the imposing bulk
of the latest six-shilling novel. Little do you guess that every page
of the play has cost more care, severer mental tension, if not more
actual manual labour, than any chapter of a novel, though it be fifty
pages long. It is the height of the author's art, according to the
old maxim, that the ordinary spectator should never be clearly
conscious of the skill and travail that have gone to the making of the
finished product. But the artist who would achieve a like feat must
realise its difficulties, or what are his chances of success?"

But what I should, in little, be inclined to say, in answer to the
"concentration" idea is that, unless you have first some firm hold on the
broad bed-rock facts of human nature specially appealed to or called
forth by the drama, you may concentrate as much as you please, but you
will not write a successful acting drama, not to speak of a great one. Mr
Pinero's magnifications of the immense effort demanded from him must in
the end come to mean that he himself does not instinctively and with
natural ease and spontaneity secure this, but secures it only after great
conscious effort; and hence, perhaps, it is that he as well as so many
other modern playwrights fall so far behind alike in the amount turned
out, and also in its quality as compared with the products of many
playwrights in the past.

The problem drama, in every phase and turn of it, endeavours to dispense
with these fundamental demands implied in the common and instinctive
sense or consciousness of the mass of men and women, and to substitute
for that interest something which will artificially supersede it, or, at
any rate, take its place. The interest is transferred from the crises
necessarily worked up to in the one case, with all of situation and
dialogue directed to it, and without which it would not be strictly
explicable, to something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or
exceptional in the characters themselves. Having thus, instead of
natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem dramatist
has a double task--he must gain what unity he can, and reach such crises
as he may by artificial aids and inventions which the more he uses the
more makes natural simplicity unattainable; and next he must reduce and
hide as far as he can the abnormality he has, after all, in the long run,
created and presented. He cannot maintain it to the full, else his work
would b