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 scope of the play and of the novel, the necessity for
leaving out is more acute in the one than in the other. The adjective
"photographic" is as absurd applied to the novel as to the play. And, in
the second place, other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and
it requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. To know when
to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is even harder.
Sometimes, listening to partisans of the drama, I have been moved to
suggest that, if the art of omission is so wondrously difficult, a
dramatist who practised the habit of omitting to write anything whatever
ought to be hailed as the supreme craftsman.

IV

The more closely one examines the subject, the more clear and certain
becomes the fact that there is only one fundamental artistic dif