How is the change effected, what does it achieve?--the
episode, bringing the change into view, dramatizes it, and the
question is answered. The young knight-errant has run an eventful
course, and he gives his account of it; but the leading event of his
tale is himself. His account illustrates that event, helps towards the
enactment of it. Pictorial, therefore, in form, dramatic in
function--such was the story that Meredith elected to tell in the
first person.
And in so doing he showed, as it seems to me, precisely where the
defect of the method begins to be felt. The method has a certain
dramatic energy, we have seen, making a visible fact of the relation,
otherwise unexplained, between the narrator and the tale. It has this;
but for a subject like Meredith's it is really too little, and the use
of the first person is overtaxed. Does he contrive to conceal the
trouble, does he make us exceedingly unconscious of it while we read
the book? I have no doubt that he does, with the humanity and poetry
and wisdom that he pours into it--the novel of which it has been said
that if Shakespeare revisited the globe and asked for a book of our
times to read, this would be the volume to offer him, the book more
likely than another to convince him at once that literature is still
in our midst. There is small doubt that Meredith disguises the
trouble, and there is still less that he was quite unaware of it
himself.
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