The Craft of Fiction Page 14

  XIV

  Since he practically always does so, readily enough, it may seemunnecessary to insist upon the matter. Not often have we seen anovelist pushing his self-denial beyond reason, rejecting the easy wayfor the difficult without good cause. But in order to make sure ofbreaking a sound rule at the right point, and not before--to takeadvantage of laxity when strictness becomes unrewarding, and onlythen--it is as well to work both ways, from the easy extreme to thedifficult and back again. The difficult extreme, in fiction, is thedramatic rule absolute and unmitigated; having reached it from theother end, having begun with the pictorial summary and proceeded fromthence to drama, we face the same stages reversed. And it is now, Ithink, that we best appreciate the liberties taken with the resourcesof the novelist by Balzac. His is a case that should be approachedindirectly. If one plunges straight into Balzac, at the beginning ofcriticism, it is hard to find the right line through the abundance ofgood and bad in his books; there is so much of it, and all so strongand staring. It looks at first sight as though his good and his badalike were entirely conspicuous and unmistakable. His devouringpassion for life, his grotesque romance, his truth and his falsity,these cover the whole space of the Comedie between them, and nobodycould fail to recognize the full force of either. He is tremendous,his taste is abominable--what more is there to say of Balzac? And thatmuch has been said so often, in varied words, that there can be noneed to say it again for the ten-thousandth time.

  Such is the aspect that Balzac presents, I could feel, when a critictries to face him immediately; his obviousness seems to hideeverything else. But if one passes him by, following the track of thenovelist's art elsewhere, and then returns to him with certaindefinite conclusions, his aspect is remarkable in quite a new way. Hisbadness is perhaps as obvious as before; there is nothing fresh todiscover about that. His greatness, however, wears a different look;it is no longer the plain and open surface that it was. It has depthsand recesses that did not appear till now, enticing to criticism,promising plentiful illustration of the ideas that have been gatheredby the way. One after another, the rarer, obscurer effects of fictionare all found in Balzac, behind his blatant front. He illustrateseverything, and the only difficulty is to know where to begin.

  The effect of the generalized picture, for example, supporting theplay of action, is one in which Balzac particularly delights. Heconstantly uses it, he makes it serve his purpose with a very highhand. It becomes more than a support, it becomes a kind of propulsiveforce applied to the action at the start. Its value is seen at itsgreatest in such books as Le Cure de Village, Pere Goriot, LaRecherche de l'Absolu, Eugenie Grandet--most of all, perhaps, in thislast. Wherever, indeed, his subject requires to be lodged securely inits surroundings, wherever the background is a main condition of thestory, Balzac is in no hurry to precipitate the action; that canalways wait, while he allows himself the leisure he needs for massingthe force which is presently to drive the drama on its way. Nobodygives such attention as Balzac does in many of his books, and on thewhole in his best, to the setting of the scene; he clearly considersthese preparatory pictures quite as important as the events which theyare to enclose.

  And so, in Pere Goriot, all the potent life of the Maison Vauquer isdeliberately collected and hoarded up to the point where it is enough,when it is let loose, to carry the story forward with a strong sweep.By the time the story itself is reached the Maison Vauquer is a fullycreated impression, prepared to the last stroke for the drama to come.Anything that may take place there will have the whole benefit of itssetting, without more ado; all the rank reality of the house and itsinmates is immediately bestowed on the action. When the tale of Goriotcomes to the front it is already more than the tale of a certain oldman and his woes. Goriot, on the spot, is one of Maman Vauquer'sboarders, and the mere fact is enough, by now, to differentiate him,to single him out among miserable old men. Whatever he does he carrieswith him the daily experience of the dingy house and the clatteringmeals and the frowzy company, with Maman Vauquer, hard and hungry andharassed--Mrs. Todgers would have met her sympathetically, they wouldhave understood each other--at the head of it. Into Goriot's yearningsover his fashionable daughters the sounds and sights and smells of hishorrible home have all been gathered; they deepen and strengthen hispoor story throughout. Balzac's care in creating the scene, therefore,is truly economical; it is not merely a manner of setting the stagefor the drama, it is a provision of character and energy for the dramawhen it begins.

  His pictures of country towns, too, Saumur, Limoges, Angouleme, havethe same kind of part to play in the Scenes de la vie de province.When Balzac takes in hand the description of a town or a house or aworkshop, he may always be suspected, at first, of abandoning himselfentirely to his simple, disinterested craving for facts. There aretimes when it seems that his inexhaustible knowledge of facts iscarrying him where it will, till his only conscious purpose is to setdown on paper everything that he knows. He is possessed by the lust ofdescription for its own sake, an insatiable desire to put every detailin its place, whether it is needed or no. So it seems, and so it isoccasionally, no doubt; there is nothing more tiresome in Balzac thanhis zest, his delight, his triumph, when he has apparently succeededin forgetting altogether that he is a novelist. He takes a properpride in Grandet or Goriot or Lucien, of course; but his heart neverleaps quite so high, it might be thought, as when he sees a chance fora discourse upon money or commerce or Italian art. And yet the resultis always the same in the end; when he has finished his lengthyresearch among the furniture of the lives that are to be evoked, hehas created a scene in which action will move as rapidly as hechooses, without losing any of its due emphasis. He has illustrated,in short, the way in which a pictorial impression, wrought to theright pitch, will speed the work of drama--will become an effectiveagent in the book, instead of remaining the mere decorativeintroduction that it may seem to be.

  Thus it is that Balzac was able to pack into a short book--he neverwrote a long one--such an effect of crowds and events, above all suchan effect of time. Nobody knows how to compress so much experienceinto two or three hundred pages as Balzac did unfailingly. I cannotthink that this is due in the least to the laborious interweaving ofhis books into a single scheme; I could believe that in general a bookof Balzac's suffers, rather than gains, by the recurrence of the oldnames that he has used already elsewhere. It is an amusing trick, butexactly what is its object? I do not speak of the ordinary "sequel,"where the fortunes of somebody are followed for another stage, andwhere the second part is simply the continuation of the first in adirect line. But what of the famous idea of making book after bookoverlap and encroach and entangle itself with the rest, by the deviceof setting the hero of one story to figure more or less obscurely in adozen others? The theory is, I suppose, that the characters in thebackground and at the corners of the action, if they are Rastignac andCamusot and Nucingen, retain the life they have acquired elsewhere,and thereby swell the life of the story in which they reappear. We areoccupied for the moment with some one else, and we discover among hisacquaintances a number of people whom we already know; that fact, itis implied, will add weight and authority to the story of the man inthe foreground--who is himself, very likely, a man we have metcasually in another book. It ought to make, it must make, hissituation peculiarly real and intelligible that we find him surroundedby familiar friends of our own; and that is the artistic reason of theamazing ingenuity with which Balzac keeps them all in play.

  Less artistic and more mechanical, I take it, his ingenuity seems thanit did of old. I forget how few are the mistakes and contradictions ofwhich Balzac has been convicted, in the shuffling and re-shuffling ofhis characters; but when his accuracy has been proved there stillremains the question of its bearing upon his art. I only touch uponthe question from a single point of view, when I consider whether thedensity of life in so many of his short pieces can really oweanything to the perpetual flitting of the men and women from book tobook. Suppose that for the moment Balzac is evoking th
e figure andfortunes of Lucien de Rubempre, and that a woman who appearsincidentally in his story turns out to be our well-rememberedDelphine, Goriot's daughter. We know a great deal about the past ofDelphine, as it happens; but at this present juncture, in Lucien'sstory, her past is entirely irrelevant. It belongs to anotheradventure, where it mattered exceedingly, an adventure that took placebefore Lucien was heard of at all. As for his story, and for thereality with which it may be endowed, this depends solely upon ourunderstanding of _his_ world, _his_ experience; and if Delphine's oldaffairs are no part of it, our previous knowledge of her cannot helpus with Lucien. It detracts, rather, from the force of his effect; itsets up a relation that has nothing to do with him, a relation betweenDelphine and the reader, which only obstructs our view of the world asLucien sees it. Of the characters in the remoter planes of the action(and that is Delphine's position in his story) no more is expectedthan their value for the purpose of the action in the foreground. Thatis all that can be _used_ in the book; whatever more they may bringwill lie idle, will contribute nothing, and may even become anembarrassment. The numberless people in the Comedie who carry theirlengthening train of old associations from book to book may give theComedie, as a whole, the look of unity that Balzac desired; that isanother point. But in any single story, such of these people as appearby the way, incidentally, must for the time being shed theirirrelevant life; if they fail to do so, they disturb the unity of thestory and confuse its truth.

  Balzac's unrivalled power of placing a figure in its surroundings isnot to be explained, then, by his skill in working his separate piecestogether into one great web; the design of the Human Comedy, solargely artificial, forced upon it as his purpose widened, is noenhancement of the best of his books. The fullness of experience whichis rendered in these is exactly the same--is more expressive, ifanything--when they are taken out of their context; it is all to beattributed to their own art. I come back, therefore, to the way inwhich Balzac handled his vast store of facts, when he set out to tella story, and made them count in the action which he brought to thefore. He seldom, I think, regards them as material to be disguised, tobe given by implication in the drama itself. He is quite content tooffer his own impression of the general landscape of the story, aleisurely display which brings us finally to the point of action. Thenthe action starts forward with a reserve of vigour that helps it invarious ways. The more important of these, as I see them, will bedealt with in the next chapter; but meanwhile I may pick out another,one that is often to be seen in Balzac's work and that he needed onlytoo often. It was not the best of his work that needed it; but theeffect I mean is an interesting one in itself, and it appeals to acritic where it occurs. It shows how a novelist, while in generalseeking to raise the power of his picture by means of drama, willsometimes reverse the process, deliberately, in order to rescue thepower of his drama from becoming violence. If fiction always aims atthe appearance of truth, there are times when the dramatic method istoo much for it, too searching and too betraying. It leaves the storyto speak for itself, but perhaps the story may then say too much to bereasonably credible. It must be restrained, qualified, toned down, inorder to make its best effect. Where the action, in short, is likelyto seem harsh, overcharged, romantic, it is made to look less so, lesshazardous and more real, by recourse to the art of the picture-maker.

  Balzac, it cannot be denied, had frequent cause to look about him forwhatever means there might be of extenuating, and so of confirming, anincredible story. His passion for truth was often in conflict with hislust for marvels, and the manner in which they were mixed is the chiefinterest, I dare say, of some of his books. See him, for example, inthe Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, trying with one hand towrite a novel of Parisian manners, with the other a romance ofmystery, and to do full justice to both. Trompe-la-Mort, the Napoleonof crime, and Esther, the inspired courtesan, represent the romance,and Balzac sets himself to absorb the extravagant tale into a studyof actual life. If he can get the tale firmly embedded in a backgroundof truth, its falsity may be disguised, the whole book may even passfor a scene of the human comedy; it may be accepted as a piece ofreality, on the same level, say, as Eugenie Grandet or Les ParentsPauvres. That is evidently his aim, and if only his romance were alittle less gaudy, or his truth not quite so true, he would have nodifficulty in attaining it; the action would be subdued and kept inits place by the pictorial setting. The trouble is that Balzac's ideaof a satisfying crime is as wild as his hold upon facts is sober, sothat an impossible strain is thrown upon his method of reconciling thetwo. Do what he will, his romance remains staringly false in itscontrast with his reality; there is an open gap between the wonderfulpictures of the town in Illusions Perdues and the theatrical drama ofthe old convict which they introduce. Yet his method was a right one,though it was perverse of Balzac to be occupied at all with suchdevices, when he might have rejected his falsity altogether. Inanother man's work, where there is never this sharp distinctionbetween true and false, where both are merged into something differentfrom either--in Dickens's work--the method I refer to is much moresuccessfully followed; and there, in any of Dickens's later books, wefind the clearest example of it.

  I have already been reminded of Stevenson's word upon this matter;Stevenson noted how Dickens's way of dealing with his romanticintrigues was to lead gradually into them, through well-populatedscenes of character and humour; so that his world is actual, its airfamiliar, by the time that his plot begins to thicken. He giveshimself an ample margin in which to make the impression of the kind oftruth he needs, before beginning to concentrate upon the fabulousaction of the climax. Bleak House is a very good case; the highlycoloured climax in that book is approached with great skill andcaution, all in his most masterly style. A broad stream of diversifiedlife moves slowly in a certain direction, so deliberately at firstthat its scope, its spread, is much more evident than its movement.The book is a big survey of a quantity of odd and amusing people, andit is only by degrees that the discursive method is abandoned and thenarrative brought to a point. Presently we are in the thick of thestory, hurrying to the catastrophe, without having noticed at all, itmay be, that our novel of manners has turned into a romantic drama,with a mysterious crime to crown it. Dickens manages it far moreartfully than Balzac, because his imagination is not, like Balzac's,divided against itself. The world which he peopled with Skimpole andGuppy and the Bayham Badgers was a world that could easily includeLady Dedlock, for though she is perhaps of the theatre, they arecertainly not of the common earth. They and she alike are at the sameangle to literal fact, they diverging one way, she another; theyaccordingly make a kind of reality which can assimilate her romance.Dickens was saved from trying to write two books at once by the factthat one completely satisfied him. It expressed the exciting, amazing,exhilarating world he lived in himself, with its consistenttransmutation of all values, and he knew no other.

  The method which he finally worked out for himself was exactly what herequired. There might be much to say of it, for it is by no meanssimple, but I am only concerned with one or two points in it. Thechief characteristic I take to be this careful introduction of violentdrama into a scene already prepared to vouch for it--a scene so alivethat it compels belief, so queer that almost anything might happenthere naturally. The effect which Dickens gets from the picture in hisnovels, as opposed to the action, is used as a sort of attestation ofthe action; and it surely fulfils its mission very strikingly in thebest of his work--the best from this point of view--Bleak House,Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend. His incurable love of labyrinthinemystification, when it really ran away with him, certainly defeatedall precautions; not even old Dorrit's Marshalsea, not even Flora andMr. F.'s Aunt, can do anything to carry off the story of the Clennams.But so long as he was content with a fairly straightforward romance,all went well; the magnificent life that he projected was prepared toreceive and to speed it. Blimber and Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Tox, thePodsnaps and Twemlow and the Veneerings, all contribute out of theiroverflow of
energy to the force of a drama--a drama in which they maytake no specific part, but which depends on them for the furnishing ofan appropriate scene, a favouring background, a world attuned. Thisand so much more they do that it may seem like insulting them even tothink for a moment of their subordination to the general design, whichis indeed a great deal less interesting than they. But Dickens'smethod is sound and good, and not the less so because he used it forcomparatively trivial purposes. It is strange that he should haveknown how to invent such a scene, and then have found no better dramato enact on it--strange and always stranger, with every re-reading.That does not affect his handling of a subject, which is all that Ideal with here.

  The life which he creates and distributes right and left, in such a bookas Bleak House, before bending to his story--this I call his picture,for picture it is in effect, not dramatic action. It exhibits the worldin which Lady Dedlock is to meditate murder, the fog of the suit inChancery out of which the intrigue of the book is to emerge. It is thesummary of a situation, with its elements spreading widely and touchingmany lives; it gathers them in and gives an impression of them all. Itis pictorial as a whole, and quite as much so as any of Thackeray'sbroad visions. But I have noted before how inevitably Dickens'spicture, unlike Thackeray's, is presented in the _form_ of scenicaction, and here is a case in point. All this impression of life,stretching from the fog-bound law courts to the marshes of Chesney Wold,from Krook and Miss Flite to Sir Leicester and Volumnia, is rendered asincident, as a succession of particular occasions--never, or veryseldom, as general and far-seeing narrative, after Thackeray's manner.Dickens continually holds to the immediate scene, even when his objectis undramatic; he is always readier to work in action and dialogue thanto describe at large; he is happier in placing a character there beforeus, as the man or woman talked and behaved in a certain hour, on acertain spot, than in reflecting a long impression of their manner ofliving. In Thackeray's hands the life of Miss Flite, for instance, wouldhave become a legend, recalled and lingered over, illustrated by passingglimpses of her ways and oddities. With Dickens she is always a littlehuman being who figures upon a scene, in a group, a visible creatureacting her small part; she is always dramatic.

  And Dickens, using this method everywhere, even in such a case ashers--even where his purpose, that is to say, is pictorial, to givethe sense of a various and vivacious background--is forced tocrystallize and formulate his characters very sharply, if they are tomake their effect; it is why he is so often reduced to the expedientof labelling his people with a trick or a phrase, which they have tobring with them every time they appear. Their opportunities arestrictly limited; the author does not help them out by glancing freelyinto their lives and sketching them broadly. Flite, Snagsby, Chadbandand the rest of them--whatever they are, they must be all of it withinnarrow bounds, within the few scenes that can be allotted to them; andif one of them fails now and then it is not surprising, the wonder isthat most of them succeed so brilliantly. In thus translating hispicture into action Dickens chose the most exigent way, but it wasalways the right way for him. He was curiously incapable in the other;when occasionally he tries his hand at picture-making, in Thackeray'smanner--attempting to summarize an impression of social life among theVeneerings, of official life among the Barnacles--his touch is wildindeed. Away from a definite episode in an hour prescribed he isseldom at ease.

  But though the actual presentation is thus dramatic, his books are infact examples of the pictured scene that opens and spreads verygradually, in order to make a valid world for a drama that could notbe precipitated forthwith, a drama that would be naked romance if itstood by itself. Stevenson happened upon this point, with regard toDickens, in devising the same method for a story of his own, TheWrecker, a book in which he too proposed to insinuate an abrupt andviolent intrigue into credible, continuous life. He, of course, knewprecisely what he was doing--where Dickens followed, as I suppose, anuncritical instinct; the purpose of The Wrecker is clearly writtenupon it, and very ingeniously carried out. But I doubt whetherStevenson himself noticed that in all his work, or nearly, he wasusing an artifice of the same kind. He spoke of his habitualinclination towards the story told in the first person as though itwere a chance preference, and he may not have perceived how logicallyit followed from the subjects that mostly attracted him. They werestrongly romantic, vividly dramatic; he never had occasion to use thefirst person for the effect I considered a while ago, its enhancementof a plain narrative. I called it the first step towards thedramatization of a story, and so it is in a book like Esmond, abroadly pictured novel of manners. But it is more than this in a booklike The Master of Ballantrae, where the subject is a piece offorcible, closely knit action. The value of rendering it as somebody'snarrative, of placing it in the mouth of a man who was there on thespot, is in this book the value of working the drama into a picture,of passing it through a man's thought and catching his reflection ofit. As the picture in Esmond is enhanced, so the drama in Ballantraeis toned and qualified by the method of presentation. The same methodhas a different effect, according to the subject upon which it isused; as a splash of the same grey might darken white surface andlighten a black. In Esmond the use of the first person raises the bookin the direction of drama, in Ballantrae it thrusts the book in theother direction, towards the pictured impression. So it would seem;but perhaps it is a fine distinction that criticism can afford to passby.