Now with regard to Harry Richmond, ostensibly it _is_ rather like a chronicle of romantic adventure--not formless, far from it, but freely flowing as a saga, with its illegitimate dash of blood-royal and its roaring old English squire-archy and its speaking statue and its quest of the princess; it _contains_ a saga, and even an exceedingly fantastic one. But Harry Richmond is a deeply compacted book, and mixed with its romance there is a novel of another sort. For the fantasy it is only necessary that Harry himself should give a picture of his experience, of all that he has seen and done; on this side the story is in the succession of rare, strange, poetic events, with the remarkable people concerned in them. But the aim of the book goes far beyond this; it is to give the portrait of Harry Richmond, and that is the real reason why the story is told. All these striking episodes, which Harry is so well placed to describe, are not merely pictures that pass, a story that Meredith sets him to tell because it is of high interest on its own account. Meredith's purpose is that the hero himself shall be in the middle of the book, with all the interest of the story reflected back upon his character, his temper, his growth. The subject is Harry Richmond, a youth of spirit; the subject is _not_ the cycle of romance through which he happens to have passed. In the case of Copperfield, to go back to him, Dickens had exactly the opposite intention. He found his book in the expanse of life which his David had travelled over; Dickens's only care was to represent the wonderful show that filled his hero's memory. The whole phantasmagoria is the subject of the book, a hundred men and women, populating David's past and keeping his pen at full speed in the single-minded effort to portray them. Alone among the assembly David himself is scarcely of the subject at all. He has substance enough, and amply, to be a credible, authoritative reporter--Dickens sees well to that; but he is a shadow compared with Betsy Trotwood and the Micawbers and the Heeps, with all the hundred of them, and there is no call for him to be more. In this respect his story, again, is contrasted with that of Pendennis, which is, or is evidently meant to be in the first place, a portrait of the young man--or with the story of Tom Jones perhaps, though in this case more doubtfully, for Fielding's shrewd eye was apt to be drawn away from the young man to the bustle of life around him. But in Copperfield the design is very plain and is consistently pursued; it would be a false patch in the story if at any point David attracted more attention to himself than to the people of his vision--he himself, as a child, being of course one of them, a little creature that he sees in the distance, but he himself, in later years, becoming merely the mirror of his experience, which he not unnaturally considers worthy of being pictured for its own sake.