THE recent discussion about the English drama has done some good, in bringing the matter to a definite issue by asking the question, can the English theatre be anything but a business carried on for profit? Sir Squire Bancroft answered the question when he declared that he kept a shop and conducted it on the shopkeeper's principles.

That was more sensible and more honest than talking about the artistic mission of the commercial theatre. We have gained something and cleared our minds of cant when we recognise that the first and last aim of the English theatre is to make money. It may have other aims, such as the glorification of individual actors with the consequent distortion of a play's natural construction, but these aims are not general, nor openly avowed.

In fact, the theatrical manager is in the same position as any other shopkeeper; he can live only by pleasing his customers. The theatrical, like the drapery, trade has its leading establishments, its Bond Street houses, its suburban emporiums, and its little shops in back streets. The sales indicate the means, knowledge, intelligence, and ideals of the patrons who are attracted and retained by the enterprise and shrewdness of the shopkeeper, and particularly by the judgment he shows in selecting the season's novelties. The intelligent tradesman sees, and the most intelligent sees first, a change in his clients' taste. If through Ruskin, or William Morris, or South Kensington, they have heard of art, the intelligent tradesman gives them art-fabrics and

art-furniture, varying the fabrics and patterns as required. But he does not go about claiming to be an artist, and declaring that his object in life is to create a love of the Beautiful. He is satisfied with his profits. The theatrical manager goes to work in the same way. He has his spring shows and his autumn shows, and he sets off his wares with idealism or romanticism, with art or poetry as he thinks best. These are only the lures for his public, the means to his profits. Unfortunately, the commercial manager makes the mistake which the draper avoids; he will go about saying that he lives for art and poetry, and all the other pretty things. He deceives himself and the truth is not in him. He cannot afford to live for poetry and art: at the best he can do so only so far as his public will let him; and we know the sort of art and how much of it the commercial manager's customers want. So far as it is art, it is the spectacular art which uses colour and light, scenery, crowds, and costumes for sensuous effects. The large stages and the mechanical resources of the modern theatre are favourable to spectacle which sometimes deserves to rank as an artistic creation. The attraction of colour, of ordered movement, and of balanced mass is universal; but the pleasure it gives is scarcely intellectual. The love of a show is common to the women of the people and the women of society, and to the men of all classes whose senses and minds are as those of a little child. The masque, which was also a show, was immensely popular

in England in the spacious days of great Eliza and the less spacious days of James Stuart. Spectacle is the modern form, and when it is well done there is nothing to say against it, except that it is not dramatic; it reduces drama to a mere accessory. Spectacle, because it is a living, natural, and progressive art, will probably kill drama. Ruskin opened the eyes of the English people, and now that they have been educated beyond the primary contrasts, they can enjoy refinements of colour and tone which did not exist for the early Victorians. It is a great gain, though not a gain to drama, and if the taste for spectacle continues to grow, the dramatic part of it will be represented by the commercial manager standing at the proscenium delivering explanatory verse, while objects and creatures of surpassing beauty defile before a succession of panorama

cloths.

That, or something of the kind, will probably be the sole advance in the art of the theatre if playgoers continue to educate their eyes and neglect their intellects. The present discussion began with the reformers saying that we had no national theatre. The apologists of the commercial theatre rent the clouds with denials and protestations, and quoted the receipts of box-offices. They asserted that the English people had a national drama which they loved next after their national Church and their national sport.

They argued that, just as every nation has the laws it deserves, so it has the drama it deserves, an argument (if it be one) which anyone can meet by denying the premiss and the analogy as well. No one on either side has told us what he understands by national drama. Perhaps it is an innate idea, or it may be that exactness is considered pedantic and likely to pre

vent controversialists from arguing high and low and round about them. Even at that cost it is better to know what we are talking about, and greatly daring I will hazard a definition. National drama is the kind of drama which reflects the temper, manners, thought, and custom peculiar to any country.

Let us test our plays by this definition and see how far they reflect our national life. There is the important matter of religion. How far does our drama reflect the religious life of the nation? So far as THE Sign of the CROSS. Even the commercial apologists see the inadequacy of this reflection, and yield the point by saying that it is irreverent to treat sacred themes in the theatre. The Greeks did not think so, nor the Christians of the ages of faith. Modern France and Germany produce religious plays. England does not and cannot; and when we allow ministers of religion on the stage, the Anglican clergyman is an example of benignant and gentlemanlike piety, the Nonconformist an obvious hypocrite, and the Catholic priest ascetic in England, jovial in Ireland, and diplomatic in the Latin countries. Surely the gifts of Providence are not distributed with such mechanical exactitude. However that may be, there is clearly no place for religion on the English stage, and there is one vital element of society ruled out of the drama.

Let us next take politics. Now, people do not agree on politics, and disagreements may produce disorder, and nothing hurts business so much as disorder or the fear of it. The theatre, managers say, gets a bad name with respectable people who have no politics. I am sorry for this, because I am sure that there is good dramatic material in politics. What an admirable political play Lord Beaconsfield could have written ! And is not the

commercial manager like all capitalists rather timorous? I should not damage the theatre if my neighbour showed excessive (and unreasonable) delight in the Conservative speeches; I should possess my soul in peace, knowing that my man would have his turn before long. And that of course is what most people would do. To see the female politician on the stage, and the duchess who makes unmakes ministries in the societypapers! And then the scope for intrigue! But it is all a vain dream; there is no room for politics in the English drama.

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These explosive themes, however, do not exhaust life. There is the vast field of character conditioned by occupation; the professions, commerce, and labour. In this field the novelists have found their best material. Their doctors, lawyers, parsons, shopkeepers, farmers, and labourers are human beings whom we love or hate just as if they were alive. We know their looks and speech and gait and habitual gestures. The course and accidents of their lives make the plot and incidents of great novels. The ambibitions of lawyers, the ideals of doctors, the affairs of merchants, and the petty commerce of the small shop hold the stuff of pathos, humour, and tragedy; but not in the theatre. There they must creep into the husks of conventional types; they lose their individuality, and in the dry air of the stage the juices of their vitality evaporate. They degenerate into bits of character and comic relief if they are lawyers or doctors; men of science and scholars are usually represented as little better than fools outside their own professions; the lower middleclass are either comic absurdities with ridiculous names such as Tickletop and Gushington, or in serious plays they are mere figure-heads.

It seems a pity. Allowing for the difference of method, surely what is interesting in the literary form could be made interesting in the dramatic form. The fortunes of a business firm have dramatic possibilities which would be effective on the stage if faithfully observed and faithfully presented. If we can scarcely expect to recognise the partners, perhaps the managers, or at least the clerks, are persons within our knowledge. At less effort, though with less awe, we could understand them better than the sumptuous aristocrats whose emotions are always but dimly realised by commoners. Why then is the drama implicit in the lives of the English people never seen on the stage? It is conventionalised in domestic plays and caricatured in melodrama. Why do we never get the real thing?

It is partly, I take it, because the English English are a deferential people, partly because they are sentimental materialists (a combination that is supposed to produce idealism), and partly for another reason. The deferential Englishman likes to see lords and ladies on the stage just as he likes to see them in cocked hats and tiaras in the illustrated papers, or joking with difficulty in PUNCH. He does not think that they are over-represented on theatrical programmes, or that their importance in plays is so much greater than it is in the actual world. To him they are an ambition and an ideal. Aristocrats fill him with awe, millionaires strike him with terror; their misfortunes inspire him with pity, and in that way he gets the Aristotelian katharsis. The idealist who hates everything that he calls low will not have common people on the stage unless they are amusing or contemptible. So the drunken and unlicensed plumber becomes the representative of the English working

classes. That plumber shows how far we have got towards a national drama.

The other reason is that which prevents the commercial manager from exploiting (as he would say) the play of contemporary life. He is not prejudiced against such plays: he is as ready to make money out of truth as out of falsehood; but he is in the hands of his paymasters. One thing his audience will not suffer; they will not see their daily lives, the details of their business, the way they make their fortunes, and the way they realise their social aspirations, put upon the stage for the delight and edification of their neighbours and acquaintances. They shrink from seeing themselves reflected on the stage. This also is idealism.

The obscure mental processes of these classes have produced a rule of ethics which recognises how hard it is to make a decent income and keep your wife and family in a fair position, which says that we are all in the same boat and declares that the unpardonable sin is, in the elegant language of our day, to give the show away. This rule condemns most of what is true in literature and drama. It is the exceeding bitter cry of the Ephesian silversmiths; Ephesus and England are at one. The average man cares very little about truth in literature or art, but he cares very much for keeping himself and his wife and family in that state of suburban society to which he has been called. Naturally the commercial manager leaves truth out of his plays, and the national drama languishes.

There is one test that should be applied, because it seems to give the commercial drama a chance. Its apologists have no difficulty in showing that it has little or nothing to do with intellect; but in the domain of feeling it rules paramount. It appeals

directly to the primary universal instincts, which are common to men and the other animals. Time, and the revolving seasons, and the high rents of theatres in central London, have largely restricted the peculiar domain of the drama. Few of the elementary instincts pay on the stage, and as a matter of fact, they are reduced to the emotion of love. We regret the fact, and hope to be compensated by the perfection that comes from concentration, Passion is the most dramatic form of this emotion, yet passion is unknown on the modern stage. All the subvarieties of love can be seen there; the tender, the lady-like, the "nice," and the jolly, but not passion, not the one and highest form of love that ought to be there. I remember seeing it on the stage once in Mr. Jones's MICHAEL AND HIS LOST ANGEL, one of the greatest achievements of our contemporary drama, and the occasion of one of the greatest mistakes of the daily newspapers. Their criticisms, resting on the usually safe idea that the British public are as moral as Artemus Ward's kangaroo, expressed a maidenly and outraged modesty, dumb before THE SECOND MRS. TANQUERAY and THE GAY LORD QUEX. This time the professional moralisers were too moral for their clients. A large majority of the public supported the play in the theatre as well as in the drawing-room. It was a lesson to anyone inclined to despair of the English theatre, for it showed that there is a public for natural and sincere plays, and that the commercial manager cannot afford to produce them.

The commercial manager is only carrying on the traditions of his class. With rare exceptions the theatre in this country has always been commercial. The popularity of some Shakespearian plays did not mean

that the public cared particularly for the poetic drama; it meant that they cared very much to see Kean, John Kemble, and Mrs. Siddons. In the absence of "stars" the theatres of the palmy days were as commercial as our own, and as ready to attract the public with melodrama, menageries, and circuses. That was long before the cry for Free Trade in the drama, or, to speak accurately, before the anti-monoply agitation. There has always been Free Trade in drama; the dramatic produce of France, Italy, and Germany have never paid import duty. As a countervailing duty was impracticable, it is hard to see why this source of revenue was overlooked.. At all events the anti-monopolists won, and the era of Free Trade in drama began in spite of the people who argued that Free Trade is a theory of trade and not of art, and pointed out that the art of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Holland was produced in economic conditions much nearer Protection than Free Trade. Is Velasquez lodged in the Escurial an instance of free competition? Were not the St. Catherines and St. Sebastians, and the other saints whose portraits the copyists produced by the score, the true products of supply and demand? The result of applying trade principles to the drama has been to make it a trade, and to limit the relation of manager and audience to that of shopkeeper and customer. We have seen how much reflection of life there is in the commercial theatre. "Our people don't care about that kind of thing," the managers say, and apparently get their most successful plays at the Army and Navy Stores. I do not know what our officers are like in action, but in the theatre they are of an astounding simplicity, of a pathetic conservatism. Having seen Captain Hood's SWEET AND TWENTY and Captain Marshall's SECOND IN

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COMMAND I should say that Captain Hood got his psychology from Captain Marshall, if that did not bar the only possible source of Captain Marshall's psychology. Yet their plays are the only kind of national drama (besides adaptations of Dante and Homeric panoramas) that we have got from the commercial manager. He is satisfied with the theatre as it is and with the dividends it pays, and if it pays none he is kept going by the syndicates that renew themselves by fissure. It is no affair of his that since Goldsmith and Sheridan the drama has contributed nothing to English literature, and that while the characters of our great novelists have become part of the life and thought of the English people not a single character, not a single speech or phrase from the English drama is either remembered or quoted.

The commercial manager then can do nothing to remedy the critical condition of the theatre. If any competent and impartial person thinks that its condition is satisfactory he had better run over a list of the plays of the last few years and see how near they come to being a national drama. I can recall only one, MR. AND MRS. DAVENTRY, which had more than a superficial relation to life. Mr. Jones, having apparently come to the conclusion that the theatre is not the place for human nature, is now satisfied with amusing the classes and the dependents of class. Mr. Pinero always has one eye on his play and the other on the box-office, with the result that his serious pieces are mainly examples of compromise. The psychology of his heroines is either accidental or arbitrary; they usually yield to the hero, but they always yield to the plot, and his coups de théatre are as dangerous to the piece as they are to the furniture. In short, most of the plays of this, as indeed of