ve handled them in terms of pure drama, without any
direct display of Emma's secret fancies or Strether's brooding
imagination. But in neither case could that method make the most of
the subject or bring out all that it has to give. The most expressive,
most enlightening part of Strether's story lies in the reverberating
theatre of his mind, and as for Emma, the small exterior facts of her
story are of very slight account. Both these books, therefore, in
their general lines, are pictured impressions, not actions--even
though in Bovary to some extent, and in The Ambassadors almost wholly,
the picture is itself dramatized in the fashion I have indicated. That
last effect belongs only to the final method, the treatment of the
surface; underneath it there is in both the projection of a certain
person's point of view.

But now look at the contrast in The Awkward Age, a novel in which
Henry James followed a single method throughout, from top to bottom,
denying himself the help of any other. He chose to treat this story as
pure drama; he never once draws upon the characteristic resource of
the novelist--who is able, as the dramatist is not able, to give a
generalized and foreshortened account of the matter in hand. In The
Awkward Age everything is immediate and particular; there is no
insight into anybody's thought, no survey of the scene from a height,
no resumption of the past in retrospect. The whole of the book passes
scenically before the reader, and nothing is offered but the look and
the speech of the characters on a series of chosen occasions. It might
indeed be printed as a play; whatever is not dialogue is simply a kind
of amplified stage-direction, adding to the dialogue the expressive
effect which might be given it by good acting. The novelist, using
this method, claims only one advantage over the playwright; it is the
advantage of ensuring the very best acting imaginable, a performance
in which every actor is a perfect artist and not the least point is
ever missed. The play is not handed over to the chances of
interpretation--that is the difference; the author creates the manner
in which the words are spoken, as well as the words themselves, and he
may keep the manner at an ideal pitch. Otherwise the novelist
completely ties his hands, submitting to all the restraints of the
playwright in order to secure the compactness and the direct force of
true drama.

What is the issue of a certain conjunction of circumstan