a branch of the show-business. He must devise
stage-settings at once novel, ingenious and plausible; and he must
invent reasons for bringing together naturally the personages of his
play in the single place where each of his acts passes. He must set his
characters firm on their feet, each speaking for himself and revealing
himself as he speaks; for they need to have internal vitality as they
cannot be painted from the outside. He must see his creatures as well
as hear them; and he must know always what they are doing and how they
are looking when they are speaking. He cannot comment on them or explain
them, or palliate their misdeeds. He must project them outside of
himself; and he cannot be his own lecturer to point out their motives.
He must get on without any attempt to point out the morality of his
work, which remains implicit altho it ought to be obvious. He must work
easily within many bonds, seeming always to be free and unhampered; and
he must turn to account these restrictions and find his profit in them,
for they are the very qualities which differentiate the drama and make
it what it is.

This essential unlikeness of the drama to the novel is so keenly
appreciated by every novelist who happens also to be a dramatist, that
he is rarely tempted to treat the same theme in both forms, feeling
instinctively that it belongs either to the stage or to the library.
Often, of course, he writes a novel rather than a play, because he knows
that a certain theme, adequate as it may be for a novel, lacks that
essential struggle, that naked assertion of the human will, that clash
of contending desires, which must be visible in a play if this is to
sustain the interest of an audience. Many a tale, pleasing to thousands
of readers because it abounds in brisk adventure, will not lend itself
to successful dramatization because its many episodes are not related to
a single straight-forward conflict of forces.

When Mr. Gillette undertook to make a play out of the Sherlock Holmes
stories, which were not really dramatic, however ingeniously packed with
thrilling surprizes, he seized at once on the sinister figure of
Professor Moriarty, glimpsed only for a moment in a single tale, and he
set this portentous villain up against his hero,--thereby displaying his
mastery of a major principle of play-making. Many a novel has seemed
vulgarized on the stage, because the adapter had to wrench its structure
in seeking a struggle strong enou