In a way, if the end of a novel be the
presentation not of action, but of the springs of action; if the
external event is in it always of less importance than the emotions
which conditioned it, and the emotions which it set working, the novel
of letters is the supreme manner for fiction. Consider the possibilities
of it; there is a series of events in which A, B, and C are concerned.
Not only can the outward events be narrated as they appeared to all
three separately by means of letters from each to another, or to a
fourth party, but the motives of each and the emotions which each
experiences as a result of the actions of the others or them all, can be
laid bare. No other method can wind itself so completely into the
psychological intricacies and recesses which lie behind every event. Yet
the form, as everybody knows, has not been popular; even an expert
novel-reader could hardly name off-hand more than two or three examples
of it since Richardson's day. Why is this? Well, chiefly it is because
the mass of novelists have not had Richardson's knowledge of, or
interest in, the psychological under side of life, and those who have,
as, amongst the moderns, Henry James, have devised out of the convention
of the invisible narrator a method by which they can with greater
economy attain in practice fairly good results.
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