Part 4

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