away in the rare ether, among the precious and æsthetic intellects of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course, a year in which to realize the dream of a lifetime, the vision of his youth—a year in which to write the plays he had always dreamed of writing. And what kind of plays did he write?
Alas! Old Seth did exactly what he set out to do; he succeeded perfectly in fulfilling his desire—and, by a tragic irony, his failure lay in just this fact. The plays which he produced with an astounding and prolific ease—(“Three days is enough to write a play,” the old man said in his sour voice. “You guys who take a year to write a play give me a pain. If you can’t write a play a week, you can’t write anything; the play’s no good”)—these plays were just the plays which he had dreamed of writing as a young man, and therein was evident their irremediable fault.
For Seth’s plays—so neat, brisk, glib, and smartly done—would have been good plays in a commercial way, as well, if he had only done them twenty years before. He wrote, without effort and with unerring accuracy, a kind of play which had been immensely popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, but which people had grown tired of twenty years before. He wrote plays in which the babies got mixed up in the maternity ward of a great hospital, in which the rich man’s child goes to the family of the little grocer, and the grocer’s child grows up as the heir to an enormous fortune, with all the luxuries and securities of wealth around him. And he brought about the final resolution of this tangled scheme, the meeting of these scrambled children and their bewildered parents, with a skill of complication, a design of plot, a dexterity that was astonishing. His characters—all well-known types of the theatre, as of nurse tough-spoken, shop-girl slangy, reporter cynical, and so on—were well conceived to fret their purpose, their lives well-timed and apt and deftly made. He had mastered the formula of an older type of “well-made play” with astonishing success. Only, the type was dead, the interest of the public in such plays had vanished twenty years before.
So here he was, a live man, writing, with amazing skill, dead plays for a theatre that was dead, and for a public that did not exist.
“Chekhov! Ibsen!” old Seth would whine sourly with a dismissing gesture of his parched old hand, and a scornful contortion of his bitter mouth in his old mummy of a face. “You guys all make me tired the way you worship them!” he would whine out at some of the exquisite young temperaments in Professor Hatcher’s class. “Those guys can’
