have ever given it.

The trouble with most of the dreamers who league themselves for the
uplifting of the stage is that they consider the theatre with an illogical
solemnity. They base their efforts on the proposition that a theatre
audience ought to want to be edified. As a matter of fact, no audience ever
does. Moliere and Shakespeare, who knew the limits of their art, never said
a word about uplifting the stage. They wrote plays to please the crowd; and
if, through their inherent greatness, they became teachers as well as
entertainers, they did so without any tall talk about the solemnity of
their mission. Their audiences learned largely, but they did so
unawares,--God being with them when they knew it not. The demand for an
endowed theatre in America comes chiefly from those who believe that a
great play cannot earn its own living. Yet _Hamlet_ has made more money
than any other play in English; _The School for Scandal_ never fails to
draw; and in our own day we have seen _Cyrano de Bergerac_ coining money
all around the world. There were not any endowed theatres in Elizabethan
London. Give the crowd the sort of plays it wants, and you will not have to
seek beneficence to keep your theatre floating. But, on the other hand, no
endowed theatre will ever lure the crowd to listen to the sort of plays it
does not want. There is a wise maxim appended to one of Mr. George Ade's
_Fables in Slang_: "In uplifting, get underneath." If the theatre in
America is weak, what it needs is not endowment: it needs great and popular
plays. Why should we waste our money and our energy trying to make the
crowd come to see _The Master Builder_, or _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, or
_The Hour Glass_, or _Pelleas and Melisande_? It is willing enough to come
without urging to see _Othello_ and _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. Give us
one great dramatist who understands the crowd, and we shall not have to
form societies to propagate his art. Let us cease our prattle of the
theatre for the few. Any play that is really great as drama will interest
the many.

IV

One point remains to be considered. In any theatre audience there are
certain individuals who do not belong to the crowd. They are in it, but not
of it; for they fail to merge their individual self-consciousness in the
general self-consciousness of the multitude. Such are the professional
critics, and other confirmed frequenters of the theatre. It is not for them
primarily that plays are w