Now, of course, this is true to some degree of the theatre also――at any rate in the great centres of population like London, where there are many neighbourhoods and many theatres. You would not expect to fill a popular ‘low price’ house with the same bill that might succeed at the St. James’s or, in recent days, at the Court Theatre. Nevertheless, it is immensely less true of the theatre than it is of the novel. Take the average West End theatre――it has to cater for all of us. The fashionable folk go, you and I go, our growing boys and girls go, our relations from the country go, our servants go, our butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers go, the girls from the A.B.C. shops, and the young gentlemen from Marshall & Snelgrove’s go――we have all to be catered for――we have all to be pleased with the same dinner! Across the footlights lies a miniature world, in which wellnigh every variety that exists in the great world outside has paid its money and sits in its seat. Is this to say that the theatre must rely on the commonplace and obvious? Not at all――but it is to say that it must in the main rely on the universal――on that which appeals to all the varieties in virtue of the common humanity that underlies the variations. It must find, so to say, the least common denominator, and work through and appeal to that. The things that will do it differ profoundly―― ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!’ That does it. Or Congreve’s ‘Though Marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves them still two fools!’――That does it, though obviously in quite a different way――or ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’――again in a different way. Or again something quite elementary――even schoolboyish if one may dare to use the word of Shakespeare――may win its way by its absolute naturalness, as when Jacques says to Orlando――of Rosalind, ‘I do not like her name’――‘There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened’――an unanswerable retort to an impertinent observation which I have never known to fail in pleasing the house. The thing may or may not be simple, it may or may not be profound, it may or may not be witty, but it must have a wide appeal――it must touch a common chord. I imagine that very few plays――though I think I have known a few――get produced and then please nobody――absolutely nobody in the house. I have known some failures that have pleased very highly people whom any author should be proud to please. But they haven’t pleased enough people――not merely not enough to succeed, but not enough to establish them as good plays, however much good literary stuff and good literary form there might be contained and exhibited in them.