And now, having shown that some alleged differences between the play and the novel are illusory, and that a certain technical difference, though possibly real, is superficial and slight, I come to the fundamental difference between them—­a difference which the laity does not suspect, which is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which nobody who is well versed in the making of both plays and novels can fail to feel profoundly.  The emotional strain of writing a play is not merely less prolonged than that of writing a novel, it is less severe even while it lasts, lower in degree and of a less purely creative character.  And herein is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write than a novel.  The drama does not belong exclusively to literature, because its effect depends on something more than the composition of words.  The dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the sole creator of it.  Without him nothing can be done, but, on the other hand, he cannot do everything himself.  He begins the work of creation, which is finished either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by the creative imagination of the reader in the study.  It is as if he carried an immense weight to the landing at the turn of a flight of stairs, and that thence upward the lifting had to be done by other people.  Consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist is the base—­but he is not the apex.  A play is a collaboration of creative faculties.  The egotism of the dramatist resents this uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists.  And further, the creative faculties are not only those of the author, the stage-director ("producer”) and the actors—­the audience itself is unconsciously part of the collaboration.

Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation before the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the functions of others, and will fail of proper accomplishment at the end.  The dramatist must deliberately, in performing his share of the work, leave scope for a multitude of alien faculties whose operations he can neither precisely foresee nor completely control.  The point is not that in the writing of a play there are various sorts of matters—­as we have already seen—–­which the dramatist must ignore; the point is that even in the region proper to him he must not push the creative act to its final limit.  He must ever remember those who are to come after him.  For instance, though he must visualise a scene as he writes it, he should not visualise it completely, as a novelist should.  The novelist may perceive vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real actors and hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such real actors, or he will perceive imaginary faces, and the ultimate interpretation will perforce falsify his work and nullify his intentions.  This aspect of the subject might well be much amplified, but only for a public of practising dramatists.