ture and sculpture not painting.

But to emphasize this distinction is not to confess that the drama
cannot do at all certain things which the novel does with unconscious
ease. Is there no rich variety of self-analysis in 'Macbeth,' one may
ask, and in 'Hamlet'? Did any novelist of the seventeenth century lay
bare the palpitations of the female heart more delicately than Racine?
Did any novelist of the eighteenth century reveal a subtler insight into
the hidden recesses of feminine psychology than Marivaux? It may be true
enough that, in the nineteenth century, prose-fiction has been more
fortunate than the drama and that the novelists have achieved triumphs
of insight and of subtlety denied to the dramatists. But who shall say
that this immediate inferiority of the play to the novel is inherent in
the form itself? Who will deny that it may be merely the defect of the
playwrights of our time? Who will assert that a more accomplished
dramatist may not come forward in the twentieth century to prove that
the drama is a fit instrument for emotional dissection?

No one has more clearly indicated the limitations of the dramatic medium
than Mr. A.B. Walkley, who once declared that the future career of the
drama "is likely to be hampered by its inability to tell cultivated and
curious people of to-day a tithe of the things they want to know. What
the drama can tell, it can tell more emphatically than any other art.
The novel, for instance, is but a report; the drama makes you an
eyewitness of the thing in the doing. But then there is a whole world of
things which cannot be done, of thoughts and moods and subconscious
states which cannot be exprest on the stage and which can be exprest in
the novel. In earlier ages, which could do with a narrow range of vivid
sensations, the drama sufficed; it will not suffice for an age which
wants an illimitable range of sensations, and, being quick in the
uptake, can dispense with vividness." And then the brilliant critic of
the London _Times_ dwelt on the meagerness of Ibsen's 'Master-Builder'
when contrasted with "the extraordinarily complicated texture of subtle
thoughts and minute sensations" in Mr. James's 'Wings of the Dove.'

It may as well be confest frankly that, even in the twenty-first
century, the playhouse is unlikely to be hospitable to an
"extraordinarily complicated texture of subtle thoughts and minute
sensations"; but we may ask also if the playhouse will really be very
mu