may amble on—­and it will still be a play, and it may succeed in pleasing either the fastidious hundreds or the unfastidious hundreds of thousands, according to the talent of the author.  Without doubt mandarins will continue for about a century yet to excommunicate certain plays from the category of plays.  But nobody will be any the worse.  And dramatists will go on proving that whatever else divides a play from a book, “dramatic quality” does not.  Some arch-Mandarin may launch at me one of those mandarinic epigrammatic questions which are supposed to overthrow the adversary at one dart.  “Do you seriously mean to argue, sir, that drama need not be dramatic?” I do, if the word dramatic is to be used in the mandarinic signification.  I mean to state that some of the finest plays of the modern age differ from a psychological novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling.  Example, Henri Becque’s La Parisienne, than which there is no better.  If I am asked to give my own definition of the adjective “dramatic,” I would say that that story is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined to be spoken by actors and actresses on the stage, and that any narrower definition is bound to exclude some genuine plays universally accepted as such—­even by mandarins.  For be it noted that the mandarin is never consistent.

My definition brings me to the sole technical difference between a play and a novel—­in the play the story is told by means of a dialogue.  It is a difference less important than it seems, and not invariably even a sure point of distinction between the two kinds of narrative.  For a novel may consist exclusively of dialogue.  And plays may contain other matter than dialogue.  The classic chorus is not dialogue.  But nowadays we should consider the device of the chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays, it indeed would be.  We have grown very ingenious and clever at the trickery of making characters talk to the audience and explain themselves and their past history while seemingly innocent of any such intention.  And here, I admit, the dramatist has to face a difficulty special to himself, which the novelist can avoid.  I believe it to be the sole difficulty which is peculiar to the drama, and that it is not acute is proved by the ease with which third-rate dramatists have generally vanquished it.  Mandarins are wont to assert that the dramatist is also handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of material.  This is not so.  Rigid economy in the use of material is equally advisable in every form of art.  If it is a necessity, it is a necessity which all artists flout from time to time, and occasionally with gorgeous results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been less guilty of flouting it than the novelist or any other artist.

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