The Craft of Fiction Read online

  THE CRAFT OF FICTION

  by

  PERCY LUBBOCK

  Jonathan CapeEleven Gower Street, LondonFirst Published 1921.

  THE CRAFT OF FICTION

  I

  To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, toturn it over and survey it at leisure--that is the effort of a criticof books, and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keepa book steady and motionless before us, so that we may have time toexamine its shape and design. As quickly as we read, it melts andshifts in the memory; even at the moment when the last page is turned,a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague anddoubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much isreally left of it? A cluster of impressions, some clear pointsemerging from a mist of uncertainty, this is all we can hope topossess, generally speaking, in the name of a book. The experience ofreading it has left something behind, and these relics we call by thebook's name; but how can they be considered to give us the materialfor judging and appraising the book? Nobody would venture to criticizea building, a statue, a picture, with nothing before him but thememory of a single glimpse caught in passing; yet the critic ofliterature, on the whole, has to found his opinion upon little more.Sometimes it is possible to return to the book and renew theimpression; to a few books we may come back again and again, till theydo in the end become familiar sights. But of the hundreds and hundredsof books that a critic would wish to range in his memory, in order toscrutinize and compare them reflectively, how many can he expect tobring into a state of reasonable stability? Few indeed, at the best;as for the others, he must be content with the shapeless, incoherentvisions that respond when the recollection of them is invoked.

  It is scarcely to be wondered at if criticism is not very precise, notvery exact in the use of its terms, when it has to work at such adisadvantage. Since we can never speak of a book with our eye on theobject, never handle a book--the real book, which is to the volume asthe symphony to the score--our phrases find nothing to check them,immediately and unmistakably, while they are formed. Of a novel, forinstance, that I seem to know well, that I recall as an oldacquaintance, I may confidently begin to express an opinion; but when,having expressed it, I would glance at the book once more, to besatisfied that my judgement fits it, I can only turn to the image,such as it is, that remains in a deceiving memory. The volume liesbefore me, no doubt, and if it is merely a question of detail, a nameor a scene, I can find the page and verify my sentence. But I cannotcatch a momentary sight of the book, the book itself; I cannot lookup from my writing and sharpen my impression with a straight,unhampered view of the author's work; to glance at a book, though thephrase is so often in our mouths, is in fact an impossibility. Theform of a novel--and how often a critic uses that expression too--issomething that none of us, perhaps, has ever really contemplated. Itis revealed little by little, page by page, and it is withdrawn asfast as it is revealed; as a whole, complete and perfect, it couldonly exist in a more tenacious memory than most of us have to rely on.Our critical faculty may be admirable; we may be thoroughly capable ofjudging a book justly, if only we could watch it at ease. But finetaste and keen perception are of no use to us if we cannot retain theimage of the book; and the image escapes and evades us like a cloud.

  We are so well accustomed to this disability that I may seem to maketoo much of it. In theory, certainly, the book is never present in thecritic's mind, never there in all its completeness; but enough of it,in a commonly good memory, remains to be discussed and criticized--thebook as we remember it, the book that survives, is sufficient forpractical purposes. Such we assume to be the case, and our criticismis very little troubled by the thought that it is only directed atcertain fragments of the book which the author wrote, the rest of ithaving ceased to exist for us. There is plenty to say of a book, evenin this condition; for the hours of our actual exposure to it werefull and eventful, and after living for a time with people likeClarissa Harlowe or Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary we have had a lastingexperience, though the novels in which they figured may fall away intodimness and uncertainty. These women, with some of the scenes andepisodes of their history, remain with us as vividly as though we hadknown them in life; and we still keep a general impression of theirsetting and their fortunes, a background more or less undefined, butassociated with the thought of them. It all makes a very real andsolid possession of a kind, and we readily accept it as the bookitself. One does not need to remember the smaller detail of the storyto perceive the truth and force of the characters; and if a great dealis forgotten, the most striking aspects of the case will linger in themind as we look back. Dramatic episodes, fine pieces of description,above all the presence of many interesting and remarkablepeople--while there is so much that instantly springs to light whenthe book is mentioned, it seems perverse to say that the book is notbefore us as we write of it. The real heart and substance of the book,it might even be urged, stands out the more clearly for the obscurityinto which the less essential parts of it subside.

  And true it is that for criticism of the author's genius, of the powerand quality of his imagination, the impressions we are able to savefrom oblivion are material in plenty. Of Richardson and Tolstoy andFlaubert we can say at once that their command of life, their grasp ofcharacter, their knowledge of human affections and manners, had acertain range and strength and depth; we can penetrate their minds anddetect the ideas that ruled there. To have lived with their creationsis to have lived with them as well; with so many hours of familiarintercourse behind us we have learnt to know them, and it matterslittle that at any particular moment our vision of their work is boundto be imperfect. The forgotten detail has all contributed to our senseof the genius which built up and elaborated the structure, and thatsense abides. Clarissa and Anna and Emma are positive facts, and soare their authors; the criticism of fiction is securely founded uponits object, if by fiction we mean something more, something other,than the novel itself--if we mean its life-like effects, and theimaginative gifts which they imply in the novelist. These we canexamine as long and as closely as we choose, for they persist and growmore definite as we cultivate the remembrance of them. And to these,accordingly, we find our criticism always tending; we discuss thewriter, we discuss the people in his book, we discuss the kind of lifehe renders and his success in the rendering. But meanwhile the book,the thing he made, lies imprisoned in the volume, and our glimpse ofit was too fleeting, it seems, to leave us with a lasting knowledge ofits form. We soon reach the end of so much as we have to say on thatsubject.

  Perhaps we should have more to say of it if we read the bookdifferently in the first place. I scarcely think we could any of usclaim that in reading a novel we deliberately watch the book itself,rather than the scenes and figures it suggests, or that we seek toconstruct an image of the book, page by page, while its form isgradually exposed to us. We are much more inclined to forget, if wecan, that the book is an object of art, and to treat it as a piece ofthe life around us; we fashion for ourselves, we objectify, theelements in it that happen to strike us most keenly, such as aneffective scene or a brilliant character. These things take shape inthe mind of the reader; they are recreated and set up where the mind'seye can rest on them. They become works of art, no doubt, in theirway, but they are not the book which the author offers us. That is alarger and more complex form, one that it is much more difficult tothink of as a rounded thing. A novel, as we say, opens a new world tothe imagination; and it is pleasant to discover that sometimes, in afew novels, it is a world which "creates an illusion"--so pleasantthat we are content to be lost in it. When that happens there is nochance of our finding, perceiving, recreating, the form of the book.So far from losing ourselves in the world of the novel, we must holdit
away from us, see it all in detachment, and use the whole of it tomake the image we seek, the book itself.

  It is difficult to treat a large and stirring piece of fiction inthis way. The landscape opens out and surrounds us, and we proceed tocreate what is in effect a novel within the novel which the authorwrote. When, for example, I try to consider closely the remnant thatexists in my memory of a book read and admired years ago--of such abook as Clarissa Harlowe--I well understand that in reading it I wasunconsciously making a selection of my own, choosing a little of thestory here and there, to form a durable image, and that my selectiononly included such things as I could easily work into shape. The girlherself, first of all--if she, though so much of her story has fadedaway, is still visibly present, it is because nothing is simpler thanto create for oneself the idea of a human being, a figure and acharacter, from a series of glimpses and anecdotes. Creation of thiskind we practise every day; we are continually piecing together ourfragmentary evidence about the people around us and moulding theirimages in thought. It is the way in which we make our world;partially, imperfectly, very much at haphazard, but still perpetually,everybody deals with his experience like an artist. And his talent,such as it may be, for rounding and detaching his experience of a manor a woman, so that the thing stands clear in his thought and takesthe light on every side--this can never lie idle, it is exercisedevery hour of the day.

  As soon as he begins to hear of Clarissa, therefore, on the first pageof Richardson's book, the shaping, objectifying mind of the reader isat work on familiar material. It is so easy to construct the idea ofthe exquisite creature, that she seems to step from the pages of herown accord; I, as I read, am aware of nothing but that a newacquaintance is gradually becoming better and better known to me. Noconscious effort is needed to make a recognizable woman of her, thoughin fact I am fitting a multitude of small details together, as Iproceed to give her the body and mind that she presently possesses.And so, too, with the lesser people in the book, and with theirsurroundings; so, too, with the incidents that pass; a succession ofmoments are visualized, are wrought into form by the reader, thoughperhaps very few of them are so well made that they will last inmemory. If they soon disappear, the fault may be the writer's or thereader's, Richardson's if he failed to describe them adequately, mineif my manner of reading has not been sufficiently creative. In anycase the page that has been well read has the best chance of survival;it was soundly fashioned, to start with, out of the material given meby the writer, and at least it will resist the treachery of a poormemory more resolutely than a page that I did not thoroughly recreate.

  But still, as I say, the aspects of a book that for the most part wedetach and solidify are simply those which cost us no deliberatepains. We bring to the reading of a book certain imaginative facultieswhich are in use all the day long, faculties that enable us tocomplete, in our minds, the people and the scenes which the novelistdescribes--to give them dimensions, to see round them, to make them"real." And these faculties, no doubt, when they are combined with atrained taste, a sense of quality, seem to represent all that isneeded for the criticism of fiction. The novel (and in these pages Ispeak only of the modern novel, the picture of life that we are in aposition to understand without the knowledge of a student or ascholar)--the modern novel asks for no other equipment in its readersthan this common gift, used as instinctively as the power ofbreathing, by which we turn the flat impressions of our senses intosolid shapes: this gift, and nothing else except that other, certainlymuch less common, by which we discriminate between the thing that isgood of its kind and the thing that is bad. Such, I should think, isvery nearly the theory of our criticism in the matter of the art offiction. A novel is a picture of life, and life is well known to us;let us first of all "realize" it, and then, using our taste, let usjudge whether it is true, vivid, convincing--like life, in fact.

  The theory does indeed go a little further, we know. A novel is apicture, a portrait, and we do not forget that there is more in aportrait than the "likeness." Form, design, composition, are to besought in a novel, as in any other work of art; a novel is the betterfor possessing them. That we must own, if fiction is an art at all;and an art it must be, since a literal transcript of life is plainlyimpossible. The laws of art, therefore, apply to this object of ourscrutiny, this novel, and it is the better, other things being equal,for obeying them. And yet, is it so very much the better? Is it notsomehow true that fiction, among the arts, is a peculiar case,unusually exempt from the rules that bind the rest? Does the fact thata novel is well designed, well proportioned, really make a very greatdifference in its power to please?--and let us answer honestly, for ifit does not, then it is pedantry to force these rules upon a novel. Inother arts it may be otherwise, and no doubt a lop-sided statue or anill-composed painting is a plain offence to the eye, however skilfullyit may copy life. The same thing is true of a novel, perhaps, if thefault is very bad, very marked; yet it would be hard to say that evenso it is necessarily fatal, or that a novel cannot triumphantly livedown the worst aberrations of this kind. We know of novels whicheverybody admits to be badly constructed, but which are so full oflife that it does not appear to matter. May we not conclude that form,design, composition, have a rather different bearing upon the art offiction than any they may have elsewhere?

  And, moreover, these expressions, applied to the viewless art ofliterature, must fit it loosely and insecurely at best--does it notseem so? They are words usurped from other arts, words that suppose avisible and measurable object, painted or carved. For criticizing thecraft of fiction we have no other language than that which has beendevised for the material arts; and though we may feel that to talk ofthe colours and values and perspective of a novel is natural andlegitimate, yet these are only metaphors, after all, that cannot beclosely pressed. A book starts a train of ideas in the head of thereader, ideas which are massed and arranged on some kind of system;but it is only by the help of fanciful analogies that we can treat themass as a definite object. Such phrases may give hints and suggestionsconcerning the method of the novelist; the whole affair is toonebulous for more. Even if a critic's memory were infallible, as itcan never be, still it would be impossible for him to give a reallyscientific account of the structure of the simplest book, since in thelast resort he cannot lay his finger upon a single one of the effectsto which he refers. When two men stand looking at a picture, at leasttheir two lines of vision meet at a point upon the canvas; they maydispute about it, but the picture stands still. And even then theyfind that criticism has its difficulties, it would appear. Theliterary critic, with nothing to point to but the mere volume in hishand, must recognize that his wish to be precise, to be definite, tobe clear and exact in his statements, is hopelessly vain.

  It is all undeniable, no doubt; from every side we make out that thecriticism of a book--not the people in the book, not the character ofthe author, but the book--is impossible. We cannot remember the book,and even if we could, we should still be unable to describe it inliteral and unequivocal terms. It cannot be done; and the only thingto be said is that perhaps it can be approached, perhaps the book canbe seen, a little more closely in one way than in another. It is amodest claim, and my own attempt to assert it will be still moremodest. A few familiar novels, possibly a dozen, by still fewerwriters--it will be enough if I can view this small handful with someparticularity. And I shall consider them, too, with no idea ofcriticizing all their aspects, or even more than one. How they aremade is the only question I shall ask; and though indeed that is aquestion which incidentally raises a good many others--questions ofthe intention of the novelist, his choice of a subject, the manner ofhis imagination, and so forth--these I shall follow no further than Ican help. And as for the few novels that I shall speak of, they willbe such as appear to illustrate most plainly the various elements ofthe craft; one need not range widely to find them, nor does it matterif the selection, from any other point of view, should seem arbitrary.Many great names may be passed over, for it is not always the
greatestwhose method of work gives the convenient example; on the other handthe best example is always to be found among the great, and it isessential to keep to their company.

  But something may first be said of the reading of a novel. Thebeginning of criticism is to read aright, in other words to get intotouch with the book as nearly as may be. It is a forlornenterprise--that is admitted; but there are degrees of unsuccess.