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
of their liver. In this average process of financial decline, there may
be--there has been--matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a
drama. That admirable chapter in _Little Dorrit,_ wherein Dickens
describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows
how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite
impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage. So, too, with the
bankruptcy of Colonel Newcome--certain emotional crises arising from it
have, indeed, been placed on the stage, but only after all Thackeray's
knowledge of the world and fine gradations of art had been eliminated.
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