portraying gradual change, whether in the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order to trespass on the domain of the dramatist.  Most great novels embrace considerable segments of many lives; whereas the drama gives us only the culminating points—­or shall we say the intersecting culminations?—­two or three destinies.  Some novelists have excelled precisely in the art with which they have made the gradations of change in character or circumstance so delicate as to be imperceptible from page to page, and measurable, as in real life, only when we look back over a considerable period.  The dramatist, on the other hand, deals in rapid and startling changes, the “peripeties,” as the Greeks called them, which may be the outcome of long, slow processes, but which actually occur in very brief spaces of time.  Nor is this a merely mechanical consequence of the narrow limits of stage presentation.  The crisis is as real, though not as inevitable, a part of human experience as the gradual development.  Even if the material conditions of the theatre permitted the presentation of a whole Middlemarch or Anna Karenine—­as the conditions of the Chinese theatre actually do—­some dramatists, we cannot doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of prolixity, in order to cultivate an art of concentration and crisis.  The Greek drama “subjected to the faithful eyes,” as Horace phrases it, the culminating points of the Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of theatrical presentment the culminating points of modern experience.

But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic.  A serious illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage, may be a crisis in a man’s life, without being necessarily, or even probably, material for drama.  How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic from a non-dramatic crisis?  Generally, I think, by the fact that it develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible, the vivid manifestation of character.  Take, for instance, the case of a bankruptcy.  Most people, probably, who figure in the Gazette do not go through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension, special humiliation, special agony.  They gradually drift to leeward in their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state of their liver.  In this average process of financial decline, there may be—­there has been—­matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a drama.  That admirable chapter in Little Dorrit, wherein Dickens describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage.  So, too, with the bankruptcy