Now and then, indeed, we shall find a writer deliberately
confining himself to one method only, treating his whole book with a
rigid consistency, and this for the sake of some particular aspect of
his theme which an unmixed manner is best fitted to reveal. But
generally a novelist retains his liberty to draw upon any of his
resources as he chooses, now this one and now that, using drama where
drama gives him all he needs, using pictorial description where the
turn of the story demands it. The only law that binds him throughout,
whatever course he is pursuing, is the need to be consistent on
_some_ plan, to follow the principle he has adopted; and of course it
is one of the first of his precepts, as with every artist in any kind,
to allow himself no more latitude than he requires. A critic, then,
looks for the principle on which a novelist's methods are mingled and
varied--looks for it, as usual, in the novelist's subject, and marks
its application as the subject is developed.
And so with the devices that I distinguish as scenic and
panoramic--one watches continually to see how this alternation is
managed, how the story is now overlooked from a height and now brought
immediately to the level of the reader. Here again the need of the
story may sometimes seem to pull decisively in one direction or the
other; and we get a book that is mainly a broad and general survey, or
mainly a concatenation of particular scenes.
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