The trouble with most of the dreamers who league themselves for the uplifting of the stage is that they consider the theatre with an illogical solemnity.  They base their efforts on the proposition that a theatre audience ought to want to be edified.  As a matter of fact, no audience ever does.  Moliere and Shakespeare, who knew the limits of their art, never said a word about uplifting the stage.  They wrote plays to please the crowd; and if, through their inherent greatness, they became teachers as well as entertainers, they did so without any tall talk about the solemnity of their mission.  Their audiences learned largely, but they did so unawares,—­God being with them when they knew it not.  The demand for an endowed theatre in America comes chiefly from those who believe that a great play cannot earn its own living.  Yet Hamlet has made more money than any other play in English; The School for Scandal never fails to draw; and in our own day we have seen Cyrano de Bergerac coining money all around the world.  There were not any endowed theatres in Elizabethan London.  Give the crowd the sort of plays it wants, and you will not have to seek beneficence to keep your theatre floating.  But, on the other hand, no endowed theatre will ever lure the crowd to listen to the sort of plays it does not want.  There is a wise maxim appended to one of Mr. George Ade’s Fables in Slang:  “In uplifting, get underneath.”  If the theatre in America is weak, what it needs is not endowment:  it needs great and popular plays.  Why should we waste our money and our energy trying to make the crowd come to see The Master Builder, or A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, or The Hour Glass, or Pelleas and Melisande?  It is willing enough to come without urging to see Othello and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.  Give us one great dramatist who understands the crowd, and we shall not have to form societies to propagate his art.  Let us cease our prattle of the theatre for the few.  Any play that is really great as drama will interest the many.

IV

One point remains to be considered.  In any theatre audience there are certain individuals who do not belong to the crowd.  They are in it, but not of it; for they fail to merge their individual self-consciousness in the general self-consciousness of the multitude.  Such are the professional critics, and other confirmed frequenters of the theatre.  It is not for them primarily that plays are written; and any one who has grown individualised through the theatre-going habit cannot help looking back regretfully upon those fresher days when he belonged, unthinking, to the crowd.  A first-night audience is anomalous, in that it is composed largely of individuals opposed to self-surrender; and for this reason, a first-night judgment of the merits of a play is rarely final.  The dramatist has written for a crowd, and he is judged by individuals.  Most dramatic critics will tell you that they long to lose themselves in the crowd, and regret the aloofness from the play that comes of their profession.  It is because of this aloofness of the critic that most dramatic criticism fails.