on it, but difficult enough to
challenge and inspire great adroitness so soon as the elements to be
dealt with begin at all to "size up."

The disdainers of the contemporary drama deny, obviously, with all
promptness, that the matter to be expressed by its means--richly and
successfully expressed that is--CAN loom with any largeness; since from
the moment it does one of the conditions breaks down. The process simply
collapses under pressure, they contend, proves its weakness as quickly
as the office laid on it ceases to be simple. "Remember," they say to
the dramatist, "that you have to be, supremely, three things: you have
to be true to your form, you have to be interesting, you have to be
clear. You have in other words to prove yourself adequate to taking a
heavy weight. But we defy you really to conform to your conditions with
any but a light one. Make the thing you have to convey, make the picture
you have to paint, at all rich and complex, and you cease to be
clear. Remain clear--and with the clearness required by the infantine
intelligence of any public consenting to see a play--and what becomes
of the 'importance' of your subject? If it's important by any other
critical measure than the little foot-rule the 'produced' piece has to
conform to, it is predestined to be a muddle. When it has escaped being
a muddle the note it has succeeded in striking at the furthest will be
recognised as one of those that are called high but by the courtesy, by
the intellectual provinciality, of theatrical criticism, which, as we
can see for ourselves any morning, is--well, an abyss even deeper than
the theatre itself. Don't attempt to crush us with Dumas and Ibsen, for
such values are from any informed and enlightened point of view, that is
measured by other high values, literary, critical, philosophic, of the
most moderate order. Ibsen and Dumas are precisely cases of men, men in
their degree, in their poor theatrical straight-jacket, speculative,
who have HAD to renounce the finer thing for the coarser, the thick, in
short, for the thin and the curious for the self-evident. What earthly
intellectual distinction, what 'prestige' of achievement, would have
attached to the substance of such things as 'Denise,' as 'Monsieur
Alphonse,' as 'Francillon' (and we take the Dumas of the supposedly
subtler period) in any other form? What virtues of the same order would
have attached to 'The Pillars of Society,' to 'An Enemy of the People,'