"The novel, as practised in English, is the perfect paradise of the loose end," so Mr. Henry James once pointed out, whereas "the play consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically right, and with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface and as grave a dishonor as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry." The action of a story may be what its writer pleases, and he can reduce it to a minimum or embroider it at will with airy arabesques of incessant digression; but the plot of a play must be a straight line, the shortest distance between two points, the point of departure and the point of arrival. And it is because of this imperative necessity for integrity of construction that the drama is more difficult than prose fiction. Since a part of our pleasure in any art is derived from our consciousness of the obstacles to be overcome by the artist, and from our recognition of the skill displayed by him in vanquishing them, we have here added evidence in behalf of the belief in the artistic superiority of the play over the novel merely as a form of expression. The drama may be likened to the sister art of architecture in its insistent demand for plan and proportion. A play is a poor thing, likely to expire of inanition, unless its author is possessed of the ability to build a plot which shall be strong and simple and clear, and unless he has the faculty of enriching it with abundant accessories in accord with a scheme thought out in advance and adhered to from start to finish. With this constructive skill women seem to be less liberally endowed than men; at least, they have not yet revealed themselves as architects, altho they have won a warm welcome as decorators--a subordinate art for which they are fitted by their superior delicacy and by their keener interest in details. Much of the pervasive charm of many of the cleverest novels of female authorship lies in the persistent ingenuity with which the lesser points of character, of conduct, and of manners are presented. In Jane Austen, in Maria Edgeworth, and often also in George Eliot, we are delighted by little miracles of observation, and by little triumphs in the microscopic analysis of subtle and unsuspected motives. But in these very books, the story, however felicitously decorated, is not sustained by a severe architectural framework. And it is this firm certainty of structure that the drama imperatively demands.