ther than anything that he _did_; his action depended
upon his view of things and logically flowed from it, but his action
by itself would give no measure at all of his inner life. With the
people of The Awkward Age, on the other hand, their action fully
covers their motives and sentiments--or can be made to do so, by the
care of a dexterous author.

And so the story can be rendered with absolute consistency, on one
method only, if the author chooses. And he does so choose, and The
Awkward Age rounds off the argument I have sought to unwind--the
sequence of method and method, each one in turn pushing its way
towards a completer dramatization of the story. Here at any rate is
one book in which a subject capable of acting itself out from
beginning to end is made to do so, one novel in which method becomes
as consistent and homogeneous as it ever may in fiction. No other
manner of telling a story can be quite so true to itself. For whereas
drama, in this book, depends not at all upon the author's "word of
honour," and deals entirely with immediate facts, the most undramatic
piece of fiction can hardly for long be consistent in its own line,
but must seek the support of scenic presentation. Has anyone tried to
write a novel in which there should be no dialogue, no immediate
scene, nothing at all but a diffused and purely subjective impression?
Such a novel, if it existed, would be a counterpart to The Awkward
Age. Just as Henry James's book never deviates from the straight,
square view of the passing event, so the other would be exclusively
oblique, general, retrospective, a meditation upon the past, bringing
nothing into the foreground, dramatizing nothing in talk or action.

The visionary fiction of Walter Pater keeps as nearly to a method of
that kind, I suppose, as fiction could. In Marius probably, if it is
to be called a novel, the art of drama is renounced as thoroughly as
it has ever occurred to a novelist to dispense with it. I scarcely
think that Marius ever speaks or is spoken to audibly in the whole
course of the book; such at least is the impression that it leaves.
The scenes of the story reach the reader by refraction, as it were,
through the medium of Pater's harmonious murmur. But scenes they must
be; not even Pater at his dreamiest can tell a story without incident
particularized and caught in the act. When Marius takes a journey,
visits a philosopher or enters a church, the event stands out of the
past a