Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/168

138 : And you throw the book on the waters, hoping that the bait will be swallowed by some greedy fish.

It occurred to me that it would be as well to give The Coming of Gabrielle to the Tauchnitz Library, and the manager of the National Theatre, Prague, picked the up from a bookstall and decided to produce it.


 * I shall print my play.

I hope you will, for the publication will attract and prepare the public for literary drama.


 * You live in London (I in Devon and Italy) and may be able to tell me if people are beginning to weary of trash.

The public accept what the managers give them, and if an author has written books, especially well-written books, if his name, I mean, be connected with literature, the manager begins to sniff danger, for we have no record of a successful "literary" play. Of course we haven't; literature is never literary. And the manager is duped by the high-brow, and the high-brow in turn is duped by the disagreeable, else I should drop, he says, into the common-place. The literary papers shriek "Literature at Stake!" but the public heed them not. The manager puts on Cocoanut Ice and gets a run of three hundred nights. The Two-Seater follows and gets a run of four hundred nights. And once more literature is discredited by the "literary."


 * As the theatre cannot be suppressed, a Bill will be introduced into Parliament for its reformation sooner or later. There will be hitches and delays—


 * There will indeed; for the roots of Puritanism are so deep in England that at the first hint of a National Theatre theology and morals will be massed against us, and the question will be asked in both Houses of Parliament if it be just that the taxpayer should put his hand into his pocket to pay for what he does not want, indeed, for what he actively dislikes.


 * You talk like one who is opposed to a National Theatre.

No, not opposed, but in doubt whether art can be beckoned. Art comes to a country and flourishes in it for a while, and then leaves it, never to return.


 * It may be so; so far as you know, it is so. But to-morrow may prove your theory to be wrong. Why furnish the opposition with arguments?