than formerly, but our playwrights still produce
the second-hand drama, getting their material ready-made from novels,
and they suffer in the same way as their predecessors, and injure their
natural gifts. This is not an entirely new thing. It may be suggested
that Shakespeare was one of the most persistent of adapters. He may very
well be left out of the question. Such genius as his has its own laws
and privileges, and cannot very well be brought in as an element when
discussing the procedure of much lesser men, and yet few critics will
deny that in some instances his plays were injured by his following too
closely the course of his original. Perhaps in his case the gifts of
imagination and invention were sometimes dulled because he was to such a
great extent an adapter.

The idea of the novelist may inspire a dramatist with an idea for a
play, but the novelist's treatment of his idea hardly ever supplies the
dramatist with useful materials. We have had scores of radically bad
plays adapted by clever men from good novels. At first sight it looks as
if the playwright would gain an advantage from using ready-made
materials, but careful consideration and experience show that this is
not the case; he is overwhelmed by excess of material, and his task of
selection is appallingly difficult.

Moreover, his material is all in the wrong form, and has to be
transformed--and the process of transformation requires great skill.

For it must be remembered that the methods of the dramatist and the
novelist as a broad proposition are entirely different; and when the
playwright is dealing with a long, finely-written, complex novel he can
hardly expect his adaptation to bear a greater resemblance to the
original than that of an easy pianoforte transcription to one of the
later operas of Wagner.

One need only consider any of the novels of Dickens and the stage
version that impudently bears its name to see how entirely crushed the
dramatist has been by excess of material--like a Tarpeia by the gifts of
the enemy--by difficulty in selection, and in transformation, and
recollect that the product has almost always been an inconsecutive
story, unintelligible to those unacquainted with the book, destitute of
the peculiar atmosphere of Dickens, irritating to lovers of the novel
because pet characters have been entirely suppressed or cut down nearly
to nothing, and only recognisable in many cases as a version of the
original on account of c