that while
amusing ministers to the mind and emotions of the hearers in a way to
give profit with the pleasure. Catholic in his view, he will just as
warmly welcome a people's theater in South Boston or on the East Side in
New York, or at Hull House in Chicago, as he will a New Theater in upper
New York, or a Fine Arts Theater in Chicago, or a Toy Theater in Boston;
believing that since the playhouse is in essence and by the nature of
its appeal democratic, it must neglect no class of society in its
service. He will prick up his ears and become alert in hearing of the
Minnesota experiment, where a rural play, written by a member of the
agricultural school, was given under university auspices fifty times in
one season, throughout the state. He will rejoice at the action of
Dartmouth College in accepting a $100,000 bequest for the erection and
conductment of a theater in the college community and serving the
interests of both academic and town life. And he will also be glad to
note that the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, has
initiated a School of Drama as an organic part of the educational life.
He will see in such things a recognition among educators that the
theater should be related to educational life. And, musing happily upon
such matters, it will come to him again and again that it is rational to
strive for a people's price for a people's entertainment, instead of a
price for the best offerings prohibitive to four-fifths of all
Americans. And in this fact he will see the explanation for the enormous
growth of the moving picture type of amusement, realizing it to be
inevitable under present conditions, because a form of entertainment
popular in price as well as in nature, and hence populously frequented.
And so our theater-goer, who has now so long listened with at least
hypothetic patience to exposition and argument, will be willing, indeed,
will wish, as part of his watchful canniness with respect to the plays
he sees and reads, to judge the playwright, among other things,
according to his interpretation of life; and especially the modern
social life of his own day and country.

I have already spoken of the need to have an idea in drama; a
centralizing opinion about life or a personal reaction to it--something
quite distinct from the thesis or propaganda which might change a work
of art into a dissertation. Let it now be added that, other things being
equal, a play to-day will represent its time