y part. I have not been trying to write "literary" plays. I
quite agree with those who think that a play must be a play first.
If it be "literature" afterwards, that is an added grace which
gives it a permanent value. If it be not, still it may be a good
play in its day and generation. I have not, for the sake of being
unconventional, deliberately set myself to violate all the received
canons of dramatic art, as practised by the "practical dramatist,"
thus making a convention of unconventionality. Unconventional art is
impossible, and the drama, like other arts, has its conventions. But
conventions change, and new ones are evolved, as new problems in art
and other things--even morality itself--come in with each new tide
of the human imagination. The "well-made play" of the day before
yesterday is not a canon for all time, even for the most
conservative playgoer.

No, what I have been trying to do is simply to write a good play. Ah
yes! But what _is_ a good play? The enthusiastic critic has a ready
answer: "The play that succeeds, that has a long run, that has money
in it!" I accept the answer for what it is worth. This potentiality
of money is, like "literature," an added grace: and it certainly,
in a sense, marks the survival of the fittest. But there are other
standards in the great workshop of the artist, Nature. Even the
plant or play that lives but a short time may cast its seed into the
soil, or imagination, of its day, and, like Banquo, beget a royal
race, though not itself a king.

Now, how does such a play as THE BLACK CAT differ from
those we see succeeding on the stage every day? Really not so very
much, after all. It merely accentuates a growing tendency in the
plays of the period to get more of the stuff of life, our every-day
human life, typically upon the stage; with less of the traditional
theatrical-academic element. The "well-made play" has itself
undergone evolution since the days when it was an aphorism that not
what is said but what is done on the stage is the essential thing.
This of course is at once true and false, like every other truism.
Without action there can be no play; and a play may be made fairly
intelligible without a single spoken word, just as a scene from
history or fiction may be quite recognisably depicted in a few
symbolic lines, dots, and dashes, though no single human figure be
decently drawn.

We must not, however, forget that action itself is language. What is
called the