And therefore, though
the book is largely a picture, a review of many details and occasions,
the question of the narrator is never insistent. The landscape that
Thackeray controls is so much wider and fuller that even with all the
tact of Flaubert--and little he has of it--he could scarcely follow
Flaubert's example. His book is not a portrait of character but a
panorama of manners, and there is no disguising the need of some
detached spectator, who looks on from without.
It is the method of picture-making that enables the novelist to cover
his great spaces of life and quantities of experience, so much greater
than any that can be brought within the acts of a play. As for
intensity of life, that is another matter; there, as we have seen, the
novelist has recourse to his other arm, the one that corresponds with
the single arm of the dramatist. Inevitably, as the plot thickens and
the climax approaches--inevitably, wherever an impression is to be
emphasized and driven home--narration gives place to enactment, the
train of events to the particular episode, the broad picture to the
dramatic scene. But the limitation of drama is as obvious as its
peculiar power. It is clear that if we wish to see an abundance and
multitude of life we shall find it more readily and more summarily by
looking for an hour into a memory, a consciousness, than by merely
watching the present events of an hour, however crowded.
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