adly printed
and cheaply bound, which did not make the literary appeal at all. Where
to-day our leading dramatists publish their work as a matter of course,
offering it as they would fiction or any other form of literature, the
reading public of the middle century neither expected nor received plays
as part of their mental pabulum, and an element in the contemporary
letters. The drama had not only ceased to be a recognized section of
current literature, but was also no longer an expression of national
life. The first faint gleam of better things came when T. W. Robertson's
genteel light comedies began to be produced at the Court Theater in
1868. As we read or see _Caste_ or _Society_ to-day they seem somewhat
flimsy material, to speak the truth; and their technic, after the rapid
development of a generation, has a mechanical creak for trained ears.
But we must take them at the psychologic moment of their appearance, and
recognize that they were a very great advance on what had gone before.
They brought contemporary social life upon the stage as did Congreve in
1680, Sheridan in 1765; and they made that life interesting to large
numbers of theater-goers who hitherto had abstained from play acting.
And so _Caste_ and its companion plays, of which it is the best, drew
crowded houses and the stage became once more an amusement to reckon
with in polite circles. The royal box was once more occupied, the
playhouse became fashionable, no longer quite negligible as a form of
art. To be sure, this was a town drama, and for the upper classes, as
was the Restoration Comedy and that of the eighteenth century. It was
not a people's theater, the Theater Robertson, but it had the prime
merit of a more truthful representation of certain phases of the life of
its day. And hence Robertson will always be treated as a figure of some
historical importance in the British drama, though not a great
dramatist.

In the eighteen eighties another influence began to be felt, that of
Ibsen. The great dramatist from the North was made known to English
readers by the criticism and translations of Gosse and Archer; and
versions of his plays were given, tentatively and occasionally, in
England, as in other lands. Thus readers and audiences alike gradually
came to get a sense of a new force in the theater: an uncompromisingly
truthful, stern portrayal of modern social conditions, the story told
with consummate craftsmanship, and the national note sounding