they could not well be both, at any rate without neglecting the
financial pursuits which are their chief real amusement and hobby. I
mention the theaters in connection with sports, rather than in
connection with the arts, because the American drama is more closely
related to sporting diversions than to dramatic art. If this seems a
hard saying, I will add that I am ready to apply it with similar force
to the English and French drama, and, indeed, to almost all modern drama
outside Germany. It was astonishing to me that America, unhampered by
English traditions, should take seriously, for instance, the fashionable
and utterly meretricious French dramatists, who receive nothing but a
chilly ridicule from people of genuine discrimination in Paris. Whatever
American dramatists have to learn, they will not learn it in Paris; and
I was charmed once to hear a popular New York playwright, one who
sincerely and frankly wrote for money alone, assert boldly that the
notoriously successful French plays were bad, and clumsily bad. It was a
proof of taste. As a rule, one finds the popular playwright taking off
his hat to contemporaries who at best are no better than his equals.

A few minor cases apart, the drama is artistically negligible throughout
the world; but if there is a large hope for it in any special country,
that country is the United States. The extraordinary prevalence of big
theaters, the quickly increasing number of native dramatists, the
enormous profits of the successful ones--it is simply inconceivable in
the face of the phenomena, and of the educational process so rapidly
going on, that serious and first-class creative artists shall not arise
in America. Nothing is more likely to foster the production of
first-class artists than the existence of a vast machinery for winning
money and glory. When I reflect that there are nearly twice as many
first-class theaters in New York as in London, and that a very
successful play in New York plays to eighteen thousand dollars a week,