We hear the phrase on all sides, an unending argument is waged over
it. One critic condemns a novel as "shapeless," meaning that its shape
is objectionable; another retorts that if the novel has other fine
qualities, its shape is unimportant; and the two will continue their
controversy till an onlooker, pardonably bewildered, may begin to
suppose that "form" in fiction is something to be put in or left out
of a novel according to the taste of the author. But though the
discussion is indeed confusingly worded at times, it is clear that
there is agreement on this article at least--that a book is a thing to
which a shape is ascribable, good or bad. I have spoken of the
difficulty that prevents us from ever seeing or describing the shape
with perfect certainty; but evidently we are convinced that it is
there, clothing the book.
Not as a single form, however, but as a moving stream of impressions,
paid out of the volume in a slender thread as we turn the pages--that
is how the book reaches us; or in another image it is a procession
that passes before us as we sit to watch. It is hard to think of this
lapse and flow, this sequence of figures and scenes, which must be
taken in a settled order, one after another, as existing in the
condition of an immobile form, like a pile of sculpture. Though we
readily talk of the book as a material work of art, our words seem to
be crossed by a sense that it is rather a process, a passage of
experience, than a thing of size and shape.
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