written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism
as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of
liberty and largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in
which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a flat
board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their
solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these identities
that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels
as compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat
board on to which the novelist throws everything. And from
this there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a
great compensating gain in his power over the subject; so
that he can now subordinate one thing to another in
importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail,
to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just
as easily the flourish of trumpets before a victorious
emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual
decay of forty years of a man's life and the gesture of a
passionate moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he
looks at it from one point of view - equally able, if he
looks at it from another point of view - to reproduce a
colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical
action. He can show his readers, behind and around the
personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his
story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of
the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes,
dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant
events, the stream of national tendency, the salient
framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat
board - all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the
texture of continuous intelligent narration.