would get no advantage from a more dramatic method. If it
would gain nothing, it would undoubtedly lose; the subject would be
over-treated and would suffer accordingly. Nothing would have been
easier than for Dickens to take the next step, as I call it--to treat
his story from the point of view of David, but not as David's own
narration. Dickens might have laid bare the mind of his hero and
showed its operation, as Dostoevsky did with his young man. There was
no reason for doing so, however, since the subject is not essentially
in David at all, but in the linked fortunes of a number of people
grouped around him. David's consciousness, if we watched it instead of
listening to his story, would be unsubstantial indeed; Dickens would
be driven to enrich it, giving him a more complicated life within;
with the result that the centre would be displaced and the subject so
far obscured. A story is damaged by too much treatment as by too
little, and the severely practical need of true economy in all that
concerns a novel is demonstrated once more.

I go no further for the moment, I do not yet consider how the picture
of a man's mind is turned into action, induced to assume the look of
an objective play. It is a very pretty achievement of art, perhaps the
most interesting effect that fiction is able to produce, and I think
it may be described more closely. But I return meanwhile to the device
of the first person, and to another example of the way in which it is
used for its dramatic energy. For my point is so oddly illustrated by
the old contrivance of the "epistolary" novel that I cannot omit to
glance at it briefly; the kind of enhancement which is sought by the
method of The Ambassadors is actually the very same as that which is
sought by the method of Clarissa and Grandison. Richardson and Henry
James, they are both faced by the same difficulty; one of them is
acutely aware of it, and takes very deep-laid precautions to
circumvent it; the other, I suppose, does not trouble about the theory
of his procedure, but he too adopts a certain artifice which carries
him past the particular problem, though at the same time it involves
him in several more. Little as Richardson may suspect it, he--and
whoever else has the idea of making a story out of a series of
letters, or a running diary written from day to day--is engaged in the
attempt to show a mind in action, to give a dramatic display of the
commotion within a breast. He desires t