the arts that the dramatist
cannot narrow himself as the novelist may, if he chooses; and it is
because this breadth of appeal is inherent in the acted play that
Aristotle held the drama to be a nobler form than the epic. "The
dramatic poem," said Mr. Henry James some thirty years ago, when he was
dealing with Tennyson's 'Queen Mary,' "seems to me of all literary forms
the very noblest.... More than any other work of literary art, it needs
a masterly structure."

Whether nobler or not, the dramatic form has always had a powerful
fascination for the novelists, who are forever casting longing eyes on
the stage. Mr. James himself has tried it, and Mr. Howells and Mark
Twain also. Balzac believed that he was destined to make his fortune in
the theater; and one of Thackeray's stories was made over out of a
comedy, acted only by amateurs. Charles Reade called himself a dramatist
forced to be a novelist by bad laws. Flaubert and the Goncourts, Zola
and Daudet wrote original plays, without ever achieving the success
which befell their efforts in prose-fiction. And now, in the opening
years of the twentieth century, we see Mr. Barrie in London and M.
Hervieu in Paris abandoning the novel in which they have triumphed for
the far more precarious drama. Mr. Thomas Hardy also appears to have
wearied of the novel and to be seeking relief, if not in real drama, at
least in a form borrowed from it, a sort of epic in dialog. Nor is it
without significance that the professional playwrights seem to feel
little or no temptation to turn story-tellers. Apparently the dramatic
form is the more attractive and the more satisfactory, in spite of its
greater difficulty and its greater danger.

Perhaps, indeed, we may discover in this difficulty and danger one
reason why the drama is more interesting than prose-fiction. A true
artist cannot but tire of a form that is too facile; and he is ever
yearning for a grapple with stubborn resistance. He delights in technic
for its own sake, girding himself joyfully to vanquish its necessities.
He is aware that an art which does not demand a severe apprenticeship
for the slow mastery of its secrets will fail to call forth his full
strength. He knows that it is bad for the art and unwholesome for the
artist himself, when the conditions are so relaxed that he can take it
carelessly.

It was a saying of the old bard of Brittany that "he who will not answer
to the rudder must answer to the rocks"; and not a