When Esmond ruminates and reflects, his
manner is the expression of a human being there present, to whom it
can be referred; when Thackeray does the same, there is no such
compactness, and the manner trails away where we cannot follow it.
Dramatically it seems clear that the method of Esmond has the
advantage over the method of Vanity Fair.
Here are sound reasons, so far as they go, for the use of the first
person in the distinctively pictorial book. David Copperfield, for
instance--it is essentially a long glance, working steadily over a
tract of years, alone of its kind in Dickens's fiction. It was the one
book in which he rejected the intrigue of action for the centre of his
design--did not reject it altogether, indeed, but accepted it as
incidental only. Always elsewhere it is his chosen intrigue, his
"plot," that makes the shape of his book. Beginning with a deceptive
air of intending mainly a novel of manners and humours, as Stevenson
once pointed out, in Bleak House or in Little Dorrit or in Our Mutual
Friend--in his later books generally--he insinuates a thread of action
that gradually twists more and more of the matter of the book round
itself. The intrigue begins to take the first place, to dominate and
at last to fill the pages. That was the form, interesting of its kind,
and one to which justice has hardly been done, which he elaborated and
made his own.
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