single action, swiftly presented, and kept free from lyrical and
oratorical digressions existing for their own sake and not aiding in the
main purpose of the drama.

The practitioners of each art conceive their stories in accordance with
the necessities of that art, the novelist thinking in terms of the
printed page and the dramatist thinking in terms of the actual theater,
with its actors and with its spectators. Here, indeed, is a chief reason
why the perspective of the play is different from the perspective of
the novel, in that the playwright must perforce take account of his
audience, of its likes and its dislikes, of its traditions and its
desires. The novelist need not give a thought to his readers, assured
that those in sympathy with his attitude and his mood will find him out
sooner or later. To the story-teller, readers may come singly and at
intervals; but the play-maker has to attract his audience in a mass.
Much of the merely literary merit of a drama may be enjoyed by a lone
reader under the library lamp; but its essential dramatic quality is
completely and satisfactorily revealed only in front of the footlights
when the theater is filled with spectators.

It is this consciousness that his appeal is not to any individual man,
but to man in the mass, that makes the dramatist what he is. To
scattered readers, each sitting alone, an author may whisper many things
which he would not dare blurt out before a crowd. The playwright knows
that he can never whisper slyly; he must always speak out boldly so that
all may hear him; and he must phrase what he has to say so as to please
the boys in the gallery without insulting the women in the stage-boxes.
To the silent pressure of these unrelated spectators he responds by
seeking the broadest basis for his play, by appealing to elemental human
sympathy, by attempting themes with more or less of universality. It is