I
conclude that on this paradox the art of dramatizing the picture of
somebody's experience--the art I have been considering in these last
chapters--touches its limit. There is indeed no further for it to go.
XII
There is no further for it to go, for it now covers the whole story.
Henry James was the first writer of fiction, I judge, to use all the
possibilities of the method with intention and thoroughness, and the
full extent of the opportunity which is thus revealed is very great.
The range of method is permanently enlarged; it is proved, once for
all, that the craft of fiction has larger resources than might have
been suspected before. A novelist in these days is handling an
instrument, it may be said, the capacity of which has been very
elaborately tested; and though in any particular case there may be
good reason why its dramatic effects should not be exhausted--the
subject may need none or few of them--yet it must be supposed that the
novelist is aware of the faculties that he refuses. There are kinds of
virtuosity in any art which affect the whole of its future; painting
can never be the same again after some painter has used line and
colour in a manner that his predecessors had not fully developed,
music makes a new demand of all musicians when one of them has once
increased its language. And the language of the novel, extended to the
point which it has reached, gives a possible scope to a novelist
which he is evidently bound to take into account.
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