lingers too much on the surface. By dint of seeking for form, it lets go
of the fact. It addresses itself to men of cultivation. But there are,
strictly speaking, no men of cultivation, for we are, first of all,
men."

Because the drama was popular, these artistic aristocrats despised it.
Altho they pined to succeed as play-makers, they scorned the trouble of
mastering the methods of the theater. Because the drama, at its highest,
attained to the loftier levels of literature, they assumed that a man of
letters had no need to spy out the secrets of the stage. If they could
not apply in the play the methods they had been applying skilfully and
successfully in the novel, so much the worse for the play. Evidently,
the drama was not literature, and the theater was no place for a
literary man. The fault was not in them; it could not be, since they had
regenerated the novel. It must be in the stage itself, and in the
stupidity of the public.

In one of his most vigorous essays, Brunetière joined issue with this
little group of French novelists, and told them sharply that they had
better consider anew the theatrical practises and prejudices which
seemed to them absurdly out-worn, and which they disdained as born of
mere chance and surviving only by tradition. He bade them ask themselves
if these tricks of the trade, so to style them, were not due to the fact
that the dramatist's art is a special art, having its own laws, its own
conditions, its own conventions, inherent in the nature of the art
itself. When they exprest their conviction that the method of the novel
ought to be applicable to the play, Brunetière retorted that, if the
novel was the play and if the play was the novel, then in all accuracy
there would be neither novel nor play, but only a single and undivided
form; and he insisted that, if as a matter of fact this single form did