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Title: The writing of fiction
Author: Edith Wharton
Release date: December 17, 2023 [eBook #72446]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925
Credits: Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, Joyce Wilson, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WRITING OF FICTION ***
THE WRITING OF FICTION
The Writing of Fiction
_By_
EDITH WHARTON
_Order the beauty even of Beauty is._
--THOMAS TRAHERNE.
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1924, 1925, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY THE YALE PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION, INC.
Printed in the United States of America
[Illustration]
TO
GAILLARD LAPSLEY
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. IN GENERAL 1
II. TELLING A SHORT STORY 31
III. CONSTRUCTING A NOVEL 59
IV. CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL 123
V. MARCEL PROUST 149
THE WRITING OF FICTION
I
IN GENERAL
THE WRITING OF FICTION
I
IN GENERAL
I
To treat of the practice of fiction is to deal with the newest, most
fluid and least formulated of the arts. The exploration of origins is
always fascinating; but the attempt to relate the modern novel to the
tale of Joseph and his Brethren is of purely historic interest.
Modern fiction really began when the “action” of the novel was
transferred from the street to the soul; and this step was probably
first taken when Madame de La Fayette, in the seventeenth century,
wrote a little story called “La Princesse de Clèves,” a story of
hopeless love and mute renunciation in which the stately tenor of
the lives depicted is hardly ruffled by the exultations and agonies
succeeding each other below the surface.
The next advance was made when the protagonists of this new inner
drama were transformed from conventionalized puppets--the hero, the
heroine, the villain, the heavy father and so on--into breathing and
recognizable human beings. Here again a French novelist--the Abbé
Prévost--led the way with “Manon Lescaut”; but his drawing of character
seems summary and schematic when his people are compared with the first
great figure in modern fiction--the appalling “Neveu de Rameau.” It
was not till long after Diderot’s death that the author of so many
brilliant tales peopled with eighteenth century puppets was found, in
the creation of that one sordid, cynical and desolately human figure,
to have anticipated not only Balzac but Dostoievsky.
But even from “Manon Lescaut” and the “Neveu de Rameau,” even from
Lesage, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Scott, modern
fiction is differentiated by the great dividing geniuses of Balzac and
Stendhal. Save for that one amazing accident of Diderot’s, Balzac was
the first not only to see his people, physically and morally, in their
habit as they lived, with all their personal hobbies and infirmities,
and make the reader see them, but to draw his dramatic action as much
from the relation of his characters to their houses, streets, towns,
professions, inherited habits and opinions, as from their fortuitous
contacts with each other.
Balzac himself ascribed the priority in this kind of realism to Scott,
from whom the younger novelist avowedly derived his chief inspiration.
But, as Balzac observed, Scott, so keen and direct in surveying the
rest of his field of vision, became conventional and hypocritical when
he touched on love and women. In deference to the wave of prudery which
overswept England after the vulgar excesses of the Hanoverian court
he substituted sentimentality for passion, and reduced his heroines
to “Keepsake” insipidities; whereas in the firm surface of Balzac’s
realism there is hardly a flaw, and his women, the young as well as
the old, are living people, as much compact of human contradictions and
torn with human passions as his misers, his financiers, his priests or
his doctors.
Stendhal, though as indifferent as any eighteenth century writer to
atmosphere and “local colour,” is intensely modern and realistic in
the individualizing of his characters, who were never types (to the
extent even of some of Balzac’s) but always sharply differentiated and
particular human beings. More distinctively still does he represent
the new fiction by his insight into the springs of social action. No
modern novelist has ever gone nearer than Racine did in his tragedies
to the sources of personal, of individual feeling; and some of the
French novelists of the eighteenth century are still unsurpassed (save
by Racine) in the last refinements of individual soul-analysis. What
was new in both Balzac and Stendhal was the fact of their viewing each
character first of all as a product of particular material and social
conditions, as being thus or thus because of the calling he pursued
or the house he lived in (Balzac), or the society he wanted to get
into (Stendhal), or the acre of ground he coveted, or the powerful or
fashionable personage he aped or envied (both Balzac and Stendhal).
These novelists (with the solitary exception of Defoe, when he wrote
“Moll Flanders”) are the first to seem continuously aware that the
bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but
that each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.
The characterization of all the novelists who preceded these
two masters seems, in comparison, incomplete or immature. Even
Richardson’s seems so, in the most penetrating pages of “Clarissa
Harlowe,” even Goethe’s in that uncannily modern novel, the “Elective
Affinities”--because, in the case of these writers, the people
so elaborately dissected are hung in the void, unvisualized and
unconditioned (or almost) by the special outward circumstances of
their lives. They are subtly analyzed abstractions of humanity, to whom
only such things happen as might happen to almost any one in any walk
of life--the inevitable eternal human happenings.
Since Balzac and Stendhal, fiction has reached out in many new
directions, and made all sorts of experiments; but it has never ceased
to cultivate the ground they cleared for it, or gone back to the realm
of abstractions. It is still, however, an art in the making, fluent
and dirigible, and combining a past full enough for the deduction of
certain general principles with a future rich in untried possibilities.
II
On the threshold of any theory of art its exponent is sure to be asked:
“On what first assumption does your theory rest?” And in fiction, as in
every other art, the only answer seems to be that any theory must begin
by assuming the need of selection. It seems curious that even now--and
perhaps more than ever--one should have to explain and defend what is
no more than the rule underlying the most artless verbal statement. No
matter how restricted an incident one is trying to give an account of,
it cannot but be fringed with details more and more remotely relevant,
and beyond that with an outer mass of irrelevant facts which may crowd
on the narrator simply because of some accidental propinquity in time
or space. To choose between all this material is the first step toward
coherent expression.
A generation ago this was so generally taken for granted that to
state it would have seemed pedantic. In every-day intercourse the
principle survives in the injunction to stick to the point; but the
novelist who applies--or owns up to applying--this rule to his art, is
nowadays accused of being absorbed in technique to the exclusion of the
supposedly contrary element of “human interest.”
Even now, the charge would hardly be worth taking up had it not lately
helped to refurbish the old trick of the early French “realists,”
that group of brilliant writers who invented the once-famous _tranche
de vie_, the exact photographic reproduction of a situation or an
episode, with all its sounds, smells, aspects realistically rendered,
but with its deeper relevance and its suggestions of a larger whole
either unconsciously missed or purposely left out. Now that half a
century has elapsed, one sees that those among this group of writers
who survive are still readable in spite of their constricting theory,
or in proportion as they forgot about it once they closed with their
subject. Such are Maupassant, who packed into his brief masterpieces
so deep a psychological significance and so sure a sense of larger
relations; Zola, whose “slices” became the stuff of great romantic
allegories in which the forces of Nature and Industry are the huge
cloudy protagonists, as in a Pilgrim’s Progress of man’s material
activities; and the Goncourts, whose French instinct for psychological
analysis always made them seize on the more significant morsel of the
famous slices. As for the pupils, the mere conscientious appliers of
the system, they have all blown away with the theory, after a briefer
popularity than writers of equal talent might have enjoyed had they not
thus narrowed their scope. An instance in proof is Feydeau’s “Fanny,”
one of the few “psychological” novels of that generation, and a slight
enough adventure in soul-searching compared with the great “Madame
Bovary” (which it was supposed at the time to surpass), but still
readable enough to have kept the author’s name alive, while most of
his minor contemporaries are buried under the unappetizing _débris_ of
their “slices.”
It seemed necessary to revert to the slice-of-life because it has
lately reappeared, marked by certain unimportant differences, and
re-labelled the stream of consciousness; and, curiously enough,
without its new exponents’ appearing aware that they are not also
its originators. This time the theory seems to have sprung up first
in England and America; but it has already spread to certain of the
younger French novelists, who are just now, confusedly if admiringly,
rather overconscious of recent tendencies in English and American
fiction.
The stream of consciousness method differs from the slice-of-life
in noting mental as well as visual reactions, but resembles it in
setting them down just as they come, with a deliberate disregard of
their relevance in the particular case, or rather with the assumption
that their very unsorted abundance constitutes in itself the author’s
subject.
This attempt to note down every half-aware stirring of thought and
sensation, the automatic reactions to every passing impression, is
not as new as its present exponents appear to think. It has been
used by most of the greatest novelists, not as an end in itself, but
as it happened to serve their general design: as when their object
was to portray a mind in one of those moments of acute mental stress
when it records with meaningless precision a series of disconnected
impressions. The value of such “effects” in making vivid a tidal rush
of emotion has never been unknown since fiction became psychological,
and novelists grew aware of the intensity with which, at such times,
irrelevant trifles impinge upon the brain; but they have never been
deluded by the idea that the subconscious--that Mrs. Harris of the
psychologists--could in itself furnish the materials for their art.
All the greatest of them, from Balzac and Thackeray onward, have made
use of the stammerings and murmurings of the half-conscious mind
whenever--but only when--such a state of mental flux fitted into the
whole picture of the person portrayed. Their observation showed them
that in the world of normal men life is conducted, at least in its
decisive moments, on fairly coherent and selective lines, and that
only thus can the great fundamental affairs of bread-getting and
home-and-tribe organizing be carried on. Drama, situation, is made out
of the conflicts thus produced between social order and individual
appetites, and the art of rendering life in fiction can never, in the
last analysis, be anything, or need to be anything, but the disengaging
of crucial moments from the welter of existence. These moments need not
involve action in the sense of external events; they seldom have, since
the scene of conflict was shifted from incident to character. But there
must be something that _makes_ them crucial, some recognizable relation
to a familiar social or moral standard, some explicit awareness of
the eternal struggle between man’s contending impulses, if the tales
embodying them are to fix the attention and hold the memory.
III
The distrust of technique and the fear of being unoriginal--both
symptoms of a certain lack of creative abundance--are in truth leading
to pure anarchy in fiction, and one is almost tempted to say that in
certain schools formlessness is now regarded as the first condition of
form.
Not long ago I heard a man of letters declare that Dostoievsky was
superior to Tolstoy because his mind was “more chaotic,” and he could
therefore render more “truthfully” the chaos of the Russian mind in
general; though how chaos can be apprehended and defined by a mind
immersed in it, the speaker did not make clear. The assertion, of
course, was the result of confusing imaginative emotivity with its
objective rendering. What the speaker meant was that the novelist
who would create a given group of people or portray special social
conditions must be able to identify himself with them; which is rather
a long way of saying that an artist must have imagination.
The chief difference between the merely sympathetic and the creative
imagination is that the latter is two-sided, and combines with the
power of penetrating into other minds that of standing far enough aloof
from them to see beyond, and relate them to the whole stuff of life
out of which they but partially emerge. Such an all-round view can
be obtained only by mounting to a height; and that height, in art,
is proportioned to the artist’s power of detaching one part of his
imagination from the particular problem in which the rest is steeped.
One of the causes of the confusion of judgment on this point is
no doubt the perilous affinity between the art of fiction and the
material it works in. It has been so often said that all art is
re-presentation--the giving back in conscious form of the shapeless
raw material of experience--that one would willingly avoid insisting
on such a truism. But while there is no art of which the saying is
truer than of fiction, there is none in respect of which there is more
danger of the axiom’s being misinterpreted. The attempt to give back
any fragment of life in painting or sculpture or music presupposes
transposition, “stylization.” To re-present in words is far more
difficult, because the relation is so close between model and artist.
The novelist works in the very material out of which the object he is
trying to render is made. He must use, to express soul, the signs
which soul uses to express itself. It is relatively easy to separate
the artistic vision of an object from its complex and tangled actuality
if one has to re-see it in paint or marble or bronze; it is infinitely
difficult to render a human mind when one is employing the very
word-dust with which thought is formulated.
Still, the transposition does take place as surely, if not as
obviously, in a novel as in a statue. If it did not, the writing
of fiction could never be classed among works of art, products of
conscious ordering and selecting, and there would consequently be
nothing to say about it, since there seems to be no way of estimating
æsthetically anything to which no standard of choice can be applied.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of
immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though
one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another, equally imperious,
is that of fiercely guarding against it. In this respect, the novelist
of the present day is in danger of being caught in a vicious circle,
for the insatiable demand for quick production tends to keep him in
a state of perpetual immaturity, and the ready acceptance of his
wares encourages him to think that no time need be wasted in studying
the past history of his art, or in speculating on its principles.
This conviction strengthens the belief that the so-called quality of
“originality” may be impaired by too long brooding on one’s theme and
too close a commerce with the past; but the whole history of that
past--in every domain of art--disproves this by what survives, and
shows that every subject, to yield and to retain its full flavour,
should be long carried in the mind, brooded upon, and fed with all the
impressions and emotions which nourish its creator.
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That
new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at
the object represented to make it the writer’s own; and the mind which
would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it
with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. To know any
one thing one must not only know something of a great many others, but
also, as Matthew Arnold long since pointed out, a great deal more of
one’s immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly
includes; and Mr. Kipling’s “What should they know of England who only
England know?” might be taken as the symbolic watchword of the creative
artist.
One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has
invented the “fiction course” is getting the fiction it deserves. At
any rate it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art
is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that
notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms. But though
the trade-wind in fiction undoubtedly drives many beginners along the
line of least resistance, and holds them there, it is far from being
the sole cause of the present quest for short-cuts in art. There are
writers indifferent to popular success, and even contemptuous of
it, who sincerely believe that this line marks the path of the true
vocation. Many people assume that the artist receives, at the outset
of his career, the mysterious sealed orders known as “Inspiration,”
and has only to let that sovereign impulse carry him where it will.
Inspiration does indeed come at the outset to every creator, but it
comes most often as an infant, helpless, stumbling, inarticulate, to be
taught and guided; and the beginner, during this time of training his
gift, is as likely to misuse it as a young parent to make mistakes in
teaching his first child.
There is no doubt that in this day of general “speeding up,” the
“inspirational” theory is seductive even to those who care nothing
for easy triumphs. No writer--especially at the beginning of his
career--can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that
awaits him; and the young novelist may ask of what use are experience
and meditation, when his readers are so incapable of giving him
either. The answer is that he will never do his best till he ceases
altogether to think of his readers (and his editor and his publisher)
and begins to write, not for himself, but for that _other self_ with
whom the creative artist is always in mysterious correspondence, and
who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day
receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it.
As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination
can make a little go a long way, provided it remains long enough in
the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. One good heart-break will
furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable
number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break.
Even to the writer least concerned with popularity it is difficult,
at first, to defend his personality. Study and meditation contain
their own perils. Counsellors intervene with contradictory advice
and instances. In such cases these counsellors are most often other
people’s novels: the great novels of the past, which haunt the
beginner like a passion, and the works of his contemporaries, which
pull him this way and that with too-persuasive hands. His impulse, at
first, will be either to shun them, to his own impoverishment, or to
let his dawning individuality be lost in theirs; but gradually he will
come to see that he must learn to listen to them, take all they can
give, absorb it into himself, and then turn to his own task with the
fixed resolve to see life only through his own eyes.
Even then another difficulty remains; the mysterious discrepancy which
sometimes exists between a novelist’s vision of life and his particular
kind of talent. Not infrequently an innate tendency to see things in
large masses is combined with the technical inability to render them
otherwise than separately, meticulously, on a small scale. Perhaps
more failures than one is aware of are due to this particular lack of
proportion between the powers of vision and expression. At any rate, it
is the cause of some painful struggles and arid dissatisfactions; and
the only remedy is resolutely to abandon the larger for the smaller
field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing
closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.
Of twenty subjects that tempt the imagination (subjects one sees one’s
self doing, oh so wonderfully, if only one were Mérimée or Maupassant,
or Conrad or Mr. Kipling!) probably but one is “fit for the hand” of
the limited person one happens to be; and to learn to renounce the
others is a first step toward doing that particular one well.
IV
These considerations have led straight to the great, the central,
matter of subject; and inextricably interwoven with it are the
subsidiary points of form and style, both of which ought, as it
were, to spring naturally out of the particular theme chosen for
representation.
Form might perhaps, for present purposes, be defined as the order,
in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are
grouped; and style as the way in which they are presented, not only
in the narrower sense of language, but also, and rather, as they are
grasped and coloured by their medium, the narrator’s mind, and given
back in his words. It is the quality of the medium which gives these
incidents their quality; style, in this sense, is the most personal
ingredient in the combination of things out of which any work of art
is made. Words are the exterior symbols of thought, and it is only by
their exact use that the writer can keep on his subject the close and
patient hold which “fishes the murex up,” and steeps his creation in
unfading colours.
Style in this definition is discipline; and the self-consecration it
demands, and the bearing it has on the whole of the artist’s effort,
have been admirably summed up by Marcel Proust in that searching
chapter of “A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs” where he analyzes
the art of fiction in the person of the great novelist Bergotte. “The
severity of his taste, his unwillingness to write anything of which he
could not say, in his favourite phrase: ‘_C’est doux_’ [harmonious,
delicious], this determination, which had caused him to spend so many
seemingly fruitless years in the ‘precious’ carving of trifles, was
in reality the secret of his strength; for habit makes the style of
the writer as it makes the character of the man, and the author who
has several times contented himself with expressing his thought in an
approximately pleasing way _has once and for all set a boundary to his
talent, and will never pass beyond_.”
These definitions of form and style being established, and the
preliminary need of the harmony between an author’s talent and his
argument being assumed, one is next faced by the profounder problem
of the inherent fitness of any given subject as material for the
imagination.
It has been often said that subject in itself is all-important, and
at least as often that it is of no importance whatever. Definition
is again necessary before the truth can be extracted from these
contradictions. Subject, obviously, is _what the story is about_; but
whatever the central episode or situation chosen by the novelist, his
tale will be about only just so much of it as he reacts to. A gold mine
is worth nothing unless the owner has the machinery for extracting
the ore, and each subject must be considered first in itself, and
next in relation to the novelist’s power of extracting from it what
it contains. There are subjects trivial in appearance, and subjects
trivial to the core; and the novelist ought to be able to discern at
a glance between the two, and know in which case it is worth while to
set about sinking his shaft. But the novelist may make mistakes. He is
exposed to the temptation of the false good-subject, and learns only by
prolonged experience to resist surface-attractions, and probe his story
to the depths before he begins to tell it.
There is still another way in which subject must be tested. Any subject
considered in itself must first of all respond in some way to that
mysterious need of a judgment on life of which the most detached human
intellect, provided it be a normal one, cannot, apparently, rid itself.
Whether the “moral” be present in the guise of the hero rescuing the
heroine from the villain at the point of the revolver, or whether it
lurk in the quiet irony of such a scene as Pendennis’s visit to the
Grey Friars’ Chapel, and his hearing the choir singing “I have been
young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor
his seed begging their bread,” at the very moment when he discovers the
bent head of Colonel Newcome among the pauper gentlemen--in one form or
another there must be some sort of rational response to the reader’s
unconscious but insistent inner question: “What am I being told this
story for? What judgment on life does it contain for me?”
There seems to be no escape from this obligation except into a
pathological world where the action, taking place between people
of abnormal psychology, and not keeping time with our normal human
rhythms, becomes an idiot’s tale, signifying nothing. In vain has it
been attempted to set up a water-tight compartment between “art” and
“morality.” All the great novelists whose books have been used to point
the argument have invariably declared themselves on the other side,
not only by the inner significance of their work, but also, in some
cases, by the most explicit statements. Flaubert, for instance, so
often cited as the example of the writer viewing his themes in a purely
“scientific” or amoral light, has disproved the claim by providing the
other camp with that perfect formula: “_Plus la pensée est belle, plus
la phrase est sonore_”--not the metaphor, not the picture, but _the
thought_.
A good subject, then, must contain in itself something that sheds a
light on our moral experience. If it is incapable of this expansion,
this vital radiation, it remains, however showy a surface it presents,
a mere irrelevant happening, a meaningless scrap of fact torn out
of its context. Nor is it more than a half-truth to say that the
imagination which probes deep enough can find this germ in any
happening, however insignificant. The converse is true enough: the
limited imagination reduces a great theme to its own measure. But the
wide creative vision, though no fragment of human experience can appear
wholly empty to it, yet seeks by instinct those subjects in which some
phase of our common plight stands forth dramatically and typically,
subjects which, in themselves, are a kind of summary or foreshortening
of life’s dispersed and inconclusive occurrences.
II
TELLING A SHORT STORY
II
TELLING A SHORT STORY
I
Like the modern novel, the modern short story seems to have
originated--or at least received its present stamp--in France. English
writers, in this line, were slower in attaining the point to which the
French and Russians first carried the art.
Since then the short story has developed, and reached out in fresh
directions, in the hands of such novelists as Mr. Hardy (only
occasionally at his best in this form), of Stevenson, James, and
Conrad, all three almost unfailingly excellent in it, of Mr. Kipling,
past-master of the _conte_, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose
delightful early volumes, “Noughts and Crosses” and “I Saw Three
Ships,” are less known than they deserve to be. These writers had long
been preceded by Scott in “Wandering Willy’s Tale” and other short
stories, by Poe, the sporadic and unaccountable, and by Hawthorne;
but almost all the best tales of Scott, Hawthorne, and Poe belong to
that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic
tradition.
When the novel of manners comes to be dealt with, classification in
order of time will have to be reversed, and in order of merit will be
less easy; for even against Balzac, Tolstoy, and Turgenev the genius
of the great English observers, from Richardson and Jane Austen to
Thackeray and Dickens, will weigh heavily in the balance. With regard
to the short story, however, and especially to that compactest form
of it, the short short-story or _conte_, its first specimens are
undoubtedly of continental production; but happily for English letters
the generation who took over and adapted the formula were nursed on
the Goethean principle that “those who remain imprisoned in the false
notion of their own originality will always fall short of what they
might have accomplished.”
The sense of form--already defined as the order, in time and
importance, in which the narrated incidents are grouped--is, in all
the arts, specifically of the classic, the Latin tradition. A thousand
years of form (in the widest disciplinary sense), of its observance,
its application, its tacit acceptance as the first condition of
artistic expression, have cleared the ground, for the French writer of
fiction, of many superfluous encumbrances. As the soil of France is of
all soils the most weeded, tilled, and ductile, so the field of art,
wherever French culture extends, is the most worked-over and the most
prepared for whatever seed is to be sown in it.
But when the great Russians (who owe to French culture much more
than is generally conceded) took over that neat thing, the French
_nouvelle_, they gave it the additional dimension it most often lacked.
In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come
to tears; and the Russians almost always dig to that depth. The result
has been to give to the short story, as French and Russian art have
combined to shape it, great closeness of texture with profundity of
form. Instead of a loose web spread over the surface of life they have
made it, at its best, a shaft driven straight into the heart of human
experience.
II
Though the critic no longer feels that need of classifying and
sub-classifying the _genres_ which so preoccupied the contemporaries
of Wordsworth, there are, in all the arts, certain local products that
seem to necessitate a parenthesis.
Such, in fiction, is the use of the supernatural. It seems to have come
from mysterious Germanic and Armorican forests, from lands of long
twilights and wailing winds; and it certainly did not pass through
French or even Russian hands to reach us. Sorcerers and magic are of
the south, the Mediterranean; the witch of Theocritus brewed a brew fit
for her sister-hags of the Scottish heath; but the spectral apparition
walks only in the pages of English and Germanic fiction.
It has done so, to great effect, in some of the most original of our
great English short stories, from Scott’s “Wandering Willy” and Poe’s
awful hallucinations to Le Fanu’s “Watcher,” and from the “Thrawn
Janet” of Stevenson to “The Turn of the Screw” of Henry James, last
great master of the eerie in English.
All these tales, in which the effect sought is completely achieved, are
models of the subtlest artifice. It is not enough to believe in ghosts,
or even to have seen one, to be able to write a good ghost story. The
greater the improbability to be overcome the more studied must be the
approach, the more perfectly maintained the air of naturalness, the
easy assumption that things are always likely to happen in that way.
One of the chief obligations, in a short story, is to give the reader
an immediate sense of security. Every phrase should be a sign-post,
and never (unless intentionally) a misleading one: the reader must
feel that he can trust to their guidance. His confidence once gained,
he may be lured on to the most incredible adventures--as the Arabian
Nights are there to show. A wise critic once said: “You may ask your
reader to believe anything you can _make_ him believe.” It is never
the _genii_ who are unreal, but only their unconvinced historian’s
description of them. The least touch of irrelevance, the least chill of
inattention, will instantly undo the spell, and it will take as long
to weave again as to get Humpty Dumpty back on his wall. The moment
the reader loses faith in the author’s sureness of foot the chasm of
improbability gapes.
Improbability in itself, then, is never a danger, but the appearance
of improbability is; unless, indeed, the tale be based on what,
in my first chapter, I called pathological conditions--conditions
of body or mind outside the field of normal experience. But this
term, of course, does not apply to states of mind inherited from an
earlier phase of race-culture, such as the belief in ghosts. No one
with a spark of imagination ever objected to a good ghost story as
“improbable”--though Mrs. Barbauld, who doubtless lacked the spark, is
said to have condemned “The Ancient Mariner” on this ground. Most of us
retain the more or less shadowy memory of ancestral terrors, and airy
tongues that syllable men’s names. We cannot believe _a priori_ in the
probability of the actions of madmen, or neurasthenics, because their
reasoning processes escape most of us, or can at best be imagined only
as belonging to abnormal and exceptional people; but everybody knows a
good ghost when he reads about him.
When the reader’s confidence is gained the next rule of the game is to
avoid distracting and splintering up his attention. Many a would-be
tale of horror becomes innocuous through the very multiplication and
variety of its horrors. Above all, if they are multiplied they should
be cumulative and not dispersed. But the fewer the better: once the
preliminary horror posited, it is the harping on the same string--the
same nerve--that does the trick. Quiet iteration is far more racking
than diversified assaults; the expected is more frightful than the
unforeseen. The play of “Emperor Jones” is a striking instance of the
power of simplification and repetition to excite in an audience a
corresponding state of tension. By sheer voodoo-practice it shows how
voodoo acts.
In “The Turn of the Screw”--which stands alone among tales of the
supernatural in maintaining the ghostliness of its ghosts not only
through a dozen pages but through close on two hundred--the economy
of horror is carried to its last degree. What is the reader made to
expect? Always--all through the book--that somewhere in that hushed
house of doom the poor little governess will come on one of the two
figures of evil with whom she is fighting for the souls of her charges.
It will be either Peter Quint or the “horror of horrors,” Miss Jessel;
no diversion from this one dread is ever attempted or expected. It
is true that the tale is strongly held together by its profound, its
appalling moral significance; but most readers will admit that, long
before they are conscious of this, fear, simple shivering animal fear,
has them by the throat; which, after all, is what writers of ghost
stories are after.
III
It is sometimes said that a “good subject” for a short story should
always be capable of being expanded into a novel.
The principle may be defendable in special cases; but it is certainly
a misleading one on which to build any general theory. Every “subject”
(in the novelist’s sense of the term) must necessarily contain within
itself its own dimensions; and one of the fiction-writer’s essential
gifts is that of discerning whether the subject which presents itself
to him, asking for incarnation, is suited to the proportions of a short
story or of a novel. If it appears to be adapted to both the chances
are that it is inadequate to either.
It would be as great a mistake, however, to try to base a hard-and-fast
theory on the denial of the rule as on its assertion. Instances of
short stories made out of subjects that could have been expanded into
a novel, and that are yet typical short stories and not mere stunted
novels, will occur to every one. General rules in art are useful
chiefly as a lamp in a mine, or a hand-rail down a black stairway;
they are necessary for the sake of the guidance they give, but it is a
mistake, once they are formulated, to be too much in awe of them.
There are at least two reasons why a subject should find expression in
novel-form rather than as a tale; but neither is based on the number
of what may be conveniently called incidents, or external happenings,
which the narrative contains. There are novels of action which might be
condensed into short stories without the loss of their distinguishing
qualities. The marks of the subject requiring a longer development are,
first, the gradual unfolding of the inner life of its characters, and
secondly the need of producing in the reader’s mind the sense of the
lapse of time. Outward events of the most varied and exciting nature
may without loss of probability be crowded into a few hours, but moral
dramas usually have their roots deep in the soul, their rise far back
in time; and the suddenest-seeming clash in which they culminate should
be led up to step by step if it is to explain and justify itself.
There are cases, indeed, when the short story may make use of the moral
drama at its culmination. If the incident dealt with be one which a
single retrospective flash sufficiently lights up, it is qualified
for use as a short story; but if the subject be so complex, and its
successive phases so interesting, as to justify elaboration, the lapse
of time must necessarily be suggested, and the novel-form becomes
appropriate.
The effect of compactness and instantaneity sought in the short
story is attained mainly by the observance of two “unities”--the old
traditional one of time, and that other, more modern and complex, which
requires that any rapidly enacted episode shall be seen through only
one pair of eyes.
It is fairly obvious that nothing is more retarding than the marking of
a time-interval long enough to suggest modification in the personages
of the tale or in their circumstances. The use of such an interval
inevitably turns the short story into a long tale unduly compressed,
the bald scenario of a novel. In the third chapter, where an attempt
will be made to examine the technique of the novel, it will be needful
to explore that central mystery--of which Tolstoy was perhaps the one
complete master--the art of creating in the reader’s mind this sense
of passing time. Meanwhile, it may be pointed out that a third, and
intermediate, form of tale--the _long_ short-story--is available for
any subject too spreading for conciseness yet too slight in texture to
be stretched into a novel.
The other unity, that of vision, will also be dealt with in considering
the novel, in respect of which it becomes a matter much more
complicated. Henry James, almost the only novelist who has formulated
his ideas about his art, was the first to lay down the principle,
though it had long (if intermittently) been observed by the masters of
fiction. It may have occurred to other novelists--presumably it has--to
ask themselves, as they sat down to write: Who saw this thing I am
going to tell about? By whom do I mean that it shall be reported? It
seems as though such a question must precede any study of the subject
chosen, since the subject is conditioned by the answer; but no critic
appears to have propounded it, and it was left to Henry James to do so
in one of those entangled prefaces to the Definitive Edition from which
the technical axioms ought some day to be piously detached.
It is clear that exactly the same thing never happens to any two
people, and that each witness of a given incident will report it
differently. Should some celestial task-master set the same theme to
Jane Austen and George Meredith the bewildered reader would probably
have some difficulty in discovering the common denominator. Henry
James, in pointing this out, also made the corollary suggestion that
the mind chosen by the author to mirror his given case should be so
situated, and so constituted, as to take the widest possible view of it.
One thing more is needful for the ultimate effect of probability;
and that is, never to let the character who serves as reflector
record anything not naturally within his register. It should be the
story-teller’s first care to choose this reflecting mind deliberately,
as one would choose a building-site, or decide upon the orientation of
one’s house, and when this is done, to live inside the mind chosen,
trying to feel, see and react exactly as the latter would, no more,
no less, and, above all, no otherwise. Only thus can the writer avoid
attributing incongruities of thought and metaphor to his chosen
interpreter.
IV
It remains to try to see what constitutes (in any permanent sense) the
underlying norm of the “good short story.”
A curious distinction between the successful tale and the successful
novel at once presents itself. It is safe to say (since the surest
way of measuring achievement in art is by survival) that the test of
the novel is that its people should be _alive_. No subject in itself,
however fruitful, appears to be able to keep a novel alive; only the
characters in it can. Of the short story the same cannot be said.
Some of the greatest short stories owe their vitality entirely to the
dramatic rendering of a situation. Undoubtedly the characters engaged
must be a little more than puppets; but apparently, also, they may be
a little less than individual human beings. In this respect the short
story, rather than the novel, might be called the direct descendant
of the old epic or ballad--of those earlier forms of fiction in all
of which action was the chief affair, and the characters, if they did
not remain mere puppets, seldom or never became more than types--such
as the people, for instance, in Molière. The reason of the difference
is obvious. Type, general character, may be set forth in a few
strokes, but the progression, the unfolding of personality, of which
the reader instinctively feels the need if the actors in the tale are
to retain their individuality for him through a succession of changing
circumstances--this slow but continuous growth requires space, and
therefore belongs by definition to a larger, a symphonic plan.
The chief technical difference between the short story and the novel
may therefore be summed up by saying that situation is the main
concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows
that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely
on its form, or presentation. Even more--yes, and much more--than
in the construction of the novel, the impression of vividness, of
_presentness_, in the affair narrated, has to be sought, and made sure
of beforehand, by that careful artifice which is the real carelessness
of art. The short-story writer must not only know from what angle to
present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires, but must
understand just _why_ that particular angle and no other is the right
one. He must therefore have turned his subject over and over, walked
around it, so to speak, and applied to it those laws of perspective
which Paolo Uccello called “so beautiful,” before it can be offered to
the reader as a natural unembellished fragment of experience, detached
like a ripe fruit from the tree.
The moment the writer begins to grope in the tangle of his “material,”
to hesitate between one and another of the points that any actual
happening thrusts up in such disorderly abundance, the reader feels
a corresponding hesitancy, and the illusion of reality vanishes. The
non-observance of the optics of the printed page results in the same
failure to make the subject “carry” as the non-observance of the optics
of the stage in presenting a play. By all means let the writer of short
stories reduce the technical trick to its minimum--as the cleverest
actresses put on the least paint; but let him always bear in mind
that the surviving minimum is the only bridge between the reader’s
imagination and his.
V
Nietzsche said that it took genius to “make an end”--that is, to give
the touch of inevitableness to the conclusion of any work of art. In
the art of fiction this is peculiarly true of the novel, that slowly
built-up monument in which every stone has its particular weight and
thrust to carry and of which the foundations must be laid with a view
to the proportions of the highest tower. Of the short story, on the
contrary, it might be said that the writer’s first care should be to
know how to make a beginning.
That an inadequate or unreal ending diminishes the short tale in value
as much as the novel need hardly be added, since it is proved with
depressing regularity by the machine-made “magazine story” to which one
or the other of half-a-dozen “standardized” endings is automatically
adjusted at the four-thousand-five-hundredth word of whatsoever has
been narrated. Obviously, as every subject contains its own dimensions,
so is its conclusion _ab ovo_; and the failure to end a tale in
accordance with its own deepest sense must deprive it of meaning.
None the less, the short-story writer’s first concern, once he has
mastered his subject, is to study what musicians call the “attack.” The
rule that the first page of a novel ought to contain the germ of the
whole is even more applicable to the short story, because in the latter
case the trajectory is so short that flash and sound nearly coincide.
Benvenuto Cellini relates in his Autobiography that one day, as a
child, while he sat by the hearth with his father, they both saw a
salamander in the fire. Even then the sight must have been unusual,
for the father instantly boxed his son’s ears so that he should never
forget what he had seen.
This anecdote might serve as an apothegm for the writer of short
stories. If his first stroke be vivid and telling the reader’s
attention will be instantly won. The “‘Hell,’ said the Duchess as she
lit her cigar” with which an Eton boy is said to have begun a tale for
his school magazine, in days when Duchesses less commonly smoked and
swore, would undoubtedly have carried his narrative to posterity if
what followed had been at the same level.
This leads to another point: it is useless to box your reader’s ear
unless you have a salamander to show him. If the heart of your little
blaze is not animated by a living, moving _something_ no shouting and
shaking will fix the anecdote in your reader’s memory. The salamander
stands for that fundamental significance that made the story worth
telling.
The arrest of attention by a vivid opening should be something more
than a trick. It should mean that the narrator has so brooded on this
subject that it has become his indeed, so made over and synthesized
within him that, as a great draughtsman gives the essentials of a face
or landscape in a half-a-dozen strokes, the narrator can “situate”
his tale in an opening passage which shall be a clue to all the detail
eliminated.
The clue given, the writer has only to follow. But his grasp must be
firm; he must never for an instant forget what he wants to tell, or
why it seemed worth telling. And this intensity of hold on his subject
presupposes, before the telling of even a short story, a good deal of
thinking over. Just because the limits of the form selected prevent
his producing the semblance of reality by elaborating his characters,
is the short-story writer the more bound to make real the adventure in
itself. A well-known French confectioner in New York was once asked why
his chocolate, good as it was, was not equal to that made in Paris. He
replied: “Because, on account of the expense, we cannot _work it over_
as many times as the French confectioner can.” Other homely analogies
confirm the lesson: the seemingly simplest sauces are those that have
been most cunningly combined and then most completely blent, the
simplest-looking dresses those that require most study to design.
The precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience
which, if it be not genius, must be one of genius’s chief reliances
in communicating itself. On this point repetition and insistence are
excusable: the shorter the story, the more stripped of detail and
“cleared for action,” the more it depends for its effect not only on
the choice of what is kept when the superfluous has been jettisoned,
but on the order in which these essentials are set forth.
VI
Nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the
short-story writer from another danger: that of contenting himself
with a mere sketch of the episode selected. The temptation to do so
is all the greater because some critics, in their resentment of the
dense and the prolix, have tended to overestimate the tenuous and the
tight. Mérimée’s tales are often cited as models of the _conte_; but
they are rather the breathless summaries of longer tales than the
bold foreshortening of an episode from which all the significance it
has to give has been adroitly extracted. It is easy to be brief and
sharply outlined if one does away with one or more dimensions; the
real achievement, as certain tales of Flaubert’s and Turgenev’s, of
Stevenson’s and of Maupassant’s show, is to suggest illimitable air
within a narrow space.
The stories of the German “romantic,” Heinrich von Kleist, have
likewise been praised for an extreme economy of material, but they
should rather be held up as an awful warning against waste, for in
their ingenious dovetailing of improbable incidents, the only economy
practised is that of leaving out all that would have enriched the
subject, visually or emotionally. One, indeed, “The Marquise d’O.”
(thrift is carried so far that the characters are known merely by their
initials), has in it the making of a good novel, not unlike Goethe’s
“Elective Affinities”; but reduced to the limits of a short story it
offers a mere skeleton of its subject.
The phrase “economy of material” suggests another danger to which
the novelist and the writer of short stories are equally exposed.
Such economy is, in both cases, nearly always to be advised in the
multiplication of accidental happenings, minor episodes, surprises
and contrarieties. Most beginners crowd into their work twice as much
material of this sort as it needs. The reluctance to look deeply enough
into a subject leads to the indolent habit of decorating its surface. I
was once asked to read a manuscript on the eternal theme of a lovers’
quarrel. The quarrelling pair made up, and the reasons for dispute and
reconciliation were clearly inherent in their characters and situation;
but the author, being new at the trade, felt obliged to cast about for
an additional, a fortuitous, pretext for their reunion--so he sent them
for a drive, made the horses run away, and caused the young man to save
the young lady’s life. This is a crude example of a frequent fault.
Again and again the novelist passes by the real meaning of a situation
simply for lack of letting it reveal all its potentialities instead
of dashing this way and that in quest of fresh effects. If, when once
drawn to a subject, he would let it grow slowly in his mind instead
of hunting about for arbitrary combinations of circumstance, his tale
would have the warm scent and flavour of a fruit ripened in the sun
instead of the insipidity of one forced in a hot-house.
There is a sense in which the writing of fiction may be compared to
the administering of a fortune. Economy and expenditure must each
bear a part in it, but they should never degenerate into parsimony or
waste. True economy consists in the drawing out of one’s subject of
every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting
time, meditation and patient labour to the process of extraction and
representation.
It all comes back to a question of expense: expense of time, of
patience, of study, of thought, of letting hundreds of stray
experiences accumulate and group themselves in the memory, till
suddenly one of the number emerges and throws its sharp light on the
subject which solicits you. It has been often, and inaccurately, said
that the mind of a creative artist is a mirror, and the work of art the
reflection of life in it. The mirror, indeed, is the artist’s mind,
with all his experiences reflected in it; but the work of art, from the
smallest to the greatest, should be something projected, not reflected,
something on which his mirrored experiences, at the right conjunction
of the stars, are to be turned for its full illumination.
III
CONSTRUCTING A NOVEL
III
CONSTRUCTING A NOVEL
I
For convenience 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 fiction to 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 of _Tom Jones_ was buried, no
writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost
power a MAN”; 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 novelist
since 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.”
In one respect the English novelists are still supreme; and that is in
the diffusion of good humour, good manners one might almost say, 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 English _bonhomie_, 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 art has 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.
II
Most novels, 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 from
England), 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.”
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 Fair”; 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 contain the 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 of Gyp”--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 the advantage 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 used as 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 wastefulness and 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, bewildered and weary, at a point to which one
paragraph of narrative could have carried him.
III
In writing 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 as much 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 he usually 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 resuscitated _real 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.”
There is one famous book which might be described 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 once _seen 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.
IV
The question 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 artificial trick 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 impersonate _the 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.”
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, by choosing 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. In both 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 sunrise from 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 people _to
whom they happened_ would 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.
V
The two 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 technical”; 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 happens to 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
different angles, always presents itself to the reader _as 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 of course 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.”
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 his picture 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
of _co-ordinating consciousness_ detached 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 “The
Golden 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 “hall of
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 she has 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 themselves”--he attempted, probably on the spur of
the moment, a solution which proved admirably successful--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 breathless _chassé-croisé_
which 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 different
purpose--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._”
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 maturing of 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. He _knows_ that
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 lost _the 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 slovenly
_mère-de-famille_ of 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 there _has_ been 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.
VI
The evening 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
crowded novel. 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 question _where to begin_ is the next to confront the novelist;
and the art of seizing on the right moment is even more important
than 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 Parme”--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 in nature but
not in art_.” That is, being out of place in that particular work of
art, it loses its reality _as art_ and 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.
VII
The length 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.”
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 one usually 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 nerves of 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 “Yvette”--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 his instinct 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 Salathiel Pavy; 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 relation between 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 Sentimentale”; 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 there should 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 the _form_ of 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 mind”--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 the _illuminating incident_ to 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 Perdues”) 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 Guest suddenly 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 colonial army, 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_.”
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 significance are 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 scene in 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 and verse, 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.”
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 appeal of 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.
VIII
Goethe declared 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 not have 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 counsel of 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 try for 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 even more so, but in a way entirely
different; it is a world to and from which he passes without any sense
of effort, but always _with 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 milk of 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.
IV
CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL
IV
CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL
I
Definitions, however difficult and inadequate, are the necessary “tools
of criticism.” To begin, therefore, one may distinguish the novel of
situation from that of character and manners by saying that, in the
first, the persons imagined by the author almost always spring out
of a vision of the situation, and are inevitably conditioned by it,
whatever the genius of their creator; whereas in the larger freer form,
that of character and manners (or either of the two), the author’s
characters are first born, and then mysteriously proceed to work out
their own destinies. Let it, at any rate, be understood that this rough
distinction shall serve in the following pages to mark the difference
between the two ways of presenting the subject since most subjects
lend themselves to being treated from either point of view.
It is not easy to find, among great novels written in English, examples
of novels of pure situation, that is, in which the situation is what
the book is remembered by. Perhaps “The Scarlet Letter” might be cited
as one of the few obvious examples. In “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,”
which one is tempted to name also, the study of character is so
interwoven with the drama as to raise the story--for all its obvious
shortcomings--to the level of those supreme novels which escape
classification. For if one remembers Tess’s tragedy, still more vividly
does one remember Tess herself.
In continental literature several famous books at once present
themselves in the situation group. One of the earliest, as it is the
most famous, is Goethe’s “Elective Affinities,” where a great and
terrible drama involves characters of which the creator has not managed
quite to sever the marionette wires. Who indeed remembers those vague
initialled creatures, whom the author himself forgot to pull out of
their limbo in his eagerness to mature and polish their ingenious
misfortunes?
Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata” is another book which lives only by
force of situation, sustained, of course, by the profound analysis of
a universal passion. No one remembers who the people in “The Kreutzer
Sonata” were, or what they looked like, or what sort of a house they
lived in--but the very roots of human jealousy are laid bare in the
picture of the vague undifferentiated husband, a puppet who comes to
life only in function of his one ferocious passion. Balzac alone,
perhaps, managed to make of his novels of situation--such as “César
Birotteau” or “Le Curé de Tours”--such relentless and penetrating
character studies that their protagonists and the difficulties which
beset them leap together to the memory whenever the tales are named.
But this fusion of categories is the prerogative of the few, of those
who know how to write all kinds of novels, and who choose, each time,
the way best suited to the subject in hand.
Novels preeminently of character, and in which situation, dramatically
viewed, is reduced to the minimum, are far easier to find. Jane
Austen has given the norm, the ideal, of this type. Of her tales it
might almost be said that the reader sometimes forgets what happens
to her characters in his haunting remembrance of their foibles and
oddities, their little daily round of preoccupations and pleasures.
They are “speaking” portraits, following one with their eyes in that
uncannily lifelike way that good portraits have, rather than passionate
disordered people dragging one impetuously into the tangle of their
tragedy, as one is dragged by the characters of Stendhal, Thackeray
and Balzac. Not that Jane Austen’s characters do not follow their
predestined orbit. They evolve as real people do, but so softly,
noiselessly, that to follow the development of their history is as
quiet a business as watching the passage of the seasons. A sense of
her limitations as certain as her sense of her power must have kept
her--unconsciously or not--from trying to thrust these little people
into great actions, and made her choose the quiet setting which enabled
her to round out her portraits as imperceptibly as the sun models a
fruit. “Emma” is perhaps the most perfect example in English fiction of
a novel in which character shapes events quietly but irresistibly, as a
stream nibbles away its banks.
Next to “Emma” one might place, in this category, the masterpiece of
a very different hand: “The Egoist” of Meredith. In this book, though
by means so alien to Miss Austen’s delicate procedure that one balks
at the comparison, the fantastic novelist, whose antics too often make
one forget his insight, discarding most of his fatiguing follies, gives
a rich and deliberate study of a real human being. But he does not
quite achieve Jane Austen’s success. His Willoughby Patterne is typical
before he is individual, while every character in “Emma” is both, and
in degrees always perfectly proportioned. Still, the two books are
preeminent achievements in the field of pure character-drawing, and one
must turn to the greatest continental novelists--to Balzac again (as
always), to Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, Marcel Proust,
and perhaps to the very occasional best of Trollope--to match such
searching and elaborate studies.
But among the continental novelists--with few exceptions--the
delineation of character is inextricably combined with the study of
manners, as for instance in the novels of Tolstoy, of Balzac and of
Flaubert. Turgenev, in “Dmitri Rudin,” gave the somewhat rare example
of a novel made almost entirely out of the portrayal of a single
character; as, at the opposite extreme, Samuel Butler’s “Way of all
Flesh,” for all its brilliant character-drawing, is essentially the
portrait of a family and a social group--one of the most distinctive
novels of “manners” it is possible to find.
Such preliminary suggestions, cursory as they are, may help, better
than mere definitions, to keep in mind the differing types of novel in
which either character or situation weighs down the scales.
II
The novel, in the hands of English-speaking writers, has always tended,
as it rose in value, to turn to pictures of character and manners,
however much blent with dramatic episodes, or entangled in what used to
be vaguely known as a plot. The plot, in the traditional sense of the
term, consisted in some clash of events, or, less often, of character.
But it was an arbitrarily imposed and rather spaciously built
framework, inside of which the people concerned had room to develop
their idiosyncrasies and be themselves, except in the crucial moments
when they became the puppets of the plot.
The real novel of situation, a compacter and above all a more
inevitable affair, did not, at least on English soil, take shape till
“plot,” in the old-fashioned sense of a coil of outward happenings,
was giving way to the discovery that real drama is soul-drama. The
novel of situation, indeed, has never really acclimatized itself
in English-speaking countries; whereas in France it seems to have
grown naturally from the psychological novel of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, wherein the conflict of characters tended from
the first to simplify the drawing of _character_ and to turn the
protagonists into embodiments of a particular passion rather than of a
particular person.
From this danger the English novelist has usually been guarded by
an inexhaustible interest in personality, and a fancy for loitering
by the way. The plots of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot
and their successors are almost detachable at will, so arbitrarily
are they imposed on the novel of character which was slowly but
steadily developing within their lax support, and which became, as the
nineteenth century advanced, the typical form of English fiction.
The novel of situation is a different matter. The situation, instead
of being imposed from the outside, is the kernel of the tale and its
only reason for being. It seizes the characters in its steely grip,
and jiu-jitsus them into the required attitude with a relentlessness
against which only genius can prevail. In every form of novel it is
noticeable that the central characters tend to be the least real.
This seems to be partly explained by the fact that these characters,
survivors of the old “hero” and “heroine,” whose business it was not
to be real but to be sublime, are still, though often without the
author’s being aware of it, the standard-bearers of his convictions
or the expression of his secret inclinations. They are _his_ in
the sense of tending to do and say what he would do, or imagines
he would do, in given circumstances, and being mere projections of
his own personality they lack the substance and relief of the minor
characters, whom he views coolly and objectively, in all their human
weakness and inconsequence. But there remains another reason, less
often recognized, for the unreality of novel “heroes” and “heroines,”
a reason especially applicable to the leading figures in the novel of
situation. It is that _the story is about them_, and forces them into
the shape which its events impose, while the subordinate characters,
moving at ease in the interstices of the tale, and free to go about
their business in the illogical human fashion, remain real to writer
and readers.
This fact, exemplified in all novels, becomes most vivid in the novel
of situation, where the characters tend to turn into Laocoöns, and die
in the merciless coils of their adventure. This is the extreme point of
the difference between the novel of situation and of character, and the
cause of the common habit of regarding them as alternative methods of
fiction.
III
The thoughtful critic who would be rid of the cheap formulas of
fiction-reviewing, and reach some clearer and deeper expression of
the sense and limitations of the art, is sure to resent the glib
definition of the novel of situation and the novel of character (or
manners) as necessarily antithetical and mutually exclusive. The
thoughtful critic will be right; and the thoughtful novelist will
share his view. What sense is there in such arbitrary divisions, such
opposings of one manner to another, when almost all the greatest novels
are there, in their versatility and their abundance, to show the
glorious possibility of welding both types of fiction into a single
masterpiece?
In what category, for instance, should “Anna Karenina” be placed?
Undoubtedly in that of novels of character and manners. Yet if one sums
up the tale in its rapidity and its vehemence, what situation did Dumas
Fils ever devise for his theatre “of situation” half so poignant or so
dramatic as that which Tolstoy manages to keep conspicuously afloat on
the wide tossing expanse of the Russian social scene? In “Vanity Fair,”
again, so preeminently a novel of manners, a novel of character, with
what dramatic intensity the situation between Becky, Rawdon and Lord
Steyne stands out from the rich populous pages, and gathers up into
itself all their diffused significance!
The answer is evident: above a certain height of creative capacity the
different methods, the seemingly conflicting points of view, are merged
in the artist’s comprehensive vision, and the situations inherent
in his subject detach themselves in strong relief from the fullest
background without disturbing the general composition.
But though this is true, it is true only of the greatest
novelists--those who, as Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare, do not
abide our question but are free. In them, vast vision is united to
equivalent powers of co-ordination; but more often the novelist who
has the creative vision lacks the capacity for co-ordinating and
rendering his subject, or at least is unable, in the same creation, to
give an equal part to the development of character and to the clash
of situation. Owing to the lack of that supreme equipment which
always rises above classification most of the novelists have tended
to let their work fall into one of the two categories of situation or
character, thus fortifying the theory of the superficial critics that
life in fiction must be presented either as conflict or as character.
The so-called novel of character, even in less than the most powerful
hands, does not, of course, preclude situation in the sense of
a dramatic clash. But the novelist develops his tale through a
succession of episodes, all in some way illustrative of the manners
or the characters out of which the situation is eventually to spring;
he lingers on the way, is not afraid of by-paths, and enriches his
scene with subordinate pictures, as the mediæval miniaturist encloses
his chief subjects in a border of beautiful ornament and delicate
vignettes; whereas the novel of situation is, by definition, one in
which the problem to be worked out in a particular human conscience,
or the clash between conflicting wills, is the novelist’s chief if not
his only theme, and everything not directly illuminative of it must be
left out as irrelevant. This does not mean that in the latter type of
tale--as, for instance, in “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”--the episode,
the touch of colour or character, is forbidden. The modern novelist of
situation does not seem likely to return to the monochrome starkness
of “Adolphe” or “La Princesse de Clèves.” He uses every scrap of
colour, every picturesque by-product of his subject which that subject
yields; but he avoids adding to it a single touch, however decoratively
tempting, which is not part of the design.
If the two methods are thus contrasted, the novel of character and
manners may seem superior in richness, variety and play of light and
shade. This does not prove that it is necessarily capable of a greater
total effect than the other; yet so far the greatest novels have
undoubtedly dealt with character and manners rather than with mere
situation. The inference is indeed almost irresistible that the farther
the novel is removed in treatment from theatrical modes of expression,
the more nearly it attains its purpose as a freer art, appealing to
those more subtle imaginative requirements which the stage can never
completely satisfy.
When the novelist has been possessed by a situation, and sees his
characters hurrying to its culmination, he must have unusual keenness
of vision and sureness of hand to fix their lineaments and detain them
on their way long enough for the reader to recognize them as real human
beings. In the novel of pure situation it is doubtful if this has
ever been done with more art than in “The Wrong Box,” where Stevenson
launched on his roaring torrent of farce a group of _real people_,
alive and individual, who keep their reality and individuality till the
end. The tears of laughter that the book provokes generally blind the
reader to its subtle character-drawing; but, save for the people in
“Gil Blas,” and the memorable figures of Chicot and Gorenflot in the
Dumas cycle headed by “La Dame de Monsoreau,” it would be hard, in any
tale of action, to find characters as vivid and individual as those
which rollick through this glorious farce.
The tendency of the situation to take hold of the novelist’s
imagination, and to impose its own _tempo_ on his tale, can be resisted
only by richness and solidity of temperament. The writer must have a
range wide enough to include, within the march of unalterable law,
all the inconsequences of human desire, ambition, cruelty, weakness
and sublimity. He must, above all, bear in mind at each step that his
business is not to ask what the situation would be likely to make of
his characters, but what his characters, being what they are, would
make of the situation. This question, which is the tuning-fork of
truth, never needs to be more insistently applied than in writing the
dialogue which usually marks the culminating scenes in fiction. The
moment the novelist finds that his characters are talking not as they
naturally would, but as the situation requires, are visibly lending him
a helping hand in the more rapid elucidation of his drama, the moment
he hears them saying anything which the stress of their predicament
would not naturally bring to their lips, his effect has been produced
at the expense of reality, and he will find them turning to sawdust on
his hands.
Some novelists, conscious of the danger, and not sufficiently skilled
to meet it, have tried to turn it by interlarding these crucial
dialogues with irrelevant small-talk, in the hope of thus producing a
greater air of reality. But this is to fall again into the trap of what
Balzac called “a reality in nature which is not one in art.” The object
of dialogue is to gather up the loose strands of passion and emotion
running through the tale; and the attempt to entangle these threads
in desultory chatter about the weather or the village pump proves
only that the narrator has not known how to do the necessary work of
selection. All the novelist’s art is brought into play by such tests.
His characters must talk as they would in reality, and yet everything
not relevant to his tale must be eliminated. The secret of success
lies in his instinct of selection.
These difficulties are not a reason for condemning the novel of
situation as an inferior or at least as a not-worth-while form of the
art. Inferior to the larger form, the novel of character and manners,
it probably is, if only in the matter of scale; but certainly also
worth while, since it is the natural vehicle of certain creative minds.
As long as there are novelists whose inventive faculty presents them
first with the form, and only afterward with the substance, of the
tales they want to tell, the novel of situation will fill a purpose.
But it is precisely this type of mind which needs to be warned against
the dangers of the form. When the problem comes to the novelist
before he sees the characters engaged in it, he must be all the more
deliberate in dealing with it, must let it lie in his mind till it
brings forth of itself the kind of people who would naturally be
involved in that particular plight. The novelist’s permanent problem is
that of making his people at once typical and individual, universal
and particular, and in adopting the form of the novel of situation he
perpetually runs the risk of upsetting that nice balance of attributes
unless he persists in thinking of his human beings first, and of their
predicament only as the outcome of what they are.
IV
The predicament--the situation--must still be borne in mind if the
novelist approaches his task in another way, and sees his tale as
situation illustrating character instead of the reverse.
Even the novel of character and manners can never be without situation,
that is, without some sort of climax caused by the contending forces
engaged. The conflict, the shock of forces, is latent in every attempt
to detach a fragment of human experience and transpose it in terms of
art, that is, of completion.
The seeming alternative is to fall back on the “stream of
consciousness”--which is simply the “slice-of-life” of the ’eighties
renamed--but that method, as has already been pointed out, contains
its own condemnation, since every attempt to employ it of necessity
involves selection, and selection in the long run must eventually lead
to the transposition, the “stylization,” of the subject.
Let it be assumed, then, that a predicament there must be, whether
worked out in one soul, or created by the shock of opposing purposes.
The larger the canvas of the novel--supposing the novelist’s powers
to be in scale with his theme--the larger will be the scale of
the predicament. In the great novel of manners in which Balzac,
Thackeray and Tolstoy were preeminent, the conflict engages not only
individuals but social groups, and the individual plight is usually
the product--one of the many products--of the social conflict. There
is a sense in which situation is the core of every tale, and as truly
present in the quiet pages of “Eugénie Grandet” or “Le Lys dans la
Vallée” as in the tense tragedy of “The Return of the Native,” the epic
clash of “War and Peace” or the dense social turmoil of “Vanity Fair.”
But the main advantage of the novelist to whom his subject first
presents itself in terms of character, either individual or social, is
that he can quietly watch his people or his group going about their
business, and let the form of his tale grow out of what they are, out
of their idiosyncrasies, their humours and their prejudices, instead
of fitting a situation onto them before he really knows them, either
personally or collectively.
It is manifest that every method of fiction has its dangers, and
that the study of character pursued to excess may tend to submerge
the action necessary to illustrate that character. In the inevitable
reaction against the arbitrary “plot” many novelists have gone too
far in the other direction, either swamping themselves in the tedious
“stream of consciousness,” or else--another frequent error--giving an
exaggerated importance to trivial incidents when the tale is concerned
with trivial lives. There is a sense in which nothing which receives
the touch of art is trivial; but to rise to this height the incident,
insignificant in itself, must illustrate some general law, and turn on
some deep movement of the soul. If the novelist wants to hang his drama
on a button, let it at least be one of Lear’s.
All things hold together in the practice of any art, and character and
manners, and the climaxes springing out of them, cannot, in the art of
fiction, be dealt with separately without diminution to the subject. It
is a matter for the novelist’s genius to combine all these ingredients
in their due proportion; and then we shall have “Emma” or “The Egoist”
if character is to be given the first place, “Le Père Goriot” or
“Madame Bovary” if drama is to be blent with it, and “War and Peace,”
“Vanity Fair,” “L’Education Sentimentale” if all the points of view
and all the methods are to be harmonized in the achievement of a great
picture wherein the individual, the group and their social background
have each a perfectly apportioned share in the composition.
“Four great walls in the New Jerusalem
Meted on each side by the angel’s reed--”
Yes; but to cover such spaces adequately happens even to the greatest
artists only once or twice in their career.
V
MARCEL PROUST
V
MARCEL PROUST
I
The difficulty of speaking at all adequately of Marcel Proust has grown
with the number of volumes of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” and
also with the lapse of time since the first were published. The cycle,
moreover, is still incomplete (though we now know that its conclusion
will appear); and the critic who ventures to see a definite intention
in the dense and branching pages already published does so at his
peril, and on the faith of that sense of inner continuity communicated
from the outset by all the greatest novels, from the rambling and
extravagant “Gil Blas” to the compact and thrifty “Emma.”
The death of Marcel Proust, premature though it was, yet did not happen
till his dying hand had put the last words to the last page of his vast
narrative. Last words; but unhappily not last touches. The appearance
of “La Prisonnière” confirms the report circulated after his death
that the volumes then unpublished were left without those innumerable
enriching strokes which gave their golden ripeness to the others. But,
whether or not these final chapters, written in illness, and clouded
(as one perceives from “La Prisonnière”) by physical weakness and deep
mental distress, fulfil the promise of that unity to which all the
strands of the elaborate fabric seem to tend, the first volumes (by
which the author’s greatness will perhaps finally be measured) make
it clear that he himself felt the need of such unity, and would have
submitted his restless genius to it if illness had not disintegrated
his powers. On this inference the critic will probably have to rest;
and it is enough to justify treating the fragment before us as already
potentially a whole.
More serious for the critic is the obstacle caused by the long lapse of
years since “Du Côté de chez Swann” led off the astounding procession.
Since then the conception of the art of fiction, as it had taken shape
during the previous half-century, has been unsettled by a series of
experiments, each one too promptly heralded as the final and only way
of novel-writing. The critics who have handed down these successive
ultimata have apparently decided that no interest, even archæological,
attaches any longer to the standards and the vocabulary of their
predecessors; and this wholesale rejection of past principles has
led to a confusion in terms which makes communication difficult and
conclusions ambiguous.
An unexpected result of the contradictory clamour has been to
transfer Proust, who ten or twelve years ago seemed to many an almost
unintelligible innovator, back to his rightful place in the great line
of classic tradition. If, therefore, the attempt to form a judgment
of his art has become doubly arduous it has also become doubly
interesting; for Proust, almost alone of his kind, is apparently still
regarded as a great novelist by the innovators, and yet is already
far enough off to make it clear that he was himself that far more
substantial thing in the world of art, a renovator.
With a general knowledge of letters extending far beyond the usual
limits of French culture he combined a vision peculiarly his own; and
he was thus exceptionally fitted to take the next step forward in a
developing art without disowning its past, or wasting the inherited
wealth of experience. It is as much the lack of general culture as
of original vision which makes so many of the younger novelists, in
Europe as in America, attach undue importance to trifling innovations.
Original vision is never much afraid of using accepted forms; and
only the cultivated intelligence escapes the danger of regarding
as intrinsically new what may be a mere superficial change, or the
reversion to a discarded trick of technique.
The more one reads of Proust the more one sees that his strength is
the strength of tradition. All his newest and most arresting effects
have been arrived at through the old way of selection and design. In
the construction of these vast, leisurely, and purposeful compositions
nothing is really wasted, or brought in at random. If at first Proust
seemed so revolutionary it was partly because of his desultory manner
and parenthetical syntax, and chiefly because of the shifting of
emphasis resulting from his extremely personal sense of values. The
points on which Proust lays the greatest stress are often those inmost
tremors, waverings, and contradictions which the conventions of fiction
have hitherto subordinated to more generalized truths and more rapid
effects. Proust bends over them with unwearied attention. No one else
has carried as far the analysis of half-conscious states of mind,
obscure associations of thought and gelatinous fluctuations of mood;
but long and closely as he dwells on them he never loses himself in
the submarine jungle in which his lantern gropes. Though he arrives at
his object in so roundabout a way, that object is always to report
the conscious, purposive conduct of his characters. In this respect
he is distinctly to be classed among those whom the jargon of recent
philosophy has labelled “behaviourists” because they believe that the
proper study of mankind is man’s conscious and purposive behaviour
rather than its dim unfathomable sources. Proust is in truth the
aware and eager inheritor of two great formulas: that of Racine in
his psychology, that of Saint-Simon in its anecdotic and discursive
illustration. In both respects he is deliberately traditional.
II
Fashions in the arts come and go, and it is of little interest to try
to analyze the work of any artist who does not give one the sense of
being in some sort above them. In the art of one’s contemporaries it is
not always easy to say what produces that sense; and perhaps the best
way of trying to find out is to apply a familiar touchstone.
Out of all the flux of judgments and theories which have darkened
counsel in respect of novel-writing, one stable fact seems always to
emerge; the quality the greatest novelists have always had in common
is that of making their people live. To ask why this matters more than
anything else would lead one into the obscurest mazes of æsthetic;
but the fact is generally enough admitted to serve as a ground for
discussion. Not all the other graces and virtues combined seem to have
in them that aseptic magic. Vivacity, virtuosity, an abundance of
episodes, skill in presenting them: what power of survival have these,
compared with the sight of the doddering Baron Hulot climbing his
stairs to a senile tryst, to Beatrix Esmond descending hers in silver
clocks and red-heeled shoes?
M. Jusserand, in his “Literary History of the English People,”
says of Shakespeare that he was _un grand distributeur de vie_, a
great life-giver; it is the very epithet one needs for Proust. His
gallery of living figures is immense, almost past reckoning; so far,
in that ever-growing throng, it is only the failures that one can
count. And Proust’s power of evocation extends from the background
and middle distance (where some mysterious law of optics seems to
make it relatively easy for the novelist to animate his puppets) to
that searching “centre front” where his principal characters, so
scrutinized, explained, re-explained, pulled about, taken apart and
put together again, resist in their tough vitality his perpetual
nervous manipulation, and keep carelessly on their predestined way.
Swann himself, subjected to so merciless an examination, Swann, as to
whose haberdashery, hats, boots, gloves, taste in pictures, books,
and women we are informed with an impartial abundance, is never more
alive than when, in that terrible scene of the fifth volume, he
quietly tells the Duchesse de Guermantes that he cannot promise to
go to Italy the following spring with her and the Duke because he
happens to be dying. Equally vivid are the invalid aunt in the pale
twilight of her provincial bedroom, and the servant Françoise who
waits on her, and at her death passes as a matter of course to the
rest of the family--amazing composite picture of all the faults and
virtues of the old-fashioned French maid-servant. And then there is the
hero’s grandmother, who fills the pages with a subdued yet tingling
vitality from the moment when we first see her dashing out for one of
her lonely walks in the rain to that other day, far on in the tale,
when, fiercely and doggedly nursed by Françoise, she dies in an equal
loneliness; there is the Marquis de Saint-Loup, impetuous, selfish,
and sentimental, with his artless veneration for the latest thing in
“culture,” his snobbishness in the Bohemian world, his simplicity
and good-breeding in his own; the Jewish actress, his mistress, who
despises him because he is a mere “man of the world” and not one of her
own crew of æsthetic charlatans; the great, the abject, the abominable
and magnificent Monsieur de Charlus, and the shy scornful Duchesse de
Guermantes, with her quickness of wit and obtuseness of heart, her
consuming worldliness and her sincere belief that nothing bores her as
much as the world--the poor Duchess, mistress of all the social arts,
yet utterly nonplussed, and furious, because Swann’s announcement that
he is dying is made as she is getting into her carriage to go to a big
dinner, and nothing in her code teaches her how to behave to a friend
tactless enough to blurt out such news at such a moment! Ah, how they
all live, and abound each in his or her own sense--and how, each time
they reappear (sometimes after disconcertingly long eclipses), they
take up their individual rhythm as unerringly as the performers in some
great orchestra!
The sense that, through all his desultoriness, Proust always knows
whither his people are tending, and which of their words, gestures and
thoughts are worth recording; his ease in threading his way through
their crowded ranks, fills the reader, from the first, with the feeling
of security which only the great artists inspire. Certain novels,
beginning very quietly--carelessly, almost--yet convey on the opening
page the same feeling of impending fatality as the first bars of the
Fifth Symphony. Destiny is knocking at the gate. The next knock may
not come for a long time; but the reader knows that it _will_ come,
as surely as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyitch knew that the mysterious little
intermittent pain which used to disappear for days would come back
oftener and more insistently till it destroyed him.
There are many ways of conveying this sense of the foot-fall of
Destiny; and nothing shows the quality of the novelist’s imagination
more clearly than the incidents he singles out to illuminate the course
of events and the inner workings of his people’s souls. When Imogen,
setting forth to meet her adored Posthumus at Milford Haven, asks
his servant Pisanio (who has been ordered by the jealous Posthumus
to murder her on the way): “How many score of miles may we well ride
’twixt hour and hour?” and, getting the man’s anguished answer: “One
score ’twixt sun and sun, Madam, ’s enough for you, and too much too,”
exclaims: “_Why, one that rode to’s execution, man, could never go so
slow_--” or when Gretchen, opening her candid soul to Faust, tells him
how she mothered her little sister from the cradle--“My mother was so
ill ... I brought the poor little creature up on milk and water ... the
cradle stood by my bed, she could hardly stir without my waking. I had
to feed her, take her into the bed with me, walk the floor with her all
night, and be early the next morning at the wash-tub; but I loved her
so that I was glad to do it”--when the swift touch of genius darts such
rays on the path to come, one is almost tempted to exclaim: There is
nothing in mere “situation”--the whole of the novelist’s art lies in
the particular way in which he brings the given conjuncture home to the
imagination!
Proust had an incredible sureness of touch in shedding this prophetic
ray on his characters. Again and again he finds the poignant word,
the significant gesture, as when, in that matchless first chapter
(“Combray”) of “Du Côté de chez Swann” he depicts the suspense of
the lonely little boy (the narrator) who, having been hurried off
to bed without a goodnight kiss because M. Swann is coming to dine,
persuades the reluctant Françoise to carry to his mother a little
note in which he implores her to come up and see him “about something
very important.” So far, the episode is like many in which the modern
novelist has analyzed--especially since “Sinister Street”--the
inarticulate tragedies of childhood. But for Proust such an episode, in
addition to its own significance, has a deeper illuminative use.
“I thought to myself,” he goes on, “how Swann would have laughed at
my anguish if he had read my letter, and guessed its real object”
(which was, of course, to get his mother’s goodnight kiss); “but, on
the contrary, as I learned later, for years an anguish of the same
kind was the torture of Swann’s own life. That anguish, which consists
in knowing that the being one loves is in some gay scene [_lieu de
plaisir_] where one is not, where there is no hope of one’s being;
that anguish, it was through the passion of love that he experienced
it--that passion to which it is in some sort predestined, to which
it peculiarly and specifically pertains”--and then, when Françoise
has been persuaded to take the child’s letter, and his mother
(engaged with her guest) does not come, but says curtly: “There is
no answer”--“Alas!” the narrator continues, “Swann also had had that
experience, had learned that the good intentions of a third person
are powerless to move a woman who is irritated at feeling herself
pursued in scenes of enjoyment by some one whom she does not love--”
and suddenly, by one touch, in the first pages of that quiet opening
chapter in which a little boy’s drowsy memories reconstitute an old
friend’s visit to his parents, a light is flashed on the central theme
of the book: the hopeless incurable passion of a sensitive man for a
stupid uncomprehending woman. The foot-fall of Destiny has echoed
through that dull provincial garden, her touch has fallen on the
shoulder of the idle man of fashion, and in an instant, and by the most
natural of transitions, the quiet picture of family life falls into its
place in the great design of the book.
Proust’s pages abound in such anticipatory flashes, each one of which
would make the fortune of a lesser novelist. A peculiar duality of
vision enabled him to lose himself in each episode as it unrolled
itself before him--as in this delicious desultory picture of Swann’s
visit to his old friends--and all the while to keep his hand on the
main threads of the design, so that no slightest incident contributing
to that design ever escapes him. This degree of saturation in one’s
subject can be achieved only through something like the slow ripening
processes of nature. Tyndall said of the great speculative minds:
“There is in the human intellect a power of expansion--I might almost
call it a power of creation--which is brought into play by the simple
brooding upon facts”; and he might have added that this brooding is
one of the most distinctive attributes of genius, is perhaps as near an
approach as can be made to the definition of genius.
Nothing can be farther from the mechanical ingenuities of
“plot”-weaving than this faculty of penetrating into a chosen subject
and bringing to light its inherent properties. Neither haste to have
done, nor fear lest the reader shall miss his emphasis, ever affects
the leisurely movement of Proust’s narrative, or causes him to give
unnatural relief to the passages intended to serve as sign-posts. A
tiny “blaze,” here and there, on the bark of one of the trees in his
forest, suffices to show the way; and the explorer who has not enough
wood-craft to discover these signs had best abstain from the adventure.
III
It was one of the distinctive characters of Proust’s genius that he
combined with his great sweep of vision an exquisite delicacy of touch,
a solicitous passion for detail. Many of his pages recall those
mediæval manuscripts where the roving fancy of the scribe has framed
some solemn gospel or epistle in episodes drawn from the life of towns
and fields, or the pagan extravagances of the Bestiary. Jane Austen
never surpassed in conciseness of irony some of the conversations
between Marcel’s maiden aunts, or the description of Madame de
Cambremer and Madame de Franquetot listening to music; and one must
turn to “Cranford” for such microscopic studies of provincial life as
that of the bed-ridden aunt, Madame Octave, who is always going to get
up the next day, and meanwhile lies beside her bottle of Vichy and her
purple velvet prayer-book “bursting with pious images,” and listens to
Françoise’s report of what is going on in the street, down which Madame
Goupil, just before a thunder-storm, is seen walking _without her
umbrella_ in the new silk dress she has had made at Châteaudun!
But just as the reader is sinking delectably into the feather-bed of
the small town, Proust snatches him up in eagle’s talons and swings
him over the darkest abysses of passion and intrigue--showing him,
in the slow tortures of Swann’s love for Odette, and of Saint-Loup’s
for Rachel, the last depths and involutions of moral anguish, or
setting the frivolous careers of the two great Guermantes ladies, the
Duchess and the Princess, on a stage vaster than any since Balzac’s,
and packed with a human comedy as multifarious. This changing but
never confusing throng is composed of most of the notable types of a
society which still keeps its aristocratic framework: the old nobility
of the “Faubourg” with their satellites; rich and cultivated Jews
(such as Swann and Bloch), celebrated painters, novelists, actresses,
diplomatists, lawyers, doctors, Academicians; men of fashion and vice,
_déclassées_ Grand Duchesses, intriguing vulgarians, dowdy great
ladies, and all the other figures composing the most various, curious,
and restless of modern societies.
Without visible effort Proust’s art marshals these throngs and then
turns serenely aside to put the last tender touches to his description
of the hawthorns at Combray, or the lovely episode of Marcel’s first
visit to Rachel, where the young man walks up and down under the
blossoming pear-trees while Saint-Loup goes to fetch his mistress.
Every reader enamoured of the art must brood in amazement over the way
in which Proust maintains the balance between these two manners--the
broad and the minute. His endowment as a novelist--his range of
presentation combined with mastery of his instruments--has probably
never been surpassed.
Fascinating as it is to the professional to dwell on this amazing
virtuosity, yet the lover of Proust soon comes to feel that his rarest
quality lies beyond and above it--lies in the power to reveal, by a
single allusion, a word, an image, those depths of soul beyond the
soul’s own guessing. The man who could write of the death of Marcel’s
grandmother: “A few hours ago her beautiful hair, just beginning to
turn gray ... had seemed less old than herself. Now, on the contrary,
it placed the crown of age on a face grown young again, and from
which the wrinkles, the contractions, the heaviness, the tension, the
flaccidity caused by suffering had all disappeared. As in the far-off
time when her parents had chosen her bridegroom for her, the features
of her face were delicately traced in lines of purity and submission,
the cheeks shone with chaste hopes, with a dream of bliss, even with
an innocent gaiety that the years, one by one, had slowly destroyed.
Life, in leaving her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A
smile seemed to rest upon my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral bed,
death, like the mediæval sculptor, had laid her down in the guise of
a young girl--” the man who could find words in which to express the
inexpressible emotion with which one comes suddenly, in some apparently
unknown landscape, upon a scene long known to the soul (like that
mysterious group of trees encountered by Marcel in the course of a
drive with Madame de Villeparisis)--the man who could touch with so
sure and compassionate a hand on the central mysteries of love and
death, deserves at such moments to be ranked with Tolstoy when he
describes the death of Prince Andrew, with Shakespeare when he makes
Lear say: “Pray you, undo this button....”
IV
Hitherto I have only praised.
In writing of a great creative artist, and especially of one whose work
is over, it is always better worth while to dwell on the beauties than
to hunt down the blemishes. Where the qualities outweigh the defects
the latter lose much of their importance, even when, as sometimes
in Proust’s case, they are defects in the moral sensibility, that
tuning-fork of the novelist’s art.
It is vain to deny, or to try to explain away, this particular
blemish--deficiency, it should be rather called--in Proust’s work.
Undoubtedly there are blind spots in his books, as there are in
Balzac’s, in Stendhal’s, in Flaubert’s; but Proust’s blind spots are
peculiarly disconcerting because they are intermittent. One cannot
dismiss the matter by saying that a whole category of human emotions is
invisible to him, since at certain times his vision is acutest at the
precise angle where the blindness had previously occurred.
A well-known English critic, confusing the scenes in which Proust’s
moral sense has failed him with those (far more numerous) in which he
deliberately portrays the viler aspects of the human medley, suggests
that timorous readers might find unmingled enjoyment in the perusal of
“A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by the simple expedient of “thinking
away” M. de Charlus--as who should propose “thinking away” Falstaff
from the plays in which he figures! It would, in fact, be almost as
difficult to dismiss M. de Charlus with an “I know thee not, old man,”
as Falstaff; and quite as unnecessary. It is not by daring to do “in
the round” a mean or corrupt character--an Iago, a Lord Steyne, a
Philippe Bridau, or a Valérie Marneffe--that a novelist diminishes
the value of his work. On the contrary, he increases it. Only when
the vileness and the cruelty escape him, when he fails to see the
blackness of the shadow they project, and thus unconsciously flattens
his modelling, does he correspondingly empoverish the picture; and
this Proust too often did--but never in drawing M. de Charlus, whose
ignominy was always as vividly present to him as Iago’s or Goneril’s to
their creator.
There is one deplorable page where the hero and narrator, with whose
hyper-sensitiveness a hundred copious and exquisite passages have
acquainted us, describes with complacency how he has deliberately
hidden himself to spy on an unedifying scene. This episode--and
several others marked by the same abrupt lapse of sensibility--might
be “thought away” with all the less detriment that, at such moments,
Proust’s characters invariably lose their _probableness_ and begin
to stumble through their parts like good actors vainly trying to
galvanize a poor play. All through his work there are pages literally
trembling with emotion; but wherever the moral sensibility fails, the
tremor, the vibration, ceases. When he is unaware of the meanness of an
act committed by one of his characters, that character loses by so much
of its life-likeness, and, reversing Pygmalion’s gesture, the author
turns living beings back to stone.
But what are these lapses in a book where countless pages throb with
passionate pity and look at one with human eyes? The same man who thus
offends at one moment, at the next has one by the heartstrings in a
scene such as that where the hero, hearing his grandmother speak for
the first time over the telephone, is startled into thoughts of death
and separation by the altered sound of a familiar voice; or that in
which Saint-Loup comes up to Paris on twenty-four hours’ leave, and
his adoring mother first exults at the thought that he is going to
spend his evening with her, then bitterly divines that he is not, and
finally trembles lest, by betraying her disappointment, she shall have
spoilt his selfish pleasure. And it is almost always at the very moment
when the reader thinks: “Oh, if only he doesn’t fail me _now_!” that he
floods his squalid scene with the magic of an inexhaustible poetry, so
that one could cry out, like Sigmund when the gale blows open the door
of the hut: “No one went--some one came! _It is the spring._”
M. Benjamin Crémieux, whose article on Proust is the most thoughtful
study of his work yet published, has come upon the obstacle of Proust’s
lapses of sensibility, and tried, not very successfully, to turn it.
According to this critic, Proust’s satire is never “based on a moral
ideal,” but is always merely “complementary to his psychological
analysis. The only occasion” (M. Crémieux continues) “where Proust
incidentally speaks of a moral ideal is in the description of the
death of Bergotte.” He then cites the beautiful passage in question:
“Everything happens in our lives as though we had entered upon them
with a burden of obligations contracted in an anterior existence; there
is nothing in our earthly condition to make us feel that we are under
an obligation to be good, to be morally sensitive [_être délicats_],
even to be polite; nor, to the artist, to begin over again twenty times
a passage which will probably be admired only when his body has been
devoured by worms.... All these obligations, which have no sanction
in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world
founded on goodness, on moral scruple, on sacrifice, a world entirely
different from this one, a world whence we come when we are born on
earth, perhaps to return there and live once more under the rule of
the unknown laws which we have obeyed here because we carried their
principles within ourselves, without knowing who decreed that they
should be; those laws to which every deep intellectual labour draws us
nearer, and which are invisible only--and not always!--to fools.”
It is difficult to see how so deliberate a profession of faith in a
moral ideal can be brushed aside as “incidental.” The passage quoted
would rather seem to be the key to Proust’s whole attitude: to its
weakness as well as to its strength. For it will be noticed that, among
the mysterious “obligations” brought with us from that other “entirely
different” world, he omits one; the old stoical quality of courage.
That quality, moral or physical, seems never to have been recognized
by him as one of the mainsprings of human action. He could conceive of
human beings as good, as pitiful, as self-sacrificing, as guided by the
most delicate moral scruples; but never, apparently, as brave, either
by instinct or through conscious effort.
Fear ruled his moral world: fear of death, fear of love, fear of
responsibility, fear of sickness, fear of draughts, fear of fear. It
formed the inexorable horizon of his universe and the hard delimitation
of his artist’s temperament.
In saying so one touches on the narrow margin between the man’s genius
and his physical disabilities, and at this point criticism must draw
back, or linger only in reverent admiration of the great work achieved,
the vast register covered, in spite of that limitation, in conflict
with those disabilities.
Nietzsche’s great saying, “Everything worth while is accomplished
notwithstanding” [_trotzdem_], might serve as the epitaph of Proust.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
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Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
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