to be in sight.  Ibsen did not write for a coterie, though special and regrettable circumstances have made him, in England, something of a coterie-poet.  In Scandinavia, in Germany, even in America, he casts his spell over great audiences, if not through long runs (which are a vice of the merely commercial theatre), at any rate through frequently-repeated representations.  So far as I know, history records no instance of a playwright failing to gain the ear of his contemporaries, and then being recognized and appreciated by posterity.  Alfred de Musset might, perhaps, be cited as a case in point; but he did not write with a view to the stage, and made no bid for contemporary popularity.  As soon as it occurred to people to produce his plays, they were found to be delightful.  Let no playwright, then, make it his boast that he cannot disburden his soul within the three hours’ limit, and cannot produce plays intelligible or endurable to any audience but a band of adepts.  A popular audience, however, does not necessarily mean the mere riff-raff of the theatrical public.  There is a large class of playgoers, both in England and America, which is capable of appreciating work of a high intellectual order, if only it does not ignore the fundamental conditions of theatrical presentation.  It is an audience of this class that I have in mind throughout the following pages; and I believe that a playwright who despises such an audience will do so to the detriment, not only of his popularity and profits, but of the artistic quality of his work.

Some people may exclaim:  “Why should the dramatist concern himself about his audience?  That may be all very well for the mere journeymen of the theatre, the hacks who write to an actor-manager’s order—­not for the true artist!  He has a soul above all such petty considerations.  Art, to him, is simply self-expression.  He writes to please himself, and has no thought of currying favour with an audience, whether intellectual or idiotic.”  To this I reply simply that to an artist of this way of thinking I have nothing to say.  He has a perfect right to express himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end.  But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression stultifies himself in that very phrase.  The painter may paint, the sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,[5] but the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience.  It is a portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place.  “The public,” it has been well said, “constitutes the theatre.”  The moment a playwright confines his work within the two or three hours’ limit prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is currying favour with an audience.  That limit is imposed simply by the physical endurance and power of sustained