on 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 metho