Courts was the announcement to the English-speaking world that
certain plays of mine were unfit for public performance, a
substantial set-off against this being that the British Court, in
the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to the bad
character given me by the chief officer of its household.

Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London
stage, and were presently followed by the plays of Granville
Barker, Gilbert Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence
Housman, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and
others which would in the nineteenth century have stood rather
less chance of production at a London theatre than the Dialogues
of Plato, not to mention revivals of the ancient Athenian drama
and a restoration to the stage of Shakespeare's plays as he wrote
them, was made economically possible solely by a supply of
theatres which could hold nearly twice as much money as it cost
to rent and maintain them. In such theatres work appealing to a
relatively small class of cultivated persons, and therefore
attracting only from half to three-quarters as many spectators as
the more popular pastimes, could nevertheless keep going in the
hands of young adventurers who were doing it for its own sake,
and had not yet been forced by advancing age and responsibilities
to consider the commercial value of their time and energy too
closely. The war struck this foundation away in the manner I have
just described. The expenses of running the cheapest west-end
theatres rose to a sum which exceeded by twenty-five per cent the
utmost that the higher drama can, as an ascertained matter of
fact, be depended on to draw. Thus the higher drama, which has
never really been a commercially sound speculation, now became an
impossible one. Accordingly, attempts are being made to provide a