It has arisen just as you say, sir—because Two Necessities pressed. The Passion must have its torrent, else _you_ will never endure that Othello shall kill Desdemona. Events must have their concatenation, else—but I stop at this the incredible anomaly, that for _Othello_ himself you require the double time! You cannot imagine him embracing his wife, misdoubted false; as little can you his Love measureless, between sunrise and sunset turned into Murder. NORTH. Even so. TALBOYS. My dear sir, what really happened? NORTH. Oh! Talboys, Talboys. Well then—_not_ that Othello killed her upon the first night after the arrival at Cyprus. The Cycle could not have been so run through. TALBOYS. How then in reality did the Weeks pass? NORTH. That’s a good one! Why, I was just about to ask you—and ’tis your indisputable duty to tell me and the anxious world—how. TALBOYS. I do not choose to commit myself in such a serious affair. NORTH. Suppose the framing of the tale into a Prose Romance. Surely, surely, surely, no human romancer, compounding the unhappy transactions into a prose narrative, could, could, could have put the first sowing of doubt, and the smothering under the pillows, for incidents of one day. He would have made Othello for a time laugh at the doubt, toss it to the winds. Iago would have wormed about him a deal slowlier. The course of the transactions in the Novel would have been much nearer the course of reality. TALBOYS. In Cinthio’s Novel— NORTH. Curse Cinthio. TALBOYS. My Lord, I bow to your superior politeness. NORTH. Confound Chesterfield. My dear friend, Reality has its own reasons—a Novel its own—and its own a Drama. Every work of art brings its own conditions, which divide you from the literal representation of human experience. Ask Painter, Sculptor, and Architect. Every fine art exercises its own sleights. TALBOYS. In the Novel, I guess or admit that they would have been a month at Cyprus ere Iago had stirred. What hurry? He would have watched his time—ever and anon would have thrown in a hundred suggestions of which we know nothing. Let any man, romancer or other, set himself to conceive the Prose Novel. He cannot, by any possibility, conceive that he should have been led to make but a day of it. Ergo, the Drama proceeds upon its own Laws. No representation in art is the literal transcript of experience. NORTH.