f all
drama was there actively exhibited, and all casuistic pleading of excuses
of some sort, even of justification for the witch (that it was her
nature; heredity in her aworking, etc., etc.) would have not only been
out of place, but hotly resented by that audience. Now, Stevenson, if he
could have made up his mind to have the witch locked in her own oven,
would most assuredly have tried some device to get her out by some fairy
witch-device or magic slide at the far end of it, and have proceeded to
paint for us the changed character that she was after she had been so
outwitted by a child, and her witchdom proved after all of little effect.
He would have put probably some of the most effective moralities into her
mouth if indeed he would not after all have made the witch a triumph on
his early principle of bad-heartedness being strength. If this is the
sort of falsification which the play demands, and is of all tastes the
most ungrateful, then, it is clear, that for full effect of the drama it
is essential to it; but what is primary in it is the direct answering to
certain immediate and instinctive demands in common human nature, the
doing of which is far more effective than no end of deep philosophy to
show how much better human nature would be if it were not just quite thus
constituted. "Concentration," says Mr Pinero, "is first, second, and
last in it," and he goes on thus, as reported in the _Scotsman_, to show
Stevenson's defect and mistake and, as is not, of course, unnatural, to
magnify the greatness and grandeur of the style of work in which he has
himself been so successful.

"If Stevenson had ever mastered that art--and I do not question that
if he had properly conceived it he had it in him to master it--he
might have found the stage a gold mine, but he would have found, too,
that it is a gold mine which cannot be worked in a smiling, sportive,
half-contemptuous spirit, but only in the sweat of the brain, and with
every mental nerve and sinew strained to its uttermost. He would have
known that no ingots are to be got out of this mine, save after
sleepless nights, days of gloom and discouragement, and other days,
again, of feverish toil, the result of which proves in the end to be
misapplied and has to be thrown to the winds. . . . When you take up a
play-book (if ever you do take one up) it strikes you as being a very
trifling thing--a mere insubstantial pamphlet beside