Much may
happen in that time, but in extent it will be nothing to the regions
thrown open by the other method. A novelist, with a large and
discursive subject before him, could not hope to show it all
dramatically; much of it, perhaps the greater part, must be so
marshalled that it may be swept by a travelling glance. Thackeray
shows how it is done and how a vista of many facts can be made to fall
into line; but he shows, too, how it needs a mind to create that
vista, and how the creative mind becomes more and more perceptible,
more visibly active, as the prospect widens.
Most novelists, I think, seem to betray, like Thackeray, a preference
for one method or the other, for picture or for drama; one sees in a
moment how Fielding, Balzac, George Eliot, incline to the first, in
their diverse manners, and Tolstoy (certainly Tolstoy, in spite of his
big range) or Dostoevsky to the second, the scenic way. But of course
every novelist uses both, and the quality of a novelist appears very
clearly in his management of the two, how he guides the story into the
scene, how he picks it out of the scene, a richer and fuller story
than it was before, and proceeds with his narrative. On the whole, no
doubt, the possibilities of the scene are greatly abused in fiction,
in the daily and familiar novel. They are doubly abused; for the
treatment of the scene is neglected, and yet it recurs again and
again, much too often, and its value is wasted.
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