novelist often fails as a dramatist, because he has the gift of the
story-teller only, and not that of the play-maker, but more often still
because the writing of fiction has provided him with no experience in
working beneath any law other than his own caprice.

The modern sculptor, by the mere fact that he may now order marble of
any shape and of any size, finds his work far easier and, therefore,
far less invigorating than it was long ago, when the artist needed to
have an alerter imagination to perceive in a given piece of marble the
beautiful figure he had to cut out of that particular block and no
other. Professor Mahaffy has suggested that the decay of genius may be
traced to the enfeebling facilities of our complex civilization. "In
art," he maintained, "it is often the conventional shackles,--the
necessities of rime and meter, the triangle of a gable, the circular top
of a barrel--which has led the poet, the sculptor, or the painter, to
strike out the most original and perfect products of their art.
Obstacles, if they are extrinsic and not intrinsic, only help to feed
the flame." Professor Butcher has declared that genius "wins its most
signal triumphs from the very limitations within which it works." And
this is what Gautier meant when he declared that the greater the
difficulty the more beautiful the work; or, as Mr. Austin Dobson has
paraphrased it:

Yes; when the ways oppose--
When the hard means rebel,
Fairer the work outgrows,--
More potent far the spell.

Not only has a useful addition to the accepted devices of the craft been
the guerdon of a victorious grapple with a difficulty, but the