playwright lures them to the theatre by a promise to excite their senses
in a very special and sensational manner, and then, having successfully
trapped them in exceptional numbers, proceeds to ignore their senses and
ruthlessly improve their minds? But I protest again that the lure was
not mine. The play had been in print for four years; and I have spared
no pains to make known that my plays are built to induce, not voluptuous
reverie but intellectual interest, not romantic rhapsody but humane
concern. Accordingly, I do not find those critics who are gifted with
intellectual appetite and political conscience complaining of want of
dramatic power. Rather do they protest, not altogether unjustly, against
a few relapses into staginess and caricature which betray the young
playwright and the old playgoer in this early work of mine.

As to the voluptuaries, I can assure them that the playwright, whether
he be myself or another, will always disappoint them. The drama can do
little to delight the senses: all the apparent instances to the contrary
are instances of the personal fascination of the performers. The drama
of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been
conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts
seem cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is dry,
tedious, and rhetorical in comparison with Wagner's Tristan, even though
Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often is in Germany.
Indeed, it needed no Wagner to convince the public of this. The
voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod's Faust and Bizet's Carmen has
captured the common playgoer; and there is, flatly, no future now for
any drama without music except the drama of thought. The attempt to
produce a genus of opera without music (and this absurdity is what
our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time without
knowing it) is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept
problem as the normal materiel of the drama.