tion of sex motives, there has sprung up a
younger school which has striven to introduce more varied subject-matter
and a broader view, also greater truth and subtler methods in
play-making. Here belong Granville Barker, with his _Voysey Inheritance_
(his best piece), noteworthy also as actor-manager and producer; the
novelists, Galsworthy and Bennett; and Masefield, whose _Tragedy of Nan_
contains imaginative poetry mingled with melodrama; and still later
figures, conspicuous among them the late Stanley Houghton, whose _Hindle
Wakes_ won critical and popular praise; others being McDonald Hastings
with _The New Sin_; Githa Sowerby, author of the grim, effective play,
_Rutherford and Son_; Elizabeth Baker, with _Chains_ to her credit;
Wilfred Gibson, who writes brief poignant studies of east London in
verse that in form is daringly realistic; Cosmo Hamilton, who made us
think in his attractive _The Blindness of Virtue_; and J. O. Francis,
whose Welsh play, _Change_, was recognized as doing for that country the
same service as the group led by Yeats and Synge has performed for
Ireland.

A later Synge seems to have arisen in Lord Dunsany, whose dramas in book
form have challenged admiration; and since his early death St. John
Hankin's dramatic work is coming into importance as a masterly
contribution to light comedy, the sort of drama that, after the Wilde
fashion, laughs at folly, satirizes weakness, refrains from taking
sides, and never forgets that the theater should offer amusement.

Of all these playwrights, rising or risen, who have got a hearing after
the veterans first mentioned, Galsworthy seems most significant for the
profound social earnestness of his thought, the great dignity of his art
and the fact that he rarely fails to respect the stage demand for
objective interest and story appeal. Some of these new dramatists go too
far in rejecting almost scornfully the legitimate theater mood of
amusement and the necessity of a method differing from the more analytic
way of fiction. Mr. Galsworthy, however, though severe to austerity in
his conceptions and nothing if not serious in treatment, certainly puts
upon us something of the compelling grip of the true dramatist in such
plays as _The Silver Box_, _Strife_ and, strongest of them all and one
of the finest examples of modern tragedy, Justice, where the themes are
so handled as to increase their intrinsic value. This able and
high-aiming novelist, when he turns t