This I take to be a
general principle, and where it appears to be violated a critic would
instinctively look for the particular reason which makes it
inapplicable to the particular case. No reflection, no picture, where
living drama is possible--it is a good rule; do not let the hero come
between us and his active mind, do not let the heroine stand in front
of her emotions and portray them--unless for cause, for some needful
effect that would otherwise be missed. I see the reason and the effect
very plainly in Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, to take a casual example,
where the point of the whole thing is that the man should give himself
away unknowingly; in Jane Eyre, to take another, I see neither--but it
is hard to throw such a dry question upon tragic little Jane.
If it should still be doubted, however, whether the right use of
autobiography is really so limited, it might be a good answer to point
to Henry James's Strether, in The Ambassadors; Strether may stand as a
living demonstration of all that autobiography cannot achieve. He is
enough to prove finally how far the intricate performance of thought
is beyond the power of a man to record in his own language.
Nine-tenths of Strether's thought--nine-tenths, that is to say, of the
silvery activity which makes him what he is--would be lost but for the
fact that its adventures are caught in time, while they are
proceeding, and enacted in the book.
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