equal, and whatever the losses, this establishes a superiority for the
play. A coherent section of life, which is what the story should be,
conveyed in the whole by this brevity of execution, so that the
recipient may get a full sense of its organic unity, cannot but be more
impressive than any medium of story telling where this is out of the
question. The merit of the novel, therefore, supreme in its way, is
another merit; "one star differeth from another in glory." It will be
recalled that Poe, with this matter of brevity of time and unity of
impression in mind, declared that there was no such thing as a long
poem; meaning that only the short poem which could be read through at
one sitting could attain to the highest effects.

But along with these advantages go certain limitations, too, in this
form of story telling; limitations which warn the play not to encroach
upon the domain of fiction, and which have much to do with making the
form what it is.

From its very nature the novel can be more thorough-going in the
delineation of character. The drama, as we have seen, must, under its
stern restrictions of time, seize upon outstanding traits and assume
that much of the development has taken place before the rise of the
first curtain. The novel shows character in process of development; the
play shows what character, developed to the point of test, will do when
the test comes. Its method, especially in the hands of modern
playwrights like Ibsen and Shaw, is to exhibit a human being acted upon
suddenly by a situation which exposes the hidden springs of action and
is a culmination of a long evolution prior to the plot that falls within
the play proper. In the drama characters must for the most part be
displayed in external acts, since action is of the very essence of a
play; in a novel, slowly and through long stretches of time, not the
acts alone but the thoughts, motives and desires of the character may be
revealed. Obviously, in the drama this cannot be done, in any like
measure, in spite of the fact that some of the late psychologists of the
drama, like Galsworthy, Bennett and others, have tried to introduce a
more careful psychology into their play-making. At the best, only an
approximation to the subtlety and penetration of fiction can be thus
attained. It were wiser to recognize the limitation and be satisfied
with the compensating gain of the more vivid, compelling effect secured
through the method of presenting h