The novelist often succeeds upon his literary style, a painter by his drawing and his sense of color, but paradoxically enough a good play is a bad play unless the writer has been fortunate in the choice of his subject matter; skill alone won’t save him. Since the only real standard by which one may judge a play is the rather primitive one of whether one likes it or not, it is easy to see how dangerous a game this play writing is. A good workman may work his heart out for many months to be condemned at last by the same feeling that gave birth to the old doggerel “I do not like you, Doctor Fell.” Few critics are clever enough to make the distinction between a writer’s skill and his good or evil fortune in the choice of his subject, and I am often amused to read the praises of the genius of an author who has been lucky enough to hit upon a theme or story that has tickled the public’s fancy and the complete damnation of the poor wretch who has failed to do so, although in every other particular the later play may be ten times as well built and well written as the former. Naturally we like to be amused and resent being bored. Yet, as a matter of truth, the same skill, the same hard work and the same knowledge of life and of play structure goes into a man’s failures as he puts into his successes. The writer who knows his trade fails or triumphs the hour he makes his decision of what he is going to write about. Then, too, the subject matter of plays is still far too often dictated by the manager and between us we are still getting ourselves into trouble trying to guess what the public wants instead of trying to do the best work we know how to do and letting it go at that. The old notion that the experienced showman knows more about plays than our present public knows dies hard and many of our plays are still being written by and for an intelligence distinctly below the average intelligence of the audience. The day of the routine comedy-drama and melodrama is over. The successful play of to-day is nine times out of ten a good play. In fact the most encouraging thing about the theater to-day is not that good plays are sure of success but that bad plays are sure of failure. An optimist may look happily forward to the time when writers and managers who remain blind to the change in public taste and persist in producing routine sugar-coated piffle will all have starved to death or been driven out of the business. This change has come about very gradually, as immigration has been restricted and the living standards of the American people have advanced. Life to-day is stimulating where once it was, at least for the majority, dull and uneventful. Romance, once supplied almost wholly by the theater, is all about us. Modern thought, modern invention, have done much to end the bland acceptance of routine fiction, both on the stage and on the printed page, and to be sure of an audience to-day one must have something to say and know how to say it.