By so doing, be it noted, he forfeits none of his special freedom, as I have called it, the picture-making faculty that he enjoys as a story-teller. He is not constrained, like the playwright, to turn his story into dramatic action and nothing else. He has dramatized his novel step by step, until the mind of the picture-maker, Strether or Raskolnikov, is present upon the page; but Strether and Raskolnikov are just as free to project their view of the world, to picture it for the reader, as they might be if they spoke in person. The difference is in the fact that we now see the very sources of the activity within them; we not only share their vision, we watch them absorbing it. Strether in particular, with a mind working so diligently upon every grain of his experience, is a most luminous painter of the world in which he moves--a small circle, but nothing in it escapes him, and he imparts his summary of a thousand matters to the reader; the view that he opens is as panoramic, often enough, as any of Thackeray's sweeping surveys, only the scale is different, with a word barely breathed in place of a dialogue, minutes for months, a turn of a head or an intercepted glance for a chronicle of crime or adulterous intrigue. That liberty, therefore, of standing above the story and taking a broad view of many things, of transcending the limits of the immediate scene--nothing of this is sacrificed by the author's steady advance in the direction of drama. The man's mind has become visible, phenomenal, dramatic; but in acting its part it still lends us eyes, is still an opportunity of extended vision.