normal state is again in view, and she has in a single sentence been inflated into a round character and collapsed back into a flat one. How Jane Austen can write! In a few words she has extended Lady Bertram, and by so doing she has increased the probability of the elopements of Maria and Julia. I say probability because the elopements belong to the domain of violent physical action, and here, as already indicated, Jane Austen is feeble and ladylike. Except in her school-girl novels, she cannot stage a crash. Everything violent has to take place "off"--Louisa's accident and Marianne Dashwood's putrid throat are the nearest exceptions--and consequently all the comments on the elopement must be sincere and convincing, otherwise we should doubt whether it occurred. Lady Bertram helps us to believe that her daughters have run away, and they have to run away, or there would be no apotheosis for Fanny. It is a little point, and a little sentence, yet it shows us how delicately a great novelist can modulate into the round. All through her works we find these characters, apparently so simple and flat, never needing reintroduction and yet never out of their depth--Henry Tilney, Mr. Woodhouse, Charlotte Lucas. She may label her characters "Sense," "Pride," "Sensibility," "Prejudice," but they are not tethered to those qualities. As for the round characters proper, they have already been defined by implication and no more need be said. All I need do is to give some examples of people in books who seem to me round so that the definition can be tested afterwards: All the principal characters in _War and Peace_, all the Dostoevsky characters, and some of the Proust--for example, the old family servant, the Duchess of Guermantes, M. de Charlus, and Saint Loup; Madame Bovary--who, like Moll Flanders, has her book to herself, and can expand and secrete unchecked; some people in Thackeray--for instance, Becky and Beatrix; some in Fielding--Parson Adams, Tom Jones; and some in Charlotte Brontë, most particularly Lucy Snowe. (And many more--this is not a catalogue.) The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it--life within the pages of a book. And by using it sometimes alone, more often in combination with the other kind, the novelist achieves his task of acclimatization and harmonizes the human race with the other aspects of his work. ii. Now for the second device: the point of view from which the story may be told.