THE NOVEL AGAIN
173
characteristics of poetry, that novels are now being written accord–
ing to what we can describe as a poetic conception both of experience
and of the shape which experience must take.
Of course the novel has almost since its beginning employed
certain elements or devices that are recognizably poetic in origin and
function. It
is
important to note, however, that such recognition has
become an articulate force only during recent years. Today's student
of literature, for example, can hardly read
Wuthering Heights
with–
out at some point being made aware that this novel's true affinities
are with the Greek drama and Shakespeare, and not, as twenty-five
years ago he would have been taught, with the Gothic romance or
the Minerva Press thriller. Nor is anything more striking about the
current revival of interest in Dickens than the fact that
his
novels
are regularly being discussed as if they were actually poems. When
a number of years ago F. R. Leavis undertook to praise Dickens, the
highest tribute he could accord was to call him a great poet. And
that is indeed
true.
All the images of fog and confusion in
Bleak
House,
the endlessly varied representations of imprisonment in
Little
Dorrit,
the continual presence of the river and the dust-heaps in
Our Mutual Friend- .all
of these we now understand not only as
part of the narrative design of these novels, but as infusing the most
casual of details and bringing into confluence the most wayward and
disparate events. Criticism today, in other words, regards these
novels as utterances of a mind which has been seized by certain
large plastic images, just as a poet's mind is thought to be seized.
And it considers the dramatic statement of these novels as being
made not primarily through the course of narrative or the conflict
of characters, but-to use the dismal terminology- through the ela–
borate, organic development of a thematic structure of images.
Great
Expectations
is now discussed as if it belonged to the same genre as
Timon of Athens
or "The Canonization" or "To His Coy Mistress."
And today
Paradise Lost
resembles a novel-or what was once
thought of as a novel-more than
Hard Times
does.
But most modern novelists are now seen in this light. We read
the novels and stories of Melville and Conrad and Hemingway as
we have learned to read lyric poems. We naturally read Flaubert in
this manner, since Flaubert was the first novelist to write in deliberate
approximation of a poetic principle. We even-God help us-read
