measurable, as in real life, only when we look back over a considerable
period. The dramatist, on the other hand, deals in rapid and startling
changes, the "peripeties," as the Greeks called them, which may be the
outcome of long, slow processes, but which actually occur in very brief
spaces of time. Nor is this a merely mechanical consequence of the
narrow limits of stage presentation. The crisis is as real, though not
as inevitable, a part of human experience as the gradual development.
Even if the material conditions of the theatre permitted the
presentation of a whole _Middlemarch_ or _Anna Karénine_--as the
conditions of the Chinese theatre actually do--some dramatists, we
cannot doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of prolixity, in
order to cultivate an art of concentration and crisis. The Greek drama
"subjected to the faithful eyes," as Horace phrases it, the culminating
points of the Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of
theatrical presentment the culminating points of modern experience.

But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic. A serious
illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage,
may be a crisis in a man's life, without being necessarily, or even
probably, material for drama. How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic
from a non-dramatic crisis? Generally, I think, by the fact that it
develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor
crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible,
the vivid manifestation of character. Take, for instance, the case of a
bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the _Gazette_ do not go
through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension,
special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in
their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small
vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take
lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state