produce fewer plays, and better ones. We
should seek by scientific investigation to determine just how many theatres
our cities can support, and how many weeks in the year they may
legitimately be expected to support them. Having thus determined the real
demand for plays that comes from the theatre-going population, the managers
should then bestir themselves to secure sufficient good plays to satisfy
that demand. That, surely, is the limit of sound and legitimate business.
The arbitrary creation of a further, false demand, and the feverish
grasping at a fictitious supply, are evidences of unsound economic methods,
which are certain, in the long run, to fail.

III

THE HAPPY ENDING IN THE THEATRE

The question whether or not a given play should have a so-called happy
ending is one that requires more thorough consideration than is usually
accorded to it. It is nearly always discussed from one point of view, and
one only,--that of the box-office; but the experience of ages goes to show
that it cannot rightly be decided, even as a matter of business expediency,
without being considered also from two other points of view,--that of art,
and that of human interest. For in the long run, the plays that pay the
best are those in which a self-respecting art is employed to satisfy the
human longing of the audience.

When we look at the matter from the point of view of art, we notice first
of all that in any question of an ending, whether happy or unhappy, art is
doomed to satisfy itself and is denied the recourse of an appeal to nature.
Life itself presents a continuous sequence of causation, stretching on; and
nature abhors an ending as it abhors a vacuum. If experience teaches us
anything at all, it teaches us that nothing in life is terminal, nothing
is conclusive. Marriage is not an end, as we presume in books; but rather a
beginning. Not even death is final. We find our graves not in the ground
but in the hearts of our survivors, and our slightest actions vibrate in
ever-widening circles through incalculable time. Any end, therefore, to a
novel or a play, must be in the nature of an artifice; and an ending must
be planned not in accordance with life, which is lawless and illogical, but
in accordance with art, whose soul is harmony. It must be a strictly
logical result of all that has preceded it. Having begun with a certain
intention, the true artist must complete his pattern, in accordance with
laws more rigid than