Mr. Butler Clarke died prematurely in 1904, and the hope died with him.

For the _Times_ I wrote a good many long, separate articles before 1884,
on "Spanish Novels," "American Novels," and so forth; the "leader" on
the death of Anthony Trollope; and various elaborate reviews of books on
Christian origins, a subject on which I was perpetually reading, always
with the same vision before me, growing in clearness as the
years passed.

But my first steps toward its realization were to begin with the short
story of _Miss Bretherton_, published in 1884, and then the translation
of Amiel's _Journal Intime_, which appeared in 1885. _Miss Bretherton_
was suggested to me by the brilliant success in 1883 of Mary Anderson,
and by the controversy with regard to her acting--as distinct from her
delightful beauty and her attractive personality--which arose between
the fastidious few and the enchanted many. I maintained then, and am
quite sure now, that Isabel Bretherton was in no sense a portrait of
Miss Anderson. She was to me a being so distinct from the living actress
that I offered her to the world with an entire good faith, which seems
to myself now, perhaps thirty years later, hardly less surprising than
it did to the readers of the time. For undoubtedly the situation in the
novel was developed out of the current dramatic debate. But it became to
me just _a_ situation--_a_ problem. It was really not far removed from
Diderot's problem in the _Paradoxe sur le Comedien_. What is the
relation of the actor to the part represented? One actress is
plain--Rachel; another actress is beautiful, and more than beautiful,
delightful--Miss Anderson. But all the time, is there or is there not a
region in which all these considerations count for nothing in comparison
with certain others? Is there a dramatic _art_--exacting, difficult,
supreme--or is there not? The choice of the subject, at that time, was,