it, he should
not visualise it completely, as a novelist should. The novelist may
perceive vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright
insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real actors and
hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such real actors, or he
will perceive imaginary faces, and the ultimate interpretation will
perforce falsify his work and nullify his intentions. This aspect of the
subject might well be much amplified, but only for a public of
practising dramatists.

VI

When the play is "finished," the processes of collaboration have yet to
begin. The serious work of the dramatist is over, but the most
desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do not refer to the business
of arranging with a theatrical manager for the production of the play.
For, though that generally partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also
partakes of the nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that
theatrical managers are--no doubt inevitably--theatrical. Nevertheless,
even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming the slightest interest in
anything more vital to the stage than the box-office, is himself in some
degree a collaborator, and is the first to show to the dramatist that a
play is not a play till it is performed. The manager reads the play,
and, to the dramatist's astonishment, reads quite a different play from
that which the dramatist imagines he wrote. In particular the manager
reads a play which can scarcely hope to succeed--indeed, a play against
whose chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be adduced.
It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees failure in a
manuscript, and very seldom success. The manager's profoundest
instinct--self-preservation again!--is to refuse a play; if he accepts,
it is against the grain, against his judgment--and out of a mad spirit
of adventure. Some of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed
in an atmosphere of settled despair. The dramatist naturally feels an
immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the manager,
and he is therein justified. The manager's vocation is not to write
plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to direct the rehearsals of
them, and even his knowledge of the vagaries of his own box-office has
often proved to be pitiably delusive. The manager's true and only
vocation is to refrain from producing plays. Despite all this, however,
the manager has already collab