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DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DRAMA AND NARRATIVE
There is a difference, too, between drama and narrative. To understand this difference is of great importance. To illustrate, let us take a selection from one of Francois Coppee's short stories, "The French Show." Critics consider it a pure bit of narrative.
"The night was clear and glittering with stars. A crowd was gathered in the market-place. They stood in gaping delight about the tent of some strolling acrobats. Red and smoking lanterns lighted the performance that was just beginning. Rolling their muscular limbs in dirty wraps, and decorated from head to foot with tawdry ruffles of fur, the athletes, four boyish ruffians with vulgar heads, were ranged in line before the painted canvas which represented their exploits. They stood with heads down, legs apart, and their muscular arms crossed upon their chests.
"The feminine attraction — a woman with a red rose in her hair and a man's coat over her ballet dancer's dress, to protect her from the night air — was playing, at the same time, with the cymbals and the bass drum, a desperate accompaniment to a polka which was being murdered by a blind clarinet player. The ringmaster, a sort of Hercules with the face of a galley-slave, roared out his furious appeal in loud voice.
"Suddenly the music ceased, and the crowd broke into roars of laughter. The clown had just made his appearance.
"He wore the ordinary costume of his kind — the short vest and many-colored stockings of the Opera Comique, the three horns turned backward, the red wig with its turned-up queue and its butterfly end. He was a young man, but alas, his face, whitened with flour, was already seamed with vice. He planted himself before the audience, and opened his mouth with a silly grin. His bleeding gums were almost devoid of teeth. The ringmaster kicked him violently from behind.
" 'Come on !' he ordered.
"Then the traditional dialogue, punctuated by slaps in the face, began between the mountebank and the clown. The audience applauded these souvenirs of the classic farce, the humor of which, coarse but pungent, seemed a drunken echo of the
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