To suggest that these two masters of the dramatic art would probably confine their conversation to matters of mere technic is not so vain or adventurous as it may seem, since technic is the one theme the dramatists from Lope de Vega to Legouve have always chosen to discuss, whenever they have been emboldened to talk about their art in public.  Lope’s ‘New Art of Writing Plays’ is in verse, and it has taken for its remote model Horace’s ‘Art of Poetry,’ but none the less does it contain 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 experiences that the means of expression are multiplied.  The inner meaning of what they have wrought, its message, its morality, its subtler spirit, the artists do not care ever to talk over, even with each other.  This is intangible and incommunicable; and it is too personal, too intimate, to be vulgarized in words; it is to be felt rather than phrased.  Above all, it must speak for itself, for it is there because it had to be there, and not because the artist put it there deliberately.  If he has not builded better than he knew, then is the result of his labor limited and narrow.  A story is told of Thorwaldsen in his old age, when a friend found him disconsolate before a finished statue and inquired if he was despondent because he had not been able to realize his ideal.  And the sculptor responded that, on the contrary, he had realized his ideal, and therefore he was downcast; for the first time his hand had been able to accomplish all that his mind had planned.