to-day would make it an axiom that you must not let your characters
narrate their circumstances, or expound their motives, in speeches
addressed, either directly to the audience, or ostensibly to their
solitary selves. But when we remember that, of all dramatic openings,
there is none finer than that which shows Richard Plantagenet limping
down the empty stage to say--

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried"--

we feel that the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no
absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest
common sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse,
classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists. He
said, "you had better" rather than "you must." It was Horace, in an age
of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian
formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas
of art.

How comes it, then, that there is a constant demand for text-books of
the art and craft of drama? How comes it that so many people--and I
among the number--who could not write a play to save their lives, are
eager to tell others how to do so? And, stranger still, how comes it
that so many people are willing to sit at the feet of these instructors?
It is not so with the novel. Popular as is that form of literature,
guides to novel-writing, if they exist at all, are comparatively rare.
Why are people possessed with the idea that the art of dramatic fiction
differs from that of narrative fiction, in that it can and must