The paralysis of the literary drama, then, has not been due to the indifference of the literary class. Perhaps it is time thrown away to seek for its cause. The fact is that, for one reason or another, England has lost the dramatic habit. The past fifteen or twenty years have witnessed one more concerted effort to “elevate the English stage,” and this time with a fair prospect of results. There is a stir of expectation: the new drama is announced and already in part arrived. It would be premature to proclaim success as yet; but thus much may be affirmed, that the dramatic output of the last quarter-century outweighs that of any other quarter-century since 1700. Here, for instance, are the titles of a dozen contemporary plays which it would be hard to match with any equal number produced during an equal period of time since the failure of Congreve’s latest and most brilliant comedy, “The Way of the World,” marked the close of the Restoration drama: W. S. Gilbert’s “Pygmalion and Galatea”; Sydney Grundy’s “An Old Jew”; Henry Arthur Jones’s “Judah” and “The Liars”; Arthur Wing Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” and “The Benefit of the Doubt”; George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida” and “Arms and the Man”; Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan”; Stephen Phillips’s “Ulysses”; and W. Butler Yeats’s “The Land of Heart’s Desire.” (I have gone back a few years to include Mr. Gilbert’s piece, first given at the Haymarket in 1871.) Every one of these dramas has been performed with acceptance, every one of them is a contribution to literature, worthy the attention of cultivated readers. I do not say that any one of them is a masterpiece, or that collectively they will hold the stage as Goldsmith’s and Sheridan’s are still holding it a century and a quarter after their first production. But I will venture to say that, taken together, they constitute a more solid and varied group of dramatic works than that favorite little bunch of “classical” comedies, and offer a securer ground of hope for the future of the British stage. It will be observed that half of them are tragedies, or plays of a serious interest; also that they do not form a school, in the sense in which the French tragedy of Louis XIV, or the English comedy of the Restoration, was a school—that is, a compact dramatic group, limited in subject and alike in manner. They are the work of individual talents, conforming to no single ideal, but operating on independent lines. And it would be easy to add a second dozen by the same authors little, if at all, inferior to those on the first list.