These French novelists refused to perceive that the drama is, of necessity, the most democratic of the arts, since it depends, and has always depended, and must ever depend, absolutely upon the public as a whole.  The strength of the drama, its immense advantage over other forms of literature, lies in this, that it must appeal to the mass of men, not to the intelligent more than to the unintelligent, not to the educated more than to the uneducated, not to any sect or clique, or cotery, but to men as men.  The laws of the drama may be deduced, all of them, from this principle, that in the theater the play-maker has to interest a gathering of his own contemporaries, all sorts and conditions of men.  If he cannot hold their attention, move them, sway them, control them, then he has failed frankly to do what he set out to do.  And he can do this, he can make them laugh, and make them weep, make them feel, and make them think, only by accepting the conditions of the theater itself.  Daudet and Zola had more of the needful understanding of their fellow creatures than Flaubert and Goncourt, more of the necessary sympathy; but they had all of them not a little of the conceit of the self-made man and they assumed the egotistic attitude of the cultivated aristocrat.  It would have been well if they could have taken to heart what George Sand once wrote to Flaubert:  “It seems to me that your school does not consider enough the substance of things, and that it lingers too much on the surface.  By dint of seeking for form, it lets go of the fact.  It addresses itself to men of cultivation.  But there are, strictly speaking, no men of cultivation, for we are, first of all, men.”

Because the drama was popular, these artistic aristocrats despised it.  Altho they pined to succeed as play-makers, they scorned the trouble of mastering the methods of the theater.  Because the drama, at its highest, attained to the loftier levels of literature, they assumed that a man of letters had no need to spy out the secrets of the stage.  If they could not apply in the play the methods they had been applying skilfully and successfully in the novel, so much the worse for the play.  Evidently, the drama was not literature, and the theater was no place for a literary man.  The fault was not in them; it could not be, since they had regenerated the novel.  It must be in the stage itself, and in the stupidity of the public.

In one of his most vigorous essays, Brunetiere joined issue with this little group of French novelists, and told them sharply that they had better consider anew the theatrical practises and prejudices which seemed to them absurdly out-worn, and which they disdained as born of mere chance and surviving only by tradition.  He bade them ask themselves if these tricks of the trade, so to style them, were not due to the fact that the dramatist’s art is a special art, having its own laws, its own conditions, its own conventions, inherent in the nature of the art itself.  When