ts as they would yield! Think of London
alone--what a matchless hunting-ground for the satirist--the most
magnificent that ever was. If the occasion always produced the man
London would have produced an Aristophanes. But somehow it doesn't.

Florentia. Oh, types and ideas, Aristophanes and satire--!

Dorriforth. I'm too ambitious, you mean? I shall presently show you
that I'm not ambitious at all. Everything makes against that--I am only
reading the signs.

Auberon. The plays are arranged to be as English as possible: they are
altered, they are fitted.

Dorriforth. Fitted? Indeed they are, and to the capacity of infants.
They are in too many cases made vulgar, puerile, barbarous. They are
neither fish nor flesh, and with all the point that's left out and all
the naivete that's put in, they cease to place before us any coherent
appeal or any recognizable society.

Auberon. They often make good plays to act, all the same.

Dorriforth. They may; but they don't make good plays to see or to hear.
The theatre consists of two things, _que diable_--of the stage and the
drama, and I don't see how you can have it unless you have both, or how
you can have either unless you have the other. They are the two blades
of a pair of scissors.

Auberon. You are very unfair to native talent. There are lots of
_strictly original_ plays--

Amicia. Yes, they put that expression on the posters.

Auberon. I don't know what they put on the posters; but the plays are
written and acted--produced with great success.

Dorriforth. Produced--partly. A play isn't fully produced until it is in
a form in which you can refer to it. We have to talk in the air. I can
refer to my Congreve, but I can't to my Pinero. {*}

* Since the above was written several of Mr. Pinero's plays
have been published.

Florentia. The authors are not bound to publish them if they don't wish.

Dorriforth. Certainly not, nor are they in that case bound to insist on
one's not being a little vague about them. They are perfectly free to
withhold them; they may have very good reasons for it, and I can imagine
some that would be excellent and worthy of all respect. But their
withholding them is one of the signs.

Auberon. What signs?

Dorriforth. Those I just spoke of--those we are trying to read together.
The signs that ambition and desire are folly, that the sun of the drama
has set, that the matter isn't worth talking about, that it has ceased
to be an