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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
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