It proved extraordinarily suitable for his purpose.
Not only did it make it easy for him to lighten his narrative with
excursions in a heightened style, burlesquing his origins, but it gave
him at once the right attitude to his material. He told his story as
one who knew everything; could tell conversations and incidents as he
conceived them happening, with no violation of credibility, nor any
strain on his reader's imagination, and without any impropriety could
interpose in his own person, pointing things to the reader which might
have escaped his attention, pointing at parallels he might have missed,
laying bare the irony or humour beneath a situation. He allowed himself
digressions and episodes, told separate tales in the middle of the
action, introduced, as in Partridge's visit to the theatre, the added
piquancy of topical allusion; in fact he did anything he chose. And he
laid down that free form of the novel which is characteristically
English, and from which, in its essence, no one till the modern realists
has made a serious departure.
In the matter of his novels, he excels by reason of a Shakespearean
sense of character and by the richness and rightness of his faculty of
humour. He had a quick eye for contemporary types, and an amazing power
of building out of them men and women whose individuality is full and
rounded.
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