These are the familiar resources of a story-teller, which everybody
uses as a matter of course. It is so natural to take advantage of them
that unless we purposely keep an eye upon the writer's devices,
marking them off as he turns from one to another, we hardly notice the
change. He is telling a story in the ordinary way, the obvious and
unconstrained. But in fact these variations represent differences of
method that are fundamental. If the story is to be _shown_ to us, the
question of our relation to the story, how we are placed with regard
to it, arises with the first word. Are we placed before a particular
scene, an occasion, at a certain selected hour in the lives of these
people whose fortunes are to be followed? Or are we surveying their
lives from a height, participating in the privilege of the
novelist--sweeping their history with a wide range of vision and
absorbing a general effect? Here at once is a necessary alternative.
Flaubert, as a matter of fact, gives us first a scene--the scene of
Bovary's arrival at school, as a small boy; the incident of the
particular morning is rendered; and then he leaves that incident,
summarizes the background of the boy's life, describes his parents,
the conditions of his home, his later career as a student. It is the
way in which nine novels out of ten begin--an opening scene, a
retrospect, and a summary. And the spectator, the reader, is so well
used to it that he is conscious of no violent change in the point of
view; though what has happened is that from one moment to another he
has been caught up from a position straight in front of the action to
a higher and a more commanding level, from which a stretch of time is
to be seen outspread. This, then, is one distinction of method; and it
is a tell-tale fact that even in this elementary matter our
nomenclature is uncertain and ambiguous. How do we habitually
discriminate between these absolutely diverse manners of presenting
the facts of a story? I scarcely know--it is as though we had no
received expressions to mark the difference between blue and red. But
let us assume, at any rate, that a "scenic" and a "panoramic"
presentation of a story expresses an intelligible antithesis, strictly
and technically.

There is our relation, again--ours, the reader's--with regard to the
author. Flaubert is generally considered to be a very "impersonal"
writer, one who keeps in the background and desires us to remain
unaware of his presen