at more
ambitious dramatists might study it with advantage. Another
point--though the piece was artistically vulgar, it was not vulgar
otherwise. It contained no slightest trace of the outrageous salacity
and sottishness which disfigure the great majority of successful musical
comedies. It was an honest entertainment. But to me its chief value and
interest lay in the fact that while watching it I felt that I was really
in New York, and not in Vienna, Paris, or London.

Of the regular theater I did not see nearly enough to be able to
generalize even for my own private satisfaction. I observed, and
expected to observe, that the most reactionary quarters were the most
respected. It is the same everywhere. When a manager, having discovered
that two real clocks in one real room never strike simultaneously, put
two real clocks on the stage, and made one strike after the other; or
when a manager mimicked, with extraordinary effects of restlessness, a
life-sized telephone-exchange on the stage--then was I bound to hear of
"artistic realism" and "a fine production"! But such feats of
truthfulness do not consort well with chocolate sentimentalities and
wilful falsities of action and dialogue. They caused me to doubt whether
I was not in London.

The problem-plays which I saw were just as futile and exasperating as
the commercial English and French varieties of the problem-play, though
they had a trifling advantage over the English in that their most
sentimental passages were lightened by humor, and the odiously insincere
felicity of their conclusions was left to the imagination instead of
being acted ruthlessly out on the boards. The themes of these plays
showed the usual obsession, and were manipulated in the usual attempt to
demonstrate that the way of transgressors is not so very hard after all.
They threw, all unconsciously, strange side-lights on the American man's
private estimate of the American woman, and the incidence of the
applause was extremely instructive.

The most satisfactory play that I saw, "Bought and Paid For," by George
Broadhurst, was not a problem-play, though Mr. Broadhurst is also a
purveyor of problem-plays. It was just an unpretentious fairy-tale about
the customary millionaire and the customary poor girl. The first act
was maladroit, but the others made me think that "Bought and Paid For"
was one of the best popular commercial Anglo-Saxon plays I had ever seen
anywhere. There were touches of authent