ouches nearly
all social problems. But the great play does this by indirection.
Every beautiful thought is a teacher; every noble line speaks to
the brain and heart. Beauty, proportion, melody suggest moral
beauty, proportion in conduct and melody in life. In a great play
the relations of the various characters, their objects, the means
adopted for their accomplishment, must suggest, and in a certain
sense solve or throw light on many social problems, so that the
drama teaches lessons, discusses social problems and gives intellectual
pleasure.

The stage should not be dogmatic; neither should its object be
directly to enforce a moral. The great thing for the drama to do,
and the great thing it has done, and is doing, is to cultivate the
imagination. This is of the utmost importance. The civilization
of man depends upon the development, not only of the intellect,
but of the imagination. Most crimes of violence are committed by
people who are destitute of imagination. People without imagination
make most of the cruel and infamous creeds. They were the persecutors
and destroyers of their fellow-men. By cultivating the imagination,
the stage becomes one of the greatest teachers. It produces the
climate in which the better feelings grow; it is the home of the
ideal. All beautiful things tend to the civilization of man. The
great statues plead for proportion in life, the great symphonies
suggest the melody of conduct, and the great plays cultivate the
heart and brain.

_Question_. What do you think of the French drama as compared with
the English, morally and artistically considered?

_Answer_. The modern French drama, so far as I am acquainted with
it, is a disease. It deals with the abnormal. It is fashioned
after Balzac. It exhibits moral tumors, mental cancers and all
kinds of abnormal fungi,--excrescences. Everything is stood on
its head; virtue lives in the brothel; the good are the really bad
and the worst are, after all, the best. It portrays the exceptional,
and mistakes the scum-covered bayou for the great river. The French
dramatists seem to think that the ceremony of marriage sows the
seed of vice. They are always conveying the idea that the virtuous
are uninteresting, rather stupid, without sense and spirit enough
to take advantage of their privilege. Between the greatest French
plays and the greatest English plays of course there is no comparison.
If a Frenchman had written the plays