et down"--the pass, if not "sold," somewhat weakly held.[323]
No such half-heartedness shall be chargeable on what is going to be said
under the last category, which, in a way, allies itself to the first. It
is, to a very large extent, by his marvellous use of conversation that
Dumas attains his actual mastery of story-telling; and so this
characteristic of his is of double importance and requires a Benjamin's
allowance of treatment. The name just used is indeed specially
appropriate, because Conversation is actually the youngest of the
novelist's family or staff of work-fellows. We have seen, throughout or
nearly throughout the last volume, how very long it was before its
powers and advantages were properly appreciated; how mere _recit_
dominated fiction; and how, when the personages were allowed to speak,
they were for the most part furnished only or mainly with
harangues--like those with which the "unmixed" historian used to endow
his characters. That conversation is not merely a grand set-off to a
story, but that it is an actual means of telling the story itself, seems
to have been unconscionably and almost unintelligibly slow in occurring
to men's minds; though in the actual story-telling of ordinary life by
word of mouth it is, and always must have been, frequent enough.[324] It
is not impossible that the derivation of prose from verse fiction may
have had something to do with this, for gossippy talk and epic or
romance in verse do not go well together. Nor is it probable that the
old, the respectable, but the too often mischievous disinclination to
"mix kinds" may have had its way, telling men that talk was the
dramatist's not the novelist's business. But whatever was the cause,
there can be no dispute about the fact.

It was, it should be hardly necessary to say, Scott who first discovered
the secret[325] to an effectual extent, though he was not always true to
his own discovery. And it is not superfluous to note that it was a
specially valuable and important discovery in regard to the novel of
historical adventure. It had, of course, and almost necessarily, forced
itself, in regard to the novel of ordinary life, upon our own great
explorers in that line earlier. Richardson has it abundantly. But when
you are borrowing the _subjects_ of the historian, what can be more
natural than to succumb to the _methods_ of the historian--the long
continuous narrative and the intercalated harangue? It must be done
sometimes;