Jane Austen spent her great gift on the carving of cherry-stones, laboring with exquisite art to lift into temporary importance the eternally unimportant; and Charlotte Brontë, in her ampler endeavor, was ever hampered by inadequacy of knowledge. George Eliot, with wider opportunity than either of these predecessors, profited by both of them and borrowed their processes in turn; she was broader than they were, and bolder in her attack on life; her effort is more strenuously intellectual than theirs, and therefore a little fatiguing, and this is perhaps why her vogue seems now to be evaporating slowly. And when all is said, no one of these clever story-tellers really attains to an altitude of accomplishment where she can fairly be considered as a competitor of the mighty masters of prose fiction. No woman novelist is to be ranked among the supreme leaders, worthy to stand by the side of Cervantes and Fielding, Balzac and Tolstoi. The merits of the women novelists are many and they are beyond cavil; but no one of them has yet been able to handle a large theme powerfully and to interpret life with the unhasting and unresting strength which is the distinguishing mark of the mightier masters of fiction. III Furthermore, we find in the works of female storytellers not only a lack of largeness in topic, but also a lack of strictness in treatment. Their stories, even when they charm us with apt portraiture and with adroit situation, are likely to lack solidity of structure. 'Castle Rackrent,' an illuminating picture of human nature in a special environment, is a straggling sequence of episodes; 'Pride and Prejudice' is almost plotless, when considered as a whole; and 'Romola' is ill-proportioned and misshapen. No woman has ever achieved the elaborate solidity of 'Tom Jones,' the superb structure of the 'Scarlet Letter,' or the simple unity of 'Smoke.' And here we come close to the most obvious explanation of the dearth of female dramatists--in the relative incapacity of women to build a plan, to make a single whole compounded of many parts, and yet dominated in every detail by but one purpose. The drama demands a plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and with everything rigorously excluded which does not lead from the beginning thru the middle to the end. The novel refuses to submit itself to any such requirement; it can make shift to exist without an articulated skeleton. There is little or no plot, there is only a casual succession of more or less unrelated incidents in 'Gil Blas' and 'Tristram Shandy,' in the 'Pickwick Papers,' and in Huckleberry Finn.' The novel may be invertebrate and yet survive, whereas the play without a backbone is dead--which is biologic evidence that the drama is higher in the scale of creation than prose fiction.