ot in them; it could not be, since they had
regenerated the novel. It must be in the stage itself, and in the
stupidity of the public.

In one of his most vigorous essays, Brunetiere joined issue with this
little group of French novelists, and told them sharply that they had
better consider anew the theatrical practises and prejudices which
seemed to them absurdly out-worn, and which they disdained as born of
mere chance and surviving only by tradition. He bade them ask themselves
if these tricks of the trade, so to style them, were not due to the fact
that the dramatist's art is a special art, having its own laws, its own
conditions, its own conventions, inherent in the nature of the art
itself. When 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