The French critic Joubert once asserted that "to make in advance an exact and detailed plan is to deprive one's intellect of all the pleasures of novelty and chance meeting during its execution; it is to make this execution insipid, and in consequence impossible, in works calling for enthusiasm and imagination." This is an overstatement--but it is not a misstatement--of a principle of composition which is fundamentally sound in the writing of prose fiction, but which is fundamentally unsound in the writing of plays. The drama demands a well-built story, artfully put together, while a novel need not have a coherent and compact plot. Some great novels, Fielding's 'Tom Jones' for one, and Turgenef's 'Smoke' for another, have each of them a beautifully articulated structure, and so has Mr. Howells's 'Rise of Silas Lapham,' to take a later example. But other great novels are frankly more or less haphazard in their movement, the 'Pickwick Papers,' for instance, and 'Tartarin on the Alps,' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' And it is not too much to say that only a very few novels attain to the severity of structure, the regularity of action, the straightforward, unswerving movement which we discover in the dramas of a corresponding rank, and which can be achieved only by making in advance the exact and detailed plan that Joubert held to be fatal in works calling for enthusiasm and imagination. Of course, the drama can utilize enthusiasm and imagination quite as often and quite as abundantly as can prose fiction, but it must use these precious gifts with a discretion which is not imposed upon its rival. In a novel enthusiastic imagination may lure the story-teller into a host of by-paths not foreseen by him when he set out on his journey; and while he is adventuring himself in these by-paths, he may chance to encounter characters of a diverting or an appealing personality, whom it may amuse him to delineate, and whom the readers of his book will be glad to welcome. But in a drama the story-teller is debarred from these wanderings from the straight and narrow road, and he must, perforce, control his enthusiastic imagination, compelling it to do its work within the rigid limits of the artfully devised framework of the plot.