has been more fortunate than the drama and that the novelists have achieved triumphs of insight and of subtlety denied to the dramatists.  But who shall say that this immediate inferiority of the play to the novel is inherent in the form itself?  Who will deny that it may be merely the defect of the playwrights of our time?  Who will assert that a more accomplished dramatist may not come forward in the twentieth century to prove that the drama is a fit instrument for emotional dissection?

No one has more clearly indicated the limitations of the dramatic medium than Mr. A.B.  Walkley, who once declared that the future career of the drama “is likely to be hampered by its inability to tell cultivated and curious people of to-day a tithe of the things they want to know.  What the drama can tell, it can tell more emphatically than any other art.  The novel, for instance, is but a report; the drama makes you an eyewitness of the thing in the doing.  But then there is a whole world of things which cannot be done, of thoughts and moods and subconscious states which cannot be exprest on the stage and which can be exprest in the novel.  In earlier ages, which could do with a narrow range of vivid sensations, the drama sufficed; it will not suffice for an age which wants an illimitable range of sensations, and, being quick in the uptake, can dispense with vividness.”  And then the brilliant critic of the London Times dwelt on the meagerness of Ibsen’s ‘Master-Builder’ when contrasted with “the extraordinarily complicated texture of subtle thoughts and minute sensations” in Mr. James’s ‘Wings of the Dove.’

It may as well be confest frankly that, even in the twenty-first century, the playhouse is unlikely to be hospitable to an “extraordinarily complicated texture of subtle thoughts and minute sensations”; but we may ask also if the playhouse will really be very much poorer by this inhospitality.  Even tho a small subdivision of the public shall find a keen pleasure in them, there are other things in life than subtle thoughts and minute sensations; there are larger aspects of existence than those we find registered either in the ’Wings of the Dove’ or in the ‘Master-Builder.’  The texture of Mr. James’s book may be more complicated than that of Ibsen’s play; but this is not entirely because one is a novel and the other a drama.  Both works fail in breadth of appeal; they are narrow in their outlook on life, however skilful in craftsmanship they may be, each in its own way; they are devised for the dilettants, for the men of cultivation, and for these mainly; and that way danger lies.  Taine dwelt on the disintegration impending when artists tended to appeal to the expert rather than to the public as a whole.  “The sculptor,” so he declared, “no longer addresses himself to a religious, civic community, but to a group of isolated lovers of the art.”  In the future as in the past, the appeal of the playwright must be to the main body of his contemporaries, even tho this may be at the risk of not fully satisfying one group or another.