But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic. A serious illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage, may be a crisis in a man's life, without being necessarily, or even probably, material for drama. How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic from a non-dramatic crisis? Generally, I think, by the fact that it develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible, the vivid manifestation of character. Take, for instance, the case of a bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the _Gazette_ do not go through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension, special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state of their liver. In this average process of financial decline, there may be--there has been--matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a drama. That admirable chapter in _Little Dorrit,_ wherein Dickens describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage. So, too, with the bankruptcy of Colonel Newcome--certain emotional crises arising from it have, indeed, been placed on the stage, but only after all Thackeray's knowledge of the world and fine gradations of art had been eliminated. Mr. Hardy's _Mayor of Casterbridge_ has, I think, been dramatized, but not, I think, with success. A somewhat similar story of financial ruin, the grimly powerful _House with the Green Shutters_, has not even tempted the dramatiser. There are, in this novel, indeed, many potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment. Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,[3] a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright. In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently suited for treatment in fiction rather than in drama.