They were
strongly romantic, vividly dramatic; he never had occasion to use the
first person for the effect I considered a while ago, its enhancement
of a plain narrative. I called it the first step towards the
dramatization of a story, and so it is in a book like Esmond, a
broadly pictured novel of manners. But it is more than this in a book
like The Master of Ballantrae, where the subject is a piece of
forcible, closely knit action. The value of rendering it as somebody's
narrative, of placing it in the mouth of a man who was there on the
spot, is in this book the value of working the drama into a picture,
of passing it through a man's thought and catching his reflection of
it. As the picture in Esmond is enhanced, so the drama in Ballantrae
is toned and qualified by the method of presentation. The same method
has a different effect, according to the subject upon which it is
used; as a splash of the same grey might darken white surface and
lighten a black. In Esmond the use of the first person raises the book
in the direction of drama, in Ballantrae it thrusts the book in the
other direction, towards the pictured impression. So it would seem;
but perhaps it is a fine distinction that criticism can afford to pass
by.
XV
As for the peculiar accent and stir of life, the life behind the
story, Balzac's manner of finding and expressing it is always
interesting.
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