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 sculpture 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