the practical counsels of a practical playwright, advising his
fellow-craftsmen how best to succeed on the stage; and it is just as
technical in its precepts as Mr. Pinero's acute lecture on the probable
success of Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, if only the Scots
romancer had taken the trouble to learn the rules of the game, as it is
played in the theater of to-day.

In thus centering the interest of their public utterance upon the
necessities of craftsmanship, the dramatists are in accord with the
customs of the practitioners of all the other arts. Consider the
criticism of poetry by the poets themselves, for example,--how narrowly
it is limited to questions of vocabulary or of versification, whether
the poet-critic is Dryden or Wordsworth or Poe. Consider the criticism
of painting by the painters themselves,--how frankly it is concerned
with the processes of the art, whether the painter-critic is Fromentin
or La Farge. It is La Farge who records that Rembrandt was a "workman
following his trade of painting to live by it," and who reminds us that
"these very great artists"--Rembrandt and his fellows--"are primarily
workmen, without any pose or assumption of doing more than a daily
task." What they did was all in the day's work. One of the most
distinguished of American sculptors was once standing before a
photograph of the Panathenaic frieze, and a critical friend by his side
exprest a wonder as to "what those old Greeks were thinking of when they
did work like that?" The professional artist smiled and responded: "I
guess that, like the rest of us, they were thinking how they could pull
it off!"

The method, the tricks of the trade, the ingenious devices of one kind
or another, these are what artists of all sorts like to discuss with
fellow-practitioners of the art; and it is by this interchange of