The world of drama appears to-day to be at sea, by reason of the loss of the great compass of a controlling dramatic tradition, yet this is not quite true; because other influences--vague perhaps, yet very authoritative--supply, in some degree, the place of the older tyrant, custom. The controlling force of living dramatic practice has died away in the world, and has become dissipated into a thousand traditions. But in dying, it has left two influences as its heirs--namely, the influence of criticism, and the influence of academic training. These two watch-dogs of the drama tend to keep at least some record of the past. They organize and classify the new varieties of drama which are constantly springing up. For it appears that a new kind of drama is not so very difficult a thing for a community to develop. The oratorio, for example, and modern opera in all its forms, are even more artificial than the Greek drama, and require an even greater conventional sympathy on the part of the audience. Yet they have grown up naturally among us and are true children of stage life. In quite recent years Wagner, Ibsen, and Mæterlinck has each developed a personal theatre of his own. Each has drawn to himself a sort of international public, held together by ties of education, by taste and by the spirit of the age--such a public as a novelist might collect, but which one would never have predicted for a playwright. This could only have happened in an age when there existed a large reading public made up of persons who were scattered throughout all the nations. For it must be noted that the reading of plays is as good as a chorus. It warns the people of what is to come. Not only the reading of plays but the reading of pamphlets and of essays is necessary in order that people may be primed to accept any new departure in the drama. The undeniable genius of Gluck was not able to establish his lyrical drama without the aid of many writers, talkers, and promoters. It required a war of pamphlets and the influence of royalty to make the new opera acceptable. Ibsen and Wagner have been accompanied by a wagonload of pamphlets and broadsides, as if they were the forerunners of a new circus. Bernard Shaw went with every play he gave as an advertising agent, a gladiator and shouting billman that would get the attention of the public at any price. It was quieter inside the theatre than outside of it, so people took refuge within. Let no one think that criticism is an unnecessary part of the modern drama. Criticism to-day is but the articulate utterance of those conventions, those assumptions, and prejudices which must accompany and support any drama in the mind of the audience, and which in simpler ages hardly needed statement, because they were established. They stood in the public consciousness much as the walls of the theatre stood in the market-place, while the plays proceeded within them.