in sympathy with his attitude and his mood will find him out sooner or later.  To the story-teller, readers may come singly and at intervals; but the play-maker has to attract his audience in a mass.  Much of the merely literary merit of a drama may be enjoyed by a lone reader under the library lamp; but its essential dramatic quality is completely and satisfactorily revealed only in front of the footlights when the theater is filled with spectators.

It is this consciousness that his appeal is not to any individual man, but to man in the mass, that makes the dramatist what he is.  To scattered readers, each sitting alone, an author may whisper many things which he would not dare blurt out before a crowd.  The playwright knows that he can never whisper slyly; he must always speak out boldly so that all may hear him; and he must phrase what he has to say so as to please the boys in the gallery without insulting the women in the stage-boxes.  To the silent pressure of these unrelated spectators he responds by seeking the broadest basis for his play, by appealing to elemental human sympathy, by attempting themes with more or less of universality.  It is because the drama is the most democratic of the arts that the dramatist cannot narrow himself as the novelist may, if he chooses; and it is because this breadth of appeal is inherent in the acted play that Aristotle held the drama to be a nobler form than the epic.  “The dramatic poem,” said Mr. Henry James some thirty years ago, when he was dealing with Tennyson’s ‘Queen Mary,’ “seems to me of all literary forms the very noblest....  More than any other work of literary art, it needs a masterly structure.”

Whether nobler or not, the dramatic form has always had a powerful fascination for the novelists, who are forever casting longing eyes on the stage.  Mr. James himself has tried it, and Mr. Howells and Mark Twain also.  Balzac believed that he was destined to make his fortune in the theater; and one of Thackeray’s stories was made over out of a comedy, acted only by amateurs.  Charles Reade called himself a dramatist forced to be a novelist by bad laws.  Flaubert and the Goncourts, Zola and Daudet wrote original plays, without ever achieving the success which befell their efforts in prose-fiction.  And now, in the opening years of the twentieth century, we see Mr. Barrie in London and M. Hervieu in Paris abandoning the novel in which they have triumphed for the far more precarious drama.  Mr. Thomas Hardy also appears to have wearied of the novel and to be seeking relief, if not in real drama, at least in a form borrowed from it, a sort of epic in dialog.  Nor is it without significance that the professional playwrights seem to feel little or no temptation to turn story-tellers.  Apparently the dramatic form is the more attractive and the more satisfactory, in spite of its greater difficulty and its greater danger.