"Does it require no more than that to write a play?" he inquired with a shade of dismay in his tone.
"You want a certain knack," I allowed, "but no more than to play billiards."
"They lecture on the technique of the drama in all the important universities of America," said he.
"The Americans are an extremely practical people," I answered. "I believe that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how to suck eggs."
"I do not think I quite understand you."
"If you can't write a play no one can teach you and if you can it's as easy as falling off a log."
Here his face expressed a lively perplexity, but I think only because he could not make up his mind whether this operation came within the province of the professor of physics or within that of the professor of applied mechanics.
"But if it is so easy to write a play why do dramatists take so long about it?"
"They didn't, you know. Lope de la Vega and Shakespeare and a hundred others wrote copiously and with ease. Some modern playwrights have been perfectly illiterate men and have found it an almost insuperable difficulty to put two sentences together. A celebrated English dramatist once showed me a manuscript and I saw that he had written the question: will you have sugar in your tea, five times before he could put it in this form. A novelist would starve if he could not on the whole say what he wanted to without any beating about the bush."
"You would not call Ibsen an illiterate man and yet it is well known that he took two years to write a play."