hero and heroine in her oven, having "fatted" them up well, to make
sweet her eating of them, was by the coolness and cleverness of the

heroine locked in her own oven and baked there, literally brought
down the house. She received exactly what she had planned to give

those children, whom their own cruel parents had unwittingly, by
losing the children in the wood, put into her hands. Quaint,

naive, half-grotesque it was in conception, yet the truth of 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 the imposing bulk of the latest six-
shilling novel. Little do you guess that every page of the play

has cost more care, severer mentaltension, 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 speciallyappealed 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" target="_blank" title="n.意识；觉悟；知觉">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 become a mere medical or psychological
treatise under the poorest of disguises; and the very necessity for

the action and reaction of characters upon each other is a further
element against him. In a word no one character can stand alone,

and cannot escape influencing others, and also the action. Thus it
is that he cannot isolate as a doctor does his patient for

scientific examination. The healthy and normal must come in to
modify on all sides what is presented of unhealthy and abnormal,

and by its very presence expose the other, while at the same time
it, by its very presence, ministers improvement, exactly as the

sunlight disperses mist and all unhealthy vapours, germs, and
microbes.

The problem dramatist, in place of broad effect and truth to
nature, must find it in stress of invention and resource of that

kind. Thus care and concentration must be all in all with him - he
must never let himself go, or get so interested and taken with his

characters that THEY, in a sense, control or direct him. He is all
too conscious a "maker" and must pay for his originality by what in

the end is really painful and overweighted work. This, I take it,
is the reason why so many of the modern dramatists find their work

so hard, and are, comparatively, so slow in the production of it,
while they would fain, by many devices, secure the general

impression or appeal made to all classes alike by the natural or
what we may call spontaneous drama, they are yet, by the necessity

of subject matter and methods of dealing with it, limited to the
real interest of a special class - to whom is finally given up what

was meant for mankind - and the troublesome and trying task laid on
them, to try as best they may to reconcile two really conflicting

tendencies which cannot even by art be reconciled but really point
different ways and tend to different ends. As the impressionist

and the pre-Raphaelite, in the sister-art of painting cannot be
combined and reconciled in one painter - so it is here; by

conception and methods they go different ways, and if they SEEK the
same end, it is by opposing processes - the original conception

alike of nature and of art dictating the process.
As for Stevenson, it was no lack of care or concentration in

anything that he touched; these two were never lacking, but because
his subtlety, mystical bias and dreaminess, and theorising on human

nature made this to him impossible. He might have concentrated as
much as he pleased, concentrated as much as even Mr Pinero desires,

but he would not have made a successful drama, because he was
Robert Louis Stevenson, and not Mr Pinero, and too long, as he

himself confessed, had a tendency to think bad-heartedness was
strength; while the only true and enduring joy attainable in this

world - whether by deduction from life itself, or from IMPRESSIONS
of art or of the drama, is simply the steady, unassailable, and

triumphant consciousness" target="_blank" title="n.意识；觉悟；知觉">consciousness that it is not so, but the reverse, that
goodness and self-sacrifice and self-surrender are the only

strength in the universe. Just as Byron had it with patriotism:-
"Freedom's battle once begun,

Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Tho' baffled oft is ever won."

To go consciously either in fiction or in the drama for bad-
heartedness as strength, is to court failure - the broad, healthy,

human heart, thank Heaven, is so made as to resent the doctrine;
and if a fiction or a play based on this idea for the moment