gh 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.

The novelist has privileges denied to the playwright; and, chief among
them, of course, is the right to explain his characters, to analize
their motives, to set forth every fleeting phase of emotion to which
they are subject. Sidney Lanier asserted that the novel was a finer form
than the drama because there were subtleties of feeling which Shakspere
could not make plain and George Eliot could. Unfortunately for Lanier,
his admiration for George Eliot is felt now to be excessive; and few of
us are ready to accept Gwendolen Harleth as a more successful attempt at
portraiture than any one of half a score of Shakspere's heroines, so
convincingly feminine. But there is truth, no doubt, in the contention
that the novel is freer, more fluid, more flexible than the play; and
that there are themes and subjects unsuited to the stage and wholly
within the compass of the story-teller. To say this is but to repeat
again that the drama is not prose-fiction and prose-fiction is not the
drama,--just as painting is not sculp