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VI
The Ephemeral Drama and the
Enduring Drama
INDEED,
of all the big crowd of
English playrights who produced dra-
mas, always with extreme facility and
sometimes with contemporaneous success,
between 1845 and 1875, — excepting, of
course. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, —
every man but Robertson is to-day practi-
cally obsolete. Not a single one of their
works has a name that will survive the first
quarter of this centur}'^, unless it be a sur-
vival to be embalAied and entombed in an
encyclopaedia. By 1925 the stage that knew
these dramas will know them no more,
and Time will have allowed their claims
for recognition as literature by impartially
pitching them all into his dust heap.
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