When Mr. Gillette undertook to make a play out of the Sherlock Holmes stories, which were not really dramatic, however ingeniously packed with thrilling surprizes, he seized at once on the sinister figure of Professor Moriarty, glimpsed only for a moment in a single tale, and he set this portentous villain up against his hero,--thereby displaying his mastery of a major principle of play-making. Many a novel has seemed vulgarized on the stage, because the adapter had to wrench its structure in seeking a struggle strong enough to sustain the framework of a play. Many a story has been cheapened pitifully by the theatrical adapter, simply because he was incapable of seeing in it more than a series of striking scenes which could be hewn into dialog for rough and ready representation on the stage, and because he had seized only his raw material, the bare skeleton of intrigue, without possessing the skill or the taste needed to convey across the footlights the subtle psychology which vitalized the original tale, or the evanescent atmosphere which enveloped it in charm. Mr. Bliss Perry phrased it most felicitously when he asserted that "a novel is typically as far removed from a play as a bird is from a fish," and that "the attempt to transform one into the other is apt to result in a sort of flying-fish, a betwixt-and-between thing." We all know that the ultimate value of certain accepted works of fiction is to be found, not in the story itself or even in the characters, but rather in the interpretative comment with which the novelist has encompassed people and happenings commonplace enough; and we all can see that, when one of these stories is set on the stage, the comment must be stript off, the incidents and the characters standing naked in their triteness. But this betrayal is not to be charged against dramatic form, for all that the dramatization did was to uncover brutally an inherent weakness which the novelist had hoped to hide.