But at the same time it must be admitted that there is more in the general unwillingness of story-tellers to entrust the story to the people in it--there is more than I have said. If they are much less dramatic than they might be, still it is not to be asserted that a subject will often find perfect expression through the uncompromising method of The Awkward Age. That book itself perhaps suggests, if it does no more than suggest, that drama cannot always do everything in a novel, even where the heart of the story seems to lie in its action. The story of Nanda drops neatly into scenic form--that is obvious; it is well adapted for treatment as a row of detached episodes or occasions, through which the subject is slowly developed. But it is a question whether a story which requires and postulates such a very particular background, so singular and so artificial, is reasonably denied the licence to make its background as effective as possible, by whatever means. Nanda's world is not the kind of society that can be taken for granted; it is not modernity in general, it is a small and very definite tract. For the purposes of her story it is important that her setting should be clearly seen and known, and the method of telling her story must evidently take this into account. Nanda and her case are not rendered if the quality of the civilization round her is left in any way doubtful, and it happens to be a very odd quality indeed. Henry James decided, I suppose, that it was sufficiently implied in the action of his book and needed nothing more; Nanda's little world would be descried behind the scene without any further picturing. He may have been right, so far as The Awkward Age is concerned; the behaviour of the people in the story is certainly packed with many meanings, and perhaps it is vivid enough to enact the general character of their lives and ways, as well as their situation in the foreground; perhaps the charmed circle of Mrs. Brookenham and her wonderful crew is given all the effect that is needed. But the question brings me to a clear limitation of drama on the whole, and that is why I raise it. Here is a difficulty to which the dramatic method, in its full severity, is not specially accommodated, one that is not in the line of its strength. To many of the difficulties of fiction, as we have seen, it brings precisely the right instrument; it gives validity, gives direct force to a story, and to do so is its particular property. For placing and establishing a piece of action it is paramount. But where it is not only a matter of placing the action in view, but of relating it to its surroundings, strict drama is at once at a disadvantage. The seeing eye of the author, which can sweep broadly and generalize the sense of what it sees, will meet this difficulty more naturally. Drama reinforcing and intensifying picture we have already seen again and again; and now the process is reversed.