they exprest their conviction that the method of the novel ought to be applicable to the play, Brunetiere retorted that, if the novel was the play and if the play was the novel, then in all accuracy there would be neither novel nor play, but only a single and undivided form; and he insisted that, if as a matter of fact this single form did not actually exist, if it had divided itself, if there was such a thing as a novel and such a thing as a play, then that could be only because we go to the theater to get a specific pleasure which we cannot get in the library.  The practical critic gave them the sound advice that, if they sought to succeed in the theater as they had succeeded in the library, they should study the art of the playwright, endeavoring to perceive wherein it differs from the art of the story-teller.

The points of agreement between the novel and the play are so obvious that there is some excuse for overlooking the fact that the points of disagreement are almost as numerous.  It is true that, in the play as in the novel, a story is developed by means of characters whose conversation is reproduced.  So the game of golf is like the game of lawn-tennis, in so far as there are in both of them balls to be placed by the aid of certain implements.  But as the balls are different and as the implements are different, the two games are really not at all alike; and it is when they are played most skilfully and most strictly according to the rules that they are most unlike.

The play is least dramatic when it most closely resembles the novel, as it did in the days of Peele and Greene, whose dramas are little more than narratives presented in dialog.  In the three centuries since Peele and Greene, the play and the novel have been getting further and further away from each other.  Each has been steadily specializing, seeking its true self, casting out the extraneous elements proved to be useless.  The novel in its highest development is now a single narrative, no longer distended and delayed by intercalated tales, such as we find in ’Don Quixote’ and ‘Tom Jones,’ in ‘Wilhelm Meister’ and in ‘Pickwick,’ inserted for no artistic reason, but merely because the author happened to have them on hand.  The play in its highest development is now a single action, swiftly presented, and kept free from lyrical and oratorical digressions existing for their own sake and not aiding in the main purpose of the drama.

The practitioners of each art conceive their stories in accordance with the necessities of that art, the novelist thinking in terms of the printed page and the dramatist thinking in terms of the actual theater, with its actors and with its spectators.  Here, indeed, is a chief reason why the perspective of the play is different from the perspective of the novel, in that the playwright must perforce take account of his audience, of its likes and its dislikes, of its traditions and its desires.  The novelist need not give a thought to his readers, assured that those