_should_ be, I know.)
They look at an author's work as a man looks at the universe--a small
part at a time. That trite old paradox that, to the actor, the part is
greater than the whole, should never be forgotten. Remember, too, how
"touchy," as he calls it, they _must_ be, in the nature of things.
Their touchiness, their affectation, their lack of culture--all are
inherent in them. _Their_ success is always immediate, using the word
in its literal sense as a metaphysician would use it; the author's
success is mediate, through time and trial. So one should not be
discouraged because they fail to appreciate one's efforts to give
them the atmosphere of the period. They will get the atmosphere
intuitively, or not at all.

He complains of "loss of time," "thankless task," "inefficiency," and
the like. Now, I think that is grumbling without cause. Take my own
case, for example. I have no problems of dramatic art to wrestle with,
only the problem of coal consumption. But it is ultimately the same
thing, i.e., energy. My friend mourns the shameful loss of energy
incident to the production of a decent presentment of his dramatic
conception. I, as an engineer, mourn over the hideous loss of coal
incidental to the propulsion of the ship. The loss in his case, I
suppose, is incalculable: in mine it is nearly seventy per cent. Think
of it for a moment. The _Lusitania's_ furnaces consume one thousand
tons of coal per day, seven hundred of which are, in all probability,
lost in the inefficiency of the steam-engine as a prime mover. It runs
through the whole of our life, my friend! Waste, waste, waste! What we
call the perfect cycle, the conversion of energy into heat and heat
into energy, cannot, in practice, be accomplished without loss. What
may interest you still more is that we cannot, even in theory,
calculate on no loss whatever in the progress of the cycle, and by
this same "entropy loss," as we call it, some of our more reckless
physicists foresee the running down of the great universe-machine some
day, and so eliminating both plays and steam-engines from the problem
altogether. But this is my point. Prodigious loss is the law of
nature which she imposes both on artist and artisan. Indeed, artist
and artisan have their reason of being in that loss, as I think you
will admit.

Again, history will corroborate my contention as to the catholicity of
this loss. Imagine the French Revolution, the Lutheran Reformation,
the "Catho