embly David himself is
scarcely of the subject at all. He has substance enough, and amply, to
be a credible, authoritative reporter--Dickens sees well to that; but
he is a shadow compared with Betsy Trotwood and the Micawbers and the
Heeps, with all the hundred of them, and there is no call for him to
be more. In this respect his story, again, is contrasted with that of
Pendennis, which is, or is evidently meant to be in the first place, a
portrait of the young man--or with the story of Tom Jones perhaps,
though in this case more doubtfully, for Fielding's shrewd eye was apt
to be drawn away from the young man to the bustle of life around him.
But in Copperfield the design is very plain and is consistently
pursued; it would be a false patch in the story if at any point David
attracted more attention to himself than to the people of his
vision--he himself, as a child, being of course one of them, a little
creature that he sees in the distance, but he himself, in later years,
becoming merely the mirror of his experience, which he not unnaturally
considers worthy of being pictured for its own sake.

Look back then at Harry Richmond, and it is obvious that Harry himself
is all the subject of the book, there is no other. His father and his
grandfather, Ottilia and Janet, belong to the book by reason of him;
they stand about him, conditions of his life, phases of his career,
determining what he is and what he becomes. That is clearly Meredith's
thought in undertaking this chronicle; he proposes to show how it
makes the history, the moral and emotional history, of the man through
whom it is uttered. Harry's adventures, ambitions, mistakes,
successes, are the gradual and elaborate expression of him, complete
in the end; they round him into the figure of the man in whom Meredith
saw his book. The book started from Harry Richmond, the rest of it is
there to display him. A youth of considerable parts and attractions,
and a youth characteristic of his time and country, and a youth whose
circumstances are such as to give him very free play and to test and
prove him very effectually--there is the burden of Meredith's saga, as
I call it, and he never forgets it, though sometimes he certainly
pushes the brilliant fantasy of the saga beyond his strict needs. The
romance of the blood-royal, for instance--it would be hard to argue
that the book honestly requires the high colour of that infusion, and
all the pervading thrill that Meredith