In other words, character is all-important in prose fiction, and the ultimate fame of the novelist depends upon his power of endowing his creatures with life, and upon his ability to let them obey the laws of their being before our eyes. This must the playwright also achieve; but he has the added duty of relating his characters intimately to the main action of his drama. Now, the novelist is under no obligation of this sort; he appeals not to a crowd seated before a stage, but to the solitary reader in the study; and experience shows that solitary readers do not insist upon the solidity of structure in a novel which the same individuals desire and demand when they betake themselves to the theater. The novel-reader may be satisfied by characters who do not know their own minds, and who are merely exhibited and put through their paces, without having any vital relation to the story, even if there is anything which can fairly be called a story--and in some novels of high repute, in Sterne's 'Sentimental Journey,' for example, and in Anatole France's 'Histoire Contemporaine,' each of them extending over several volumes, there is little or no story, no main thread, no pretense of a plot. II Here, then, is the fatal difference between a novel and a play; a novel may have a plot, but a plot is not necessary, and it can get along with a minimum of story; whereas a play must have a plot, skilfully articulated, even if the skeleton is beautifully covered; it must have a story peopled by persons knowing their own minds, a story set in action by a dominating will, which determines the successive episodes of the action. As the making of a plot, as the putting together of a supporting skeleton of action, calls for dexterity of workmanship, for ingenuity of resource, for adroitness of construction, for the most careful consideration of the means whereby the end is to be obtained, two heads are often better than one, because the partners have to talk the thing out to its uttermost details before they decide upon the straight line which is the shortest distance between two points. The technic of play-making is more exacting than the technic of novel-writing, and it requires imperatively the exact and detailed plan which Joubert held to be hampering to enthusiasm and imagination. Scott, for example, as he tells us himself, began more than one of his novels not knowing what he was going to put into it, and not knowing from day to day, as he was writing, what his ultimate goal would be. But no playwright, however happy-go-lucky in his tendencies, has ever dared to begin a play before he knew with absolute certainty how he intended to end it. In the drama we insist upon a straightforward and unswerving action; the end is implied in the beginning, and the beginning is only what that end makes necessary.