In any period of abundant fertility we can observe growing together at the same time from the soil, a fairly large number of trees rising above the underbrush, and we can also perceive here and there a tree of conspicuous eminence towering above these clumps of average height. In the luxuriant forest of the drama many of the trees of average height may be ticketed with two names, but the monarchs of the wood, those whose tops lift themselves high above their neighbors--these will be found to bear only single signature. (1914.) VI THE DRAMATIZATION OF NOVELS AND THE NOVELIZATION OF PLAYS THE DRAMATIZATION OF NOVELS AND THE NOVELIZATION OF PLAYS I In Professor Bliss Perry's admirably suggestive 'Study of Prose Fiction,' he devotes one chapter to a careful consideration of the essential distinctions between prose fiction and the drama, in which he makes it plain that "the novel and the play are not merely two different modes of communicating the same fact or truth," because "the different modes of presentation really result in the communication of a different fact." Professor Perry declares that the field of the dramatist is marked off from that of the novelist "by the nature of the artistic medium which each man employs," and he asserts that the choice of a medium for presenting his story and projecting his characters "depends wholly upon the personality and training of the artist and the nature of the fact or truth that he wishes to convey to the public". And he sums up by insisting that "a novel is typically as far removed from a play as a bird is from a fish, and that any attempt to transform one into the other is apt to result in a sort of flying-fish, a betwixt-and-between thing--capable, indeed, of both swimming and flying, but good at neither." In other words, a dramatized novel or a novelized play is an attempt to breed an amphibious creature which, as the Irishman once defined it, "can't live on the land, and dies in the water."