TALK AT THE MARTELLO TOWER
Our boatman with blue eyes and red cheeks is not more skilful with the oar than any of his fellows or more ready to give you change out of a shilling when he has rowed you across the harbour, though the notice board says the fare is twopence. But the ladies love primary colours, and we had to have him. We all three had our novels, and the blue eyes glanced at them, especially the yellow-back, with disfavour. He is a Swedenborgian—our little port, like most, is rich in out-of-the-way religions—and presumably regards all modern literature as on the wrong tack. It was not until we had parted with him at the Martello tower that we dared open our books.
Selina had grabbed Patty’s, the yellow-back, but she soon laid it down, and made a face. “My dear Patty,” she said wearily, “howcanyou go on reading Gyp? Don’t you see that the silly woman doesn’t even know how to tell her own silly stories?”
Patty slightly flushed. She knew Gyp was a countess and great-granddaughter of Mirabeau-Tonneau, and felt it was almost Bolshevist manners to call so well-born a woman silly. Nothing could have been more frigid than her “What on earth do you mean, Selina?”
“I mean,” said Selina, “that the poor woman is dreadfullyvieux jeu. I’m not thinking of her social puppets, her vicious clubmen, her languid swells, her anti-Semite Hebrews, her fashionable ladies who are no better than they should be though, goodness knows, these are old-fashioned enough. She began making them before I was born.” (Selina is no chicken, but it was horrid of Patty to raise her eyebrows.) “What I mean is, that she is at the old worn-out game of playing the omniscient author. Here she is telling you not only what Josette said and did when La Réole attacked her, but what La Réole said and did when Josette had left him, and so on. She ‘goes behind’ everybody, tells you what is inside everybody’s head. Why can’t she take her point of view, and stick to it? Wasn’t her obvious point of view Josette’s? Then she should have told us nothing about the other people but what Josette could know or divine about them.”
“Ah, Selina,” I interrupted, “your ‘goes behind’ gives you away. You’ve been reading Henry James’s letters.”
“Like everybody else,” she snapped.
“Why, to be sure, oh Jacobite Selina, but one may read them without taking their æsthetics for law and gospel. I know that the dear man lectured Mrs. Humphry Ward about the ‘point of view,’ when she was writing ‘Elinor,’ and got, I fancy, rather a tart answer for his pains. But you are more intransigent than the master. For he admittedthat the point of view was all according to circumstances, and that some circumstances—for instance, a big canvas—made ‘omniscience’ inevitable. What about Balzac and Tolstoy? Both took the omniscient line, and, as novelists, are not exactly to be sneezed at.”
“Yes, but Gyp’s isn’t a big canvas,” said Selina, “and it seems to men’en déplaise à votre seigneurie, that this precious story of hers called aloud for Josette’s point of view, and nothing but Josette’s. She is the one decent woman in the book, according to Gyp’s queer standards of decency” (Patty sniffed), “and the whole point, so far as I can make out, is the contrast of her decent mind with the highly indecent people round her. She is as innocent as Maisie, but a Maisie grown up and married. What a chance for another ‘What Maisie knew’!”
“I only wishIknew what you two are talking about,” pouted Patty.
“That is not necessary, dear child,” I said, in my best avuncular manner. “You are a Maisie yourself—a Maisie who reads French novels. But, Selina, dear, look at your own Henry James’s own practice. He didn’t always choose his point of view and stick to it. He chose two in ‘The Golden Bowl,’ and three in ‘The Wings of the Dove,’ and I’m hanged if I know whether he took several, or none at all, in ‘The Awkward Age.’”
“Well,” rejoined Selina, “and isn’t that just why those books don’t quite come off? Don’t you feelthat ‘The Golden Bowl’ is not one book but two, and that ‘The Wings’ is almost as kaleidoscopic” (Patty gasped) “as ‘The Ring and the Book’? I mentioned ‘Maisie,’ but after all that was atour de force, it seemed to have been done for a wager. If you challenge me to give you real perfection, why, take ‘The Ambassadors’ and ‘The Spoils of Poynton.’ Was ever the point of view held more tight? Everything seen through Strether’s eyes, everything through Fleda’s!”
“Oh, I grant you the success of the method there, but, dear Selina” (I had lit my pipe and felt equal to out-arguing a non-smoker in the long run), “let us distinguish.” (Patty strolled away with her Gyp while we distinguished.) “The method of Henry James was good for Henry James. What was the ruling motive of his people? Curiosity about one another’s minds. Now, if he had just told us their minds, straightway, by ‘getting behind’ each of them in turn, in the ‘omniscient’ style, there would have been no play of curiosity, no chance for it even to begin, the cat would have been out of the bag. By putting his point of view inside one of his people and steadily keeping it fixed there, he turns all the other people into mere appearances—just as other people are for each one of us in real life. We have to guess and to infer what is in their minds, we make mistakes and correct them; sometimes they purposely mislead us. This is rather a nuisance, perhaps, in the real world of action, where ourcuriosity must have a ‘business end’ to it; but it is (for those who like it, as you and I do, Selina) immense fun in the world of fiction.”
“Now,” interjected Selina, “you are talking! That is precisely my case.”
“Stop a minute, Selina. I said the method was good for the writer whose temperament it suited. But so are other methods for other temperaments. You may tell your story all in letters, if you are a Richardson, or with perpetual digressions and statements that you are telling a story, if you are a Fielding or a Thackeray, or autobiographically, if your autobiography is a ‘Copperfield’ or a ‘Kidnapped.’ Every author, I suggest, is a law to himself. And I see no reason why we should bar ‘omniscience,’ as you apparently want to. Why forbid the novelist the historian’s privilege? Why rule out the novel which is a history of imaginary facts?”
“I can’t quite see Gyp as a historian,” said Selina.
“No more can I, thank goodness,” said Patty.
And so we were rowed back to the jetty, and the blue eyes didn’t blink over half-a-crown under the very notice board.