erly design, but to let it
wander free. Formlessness becomes actually the mark of right form in
literature of this class; and a novel presented as fictitious
autobiography gets the same advantage. And there the argument brings
us back to the old question; fiction must _look_ true, and there is no
look of truth in inconsequence, and there is no authority at the back
of a novel, independent of it, to vouch for the truth of its apparent
wilfulness. But it is not worth while to linger here; the use of the
first person has other and more interesting snares than this, that it
pretends to disguise unmeaning, inexpressive form in a story.

Now with regard to Harry Richmond, ostensibly it _is_ rather like a
chronicle of romantic adventure--not formless, far from it, but freely
flowing as a saga, with its illegitimate dash of blood-royal and its
roaring old English squire-archy and its speaking statue and its quest
of the princess; it _contains_ a saga, and even an exceedingly
fantastic one. But Harry Richmond is a deeply compacted book, and
mixed with its romance there is a novel of another sort. For the
fantasy it is only necessary that Harry himself should give a picture
of his experience, of all that he has seen and done; on this side the
story is in the succession of rare, strange, poetic events, with the
remarkable people concerned in them. But the aim of the book goes far
beyond this; it is to give the portrait of Harry Richmond, and that
is the real reason why the story is told. All these striking episodes,
which Harry is so well placed to describe, are not merely pictures
that pass, a story that Meredith sets him to tell because it is of
high interest on its own account. Meredith's purpose is that the hero
himself shall be in the middle of the book, with all the interest of
the story reflected back upon his character, his temper, his growth.
The subject is Harry Richmond, a youth of spirit; the subject is _not_
the cycle of romance through which he happens to have passed.

In the case of Copperfield, to go back to him, Dickens had exactly the
opposite intention. He found his book in the expanse of life which his
David had travelled over; Dickens's only care was to represent the
wonderful show that filled his hero's memory. The whole phantasmagoria
is the subject of the book, a hundred men and women, populating
David's past and keeping his pen at full speed in the single-minded
effort to portray them. Alone among the ass