The Craft of Fiction Read online

  II

  A book has a certain form, we all agree; what the form of a particularbook may be, whether good or bad, and whether it matters--these arepoints of debate; but that a book _has_ a form, this is not disputed.We hear the phrase on all sides, an unending argument is waged overit. One critic condemns a novel as "shapeless," meaning that its shapeis objectionable; another retorts that if the novel has other finequalities, its shape is unimportant; and the two will continue theircontroversy till an onlooker, pardonably bewildered, may begin tosuppose that "form" in fiction is something to be put in or left outof a novel according to the taste of the author. But though thediscussion is indeed confusingly worded at times, it is clear thatthere is agreement on this article at least--that a book is a thing towhich a shape is ascribable, good or bad. I have spoken of thedifficulty that prevents us from ever seeing or describing the shapewith perfect certainty; but evidently we are convinced that it isthere, clothing the book.

  Not as a single form, however, but as a moving stream of impressions,paid out of the volume in a slender thread as we turn the pages--thatis how the book reaches us; or in another image it is a processionthat passes before us as we sit to watch. It is hard to think of thislapse and flow, this sequence of figures and scenes, which must betaken in a settled order, one after another, as existing in thecondition of an immobile form, like a pile of sculpture. Though wereadily talk of the book as a material work of art, our words seem tobe crossed by a sense that it is rather a process, a passage ofexperience, than a thing of size and shape. I find this contradictiondividing all my thought about books; they are objects, yes, completedand detached, but I recall them also as tracts of time, during whichClarissa and Anna moved and lived and endured in my view. Criticism ishampered by the ambiguity; the two books, the two aspects of the samebook, blur each other; a critic seems to shift from this one to that,from the thing carved in the stuff of thought to the passing movementof life. And on the whole it is the latter aspect of the two whichasserts itself; the first, the novel with its formal outline, appearsfor a moment, and then the life contained in it breaks out andobscures it.

  But the procession which passes across our line of sight in thereading must be marshalled and concentrated somewhere; we receive thestory of Anna bit by bit, all the numerous fragments that togethermake Tolstoy's book; and finally the tale is complete, and the bookstands before us, or should stand, as a welded mass. We have beengiven the material, and the book should now be there. Our treacherousmemory will have failed to preserve it all, but that disability wehave admitted and discounted; at any rate an imposing object ought toremain, Tolstoy's great imaginative sculpture, sufficientlyrepresenting his intention. And again and again, at this point, I makethe same discovery; I have been watching the story, that is to say,forgetful of the fact that there was more for me to do than to watchreceptively and passively, forgetful of the novel that I should havebeen fashioning out of the march of experience as it passed. I havebeen treating it as life; and that is all very well, and is the rightmanner as far as it goes, but my treatment of life is capricious andeclectic, and this life, this story of Anna, has suffered accordingly.I have taken much out of it and carried away many recollections; Ihave omitted to think of it as matter to be wrought into a singleform. What wonder if I search my mind in vain, a little later, for thebook that Tolstoy wrote?

  But how is one to construct a novel out of the impressions thatTolstoy pours forth from his prodigious hands? This is a kind of"creative reading" (the phrase is Emerson's) which comes instinctivelyto few of us. We know how to imagine a landscape or a conversationwhen he describes it, but to gather up all these sights and soundsinto a compact fabric, round which the mind can wander freely, asfreely as it strays and contemplates and loses its way, perhaps, inTolstoy's wonderful world--this is a task which does not achieveitself without design and deliberation on the part of the reader. Itis an effort, first of all, to keep the world of Anna (I cling to thisillustration) at a distance; and yet it must be kept at a distance ifit is to be impressed with the form of art; no artist (and the skilfulreader is an artist) can afford to be swayed and beset by hismaterial, he must stand above it. And then it is a further effort,prolonged, needing practice and knowledge, to recreate the novel inits right form, the best form that the material, selected and disposedby the author, is capable of accepting.

  The reader of a novel--by which I mean the critical reader--is himselfa novelist; he is the maker of a book which may or may not please histaste when it is finished, but of a book for which he must take hisown share of the responsibility. The author does his part, but hecannot transfer his book like a bubble into the brain of the critic;he cannot make sure that the critic will possess his work. The readermust therefore become, for his part, a novelist, never permittinghimself to suppose that the creation of the book is solely the affairof the author. The difference between them is immense, of course, andso much so that a critic is always inclined to extend and intensifyit. The opposition that he conceives between the creative and thecritical task is a very real one; but in modestly belittling his ownside of the business he is apt to forget an essential portion of it.The writer of the novel works in a manner that would be utterlyimpossible to the critic, no doubt, and with a liberty and with arange that would disconcert him entirely. But in one quarter theirwork coincides; both of them make the novel.

  Is it necessary to define the difference? That is soon done if wepicture Tolstoy and his critic side by side, surveying the free andformless expanse of the world of life. The critic has nothing to say;he waits, looking to Tolstoy for guidance. And Tolstoy, with the helpof some secret of his own, which is his genius, does not hesitate foran instant. His hand is plunged into the scene, he lifts out of itgreat fragments, right and left, ragged masses of life torn from theirsetting; he selects. And upon these trophies he sets to work with thefull force of his imagination; he detects their significance, hedisengages and throws aside whatever is accidental and meaningless; here-makes them in conditions that are never known in life, conditionsin which a thing is free to grow according to its own law, expressingitself unhindered; he liberates and completes. And then, upon all thisnew life--so like the old and yet so different, _more_ like the old,as one may say, than the old ever had the chance of being--upon allthis life that is now so much more intensely living than before,Tolstoy directs the skill of his art; he distributes it in a single,embracing design; he orders and disposes. And thus the critic receiveshis guidance, and _his_ work begins.

  No selection, no arrangement is required of him; the new world that islaid before him is the world of art, life liberated from the tangle ofcross-purposes, saved from arbitrary distortion. Instead of acontinuous, endless scene, in which the eye is caught in a thousanddirections at once, with nothing to hold it to a fixed centre, thelandscape that opens before the critic is whole and single; it haspassed through an imagination, it has shed its irrelevancy and iscompact with its own meaning. Such is the world in the book--inTolstoy's book I do not say; but it is the world in the book as it maybe, in the book where imagination and execution are perfectlyharmonized. And in any case the critic accepts this ordered, enhanceddisplay as it stands, better or worse, and uses it all for thecreation of the book. There can be no picking and choosing now; thatwas the business of the novelist, and it has been accomplishedaccording to his light; the critic creates out of life that is alreadysubject to art.

  But his work is not the less plastic for that. The impressions thatsucceed one another, as the pages of the book are turned, are to bebuilt into a structure, and the critic is missing his opportunityunless he can proceed in a workmanlike manner. It is not to besupposed that an artist who carves or paints is so filled with emotionby the meaning of his work--the story in it--that he forgets theabstract beauty of form and colour; and though there is more room forsuch sensibility in an art which is the shaping of thought andfeeling, in the art of literature, still the man of letters is acraftsman, and the critic cannot be less. He must know ho
w to handlethe stuff which is continually forming in his mind while he reads; hemust be able to recognize its fine variations and to take them allinto account. Nobody can work in material of which the properties areunfamiliar, and a reader who tries to get possession of a book withnothing but his appreciation of the life and the ideas and the storyin it is like a man who builds a wall without knowing the capacitiesof wood and clay and stone. Many different substances, as distinct tothe practised eye as stone and wood, go to the making of a novel, andit is necessary to see them for what they are. So only is it possibleto use them aright, and to find, when the volume is closed, that acomplete, coherent, appraisable book remains in the mind.

  And what are these different substances, and how is a mere reader tolearn their right use? They are the various forms of narrative, theforms in which a story may be told; and while they are many, they arenot indeed so very many, though their modifications and theircommixtures are infinite. They are not recondite; we know them welland use them freely, but to use them is easier than to perceive theirdemands and their qualities. These we gradually discern by using themconsciously and questioningly--by reading, I mean, and readingcritically, the books in which they appear. Let us very carefullyfollow the methods of the novelists whose effects are incontestable,noticing exactly the manner in which the scenes and figures in theirbooks are presented. The scenes and figures, as I have said, we shape,we detach, without the smallest difficulty; and if we pause over themfor long enough to see by what arts and devices, on the author's part,we have been enabled to shape them so strikingly--to see precisely howthis episode has been given relief, that character made intelligibleand vivid--we at once begin to stumble on many discoveries about themaking of a novel.

  Our criticism has been oddly incurious in the matter, considering whatthe dominion of the novel has been for a hundred and fifty years. Therefinements of the art of fiction have been accepted without question,or at most have been classified roughly and summarily--as is proved bythe singular poverty of our critical vocabulary, as soon as we passbeyond the simplest and plainest effects. The expressions and thephrases at our disposal bear no defined, delimited meanings; they havenot been rounded and hardened by passing constantly from one critic'shand to another's. What is to be understood by a "dramatic" narrative,a "pictorial" narrative, a "scenic" or a "generalized" story? We mustuse such words, as soon as we begin to examine the structure of anovel; and yet they are words which have no technical acceptation inregard to a novel, and one cannot be sure how they will be taken. Thewant of a received nomenclature is a real hindrance, and I have oftenwished that the modern novel had been invented a hundred years sooner,so that it might have fallen into the hands of the critical schoolmenof the seventeenth century. As the production of an age of romance, orof the eve of such an age, it missed the advantage of the dry light ofacademic judgement, and I think it still has reason to regret theloss. The critic has, at any rate; his language, even now, isunsettled and unformed.

  And we still suffer from a kind of shyness in the presence of a novel.From shyness of the author or of his sentiments or of his imaginedworld, no indeed; but we are haunted by a sense that a novel is apiece of life, and that to take it to pieces would be to destroy it.We begin to analyse it, and we seem to be like Beckmesser, writingdown the mistakes of the spring-time upon his slate. It is an obscuredelicacy, not clearly formulated, not admitted, perhaps, in so manywords; but it has its share in restraining the hand of criticism. Wescarcely need to be thus considerate; the immense and necessarydifficulty of closing with a book at all, on any terms, might appearto be enough, without adding another; the book is safe from rudeviolation. And it is not a piece of life, it is a piece of art likeanother; and the fact that it is an ideal shape, with no existence inspace, only to be spoken of in figures and metaphors, makes it all themore important that in our thought it should be protected by noromantic scruple. Or perhaps it is not really the book that we areshy of, but a still more fugitive phantom--our pleasure in it. Itspoils the fun of a novel to know how it is made--is this a reflectionthat lurks at the back of our minds? Sometimes, I think.

  But the pleasure of illusion is small beside the pleasure of creation,and the greater is open to every reader, volume in hand. How anovelist finds his subject, in a human being or in a situation or in aturn of thought, this indeed is beyond us; we might look long at thevery world that Tolstoy saw, we should never detect the unwritten bookhe found there; and he can seldom (he and the rest of them) give anyaccount of the process of discovery. The power that recognizes thefruitful idea and seizes it is a thing apart. For this reason we judgethe novelist's eye for a subject to be his cardinal gift, and we havenothing to say, whether by way of exhortation or of warning, till hissubject is announced. But from that moment he is accessible, hisprivilege is shared; and the delight of treating the subject is acuteand perennial. From point to point we follow the writer, alwayslooking back to the subject itself in order to understand the logic ofthe course he pursues. We find that we are creating a design, large orsmall, simple or intricate, as the chapter finished is fitted into itsplace; or again there is a flaw and a break in the development, theauthor takes a turn that appears to contradict or to disregard thesubject, and the critical question, strictly so called, begins. Isthis proceeding of the author the right one, the best for the subject?Is it possible to conceive and to name a better? The hours of theauthor's labour are lived again by the reader, the pleasure ofcreation is renewed.

  So it goes, till the book is ended and we look back at the wholedesign. It may be absolutely satisfying to the eye, the expression ofthe subject, complete and compact. But with the book in this conditionof a defined shape, firm of outline, its form shows for what it isindeed--not an attribute, one of many and possibly not the mostimportant, but the book itself, as the form of a statue is the statueitself. If the form is to the eye imperfect, it means that the subjectis somehow and somewhere imperfectly expressed, it means that thestory has suffered. Where then, and how? Is it because the treatmenthas not started from the heart of the subject, or has diverged fromthe line of its true development--or is it that the subject itself waspoor and unfruitful? The question ramifies quickly. But anyhow here isthe book, or something that we need not hesitate to regard as thebook, recreated according to the best of the reader's ability. Indeedhe knows well that it will melt away in time; nothing can altogethersave it; only it will last for longer than it would have lasted if ithad been read uncritically, if it had not been deliberately recreated.In that case it would have fallen to pieces at once, Anna andClarissa would have stepped out of the work of art in which theirauthors had so laboriously enshrined them, the book would haveperished. It is now a single form, and let us judge the effect of itwhile we may. At best we shall have no more time than we certainlyrequire.