; only it would have meant the surrender of the method
of autobiography.

Here then, I conclude, the dramatizing force of the first person gives
out. It is very useful for enhancing the value of a picture, where
none but the pictorial method is available, where we are bound to rely
upon an intervening story-teller in some guise or other; it is much
more satisfactory to know who the story-teller is, and to see him as a
part of the story, than to be deflected away from the book by the
author, an arbitrary, unmeasurable, unappraisable factor. But when the
man in the book is expected to make a picture of himself, a searching
and elaborate portrait, then the limit of his capacity is touched and
passed; or rather there is a better method, one of finer capacity,
then ready to the author's hand, and there is no reason to be content
with the hero's mere report. The figure of the story-teller is a
dramatic fact in Meredith's book, and that is all to the good; but the
story-teller's inner history--it is not clear that we need the
intervention of anybody in this matter, and if it might be dramatized,
made immediately visible, dramatized it evidently should be. By all
means let us have Harry's account if we must have somebody's, but
perhaps there is no such need. There seems to be none; it is surely
time to take the next step in the process I am trying to track.

X

And the next step is to lay aside the autobiographic device which the
novelist was seen to adopt, a few pages ago, in the interest of drama.
When it has served as Dickens and Thackeray made it serve, it seems to
have shown the extent of its power; if the picture of a life is to be
still further dramatized, other arts must be called into play. I am
still assuming that the novel under consideration is one that
postulates--as indeed most novels do--a point of view which is not
that of the reader; I am supposing that the story requires a seeing
eye, in the sense I suggested in speaking of Vanity Fair. If no such
selecting, interpreting, composing minister is needed, then we have
drama unmixed; and I shall come across an example or so in fiction
later on. It is drama unmixed when the reader is squarely in front of
the scene, all the time, knowing nothing about the story beyond so
much as may be gathered from the aspect of the scene, the look and
speech of the people. That does not happen often in fiction, except in
short pieces, small _contes_. And still I am conce