the top of the hill and let its contents roll
in ruin to the bottom, I can only say, "I cannot do justice to this
situation," and let it pass without another word.

The Higher Drama put out of Action

The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined. The
beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it. Rents
went up to an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices doubled
everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of
management to such a degree that unless the houses were quite full every
night, profit was impossible. Even bare solvency could not be attained
without a very wide popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible
to a limited extent before the war was that a play could pay its
way even if the theatre were only half full until Saturday and
three-quarters full then. A manager who was an enthusiast and a
desperately hard worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an
artistically disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare
and happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be
potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time a relay
might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus and not otherwise
occurred that remarkable revival of the British drama at the beginning
of the century which made my own career as a playwright possible in
England. In America I had already established myself, not as part of the
ordinary theatre system, but in association with the exceptional genius
of Richard Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no difficulty: the
system of publicly aided theatres there, Court and Municipal, kept drama
of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted to the Emperor of
Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a time when the sole
official attention paid me by the British Courts was the announcement
to the English-speaking world that certain plays of mine were unfit for
public performance, a substantial set-off against this being that the
British Court, in the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to
the bad character given me by the chief officer of its household.

Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London stage,
and were presently followed by the plays of Granville Barker, Gilbert
Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence Housman, Arnold
Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and others which would in
the nineteenth centu