life-like effects, and the
imaginative gifts which they imply in the novelist. These we can
examine as long and as closely as we choose, for they persist and grow
more definite as we cultivate the remembrance of them. And to these,
accordingly, we find our criticism always tending; we discuss the
writer, we discuss the people in his book, we discuss the kind of life
he renders and his success in the rendering. But meanwhile the book,
the thing he made, lies imprisoned in the volume, and our glimpse of
it was too fleeting, it seems, to leave us with a lasting knowledge of
its form. We soon reach the end of so much as we have to say on that
subject.

Perhaps we should have more to say of it if we read the book
differently in the first place. I scarcely think we could any of us
claim that in reading a novel we deliberately watch the book itself,
rather than the scenes and figures it suggests, or that we seek to
construct an image of the book, page by page, while its form is
gradually exposed to us. We are much more inclined to forget, if we
can, that the book is an object of art, and to treat it as a piece of
the life around us; we fashion for ourselves, we objectify, the
elements in it that happen to strike us most keenly, such as an
effective scene or a brilliant character. These things take shape in
the mind of the reader; they are recreated and set up where the mind's
eye can rest on them. They become works of art, no doubt, in their
way, but they are not the book which the author offers us. That is a
larger and more complex form, one that it is much more difficult to
think of as a rounded thing. A novel, as we say, opens a new world to
the imagination; and it is pleasant to discover that sometimes, in a
few novels, it is a world which "creates an illusion"--so pleasant
that we are content to be lost in it. When that happens there is no
chance of our finding, perceiving, recreating, the form of the book.
So far from losing ourselves in the world of the novel, we must hold
it away from us, see it all in detachment, and use the whole of it to
make the image we seek, the book itself.

It is difficult to treat a large and stirring piece of fiction in
this way. The landscape opens out and surrounds us, and we proceed to
create what is in effect a novel within the novel which the author
wrote. When, for example, I try to consider closely the remnant that
exists in my memory of a book read and admired years ago--of such a