nd makes an appeal to the eye, is presented as it takes place;
and this is a movement in the direction of drama, even if it goes no
further. Pater, musing over the life of his hero, all but lost in the
general sentiment of its grace and virtue, is arrested by the definite
images of certain hours and occasions; the flow of his rumination is
interrupted while he pauses upon these, to make them visible; they
must be given a kind of objectivity, some slight relief against the
dim background. No story-teller, in short, can use a manner as
strictly subjective, as purely personal, as the manner of The Awkward
Age is the reverse.

But as for this book, it not only ends one argument, it is also a
turning-point that begins another. For when we have seen how fiction
gradually aspires to the weight and authority of the thing acted,
purposely limiting its own discursive freedom, it remains to see how
it resumes its freedom when there is good cause for doing so. It is
not for nothing that The Awkward Age is as lonely as it seems to be in
its kind. I have seized upon it as an example of the dramatic method
pursued _a outrance_, and it is very convenient for criticism that it
happens to be there; the book points a sound moral with clear effect.
But when it is time to suggest that even in dealing with a subject
entirely dramatic, a novelist may well find reason to keep to his old
familiar mixed method--_circumspice_: it would appear that he does so
invariably. Where are the other Awkward Ages, the many that we might
expect if the value of drama is so great? I dare say one might
discover a number of small things, short dramatic pieces (I have
mentioned the case of Maupassant), which would satisfy the
requirement; but on the scale of Henry James's book I know of nothing
else. Plenty of people find their theme in matters of action, matters
of incident, like the story of Nanda; it is strange that they should
not sometimes choose to treat it with strict consistency. How is one
to assert a principle which is apparently supported by only one book
in a thousand thousand?

I think it must be concluded, in the first place, that to treat a
subject with the rigour of Henry James is extremely difficult, and
that the practice of the thousand thousand is partly to be explained
by this fact. Perhaps many of them would be more dramatically inclined
if the way were easier. It must always be simpler for a story-teller
to use his omniscience, to dive int