In dealing with the method that I find peculiarly characteristic of Thackeray, the "panoramic" method, I have spoken of it also as "pictorial"; and it will be noticed that I have thus arrived at another distinction which I touched upon in connection with Bovary. Picture and drama—this is an antithesis which continually appears in a novel, and I shall have much to say of it. And first of the names which I give to these contrasted manners of treatment—I do not know that they are the best names, but they express the main point of difference, and they also have this advantage, that they have been used technically in the criticism of fiction, with specific meaning. In writing about novels one is so rarely handling words that have ever been given close definition (with regard to the art of fiction, I mean) that it is natural to grasp at any which have chanced to be selected and strictly applied by a critic of authority. Picture and drama, therefore, I use because Henry James used them in discussing his own novels, when he reviewed them all in his later years; but I use them, I must add, in a rather more extended sense than he did. Anybody who knows the critical prefaces of his books will remember how picture and drama, to him, represented the twofold manner towards which he tended in his last novels, composed as they are in a regular alternation of dramatic dialogue and pictorial description. But his pictorial description was of a very special kind; and when the subject of criticism is fiction generally, not his alone, picture will take a wider meaning, as opposed to drama. It will be found to cover the panoramic manner of Thackeray.

It is a question, I said, of the reader's relation to the writer; in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it. In the drama of the stage, in the acted play, the spectator evidently has no direct concern with the author at all, while the action is proceeding. The author places their parts in the mouths of the players, leaves them to make their own impression, leaves us, the audience, to make what we can of it. The motion of life is before us, the recording, registering mind of the author is eliminated. That is drama; and when we think of the story-teller as opposed to the dramatist, it is obvious that in the full sense of the word there is no such thing as drama in a novel. The novelist may give the very words that were spoken by his characters, the dialogue, but of course he must interpose on his own account to let us know how the people appeared, and where they were, and what they were doing. If he offers nothing but the bare dialogue, he is writing a kind of play; just as a dramatist, amplifying his play with "stage-directions" and putting it forth to be read in a book, has really written a kind of novel. But the difference between the story-teller and the playwright is not my affair; and a new contrast, within the limits of the art of fiction, is apparent when we speak of the novel by itself—a contrast of two methods, to one of which it is reasonable to give the name of drama.

I do not say that a clear line can be drawn between them; criticism does not hope to be mathematically exact. But everybody sees the diversity between the talkative, confidential manner of Thackeray and the severe, discreet, anonymous manner—of whom shall I say?—of Maupassant, for a good example, in many of his stories. It is not only the difference between the personal qualities of the two men, which indeed are also as far apart as the house of Castlewood and the Maison Tellier; it is not the difference between the kinds of story they chose to tell. They approached a story from opposite sides, and thought of it, consequently, in images that had nothing in common: not always, I dare say, but on the whole and characteristically they did so. Maupassant's idea of a story (and not peculiarly Maupassant's, of course, but his name is convenient) would suggest an object that you fashioned and abandoned to the reader, turning away and leaving him alone with it; Thackeray's would be more like the idea of a long and sociable interview with the reader, a companion with whom he must establish definite terms. Enough, the contrast is very familiar. But these are images; how is the difference shown in their written books, in Esmond and La Maison Tellier? Both, it is true, represent a picture that was in the author's mind; but the story passes into Thackeray's book as a picture still, and passes into Maupassant's as something else—I call it drama.

In Maupassant's drama we are close to the facts, against them and amongst them. He relates his story as though he had caught it in the act and were mentioning the details as they passed. There seems to be no particular process at work in his mind, so little that the figure of Maupassant, the showman, is overlooked and forgotten as we follow the direction of his eyes. The scene he evokes is contemporaneous, and there it is, we can see it as well as he can. Certainly he is "telling" us things, but they are things so immediate, so perceptible, that the machinery of his telling, by which they reach us, is unnoticed; the story appears to tell itself. Critically, of course, we know how far that is from being the case, we know with what judicious thought the showman is selecting the points of the scene upon which he touches. But the effect is that he is not there at all, because he is doing nothing that ostensibly requires any judgement, nothing that reminds us of his presence. He is behind us, out of sight, out of mind; the story occupies us, the moving scene, and nothing else.

But Thackeray—in his story we need him all the time and can never forget him. He it is who must assemble and arrange his large chronicle, piecing it together out of his experience. Becky's mode of life, in his story, is a matter of many details picked up on many occasions, and the power that collects them, the mind that contains them, is always and openly Thackeray's; it could not be otherwise. It is no question, for most of the time, of watching a scene at close quarters, where the simple, literal detail, such as anybody might see for himself, would be sufficient. A stretch of time is to be shown in perspective, at a distance; the story-teller must be at hand to work it into a single impression. And thus the general panorama, such as Thackeray displays, becomes the representation of the author's experience, and the author becomes a personal entity, about whom we may begin to ask questions. Thackeray cannot be the nameless abstraction that the dramatist (whether in the drama of the stage or in that of the novel) is naturally. I know that Thackeray, so far from trying to conceal himself, comes forward and attracts attention and nudges the reader a great deal more than he need; he likes the personal relation with the reader and insists on it. But do what he might to disguise it, so long as he is ranging over his story at a height, chronicling, summarizing, foreshortening, he must be present to the reader as a narrator and a showman. It is only when he descends and approaches a certain occasion and sets a scene with due circumspection—rarely and a trifle awkwardly, as we saw—that he can for the time being efface the thought of his active part in the affair.

So much of a novel, therefore, as is not dramatic enactment, not scenic, inclines always to picture, to the reflection of somebody's mind. Confronted with a scene—like Becky's great scene, once more—we forget that other mind; but as soon as the story goes off again into narrative a question at once arises. Who is disposing the scattered facts, whose is this new point of view? It is the omniscient author, and the point of view is his—such would be the common answer, and it is the answer we get in Vanity Fair. By convention the author is allowed his universal knowledge of the story and the people in it. But still it is a convention, and a prudent novelist does not strain it unnecessarily. Thackeray in Vanity Fair is not at all prudent; his method, so seldom strictly dramatic, is one that of its nature is apt to force this question of the narrator's authority, and he goes out of his way to emphasize the question still further. He flourishes the fact that the point of view is his own, not to be confounded with that of anybody in the book. And so his book, as one may say, is not complete in itself, not really self-contained; it does not meet and satisfy all the issues it suggests. Over the whole of one side of it there is an inconclusive look, something that draws the eye away from the book itself, into space. It is the question of the narrator's relation to the story.

However unconsciously—and I dare say the recognition is usually unconscious—the novelist is alive to this difficulty, no doubt; for we may see him, we presently shall, taking various steps to circumvent it. There is felt to be an unsatisfactory want of finish in leaving a question hanging out of the book, like a loose end, without some kind of attempt to pull it back and make it part of an integral design. After all, the book is torn away from its author and given out to the world; the author is no longer a wandering jongleur who enters the hall and utters his book to the company assembled, retaining his book as his own inalienable possession, himself and his actual presence and his real voice indivisibly a part of it. The book that we read has no such support; it must bring its own recognisances. And in the fictitious picture of life the effect of validity is all in all and there can be no appeal to an external authority; and so there is an inherent weakness in it if the mind that knows the story and the eye that sees it remain unaccountable. At any moment they may be questioned, and the only way to silence the question is somehow to make the mind and the eye objective, to make them facts in the story. When the point of view is definitely included in the book, when it can be recognized and verified there, then every side of the book is equally wrought and fashioned. Otherwise it may seem like a thing meant to stand against a wall, with one side left in the rough; and there is no wall for a novel to stand against.

That this is not a fanciful objection to a pictorial book like Vanity Fair, where the point of view is not accounted for, is proved, I think, by the different means that a novelist will adopt to authenticate his story—to dramatize the seeing eye, as I should prefer to put it. These I shall try to deal with in what seems to be their logical order; illuminating examples of any of them are not wanting. I do not suggest that if I were criticizing Vanity Fair I should think twice about this aspect of it; to do so would be very futile criticism of such a book, such a store of life. But then I am not considering it as Vanity Fair, I am considering it as a dominant case of pictorial fiction; and here is the characteristic danger of the method, and a danger which all who practise the method are not likely to encounter and over-ride with the genius of Thackeray. And even Thackeray—he chose to encounter it once again, it is true, in Pendennis, but only once and no more, and after that he took his own precautions, and evidently found that he could move the more freely for doing so.

But to revert yet again for a moment to Bovary—which seemed on scrutiny to be more of a picture than a drama—I think it is clear how Flaubert avoided the necessity of installing himself avowedly as the narrator, in the sight of the reader. I mentioned how he constantly blends his acuter vision with that of Emma, so that the weakness of her gift of experience is helped out; and the help is mutual, for on the other hand her vision is always active as far as it goes, and Flaubert's intervention is so unobtrusive that her point of view seems to govern the story more than it does really. And therefore, though the book is largely a picture, a review of many details and occasions, the question of the narrator is never insistent. The landscape that Thackeray controls is so much wider and fuller that even with all the tact of Flaubert—and little he has of it—he could scarcely follow Flaubert's example. His book is not a portrait of character but a panorama of manners, and there is no disguising the need of some detached spectator, who looks on from without.

It is the method of picture-making that enables the novelist to cover his great spaces of life and quantities of experience, so much greater than any that can be brought within the acts of a play. As for intensity of life, that is another matter; there, as we have seen, the novelist has recourse to his other arm, the one that corresponds with the single arm of the dramatist. Inevitably, as the plot thickens and the climax approaches—inevitably, wherever an impression is to be emphasized and driven home—narration gives place to enactment, the train of events to the particular episode, the broad picture to the dramatic scene. But the limitation of drama is as obvious as its peculiar power. It is clear that if we wish to see an abundance and multitude of life we shall find it more readily and more summarily by looking for an hour into a memory, a consciousness, than by merely watching the present events of an hour, however crowded. Much may happen in that time, but in extent it will be nothing to the regions thrown open by the other method. A novelist, with a large and discursive subject before him, could not hope to show it all dramatically; much of it, perhaps the greater part, must be so marshalled that it may be swept by a travelling glance. Thackeray shows how it is done and how a vista of many facts can be made to fall into line; but he shows, too, how it needs a mind to create that vista, and how the creative mind becomes more and more perceptible, more visibly active, as the prospect widens.

Most novelists, I think, seem to betray, like Thackeray, a preference for one method or the other, for picture or for drama; one sees in a moment how Fielding, Balzac, George Eliot, incline to the first, in their diverse manners, and Tolstoy (certainly Tolstoy, in spite of his big range) or Dostoevsky to the second, the scenic way. But of course every novelist uses both, and the quality of a novelist appears very clearly in his management of the two, how he guides the story into the scene, how he picks it out of the scene, a richer and fuller story than it was before, and proceeds with his narrative. On the whole, no doubt, the possibilities of the scene are greatly abused in fiction, in the daily and familiar novel. They are doubly abused; for the treatment of the scene is neglected, and yet it recurs again and again, much too often, and its value is wasted. It has to be remembered that drama is the novelist's highest light, like the white paper or white paint of a draughtsman; to use it prodigally where it is not needed is to lessen its force where it is essential. And so the economical procedure would be to hoard it rather, reserving it for important occasions—as in Bovary, sure enough.

But before I deal with the question of the novelist's drama I would follow out the whole argument that is suggested by his reflected picture of life. This, after all, is the method which is his very own, which he commands as a story-teller pure and simple. And for a beginning I have tried to indicate its prime disadvantage, consisting of the fact that in its plain form it drags in the omniscient author and may make him exceedingly conspicuous. Why is this a disadvantage, is it asked? It is none, of course, if the author has the power to make us admire and welcome the apparition, or if his picture is so dazzling that a theoretic defect in it is forgotten. But a novel in which either of these feats is accomplished proves only the charm or genius of the author; charm and genius do what they will, there is nothing new in that. And I believe that the defect, even though at first sight it may seem a trifle, is apt to become more and more troublesome in a book as the book is re-read. It makes for a kind of thinness in the general impression, wherever the personal force of the writer is not remarkable. I should say that it may often contribute towards an air of ineffectiveness in a story, which it might otherwise be difficult to explain.

The fiction of Turgenev is on the whole a case in point, to my mind. Turgenev was never shy of appearing in his pages as the reflective story-teller, imparting the fruits of his observation to the reader. He will watch a character, let us say, cross a field and enter a wood and sit down under a tree; good, it is an opportunity for gaining a first impression of the man or woman, it is a little scene, and Turgenev's touch is quick and light. But then with perfect candour he will show his hand; he will draw the reader aside and pour into his ear a flow of information about the man or woman, information that openly comes straight from Turgenev himself, in good pictorial form, no doubt, but information which will never have its due weight with the reader, because it reposes upon nothing that he can test for himself. Who and what is this communicative participator in the business, this vocal author? He does not belong to the book, and his voice has not that compelling tone and tune of its own (as Thackeray's had) which makes a reader enjoy hearing it for its own sake. This is a small matter, I admit, but Turgenev extends it and pursues the same kind of course in more important affairs. He remains the observant narrator, to whom we are indebted for a share in his experience. The result is surely that his picture of life has less authority than its highly finished design would seem to warrant. It is evidently not a picture in which the deeps of character are sounded, and in which the heights of passion are touched, and in which a great breadth of the human world is contained; it is not a picture of such dimensions. But it has so much neat and just and even exquisite work in it that it might seem final of its kind, completely effective in what it attempts; and it falls short of this, I should say, and there is something in that constant sense of Turgenev at one's elbow, proffering the little picture, that may very well damage it. The thing ought to stand out by itself; it could easily be made to do so. But Turgenev was unsuspecting; he had not taken to heart the full importance of dramatizing the point of view—perhaps it was that.

The narrative, then, the chronicle, the summary, which must represent the story-teller's ordered and arranged experience, and which must accordingly be of the nature of a picture, is to be strengthened, is to be raised to a power approaching that of drama, where the intervention of the story-teller is no longer felt. The freedom which the pictorial method gives to the novelist is unknown to the playwright; but that freedom has to be paid for by some loss of intensity, and the question is how to pay as little as possible. In the end, as I think it may be shown, the loss is made good and there is nothing to pay at all, so far may the dramatizing process be followed. Method, I have said, can be imposed upon method, one kind upon another; and in analyzing the manner of certain novelists one discovers how ingeniously they will correct the weakness of one method by the force of another and retain the advantages of both. It is rather a complicated story, but the beginning is clear enough, and the direction which it is to take is also clear. Everything in the novel, not only the scenic episodes but all the rest, is to be in some sense dramatized; that is where the argument tends. As for the beginning of it, the first obvious step, the example of Thackeray is at hand and it could not be bettered. I turn to Esmond.