of a game of difficulty breathlessly played, than just this
business of looking for the unseen and the occult, in a scheme
half-grasped, by the light or, so to speak, by the clinging scent, of
the gage already in hand. No dreadful old pursuit of the hidden slave
with bloodhounds and the rag of association can ever, for "excitement,"
I judge, have bettered it at its best. For the dramatist always, by
the very law of his genius, believes not only in a possible right issue
from the rightly-conceived tight place; he does much more than this--he
believes, irresistibly, in the necessary, the precious "tightness" of
the place (whatever the issue) on the strength of any respectable hint.
It being thus the respectable hint that I had with such avidity picked
up, what would be the story to which it would most inevitably form the
centre? It is part of the charm attendant on such questions that the
"story," with the omens true, as I say, puts on from this stage the
authenticity of concrete existence. It then is, essentially--it begins
to be, though it may more or less obscurely lurk, so that the point is
not in the least what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and
very damnably, where to put one's hand on it.

In which truth resides surely much of the interest of that admirable
mixture for salutary application which we know as art. Art deals with
what we see, it must first contribute full-handed that ingredient; it
plucks its material, otherwise expressed, in the garden of life--which
material elsewhere grown is stale and uneatable. But it has no sooner
done this than it has to take account of a PROCESS--from which only
when it's the basest of the servants of man, incurring ignominious
dismissal with no "character," does it, and whether under some muddled
pretext of morality or on any other, pusillanimously edge away. The
process, that of the expression, the literal squeezing-out, of value is
another affair--with which the happy luck of mere finding has little to
do. The joys of finding, at this stage, are pretty well over; that
quest of the subject as a whole by "matching," as the ladies say at the
shops, the big piece with the snippet, having ended, we assume, with a
capture. The subject is found, and if the problem is then transferred
to the ground of what to do with it the field opens out for any amount
of doing. This is precisely the infusion that, as I submit, completes
the strong mixture. It is on the other