And having said this, the author has only
moved the question a stage further, and it reappears in exactly the
same form. The man or the woman, after all, is only telling and
stating, and we are still invited to accept the story upon somebody's
authority. The narrator may do his best, and may indeed do so well
that to hear his account is as good as having seen what he describes,
and nothing could be better than that; the matter might rest there, if
this were all. But it must depend considerably on the nature of his
story, for it may happen that he tells and describes things that a man
is never really in a position to substantiate; his account of himself,
for example, cannot be thoroughly valid, not through any want of
candour on his part, but simply because no man can completely
objectify himself, and a credible account of anything must appear to
detach it, to set it altogether free for inspection. And so the
novelist passes on towards drama, gets behind the narrator, and
represents the mind of the narrator as in itself a kind of action.
By so doing, be it noted, he forfeits none of his special freedom, as
I have called it, the picture-making faculty that he enjoys as a
story-teller. He is not constrained, like the playwright, to turn his
story into dramatic action and nothing else. He has dramatized his
novel step by step, until the mind of the picture-maker, Strether or
Raskolnikov, is present upon the page; but Strether and Raskolnikov
are just as free to project their view of the world, to picture it
for the reader, as they might be if they spoke in person.
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