Part 5

Chapter 53,986 wordsPublic domain

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.

CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL

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.