The dramatist may have to imagine a landscape, a room, or a gesture; but he has not got to write it—­and it is the writing which hastens death.  If a dramatist and a novelist set out to portray a clever woman, they are almost equally matched, because each has to make the creature say things and do things.  But if they set out to portray a charming woman, the dramatist can recline in an easy chair and smoke while the novelist is ruining temper, digestion and eyesight, and spreading terror in his household by his moodiness and unapproachability.  The electric light burns in the novelist’s study at three a.m.,—­the novelist is still endeavouring to convey by means of words the extraordinary fascination that his heroine could exercise over mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and he never has really succeeded and never will.  The dramatist writes curtly, “Enter Millicent.”  All are anxious to do the dramatist’s job for him.  Is the play being read at home—­the reader eagerly and with brilliant success puts his imagination to work and completes a charming Millicent after his own secret desires. (Whereas he would coldly decline to add one touch to Millicent were she the heroine of a novel.) Is the play being performed on the stage—­an experienced, conscientious, and perhaps lovely actress will strive her hardest to prove that the dramatist was right about Millicent’s astounding fascination.  And if she fails, nobody will blame the dramatist; the dramatist will receive naught but sympathy.

And there is still another region of superlative difficulty which is narrowly circumscribed for the spoilt dramatist:  I mean the whole business of persuading the public that the improbable is probable.  Every work of art is and must be crammed with improbabilities and artifice; and the greater portion of the artifice is employed in just this trickery of persuasion.  Only, the public of the dramatist needs far less persuading than the public of the novelist.  The novelist announces that Millicent accepted the hand of the wrong man, and in spite of all the novelist’s corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident as unconvincing.  The dramatist decides that Millicent must accept the hand of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage in flesh and blood, veritably doing it!  Not easy for even the critical beholder to maintain that Millicent could not and did not do such a silly thing when he has actually with his eyes seen her in the very act!  The dramatist, as usual, having done less, is more richly rewarded by results.

Of course it will be argued, as it has always been argued, by those who have not written novels, that it is precisely the “doing less”—­the leaving out—­that constitutes the unique and fearful difficulty of dramatic art.  “The skill to leave out”—­lo! the master faculty of the dramatist!  But, in the first place, I do not believe that, having regard to the relative