imaginative comedy would be less difficult to solve than it seems to be in the case of serious poetic drama. Actors are always more ready to understand and do justice to plays that are good fun as well as good literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw and Gilbert and Sullivan are apt to meet with better treatment at the hands of our producers and performers than Ibsen or Wagner. All the same even poetic tragedy should not be too lightly despaired of. If great plays can be written, someone sooner or later is likely to have the ambition and the intelligence to produce them worthily. Something of the kind[Pg 54] seems to have happened at Glasgow, in the case of Mr. Gordon Bottomley’s verse plays. Let us hope, however cautiously, that what Scotland does to-day, England may at least begin to think of doing to-morrow. Meantime there is one wholesome lesson that poets may learn from the undoubted literary success of Mr. Bottomley’s Gruach and Lear’s Wife. It is continually being dinned into their ears by critics who should know better, that the time is now gone by when poets might borrow their material from a remote or legendary past; that a twentieth-century dramatist must deal only in twentieth-century themes if he hopes to reach the hearts of twentieth-century men and women, or to win the good graces of Georgian reviewers. And yet it is unquestionably true that in every period when poetic tragedy has flourished, mythical, legendary and historical subjects have been the rule, and contemporary themes the rare exceptions.[Pg 55] Oedipus, Agamemnon and Pentheus were not fifth-century Athenians any more than Hamlet, Lear and Antony were Elizabethans, or Andromaque and Phèdre Parisiennes of the grand siècle. The artistic success of the Persae, Othello and Bajazet merely make this determined preference for archaic subject-matter seem the more remarkable. And yet none of these writers were mere literary antiquarians, but true children of their own age, to whose dramas we now look first, if we wish to understand the mentality and the moral standards of the populace that applauded them. Even Goethe, in the work that perhaps more than any other represents the complexity of modern ideas and aspirations, went back to a myth that was then two hundred years old. It would seem as though the poetic imagination, when it sets itself the most arduous of its tasks, that of alembicating tragic beauty from human misery and passion, welcomes the limitation[Pg 56] of choice, the simplicity of atmosphere, the freedom from distracting contemporary preoccupations, which a remote theme brings with it. None the less Ibsen’s Brandt and Peer Gynt show how a modern, though scarcely a familiar world, may be made the background of true poetic tragedy; although in Peer Gynt the almost continued 

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