Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/127

 "Outside of New York there is no feeling for art in America at all. Our plays find almost no audience beyond that centre. You can judge for yourself what such people as those you saw last night would make of anything with any depth or of anything really poignant or searching. I have just said that such people are not typical; but I admit that they are fairly characteristic of the newly prosperous vulgar so numerous among us. Suppose you put a play before them in which you expressed a sense of the tragedy and mystery of life; of the chaotic war always just beneath the surface of life; of the monstrous formlessness beneath the struggle that goes on near the surface—you may imagine what they would make of it! To please them you must offer a pretty little romance about money and marriage. If you write of humanity they think you are either prurient or insane. Fortunately, in the last four or five years we have either discovered or educated—I do not know which—an audience in New York that cares for an art somewhat more sophisticated than would delight these morons."

"Morons?" She repeated the word thoughtfully. "Morons. I do not know it. It means?"

"Defectives," he explained. "People whose