DEDICATION

To PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY, LL.D., Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford.

DEAR PROFESSOR MURRAY, In your interesting summary of the modern English drama, as reported in an American paper last spring, you incidentally buried me. I had not the faintest idea that I was dead, and am still under the impression that I am alive. But this may be merely a wilful, selfish prejudice of mine.

Vast numbers of our population, wearing a human shape, move about amongst us, eating, chattering, marketing, dressing and undressing themselves, crowding our streets and churches and trains, in the fixed idea that they are alive; whereas they are virtually as defunct as if their bones were in the earth and their souls with the saints. You will have noticed that these colloidal bodies form a large proportion of our voters at elections, and of our audiences at the theatres; while many of our newspapers and

popular magazines are written almost exclusively for them.

And for all I know I may be one of them. In that case it was a kindly and thoughtful action on your part to bury me. For this persistent mass of obstructive matter, walking about in the guise of living men and women, is a sad and main hindrance to the real business of the world. And as our drama is already clogged and choked with it, you were moved by a wise impulse in trying to get some of it out of the way.

Being thus mercifully disposed of, I fear it shows a great want of consideration on my part to revisit you, and ask you to accept the dedication of the following play, written, I grieve to tell you, after my compulsory interment. You cannot but think it a monstrous impertinence for me to pretend to be still alive. It may be necessary for you, or for some stern guardian of the very latest school of modern drama, to treat me as Punch treats the obtuse policeman who also shows symptoms of recalcitrant vitality - to chastise my obstinacy with redoubled thwacks, and to shout over me more exultant pæans. At least I here offer you a chance to give me a deeper and more determined and, more forcible burial-after you have carefully ascertained this time that I am really dead.

However, this preference or whim of mine for keeping alive is, after all, a mere personal concern. If I can be persuaded that the interests of the drama are thereby to be served I am ready to yield

the point, and will uncomplainingly attend my own funeral in the usual quiescent horizontal manner. In any case it is not a matter of great importance.

What, however, is of great importance is the fact that an English scholar and man of letters of your standing is to be found taking a keen interest in the modern acted drama; that you are alive to its vast influence for good or evil in our national life; that you are searching out its laws; that you are actively engaged in advancing its welfare, and bringing it again into communion with English literature; that being a man of letters you are also a man of the theatre. That is a fact upon which the English modern drama is to be congratulated. And if I have timidly hinted a doubt as to the soundness of your judgment in one individual case, this need scarcely detract from the value of your advocacy as a whole.

For English men of letters do as a rule make a woeful mess of it when they turn their attention to the modern drama. There was Mr. Birrell, for instance, who set out to prove that Browning was essentially a popular playwright who only just missed being popular, because the dense stupidity of the public would not allow him to be popular in his own remote unpopular

way.

However, Mr. Birrell has ceased to confuse the public mind upon the subject of dramatic literature, and has since been elegantly toying with National Education and Home Rule.

Now our so-called modern literary plays may for the most part be divided into three classes-those that are

not plays; those that are not literature; and those that are neither plays nor literature.

Clearly, a literary play should first of all be a play. Its story, motives, and characters should be so plain and direct as to hold the interest of an average audience from beginning to end. It should stand the noisy test of representation on the boards.

Clearly, a literary play should also be literature. If it is a play of modern life its dialogue should be easy, natural, colloquial, unstilted, unaffected, characteristic of each person speaking in each situation. It should carefully avoid being banal, commonplace, slangy, or smart and epigrammatic on the level of a cheap comic illustrated paper. It should stand the quiet test of reading in the study.

This does not imply that the literary dramatist is limited in his choice of characters to those persons who talk like a book. It does imply that he should choose only those persons who occasionally do and say things that are worthy of remembrance, and that he should choose them in those few moments and situations when they are saying and doing such things. And to the extent that he does this, will his play become more and more unlike a picture of ordinary average actualities, more unlike what is called "a slice of life." It will become more artificial in that sense in which all works of art are artificial. The higher the art and the higher the subject, the more surely the artist is forced to employ transparent artifice. Art is art because it is not nature.

I notice you are growing impatient. You will

surely rebuke me for daring to offer such a platitude to the translator of Euripides and Aristophanes. But I am not now addressing you as the delightful and scholarly translator, who commands my unquestioning admiration. I am addressing you as the critic of modern English drama. And may I be pardoned for saying that, in your reported American utterances, I thought I detected some divergency of general outlook between your two characters? I thought I perceived what Urquhart, equal in renown with yourself as a translator of classics, would have called “an enormous dissolution of continuity."

But this failure of mine to reconcile your points of view may be due to that perversity and confusion which cloud the mind and vision of moribund persons, and which probably deepen and intensify when once they are safely and determinately dead. And perhaps it is this perversity and confusion of mind which, clinging to me even in the shades, lead me to ask a few querulous inopportune questions.

Has not our modern drama been getting away from the centre of late? Is it not showing a tendency to leave the main road and run up little by-lanes? When it is not freakish, argumentative, paradoxical, does it not become merely photographic and phonographic? In its ambition to be a faithful reporter of life, a diligent student of commonplace persons in commonplace moods and situations, a cataloguer of small actualities, has it not largely declined to be the haunting imaginative interpreter of life? And in its desire to transcribe in an honest businesslike way