The only thing I can add to these scattered notes about play writing is that no one should allow a failure to beat him. There isn’t anything at all remarkable about having written a bad play; it’s been done before and it’s going to be done again. It’s writing a good play that is unusual as the man who bit the dog; he’s the fellow worth talking about. No matter how much you may be scorned and derided for having written what you wrote, no matter how sure you may be that you never again will dare to look anybody in the face—for a dramatist’s failure in the theater, for some reason that escapes me, seems to carry with it a moral disgrace and a social ostracism—in spite of this you will get another chance when you get another play. I have always demanded that each new play of mine should be judged exactly as though I had never written one before, and, as I said earlier in this article, the critic must tell the truth; he may not want to, but if you really have done a good job he can’t help himself. Critics, like dramatists, are emotional idiots.
Although I remain firmly of the opinion that the talent of the dramatist, like the talent of the great singer, actor, painter and musician, is a thing born in them and not to be acquired by any other than the chosen few, I know that love and appreciation of the theater may be taught and hidden talents discovered and developed. When in my college days I was running one hundred yards in ten and one-fifth seconds I often thought that, in spite of the fact that few men alive at that time had me beaten that time, there were probably plenty of young fellows in the country towns who could have been trained to beat it. Every boy in the world doesn’t try to run a hundred yards, and of course many a doctor and lawyer and business man has been born with the gift of poetry, music, painting and drama and has neglected those talents or even been quite unconscious of them. These new classes of Dramatic Arts in the schools and universities will catch any submerged talent and bring it to the light and beside this they will make cultured audiences, and in the end good audiences will make good plays.
Our present bewilderment in the theater as to what the public wants would soon vanish if we had a public who themselves knew what they wanted and when the day comes when we have a large audience ready to express the growing demand for mature and adult drama even we laggards of the theater will hasten to furnish it—we are all of us hungry for success even to the extreme of being willing to do good work for it.