For the only sort of play that permits itself to be remembered is a play that presents a distinct theme to the mind of the observer. It is ten years since I have seen _Le Tartufe_ and six years since last I read it; and yet, since the theme is unforgetable, I could at any moment easily reconstruct the piece by retrospective imagination and summarise the action clearly in a paragraph. But on the other hand, I should at any time find it impossible to recall with sufficient clearness to summarise them, any of a dozen American plays of the usual type which I had seen within the preceding six months. Details of incident or of character or of dialogue slip the mind and melt away like smoke into the air. To have seen a play without a theme is the same, a month or two later, as not to have seen a play at all. But a piece like _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, once seen, can never be forgotten; because the mind clings to the central proposition which the play was built in order to reveal, and from this ineradicable recollection may at any moment proceed by psychologic association to recall the salient concrete features of the action. To develop a play from a central theme is therefore the sole means by which a dramatist may insure his work against the iniquity of oblivion. In order that people may afterward remember what he has said, it is necessary for him to show them clearly and emphatically at the outset why he has undertaken to talk and precisely what he means to talk about. Most of our American playwrights, like Juliet in the balcony scene, speak, yet they say nothing. They represent facts, but fail to reveal truths. What they lack is purpose. They collect, instead of meditating; they invent, instead of wondering; they are clever, instead of being real. They are avid of details: they regard the part as greater than the whole. They deal with outsides and surfaces, not with centralities and profundities. They value acts more than they value the meanings of acts; they forget that it is in the motive rather than in the deed that Life is to be looked for. For Life is a matter of thinking and of feeling; all act is merely Living, and is significant only in so far as it reveals the Life that prompted it. Give us less of Living, more of Life, must ever be the cry of earnest criticism. Enough of these mutitudinous, multifarious facts: tell us single, simple truths. Give us more themes, and fewer fabrics of shreds and patches. XIV THE FUNCTION OF IMAGINATION