The list of the dramatists who have been tempted to talk about the drama as an art is long, far longer indeed than is suspected by those who have never sought to seek them out. It includes Lope de Vega, Ben Jonson and Dryden, Corneille and Molière, Goethe, Lessing and Grillparzer, Voltaire and Goldoni, Victor Hugo and the two Dumas, Ernest Legouvé and Jules Lemaître, Bronson Howard and William Gillette, Arthur Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. These are all the names of professional playwrights whose dramas, comic and tragic, withstood the ordeal by fire in the theater. Yet it may be well to point out that they divide themselves into two groups. We may put into the first group those who were critics by profession and whose reputation is due rather to their critical acumen than to their playmaking skill,—Ben Jonson and Dryden, Lessing and Jules Lemaître. Then we put into a second group those who were critics only on occasion, their fame being based on their creative work,—Lope de Vega, Corneille and Molière, Grillparzer and Pinero, to name only a few. It is from these latter that we have a right to expect the most significant statements. II The first thing we discover when we compare the opinions of the professional playwrights is that they agree in accepting the judgment of the audience as decisive and final. As their plays were composed for the delight of the spectators, they all feel that they are bound to accept the verdict rendered in the theater. They know better than any one else how vain is the hope of an appeal to any other tribunal. They were seeking success on the stage, not in the study; they desired to arouse and retain the interest of their own contemporaries in their own country. They gave no thought to posterity or to foreign nations. They recognized that they had no right to complain if they could not win over the jury by which they had chosen to be tried. In so far as the dramatists have expressed their opinion on this point they are unanimous. In Professor William Lyon Phelps’s lively little book on the ‘Twentieth Century Theater,’ he has told us about an unnamed author, who “profoundly influenced not only the stage but also modern thought” and who nevertheless maintained that the “true dramatist must not think of the box-office while he is writing his plays. He must express himself, which is the only reason for writing at all. If what he writes happens to be financially successful, so much the better. But he must not think of popular success while at work.” We cannot doubt the sincerity of these sentiments, since Professor Phelps has frankly informed us that the majority of this author’s pieces “have been failures on the stage.”