On another occasion Goethe spoke of the prolixity of Schiller’s earlier pieces, a fault which Schiller was never quite able to overcome. Goethe commented that it “is more difficult than is imagined to control a subject properly, to keep it from overpowering one, and to concentrate one’s attention on that alone which is absolutely essential.” The younger Dumas, who always knew what he was driving at, declared that the first qualification of the accomplished dramatist was logic, which “must be implacable from beginning to end.... The playwright must unfailingly place before the spectator that part of the being or thing for or against which he wishes to draw a conclusion.” Sir Arthur Pinero agrees with Dumas in holding that dramatic, like poetic, talent is born, not made; if it is to achieve success it must be developed into theatrical talent by hard study and generally by long practice. For theatrical talent consists in the power of making your characters not only tell a story by means of dialog but tell it in such skilfully devised form and order as shall, within the limits of an ordinary theatrical representation, give rise to the greatest amount of that peculiar kind of emotional effect the production of which is the one great function of the theater. This theatrical talent has to be exercised within the limits of the theater as this exists at the time when the dramatist lives. The principles of playmaking are eternal, no doubt, but the practices of playmaking are modified by the constantly changing conditions of the stage. Pinero likens the art of the drama to the art of war, the permanent principles of playmaking to strategy, and its variable principles to tactics. Strategy is to-day what it was yesterday; and it was succinctly defined during our Civil War by General Forrest, when he said it consisted in “getting there first with the most men”—that is to say, in gaining an advantageous position for yourself and putting the enemy in a disadvantageous position. It is therefore unchanging in its essential elements, Foch profiting by the example of Napoleon and Cæsar, Hannibal and Alexander. But tactics are in incessant modification, as the soldier has new implements put in his hands by the inventions of the ages, gunpowder unhorsing the man in armor and tanks taking the place of elephants. While the strategy of the drama is constant, its tactics “are always changing,” so Pinero has put it; and every dramatist whose ambition it is to produce live plays is absolutely bound to study carefully, and I may add respectfully—at any rate not contemptuously—the conditions that hold good for his own age and generation.