are discouraged I can only suggest a
course of reading in the lives of dramatists. I recall a few
offhand--Lessing, Moliere, Scribe, Wagner, Ibsen, these will suffice.
When did _they_ stop and fold their hands in despair? As for the
Elizabethan and Restoration playwrights, their facility of invention,
their exuberance under difficulties is devastating. That, however, is
not your problem. Your drama of to-day is an old bottle with no wine
in it. You fail because words have ceased to have any definite
meaning. The words in a man's mouth bear as little relation to his
emotions as the architecture of his house bears to his ideas. Words
like Love, God, Faith, and Soul are mere coloured balloons floating
about the modern West End stage. It is easy to be horrified at such a
view, but men like me, who deal with _things_, are not to be
humbugged. You put a man in a commonplace predicament, and you make
him say tragically, "The die is cast," or "I will see him hanged
first," or "All is over between us." That is not drama; it is
nonsense. Dies are rarely cast nowadays, public hangings have been
abolished, and salaries rule too low to risk breach of promise
actions. There's your dilemma. Write me a play in which every word is
_meant_--the drama will look after itself. But, if you will allow a
young man to suggest a point, I say that you are all working in the
dark; you are groping blindly forward when you might rejoice in the
sunlight. And now, with my colleagues as texts, I shall read a homily
on the conditions of modern dramatic art.

The division of biped mammalia into merely men and women is of
comparatively recent date. In very early times, however, when wisdom
was commoner than now, the classification began with gods and
goddesses, heroes, men and women, with lower types like fauns and
satyrs. I venture to think that this nomenclature might with advantage
be revived. From time to time, in the history of the human mind since
_Anno Domini_, one sees efforts to differentiate, generally with scant
success. The Roman Catholic Church, with her elaborate canonising
machinery, stands as the most prosperous example of this, though with
the vital fault of postponing the sanctifying till after death. She,
again, is responsible for another attempt, viz., the infallibility of
her ministers, a promising enough plan, but ill regulated. The Stuart
_regime_, urging with unpleasant vigour the divinity of kingship and
the corresponding caddis