ecome 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