Continuous narration is the flat
board on to which the novelist throws everything. And from
this there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a
great compensating gain in his power over the subject; so
that he can now subordinate one thing to another in
importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail,
to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just
as easily the flourish of trumpets before a victorious
emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual
decay of forty years of a man's life and the gesture of a
passionate moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he
looks at it from one point of view - equally able, if he
looks at it from another point of view - to reproduce a
colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical
action. He can show his readers, behind and around the
personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his
story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of
the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes,
dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant
events, the stream of national tendency, the salient
framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat
board - all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the
texture of continuous intelligent narration.
This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott.
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