presence. Time, at any rate, is stored up in the description of the
child's life there, quiet layers of time in which the recorded
incidents sink deep.

VIII

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 o