turn of the
Native_, paints Egdon Heath--"Haggard Egdon"--in its shifting moods
before he introduces a single human being upon the scene of their
coming tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern playwright, with
an artist to aid him, to show the audience the scene of his drama, to
let its suggestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm or fire
their fancies before the speech and action begin. So also, as Wagner
and Mr. Herne have demonstrated, there can be a climax of the vacant
stage. I look to the new stage-craft to develop such possibilities.

[Illustration]

_On Giving an Author a Plot_

There are two people who annoy an author more than any others--the
person who calmly supposes that everything he writes is biographical,
or even autobiographical, and the person who declares, "I've got a
dandy plot for you"--and proceeds to tell it.

The first person, of course, is annoying, because an author's stories
always _are_ either biographical or autobiographical, and he never
cares to admit, even to himself, how true this is. To be sure, his
characters are composites, and his self-revelations are rather
possibilities (or even, alas, Freudian wishes!) than records of
actuality. But fancy trying to explain that to a gushing female who
has developed a sudden passion for calling on your wife, and is heard
to remark, "Oh, is that where he writes?" as you flee by a back door,
down the garden!

The second person is annoying not so much because most of the "dandy
plots" that he or she tells are hoary with age, or even because most
writers don't start with a 'plot' at all, and couldn't define a plot
if they had to; but rather because a writer, however humble, has to
feel the idea for a story come glowing up over the horizon of his
brain out of the east of his own subconsciousness, or it is never his,
it never acquires the necessary warmth to interest him, the color and
light to make it real. This is a curious fact, and one which your
modest writer shrinks from trying to explain to his well-meaning
friend, lest he seem egotistical. Only the blessed publicity of print
could draw him out. Yet the psychology involved perhaps deserves some
attention.

Suppose it is my common method, in writing a story, to start from some
social situation which illumines a strata of life; suppose, let us
assume, that I am present at a dinner party where a radical has got in
by mista