If American audiences are younger than they were, then they are not so rich in knowledge of the world, not so ripe in judgment. If they are also more largely feminine, then they will be different from what they have been in the days when the drama attained to its superbest expression. The tragedies of Sophocles were represented in the Theater of Dionysus before the citizens of Athens; and the spectators were all men of more or less maturity. The tragedies and the comedies of Shakspere were written for the Globe Theater in London, in which the spectators were predominantly male. The comedies of Molière were acted in the Palais Royal Theater in Paris, before audiences which included comparatively few women. It is significant that women were admitted to the orchestra seats of the Théâtre Français only about forty years ago; and that Sarcey, a very shrewd observer of things theatrical, was moved more than once to record his regret that this had helped to bring about the more rapid dispersal of the group of old playgoers, experts in playwriting and in acting, who were wont to follow the performances of the Comédie-Française assiduously and devotedly. And it was almost a hundred years ago that Goethe anticipated Sarcey’s complaint. “What business have young girls in the theater?” he asked. “They do not belong to it; ... the theater is only for men and women, who know something of human affairs.” But “things are what they are, and will be what they will be.” (1919) V ON THE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING A PATTERN V ON THE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING A PATTERN I No passage of Stevenson’s has been oftener quoted than his confession how he taught himself the art of letters by playing “the sedulous ape to many masters”; and in this avowal he had been preceded by masters of style as dissimilar in their accomplishment as Franklin and Newman. Stevenson may be overstating the case—he had caught the trick of over-statement from Thoreau—but he is not misstating it when he asserts that this is the only way to learn to write. Certainly it is an excellent way, if we judge by its results in his own case, in Franklin’s and in Newman’s. The method of imitative emulation will help any apprentice of the craft to choose his words, to arrange them in sentences and to build them up in coherent paragraphs. It is a specific against that easy writing which is “cursed hard reading.” But it goes no deeper than the skin, since it affords insufficient support when the novice has to consider his structure as a whole, the total form he will bestow upon his essay, his story, his play.