________________________________________________
_ WE have recently (12) enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing,
in some detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, of Mr.
Walter Besant and Mr. Henry James; two men certainly of very
different calibre: Mr. James so precise of outline, so cunning of
fence, so scrupulous of finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so
friendly, with so persuasive and humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James
the very type of the deliberate artist, Mr. Besant the
impersonation of good nature. That such doctors should differ will
excite no great surprise; but one point in which they seem to agree
fills me, I confess, with wonder. For they are both content to
talk about the "art of fiction"; and Mr. Besant, waxing exceedingly
bold, goes on to oppose this so-called "art of fiction" to the "art
of poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean nothing but the art
of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of
prose. For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to
call by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality;
present, at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too
seldom present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the
ode and epic. Fiction is the same case; it is no substantive art,
but an element which enters largely into all the arts but
architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini,
all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose that either Hogarth
or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any degree into
the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr. James's
charming essay. The art of fiction, then, regarded as a
definition, is both too ample and too scanty. Let me suggest
another; let me suggest that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant had
in view was neither more nor less than the art of narrative.
But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the modern English
novel," the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author
of the most pleasing novel on that roll, ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS
OF MEN, the desire is natural enough. I can conceive, then, that
he would hasten to propose two additions, and read thus: the art of
FICTITIOUS narrative IN PROSE.
Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to
be denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and
gilded lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of
literature; but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it
is needful to build our definitions on some more fundamental ground
then binding. Why, then, are we to add "in prose"? THE ODYSSEY
appears to me the best of romances; THE LADY OF THE LAKE to stand
high in the second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues to
contain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than
the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether a narrative be written in
blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long period of Gibbon
or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles of the art
of narrative must be equally observed. The choice of a noble and
swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration in the
same way, if not to the same degree, as the choice of measured
verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of events, a higher key of
dialogue, and a more picked and stately strain of words. If you
are to refuse DON JUAN, it is hard to see why you should include
ZANONI or (to bracket works of very different value) THE SCARLET
LETTER; and by what discrimination are you to open your doors TO
THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and close them on THE FAERY QUEEN? To bring
things closer home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum.
A narrative called PARADISE LOST was written in English verse by
one John Milton; what was it then? It was next translated by
Chateaubriand into French prose; and what was it then? Lastly, the
French translation was, by some inspired compatriot of George
Gilfillan (and of mine) turned bodily into an English novel; and,
in the name of clearness, what was it then?
But, once more, why should we add "fictitious"? The reason why is
obvious. The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not
want for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same,
whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real
series of events or of an imaginary series. Boswell's LIFE OF
JOHNSON (a work of cunning and inimitable art) owes its success to
the same technical manoeuvres as (let us say) TOM JONES: the clear
conception of certain characters of man, the choice and
presentation of certain incidents out of a great number that
offered, and the invention (yes, invention) and preservation of a
certain key in dialogue. In which these things are done with the
more art - in which with the greater air of nature - readers will
differently judge. Boswell's is, indeed, a very special case, and
almost a generic; but it is not only in Boswell, it is in every
biography with any salt of life, it is in every history where
events and men, rather than ideas, are presented - in Tacitus, in
Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay - that the novelist will find
many of his own methods most conspicuously and adroitly handled.
He will find besides that he, who is free - who has the right to
invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more
precious still, of wholesale omission - is frequently defeated,
and, with all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of
reality and passion. Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming
fervour on the sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more careful
examination truth will seem a word of very debateable propriety,
not only for the labours of the novelist, but for those of the
historian. No art - to use the daring phrase of Mr. James - can
successfully "compete with life"; and the art that seeks to do so
is condemned to perish MONTIBUS AVIIS. Life goes before us,
infinite in complication; attended by the most various and
surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to
the mind - the seat of wonder, to the touch - so thrillingly
delicate, and to the belly - so imperious when starved. It
combines and employs in its manifestation the method and material,
not of one art only, but of all the arts, Music is but an arbitrary
trifling with a few of life's majestic chords; painting is but a
shadow of its pageantry of light and colour; literature does but
drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moral obligation, of
virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony, with which it teems. To
"compete with life," whose sun we cannot look upon, whose passions
and diseases waste and slay us - to compete with the flavour of
wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness
of death and separation - here is, indeed, a projected escalade of
heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat,
armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed
with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the
insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can "compete
with life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts,
but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even
when we read of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are
surprised, and justly commend the author's talent, if our pulse be
quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, that this quickening
of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely agreeable; that these
phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute,
convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of
life, can torture and slay.
What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the
source of its power? The whole secret is that no art does "compete
with life." Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to
half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality.
The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from
the gross, coloured and mobile nature at our feet, and regard
instead a certain figmentary abstraction. Geometry will tell us of
a circle, a thing never seen in nature; asked about a green circle
or an iron circle, it lays its hand upon its mouth. So with the
arts. Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake-white, gives
up truth of colour, as it had already given up relief and movement;
and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme of harmonious
tints. Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the mood of
narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues instead
an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all, it
imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but
the emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells
of them. The real art that dealt with life directly was that of
the first men who told their stories round the savage camp-fire.
Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in
making stories true as in making them typical; not so much in
capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of
them towards a common end. For the welter of impressions, all
forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a
certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly
represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the
same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or
like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters,
from all its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel
echoes and re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to
this must every incident and character contribute; the style must
have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a
word that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer,
and (I had almost said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous,
infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in
comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and
emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate
thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of
experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.
A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a
proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work
of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both
inhere in nature, neither represents it. The novel, which is a
work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are
forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but
by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and
significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.
The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible
magazine from which subjects are to be selected; the name of these
is legion; and with each new subject - for here again I must differ
by the whole width of heaven from Mr. James - the true artist will
vary his method and change the point of attack. That which was in
one case an excellence, will become a defect in another; what was
the making of one book, will in the next be impertinent or dull.
First each novel, and then each class of novels, exists by and for
itself. I will take, for instance, three main classes, which are
fairly distinct: first, the novel of adventure, which appeals to
certain almost sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man;
second, the novel of character, which appeals to our intellectual
appreciation of man's foibles and mingled and inconstant motives;
and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff as
the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature and moral
judgment.
And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James refers, with
singular generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for
hidden treasure; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather
startling words. In this book he misses what he calls the "immense
luxury" of being able to quarrel with his author. The luxury, to
most of us, is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by the tale
as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin to distinguish and
find fault, when the piece is over and the volume laid aside.
Still more remarkable is Mr. James's reason. He cannot criticise
the author, as he goes, "because," says he, comparing it with
another work, "I HAVE BEEN A CHILD, BUT I HAVE NEVER BEEN ON A
QUEST FOR BURIED TREASURE." Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for
if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be
demonstrated that he has never been a child. There never was a
child (unless Master James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate,
and a military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has
fought, and suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little
hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and
triumphantly protected innocence and beauty. Elsewhere in his
essay Mr. James has protested with excellent reason against too
narrow a conception of experience; for the born artist, he
contends, the "faintest hints of life" are converted into
revelations; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority of
cases, that the artist writes with more gusto and effect of those
things which he has only wished to do, than of those which he has
done. Desire is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best
observatory. Now, while it is true that neither Mr. James nor the
author of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone
questing after gold, it is probable that both have ardently desired
and fondly imagined the details of such a life in youthful day-
dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and well aware (cunning
and low-minded man!) that this class of interest, having been
frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to
the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout to the
building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream. Character
to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair
of wide trousers and a liberal complement of pistols. The author,
for the sake of circumstantiation and because he was himself more
or less grown up, admitted character, within certain limits, into
his design; but only within certain limits. Had the same puppets
figured in a scheme of another sort, they had been drawn to very
different purpose; for in this elementary novel of adventure, the
characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities -
the warlike and formidable. So as they appear insidious in deceit
and fatal in the combat, they have served their end. Danger is the
matter with which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with
which it idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far
as they realise the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of
fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, to start the hare of
moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox of
material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale. The
stupid reader will only be offended, and the clever reader lose the
scent.
The novel of character has this difference from all others: that it
requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in the case
of GIL BLAS, it is sometimes called the novel of adventure. It
turns on the humours of the persons represented; these are, to be
sure, embodied in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being
tributary, need not march in a progression; and the characters may
be statically shown. As they enter, so they may go out; they must
be consistent, but they need not grow. Here Mr. James will
recognise the note of much of his own work: he treats, for the most
part, the statics of character, studying it at rest or only gently
moved; and, with his usual delicate and just artistic instinct, he
avoids those stronger passions which would deform the attitudes he
loves to study, and change his sitters from the humorists of
ordinary life to the brute forces and bare types of more emotional
moments. In his recent AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO, so just in
conception, so nimble and neat in workmanship, strong passion is
indeed employed; but observe that it is not displayed. Even in the
heroine the working of the passion is suppressed; and the great
struggle, the true tragedy, the SCENE-A-FAIRE passes unseen behind
the panels of a locked door. The delectable invention of the young
visitor is introduced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr.
James, true to his method, might avoid the scene of passion. I
trust no reader will suppose me guilty of undervaluing this little
masterpiece. I mean merely that it belongs to one marked class of
novel, and that it would have been very differently conceived and
treated had it belonged to that other marked class, of which I now
proceed to speak.
I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because
it enables me to point out by the way a strange and peculiarly
English misconception. It is sometimes supposed that the drama
consists of incident. It consists of passion, which gives the
actor his opportunity; and that passion must progressively
increase, or the actor, as the piece proceeded, would be unable to
carry the audience from a lower to a higher pitch of interest and
emotion. A good serious play must therefore be founded on one of
the passionate CRUCES of life, where duty and inclination come
nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I call, for that
reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a few worthy
specimens, all of our own day and language; Meredith's RHODA
FLEMING, that wonderful and painful book, long out of print, (13)
and hunted for at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy's PAIR OF BLUE
EYES; and two of Charles Reade's, GRIFFITH GAUNT and the DOUBLE
MARRIAGE, originally called WHITE LIES, and founded (by an accident
quaintly favourable to my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the
partner of the great Dumas. In this kind of novel the closed door
of THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO must be broken open; passion must
appear upon the scene and utter its last word; passion is the be-
all and the end-all, the plot and the solution, the protagonist and
the DEUS EX MACHINA in one. The characters may come anyhow upon
the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before they leave
it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of themselves by
passion. It may be part of the design to draw them with detail; to
depict a full-length character, and then behold it melt and change
in the furnace of emotion.
But there is no obligation of the sort; nice portraiture is not
required; and we are content to accept mere abstract types, so they
be strongly and sincerely moved. A novel of this class may be even
great, and yet contain no individual figure; it may be great,
because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart and the
impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the second
class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue
has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind
directed to passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its fair
field in the novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this
more solemn theatre. A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of
the issue, a witty instead of a passionate turn, offend us like an
insincerity. All should be plain, all straightforward to the end.
Hence it is that, in RHODA FLEMING, Mrs. Lovell raises such
resentment in the reader; her motives are too flimsy, her ways are
too equivocal, for the weight and strength of her surroundings.
Hence the hot indignation of the reader when Balzac, after having
begun the DUCHESSE DE LANGEAIS in terms of strong if somewhat
swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the hero's
clock. Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of
character; they are out of place in the high society of the
passions; when the passions are introduced in art at their full
height, we look to see them, not baffled and impotently striving,
as in life, but towering above circumstance and acting substitutes
for fate.
And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to
intervene. To much of what I have said he would apparently demur;
in much he would, somewhat impatiently, acquiesce. It may be true;
but it is not what he desired to say or to hear said. He spoke of
the finished picture and its worth when done; I, of the brushes,
the palette, and the north light. He uttered his views in the tone
and for the ear of good society; I, with the emphasis and
technicalities of the obtrusive student. But the point, I may
reply, is not merely to amuse the public, but to offer helpful
advice to the young writer. And the young writer will not so much
be helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its
highest, as by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms.
The best that we can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive,
whether of character or passion; carefully construct his plot so
that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every
property employed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or
contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakespeare,
the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main intrigue;
suffer not his style to flag below the level of the argument; pitch
the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men talk in
parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may be
called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative
nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one
sentence that is not part and parcel of the business of the story
or the discussion of the problem involved. Let him not regret if
this shortens his book; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant
matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss
a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of
the one he has chosen. Let him not care particularly if he miss
the tone of conversation, the pungent material detail of the day's
manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the environment.
These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent, and yet
have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better
depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. In this
age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract,
the great books of the past, the brave men that lived before
Shakespeare and before Balzac. And as the root of the whole
matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of
life, to be judged by its exactitude; but a simplification of some
side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant
simplicity. For although, in great men, working upon great
motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet
underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that
simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their
excellence.
II
Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly
the lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells;
and none ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. His own
work and those of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he
is the bondslave, the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance
in art like what there is in science; he thinks of past things as
radically dead; he thinks a form can be outlived: a strange
immersion in his own history; a strange forgetfulness of the
history of the race! Meanwhile, by a glance at his own works
(could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of this
illusion would be dispelled. For while he holds all the poor
little orthodoxies of the day - no poorer and no smaller than those
of yesterday or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as
they are exclusive - the living quality of much that he has done is
of a contrary, I had almost said of a heretical, complexion. A
man, as I read him, of an originally strong romantic bent - a
certain glow of romance still resides in many of his books, and
lends them their distinction. As by accident he runs out and
revels in the exceptional; and it is then, as often as not, that
his reader rejoices - justly, as I contend. For in all this
excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central
human thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect: I
mean himself? A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the
appearances of life, a cunning reader of the mind, he has other
passions and aspirations than those he loves to draw. And why
should he suppress himself and do such reverence to the Lemuel
Barkers? The obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules
and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the contemporary shape,
and thus attain, in the eyes of the true observer, only a higher
power of insignificance; and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw
the normal, a man should draw the null, and write the novel of
society instead of the romance of man. _
Read next: FOOTNOTES
Read previous: CHAPTER XV - A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
Table of content of Memories and Portraits
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
