THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM
Latin races, he grants, are accustomed to give greater attention to unity of structure; the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs, on the contrary, prefer a greater variety of interest, a more prodigal abundance of life:
One of the best contemporary Russian novels, War and Peace, might with very little effort be divided in two, because it contains two perfectly defined actions, which are carried on side by side throughout the whole course of the book. Which of these conceptions of the composition of a novel is the true one? In my opinion, both of them. To decide in favour of one of them would be to assert the inferiority of the novels written according to the other and that seems to me unjust. Dickens, Thackeray, Gogol, Tolstoy are as excellent novelists as Balzac, George Sand, Flaubert and Manzoni.[1]
The fallacy of Señor Valdès argument, of course, is his failure to recognise that while the English and Russian novelists
- ↑ From preface to La Hermana San Sulpicio.
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