f dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must
accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people
whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage
laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the
tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful,
we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the
sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is
why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the
countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness
to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and
Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress.
The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental
relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made
love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married
or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console
ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our
starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the lady because
she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with all
its preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual interest, good
looks are more desired than histrionic skill.

Let me press this point on you, since you are too clever to raise the
fool's cry of paradox whenever I take hold of a stick by the right
instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with
the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those
who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their
discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at
social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless?
What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past
occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the
relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or
marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which
discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and
convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they
are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about
the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the
relations between both and our courts of law and p