There was no reason that I could see why the first attempt of the National Theatre should have ended its existence, but the fact remains that from that day to this I have heard no more about it and I turned back to my own work with some feeling of thankfulness. After all, if a man must be mixed up in a failure, why shouldn’t he have the fun of being responsible for all of it? and, since a man with a mind trained to full activity must focus his thoughts on something, isn’t it better after all that the something should be the activity he knows the most about? I don’t in the least know how long a writer is supposed to last. It may well be that my thirty odd years have been the greater part of my share although I am sure I should enjoy making it an even hundred, but I do know that to keep up with the parade to-day a writing man must keep his eyes wide open and his fingers on the pulse of the public. This is many times more true to-day than it was in the years before the war, but even then the critical sense of the public was growing rapidly. In the old days a playwright’s plots and characters were accepted about as automatically as the church creeds of the time were accepted, and for about the same reason; the habit of the average citizen of thinking things out for himself had not yet grown to its present stimulating proportion. If both the church and the stage of to-day are placed in a position where they must fight for their life, surely nothing that is fine in either of them is in danger. With the bunk gone the truth will be twice as powerful. It has always seemed to me to have been Ibsen who sounded the first note of modern characterization in the drama. Good dramatists have always drawn good characters, but the accent upon the character and the character’s propelling force upon the narrative was quite different. Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, Portia, Rip, Caleb Plummer, Duston Kirk and hundreds of others were finely drawn characters, but Ibsen’s Nora not only lived and moved but she moved the play with her and her emotional progress marked the progress of the drama. After the production of THE NERVOUS WRECK I tried very hard to write the play I earnestly wanted to write, but I couldn’t get it. THE DETOUR and ICEBOUND were true plays from my point of view, honest attempts to do the best work I knew how to do. But I had a feeling that the American drama should express a more optimistic note, that it was, or ought to be, possible to write of life as truly as plays of that class were trying to write about it, and yet express the fundamental difference between our lives and the lives of the people of Middle Europe, whose dramatists had given birth to the new school of naturalistic play writing.