councillor's rhetorical periods, Rodolphe's tender speeches, Emma's
replies, with the rumour of the crowd breaking through from time to
time. It is a scene which might be put upon the stage, quite
conceivably, without any loss of the main impression it is made to
convey in the book--an impression of ironic contrast, of the bustle
and jostle round the oration of the pompous dignitary, of the
commonplace little romance that is being broached unobserved. To
receive the force of the contrast the reader has only to see and hear,
to be present while the hour passes; and the author places him there
accordingly, in front of the visible and audible facts of the case,
and leaves it to these to tell the story. It is a scene treated
dramatically.

This is a difference of method that constantly catches a critic's eye
in reading a novel. Is the author writing, at a given moment, with his
attention upon the incidents of his tale, or is he regarding primarily
the form and colour they assume in somebody's thought? He will do
both, it is probable, in the course of his book, on the same page,
perhaps, or even in the same sentence; nothing compels him to forego
the advantage of either method, if his story can profit in turn from
both. Now and then, indeed, we shall find a writer deliberately
confining himself to one method only, treating his whole book with a
rigid consistency, and this for the sake of some particular aspect of
his theme which an unmixed manner is best fitted to reveal. But
generally a novelist retains his liberty to draw upon any of his
resources as he chooses, now this one and now that, using drama where
drama gives him all he needs, using pictorial description where the
turn of the story demands it. The only law that binds him throughout,
whatever course he is pursuing, is the need to be consistent on
_some_ plan, to follow the principle he has adopted; and of course it
is one of the first of his precepts, as with every artist in any kind,
to allow himself no more latitude than he requires. A critic, then,
looks for the principle on which a novelist's methods are mingled and
varied--looks for it, as usual, in the novelist's subject, and marks
its application as the subject is developed.

And so with the devices that I distinguish as scenic and
panoramic--one watches continually to see how this alternation is
managed, how the story is now overlooked from a height and now brought
immediately to the level of the reader