to be invited 
 to the theatre for first-night performances ; but that 
 they should be required on entering the theatre to 
 sign a paper. This paper will contain an assertion 
 on the part of the signatory (i) that he is the member 
 of no club or social group where men and women 
 professionally interested in the theatre are in the 
 habit of congregating ; (2) that he is personally
 
 28 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 unknown to any of the actors, authors, or managers 
 interested in the failure or success of the play he is 
 intending to criticise ; (3) that he has never received 
 from any manager interested in, or in competition 
 with, the theatre he is attending any sum on account 
 of royalties for any play, or part of a play, or scen- 
 ario ; (4) that he is entirely unsusceptible to the 
 personal charm of any actress taking part in the 
 production, and has never bought, or felt the least 
 inclination to buy, her picture postcard ; (5) that he 
 has never intentionally penetrated beyond the stage 
 door, or visited any portion of a building licensed 
 for theatrical productions except the portion in- 
 tended for the accommodation of an audience ; 
 (6) that he has practically demonstrated his capa- 
 city to maintain himself in modest competence 
 by honest employment entirely unconnected with 
 the theatre or the press. 
 
 This pamphlet of the literary adviser will 
 please neither the Right nor the Left. As the way 
 is with ingenious men of peace, the author will 
 draw upon himself the heaviest censure of both 
 the extreme parties. But the scheme will actually 
 break, not upon the vast mass of opposing argu- 
 ment, but upon a practical difficulty. It will be 
 pointed out that no dramatic critic can be found 
 able, without flat perjury, to sign such a document. 
 Vainly the literary adviser will urge that under 
 his scheme a regular system of honest, competent 
 and wholesome criticism is assured. The critics 
 he will require will not exist. The Right will
 
 THE futurp: of dramatic critics 29 
 
 continue to argue that the literary adviser's 
 pamphlet is a gross libel upon an honourable pro- 
 fession. The Left will continue to argue that it is 
 a mere palliative. Meantime, the chief director, 
 consulting his knowledge of the theatre and of 
 the press as a shrewd and practical man of affairs, 
 will quietly put the literary adviser's pamphlet 
 into a pigeon-hole, and issue instructions to his 
 acting-manager that no further free tickets are to 
 be issued. 
 
 The meaning of this revolution will more clearly 
 appear when we have considered the future of the 
 English public. For the public has a future. 
 The future of the public will help us to realise 
 how it was inevitable that the director of the 
 National Memorial Theatre should be successfully 
 able to take this momentous step of abolishing free 
 invitations.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC 
 
 You would play upon me ; j'^ou would seem to know my stops ; 
 you would pluck out the heart of my mystery ; you would sound 
 me from my lowest note to the top of my compass ! And there 
 is much music, excellent voice in this Uttle organ ; yet cannot 
 you make it speak. 
 
 Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel ? 
 
 By the mass, and 'tis a camel, indeed. 
 
 Methinks 'tis like a weasel. 
 
 It is backed like a weasel. 
 
 Or like a whale ? 
 
 Very like a whale . . . 
 
 They fool me to the top of my bent 1 
 
 IT is too readily assumed that the public is 
 incapable of reason. If this were as true as 
 is commonly supposed it would be of little use 
 discussing the future of the theatre. Stage plays 
 are performed in public for the delectation of an 
 audience ; and, whether one be Shakespeare or 
 Brandon Thomas, one must strive to please it 
 every day. If the actor-manager confines himself 
 to the office of Master Peaseblossom, spending his 
 years scratching the head of Bottom transformed, 
 prophesying is in vain. 
 
 To assume that the public is incapable of reason 
 
 30
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC 31 
 
 is a derivative of the popular fallacy that the 
 public invariably gets what it wants. The public 
 supports a foolish play. It is therefore assumed 
 that this foolish play is at all points what the 
 public requires. Managers, proceeding on this 
 hypothesis, seek out other foolish plays as nearly 
 like it as possible. More often than not these 
 other foolish plays dismally fail. The managers 
 are puzzled ; but still persist in assuming that the 
 first foolish play pleased for its folly. The public, 
 they say, is incapable of reason ; but it is filled 
 with obstinate and unaccountable fancies. 
 
 Public taste is unplumbed and mysterious. It 
 is not for me to pretend to understand why one 
 play succeeds where another fails ; nor would I 
 tell it in Gath if I had found a clue. A person 
 who could discover anything about public taste 
 would not be writing books about the theatre. 
 He would be employed by actor-managers at an 
 enormous salary to choose plays. In default of 
 any such infallible scientific analyst managers 
 fall into two classes — men of business who aim 
 quite simply at hitting the public rage one time in 
 ten, and men of art who go their own way, hoping 
 it is also the way of the public. These two classes 
 of manager shade off imperceptibly into one another. 
 Business and art are ingeniously combined in all 
 sorts of ways. But these are the two main classes. 
 
 The distinction between them is of the first 
 importance for the future of the English theatre. 
 Let us consider each of them a little more par-
 
 32 THE FUTURE OF TPIE THEATRE 
 
 ticularly. There are two ways of treating the 
 Enghsh pubUc. You may conceive it in the image 
 of Bottom desiring only to be scratched ; as a 
 spoiled child wishing only to be humoured. You 
 may wait apprehensively upon every indication of 
 its appetite and temper. You may be perpetually 
 afraid of being too refined, subtle, clever, elevated, 
 or profound for its understanding and fancy. You 
 may spend unfailing ingenuity, vast sums of money, 
 stores of cunning, unending foresight and brilliant 
 conjecture in attempting to anticipate its whims 
 and wishes. You may put aside your artistic 
 conscience, do perpetual violence to your intelli- 
 gence, be ever ready to dance when the public 
 pipes to you ; and at the end of it all you may 
 retire into bankruptcy, having made and lost a 
 hundred fortunes. Is this a picture of imagina- 
 tion ? Has it any relation to the procedure of a 
 certain sort of actor-manager to-day ? Have we 
 never heard of the actor who, calling himself a 
 servant of the public, is in private hardly prepared 
 to admit that the public is much better than a 
 violent fool ? 
 
 But there is another way. Without calling 
 yourself a servant of the public, or troubling in 
 the least about the public taste, you may produce 
 plays to please yourself. At the back of your 
 head there may be the shadow of an idea that 
 the public is neither so foolish nor unaccountable 
 as its servants proclaim ; that possibly if you 
 follow your conscience, choose that which is good
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC 33 
 
 in your own eyes, be never afraid of being too 
 excellent and original for your auditors — that 
 then you may not only do better for the sweetness 
 and favour of your name than managers of another 
 school, but likewise be more respected and favoured 
 by the public, and less likely to come within 
 prospect of a base material disaster. Suppose the 
 public, like the fourteenth-century commons on 
 Blackheath, are asking, not for a servant of their 
 base desires, but for a leader. Suppose the public 
 is willing to be educated, to be led into an apprecia- 
 tion of what is beautiful, to be constrained and 
 disciplined into love of something perhaps a little 
 higher than its grasp at present reaches, a little 
 clearer than its intelligence has so far penetrated. 
 Suppose it has been the office of all who truly 
 profess the arts, not slavishly to accept the con- 
 ceptions of the vulgar, but to impose their own. 
 Suppose that men are hungry for dreams and 
 visions ; that they are ready to snatch at any- 
 thing that seems as though it came to them with 
 authority. 
 
 Which manager, of these, is the manager of the 
 future ? Let us look merely at the evidence. We 
 are shortly to discover that the days of Sir Pandarus 
 are numbered. The manager who, with the wisdom 
 of a fool, waits on the popular breeze, whose prin- 
 ciple of management allows him cheerfully to lose 
 a hundred per cent, upon four trashy plays in 
 succession so long as the fifth trashy play happens 
 mysteriously to do his business — this sort of 
 3
 
 34 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 manager will in 1920 have been managed out of 
 the land by men who equally respect themselves 
 and their supporters. This prophesying is not 
 delirious. There are facts. 
 
 Let us, for our period of examination, go no 
 further back than the beginning of this present 
 century. Consider Mr. Bernard Shaw. We are 
 not here concerned with the quality or future of 
 his plays, but with two plain circumstances of 
 his biography : (i) that he has never made the 
 smallest concession to the public with the idea of 
 thereby making himself more popular and agree- 
 able ; (2) that he is one of the most successful 
 dramatic authors of the present day. He is more 
 persistently before the public than Mr. Pease- 
 blossom. He is well able to make his own and 
 his producer's fortune. The production of his 
 first plays was an essay in the new principle of 
 not caring a jot as to what the public wants. 
 Messrs. Vedrenne and Barker at the Court theatre 
 in 1904 knew what they wanted themselves, and 
 gave the public an opportunity of agreeing. They 
 realised that, if the public were given time, it would 
 discover and support a good thing honestly offered 
 at a fair price. It is now found that honesty, if 
 it does not invariably pay a hundred per cent., will 
 with average good luck pay twenty to fifty, and 
 will in any case keep well upon the windy side of 
 bankruptcy. 
 
 It is here suggested, not that the public is always 
 right, but that the public is not always wrong ;
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC 35 
 
 that managers who regard it as incapable of reason, 
 and persistently play down to it, are more likely 
 to come to a bad end than their honest competitors ; 
 that to choose plays for their merit alone, with no 
 reference to what the public supported last year, 
 or is likely to support next year, is better policy 
 than trying to measure the public taste. It is 
 now being realised — and when we have a National 
 Theatre it will be realised even more clearly — that 
 the secret of successful management is to give the 
 public the best in your power, confident that it 
 is safer to be too delicate or too profound than 
 not to be delicate or profound enough. During 
 the last two years most of the really successful 
 plays were staged, either experimentally by enter- 
 prising men of mind, or in the regular way of pro- 
 duction by managers of the new school; Eliminate 
 plaj's like Bunty Pulls the Strings and Rutherford 
 and Son (pla3^s which slipped on to the commercial 
 stage by way of experimental matinees), and plays 
 like Milestones and The Great Adventure (plays 
 which were produced by Mr. Denis Eadie and Mr. 
 Granville Barker) — eliminate plays such as these, 
 and the average of financial success of the London 
 theatres is considerably reduced. The artistic 
 merit of these plays is not here under discussion. 
 They are taken merely as instances that the logic 
 of events, apart from the principles of right reason, 
 points to the elimination of the manager whose 
 principle it is, not to produce plays he likes (suffer- 
 ing his policy of management to be determined
 
 36 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 by independent artistic conviction), but to follow 
 the popular breeze. 
 
 There is an admirable illustration of this argu- 
 ment in the career of Mr. Stanley Houghton. Mr. 
 Stanley Houghton, an amateur of the stage in 
 Manchester (an amateur in the sense that Congreve 
 was an amateur), wrote two plays already cele- 
 brated in the immediately recent history of the 
 English theatre. The first of these amateur plays 
 was Hindle Wakes. Hindle Wakes came deviously 
 to the London stage by way of Miss Horniman's 
 Repertory players and the Stage Society. It was 
 secured by Mr. Cyril Maude for the Playhouse. 
 It had quite a respectable run in London, a succes 
 d'estime in all the repertory cities of Great Britain, 
 and a succes de scandale at Oxford, which was at 
 that time actively dissociating itself from the intel- 
 lectual and artistic ambitions of the English theatre. 
 The second of these plays was The Younger 
 Generation. The Younger Generation was first 
 played in London at Notting Hill Gate. It was 
 afterwards secured by Mr. Frederick Harrison, who 
 made such a success of it that it had to be turned out 
 of the Haymarket into the Comedy before the run 
 was exhausted. These two plays were Mr. Hough- 
 ton's sincere contribution to English drama — 
 written without thought of the public. The Younger 
 Generation, more especially, contained none of those 
 things which experts upon public taste tell us are 
 indispensable to a play with money in it. It was 
 ' slight ' without being merry. But it succeeded.
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC 37 
 
 The next we heard of Mr. Houghton was that he 
 had come to London, and that he was writing a 
 play for Mr. Arthur Bourchier. He was no longer 
 an amateur writing to please himself. He was a 
 professional author writing for an audience at the 
 Garrick theatre. The play was produced ; and the 
 public was invited to come for a hundred nights. But 
 the public did not go. Trust the People, expressly 
 written for the public, did not please the public. 
 Mr. Houghton's new play contained everything the 
 public is supposed to like. All the ingredients of 
 a really popular play were handled with quite 
 an astonishing neatness and dexterity. If Mr. 
 Houghton had deliberately intended to tickle his 
 audience from the front row of the stalls to the back 
 row of the gallery, he could not more faithfully 
 have served the public taskmaster. But in vain 
 was the net spread. The public would not be 
 caught. Trust the People, upon which Mr. Pease- 
 blossom would feel at any time justified in put- 
 ting his money, significantly failed, whereas The 
 Younger Generation, for which Mr. Peaseblossom 
 would have predicted a dead loss, succeeded. Mr. 
 Houghton, being a man of quick perception, saw 
 it was a mistake to get into touch with the English 
 public ; that nothing pleases it so much as to be 
 ignored. It was soon reported that he had gone 
 away to Paris to forget what the English public was 
 like. 
 
 These tiresome details go conclusively to show 
 that the public more often wants the best work 
 
 '3
 
 38 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 of the best authors than what Mr. Peaseblossom 
 imagines it is Hkely to want. In ten years' time 
 this chapter will happily be quite unnecessary. 
 Mr. Peaseblossom will then be extinct. It will 
 then be recognised that the public is wiser than the 
 public thinks ; that he who would save his public 
 must be prepared to lose it ; that the public will 
 only follow people who are ready to lead it. 
 
 Here is additional reason why dramatic criticism 
 of the sort with which we are to-day familiar will 
 be extinct in 1920. Dramatic criticism to-day is 
 really a part of the general conspiracy to pretend 
 that the public is incapable of reason. It is part 
 of the polite fiction about dramatic critics, which we 
 have already examined, that they lead the public 
 taste ; that they help to decide what plays the public 
 shall see. The public being quite unable to decide 
 what it wants, the dramatic critics are supposed to 
 perform a useful service in helping it to make up 
 its mind. They are also supposed to reconcile 
 the public to what is new and original ; to secure 
 a hearing for strange prophets ; to stand between 
 dramatic art and the vulgar as experts and inter- 
 preters. 
 
 This agreeable pretence must vanish like the 
 rest, once it is proven by experience that the public 
 will not be led by the nose, even though an angel 
 from heaven offers to be its conductor. It is 
 already dimly conjectured by intelligent managers 
 (i) that no degree or extent of eulogy in the press 
 will make the fortunes of a play that the public
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC 39 
 
 does not want; (2) that nothing a critic can say 
 will keep the public out of a theatre once it has made 
 up its mind to be there. These convictions will 
 become clearer and more embracing when, with a 
 National Theatre continuously producing plays of 
 all sorts, we are able more scientifically to observe 
 the habits and temperament of the playgoing 
 classes. One thing very definitely will emerge — 
 that when it comes to leading public opinion experts 
 are by the nature of things incapable. 
 
 Consider again for a moment, before looking into 
 the future, the progress of the English dramatic 
 movement associated with Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. 
 Galsworthy and Mr. Granville Barker. At what 
 stage of it were the expert leaders of public opinion 
 of the slightest use? It used to be said that no 
 play could succeed on the English stage in which the 
 speeches were more than ten lines long ; that no 
 English audience could possibly endure a play in 
 which religion entered, or politics, or social economy ; 
 that no play could succeed without a romantic 
 love interest, a plot which could be described on 
 half a sheet of notepapcr and a happy ending. 
 Already a large public has discovered it can do 
 without any of these things. Who taught it to do 
 without them ? Where are the leaders of opinion 
 who brought the English public into the English 
 theatre from the byways ? Who told the public in 
 1904 that Mr. Bernard Shaw would be the darling 
 of playgoers in 1913 ? Let him appear. 
 
 The true enormity of the fallacy that the expert
 
 40 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 sees most of the game is quickly realised if one 
 attends regularly the meetings of this society or 
 that, dedicated to the progress of dramatic art. 
 If you have anything really original to say, declare 
 it in Hyde Park or in Battersea. Do not breathe 
 a word of it to the Incorporated Stage Society, or 
 the Pioneers, or the Oncomers. The pretence as 
 to these advanced societies is that they are looking 
 for genius, anxious and ready to embrace it ; that 
 if you are an original author you will find here the 
 help and encouragement denied you in the common 
 streets. But, as every one knows who has had any- 
 thing to do with people or societies claiming special 
 knowledge and a labelled enthusiasm, when any- 
 thing outside the limited expert experience of an 
 expert body comes along — that is to say, when any- 
 thing comes along which is really important and 
 revolutionary — the expert body is far more thor- 
 oughly at a loss than a jury of twelve plain men. 
 The Incorporated Stage Society, for instance, 
 seating more dramatic authors, critics and actors 
 to the cubic inch than any other institution in 
 Europe, has during the last few years had two 
 splendid opportunities of exhibiting the true critical 
 worth of an expert assembly. It has had an oppor- 
 tunity of welcoming the first plays in English of 
 August Strindberg and of Anton Tchekoff. The 
 reception of these plays by this society and by the 
 leaders of public opinion showed quite conclusively 
 that here were the true lineal descendants of the 
 experts who turned down Ibsen in the 'nineties.
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC 41 
 
 It still remains for the public to put this right, as in 
 due time, when the experts have been decorously 
 extinguished, it will proceed to do. The position 
 of experts and of societies like the Incorporated Stage 
 Society to-day may be summed up in a single state- 
 ment which in the further course of these pages 
 will appear indubitable. There are two really 
 magnificent periods in the history of the English 
 theatre — the period of Elizabethan tragedy and 
 the period of Carolingian comedy. But if Shake- 
 speare or if Congreve appeared to-day, he would 
 inevitably be rejected by all the reading committees 
 of all the societies in London and by all the pro- 
 fessional readers of Mr. Peaseblossom. 
 
 What is the future of the English public ? 
 It is a glorious future. Facts will be recognised. 
 The public is not led by critics and middlemen. 
 It is led by artists. Critics, at their most useful, 
 interpret the public instinct ; they do not lead 
 it. At their most mischievous they are the worst 
 enemies of the original author or producer who wants 
 to lead a willing public into new ways. They find 
 reasons for opposing him. They lend weight to 
 the inertia of the multitude. They put off the time 
 of recognition and fulfilment ; but in the end the 
 public chooses and the critics acquiesce. When 
 these facts are clearly realised (as they must neces- 
 sarily be realised when a great national drama is 
 making a direct appeal to an alert and invigorated 
 national public) the middlemen will go. The 
 learned societies will dissolve. Dramatic critics,
 
 42 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 as we know them to-day, will be unnecessary. 
 The public will then clearly and thankfully accept 
 their true position. Its noble and happy function 
 is to follow its leaders into battle with prejudice and 
 ignorance ; to suffer no interloping between itself 
 and them ; to test everything and to hold fast that 
 which they truly admire.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE FUTURE OF PRODUCTION 
 
 Leave thy damnable faces, and begin. 
 
 PRODUCTION includes everything that hap- 
 pens to a play from the moment it leaves 
 the author's hands to the moment the curtain rises 
 upon the first act. The designing and painting of 
 scenery, the appearance and conduct of the 
 players, the lighting of the stage, the disposition 
 of its furniture, the decision as to where this line 
 or that shall be delivered — in short, the whole 
 process whereby the written play is translated into 
 a continuous and visible pageant — all this is in- 
 cluded in the term production. 
 
 Perhaps the most characteristic dramatic develop- 
 ment of the last ten years is the gradual insinuation 
 into a position of authority and importance of 
 the producer. For producers are not a necessity 
 in the production of plays. They are a fashionable 
 luxury of the time. They are also a most important 
 symbol of the present state of the drama. 
 
 Let us be quite clear as to the producer's function. 
 He is not the humble stage-manager who orders 
 costumes and shepherds the cast under superior 
 
 43
 
 44 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 direction ; he is not the principal player grouping 
 the company about him with an exquisite regard 
 for his own place in the limelight ; he is not the 
 author jealous for a correct interpretation of his 
 play. He is an artist to whom the author's play 
 and the manager's company are handed over as 
 raw material. The public, to-day, is invited, at 
 the Savoy, to see Mr. Granville Barker's Tweljth 
 Night. At Covent Garden the public is invited to 
 see Professor Reinhardt's (Edipus Rex. Shake- 
 speare and Sophocles, i\Ir. Henry Ainley and Mr, 
 Martin Harvey, had important shares in these pro- 
 ductions. But the important people whose names 
 bulked in big letters upon posters and programmes 
 were names of the producers. 
 
 The producer is by origin respectable. He is 
 a symbol of our recovery from a period of English 
 drama when plays were disregarded. Plays were a 
 star-part, and, for the rest of the company, sauve 
 qui pent. The producer has changed all that. 
 Even our few remaining stars have realised that 
 a play put on the stage without the supervision 
 of some disinterested authority is very like a band 
 without a conductor. Actor-managers no longer 
 care only for their own appearance and dignity. 
 They are even losing the old offensive habit of 
 regarding themselves as merely ' supported ' by 
 the inferior members of their company. Even 
 actor-managers who are their own producers have 
 learned to respect the unity and balance of a play ; 
 to view its progress from outside ; and not neces-
 
 THE FUTURE OF PRODUCTION 45 
 
 sarily to lose interest in the proceedings of their 
 company as soon as they leave the stage. 
 
 But though the producer is a healthy sign of 
 the times, and of an indubitably respectable origin, 
 yet he will surely pass away. In a perfectly 
 healthy state of the theatre the producer would 
 not exist. He cannot be fitted into our theatre 
 of the future. He is a very valuable antitoxin 
 for a worse disease. But when the disease is cured 
 we must be rid of the antitoxin. 
 
 At this point it is necessary to plunge a little 
 deeper into our subject. So far we have taken it 
 for granted that drama is the art of a dramatist 
 conveyed to the public through the art of a player ; 
 that plays as presented in the past, present and 
 future theatres of England were, are and will 
 continue to be a product of the collaboration of 
 authors and actors. This is a very tall assumption 
 in the light of much which is being written about 
 the art of the theatre to-day. It will not pass 
 without serious justification. 
 
 The greatest English producer of plays to-day, 
 though his productions have been few and caviare 
 to the general public, is Mr. Gordon Craig. Mr. 
 Craig is a genius and a prophet. Moreover, he is 
 an artist seeking expression through the art of 
 the theatre. His practical work in the theatres 
 of Europe and his books on the art of the theatre 
 are a clear and logical declaration of what neces- 
 sarily ensues in an apotheosis of the art of pro- 
 duction. Mr. Craig's artistic justification of pro-
 
 46 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 ducers, his conception of production as a fine art, 
 has led him by natural stages to such amazing 
 results that many of his warmest admirers have 
 parted from him in mystification. Yet, when we 
 examine Mr. Craig's ultimate position, we find it 
 is all contained in a few apparently innocent 
 assumptions which are accepted by most of the 
 producers who refuse to follow him out into the 
 wilderness. The only difference between Mr. Craig, 
 whose logical intention is to destroy all that we 
 now understand by dramatic art, and Mr. Granville 
 Barker, whose aim is merely to produce it, is that 
 Mr. Craig goes to the extreme of his position, and 
 that Mr. Barker does not. If Mr. Barker accepts 
 Mr. Craig's premises, as he undoubtedly does, he 
 is logically bound to retire with Mr. Craig into 
 the wilderness. Happily, Mr. Barker will do no 
 such thing. He is right in refusing the absurdities 
 to which Mr. Craig's position has committed him. 
 Where he is wrong, as we are now to see, is in 
 accepting the false psychology and the false 
 gesthetics on which this modern conception of 
 producing as a fine art is founded. 
 
 Wagner was the original maker of mischief, 
 turning men's heads in the direction of a union 
 of the arts, inconceivable in practice and, even 
 if it were practicable, bound to fail of its effect. 
 Wagner's theory of music-drama was a perfect 
 blend of the arts. Poetry, music and the plastic 
 arts, employed in a theatre, were to combine in a 
 perfect whole, each setting off the other, each
 
 THE FUTURE OF PRODUCTION 47 
 
 lieightening the other's effect, the sum of aesthetic 
 emotion being mnltipHcd by the simultaneous 
 appeal. Suppose this were possible in practice, 
 suppose an artist with the music in his brain of 
 Beethoven, the poetry of Shakespeare, the visions 
 of Tintoretto and Pheidias. Suppose he had 
 mastered, not only the technical secrets of express- 
 ing himself perfectly through each of his separate 
 media, but the art also of running a single inspiration 
 in leash of them all. Even then this masterpiece 
 must fail of its effect. To begin with a very small 
 but obvious difficulty, it very rarely happens that 
 an equal appreciation of all the arts resides in one 
 and the same spectator. It is, of course, an 
 assumption of polite conversation that a cultured 
 person can talk with equal tact and intelligence 
 about pictures as about music or letters. But, 
 these pretences apart, we all know that cultivated 
 men of letters rarely have an even tolerable ear 
 for music, and that people who are exquisitely 
 responsive to the delicate loveliness of Beethoven's 
 ultimate variations in Opus in cannot even 
 begin to understand why Raphael was a great 
 painter (if he was). But put this difficulty aside. 
 Suppose, not only that Beethoven-Shakespeare- 
 Tintoretto-Pheidias has produced in a single 
 masterpiece a perfect blend of the arts, but also 
 that we are all equally responsive to their appeal. 
 What will happen to an audience of people who 
 are at the same time amateurs of poetry, music, 
 painting and sculpture ?
 
 48 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 The answer is inevitable — hopeless tedium and 
 confusion. When we listen to a song of Shakespeare 
 set to music by Purcell — supposing we are equally 
 appreciative of music and poetry — we spend half 
 the time resenting the damage done to Shake- 
 speare's poetry by forcing it into rhythms and 
 cadences foreign to the medium of a poet, and the 
 other half of the time resenting the limitations 
 set to the music of Purcell by forcing it to run in 
 harness with Shakespeare's words. Each apart 
 is exquisite and has a completely satisfying 
 emotional appeal. The total combined effect can 
 only please the poet who is not a musician, or the 
 musician who is not a poet. The poet who is not 
 a musician will not be troubled with the music 
 — that is to say, with an appeal to an entirely 
 distinct set of aesthetic values and associations. 
 For him the song will be a rather odd conventional 
 sort of recitation of a good poem. The musician 
 who is not a poet, on the other hand, will listen 
 to the music. The words for him will be merely 
 words. They will not confuse his aesthetic 
 enjoyment with a distinct set of delicate poetic 
 values. Those, on the other hand, who are equally 
 open to the appeal of poetry and music will only 
 get a consistent aesthetic pleasure by wilfully 
 stopping their ears to one or the other. There is 
 no avoiding this difficulty; for it is psychological. 
 Appealing to three aesthetic senses at once is not 
 multi|)Iyiiig the ultimate appeal by three. It is 
 psychologically impossible to receive more than
 
 THE FUTURE OF PRODUCTION 49 
 
 one appeal at a time. In a long work of the 
 combined arts one might drift from one to the 
 other, or by rapid gymnastic of the mind give 
 them preference in rapid alternation. But a 
 strictly simultaneous appeal, even supposing a 
 perfect masterpiece of all the arts, and a perfect 
 audience to receive it, is humanly impossible. 
 
 But why need we speculate in the air ? This 
 thing has never been done. Wagner, who aimed 
 at a combination of the arts, wedded glorious 
 music to indifferent verse and to stage-effects 
 that are a flouting-stock. When we go to a music- 
 drama by Wagner we go quite definitely for a 
 continuously written masterpiece of great music. 
 When we go to an opera by Mozart, we go quite 
 as definitely for an exquisite series of musical 
 numbers strung on a conventional thread. We 
 do not go for a combination masterpiece of musical 
 and dramatic art ; if we did, we should not obtain 
 it ; and, if we obtained it, we should very speedily 
 discover that we were wholly incapable of en- 
 joying it. 
 
 We are now in a position to survey the starting- 
 point of Mr. Craig's pilgrimage into the wilderness. 
 He started quite simply as a producer of plays, 
 and his whole logical system of creation and 
 criticism naturally followed from his assumption 
 that there is a tine art of production ; that the 
 producer is a man with aesthetic emotions and 
 ideas which he is determined to realise upon the 
 stage. Mr. Craig, for example, begins as a finc- 
 4
 
 so THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 artist to produce Macbeth. He sees Macbeth as 
 a visible work of art ; or perhaps it Vvould be 
 more accurate to say that he sees a work of art 
 by Gordon Craig in terms of Macbeth. Primarily 
 a designer, expressing himself in line and colour, 
 Mr. Craig begins to express Macbeth over again in 
 stage pictures, and in the movement and grouping 
 of stage figures. The aesthetic emotion conveyed 
 by Shakespeare in dramatic form Mr. Craig conveys 
 again in plastic form. The result is the com- 
 bination of a work of art by Shakespeare with a 
 work of art by Mr. Gordon Craig ; for, always 
 supposing production is a fine art, and that Mr. 
 Craig is a fine-artist, Mr. Craig's Macbeth, purporting 
 to reverberate the appeal of Shakespeare, will also 
 have added an imaginative vision of his own. 
 
 So far Mr. Craig takes with him all those people 
 who really believe in Wagner's idea of a union of 
 the arts, each enhancing the appeal of its neigh- 
 bour. But mark what follows ! Mr. Craig, pur- 
 suing this union of the arts, has himself discovered 
 that such a union is impossible unless the theatre 
 of to-day and all that we have understood by 
 dramatic art from Shakespeare to Synge is first 
 destroyed. 
 
 What was the logical progress of Mr. Craig ? He 
 began to ask himself perplexing questions. How 
 can a producer as a man of art build up aesthetic 
 conceptions with material that is beyond his 
 control ? How can he express himself through the 
 individuality — even though it be trained to his
 
 THE FUTURE OF PRODUCTION 51 
 
 purpose and surrendered to his will — of the living, 
 mobile and unaccountable player ? How can 
 artistic unity be achieved in an enforced marriage 
 between the artistic purpose of a dramatic author 
 unpacking his imagination in words and a pro- 
 ducer unpacking his imagination in colour and 
 line ? How can a work of art arise from the chance 
 combination of costumes by A., verses by B., scenery 
 by C, lighting by D., and stage management by E. ? 
 If production is a fine art, argued Mr. Craig, then 
 it needs must follow (i) that players are an un- 
 satisfactory material ; (2) that the author is an 
 interloper ; (3) that the art of the theatre will be 
 discovered in an aesthetic handling of colour, line, 
 light and movement ; (4) that the producer must 
 be a master-craftsman in the handling of this 
 material, not merely a chief -of-staff with a subordin- 
 ate company of artificers. Thus, the player vanishes 
 in favour of the iiber-marionette or super-doll, 
 because the player is not a perfect instrument in the 
 construction of Mr. Craig's undiscovered symphonies 
 of movement. The author vanishes, because he is 
 an unnecessary impertinence in the producer's 
 effort to achieve aesthetic results as a fine-artist. 
 The scene-painter, costumier, stage-carpenter and 
 electrician vanish, because it would be absurd for 
 Shakespeare, say, to plan Macbeth in the rough 
 and give out the various scenes for execution to 
 subordinate authors, or for Raphael to design a 
 cartoon and leave it to be put together by journey- 
 man decorators.
 
 5 2 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 Mr. Craig's logical excursion is really a reductio 
 ad ahsiirdum of Wagner's combination of the arts. 
 Mr. Craig might have reached his present position 
 by a shorter way. What was the result of his 
 production, say, of Macbeth ? In so far as he 
 was an original artist, he had set up beside the 
 Macbeth of Shakespeare a Macbeth of Mr. Gordon 
 Craig. The one stood perfect in dramatic form ; 
 the other in colour and space. According to 
 Wagner's theory, the one enforced the appeal of the 
 other. According to our own view, either Shake- 
 speare was unnecessary, or Mr. Craig. The appeal 
 of Shakespeare's lines is not enforced, but diverted 
 and confused, by the appeal of Mr. Craig's re-state- 
 ment in terms of plastic art. It is a repetition of 
 the fallacy of a song by Shakespeare set to music 
 by Purcell. Mr. Craig, going even deeper into the 
 postulates of production as a fine art has ultimately 
 eliminated Shakespeare from his theatrical scheme. 
 We, who have neglected Wagner, can see quite 
 clearly that he might have eliminated Shakespeare 
 on a priori grounds of psychology even before he 
 had reached the liber-marionette or super-doll. 
 Whichever way you take — the way of logical 
 artistic progress followed by Mr. Craig, or the way 
 of psychological analysis whereby we have our- 
 selves in the preceding pages been led to reject a 
 union of the arts — you come to the inevitable con- 
 clusion that production as a fine art is impossible 
 side by side with a retention in our theatres of 
 what we have hitherto regarded as dramatic art.
 
 THE FUTURE OF PRODUCTION 53 
 
 Dramatic art is the realisation through the Uving 
 player of the conceptions of a dramatic poet. The 
 producer coming in with conceptions of his own, 
 the producer as an artist with something of his own 
 to visualise and express, is an interloper. He can 
 only grow to his full stature by the destruction of 
 the parties whose intermediary he is supposed to 
 be. Either the fine art of production, the producer 
 in his most modern shape, will disappear, or dramatic 
 art will disappear. 
 
 Which is it to be ? Let us begin quite simply 
 with a fresh inquiry into the fundamental reason of 
 the producer's apparition. Why is the producer 
 necessary at all ? We will eliminate now pro- 
 ducers like Mr. Craig and Professor Reinhardt, 
 whose real tendency is to subordinate and finally 
 to destroy dramatic art altogether ; and consider 
 only producers like Mr. Barker and Mr. Boucicault, 
 who in the present state of the drama still have a 
 quite definite and useful function to perform. We 
 have already seen that in so far as Mr. Barker and 
 Mr. Boucicault are a protest against the inartistic 
 subordination of plays and players to the star 
 manager they are a healthy and encouraging sign. 
 But this is only the better side of Mr. Barker and 
 Mr. Boucicault. They are also a symptom of 
 disease. 
 
 It is a disease whose ramifications will meet us 
 at every turn — namely, the long divorce of English 
 art and letters from the English theatre. The 
 history of English drama during the last twenty
 
 54 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 years is, as we shall see, the history of a movement 
 whereby men of mind are again coming to regard 
 the theatre as a natural medium. The rift is closing ; 
 and one result of its closing will be the squeez- 
 ing out of producers. Producers of the modern 
 Napoleonic sort are necessary to bridge the gulf 
 between the author and the player. When that 
 gulf no longer exists they will have no further part to 
 play in the development of contemporary dramatic 
 art. The dramatic author, grown into a closer 
 contact with the theatre, will be master of its con- 
 ventions and technique. The player, grown into 
 a closer contact with art and letters, will no longer 
 require a heaven-sent expert to translate for him 
 the author's meaning or to keep him out of his 
 neighbour's limelight. Only in a continuous co- 
 operation of author and actor can great dramatic 
 art be achieved. The producer, if he be of the school 
 of Mr. Craig, aims at the extinction of author and 
 actor ; if he be of the school of Mr. Barker, he is a 
 symptom of the temporary lack of understanding 
 between author and actor. How this lack of 
 understanding first arose, and how it is on the happy 
 eve of removal, is not our present theme. But we 
 must definitely realise that the producer's function — 
 so far as he aims merely at filling a place in dramatic 
 art and not destroying it altogether— is to play 
 the interpreter between two parties, the author 
 and the actor, who have for the moment forgotten 
 how to speak in a common tongue. 
 
 The producer will disappear. In twenty years'
 
 THE FUTURE OF PRODUCTION 55 
 
 time people will wonder how the name of this 
 mysterious functionary came into programmes and 
 posters. They will speculate as to the nature of 
 his olhce — wonder where precisely he fitted into 
 the dramatic scheme. Plays, they will argue, are 
 the natural fruit of an artistic collaboration of 
 dramatic authors with players. The rest is 
 machiner}^ set in motion by a stage-manager. Who, 
 they will vainly inquire, was the mysterious third 
 person who was in the habit of ' producing ' plays ? 
 Who was this person who knew more about the 
 theatre than the men who were writing for the 
 theatre, and more about the conduct of a scene than 
 the players whose art it was ? They will be unable 
 to picture the degradation of a dramatic day when 
 producers were a necessary and wholesome correc- 
 tive for the egotism, ignorance and artistic insensi- 
 bility of players ; and a necessary safeguard for 
 dramatic authors ignorant of stagecraft and out 
 of touch with the English theatre. 
 
 fa ira ! The middlemen are vanishing easily 
 and happily. The dramatic critic has gone ; the 
 public is in immediate touch with the finished play. 
 The producer has gone ; the dramatic author is in 
 immediate touch with his helpers and servers. 
 These are conditions of vitality and progress. 
 
 Let us be glad, but not brutally triumphant in 
 the disappearance of unhealthy symptoms. The 
 dramatic critic and the producer were harmless 
 necessary features of the old dispensation. We 
 may without treason to our vision of the future
 
 56 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 years drop a decent tear in contemplation of their 
 empty places. The fate of the producer is especially 
 affecting. Has he not in the insolent bold excess 
 of his elevated day threatened author and player 
 with that same destruction which now has over- 
 taken himself ?
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THEATRICAL 
 HABERDASHERS 
 
 Get your apparel together, good strings to your beards, new 
 ribbons to your pumps ; meet presently at the palace ; for the 
 long and the short is, our play is preferred. 
 
 THE producer as a fine-artist, likewise as a 
 middleman between author and player, has 
 disappeared. But we have yet to foresee the direc- 
 tion of all those subsidiary arts and crafts of the 
 theatre which during the last few years have tended 
 to usurp a position quite out of proportion to their 
 importance ? What will be the position in our 
 theatre of the future of theatrical haberdashers — 
 of the wig-maker, scene-painter, costumier and 
 electrician ? How far are these craftsmen of im- 
 portance in the worthy presentation of a master- 
 piece of dramatic art ? Dramatic art is the con- 
 ception of a dramatic author (delivered in speech 
 and action of their characters) executed in the art 
 of a player. These two varieties of artist combine 
 to make a simple appeal to a public expecting to 
 be approached neither as a public of musicians, 
 painters, nor connoisseurs in objcts d'art ct de vcrtii. 
 But a play has to be set within a framework of scenery, 
 
 57
 
 58 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 and players have to be appropriately habited. 
 What is the true place and function of decoration ? 
 
 It is no more the business of scene-painters and 
 costumiers to repeat in their scenes and costumes 
 what they conceive to be the emotional appeal of 
 the play they are helping to present, than it is the 
 duty of printers to convey the emotions inspired 
 in them by the text of a novel or a poem by printing 
 it in divers coloured inks or varying the shape of 
 the letters according to the aesthetic content of 
 the passage transcribed. A printer aesthetically 
 moved to print Henley's lines, MargaritcB Sorori, 
 in the varied and rich hues of sunset, suggesting 
 in the form of his letters a late lark, the old grey 
 city, changing spires and Night with her train of 
 stars, would justly be regarded as a nuisance. 
 Nor should we be very greatly moved to bless 
 and to admire a bookbinder who gave us King 
 Lear in pages varying in shape, texture and hue 
 according as his aesthetic ideas of their content 
 prompted him. The scene-painter and costumier 
 is not in quite the same position as the printer 
 and bookbinder, but he is very much more nearly 
 allied to these humble craftsmen than to the inspired 
 pantechnicon fine-artist which Mr. Gordon Craig 
 and Herr Stern would ask us to recognise. He 
 has virtually the same duty to perform — never 
 on any account to thrust himself between the 
 dramatic author and his public, never to divert 
 attention from the player to the scenes in which 
 the player moves or to the clothes in which the
 
 THEATRICAL HABERDASHERS 59 
 
 player is dressed. The craft of the scene-painter 
 and the costumier resolves itself into the art of 
 being inconspicuous. 
 
 This doctrine is the flattest heresy to-day, no 
 matter to what sect we look — the pseudo-naturalist 
 at His Majesty's theatre, the fine-art producers 
 in Moscow and Berlin, or Mr. Granville Barker's 
 conventional decoration of Shakespeare. Sir 
 Herbert Tree overwhelms himself, his company 
 and his author in irrelevant sumptuous detail, 
 which, far from adding anything to the dramatic 
 appeal of his production, distracts the imagination 
 and gives one an impression that authors and 
 actors are making perpetual desperate efforts to 
 out-Herod their surroundings, to get their message 
 manfully delivered out of a smoke and smother 
 of contending crafts, to shout down scenes scream- 
 ing to be heard, to outface costumes grimacing 
 at the spectator, to outstare the electrician. The 
 conditions of playing at His Majesty's are con- 
 ditions which seem to have been carefully elaborated 
 to kill the art of acting, to make it of no account. 
 The art of Sir Herbert Tree's dramatic haber- 
 dashers is the converse of the art of being incon- 
 spicuous. What Sir Herbert has done in a thor- 
 oughly conscientious effort to vie with the text of 
 Shakespeare, Mr. Craig has done because he is a 
 fine-artist seeking expression in line and colour. 
 His stage designs not only make an appeal inde- 
 pendently of the play they are supposed to illus- 
 trate : they actually dwarf the players' art and
 
 6o THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 disastrously compete with the author's intention. 
 Even when Mr. Craig is designing for hving players 
 and planning scenes wherein the spoken word is 
 everything, he is already looking unconsciously 
 forward to the logical result of his painter's view 
 of the theatre — to a theatre of the future living 
 somewhere beyond the kingdom of the super-doll. 
 Professor Reinhardt is equally bent upon establish- 
 ing theatrical haberdashery in a position where it 
 becomes more important than the dramatic appeal. 
 Sophocles and Shakespeare are mannequins for 
 Professor Reinhardt and his milliners-in-chief. 
 Even Mr. Barker has not yet, in his Shakespearean 
 excursion, understood that the whole art of staging 
 and dressing a play is the art of keeping the haber- 
 dasher's share of the enterprise as far in the back- 
 ground as is practically possible. The critics of 
 Mr. Barker's The Winter's Tale, produced in the 
 autumn of 1912, were in a manner right, though 
 they grossly misunderstood Mr. Barker's intentions 
 and grossly undervalued the magnificent importance 
 of his progress in the restoration of Shakespeare 
 to the modern stage. Mr. Rothenstein's costumes 
 were very beautiful, admirable in design and colour, 
 supremely and delicately beautiful as works of art. 
 But they did not fulfil the first condition of dra- 
 matic haberdashery. They were not inconspicuous. 
 They interfered disastrously with the play. Either 
 you shut your eyes to them, which required a 
 considerable effort of inattention ; or you missed 
 the dramatic appeal of Shakespeare precisely in
 
 THEATRICAL HABERDASHERS 6i 
 
 proportion as you yielded to the decorative appeal 
 of Mr. Rothenstein. 
 
 The art of being inconspicuous is not simple. 
 Much, for instance, depends on what the spectators 
 are accustomed to see. Anything unexpected, 
 anything that arrests the spectator's mind or 
 creates in him a sense of novelty and surprise is, 
 so far as it does this, bad for the play. An audience 
 continuously startled by Professor Reinhardt's 
 stage effects in (Edipus Rex or A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream will, in the degree they are startled, 
 miss the appeal of Sophocles and Shakespeare. 
 One of the most striking Shakespeare revivals of 
 1912 was Mr. William Poel's Troilus and Cressida. 
 Mr. Poel dressed his Greeks as ordinary Elizabethan 
 gentlemen, put a clay pipe into the mouth of Achilles, 
 and habited Thersites as the parti-coloured fool 
 of Shakespearean comedy. Mr. Poel's spectacle was 
 probably not very different from what Shakespeare 
 intended. Certainly there were excellent reasons 
 for all that Mr. Poel had ventured to do. But 
 he had not solved the problem of being incon- 
 spicuous. Greek warriors in doublet and hose 
 require a very complicated mental gymnastic on 
 the part of a modern audience before it can begin 
 to see and appreciate the play. 
 
 Are we not arriving at a very monstrous and 
 impossible doctrine ? If spectators are to see only 
 what they expect to see, perhaps His Majesty's 
 theatre is the best home for Shakespeare after all. 
 London playgoers are used to the methods of
 
 62 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 Sir Herbert Tree. They can begin to disregard 
 them and attend only to the play. Is our National 
 Theatre to follow the popular mode ? Is the 
 repertory theatre of the future to worry not at 
 all about the subsidiary crafts, to take anything 
 that happens to be in fashion ? 
 
 It does not follow. Being inconspicuous as a 
 principle of craft, as a positive ideal to be attained, 
 is very different from being conspicuous in so 
 fashionable a manner that people have outgrown 
 their astonishment. The problem of staging 
 Shakespeare (Shakespeare is conveniently taken as 
 a synonym for English poetic drama) is to find a 
 satisfactory elastic convention, and to hold it fast. 
 All poetic drama, making its appeal through the 
 spoken word and action of players, has at its 
 highest and best rested on an assumption that 
 the stage conventions, being fixed and easily 
 adjusted to the needs of each individual play, will 
 be of no relative importance as compared with 
 the play itself. The machinery of the Greek stage 
 was a perfect conventional medium. It counted 
 for nothing in the spectators' mind. It was 
 expected, invariable, simple and easily adapted 
 to the author's individual needs. The machinery 
 of the English Elizabethan stage was of precisely 
 the same character. Shakespeare uttered his 
 ' scenery ' in his lines. He imposed his vision of 
 the play upon the spectator by a dramatic means, 
 not with the help of a plastic artist. 
 
 The problem for players, dramatic authors and
 
 THEATRICAL HABERDASHERS 63 
 
 their craftsmen is to discover and determine the 
 simple stage conventions of the future without 
 regard to what happens at the moment to be the 
 popular and accepted thing. Once the conventions 
 are determined, to develop hereafter in organic 
 response to the needs of dramatic art, the public 
 will very soon accept them, and accepting them 
 begin to disregard them. The chief use of a 
 convention is that its presence is not felt. New 
 conventions startle the stranger till their organic 
 relation to the new message or vision of the artist is 
 perceived. Then they are overlooked and forgotten. 
 Old conventions offend the younger generation, 
 partly because they are ill-fitted for its younger 
 purpose, partly because they have come to be 
 associated with the work of men who are merely 
 repeating the art of the last great age. Conventions 
 level with the art of the day are not even perceived 
 by men of the day. Such conventions are an 
 essential requirement of the dramatic art of the 
 future. Conventions are the only things in art 
 whose end it is to be inconspicuous. Their dis- 
 covery and their determination will be one of the 
 most important offices of the National Theatre in 
 the years 1916-1920. 
 
 The history of English stagecraft has yet to be 
 written ; and it will be a very fascinating study in 
 history and in art. Briefly it is the story of a 
 gradual conversion of the Elizabethan platform 
 stage to the stage as we have it to-day, seen as a 
 picture within a frame. In Shakespeare's day the
 
 64 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 stage projected into the auditorium. It was virtually 
 surrounded by spectators upon three sides. It is 
 true that interior scenes were usually enacted upon 
 an interior stage at the back of the platform under 
 much the same conditions as prevail on the picture 
 stage to-day. But for convenience sake we may 
 regard the stage of Shakespeare — the stage that 
 determined Shakespeare's technical method — as a 
 projecting platform. There w^as a clear under- 
 standing that an audience was present in the theatre, 
 in immediate touch with the poet and his pla3^ers. 
 There was no pretence that the players were of 
 another world. There was a continuous rapport 
 between the actors and their audience. The players 
 were eye to eye with the people. They appealed 
 to their auditors as orators appeal. It was an appeal 
 of the kindled eye and the impassioned voice. 
 Sometimes the appeal to an audience was personally 
 direct. The plaj^er's " aside " took them into his 
 confidence ; his soliloquy (not the thinking soliloquy, 
 which is always in order, but the soliloquy which 
 helps forward the action) kept them posted in the 
 progress of events. 
 
 The conventions of Shakespeare's stage were 
 determined by the simple ph3^sical fact that a 
 projecting platform cannot be cut off with a curtain 
 and that a theatre open to the air cannot be arti- 
 ficially darkened. The dramatist must create his 
 own illusion — 
 
 " But look, the morn in russet mantle clad 
 Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill."
 
 THEATRICAL HABERDASHERS 65 
 
 This is Shakespeare's substitute for the modem 
 stage-manager's call for two reds, back stage on the 
 O.P. side. The method has its advantages, nor 
 should we too hastily speak of its limitations. 
 
 In direct contrast with all this is the stage to-day, 
 remote from the spectator. The player is thrust 
 within a frame that cuts him off from direct personal 
 contact with the audience ; removes him to a far 
 mimic world which pursues the event as though the 
 audience was not in presence. To Shakespeare's 
 age of poetic tragedy succeeded the post-Etherege 
 age of naturalist comedy. The tragic platform 
 on whose boards the Elizabethan iambus had built 
 scene upon scene of magnificence and glamour 
 retreated gradually within the proscenium arch. 
 In Shakespeare's theatre the audience shares the 
 progress of the scene ; in Ibsen's theatre the audience 
 is an eavesdropper. Modern producers have even 
 suggested a fourth wall, completing the full circle 
 of evolution by shutting the audience out altogether. 
 Players sit solemnly before a fireplace supposed to lie 
 between them and the spectators they have been 
 taught to ignore. With this retreat of the stage 
 from the spectator all the dramatic conventions 
 which rested upon a recognition that the audience 
 was in presence have disappeared. To address the 
 audience is to-day a solecism. There is obviously 
 something wrong in speaking to an audience which 
 is not supposed to be there. 
 
 The retreat of the stage within the proscenium 
 arch is organically connected with the movement 
 5
 
 66 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 towards naturalism. We have very narrowly to 
 determine what naturalism is, and what will be its 
 place in the future of the English theatre. At 
 present we will assume that naturalism is a legitimate 
 artistic method admirably suited to certain ends ; 
 and that conventional naturalist machinery will be 
 included in the apparatus of our theatres to be. The 
 object now is to determine the form of our future 
 stage, to which end it is essential to note that in 
 English dramatic history, as a matter not of argu- 
 ment but of fact, the poetic drama of Shakespeare, 
 depending for its illusion upon the immediate 
 presence of players declaiming in the open house in 
 living and emotional contact with the spectator, 
 synchronised with the use of the platform stage ; 
 and that the naturalist drama of Etherege and his 
 successors, depending for its illusion upon scenes 
 framed and aloof, the spectators removed to another 
 world, acting as God's spies upon the players, 
 synchronised with the retreat of the platform stage 
 through the proscenium arch. There is a perfect 
 parallelism of the movement in English dramatic 
 art to the movement in construction of the English 
 playhouse. 
 
 The retreat of the stage within the proscenium 
 arch was not yet complete in the nineteenth century. 
 There remained the proscenium arch with pros- 
 cenium doors right and left, and an apron stage 
 reaching out into the auditorium, long after the 
 age of Mrs. Siddons and Macready. The period most 
 likely to reward the historian in search of an organic
 
 THEATRICAL HABERDASHERS 67 
 
 correlation between the English playhouse and the 
 English play is just this period of transition — the 
 period when Shakespeare's romantic method of the 
 platform still struggled for a footing upon the 
 projecting apron of the eighteenth century. So 
 long as the players entered by proscenium doors 
 they had not entirely lost touch with the audience. 
 Coming forward they could employ the platform 
 conventions of Shakespeare. Retiring through the 
 proscenium arch they could employ the eaves- 
 dropping or fourth- wall conventions of Ibsen. 
 Restoration comedy belongs to this period of 
 transition. It looks back to the platform and it 
 looks forward to the fourth wall. Congreve's 
 defence of soliloquy is quite modern. He uses only 
 the thinking soliloquy ; and he does not include in 
 his justification the soliloquy used for forwarding 
 the action. So far he is modern. His stage is 
 definitely retiring wdthin the frame. But Congreve, 
 like all his contemporaries, and like his successors 
 for two hundred years, uses the " aside." It is still 
 possible for players from the projecting apron to 
 take the audience into their confidence. The 
 spectator is not yet shut off. Nothing could more 
 sharply point the parallelism between the evolution 
 of the playhovise and the evolution of the play 
 than the simultaneous disappearance in the late 
 nineteenth century of the proscenium doors on the 
 one hand and of the " aside " on the other. 
 
 The platform stage and the picture stage are 
 not mere accidents of structure determined by
 
 6S THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 architects and electricians. The purpose of this 
 brief survey is to show that each corresponds to a 
 distinct dramatic method and a distinct dramatic 
 appeal. The theatre of the future \vill confine 
 itself neither to one nor to the other. The signifi- 
 cance of the evolution of the picture stage, and of 
 the partial return of modern poetic dramatists 
 and producers to the neglected apron, has not yet 
 been clearly realised by the critics. The apron 
 stage lit from the auditorium is not a mechanical 
 device to create a mild sensation of novelty in the 
 playgoer ; nor is it the pedantry of Shakespearean 
 antiquaries. The platform stage reappears in re- 
 sponse to the needs of poetic drama. No sooner 
 had the stage retreated bag and baggage into the 
 proscenium arch ; no sooner had the last touch of 
 naturalism been added to the process by the im- 
 aginary addition of a fourth wall, whereby players 
 came down to the footlights and treated the audience 
 as if it were a fireplace, than the revolt of poetic 
 drama against this last consecration of naturalist 
 stage machinery began. It is significant that 
 Mr. Granville Barker, who has done more than 
 any modern producer to popularise the fourth 
 wall, has also done most to popularise the apron. 
 The one method is as right and as necessary as the 
 other. One thing at least clearly ensues from this 
 inquiry — a complete exposure of the assumption 
 that the modern picture stage is of itself better or 
 worse than its predecessor. The majority of modern 
 managers assume that the stage within a frame is
 
 THEATRICAL HABERDASHERS 69 
 
 intrinsically a fmcr thing than Shakespeare's 
 platform — that Shakespeare, if he had only .seen 
 his plays produced at His Majesty's theatre, would 
 at once have perceived the advantages of Sir Herbert 
 Tree's methods over those of Burbage. So deeply 
 rooted is this assumption of the modern manager 
 that he tears to pieces plays which were fitted to an 
 entirely different convention to make them square 
 with his own. An historical survey of the parallel 
 movement of the English playhouse and the English 
 play achieves the discomfiture of our modern 
 Procrustes. He is compelled to realise that plays 
 best make the effect intended by their author when 
 they are played according to their author. Shake- 
 speare's pla3^s are not plays badly constructed 
 to fit the picture stage of 1913. They are plays 
 very well constructed to fit the platform stage of 
 1613. 
 
 The National Theatre will be constructed to 
 admit every step in the national evolution of the 
 English stage from Shakespeare to St. John Han- 
 kin. The principle of stagecraft in the presenta- 
 tion of Shakespeare and the poetic drama will be 
 the conventionalising and simplifying to the last 
 possible degree of all that merely subsidises the 
 dramatic appeal. The part of the electrician is 
 not to add an assthetic appeal of his own to the 
 aesthetic appeal of the author and actor. His part 
 is to light the scene in a way that will neither dis- 
 tract the spectator with claims for an independent 
 consideration, nor offend him with its crudity.
 
 70 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 The electrician may exercise his craft to the top of 
 his bent ; but he must not mistake his position. 
 It is one of tlie unhealthy signs of the state of 
 poetic drama to-day that the electrician is asked 
 to do for the poet what the poet is unable to do 
 for himself. The costumier and the scene-painter 
 and designer are in equal case. The plastic artist 
 has no legitimate place or function in the theatre. 
 Only in an age of meagre dramatic inspiration is he 
 permitted to usurp the function of the dramatist. 
 The National Theatre, with a staff of competent 
 workmen, certified plumbers and decorators pre- 
 ferred, with a complete outfit of the latest appli- 
 ances for lighting and changing the scene, will be 
 a perfect instrument for the delivery of the finest 
 masterpieces of dramatic art. 
 
 The burden of this chapter is supported by the 
 difference of level to-day between naturalist 
 production and poetic production. With one or 
 two exceptions that prove the rule there is in the 
 theatre to-day no poetic drama of consequence. 
 The poetic dramatist uncertain of himself, unequal 
 to an adequate assertion of his importance or to 
 an adequate delivery of his appeal, relies, in his 
 lack of inspiration, upon craft of production to 
 make his position good. Contrast with him the 
 naturalist. The best plays to-day are naturalist 
 plays. The authors who are using the naturalist 
 dramatic method rcl}^ upon themselves alone. 
 They determine the character and style of their 
 scene, leaving it to the mere honest work of theatrical
 
 THEATRICAL HABERDASHERS 1 i 
 
 craftsmen to carry out their intention. There is 
 no attempt at irrelevant fine-art in the production 
 of a play like Justice or The Madras House. It is 
 not assumed by the author, or felt by the spectator, 
 that the costumier or the electrician adds a jot to 
 the dramatic appeal of Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. 
 Barker. Why does the electrician or the costumier 
 become so much more important in poetic than 
 in naturalist drama ? The electrician and cos- 
 tumier become more important as the author and 
 actor become less competent of themselves to assert 
 their intention. Naturalist authors and natural- 
 ist players are masters of their method. The 
 poetic dramatist and player are not. Poetic drama 
 has fallen upon evil times. The dramatist being 
 unequal to his burden, the artificers in light and 
 hair and turpentine are invoked to help him sus- 
 tain it. In the mid-twentieth-century outburst of 
 poetic splendour, which will follow the foundation 
 of our National Theatre, it will soon be realised how 
 the former degradation of poetic drama was direct- 
 ly measured by the importance yielded thereby to 
 the subordinate crafts. The quaint superstition of 
 to-day that the limelight man is an important person 
 in the raising of Csesar's ghost will disappear when 
 poetic drama of the future is lifted to the level 
 of naturalist drama of to-day. 
 
 Even to-day when there comes an actor of genius 
 who can present Shakespeare in the solid flesh it is 
 possible for the least reflective playgoer to realise 
 how little it matters that the limelight is not of the
 
 72 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 latest and best quality, or that paint upon the scene 
 is spread too thick. We have lately had oppor- 
 tunities, within a single year, of measuring Shake- 
 speare as produced by Mr. Granville Barker against 
 Shakespeare as acted by Sir Johnston Forbes- 
 Robertson. Compare for a moment Mr. Barker's 
 Twelfth Night with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson's 
 Hamlet. Mr. Barker's Twelfth Night had every 
 advantage that a producer can bestow. Beautiful 
 costumes against a beautiful decorative background, 
 excellent music, an intelligent revival of the 
 necessary apron, a very fair quality of acting, rising 
 in a few instances to an extremely high level of 
 accomplishment — all that the producer as fine- 
 artist has been able to discover was tested and 
 adapted for the occasion. 
 
 " Look here upon this picture, and on this." 
 
 Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson in his Hamlet of 
 1913 seemed bent upon showing once for all that pro- 
 duction matters not at all when great acting is toward. 
 The Drury Lane Hamlet of 1913 showed, not only 
 that the actor and his author require no artistic 
 aid of theatrical haberdashers to make their effect, 
 but also that the actor and his author, if they have 
 as much genius between them as will cover a penny 
 piece, can unite and play clean out of existence the 
 ugliest daubs of the false cardboard naturalism of 
 the late ' nineties.' In Sir Johnston Forbes-Robert- 
 son's Hamlet was no borrowed grace of the producing 
 fine-artist. Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson had
 
 THEATRICAL HABERDASHERS 73 
 
 not even the advantage of the poetic conventions 
 to which his play was originally fitted. He made 
 his dramatic appeal in spite of his conditions, rather 
 than with their assistance. Yet every one open 
 to the appeal of Shakespeare had to declare that 
 the total aesthetic effect of Sir Johnston Forbes- 
 Robertson's Hamlet infinitely outweighed the total 
 aesthetic effect of Mr. Barker's Twelfth Night. 
 
 Let us therefore light-heartedly contemplate the 
 shutting of our theatres-to-be upon that cloud- 
 cuckooland of light and colour seeking at this 
 moment to lead them astray. Honest craft the 
 theatres of the future will require. The worthy 
 presentation of a play will, always as now, tax 
 the resources of the stage-manager with his " helpers 
 and servers." But with the disappearance of the 
 producer as fine-artist, and a clear recognition that 
 plays and play-acting are the first and last serious 
 word of drama, the subordinate arts and crafts 
 of the theatre will find their appropriate level. It 
 is for the player to determine the conditions of 
 his playing, the author to determine the artistic 
 message of his play. The rest is decent framing of 
 the picture.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY 
 
 Come, sit down every mother's son and rehearse your parts, 
 Pyramus, you begin : when you have spoken your speech, enter 
 into that brake ; and so every one according to his cue. 
 
 • •••«••• 
 
 In all the play 
 There is not one word apt, one player fitted. 
 
 THERE are, as we have seen, two sorts of 
 managers, two ways of choosing a play, 
 two methods of financially managing a theatre. 
 The present method is to give the public what 
 you imagine it requires. As it is impossible to 
 tell in advance what the public is likely to say to 
 any particular play, the method of giving the 
 public what it requires resolves itself into producing 
 at artistic hazard four or five plays on the chance 
 that one of them will hit the public fancy. It 
 also resolves itself into running the winning play 
 (when and if you are able to find it) to the bitter 
 death. Producing what the public is supposed to 
 require resolves itself, in fact, into the long-run 
 system. It is a system whereby losses are cut and 
 gains are counted ; whereby the unpopular play is 
 dropped like a very hot chestnut ; and a popular 
 
 74
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY 75 
 
 play is exploited to the last penny in a continuous 
 career. 
 
 But the speculative manager, like the dramatic 
 critic and the i:)roducing fine-artist, is in 1950 to be 
 extinct. It follows that the long-run system — the 
 system of regulating your career in accordance with 
 reports of the acting-manager — wiU be abandoned. 
 The manager of 1950 will follow his own ideas. 
 He will be a man of mind and a man of art, looking 
 for good plays, and determined that they shah be 
 well acted. He will be content to pay his way, 
 and to be worthy of his hire. He will sturdily 
 resist the temptation to angle for immediate public 
 favour at the ultimate risk of degrading the public 
 taste and of losing his own. 
 
 The repertory system is the only possible means 
 to this end. Repertory is the only system whereby 
 the theatre can be continuously kept in a healthy 
 condition of experiment, discovery and honest 
 work. It is the only salvation for the art of the 
 player, for the conscience of the manager, for the 
 encouragement of the dramatic author. Let us 
 briefly consider what repertory is ; why it is 
 essential for the improvement of the English 
 theatre ; why, too, it must surely prevail. 
 
 A repertory theatre has been strictly defined in 
 the provisional statutes of the Executive Committee 
 of the Shakespeare National Memorial Theatre. 
 The National Theatre, to be opened in 1916, will, 
 of course, be a repertory theatre ; and the Executive 
 Committee has realised the necessity of marking
 
 t6 the future of the theatre 
 
 the boundaries where repertory ends and long runs 
 begin. Their definition is admirably elastic and 
 admirably clear. We will accept it as the basis 
 of our discussion. 
 
 " Following the precedent of all National 
 Theatres," runs statute 12 of the provisional draft, 
 " the theatre should be a repertory theatre, built 
 and equipped for the purpose, and the company, 
 both in respect of number and of qualification, 
 should be suited to the presentation of a repertory : 
 and, in order that there should be no doubt as to the 
 meaning attached to the phrase, it seems desirable 
 to state that a repertory theatre should be held to 
 mean a theatre able to present at least two different 
 plays of full length at evening performances in 
 each completed week during the annual season, 
 and at least three different plays at evening per- 
 formances and matinees taken together . . . and 
 the number of plays presented in a year should not 
 be less than twenty-five. A play of full length 
 means a play occupying at least two-thirds of the 
 whole time of any performance. But two two-act 
 plays, or three one-act plays, composing a single 
 programme, should, for the purposes of this 
 statute, be reckoned as equivalent to a play of 
 full length." 
 
 This statute is both elastic and water-tight. A 
 theatre run on these lines would be out of reach 
 of temptation. Some such direction would be 
 necessary during the period of transition ; for 
 repertory managers during the period 1916-1920
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY yj 
 
 will often be sorely tempted into sliding back. 
 Conceive our man of art, producing plays quite 
 honestly after his own spirit. He happens upon a 
 play that is bound to draw the public for two or 
 three hundred nights. It is a good play. Why 
 should he not turn aside from the strait and narrow 
 way of repertory ; pile up guineas for himself ; 
 give his players an easy time for twelve months ; 
 and please his audiences every day ? The tempta- 
 tion is more than flesh and blood can stand. Mr. 
 Granville Barker has been a repertory man. But 
 how does he proceed? His runs are longer and 
 more profitable than those of the most unblushing 
 speculator. Mr. Dennis Eadie's enterprises in 
 behalf of good plays and competent acting were 
 grievously held up for two years at the 'New Royalty, 
 while he exhausted the financial possibilities of 
 Milestones. We cannot very bitterly censure 
 either Mr. Barker or Mr. Eadie on this account. 
 Indeed, their success is in one way a palpable 
 hit at the speculating manager. It shows that 
 managers who choose for themselves, aspiring to 
 lead the public, are more likely to choose what 
 the public is looking for, and to be followed by 
 the public, than managers who put what they are 
 pleased to call business before everything. Mr. 
 Barker and Mr. Eadie merely play the old, very 
 merry and human game of spoiling the Egyptians. 
 Their exploitation of the long run when it comes 
 their way is the worldly wisdom of a Socialist 
 denouncing the social system of private capital,
 
 78 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 but apparently quite ready, till the system is 
 changed, to profit by it. 
 
 Nevertheless the men who yield to this tempta- 
 tion are digging the grave equally of their reputa- 
 tion and their profit. They are drawing heavily 
 upon their current account at the bank of public 
 opinion. When public opinion is alert, sensitive, 
 educated and really able to declare itself, the folly 
 of yielding will have become so obvious that the 
 temptation will no longer exist. Meantime defini- 
 tion and a self-denying ordinance are necessary to 
 buttress the resolutions of a private manager to 
 be true to the spirit of repertory, which forbids him 
 to sacrifice the future to the present, though he be 
 as ravenous as Esau. 
 
 Repertory being defined as three plays a week 
 and at least twenty-five new plays a year, what 
 are its advantages for managers, players, and 
 authors ? 
 
 The manager's advantage is clear. He does not 
 stake everything upon a single play, to gain or 
 lose it all. He need not perpetually be making 
 haggard inquiries at the box office. He can feel 
 as noble as a missionary, as absolute as a King, as 
 judicial as a Lord Chancellor, as independent as a 
 Civil Servant. He is in a position to lap experience 
 as a cat laps milk. He may kindle the smoking 
 flax of dramatic genius into a national conflagra- 
 tion. He gets the last inch of interest, ardour and 
 intelligence out of his players. Above and beyond 
 all this, he can do what scarcely a manager in ten,
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY 79 
 
 as things obtain at present, can do : he can keep 
 his head. 
 
 There is a noted misconception about a repertory 
 theatre. It is tacitly assumed that the only plays 
 to be run by a repertory theatre will be unsuccess- 
 ful plays. This misconception arises from the 
 fact that a repertory theatre in London has never 
 yet been tried. Mr. Frohman's enterprise in 1910 
 was a repertory theatre that intended to fail. 
 It was run on the assumption that a repertory 
 theatre only produces plays that the public are 
 not likely to want. The fact we have yet to grasp 
 about repertory theatres of the future is that their 
 difficulty will be, not in the unpopularity, but in 
 the popularity, of their plays. After a short period 
 of experimental education of the public, many an 
 excellent play, honestly chosen for its merit and 
 competently acted, will be a popular success. The 
 difficulty will be to give the public as many of these 
 plays as it requires. Every repertory theatre in 
 London will have in its list of plays two or three 
 safe and certain successes. Running these plays 
 collaterally with plays of experiment, plays of the 
 future, plays of new men whom it is desired to 
 afford a chance of seeing their work produced and 
 acted, plays by their nature appealing to a limited 
 section of the public, plays intended to push still 
 further the important enterprise of winning back 
 to the theatre the intelligent reading classes driven 
 thence in despair by the speculating manager — 
 in a word, running the popular plays with the
 
 8o THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 pioneer plays, the repertory theatres will undoubtedly 
 pay their way and lead the English theatre into 
 fresh fields. 
 
 The manager of such a theatre will be an alert 
 and polished citizen of the commonwealth. He 
 will not be a hunted and haunted specialist, mad 
 wdth all sorts of fixed ideas as to what the public 
 wants ; how a play should be written ; how a happy 
 ending is necessary here, or a feminine interest there ; 
 how the principal actor should speak at least two 
 thousand words, enter somewhere about the middle of 
 the first act, and never be more than thirty-five. He 
 will be a man who lives level with the thought of his 
 time, a man of ideas, impatient to find an original 
 dramatic conception and faithful to execute it. He 
 will neither despise his public nor slavishly respect it. 
 He will realise that, though the multitude's opinion 
 is more likely to be right than an Academy's, yet 
 there will always be fine art v.ith a limited appeal, 
 as well as fine art with a universal appeal. He will 
 also reahse — a fact strangely lost sight of by people 
 who write about art and the public — that though 
 Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or to take a more 
 homely illustration, Mr. Bernard Shaw's Candida, 
 may in a given month of the present year be in- 
 capable of appealing to so many people as Alex- 
 ander's Rag-Time-Band, yet, by the time we have 
 exhausted the appeal of Beethoven or Mr. Shaw, 
 they will easily in mere brute numbers have beaten 
 Alexander to a frazzle. No one remembers or 
 would understand the equivalent of Alexander's
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY 8i 
 
 Rag-Time-Band in 1837 ; but the Ninth Symphony, 
 unhke Charley's Aunt, is still running. 
 
 Let us now consider the repertory system from 
 the point of view of the player. The present system 
 is clearly for the majority of players as wretched, as 
 wasteful, as discouraging and as stupefying as a 
 system well could be. There is a certain number of 
 competent players in the labour market. There is 
 a certain number of managers who desire to employ 
 them. Fresh companies are formed for the pro- 
 duction of each new play. The play may run for 
 two nights or for two hundred, but at the end of the 
 run, \Ahatever its length, the contract is terminated. 
 No actor knows where he will be playing six weeks 
 hence, or with whom, or for how long, or for how 
 much. It is a system workable from the manager's 
 point of view only on the supposition that there will 
 be always some competent player for his sudden 
 purpose unemployed and ready to support him. 
 It is a system of continual reshuffling ; a system 
 that provides for the unhappy player a maximum 
 of anxiety, uncertainty and discomfort ; and for the 
 unhappy manager a frequent necessity to spoil his 
 productions with a pis alter owing to the fact that 
 the player he wants is contracted to some one else 
 for a play that promises to run for ever. 
 
 But these economic difficulties of the market are 
 of small account beside its evil artistic results. 
 These are summed up in the fact that under this 
 present system a player must of necessity label 
 himself in big letters. When managers are hurriedly 
 6
 
 82 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 looking for a player to take up this part or that in 
 a contemplated production, it is obviously useful to 
 know that A. is good at playing old men, that B. is 
 good at playing a maiden aunt, that C. is good at 
 playing a middle-aged epigrammatist with a monocle. 
 So far has this system been developed between 
 managers anxious to know where they can find some 
 one to play a butler or an archdeacon and players 
 anxious to be emploj^ed as continuously as possible 
 in the continual reshuffle of companies, that slang 
 terms have been invented to describe the required 
 types. You hear a manager wondering where he 
 can find a 'juvenile lead ' ; and, before you have 
 recovered from the fit of shuddering horror into 
 which he has thrown you, you hear his agent telling 
 him that X. (whom every one know is the juvenile 
 lead par excellence) is out of a job, and that he lives 
 somewhere near the Marble Arch. 
 
 Not only are the less competent actors spoiled 
 and artistically degraded. The system of long runs 
 spoils the best actors, not only by the necessarily 
 fortuitous system of its recruiting, but by the mere 
 fact that it is a system of long runs. A young actor 
 comes into notice. He is cast for some part at a 
 West-End theatre. The play is successful, and runs 
 for a year. What is the result upon this player's 
 art ? At a time when he should be continually 
 experimenting, continually changing his roles, doing 
 all in his power to keep his technique flexible, to 
 figlit against the inevitable tendency of every artist 
 to become stereotyped and fixed in his manner, he
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY 83 
 
 is invited to appear night after night in the same 
 piece, to fix for a whole year the tones of his voice 
 and the conduct of his person, to run himself into 
 the same mould. How disastrous this is appears 
 in the fearful examples swarming in the English 
 theatre to-day of players once of infinite promise, 
 now little better than walking compendiums of 
 tricks and mannerisms from which the life has long 
 since departed — walking caricatures of their dead 
 selves. 
 
 What a contrast is presented in the system of 
 repertory ! Each repertory theatre will have a staff 
 of players v.-orking at a fixed salary in permanent 
 employment. The staff will be large enough to 
 allow of the competent presentation of an}^ play 
 from Shakespeare to Synge, from Euripides to Mr. 
 Galsworthy. Plays will continually be in rehearsal. 
 Parts v.'ill continually be re-allotted. The members 
 of the company will be friends and fellow-craftsmen. 
 The theatre will be their school as well as their 
 stage. Every symptom of that fatal tendency to 
 inelasticity, to the stereotyping of the art of this 
 man or that, will be watched and corrected. As 
 soon as A. shows the least sign of being able to play 
 Polonius in his sleep he will be put into Claudius or 
 Laertes. 
 
 The greater the actor, the more he stands to gain 
 by the change. The introduction of the repertory 
 system means the total abolition of the present con- 
 ception of a company of players as a group collected 
 about an actor-manager in roles decorously subordin-
 
 84 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 ated to his in length and importance. No one suffers 
 more from this than the actor-manager himself, 
 in his art, in his health of body and mind, or in his 
 powers of intelligently choosing and staging a play. 
 Under the present system if an actor-manager plays 
 Hamlet eight times a week for several months one 
 of two things must happen — either Hamlet will kill 
 him or he will kill Hamlet. Before we ignorantly 
 censure this or that distinguished actor-manager for 
 cliches none the less disastrous in that originally 
 they were his own and meant something ; for 
 indulging fixed habits in the interpretation of utterly 
 different roles ; for preferring to play continuously 
 a specific type of character — before we censure him, 
 let us reflect that overdriven men will habitually 
 take the easier way ; that the faults of much of our 
 best playing are the natural fruit of our pernicious 
 system of production ; that they run through and 
 through the foul body of the infected theatre ; that 
 no remedy is conceivable till in permanent repertory 
 companies Hotspur is willing at short notice to 
 change with Falstaff, Hamlet with the Gravedigger, 
 John Tanner with Roebuck Ramsden. 
 
 An interjection is necessary here for the benefit 
 of reverend playgoers who remember the days of 
 the old stock company. The old stock company 
 corresponds in time with the era of the lowest 
 degradation of the English theatre. Believers in 
 the long run, and in the continuous reshuffle of 
 companies responding to the needs of our captains of 
 theatrical industry, may justly argue that their way
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY 85 
 
 is at any rate an improvement on the way of 
 Crummies and of Nicholas Nickleby. But we can- 
 not allow them to infer from this that their way is 
 better than the repertory or stock company of the 
 future. It is true that the old stock company had 
 a repertory of plays, that runs were short, and the 
 bills frequently changed. But the old stock com- 
 pany had no true resemblance to the new. The old 
 stock company had got, in name, a repertory of 
 plays ; but it had not got a repertory of parts. All 
 the plays were the same, and all the parts in the 
 plays. The actor who played old men walked out 
 of the The Murder of Alice into The Blood of the 
 Innocent. It was the same play and the same part 
 in the play. M. or N. always played the villain of 
 the piece ; and, immediately M. or N. appeared, 
 the audience, as well as he, knew precisely where 
 they were. There was nothing wrong in the old 
 repertory system except that there was no repertory. 
 The remedy for this state of things was the appear- 
 ance of an English author who could write plays. 
 The degradation of the English theatre of Crummies 
 had nothing to do with the merits of repertory as 
 against the merits of actor-management. The only 
 great periods of English drama have been periods 
 of the stock company. Burbage's company was a 
 stock company : the Globe in Southwark was a 
 repertory theatre. Betterton's was a stock com- 
 pany : the King's House and the Duke's House were 
 repertory theatres. 
 
 Returning to the present advantages of repertory.
 
 86 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 what will it mean for the dramatic author ? Clearly 
 he stands to gain most of all. We have yet to con- 
 sider the causes and the width of the breach between 
 English life, letters and art on the one hand, and 
 English drama on the other. But one of those 
 causes is undoubtedly exposed in the system of 
 speculative actor-management and long runs. The 
 effect of this system on the manager is to make him 
 timid, conventional, stiff, orthodox. Having run to 
 death his last success, his impulse is not the impulse 
 of the true artist and entrepreneur — the impulse to 
 look for something fresh, to break new ground, to 
 carry his public on a career of joint exploration with 
 himself. His impulse is to look for something as 
 like his old success as possible, to ask the authors 
 whose plays he knows for another play. He does 
 not stage plays as an experiment, as a sure education 
 for young authors and a possible education of the 
 public. 
 
 But this is not the worst of actor-management. 
 It not only restricts the number of plays produced, 
 and tends mischievously and unintelligently to limit 
 their choice, but by indirect influence of the player 
 upon the playwright it actually confines his imagina- 
 tion. It consecrates in the mind of the young 
 dramatist stage-types and stage-personalities of the 
 day. The majority of our conspicuous actors are 
 associated with characters and scenes repeated in 
 a score of different plays. These characters and 
 scenes, in the case of a dramatist who deliberately 
 writes his play for a particular player, degrade his
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY 87 
 
 work to the level of an academic exercise, and, in 
 the case of any dramatist in touch with the theatre 
 (as all dramatists necessarily should be), uncon- 
 sciously pervert the tenor of his ideas. The 
 stereotyping of the player leads inevitably to the 
 stereotyping of the play. The repertory system, 
 modifying the one, will necessarily modify the other. 
 
 How are all these wonderful changes to come 
 about ? How will speculating managers learn to 
 resist the financial possibilities of a long run ? How 
 is every London theatre going to be induced to 
 change its mode of life ? How will our successful 
 players learn to prefer hard work, continual prac- 
 tice, gracious self-obliteration, generous admission of 
 new men, the perpetual give-and-take which a reper- 
 tory system requires ? 
 
 The first stimulus will be in the first few years' 
 progress of the National Theatre. The National 
 Theatre will attract an ever-widening public. It 
 will pay its way, and be a perpetual solid proof that 
 conscientious work does not necessarily mean bank- 
 ruptcy. It will get the best plays, setting a stand- 
 ard which the actor-manager houses will in vain 
 attempt to achieve. The National Repertory Com- 
 pany will act the speculative theatres clean off their 
 respective stages in public derision. Other reper- 
 tory theatres will open in imitation of the National 
 Theatre, run by men long-headed enough to look 
 ten years ahead ; and in sheer self-defence the 
 actor-managers will be comj^clled to consider their 
 position. Players will begin everywhere to revolt
 
 88 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 against the humiliating conditions of employment 
 hitherto in vogue. They will perceive the advan- 
 tages of the new system. The repertory managers 
 will get better talent and a more conscientious 
 service ; and they will know how to push their 
 advantage. Every year that the intelligent public 
 looks more and more to the theatre as a fine art, 
 as an institution reflecting the life and thought of 
 the time ; every year that the pla3^goer tends to put 
 the theatre in a place of honour and authority 
 beside the philosophers, poets and novelists of 
 his day, the position of the speculative long-run 
 entertainer will become more difficult. Even were 
 he a wicked and stubborn materialist, lacking in 
 the ideals even of a conscientious sign-painter, he 
 would be forced into reformation for economy's 
 sake alone. All we have so far realised as pointing 
 to an ultimate victory, in shillings and pounds, of 
 the man of art over the man of business equally 
 applies to the victory of the repertory over the 
 long-run system of producing plays. 
 
 But the movement will run more easily than the 
 strict logic of shillings and pounds. Players and 
 managers to-day are not merely grubbing after 
 pence. Like all men worthy of their hire, the first 
 object of a competent manager is to do a job 
 thoroughly and to do it well. The artistic advan- 
 tages of the new system will urge him towards 
 repertory quite as strongly as its economics. No 
 manager worth his salt will wait to see that repertory 
 pays a dividend. No player worthy his buskins
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY 89 
 
 will wait to see that repertory means finer oppor- 
 tunities and more regular employment. As soon 
 as the obvious artistic advantages of repertory are 
 perceived, a general movement will begin in its 
 favour. This may ring possibly a little optimistic- 
 ally in the ears of people accustomed to think of 
 actors and actresses as jealous, vain and feather- 
 headed ; squabbling about the size of their names 
 upon a poster ; fighting as to who shall wear the 
 most striking costume in a play ; yielding every 
 inch of their limelight with an evil grace. It is 
 true that many players are fretful and ungenerous, 
 envious of success, insolent in triumph, bitter in 
 failure. But these symptoms are not peculiar to 
 players. They are the invariable symptoms of any 
 profession where rewards are capriciously bestowed, 
 and opportunities capriciously refused. The average 
 player with a fair chance would be much like the 
 average member of any other profession. Men do 
 not work only for hire, or seek to excel only for 
 vainglory. The acting profession, ill-regulated as 
 it is to-day, teems with men and women with all 
 the good craftsman's contempt of slovenly work 
 and low intention. These men and women will 
 not necessarily remain with a bad master who pays 
 them five pounds if they can get a good master 
 who pays them four. The tragic condition of 
 the stage to-day is just this — that the best people, 
 players and managers alike, are in the grip of 
 a system which in their hearts they know to be 
 a makeshift. Show them a better system, and
 
 90 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 they will not wait to know that it returns them a 
 slightly higher dividend than the old. Managers 
 will not wait to perceive it will actually pay them to 
 produce the Bernard Shaws of 1920 in 1916, as Mr. 
 Barker produced the Bernard Shaw of 1913 in 1904. 
 
 Here we come upon the most important result of 
 having a National Theatre as an object and an 
 example. In order to show how money can be made 
 by honest work it is an excellent idea to have an 
 endowed institution to do honest work independ- 
 ently of money. In five years the National Theatre 
 will be spending its profits in experimentally 
 perfecting its work and lowering its prices ; 
 and not till then will it reall}^ be justified of its 
 founders. It is the duty of a National State Theatre 
 to prove to the individual manager how the best 
 that can be done by people of independent means is 
 also the best for the means of people who must 
 make their enterprises pay. In this connection 
 it is interesting to note that when the National 
 Theatre was in 1913 first debated in the House of 
 Commons, the Under-Secretary for the Home Ofhce, 
 picturing it as playing to empty houses, wanted to 
 know of what use it was likely to be to the nation. 
 Where, he asked, is the demand for a National 
 Theatre ? Mr. Ellis Griffith was saying in effect — 
 Show me the fruit and I will help you to plant the 
 tree. The demand for a National Theatre founded 
 in 1916 will be clear enough in 1920. In 1920 it 
 will have grown into a demand that all theatres 
 shall be National Theatres. The National Theatre
 
 THE FUTURE OF REPERTORY 91 
 
 of 1 91 6 will in 1920 have proved to the satisfac- 
 tion of playgoers, players, managers and dramatic 
 authors that only in a theatre conducted on the 
 principles of a national repertory theatre can English 
 drama come to an honourable place in the life of the 
 English nation, or be worthy of them that serve it 
 and them that rule.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE FUTURE OF THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN 
 
 But man, proud man, 
 Drest in a little brief authority, 
 Most ignorant of what he's most assured. 
 His glassy essence, like an angry ape, 
 Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven 
 As make the angels weep ; who, with our spleens, 
 Would all themselves laugh mortal. 
 
 THE title of this chapter is misleading. I am 
 not going to talk specifically of the Censor, or 
 to discuss the licensing of theatres. Every one is 
 heartily sick of the subject ; and I have already 
 written in extenso upon the Censor's iniquities, the 
 necessity for his removal, the principles and work 
 of his office, together with the grievances and 
 interests of everybody concerned in the licensing of 
 theatres. 1 For the purposes of this chapter the 
 Lord Chamberlain's censorship of stage plays is 
 merely a symbol of the divorce between English 
 letters, English life and English art, on the one hand, 
 and the English theatre on the other. Lord Chester- 
 field prophesied at the passing of Walpole's in- 
 
 * The Censor and the Theatres. London : T, Fisher Unwin. 
 
 1912. 
 
 93
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN 93 
 
 famous statute of 1737 that its consequence would 
 be the fixing of a great gulf between English litera- 
 ture and the English playhouse. His prediction 
 was true from the moment in which Fielding deserted 
 the English play for the English press. 
 
 In 1737 the English play was for the first time in 
 our history put into a position of inferiority to every 
 other form of artistic expression. Till 1737 pulpit, 
 press, political platform and play had been neither 
 more nor less free one than the other. Each was 
 progressing towards freedom under the law. Wal- 
 pole for political reasons in 1737 outlawed the English 
 theatre, and determined that for nearly two cen- 
 turies it should be at a disadvantage. Pulpit, press 
 and platform went the appointed way of develop- 
 ment. It was agreed that speech and thought 
 should be free, subject to the right of the State to 
 prosecute for definite offences. The theatre, on the 
 other hand, was subjected to the capricious and 
 undefined control of an official who had neither 
 tradition, principles, nor law to guide or to limit the 
 conduct of his office. The institution of the Lord 
 Chamberlain's censorship of plays is a fitting symbol 
 of the degeneration and dark age of the English 
 theatre ; of its insensibility to the form and pressure 
 of the time ; of its divorce from the spiritual and 
 imaginative life of a hundred and fifty years. 
 
 The revolt against the censorship of the stage 
 synchronises with the renaissance of English drama. 
 It is no mere accident of chronology that agitation 
 against the absolute rule of the Lord Chamberlain's
 
 94 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 clerk dates from the appearance of Mr. William 
 Archer before the Committee of 1892 as a solitary 
 witness on behalf of a free theatre, or that these wit- 
 nesses had in 1909 swelled to a host. Before Mr. 
 William Archer appeared in 1892, every one was 
 agreed that the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain 
 worked well, nor was any one able to imagine a vain 
 thing which might conceivably be better. Com- 
 mittees of expert gentlemen in 1853 and 1866 re- 
 ported in favour and admiration of the censorship. 
 Why, indeed, should there be difficulty ? Solitu- 
 dinem faciunt et pacem appellant. No idea, no 
 method or convention of art, entered the theatre 
 in those days which had not already, as Disraeli 
 said of Peel's quotations, received the meed of public 
 approbation. When an idea had been sufficiently 
 long in the public mind to be sanctified by familiarity 
 into being entirely respectable, it was put into a play. 
 No one with anything shocking to say (and all 
 original things run the risk of shocking somebody) 
 would at that time have dreamed of conveying it to 
 the public through the theatre. It was in conse- 
 quence unlikely that the Lord Chamberlain would 
 find the administration of his office very difficult. 
 He had frightened genius out of the theatre. He 
 reigned competently in an empty land ; and, 
 pointing to the abomination of desolation he had 
 made, inferred that no rebellion proved the justice 
 and beneficence of his empire. 
 
 The renaissance of English drama has changed all 
 that. The Joint Select Committee of 1909 did not
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN 95 
 
 report that the censorship of stage plays was working 
 easily and well. Some of its conclusions would have 
 caused each particular hair of the members of all 
 former committees to stand upon end. It pro- 
 claimed that " A censorship with a power of veto 
 before production is open to grave objections. 
 Secret in its operations, subject to no effective con- 
 trol by public opinion, its effect can hardly fail to 
 be to coerce into conformity with the conventional 
 standards of the day dramatists who are seeking to 
 amend them. These standards are not absolute. 
 It is an axiom underlying all our legislation that only 
 through the toleration of that which one age thinks 
 to be error can the next age progress further in the 
 pursuit of truth. ... In view of the danger that 
 ofhcial control over plays before their production 
 may hinder the growth of a great and serious 
 national drama . . . we conclude that the licensing 
 authority . . . should not have power to impose a 
 veto on the production of plays." 
 
 We are not here concerned with the merits of the 
 censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, only with its 
 significance as a symbol of the divorce between the 
 English theatre and English art. The above con- 
 clusions are from this point of view only important 
 so far as they formally proclaim that gradual re- 
 union of the English theatre with English life, 
 which is the most conspicuous and important 
 movement of the last thirty years — a movement 
 whose future we must very particularly determine. 
 Why did the English theatre turn suddenly and
 
 96 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 valiantly upon the oppressor ; assert its dignity 
 and competence ; refuse to hang like a camp- 
 follower in the rear of the arts ? The revolt of the 
 English theatre against the Lord Chamberlain is 
 the token of its determination to contribute to the 
 meaning and beauty of our English inheritance ; to 
 be put upon a level with poets, preachers and 
 statesmen. As soon as the English theatre felt this 
 impulse to recover its estate and dignity, forcibly 
 confiscated by an Act of Parliament that remains 
 to this day as a shameful evidence of Whig tyranny 
 and Whig hypocrisy, it was bound to raise riot 
 and rebellion in the desert confines of the Lord 
 Chamberlain's province. The extent and the 
 meaning of this revolt has now to be considered 
 together with the prospects of its issue. 
 
 The renaissance of English drama cannot be fully 
 understood without reference to the renaissance of 
 the drama in Europe. While the English theatre 
 was in the early nineties of last century sunk in a 
 shameful surrender to the fiat that made of it a 
 retailer of small wares — of second-hand goods im- 
 ported from France, or stolen by theatrical hacks 
 from the English stock of commonplaces already 
 rejected as worn-out by contemporary thinkers and 
 writers — in a word, while the English theatre was 
 almost entirely cut off from English civilisation, the 
 theatre in Europe at large was coming to be regarded 
 as a noble instrument of expression, a form fitted 
 for the delivery of high passions and big ideas. No 
 sordid accident of political history had in vScandi-
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN 97 
 
 navia, Russia, or Germany determined that the 
 theatre should fall into a position of inferiority. 
 Thinkers and poets of these races were not given to 
 understand that if they chose the theatre for their 
 kingdom their work would be inspected, and, at the 
 discretion of a Government clerk, declared unfit for 
 public consumption and destroyed. In Scandi- 
 navia, Ibsen, Bjornson and Strindberg ; in Russia, 
 Tchekoff, Gogol, Gorki and Tolstoi ; in Germany, 
 Hauptmann and Wedekind were producing plays 
 that reflected the intellectual life of their time. Of 
 all these movements and of all these names one only 
 had an immediate influence in England. The 
 plays of Ibsen began almost immediately to be 
 translated into English and to be played in English 
 theatres. Ibsen's advantage over his contemporaries 
 was mainly due to the ardour with which his art was 
 expounded and advocated by a group of able and 
 determined champions of naturalist drama. He 
 became the watchword of a sect. He was an active 
 leaven, and the whole lump was speedily and with 
 an amazing virulence fermented. Mr. William 
 Archer led heavy battalions in this attack. Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw dashed impetuously to and fro. 
 Mr. A. B. Walkley skirmished in light array. The 
 influence of Ibsen was speedily felt in England as a 
 model of dramatic style, and as a living witness to 
 the shame of the English theatre. It came to be 
 realised that in Norway was a theatre that counted 
 in the intellectual life of the people — a theatre that 
 handled the problems of life in pla^^s for the stage 
 7
 
 98 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 as fearlessly as in England Mr. Thomas Hardy 
 handled the problems of life in his novels of Wessex. 
 English critics looked into Russia, and there saw 
 dramatic art swaying level with Russian music ; 
 into Germany, and saw dramatic art swaying 
 level with German letters. Discontent intruded. 
 Questions were asked. Why should the English 
 theatre be thus outstripped ? Why should the 
 countrymen of Shakespeare and of Etherege be 
 thus put down by the countrymen of Tchekoff and 
 the countrymen of Strindberg ? 
 
 These questions were promptly and rudely 
 answered by the Lord Chamberlain. Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw, having introduced Ibsen to English play- 
 goers, now set about introducing himself. He 
 wrote Mrs. Warren s Profession. Mr. Granville 
 Barker, a pioneer in the art of producing natural- 
 ist drama in England, now began to write it. 
 He wrote Waste. These plays were written on 
 the assumption that English dramatic art was in 
 dignity upon a level with the dramatic art of 
 Scandinavia, in which Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker 
 were deeply read. The sequel is a well-worn story. 
 The plays were refused a licence. It had for nearly 
 two hundred years been assumed that the theatre 
 was an improper place for ideas not thoroughly 
 familiar to the English people. It had for nearly 
 two hundred years been assumed by the public and 
 by men of mind that the theatre was unsuitable 
 for any serious approach of any of the high things 
 which supremely matter. Mr. Shaw and Mr.
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN 99 
 
 Barker, looking at Scandinavia and Russia, had 
 for the moment forgotten this. The Lord Chamber- 
 lain sharply arrested them. The theatre, he said, 
 is in a position of inferiority ; if you have anything 
 important or original to say, you must write a 
 poem or a novel, or make a speech in Hyde Park, 
 or deliver a course of lectures in a public hall, or 
 write a series of articles in the Times. So long as 
 you are not blasphemous or indecent, all these 
 ways of expression are open to you. But you must 
 not put anything sincere, original, or serious into 
 a play. You must not put into a play anything 
 that has not already been put into a novel or a 
 newspaper. You may not in a play say anything, 
 however innocent of offence, that has not been said 
 before. If you put anything into a play beyond 
 household words, I have in my office at St. James's 
 Palace a clerk who will be shocked and startled ; 
 and I shall be compelled to assume that every one 
 else in England will be equally shocked and startled, 
 and that a scandal will ensue. I shall therefore 
 have to forbid the performance of this play, and 
 destroy therein the property of the author. 
 
 From that position the Lord Chamberlain has not 
 to this day retreated. A Joint Select Committee 
 has drawn evidence that covers his high office with 
 ridicule. The House of Commons has resolved 
 (with one dissentient who misunderstood the 
 motion before the House) that the censorship of 
 stage plays should be abolished. But the Lord 
 Chamberlain's clerks (owing to the increasing
 
 100 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 anxiety and labour of the office, arising out of 
 the recent revival of English drama, the clerical 
 staff has had to be doubled) still refuse to pass 
 plays that contain anything in violation of the 
 pact of 1737. The agitation against him grows, 
 and the motives of war multiply in proportion as 
 the English theatre strives to come more closely 
 into touch with the imaginative and spiritual needs 
 of the people. 
 
 That the correspondence between the renaissance 
 of the English theatre and its quarrel with the 
 Lord Chamberlain should be put beyond a doubt, 
 whenever a foreign play is translated for presenta- 
 tion in an English theatre — a foreign play of the 
 type that inspired the English renaissance — the 
 Lord Chamberlain refuses to allow its public per- 
 formance. Who knows to what extremes of 
 perilous emulation it might impel the more turbulent 
 English spirits ? The Lord Chamberlain has not 
 forgiven Ibsen his share of the enterprise. He has 
 never been able to forget how, in a fit of absent- 
 mindedness, his clerk allowed A Doll's House to 
 slip through and corrupt the English theatre into 
 rebellion and contempt. He screws his revenge 
 to the sticking-place. Ghosts is still waiting for a 
 licence, though the ideas in Ghosts have for years 
 been commonplaces of English literature and 
 conversation. 
 
 It must not be imagined that the censorship of 
 the Lord Chamberlain acts only to the disadvantage 
 of a particular kind of heretical or propagandist
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN loi 
 
 play. It is an accident merely of the renaissance of 
 English drama that its most conspicuous examples 
 are naturalist plays of a particular school. The 
 quarrel of the English theatre with the Lord Cham- 
 berlain is not that he objects to the theatre being 
 used as an heretical pulpit, that he objects to the 
 undermining of institutions like monogamy or the 
 established Church, but that he objects to any 
 revival of English drama whatsoever. Every 
 author who chooses the theatre for the delivery of 
 his artistic message puts himself in peril of the 
 Censor. The Theatres Act was intended to keep 
 men of art and men of mind out of the theatre, and 
 the Lord Chamberlain knows it is his duty to abide 
 by this intention and to enforce it. He knows it is 
 his duty to prevent the sincere treatment in a stage 
 play of religion or of politics. Neither men's 
 spiritual nor their social adventures are lawful 
 dramatic ware. Religion is contraband. Politics 
 is false coin. Imaginative sincerity has a price 
 upon its head. Mr. Bernard Shaw writes a religious 
 play : it is forfeit. Mr. Granville Barker writes 
 the tragic spiritual history of a man who trans- 
 gressed the social agreement and of a woman who 
 sinned against the laws of life : it is forfeit. Mr. 
 Phillpotts puts into a play of Dartmoor some part 
 of that force and sincerity of effort which have 
 given him his standing in English letters : it is 
 forfeit. M. Maeterlinck repeats the theme of 
 Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and of the 
 Hebrews' Judith : it is forfeit. These forfeitures
 
 I02 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 are not exacted owing to the subjects at issue. 
 Adultery is a privileged theme. Blasphemy, de- 
 famation and indecency are allowed in precisely 
 that degree in which they are required by theatrical 
 financiers and by the public. The Lord Chamber- 
 lain looks only to the purpose of his office, which 
 is to keep the theatre isolated so far as he can from 
 the intellectual and imaginative life of the time. 
 His heaviest blows have fallen upon the naturalist 
 school that follows Ibsen, because this school has 
 up to the present been closely identified with the 
 revival of English dramatic art. But they are not 
 confined to this school, nor are they levelled at 
 naturalist drama eo nomine. 
 
 The Lord Chamberlain very fortunately dele- 
 gates his functions as licenser to a clerk who from 
 the nature of his office is seldom a statesman or a 
 prophet. The Censor has incompetently allowed 
 the rift between English art and the English theatre 
 to close quite appreciably. He has frequently 
 wasted his thunder upon plays that are relatively 
 harmless, and let pass unchallenged plays that are 
 dangerous to the last degree. Even in dealing 
 with the naturalist school of authors, he has 
 made error upon error of judgment. Ghosts is a 
 comparatively harmless play, from a Censor's 
 point of view, compared with A Doll's House. The 
 obvious moral message of Ghosts is a commonplace 
 of English family life compared with the obvious 
 moral message of A Doll's House. Ghosts is Ibsen's 
 impressive invitation to mankind to remember that
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN 103 
 
 sins of the mothers and fathers arc visited upon 
 the children — an invitation which may conceivably 
 be spiritually beneficial to susceptible members of 
 an audience, but not necessarily destructive of their 
 domestic peace. A Doll's House is Ibsen's invitation 
 to ninety-nine Englishwomen out of a hundred to 
 abandon the beds and boards of their husbands. 
 A competent censor would never have licensed 
 A Doll's House. The censor's mistake in dealing 
 with individual examples of the naturalist school 
 is as nothing compared with his mistake of suppos- 
 ing that the naturalist school was head and front 
 of the peril in which he stood. The naturalist 
 school was identified by its enemies with the English 
 dramatic revival, and its authors and critics assisted 
 the delusion. Nevertheless, it was neither the 
 only nor, as ultimately we shall see, the most im- 
 portant part of the English renaissance. The 
 Lord Chamberlain was so fully taken up with resist- 
 ing the efforts of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker to bring 
 English dramatic art into touch with English life 
 that he neglected to observe that authors like Oscar 
 Wilde and St. John Hankin were similarly engaged. 
 
 Let us briefly consider the course of the English 
 renaissance of the last thirty or forty years that 
 we may precisely measure the extent of the Lord 
 Chamberlain's error, and predict its consequences. 
 
 It began, of course, with Robertson. The Lord 
 Chamberlain's first mistake was licensing Society 
 and Caste. Tom Robertson should have been for 
 him a screed upon the wall, a portent and the pro-
 
 104 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 logue of revolt. Here were plays of the English 
 temperament ; unborrowed, clean work of an 
 honest author ; aiming quite obviously at English 
 language. For the Lord Chamberlain these plays 
 should have smacked unmistakably of rebellion. 
 Teacup and saucer was a . premonition of tum- 
 brils and the guillotine. He should have shut his 
 eyes to seeming prettiness and innocence. The 
 audience which assembled in the Bancrofts' theatre 
 over a generation ago at the premiere of Society 
 was assisting at a dereliction of duty by the Lord 
 Chamberlain. 
 
 The impulse given to the infant English drama 
 by Robertson, once suffered, could not in its conse- 
 quences be recalled. Before it was exhausted, 
 the Lord Chamberlain, misled by superficial ab- 
 surdity, had suffered Sir William Gilbert. This 
 error was the more remarkable as Gilbert's work 
 was quite definitely a recovery for the English 
 theatre of a province from which it had been 
 definitely excluded in 1737. Gilbert and Sullivan's 
 comic opera was in practical effect a repetition in the 
 English theatre of offences for which it was origin- 
 ally outlawed. It recalled the work of Gay, whose 
 Beggar's Opera was the immediate occasion of the 
 Theatres Act. Patience was a topical commentary 
 upon English life, as valuable for the future of the 
 English theatre, as symptomatic of the closing of the 
 rift which the Lord Chamberlain was expected to 
 maintain, as any product of the naturalist theatre 
 of Ibsen.
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN 105 
 
 Even more important for the future was the 
 almost entire civilisation of the English theatre 
 reflected in the comedies of Oscar Wilde. The 
 Importance of Being Earnest was as definite an 
 assertion as we have yet had that the English 
 theatre was determined to recover its inheritance. 
 It was a play that might dcfmitely rank with the 
 best work of contemporary novelists and poets. 
 It has left its mark upon English comedy as in- 
 delibly as the work of Ibsen. The great majority 
 of English comedies written since the first perform- 
 ance of The Importance of Being Earnest and A 
 Doll's House are a blend of the naturalist stage- 
 craft of Ibsen with the literary manner of Wilde. 
 No London drawing-room of English comedy was 
 the same after Wilde. 
 
 St. John Hankin is another important dramatic 
 author who by a happy accident entirely escaped 
 the Lord Chamberlain. The influence of Hankin 
 upon the English theatre is profoundly under- 
 rated. It is true that his plays are to this day but 
 rarely performed in London ; that he is merely a 
 name to thousands who have been deeply influenced 
 by work which ultimately derives from him. But 
 his influence is not to be measured by the present 
 extent of his reputation, as we shall realise here- 
 after in another connection. Hankin is the original 
 author of the ' slight ' play ; the comedy of pro- 
 vincial manners ; the comedy of what Elia would 
 have called ' middle interests ' ; the comedy of life, 
 not at its crises, but from day to day. Hankin
 
 io6 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 was to this extent a pioneer in the closing of the 
 rift between the EngUsh theatre and EngHsh Hfe. 
 Hankin, moreover, with Wilde and with Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw, definitely restored the connection 
 of the English theatre with English letters. Plays 
 are read to-day as literature. Plays are published. 
 There are beautiful editions of Wilde and a beautiful 
 edition of Hankin. The publication of English 
 plays is an industry of the last ten or fifteen years ; 
 and to measure the extent of the dramatic revolu- 
 tion typified in the fact that plays can without 
 absurdity be decently bound and fairly printed we 
 have only to purchase from Messrs. Samuel French 
 half a dozen acting editions of plays taken at hazard 
 from the shelves of twenty years ago. The old 
 acting edition was not intended to be read. It was 
 only fit to be scored by the stage-manager, thumbed 
 by the prompter, worn into a merciful condition 
 of unrecognisability by the player. It was an 
 affront to the eye in format ; an offence to the 
 soul of any one who cared for the dignity of English 
 drama. No English author other than a dramatic 
 author would have permitted his work to issue so 
 meanly forth. The old acting edition conspicu- 
 ously asserted that the contemporary English 
 play was unworthy to be printed. Hankin and 
 Wilde have changed all that. At the present 
 moment hardly a publisher in London is not putting 
 forth plays to be read. English plays are a part 
 to-day of English letters. 
 This publication of plays is an excellent indication
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN 107 
 
 of the extent to which the Lord Chamberlain's 
 regime has broken down. In defiance of the old 
 understanding, ideas are now put into English plays 
 that have not been previously exhausted elsewhere ; 
 and they are presented in language fit to print. The 
 root assumption of the Lord Chamberlain's juris- 
 diction is that anything fit to print was unfit for a 
 play. If a thing was fit to print — if it were written 
 well enough to stand the test of publication, and if 
 it were of sufficient original value to make it worth 
 a publisher's while to assume that the public might 
 like it in a book — then it must necessarily tend to 
 bring the English theatre upon an equality with 
 English letters, and into touch. with English life, 
 which ends it was the Lord Chamberlain's manifest 
 dut}' to defeat. That we have arrived so far in the 
 stultification of the Lord Chamberlain's policy is 
 due to the fact that, while the naturalists of English 
 drama were holding the main forces of the official 
 enemy preoccupied with a frontal attack, other 
 movements were afoot, under the leadership of men 
 like Wilde and Hankin, committing irreparable 
 damage upon flank and rear. The extent of this 
 damage is measured by the publisher's present 
 willingness to consider that almost any successful 
 play of the day is likely to be worth reading by a 
 public who can afford to buy it decently printed and 
 becomingly bound. 
 
 The Lord Chamberlain has not yet realised the 
 extent and consequences of his error. To thoughtful 
 observers they were already clear in the agitation of
 
 io8 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 dramatic authors which preceded the appointment of 
 the Joint Select Committee of 1909. It was then 
 perceived that the attack upon the Lord Chamber- 
 lain's authority included every dramatic author of 
 dignity and repute. It was not confined to authors 
 of the school upon which the Lord Chamberlain's 
 thunder had been almost exclusively directed. 
 Authors, like Sir Arthur Pinero, belonging to an age 
 which dated back to the era when plays were 
 written in a mysterious stage-shorthand, were seen 
 in alliance with authors like Sir James Barrie, who 
 inherited the tradition introduced by Wilde that 
 plays should be written in English, to attack and 
 discredit the censorship. Every author who felt 
 he had a small share, original or imitative, in the 
 renaissance of the English theatre was compelled to 
 bear a part in the rebellion. The Lord Chamberlain, 
 identifying the English dramatic renaissance with 
 the naturalists, was in 1909 thunder-smitten to 
 realise that the whole body of English authors — 
 tragedy, comed}^ history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, 
 historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comi- 
 cal, scene-individable, or poem-unlimited — was united 
 with the naturalists for his discomfiture. Every 
 dramatic author who shared the determination of 
 the naturalists that English drama should resume 
 an honourable place in the dramatic art of Europe, 
 and beside the kinsmen fine arts of England, recog- 
 nised in the Lord Chamberlain the incarnation of 
 their degradation and the sanctified obstacle of their 
 ambition.
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN 109 
 
 Rebellion has now spread too far to be checked. 
 The smoking flax is now a conflagration. The 
 Lord Chamberlain is unable to quench it, and a 
 formal decree of the House of Commons has already 
 gone forth for the extinction of his authority. His 
 one remaining bulwark against sense is the support 
 of speculative managers and of managers who from 
 native modesty pretend that they are no better than 
 their inferior brethren. Sir George Alexander, for 
 example, supports the Lord Chamberlain, affirming 
 he is incompetent to keep the St. James's theatre 
 decently in order without the help of a Government 
 inspector. This is merely Sir George Alexander's 
 generosity and good feeling. As a manager he feels 
 bound to stand by those of his comrades of whom 
 this confession would be strictly true. Sir Herbert 
 Tree, on the other hand, tells us that, as a man of 
 art, he objects to the censor ; but that as a manager 
 (again from a generous but mistaken impulse of 
 generosity) he thinks the censor is useful and 
 necessary. It would be impertinent here to discuss 
 the remote financial considerations that determine the 
 rank and file of speculative managers in supporting 
 the censor's jurisdiction. These considerations are 
 bound up with the system of long runs, of provincial 
 tours, and of actor-management which, as we have 
 seen, is shortly to be superseded. Support of the 
 censorship of stage plays by managers coincides, m 
 fact, as we should suspect, with a system admirably 
 fitted to ensure the degradation of dramatic art 
 and a post-dating of its revival. The passing of this
 
 no THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 system and the passing of the censorship will naturally 
 synchronise one with the other. The Lord Cham- 
 berlain will lose his last supporters in the coming 
 reformation of the conditions of management. 
 
 The Lord Chamberlain's censorship of stage plays 
 will be abolished in 191 7 as a natural corollary 
 of the endowment of the National Theatre. It will 
 not be necessary for English dramatic authors to wait 
 until the revolution is complete for the censor's re- 
 moval. Several years before the speculative manager 
 is entirely extinct the pressure of dramatic authors 
 and of public opinion, educated and inspired by the 
 dramatic revival, will be sufficient to sweep away 
 the censorship of stage plays. The institution is 
 already effete. It has completely lost touch with 
 its primitive intention. It has become false to its 
 ideals of the nineteenth century — the period of its 
 supremacy and vigour. It yearly licenses plays that 
 are yet further concessions to an enemy leagued for 
 its destruction. Every Hcensed play of merit and 
 distinction, of sincerity and value, is a stitch in the 
 censor's shroud. In vain he tries to detach parties 
 of the enemy from their allegiance, to make dis- 
 sension in the opposing ranks. In vain he attempts 
 to bribe, with offers of an immunity almost com- 
 plete, authors who, he thinks, might possibly find 
 it to their interest to support him for a considera- 
 tion. " You may be indecent," says the Lord 
 Chamberlain, " defamatory, vulgar, licentious, per- 
 sonally offensive and morally enervating ; you 
 may stupefy the people's imagination and degrade
 
 FUTURE OF LORD CHAMBERLAIN in 
 
 their intelligence — all this you may do if only you 
 will help me to keep the English theatre in the 
 position it was intended to occupy by the theatres 
 legislation of 1737 and 1843. I will free you from 
 responsibility to your conscience, from account- 
 ability to the law. You may, at your pleasure, de- 
 grade the theatre and maintain your respectability. 
 All I ask in return is that you should uphold me 
 in the seat of authority." The dramatic authors 
 are deaf to these appeals. Their final victory four 
 years from now will be little more than the formal 
 consecration of a freedom already achieved.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE FUTURE OF DRAMATIC NATURALISM 
 
 Be not too tame neither, but let your discretion be your 
 tutor : suit the action to the word, the word to the action ; 
 with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty 
 of nature : for anything so overdone is from the purpose of play- 
 ing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 
 'twere, the mirror up to nature. 
 
 THE dramatic method to-day is the method of 
 natiirahsm. Why this should be will shortly 
 appear, also why this method will no longer obtain 
 in 1950. First, let us be quite clear as to what we 
 mean by naturalism. It is too often assumed that 
 naturalism implies a more truthful interpretation 
 of the facts of life, a closer approximation to reality, 
 than romanticism, say, or classicism. But we 
 have very definitely to realise that these various 
 labels do not touch the quality or measure the 
 veracity of art : that they do not tell us anything 
 as to the truth and value of the artist's message, 
 or the virtue of his creative power. They merely 
 describe his delivery, the form which his artistic 
 conception has assumed, his mode of utterance. 
 They are a question of language merely, quite 
 immaterial to the poet's rank. I shall, in the course
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 113 
 
 of this chapter, try to clear away one or two funda- 
 mental misunderstandings as to the meaning of 
 terms so hopelessly corrupt and misused as 
 ' realism,' ' naturalism,' ' idealism,' ' romanticism.' 
 It is a good rule for critics, who should be painfully 
 aware of the necessity of clear thinking, to distrust 
 all words in ' ism.' There are, and always will be, 
 writers who conceal, not only from their readers, 
 but from themselves, that in building up impressive 
 sentences with an inserted ' ism ' at precisely the 
 point where in plain English their puzzle-headedness 
 would stand revealed, they merely darken counsel 
 and bar the way to a salutary sense of the difficulty 
 of their subject. The mere presence of a barbar- 
 ously imported foreign termination upon the end 
 of a word which is able to live quite comfortably 
 without it is ground for suspicion. If you are able 
 to say that a thing is ' natural,' you should very 
 particularly pry into the merits of an opinion that 
 requires you at a critical stage of the argument to 
 say that it is 'naturalist' or 'naturalistic' For 
 where is the virtue of that affix ? 
 
 The vaguest of critics is under an impression that 
 he means something when he describes a play of 
 Mr. Galsworthy as naturalist, and in this way 
 seeks to distinguish it from a play of Shakespeare 
 or Mr. Yeats. But the employment of a technical 
 word like ' naturalist ' blinds him to the true 
 nature of the distinction. If he were compelled to 
 describe Mr. Galsworthy's play simply as ' natural,' 
 he would at once feel there was something wrong. 
 8
 
 114 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 He would say, Are not the plays of Shakespeare 
 natural ? — and, if so, what on earth do I mean by 
 distinguishing them by this particular epithet from 
 the plays of Mr. Galsworthy ? The same difficulty 
 arises if we choose the alternative pair of words, 
 real and realistic. In what sense is The Silver Box 
 more ' real ' than Cymbeline ? If Mr. Galsworthy 
 be ' real,' is Shakespeare therefore not real ? 
 
 There is no strict antithesis between what is 
 ' classical ' or ' romantic ' and what is ' natural ' 
 in art. The true antithesis is between good art 
 and bad ; and there is no other antithesis that 
 matters. The distinction between the ' classical ' 
 and the ' natural ' is merely a distinction of method, 
 as immaterial in itself to the quality of the work 
 as the distinction between writing it with a Pickwick 
 and writing it with a Waverley pen. A slovenly 
 use of terms like ' realism ' and ' naturalism ' has 
 fostered an absurd idea that there is a class of artists 
 who actually aim at observing and copying the 
 facts of life ; and that this class of artists must be 
 sharply contrasted with another class which aims 
 at fashioning an ideal. The mere statement of so 
 absurd a view bristles with contradictions. To 
 talk of an artist copying the facts of life is nonsense. 
 Nevertheless, there is obviously a difference between 
 Mr. Yeats' Deirdre and Mr. Galsworthy's The 
 Silver Box. If you cannot account for it by 
 describing The Silver Box as natural, thereby 
 insinuating that Deirdre is not natural, you must 
 account for it otherwise. There is, of course, a very
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 115 
 
 real distinction, which makes it the more deplorable 
 that it has been overlaid with persistent misuse. 
 All art must come by way of the artist's imaginative 
 vision of things ; and it is inherently a false dis- 
 tinction to describe one sort of art as imagined, and 
 another sort as copied. The so-called realist does 
 not imitate what he sees — always supposing he is an 
 artist ; but, just like Racine or Shakespeare, he 
 absorbs into his heart and brain the facts of life. 
 They are his raw material, just as they are the raw 
 material of the classic or the romantic. It is when 
 the process of imaginative assimilation is complete 
 that the difference between the schools — simply a 
 difference in presentation — begins to appear. The 
 artist has now made the material his own ; and he 
 is great in the proportion that this imaginative 
 assimilation is deep and full. This is the mysterious 
 process of creation, almost unconscious, as all the great 
 poets have witnessed ; and, according as the process 
 is complete, so will the created thing, whatever form 
 it may assume, live of itself and compel mankind to 
 receive it for vital truth. 
 
 What, then, is the difference of method which has 
 led so many to misunderstand what is commonly 
 known as ' realism ' ? It is merely a question as to 
 the form in which the artist desires his conception 
 to appear. Some dramatists, for instance, having 
 collected, in observation of life and in heart-search- 
 ing, the raw material of their drama, prefer, when 
 they have made it their own, to throw it back into 
 a cunning semblance of the form in which it was
 
 ii6 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 first derived. Ibsen toolc this way in his naturalist 
 plays. He observed his facts from life ; lived 
 with them, sometimes for years, in imagination ; 
 and, at the last, when the moment came to give 
 them shape and tongue, he chose to present them 
 as illusively of the texture of the medium from which 
 they were originally derived. Ibsen, as an artist, 
 must therefore be judged, not as ignorantly he 
 often has been, on the fidelity of his sociological 
 plays to the actual events and appearances of a 
 Norwegian domestic interior, but by the three 
 supreme tests of every artist, no matter what way he 
 chooses to buHd his illusion. First, was his vision 
 perfect of the world ? — did he choose his material 
 from life as a just man, whose view of things is 
 balanced and true ? Second, had he the imagina- 
 tive power to make this material his own ? — was he 
 able to breathe upon the body of what he saw, to 
 give it life, and return it to the world quick with the 
 breath of his spirit ? Third, was he sufficiently the 
 master of craft, in giving a local habitation to his 
 vision, to build the illusion of truth in the medium 
 he chose ? — could he, in fact, as the formal artist, 
 successfully observe the conventions he accepted ? 
 It is at this third stage that the distinction comes 
 in between the ' naturalist ' and the ' roman- 
 tic ' — namely, in the choice of their method of 
 illusion — whether it be Shakespeare's method with 
 Bottom and Titania, or Mr. Shaw's method with Mr. 
 Tanner and Miss Whiteficld. The reason why Mr. 
 Shaw is inferior to Shakespeare is not that he
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 117 
 
 chooses to give to his people the ilhision of being 
 contemporary ratepayers, whereas Shakespeare 
 chooses to give to his people the illusion of being 
 fairies, but (i) that Shakespeare's vision of life is 
 more just than Mr. Shaw's, (2) that Shakespeare's 
 imaginative power is greater than Mr. Shaw's, 
 (3) that Shakespeare more successfully sustains 
 the illusion that Titania is a fairy than Mr. Shaw 
 sustains the illusion that Miss Whitefield is the 
 woman one meets in the Tube. Shakespeare, in 
 fact, is superior to Mr. Shaw at all points of the 
 artist's progress. 
 
 These facts are quite frequently ignored even by 
 those who clearly realise that the mode or label 
 is comparatively a small thing. It is a tendency 
 of each new generation of artists to assume that 
 the conventions it accepts are better than those of 
 its predecessor. The assumption is always absurd 
 and is always seen to be absurd by critics of a later 
 period. Conventions in themselves are neither good 
 nor bad. 
 
 The chief fault of the English theatre to-day is 
 precisely this too ready belief in the virtue of this 
 or that particular convention. The naturalist 
 followers of Ibsen really believe, though they do 
 not confess it, that the naturalist gets by mere 
 virtue of his method nearer to life and nature than 
 the romantic or classic. He tends to assume that 
 the mere application of the naturalist formula 
 has a positive value ; that it is a kind of talisman 
 for the evocation of a masterpiece. Other schools,
 
 ii8 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 forming in opposition to the naturalists, quite as 
 definitely direct their criticism not upon the art 
 of their rivals but upon their artistic method. 
 
 In the autumn of 191 2 I delivered upon this 
 text an hortation to the playgoers of Manchester. 
 Manchester has played an important part in the 
 history of English drama during the last few years. 
 Manchester has had the best and most faithful of 
 the repertory theatres of Great Britain — a theatre 
 which for a time enjoyed the advantage of having 
 for its director Mr. B. Iden Payne, one of the few 
 producers to-day who is not slavishly identified 
 with this or that particular ' school ' of dramatic 
 art. Manchester needs hortation far less urgently 
 than London or the English theatre at large. 
 Manchester, nevertheless, has confessed itself, mea 
 culpa, in the organ-voice of her Manchester Guardian, 
 which advised those of its people who were interested 
 in the future of the English theatre to learn by heart 
 this jeremiad of a strange prophet. Upon this hint 
 of its pertinence I venture here to transcribe from 
 my address one or two of the more reasonable 
 paragraphs ^ : — 
 
 " The most unhappy feature of the theatre to-day 
 is the rooted faith of its authors, players and critics 
 in the mere virtue of mode. The theatre is riddled 
 with sects and persuasions. The fashion is to look 
 
 " Printed in extenso in the very beautiful Manchester Playgoer, 
 the first number of a new series, edited by Mr. Raymond Drey 
 (Sept. 1912).
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 119 
 
 for a definite sort of drama. Each of us is waiting 
 upon the future with a private and particular interest 
 in a brand of play, or a method of production, whose 
 character we rather confuse than explain with 
 technical terms. Each small group is able most 
 distinctly to pronounce the tribal shibboleth ; and is 
 serenely happy to assess the merits and relative 
 importance of this or that member of the happy 
 family in whose distinguished bosom the ' new ' 
 great drama will be cherished to ultimate perfection. 
 The fortunate side of these cabalistic arrangements 
 is that members of one system would invariably 
 scorch out of existence every one who remains out- 
 side. Since at present there cannot be too fierce a 
 critical ray turned into every hole and corner of the 
 theatrical position, the spirit of hostility of those 
 who cry ' mum ' to the less fortunately inspired who 
 cry ' budget,' is in itself highly desirable, and not 
 lightly to be discouraged. But, unfortunately, 
 the criticism is not always intelligent. Group A. 
 quarrels with group B., not, as in the majority of 
 cases it well might, because group B. is failing to 
 produce great and inspired tragedies and comedies, 
 but because it is trying to produce them in a different 
 way. Moreover, within the group all is high com- 
 mendation, praise, and love, which will rise to the 
 absurdest heights. I have before me a recent issue 
 of the Mask. The ferocious destructive criticism 
 of this periodical is always delightful and frequently 
 suggestive ; for contributors to the Mask have a 
 lively gift of writing, and, though in common with
 
 120 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 every group I have as yet encountered, they would 
 compass the whole world to make one proselyte, 
 they at least understand the formula they are 
 applying, which at once distinguishes them from 
 the greater number of their contemporaries. But, 
 although the Mask is positively healthful in 
 attack, it is resolutely blind in commendation of this 
 or that author who happens to advance a theory or 
 reflect the spirit of their enterprise. It is resolutely 
 as blind as a recent celebrated critic of the Saturday 
 Review, to whom I shall shortly have occasion to 
 allude more particularly. It is generally possible 
 to predict with accuracy the books and the plays 
 which the Mask — I take the Mask merely as 
 an instance of universal application — wiU see and 
 read with approval and gladness. . . . 
 
 " My recent critic on the Saturday Review is, 
 of course, Mr. Bernard Shaw. Mr. Shaw's career 
 pointedly illustrates the influence for good and evil 
 inherent in every 'movement.' So far as it has 
 led to a questioning of accepted canons, and been 
 productive of hostile criticism searching the weak 
 places of the theatre, it has done excellent work. 
 So far as it has endeavoured to determine the 
 channel of dramatic development, to set up a 
 standard, and erect itself as a positive divine guide 
 for young authors seeking a mode of expression, 
 it has been wholly mischievous. All criticism or 
 production is necessarily suspect that attaches very 
 great importance to method or genre. Mr. Shaw's 
 method, apart from Mr. Shaw, is of as little virtue
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 121 
 
 or significance as Shakespeare's method apart from 
 Shakespeare. . . . 
 
 " Movements, labels, fashions, modes and methods 
 disappear into the pages of literary text-books. The 
 names of important individuals alone remain. Thus, 
 in the dead dull days after Corneille, the French 
 theatre went to sleep and playmakers constructed 
 wooden replicas of the ' classical ' model till a 
 dramatist was born, and people suddenly discovered 
 that the classical model was out of date. As a 
 fact, nothing was wrong with the classical model, 
 except that a generation of mediocre ' classicists ' 
 had been assuming precisely what their ' romantic ' 
 successors in turn assumed — namely, that there 
 was such virtue in the particular mode they affected 
 that it would enable a dramatist who had nothing 
 to say to say it dramatically. The ' classic ' versus 
 ' romantic ' controversy, with the heaps of critical 
 and explanatory rubbish it produced, lives now only 
 for the scholar. The merely literate man is content 
 to know that Hugo was individually great, not 
 that he called himself a ' romantic ' ; and that, so 
 far as his formula went, it was neither ' new ' nor 
 intrinsically important or virtuous. Really, it is 
 amazing to see how frequently big men of a literary 
 epoch accept the criteria of small men, meeting 
 them on their own level. The French classical 
 mediocrity said in effect to the French romantic : 
 ' I have here a mode of expression handed down from 
 our forefathers which enables me without genius 
 to produce great drama.' The great dramatist
 
 122 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 answers : ' Your mode is not my mode ; it is out of 
 date ; it is foolish ; if you want to write great drama 
 you must adopt my mode.' This is helping the fool 
 in his folly. Actually the mode matters little or 
 nothing at all ; and, in practice, it is of first-rate 
 importance only in an exhausted age. The great men 
 who invent new formulae are found by their succes- 
 sors really to have disregarded them. . . . 
 
 " If we are really to be ready to welcome our next 
 great dramatist when he comes, it is our first 
 necessity to dissolve all the little groups and cliques 
 which invariably show themselves blind and deaf 
 to any but a shibboleth appeal. If Shakespeare 
 were to appear to-day, he would not be performed 
 at the Stage Society (probably the few Shakespeare 
 plays that passed the Censor would be applauded 
 by ignorant crowds at Drury Lane, and the critics 
 would discover his real quality from obituary 
 notices in the German newspapers). The present 
 impulse is to reject all work that cannot be con- 
 spicuously labelled. The virus of this impulse 
 runs right through the literary and social activities 
 of the period ; but it flourishes most actively in 
 the theatre, because dramatic critics are tired men 
 who work in impossible conditions, and are only too 
 thankful that a system of labels should be invented 
 which reduces their work to a minimum. It is by 
 no means confined to the playwrights. The ' new' 
 acting is as full of mechanical trickery as the old ; 
 and there are as many unassimilated devices in the 
 ' new ' producing. Any trick or device noted as
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 123 
 
 being ' effective ' is adopted, and run to extermina- 
 tion. Neither managers, nor authors, nor actors 
 seem to realise that another person's technique 
 is no more likely to fit them than another person's 
 coat. There are many actors who deliberately 
 copy from their fellows some tone or gesture which 
 in the inventor's delivery was probably organically 
 significant, but in the unintelligent copyist is mere 
 trick-work ; and there is a whole chorus of critics 
 and authors who think the stage is to be uplifted 
 and redeemed by substituting in plays and players 
 one bundle of tricks for another. . . . 
 
 " The truly parochial character of our theatrical 
 production and criticism is never so clearly shown 
 as when a stranger arrives in our midst who is 
 neither bound to a particular group nor committed 
 to a private creed. Briefly, if we cannot label the 
 new product, we usually dismiss it altogether. For 
 proof of this we need go no further back than to 
 the reception accorded to the plays of Tchekoff 
 and Strindberg within the last few years by the 
 advanced theatrical clubs of London. . . . 
 
 " Mr. Shaw and the naturalists in the days of 
 their prosperity continue their critical methods of 
 a date when the ' new ' drama was fighting an 
 uphill game. A generous measure of truculence 
 and pose was then excusable. At present, how- 
 ever, this spirit of clique, and absolute belief in 
 the saving grace of a formula to which this spirit 
 has given so monstrous a birth, are more mischievous 
 than salutary. . . .
 
 124 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 " Let us beware of anything, either technical or 
 spiritual, that describes itself as ' new ' or ' modem.' 
 The new thing to-day is obviously the old thing 
 to-morrow. ' New ' was the favourite adjective 
 of the Restoration theatre, which to-day is so far 
 out-moded that from the days of Jeremy Collier it 
 has been most wickedly and wilfully decried and 
 misunderstood. In Charles ii.'s time the talk was 
 eternally of the ' new morality ' and the ' new 
 theology.' As to the ' new technique ' which was 
 to revivify and ennoble the theatres of the Restora- 
 tion, the Duke of Buckingham tells us about it in 
 The Rehearsal : ' You must know this is the new 
 way of writing, and these hard things please forty 
 times better than the old plain way of writing.' 
 We ourselves have to get out of the habit of mechani- 
 cally taking it for granted either that the new way 
 or the old plain way is in itself a spell to conjure up 
 great dramatists into a circle. The point of import- 
 ance for us is whether the authors who use this way 
 or that have anything to say. Are they imagina- 
 tively gifted ? We may leave questions of technical 
 equipment for after-consideration ; and then only 
 to ask whether our author's brow, like to a title 
 leaf, foretells the nature of his volume. Does his 
 form fit the matter and his matter the form ? " 
 
 Such was the gist of my message to the playgoers 
 of Manchester. If I could make it more provocative 
 by wording it anew, I would do so ; but I cannot 
 now recapture the fine rapture of a challenge con-
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 125 
 
 ccived in the humble expectation that the natural- 
 ists of Manchester would at least justify their 
 shibboleths. I was disappointed. The challenge 
 was taken up, not by the naturalists in whom 
 triumph has bred complacency, but by Mr. Gordon 
 Craig, with whom I would not then have quarrelled 
 for the world. It is here repeated and directed 
 specifically against the victorious conventions of 
 naturalism — in playing, play-writing and play- 
 producing. For a sharper edge to this provocation I 
 hereby declare that naturalism is unfitted to the 
 English temperament, that its present victorious 
 position is due to an historical accident, and that it 
 will surely be disestablished as a dramatic method as 
 soon as the English theatre becomes once again 
 really national. 
 
 We have seen that no convention in the world is 
 good or bad, but the fitness makes it so ; that to 
 pin one's faith to a mode or genre is a common 
 folly of the wise ; that neither naturalism nor 
 romanticism is in itself better or worse than its 
 rival ; that it is the unmistakable sign of a barren 
 period when formulae are repeated for their own 
 sake on the assumption that of themselves they 
 will help the artist to achieve art ; that the writing 
 of symphonies after Beethoven is idle without 
 the identical inspiration of Beethoven ; that the 
 writing of plays after Ibsen is idle unless it be 
 justified with a divine right to say what Ibsen said ; 
 that the base classicism of French drama after 
 Comeille was due to the same blind faith in a
 
 126 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 formula which is responsible for the base naturalism 
 of the English theatre to-day. 
 
 The point at which the naturalist method be- 
 comes base is very accurately revealed. When 
 the artist finds himself recording the facts of life 
 for their own sake he has ceased to be an artist. He 
 is making precisely the mistake of the French 
 academicians, who, seeing that Racine observed the 
 unities, assumed that by imitating the letter they 
 could achieve the spirit. They saw the unities in 
 Racine as the modern naturalist sees the facts of life 
 in Ibsen, forgetting that the unities are no more the 
 main achievement of Racine than the facts of life are 
 the main achievement of Ibsen. Base naturalism 
 begins precisely at the point where an artist, instead 
 of giving to his vision the likeness of common things 
 and using the illusion of common things merely as 
 language and form, deliberately sets out to record 
 and to catalogue these syllables of style. He 
 mistakes his coins and tokens for true wealth. 
 The great bulk of popular literature to-day is 
 infected through and through with naturalist 
 detail pursued for its own sake — detail inserted 
 into the web of the author's conception, not because 
 it has any real relevance to the idea he pursues, 
 but for its own sake, in a confused presupposition 
 that any reported experience, sentiment, incident, 
 emotion — any fact of common existence down to the 
 number of chairs and tables in a particular house 
 of a particular street of a particular town — has 
 in itself an aesthetic value. Even those authors
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 127 
 
 to whom naturalist conventions are admirably 
 suited, who would instinctively take the naturalist 
 way of expressing themselves, apart from the 
 modern superstition that it is in itself a magical 
 conjuration — authors like Mr. Arnold Bennett or 
 Mr. Gissing — pack their work with masses of 
 irrelevant detail that make it less a low kind of art 
 than a high kind of handbook to the habits and 
 environment of this or that class of contemporary 
 people. 
 
 Base naturalism that merely applies a formula will 
 utterly perish with the first great artist who arises 
 to pursue and popularise another. Great naturalist 
 art — the work of Tchekoff, Ibsen, and Gorki — will 
 no more perish than Shakespeare or .^schylus. To 
 those who say, or tacitly assume, that naturalism 
 holds the field to-day by virtue of its superiority as a 
 method over its predecessors ; that any dereliction 
 from naturalism is necessarily degenerate ; that art 
 of the future must needs be naturalist, because 
 art of the future must needs be an improvement 
 upon art of the past ; that the naturalism of Ibsen 
 necessarily leads the artist deeper into beauty and 
 truth than the romanticism of Shakespeare or the 
 classicism of Racine — for such as cling to this tissue 
 of absurdity no more remains to be urged. A more 
 serious question is already suggested. 
 
 It may quite reasonably be argued that par- 
 ticular periods, races and temperaments have a 
 natural leaning towards expressing themselves after 
 a particular manner — that French art tends to
 
 128 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 flourish under an academy, being formal and con- 
 servative; whereas EngHsh art is invariably killed 
 under an academy, being individual and lawless ; or 
 that French art under the Grand Monarch was 
 necessarily classical, and after the Revolution neces- 
 sarily romantic ; or that Russian art necessarily 
 runs to naturalism. Any number of questionable 
 propositions may be quite plausibly laid down upon 
 a root assumption that race or the Zeitgeist deter- 
 mines artistic formulae of the centuries. Prophets 
 who contend that naturalism is the inevitable method 
 of the English theatre during the next hundred years, 
 because it is a method intrinsically fitted to the 
 needs of the time or of the English genius, are at any 
 rate entitled to a formal confutation. 
 
 Perhaps the most striking point about the English 
 dramatic revival, so far as it has gone at present, 
 is the enormous influence of foreign models. We 
 have already seen how the English dramatic renais- 
 sance received its most violent impulse from the 
 ambition of a small group of authors and critics to 
 bring the English theatre into line with the general 
 European advance. Tolstoi, Gorki, Tchekoff and 
 Ibsen are the fathers of our English dramatic re- 
 formation. The impulse came from abroad, though it 
 actually filtered through in the work and influence of 
 English authors. The impulse as it came from Europe 
 was an impulse towards naturalism. English natural- 
 ism is the germination upon English soil of a foreign 
 seed. Here was a rushing mighty wind from strange 
 places ; and the solitary spark of genius it has so far
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 129 
 
 fanned into flame is the genius of Mr. Bernard Shaw — 
 who is an Irishman. Certainly there is nothing in the 
 circumstance of its introduction that warrants us in 
 beheving that naturaHsm is ideally fitted to the 
 artistic needs of the English people. 
 
 Nor does the history of the English theatre at 
 large justify the assumption. In one period only of 
 English dramatic history has the triumph of the 
 naturalist method coincided with the production of 
 great drama — the period that began with Etherege 
 and ended with Farquhar. It was a period in which 
 every typically English institution and sentiment 
 was in abeyance, so far as the group of men who 
 produced it and supported it were concerned. It is 
 the exception that proves the rule. Compare with 
 this the great period of English tragedy when 
 Shakespeare and his contemporaries were producing a 
 body of dramatic literature which is rightly accepted 
 to this day as definitely English ! Shakespeare is 
 English for all time ; Congreve is English only for 
 the late seventeenth century. The English genius, 
 if it be by nature fitted to run into any one particular 
 mould, is almost certainly fitted to run into the 
 romantic mould of Shakespeare, rather than the 
 naturalist mould of Ibsen. We shall hereafter 
 discover that the continual burden of Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw's brilliant indictment of the English character 
 — the fundamental text of every one of his plays — is 
 that the English character is incorrigibly romantic ; 
 that, so far from loving facts for their own sake 
 (which is the capital sin of a people fatally inclined 
 9
 
 130 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 to naturalism) the English genius shows itself at its 
 highest power when it refuses them any respect. 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw is right, and we shall shortly per- 
 ceive that what he charges to our account as a 
 shameful thing is really the national distinction of 
 our life and art. For the present we only note that 
 Mr. Shaw's accusation, on his own showing, points 
 to a fundamental dissonance between the English 
 character and the aesthetic method he would have 
 the English theatre adopt for its expression. 
 
 The evidence, then, so far as race is an index, is 
 against naturalism being the inevitable method of 
 a really national dramatic art. But what of that 
 other great determining influence upon thought and 
 its expression, upon the direction in which we look 
 for beauty and the form in which we elect to fashion 
 it ? What of the running of years and the lapse of 
 generations ? Does English naturalism run with 
 the naturalism of Tchekoff and Zola, of Ibsen and 
 M. Brieux, upon a mightier tide of the spirit than 
 that which is bounded in a single people. Is 
 naturalist art the incarnation of an epoch in human 
 progress ? Are we to look for its ancestor to Francis 
 Bacon ? It were to consider too curiously to con- 
 sider so. In any case, those who, believing in the 
 future of naturalism, would identify it with our 
 modern scientific civilisation, attuning it with the 
 throbbing of the great machine we have builded in 
 the last hundred years, may enjoy their fancy 
 without peril to the argument here sustained. 
 Identify naturalism with the conquest of matter,
 
 DRAMATIC NATURALISM 131 
 
 and you identify it with an enterprise whose vital 
 significance for art already shows signs of exhaustion. 
 The feeling of thinkers to-day and of the multitude 
 to-morrow is to discount the value of that conquest, 
 and to perceive wherein it is barren. 
 
 However we limit or widen the scope of our sur- 
 veying, a conviction will meet us at the end that 
 naturalism is at the ebb. The tide has come 
 magnificently in with noise and spectacle. To many 
 it seems a flood that is mounting yet. The clamour 
 and movement seem still to be setting towards us. 
 Actually the tide has turned. As yet we only per- 
 ceive it in the motions of small objects captured or 
 left upon the shore. 
 
 Something too much of this. A critical point of 
 view is now established whence to observe the future 
 of English dramatic art. We have discarded all 
 idea of there being virtue in any particular mode or 
 method of art, and we have begun to suspect that 
 naturalism is not the dramatic method of the future, 
 at any rate in England. This suspicion may become 
 hereafter a certainty — take root and rise by slow 
 degrees to a positive conviction.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 THE FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 
 
 All the interim is 
 Like a phantasma or a hideous dream : 
 The genius and the mortal instruments 
 Are then in council, and the state of man. 
 Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
 The nature of an insurrection. 
 
 THE title of this chapter is misleading. It is 
 difficult — and not very wise — to group drama- 
 tic movements of the day under separate heads ; but 
 to a certain extent it is inevitable if we are to avoid 
 talking in the air. Discussing an important set 
 of critical and destructive influences in the theatre, 
 we had best conceive them — if it be reasonably 
 possible — as typified in some conspicuous figure of 
 the time. Mr. Bernard Shaw will do quite admirably. 
 He is here to be regarded as a technical term. He 
 is a symbolical figure of destruction. He includes 
 Hankin and Mr. Galsworthy. He is a collection of 
 distinguished anarchists. He is our concrete image 
 of at least one aspect of the form and pressure of 
 the time. He is not introduced with the idea of 
 advertising his work or exalting his merits. Mr. 
 
 Shaw is too well able to look after these things 
 
 13a
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 133 
 
 himself. Nor arc we here concerned directly with 
 the future of Mr. Shaw. The future of Mr. Shaw, 
 so far as it exists, is sufficiently provided for in a 
 draft statute of the National Memorial l^heatre, which 
 provides for the frequent revival of recent plays of 
 great merit which would otherwise be permitted to 
 pass into a rapid and unmerited oblivion. 
 
 The English dramatic renaissance has so far been 
 more a protest than an achievement. Perhaps it 
 would be more accurate to describe it as an achieve- 
 ment that has come by way of a protest. Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw, its most vital expression, has protested most ; 
 and, in consequence, has achieved most. His plays are 
 well written as a protest against the ancient practice 
 of not writing plays at all. His heroes are practical 
 men as a protest against heroes who were impractical 
 idiots ; his heroines live upon beef-steaks as a protest 
 against impossible stage heroines who lived upon 
 modesty and married bliss ; his soldiers who eat 
 chocolate creams are a protest against soldiers who 
 ate fire. 
 
 We have already seen how Mr. Shaw played an 
 important part in bringing the theatre into touch 
 with English life and letters. We have now to 
 realise to what extent this part was destructive ; to 
 discover that the main fury of the movement we are 
 for convenience' sake identifying with Mr. Shaw was 
 a fury of cleansing and purification — an impulse to 
 sweep the theatre clean of exhausted shams, to 
 throw down the unsanctified idols of the stage. 
 Mr. Shaw is the Socrates of the English dramatic
 
 134 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 renaissance. He went into the theatres of his day 
 as Socrates went into the market-place. His 
 manner was considerably more aggressive ; he 
 tended rather to dig the pit himself for his enemies 
 than to make them the instruments of their own 
 confusion. But, though his methods were different, 
 his intention and effect were the same. The strength 
 of Socrates in his contest with the sophists was that, 
 whereas Socrates stood for common sense, the 
 sophists stood for nothing at all. Socrates would 
 have had no more chance with an interlocutor of 
 fiery convictions and unassailable faith than Mr. 
 Shaw would have had with a theatre that really 
 believed it was a chosen instrument. Mr. Shaw had 
 the advantage of knowing what he wanted, and for 
 what he stood ; whereas the theatre of his day knew 
 nothing beyond the fact that it desired to attract into 
 its houses the greatest possible number of people. 
 
 Mr. Shaw was by temperament well fitted for the 
 mission of declaring that all was wrong with the 
 theatres of his generation. He has a natural instinct 
 for destruction, a mischievous strain of the bad 
 fairy for whom it is an act of necessary piety to be 
 present at the christening of all babies likely to be 
 too fortunate in an ill-ordered world. Mr. Shaw's 
 first impulse when he perceives everybody quite 
 happy and comfortable is to assume that there must 
 be something wrong. Somebody is not telling the 
 truth. He examines the facts, and in five minutes he 
 has proved that all this happiness and comfort is a 
 sham ; that it is a disgrace to some one or other ; that
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 135 
 
 in a well-regulated society it would not be tolerated ; 
 that every paradise is made by fools ; that to be satis- 
 fied with life is proof of a naturally vicious disposition ; 
 that people who are happy and comfortable are not 
 really happy and comfortable at all, because they do 
 not know what happiness and comfort is. In a word, 
 Mr. Shaw is fundamentally a Puritan, with a rooted 
 distrust in life as life is understood by the mean 
 sensual man. However much his love of things 
 beautiful ; his candour and honesty of mind ; his 
 open-hearted hospitality for new ideas ; his in- 
 tellectual sympathy even with the forces that are 
 leagued for his destruction — however these qualifying 
 attributes may disguise the Puritan cast of his mind, 
 and obliterate the harsher features of the Puritan 
 character, he nevertheless remains definitely and 
 obviously the natural enemy of Grangousier and of 
 Falstaff — of all the great figures that stand for the 
 brutal flesh of common humanity. Mr. Shaw- is 
 fundamentally a Puritan, and he enjoys to be in a 
 perpetual minority (more especially as he has the 
 genius to make a fortune out of being in a minority) . 
 Mr. Shaw has always been in love with exceptions 
 that do not prove the rule. He is by temperament 
 the aptest figure of a man to rise to the height of 
 his stature in a career of protest and perpetual 
 challenge. 
 
 Moreover, he came to criticise the English stage 
 in a fortunate hour. He found it infected through 
 and through with precisely the sort of falsehood he 
 was most aptly fitted to expose. Mr. Shaw has a
 
 136 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 natural dislike of the English character. He found 
 the English theatre reflecting all the worst vices of 
 the English character and scarcely one of its re- 
 deeming virtues. He had an enemy whose throat he 
 would cut in the church, and think it justifiable 
 homicide ; and he had an enemy in all but brute 
 force conspicuously inferior to himself in equipment 
 and morale. Mr. Shaw, by nature averse from the 
 English romantic hero, had for his enemy less a 
 romantic hero than a romantic idiot. 
 
 Thorough was his word. As critic and playwright 
 he smote the stage-figures of his day. But a critic 
 is only half a captain. Mr. Shaw, when he had told 
 the play-makers of his day, as a critic, what they 
 should do, next showed them, as a playwright, how 
 to do it. He ridiculed romantic war of the fire- 
 eater ; and wrote a play of arms and the man, in 
 which romantic war of the fire-eater was the fool of 
 the piece. He ridiculed the stage Irishman ; and 
 wrote a play in which the stage Irishman was only 
 permitted to appear in order to show that God's 
 Englishman knew nothing about him. He ridiculed 
 the stage-heroine of the time, who almost answered 
 lago's ideal of the perfect housewife ; and wrote 
 a whole series of plays in which women were 
 brought upon the stage with the express purpose 
 of reminding English audiences that women, like 
 Shakespeare's Jew, had eyes, hands, organs, dimen- 
 sions, senses, affections and passions; that they 
 were fed with the same food, hurt with the same 
 weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 137 
 
 same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter 
 and summer. "If you prick them," he shouted, 
 " do they not bleed ? If you tickle them, do they 
 not laugh ? If you wrong them, shall they not 
 revenge ? " People were shocked to be thus re- 
 minded. Blanche Sartorious, a very ordinary young 
 woman in Peckham, was something of a monster on 
 the stage. Anne Whitefield, an extremely attractive 
 young woman in Kensington, was something of a 
 harpy and a hypocrite upon the stage. But Blanche 
 Sartorious and Anne Whitefield had very soon ful- 
 filled the mission of their creator, slaying their 
 limelight sisters, grown too delicate and precious 
 to live anywhere but in a badly ventilated playhouse. 
 Mr. Shaw also sent forth a line of heroes who quickly 
 discomfited the pretty fellows, darlings of an age 
 which did not expect stage-figures to have the gait 
 of Christian, pagan, or man. Mr. Shaw's heroes had 
 felt some of the common sensations of humanity. 
 They were susceptible to fear, hunger, self-interest, 
 partiality for a good investment — emotions so 
 strange and unnatural upon an English stage that 
 Mr. Shaw's heroes were at first invariably mistaken 
 for his villains. 
 
 Such work was by inspiration destructive. This 
 does not necessarily imply that it had no positive 
 merit. We shall shortly perceive wherein this 
 positive merit lay ; for it is necessary to be quite 
 clear as to the precise value of Mr. Shaw's contri- 
 butions to the drama, if we are to foretell the future 
 of the English theatre with any confidence. But
 
 138 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 for the present we must particularly insist that the 
 chief value of Mr. Shaw's plays, so far as the year 
 1950 is concerned, was that they definitely put an 
 end to an undesirable state of things ; that they shut 
 the door upon any further repetition of monstrous 
 stage- formulae, out of which all meaning had already 
 departed ; that they let into the theatre the light 
 of common day, till the spectators, blinking in 
 amazement, began to realise that the theatres they 
 had so patiently inhabited for so many weary years 
 had been remarkably innocent of nature's own 
 sweet and cunning hand. 
 
 That Mr. Shaw was mainly a destructive influence 
 — that his work was inspired mainly with an instinct 
 to sweep aM'ay stale traditions that offended him, 
 mechanical nonsense that outraged his intelligence, 
 consecrated absurdities that lingered only by reason 
 of there being nothing to replace them — this is far 
 from being a merely verbal proposition. It is at the 
 heart of our conclusions respecting the future of 
 English play-writing. Mr. Shaw's naturalism — so 
 far as he was a naturalist — was instinctively adopted 
 by him as the deadliest possible weapon of attack 
 upon the existing condition of things. It was the 
 function of Mr. Shaw's naturalism to cleanse and 
 purify the English theatre against the coming era of 
 accomplishment. Mr. Shaw's naturalism has coin- 
 cided with a critical era of preparation — an inter- 
 calary season of disinfection. When we have clearly 
 realised that Mr. Shaw's work was mainly destructive, 
 we have realised also that naturalism was the
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 139 
 
 diversion of a dramatic interim — that it is not 
 necessarily the method of progress in the future 
 because it was the method of progress in the past. 
 Let us take a concrete example from one of Mr. 
 Shaw's plays. How He Lied to Her Husband is an 
 admirable instance of Mr. Shaw's salutary treatment 
 of a stage-theme handled for generations by mechani- 
 cal rule of thumb. Marital jealousy is the crux. It 
 had been assumed for long years by English playgoers 
 that when stage-husbands found that their stage- 
 wives were not exclusively adored by themselves, 
 nothing remained but to discover the interloper and 
 throw him violently from the room with the strongest 
 expressions possible of indignation and contempt. 
 Mr. Shaw, coming into the theatre from a world 
 where social behaviour was not an affair of pennies- 
 in-the-machine, found these mechanical ejections 
 of the poaching philanderer, accompanied with 
 mechanical assertions of the right — the ability being 
 taken for granted — of every Englishman to throw 
 downstairs every invader of his peace, tedious and 
 not wholly true to his experience. Mr. Shaw had 
 perceived that men were not invariably jealous of 
 their wives, that some men even liked their wives to 
 be admired. Accordingly he wrote a play wherein 
 He, She, and Her Husband were discovered at the 
 usual corners of the eternal stage-triangle. He, it 
 seems, had lost some highly inflammatory poems 
 addressed to Her ; and, having been to many 
 theatres where Her Husband invariably discovered 
 them, She was considerably alarmed. So, too, was
 
 I40 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 the audience, expecting, as audiences had till recently 
 good cause to expect, that what had happened before 
 in the theatre would assuredly happen again. He, 
 convinced by Her panic, agreed to lie. Her Husband 
 entered with the poems. Her Husband was assured 
 by Him that the poems were written to Aurora, 
 Goddess of the Dawn, and that He was quite innocent 
 of any adoration. Whereat, to the immense astonish- 
 ment of the audience. Her Husband took off his coat 
 and went for Him as an insensible young puppy. 
 Such was Mr. Shaw's classical parody of Candida — 
 one of the lightest and best of his pieces. 
 
 Observe that the dramatic effect of this play 
 hangs almost wholly upon the fact that it is para 
 prosdokian. The comic effect of Her Husband's 
 onslaught upon Him for not adoring Her is entirely 
 due to the fact that Mr. Shaw's audience has been 
 artificially trained to expect Her Husband's onslaught 
 upon Him for a precisely opposite reason. Not 
 only the effect, but the entire value, of the play's 
 motive is that it flatly challenges the motive of the 
 majority of its predecessors and contemporaries. 
 It is an irresistible appeal to play-makers and play- 
 goers to reconsider their position, to re-examine 
 the mechanically repeated orthodoxies of their 
 craft, to revalue dramatic motives in relation to 
 life. The primary importance of Mr. Shaw's story 
 of Him, Her, and Her Husband is not that these 
 three dramatic personages are true to Mr. Shaw's 
 experience of men and women. Its primary im- 
 portance is that it warns Mr. Shaw's contemporaries
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 141 
 
 against remaining in the mechanical assumption 
 that the old formula was an invariable law of nature. 
 How He Lied to Her Husband, so far as its motive is 
 concerned, would have very little point indeed — 
 very little power to stimulate and amuse us — if 
 we were not viciously predisposed to expect some- 
 thing entirely different. Like the great majority 
 of Mr. Shaw's best people and passages, the people 
 and passages of How He Lied to Her Husband, are 
 a delightful surprise. They are destructive of pre- 
 conceptions. They disturb us and stimulate us 
 with an immediate conviction that the laws of the 
 dramatic commonwealth are at the point of revolu- 
 tion ; that henceforth there are no more dogdays ; 
 that Mr. Shaw's people, though they are not neces- 
 sarily the predestined heroes of an English theatre, 
 are very thoroughly and disrespectfully clearing 
 the English theatre of encumbrances. 
 
 Run through almost any play of Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw and solemnly ask yourself how much it 
 gains or loses from the mere violence of its contrast 
 with plays of his contemporaries. Bluntschli does 
 not make an epoch in dramatic literature as a 
 profound study of a practical soldier. Bluntschli 
 makes an epoch as a challenge to the accepted 
 stage tradition of a practical soldier. Blanche 
 Sartorious does not make an epoch in dramatic 
 literature merely because she hates the poor and 
 flies into unlovely passions ; but because her pre- 
 decessors and contemporaries had for years been 
 looked upon as incapable of hating anything or of
 
 142 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 having any passions to indulge. Blanche is im- 
 portant, not because she is Blanche, but because she 
 is not the domesticated Saint Cecilia she was ex- 
 pected to be. Similarly Harry Trench is not im- 
 portant because he is a singularly true or conspicu- 
 ously well-delineated young man of the world. He 
 is not important because he is an ordinary young 
 man in love with an ordinary young woman. He 
 is important because he is not the extraordinary 
 young man in love with the extraordinary young 
 woman which the playgoers of his generation ex- 
 pected to see. 
 
 Mr. Shaw has, to a large extent, disguised the 
 destructive character of his work by confusing 
 his activities as a playwright with his activities 
 as a sociologist. Mr. Shaw believes that his plays 
 are positively valuable in that they seek to popular- 
 ise ideas about sex, society, politics and religion 
 which are to have a decisive influence in the develop- 
 ment of European civilisation. Mr. Shaw has even 
 pretended to himself and the world at large that his 
 first impulse towards play-writing was the impulse 
 of a social missionary to seize upon a pulpit and a 
 platform too long neglected. He is a philosopher, 
 he tells us, who scatters his doctrines by way of 
 the theatre. He thinks he perceives, for example, 
 that prostitution is partly a matter of pounds and 
 pence, the result of the economic dependence of 
 women. Therefore he writes Mrs. Warren's Pro- 
 fession. He thinks he perceives that the medical 
 profession is a conspiracy of experts to fleece the
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 143 
 
 layman. Therefore he writes The Doctor s Dilemma. 
 He thinks he perceives that monogamous marriage 
 with its assumptions of Hfelong passion and per- 
 petual proprietory right of the parties in one another 
 has become socially insupportable. Therefore he 
 writes Getting Married. He continually disguises 
 the primarily destructive character of his work 
 by advertising it as a campaign of constructive 
 social propaganda. 
 
 Mr. Shaw is not the first distinguished man who 
 has extensively erred about himself. Wherein 
 Mr. Shaw's work is positively important, wherein 
 lies the immortal part of him, will be subsequently 
 exposed as a conclusion only reasonable and fair, 
 to a chapter mainly dedicated to a proof that his 
 merits are mainly negative. Certain it is that his 
 positive merit does not lie in social or philosophic 
 ideas. Mr. Shaw in this respect is no more import- 
 ant than Wilde. Just as Wilde imagined that his 
 importance arose from his contribution towards a 
 philosophy of life for the individual which was 
 little more than the philosophy of Pater at second- 
 hand, so Mr. Shaw imagines that his importance 
 arises from his contribution towards a philosophy 
 of life for the community which is little more than 
 a fairly complete collection of the best thought 
 of his time. Wilde was mistaken ; and Mr. Shaw 
 is mistaken even more thoroughly than was Wilde. 
 There is nothing, nor ever was an>i:hing, very 
 startling or original about Mr. Shaw's ideas in 
 political economy, sex-psychology, or political philo-
 
 144 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 sophy. They are common property of some very 
 dull dogs, from whom Mr. Shaw only differs — 
 what an important difference it is we shall shortly 
 perceive — in his ability to express them like a 
 genius. 
 
 Mr. Shaw, regarded as an incarnation of the 
 purifying and destructive influences of the interim 
 period of naturalism, includes Hankin, Mr. Gran- 
 ville Barker and Mr. John Galsworthy. 
 
 Hankin's destructive energy did not proceed, 
 like Mr. Shaw's, from a spirit welded of Robin 
 Goodfellow and John Knox. Hankin's purifying 
 influence was due entirely to the presence in his 
 nature of an exaggerated sanity. In a robustly 
 constituted individual such sanity is the comic 
 spirit at its highest power. In individuals of 
 low vitality, to be very sane is to be almost mad, 
 for this is too mad a world to be tolerable to the 
 eye that requires for ever a perfect proportion in 
 the design of its affairs. It becomes too grievous 
 to be borne. Hankin was this unfortunate man — 
 too sane to believe in a world of matter and im- 
 pertinence mixed, reason in madness ; not suffi- 
 ciently robust to stand apart and use it for his 
 mirth. For Hankin the laws of character seemed 
 even more inevitable in fancy than in reality they 
 are. His comedy, like the comedy of Sir John 
 Vanbrugh, began with a distrust of happy endings. 
 Almost his first work was a collection of dramatic 
 sequels — to Hamlet, to The Second Mrs. Tanqtieray, 
 to Alcestis. His comedies that followed were
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 145 
 
 a further declaration of scepticism in the tahsman 
 of a faUing curtain to cure all human ills. His was 
 the melancholy cast of a true comedian who watches 
 with foreknowledge the progress of his creatures. 
 He knows they must obey the laws of their nature ; 
 that their characters, inherited or acquired, will 
 not let them off at the last, but exact the uttermost 
 farthing. 
 
 He was in this regard clearly most admirably 
 qualified to perform a very necessary and useful 
 part in the destruction of an antique convention 
 of the English stage which had long ceased to have 
 any vital meaning. The ' happy ending ' was the 
 survival of a time when it really corresponded with 
 a conviction that the world was on the whole a 
 happy place ; where, though the rain undoubtedly 
 fell upon the just and upon the unjust, yet Provi- 
 dence somehow contrived to provide the just with 
 an umbrella. But the happy ending, which Hankin 
 so conspicuously helped to abolish, had no justifica- 
 tion in any conviction of the practising authors who 
 employed it. It was merely a convention that 
 no matter what the characters in a play might be 
 like they must all somehow contrive to come within 
 immediate prospect of a happy marriage in the last 
 act. There might be no two people in the play 
 susceptible of really civilised intercourse as man 
 and wife. The rule of play-writing was that whereas 
 dramatic personages might make free use of their own 
 characters for three acts of a play — revealing them- 
 selves as pleasant or unpleasant, companionable or 
 10
 
 146 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 misogynist, selfish or unselfish, greedy or continent 
 — nevertheless they must in the fourth act deliver 
 themselves up, hand and foot, to the author, who 
 might marry them all off exactly as he pleased, bid 
 them be happy, and send away his audience v/ith 
 an assurance that their happiness would endure. 
 Hankin revolted against this perverted practice 
 of the popular dramatist. Eustace Jackson in the 
 first acts of The Return of the Prodigal reveals himself 
 as a young man with too many brains and too little 
 of the ' will to power.' He was an attractive 
 young man — obviously the hero of the piece. 
 Naturally we expected that he would be rewarded 
 for his agreeable qualities, and his ability to 
 amuse the audience, with the hand of the prettiest 
 marriageable young woman of the play ; and that, 
 in order that we might leave the theatre with a 
 comfortable assurance that marriage would bring 
 lasting happiness, we should be discreetly required 
 to understand that Eustace would reform his char- 
 acter with a stiffening of the spine. Conceive 
 the amazement of plaj-goers and critics when 
 Eustace remained invertebrate to the end ; failed 
 to be married off to anybody ; and, instead of 
 attaining happiness by sponging on a rich wife 
 (which was the orthodox solution of his fate), 
 attained merely a beggarly two hundred a year by 
 sponging on his relatives. The astonishment of 
 the public was so loud and universal that Hankin 
 had actually to write a Note on Happy Endings in 
 defence of this revolutionary practice of allowing
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 147 
 
 people to keep their characters unimpaired. This 
 note included the unhappy Eustace, the even more 
 unhappy Verrckcr, and the incomparable Ethel 
 Borridge. Vcrreker had sinned against the con- 
 ventional happy ending even more grievously than 
 Eustace. Verrekcr was on the point of satisfying 
 his audience with the conventional dramatic end- 
 ing — the redemption of an eternal masculine through 
 the kind offices of an eternal feminine — when sud- 
 denly he realised that man is not necessarily born 
 again when he marries a virtuous woman. Ver- 
 reker not only disappointed his audience at the 
 last hour ; he even suggested a universal scepticism 
 as to the validity of a good match to suspend all 
 the rules that govern the operations of the human 
 will. Hankin found it necessary to justify the 
 scepticism of Verreker ; also to explain why true 
 love, though it be an extremely wonderful experi- 
 ence, was no more able to make a lady of Ethel 
 Borridge than it was able to make of poor Verreker 
 a man of steel. 
 
 Apart from Hankin 's share in the restoration of 
 style to the English theatre, this was his most 
 important contribution to the English renaissance. 
 He made it his particular share of the enterprise 
 to destroy the happy ending, to insist that the 
 position of the characters at the end of a play should 
 bear some comprehensible relation to their conduct 
 of the earlier scenes. There is no reason in the 
 world why a play should not end happily. There 
 is, in fact, a very good reason why it should ;
 
 148 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 for life itself is on the whole a tolerable adventure 
 with at least as much upon the credit as upon the 
 debit side. But there is every reason why a 
 happy ending, if a happy ending is desired, should 
 have a credible foundation. Hankin destroyed the 
 meaningless convention of a happy ending, which 
 was merely an arbitrary and reckless disposition of 
 characters at the fall of the curtain, for whose 
 stability the author, if he were wise, disclaimed 
 all responsibility. Hankin, in fact, destroyed 
 the happy ending which was no ending at all. 
 He very definitely questioned the necessity of a 
 convention that required every play to end with an 
 assortment of marriages obviously so many preludes 
 to fifth-act proceedings in the divorce court. 
 
 Mr. Granville Barker, like Hankin, may be in 
 part identified with the destructive era of natural- 
 ism. We have very particularly to distinguish 
 between Mr. Granville Barker's past and his future. 
 Mr. Barker has as yet no intimation of what his 
 future will be. We, who enjoy the privilege of 
 foreseeing the sort of plays he will be writing in 
 1925, are in a more fortunate position. Mr. Barker's 
 past — generally speaking — belongs to the naturalists. 
 His future belongs to the great age of the romantic 
 revival. His work, so far, has consisted in a 
 singularly meteoric career of intellectual wild oats. 
 His present impulse is to be rid of all that chokes 
 the path of revival. His principal offensive 
 weapon, like those of his older comrades, is the 
 imported naturalism of Ibsen and Gorki. He
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 149 
 
 employs it equally to destroy degraded survivals 
 of false romanticism and mistaken applications of 
 precisely that formula which he himself invokes. 
 At one moment he is united with Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw in a resolute attack upon naturalist comedy 
 that is not naturalist ; at another moment he is 
 united with Mr. Poel in a resolute attack upon 
 romantic tragedy that is not romantic. He attacks 
 with equal conviction comedy at the St. James's 
 for not giving one sufficiently the illusion of common 
 day, and Shakespeare at His Majesty's for giving 
 one the illusion of common day in disastrous 
 perfection. His heroes are a protest against the 
 heroes of Mr. Sydney Grundy. His productions of 
 Shakespeare are a protest against the productions 
 of Sir Herbert Tree. The value of these enterprises 
 is strictly negative. They belong to the spring- 
 cleaning era of the English renaissance. As 
 positive contributions to dramatic art they will 
 have no meaning in 1950. As statements, vigorously 
 negative, of what English dramatic art is deter- 
 mined to be rid of in 1913 their value is inestimable. 
 The work of Mr. John Galsworthy is negative 
 merit in excelsis. Almost the sole merit of his 
 plays is a dogged determination to avoid what 
 Mr. Galsworthy would almost inevitably describe 
 as theatrical. There is in every line of his work 
 a profound distrust of the theatre and fastidious 
 rejection of any device that has about it a relish 
 of the limelight. His people seem perpetually to 
 be avoiding the dramatic cliches of their genera-
 
 ISO THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 tion. Their merit consists in all the commonplaces 
 that they do not utter, in all the obvious things 
 they do not do, in all the expected attitudes they 
 do not strike, in all the fine speeches they do not 
 make. Mr. Galsworthy's plays are of extremely 
 little value as positive achievements. They are 
 immensely valuable as proving that the plays of his 
 contemporaries are imperfect exercises in a method 
 they do not fully understand. " Play-write no 
 more : Mr. Galsworthy doth murder play- writing " 
 is their insistent message ; and the message includes 
 himself. Mr. Galsworthy does not really write 
 his plays at all. He presents a situation ; and, 
 where the practising playwright of his day would 
 improve the occasion with a speech, he discreetly 
 retires. Actually to write the scene to which 
 he has conducted one might lead, possibly, to 
 dramatic art ; but, horrible reflection ! it might 
 also lead to something theatrical. Mr. Galsworthy 
 implores his contemporaries not to be theatrical. 
 He kills their ambition to be theatrical by pointedly 
 abstaining from being theatrical. His plays un- 
 consciously spread in the bosoms of practising 
 playwrights an infectious horror of the pitch with 
 which he personally refuses to be defiled. 
 
 Mr. Galsworthy is a better symbol of destructive 
 naturalism than any other author of to-day ; and 
 if he were a tenth as influential a dramatist as 
 Mr. Shaw his name would more fitly appear at the 
 head of this chapter. Hankin had grace of style 
 that makes his contribution to luiglish dramatic
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SHAW 151 
 
 literature of positive value apart from his share in 
 cleaning the theatre for a genuine revival. Mr. 
 Shaw, as we shall see, is a genius as well as a mere 
 forerunner of better days. Mr. Barker, as also we 
 shall see, will play a modest part in the romantic 
 revival of the next generation. But Mr. Gals- 
 worthy's dramatic virtue consists almost wholly 
 in the avoiding of dramatic vices. He has cast out 
 the seven devils of footlights. His house is swept 
 and garnished ; and it is desolately bare. He is 
 resolutely determined to leave undone the things 
 a dramatist ought not to do ; and there his merit 
 ends. In the winter of 1912 Mr. Granville Barker 
 produced The Eldest Son at the Kingsway — 
 an almost perfect example of Mr. Galsworthy's 
 dramatic method. The Eldest Son is a play of the 
 baronet's heir who misconducts himself with his 
 mother's maid. It is a well-worn theme, at once 
 suggesting a host of inevitable dramatic cliches, 
 stale and meaningless from long abuse. The 
 merit of Mr. Galsworthy's treatment is merely 
 that he avoids them. Thus, when the hero, whose 
 name is Bill, learns from the heroine, whose name 
 is Freda, that there is to be a child of their trans- 
 gression, Mr. Galsworthy refuses to improve the 
 occasion with so obvious a contempt for all the 
 inadequate things he might have said, and all the 
 ancient things which the majority of his contem- 
 poraries certainly expected him to say, that one 
 cannot imagine any pla3^wright ever after venturing 
 to let himself go on the old exhausted lines.
 
 152 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 Freda says, " Oh, Bill ! " and Bill makes the three 
 following speeches : (i) " Freda ! " ; (2) " Good 
 God ! " ; (3) " By Jove ! This is " Where- 
 upon the curtain saves him from committing 
 his author any further. These are tactics of 
 masterly inactivit3^ The scene is suggested by the 
 players ; and the audience supplies the emotion. 
 Mr. Galsworthy has done nothing, except to suggest 
 very clearly that he has avoided doing anything 
 wrong. 
 
 Here we have a finished example of negative merit. 
 The useful plays of this present period all share this 
 characteristic of The Eldest Son. They are all 
 protests against the exhausted and mechanical 
 theatre of the Lord Chamberlain's period of un- 
 disputed supremacy. Moreover, they are almost 
 all naturalist plays. Naturalism imported from 
 abroad has been an instrument of purification of the 
 English stage. It is identified in England with a 
 period of destruction. Its purest examples — the 
 plays of Mr. Galsworthy — are also most completely 
 examples, not in the art of how to write, but in 
 the art of how not to write. Naturalism in England 
 will depart with the self-conscious reaction against 
 dead models which originally inspired it. It has 
 been the method of protest and revolt. There is no 
 guarantee that it will be the method of revival and 
 construction. 
 
 It remains that we put ourselves right with Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw. As the most conspicuous dramatic 
 figure of our time we have so far identified him
 
 FUTURE OF MR. BERNARD SIIAW 153 
 
 with the most important movement of oin^ time, a 
 movement negative in its results, more important 
 by virtue of the things it has destroyed than by 
 virtue of the things it has created. This identifica- 
 tion is not quite fair to Mr. Shaw, whose plays will 
 run well into this century by reason of a very 
 positive quality. There is an immortal part of him. 
 It is not his ideas about life that matter — his 
 political economy and social philosophy. They 
 will be scrapped with other rubbish of this hateful 
 time. They are the dust raised by an effort after 
 something better in art and life than the eternal 
 assortment of happy or unhappy couples into bed- 
 rooms, according to a morality which is old or new 
 with the changing moon. The immortal part of 
 Mr. Shaw is precisely that intellectual buffoonery 
 which he so fiercely repudiates as the source of his 
 real distinction. Mr. Shaw's serious message for 
 mankind would be as tedious as the face of a chiding 
 clock were it not that he has a gift of literary expres- 
 sion second to no English dramatic author (with 
 the single exception of Oscar Wilde) since Wycherley. 
 For want of a better word — less worn with mis- 
 application — we must describe the immortal part 
 of Mr. Shaw as his wit. 
 
 It will help us to realise wherein this ' wit ' of 
 Mr. Shaw consists if we actually compare him 
 with his natural predecessor. We do not return to 
 William Wycherley quite by accident. There is not 
 the space here to suggest adequately the close 
 analogy between the work of William Wycherley
 
 154 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 and of Mr. Shaw. Apart from their identically 
 similar ideas as to sex-morality, their fundamental 
 Puritan bias (in the sense already suggested in this 
 chapter), and their agreeable habit of impudent 
 self-criticism, there is so great a similarity of style 
 between the two authors that one wonders it has 
 not been seized by the curious in literary com- 
 parisons. Wycherley was praised for his wit ; and, 
 as in Mr. Shaw, the wit his contemporaries found in 
 him was something more and something less than 
 wit — an amazing clarity and vigour of expression ; 
 a succession of ideas happily and swiftly executed ; 
 an alert intelligence caught perpetually in the act 
 of arresting and playing with something new — a 
 phrase, a figure, a situation, or an idea ; a kind of 
 intellectual horseplay, bloodlessly, but with enormous 
 vigour, aping intellectually in a land of shades 
 the fleshly bouts of the giants of Rabelais ; an 
 impetus of enthusiastic logic carrying readers 
 headlong to the limit of every started theme. If 
 this can be described as wit, then Mr. Shaw's wit is 
 his immortal part. The rest is a collection of moral 
 and political ideas which, whether they be right or 
 wrong, are neither important nor interesting so far 
 as the future of the English theatre is concerned, 
 and a method of dramatic presentation which has 
 served its turn and will shortly be superseded.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY 
 
 And it is notliing, nothing in the world ; 
 Unless you can find sport in their intents, 
 Extremely stretch'd and conn'd with cruel pain, 
 To do you service. 
 
 THESE next few pages are not strictly neces- 
 sary. They may be jumped by readers in 
 a hurry to know about the theatre in 1950. But 
 I cannot help feeling that many people will expect, 
 in a book about the future of the theatre, to find 
 one or two familiar and distinguished names that 
 are associated with the theatre of the present ; 
 that these people will feel that the chapitre a /aire 
 of this little volume is missing if they find in it no 
 word of authors like Sir James Barrie, Mr. Henry 
 Arthur Jones, Mr. Somerset Maugham, Sir Arthur 
 Pinero, Mr. Hubert Henry Davies, Mr. Sydney 
 Carton, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Stanley Houghton ; 
 or of managers like Mr. Arthur Bourchier, Sir George 
 Alexander, Mr. Cyril Maude and Mr. Gerald Du 
 Maurier. I therefore feel more or less compelled 
 to insert here a few intercalary paragraphs, if only 
 to show that they are quite unnecessary. The 
 future of an institution has obviously nothing to 
 
 »55
 
 IS6 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 do with supporters whose achievement it is always 
 to be at one with the present ; whose business it 
 is not to start an idea or to lead a movement, 
 but to popularise it. When we have mentioned 
 Wilde and Hankin and Mr. Shaw, there is no 
 need (so far as the future is concerned) to mention 
 Mr. Somerset Maugham, Sir Arthur Pinero, or Mr. 
 Stanley Houghton. Barometers are useful in re- 
 cording the state of the weather ; but they do 
 not determine what the state of the weather is 
 to be. Nevertheless, it is perhaps necessary, before 
 passing to a conclusion, to justify an omission from 
 this study of so many famous names ; so many 
 agreeable, popular and clever people ; so many 
 excellent craftsmen. 
 
 Sir Arthur Pinero is typical of the group with 
 which we are dealing. He is the practising play- 
 wright in perfection. His plays, like the plays of 
 Sardou, are journalism in the highest sense. He 
 has always been level with the public, not only in 
 its conception of technique and the machinery 
 of play-making, but in the choice and treat- 
 ment of his themes. The public that applauded 
 Tom Robertson could without hesitation accept 
 and applaud Sir Arthur Pinero 's early farces — 
 The Magistrate, Sweet Lavender, The Schoolmistress. 
 The public which began to feel in the air the in- 
 fluence and ideas of Ibsen, and to misunderstand 
 them, could without hesitation accept and applaud 
 The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. The public which 
 began to read the unj^lcasant plays of Mr. Shaw
 
 FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY 157 
 
 could without hesitation accept and applaud Pre- 
 serving Mr. Panmtire and The Mind the Paint 
 Girl. Sir Arthur Pinero has continuously timed 
 his delivery and his message to the hour. That he 
 has done this unconsciously, and with an entirely 
 honest belief in himself, only makes him the better 
 journalist. He has never written down to the 
 public, because he has always been on a level with 
 the public. His spirit has been throughout the 
 spirit of Sardou, who paid more respect and atten- 
 tion to the effect of his plays at rehearsal upon 
 carpenters and scene-shifters, than to their effect 
 upon expert critics. 
 
 The plays of Sir Arthur Pinero, from Sweet 
 Lavender to The Mind the Paint Girl, are a priceless 
 document of dramatic history. Therein you may, 
 as an interesting question of technique, precisely 
 fix the year when soliloquies and asides began 
 to be old-fashioned owing to the incursions of 
 dramatic naturalism. Therein you may learn 
 w'hen the teacup-and-saucer heroine began to give 
 way to the more passionate creature who sits at 
 the heart of a social problem. Therein you may 
 decide at what moment of the playgoer's progress 
 towards a misconception of the sweet uses of 
 naturalism he first began to relish pictorial 
 incursions into the suburbs of London. Sweet 
 Lavender, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and Mid- 
 Channel arc very precious milestones. Naturally 
 enough, not all Sir Arthur Pinero's periods are of 
 equal merit. Sir Arthur is by temperament a
 
 158 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 mid-Victorian. The sentimental farces of his first 
 years are his best work. His later plays are by 
 comparison little more than a praiseworthy effort 
 to be level with the time. They typify the refusal 
 of every self-respecting author to be left behind 
 and superseded. Sir Arthur's head has grown old 
 along with the present day ; but his heart has 
 remained for ever young. He gave it away to Sweet 
 Lavender in the first fine rapture of dramatic com- 
 position, and he has never entirely recovered it. 
 His sympathy with Mrs. Tanqueray is imperfect ; 
 he does not really know her. He is only senti- 
 mental about Paula Tanqueray. He does not 
 know her as Herr Schnitzler knows her. No 
 Englishman does, or would care to own it in a 
 play if he did. 
 
 So far as Sir Arthur Pinero's ideal and methods 
 go, he may safely be left out of account in a con- 
 sideration of the future of the theatre. But there 
 is one respect in which Sir Arthur rises at the present 
 moment almost to the level of a portent. He 
 resembles dramatic authors of the future in all 
 those qualities that fit the man who writes a play 
 to produce a play. His plays, like plays of the 
 future, are the result of a collaboration between 
 the author and his players. Sir Arthur Pinero is 
 a man of the theatre. He is not afraid to use the 
 theatre— to be theatrical. His plays are so entirely 
 of the theatre in its narrowest sense that they are 
 unfit to print. He is an incarnate protest against 
 dramatic authors like Mr. John Galsworthy, who
 
 FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY 159 
 
 distrust the theatre, who touch it with the tips 
 of their hterary fingers, who invoke the help of a 
 hmehght man with something of the sensations 
 of a mediaeval professor invoking the devil. It is 
 distinctly to the credit of Sir Arthur Pinero that 
 in an age when men of letters resolutely invaded 
 the theatre— when Hankin, Wilde and Mr. Shaw 
 were setting standards of dramatic style that send 
 one for literary excellence beyond Sheridan and 
 Goldsmith to Etherege and Jonson — he resolutely 
 refused to abandon the prevalent idea of his early 
 years that plays write themselves ; that the theatre 
 is one thing and literature another ; that it is more 
 important for a player accurately to execute funny 
 business invented by the author than to talk 
 English. Sir Arthur Pinero has through these years 
 of revolution stood for a very definite idea in play- 
 making which might otherwise have almost en- 
 tirely perished — the idea, namely, that pla3^s are 
 intended for a theatre ; that only in a theatre can 
 they fulfil the purpose of their author ; that there 
 is something wrong with a play that can be better 
 enjoyed in a library than upon the stage. Sir 
 Arthur, of course, carried this idea to extremes. 
 Realising there must be something wrong with 
 plays which are better to read than to act, he 
 neglected to realise there must be something wrong 
 with plays which cannot be read at all. The 
 dramatic author of the future will, like Sir Arthur 
 Pinero, be in touch with the theatre ; express him- 
 self naturally and easily in terms of the theatre ;
 
 i6o THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 be equally capable of producing his plays, and 
 equally a master of all the devices whereby a play 
 upon the stage of a theatre has immeasurable 
 advantages over a play between the covers of a 
 book. But the dramatic authors of the future will 
 not be afraid of letting their characters talk like a 
 good book, because Sir Arthur Pinero's characters 
 talk like a bad book. They will realise that, though 
 it is important for an author to know what at any 
 moment is the best position upon his stage for the 
 delivery of his lines, and what action he intends 
 the players to adopt, it is equally important that, 
 when they have something to say, it shall be worth 
 saying. 
 
 Apart from his obstinate refusal to pay any 
 attention to the movement which has brought the 
 English theatre within measurable distance of an 
 alliance with English letters, Sir Arthur Pinero 
 stands as a barometer of dramatic fashions. His 
 contemporaries fall into two, or perhaps three, 
 classes, according as one of three features prevails 
 in the quality of their work. First there are 
 playwrights who, like Sir Arthur Pinero, accept 
 and popularise the sentiments, emotions and 
 technical methods of the passing years. These men 
 are sensitive to the atmosphere of their generation. 
 They feel what is in the air. Without deliberate 
 plagiary or imitation they react unconsciously to 
 the prevailing influences of the day. Though they 
 would never of their own motion lead the public, or 
 influence the future of dramatic art, yet they con-
 
 FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY i6r 
 
 trive to keep level with the intellectual minority, 
 to veer with the latest breeze, to be creditably in 
 the van without actually perishing in the breach. 
 Sir Arthur Pinero deservedly leads this battalion 
 of prudent heroes. If the younger recruits can 
 emulate their leader with his persistent vigour and 
 success, so much the better for them and for the 
 public. These are the men who make things 
 popular, who do the spade-work of education, who 
 are always ready on the public's behalf to turn the 
 newest truth into the latest commonplace. They 
 take up every new idea the moment it is ripe for 
 popularity. They drop it when it has become a cliche. 
 Of the younger members of this important group 
 of authors Mr. Arnold Bennett is conspicuous and 
 typical, though he has perhaps less conscience as 
 an artist and more brains as a man of commerce 
 than the majority of his colleagues. Playwrights 
 like Mr. Alfred Sutro and Mr. Stanley Houghton 
 are good examples. Naturally, it is a class which 
 tends to be rapidly recruited and rapidly cashiered. 
 Not many men have the wonderful agility of Sir 
 Arthur Pinero in the art of unconscious adaptation. 
 Greatly inferior to these very able captains of the 
 industry are authors whose plays must be regarded 
 as deliberate attempts to be in the fashion. They 
 differ from authors like Sir Arthur Pinero in that their 
 work is less an unconscious reaction to prevailing 
 influences of the time than a mechanical imitation 
 of accepted models. They write dramatic variations 
 upon the fashionable air. Their plays are neither 
 II
 
 i62 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 expressions of a temperament nor of anything ob- 
 served in the life of their time. People who write 
 this sort of play may be — and frequently are — in- 
 genious and talented to the last degree ; and there is 
 no more an3,i;hing morally reprehensible or dishonest 
 in their work than in the work of an expert milliner. 
 There is no necessity to be angry or unkind in their 
 description. They drive a legitimate industry ; and 
 so long as they do not pretend to be what they 
 obviously are not — great artists, thinkers, or mission- 
 aries — they may be dismissed as useful, amusing and 
 agreeable people, who have as much right to their 
 profits and percentages as has any dealer in goods of 
 marketable value. These writers cannot always be 
 very accurately distinguished from the dramatists 
 whose acquaintance we have already made. It is 
 not always possible to distinguish between work 
 deliberately imitated from a fashionable model and 
 work unconsciously derived from the general stock 
 of dramatic commonplaces. Sometimes the two 
 things are actually present in a greater or less degree 
 in one and the same play. Derivation may be 
 deliberate, or unconscious, or half-conscious. A 
 dramatic author may treat a certain idea in a certain 
 way, either in imitation of an author who has already 
 successfully done so ; or because the idea and the 
 method are common property of the tribe ; or be- 
 cause he has read and forgotten plays of the same 
 kind ; or because he wrongly imagines that he is 
 giving an original turn to something good enough to 
 be repeated.
 
 FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY 163 
 
 Mr. Somerset Maugham is an excellent example of 
 the distinction between the work of these two broadly 
 different types. ]\Ir. Maugham began his dramatic 
 career with a play entitled The Man of Honour. 
 The Man of Honour was definitely a play of the 
 higher type. It was in no sense an earth-shaking 
 performance. It was not a revolutionary play in 
 the sense that The Importance of Being Earnest or 
 Man and Superman were revolutionary plays. It 
 could have no possible effect upon Mr. Maugham's 
 contemporaries, turn them into a new path, or add 
 one cubit to the general average of dramatic stature. 
 But it was a play sincerely written, with some sense 
 of the value of ideas and methods that were at 
 that moment in the air. It was a play of the type of 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett's The Great Adventure, or Mr. 
 Alfred Sutro's The Perplexed Husband, or Sir Arthur 
 Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. It was de- 
 rived work ; but the derivation was not deliberate. 
 Mr. Somerset Maugham's popular West-End plays, 
 on the other hand, are plays of the lower type whose 
 character we are now trying to fix. They are 
 mechanical exercises in approved emotional and 
 technical formulae of the day. Lady Frederick is an 
 academic performance. It has no relation either in 
 manner or matter to the life of the time or to the 
 living theatre of the time. The author who wrote 
 A Man of Honour is quite obviously sensitive to 
 what is happening in the theatre and in the world. 
 But the author of Lady Frederick has deliberately 
 shut himself off from every influence that might
 
 i64 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 disturb his ability to imitate the sort of thing that 
 succeeded with his public the day before yesterday. 
 There is a third type of play infinitely more at- 
 tractive than these other two — the type of play which 
 Sir J ames Barrie writes in perfection. Such plays may 
 be described as mildly individual. They have not the 
 strongly marked character of plays that are imitated. 
 They do not, like the plays of Wilde or of Mr. Shaw, 
 set the current of dramatic progress flowing in a fresh 
 direction. At the same time, they are not merely 
 plays of the populariser, framed of commonplaces 
 accepted or about to be accepted ; and they are 
 certainly not plays of the professed imitator. They 
 are plays of authors who are as open to the indirect 
 influence of their big contemporaries as are authors 
 like Sir Arthur Pinero, Mr. Arnold Bennett, or Mr. 
 Stanley Houghton. They are equally ready to 
 accept the popular and accepted machinery of the 
 stage. But they have a temperament. Their work 
 has a faintly personal flavour. They have a way of 
 doing nothing — nothing very unusual — with an air. 
 They will have no more influence in shaping the 
 future of the theatre than the professed imitators. 
 They will have less influence in shaping the future of 
 the theatre than the men who at least disseminate 
 doctrines thankfully or unconsciously received. 
 But they fill the stage of their generation happily 
 and with distinction. Sir James Barrie is the most 
 popular of this group. Mr. Hubert Henry Davies 
 and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones are of its best blood. 
 There is a definite flavour about a Barrie play, a
 
 FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY 165 
 
 Jones play and a Davies play. There is no flavour 
 about a play by Sir Arthur Pinero or Mr. Arnold 
 Bennett ; or, rather, the flavour varies with the 
 seasons. Sir James Barrie, Mr. Jones and Mr. 
 Davies represent all that is best in English con- 
 temporary comedy after we have eliminated the 
 pioneers of the revolution. 
 
 It is not proposed in these few paragraphs in any 
 sense to cover the contemporary field ; or to classify 
 all living dramatists under heads and phrases. This 
 short chapter is here inserted merely to justify the 
 omission of so much that fills the eyes and ears of 
 playgoers to-day. It may possibly have seemed that 
 too much space has been given to authors of one 
 particular school, that Mr. Shaw and the naturalists 
 have received inordinate attention. Why, it may be 
 asked, should Mr. Galsworthy, whose merit is mainly 
 negative, be weighed so much more scrupulously than 
 Mr. Henry Arthur Jones or than Sir James Barrie, 
 whose metal is in some ways so infinitely more 
 attractive ? Why should Mr. Bernard Shaw have a 
 chapter to himself, and persist in overflowing into 
 chapters that have very little to do with the actual 
 artistic merit of his work ? 
 
 The answer is simple. We are not, in these 
 pages, directly concerned with the artistic merit of 
 the work of contemporary authors ; but we are 
 greatly concerned in measuring its influence upon 
 the future of the theatre. Mr. Shaw and the 
 naturalists are important as revolutionary writers 
 who have challenged contemporary conventions
 
 i66 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 and brought about what solemn people would 
 call a transvaluation of all values. These same 
 revolutionary authors have also claimed that the 
 future, even more than the present, is with them 
 and with their methods. It has therefore been 
 necessary to show that the work of these revolu- 
 tionary authors was in origin and result destructive ; 
 that they hold no mortgage upon the future of the 
 English theatre ; that their task is accomplished 
 and their wages taken ; that the virtue of their 
 methods, though it has had a persistent and a 
 purifying influence upon the theatre of yesterday 
 and to-day, is already outlived ; that they set the 
 pace of a movement which, though it is now ex- 
 hausted, has prepared for the English theatre an 
 honourable future career, to be run in alliance with 
 the life, letters and national spirit of the English 
 people. 
 
 The authors whose title to existence we have in 
 this chapter rather admitted than defined have had 
 no such influence and made no such claim. It need 
 not therefore be inferred that we profess for them 
 any less respect or recognition than people whose 
 names and work have figured more prominently 
 in these pages. There is no assumption that the 
 authors to whom this chapter is inscribed are 
 necessarily of low degree. It is roughly indicated 
 that they are of varying degrees. This equally 
 applies to managers whose names have not figured 
 here in proportion to their public importance to- 
 day. Sir George Alexander has only once in his
 
 FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY 167 
 
 career been of vital importance to the future of 
 that theatre which he so conspicuously adorns — 
 at the raoment, namely, when, as the uncon- 
 scious instrument of revolution, he produced 
 The Importance of Being Earnest. This does not 
 necessarily mean that Sir George Alexander is not 
 a very cultivated and able manager. Mr. Arthur 
 Bourchier is not yet identified with any play that 
 can have the smallest meaning or influence as re- 
 gards the English theatre of 1950. This does 
 not mean that Mr. Arthur Bourchier is unworthy of 
 a place in a book devoted to an estimate of dramatic 
 work of contemporary distinction and value. It 
 obviously does mean that Mr. Arthur Bourchier 
 has no part in our present enterprise. 
 
 An important feature of the dramatic activities 
 of to-day yet remains. Much pious expectation 
 has been aroused in the minds of many excellent 
 people by local revivals of the masque or pageant. 
 Arguing from these, and from one or two conspicu- 
 ously successful efforts to raise crops of dramatic 
 genius in villages of the countryside, it has been 
 rashly prophesied that thither we must look for the 
 true revival of the English theatre. Some of the 
 more enthusiastic believers in this work have pointed 
 to the success of the Irish National Theatre as an 
 instance of what can be achieved by way of raising 
 dramatic art in the wilder parts and more rustic 
 places of these islands. 
 
 A history and an appreciation of Irish plays and 
 players cannot here be attempted ; nor would it be
 
 i68 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 pertinent in a review of the English theatre. John 
 Synge, though his appeal is universal, and will 
 easily outlive every one of his contemporaries, is too 
 conspicuously the exception to every rule to be 
 reasonably taken as a sign of the times or measured 
 as an influence upon his generation. But a few 
 words are necessary as to the significance of the 
 Irish movement and of abortive attempts in 
 England to emulate their literary policj' of back 
 to the land. 
 
 There is no surer sign of an elaborate sophistica- 
 tion than a self-conscious effort after simplicity. 
 One is reminded of the French noblesse of the 
 eighteenth century playing at skilled labour in 
 well-appointed dairies and carpenters' shops. 
 Simple life is frequently the last word in complicated 
 civilisation. A deliberate return to the primitive 
 in art argues an exhausted inspiration, just as a 
 diet of oats and water argues an exhausted palate. 
 It means that the artist no longer feels impelled to 
 utter the beauty and significance of the world in his 
 native idiom ; that he has reached the limit of 
 decadence in a confidence that language is the end 
 of language. A self-conscious return to primitive 
 forms of expression betrays a belief in expression 
 for its own sake, which is a symptom, not of the 
 simplicity of youth, but of the simplicity of second 
 childhood. The last utterance of a weary genera- 
 tion is a cry for the bauble of infancy. This utter- 
 ance does not imply a recovery of lost innocence, 
 for which these baubles glittered as symbols of an
 
 FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY 169 
 
 opening world ; it implies no limpid freshness of 
 the eye crying anew for the moon which seemed with- 
 in limit of its grasp. Neither the centuries nor the 
 years of a running life can return upon themselves. 
 The belief that they do is a monstrous perversion 
 of the dreary philosophic fallacy of eternal recur- 
 rence. 
 
 We should, therefore, not readily believe in any 
 movement of art, letters, or life that begins with a 
 repudiation of experience ; that calls for a return 
 to the primitive works of our childhood ; that 
 would find the art of coming days in places where 
 the art still lingers of days that have passed. If 
 we believe in such a movement, we should at any 
 rate be honest with ourselves. Such a movement 
 is only justified if we have definitely lost faith in 
 the present and the future. The attitude of its 
 disciples implies that all beauty is already uttered ; 
 that the power to utter in fresh terms a world that 
 still is fresh has departed from us ; that the living 
 speech of to-day and to-morrow is incapable of a 
 great message ; that a deliberate return to the 
 idiom of dead minstrels is all that is left for this 
 barren time. If we devoutly believe this, then is 
 an enterprise like that of Mr. Yeats and the Gaelic 
 League the only possible salvation of beauty 
 in a world whence inspiration has departed. On 
 the other hand, if we have faith in the apostolic 
 succession of the artists, then we may see in this 
 enterprise of recalling the past and washing our 
 language clean of all that can associate it Vvdth
 
 I70 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 images of the present little more than a pathetic 
 recoil of sensitive minds outraged by the accidents 
 of a period whose artistic message is yet awaiting 
 delivery. 
 
 No art of the future can come of a self-conscious 
 stripping from art and language of all that links it 
 with the present. Deliberate naivety — as the phrase 
 implies — is one of those preposterous contradictions 
 only possible at a time when all things are tested, 
 when nothing is held fast. It is precisely that 
 experiment of all experiments made in a period of 
 transition which can lead to nothing. The work 
 of Mr. Yeats is valuable more as a protest against 
 the misuses of our tongue to-day, than as an 
 instrument for its perfection. 
 
 But the Irish theatre is in its playing associated 
 with artistic naivety at the other extreme from Mr. 
 Yeats' studious discarding of the rags of civilisation. 
 When the Irish players first came to London they 
 really had that art which conceals the artist. 
 They played with the simplicity that came of an 
 emotional sincerity, unconscious of itself, flowing 
 naturally with the scene. Theirs was really the 
 innocence of Adam naming the beasts in Paradise. 
 Their playing was work of the amateur in a noble 
 sense. It was the same artlessness that in Dorchester 
 and Aldbourne had captivated civilised auditors 
 with glimpses of Arcadia. The Irish players had, 
 of course, immensely more native charm than the 
 players collected into his village theatre by Mr. 
 MacEvoy or than the Wessex interpreters of Mr.
 
 FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY 171 
 
 Hardy. But it was work of the same kind — racy 
 of the soil, sprung from an instinct unspoiled with 
 self-knowledge. 
 
 Mark what follows. The fate of the Irish players 
 is eloquent of what happens to all uncivilised 
 * ports and happy havens ' as soon as they are 
 discovered for the spirit and profit of a sadder 
 and wiser generation. The Irish players came, as 
 everything good must eventually come, to London. 
 For two successive seasons they played to houses 
 empty or discreetly papered. Visitors who loved 
 their art attended night by night ; and, if they 
 had a public voice, used it in their behalf. They 
 implored the London playgoer to avoid for a night 
 or so the stuffy themes and threadworn artifice of the 
 fashionable theatres ; to journey into the far west 
 of Sloane Square and behold how a wilderness 
 had blossomed like the rose. Would the lovers 
 of the Irish theatre had been more wisely jealous 
 of their trove ! London, for once in a way, pricked 
 up its ears, went to the Irish theatre, and found 
 it was being amused. In 1912 the Irish players 
 were no longer the private delight of their original 
 friends. They were a public institution. They 
 played to fat houses. They were invited to 
 America. They were asked to appear as a star 
 variety-turn at the Coliseum. No company in the 
 world could long be innocent in the face of the 
 systematic and enormous temptation to which the 
 Irish players were at this time subjected. Simplicity 
 that can fill a London theatre, where all the cunning
 
 172 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 of the practised merchants is at fault, will soon 
 be simplicity with reservations. The first friends of 
 the Irish players were now compelled to look sadly 
 on while they improved in the wisdom of this world 
 quite out of recognition. They were now the latest 
 sensation of a sophisticated audience ; and their 
 playing insensibly altered to meet the situation. 
 
 Equally significant was Mr. MacEvoy's adventure 
 with the Aldboume villagers. This company never 
 had the native grace of the Irish players, but 
 in Aldbourne they were happily met. Conveyed 
 into London, it was perceived that between the 
 artlessness of the amateur and the art of genius lies 
 a whole wilderness, to be painfully traversed, of 
 necessary discipline in necessary craft. This art 
 of the soil — this naivety of the natural man — is 
 the other extreme of civilised artistic achievement. 
 It must first be destroyed and afterwards re- 
 fashioned. Is the English theatre to be born again, 
 as Medea predicted of Jason, after a preliminary 
 wholesale massacre of local debating and dramatic 
 societies ? The deterioration of the Irish players 
 from the moment of their contact with the English 
 public, and the ineffectiveness of Mr. ]\IacEvoy's 
 villagers in a theatre of the town conspicuously 
 discourage the hypothesis. 
 
 As to the masques and pageants which in the last 
 few years have swept the country like an epidemic, 
 no one who has borne a part in these enterprises is 
 seriously able, on their behalf, to proclaim a national 
 revival of dramatic art. The greater number of
 
 FUTURE OF THE PRESENT DAY 173 
 
 these were country meetings of fashionable people 
 playing the perennially delightful game known to 
 children of all ages as ' dressing-up.' At best they 
 were an elaborate fancy-dress ball. At worst they 
 were conspicuous instances of precisely that de- 
 liberate cult of innocence and simplicity which is the 
 last possible quarter whither we should look for a 
 revival of the arts. They correspond with the 
 activities of a large class of people who imagine they 
 can recapture the sixteenth century by writing 
 ' Merrie Englande ' upon invitations to a contest 
 of brass bands — people whose taste has busily littered 
 the country with unspeakable rough-cast and half- 
 timbered houses in the garden suburb manner ; who 
 imagine they are putting back the clocks of history 
 by measuring time with a sundial. 
 
 For better or worse men are now gathered into 
 cities. From cities where the pulse of modern life 
 beats fastest, where contemporary interests most 
 thickly crowd, where each moment passes as an 
 intensity between the forgotten past and the 
 enigmatic future — thence must the art of to-day and 
 to-morrow burst into its only spontaneous and 
 sincere expression. Only those who believe that 
 modern life will never find a messenger, that it is 
 insusceptible of a fresh miracle of annunciation, 
 will turn humanity back upon its traces and look 
 for the art of the future in a studied cultivation of 
 the past.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 The best in this kind are but shadows ; and the worst are 
 no worse if imagination amend them. 
 
 THE theatre is now swept and garnished. The 
 dramatic critic, or expert in what the pubUc 
 is supposed to want, has disappeared. Intelhgent 
 audiences are in Uving contact with intelhgent 
 actors and intelhgent authors. The stage is ready 
 to take a level place with the fine arts. It has re- 
 covered touch with English letters and life. As an 
 instrument it has been tuned to the delivery of music 
 in its proper voice. The conditions of playing have 
 been improved past recognition by the abolition of 
 star performances and of the system of long runs. 
 The intimacy of the dramatic author with crafts of 
 the theatre has sent packing that significant figure 
 of our transition — the producer who so prominently 
 thrust himself between the author and his inter- 
 preters. A generation of revolutionary writers has 
 caused every convention of our time to be tested ; 
 has by precept and example killed off the brood of 
 mechanical stage figures and formuLx with wliich the 
 theatre had jxrforcc to be uncmcumbered. Symbolic 
 
 '74
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH DRAMA 175 
 
 of a recovery of the English theatre into sanity and 
 life, the censorship of stage plays has been swept 
 away. A National Theatre partially independent of 
 the public has shown that to be independent pays 
 better than to be perpetually asking which way is 
 the wind. The speculative manager has disappeared . 
 All, in fact, is ready for a national revival of English 
 drama. But the most important and difficult task 
 remains. How is this magnificent pedestal to be 
 filled ? So far we have been mainly concerned with 
 machinery, only incidentally with its uses. Whence 
 is the drama of the future to spring ? Wherein will 
 be the inspiration of Melpomene restored ? Where 
 are the authors now who in 1950 will be the stay of 
 our English theatre ? 
 
 Let us recall the career of a playwright, still young, 
 as playwrights go, and for many years yet to be a 
 prominent figure of the stage. Mr. Granville Barker, 
 as an author of plays, is an excellent peg for our dis- 
 course upon the future direction of English drama. 
 Mr. Barker began his author's career with a play 
 which, for his age, was, without hyperbole, amazing. 
 The Marrying of Ann Leete was not a masterpiece, 
 but it must have seemed to Mr. Barker's contem- 
 poraries of the late 'nineties the promise of master- 
 pieces to come. It revealed an author untouched by 
 the rampant destructive naturalism of his friends — 
 an author obviously fitted to march into the empty 
 theatre (after the iconoclasts had passed) in the van- 
 guard of a romantic renaissance. The theme alone 
 of The Marrying of Ann Leete marked it sharply off
 
 1/6 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 from plays like Arms and the Man and The Silver 
 Box. The woman of fine blood breaking from the 
 prison of her caste to find reality upon earth was a 
 creature of another world than that in which the 
 heroines of her time were moving. Nor was the 
 method of her portraiture less remarkable. No 
 methodical and reasoned exposition was here ; not 
 the least care to give her that illusion, so precious to 
 them that fashioned her contemporaries, of being 
 of the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth century. 
 She was presented romantically — in the half-light 
 where illusion is built up of creatures who em- 
 body, not the particular ache of this generation or 
 that, but the common burden of all men and women. 
 Ann Leete lighted to her room in the fall of her 
 wedding-day is, for the English theatre, a more 
 precious and a more significant figure than Nora 
 Helmer slamming the door upon A Doll's House. 
 She is the woman of our future stage, who has found 
 the world, in succession to the perturbing Helmers, 
 who have lost it. She is the younger generation. 
 
 The author who wrote The Marrying of Ann Leete 
 was obliterated by the author who wrote The Voysey 
 Inheritance, Waste and The Madras House. The 
 author who in his nonage had looked unconsciously 
 forward to 1950 was thereafter content to bear a 
 part in the merely destructive campaign of his con- 
 temporaries. That Mr. Granville Barker in his im- 
 ]:)ressionable years fell into the hands of Mr. Shaw 
 and Mr. Galsworthy is a tragedy of English dramatic 
 literature. Whether he will win entirely free of
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH DRAMA 177 
 
 these influences and adorn the theatres of 1950 is 
 not our business to determine. But Mr. Barker's 
 career is too significant to be Hghtly passed over. 
 To measure the extent of Mr. Barker's derehction 
 from The Marrying of Ann Leete is especially in- 
 structive. It enables us to point quite definitely in 
 the direction of our progress. 
 
 The perpetual conflict in the work of Mr. Gran- 
 ville Barker between his acquired habit of natural- 
 ism and his original instinct to write against the 
 grain of his period is in microcosm an exact image 
 of the passing moment. Mr. Barker has written 
 plays and produced plays; and he has justified 
 them conclusively in that they answer exactly the 
 requirements of the naturalist formula. But his 
 practice often betrays an uneasy sense that all that 
 answers exactly the requirements of the naturalist 
 formula is not necessarily inspired. 
 
 Mr. Barker's Shakespeare productions at the 
 Savoy theatre in 1912 were in this respect an 
 eloquent commentary on the present condition of 
 the English theatre. Mr. Barker avoided the base 
 uses of the picture stage, admitting that the illusion 
 at which Shakespeare aimed was not the illusion 
 of a fair copy of natural objects. Mr. Barker's 
 decoration was conventional. He did not aim at 
 filling the spectator's eye, or at commanding his 
 attention. He aimed at leaving the spectator's 
 mind at liberty to seize each hint of the poet as it 
 came into his verse. Mr. Barker's decoration did 
 not invariably fulfil his intention. An active artistic 
 12
 
 178 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 middleman intruded into his .^calculations who 
 insisted that his decorations should be very particu- 
 larly noticed. Shakespeare was not allowed to 
 turn Mr. Norman Wilkinson's Garden of Olivia 
 into his own Garden of Olivia. On the contrary, 
 Shakespeare's Garden of Olivia was turned into 
 Mr. Norman Wilkinson's. But this was an ac- 
 cident and not the intention of Mr. Barker's enter- 
 prise. Mr. Barker struck very definitely at the 
 naturalists in that he aimed at decorating Shake- 
 speare, and not at illustrating him. Mr. Barker, 
 when he did this, was the author of Ann Leete, 
 relying as a producer upon the romantic method 
 of suggestion. 
 
 But the author of The Voysey Inheritance was 
 equally conspicuous, and with lamentable results. 
 Shakespeare was not a naturalist. He did not care 
 to give back to his creatures, or to the progress of 
 his scene, a faithful resemblance to the life whence 
 he had drawn them. He did not see Perdita from 
 the point of view of a local education authority. 
 He did not write in prose, and he did not mean his 
 phrases to be taken with the kind of precision so 
 useful and necessary in drawing a legal document. 
 Mr. Barker betrayed, in his Shakespeare at the 
 Savoy, a tendency to ignore these commonplaces. 
 Mr. Barker argued about Perdita like a naturalist, 
 and frequently lost the meaning of the text of 
 Shakespeare by too closely translathig it in the 
 action. Shakespeare, for cxam]>le, intends us to 
 see in Perdita an obvious princess obviously
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH DRAMA 179 
 
 disguised. Mr. Barker, instead of taking his obvious 
 princess for granted, argued that Perdita, having 
 been brought uj) by a shepherd, would in hfe have 
 the bearing and the habit of a shepherd's daughter, 
 with (since Mr. Granville Barker believes a little in 
 heredity) some inkling of the blood as to her royal 
 parents. He emphasised her rusticity rather than 
 her royalty, giving us the spectacle of Perdita 
 bobbing a milkmaid's welcome to her shearing. 
 
 As an instance where too close a translation of 
 the text into action gave a result equally lament- 
 able as this too close reasoning about character, 
 the opening lines of Tweljih NigJit will readily 
 serve : 
 
 " If music be the food of love, play on ; 
 Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting. 
 The appetite may sicken, and so die. 
 That strain again ! it had a dying fall : 
 Oh ! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south. 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets, 
 Stealing and giving odour. Enough ; no more ; 
 'Tis not so sweet now, as it was before." 
 
 Mr. Barker translated this as follovv'S : First 
 there must be music ; and it must be the perform- 
 ance of a definite piece of music containing one 
 strain at least which has a dying fall. Mr. Barker, 
 accordingly, arranges that a string trio shall per- 
 form an air ; that the Duke shall listen to it quite 
 attentively ; and that, when the air is finished, 
 the Dulce shall ask them to repeat it ; that the 
 aforesaid air shall be solemnly re-played ; that, 
 when it has been thus repeated, the Duke with the
 
 i8o THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 pragmatical air of a critical musician shall pronounce 
 it " not so sweet now as it was before." Perhaps 
 this, being written after a lapse of over a year, is 
 an exaggerated account of the scene as played at 
 the Savoy. But it is strictly true of the way — the 
 attitude of mind — in which Mr. Barker approached 
 it, and of the method of strict translation he 
 employed. The point to note is that he interrupted 
 a beautiful speech, clearly intended to be spoken 
 as a whole, in order that the Duke's wish to hear 
 a particular phrase repeated might be literally ful- 
 filled. Only a producer misled by the evil habit 
 of this present time could go so far astray. A 
 producer who had lived only with Shakespeare ; 
 who was uncorrupted by imported fashions from 
 Norway and Russia ; who had written only The 
 Marrying of Ann Leete, and was incapable of The 
 Voysey Inheritance, — such a producer could not 
 have so far commingled impertinent naturalism 
 with romantic comedy as, in one and the same 
 production, to give back one piece of Shakespeare 
 to his generation and to mar the other. Mr. Barker, 
 divided between two methods in the production of 
 Shakespeare, is typical of 1913. We are actually 
 upon the threshold of a long farewell to the 
 models of Mr. Galsworthy and the post-Leete models 
 of Mr. Barker. But the farewell will be long in 
 saying. It will be several years before the reaction 
 is swinging with sufficient violence to be detected 
 beyond mistake as the most important movement 
 of our time.
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH DRAMA i8i 
 
 Very significant is the career of Sir Henry Irving. 
 It is customary to applaud the genius of Irving and 
 to deplore his judgment. What might he not have 
 done for English drama, runs the thought of many 
 excellent critics, had he cared as much for the 
 play as for the player, had he come to terms with 
 the revival of the 'eighties and 'nineties. It is 
 undeniable that Irving wasted his great imagina- 
 tion upon worthless plays ; that he wrought a 
 miracle upon dead matter by play-making hacks 
 who were filling the theatres of his generation with 
 rubbish since swept into oblivion by the followers 
 of Ibsen. But this does not altogether dispose of 
 Irving. Why Irving never came to terms with 
 naturalism was that Irving was too English. He 
 did not measure a play by its quality but by its 
 kind. The English people, so long as they remain 
 a people with a definite sense of the theatre, will 
 always like the kind of play which Irving accepted. 
 When you find an Englishman preaching the unities, 
 or clamouring for the conventions of a fourth wall, 
 suspect him. Perhaps he is an Englishman who is 
 happiest when in Paris. Perhaps he is an Irish- 
 man (like Sheridan, Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw, 
 the doyens of our comedy). Perhaps he is only an 
 English play-maker who has unconsciously adopted 
 or intentionally apes an imported fashion. What- 
 ever he be by birth or fashion, he will have very 
 little to do with the coming revival. The walking 
 spirits of dead men will in 1950 be more familiar 
 with the English stage than is the county councillor
 
 i82 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 to-day, and a dramatic personage who speaks like 
 an angel will be recognised as more true to the 
 spirit of English life than one who speaks like the 
 latest candidate for the Chiltern Hundreds. English 
 people in a theatre desire a miracle — the great ex- 
 ceptions of life that prove the greater rule. They 
 desire to see Ann Leete lit with a rush-candle to 
 a strange fate. They desire to see how she stood 
 from the ranks and adventured. They do not desire 
 to see how her fellows went to unremarkable death 
 decently and in order. They do not desire to be 
 reminded that matches made in heaven rarely work 
 upon earth, but that this particular match was 
 mysterious and pitiful. They hate to see the 
 grinding of inevitable law. Life to the English 
 mind is a succession of wonderful things unclassified, 
 unexpected, irreducible to reason. It is not the mind 
 of a naturalist : it is even less the classical mind. 
 It is, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has accusingly pro- 
 phesied against us, an incorrigibly romantic 
 mind. 
 
 English people should accept the charge. It is 
 their birthright and not a shameful thing. That 
 Mr. Shaw persistently has used it as an infamous re- 
 proach is due, partly to his incorrigible superstitious 
 belief in the validity of common sense, partly to an 
 instinctive policy of self-protection, partly to justifi- 
 able bad temper with a condition of things in the 
 theatres of his youth and middle age that were 
 truly appalling. Mr. Shaw was driven to his indict- 
 ment of English romantics by the natural bias of a
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH DRAMA 183 
 
 mind that is only happy in the broad dayhght of 
 what is reasonable. He was able to drive his indict- 
 ment home because the romantics he attacked were 
 mechanical, lifeless romantics of a theatre in which 
 every living thing had long been asphyxiated. His 
 successful campaign of destruction is no argument 
 that romantics are wrong — still less that they are 
 false to the English character. The wheel is to- 
 day full circle. In place of the dead formulae of 
 romanticism we have the dead formulae of natural- 
 ism. In place of the superstition that by writing 
 plays in the manner of Wills or Lytton we are neces- 
 sarily writing good plays, we now have the super- 
 stition that by writing plays in the manner of 
 Ibsen or Mr. Galswoi thy we are writing good plays. 
 Such is the superstition which inspires men like Mr. 
 Stanley Houghton and Mr. Arnold Bennett. The 
 presence of this superstition is itself a proof that 
 the hour of the naturalist is already sounded — that 
 his inspiration is outworn and his models at the 
 point of being discarded. 
 
 Prophesying as to English drama — now that 
 English drama is a member of English life — is of 
 necessity prophesying as to the direction of English 
 thought and morality. The restoration in the 
 English theatre of a type of play loosely con- 
 structed after the English or Shakespearean fashion 
 — the play of simple motives, rapid movement and 
 poetic rendering of to-day's passion in the raiment 
 of forever — is but the fiower of that great spiritual 
 revival whose signs even now are showing. The
 
 i84 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 generations whose English works are written in 
 the plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw have wandered forty 
 years in that immemorial wilderness wherein all 
 nations are periodically lost — the wilderness not of 
 that modest doubt which is the only beacon of the 
 wise, but of that intellectual arrogance which 
 rejects a superstition of the priests to fall into a 
 superstition of the lawyers (as when Rousseau 
 proclaimed the ' law of nature '), or into a superstition 
 of the scientists (as when Huxley proclaimed the 
 ultimate nescience of natural philosophy). It is 
 difficult to realise to-day that the great event of 
 the later years of Victoria was a dispute between 
 religion and science as to which had eaten most 
 of the Tree of Knowledge. Echoes of this contest 
 still ring in remote parishes of England. Why the 
 scientific materialist imagined he was getting any 
 nearer to the Absolute First Cause— or whatever 
 he called that evil genius which generations before 
 as a Pillar of Cloud by day and a Pillar of Fire by 
 night had led the Hebrews so consistently in a vicious 
 circle— will be difficult for the happy young people 
 of to-morrow to realise. But we have to remember 
 how within living memory it was actually a matter 
 for intellectual triumph in the scientist, and panic 
 in the priest, that the scientist was able to tell 
 people the atomic weight (;f hydrogen, and that the 
 priest was unable to contradict him ; that the dis- 
 covery of the properties of matter, or, as it was 
 arrogantly termed, the conquest of nature, was 
 actually regarded as of itself an appreciable advance
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH DRAMA 185 
 
 in the direction of grasping the mysteries of Hfe 
 and death. For even so much as alluding to this 
 extinct and barren controversy an apology is at 
 this happier time due to a civilised reader. The 
 allusion is, notwithstanding, pertinent. The after- 
 math of the intellectual and spiritual disturbance 
 caused by the turning of Western civilisation into 
 the paths of material progress, with its conquest of 
 nature, its measurement of prosperity in terms of 
 wheat, and its glorification of man's cunning of 
 hand and brain, is the period, through which to-day 
 we are passing, of desperate interrogation — a period 
 in which moral, religious and i)hilosophical values 
 have all to be reconsidered, society rebuilt, the 
 framework of existence redescribed. We have to 
 recover the two essential elements of a sane career 
 — to redetermine absolutely the conventions of 
 conduct and the dogmas of religion. All great art — 
 dramatic art included — has to do with the adventures 
 of an individual soul, not, as now, in search of 
 truth uncertain ; but in conflict with truth assured. 
 When the laws of conduct are fixed ; when honour 
 is not merely good or bad as thinking makes it so ; 
 when the conscience of the community runs in- 
 fallibly according to fixed ideals of the perfect 
 citizen ; when there is no question as to what is 
 right or what is wrong, but only a tremendous 
 and sustained interest as to who is right and who is 
 wrong ; when the sole dramatic question in the life 
 of a hero is not, as now, whether he is really a hero 
 at all, but whether he will ultimately kill the dragon
 
 1 86 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 of his fate ; when we are invited, not, as now, to 
 wonder whether Arthur was in the right of that 
 affair with Guinevere, or Lancelot in the wrong, but 
 to wonder at and to feel the tragedy of a blazon 
 soiled; when the whole world is no longer a night- 
 mare v/herein all motives and springs of action when 
 pursued dissolve or turn upon them that follow a 
 countenance wherein the lineaments waver and 
 change ; when St. George upon his quest asks, 
 not, as now, to know whether he be a fool or hero, 
 but to know only where is the monster of his seek- 
 ing ; when, in a word, the root conventions of 
 morality and honour, on which society is founded, 
 are recovered and put upon the tables of a new 
 religion — then will the drama naturally recover 
 simplicity and power. 
 
 These years are at hand. We cannot long continue 
 in this period of discovery. The image of this 
 time — its complete and most forcible expression — 
 is to be found in the life of that tortured prophet 
 and adventurer into the unknown — August Strind- 
 berg. A civilisation can no more rest in the stage 
 which we find incarnate in August Strindberg than 
 Strindberg himself could rest in the inferno of his 
 middle period. The pain of readjustment, of fitting 
 the spirit anew to a changed environmxnt, belongs 
 only to a period of transition. It imjdies ultimate 
 peace and certainty renewed. Our purpose hardly 
 requires us to speculate as to how we shall emerge 
 from that same adventure which sent Strindberg 
 out into the wilderness to be tormented of devils,
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH DRAMA 187 
 
 and to emerge by way of the valley of mysticism 
 into peace. But it clearly requires us to realise 
 that this peace and this certainty must come ; that 
 life will again go forward as a play whose conven- 
 tions are fixed and ordered ; that man may hence- 
 forth defy the heavens, but no longer be uncertain 
 whither his challenge is addressed ; that the 
 laws of this mighty stage will be at least so clear 
 as to suffer the spectators to be sure where their 
 applause or pity must be bestowed, and to be 
 thrilled with a contest whose rules are not in 
 doubt. 
 
 That the time is ripe for this restoration is seen 
 in every straw that blows. The changes of this 
 present time are best summed in the philosophic 
 revolution which is typified in the conviction that 
 life, ascending the ages, no longer, as was once main- 
 tained, takes blindly the line of least resistance, 
 but follows consciously the line of most advantage. 
 The popularity of a teacher like Professor Bergson 
 is not entirely due to his literary felicity, his charm- 
 ing address and the amiable blend of metaphysical 
 with scientific speculation which has always ap- 
 pealed to dilettanti philosophers. It is due more 
 to his sense of our present need for a restoration 
 into physical existence of something positively 
 teleological. M. Bergson gives back to the universe 
 a soul of goodness in things evil. He has restored 
 Jehovah in terms of biological science. He meets 
 the spiritual needs of the present ; and it is therefore 
 that he has so irresistible a vogue.
 
 i88 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 Even more significant is the trend of artificial 
 aesthetics. This, to-day, is all in the direction of 
 restoring to art its necessary conventions. The 
 heritage of yesterday is the base naturalism which 
 unconsciously assumes that the conventional ele- 
 ment in art is a clog ; that art is great in propor- 
 tion that conventions are eliminated ; that it is an 
 adequate defence of a piece of art that precisely 
 thus it was heard, seen, or inferred from a piece of 
 life. The tendency in criticism now — not the 
 criticism which merely reflects the fallacies of the 
 popular work of the day, but criticism that looks 
 forward to the coming age and feels the breath of 
 the unborn spirit of to-morrow — the tendency of 
 criticism now is rather to exaggerate the value of 
 forms and symbols consciously employed by the 
 artist and immediately eloquent for the people, of 
 fixed morality and of a dogmatic religion. Criticism 
 which puts the hieratic conventions, the grave 
 simplicity, the unvarying formality of Egyptian art 
 above the comparatively unfettered democratic 
 exuberance of Greece will not have a deep or lasting 
 influence upon the artistic progress of modern 
 Europe. Nevertheless, that such criticism is to-day 
 being written and widely discussed is an eloquent 
 testimony to the violence of a reaction, already due, 
 against the tacit heresies of a critic like Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw, who solemnly maintains that photography is 
 a fine art for precisely those qualities which put it 
 beyond the category. Without going to the extreme 
 of the Oriental j^osition — a position which denies
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH DRAMA 189 
 
 the artist any function beyond that of formal 
 decoration — we may yet accept so much doctrine 
 of the new school as admits our main contention — 
 namely, that the dramatic art of 1950 will in form 
 arise from a recognition of the necessity and value 
 of conventional simplicity, and will in material 
 be ruled by a national reassertion of the laws of 
 morality and the dogmas of religion. 
 
 The most important result of this national re- 
 covery will be the complete disappearance of didactic 
 art. Didactic art is the invariable symptom of a 
 period of interrogation. The instinct to enjoy what 
 is beautiful is for the moment less imperative than 
 the instinct to look for what is true. Art for its 
 own sake is a luxury the time cannot afford. The 
 problems of existence are too instant. The spiritual 
 energies of sensitive and thinking men are devoted 
 to the work of readjustment, of fixing anew the 
 principles of conduct. They seize upon the theatre 
 and the press, not as artists to turn to forms of 
 beauty the simple and sure things of life, but to 
 rediscover what is simple and what is sure. They 
 are less artists than men who quarry the material of 
 which art will in future be made. Yesterday and 
 to-day, the philosopher, the publicist, the politician, 
 the economist, the preacher — these usurp the instru- 
 ments and forms of the artist. Their generation is 
 passing, and the artists of the future will inherit 
 their labours, building the palace of art upon the 
 laws of society restored, the principles of morality 
 reaffirmed, the dogmas of religion reframed. Till
 
 igo THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 this be accomplished neither the work of the world, 
 nor the art of the world, can come to the fulness of 
 power. For this is the end and sanction of authority 
 — authority which declares what is true for all 
 men, for ever reasserting the law and the prophets to 
 fit the running years— that the generations, resting 
 in authority, may build happy houses for their 
 common needs, and beautiful temples. Not till 
 religion is refashioned, not till the gods are set 
 again on high, will the temples of our art of the 
 future be raised. Not till the national conscience is 
 again single and at rest shall we recover the capacity 
 to build great art upon the struggle of human wil- 
 fulness with human will ; of the tragic protagonist 
 ensuing the evil that he knows ; of the passionate 
 hero in conflict with the irremovable laws of his 
 time and fate. The didactic art of to-day is 
 seeking to descry the banners by whose inspiration 
 our heroes of to-morrow will ride forward to the 
 test. 
 
 Dramatic art of the future will, in a word, be 
 catholic art. It will be universal in appeal and based 
 upon authority. It will beautifully express what is 
 common to all men — the common bond of a code 
 new fitted to the time. Art will no more be the 
 arrogated privilege of a minority of hard-thinking 
 pioneers, of men who in the light of common reason 
 are seeking restlessly to destroy or frantically to 
 recover shibboleths for the general case. The period 
 of these men is passing even now in the dawn of 
 a catholic renaissance. With this renaissance will
 
 THE FUTURE OE ENGLISH DRAMA 191 
 
 come a new delight and wonder in the procession of 
 hfe. To-day may be figured as a crowd of which 
 each unit is lost among his fellows. In confusion and 
 great loneliness the artist retires within himself ; 
 and, in a frenzy of introspection, discovers, proclaims 
 and values that which marks him out — saves, as it 
 were, his spiritual identity — from the unintelligible 
 throng. We see collected apart, in this corner or 
 that, small knots of men of the same habit and 
 conversation among themselves, but proud of their 
 distinction from the vulgar. Some are devising a 
 new religion ; others are drawing the foundations 
 of a new state ; all are agreed that the bonds are 
 broken which once made of the mob that surges 
 about them a people and a congregation. The great 
 romantic revival of English drama will be due when 
 this distracted crowd ' faUs in ' to a mightier music ; 
 obeys a more glorious discipline ; marches to a 
 greater purpose than is dreamed of to-day b}/ militant 
 soldiers of the ]\Iarseillaise. This dramatic art of 
 the future will restore the touch of nature which 
 makes the whole world kin ; insisting upon the 
 strife, the passion, the power and the glory of life 
 upon solid earth, beneath the discii)linc of whatever 
 gods there be restored. When the gods are con- 
 spicuously in heaven, then man may at last send 
 forth Prometheus and watch his great adventure. 
 The lists are set, and the rules of the game are 
 plainly written. Great art has not to do with in- 
 genious sophistries confounding heaven and earth ; 
 but with the emotions of simple men whose gods are
 
 192 THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 
 
 visible and mighty till they are overthrown. Great 
 art makes no terms with cold philosophy. It is 
 not a hard saying to be interpreted by wise men. It 
 is the rhythm of the common tread of humanity — 
 forward into the future.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Achilles, 6i. 
 
 Actor-manager, 19-29. 
 
 /Eschylus, 127. 
 
 Ainley, Henry, 44. 
 
 Alcestis, 144. 
 
 Aldbourne, 170, 172. 
 
 Alexander, Sir George, 2, 6, 9, 
 
 109, 155, 166. 
 Alexander, J. \V., So. 
 Apron, stage, 68, 72. 
 Archer, William, 94, 97. 
 Aristotle, xi. 
 Arms and the A/a>t, 176. 
 Arthur, King, 186. 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 130. 
 
 Ballet, 2. 
 
 Bancrofts, the, 104. 
 
 Barker, Granville, Dedication, 2, 
 6, II, 25, 34, 35, 44, 46, 53, 
 59, 60, 66, 71, 72, 77, 90, 98, 
 lOl, 103, 144, 148-9, 175. 
 
 Barrie, Sir James, 7, 108, 155, 
 164. 
 
 Beerbohm, Max, 7. 
 
 Beethoven, L. von, 47, 80, 125. 
 
 Beggar's Opera, The, 104. 
 
 Bennett, Arnold, 127, 161, 163, 
 183, 187. 
 
 Bergson, Henri, 187. 
 
 Betterton, T., 85. 
 
 Bjornson, B., 97. 
 
 Blood of the Innocent, The, 85. 
 
 Bluntschli, 141. 
 
 Borridge, Ethel, 147. 
 
 Bottom, 30, 116. 
 
 Boucicault, Dion, 53. 
 
 Bourchier, Arthur, 37, 155, 167. 
 
 13 
 
 Buckingham, Duke of, 124. 
 Bunty Pulls the Strings, 35. 
 Burbage, Cuthbert, 2, 69, 85. 
 
 Candida, 80. 
 
 Carton, Sydney, 155. 
 
 Caste, 103. 
 
 Censor, 92 and note, 102. See also 
 
 Chamberlain, the Lord. 
 Chamberlain, the Lord, 5, 92-1 1 1. 
 
 See also Censor. 
 Charles ll., 124. 
 Charley s Aunt, 81. 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 92. 
 Coliseum, the, 3, 171. 
 Collier, Jeremy, 124. 
 Comedy Theatre, 36. 
 Congreve, W., 36, 41, 67, 129. 
 Corneille, P., 121, 125. 
 Covent Garden Theatre, 3. 
 Craig, Gordon, 45, 58, 59, 125. 
 Critics, Dramatic, 18-29. 
 Crummies, 85. 
 Cymbeline, 114. 
 
 Daly's Theatre, 12. 
 
 Davies, Hubert Henry, 155, 164. 
 
 Deirdre, II 4. 
 
 Disraeli, B., 94. 
 
 Doctor'' s Dilemma, The, 143. 
 
 Doirs House, A, 100, 102, 105. 
 
 Dorchester, 170. 
 
 Drama, 45. 
 
 Dramatic sequels, 144. 
 
 Drey, Raymond, iiS n. 
 
 Drury Lane, 13, 72. 
 
 Du Maurier, Gerald, 155. 
 
 Duke's House Theatre, 85.
 
 194 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Eadie, Denis, 35, 77. 
 Eldest Son, The, 151. 
 Electric theatre. See Kinemato- 
 
 graph. 
 Etherege, Sir G., 65, 129, 159. 
 Euripides, 83. 
 
 Falstaff, 84. 
 Farquhar, G., 2, 129. 
 Fielding, Henry, 93. 
 Forbes-Robertson, Sir Johnston, 
 
 72. 
 French, Messrs. Samuel, 106. 
 Frohmann, D., 79. 
 
 Gaelic League, 169. 
 Gaiety, the, 12, 13. 
 Galsworthy, John, 39, 71, 83, 113, 
 
 132, 144, 149-52, 158, 176, 
 
 178, 183. 
 Garrick Theatre, 37. 
 Gay, J., 104. 
 George, St., 186. 
 Getting Married, 1 43. 
 Ghosts, 100, 102. 
 Gilbert, Sir William, 104. 
 Gissing, George, 127. 
 Globe Theatre, 85. 
 Gogol, M., 97. 
 Goldsmith, O., 159. 
 Goodfelloiv, Robin, 144. 
 Gorki, M., 97, 127, 128, 148. 
 Great Advetitttre, The, 35, 163. 
 Griffith, Ellis, 90. 
 Grundy, Sydney, 149. 
 Guinevere, 186. 
 
 Hamlet, 72, 84, 144. 
 
 Hankin, St. John, 69, 103, 105, 
 
 132, 144-8, 150, 159. 
 Hardy, Thomas, 98, 1 70. 
 Harrison, Frederick, 36. 
 Harvey, Martin, 44. 
 Hauptmann, G., 97. 
 Haymarket, 36. 
 Henley, \V. E., Margaritce Sorori , 
 
 58. 
 Htndle Wakes, 36. 
 His Majesty's, 13, 59, 61, 149. 
 
 Horniman, Miss, 36. 
 
 Hotspur, 84. 
 
 Houghton, Stanley, 36, 155, 161, 
 
 183. 
 How He Lied to Her Husband, 
 
 139-141. 
 Hugo, Victor, 121. 
 Huxley, T. H., 184. 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik, 40, 65, 97, 102, 
 
 104, 116, 125, 126, 127, 128, 
 130, 148, 156, 179, 183. 
 
 " Idealism," 113, etc. 
 Importance of Being Earnest, The, 
 
 105, 163, 167. 
 Incorporated Stage Society, 40. 
 Inheritance, 176. 
 
 Irish National Theatre, 167-72. 
 Irving, Ethel, 13. 
 Irving, Sir Henry, 181. 
 
 Jackson, Eustace, 146. 
 
 Joint Select Committee (1909), 94, 
 
 99. 
 Jones, Henry Arthur, 7, 155, 
 
 164. 
 Jonson, Ben, 159. 
 Judith, loi. 
 Justice, 71. 
 
 Kinematograph, 2, 13, 16. 
 King Lear, 58. 
 King's House The.itre, 85. 
 Kingsway, the, 3, 151. 
 Knox, John, 144. 
 
 Lady Frederick, 163. 
 Lancelot, 186. 
 Leicester, Lord, 2. 
 Lyltelton, Dr., 15. 
 Lytton, Lord, 183. 
 
 Macbeth, 50. 
 
 MacEvoy, Charles, 170, 172. 
 Macready, W. C, 2, 66. 
 Madras House, The, 71, 1 76. 
 Maeterlinck, M., loi. 
 Magistrate, The, 156. 
 Man and Superman, 163.
 
 INDEX 
 
 195 
 
 Man of Honour, The, 163. 
 Manchester Playgoer, 118, 1 18 n. 
 Marrying of Anne Leete, The, 
 
 175. 176, 177. 178, 180. 
 Marx, Karl, 143. 
 Mask, The, 119. 
 Masque or pageant, 167, 172. 
 Maude, Cyril, 36, 155. 
 Maugham, Somerset, 155, 163. 
 Measure for Measure, lOI. 
 Mid-Channel, 157. 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 61. 
 Milestones, 35, 77. 
 Mind (he Paint Girl, 1 57. 
 Mozart, W. A., 49. 
 A/rs. [barren's Profession, 98, 142. 
 Murder of Alice, The, 85. 
 Musical comedy, 2, 12. 
 Music-hall, 2, 4, 6. 
 
 National Memorial Theatre, 25, 
 35, 62, 63, 70, 71, 75, 87, 90, 
 no, 132, 175. 
 
 National Shakespeare Memorial 
 Theatre. See National Memorial 
 Theatre. 
 
 National State Theatre. See Na- 
 tional Memorial Theatre. 
 
 "Naturalism," 113, etc. 
 
 Naturalism, method of, 65-66, 
 112 seq. 
 
 New Royalty, 77. 
 
 Nicklcby, Nicholas, 85. 
 
 Nietzsche, F., 143. 
 
 Nora Helmer, 176. 
 
 Gidipus Rex, 44. 
 
 " Oncomers," the, 40. 
 
 Pageant or masque, 167. 
 
 Palace Theatre, 5, 7, 9. 
 
 Palace of Variety. See Music-hall. 
 
 Pater, Walter, 143. 
 
 Patience, 104. 
 
 Paula Tanqueray, 158. 
 
 Peasehlossom, Master, 30, 34, 38, 
 
 41. 
 Peel, Sir R., 94. 
 Perdita, 178. 
 
 Perplexed Husband, The, 163. 
 
 Pheidias, 47. 
 
 Piiillpotts, Eden, 101. 
 
 Picture Palace. See also Kime- 
 
 matograph. 
 Finero, Sir Arthur, 108, 155, 
 
 156. 
 " Pioneers," the, 40. 
 Playhouse, 36. 
 Poel, William, 61, 149. 
 Preserving Mr. Panmure, 1 57. 
 Producer, the, 43-56. 
 Production, 43-56. 
 Published plays, 106. 
 Purcell, 11., 48, 52. 
 
 Rabelais, F., 154. 
 
 Racine, J., 115, 126, 127. 
 
 Rag-Time- Hand, 80. 
 
 Ramsden, Roebuck, 84. 
 
 Raphael, 47, 51. 
 
 " Realism," 113, 115. 
 
 Redford, G. A., 14. 
 
 Rehearsal, The, 124. 
 
 Reinhardt, Professor M., 7, u, 
 
 44, 60, 61. 
 Repertory players, 36. 
 Repertory system, 75. 
 Return of the Prodigal, 1 46. 
 Robertson, Tom, 103, 156. 
 "Romanticism," 113. 
 Rothenstein, W., 60. 
 Rousseau, J. J., 184. 
 Rutherford and Son, 35. 
 
 St. James' Theatre, 7, 109, 149. 
 Sardou, V., 156, 157. 
 Sartorious, Blanche, 137. 
 Saturday Reviexv, The, I20. 
 Schnitzler, Arthur, 7, II, 158. 
 Schoolmistress, The, 156. 
 Schopenhauer, A., 143. 
 Second Mrs. Tanqueray, 144, 
 
 156, 163. 
 Shakespeare, William, 2, 13, 25, 
 
 30, 39, 41, 44, 47, 4S, 50. 59. 
 
 60, 61, 69, 71, 72, 83, 98, lOI, 
 
 113, 115, 116, 120, 122, 127, 
 
 129, 177.
 
 196 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Shaw, George Bernard, 7, 15, 34, 
 39, 80, 90, 97, loi, 103, 106, 
 116, 120, 123, 129, 132-54, 
 156, 159. 176, 181, 182, 
 188. 
 
 Sheridan, R. B., 159, 181. 
 
 Siddons, Mrs., 66. 
 
 Silver Box, The, 114, 176. 
 
 " Sketches," i. 
 
 Society, 103, 104. 
 
 Socrates, 132. 
 
 Sophocles, 44, 61. 
 
 Stage, Shakespearean, 63-64. 
 
 Stage Society, 36, 122. 
 
 Stern, Herr, 58. 
 
 .Stock company, 84. 
 
 Strindberg, August, 25, 40, 97, 
 98, 123, 1S6. 
 
 SuUivan, Sir A. S., 104. 
 
 Sutro, Alfred, 161, 163. 
 
 Sweet Lavender, 156, 158. 
 
 Synge, John M., 50, 83, 168. 
 
 *' System," ix. 
 
 Tanner, John, 84, 1 16. 
 Tchekoff, Anton, 40, 97, 98, 123, 
 
 127, 130. 
 Theatre, English, defined, i. 
 Thersites, 61. 
 Thomas, Brandon, 30. 
 Tintoretto, 47. 
 Tit a Ilia, 1 16. 
 Tivoli, the, 5. 
 Tolstoi, L., 97, 128, 143. 
 
 Tree, Sir Herbert, 2, 6, 19, 59, 
 
 62, 69, 109. 
 Trench, Harry, 142. 
 Troilus and Cressida, 61. 
 Trust the People, 37. 
 "Turns," i. 
 Twelfth AHght, 44, 72. 
 
 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 144. 
 Vaudeville, 16. 
 Vedrenne, J. E. , 34. 
 
 Verreker, 147. 
 
 Via Media, 27. 
 
 Voysey Inheritance, The, 178, 
 180. 
 
 Wagner, Richard, 46. 
 Walkley, A. B., 97. 
 Walpole, H., 92. 
 
 Waste, 98, 176. 
 Wedekind, F., 97. 
 
 IVhitefield, Anne, 116, 137. 
 
 Winter'' s Tale, The, 60. 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, 103, 105, 106, 143, 
 
 153. 159, 181. 
 Wilkinson, Norman, 17S. 
 Wills, W. H., 183. 
 Wycherley, William, 153. 
 
 Yeats, W. B., 113, 114, 169, 
 
 170. 
 Youttger Generation, The, 36. 
 
 Zola, E., 130. 
 
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