o the minds of his people for an
explanation of their acts, than to make them so act that no such
explanation is ever needed. Or perhaps the state of criticism may be
to blame, with its long indifference to these questions of theory; or
perhaps (to say all) there is no very lively interest in them even
among novelists. Anyhow we may say from experience that a novel is
more likely to fall below its proper dramatic pitch than to strain
beyond it; in most of the books around us there is an easy-going
reliance on a narrator of some kind, a showman who is behind the
scenes of the story and can tell us all about it. He seems to come
forward in many a case without doing the story any particular service;
sometimes he actually embarrasses it, when a matter of vivid drama is
violently forced into the form of a narration. One can only suspect
that he then exists for the convenience of the author. It _is_ helpful
to be able to say what you like about the characters and their doings
in the book; it may be very troublesome to make their doings as
expressive as they might be, eloquent enough to need no comment.

Yet to see the issue slowly unfolding and flowering out of the middle
of a situation, and to watch it emerge unaided, with everything that
it has to say said by the very lines and masses of its structure--this
is surely an experience apart, for a novel-reader, with its
completeness and cleanness and its hard, pure edge. It is always
memorable, it fills the mind so acceptably that a story-teller might
be ready and eager to aspire to this effect, one would think, whenever
his matter gives him the chance. Again and again I have wished to
silence the voice of the spokesman who is supposed to be helping me to
a right appreciation of the matter in hand--the author (or his
creature) who knows so much, and who pours out his information over
the subject, and who talks and talks about an issue that might be
revealing itself without him. The spokesman has his way too often, it
can hardly be doubted; the instant authority of drama is neglected. It
is the day of the deep-breathed narrator, striding from volume to
volume as tirelessly as the Scuderies and Calprenedes of old; and it
is true, no doubt, that the novel (in all languages, too, it would
seem) is more than ever inclined to the big pictorial subject, which
requires the voluble chronicler; but still it must happen occasionally
that a novelist prefers a dramatic motive, and might cas