may depict subjective events which
are quite beyond the presentation of actors in a theater. Furthermore,
since he is not obliged to think of actors, the novelist has a
greater freedom in creating characters than the dramatist. The great
characters of the drama have been devised by playwrights who have
already attained command of the theater of their place and time, and
who therefore have fashioned their parts to fit the individual actors
they have found ready to perform them. Consequently they have endowed
their characters with the physical, and even to some extent the
mental, characteristics of certain actual actors. M. Rostand's Cyrano
de Bergerac is not merely Cyrano, but also M. Constant Coquelin;
M. Sardou's La Tosca is not merely La Tosca, but also Mme. Sarah
Bernhardt; Moliere's Celimene is not merely Celimene, but also Mlle.
Moliere; Shakespeare's Hamlet is not merely Hamlet, but also Richard
Burbage. In working thus with one eye upon the actual, the dramatist
is extremely likely to be betrayed into untruthfulness. In the last
scene of "Hamlet," the Queen says of the Prince, "He's fat and scant
of breath." This line was of course occasioned by the fact that
Richard Burbage was corpulent during the season of 1602. But the
eternal truth is that Prince Hamlet is a slender man; and Shakespeare
has here been forced to belie the truth in order to subserve the fact.
On the other hand, the dramatist is undoubtedly aided in his great aim
of creating characters by holding in mind certain actual people who
have been selected to represent them; and what the novelist gains
in range and freedom of characterization, he is likely to lose in
concreteness of delineation.

Secondly, the form and structure of the drama in any age is imposed
upon the dramatist by the size and shape and physical appointments of
the theater he is writing for. Plays must be built in one way to fit
the theater of Dionysius, in another way to fit the Globe upon the
Bankside, in still another way to fit the modern electric-lighted
stage behind a picture-frame proscenium. The dramatist, in
constructing his story, is hedged in by a multitude of physical
restrictions, of which he must make a special study in order to
force them to contribute to the presentation of his truth instead of
detracting from it. In this regard, again, the novelist works with
greater freedom. Seldom is his labor subjected to merely physical
restrictions from without. Sometimes, to