The only other author who has ventured to turn a play into a novel, and then back into a play varying widely from the original piece, is Sir James Barrie, and what he did was not quite what Reade had done. Sir James wrote a charming story, called the 'Little White Bird,' and he found in his own prose fiction part of the material out of which he was moved later to make a charming play, called 'Peter Pan.' For reasons best known to himself, but deplored by all who are interested in the progress of the English drama, Sir James Barrie has chosen to publish only a few of his comedies. Yet he met the demands of a multitude of readers by borrowing from his fantastic piece a part of the material which he made into a delightful tale, called 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.' These successive rehandlings of an idea, first in prose fiction, then in dramatic form, and finally again in prose fiction, were possible only to a novelist who was also a dramatist--to an author who had mastered the secrets of two different methods of story-telling, the method of the theater and the method of the library. V The novelist-dramatist of this type is a comparatively new figure in literature. Formerly there was a sharp line of cleavage between the man who wrote novels and the man who wrote plays, altho one or the other might be lured on occasion into a sporadic raid into the territory of the other. During three-quarters of the nineteenth century prose fiction reigned supreme in every modern literature except that of France, and the novelists were rather inclined to look down on the playwrights, and to dismiss the drama as an inferior form, likely to be absolutely superseded by prose fiction. But toward the end of the century there began to be visible signs of an awakening interest in the drama, and also of a slackening interest in prose fiction. The novelists of the twentieth century, so far from holding the drama to be an inferior form, are discovering that it is at least a more difficult form, and therefore artistically more attractive. As a result of this discovery not a few novelists have turned playwrights, taking the pains to learn the principles of the more dangerous art of play-making. Sir James Barrie in England, M. Paul Hervieu in France, Herr Sudermann in Germany, and Signor d'Annunzio in Italy may not have abandoned altogether the prose fiction in which they first won fame, but at least they now devote the major part of their energies to the drama. It may be recalled that Clyde Fitch began his literary career as a writer of short stories, and that Mr. Bernard Shaw originally emerged to view as the author of a novel.