Mrs. Warren’s Profession is just as interesting to the thoughtful reader as Candida.  It is built with the same technical efficiency, and written with the same agility and wit; it is just as sound and true, and therefore just as moral; and as a criticism, not so much of life as of society, it is indubitably more important.  Why, then, is Candida a better work?  The reason is that the unpleasant play is interesting merely to the intellect and leaves the audience cold, whereas the pleasant play is interesting also to the emotions and stirs the audience to sympathy.  It is possible for the public to feel sorry for Morell; it is even possible for them to feel sorry for Marchbanks:  but it is absolutely impossible for them to feel sorry for Mrs. Warren.  The multitude instinctively demands an opportunity to sympathise with the characters presented in the theatre.  Since the drama is a democratic art, and the dramatist is not the monarch but the servant of the public, the voice of the people should, in this matter of pleasant and unpleasant plays, be considered the voice of the gods.  This thesis seems to me axiomatic and unsusceptible of argument.  Yet since it is continually denied by the professed “uplifters” of the stage, who persist in looking down upon the public and decrying the wisdom of the many, it may be necessary to explain the eternal principle upon which it is based.  The truth must be self-evident that theatre-goers are endowed with a certain inalienable right—­namely, the pursuit of happiness.  The pursuit of happiness is the most important thing in the world; because it is nothing less than an endeavor to understand and to appreciate the true, the beautiful, and the good.  Happiness comes of loving things which are worthy; a man is happy in proportion to the number of things which he has learned to love; and he, of all men, is most happy who loveth best all things both great and small.  For happiness is the feeling of harmony between a man and his surroundings, the sense of being at home in the universe and brotherly toward all worthy things that are.  The pursuit of happiness is simply a continual endeavor to discover new things that are worthy, to the end that they may waken love within us and thereby lure us loftier toward an ultimate absolute awareness of truth and beauty.  It is in this simple, sane pursuit that people go to the theatre.  The important thing about the public is that it has a large and longing heart.  That heart demands that sympathy be awakened in it, and will not be satisfied with merely intellectual discussion of unsympathetic things.  It is therefore the duty, as well as the privilege, of the dramatist to set before the public incidents which may awaken sympathy and characters which may be loved.  He is the most important artist in the theatre who gives the public most to care about.  This is the reason why Joseph Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle must be rated as the greatest creation of the American stage.  The play was shabby as a work of art, and there was nothing even in the character to think about; but every performance of the part left thousands happier, because their lives had been enriched with a new memory that made their hearts grow warm with sympathy and large with love.