ged differences between the play and
the novel are illusory, and that a certain technical difference, though
possibly real, is superficial and slight, I come to the fundamental
difference between them--a difference which the laity does not suspect,
which is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which nobody
who is well versed in the making of both plays and novels can fail to
feel profoundly. The emotional strain of writing a play is not merely
less prolonged than that of writing a novel, it is less severe even
while it lasts, lower in degree and of a less purely creative character.
And herein is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write
than a novel. The drama does not belong exclusively to literature,
because its effect depends on something more than the composition of
words. The dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the
sole creator of it. Without him nothing can be done, but, on the other
hand, he cannot do everything himself. He begins the work of creation,
which is finished either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by
the creative imagination of the reader in the study. It is as if he
carried an immense weight to the landing at the turn of a flight of
stairs, and that thence upward the lifting had to be done by other
people. Consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist
is the base--but he is not the apex. A play is a collaboration of
creative faculties. The egotism of the dramatist resents this
uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. And further, the creative
faculties are not only those of the author, the stage-director
("producer") and the actors--the audience itself is unconsciously part
of the collaboration.

Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation before
the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the functions of others,
and will fail of proper accomplishment at the end. The dramatist must
deliberately, in performing his share of the work, leave scope for a
multitude of alien faculties whose operations he can neither precisely
foresee nor completely control. The point is not that in the writing of
a play there are various sorts of matters--as we have already
seen---which the dramatist must ignore; the point is that even in the
region proper to him he must not push the creative act to its final
limit. He must ever remember those who are to come after him. For
instance, though he must visualise a scene as he writes