ays of him that he
introduced decency to the stage that afterward drove his own comedies
off it. A little after Congreve, the school, so to speak, for we have
nothing but the school, was so stupid that it brought forth no great
writers, and produced weak, sentimental plays. Then came Goldsmith,
who wrote "She Stoops to Conquer" actually as a protest against the
feeble sentimentality I have referred to. Richard Brinsley Sheridan
was made possible by Goldsmith. We went on after that with a school
of old comedies. When we speak of the "old comedies," I am not talking
about Beaumont and Fletcher, nor Wycherley, nor Vanbrugh, nor even
Congreve, but of the comedy of Goldsmith in the third quarter of the
eighteenth century down to Bulwer Lytton's "Money" and Boucicault's
"London Assurance," bringing us to about 1840. Then there swung a
school of what we call the palmy days of old comedy, and in the '40's
it dwindled to nothing, and England and America waited until the early
'60's. Then came Tom Robertson with his so-called "tea-cup and saucer"
school, which consisted of sententious dialogue, simple situations,
conventional characterizations, and threads of plots, until Pinero and
Jones put a stop to the Robertson fad.

This proves in my judgment that the school always starts by being
shown what the popular taste is, and follows that, until some
individual discovery that the popular taste is changed. The tendency
of the school is always to become academic and fixed in its ideas--it
is the individual who points to the necessary changes. Schools and
these special individuals are interdependent.

As to the present comedies in America: in the first place, it is
impossible as a rule to decide fully what are the tendencies of a
school when one is living in the midst of its activities. There is no
marked tendency now; and as far as I can see it is only the occasional
man who discovers the tendency of the times. Pinero undoubtedly saw
that the public was tired of the "tea-cup and saucer." Probably had he
not thought so, he would have gone on in that school.

Undoubtedly more plays are written to order than are written on the
mere impulse of authors, independently of popular demand. The "order"
play simply represents the popular demand as understood by managers,
and the meeting of that demand in each age produces the great mass
of any nation's drama. So far from lowering the standard of dramatic
writing, it is a necessary impulse in