The Craft of Fiction Read online

  VII

  Of the notions on the subject of method that are suggested by Bovary,the first I shall follow is one that takes me immediately, without anydoubt whatever, into the world of Thackeray. I start from thatdistinction between the "panoramic" and the "scenic" presentation of astory, which I noted a few pages ago; and to turn towards thepanorama, away from the scene, is to be confronted at once with VanityFair, Pendennis, The Newcomes, Esmond, all of them. Thackeray saw themas broad expanses, stretches of territory, to be surveyed from edge toedge with a sweeping glance; he saw them as great general, typicalimpressions of life, populated by a swarm of people whose manners andadventures crowded into his memory. The landscape lay before him, hisimagination wandered freely across it, backwards and forwards. Thewhole of it was in view at once, a single prospect, out of which thestory of Becky or Pendennis emerged and grew distinct while hewatched. He wrote his novel with a mind full of a surge and wash ofmemories, the tenor of which was somehow to be conveyed in the outwardform of a narrative. And though his novel complies with that formmore or less, and a number of events are marshalled in order, yet itsconstant tendency is to escape and evade the restrictions of a scenicmethod, and to present the story in a continuous flow of leisurely,contemplative reminiscence.

  And that is evidently the right way for the kind of story thatThackeray means to create. For what is the point and purpose of VanityFair, where is the centre from which it grows? Can it be described asa "plot," a situation, an entanglement, something that raises aquestion of the issue? Of plots in this sense there are plenty inVanity Fair, at least there are two; Becky dominates one, Ameliasmiles and weeps in the other. They join hands occasionally, butreally they have very little to exchange. Becky and her Crawleys,Becky and her meteoric career in Curzon Street, would have been all asthey are if Amelia had never been heard of; and Bloomsbury, too, ofthe Osbornes and the Sedleys, might have had the whole book to itself,for all that Becky essentially matters to it. Side by side they exist,and for Thackeray's purpose neither is more important than the other,neither is in the middle of the book as it stands. Becky seems to bein the middle, certainly, as we think of her; but that is not whereThackeray placed her. He meant Amelia to be no less appealing thanBecky is striking; and if Amelia fails and drops into the background,it is not because she plays a subordinate part, but only because sheplays it with so much less than Becky's vivid conviction. They fillthe book with incident between the two of them; something is alwayshappening, from the moment when they drive out of Miss Pinkerton'sgate at Chiswick till the last word that is told of either. But thebook as a whole turns upon nothing that happens, not even upon thecatastrophe of Curzon Street; that scene in Becky's drawing-roomdisposes of _her_, it leaves the rest of the book quite untouched.

  Not in any complication of incident, therefore, nor in any singlestrife of will, is the subject of Vanity Fair to be discerned. It isnow here but in the impression of a world, a society, a time--certainmanners of life within a few square miles of London, a hundred yearsago. Thackeray flings together a crowd of the people he knows so well,and it matters not at all if the tie that holds them to each other isof the slightest; it may easily chance that his good young girl andhis young adventuress set out together upon their journey, their pathsmay even cross from time to time later on. The light link is enoughfor the unity of his tale, for that unity does not depend on anintricately woven intrigue. It depends in truth upon one fact only,the fact that all his throng of men and women are strongly,picturesquely typical of the world from which they are taken--that allin their different ways can add to the force of its effect. The bookis not the story of any of them, it is the story which they unite totell, a chapter in the notorious career of well-to-do London. Exactlyhow the various "plots" evolve is not the main matter; behind them isthe presence and the pressure of a greater interest, the mass of lifewhich Thackeray packs into his novel. And if that is the meaning ofVanity Fair, to give the succession of incident a hard, particular,dramatic relief would be to obscure it. Becky's valiant struggle inthe world of her ambition might easily be isolated and turned into aplay--no doubt it has been; but consider how her look, her value,would in that case be changed. Her story would become a mere personalaffair of her own, the mischance of a certain woman's enterprise.Given in Thackeray's way, summarized in his masterly perspective, itis part of an impression of manners.

  Such, I take it, is Thackeray's difference, his peculiar mark, thedistinction of his genius. He is a painter of life, a novelist whosematter is all blended and harmonized together--people, action,background--in a long retrospective vision. Not for him, on the whole,is the detached action, the rounded figure, the scenic rendering of astory; as surely as Dickens tended towards the theatre, with itsclear-cut isolation of events and episodes, its underlining of thepersonal and the individual in men and women, so Thackeray preferredthe manner of musing expatiation, where scene melts into scene,impressions are foreshortened by distance, and the backward-rangingthought can linger and brood as it will. Every novel of his takes thegeneral form of a discursive soliloquy, in which he gradually gathersup the long train of experience that he has in mind. The earlychapters of Esmond or Pendennis, the whole fragment of Denis Duval,are perfect examples of Thackeray's way when he is most himself, andwhen he is least to be approached by any other writer of fiction. Allthat he has to describe, so it seems, is present to him in the hour ofrecollection; he hangs over it, and his eye is caught by a point hereand there, a child with a book in a window-seat, the Fotheringaycleaning her old shoe, the Major at his breakfast in Pall Mall; theassociations broaden away from these glimpses and are followed hitherand thither. But still, though the fullness of memory is directed intoa consecutive tale, it is not the narrative, not its order andmovement, that chiefly holds either Thackeray's attention or ours whoread; the narrative is steeped in the suffusion of the general tone,the sensation of the place and the life that he is recalling, and itis out of this effect, insensibly changing and developing, that thenovel is created.

  For a nearer sight of it I go back to Vanity Fair. The chapters thatare concerned with Becky's determined siege of London--"How to livewell on nothing a year"--are exactly to the point; the wonderfulthings that Thackeray could do, the odd lapse of his power when he hadto go beyond his particular province, both are here written large.Every one remembers the chapters and their place in the book. Becky,resolutely shaking off old difficulties for the moment, installsherself with her husband in the heart of the world she means toconquer; she all but succeeds, she just fails. Her campaign and itsuntimely end are to be pictured; it is an interlude to be filled withstir and glitter, with the sense of the passage of a certain time,above all with intimations of insecurity and precarious fortune; andit is to lead (this it must do) to a scene of final and decisiveclimax. Such is the effect to be drawn from the matter that Thackerayhas stored up--the whole hierarchy of the Crawleys, Steyne, GauntHouse, always with Becky in the midst and to the fore. Up to a pointit is precisely the kind of juncture in which Thackeray's artdelights. There is abundance of vivid stuff, and the picture to bemade of it is highly functional in the book. It is not merely apreparation for a story to follow; it is itself the story, a mostimportant part of it. The chapters representing Becky's manner of lifein Curzon Street make the hinge of her career; she approaches herturning-point at the beginning of them, she is past it at the end.Functional, therefore, they are to the last degree; but up to the veryclimax, or the verge of it, there is no need for a set scene ofdramatic particularity. An impression is to be created, growing andgrowing; and it can well be created in the loose panoramic style whichis Thackeray's paramount arm. A general view, once more, a summary ofBecky's course of action, a long look at her conditions, aparticipation in her gathering difficulties--that is the nature andthe task of these chapters, that is what Thackeray proceeds to giveus.

  He sets about it with a beautiful ease of assurance. From his heighthe looks forth, takes in the effect with his sweeping vision,possesses him
self of the gradation of its tone; then, stooping nearer,he seizes the detail that renders it. But the sense of the broadsurvey is first in his thought. When he reflects upon Becky's life inLondon and all that came of her attempt to establish herself there, heis soon assailed by a score of definite recollections, tell-taleincidents, scraps of talk that show how things were going with her;but these, it would seem, arise by the way, they spring up in his mindas he reviews the past. They illustrate what he has to say, and hetakes advantage of them. He brushes past them, however, without muchdelaying or particularizing; a hint, a moment, a glance suffices forthe contribution that some event or colloquy is to make to thepicture. Note, for example, how unceremoniously, again and again, andwith how little thought of disposing a deliberate scene, he driftsinto his account of something that Becky said or did; she begins totalk, you find there is some one else in the room, you find they arein a certain room at a certain hour; definition emerges unawares in abrooding memory. Briefly, to all appearance quite casually, the littleincident shows itself and vanishes; there is a pause to watch andlisten, and then the stream sets forward again, by so much enrichedand reinforced. Or in a heightened mood, as in the picture of themidnight flurry and alarm of the great desolate house, when old PittCrawley is suddenly struck down, still it is as though Thackeraycircled about the thought of the time and place, offering swift andpiercing glimpses of it, giving no continuous and dramatic display ofa constituted scene.

  That foreshortening and generalizing, that fusion of detail, thatsubordination of the instance and the occasion to the broad effect,are the elements of the pictorial art in which Thackeray is so great amaster. So long as it is a matter of sketching a train of life inbroad free strokes, the poise and swing of his style are beyondpraise. And its perfection is all the more notable that it stands insuch contrast with the curious drop and uncertainty of his skill, sosoon as there is something more, something different to be done. ForBecky's dubious adventure has its climax, it tends towards aconclusion, and the final scene cannot be recalled and summarized inhis indirect, reminiscential manner. It must be placed immediatelybefore us, the collapse of Becky's plotting and scheming must beenacted in full view, if it is to have its proper emphasis and rightlyround off her career. Hitherto we have been listening to Thackeray, onthe whole, while he talked about Becky--talked with such extraordinarybrilliance that he evoked her in all her ways and made us see her withhis eyes; but now it is time to see her with our own, his livelyinterpretation of her will serve no longer. Does Becky fail in theend? After all that we have heard of her struggle it has become thegreat question, and the force of the answer will be impaired if it isnot given with the best possible warrant. The best possible, bettereven than Thackeray's wonderful account of her, will be the plain andimmediate _performance_ of the answer, its embodiment in a scene thatshall pass directly in front of us. The method that was not demandedby the preceding phases of the tale is here absolutely prescribed.Becky, Rawdon, Steyne, must now take the matter into their own handsand show themselves without any other intervention. Hitherto,practically throughout, they have been the creatures of Thackeray'sthought, they have been openly and confessedly the figures of _his_vision. Now they must come forward, declare themselves, and be seenfor what they are.

  And accordingly they do come forward and are seen in a famous passage.Rawdon makes his unexpected return home from prison, and Becky'sunfortunate disaster overtakes her, so to say, in our very presence.Perhaps I may seem to exaggerate the change of method which I note atthis point; but does it not appear to any one, glancing back at hisrecollection of the book, that this particular scene is defined andrelieved and lighted differently, somehow, from the stream ofimpressions in which it is set? A space is cleared for it, the stageis swept. This is now no retrospective vision, shared with Thackeray;it is a piece of present action with which we are confronted. It isstrictly dramatic, and I suppose it is good drama of its kind. Butthere is more to be said of it than this--more to be said, even whenit has been admitted to be drama of rather a high-pitched, theatricalstrain. The foot-lights, it is probably agreed, seem suddenly to flarebefore Becky and Rawdon, after the clear daylight that reigned inThackeray's description of them; they appear upon the scene, as theyshould, but it must be owned that the scene has an artificial look, bycomparison with the flowing spontaneity of all that has gone before.And this it is exactly that shows how and where Thackeray's skillbetrays him. He is not (like Dickens) naturally inclined to thetheatre, the melodramatic has no fatal attraction for him; so that ifhe is theatrical here, it is not because he inevitably would be, givenhis chance. It is rather because he must, at all costs, make thisclimax of his story conclusively _tell_; and in order to do so he isforced to use devices of some crudity--for him they are crude--becausehis climax, his _scene a faire_, has been insufficiently prepared for.Becky, Rawdon, Steyne, in all this matter that has been leading up tothe scene, have scarcely before been rendered in these immediateterms; and now that they appear on their own account they can onlymake a sure and pronounced effect by perceptibly forcing their note. Alittle too much is expected of them, and they must make an unnaturaleffort to meet it.

  My instance is a small one, no doubt, to be pressed so far; inlingering over these shades of treatment a critic, it may be thought,loses sight of the book itself. But I am not trying, of course, tocriticize Vanity Fair; I am looking for certain details of method, andthe small instance is surely illuminating. It shows how littleThackeray's fashion of handling a novel allowed for the big dramaticscene, when at length it had to be faced--how he neglected it inadvance, how he refused it till the last possible moment. It is asthough he never quite trusted his men and women when he had to placethings entirely in their care, standing aside to let them act; hewanted to intervene continually, he hesitated to leave them alone savefor a brief and belated half-hour. It was perverse of him, because themen and women would have acquitted themselves so strikingly with abetter chance; he gave them life and vigour enough for much moreindependence than they ever enjoyed. The culmination of Becky'sadventure offered a clear opening for full dramatic effect, if he hadchosen to take advantage of it. He had steadily piled up hisimpression, carefully brought all the sense of the situation toconverge upon a single point; everything was ready for the great sceneof Becky's triumph in the face of the world, one memorable night of aparty at Gaunt House. It is incredible that he should let theopportunity slip. There was a chance of a straight, unhampered viewof the whole meaning of his matter; nothing was needed but to allowthe scene to show itself, fairly and squarely. All its force wouldhave been lent to the disaster that follows; the dismay, thedisillusion, the snarl of anger and defiance, all would have been madebeforehand. By so much would the effect of the impending scene, thescene of catastrophe, have been strengthened. There would have been nonecessity for the sudden heightening of the pitch, the thickening ofthe colour, the incongruous and theatrical tone.

  Yet the chance is missed, the triumphal evening passes in a confusedhaze that leaves the situation exactly where it was before. Theepisode is only a repetition of the kind of thing that has happenedalready. There are echoes of festive sound and a rumour of Becky'sbrilliance; but the significant look that the actual facts might haveworn and must have betrayed, the look that by this time Thackeray hasso fully instructed his reader to catch--this is not disclosed afterall. There is still nothing here but Thackeray's amusing,irrepressible conversation _about_ the scene; he cannot make up hismind to clear a space before it and give the situation the free fieldit cries out for. And if it is asked what kind of clarity I mean, Ineed only recall another page, close by, which shows it perfectly.Becky had made an earlier appearance at Gaunt House; she had dinedthere, near the beginning of her social career, and had found herselfin a difficulty; there came a moment when she had to face the frigidhostility of the noble ladies of the party, alone with them in thedrawing-room, and her assurance failed. In the little scene thatensues the charming veil of Thackeray's talk is suddenly raised; there
is Becky seated at the piano, Lady Steyne listening in a dream of oldmemories, the other women chattering at a distance, when the jarringdoors are thrown open and the men return. It is all over in half apage, but in that glimpse the story is lifted forward dramatically;ocular proof, as it were, is added to Thackeray's account of Becky'sdoubtful and delicate position. As a matter of curiosity I mention theone moment in the later episode, the evening of those strangelyineffective charades at Gaunt House, which appears to me to open thesame kind of rift in the haze; it is a single glimpse of Steyne,applauding Becky's triumph. He is immediately there, an actor in theshow, alive and expressive, but he is alone; none of the others soemerges, even Becky is only a luminous spot in the dimness. As for therelation of the three, Steyne, Becky, and her husband, which is on thepoint of becoming so important, there is nothing to be seen of it.

  Right and left in the novels of Thackeray one may gather instances ofthe same kind--the piercing and momentary shaft of direct vision, thebig scene approached and then refused. It is easy to find another inVanity Fair. Who but Thackeray could have borne to use the famousmatter of the Waterloo ball, a wonderful gift for a novelist to findin his path, only to waste it, to dissipate its effect, to get no realcontribution from it after all? In the queer, haphazard, polyglotinterlude that precedes it Thackeray is, of course, entirely at home;there it is a question of the picture-making he delights in, the largeimpression of things in general, the evocation of daily life; Brusselsin its talkative suspense, waiting for the sound of the guns, feedingon rumour, comes crowding into the chapter. And then the greatoccasion that should have crowned it, into which the story naturallyand logically passes--for again the scene is not a decorative patch,the story needs it--the Waterloo ball is nothing, leaves no image,constitutes no effect whatever; the reader, looking back on the book,might be quite uncertain whether he had been there or not. Nobodycould forget the sight of Lady Bareacres, sitting under the _portecochere_ in her horseless carriage--of good Mrs. O'Dowd, rising in thedawn to equip her warrior for battle--of George Osborne, dead on thefield; but these are Thackeray's flashes of revelation, straight andsure, and they are all the drama, strictly speaking, that he extortsfrom his material. The rest is picture, stirringly, vivaciouslyreflected in his unfailing memory--with the dramatic occasion to whichit tends, the historic affair of the "revelry by night," neglected andlost.

  There is scarcely need for more illustration of my point, but it istempting to look further. In all these well-remembered booksThackeray, in an expansive mood, opens his mind and talks it out onthe subject of some big, loosely-knit company of men and women. Heremembers, as we all remember, with a strong sense of the tone and airof an old experience, and a sharp recollection of moments thathappened for some reason to be salient, significant, peculiarly keenor curious. Ethel Newcome, when she comes riding into the garden inthe early morning, full of the news of her wonderful discovery, theletter shut in the old book; Blanche Amory, when she is caught out inher faithlessness, warbling to the new swain at the piano and whippingher handkerchief over his jewel-case as the old one enters; MadamEsmond, on her balcony, defying the mob with "Britons, strike home";old Sir Pitt, toasting his rasher in the company of the char-woman: Iname them at random, they are all instances of the way in which theglance of memory falls on the particular moment, the aspect thathardens and crystallizes an impression. Thackeray has these flashes inprofusion; they break out unforgettably as we think of his books. Themost exquisite of all, perhaps, is in Esmond, that sight of the duskychoir of Winchester Cathedral, the shine of the candle-light, theclear faces of Rachel and her son as they appear to the returnedwanderer. We no longer listen to a story, no longer see the past in asympathetic imagination; this is a higher power of intensity, afragment of the past made present and actual. But with Thackeray it isalways a fragment, never to any real purpose a deliberate andcontinuous enactment.

  For continuity he always recurs to his pictorial summary. The Newcomesalone would give a dozen examples of this side of his genius--in thepages that recall the lean dignity of the refugees from revolutionaryParis, or the pious opulence of Clapham, or the rustle of fashionround the Mayfair chapel, or the chatter and scandal of Baden-Baden,or the squalid pretensions of English life at Boulogne. I need notlengthen the list; these evocations follow one upon another, and asquickly as Thackeray passes into a new circle he makes us feel andknow what it was like to live there and belong to it. The typical lookof the place is in his mind, the sense of its habitual life, thesavour of the hours that lapse there. But Esmond again has the lastword; the early chapters of the old days at Castlewood show a subtletyof effect that is peculiar and rare. It is more than a picture of aplace and an impression of romance, it is more than the portrait of achild; besides all this it is the most masterly of "time-pictures," ifthat is a word that will serve. The effect I am thinking of isdifferent from that of which I spoke in the matter of Tolstoy's greatcycles of action; there we saw the march of time recording itself,affirming its ceaseless movement, in the lives of certain people. Thisof Thackeray's is not like that; time, at Castlewood, is notmovement, it is tranquillity--time that stands still, as we say, onlydeepening as the years go. It cannot therefore be shown as a sequence;and Thackeray roams to and fro in his narrative, caring little for theconnected order of events if he can give the sensation of time, deepand soft and abundant, by delaying and returning at ease over thistract of the past. It would be possible, I think, to say veryprecisely where and how the effect is made--by what leisurely playwith the chronology of the story, apparently careless andunmethodical, or by what shifting of the focus, so that the house ofCastlewood is now a far-away memory and now a close, benevolentpresence. Time, at any rate, is stored up in the description of thechild's life there, quiet layers of time in which the recordedincidents sink deep.