us start with the purely
dramatic subject, the story that will tell itself in perfect
rightness, unaided, to the eye of the reader. This story never
deviates from a strictly scenic form; one occasion or episode follows
another, with no interruption for any reflective summary of events.
Necessarily it must be so, for it is only while the episode is
proceeding that no question of a narrator can arise; when the scene
closes the play ceases till the opening of the next. To glance upon
the story from a height and to give a general impression of its
course--this is at once to remove the point of view from the reader
and to set up a new one somewhere else; the method is no longer
consistent, no longer purely dramatic. And the dramatic story is not
only scenic, it is also limited to so much as the ear can hear and the
eye see. In rigid drama of this kind there is naturally no admission
of the reader into the private mind of any of the characters; their
thoughts and motives are transmuted into action. A subject wrought to
this pitch of objectivity is no doubt given weight and compactness and
authority in the highest degree; it is like a piece of modelling,
standing in clear space, casting its shadow. It is the most finished
form that fiction can take.

But evidently it is not a form to which fiction can aspire in general.
It implies many sacrifices, and these will easily seem to be more than
the subject can usefully make. It is out of the question, of course,
wherever the main burden of the story lies within some particular
consciousness, in the study of a soul, the growth of a character, the
changing history of a temperament; there the subject would be
needlessly crossed and strangled by dramatization pushed to its limit.
It is out of the question, again, wherever the story is too big, too
comprehensive, too widely ranging, to be treated scenically, with no
opportunity for general and panoramic survey; it has been discovered,
indeed, that even a story of this kind _may_ fall into a long
succession of definite scenes, under some hands, but it has also
appeared that in doing so it incurs unnecessary disabilities, and will
likely suffer. These stories, therefore, which will not naturally
accommodate themselves to the reader's point of view, and the reader's
alone, we regard as rather pictorial than dramatic--meaning that they
call for some narrator, somebody who _knows_, to contemplate the facts
and create an impression of them.