SOURCE: "A Contemporary Renaissance?" in Poet Lore, Vol. XXXVI, Spring, 1925, pp. 126-35.

In the following essay Bennett discusses Drinkwater's plays in relation to Elizabethan drama.

Fundamental to all discussion of literature is the idea that the appeal of any art to the public should be real. The validity of this statement is probably most concretely illustrated in the arts of painting and sculpture, whose flowering, in the history of our culture, has always belonged to a time when there was a demand for their ministrations. For example, in the days when Greek sculpture reached its pre-eminence, the artists worked simply and earnestly and enthusiastically to fill the demand for statues for market-place, civic building, temple, and national precinct. This was no self-conscious cry of "art for art's sake." The demand of noble utility on the part of the public met the creative imagination of genius. Again, in the...