The house holds 1800 persons,
yielding gross receipts of L200 for a nightly expenditure of L125.
There are no advertising expenses, no posters. The newspapers give
notice of the daily programme as an attractive item of news.
VI
There is some disinclination among Englishmen deliberately to adopt
foreign methods, to follow foreign examples, in any walk of life. But
no person of common sense will reject a method merely because it is
foreign, if it can be proved to be of utility. It is spurious
patriotism to reject wise counsel because it is no native product. On
the other hand, it is seriously to asperse the culture and
intelligence of the British nation to assume that no appreciable
section of it cherishes that taste for the literary drama which keeps
the national or municipal theatre alive in France and Germany. At any
rate, judgment should be held in suspense until the British playgoers'
mettle has been more thoroughly tested than hitherto.
No less humiliating is the argument that the art of acting in this
country is at too low an ebb to justify the assumption by a public
body of responsibility for theatrical enterprise. One or two critics
assert that to involve public credit in a theatre, until there exist
an efficient school of acting, is to put the cart before the horse.
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