But it is accompanied
and checked by another, not less important.
This is his care for economy; the method is to be pushed as far as the
subject can profit by it, but no further. It may happen (for instance
in David Copperfield) that the story _needs_ no high dramatic value,
and that it would get no advantage from a more dramatic method. If it
would gain nothing, it would undoubtedly lose; the subject would be
over-treated and would suffer accordingly. Nothing would have been
easier than for Dickens to take the next step, as I call it--to treat
his story from the point of view of David, but not as David's own
narration. Dickens might have laid bare the mind of his hero and
showed its operation, as Dostoevsky did with his young man. There was
no reason for doing so, however, since the subject is not essentially
in David at all, but in the linked fortunes of a number of people
grouped around him. David's consciousness, if we watched it instead of
listening to his story, would be unsubstantial indeed; Dickens would
be driven to enrich it, giving him a more complicated life within;
with the result that the centre would be displaced and the subject so
far obscured. A story is damaged by too much treatment as by too
little, and the severely practical need of true economy in all that
concerns a novel is demonstrated once more.
I go no further for the moment, I do not yet consider how the picture
of a man's mind is turned into action, induced to assume the look of
an objective play.
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