It is
enough that he should make Micawber live again, make Beatrix appear on
the staircase of the old house, with her scarlet ribbon and the taper
in her hand. _They_ owe everything to the presence of the man who
calls them back from the past; they receive their being, they do
little in return.
This picture, this bright vision, spied through the clever
ministration of a narrator, is not enough for Harry Richmond. Here the
peopled view, all of it together, is like an actor in a play, and the
interlocutor, the protagonist, is the man in the foreground, Harry
himself. There is no question of simply seeing through his eyes,
sharing his memory, perhaps even a little forgetting him from time to
time, when the figured scene is particularly delightful. The thought,
the fancy, the emotion of Harry Richmond are the centre of the play;
from these to the men and women who shape his fate, from them again to
the mind that recalls them, attention passes and returns; we who look
on are continually occupied with the fact of Harry's consciousness,
its gradual enlargement and enrichment. That is the process which
Ottilia and Janet and the rest of them are expected to forward, and
they contribute actively. Harry before the quest of the princess and
Harry when it has finally failed are different beings, so far as a man
is changed by an experience that is absorbed into the whole of his
nature.
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