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AMONG readers of this journal I sincerely hope that there may be found a large number of future or would-be dramatists, for they are a critic's best audience. The dramatist in esse is convinced he knows his own business far better than any critic can; the average playgoer says he knows what he likes (often quite untrue) "and there's an end of it"; but you, delightful people with plays you cannot place or finish, or perhaps even begin, you will listen to me. When I expatiate, you will have some patience; when distributing praise, should I speak inadvertently with mild avuncular authority, you will not be exasperated; if I belabour extant dramatists, you at least will kiss the rod.

There is much to be learnt from Mr. Arnold Bennett's new play, "The Great Adventure," which is going to be, and deservedly, a great success. It competes with the normal play, breaks the canons by which such a play is usually constructed, and beats it on its own ground. Indeed, there is no mistaking the ring of the applause in the Kingsway Theatre; in volume perhaps hardly equal to the hard, persistent clapping of a hundred conscientious hands, which often on first nights raises the curtain three or four times and the author's hopes, but in quality significant. There is no better way of discovering if a comedy is going to "go" than to mark the kind of jokes in it at which the audience are catching eagerly. If these are generally the irrelevant laughter-traps, though the guffaws may be loud, the piece will be probably a failure; indeed, people often laugh the louder for having been bored. But when the humour which goes home is that which rises naturally out of situation and character, then you may be sure that everyone present is attentive and amused: the really successful lines in 'The Great Adventure" are of that kind. Removed from their context, considered as gems, it is doubtful if they would brighten the pages of the Arnold Bennett Birthday Book, but in the mouths of the characters who speak them they sparkle with comic intuition, and the delight with which they are received is all the more significant because Mr. Bennett has characteristically not trusted to them alone to win our applause. He deals us out china eggs to cackle over as well. But the augury of his success, the proof of his genuine comic power, is that he might have omitted all those cheap little extraneous jokes, like the one about dying of appendicitis from swallowing a tooth-brush bristle, without lessening appreciably the hilarity of his audience. Personally, I wish he had, but it matters very little, and it is no use remonstrating; he always did and always will do that kind of thing. The fact is, Mr. Bennett has not a sensitive artistic cons cience. He has, however, what is far more important and rarer--genuine artistic instincts. The two do not always go together (vide William Shakespeare), and their separation is always peculiarly painful to those who are all artistic conscience and responsibility for so many impeccable, unreadable works. Still, Conscience in all its branches seems so much at a discount just now that I am not at all sure that, as a dramatic critic, child of the age though I am, it is not my duty to stiffen myself up into being more of as tickler; but I am not going to beg in practising on Mr. Arnold Bennett, whose work shows so much vigorous, spontaneous invention, and who being on the crest of success will now find plenty of people to cry him down.

Let us see how in "The Great Adventure" he handles his theme. It is a fantastic one, taken from that capital novel of his, "Buried Alive" and Mr Bennet's sound judgement has made him hit on the exact degree of perfunctory lightness of treatment appropriate to this story. It is the fantastic story of an abnormally shy man. 11am Carve, an artist of European reputation, is so shy that even casual contacts with his fellow-men have always been embarrassing to him, while the more trying intimacies were avoided by travelling ceaselessly about the Continent with one companion, his valet. The faculty of being able to do what seems to him of more importance than anything, namely, to paint well, has brought, alas! the most galling of burdens in its train -- the curiosity of the unintelligently insincere and the importunities of the intrusively respectful. His life has been spent in dodging his fame. Being a really shy man, he is most sensitive where he is most passionate, and therefore the only people with whom he has e ver felt safe and comfortable are those who have had no conception of what an artist feels or what art is. His "great adventure" brings him a wife unusually qualified to soothe and satisfy him in such respects.

On his arrival in England his impulse to hide allows him to permit the doctor who attends his sick valet to suppose that the valet is the famous Ilam Carve, and he the valet. The valet dies and circumstances conspire to make it more and more difficult to set the error straight; so the valet is duly buried in Westminster Abbey and 11am Carve begins life again in blissful obscurity, hiding his happy, diminished head in the shades of Putney, married to the young woman with whom his valet had been previously corresponding through a matrimonial agency.

Mr. Bennett's genius (if he and my readers will excuse this hackneyed term) is shown in having set these two characters in harmonious juxtaposition to each other. Janet (Miss Wish Wynne deserves the credit of being a co-creator of the character, so perfectly does she fulfil it) is the complement and opposite of a skinless, apprehensive, unpractical artist. She moves in a world small but thoroughly understood. Her astoundingly adequate, ignorant aplomb only fails her a little when she is faced with the fact that her husband, whom she had fondly supposed to be only endearingly crazy, really is the famous artist who was buried in the Abbey.

The trouble all came about through Ilam Carve continuing quietly to paint in Putney, selling his pictures for a pound or two on the sly. His old dealer spotted them as genuine works of the master, and sold them as such to a collector in America. The collector's attention was drawn to the fact that in one picture a taxicab appeared, and he concludes, since Carve died before taxicabs were seen in the streets of London, that the picture in question is a forgery. A great lawsuit is therefore pending between the dealer and the connoisseur, and in self-defence the dealer hunts out the unhappy artist. The case is settled out of court. Carve's identity is established in the last act, in spite of his refusal to admit or deny it, by a mole beneath his collarbone (a classical method of recognition) and national dignity is saved by Ilam readily consenting to remain nominally dead.

In addition to the high farce of the apotheosis of the valet in place of the master in Westminster Abbey and the desperate, tardy attempts of the nervous artist to prevent such an enormous gaffe, there are two other elements in this story which everybody will enjoy: Ilam in Putney is a refreshingly new version of the great man in humble disguise, and in Janet we enjoy the ever-exhilarating spectacle of a thoroughly natural person exhibiting the completest indifference to art and social prestige -- two things which tend to overawe us overmuch. In telling his story Mr. Bennett uses the drop curtain freely, bidding us imagine when it suits him that three days, or two years, or three minutes have elapsed, which we do obediently and with no discomfort to ourselves. His confident, easy-going methods of construction are to be highly recommended.