Perhaps ‘Castle Rackrent’ is the finest of Miss Edgeworth’s stories, because it is the only one in which she had set herself a technical problem of exceeding difficulty.  She chose to use the faithful old retainer to tell the tale of the family’s downfall in consequence of its weakness, its violence, and its vice.  Thady has never a word of blame for any son of the house he has served generation after generation.  Indeed, he is forever praising his succession of masters; but so artfully does the author utilize the device of transparency that the reader is put in possession of the damning facts, one by one, and is soon able to see the truth of the matter which Thady himself has no thought of revealing,—­which, indeed, he would probably deny indignantly if it was suggested by any one else.

The chief reason why the novel is still held to be inferior to the drama is to be found in its looseness of form.  The novel is not strictly limited, as the play must be by the practical necessities of the theater; and the practitioners of the art of fiction permit themselves a license of structure which cannot but be enfeebling to the artists themselves.  Few of the novelists have ever gone about a whole winter with a knot in their foreheads, such as Hawthorne carried there while he was thinking out the ‘Scarlet Letter.’  And only by strenuous grappling with his obstacles was he able to attain the masterly simplicity of that Puritan tragedy.  A resolute wrestling with difficulty is good not only for the muscles but also for the soul; and it may be because they know this, that artists are inclined to go afield in search of difficulties to be overthrown, that they set themselves problems, that they accept limitations.  Herein we may see a cause for the long popularity of the sonnet, with its restricted scheme of rimes.  Herein, again, we may see a reason for the desire of the novelist to try his fate as a dramatist.  “To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws,” so Mr. James once declared, “is always a strong man’s highest ideal of success.”  The novelist often fails as a dramatist, because he has the gift of the story-teller only, and not that of the play-maker, but more often still because the writing of fiction has provided him with no experience in working beneath any law other than his own caprice.

The modern sculptor, by the mere fact that he may now order marble of any shape and of any size, finds his work far easier and, therefore, far less invigorating than it was long ago, when the artist needed to have an alerter imagination to perceive in a given piece of marble the beautiful figure he had to cut out of that particular block and no other.  Professor Mahaffy has suggested that the decay of genius may be traced to the enfeebling facilities of our complex civilization.  “In art,” he maintained, “it is often the conventional shackles,—­the necessities of rime and meter, the triangle of a gable, the circular top of a barrel—­which has