out the essential import of the situation,
the relation of character to character, at any given moment. An
action, an incident, may have a thousand different shades of meaning
or motive. Language, tone, and gesture give it its precise value.
Plot and situations are at best but the skeleton; character and
emotion are the flesh and blood. The treatment is everything.

We still want more of life, of the vital movements of our own time,
upon the stage; and we shall get it by degrees. Sentimental
melodrama, with its male puppet, who is hero or villain, its female
puppet, who is angel or devil, may still continue to flourish among
us; for it still satisfies the natural craving for romance,
ideality, which the drama is bound to supply. But these things
belong to a decaying phase of romance; and our so-called realism is
but the first wave of a new romantic movement, on the stage as
elsewhere. For when the old ideals become decrepit, we must go back
to nature to get the stuff wherewith to make new ones.

As our dramatists advance with the times, people begin to go to the
theatre to see plays, and not merely an actor in a part. The
"well-made play," which was a piece of mechanical contrivance into
which the puppets were ingeniously fitted, may some day develop into
a work of art--a thing born rather than made--growing up like a
flower in the imagination of the dramatist.

When that day comes, the actor, who used to "create" the part, will
have to be content to let the part create him. The play will make
the actor, not the actor the play; to the great benefit of both play
and actor.

But why be so serious over an art whose end is only to amuse? To
amuse? Yes; but we are not all equally amused by the same things.
There may be forms of humour which tickle some people more
exquisitely than even that magnificent making of tea in an old
gentleman's hat, which convulses the _Charley's Aunt_ audience. And
if amusement be the object of the drama, we must take the word in an
extended sense. I should myself roughly define a good play as one
that, when adequately performed, can hold the attention of an
unprejudiced audience from beginning to end, whether it amuses or
merely interests them. It does not follow that because it may shock,
or even bore, some worthy people it is a bad play. Even farcical
comedy bores some people, with whom I cannot sympathise.

And now, if I have been rather hard upon the "well-made play," it
must not be a