rs is now in dramatic form: the play being the most notable
contribution, after the novel, of our time. Leading writers everywhere
are practical dramatists; men of letters, yet also men of the theater,
who write plays not only to be read but to be acted, and who have
conquered the difficult technic of the drama so as to kill two birds
with the one stone.

The student of historical drama will perceive that this welcome change
is but a return to earlier and better conditions when the mighty
play-makers of the past--Calderon, Moliere, Shakespeare and their
compeers--were also makers of literature which we still read with
delight. And, without referring to the past, a glance at foreign lands
will reveal the fact that other countries, if not our own, have always
recognized this cultural value of the stage and hence given the theater
importance in the civic or national life, often spending public moneys
for its maintenance and using it (often in close association with
music) as a central factor in national culture. The traveler to-day in
Germany, France, Russia and the Scandinavian lands cannot but be
impressed with this fact, and will bring home to America some suggestive
lessons for patriotic native appreciation. In the modern educational
scheme, then, room should be made for some training in intelligent
play-going. So far from there being anything Quixotic in the notion, all
the signs are in its favor. The feeling is spreading fast that school
and college must include theater culture in the curriculum and people at
large are seeking to know something of the significance of the theater
in its long evolution from its birth to the present, of the history of
the drama itself, of the nature of a play regarded as a work of art; of
the specific values, too, of the related art of the actor who alone
makes the drama vital; and of the relative excellencies, in the actual
playhouses of our time, of plays, players and playwrights; together with
some idea of the rapidly changing present-day conditions. Such changes
include the coming of the one-act play, the startling development of
the moving picture, the growth of the Little Theater, the rise of the
masque and pageant, and so on with other manifestations yet. Surely,
some knowledge in a field so broad and humanly appealing, both for
legitimate enjoyment of the individual and in view of his obligations to
fellow man, is of equal moment to a knowledge of the chemical effect of
hydrochl