has begun with human nature and not with the artifices of the
stage, she has thought of her characters as people before thinking of
them as persons of the drama, she has something to say through them,
they are not mere lines in a pattern. I am not at all sure that she has
the makings of a dramatist, or that if she writes another play it will
be better than this one. You do not necessarily get to your destination
by taking the right turning at the beginning of the journey. The one
certain thing is that if you take the wrong turning at the beginning,
and follow it persistently, you will not get to your destination at all.
The playwright who writes merely for the stage, who squeezes the breath
out of life before he has suited it to his purpose, is at the best only
playing a clever game with us. He may amuse us, but he is only playing
ping-pong with the emotions. And that is why we should welcome, I think,
any honest attempt to deal with life as it is, even if life as it is
does not always come into the picture.

TOLSTOI AND OTHERS

There is little material for the stage in the novels of Tolstoi. Those
novels are full, it is true, of drama; but they cannot be condensed into
dramas. The method of Tolstoi is slow, deliberate, significantly
unemphatic; he works by adding detail to detail, as a certain kind of
painter adds touch to touch. The result is, in a sense, monotonous, and
it is meant to be monotonous. Tolstoi endeavours to give us something
more nearly resembling daily life than any one has yet given us; and in
daily life the moment of spiritual crisis is rarely the moment in which
external action takes part. In the drama we can only properly realise
the soul's action through some corresponding or consequent action which
takes place visibly before us. You will find, throughout Tolstoi's work,
many striking single scenes, but never, I think, a scene which can bear
detachment from that network of detail which has led up to it and which
is to come out of it. Often the scene which most profoundly impresses
one is a scene trifling in itself, and owing its impressiveness partly
to that very quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection," Book II.,
chapter xxviiii., the scene in the theatre "during the second act of the
eternal 'Dame aux Camelias,' in which a foreign actress once again, and
in a novel manner, showed how women died of consumption." The General's
wife, Mariette, smiles at Nekhludoff in the box, and, ou