His play is like a badly-designed engine in
which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose.
The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and
employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more
free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy
to which the dramatist must submit. Far from being bound to do things in
the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as
unsuited to his medium. Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle
applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case
of the drama. "Advisable" in the novelist's vocabulary is translated by
"imperative" in the dramatist's. The one is playing a long-drawn game,
in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has
staked his all on a single rubber.
* * * * *
Obligatory scenes of the first type--those necessitated by the inherent
logic of the theme--can naturally arise only in plays to which a
definite theme can be assigned.
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