a play.  Many a story has been cheapened pitifully by the theatrical adapter, simply because he was incapable of seeing in it more than a series of striking scenes which could be hewn into dialog for rough and ready representation on the stage, and because he had seized only his raw material, the bare skeleton of intrigue, without possessing the skill or the taste needed to convey across the footlights the subtle psychology which vitalized the original tale, or the evanescent atmosphere which enveloped it in charm.  Mr. Bliss Perry phrased it most felicitously when he asserted that “a novel is typically as far removed from a play as a bird is from a fish,” and that “the attempt to transform one into the other is apt to result in a sort of flying-fish, a betwixt-and-between thing.”

We all know that the ultimate value of certain accepted works of fiction is to be found, not in the story itself or even in the characters, but rather in the interpretative comment with which the novelist has encompassed people and happenings commonplace enough; and we all can see that, when one of these stories is set on the stage, the comment must be stript off, the incidents and the characters standing naked in their triteness.  But this betrayal is not to be charged against dramatic form, for all that the dramatization did was to uncover brutally an inherent weakness which the novelist had hoped to hide.

The novelist has privileges denied to the playwright; and, chief among them, of course, is the right to explain his characters, to analize their motives, to set forth every fleeting phase of emotion to which they are subject.  Sidney Lanier asserted that the novel was a finer form than the drama because there were subtleties of feeling which Shakspere could not make plain and George Eliot could.  Unfortunately for Lanier, his admiration for George Eliot is felt now to be excessive; and few of us are ready to accept Gwendolen Harleth as a more successful attempt at portraiture than any one of half a score of Shakspere’s heroines, so convincingly feminine.  But there is truth, no doubt, in the contention that the novel is freer, more fluid, more flexible than the play; and that there are themes and subjects unsuited to the stage and wholly within the compass of the story-teller.  To say this is but to repeat again that the drama is not prose-fiction and prose-fiction is not the drama,—­just as painting is not sculpture and sculpture not painting.

But to emphasize this distinction is not to confess that the drama cannot do at all certain things which the novel does with unconscious ease.  Is there no rich variety of self-analysis in ‘Macbeth,’ one may ask, and in ‘Hamlet’?  Did any novelist of the seventeenth century lay bare the palpitations of the female heart more delicately than Racine?  Did any novelist of the eighteenth century reveal a subtler insight into the hidden recesses of feminine psychology than Marivaux?  It may be true enough that, in the nineteenth century, prose-fiction