I have not spoken of the artistic side of this play-concoction, because it scarcely has any. My aim in writing plays, whether alone or in collaboration, has always been strictly commercial.[3] I wanted money in heaps, and I wanted advertisement for my books. Here and there, in the comedies and farces in which I have been concerned, a little genuine dramatic art has, I fancy, been introduced; but surreptitiously, and quite unknown to the managers. I have never boasted of it in managerial apartments. That I have amused myself while constructing these arabesques of intrigue and epigram is indubitable, whether to my credit or discredit as a serious person. I laugh constantly in writing a farce. I have found it far easier to compose a commercial play than an artistic novel. How our princes of the dramatic kingdom can contrive to spend two years over a single piece, as they say they do, I cannot imagine. The average play contains from eighteen to twenty thousand words; the average novel contains eighty thousand; after all, writing is a question of words. At the rate of a thousand words a day, one could write a play three times over in a couple of months; prefix a month--thirty solid days of old Time!--for the perfecting of the plot, and you will be able to calculate the number of plays producible by an expert craftsman in a year. And unsuccessful plays are decidedly more remunerative than many successful novels. I am quite certain that the vast majority of failures produced in the West End mean to their authors a minimum remuneration of ten pounds per thousand words. In the fiction-mart ten pounds per thousand is gilded opulence. I am neither Sardou, Sudermann, nor George R. Sims, but I know what I am talking about, and I say that dramatic composition for the market is child's play compared to the writing of decent average fiction--provided one has an instinct for stage effect. [Footnote 3: Once more written in 1900.] XIV