nal and intellectual equipment necessary to the sort of audience best
fitted to appreciate that theme. Thereafter, if he build and write for that
audience and that alone, and if he do his work sufficiently well, he may be
almost certain that his play will attract the sort of audience he has
demanded; for any good play can create its own public by the natural
process of selecting from the whole vast theatre-going population the kind
of auditors it needs. That problem of the dramatist to please his public
reduces itself, therefore, to two very simple phases: first, to choose the
sort of public that he wants to please, and second, to direct his appeal to
the mental make-up of the audience which he himself has chosen. This task,
instead of hampering the dramatist, should serve really to assist him,
because it requires a certain concentration of purpose and consistency of
mood throughout his work.

This concentration and consistency of purpose and of mood may be symbolised
by the figure of aiming straight at a predetermined target. In the years
when firearms were less perfected than they are at present, it was
necessary, in shooting with a rifle, to aim lower than the mark, in order
to allow for an upward kick at the discharge; and, on the other hand, it
was necessary, in shooting with heavy ordnance, to aim higher than the
mark, in order to allow for a parabolic droop of the cannon-ball in
transit. Many dramatists, in their endeavor to score a hit, still employ
these compromising tricks of marksmanship: some aim lower than the judgment
of their auditors, others aim higher than their taste. But, in view of the
fact that under present metropolitan conditions the dramatist may pick his
own auditors, this aiming below them or above them seems (to quote Sir
Thomas Browne) "a vanity out of date and superannuated piece of folly."
While granting the dramatist entire liberty to select the level of his
mark, the critic may justly demand that he shall aim directly at it,
without allowing his hand ever to droop down or flutter upward. That he
should not aim below it is self-evident: there can be no possible excuse
for making the judicious grieve. But that he should not aim above it is a
proposition less likely to be accepted off-hand by the fastidious: Hamlet
spoke with a regretful fondness of that particular play which had proved
caviare to the general. It is, of course, nobler to shoot over the mark
than to shoot under it; but it is no