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 imagination, of its day, and, like Banquo, beget a royal
race, though not itself a king.

Now, how does such a play as THE BLACK CAT differ from
those we see succeeding on the stage every day? Really not so very
much, after all. It merely accentuates a growing tendency in the
plays of the period to get more of the stuff of life, our every-day
human life, typically upon the stage; with less of the traditional
theatrical-academic element. The "well-made play" has itself
undergone evolution since the days when it was an aphorism that not
what is said but what is done on the stage is the essential thing.
This of course is at once true and false, like every other truism.
Without action there can be no play; and a play may be made fairly
intelligible without a single spoken word, just as a scene from
history or fiction may be quite recognisably depicted in a few
symbolic lines, dots, and dashes, though no single human figure be
decently drawn.

We must not, however, forget that action itself is language. What is
called the action of a play is simply a story told by the movements
of the players. But when we see a man stabbed, or a woman kissed,
our curiosity is excited. We want to know something more about the
people whose actions we see. This, indeed, may be roughly told by