The drama may be called the art of
crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments. It is the
slowness of its processes which differentiates the typical novel from
the typical play. If the novelist does not take advantage of the
facilities offered by his form for portraying gradual change, whether in
the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order
to trespass on the domain of the dramatist. Most great novels embrace
considerable segments of many lives; whereas the drama gives us only the
culminating points--or shall we say the intersecting culminations?--two
or three destinies. Some novelists have excelled precisely in the art
with which they have made the gradations of change in character or
circumstance so delicate as to be imperceptible from page to page, and
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.
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