And now may I say a few words with regard to some misconceptions on the part of the critics as to my aim in writing these two plays?  One of them, an enthusiast himself, did me the honour to hail me as a brother enthusiast, albeit an erring one.  Possibly I am.  But I have not been trying to educate the public, which is being educated past its old standards day by day, without such philanthropic effort on my part.  I have not been trying to write “literary” plays.  I quite agree with those who think that a play must be a play first.  If it be “literature” afterwards, that is an added grace which gives it a permanent value.  If it be not, still it may be a good play in its day and generation.  I have not, for the sake of being unconventional, deliberately set myself to violate all the received canons of dramatic art, as practised by the “practical dramatist,” thus making a convention of unconventionality.  Unconventional art is impossible, and the drama, like other arts, has its conventions.  But conventions change, and new ones are evolved, as new problems in art and other things—­even morality itself—­come in with each new tide of the human imagination.  The “well-made play” of the day before yesterday is not a canon for all time, even for the most conservative playgoer.

No, what I have been trying to do is simply to write a good play.  Ah yes!  But what is a good play?  The enthusiastic critic has a ready answer:  “The play that succeeds, that has a long run, that has money in it!” I accept the answer for what it is worth.  This potentiality of money is, like “literature,” an added grace:  and it certainly, in a sense, marks the survival of the fittest.  But there are other standards in the great workshop of the artist, Nature.  Even the plant or play that lives but a short time may cast its seed into the soil, or imagination, of its day, and, like Banquo, beget a royal race, though not itself a king.

Now, how does such a play as THE BLACK CAT differ from those we see succeeding on the stage every day?  Really not so very much, after all.  It merely accentuates a growing tendency in the plays of the period to get more of the stuff of life, our every-day human life, typically upon the stage; with less of the traditional theatrical-academic element.  The “well-made play” has itself undergone evolution since the days when it was an aphorism that not what is said but what is done on the stage is the essential thing.  This of course is at once true and false, like every other truism.  Without action there can be no play; and a play may be made fairly intelligible without a single spoken word, just as a scene from history or fiction may be quite recognisably depicted in a few symbolic lines, dots, and dashes, though no single human figure be decently drawn.