He was a persistent playgoer, altho his visits to the theater were less frequent in later life than they had been earlier. He took the drama seriously, as he took the other facts of life; and he thought that the American theater was not doing its duty by the American people. In an illuminating article “About Play-Acting,” published in a magazine in 1898 (and most unaccountably not included in any of the volumes of his complete works) he described a tragedy which he had seen at the Burg Theater in Vienna. Then he listed the shows on exhibition in New York in a single week; and he drew a moral from the contrast: It is right and wholesome to have these light comedies and entertaining shows; and I shouldn’t wish to see them diminished. But none of us is _always_ in the comedy spirit; we have our graver moods; they come to us all; the lightest of us cannot escape them. These moods have their appetites,—healthy and legitimate appetites—and there ought to be some way of satisfying them. It seems to me that New York ought to have one theater devoted to tragedy. With her three millions of population, and seventy outside millions to draw upon, she can afford it, she can support it. America devotes more time, labor, money and attention to distributing literary and musical culture among the general public than does any other nation, perhaps; yet here you find her neglecting what is possibly the most effective of all the breeders and nurses and disseminators of high literary taste and lofty emotion—the tragic stage. To leave that powerful agency out is to haul the culture-wagon with a crippled team. Nowadays when a mood comes which only Shakspere can set to music, what must we do? Read Shakspere ourselves? Isn’t it pitiful? It is playing an organ solo on a jews-harp. _We_ can’t read. None but the Booths can do it.... Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the solemn pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built upon by Shakspere. Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of my line; I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on a vacation. III Altho I have quoted Mark’s assertion that he had never had the felicity of having a play accepted, he did have two pieces produced by managers; and a third, written in collaboration with Howells, had a brief and inglorious career at the expense of its authors. His first play, made out of one of his novels, drew delighted audiences for several seasons; the second, written in partnership with Bret Harte, and the third, written in partnership with Howells, met with so little success that they sank at once beneath the wave of oblivion, being almost unknown except in the hazy memories of the few surviving spectators who chanced to see one or the other during its brief stay on the stage. No one of the three has ever been published.