he will never, at the ultimate bar, be reckoned supreme. That which
counts, on every page, and all the time, is the very texture of his
mind--the glass through which he sees things. Every other attribute is
secondary, and is dispensable. Fielding lives unequalled among English
novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is unequalled. He is
read with unreserved enthusiasm because the reader feels himself at each
paragraph to be in close contact with a glorious personality. And no
advance in technique among later novelists can possibly imperil his
position. He will take second place when a more noble mind, a more
superb common sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before.
What undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that the
texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in courageous facing
of the truth, and in certain delicacies of perception. As much may be
said of Thackeray, whose mind was somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a
figure, and not free from defects which are inimical to immortality.

It is a hard saying for me, and full of danger in any country whose
artists have shown contempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, as
the years pass, I attach less and less importance to good technique in
fiction. I love it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its
importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern history
of fiction will not support me. With the single exception of Turgenev,
the great novelists of the world, according to my own standards, have
either ignored technique or have failed to understand it. What an error
to suppose that the finest foreign novels show a better sense of form
than the finest English novels! Balzac was a prodigious blunderer. He
could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general form of a
book. And as for a greater than Balzac--Stendhal--his scorn of technique
was notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece: "By
the way I ought to have told you earlier that the Duchess--!" And as for