The ruling ethic of the American press so far as the theatre is concerned is one of unctuous _laissez faire_. “If you can’t praise, don’t dispraise,” is the editorial injunction to the reviewer. The theatre in America is a great business--greater even than the department store--and a great business should be treated with proper respect. What if the reviewer does not admire “The Key to Heaven”? It played to more than _twelve thousand dollars_ last week; it _must_ be good. The theatre must be helped, and the way to help it is uninterruptedly to speak well of it. Fine drama? Art? A newspaper has no concern with fine drama and art; the public is not interested in such things. A newspaper’s concern is primarily with news. But is not dramatic swindling, the selling of spurious wares at high prices, news? Is not an attempt to corrupt the future of the theatre as an honourable institution and an honourable business also news, news not so very much less interesting, perhaps, than the three column account of an ex-Follies girl’s adulteries? The reviewer, for his impertinence, is assigned henceforth to cover the Jefferson Market police court. The key-note of the American journalistic attitude toward the theatre is a stagnant optimism. Dramatic art and the red-haired copy boy are the two stock jokes of the American newspaper office. Here and there one encounters a reviewer who, through either the forcefulness or the amiability of his personality, is successful for a short time in evading the editorial shackles--there are a few such still extant as I write. But soon or late the rattle of the chains is heard and the reviewer that was is no more. He is an American, and must suffer the penalty that an American who aspires to cultured viewpoint and defiant love of beauty must ever suffer. For--so George Santayana, late professor of philosophy in Harvard University, in “Character and Opinion in the United States”--“the luckless American who is drawn to poetic subtlety, pious retreats, or gay passions, nevertheless has the categorical excellence of work, growth, enterprise, reform, and prosperity dinned into his ears: every door is open in this direction and shut in the other; so that he either folds up his heart and withers in a corner--in remote places you sometimes find such a solitary gaunt idealist--or else he flies to Oxford or Florence or Montmartre to save his soul--or perhaps not to save it.” * * * * * * Transcriber’s note: Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. On page 83, second sentence, after the word So, it appears that a word is missing. The transcriber is unable to ascertain what the missing word, if any, might be.