This process made, at all events, for what we in particular wanted,
which was a play that the League could stage for half an evening's
entertainment; but it left existent not a shred of the rhetorical
fripperies which I had in the beginning concocted, and it made of the
actual first public performance a collaboration with almost as many
contributing authors as though the production had been a musical comedy.

And if only fate had gifted me with an exigent conscience and a turn for
oratory, I would, I like to think, have publicly confessed, at that first
public performance, to all those tributary clarifying rills to the play's
progress: but, as it was, vainglory combined with an aversion to
"speech-making" to compel a taciturn if smirking acceptance of the
curtain-call with which an indulgent audience flustered the nominal author
of _The Jewel Merchants_.... Now, in any case, it is due my collaborators
to tell you that _The Jewel Merchants_ has amply fulfilled the purpose
of its makers by being enacted to considerable applause,--and is a
pleasure to add that this _succes d'estime_ was very little chargeable to
anything which I contributed to the play.

For another matter, I would here confess that _The Jewel Merchants_,
in addition to its "literary" deficiencies, lacks moral fervor. It will,
I trust, corrupt no reader irretrievably, to untraversable leagues beyond
the last hope of redemption: but, even so, it is a frankly unethical
performance. You must accept this resuscitated trio, if at all, very much
as they actually went about Tuscany, in long ago discarded young flesh,
when the one trait everywhere common to their milieu was the absence of
any moral excitement over such-and-such an action's being or not being
"wicked." This phenomenon of Renaissance life, as lived in Italy in
particular, has elsewhere been discussed time and again, and I lack here
the space, and the desire, either to explain or to apologize for the era's