720 THE DRAMA 



you are the veritable salt of the earth, as by your demeanor we seem 

 to sniff, and as by this appeal we are willing to allow if you are 

 the veritable salt of the earth, where can you exhale your savor to 

 better effect than in the theatres of your native land ? Come among 

 us and brace and strengthen us; incidentally we may sweeten and 

 humanize you, and give you a larger outlook upon life. 



" Look at the vast population of our great cities crowding more 

 and more in our theatres, demanding there to be given some kind of 

 representation of life, some form of play. You cannot quench that 

 demand. During the next generation hundreds of theatres will be 

 opened all over America and England. If you abstain from visiting 

 these theatres, you will not close them. Millions of your countrymen, 

 the vast masses, will still frequent them. The effect of your absence, 

 and of your discountenance, will merely be to lower the moral and 

 intellectual standard of the plays that will then be given. Will you 

 never learn the lesson of the English Restoration, that when the best 

 and most serious classes of the nation detest and defame their the- 

 atre, it instantly justifies their abuse and becomes, indeed, a scandal 

 and a source of corruption ? Many of you already put Shakespeare 

 next to the Bible as the guide and inspirer of our race. Why, then, 

 do you despise his calling, and vilify his disciples, and misunderstand 

 his art ? Do you not see that this amusement which you neglect 

 and flout and decry is more than an amusement; is, indeed, at once 

 the finest and the most popular of all the arts, with an immense influ- 

 ence on the daily lives of our fellow-citizens ? Help us, then, to 

 organize and endow this fine art in all the cities of our Anglo- 

 American race, wherever our common tongue is spoken, from London 

 to San Francisco. Help us to establish it in the esteem and affec- 

 tions of our fellow-countrymen, as the measure of our advance in 

 humanity and civilization, and in that knowledge of ourselves which 

 is the end and flower of all education ! " 



Some such appeal may, I think, be made to the more seriously- 

 minded of our countrymen on both sides of the Atlantic. I have 

 given it great prominence in this lecture because I feel that before we 

 begin to build we need to clear the ground of the rank growths of 

 prejudice and Puritan hatred which still choke the Drama. Both in 

 England and America we seem to be waiting for some great national 

 impulse, some word of command for a general forward movement 

 toward a creative school of Drama. In spite of many discourage- 

 ments and humiliations during the last ten or twelve years; in spite 

 of the hatred of the religious world, the indifference and contempt of 

 the educated and artistic classes, the debased frivolity of the multi- 

 tude, the zealous envy and rage of those whose ignoble trade and daily 

 bread it is to keep the Drama on a degraded level in spite of all 

 these hindrances, I believe that word of command will be spoken, and 



