e, or in which
the chief appeal is made to the individual (instead of the collective)
mind, is not capable of being dramatized successfully.

It is impossible to determine whether, at the present day, the novel
or the drama is the more effective medium for embodying the truths
of human life in a series of imagined facts. Dramatic fiction has the
greater depth, and novelistic fiction has the greater breadth. The
latter is more extensive, the former more intensive, in its artistry.
This much, however, may be decided definitely. The novel, at its
greatest, may require a vaster sweep of wisdom on the part of the
author; but the drama is technically more difficult, since the
dramatist, besides mastering all of the general methods of fiction
which he necessarily employs in common with the novelist, must labor
in conformity with a special set of conditions to which the novelist
is not submitted. Mr. Meredith may be a greater author than Mr. Arthur
Wing Pinero; but Mr. Pinero is of necessity more rigid in his mastery
of structure.

CHAPTER X

THE NOVEL, THE NOVELETTE, AND THE SHORT-STORY

Turning our attention from the epic and the drama, and confining it
to the general type of fiction which in the last chapter was loosely
named novelistic, we shall find it possible to distinguish somewhat
sharply, on the basis of both material and method, between three
several forms,--the novel, the novelette, and the short-story. The
French, who are more precise than we in their use of denotative terms,
are accustomed to divide their novelistic fiction into what they call
the _roman_, the _nouvelle_, and the _conte_. "Novel" and "novelette"
are just as serviceable terms as _roman_ and _nouvelle_; in fact,
since "novelette" is the diminutive of "novel," they express even more
clearly than their French equivalents the relation between the two
forms they designate. But it is greatly to be regretted that we do not
have in English a distinctive word that is the equivalent of _conte_.
Edgar Allan Poe used the word "tale" with similar meaning; but this
term is so indefinite and vague that it has been discarded by
later critics. It is customary at the present day to use the word
"short-story," which Professor Brander Matthews has suggested
spelling with a hyphen to indicate that it has a special and technical
significance.

The French apply the term _roman_ to extensive works like "Notre Dame
de Paris" and "Eugenie Grandet"; and they a