The Craft of Fiction Page 10

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  And the next step is to lay aside the autobiographic device which thenovelist was seen to adopt, a few pages ago, in the interest of drama.When it has served as Dickens and Thackeray made it serve, it seems tohave shown the extent of its power; if the picture of a life is to bestill further dramatized, other arts must be called into play. I amstill assuming that the novel under consideration is one thatpostulates--as indeed most novels do--a point of view which is notthat of the reader; I am supposing that the story requires a seeingeye, in the sense I suggested in speaking of Vanity Fair. If no suchselecting, interpreting, composing minister is needed, then we havedrama unmixed; and I shall come across an example or so in fictionlater on. It is drama unmixed when the reader is squarely in front ofthe scene, all the time, knowing nothing about the story beyond somuch as may be gathered from the aspect of the scene, the look andspeech of the people. That does not happen often in fiction, except inshort pieces, small _contes_. And still I am concerned with the kindof book that preponderantly needs the seeing eye--the kind of novelthat I call distinctively pictorial.

  The novelist, therefore, returns to the third person again, but hereturns with a marked difference. He by no means resumes his originalpart, that of Thackeray in Vanity Fair; for his hero's personalnarration he does not substitute his own once more. It is still theman in the book who sees and judges and reflects; all the picture oflife is still rendered in the hero's terms. But the difference is thatinstead of receiving his report we now see him in the act of judgingand reflecting; his consciousness, no longer a matter of hearsay, amatter for which we must take his word, is now before us in itsoriginal agitation. Here is a spectacle for the reader, with noobtrusive interpreter, no transmitter of light, no conductor ofmeaning. This man's interior life is cast into the world ofindependent, rounded objects; it is given room to show itself, itappears, it _acts_. A distinction is made between the scene which theman surveys, and the energy within him which converts it all into thestuff of his own being. The scene, as much as ever, is watched throughhis eyes; but now there is this other fact, in front of the scene,actually under the hand of the reader. To this fact the value of dramahas accrued.

  Meredith would have sacrificed nothing, so far as I can see, byproceeding to the further stage in Harry Richmond--unless perhaps thestory, told in the third person, might seem to lose some of itsairings of romance. On the other hand, the advantage of following thestir of Harry's imagination _while_ it is stirring would be great;the effect would be straighter, the impression deeper, the readerwould have been nearer to Harry throughout, and more closelyimplicated in his affair. Think of the young man, for instance, inDostoevsky's Crime and Punishment--there is a young man whoseexperience surrounds and presses upon the reader, is felt and tastedand endured by the reader; and any one who has been through the bookhas truly become Raskolnikov, and knows exactly what it was to be thatyoung man. Drama is there pushed into the theatre of a mind; the playproceeds with the reading of the book, accompanying the eye that fallson it. How could a retrospect in the words of the young man--only ofcourse Dostoevsky had no choice in the matter, such a method was ruledout--but supposing the story had admitted it, how could a retrospecthave given Raskolnikov thus bodily into the reader's possession? Therecould have been no conviction in his own account comparable with thecertainty which Dostoevsky has left to us, and left because he neitherspoke for himself (as the communicative author) nor allowedRaskolnikov to speak, but uncovered the man's mind and made us look.

  It seems, then, to be a principle of the story-teller's art that apersonal narrator will do very well and may be extremely helpful, solong as the story is only the reflection of life beyond and outsidehim; but that as soon as the story begins to find its centre ofgravity in his own life, as soon as the main weight of attention isclaimed for the speaker rather than for the scene, then his report ofhimself becomes a matter which might be strengthened, and which shouldaccordingly give way to the stronger method. This I take to be ageneral principle, and where it appears to be violated a critic wouldinstinctively look for the particular reason which makes itinapplicable to the particular case. No reflection, no picture, whereliving drama is possible--it is a good rule; do not let the hero comebetween us and his active mind, do not let the heroine stand in frontof her emotions and portray them--unless for cause, for some needfuleffect that would otherwise be missed. I see the reason and the effectvery plainly in Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, to take a casual example,where the point of the whole thing is that the man should give himselfaway unknowingly; in Jane Eyre, to take another, I see neither--but itis hard to throw such a dry question upon tragic little Jane.

  If it should still be doubted, however, whether the right use ofautobiography is really so limited, it might be a good answer to pointto Henry James's Strether, in The Ambassadors; Strether may stand as aliving demonstration of all that autobiography cannot achieve. He isenough to prove finally how far the intricate performance of thoughtis beyond the power of a man to record in his own language.Nine-tenths of Strether's thought--nine-tenths, that is to say, of thesilvery activity which makes him what he is--would be lost but for thefact that its adventures are caught in time, while they areproceeding, and enacted in the book. Pictured by him, as he mighthimself look back on them, they would drop to the same plane as therest of the scene, the picture of the other people in the story; hisstate of mind would figure in his description on the same terms as theworld about him, it would simply be a matter for him to describe likeanother. In the book as it is, Strether personally has nothing to dowith the impression that is made by the mazy career of hisimagination, he has no hand in the effect it produces. It speaks foritself, it spreads over the scene and colours the world just as it didfor Strether. It is immediately in the foreground, and the "seeingeye" to which it is presented is not his, but the reader's own.

  No longer a figure that leans and looks out of a window, scanning astretch of memory--that is not the image suggested by Henry James'sbook. It is rather as though the reader himself were at the window,and as though the window opened straight into the depths of Strether'sconscious existence. The energy of his perception and discriminationis there seen at work. His mind is the mirror of the scene beyond it,and the other people in the book exist only in relation to him; buthis mind, his own thought of them, is there absolutely, its restlessevolution is in full sight. I do not say that this is a completeaccount of the principle on which the book is constructed; for indeedthe principle goes further, encompassing points of method to be dealtwith later. But for the moment let the book stand as the type of thenovel in which a mind is dramatized--reflecting the life to which itis exposed, but itself performing its own peculiar and private life.This last, in the case of Strether, involves a gradual, long-drawnchange, from the moment when he takes up the charge of rescuing hisyoung friend from the siren of Paris, to the moment when he findshimself wishing that his young friend would refuse to be rescued. Suchis the curve in the unexpected adventure of his imagination. It isgiven as nobody's view--not his own, as it would be if he told thestory himself, and not the author's, as it would be if Henry Jamestold the story. The author does not tell the story of Strether's mind;he makes it tell itself, he dramatizes it.

  Thus it is that the novelist pushes his responsibility further andfurther away from himself. The fiction that he devises is ultimatelyhis; but it looks poor and thin if he openly claims it as his, or atany rate it becomes much more substantial as soon as he fathers itupon another. This is not _my_ story, says the author; you knownothing of me; it is the story of this man or woman in whose words youhave it, and he or she is a person whom you _can_ know; and you maysee for yourselves how the matter arose, the man and woman being suchas they are; it all hangs together, and it makes a solid andsignificant piece of life. And having said this, the author has onlymoved the question a stage further, and it reappears in exactly thesame form. The man or the woman, after all, is only telling andstating, and we are still invited to accept the story u
pon somebody'sauthority. The narrator may do his best, and may indeed do so wellthat to hear his account is as good as having seen what he describes,and nothing could be better than that; the matter might rest there, ifthis were all. But it must depend considerably on the nature of hisstory, for it may happen that he tells and describes things that a manis never really in a position to substantiate; his account of himself,for example, cannot be thoroughly valid, not through any want ofcandour on his part, but simply because no man can completelyobjectify himself, and a credible account of anything must appear todetach it, to set it altogether free for inspection. And so thenovelist passes on towards drama, gets behind the narrator, andrepresents the mind of the narrator as in itself a kind of action.

  By so doing, be it noted, he forfeits none of his special freedom, asI have called it, the picture-making faculty that he enjoys as astory-teller. He is not constrained, like the playwright, to turn hisstory into dramatic action and nothing else. He has dramatized hisnovel step by step, until the mind of the picture-maker, Strether orRaskolnikov, is present upon the page; but Strether and Raskolnikovare just as free to project their view of the world, to picture itfor the reader, as they might be if they spoke in person. Thedifference is in the fact that we now see the very sources of theactivity within them; we not only share their vision, we watch themabsorbing it. Strether in particular, with a mind working sodiligently upon every grain of his experience, is a most luminouspainter of the world in which he moves--a small circle, but nothing init escapes him, and he imparts his summary of a thousand matters tothe reader; the view that he opens is as panoramic, often enough, asany of Thackeray's sweeping surveys, only the scale is different, witha word barely breathed in place of a dialogue, minutes for months, aturn of a head or an intercepted glance for a chronicle of crime oradulterous intrigue. That liberty, therefore, of standing above thestory and taking a broad view of many things, of transcending thelimits of the immediate scene--nothing of this is sacrificed by theauthor's steady advance in the direction of drama. The man's mind hasbecome visible, phenomenal, dramatic; but in acting its part it stilllends us eyes, is still an opportunity of extended vision.

  It thus becomes clear why the prudent novelist tends to prefer anindirect to a direct method. The simple story-teller begins byaddressing himself openly to the reader, and then exchanges thismethod for another and another, and with each modification he reachesthe reader from a further remove. The more circuitous procedure on thepart of the author produces a straighter effect for the reader; thatis why, other things being equal, the more dramatic way is better thanthe less. It is indirect, as a method; but it places the thing itselfin view, instead of recalling and reflecting and picturing it. For anystory, no doubt, there is an ideal point upon this line of progresstowards drama, where the author finds the right method of telling thestory. The point is indicated by the subject of the story itself, bythe particular matter that is to be brought out and made plain; andthe author, while he regards the subject and nothing else, is guidedto the best manner of treatment by a twofold consideration. In thefirst place he wishes the story so far as possible to speak foritself, the people and the action to appear independently rather thanto be described and explained. To this end the method is raised to thehighest dramatic power that the subject allows, until at last,perhaps, it is found that nothing need be explained at all; there needbe no revelation of anybody's thought, no going behind any of theappearances on the surface of the action; even the necessarydescription, as we shall see later on, may be so treated that this toogains the value of drama. Such is the first care of the prudentnovelist, and I have dwelt upon it in detail. But it is accompaniedand checked by another, not less important.

  This is his care for economy; the method is to be pushed as far as thesubject can profit by it, but no further. It may happen (for instancein David Copperfield) that the story _needs_ no high dramatic value,and that it would get no advantage from a more dramatic method. If itwould gain nothing, it would undoubtedly lose; the subject would beover-treated and would suffer accordingly. Nothing would have beeneasier than for Dickens to take the next step, as I call it--to treathis story from the point of view of David, but not as David's ownnarration. Dickens might have laid bare the mind of his hero andshowed its operation, as Dostoevsky did with his young man. There wasno reason for doing so, however, since the subject is not essentiallyin David at all, but in the linked fortunes of a number of peoplegrouped around him. David's consciousness, if we watched it instead oflistening to his story, would be unsubstantial indeed; Dickens wouldbe driven to enrich it, giving him a more complicated life within;with the result that the centre would be displaced and the subject sofar obscured. A story is damaged by too much treatment as by toolittle, and the severely practical need of true economy in all thatconcerns a novel is demonstrated once more.

  I go no further for the moment, I do not yet consider how the pictureof a man's mind is turned into action, induced to assume the look ofan objective play. It is a very pretty achievement of art, perhaps themost interesting effect that fiction is able to produce, and I thinkit may be described more closely. But I return meanwhile to the deviceof the first person, and to another example of the way in which it isused for its dramatic energy. For my point is so oddly illustrated bythe old contrivance of the "epistolary" novel that I cannot omit toglance at it briefly; the kind of enhancement which is sought by themethod of The Ambassadors is actually the very same as that which issought by the method of Clarissa and Grandison. Richardson and HenryJames, they are both faced by the same difficulty; one of them isacutely aware of it, and takes very deep-laid precautions tocircumvent it; the other, I suppose, does not trouble about the theoryof his procedure, but he too adopts a certain artifice which carrieshim past the particular problem, though at the same time it involveshim in several more. Little as Richardson may suspect it, he--andwhoever else has the idea of making a story out of a series ofletters, or a running diary written from day to day--is engaged in theattempt to show a mind in action, to give a dramatic display of thecommotion within a breast. He desires to get into the closest touchwith Clarissa's life, and to set the reader in the midst of it; andthis is a possible expedient, though it certainly has its drawbacks.

  He wishes to avoid throwing Clarissa's agitations into the past andtreating them as a historical matter. If they were to become thesubject of a record, compiled by her biographer, something would belost; there would be no longer the same sense of meeting Clarissaafresh, every morning, and of witnessing the new development of herwrongs and woes, already a little more poignant than they were lastnight. Even if he set Clarissa to write the story in after days,preserving her life for the purpose, she could not quite give us thisrecurring suspense and shock of sympathy; the lesson of her fortitudewould be weakened. Reading her letters, you hear the cry that waswrung from her at the moment; you look forward with her in dismay tothe ominous morrow; the spectacle of her bearing under such terribletrials is immediate and urgent. You accompany her step by step, theend still in the future, knowing no more than she how the next corneris to be turned. This is truly to share her life, to lead it by herside, to profit by her example; at any rate her example is eloquentlypresent. Richardson or another, whoever first thought of making hertell her story while she is still in the thick of it, invented afashion of dramatizing her sensibility that is found to be serviceableoccasionally, even now, though scarcely for an enterprise onClarissa's scale.

  Her emotion, like Strether's, is caught in passing; like him shedispenses with the need of a seer, a reflector, some one who will forman impression of her state of mind and reproduce it. The struggles ofher heart are not made the material of a chronicle. She reports them,indeed, but at such brief and punctual intervals that her report islike a wheel of life, it reveals her heart in its very pulsation. Thequeer and perverse idea of keeping her continually bent over herpen--she must have written for many hours every day--has at least thisadvantage, that for the spectator it keeps her long ordeal alwa
ys inthe foreground. Clarissa's troubles fall within the book, as I haveexpressed it; they are contemporaneous, they are happening while shewrites, this latest agony is a new one since she wrote last, which wasonly yesterday. Much that is denied to autobiography is thus gained byClarissa's method, and for her story the advantage is valuable. Thesubject of her story is not in the distressing events, but in heremotion and her comportment under the strain; how a young gentlewomansuffers and conducts herself in such a situation--that was whatRichardson had to show, and the action of the tale is shaped roundthis question. Lovelace hatches his villainies in order that thesubject of the book may be exhaustively illustrated. It is thereforenecessary that the conflict within Clarissa should hold the centre,and for this the epistolary method does indeed provide.

  Richardson makes the most of it, without doubt; he has strained it toits utmost capacity before he has done with it. A writer who thinks ofconstructing a novel out of somebody's correspondence may surelyconsult Clarissa upon all the details of the craft. And Clarissa, andGrandison still more, will also give the fullest warning of theimpracticability of the method, after all; for Richardson is forced topay heavily for its single benefit. He pays with the desperate shiftsto which he is driven in order to maintain any kind of verisimilitude.The visible effort of keeping all Clarissa's friends at a distance allthe time, so that she may be enabled to communicate only by letter,seems always on the point of bearing him down; while in the case ofGrandison it may be said to do so finally, when Miss Byron is reducedto reporting to her friend what another friend has reported concerningSir Charles's report of his past life among the Italians. I only speakof these wonderful books, however, for the other aspect of theirmethod--because it shows a stage in the natural struggle of the mererecord to become something more, to develop independent life and toappear as action. Where the record is one of emotions and sentiments,delicately traced and disentangled, it is not so easy to see how theymay be exposed to an immediate view; and here is a manner, not veryhandy indeed, but effective in its degree, of meeting the difficulty.