t what in the
long run would be one more blow to our staggering stage.

Anecdotal Plays

It appears that "Percival" of _The Referee_ has made a great discovery.
He has found out the reason why French plays are better than English, is
able to put his "finger on the real difference which exists between
French plays and English," he now knows why "many more plays are
successfully adapted from French into English than _vice versa_." This
sounded thrilling, but after finishing his article the reader was about
in the humour of a person who has been promised "an awfully rippin' new
story" and receives a feeble "chestnut."

Mr "Percival" is really like the American who discovered on going home
very late at night the fact that the sun rises in the east, and cackled
as much about his discovery as a hen over her first egg. His explanation
is that, "with one exception--Pinero--the English playwright invents a
plot and then writes in characters to carry that plot out. Your French
playwright does not do this.... He takes an idea and works it out with
dramatic action instead of taking a dramatic action and working it out
with such incident ideas as may happen along. And sometimes your French
dramatist just takes people with characteristics and lets them work
their own play out for him."

There is no need to seek deeply to find out why "many more plays are
successfully adopted from French into English than _vice versa_." The
explanation is that owing to Parisian prejudice hardly any English plays
of any merit, Shakespeare's excepted, have been adapted, and there is a
ferocious hostility in France to foreign drama.

The modern French drama may be better than the English; perhaps
"Percival" hardly asserts that it is, unless in the passage already
quoted and in this phrase: "There is something about three plays in four
in France which is lacking at home, and that something is something
good." No doubt, if we take the past fifty years as a basis for
comparison of the two dramas, the French is the better; but during the
last fifteen there has been a change, and one could not make any
sweeping assertion upon the subject as regards the plays of this period,
unless it be limited to the plays produced in the ordinary way of
theatrical commerce.

If the alleged superiority exists, one can offer two reasons for it
without relying upon the brilliant discovery of "Percival." The first is
the greater freedom of the French dramatist in choic