The Craft of Fiction Read online

  III

  A great and brilliant novel, a well-known novel, and at the same timea large and crowded and unmanageable novel--such will be the book toconsider first. It must be one that is universally admitted to be awork of genius, signal and conspicuous; I wish to examine its form, Ido not wish to argue its merit; it must be a book which it issuperfluous to praise, but which it will never seem too late to praiseagain. It must also be well known, and this narrows the category; thenovel of whose surpassing value every one is convinced may easily falloutside it; our novel must be one that is not only commended, buthabitually read. And since we are concerned with the difficulty ofcontrolling the form of a novel, let it be an evident case of thedifficulty, an extreme case on a large scale, where the questioncannot be disguised--a novel of ample scope, covering wide spaces andmany years, long and populous and eventful. The category is reducedindeed; perhaps it contains one novel only, War and Peace.

  Of War and Peace it has never been suggested, I suppose, that Tolstoyhere produced a model of perfect form. It is a panoramic vision ofpeople and places, a huge expanse in which armies are marshalled; canone expect of such a book that it should be neatly composed? It iscrowded with life, at whatever point we face it; intensely vivid,inexhaustibly stirring, the broad impression is made by the bigprodigality of Tolstoy's invention. If a novel could really be aslarge as life, Tolstoy could easily fill it; his great masterful reachnever seems near its limit; he is always ready to annex another andyet another tract of life, he is only restrained by the mere necessityof bringing a novel somewhere to an end. And then, too, this mightycommand of spaces and masses is only half his power. He spreadsfurther than any one else, but he also touches the detail of thescene, the single episode, the fine shade of character, with exquisitelightness and precision. Nobody surpasses, in some ways nobodyapproaches, the easy authority with which he handles the matterimmediately before him at the moment, a roomful of people, thebrilliance of youth, spring sunshine in a forest, a boy on a horse;whatever his shifting panorama brings into view, he makes of it animage of beauty and truth that is final, complete, unqualified. Beforethe profusion of War and Peace the question of its general form isscarcely raised. It is enough that such a world should have beenpictured; it is idle to look for proportion and design in a book thatcontains a world.

  But for this very reason, that there is so much in the book todistract attention from its form, it is particularly interesting toask how it is made. The doubt, the obvious perplexity, is a challengeto the exploring eye. It may well be that effective composition onsuch a scale is impossible, but it is not so easy to say exactly whereTolstoy fails. If the total effect of his book is inconclusive, it isall lucidity and shapeliness in its parts. There is no faltering inhis hold upon character; he never loses his way among the scores ofmen and women in the book; and in all the endless series of scenes andevents there is not one which betrays a hesitating intention. Thestory rolls on and on, and it is long before the reader can begin toquestion its direction. Tolstoy _seems_ to know precisely where he isgoing, and why; there is nothing at any moment to suggest that he isnot in perfect and serene control of his idea. Only at last, perhaps,we turn back and wonder what it was. What is the subject of War andPeace, what is the novel _about_? There is no very ready answer; butif we are to discover what is wrong with the form, this is thequestion to press.

  What is the story? There is first of all a succession of phases in thelives of certain generations; youth that passes out into maturity,fortunes that meet and clash and re-form, hopes that flourish and waneand reappear in other lives, age that sinks and hands on the torch toyouth again--such is the substance of the drama. The book, I take it,begins to grow out of the thought of the processional march of thegenerations, always changing, always renewed; its figures are soughtand chosen for the clarity with which the drama is embodied in them.Young people of different looks and talents, moods and tempers, butyoung with the youth of all times and places--the story is alive withthem at once. The Rostov household resounds with them--the Rostovs areof the easy, light-spirited, quick-tongued sort. Then there is thedreary old Bolkonsky mansion, with Andrew, generous and sceptical, andwith poor plain Marya, ardent and repressed. And for quite anotherkind of youth, there is Peter Besukhov, master of millions, fat andgood-natured and indolent, his brain a fever of faiths and aspirationswhich not he, but Andrew, so much more sparing in high hopes, has thetenacity to follow. These are in the foreground, and between andbehind them are more and more, young men and women at every turn,crowding forward to take their places as the new generation.

  It does not matter, it does not affect the drama, that they are menand women of a certain race and century, soldiers, politicians,princes, Russians in an age of crisis; such they are, with all thecircumstances of their time and place about them, but such they are insecondary fashion, it is what they happen to be. Essentially they arenot princes, not Russians, but figures in the great procession; theyare here in the book because they are young, not because they are therising hope of Russia in the years of Austerlitz and Borodino. It islaid upon them primarily to enact the cycle of birth and growth,death and birth again. They illustrate the story that is the samealways and everywhere, and the tumult of the dawning century to whichthey are born is an accident. Peter and Andrew and Natasha and therest of them are the children of yesterday and to-day and to-morrow;there is nothing in any of them that is not of all time. Tolstoy hasno thought of showing them as the children of their particularconditions, as the generation that was formed by a certain historicstruggle; he sees them simply as the embodiment of youth. To anEnglish reader of to-day it is curious--and more, it is strangelymoving--to note how faithfully the creations of Tolstoy, thenineteenth-century Russian, copy the young people of the twentiethcentury and of England; it is all one, life in Moscow then, life inLondon now, provided only that it is young enough. Old age is rathermore ephemeral; its period is written on it (not very deeply, afterall), and here and there it "dates." Nicholas and Natasha are alwaysof the newest modernity.

  Such is the master-motive that at first sight appears to underlie thebook, in spite of its name; such is the most evident aspect of thestory, as our thought brushes freely and rapidly around it. In thisdrama the war and the peace are episodic, not of the centre; thehistoric scene is used as a foil and a background. It appears fromtime to time, for the sake of its value in throwing the nearermovement of life into strong relief; it very powerfully andstrikingly shows what the young people _are_. The drama of the rise ofa generation is nowhere more sharply visible and appreciable than itis in such a time of convulsion. Tolstoy's moment is well chosen; hisstory has a setting that is fiercely effective, the kind of settingwhich in our Europe this story has indeed found very regularly,century by century. But it is not by the war, from this point of view,that the multifarious scenes are linked together; it is by anotheridea, a more general, as we may still dare to hope, than the idea ofwar. Youth and age, the flow and the ebb of the recurrent tide--thisis the theme of Tolstoy's book.

  So it seems for a while. But Tolstoy called his novel War and Peace,and presently there arises a doubt; did he believe himself to bewriting _that_ story, and not the story of Youth and Age? I have beensupposing that he named his book carelessly (he would not be aloneamong great novelists for that), and thereby emphasized the wrong sideof his intention; but there are things in the drama which suggest thathis title really represented the book he projected. Cutting across thebig human motive I have indicated, there falls a second line ofthought, and sometimes it is this, most clearly, that the author isfollowing. Not the cycle of life everlasting, in which the rage ofnations is an incident, a noise and an incursion from without--but thestrife itself, the irrelevant uproar, becomes the motive of the fable.War and Peace, the drama of that ancient alternation, is now thesubject out of which the form of the book is to grow. Not seldom, andmore frequently as the book advances, the story takes this new andcontradictory alignment. The centre shifts from the general play ofl
ife, neither national nor historic, and plants itself in the field ofracial conflict, typified by that "sheep-worry of Europe" whichfollowed the French Revolution. The young people immediately changetheir meaning. They are no longer there for their own sake, guardiansof the torch for their hour. They are re-disposed, partially andfitfully, in another relation; they are made to figure as creatures ofthe Russian scene, at the impact of East and West in the Napoleonicclash.

  It is a mighty antinomy indeed, on a scale adapted to Tolstoy's giantimagination. With one hand he takes up the largest subject in theworld, the story to which all other human stories are subordinate; andnot content with this, in the other hand he produces the drama of agreat historic collision, for which a scene is set with no lessprodigious a gesture. And there is not a sign in the book to show thathe knew what he was doing; apparently he was quite unconscious that hewas writing two novels at once. Such an oversight is not peculiar tomen of genius, I dare say; the least of us is capable of the feat,many of us are seen to practise it. But two such novels as these, twosuch immemorial epics, caught up together and written out in a coupleof thousand pages, inadvertently mixed and entangled, and all with anair of composure never ruffled or embarrassed, in a style of luminoussimplicity--it was a feat that demanded, that betokened, the genius ofTolstoy. War and Peace is like an Iliad, the story of certain men, andan Aeneid, the story of a nation, compressed into one book by a manwho never so much as noticed that he was Homer and Virgil by turns.

  Or can it perhaps be argued that he was aware of the task he sethimself, and that he intentionally coupled his two themes? Heproposed, let us say, to set the unchanging story of life against themomentary tumult, which makes such a stir in the history-books, butwhich passes, leaving the other story still unrolling for ever.Perhaps he did; but I am looking only at his book, and I can see nohint of it in the length and breadth of the novel as it stands; I candiscover no angle at which the two stories will appear to unite andmerge in a single impression. Neither is subordinate to the other, andthere is nothing above them (what more _could_ there be?) to whichthey are both related. Nor are they placed together to illustrate acontrast; nothing _results_ from their juxtaposition. Only from timeto time, upon no apparent principle and without a word of warning, oneof them is dropped and the other resumed. It would be possible, Ithink, to mark the exact places--not always even at the end of achapter, but casually, in the middle of a page--where the changeoccurs. The reader begins to look out for them; in the second half ofthe novel they are liberally sprinkled.

  The long, slow, steady sweep of the story--the _first_ story, as Icall it--setting through the personal lives of a few young people,bringing them together, separating them, dimming their freshness,carrying them away from hopeful adventure to their appointedcondition, where their part is only to transmit the gift of youth toothers and to drop back while the adventure is repeated--this motive,in which the book opens and closes and to which it constantly returns,is broken into by the famous scenes of battle (by some of them, to beaccurate, not by all), with the reverberation of imperial destinies,out of which Tolstoy makes a saga of his country's tempestuous past.It is magnificent, this latter, but it has no bearing on the other,the universal story of no time or country, the legend of every age,which is told of Nicholas and Natasha, but which might have been toldas well of the sons and daughters of the king of Troy. To Nicholas,the youth of all time, the strife of Emperor and Czar is the occasion,it may very well be, of the climax of his adventure; but it is no morethan the occasion, not essential to it, since by some means or otherhe would have touched his climax in any age. War and peace are likelyenough to shape his life for him, whether he belongs to ancient Troyor to modern Europe; but if it is _his_ story, his and that of hiscompanions, why do we see them suddenly swept into the background,among the figures that populate the story of a particular andmemorable war? For that is what happens.

  It is now the war, with the generals and the potentates in theforefront, that is the matter of the story. Alexander and Kutusov,Napoleon and Murat, become the chief actors, and between them the playis acted out. In this story the loves and ambitions of the younggeneration, which have hitherto been central, are relegated to thefringe; there are wide tracts in which they do not appear at all.Again and again Tolstoy forgets them entirely; he has discovered afresh idea for the unification of this second book, a theory drummedinto the reader with merciless iteration, desolating many a wearypage. The meaning of the book--and it is extraordinary how Tolstoy'sartistic sense deserts him in expounding it--lies in the relationbetween the man of destiny and the forces that he dreams he isdirecting; it is a high theme, but Tolstoy cannot leave it to make itsown effect. He, whose power of making a story _tell itself_ isunsurpassed, is capable of thrusting into his book interminablechapters of comment and explanation, chapters in the manner of acontroversial pamphlet, lest the argument of his drama should bemissed. But the reader at last takes an easy way with these maddeninginterruptions; wherever "the historians" are mentioned he knows thatseveral pages can be turned at once; Tolstoy may be left to belabourthe conventional theories of the Napoleonic legend, and rejoined lateron, when it has occurred to him once more that he is writing a novel.

  When he is not pamphleteering Tolstoy's treatment of the second story,the national saga, is masterly at every point. If we could forget theoriginal promise of the book as lightly as its author does, nothingcould be more impressive than his pictures of the two hugely-blunderingmasses, Europe and Russia, ponderously colliding at the apparentdictation of a few limited brains--so few, so limited, that the irony oftheir claim to be the directors of fate is written over all the scene.Napoleon at the crossing of the Niemen, Napoleon before Moscow, theRussian council of war after Borodino (gravely watched by the smallchild Malasha, overlooked in her corner), Kutusov, wherever heappears--all these are impressions belonging wholly to the same cycle;they have no effect in relation to the story of Peter and Nicholas, theydo not extend or advance it, but on their own account they are supreme.There are not enough of them, and they are not properly grouped andcomposed, to _complete_ the second book that has forced its way into thefirst; the cycle of the war and the peace, as distinguished from thecycle of youth and age, is broken and fragmentary. The size of thetheme, and the scale upon which these scenes are drawn, imply a novel aslong as our existing War and Peace; it would all be filled by Kutusovand Napoleon, if their drama were fully treated, leaving no room foranother. But, mutilated as it is, each of the fragments is broadlyhandled, highly finished, and perfectly adjusted to a point of view thatis not the point of view for the rest of the book.

  And it is to be remarked that the lines of cleavage--which, as Isuggested, can be traced with precision--by no means invariably dividethe peaceful scenes of romance from the battles and intrigues of thehistoric struggle, leaving these on one side, those on the other.Sometimes the great public events are used as the earlier themedemands that they should be used--as the material in which the storyof youth is embodied. Consider, for instance, one of the earlierbattle-pieces in the book, where Nicholas, very youthful indeed, isfor the first time under fire; he comes and goes bewildered, lamentslike a lost child, is inspired with heroism and flees like a hare forhis life. As Tolstoy presents it, this battle, or a large part of it,is the affair of Nicholas; it belongs to him, it is a piece ofexperience that enters his life and enriches our sense of it. Many ofthe wonderful chapters, again, which deal with the abandonment and theconflagration of Moscow, are seen through the lives of theirrepressible Rostov household, or of Peter in his squalidimprisonment; the scene is framed in their consciousness. PrinceAndrew, too--nobody can forget how much of the battle in which he ismortally wounded is transformed into an emotion of _his_; those pagesare filched from Tolstoy's theory of the war and given to his fiction.In all these episodes, and in others of the same kind, the history ofthe time is in the background; in front of it, closely watched fortheir own sake, are the lives which that history so deeply affects.

 
But in the other series of pictures of the campaign, mingled withthese, it is different. They are admirable, but they screen thethought of the particular lives in which the wider interest of thebook (as I take it to be) is firmly lodged. From a huge emotion thatreaches us through the youth exposed to it, the war is changed into anemotion of our own. It is rendered by the story-teller, on the whole,as a scene directly faced by himself, instead of being reflected inthe experience of the rising generation. It is true that Tolstoy'sgood instinct guides him ever and again away from the mere telling ofthe story on his own authority; at high moments he knows better thanto tell it himself. He approaches it through the mind of an onlooker,Napoleon or Kutusov or the little girl by the stove in the corner,borrowing the value of indirectness, the increased effect of a storythat is seen as it is mirrored in the mind of another. But he chooseshis onlooker at random and follows no consistent method. Thepredominant point of view is simply his own, that of the independentstory-teller; so that the general effect of these pictures is made ona totally different principle from that which governs the story of theyoung people. In that story--though there, too, Tolstoy's method isfar from being consistent--the effect is _mainly_ based on our freesharing in the hopes and fears and meditations of the chosen few. Inthe one case Tolstoy is immediately beside us, narrating; in the otherit is Peter and Andrew, Nicholas and Natasha, who are with us andabout us, and Tolstoy is effaced.

  Here, then, is the reason, or at any rate one of the reasons, why thegeneral shape of War and Peace fails to satisfy the eye--as I supposeit admittedly to fail. It is a confusion of two designs, a confusionmore or less masked by Tolstoy's imperturbable ease of manner, butrevealed by the look of his novel when it is seen as a whole. It hasno centre, and Tolstoy is so clearly unconcerned by the lack that onemust conclude he never perceived it. If he had he would surely havebetrayed that he had; he would have been found, at some point orother, trying to gather his two stories into one, devising a schemethat would include them both, establishing a centre somewhere. But no,he strides through his book without any such misgiving, and really itis his assurance that gives it such an air of lucidity. He would onlyhave flawed its surface by attempting to force the material on hishands into some sort of unity; its incongruity is fundamental. Andwhen we add, as we must, that War and Peace, with all this, is one ofthe great novels of the world, a picture of life that has never beensurpassed for its grandeur and its beauty, there is a moment when allour criticism perhaps seems trifling. What does it matter? Thebusiness of the novelist is to create life, and here is life createdindeed; the satisfaction of a clean, coherent form is wanting, and itwould be well to have it, but that is all. We have a magnificent novelwithout it.

  So we have, but we might have had a more magnificent still, and anovel that would not be _this_ novel merely, this War and Peace, withthe addition of another excellence, a comeliness of form. We mighthave had a novel that would be a finer, truer, more vivid and moreforcible picture of life. The best form is that which makes the mostof its subject--there is no other definition of the meaning of form infiction. The well-made book is the book in which the subject and theform coincide and are indistinguishable--the book in which the matteris all used up in the form, in which the form expresses all thematter. Where there is disagreement and conflict between the two,there is stuff that is superfluous or there is stuff that is wanting;the form of the book, as it stands before us, has failed to do justiceto the idea. In War and Peace, as it seems to me, the story sufferstwice over for the imperfection of the form. It is damaged, in thefirst place, by the importation of another and an irrelevantstory--damaged because it so loses the sharp and clear relief that itwould have if it stood alone. Whether the story was to be the drama ofyouth and age, or the drama of war and peace, in either case it wouldhave been incomparably more impressive if _all_ the great wealth ofthe material had been used for its purpose, all brought into onedesign. And furthermore, in either case again, the story isincomplete; neither of them is finished, neither of them is given itsfull development, for all the size of the book. But to this point, atleast in relation to one of the two, I shall return directly.

  Tolstoy's novel is wasteful of its subject; that is the wholeobjection to its loose, unstructural form. Criticism bases itsconclusion upon nothing whatever but the injury done to the story, theloss of its full potential value. Is there so much that is good in Warand Peace that its inadequate grasp of a great theme is easilyforgotten? It is not only easily forgotten, it is scarcely noticed--ona first reading of the book; I speak at least for one reader. But withevery return to it the book that _might_ have been is more insistent;it obtrudes more plainly, each time, interfering with the book thatis. Each time, in fact, it becomes harder to make a book of it at all;instead of holding together more firmly, with every successivereconstruction, its prodigious members seem always more disparate anddisorganized; they will not coalesce. A subject, one and whole andirreducible--a novel cannot begin to take shape till it has this forits support. It seems obvious; yet there is nothing more familiar to anovel-reader of to-day than the difficulty of discovering what thenovel in his hand is about. What was the novelist's intention, in aphrase? If it cannot be put into a phrase it is no subject for anovel; and the size or the complexity of a subject is in no waylimited by that assertion. It may be the simplest anecdote or the mostelaborate concatenation of events, it may be a solitary figure or thewidest network of relationships; it is anyhow expressible in ten wordsthat reveal its unity. The form of the book depends on it, and untilit is known there is nothing to be said of the form.