tinctively pictorial book. David Copperfield, for
instance--it is essentially a long glance, working steadily over a
tract of years, alone of its kind in Dickens's fiction. It was the one
book in which he rejected the intrigue of action for the centre of his
design--did not reject it altogether, indeed, but accepted it as
incidental only. Always elsewhere it is his chosen intrigue, his
"plot," that makes the shape of his book. Beginning with a deceptive
air of intending mainly a novel of manners and humours, as Stevenson
once pointed out, in Bleak House or in Little Dorrit or in Our Mutual
Friend--in his later books generally--he insinuates a thread of action
that gradually twists more and more of the matter of the book round
itself. The intrigue begins to take the first place, to dominate and
at last to fill the pages. That was the form, interesting of its kind,
and one to which justice has hardly been done, which he elaborated and
made his own. In Copperfield for once he took another way entirely. It
is the far stretch of the past which makes the shape of that book, not
any of the knots or networks of action which it contains. These,
instead of controlling the novel, sink into the level of retrospect.
Copperfield has not a few lesser dramas to represent; but the affair
of Steerforth, the affair of Uriah Heep, to name a pair of them, which
might have developed and taken command of the scene, fall back into
the general picture, becoming incidents in the long rhythm of
Copperfield's memory. It was a clear case for narration in person, in
character; everything was gained and nothing lost by leaving it to the
man to give his own impression. Nothing was lost, because the sole
need is for the reader to see what David sees; it matters little how
his mind works, or what the effect of it all may be upon himself. It
is the story of what happened around him, not within. David offers a
pair of eyes and a memory, nothing further is demanded of him.

But now let me take the case of another big novel, where again there
is a picture outspread, with episodes of drama that are subordinate to
the sweep of the expanse. It is Meredith's story of Harry Richmond, a
book in which its author evidently found a demand in some way
different from that of the rest of his work; for here again the first
person is used by a man who habitually avoided it. In Harry Richmond
it seemed to Meredith appropriate, I suppose, because the story has a
romantic a