Such is the progress of the writer
of fiction towards drama; such is his method of evading the drawbacks
of a mere reporter and assuming the advantages, as far as possible, of
a dramatist. How far he may choose to push the process in his
book--that is a matter to be decided by the subject; it entirely
depends upon the kind of effect that the theme demands. It may respond
to all the dramatization it can get, it may give all that it has to
give for less. The subject dictates the method.
And now let the process be reversed, let 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.
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