As to the art of the theatre, England, proud in a magnificent past, which is still the only rival in Christian times of the days of the ancient Greek drama, can with more good content than most nations submit to the present phase which makes production and scenery and not the play "the thing." But in dramatic as in musical art it is the fashion to represent England as sunk in a Slough of Despond, whilst other nations march gloriously forward on the upper heights. I take leave to dispute the truth of that picture. It is not a Golden Age anywhere for the drama. Our time seems to be capable of very little else than going over the tailing-heaps of past workers, searching for a little grain of gold here and there, and, after finding it, beating it out thin with infinite labour to make it appear as impressive as possible. There are no great nuggets being turned up; no one is pouring out a golden stream. But of what little pottering work there is being done, England is responsible for a fair share. Perhaps her surviving instinct of Puritanism stands in the way of slightly increasing a small success. There are only two stories, says some one: there is the story of one man and two women, and there is the story of one woman and two men. English custom has insisted for a century or so upon a certain reserve in the treatment of any one of the infinite variations on these two themes; and there is a Censor to enforce some unwritten and poorly-understood Rules of the Game. Censors of the Censor say that his main rule is that you may not be "sexey" and serious, though you may go far on the path of being "sexey" and frivolous. A fairly faithful study of the London theatres has suggested to me that whatever primness there was about the censorship is rapidly breaking down, and there is not an undue amount of it nowadays. The present (1912-13) fashion in London is for spectacle plays--in which the mounting is of at least equal importance to the play--and "atmosphere plays," the scene of which must be pitched in some unfamiliar, preferably some slightly uncouth phase of life, which is reproduced with meticulous accuracy. I suppose that Sir Herbert Tree may be accepted as the leader of theatrical London of the day: and when I sought to get an impression of theatrical London "behind the scenes," I obtained permission to watch him at work in the shaping of a big "production," _False Gods_, from the French, a philosophical treatise in the form of a play, which was to be launched upon London with the adventitious aid of impressive "production." "No! No!! No!!! You must go mad, go mad! Think of a French Revolution--be just that! Dance, leap, shriek. Go mad!"