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THE EPHEMERAL DRAMA
have no essential beauty, or imposing
breadth, or prevailing power to make their
appeal potent beyond a year or less of life.
" The best in this kind are but shadows,"
said the Dramatist of the World, in one
of his remarkable expressions of doubt
about the art of which he was Prime Min-
ister and Master. The rule of negative
prediction is simple enough : The play
which never passes into literature; the
play which, in "the cold permanency of
print," cannot endure reading and reread-
ing, has the sure seed of death within it.
Out of a hundred contemporary dramas,
ninety are flat and unprofitable on a first
perusal, and ninety-and-nine are warranted
to cause mental nausea at a second. Take
Robertson's School, for instance, which
was performed to delighted hundreds of
thousands, in England and America, in the
early seventies. Reading it deliberately
to-day is like absorbing a gallon of weak,
warmish eau sucree flavored with the juice
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