e 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 be