tism,
feels already to be safely true.

And if _The Servant In the House_ will--as I believe--outlive _The Witching
Hour_, it will be mainly because, in the author's theme and his ideas, it
is older by many, many centuries. The theme of Mr. Thomas's play--namely,
that thought is in itself a dynamic force and has the virtue and to some
extent the power of action--is, as I have just explained, not novel, but is
at least recent in the history of thinking. It is a theme which dates
itself as belonging to the present generation, and is likely to lose
interest for the next. But Mr. Kennedy's theme--namely, that when
discordant human beings ascend to meet each other in the spirit of
brotherly love, it may truly be said that God is resident among them--is at
least as old as the gentle-hearted Galilean, and, being dateless, belongs
to future generations as well as to the present. Mr. Thomas has been
skilfully resumptive of a passing period of popular thought; but Mr.
Kennedy has been resumptive on a larger scale, and has built his play upon
the wisdom of the centuries. Paradoxical as it may seem, the very reason
why _The Servant in the House_ struck so many critics as being strange and
new is that, in its thesis and its thought, it is as old as the world.

The truth of this point seems to me indisputable. I know that the best
European playwrights of the present day are striving to use the drama as a
vehicle for the expression of advanced ideas, especially in regard to
social ethics; but in doing this, I think, they are mistaking the scope of
the theatre. They are striving to say in the drama what might be said
better in the essay or the novel. As the exposition of a theory, Mr. Shaw's
_Man and Superman_ is not nearly so effective as the writings of
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, from whom the playwright borrowed his ideas.
The greatest works of Ibsen can be appreciated only by the cultured
individual and not by the uncultured crowd. That is why the breadth of his
appeal will never equal that of Shakespeare, in spite of his unfathomable
intellect and his perfect mastery of the technique of his art. Only his
more commonplace plays--_A Doll's House_, for example--have attained a wide
success. And a wide success is a thing to be desired for other than
material reasons. Surely it is a good thing for the public that _Hamlet_
never fails.

The conservatism of the greatest dramatists asserts itself not only in
their thoughts but even in