ifficulties of
fiction, as we have seen, it brings precisely the right instrument; it
gives validity, gives direct force to a story, and to do so is its
particular property. For placing and establishing a piece of action
it is paramount. But where it is not only a matter of placing the
action in view, but of relating it to its surroundings, strict drama
is at once at a disadvantage. The seeing eye of the author, which can
sweep broadly and generalize the sense of what it sees, will meet this
difficulty more naturally. Drama reinforcing and intensifying picture
we have already seen again and again; and now the process is reversed.
From the point of view of the reader, the spectator of the show, the
dramatic scene is vivid and compact; but it is narrow, it can have no
great depth, and the colour of the atmosphere can hardly tell within
the space. It is likely, therefore, that unless this close direct
vision is supplemented by a wider survey, fronting the story from a
more distant point of view, the background of the action, the manner
of life from which it springs, will fail to make its full impression.

It amounts to this, that the play-form--and with it fiction that is
purely dramatic in its method--is hampered in its power to express the
outlying associations of its scene. It _can_ express them, of course;
in clever hands it may seem to do so as thoroughly as any descriptive
narration. But necessarily it does so with far more expense of effort
than the picture-making faculty which lies in the hand of the
novelist; and that is in general a good reason why the prudent
novelist, with all his tendency to shed his privileges, still clings
to this one. It is possible to imagine that a novel might be as bare
of all background as a play of Racine; there might be a story in which
any hint of continuous life, proceeding behind the action, would
simply confuse and distort the right effect. One thinks of the story
of the Princesse de Cleves, floating serenely in the void, without a
sign of any visible support from a furnished world; and there, no
doubt, nothing would be gained by bringing the lucid action to ground
and fixing it in its setting. It is a drama of sentiment, needing only
to be embodied in characters as far as possible detached from any
pictured surroundings, with nothing but the tradition of fine manners
that is inherent in their grand names. But wherever the effect of the
action depends upon its time and place, a no