And if The Servant In the House will—­as I believe—­outlive The Witching Hour, it will be mainly because, in the author’s theme and his ideas, it is older by many, many centuries.  The theme of Mr. Thomas’s play—­namely, that thought is in itself a dynamic force and has the virtue and to some extent the power of action—­is, as I have just explained, not novel, but is at least recent in the history of thinking.  It is a theme which dates itself as belonging to the present generation, and is likely to lose interest for the next.  But Mr. Kennedy’s theme—­namely, that when discordant human beings ascend to meet each other in the spirit of brotherly love, it may truly be said that God is resident among them—­is at least as old as the gentle-hearted Galilean, and, being dateless, belongs to future generations as well as to the present.  Mr. Thomas has been skilfully resumptive of a passing period of popular thought; but Mr. Kennedy has been resumptive on a larger scale, and has built his play upon the wisdom of the centuries.  Paradoxical as it may seem, the very reason why The Servant in the House struck so many critics as being strange and new is that, in its thesis and its thought, it is as old as the world.

The truth of this point seems to me indisputable.  I know that the best European playwrights of the present day are striving to use the drama as a vehicle for the expression of advanced ideas, especially in regard to social ethics; but in doing this, I think, they are mistaking the scope of the theatre.  They are striving to say in the drama what might be said better in the essay or the novel.  As the exposition of a theory, Mr. Shaw’s Man and Superman is not nearly so effective as the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, from whom the playwright borrowed his ideas.  The greatest works of Ibsen can be appreciated only by the cultured individual and not by the uncultured crowd.  That is why the breadth of his appeal will never equal that of Shakespeare, in spite of his unfathomable intellect and his perfect mastery of the technique of his art.  Only his more commonplace plays—­A Doll’s House, for example—­have attained a wide success.  And a wide success is a thing to be desired for other than material reasons.  Surely it is a good thing for the public that Hamlet never fails.

The conservatism of the greatest dramatists asserts itself not only in their thoughts but even in the mere form of their plays.  It is the lesser men who invent new tricks of technique and startle the public with innovations.  Moliere merely perfected the type of Italian comedy that his public long had known.  Shakespeare quietly adopted the forms that lesser men had made the crowd familiar with.  He imitated Lyly in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Greene in As You Like It, Marlowe in Richard III, Kyd in Hamlet, and Fletcher in The Tempest.  He did the old thing better than the other men had done it,—­that is all.