akening of mind; we sit and stare over the footlights with a
brain that remains blank and unpopulated; we do not create within our souls
that real play for which the actual is only the occasion; and since we
remain empty of imagination, we find it impossible to enjoy _ourselves_.
Our feeling in regard to a bad play might be phrased in the familiar
sentence,--"This is all very well; but what is it _to me_?" The piece
leaves us unresponsive and aloof; we miss that answering and _tallying_ of
mind--to use Whitman's word--which is the soul of all experience of worthy
art. But a good play helps us to enjoy ourselves by making us aware of
ourselves; it forces us to think and feel. We may think differently from
the dramatist, or feel emotions quite dissimilar from those of the imagined
people of the story; but, at any rate, our minds are consciously aroused,
and the period of our attendance at the play becomes for us a period of
real experience. The only thing, then, that counts in theatre-going is not
what the play can give us, but what we can give the play. The enjoyment of
the drama is subjective, and the province of the dramatist is merely to
appeal to the subtle sense of life that is latent in ourselves.

There are, in the main, two ways in which this appeal may be made
effectively. The first is by imitation of what we have already seen around
us; and the second is by suggestion of what we have already experienced
within us. We have seen people who were like Hedda Gabler; we have been
people who were like Hamlet. The drama of facts stimulates us like our
daily intercourse with the environing world; the drama of ideas stimulates
us like our mystic midnight hours of solitary musing. Of the drama of
imitation we demand that it shall remain appreciably within the limits of
our own actual observation; it must deal with our own country and our own
time, and must remind us of our daily inference from the affairs we see
busy all about us. The drama of facts cannot be transplanted; it cannot be
made in France or Germany and remade in America; it is localised in place
and time, and has no potency beyond the bounds of its locality. But the
drama of suggestion is unlimited in its possibilities of appeal; ideas are
without date, and burst the bonds of locality and language. Americans may
see the ancient Greek drama of _Oedipus King_ played in modern French by
Mounet-Sully, and may experience thereby that inner overwhelming sense of
the