this. They have
not written plays. It is to these men,--the philosopher, the essayist, the
novelist, the lyric poet,--that each of us turns for what is new in
thought. But from the dramatist the crowd desires only the old, old
thought. It has no patience for consideration; it will listen only to what
it knows already. If, therefore, a great man has a new doctrine to expound,
let him set it forth in a book of essays; or, if he needs must sugar-coat
it with a story, let him expound it in a novel, whose appeal will be to the
individual mind. Not until a doctrine is old enough to have become
generally accepted is it ripe for exploitation in the theatre.

This point is admirably illustrated by two of the best and most successful
plays of recent seasons. _The Witching Hour_, by Mr. Augustus Thomas, and
_The Servant in the House_, by Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy, were both praised
by many critics for their "novelty"; but to me one of the most significant
and instructive facts about them is that neither of them was, in any real
respect, novel in the least. Consider for a moment the deliberate and
careful lack of novelty in the ideas which Mr. Thomas so skilfully set
forth. What Mr. Thomas really did was to gather and arrange as many as
possible of the popularly current thoughts concerning telepathy and cognate
subjects, and to tell the public what they themselves had been wondering
about and thinking during the last few years. The timeliness of the play
lay in the fact that it was produced late enough in the history of its
subject to be selectively resumptive, and not nearly so much in the fact
that it was produced early enough to forestall other dramatic presentations
of the same materials. Mr. Thomas has himself explained, in certain
semi-public conversations, that he postponed the composition of this
play--on which his mind had been set for many years--until the general
public had become sufficiently accustomed to the ideas which he intended to
set forth. Ten years before, this play would have been novel, and would
undoubtedly have failed. When it was produced, it was not novel, but
resumptive, in its thought; and therefore it succeeded. For one of the
surest ways of succeeding in the theatre is to sum up and present
dramatically all that the crowd has been thinking for some time concerning
any subject of importance. The dramatist should be the catholic collector
and wise interpreter of those ideas which the crowd, in its conserva