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THE NATURE OF PROSE FICTION
particulars, or to become, as Shaftesbury says, 'mere' facepainters
and historians.^ The novelist brings the same particularizing
tendencies, logically enough, to his treatment of place
and time. Locke's 'principle of individuation', Ian Watt
reminds us,
was that of existence at a particular locus in space and time: since,
as he wrote, 'ideas become general by separating from them the
circumstances of time and place,' so they become particular only
when both these circumstances are specified. In the same way the
characters of the novel can only be individualized if they are set in
a background of particularized time and place.
Thus the novelist sets his scene with care, describing it with increasing
minuteness of detail, and he chooses a particular period
in time for the unfolding of his supposed events. The novehsts'
management of these elements will be discussed at greater
length in a subsequent chapter dealing with his craftsmanship.
In this context it is enough to add that almost every narrative
technique which he uses has behind it the same intentions which
have been noticed here. The autobiographical memoir, the epistolary
method, the 'dramatized consciousness', the withdrawal of
the author from the scene, the stream of consciousness; all these
methods are designed to heighten the desired effect of authenticity
and verisimilitude by locating experience in the individual
consciousness, and by making that consciousness operate in a
particular place at a particular time.
These tendencies helped to encourage that effect of 'Dutch
minuteness' in the novel which even the earliest critics of eighteenth-century
fiction recognized as its most characteristic
'novelty'. Mrs. Barbauld discovers in Richardson 'the accuracy
and finish of a Dutch painter . . . content to produce effects by
the patient labour of minuteness',^ and Scott echoes this when
he compares Richardson's art with 'paintings which have been
very minutely laboured'.* Mario Praz in
The Hero in Eclipse in
Victorian Fiction ( 1 956) tends to overlook the eighteenth-century
^ See Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (1759), Chapter x, and Shaftesbury, Essay
on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), Part IV, section iii.
" The Rise of the Novel, p. 2 1
3 See below, Part III, p. 309.
* See below, Part III, pp. 266-7.
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