er artist. He cannot confine his
message to any single caste of society. In the same single work of art he
must incorporate elements that will interest all classes of humankind.

Those promising dramatic movements that have confined their appeal to a
certain single stratum of society have failed ever, because of this, to
achieve the highest excellence. The trouble with Roman comedy is that it
was written for an audience composed chiefly of freedmen and slaves. The
patrician caste of Rome walked wide of the theatres. Only the dregs of
society gathered to applaud the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Hence the
oversimplicity of their prologues, and their tedious repetition of the
obvious. Hence, also, their vulgarity, their horse-play, their obscenity.
Here was fine dramatic genius led astray, because the time was out of
joint. Similarly, the trouble with French tragedy, in the classicist period
of Corneille and Racine, is that it was written only for the finest caste
of society,--the patrician coterie of a patrician cardinal. Hence its
over-niceness, and its appeal to the ear rather than to the eye. Terence
aimed too low and Racine aimed too high. Each of them, therefore, shot wide
of the mark; while Moliere, who wrote at once for patrician and plebeian,
scored a hit.

The really great dramatic movements of the world--that of Spain in the age
of Calderon and Lope, that of England in the spacious times of great
Elizabeth, that of France from 1830 to the present hour--have broadened
their appeal to every class. The queen and the orange-girl joyed together
in the healthiness of Rosalind; the king and the gamin laughed together at
the rogueries of Scapin. The breadth of Shakespeare's appeal remains one of
the most significant facts in the history of the drama. Tell a filthy-faced
urchin of the gutter that you know about a play that shows a ghost that
stalks and talks at midnight underneath a castle-tower, and a man that
makes believe he is out of his head so that he can get the better of a
wicked king, and a girl that goes mad and drowns herself, and a play within
the play, and a funeral in a churchyard, and a duel with poisoned swords,
and a great scene at the end in which nearly every one gets killed: tell
him this, and watch his eyes grow wide! I have been to a thirty-cent
performance of _Othello_ in a middle-western town, and have felt the
audience thrill with the headlong hurry of the action. Yet these are the
plays that