nothing more.  They never raise questions that cannot quickly be answered by the crowd, through the instinct of inherited experience.  No mind was ever, in the philosophic sense, more commonplace than that of Shakespeare.  He had no new ideas.  He was never radical, and seldom even progressive.  He was a careful money-making business man, fond of food and drink and out-of-doors and laughter, a patriot, a lover, and a gentleman.  Greatly did he know things about people; greatly, also, could he write.  But he accepted the religion, the politics, and the social ethics of his time, without ever bothering to wonder if these things might be improved.

The great speculative spirits of the world, those who overturn tradition and discover new ideas, have had minds far different from this.  They have not written plays.  It is to these men,—­the philosopher, the essayist, the novelist, the lyric poet,—­that each of us turns for what is new in thought.  But from the dramatist the crowd desires only the old, old thought.  It has no patience for consideration; it will listen only to what it knows already.  If, therefore, a great man has a new doctrine to expound, let him set it forth in a book of essays; or, if he needs must sugar-coat it with a story, let him expound it in a novel, whose appeal will be to the individual mind.  Not until a doctrine is old enough to have become generally accepted is it ripe for exploitation in the theatre.

This point is admirably illustrated by two of the best and most successful plays of recent seasons. The Witching Hour, by Mr. Augustus Thomas, and The Servant in the House, by Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy, were both praised by many critics for their “novelty”; but to me one of the most significant and instructive facts about them is that neither of them was, in any real respect, novel in the least.  Consider for a moment the deliberate and careful lack of novelty in the ideas which Mr. Thomas so skilfully set forth.  What Mr. Thomas really did was to gather and arrange as many as possible of the popularly current thoughts concerning telepathy and cognate subjects, and to tell the public what they themselves had been wondering about and thinking during the last few years.  The timeliness of the play lay in the fact that it was produced late enough in the history of its subject to be selectively resumptive, and not nearly so much in the fact that it was produced early enough to forestall other dramatic presentations of the same materials.  Mr. Thomas has himself explained, in certain semi-public conversations, that he postponed the composition of this play—­on which his mind had been set for many years—­until the general public had become sufficiently accustomed to the ideas which he intended to set forth.  Ten years before, this play would have been novel, and would undoubtedly have failed.  When it was produced, it was not novel, but resumptive, in its thought; and therefore it succeeded.  For one of the surest ways of succeeding in the theatre is to sum up and present dramatically all that the crowd has been thinking for some time concerning any subject of importance.  The dramatist should be the catholic collector and wise interpreter of those ideas which the crowd, in its conservatism, feels already to be safely true.