In no civilized country in the world to-day is there among playwrights so little fervour for sound drama as in the United States. In England, they at least try, in a measure, to write well; in Germany, to experiment bravely in new forms; in France, to philosophize either seriously or lightly upon life as they find it; in Russia, to treat soberly of problems physical and spiritual; in Spain, to depict the Spanish heart and conscience and atmosphere; in Ireland, to reflect the life and thoughts, the humour and tragedy and encompassing aspirations, of a people. And in the United States--what? In the United States, with hardly more than two exceptions, there is at the moment not a playwright who isn’t thinking of “success” above honest work. Good and bad craftsmen alike, they all think the same. Gold, silver, copper. And the result is an endless procession of revamped crook plays, detective plays, Cinderella plays, boudoir plays, bucolic plays: fodder for doodles. The cowardice before the golden snake’s eye spreads to the highest as well as to the lowest. Integrity is thrown overboard as the ship is steered unswervingly into the Golden Gate. The unquestionable talent of an Avery Hopwood--a George M. Cohan--a George Bronson-Howard--is deliberately self-corrupted. The American professional theatre is to-day at once the richest theatre in the world, and the poorest. Financially, it reaches to the stars; culturally, with exception so small as to be negligible, it reaches to the drains. For both of these reaches, the American newspaper stands largely responsible. The American newspaper, in general, regards the theatre with contempt. My early years, upon leaving the university, were spent on the staff of one of them--the leading daily journal of America, it was in those days--and I shall never forget its attitude toward the theatre: cheap, hollow, debased. If a play was produced by a manager who advertised extensively in the paper, it was praised out of all reason. If a play was produced by a manager who happened to be _persona non grata_ in the office, it was dismissed with a brief reportorial notice. If a play was produced by a new and enterprising manager on the night of another production in a theatre patronized by fashionable audiences--the Empire, say--the former play, however worthy an effort it might be, was let down with a stick or two that there might be room to print the names of the fashionables who were in the Empire seats. The surface of things has changed somewhat since then, but the situation at bottom is much the same. A talented young reviewer writes honestly of a tawdry play in the _Evening Sun_; the producer of the play, an office favourite, complains; and the young reviewer is promptly discharged. A moving picture producer takes half-page advertisements of his forthcoming _opus_ in the New York newspapers, and the screen exhibit, a piece of trash, is hailed as a master work.