useless to attempt original pieces. It has made
the public familiar with pictures of life which
mainly depend for their interest and piquancy
upon unhealthy passion. As to the first point
—the small sums paid for dramatic work.
Managers have so long been accustomed to pay
translators' wages, that they will give no more
for original pieces. Indeed, they are disposed
to argue that they ought to give less; for,
say they, the French piece has been tried and
has succeeded, whereas your original drama
has yet to be tested. The rewards of
dramatic authors, who are not themselves actors
and managers, are incredibly small. The authors
who write for the east-end and transpontine
theatres rarely get twenty pounds for a piece.
A more common price is ten pounds, and
instances could be mentioned where authors have
written three-act pieces for a pound an act.
For an original piece which lately achieved a
great success, ran upwards of a hundred nights,
and brought the management several thousand
pounds, the author received forty pounds. At
the west-end of the town the highest price for a
piece is fifty pounds an act. If an author had
a comedy as good as the School for Scandal, or
a drama as good as the Lady of Lyons, he would
not be able, in the ordinary way, to obtain more
than two hundred pounds for it. Farces and
short pieces do not fetch more than fifty pounds
at the utmost, while the average price is about
twenty pounds.

In this state of the market, it is not
surprising that capable writers should shun the
theatre and turn to other branches of
literature where the reward is more liberal, and
where employment is more regular and
constant. The newspapers and magazines afford,
all things considered, a much higher rate of pay
than the theatres. When an author contributes
a three-act drama to a theatre, he furnishes the
principal part of the entertainment, and any
success that may ensue is mainly owing to his
work; but a man who writes a single article for
a newspaper or magazine assists only in a small
degree, with many other contributors, to
produce the work which the public require and pay
for. And yet there are many anonymous
journalists earning at the rate of a thousand a
year, while scores of general writers for the
press make very fair incomes, according to their
ability. Suppose an author could write three
plays in a year—which, if they were original,
would be very good work—and could get them
produced, what would be his gain? At the
most, six hundred pounds. There are girls who
earn more money by writing love-stories. In
this country, dramatic writing is not a profession
at all; it is a sort of amateur jobbing,
which authors devote themselves to, more for
the love than the profit of the thing. In
France it is a profession, and those who follow
it make large sums of money and live by
their dramatic works, because in that country
authors are paid at a rate in proportion to the
success of their plays. When an author stands
a chance of making a fortune out of a single
drama, it is worth his while to expend time and
trouble in making it a good drama; but when
his reward is limited to a hundred or two, as it
is in this country, he cannot afford to give more
time and trouble than that amount will pay for.
Some English dramatic authors, who are also
actors, have been able to dispose of their pieces
according to the French system, and the
arrangement has resulted to the advantage of all
parties. Pains have been taken, good pieces
have been written, and the result has been a
large reward both to manager and author.

The idea that the English intellect has no
capacity for dramatic construction ought surely
to be sufficiently disposed of by a simple reference
to the long list of brilliant dramatic works
which figure in our standard literature. The
very best literature which the modern world
has produced is to be found in the English
drama—in the works of Shakespeare. And if
we come to our immediate day, we may point to
the fact that the most successful dramas of
recent years have been original, or adaptations
of English stories written by Englishmen,
and depicting English life and manners. The
ingenious French plots which the translators
admire so much, rarely succeed in keeping
the stage. Scores of these—mere conjuring
tricks with artificial incidents, made to fit into
each other like the pieces of a fantastic
puzzle—have been transferred to the
English stage, and scarcely one of them has
survived the year of its production. The only
reason why these pieces succeed in any degree,
shorn as they are of all that renders them
acceptable to French audiences, is that they are
produced at theatres to which the public must
necessarily resort, if they go to the theatre.
There is little choice: play-goers must
accept these makeshifts or stay away. And it
is a fact that the grown-up male population does
stay away. The whole race of pit critics has
died out.

And can many people doubt that the taste for
the drama is lowered, and that the drama itself
is degraded by the representation of plays which,
losing their original interest, are not true
pictures of French life, and, being incapable of
receiving a new direction, are in no way pictures
of English life? They are, for the most part,
pictures of nothing. They might be described
as diagrams of a mechanical dramatic puzzle,
in which figures, made of wood, are arranged
to execute certain manoeuvres, like the toy men
and women that dance in front of a street
organ.

This state of things is in great part the result
of a restricted field of action. Monopoly can sell
what it pleases, and ask what price it pleases for
selling it. London wants more theatres—not
music-halls combining the drama with drink
and tobacco, for that conjunction is simply
impossible, and would never attract the respectable
classes, if it could be effected; but theatres
in the proper acceptation of the term. The
limited number of theatres in proportion to the
population, and the length of the run of