“Have we any poets worth recognising?” interrupted Dilling.
“Ah, I knew you would make that objection!” cried Hebe Barrington. “I knew that your thoughts would fly at once to Milton, and Keats, and Shelley . . . and the greatest of them all, Shakespeare. You immediately compare us with the immortals, and feel that we lose by the comparison. I don’t profess to offer you a Homer or a Sappho. But there were lesser poets in Athens whom Pericles favoured at the expense of the people’s purse. It’s harder for poetry and the Arts to flourish to-day, than two thousand years ago—Oh, don’t you see, we need a National Theatre?”
“It’s an idea,” conceded Dilling, with caution.
Hebe Barrington was clever. She did not press her slight advantage but prepared to beat a strategic retreat.
“I knew that you would see it,” she cried. “How else can we make idealism real save by expressing it first through Art and then weaving it into our practical experiences? How else can we keep alive the traditions that have given us our Empire? How teach them to the young? I am full of schemes for working this thing out. May I come to see you again—or better still,” she amended, watching him intently with her great, soft eyes, “will you come to me, say this day week?”
“If you like,” he said, opening the door.
Presently, he opened the window, too. The room was close with a heavy, sweetish odour that offended him.
He looked down the river, past the Mint and the Archives. Catching sight of the smoke-clouded roof of Earnscliffe—once the stately residence of Sir John Macdonald—he fell to wondering what the Grand Old Man would have said to such a proposition . . .
A National Theatre!
The Greeks, he remembered, spared neither time nor money on their dramatic temple, which was free! On the other hand, the Canadian theatre was almost prohibitive in point of admission fee, and far from being the object of Governmental support, it was controlled by a group of Semitic gentlemen whose habitat was Broadway and whose taste reflected anything but a Canadian National spirit. In Rome, Mommens had taught him, there were fewer occupations more lucrative than those of actor and dancer—Roscius, one of the former, receiving the equivalent of $30,000 as his annual income, and Dionysia, a fairy-footed maid, $10,000 yearly—more than twice the amount of his Parliamentary indemnity!