Perhaps, indeed, we may discover in this difficulty and danger one reason why the drama is more interesting than prose-fiction.  A true artist cannot but tire of a form that is too facile; and he is ever yearning for a grapple with stubborn resistance.  He delights in technic for its own sake, girding himself joyfully to vanquish its necessities.  He is aware that an art which does not demand a severe apprenticeship for the slow mastery of its secrets will fail to call forth his full strength.  He knows that it is bad for the art and unwholesome for the artist himself, when the conditions are so relaxed that he can take it carelessly.

It was a saying of the old bard of Brittany that “he who will not answer to the rudder must answer to the rocks”; and not a few writers of prose-fiction have made shipwreck because they gave no heed to this warning.  Many a novelist is a sloven in the telling of his tale, beginning it anywhere and ending it somehow, distracting attention on characters of slight importance, huddling his incidents, confusing his narrative, simply because he has never troubled himself with the principles of construction and proportion with which every playwright must needs make himself familiar.  Just as the architectural students at the Beaux Arts in Paris are required to develop at the same time the elevation and the ground-plan and the cross-section of the edifice they are designing, so the playwright, while he is working out his plot, must be continually solving problems of exposition and of construction, of contrast and of climax.  These are questions with which the ordinary novelist feels no need to concern himself, for the reading public makes no demand on him and there is nothing urging him to attain a high standard.  It is worthy of remark that the newspaper reviewers of current fiction very rarely comment on the construction of the novels they are considering.

In other words, the novel is too easy to be wholly satisfactory to an artist in literature.  It is a loose form of hybrid ancestry; it may be of any length; and it may be told in any manner,—­in letters, as an autobiography or as a narrative.  It may win praise by its possession of the mere externals of literature, by sheer style.  It may seek to please by description of scenery, or by dissection of motive.  It may be empty of action and filled with philosophy.  It may be humorously perverse in its license of digression,—­as it was in Sterne’s hands, for example.  It may be all things to all men:  it is a very chameleon-weathercock.  And it is too varied, too negligent, too lax, to spur its writer to his utmost effort, to that stern wrestle with technic which is a true artist’s never-failing tonic.