nods to Fitzgerald and Vane._) Mis
Le for or against it. _A Comedy of Sighs_, with its somewhat "impressionist" sketches of character, and aberrations from the ordinary type of a "well-made play," proved to be "too lightly tempered for so loud a wind" as blows upon British bugbears--"Modern Women," and the like. And now may I say a few words with regard to some misconceptions on the part of the critics as to my aim in writing these two plays? One of them, an enthusiast himself, did me the honour to hail me as a brother enthusiast, albeit an erring one. Possibly I am. But I have not been trying to educate the public, which is being educated past its old standards day by day, without such philanthropic effort on my part. I have not been trying to write "literary" plays. I quite agree with those who think that a play must be a play first. If it be "literature" afterwards, that is an added grace which gives it a permanent value. If it be not, still it may be a good play in its day and generation. I have not, for the sake of being unconventional, deliberately set myself to violate all the received canons of dramatic art, as practised by the "practical dramatist," thus making a convention of unconventionality. Unconventional art is impossible, and the drama, like other arts, has its conventions. But conventions change, and new ones are evolved, as new problems in art and other things--even morality itself--come in with each new tide of the human imagination. The "well-made play" of the day before yesterday is not a canon for all time, even for the most conservative playgoer. No, what I have been trying to do is simply to write a good play. Ah yes! But what _is_ a good play? The enthusiastic critic has a ready answer: "The play that succeeds, that has a long run, that has money in it!" I accept the answer for what it is worth. This potentiality of money is, like "literature," an added grace: and it certainly, in a sense, marks the survival of the fittest. But there are other standards in the great workshop of the artist, Nature. Even the plant or play that lives but a short time may cast its seed into the soil, or im