P.S. Just a momentary drop to meaner things--to say that I appear to have left in my room a _sleeping-suit_ (blue and white pyjamas--jacket and trousers,) which, in the hurry of my departure and my eagerness to rejoin you a little in the garden before tearing myself away, I probably left folded away under my pillows. If your brave Housekeeper (who evaded my look about for her at the last) will very kindly make of them such a little packet as may safely reach me here by parcels' post she will greatly oblige yours again (and hers),
/# The two plays on which H.J. was at work were _The Other House_ (written many years before and now revised) and _The Outcry_. #/
I have been a prey to agitations and complications, many assaults, invasions and inconveniences, since leaving town--whereby I have had to put off thanking you for two brilliant letters. And yet I have wanted to write--to tell you (explaining) how I found myself swallowed up by one social abyss after another, and tangled in a succession of artful feminine webs, at Stafford House that evening, so that I couldn't get into touch with you, or with Ethel, again, before you were gone, as I found when I finally made a dash for you. That too was very complicated, and evening-parties bristle with dangers.... The very critical business of the _final_ luminous copy is, how ever, coming to an end--I mean the arriving at the utterly last intense reductions and compressions. So much has to come out, however, that I am sickened and appalled--and this sacrifice of the very life-blood of one's play, the mere vulgar anatomy and bare-bones poverty to which one has to squeeze it more and more, is the nauseating side of the whole desperate job. In spite of which I am interesting myself deeply in the three act comedy I have undertaken for Frohman--and which I find ferociously difficult--but with a difficulty that, thank God, draws me on and fascinates. If I can go on _believing in_ my subject I can go on treating it; but sometimes I have a mortal chill and wonder if I ain't damnably deluded. However, the balance inclines to faith and I _think_ it works out. You shall hear what comes of it--even at the worst. Meanwhile for yourself, dearest Lucy, buck up and patiently woo the Muse. She responds at last always to true and faithful wooing--to the right artful patience--and turns upon one the smile from which light breaks. I have been reading over the Long Duel (which I immediately return)--with a sense of its having great charm and care of execution, and quality and grace, but also, dear Lucy, of its drawbacks for practical prosperity. The greatest of these seems to me to be fundamental--to reside in the fact that the subject isn't dramatic, that it deals with a _state_, a position, a situation (of the "static" kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a progression; which fact, highly favourable to it for a tale, a psychologic picture, is detrimental to its _tenseness_--to its being matter for a play and developed into 4 acts. A play appears to me of necessity to involve a struggle, a question (of whether, and how, will it or won't it happen? and if so, or not so, how and why?--which we have the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, the _tension_, in a word, of seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack upon _oppositions_--with the victory or the failure on one side or the other, and each wavering and shifting, from point to point.) But your hero is thus not an _agent_, he is passive, he doesn't take the field. I say all this because I think there is light on the matter of the history of the fate of the play in it--and also think that there are other elements of disadvantage for the piece too. The elderly (or almost?) French artist with a virtuous love-sorrow doesn't, for the B.P., belong to the _actual_; he's romantic, and old-fashionedly romantic, and remote; and the case is aggravated by the corresponding maturity of the heroine. You will say that there is the young couple, and what comes of their being there, and _their_ "action"; but the truth about that, I fear, is that innocent young lovers _as such_, and not as being engaged in other difficulties and with other oppositions (_of their own_,) have practically ceased to be a dramatic value--aren't any longer an element or an interest to conjure with. Don't hate me for saying these things--for working them out critically, and so far as may be, illuminatingly, in face of the difficulty the L.D. seems to have had in getting itself brought out. We are dealing with an art prodigiously difficult and arduous every way--and in which one seems most of all to sink into a Sea of colossal Waste.