The Craft of Fiction Read online

  XIII

  What, then, is a dramatic subject? Hitherto I have been speaking ofnovels in which some point of view, other than that of the reader, theimpartial onlooker, is prescribed by the subject in hand. In bigchronicles like Thackeray's it is clear that the controlling point ofview can only be that of the chronicler himself, or of some one whomhe sets up to tell the story on his behalf. The expanse of life whichthe story covers is far too great to be shown to the reader in aseries of purely dramatic scenes. It is absolutely necessary for theauthor or his spokesman to draw back for a general view of the matterfrom time to time; and whenever he does so the story becomes _his_impression, summarized and pictured for the reader. In Esmond or TheVirginians or The Newcomes, there are tracts and tracts of the storywhich are bound to remain outside the reader's direct vision; only alimited number of scenes and occasions could possibly be set forth inthe form of drama. A large, loose, manifold subject, in short,extensive in time and space, full of crowds and diversions, is apictorial subject and can be nothing else. However intensely it may bedramatized here and there, on the whole it must be presented as aconspectus, the angle of vision being assigned to the narrator. It issimply a question of amount, of quantity, of the reach of the subject.If it passes a certain point it exceeds the capacity of the straightand dramatic method.

  Madame Bovary and The Ambassadors, again, are undramatic in theirmatter, though their reach is comparatively small; for in both of themthe emphasis falls upon changes of mind, heart, character, graduallydrawn out, not upon any clash or opposition resolved in action. They_might_ be treated scenically, no doubt; their authors mightconceivably have handled them in terms of pure drama, without anydirect display of Emma's secret fancies or Strether's broodingimagination. But in neither case could that method make the most ofthe subject or bring out all that it has to give. The most expressive,most enlightening part of Strether's story lies in the reverberatingtheatre of his mind, and as for Emma, the small exterior facts of herstory are of very slight account. Both these books, therefore, intheir general lines, are pictured impressions, not actions--eventhough in Bovary to some extent, and in The Ambassadors almost wholly,the picture is itself dramatized in the fashion I have indicated. Thatlast effect belongs only to the final method, the treatment of thesurface; underneath it there is in both the projection of a certainperson's point of view.

  But now look at the contrast in The Awkward Age, a novel in whichHenry James followed a single method throughout, from top to bottom,denying himself the help of any other. He chose to treat this story aspure drama; he never once draws upon the characteristic resource ofthe novelist--who is able, as the dramatist is not able, to give ageneralized and foreshortened account of the matter in hand. In TheAwkward Age everything is immediate and particular; there is noinsight into anybody's thought, no survey of the scene from a height,no resumption of the past in retrospect. The whole of the book passesscenically before the reader, and nothing is offered but the look andthe speech of the characters on a series of chosen occasions. It mightindeed be printed as a play; whatever is not dialogue is simply a kindof amplified stage-direction, adding to the dialogue the expressiveeffect which might be given it by good acting. The novelist, usingthis method, claims only one advantage over the playwright; it is theadvantage of ensuring the very best acting imaginable, a performancein which every actor is a perfect artist and not the least point isever missed. The play is not handed over to the chances ofinterpretation--that is the difference; the author creates the mannerin which the words are spoken, as well as the words themselves, and hemay keep the manner at an ideal pitch. Otherwise the novelistcompletely ties his hands, submitting to all the restraints of theplaywright in order to secure the compactness and the direct force oftrue drama.

  What is the issue of a certain conjunction of circumstances? Thesubject of the book is in the question. First of all we see a highlysophisticated circle of men and women, who seem so well practised inthe art of living that they could never be taken by surprise. Life intheir hands has been refined to a process in which nothing appears tohave been left to chance. Their intelligence accounts for everything;they know where they are, they know what they want, and under anetwork of discretion which they all sustain they thoroughlyunderstand each other. It is a charmed world, altogetherself-contained, occupying a corner of modern London. It is carefullyprotected within and without; and yet oddly enough there is one quitecommon and regular contingency for which it is not prepared at all.Its handling of life proceeds smoothly so long as all the men andwomen together are on a level of proficiency, all alike experienced inthe art; and they can guard themselves against intruders fromelsewhere. But periodically it must happen that their young grow up;the daughter of the house reaches the "awkward age," becomes suddenlytoo old for the school-room and joins her elders below. Then comes thedifficulty; there is an interval in which she is still too young forthe freedom of her elders' style, and it looks as though she mightdisconcert them not a little, sitting there with wide eyes. Do theysimply disregard her and continue their game as before? Do they try toadapt their style to her inexperience? Apparently they have no theoryof their proper course; the difficulty seems to strike them afresh,every time that it recurs. In other such worlds, not of modern London,it is foreseen and provided for; the young woman is married andlaunched at once, there is no awkward age. But here and now--or ratherhere and _then_, in the nineteenth century--it makes a real littlesituation, and this is the subject of Henry James's book.

  It is clearly dramatic; it is a clean-cut situation, raising thequestion of its issue, and by answering the question the subject istreated. What will these people do, how will they circumvent thisawkwardness? That is what the book is to show--action essentially, notthe picture of a character or a state of mind. Mind and characterenter into it, of course, as soon as the situation is particularized;the girl becomes an individual, with her own outlook, her own way ofreaching a conclusion, and her point of view must then be understood.But whatever it may be, it does not constitute the situation. That isthere in advance, it exists in general, and the girl comes upon thescene, like the rest of the people in the book, to illustrate it. Thesubject of the book lies in their behaviour; there are no gradualprocesses of change and development to be watched in their minds, itis their action that is significant. By clever management the authorcan avoid the necessity of looking inside their motives; these arebetrayed by visible and audible signs. The story proceeds in theopen, point by point; from one scene to another it shows its curve andresolves the situation. And very ironic and pleasing and unexpectedthe resolution proves. It takes everybody by surprise; no one noticeswhat is happening till it is over, but it begins to happen from thestart. The girl Nanda, supposably a helpless spectator, takes controlof the situation and works it out for her elders. She is theintelligent and expert and self-possessed one of them all; they haveonly to leave everything to her light manipulation, and theawkwardness--which is theirs, not hers--is surmounted. By the time shehas displayed all her art the story is at an end; her action hasanswered the question and provided the issue.

  The theme of the book being what it is, an action merely, and anaction strictly limited in its scope, it requires no narrator. In adozen scenes or so the characters may set it forth on their ownaccount, and we have only to look on; nobody need stand by andexpound. The situation involves no more than a small company ofpeople, and there is no reason for them to straggle far, in space ortime; on the contrary, the compactness of the situation is one of itsspecial marks. Its point is that it belongs to a little organizedcircle, a well-defined incident in their lives. And since the root ofthe matter is in their behaviour, in the manner in which they meet orfail to meet the incident, their behaviour will sufficiently expresswhat is in their minds; it is not as though the theme of the story layin some slow revulsion or displacement of mood, which it would benecessary to understand before its issue in action could beappreciated. What do they _do_?--that is the immediate question; whatthey think an
d feel is a matter that is entirely implied in theanswer. Obviously that was not at all the case with Strether. Theworkings of his imagination spread over far more ground, ramifiedinfinitely further than anything that he _did_; his action dependedupon his view of things and logically flowed from it, but his actionby itself would give no measure at all of his inner life. With thepeople of The Awkward Age, on the other hand, their action fullycovers their motives and sentiments--or can be made to do so, by thecare of a dexterous author.

  And so the story can be rendered with absolute consistency, on onemethod only, if the author chooses. And he does so choose, and TheAwkward Age rounds off the argument I have sought to unwind--thesequence of method and method, each one in turn pushing its waytowards a completer dramatization of the story. Here at any rate isone book in which a subject capable of acting itself out frombeginning to end is made to do so, one novel in which method becomesas consistent and homogeneous as it ever may in fiction. No othermanner of telling a story can be quite so true to itself. For whereasdrama, in this book, depends not at all upon the author's "word ofhonour," and deals entirely with immediate facts, the most undramaticpiece of fiction can hardly for long be consistent in its own line,but must seek the support of scenic presentation. Has anyone tried towrite a novel in which there should be no dialogue, no immediatescene, nothing at all but a diffused and purely subjective impression?Such a novel, if it existed, would be a counterpart to The AwkwardAge. Just as Henry James's book never deviates from the straight,square view of the passing event, so the other would be exclusivelyoblique, general, retrospective, a meditation upon the past, bringingnothing into the foreground, dramatizing nothing in talk or action.

  The visionary fiction of Walter Pater keeps as nearly to a method ofthat kind, I suppose, as fiction could. In Marius probably, if it isto be called a novel, the art of drama is renounced as thoroughly asit has ever occurred to a novelist to dispense with it. I scarcelythink that Marius ever speaks or is spoken to audibly in the wholecourse of the book; such at least is the impression that it leaves.The scenes of the story reach the reader by refraction, as it were,through the medium of Pater's harmonious murmur. But scenes they mustbe; not even Pater at his dreamiest can tell a story without incidentparticularized and caught in the act. When Marius takes a journey,visits a philosopher or enters a church, the event stands out of thepast and makes an appeal to the eye, is presented as it takes place;and this is a movement in the direction of drama, even if it goes nofurther. Pater, musing over the life of his hero, all but lost in thegeneral sentiment of its grace and virtue, is arrested by the definiteimages of certain hours and occasions; the flow of his rumination isinterrupted while he pauses upon these, to make them visible; theymust be given a kind of objectivity, some slight relief against thedim background. No story-teller, in short, can use a manner asstrictly subjective, as purely personal, as the manner of The AwkwardAge is the reverse.

  But as for this book, it not only ends one argument, it is also aturning-point that begins another. For when we have seen how fictiongradually aspires to the weight and authority of the thing acted,purposely limiting its own discursive freedom, it remains to see howit resumes its freedom when there is good cause for doing so. It isnot for nothing that The Awkward Age is as lonely as it seems to be inits kind. I have seized upon it as an example of the dramatic methodpursued _a outrance_, and it is very convenient for criticism that ithappens to be there; the book points a sound moral with clear effect.But when it is time to suggest that even in dealing with a subjectentirely dramatic, a novelist may well find reason to keep to his oldfamiliar mixed method--_circumspice_: it would appear that he does soinvariably. Where are the other Awkward Ages, the many that we mightexpect if the value of drama is so great? I dare say one mightdiscover a number of small things, short dramatic pieces (I havementioned the case of Maupassant), which would satisfy therequirement; but on the scale of Henry James's book I know of nothingelse. Plenty of people find their theme in matters of action, mattersof incident, like the story of Nanda; it is strange that they shouldnot sometimes choose to treat it with strict consistency. How is oneto assert a principle which is apparently supported by only one bookin a thousand thousand?

  I think it must be concluded, in the first place, that to treat asubject with the rigour of Henry James is extremely difficult, andthat the practice of the thousand thousand is partly to be explainedby this fact. Perhaps many of them would be more dramatically inclinedif the way were easier. It must always be simpler for a story-tellerto use his omniscience, to dive into the minds of his people for anexplanation of their acts, than to make them so act that no suchexplanation is ever needed. Or perhaps the state of criticism may beto blame, with its long indifference to these questions of theory; orperhaps (to say all) there is no very lively interest in them evenamong novelists. Anyhow we may say from experience that a novel ismore likely to fall below its proper dramatic pitch than to strainbeyond it; in most of the books around us there is an easy-goingreliance on a narrator of some kind, a showman who is behind thescenes of the story and can tell us all about it. He seems to comeforward in many a case without doing the story any particular service;sometimes he actually embarrasses it, when a matter of vivid drama isviolently forced into the form of a narration. One can only suspectthat he then exists for the convenience of the author. It _is_ helpfulto be able to say what you like about the characters and their doingsin the book; it may be very troublesome to make their doings asexpressive as they might be, eloquent enough to need no comment.

  Yet to see the issue slowly unfolding and flowering out of the middleof a situation, and to watch it emerge unaided, with everything thatit has to say said by the very lines and masses of its structure--thisis surely an experience apart, for a novel-reader, with itscompleteness and cleanness and its hard, pure edge. It is alwaysmemorable, it fills the mind so acceptably that a story-teller mightbe ready and eager to aspire to this effect, one would think, wheneverhis matter gives him the chance. Again and again I have wished tosilence the voice of the spokesman who is supposed to be helping me toa right appreciation of the matter in hand--the author (or hiscreature) who knows so much, and who pours out his information overthe subject, and who talks and talks about an issue that might berevealing itself without him. The spokesman has his way too often, itcan hardly be doubted; the instant authority of drama is neglected. Itis the day of the deep-breathed narrator, striding from volume tovolume as tirelessly as the Scuderies and Calprenedes of old; and itis true, no doubt, that the novel (in all languages, too, it wouldseem) is more than ever inclined to the big pictorial subject, whichrequires the voluble chronicler; but still it must happen occasionallythat a novelist prefers a dramatic motive, and might cast it into around, sound action and leave it in that form if he chose. Here againthere is plenty of room for enterprise and experiment in fiction, evennow.

  But at the same time it must be admitted that there is more in thegeneral unwillingness of story-tellers to entrust the story to thepeople in it--there is more than I have said. If they are much lessdramatic than they might be, still it is not to be asserted that asubject will often find perfect expression through the uncompromisingmethod of The Awkward Age. That book itself perhaps suggests, if itdoes no more than suggest, that drama cannot always do everything in anovel, even where the heart of the story seems to lie in its action.The story of Nanda drops neatly into scenic form--that is obvious; itis well adapted for treatment as a row of detached episodes oroccasions, through which the subject is slowly developed. But it is aquestion whether a story which requires and postulates such a veryparticular background, so singular and so artificial, is reasonablydenied the licence to make its background as effective as possible, bywhatever means. Nanda's world is not the kind of society that can betaken for granted; it is not modernity in general, it is a small andvery definite tract. For the purposes of her story it is importantthat her setting should be clearly seen and known, and the method oftelling her story must evidently take this into ac
count. Nanda and hercase are not rendered if the quality of the civilization round her isleft in any way doubtful, and it happens to be a very odd qualityindeed.

  Henry James decided, I suppose, that it was sufficiently implied inthe action of his book and needed nothing more; Nanda's little worldwould be descried behind the scene without any further picturing. Hemay have been right, so far as The Awkward Age is concerned; thebehaviour of the people in the story is certainly packed with manymeanings, and perhaps it is vivid enough to enact the generalcharacter of their lives and ways, as well as their situation in theforeground; perhaps the charmed circle of Mrs. Brookenham and herwonderful crew is given all the effect that is needed. But thequestion brings me to a clear limitation of drama on the whole, andthat is why I raise it. Here is a difficulty to which the dramaticmethod, in its full severity, is not specially accommodated, one thatis not in the line of its strength. To many of the difficulties offiction, as we have seen, it brings precisely the right instrument; itgives validity, gives direct force to a story, and to do so is itsparticular property. For placing and establishing a piece of actionit is paramount. But where it is not only a matter of placing theaction in view, but of relating it to its surroundings, strict dramais at once at a disadvantage. The seeing eye of the author, which cansweep broadly and generalize the sense of what it sees, will meet thisdifficulty more naturally. Drama reinforcing and intensifying picturewe have already seen again and again; and now the process is reversed.From the point of view of the reader, the spectator of the show, thedramatic scene is vivid and compact; but it is narrow, it can have nogreat depth, and the colour of the atmosphere can hardly tell withinthe space. It is likely, therefore, that unless this close directvision is supplemented by a wider survey, fronting the story from amore distant point of view, the background of the action, the mannerof life from which it springs, will fail to make its full impression.

  It amounts to this, that the play-form--and with it fiction that ispurely dramatic in its method--is hampered in its power to express theoutlying associations of its scene. It _can_ express them, of course;in clever hands it may seem to do so as thoroughly as any descriptivenarration. But necessarily it does so with far more expense of effortthan the picture-making faculty which lies in the hand of thenovelist; and that is in general a good reason why the prudentnovelist, with all his tendency to shed his privileges, still clingsto this one. It is possible to imagine that a novel might be as bareof all background as a play of Racine; there might be a story in whichany hint of continuous life, proceeding behind the action, wouldsimply confuse and distort the right effect. One thinks of the storyof the Princesse de Cleves, floating serenely in the void, without asign of any visible support from a furnished world; and there, nodoubt, nothing would be gained by bringing the lucid action to groundand fixing it in its setting. It is a drama of sentiment, needing onlyto be embodied in characters as far as possible detached from anypictured surroundings, with nothing but the tradition of fine mannersthat is inherent in their grand names. But wherever the effect of theaction depends upon its time and place, a novelist naturally turns tothe obvious method if there is no clear reason for refusing it. In TheAwkward Age, to look back at it once more, it may be that there issuch a reason; the beauty of its resolute consistency is of course avalue in itself, and it may be great enough to justify a _tour deforce_. But a _tour de force_ it is, when a novelist seeks to renderthe general life of his story in the particular action, and in theaction alone; for his power to support the drama pictorially is alwaysthere, if he likes to make use of it.