rs who take their chances
in the theater? The explanation is that in reality, for our generation
of free artists, the theater is repugnant, with its cookery, its
hobbles, its demand for immediate and brutal success, its army of
collaborators, to which one must submit, from the imposing leading man
down to the prompter. How much more independent are we in the novel! And
that's why, when the glamor of the footlights makes the blood dance, we
prefer to exercise it by keeping aloof and to remain the absolute
masters of our works. In the theater we are asked to submit to too much.

Let me add that in my own case I have harnessed myself to a group of
novels which will take twenty-five years of my life. The theater is a
dissipation which I shall doubtless not permit myself until I am very
old.

After all, if I could indulge in the theater. I should try to _make_
plays much less than is the custom. In literature truth is always in
inverse proportion to the construction. I mean this: The comedies of
Moliere are sometimes of a structure hardly adequate, while those of
Scribe are often Parisian articles of marvellous manufacture.

Very cordially yours,

Emile Zola.

* * * * *

NOTES

ABRAHAM DREYFUS (1847-) was the author of half a dozen ingenious little
plays, mostly confined to a single act. One of them, 'Un Crane sans un
Tempete,' adapted into English as the 'Silent System,' was acted in New
York by Coquelin and Agnes Booth. Dreyfus was also the author of two
volumes of lively sketches lightly satirizing different aspects of the
French stage,--'Scenes de la vie de theatre' (1880) and 'L'Incendie des
Folies-Plastiques' (1886).

In the Spring of 1884 he delivered an address on the art of playmaking
before the Cercle Artistique et Litteraire of Brussels. This lecture was
entitled 'Comment se fait une piece de theatre;' and it was printed
privately in an edition limited to fifty copies, (Paris: A. Quantin,
1884). In the course of this address he read letters received by him
from ten or twelve of the most distinguisht dramatists of France in
response to his request for information as to their methods of
composition. It was to these letters that the lecture owed its interest
and its value. What M. Dreyfus contributed himself was little more than
a running commentary on the correspondence that he