The second course is: To definitely set before the public those views and
codes of life by which the dramatist himself lives, those theories in
which he himself believes, the more effectively if they are the opposite
of what the public wishes to have placed before it, presenting them so
that the audience may swallow them like powder in a spoonful of jam.

There is a third course: To set before the public no cut-and-dried codes,
but the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not
distorted, by the dramatist's outlook, set down without fear, favour, or
prejudice, leaving the public to draw such poor moral as nature may
afford. This third method requires a certain detachment; it requires a
sympathy with, a love of, and a curiosity as to, things for their own
sake; it requires a far view, together with patient industry, for no
immediately practical result.

It was once said of Shakespeare that he had never done any good to any
one, and never would. This, unfortunately, could not, in the sense in
which the word "good" was then meant, be said of most modern dramatists.
In truth, the good that Shakespeare did to humanity was of a remote, and,
shall we say, eternal nature; something of the good that men get from
having the sky and the sea to look at. And this partly because he was,
in his greater plays at all events, free from the habit of drawing a
distorted moral. Now, the playwright who supplies to the public the
facts of life distorted by the moral which it expects, does so that he
may do the public what he considers an immediate good, by fortifying its
prejudices; and the dramatist who supplies to the public facts distorted
by his own advanced morality, does so because he considers that he will
at once benefit the public by substituting for its worn-out ethics, his
own. In both cases the advantage the dramatist hopes to confer on the