What, then, is a dramatic subject? Hitherto I have been speaking of novels in which some point of view, other than that of the reader, the impartial onlooker, is prescribed by the subject in hand. In big chronicles like Thackeray's it is clear that the controlling point of view can only be that of the chronicler himself, or of some one whom he sets up to tell the story on his behalf. The expanse of life which the story covers is far too great to be shown to the reader in a series of purely dramatic scenes. It is absolutely necessary for the author or his spokesman to draw back for a general view of the matter from time to time; and whenever he does so the story becomes his impression, summarized and pictured for the reader. In Esmond or The Virginians or The Newcomes, there are tracts and tracts of the story which are bound to remain outside the reader's direct vision; only a limited number of scenes and occasions could possibly be set forth in the form of drama. A large, loose, manifold subject, in short, extensive in time and space, full of crowds and diversions, is a pictorial subject and can be nothing else. However intensely it may be dramatized here and there, on the whole it must be presented as a conspectus, the angle of vision being assigned to the narrator. It is simply a question of amount, of quantity, of the reach of the subject. If it passes a certain point it exceeds the capacity of the straight and dramatic method.

Madame Bovary and The Ambassadors, again, are undramatic in their matter, though their reach is comparatively small; for in both of them the emphasis falls upon changes of mind, heart, character, gradually drawn out, not upon any clash or opposition resolved in action. They might be treated scenically, no doubt; their authors might conceivably have handled them in terms of pure drama, without any direct display of Emma's secret fancies or Strether's brooding imagination. But in neither case could that method make the most of the subject or bring out all that it has to give. The most expressive, most enlightening part of Strether's story lies in the reverberating theatre of his mind, and as for Emma, the small exterior facts of her story are of very slight account. Both these books, therefore, in their general lines, are pictured impressions, not actions—even though in Bovary to some extent, and in The Ambassadors almost wholly, the picture is itself dramatized in the fashion I have indicated. That last effect belongs only to the final method, the treatment of the surface; underneath it there is in both the projection of a certain person's point of view.

But now look at the contrast in The Awkward Age, a novel in which Henry James followed a single method throughout, from top to bottom, denying himself the help of any other. He chose to treat this story as pure drama; he never once draws upon the characteristic resource of the novelist—who is able, as the dramatist is not able, to give a generalized and foreshortened account of the matter in hand. In The Awkward Age everything is immediate and particular; there is no insight into anybody's thought, no survey of the scene from a height, no resumption of the past in retrospect. The whole of the book passes scenically before the reader, and nothing is offered but the look and the speech of the characters on a series of chosen occasions. It might indeed be printed as a play; whatever is not dialogue is simply a kind of amplified stage-direction, adding to the dialogue the expressive effect which might be given it by good acting. The novelist, using this method, claims only one advantage over the playwright; it is the advantage of ensuring the very best acting imaginable, a performance in which every actor is a perfect artist and not the least point is ever missed. The play is not handed over to the chances of interpretation—that is the difference; the author creates the manner in which the words are spoken, as well as the words themselves, and he may keep the manner at an ideal pitch. Otherwise the novelist completely ties his hands, submitting to all the restraints of the playwright in order to secure the compactness and the direct force of true drama.

What is the issue of a certain conjunction of circumstances? The subject of the book is in the question. First of all we see a highly sophisticated circle of men and women, who seem so well practised in the art of living that they could never be taken by surprise. Life in their hands has been refined to a process in which nothing appears to have been left to chance. Their intelligence accounts for everything; they know where they are, they know what they want, and under a network of discretion which they all sustain they thoroughly understand each other. It is a charmed world, altogether self-contained, occupying a corner of modern London. It is carefully protected within and without; and yet oddly enough there is one quite common and regular contingency for which it is not prepared at all. Its handling of life proceeds smoothly so long as all the men and women together are on a level of proficiency, all alike experienced in the art; and they can guard themselves against intruders from elsewhere. But periodically it must happen that their young grow up; the daughter of the house reaches the "awkward age," becomes suddenly too old for the school-room and joins her elders below. Then comes the difficulty; there is an interval in which she is still too young for the freedom of her elders' style, and it looks as though she might disconcert them not a little, sitting there with wide eyes. Do they simply disregard her and continue their game as before? Do they try to adapt their style to her inexperience? Apparently they have no theory of their proper course; the difficulty seems to strike them afresh, every time that it recurs. In other such worlds, not of modern London, it is foreseen and provided for; the young woman is married and launched at once, there is no awkward age. But here and now—or rather here and then, in the nineteenth century—it makes a real little situation, and this is the subject of Henry James's book.

It is clearly dramatic; it is a clean-cut situation, raising the question of its issue, and by answering the question the subject is treated. What will these people do, how will they circumvent this awkwardness? That is what the book is to show—action essentially, not the picture of a character or a state of mind. Mind and character enter into it, of course, as soon as the situation is particularized; the girl becomes an individual, with her own outlook, her own way of reaching a conclusion, and her point of view must then be understood. But whatever it may be, it does not constitute the situation. That is there in advance, it exists in general, and the girl comes upon the scene, like the rest of the people in the book, to illustrate it. The subject of the book lies in their behaviour; there are no gradual processes of change and development to be watched in their minds, it is their action that is significant. By clever management the author can avoid the necessity of looking inside their motives; these are betrayed by visible and audible signs. The story proceeds in the open, point by point; from one scene to another it shows its curve and resolves the situation. And very ironic and pleasing and unexpected the resolution proves. It takes everybody by surprise; no one notices what is happening till it is over, but it begins to happen from the start. The girl Nanda, supposably a helpless spectator, takes control of the situation and works it out for her elders. She is the intelligent and expert and self-possessed one of them all; they have only to leave everything to her light manipulation, and the awkwardness—which is theirs, not hers—is surmounted. By the time she has displayed all her art the story is at an end; her action has answered the question and provided the issue.

The theme of the book being what it is, an action merely, and an action strictly limited in its scope, it requires no narrator. In a dozen scenes or so the characters may set it forth on their own account, and we have only to look on; nobody need stand by and expound. The situation involves no more than a small company of people, and there is no reason for them to straggle far, in space or time; on the contrary, the compactness of the situation is one of its special marks. Its point is that it belongs to a little organized circle, a well-defined incident in their lives. And since the root of the matter is in their behaviour, in the manner in which they meet or fail to meet the incident, their behaviour will sufficiently express what is in their minds; it is not as though the theme of the story lay in some slow revulsion or displacement of mood, which it would be necessary to understand before its issue in action could be appreciated. What do they do?—that is the immediate question; what they think and feel is a matter that is entirely implied in the answer. Obviously that was not at all the case with Strether. The workings of his imagination spread over far more ground, ramified infinitely further than anything that he did; his action depended upon his view of things and logically flowed from it, but his action by itself would give no measure at all of his inner life. With the people of The Awkward Age, on the other hand, their action fully covers their motives and sentiments—or can be made to do so, by the care of a dexterous author.

And so the story can be rendered with absolute consistency, on one method only, if the author chooses. And he does so choose, and The Awkward Age rounds off the argument I have sought to unwind—the sequence of method and method, each one in turn pushing its way towards a completer dramatization of the story. Here at any rate is one book in which a subject capable of acting itself out from beginning to end is made to do so, one novel in which method becomes as consistent and homogeneous as it ever may in fiction. No other manner of telling a story can be quite so true to itself. For whereas drama, in this book, depends not at all upon the author's "word of honour," and deals entirely with immediate facts, the most undramatic piece of fiction can hardly for long be consistent in its own line, but must seek the support of scenic presentation. Has anyone tried to write a novel in which there should be no dialogue, no immediate scene, nothing at all but a diffused and purely subjective impression? Such a novel, if it existed, would be a counterpart to The Awkward Age. Just as Henry James's book never deviates from the straight, square view of the passing event, so the other would be exclusively oblique, general, retrospective, a meditation upon the past, bringing nothing into the foreground, dramatizing nothing in talk or action.

The visionary fiction of Walter Pater keeps as nearly to a method of that kind, I suppose, as fiction could. In Marius probably, if it is to be called a novel, the art of drama is renounced as thoroughly as it has ever occurred to a novelist to dispense with it. I scarcely think that Marius ever speaks or is spoken to audibly in the whole course of the book; such at least is the impression that it leaves. The scenes of the story reach the reader by refraction, as it were, through the medium of Pater's harmonious murmur. But scenes they must be; not even Pater at his dreamiest can tell a story without incident particularized and caught in the act. When Marius takes a journey, visits a philosopher or enters a church, the event stands out of the past and makes an appeal to the eye, is presented as it takes place; and this is a movement in the direction of drama, even if it goes no further. Pater, musing over the life of his hero, all but lost in the general sentiment of its grace and virtue, is arrested by the definite images of certain hours and occasions; the flow of his rumination is interrupted while he pauses upon these, to make them visible; they must be given a kind of objectivity, some slight relief against the dim background. No story-teller, in short, can use a manner as strictly subjective, as purely personal, as the manner of The Awkward Age is the reverse.

But as for this book, it not only ends one argument, it is also a turning-point that begins another. For when we have seen how fiction gradually aspires to the weight and authority of the thing acted, purposely limiting its own discursive freedom, it remains to see how it resumes its freedom when there is good cause for doing so. It is not for nothing that The Awkward Age is as lonely as it seems to be in its kind. I have seized upon it as an example of the dramatic method pursued À outrance, and it is very convenient for criticism that it happens to be there; the book points a sound moral with clear effect. But when it is time to suggest that even in dealing with a subject entirely dramatic, a novelist may well find reason to keep to his old familiar mixed method—circumspice: it would appear that he does so invariably. Where are the other Awkward Ages, the many that we might expect if the value of drama is so great? I dare say one might discover a number of small things, short dramatic pieces (I have mentioned the case of Maupassant), which would satisfy the requirement; but on the scale of Henry James's book I know of nothing else. Plenty of people find their theme in matters of action, matters of incident, like the story of Nanda; it is strange that they should not sometimes choose to treat it with strict consistency. How is one to assert a principle which is apparently supported by only one book in a thousand thousand?

I think it must be concluded, in the first place, that to treat a subject with the rigour of Henry James is extremely difficult, and that the practice of the thousand thousand is partly to be explained by this fact. Perhaps many of them would be more dramatically inclined if the way were easier. It must always be simpler for a story-teller to use his omniscience, to dive into the minds of his people for an explanation of their acts, than to make them so act that no such explanation is ever needed. Or perhaps the state of criticism may be to blame, with its long indifference to these questions of theory; or perhaps (to say all) there is no very lively interest in them even among novelists. Anyhow we may say from experience that a novel is more likely to fall below its proper dramatic pitch than to strain beyond it; in most of the books around us there is an easy-going reliance on a narrator of some kind, a showman who is behind the scenes of the story and can tell us all about it. He seems to come forward in many a case without doing the story any particular service; sometimes he actually embarrasses it, when a matter of vivid drama is violently forced into the form of a narration. One can only suspect that he then exists for the convenience of the author. It is helpful to be able to say what you like about the characters and their doings in the book; it may be very troublesome to make their doings as expressive as they might be, eloquent enough to need no comment.

Yet to see the issue slowly unfolding and flowering out of the middle of a situation, and to watch it emerge unaided, with everything that it has to say said by the very lines and masses of its structure—this is surely an experience apart, for a novel-reader, with its completeness and cleanness and its hard, pure edge. It is always memorable, it fills the mind so acceptably that a story-teller might be ready and eager to aspire to this effect, one would think, whenever his matter gives him the chance. Again and again I have wished to silence the voice of the spokesman who is supposed to be helping me to a right appreciation of the matter in hand—the author (or his creature) who knows so much, and who pours out his information over the subject, and who talks and talks about an issue that might be revealing itself without him. The spokesman has his way too often, it can hardly be doubted; the instant authority of drama is neglected. It is the day of the deep-breathed narrator, striding from volume to volume as tirelessly as the ScudÉries and CalprenÈdes of old; and it is true, no doubt, that the novel (in all languages, too, it would seem) is more than ever inclined to the big pictorial subject, which requires the voluble chronicler; but still it must happen occasionally that a novelist prefers a dramatic motive, and might cast it into a round, sound action and leave it in that form if he chose. Here again there is plenty of room for enterprise and experiment in fiction, even now.

But at the same time it must be admitted that there is more in the general unwillingness of story-tellers to entrust the story to the people in it—there is more than I have said. If they are much less dramatic than they might be, still it is not to be asserted that a subject will often find perfect expression through the uncompromising method of The Awkward Age. That book itself perhaps suggests, if it does no more than suggest, that drama cannot always do everything in a novel, even where the heart of the story seems to lie in its action. The story of Nanda drops neatly into scenic form—that is obvious; it is well adapted for treatment as a row of detached episodes or occasions, through which the subject is slowly developed. But it is a question whether a story which requires and postulates such a very particular background, so singular and so artificial, is reasonably denied the licence to make its background as effective as possible, by whatever means. Nanda's world is not the kind of society that can be taken for granted; it is not modernity in general, it is a small and very definite tract. For the purposes of her story it is important that her setting should be clearly seen and known, and the method of telling her story must evidently take this into account. Nanda and her case are not rendered if the quality of the civilization round her is left in any way doubtful, and it happens to be a very odd quality indeed.

Henry James decided, I suppose, that it was sufficiently implied in the action of his book and needed nothing more; Nanda's little world would be descried behind the scene without any further picturing. He may have been right, so far as The Awkward Age is concerned; the behaviour of the people in the story is certainly packed with many meanings, and perhaps it is vivid enough to enact the general character of their lives and ways, as well as their situation in the foreground; perhaps the charmed circle of Mrs. Brookenham and her wonderful crew is given all the effect that is needed. But the question brings me to a clear limitation of drama on the whole, and that is why I raise it. Here is a difficulty to which the dramatic method, in its full severity, is not specially accommodated, one that is not in the line of its strength. To many of the difficulties of fiction, as we have seen, it brings precisely the right instrument; it gives validity, gives direct force to a story, and to do so is its particular property. For placing and establishing a piece of action it is paramount. But where it is not only a matter of placing the action in view, but of relating it to its surroundings, strict drama is at once at a disadvantage. The seeing eye of the author, which can sweep broadly and generalize the sense of what it sees, will meet this difficulty more naturally. Drama reinforcing and intensifying picture we have already seen again and again; and now the process is reversed. From the point of view of the reader, the spectator of the show, the dramatic scene is vivid and compact; but it is narrow, it can have no great depth, and the colour of the atmosphere can hardly tell within the space. It is likely, therefore, that unless this close direct vision is supplemented by a wider survey, fronting the story from a more distant point of view, the background of the action, the manner of life from which it springs, will fail to make its full impression.

It amounts to this, that the play-form—and with it fiction that is purely dramatic in its method—is hampered in its power to express the outlying associations of its scene. It can express them, of course; in clever hands it may seem to do so as thoroughly as any descriptive narration. But necessarily it does so with far more expense of effort than the picture-making faculty which lies in the hand of the novelist; and that is in general a good reason why the prudent novelist, with all his tendency to shed his privileges, still clings to this one. It is possible to imagine that a novel might be as bare of all background as a play of Racine; there might be a story in which any hint of continuous life, proceeding behind the action, would simply confuse and distort the right effect. One thinks of the story of the Princesse de ClÈves, floating serenely in the void, without a sign of any visible support from a furnished world; and there, no doubt, nothing would be gained by bringing the lucid action to ground and fixing it in its setting. It is a drama of sentiment, needing only to be embodied in characters as far as possible detached from any pictured surroundings, with nothing but the tradition of fine manners that is inherent in their grand names. But wherever the effect of the action depends upon its time and place, a novelist naturally turns to the obvious method if there is no clear reason for refusing it. In The Awkward Age, to look back at it once more, it may be that there is such a reason; the beauty of its resolute consistency is of course a value in itself, and it may be great enough to justify a tour de force. But a tour de force it is, when a novelist seeks to render the general life of his story in the particular action, and in the action alone; for his power to support the drama pictorially is always there, if he likes to make use of it.

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