see the writers are people without any gift at all for
writing--for writing anything--but are ordinary commonplace people who,
unless their conversation is more brilliant than their written matter,
would not be considered clever by their friends in everyday life.

They write farces or comedies, in an orthodox form, which contain a
surprisingly small number of jokes or efforts at wit and humour. Their
works have the air of being mere preliminary plays--the playwrights
apparently have set out scenes and written dialogue intended to indicate
the nature of the proposed piece with the view afterwards not, indeed
of polishing, for there is nothing to polish, but of rewriting, putting
in the vital passages during the process. One cannot offer any useful
advice to these people, save that of suggesting they should turn their
attention to gardening or golf. They have only one fault, and it is that
they have no quality. Such writers, as a rule, have at least one small
quite useless virtue--their pieces are not ridiculously unsuitable in
point of form for the stage.

A more interesting class consists of authors who possess some talent and
no idea how to use it. They write comedies which have some clever
passages, some lines witty enough to deserve a laugh, and exhibit
capacity in character-drawing, but are not at all in an acceptable form.
A comedy in six acts, with twenty scenes, would not be considered for a
moment by a modern manager.

We have returned in a curious way to something like the ideas underlying
"the unities"; perhaps that statement is incorrect, but, at least, we
have put upon our dramatists certain working laws almost as embarrassing
as the unities. The average playgoer has no idea of the skill involved
in writing the ordinary successful comedy of the present time.

The modern dramatist has nothing approaching the licence of his
predecessors. Construction was comparatively easy in the time of a
Sheridan or a Goldsmith; not only were they allowed to use explanatory
dialogue, in which A told B a number of things which B knew already,
because the author desired the audience to learn them; but they were
permitted to give direct statements of fact in soliloquies. Such licence
has gone: asides are dead, statements of fact in soliloquies are only
permitted in formal tragedies. Moreover, having the right to make almost
an unlimited number of changes of scenery, they were enabled to present
in action the facts which in o