IIICONSTRUCTING A NOVEL
IIICONSTRUCTING A NOVEL
Forconvenience of division it may be said that the novel of psychology was born in France, the novel of manners in England, and that out of their union in the glorious brain of Balzac sprang that strange chameleon-creature, the modern novel, which changes its shape and colour with every subject on which it rests.
In the general muster the novel of manners will be found to have played the most important part; and here English influences preponderate. If innate aptitude were enough for the producing of a work of art, the flowering of the English novel of manners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries might have surpassed in quality, and intrinsic importance, that of all other schools.
Balzac’s debt to Scott has already been touched on; that of the earlier French fictionto Richardson and Sterne is a commonplace in the history of the novel. But the true orientation of English fiction was away from the fine-drawn analysis of Richardson, the desultory humours of Sterne, in the direction of an ample and powerful novel of manners. Smollett and Fielding brought fresh air and noise, the rough-and-tumble of the street, the ribaldry of the tavern, into the ceremonious drawing-rooms depicted by Richardson and later by Miss Burney. The great, the distinguishing gift of the English novelist was a homely simplicity combined with an observation at once keen and indulgent; good humour was the atmosphere and irony the flavour of this great school of observers, from Fielding to George Eliot.
Till the day of Jane Austen it had been possible to treat without apology of the mixed affair of living; but Jane Austen’s delicate genius flourished on the very edge of a tidal wave of prudery. Already Scott was averting his eyes from facts on which the maiden novelist in her rectory parlour had looked unperturbed;when Thackeray and Dickens rose in their might the chains were forged and the statues draped. In the melancholy preface to “Pendennis†Thackeray puts the case bitterly and forcibly: “Since the author ofTom Joneswas buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MANâ€; and the stunted conclusion of a tale so largely begun testifies to the benumbing effect of the new restrictions. The novels of Charlotte Brontë, which now seem in some respects so romantically unreal, were denounced for sensuality and immorality; and for a time English fiction was in danger of dwindling to the pale parables of Miss Mulock and Miss Yonge.
But for this reaction against truth, this sudden fear of touching on any of the real issues of the human comedy and tragedy, Thackeray’s natural endowment would have placed him with the very greatest; Trollope might conceivably have been a lesser Jane Austen; and George Eliot, perhaps born with the richest gifts of any English novelistsince Thackeray, might have poured out her treasures of wit and irony and tenderness without continually pausing to denounce and exhort.
But the artist depends on atmosphere for the proper development of his gift; and all these novelists were cramped by the hazard of a social convention from which their continental contemporaries had the good fortune to escape. The artist of other races has always been not only permitted but enjoined to see life whole; and it is this, far more than any superiority of genius, that lifts Balzac, Stendhal and Tolstoy so high above even Thackeray when the universal values are to be appraised. The great continental novelists are all the avowed debtors of their English predecessors; they took the English novel of manners in its amplitude, its merriment and pathos, and in their hands “the thing became a trumpet.â€
In one respect the English novelists are still supreme; and that is in the diffusion of good humour, good manners one might almostsay, which envelops their comedy and tragedy. Much that is savage and acrimonious in the French, dolorous and overwrought in the Russians, is strained away through this fine Englishbonhomie, leaving a clear, bright draught, not very intoxicating or even stimulating, but refreshing and full of a lasting savour. Nor does this prevalent good humour hinder the full expression of tragedy; it helps rather to extract the final bitterness from certain scenes in “Pendennis†and “Vanity Fair,†in “Middlemarch†and the “Chronicles of Barsetshire.†The last years of Lydgate, the last hour of Mrs. Proudie, seem the more terrible for being muffled in a secure and decent atmosphere of fair play and plum-pudding.
Since then all the restraints of prudery which hampered the English novelists of the nineteenth century have come down with a crash, and the “now-that-it-can-be-told-school†(as some one has wittily named it) has rushed to the opposite excess of dirt-for-dirt’s sake, from which no real work of arthas ever sprung. Such a reaction was inevitable. No one who remembers that Butler’s great novel, “The Way of All Flesh,†remained unpublished for over twenty years because it dealt soberly but sincerely with the chief springs of human conduct can wonder that laborious monuments of school-boy pornography are now mistaken for works of genius by a public ignorant of Rabelais and unaware of Apuleius. The balance will right itself with the habit of freedom. The new novelists will learn that it is even more necessary to see life steadily than to recount it whole; and by that time a more thoughtful public may be ripe for the enjoyment of a riper art.
Mostnovels, for convenient survey, may be grouped under one or the other of three types: manners, character (or psychology) and adventure. These designations may be thought to describe the different methods sufficiently; but as a typical example of each,“Vanity Fair†for the first, “Madame Bovary†for the second, and, for the third, “Rob Roy†or “The Master of Ballantrae,†might be named.
This grouping must be further stretched to include as subdivisions what might be called the farcical novel of manners, the romance and the philosophical romance; and immediately “Pickwick†for the first, “Harry Richmond,†“La Chartreuse de Parme†or “Lorna Doone†for the second, and “Wilhelm Meister†or “Marius the Epicurean†for the third category, suggest themselves to the reader.
Lastly, in the zone of the unclassifiable float such enchanting hybrids as “John Inglesant,†“Lavengro,†and that great Swiss novel, “Der Grüne Heinrich,†in which fantasy, romance and the homeliest realities are so inimitably mingled. It will be noticed that in the last two groups—of romance pure or hybrid—but one French novel has been cited. The French genius, which made “Romanticism†its own (after borrowing it fromEngland), has seldom touched even the hem of Romance: Tristan and Iseult and their long line of descendants come from Broceliande, not from the Ile de France.
Before going farther it should be added that, in a study of the modern novel, the last-named of the three principal groups, the novel of adventure, is the least important because the least modern. That this implies any depreciation of the type in itself will not for a moment be admitted by a writer whose memory rings with the joyous clatter of Dumas the elder, Herman Melville, Captain Marryat and Stevenson; but their gallant yarns might have been sung to the minstrel’s harp before Roland and his peers, and told in Babylonian bazaars to Joseph and his Brethren: the tale of adventure is essentially the parent-stock of all subsequent varieties of the novel, and its modern tellers have introduced few innovations in what was already a perfect formula, created in the dawn of time by the world-old appeal: “Tell us another story.â€
All attempts at classification may seem to belong to school-examinations and text-books, and to reduce the matter to the level of the famous examination-paper which, in reference to Wordsworth’s “O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, or but a wandering voice?†instructed the student to “state alternative preferred, with reasons for your choice.†In a sense, classification is always arbitrary and belittling; yet to the novelist’s mind such distinctions represent organic realities. It does not much matter under what heading a school-girl is taught to class “Vanity Fairâ€; but from the creator’s point of view classification means the choice of a manner and of an angle of vision, and it mattered greatly that Thackeray knew just how he meant to envisage his subject, which might have been dealt with merely as the tale of an adventuress, or merely as the romance of an honest couple, or merely as an historical novel, and is all of these, and how much more besides—is, indeed, all that its title promises.
The very fact that so many subjects containthe elements of two or three different types of novel makes it one of the novelist’s first cares to decide which method he means to use. Balzac, for instance, gives us in “Le Père Goriot†and in “Eugénie Grandet†two different ways of dealing with subjects that contain, after all, much the same elements; in the one, englobing his tragic father in a vast social panorama, in the other projecting his miser (who should have given the tale its name) in huge Molièresque relief against the narrow background of a sleepy provincial town peopled by three or four carefully-subordinated characters.
There is another kind of hybrid novel, but in which the manner rather than the matter may be so characterized; the novel written almost entirely in dialogue, after the style, say, of “Gyp’s†successful tales. It is open to discussion whether any particular class of subjects calls for this treatment. Henry James thought so, and the oddly-contrived “Awkward Age†was a convinced attempt on his part to write “a little thing in the manner ofGypâ€â€”a resemblance which few readers would have perceived had he not pointed it out. Strangely enough, he was persuaded that certain subjects not falling into the stage-categories require nevertheless to be chattered rather than narrated; and, more strangely still, that “The Awkward Age,†that delicate and subtle case, all half-lights and shades, all innuendoes, gradations and transitions, was typically made for such treatment.
His hyper-sensitiveness to any comment on his own work made it difficult to discuss the question with him; but his greatest admirers will probably feel that “The Awkward Age†lost more than it gained by being powdered into dialogue, and that, had it been treated as a novel instead of a kind of hybrid play, the obligation of “straight†narrative might have compelled him to face and elucidate the central problem instead of suffering it to lose itself in a tangle of talk. At any rate, such an instance will probably not do much to convince either novelists or their readers of theadvantage of the “talked†novel. As a matter of fact, the mode of presentation to the reader, that central difficulty of the whole affair, must always be determined by the nature of the subject; and the subject which instantly calls for dialogue seems as instantly to range itself among those demanding for their full setting-forth the special artifices of the theatre.
The immense superiority of the novel for any subject in which “situation†is not paramount is just that freedom, that ease in passing from one form of presentation to another, and that possibility of explaining and elucidating by the way, which the narrative permits. Convention is the first necessity of all art; but there seems no reason for adding the shackles of another form to those imposed by one’s own. Narrative, with all its suppleness and variety, its range from great orchestral effects to the frail vibration of a single string, should furnish the substance of the novel; dialogue, that precious adjunct, should never be more than an adjunct, and one to be usedas skilfully and sparingly as the drop of condiment which flavours a whole dish.
The use of dialogue in fiction seems to be one of the few things about which a fairly definite rule may be laid down. It should be reserved for the culminating moments, and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore. This lifting and scattering of the wave, the coruscation of the spray, even the mere material sight of the page broken into short, uneven paragraphs, all help to reinforce the contrast between such climaxes and the smooth effaced gliding of the narrative intervals; and the contrast enhances that sense of the passage of time for the producing of which the writer has to depend on his intervening narration. Thus the sparing use of dialogue not only serves to emphasize the crises of the tale but to give it as a whole a greater effect of continuous development.
Another argument against the substitution of dialogue for narrative is the wastefulnessand round-aboutness of the method. The greater effect of animation, of presentness, produced by its excessive use will not help the reader through more than half the book, whatever its subject; after that he will perceive that he is to be made to pay before the end for his too facile passage through the earlier chapters. The reason is inherent in the method. When, in real life, two or more people are talking together, all that is understood between them is left out of their talk; but when the novelist uses conversation as a means not only of accentuating but of carrying on his tale, his characters have to tell each other many things that each already knows the other knows. To avoid the resulting shock of improbability, their dialogue must be so diluted with irrelevant touches of realistic commonplace, with what might be described as by-talk, that, as in the least good of Trollope’s tales, it rambles on for page after page before the reader, resignedly marking time, arrives, bewilderedand weary, at a point to which one paragraph of narrative could have carried him.
Inwriting of the short story I may have seemed to dwell too much on the need of considering every detail in its plan and development; yet the short story is an improvisation, the temporary shelter of a flitting fancy, compared to the four-square and deeply-founded monument which the novel ought to be.
It is not only that the scale is different; it is because of the reasons for its being so. If the typical short story be the foreshortening of a dramatic climax connecting two or more lives, the typical novel usually deals with the gradual unfolding of a succession of events divided by intervals of time, and in which many people, in addition to the principal characters, play more or less subordinate parts. No need now to take in sail and clear the decks; the novelist must carry asmuch canvas and as many passengers as his subject requires and his seamanship permits.
Still, the novel-theme is distinguished from that suited to the short story not so much by the number of characters presented as by the space required to mark the lapse of time or to permit the minute analysis of successive states of feeling. The latter distinction, it should be added, holds good even when the states of feeling are all contained in one bosom, and crowded into a short period, as they are in “The Kreutzer Sonata.†No one would think of classing “The Kreutzer Sonata,†or “Ivan Ilyitch,†or “Adolphe,†among short stories; and such instances prove the difficulty of laying down a hard-and-fast distinction between the forms. The final difference lies deeper. A novel may be all about one person, and about no more than a few hours in that person’s life, and yet not be reducible to the limits of a short story without losing all significance and interest. It depends on the character of the subject chosen.
Since the novel-about-one-person has been touched on, it may be well, before going farther, to devote a short parenthesis to its autobiographical or “subjective†variety. In the study of novel-technique one might almost set aside the few masterpieces in this class, such as the “Princesse de Clèves,†“Adolphe†and “Dominique,†as not novels at all, any more than Musset’s “Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle†is a novel. They are, in fact, all fragments of autobiography by writers of genius; and the autobiographical gift does not seem very closely related to that of fiction. In the case of the authors mentioned, none but Madame de La Fayette ever published another novel, and her other attempts were without interest. In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation. It exists on the lowest scale, and, in the art of fiction, belongs as much to the producer of “railway novels†as to Balzac, Thackeray or Tolstoy; yet it almost always marks the great creative artist. Whatever a man has it in him to do really well heusually keeps on doing with an indestructible persistency.
There is another sign which sets apart the born novelist from the authors of self-confessions in novel-form; that is, the absence of the objective faculty in the latter. The subjective writer lacks the power of getting far enough away from his story to view it as a whole and relate it to its setting; his minor characters remain the mere satellites of the principal personage (himself), and disappear when not lit up by their central luminary.
Such books are sometimes masterpieces; but if by the term “art of fiction†be understood the creation of imaginary characters and the invention of their imaginary experiences—and there seems no more convenient definition—then the autobiographical tale is not strictly a novel, since no objectively creative effort has gone to its making.
It does not follow that born novelists never write autobiographical novels. Instances to the contrary will occur to every one and none more obvious than that of“The Kreutzer Sonata.†There is a gulf between such a book and “Adolphe.†Tolstoy’s tale, though almost avowedly the study of his own tortured soul, is as objective as Othello. The magic transposition has taken place; in reading the story we do not feel ourselves to be in a resuscitatedreal world(a sort of Tussaud Museum of wax figures with actual clothes on), but in that other world which is the image of life transposed in the brain of the artist, a world wherein the creative breath has made all things new. If one happened to begin one’s acquaintance with Tolstoy by reading “The Kreutzer Sonata†one would not need to be told that it was the creation of a brain working objectively, a brain which had produced, or was likely to produce, other novels of a wholly different kind; whereas of such books as “Dominique†or “Adolphe,†were one to light on them as unpreparedly, one would say: “This is not the invention of a novelist but the self-analysis of a man of genius.â€
There is one famous book which might bedescribed as the link between the real novel and the autobiography in novel-disguise. This is Goethe’s “Werther.†Here a youth of genius, as yet unpractised in the art of fiction, has related, under the thinnest of concealments, the story of his own unhappy love. The tale is intensely subjective. The hero is never onceseen from the outside, the minor figures are hardly drawn out of the limbo of the unrealized; yet how instantly the difference between “Werther†and “Adolphe†declares itself! The latter tale is completely self-contained; it never suggests in the writer the power or the desire to project a race of imaginary characters. “Werther†does. Every page thrills with the dawning gift of creation. The lover has not been too much absorbed in his own anguish to turn its light on things external to him. The young Goethe who has noted Charlotte’s way of cutting the bread-and-butter for her little brothers and sisters, and set down the bourgeois humours and the sylvan charm of the ball in the forest, is already a novelist.
Thequestion of form—already defined as the order, in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped—is, for obvious reasons, harder to deal with in the novel than in the short story, and most difficult in the novel of manners, with its more crowded stage, and its continual interweaving of individual with social analysis.
The English novelists of the early nineteenth century were still farther enslaved by the purely artificial necessity of the double plot. Two parallel series of adventures, in which two separate groups of people were concerned, sometimes with hardly a link between the two, and always without any deep organic connection, were served up in alternating sections. Throughout the novels of Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope and the majority of their contemporaries, this tedious and senseless convention persists, checking the progress of each series of events and distracting the reader’s attention. The artificialtrick of keeping two stories going like a juggler’s ball is entirely different from the attempt to follow the interwoven movements of typical social groups, as Thackeray did in “Vanity Fair†and “The Newcomes,†Balzac in “Le Père Goriot.†In these cases the separate groups, either families or larger units, in a sense impersonatethe protagonists of the tale, and their fates are as closely interwoven as those of the two or three persons on the narrow stage of a tale like “Silas Marner.â€
The double plot has long since vanished, and the “plot†itself, in the sense of an elaborate puzzle into which a given number of characters have to be arbitrarily fitted, has gone with it to the lumber-room of discarded conventions. But traces of the parallel story linger in the need often felt by young writers of crowding their scene with supernumeraries. The temptation is specially great in composing the novel of manners. If one is undertaking to depict a “section of life,†how avoid a crowded stage? The answer is, bychoosing as principal characters figures so typical that each connotes a whole section of the social background. It is the unnecessary characters who do the crowding, who confuse the reader by uselessly dispersing his attention; but even the number of subordinate yet necessary characters may be greatly reduced by making the principal figures so typical that they adumbrate most of the others.
The traditions of the Théâtre Français used to require that the number of objects on the stage—chairs, tables, even to a glass of water on a table—should be limited to the actual requirements of the drama: the chairs must all be sat in, the table carry some object necessary to the action, the glass of water or decanter of wine be a part of the drama.
The stage-realism introduced from England a generation ago submerged these scenic landmarks under a flood of irrelevant upholstery; but as guides in the labyrinth of composition they are still standing, as necessary to the novelist as to the playwright. Inboth cases a far profounder effect is produced by the penetrating study of a few characters than by the multiplying of half-drawn figures. Neither novelist nor playwright should ever venture on creating a character without first following it out to the end of the projected tale and being sure that the latter will be the poorer for its absence. Characters whose tasks have not been provided for them in advance are likely to present as embarrassing problems as other types of the unemployed.
In the number of characters introduced, as much as in the scenic details given, relevance is the first, the arch, necessity. And characters and scenic detail are in fact one to the novelist who has fully assimilated his material. The moon-enchanted hollow of Wilming Weir in “Sandra Belloni†is as much the landscape of Emilia’s soul as of a corner of England; it was one of George Meredith’s distinguishing merits that he always made his art as a landscape-painter contribute to the interpretation of his tale, so that such scenes as that of Wilming Weir, the sunrisefrom the top of Monte Motterone in the opening chapter of “Vittoria,†and the delicious wall-flower-coloured picture of the farm-house in “Harry Richmond,†are all necessary parts of the novels in which they figure, and above all are seen as the peopleto whom they happenedwould have seen them.
This leads to another important principle. The impression produced by a landscape, a street or a house should always, to the novelist, be an event in the history of a soul, and the use of the “descriptive passage,†and its style, should be determined by the fact that it must depict only what the intelligence concerned would have noticed, and always in terms within the register of that intelligence. Two instances, illustrating respectively the observance and the neglect of this rule, may be cited from the novels of Mr. Hardy: the first, that memorable evocation of Egdon Heath by night, as Eustacia Vye looks forth on it from Rainbarrow; the other, the painfully detailed description, in all its geological and agricultural details,of the Wessex vale through which another of Mr. Hardy’s heroines, unseeing, wretched, and incapable at any time of noting such particularities as it has amused her creator to set down, flies blindly to her doom.
Thetwo central difficulties of the novel—both of which may at first appear purely technical—are still to be considered. They have to do with the choice of the point from which the subject is to be seen, and with the attempt to produce on the reader the effect of the passage of time. Both may “appear purely technicalâ€; but even were it possible to draw a definite line between the technique of a work of art and its informing spirit, the points in question go too deep to be so classed. They are rooted in the subject; and—as always, in the last issue—the subject itself must determine and limit their office.
It was remarked in the chapter on the short story that the same experience never happensto any two people, and that the story-teller’s first care, after the choice of a subject, is to decide to which of his characters the episode in question happened, since it could not have happened in that particular way to more than one. Applied to the novel this may seem a hard saying, since the longer passage of time and more crowded field of action presuppose, on the part of the visualizing character, a state of omniscience and omnipresence likely to shake the reader’s sense of probability. The difficulty is most often met by shifting the point of vision from one character to another, in such a way as to comprehend the whole history and yet preserve the unity of impression. In the interest of this unity it is best to shift as seldom as possible, and to let the tale work itself out from not more than two (or at most three) angles of vision, choosing as reflecting consciousnesses persons either in close mental and moral relation to each other, or discerning enough to estimate each other’s parts in the drama, so that the latter, even viewed from differentangles, always presents itself to the readeras a whole.
The choice of such reflectors is not easy; still more arduous is the task of determining at what point each is to be turned on the scene. The only possible rule seems to be that when things happen which the first reflector cannot, with any show of probability, be aware of, or is incapable of reacting to, even if aware, then another, an adjoining, consciousness is required to take up the tale.
Thus drily stated, the formula may seem pedantic and arbitrary; but it will be found to act of itself in the hands of the novelist who has so let his subject ripen in his mind that the characters are as close to him as his own flesh. To the novelist who lives among his creations in this continuous intimacy they should pour out their tale almost as if to a passive spectator.
The problem of the co-ordinating consciousness has visibly disturbed many novelists, and the different solutions attempted are full of interest and instruction. Each is ofcourse but another convention, and no convention is in itself objectionable, but becomes so only when wrongly used, as dirt, according to the happy definition, is only “matter in the wrong place.â€
Verisimilitude is the truth of art, and any convention which hinders the illusion is obviously in the wrong place. Few hinder it more than the slovenly habit of some novelists of tumbling in and out of their characters’ minds, and then suddenly drawing back to scrutinize them from the outside as the avowed Showman holding his puppets’ strings. All the greatest modern novelists have felt this, and sought, though often half-unconsciously, to find a way out of the difficulty. The most interesting experiments made in this respect have been those of James and Conrad, to both of whom—though in ways how different!—the novel was always by definition a work of art, and therefore worthy of the creator’s utmost effort.
James sought the effect of verisimilitude by rigorously confining every detail of hispicture to the range, and also to the capacity, of the eye fixed on it. “In the Cage†is a curiously perfect example of the experiment on a small scale, only one very restricted field of vision being permitted. In his longer and more eventful novels, where the transition from one consciousness to another became necessary, he contrived it with such unfailing ingenuity that the reader’s visual range was continuously enlarged by the substitution of a second consciousness whenever the boundaries of the first were exceeded. “The Wings of the Dove†gives an interesting example of these transitions. In “The Golden Bowl,†still unsatisfied, still in pursuit of an impossible perfection, he felt he must introduce a sort ofco-ordinating consciousnessdetached from, but including, the characters principally concerned. The same attempt to wrest dramatic forms to the uses of the novel that caused “The Awkward Age†to be written in dialogue seems to have suggested the creation of Colonel and Mrs. Assingham as a sort of Greek chorus to the tragedy of “TheGolden Bowl.†This insufferable and incredible couple spend their days in espionage and delation, and their evenings in exchanging the reports of their eaves’-dropping with a minuteness and precision worthy of Scotland Yard. The utter improbability of such conduct on the part of a dull-witted and frivolous couple in the rush of London society shows that the author created them for the sole purpose of revealing details which he could not otherwise communicate without lapsing into the character of the mid-Victorian novelist chatting with his readers of “my heroine†in the manner of Thackeray and Dickens. Convention for convention (and both are bad), James’s is perhaps even more unsettling to the reader’s confidence than the old-fashioned intrusion of the author among his puppets. Both ought to be avoided, and may be, as other great novels are there to prove.
Conrad’s preoccupation was the same, but he sought to solve it in another way, by creating what some one has aptly called a “hallof mirrors,†a series of reflecting consciousnesses, all belonging to people who are outside of the story but accidentally drawn into its current, and not, like the Assinghams, forced into it for the sole purpose of acting as spies and eaves’-droppers.
The method did not originate with Conrad. In that most perfectly-composed of all short stories, “La Grande Bretèche,†Balzac showed what depth, mystery, and verisimilitude may be given to a tale by causing it to be reflected, in fractions, in the minds of a series of accidental participants or mere lookers-on. The relator of the tale, casually detained in a provincial town, is struck by the ruinous appearance of one of its handsomest houses. He makes his way into the deserted garden, and is at once called on by a solicitor who informs him that, according to the will of the lately deceased owner, no one is to be permitted on the premises till fifty years after her death. The visitor, whose curiosity is naturally excited, next learns from the landlady of his inn that, though shehas never known the exact facts of the tragedy, she knows there has been one, and that a person whom she suspects of having played a part in it is actually lodged under her roof. From the landlady the narrator carries his enquiries to the maid-servant of the inn, who had been in the service of the dead lady, and who confides to him the dreadful scenes of which she was a helpless and horror-struck witness; and, grouping these fragments in his own more comprehending mind, he finally gives them to the reader in their ghastly completeness.
Even George Meredith, whose floods of improvisation seem to have been so rarely hampered by any concern as to the composition of his novels, was now and then visibly perplexed by the question of how to pass from the mind of one character to another without too violent a jolt to the reader. In one instance—in one of those “big scenes†which, as George Eliot said, “write themselvesâ€â€”he attempted, probably on the spur of the moment, a solution which proved admirablysuccessful—for that particular occasion. In the memorable talk in the course of which the inarticulate Rhoda Fleming and her tongue-tied suitor finally discover themselves to each other, the novelist, to show how tongue-tied both were, and yet convey the emotion beneath their halting monosyllables, hit on the device of putting in parenthesis, after each phrase, what the speaker was actually thinking. It is one of the great pages of the book; yet even in the enchantment of first reading it one is aware of admiring a mere acrobatic feat, a sort of breathlesschassé-croiséwhich could not have been kept up for another page without straining the reader’s patience and his sense of likelihood. Meredith was a genius, and his instinct for effect made him, at a crucial moment, stumble on a successful trick; but, because he was a genius, he did not prolong or repeat it.
The reason why such sudden changes from one mind to another are fatiguing and disillusioning was summed up—though for a differentpurpose—in a vivid phrase of George Eliot’s. It is in the chapter of “Middlemarch†which records the talk between Dorothea and Celia Brooke, after the latter’s first meeting with the austere and pompous Mr. Casaubon, whom her elder sister so unaccountably admires. The frivolous Celia is profoundly disappointed: she finds Mr. Casaubon very ugly. Dorothea, at this, haughtily lets drop that he reminds her of the portraits of Locke. Celia: “Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?†Dorothea: “Oh, I daresay! when people of a certain sort looked at him.â€
That answer sums up the whole dilemma. Before beginning his tale, the novelist must decide whether it is to be seen through eyes given to noting white moles, or to discovering “the visionary butterfly alit†on faces so disfigured. He cannot have it both ways and still hope to persuade his reader.
The other difficulty is that of communicating the effect of the gradual passage of time in such a way that the modifying and maturingof the characters shall seem not an arbitrary sleight-of-hand but the natural result of growth in age and experience. This is the great mystery of the art of fiction. The secret seems incommunicable; one can only conjecture that it has to do with the novelist’s own deep belief in his characters and what he is telling about them. Heknowsthat this and that befell them, and that in the interval between this and that the months and years have continued their slow task of erosion or accretion; and he conveys this knowledge by some subterranean process as hard to seize in action as the growth of a plant. A study of the great novelists—and especially of Balzac, Thackeray, and Tolstoy—will show that such changes are suggested, are arrived at, in the inconspicuous transitional pages of narrative that lead from climax to climax. One of the means by which the effect is produced is certainly that of not fearing to go slowly, to keep down the tone of the narrative, to be as colourless and quiet as life often is in the intervals between its high moments.
Another difficulty connected with this one is that of keeping so firm a hold on the main lines of one’s characters that they emerge modified and yet themselves from the ripening or disintegrating years. Tolstoy had this gift to a supreme degree. Wherever in the dense forest of “War and Peace†a character reappears, often after an interval so long that the ear has almost lostthe sound to which he rhymes, he is at once recognized as the same, profoundly the same, yet scored by new lines of suffering and experience. Natacha, grown into the fat slovenlymère-de-familleof the last chapters, is incredibly like and yet different to the phantom of delight who first captivated Prince Andrew; and the Prince himself, in those incomparable pages devoted to his long illness, where one watches the very process of dematerialization, the detachment from earthly things happening as naturally as the fall of a leaf, is the same as the restless and unhappy man who appears with his pathetic irritating little wife at the evening party of the first chapter.
Becky Sharp, Arthur Pendennis, Dorothea Casaubon, Lydgate, Charles Bovary—with what sure and patient touches their growth and decline are set forth! And how mysteriously yet unmistakably, as they reappear after each interval, the sense is conveyed that therehasbeen an interval, not in moral experience only but in the actual lapse of the seasons! The producing of this impression is indeed the central mystery of the art. To its making go patience, meditation, concentration, all the quiet habits of mind now so little practised, so seldom inculcated; and to these must be added the final imponderable, genius, without which the rest is useless, and which, conversely, would be unusable without the rest.
Theevening party with which “War and Peace†begins is one of the most triumphant examples in fiction of the difficult art of “situating†the chief actors in the opening chapter of what is to be an exceptionally crowdednovel. No reader is likely to forget, or to confuse the one with the other, the successive arrivals at that dull and trivial St. Petersburg reception; Tolstoy with one mighty sweep gathers up all his principal characters and sets them before us in action. Very different—though so notable an achievement in its way—is the first chapter of “The Karamazoff Brothers†(in the English or German translation—for the current French translation inexplicably omits it). In this chapter Dostoievsky has hung a gallery of portraits against a blank wall. He describes all the members of the Karamazoff family, one after another, with merciless precision and infernal insight. But there they remain hanging—or standing. The reader is told all about them, but is not allowed to surprise them in action. The story about them begins afterward, whereas in “War and Peace†the first paragraph leads into the thick of the tale, and every phrase, every gesture, carries it on with that slow yet sweeping movement of which Tolstoy alone was capable.
Many thickly-peopled novels begin more gradually—like “Vanity Fair,†for example—and introduce their characters in carefully-ordered succession. The process is obviously simpler, and in certain cases as effective. The morning stroll of M. and Mme. Reynal and their little boys, in the first chapter of “Le Rouge et le Noir,†sounds a note sufficiently portentous; and so does Major Pendennis’s solitary breakfast. In a general way there is much to be said for a quiet opening to a long and crowded novel; though the novelist might prefer to be able to fling all his characters on the boards at once, with Tolstoy’s regal prodigality. There is no fixed rule about this, or about any other method; each, in the art of fiction, to justify itself has only to succeed. But to succeed, the method must first of all suit the subject, must find its account, as best it can, with the difficulties peculiar to each situation.
The questionwhere to beginis the next to confront the novelist; and the art of seizing on the right moment is even more importantthan that of being able to present a large number of characters at the outset.
Here again no general rule can be laid down. One subject may require to be treated from the centre, in the fashion dear to Henry James, with its opening in the heart of the action, and retrospective vistas radiating away from it on all sides, while others—of which “Henry Esmond†is one of the most beautiful examples—would lose all their bloom were they not allowed to ripen almost imperceptibly under the reader’s absorbed contemplation. Balzac, in his preface to “La Chartreuse de Parmeâ€â€”almost the only public recognition of Stendhal’s genius during the latter’s life-time—reproves the author for beginning the book before its real beginning. Balzac knew well enough what the world would have lost had that opening picture of Waterloo been left out; but he insists that it is no part of the story Stendhal had set out to tell, and sums up with the illuminating phrase: “M. Beyle has chosen a subject [the Waterloo episode]which is real innature but not in art.†That is, being out of place in that particular work of art, it loses its realityas artand remains merely a masterly study of a corner of a battle-field, the greatest the world was to know till Tolstoy’s, but no part of a composition, as Tolstoy’s always were.
Thelength of a novel, more surely even than any of its other qualities, needs to be determined by the subject. The novelist should not concern himself beforehand with the abstract question of length, should not decide in advance whether he is going to write a long or a short novel; but in the act of composition he must never cease to bear in mind that one should always be able to say of a novel: “It might have been longer,†never: “It need not have been so long.â€
Length, naturally, is not so much a matter of pages as of the mass and quality of what they contain. It is obvious that a mediocre book is always too long, and that a great oneusually seems too short. But beyond this question of quality and weightiness lies the more closely relevant one of the development which this or that subject requires, the amount of sail it will carry. The great novelists have always felt this, and, within an inch or two, have cut their cloth accordingly.
Mr. A. C. Bradley, in his book on Shakespeare’s tragedies, threw a new and striking light on the question of length. In analyzing “Macbeth,†which is so much shorter than Shakespeare’s other tragedies that previous commentators had always assumed the text to be incomplete, he puts the following questions: If the text is incomplete, at what points are the supposed lacunæ to be found? Does any one, on first reading “Macbeth,†feel it to be too short, or even notice that it is appreciably less long than the other tragedies? And if not, is it not probable that we have virtually the whole play before us, and that Shakespeare knew he had made it as long as the subject warranted and the nervesof his audience could stand? Whether or not the argument be thought convincing in the given case, it is an admirable example of the spirit in which works of art should be judged, and of the only system of weights and measures applicable to them.
Tolstoy gave to “Ivan Ilyitch†just enough development to make a parable of universal application out of the story of an insignificant man’s death. A little more, and he would have dropped into the fussy and meticulous, and smothered his meaning under unnecessary detail. Maupassant was another writer who had an unerring sense for the amount of sail his subjects could carry; and his work contains no better proof of it than the tale of “Yvetteâ€â€”that harrowing little record of one of the ways in which the bloom may be brushed from a butterfly.
Henry James, in “The Turn of the Screw,†showed the same perfect sense of proportion. He had ventured to expand into a short novel the kind of tale usually imposed on the imagination in a single flash of horror; but hisinstinct told him that to go farther was impossible. The posthumous fragment, “The Sense of the Past,†shows that he was again experimenting with the supernatural as a subject for a long novel; and in this instance one feels that he was about to risk over-burdening his theme. When I read M. Maeterlinck’s book on the bee (which had just made a flight into fame as high as that of the insect it celebrates) I was first dazzled, then oppressed, by the number and the choice of his adjectives and analogies. Every touch was effective, every comparison striking; but when I had assimilated them all, and remade out of them the ideal BEE, that animal had become a winged elephant. The lesson was salutary for a novelist.
The great writers of fiction—Balzac, Tolstoy, Thackeray, George Eliot (how one has to return to them!)—all had a sense for the proportion of their subjects, and knew that the great argument requires space. There are few things more exquisite in minor English verse than Ben Jonson’s epitaph on SalathielPavy; but “Paradise Lost†needs more room, and the fact that it does is one of the elements of its greatness. The point is to know at the start if one has in hand a Salathiel Pavy theme or a “Paradise Lost†one.
In no novelist was this instinct more unerring than in the impeccable Jane Austen. Never is there any danger of finding any of her characters out of proportion or rattling around in their setting. The same may be said of Tolstoy, at the opposite end of the scale. His epic gift—the power of immediately establishing the right proportion between his characters and the scope of their adventure—seems never to have failed him. “War and Peace†and Flaubert’s “Education Sentimentale†are two of the longest of modern novels. Flaubert too was endowed with the rare instinct of scale; but there are moments when even his most ardent admirers feel that “L’Education Sentimentale†is too long for its carrying-power: whereas in the very first pages of “War and Peace†Tolstoy manages to establish the right relationbetween subject and length. But there is another difference between the great novel and the merely long one. Even the longest and most seemingly desultory novels of such writers as Balzac, Flaubert and Tolstoy follow a prescribed orbit; they are true to the eternal effort of art to complete what in life seems incoherent and fragmentary. This sense of the great theme sweeping around on its allotted track in the “most ancient heavens†is communicated on the first page of such novels as “War and Peace†and “L’Education Sentimentaleâ€; it is the lack of this intrinsic form that marks the other kind of long novel as merely long.
M. Romain Rolland’s “Jean-Christophe†might be cited as a case in point. In a succession of volumes, planned at the outset as parts of a great whole, he tells a series of consecutive soul-adventures, none without interest; but such hint of scale as there is in the first volume seems to warrant no more than that one, and the reader feels that if there are more there is no reason why thereshould not be any number. This impression is produced not by the lack of a plan, but of that subtler kind of composition which, inspired by the sense of form, and deducing the length of a book from the importance of its argument, creates figures proportioned to their setting, and launches them with a sure hand on their destined path.
The question of the length of a novel naturally leads to the considering of its end; but of this there is little to be said that has not already been implied by the way, since no conclusion can be right which is not latent in the first page. About no part of a novel should there be a clearer sense of inevitability than about its end; any hesitation, any failure to gather up all the threads, shows that the author has not let his subject mature in his mind. A novelist who does not know when his story is finished, but goes on stringing episode to episode after it is over, not only weakens the effect of the conclusion, but robs of significance all that has gone before.
But if theformof the end is inevitably determined by the subject, its style—using the term, in the sense already defined, to describe the way in which the episodes of the narrative “are grasped and coloured by the author’s mindâ€â€”necessarily depends on his sense of selection. At every stage in the progress of his tale the novelist must rely on what may be called theilluminating incidentto reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation. Illuminating incidents are the magic casements of fiction, its vistas on infinity. They are also the most personal element in any narrative, the author’s most direct contribution; and nothing gives such immediate proof of the quality of his imagination—and therefore of the richness of his temperament—as his choice of such episodes.
Lucien de Rubempré (in “Les Illusions Perduesâ€) writing drinking songs to pay for the funeral of his mistress, who lies dying in the next room; Henry Esmond watching Beatrix come down the stairs in her scarlet stockings with silver clocks; Stephen Guestsuddenly dazzled by the curve of Maggie Tulliver’s arm as she lifts it to pick a flower for him in the conservatory; Arabella flinging the offal across the hedge at Jude; Emma losing her temper with Miss Bates at the picnic; the midnight arrival of Harry Richmond’s father, in the first chapter of that glorious tale: all these scenes shed a circle of light far beyond the incident recorded.
At the conclusion of a novel the illuminating incident need only send its ray backward; but it should send a long enough shaft to meet the light cast forward from the first page, as in that poignant passage at the end of “L’Education Sentimentale†where Mme. Arnoux comes back to see Frédéric Moreau after long years of separation.
“He put her endless questions about herself and her husband. She told him that, in order to economize and pay their debts, they had settled down in a lost corner of Brittany. Arnoux, almost always ailing, seemed like an old man. Their daughter was married, at Bordeaux; their son was in the colonialarmy, at Mostaganem. She lifted her head: ‘But at last I see you again! I’m happy’....†She asks him to take her for a walk, and wanders with him through the Paris streets. She is the only woman he has ever loved, and he knows it now. The intervening years have vanished, and they walk on, “absorbed in each other, hearing nothing, as if they were walking in the country on a bed of dead leaves.†Then they return to the young man’s rooms, and Mme. Arnoux, sitting down, takes off her hat.
“The lamp, placed on a console, lit up her white hair.The sight was like a blow on his chest.†He tries to keep up a pretense of sentimentalizing; but “she watched the clock, and he continued to walk up and down, smoking. Neither could find anything to say to the other. In all separations there comes a moment when the beloved is no longer with us.†This is all; but every page that has gone before is lit up by the tragic gleam of Mme. Arnoux’s white hair.
The same note is sounded in the chapter of“The Golden Bowl†where the deeply, the doubly betrayed Maggie, walking up and down in the summer evening on the terrace of Fawns, looks in at the window of the smoking-room, where her father, her husband and her step-mother (who is her husband’s mistress) are playing bridge together, unconscious of her scrutiny. As she looks she knows that she has them at her mercy, and that they all (even her father) know it; and in the same instant the sight of them tells her that “to feel about them in any of the immediate, inevitable, assuaging ways, the ways usually open to innocence outraged and generosity betrayed, would have been to give them up,and that giving them up was, marvellously, not to be thought of.â€
The illuminating incident is not only the proof of the novelist’s imaginative sensibility; it is also the best means of giving presentness, immediacy, to his tale. Far more than on dialogue does the effect of immediacy depend on the apt use of the illuminating incident; and the more threads of significanceare gathered up into each one, the more pages of explanatory narrative are spared to writer and reader. There is a matchless instance of this in “Le Rouge et le Noir.†The young Julien Sorel, the tutor of the Reynal children, believes a love-affair with their mother to be the best way of advancing his ambitions, and decides to test his audacity by taking Mme. Reynal’s hand as they sit in the garden in the summer dusk. He has a long struggle with his natural timidity and her commanding grace before he can make even this shy advance; and that struggle tells, in half a page, more of his fatuities and meannesses, and the boyish simplicity still underlying them—and more too of the poor proud woman at his side—than a whole chapter of analysis and retrospection. This power to seize his characters in their habit as they live is always the surest proof of a novelist’s mastery.
But the choice of the illuminating incident, though so much, is not all. As the French say,there is the manner. In Stendhal’s plain and straightforward report of the scenein the garden every word, every stroke, tells. And this question of manner—of the particular manner adapted to each scene—brings one to another point at which the novelist’s vigilance must never flag. As every tale contains its own dimension, so it implies its own manner, the particular shade of style most fitted to convey its full meaning.
Most novelists who have a certain number of volumes to their credit, and have sought, as the subject required, to vary their manner, have been taken to task alike by readers and reviewers, and either accused of attempting to pass off earlier works on a confiding public, or pitied for a too-evident decline in power. Any change disturbs the intellectual indolence of the average reader; and nothing, for instance, has done more to deprive Stevenson of his proper rank among English novelists than his deplorable habit of not conceiving a boy’s tale in the same spirit as a romantic novel or a burlesque detective story, of not even confining himself to fiction, but attempting travels, criticism andverse, and doing them all so well that there must obviously be something wrong about it. The very critics who extol the versatility of the artists of the Renaissance rebuke the same quality in their own contemporaries; and their eagerness to stake out each novelist’s territory, and to confine him to it for life, recalls the story of the verger in an English cathedral, who, finding a stranger kneeling in the sacred edifice between services, tapped him on the shoulder with the indulgent admonition: “Sorry, sir, but we can’t have any praying here at this hour.â€
This habit of the reader of wanting each author to give only what he has given before exercises the same subtly suggestive influence as all other popular demands. It is one of the most insidious temptations to the young artist to go on doing what he already knows how to do, and knows he will be praised for doing. But the mere fact that so many people want him to write in a certain way ought to fill him with distrust of that way. It would be a good thing for letters if the perilous appealof popularity were oftener met in the spirit of the New England shop-keeper who, finding a certain penknife in great demand, did not stock that kind the following year because, as he said, too many people came bothering him about it.
Goethedeclared that only the Tree of Life was green, and that all theories were gray; and he also congratulated himself on never “having thought about thinking.†But if he never thought about thinking he did think a great deal about his art, and some of the axioms he laid down for its practice go deeper than those of the professed philosophers.
The art of fiction, as now practised, is a recent one, and the arts in their earliest stages are seldom theorized on by those engaged in creating them; but as soon as they begin to take shape their practitioners, or at least those of the number who happen to think as well as to create, perforce begin to ask themselves questions. Some may nothave Goethe’s gift for formulating the answers, even to themselves; but these answers will eventually be discoverable in an added firmness of construction and appropriateness of expression. Other writers do consciously lay down rules, and in the search for new forms and more complex effects may even become the slaves of their too-fascinating theories. These are the true pioneers, who are never destined to see their own work fulfilled, but build intellectual houses for the next generation to live in.
Henry James was of this small minority. As he became more and more preoccupied with the architecture of the novel he unconsciously subordinated all else to his ever-fresh complexities of design, so that his last books are magnificent projects for future masterpieces rather than living creations. Such an admission may seem to reinforce the argument against theorizing about one’s art; but there are few Jameses and fewer Goethes in any generation, nor is there ever much danger in urging mankind to follow a counselof perfection. In the case of most novelists, such thought as they spare to the art, its range and limitations, far from sterilizing their talent will stimulate it by giving them a surer command of their means, and will perhaps temper their eagerness for popular recognition by showing them that the only reward worth having is in the quality of the work done.
The foregoing considerations on the writing of fiction may seem to some dry and dogmatic, to others needlessly complicated; still others may feel that in the quest for an intelligible working theory the gist of the matter has been missed. No doubt there is some truth in all these objections; there would be, even had the subject been far more fully and adequately treated. It would appear that in the course of such enquiries the gist of the matter always does escape. Just as one thinks to cast a net over it, a clap of the wings, and it is laughing down on one from the topmost bough of the Tree of Life!
Is all seeking vain, then? Is it useless to tryfor a clear view of the meaning and method of one’s art? Surely not. If no art can be quite pent-up in the rules deduced from it, neither can it fully realize itself unless those who practise it attempt to take its measure and reason out its processes. It is true that the gist of the matter always escapes, since it nests, the elusive bright-winged thing, in that mysterious fourth-dimensional world which is the artist’s inmost sanctuary and on the threshold of which enquiry perforce must halt; but though that world is inaccessible, the creations emanating from it reveal something of its laws and processes.
Here another parenthesis must be opened to point out once more that, though this world the artist builds about him in the act of creation reaches us and moves us through its resemblance to the life we know, yet in the artist’s consciousness its essence, the core of it, is other. All worthless fiction and inefficient reviewing are based on the forgetting of this fact. To the artist his world is as solidly real as the world of experience, or evenmore so, but in a way entirely different; it is a world to and from which he passes without any sense of effort, but alwayswith an uninterrupted awareness of the passing. In this world are begotten and born the creatures of his imagination, more living to him than his own flesh-and-blood, but whom he never thinks of as living, in the reader’s simplifying sense. Unless he keeps his hold on this dual character of their being, visionary to him, and to the reader real, he will be the slave of his characters and not their master. When I say their master, I do not mean that they are his marionettes and dangle from his strings. Once projected by his fancy they are living beings who live their own lives; but their world is the one consciously imposed on them by their creator. Only by means of this objectivity of the artist can his characters live in art. I have never been much moved by the story of the tears Dickens is supposed to have shed over the death of Little Nell; that is, if they were real material tears, and not distilled from the milkof Paradise. The business of the artist is to make weep, and not to weep, to make laugh, and not to laugh; and unless tears and laughter, and flesh-and-blood, are transmuted by him into the substance that art works in, they are nothing to his purpose, or to ours.
Yet to say this, though it seems the last word, is not all. The novelist to whom this magic world is not open has not even touched the borders of the art, and to its familiars the power of expression may seem innate. But it is not so. The creatures of that fourth-dimensional world are born as helpless as the human animal; and each time the artist passes from dream to execution he will need to find the rules and formulas on the threshold.