uccess was achieved by entirely vulgarising a
charming book, by throwing away all that distinguished it, and
converting what might be called a delicately sentimental comedy into a
farce. We are not, however, dealing with the question from the point of
view of the novelist's credit; incidentally it must be observed that
there are few modern cases on record where the play has not borne to the
novel the relation of a crude black-and-white copy to a picture.

The difficulties are two: objective and subjective. The second is the
subtler, therefore the more dangerous. The adapter, being well
acquainted with the novel, rarely succeeds in forgetting that the
general public is not, and he almost invariably assumes that the
audience will supply from memory matters that he has left out. In the
case of most adapted plays events that appear utterly improbable to
those ignorant of the novel seem quite likely to the people who have
read it and can supply the missing facts which explain the improbable
matters. To the adapter, particularly when he is also the novelist, the
characters and events have a real existence, and his task, unlike that
of the original playwright, does not seem to be that of bringing them
into existence but merely of exhibiting them. Naturally, then, he takes
comparatively little pains to prove what to him is axiomatic.

The main objective difficulty is due to the fact that a play is a very
short thing--though, alas! this does not always seem to be the case--and
a novel is relatively long and often has many characters. In some cases,
the playwright attempts to deal with this difficulty by ignoring the
existence of half the people who figure in the original. Even then, a
mass of explanations has to be jettisoned. There is worse trouble than
this: the characters built up in the novel by hundreds of fine touches
have to be presented in the play by a few bold strokes. An extraordinary
art is necessary in what is not a work of mere transcription, but almost
a work of reconception.

There is the further vast difficulty that whilst in most cases the
novelist's procedure is to work on a system of exciting curiosity, it is
an unwritten law of drama, almost universally true, that there must be
no surprises for the audience, except, it may be, in farcical plays that
do not pretend to represent life truly and in matters of detail. No
doubt, unconscientious readers often commit an act of treason to the
author, and cheat him