I cannot claim—­it would be immodest to make such a claim in speaking even of my brother dramatists—­I cannot claim that the thorough achievement of such a task is a common one in this country.  It is indeed a rare one in any country.  But I can claim—­I do claim for my fellow-workers that they are not utterly unequal to the demands made upon them, and that of late there have been signs of the growth of a thoughtful, serious drama in England. ["Hear!  Hear!”] I venture to think, too, that these signs are not in any sense exotics; I make bold to say that they do not consist of mere imitations of certain models; I submit that they are not as a few critics of limited outlook and exclusive enthusiasm would have us believe—­I submit that they are not mere echoes of foreign voices.  I submit that the drama of the present day is the natural outcome of our own immediate environment, of the life that closely surrounds us.  And, perhaps, it would be only fair to allow that the reproaches which have been levelled for so long a period at the British theatre—­the most important of these reproaches being that it possessed no drama at all—­perhaps I say we may grant in a spirit of charity that these reproaches ought not to be wholly laid at the door of the native playwright.  If it be true that he has been in the habit of producing plays invariably conventional in sentiment, trite in comedy, wrought on traditional lines, inculcating no philosophy, making no intellectual appeal whatever, may it not be that the attitude of the frequenters of the theatre has made it hard for him to do anything else?  If he has until lately evaded in his theatrical work any attempt at a true criticism of life, if he has ignored the social, religious, and scientific problems of his day, may we not attribute this to the fact that the public have not been in the mood for these elements of seriousness in their theatrical entertainment, have not demanded these special elements of seriousness either in plays or in novels?  But during recent years, the temper of the times has been changing; it is now the period of analysis, of general restless inquiry; and as this spirit creates a demand for freer expression on the part of our writers of books, so it naturally permits to our writers of plays a wider scope in the selection of subject, and calls for an accompanying effort of thought, a large freedom of utterance.

At this moment, perhaps, the difficulty of the dramatist lies less in paucity of subject, than in an almost embarrassing wealth of it.  The life around us teems with problems of conduct and character, which may be said almost to cry aloud for dramatic treatment, and the temptation that besets the busy playwright of an uneasy, an impatient age, is that in yielding himself to the allurements of contemporary psychology, he is apt to forget that fancy and romance have also their immortal rights in the drama. ["Hear!  Hear!”] But when all is claimed for romance, we must remember