Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE IN the preceding chapter I treated of what may be called the drama of the "great British public." I did not treat it—it may be well to mention— from an historical point of view, since it neither comes within the scope of my task, nor is it my intention to recapitulate in chronological order the vicissitudes of the contemporary English stage, but to convey to the reader, whose knowledge of the subject is limited, a broad and general impression of its leading characteristics. This impression, however, would be both incomplete and incorrect were the reader allowed to believe that English drama consists, or consists only, of that which so far has formed the subject of my sketches. Pinero, Jones, Sutro, and Barrie too, besides others whose names considerations of space have prevented my doing more than mention, are the playwrights— good or bad—of the "commercial" drama; that is to say, of that drama which returns hundreds and thousands of pounds in fees to its authors, and as a set-off has to pay tribute to the ingeniousness, the vulgarity, the conventionality, and the intellectual limitations of the "great British public." In otherwords, up to the present time I have dealt only with such plays and with such writers as inspire us with scant confidence, owing to the general conditions by which they are environed, in the probability of a healthy revival of English drama by their means. Such confidence must be sought elsewhere. I remarked in my first chapter that side by side with the "great British public," created by modern civil conditions, with ideas, tastes, and sentiments which are the product of their environment, there is also a minor public—select, studious, cultured, and refined—a kind of intellectual aristocracy in the truest an...