t it into a
round, sound action and leave it in that form if he chose. Here again
there is plenty of room for enterprise and experiment in fiction, even
now.

But at the same time it must be admitted that there is more in the
general unwillingness of story-tellers to entrust the story to the
people in it--there is more than I have said. If they are much less
dramatic than they might be, still it is not to be asserted that a
subject will often find perfect expression through the uncompromising
method of The Awkward Age. That book itself perhaps suggests, if it
does no more than suggest, that drama cannot always do everything in a
novel, even where the heart of the story seems to lie in its action.
The story of Nanda drops neatly into scenic form--that is obvious; it
is well adapted for treatment as a row of detached episodes or
occasions, through which the subject is slowly developed. But it is a
question whether a story which requires and postulates such a very
particular background, so singular and so artificial, is reasonably
denied the licence to make its background as effective as possible, by
whatever means. Nanda's world is not the kind of society that can be
taken for granted; it is not modernity in general, it is a small and
very definite tract. For the purposes of her story it is important
that her setting should be clearly seen and known, and the method of
telling her story must evidently take this into account. Nanda and her
case are not rendered if the quality of the civilization round her is
left in any way doubtful, and it happens to be a very odd quality
indeed.

Henry James decided, I suppose, that it was sufficiently implied in
the action of his book and needed nothing more; Nanda's little world
would be descried behind the scene without any further picturing. He
may have been right, so far as The Awkward Age is concerned; the
behaviour of the people in the story is certainly packed with many
meanings, and perhaps it is vivid enough to enact the general
character of their lives and ways, as well as their situation in the
foreground; perhaps the charmed circle of Mrs. Brookenham and her
wonderful crew is given all the effect that is needed. But the
question brings me to a clear limitation of drama on the whole, and
that is why I raise it. Here is a difficulty to which the dramatic
method, in its full severity, is not specially accommodated, one that
is not in the line of its strength. To many of the d