The Craft of Fiction Read online

  IV

  But now suppose that Tolstoy had not been drawn aside from his firststory in the midst of it, suppose he had left the epic of his countryand "the historians" to be dealt with in another book, suppose thatthe interpolated scenes of War and Peace, as we possess it, were todisappear and to leave the subject entirely to the young heroes andheroines--what shall we find to be the form of the book which is thusdisencumbered? I would try to think away from the novel all that isnot owned and dominated by these three brilliant households, Besukhov,Bolkonsky, Rostov; there remains a long succession of scenes, in asingle and straightforward train of action. It is still a novel ofample size; it spreads from the moment when Peter, amiably uncouth,first appears in a drawing-room of the social world, to the evening,fifteen years later, when he is watched with speechless veneration bythe small boy Nicolenka, herald of the future. The climax of his life,the climax of half a dozen lives, is surmounted between these twopoints, and now their story stands by itself. It gains, I could feel,by this process of liberation, summary as it is.

  At any rate, it is one theme and one book, and the question of itsform may be further pressed. The essential notion out of which thisbook sprang, I suggested, was that of the march of life, the shift ofthe generations in their order--a portentous subject to master, butTolstoy's hand is broad and he is not afraid of great spaces. Such asubject could not be treated at all without a generous amount of roomfor its needs. It requires, to begin with, a big and variouspopulation; a few selected figures may hold the main thread of thestory and represent its course, but it is necessary for their typicaltruth that their place in the world should be clearly seen. They arechoice examples, standing away from the mass, but their meaning wouldbe lost if they were taken to be utterly exceptional, if they appearedto be chosen _because_ they are exceptional. Their attachment to thegeneral drama of life must accordingly be felt and understood; theeffect of a wide world must be given, opening away to far distancesround the action of the centre. The whole point of the action is inits representative character, its universality; this it must plainlywear.

  It begins to do so at once, from the very first. With less hesitation,apparently, than another man might feel in setting the scene of astreet or parish, Tolstoy proceeds to make his world. Daylight seemsto well out of his page and to surround his characters as fast as hesketches them; the darkness lifts from their lives, their conditions,their outlying affairs, and leaves them under an open sky. In thewhole of fiction no scene is so continually washed by the common air,free to us all, as the scene of Tolstoy. His people move in anatmosphere that knows no limit; beyond the few that are to the forethere stretches a receding crowd, with many faces in full light, andmany more that are scarcely discerned as faces, but that swell theimpression of swarming life. There is no perceptible horizon, no hardline between the life in the book and the life beyond it. Thecommunication between the men and women of the story and the rest ofthe world is unchecked. It is impossible to say of Peter and Andrewand Nicholas that they inhabit a "world of their own," as the peoplein a story-book so often appear to do; they inhabit _our_ world, likeanybody else. I do not mean, of course, that a marked horizon, drawnround the action of a book and excluding everything that does notbelong to it, is not perfectly appropriate, often enough; their ownworld may be all that the people need, may be the world that bestreveals what they are to be and to do; it all depends on the nature ofthe fable. But to Tolstoy's fable space is essential, with the senseof the continuity of life, within and without the circle of the book.He never seems even to know that there can be any difficulty inproviding it; while he writes, it is there.

  He is helped, one might imagine, by the simple immensity of hisRussian landscape, filled with the suggestion of distances andunending levels. The Russian novelist who counts on this effect hasit ready to his hand. If he is to render an impression of space thatwidens and widens, a hint is enough; the mere association of hispicture with the thought of those illimitable plains might aloneenlarge it to the utmost of his need. The imagination of distance iseverywhere, not only in a free prospect, where sight is lost, but onany river-bank, where the course of the stream lies across acontinent, or on the edge of a wood, whence the forest stretches roundthe curve of the globe. To isolate a patch of that huge field and tocut it off from the encompassing air might indeed seem to be thegreater difficulty; how can the eye be held to a point when the veryname of Russia is extent without measure? At our end of Europe, wherespace is more precious, life is divided and specialized anddifferentiated, but over there such economies are unnecessary; thereis no need to define one's own world and to live within it when thereis a single world large enough for all. The horizon of a Russian storywould naturally be vague and vast, it might seem.

  It might seem so, at least, if the fiction of Dostoevsky were notthere with an example exactly opposed to the manner of Tolstoy. Theserene and impartial day that arches from verge to verge in War andPeace, the blackness that hems in the ominous circle of the BrothersKaramazov--it is a perfect contrast. Dostoevsky needed no lucidprospect round his strange crew; all he sought was a blaze of light onthe extraordinary theatre of their consciousness. He intensified itby shutting off the least glimmer of natural day. The illuminationthat falls upon his page is like the glare of a furnace-mouth; itsearches the depths of the inner struggles and turmoils in which hisdrama is enacted, relieving it with sharp and fantastic shadows. Thatis all it requires, and therefore the curtain of darkness is drawnthickly over the rest of the world. Who can tell, in Dostoevsky's grimtown-scenery, what there is at the end of the street, what lies roundthe next corner? Night stops the view--or rather no ordinary, earthlynight, but a sudden opacity, a fog that cannot be pierced or breathed.With Tolstoy nobody doubts that an ample vision opens in everydirection. It may be left untold, but his men and women have only tolift their eyes to see it.

  How is it contrived? The mere multiplication of names and householdsin the book does not account for it; the effect I speak of spreads farbeyond them. It is not that he has imagined so large an army ofcharacters, it is that he manages to give them such freedom, such anobvious latitude of movement in the open world. Description hasnothing to do with it; there is very little description in War andPeace, save in the battle-scenes that I am not now considering. And itis not enough to say that if Tolstoy's people have evident lives oftheir own, beyond the limits of the book, it is because he understandsand knows them so well, because they are so "real" to him, becausethey and all their circumstances are so sharply present to hisimagination. Who has ever known so much about his own creations asBalzac?--and who has ever felt that Balzac's people had the freedom ofa bigger world than that very solid and definite habitation he madefor them? There must be another explanation, and I think one maydiscern where it lies, though it would take me too far to follow it.

  It lies perhaps in the fact that with Tolstoy's high poetic geniusthere went a singularly normal and everyday gift of experience. Geniusof his sort generally means, I dare say, that the possessor of it isstruck by special and wonderful aspects of the world; his vision fallson it from a peculiar angle, cutting into unsuspected sides of commonfacts--as a painter sees a quality in a face that other people neversaw. So it is with Balzac, and so it is, in their different ways, withsuch writers as Stendhal and Maupassant, or again as Dickens andMeredith; they all create a "world of their own." Tolstoy seems tolook squarely at the same world as other people, and only to make somuch more of it than other people by the direct force of his genius,not because he holds a different position in regard to it. Hisexperience comes from the same quarter as ours; it is because heabsorbs so much more of it, and because it all passes into his greatplastic imagination, that it seems so new. His people, therefore, areessentially familiar and intelligible; we easily extend their livesin any direction, instead of finding ourselves checked by thedifficulty of knowing more about them than the author tells us in somany words. Of this kind of genius I take Tolstoy to be the supremeinstance among novelists;
Fielding and Scott and Thackeray are of thefamily. But I do not linger over a matter that for my narrow argumentis a side-issue.

  The continuity of space and of daylight, then, so necessary to themotive of the book, is rendered in War and Peace with absolutemastery. There is more, or there is not so much, to be said of the wayin which the long flight of time through the expanse of the book isimagined and pictured. The passage of time, the effect of time,belongs to the heart of the subject; if we could think of War andPeace as a book still to be written, this, no doubt, would seem to bethe greatest of its demands. The subject is not given at all unlessthe movement of the wheel of time is made perceptible. I suppose thereis nothing that is more difficult to ensure in a novel. Merely tolengthen the series of stages and developments in the action will notensure it; there is no help in the simple ranging of fact beside fact,to suggest the lapse of a certain stretch of time; a novelist might aswell fall back on the row of stars and the unsupported announcementthat "years have fled." It is a matter of the build of the whole book.The form of time is to be represented, and that is something more thanto represent its contents in their order. If time is of the essenceof the book, the lines and masses of the book must show it.

  Time is all-important in War and Peace, but that does not necessarilymean that it will cover a great many years; they are in fact no morethan the years between youth and middle age. But though the wheel maynot travel very far in the action as we see it, there must be no doubtof the great size of the wheel; it must seem to turn in a largecircumference, though only a part of its journey is to be watched. Therevolution of life, marked by the rising and sinking of a certaingeneration--such is the story; and the years that Tolstoy treats,fifteen or so, may be quite enough to show the sweep of the curve. Atfive-and-twenty a man is still beginning; at forty--I do not say thatat forty he is already ending, though Tolstoy in his ruthless way isprepared to suggest it; but by that time there are clear andintelligent eyes, like the boy Nicolenka's, fixed enquiringly upon aman--the eyes of the new-comers, who are suddenly everywhere and allabout him, making ready to begin in their turn. As soon as thathappens the curve of time is apparent, the story is told. But it mustbe _made_ apparent in the book; the shape of the story must give thereason for telling it, the purpose of the author in chronicling hisfacts.

  Can we feel that Tolstoy has so represented the image of time, thepart that time plays in his book? The problem was twofold; there wasfirst of all the steady progression, the accumulation of the years,to be portrayed, and then the rise and fall of their curve. It is thedouble effect of time--its uninterrupted lapse, and the cycle of whichthe chosen stretch is a segment. I cannot think there is much doubtabout the answer to my question. Tolstoy has achieved one aspect ofhis handful of years with rare and exquisite art, he has troubledhimself very little about the other. Time that evenly and silentlyslips away, while the men and women talk and act and forget it--timethat is read in their faces, in their gestures, in the changingtexture of their thought, while they only themselves awake to thediscovery that it is passing when the best of it has gone--time inthis aspect is present in War and Peace more manifestly, perhaps, thanin any other novel that could be named, unless it were another novelof Tolstoy's. In so far as it is a matter of the _length_ of hisfifteen years, they are there in the story with their whole effect.

  He is the master of the changes of age in a human being. Under hishand young men and women grow older, cease to be young, grow old, withthe noiseless regularity of life; their mutability never hides theirsameness, their consistency shows and endures through theirdisintegration. They grow as we all do, they change in the onlypossible direction, that which results from the clash betweenthemselves and their conditions. If I looked for the most beautifulillustration in all fiction of a woman at the mercy of time, exposedto the action of the years, now facing it with what she is, presentlybetraying and recording it with what she becomes, I should surely findit in the story of Anna Karenina. Various and exquisite as she is, herwhole nature is sensitive to the imprint of time, and the way in whichtime invades her, steals throughout her, finally lays her low, Tolstoytracks and renders from end to end. And in War and Peace his hand isnot less delicate and firm. The progress of time is never broken;inexorably it does what it must, carrying an enthusiastic youngstudent forward into a slatternly philosopher of middle life, linkingan over-blown matron with the memory of a girl dancing into a crowdedroom. The years move on and on, there is no missing the sense of theirflow.

  But the meaning, the import, what I should like to call the moral ofit all--what of that? Tolstoy has shown us a certain length of time'sjourney, but to what end has he shown it? The question has to beanswered, and it is not answered, it is only postponed, if we say thatthe picture itself is all the moral, all the meaning that we areentitled to ask for. It is of the picture that we speak; its moral isin its design, and without design the scattered scenes will make nopicture. Our answer would be clear enough, as I have tried to suggest,if we could see in the form of the novel an image of the circlingsweep of time. But to a broad and single effect, such as that, thechapters of the book refuse to adapt themselves; they will not drawtogether and announce a reason for their collocation. The story isstarted with every promise, and it ceases at the end with an air ofconsiderable finality. But between these points its course is full ofdoubt.

  It is admirably started. Nothing could be more right and true than thebubbling merriment and the good faith and the impatient aspirationwith which the young life of the earlier chapters of the book comessurging upon the scene of its elders. A current of newness andfreshness is set flowing in the atmosphere of the generation that isstill in possession. The talk of a political drawing-room is stale andshrill, an old man in his seclusion is a useless encumbrance, aneasy-going and conventional couple are living without plan orpurpose--all the futility of these people is obvious to an onlookerfrom the moment when their sons and daughters break in upon them. Itwas time for the new generation to appear--and behold it appearing inlively strength. Tolstoy, with his power of making an eloquent eventout of nothing at all, needs no dramatic apparatus to set off theeffect of the irruption. Two people, an elderly man of the world and ascheming hostess, are talking together, the room fills, a young manenters; or in another sociable assembly there is a shriek and a rush,and the children of the house charge into the circle; that is quiteenough for Tolstoy, his drama of youth and age opens immediately withthe right impression. The story is in movement without delay; thereare a few glimpses of this kind, and then the scene is ready, theaction may go forward; everything is attuned for the effect it is tomake.

  And at the other end of the book, after many hundreds of pages, thestory is brought to a full close in an episode which gathers up allthe threads and winds them together. The youths and maidens are nowthe parents of another riotous brood. Not one of them has ended wherehe or she expected to end, but their lives have taken a certain shape,and it is unmistakable that this shape is final. Nothing more willhappen to them which an onlooker cannot easily foretell. They havesettled down upon their lines, and very comfortable and very estimablelines on the whole, and there may be many years of prosperity beforethem; but they no longer possess the future that was sparkling withpossibility a few years ago. Peter is as full of schemes as ever, butwho now supposes that he will _do_ anything? Natasha is absorbed inher children like a motherly hen; Nicholas, the young cavalier, is acountry gentleman; they are all what they were bound to be, thoughnobody foresaw it. But shyly lurking in a corner, late in the evening,with eyes fixed upon the elders of the party who are talking andarguing--here once more is that same uncertain, romantic, incalculablefuture; the last word is with the new generation, the budding morrow,old enough now to be musing and speculating over its own visions."Yes, I will do such things--!" says Nicolenka; and that is thenatural end of the story.

  But meanwhile the story has rambled and wandered uncontrolled--orcontrolled only by Tolstoy's perfect consistency in the treatment of hischaract
ers. They, as I have said, are never less than absolutely true tothemselves; wherever we meet them, in peace or war, they are always thepeople we know, the same as ever, and yet changing and changing (likeall the people we know) under the touch of time. It is not they, it istheir story that falters. The climax, I suppose, must be taken to fallin the great scenes of the burning of Moscow, with which all their livesare so closely knit. Peter involves himself in a tangle of misfortunes(as he would, of course) by his slipshod enthusiasm; Natasha's courageand good sense are surprisingly aroused--one had hardly seen that shepossessed such qualities, but Tolstoy is right; and presently it isAndrew, the one clear-headed and far-sighted member of the circle, whois lost to it in the upheaval, wounded and brought home to die. It is abeautiful and human story of its kind; but note that it has entirelydropped the representative character which it wore at the beginning andis to pick up again at the end. Tolstoy has forgotten about this; partlyhe has been too much engrossed in his historical picture, and partly hehas fallen into a new manner of handling the loves and fortunes of hisyoung people. It is now a tale of a group of men and women, with theircross-play of affinities, a tale of which the centre of interest lies inthe way in which their mutual relations will work out. It is the kindof story we expect to find in any novel, a drama of youngaffections--extraordinarily true and poetic, as Tolstoy traces it, but alimited affair compared with the theme of his first chapters.

  Of that theme there is no continuous development. The details of thecharming career of Natasha, for example, have no bearing on it at all.Natasha is the delightful girl of her time and of all time, asNicholas is the delightful boy, and she runs through the sequence ofmoods and love-affairs that she properly should; she is one whosefancy is quick and who easily follows it. But in the large drama ofwhich she is a part it is not the actual course of her love-affairsthat has any importance, it is the fact that she has them, that she iswhat she is, that every one loves her and that she is ready to lovenearly every one. To do as Tolstoy does, to bring into the middle ofthe interest the question whether she will marry this man orthat--especially when it is made as exquisitely interesting as hemakes it--this is to throw away the value that she had and to give heranother of a different sort entirely. At the turning-point of thebook, and long before the turning-point is reached, she is simply theheroine of a particular story; what she _had_ been--Tolstoy made itquite clear--was the heroine of a much more general story, when shecame dancing in on the crest of the new wave.

  It is a change of attitude and of method on Tolstoy's part. He seesthe facts of his story from a different point of view and representsthem in a fresh light. It does not mean that he modifies their course,that he forces them in a wrong direction and makes Natasha act in amanner conflicting with his first idea. She acts and behavesconsistently with her nature, exactly as the story demands that sheshould; not one of her impulsive proceedings need be sacrificed. Butit was for Tolstoy, representing them, to behave consistently too, andto use the facts in accordance with his purpose. He had a reason fortaking them in hand, a design which he meant them to express; and hisvacillation prevents them from expressing it. How would he havetreated the story, supposing that he had kept hold of his originalreason throughout? Are we prepared to improve upon his method, tore-write his book as we think it ought to have been written? Well, atany rate, it is possible to imagine the different effect it would showif a little of that large, humane irony, so evident in the tone of thestory at the start, had persisted through all its phases. It would nothave dimmed Natasha's charm, it would have heightened it. While she issimply the heroine of a romance she is enchanting, no doubt; but whenshe takes her place in a drama so much greater than herself, herbeauty is infinitely enhanced. She becomes representative, with allher gifts and attractions; she is there, not because she is abeautiful creature, but because she is the spirit of youth. Her charmis then universal; it belongs to the spirit of youth and lasts forever.

  With all this I think it begins to be clear why the broad lines ofTolstoy's book have always seemed uncertain and confused. Neither hissubject nor his method were fixed for him as he wrote; he rangedaround his mountain of material, attacking it now here and now there,never deciding in his mind to what end he had amassed it. None of hisvarious schemes is thus completed, none of them gets the fulladvantage of the profusion of life which he commands. At any momentgreat masses of that life are being wasted, turned to no account; andthe result is not merely negative, for at any moment the wasted life,the stuff that is not being used, is dividing and weakening the effectof the picture created out of the rest. That so much remains, in spiteof everything, gives the measure of Tolstoy's genius; _that_ becomesthe more extraordinary as the chaotic plan of his book is explored. Hecould work with such lordly neglect of his subject and yet he couldproduce such a book--it is surely as much as to say that Tolstoy's isthe supreme genius among novelists.