en their various accounts of emotional and
intellectual adventure; but they might do more, they might bring the
facts of the adventure upon the scene and leave them to make their
impression. The story passes in an invisible world, the events take
place in the man's mind; and we might have to conclude that they lie
beyond our reach, and that we cannot attain to them save by the help
of the man himself, or of the author who knows all about him. We might
have to make the best of an account at second hand, and it would not
occur to us, I dare say, that anything more could be forthcoming; we
seem to touch the limit of the possibilities of drama in fiction. But
it is not the final limit--there is fiction here to prove it; and it
is this further stroke of the art that I would now examine.

The world of silent thought is thrown open, and instead of telling the
reader what happened there, the novelist uses the look and behaviour
of thought as the vehicle by which the story is rendered. Just as the
writer of a play embodies his subject in visible action and audible
speech, so the novelist, dealing with a situation like Strether's,
represents it by means of the movement that flickers over the surface
of his mind. The impulses and reactions of his mood are the players
upon the new scene. In drama of the theatre a character must bear his
part unaided; if he is required to be a desperate man, harbouring
thoughts of crime, he cannot look to the author to appear at the side
of the stage and inform the audience of the fact; he must express it
for himself through his words and deeds, his looks and tones. The
playwright so arranges the matter that these will be enough, the
spectator will make the right inference. But suppose that instead of a
man upon the stage, concealing and betraying his thought, we watch the
thought itself, the hidden thing, as it twists to and fro in his
brain--watch it without any other aid to understanding but such as its
own manner of bearing may supply. The novelist, more free than the
playwright, could of course _tell_ us, if he chose, what lurks behind
this agitated spirit; he could step forward and explain the restless
appearance of the man's thought. But if he prefers the dramatic way,
admittedly the more effective, there is nothing to prevent him from
taking it. The man's thought, in its turn, can be made to reveal its
own inwardness.

Let us see how this plan is pursued in The Ambassadors. That book is
en