Of course, I am writing now of twenty years ago but even then the change was coming and in a way I was alive to it. I am, at this point, quite willing to admit that I frequently turn out work far beneath the standard that my observation tells me is necessary for success, and that to-morrow I am quite as apt to start frantically at work on an untrue and obsolete theme as any novice. There are writers who are under the control of their own critical faculty, but unfortunately for me I have never been one of them. A story pops into my head. Often I know it has no importance at all and sternly shut it out. But, as is often the case, if the story keeps coming back of its own free will I usually end by forgiving it its obvious faults and gradually working myself up into a lather of paternal pride.... Who ever saw a young mother whose baby didn’t seem remarkable to her? These yarns of mine seem good to me because they are mine. If any one else was to ask my opinion of the same story I would say it was terrible, but by the time I have lived with it for a month or so I see beauty in it, because I am looking at it hoping to see that beauty. As a matter of fact, one of the greatest differences between a good play and a bad one is that a good play says what the writer thinks it says, while a bad one doesn’t. Play writing is really an extraordinary difficult art; if all that was necessary for an emotion to reach an audience was for the writer to feel that emotion, we would have few failures. It is quite possible for a writer to be honestly affected by the sorrows of a character without the audience in the least sharing his feeling. I have often wept as I wrote a scene that never in the least affected any one besides myself. I have chuckled over many a farce situation that never got a laugh. A playwright’s words and his situations must have that strange power that will project them over the footlights. This projecting force is made up of instinct, experience, sincerity and a queer sense of rhythm, the timing of the dramatist. When I am asked how much play writing may be taught I always hesitate. A lot may be taught—to the right person—very little to the one without the instinctive ear—the sense of pace and build that must be there, although just exactly what it is and where it comes from I find it difficult to explain. I dug up recently, out of my files, one of the first plays I ever wrote, and was amazed at its crudity, but even more amazed by the lilt of it; its pace, its timing and its gradual accumulation to its crescendo were as deft and as sure as anything I could write to-day ... and at the time I wrote it these things were entirely instinctive. One may learn a lot about what not to write, may learn much of literary style and taste and many of the tricks of construction, but I doubt if any one without the instinctive feel of the born dramatist can learn how to time a speech or pitch a climax and without this all the rest is useless.