The Craft of Fiction Page 9

  IX

  The novelist, I am supposing, is faced with a situation in his storywhere for some good reason more is needed than the simple impressionwhich the reader might have formed for himself, had he been presentand using his eyes on the spot. It is a case for a general account ofmany things; or it is a case for a certain view of the facts, based oninner knowledge, to be presented to the reader. Thackeray, forexample, has to open his mind on the subject of Becky's ambitions orAmelia's regrets; it would take too long, perhaps it would beimpossible, to set them acting their emotions in a form that wouldtell the reader the whole tale; their creator must elucidate thematter. He cannot forget, however, that this report of their emotionsis a subjective affair of his own; it relies upon his memory ofBecky's or Amelia's plight, his insight into the workings of theirthought, his sense of past action. All this is vivid enough to theauthor, who has seen and known, but the reader stands at a furtherremove.

  It would be different if this consciousness of the past, the mindwhich holds the memory, should itself become for the reader a directlyperceptible fact. The author must supply his view, but he might treathis view as though it were in its turn a piece of action. It _is_ apiece of action, or of activity, when he calls up these oldrecollections; and why should not that effort be given the value of asort of drama on its own account? It would then be like a play withina play; the outer framework at least--consisting of the reflectivemind--would be immediately in front of the reader; and its relation tothe thing framed, the projected vision, would explain itself. So longas the recorder stands outside and away from his book, as Thackeraystands outside Vanity Fair, a potential value is wasted; the activitythat is proceeding in his mind is not in itself an element in theeffect of the book, as it might be. And if it were thus drawn into thebook it would do double duty; it would authenticate and so enhance thepicture; it would add a new and independent interest as well. It seemsthat there is everything to be said for making a drama of the narratorhimself.

  And so Thackeray evidently felt, for in all his later work he refusedto remain the unaccountable seer from without. He did not carry thedramatizing process very far, indeed, and it may be thought that thechange in his method does not amount to much. In The Newcomes and itssuccessors the old Thackerayan display seems essentially the same asever, still the familiar, easy-going, intimate outpouring, with allthe well-known inflexions of Thackeray's voice and the humours of histemperament; certainly Pendennis and Esmond and George Warrington andThackeray have all of them exactly the same conception of the art ofstory-telling, they all command the same perfection of luminous style.And not only does Thackeray stop short at an early stage of theprocess I am considering, but it must be owned that he uses the deviceof the narrator "in character" very loosely and casually, as soon asit might be troublesome to use it with care. But still he takes thestep, and he picks up the loose end I spoke of, and he packs it intohis book; and thenceforward we see precisely how the narrator standstowards the story he unfolds. It is the first step in thedramatization of picture.

  A very simple and obvious step too, it will be said, the naturaldevice of the story-teller for giving his tale a look of truth. It isso indeed; but the interest of the matter lies in recognizing exactlywhat it is that is gained, what it is that makes that look. Esmondtells the story quite as Thackeray would; it all comes streaming outas a pictorial evocation of old times; there is just as little that isstrictly dramatic in it as there is in Vanity Fair. Rarely, veryrarely indeed, is there anything that could be called a scene; thereis a long impression that creeps forward and forward, as Esmondretraces his life, with those piercing moments of vision which weremember so well. But to the other people in the book it makes all thedifference that the narrator is among them. Now, when Beatrix appears,we know who it is that so sees her, and we know where the seer isplaced; his line of sight, striking across the book, from him the seerto her the seen, is measurable, its angle is shown; it gives toBeatrix a new dimension and a sharper relief. Can you remember anymoment in Vanity Fair when you beheld Becky as again and again youbehold Beatrix, catching the very slant of the light on her face?Becky never suddenly flowered out against her background in that way;some want of solidity and of objectivity there still is in Becky, andthere must be, because she is regarded from anywhere, from nowhere,from somewhere in the surrounding void. Thackeray's language about herdoes not carry the same weight as Esmond's about Beatrix, becausenobody knows where Thackeray is, or what his relation may be to Becky.

  This, then, is the readiest means of dramatically heightening areported impression, this device of telling the story in the firstperson, in the person of somebody in the book; and large in ourfiction the first person accordingly bulks. The characterized "I" issubstituted for the loose and general "I" of the author; the loss offreedom is more than repaid by the more salient effect of the picture.Precision, individuality is given to it by this pair of eyes, knownand named, through which the reader sees it; instead of drifting inspace above the spectacle he keeps his allotted station andcontemplates a delimited field of vision. There is much benefit in thesense that the picture has now a definite edge; its value is broughtout to the best advantage when its bounding line is thus emphasized.Moreover, it is not only the field of vision that is determined by theuse of the first person, it is also the quality of the tone. When weare shown what Esmond sees, and nothing else, there is first of allthe comfortable assurance of the point of view, and then there is thepersonal colour which he throws over his account, so that it gainsanother kind of distinction. It does not matter that Esmond's tone inhis story is remarkably like Thackeray's in the stories that _he_tells; in Esmond's case the tone has a meaning in the story, is partof it, whereas in the other case it is related only to Thackeray, andThackeray is in the void. When Esmond ruminates and reflects, hismanner is the expression of a human being there present, to whom itcan be referred; when Thackeray does the same, there is no suchcompactness, and the manner trails away where we cannot follow it.Dramatically it seems clear that the method of Esmond has theadvantage over the method of Vanity Fair.

  Here are sound reasons, so far as they go, for the use of the firstperson in the distinctively pictorial book. David Copperfield, forinstance--it is essentially a long glance, working steadily over atract of years, alone of its kind in Dickens's fiction. It was the onebook in which he rejected the intrigue of action for the centre of hisdesign--did not reject it altogether, indeed, but accepted it asincidental only. Always elsewhere it is his chosen intrigue, his"plot," that makes the shape of his book. Beginning with a deceptiveair of intending mainly a novel of manners and humours, as Stevensononce pointed out, in Bleak House or in Little Dorrit or in Our MutualFriend--in his later books generally--he insinuates a thread of actionthat gradually twists more and more of the matter of the book rounditself. The intrigue begins to take the first place, to dominate andat last to fill the pages. That was the form, interesting of its kind,and one to which justice has hardly been done, which he elaborated andmade his own. In Copperfield for once he took another way entirely. Itis the far stretch of the past which makes the shape of that book, notany of the knots or networks of action which it contains. These,instead of controlling the novel, sink into the level of retrospect.Copperfield has not a few lesser dramas to represent; but the affairof Steerforth, the affair of Uriah Heep, to name a pair of them, whichmight have developed and taken command of the scene, fall back intothe general picture, becoming incidents in the long rhythm ofCopperfield's memory. It was a clear case for narration in person, incharacter; everything was gained and nothing lost by leaving it to theman to give his own impression. Nothing was lost, because the soleneed is for the reader to see what David sees; it matters little howhis mind works, or what the effect of it all may be upon himself. Itis the story of what happened around him, not within. David offers apair of eyes and a memory, nothing further is demanded of him.

  But now let me take the case of another big novel, where again thereis a picture outspread, with e
pisodes of drama that are subordinate tothe sweep of the expanse. It is Meredith's story of Harry Richmond, abook in which its author evidently found a demand in some waydifferent from that of the rest of his work; for here again the firstperson is used by a man who habitually avoided it. In Harry Richmondit seemed to Meredith appropriate, I suppose, because the story has aromantic and heroic temper, the kind of chivalrous fling that sitswell on a youth of spirit, telling his own tale. It is natural for theyouth to pass easily from one adventure to the next, taking it as itcomes; and if Meredith proposes to write a story of loose, generous,informal design he had better place it in the mouth of the adventurer.True that in so far as it is romantic, and a story of youth, and astory in which an air from an age of knight-errantry blows into moderntimes, so that something like a clash of armour and a splintering ofspears seems to mingle with the noises of modern life--true that in sofar as it is all this, Harry Richmond is not alone among Meredith'sbooks. The author of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington and Beauchampand Lord Ormont was generally a little vague on the question of thecentury in which his stories were cast. The events may happen in thenineteenth century, they clearly must; and yet the furniture and themachinery and the conventions of the nineteenth century have a way ofappearing in Meredith's pages as if they were anachronisms. But thatis by the way; Harry Richmond is certainly, on the face of it, aseries of adventures loosely connected--connected only by the factthat they befell a particular young man; and so the method ofnarration should emphasize the link, Meredith may have concluded, andthe young man shall speak for himself.

  The use of the first person, no doubt, is a source of relief to anovelist in the matter of composition. It composes of its own accord,or so he may feel; for the hero gives the story an indefeasible unityby the mere act of telling it. His career may not seem to hangtogether logically, artistically; but every part of it is at leastunited with every part by the coincidence of its all belonging to oneman. When he tells it himself, that fact is serviceably to the fore;the first person will draw a rambling, fragmentary tale together andstamp it after a fashion as a single whole. Does anybody dare tosuggest that this is a reason for the marked popularity of the methodamong our novelists? Autobiography--it is a regular literary form, andyet it is one which refuses the recognized principles of literaryform; its natural right is to seem wayward and inconsequent; its charmis in the fidelity with which it follows the winding course of thewriter's thought, as he muses upon the past, and the writer is notexpected to guide his thought in an orderly design, but to let itwander free. Formlessness becomes actually the mark of right form inliterature of this class; and a novel presented as fictitiousautobiography gets the same advantage. And there the argument bringsus back to the old question; fiction must _look_ true, and there is nolook of truth in inconsequence, and there is no authority at the backof a novel, independent of it, to vouch for the truth of its apparentwilfulness. But it is not worth while to linger here; the use of thefirst person has other and more interesting snares than this, that itpretends to disguise unmeaning, inexpressive form in a story.

  Now with regard to Harry Richmond, ostensibly it _is_ rather like achronicle of romantic adventure--not formless, far from it, but freelyflowing as a saga, with its illegitimate dash of blood-royal and itsroaring old English squire-archy and its speaking statue and its questof the princess; it _contains_ a saga, and even an exceedinglyfantastic one. But Harry Richmond is a deeply compacted book, andmixed with its romance there is a novel of another sort. For thefantasy it is only necessary that Harry himself should give a pictureof his experience, of all that he has seen and done; on this side thestory is in the succession of rare, strange, poetic events, with theremarkable people concerned in them. But the aim of the book goes farbeyond this; it is to give the portrait of Harry Richmond, and thatis the real reason why the story is told. All these striking episodes,which Harry is so well placed to describe, are not merely picturesthat pass, a story that Meredith sets him to tell because it is ofhigh interest on its own account. Meredith's purpose is that the herohimself shall be in the middle of the book, with all the interest ofthe story reflected back upon his character, his temper, his growth.The subject is Harry Richmond, a youth of spirit; the subject is _not_the cycle of romance through which he happens to have passed.

  In the case of Copperfield, to go back to him, Dickens had exactly theopposite intention. He found his book in the expanse of life which hisDavid had travelled over; Dickens's only care was to represent thewonderful show that filled his hero's memory. The whole phantasmagoriais the subject of the book, a hundred men and women, populatingDavid's past and keeping his pen at full speed in the single-mindedeffort to portray them. Alone among the assembly David himself isscarcely of the subject at all. He has substance enough, and amply, tobe a credible, authoritative reporter--Dickens sees well to that; buthe is a shadow compared with Betsy Trotwood and the Micawbers and theHeeps, with all the hundred of them, and there is no call for him tobe more. In this respect his story, again, is contrasted with that ofPendennis, which is, or is evidently meant to be in the first place, aportrait of the young man--or with the story of Tom Jones perhaps,though in this case more doubtfully, for Fielding's shrewd eye was aptto be drawn away from the young man to the bustle of life around him.But in Copperfield the design is very plain and is consistentlypursued; it would be a false patch in the story if at any point Davidattracted more attention to himself than to the people of hisvision--he himself, as a child, being of course one of them, a littlecreature that he sees in the distance, but he himself, in later years,becoming merely the mirror of his experience, which he not unnaturallyconsiders worthy of being pictured for its own sake.

  Look back then at Harry Richmond, and it is obvious that Harry himselfis all the subject of the book, there is no other. His father and hisgrandfather, Ottilia and Janet, belong to the book by reason of him;they stand about him, conditions of his life, phases of his career,determining what he is and what he becomes. That is clearly Meredith'sthought in undertaking this chronicle; he proposes to show how itmakes the history, the moral and emotional history, of the man throughwhom it is uttered. Harry's adventures, ambitions, mistakes,successes, are the gradual and elaborate expression of him, completein the end; they round him into the figure of the man in whom Meredithsaw his book. The book started from Harry Richmond, the rest of it isthere to display him. A youth of considerable parts and attractions,and a youth characteristic of his time and country, and a youth whosecircumstances are such as to give him very free play and to test andprove him very effectually--there is the burden of Meredith's saga, asI call it, and he never forgets it, though sometimes he certainlypushes the brilliant fantasy of the saga beyond his strict needs. Theromance of the blood-royal, for instance--it would be hard to arguethat the book honestly requires the high colour of that infusion, andall the pervading thrill that Meredith gets from it; Richmond Roy islargely gratuitous, a piece of indulgence on Meredith's part. But thatobjection is not likely to be pressed very severely, and anyhow Harryis firmly established in the forefront. He tells his story, hedescribes the company and the scenes he has lived through; and all thetime it is by them that he is himself described.

  It comes to this, that the picture which Harry Richmond gives of hiscareer has a function essentially dramatic; it has a part to performin the story, a part it must undertake as a whole, over and above itspictorial charge. It must do something as well as be, it must createeven while it is created. In Esmond and in Copperfield it isotherwise; there the unrolling scene has little or no part to play, asa scene, over against another actor; it holds no dialogue, so tospeak, sustains no interchange, or none of principal importance, withthe figure of the narrator. He narrates, he creates the picture; butfor us who look on, reading the book, there is nothing in the pictureto make us perpetually turn from it and face towards the man in theforeground, watching for the effect it may produce in him. Attentionis all concentrated in the life that he remembers and evokes. Hehimself, indeed, t
hough the fact of his presence is very clear to us,tends to remain in shadow; it is as though he leant from a window,surveying the world, his figure outlined against the lighted square,his features not very distinctly discerned by the reader within. It isenough that he should make Micawber live again, make Beatrix appear onthe staircase of the old house, with her scarlet ribbon and the taperin her hand. _They_ owe everything to the presence of the man whocalls them back from the past; they receive their being, they dolittle in return.

  This picture, this bright vision, spied through the cleverministration of a narrator, is not enough for Harry Richmond. Here thepeopled view, all of it together, is like an actor in a play, and theinterlocutor, the protagonist, is the man in the foreground, Harryhimself. There is no question of simply seeing through his eyes,sharing his memory, perhaps even a little forgetting him from time totime, when the figured scene is particularly delightful. The thought,the fancy, the emotion of Harry Richmond are the centre of the play;from these to the men and women who shape his fate, from them again tothe mind that recalls them, attention passes and returns; we who lookon are continually occupied with the fact of Harry's consciousness,its gradual enlargement and enrichment. That is the process whichOttilia and Janet and the rest of them are expected to forward, andthey contribute actively. Harry before the quest of the princess andHarry when it has finally failed are different beings, so far as a manis changed by an experience that is absorbed into the whole of hisnature. How is the change effected, what does it achieve?--theepisode, bringing the change into view, dramatizes it, and thequestion is answered. The young knight-errant has run an eventfulcourse, and he gives his account of it; but the leading event of histale is himself. His account illustrates that event, helps towards theenactment of it. Pictorial, therefore, in form, dramatic infunction--such was the story that Meredith elected to tell in thefirst person.

  And in so doing he showed, as it seems to me, precisely where thedefect of the method begins to be felt. The method has a certaindramatic energy, we have seen, making a visible fact of the relation,otherwise unexplained, between the narrator and the tale. It has this;but for a subject like Meredith's it is really too little, and the useof the first person is overtaxed. Does he contrive to conceal thetrouble, does he make us exceedingly unconscious of it while we readthe book? I have no doubt that he does, with the humanity and poetryand wisdom that he pours into it--the novel of which it has been saidthat if Shakespeare revisited the globe and asked for a book of ourtimes to read, this would be the volume to offer him, the book morelikely than another to convince him at once that literature is stillin our midst. There is small doubt that Meredith disguises thetrouble, and there is still less that he was quite unaware of ithimself. But it is there, and it shows plainly enough in some novels,where a personal narrator is given the same kind of task; and inMeredith's book too, I think, it is not to be missed when oneconsiders what might have been, supposing Meredith had chosen anotherway. The other way was open; he cannot have noticed it.

  The young man Harry--this is the trouble--is only a recorder, apicture-maker, so long as he speaks for himself. He is very wellplaced for describing his world, which _needs_ somebody to describeit; his world is much too big and complex to be shown scenically, inthose immediate terms I spoke of just now in connection withMaupassant's story. Scenes of drama there may be from time to time,there are plenty in Meredith's novel; but still on the whole the storymust be given as the view of an onlooker, and Harry is clearly theonlooker indicated, the only possible one. That is certain; but thenthere is laid upon him the task which is not laid, or barely at all,upon Copperfield or Esmond. Before the book is out he must have grownto ten times the weight that we dream of looking for in either ofthem. He must be distinct to see; _he_ cannot remain a dim silhouetteagainst the window, the light must fall full upon his face. How can hemanage it? How can he give that sharp impression of himself that heeasily gives of his world? It is a query that he is in no position tomeet, for the impossible is asked of him. He is expected to lend ushis eyes (which he does), and yet at the same time to present himselffor us to behold with our own; the subject of his story requires noless.

  It is not merely a matter of seeing his personal aspect and address;these are readily given by implication. When we have watched for awhile the behaviour of the people round him, and have heard somethingof his experience and of the way in which he fared in the world, weshall very well know what he was like to meet, what others saw in him.There is no difficulty here. But Harry needs a great deal moresubstance than this, if his story is to be rightly understood. What itwas like to _be_ Harry, with all that action and reaction of characterand fortune proceeding within him--that is the question, the chiefquestion; and since it is the most important affair in the book, itshould obviously be rendered as solidly as possible, by the mostemphatic method that the author can command. But Harry, speaking ofhimself, can only report; he can only recall the past and _tell_ uswhat he was, only _describe_ his emotion; and he may describe veryvividly, and he does, but it would necessarily be more convincing ifwe could get behind his description and judge for ourselves. Drama wewant, always drama, for the central, essential, paramount affair,whatever it is; Harry's consciousness ought to be dramatized.Something is lost if it is represented solely by his account of it.Meredith may enable Harry to give an account so brilliant that thedefect is forgotten; that is not the point. But could he have donemore? I think so; only it would have meant the surrender of the methodof autobiography.

  Here then, I conclude, the dramatizing force of the first person givesout. It is very useful for enhancing the value of a picture, wherenone but the pictorial method is available, where we are bound to relyupon an intervening story-teller in some guise or other; it is muchmore satisfactory to know who the story-teller is, and to see him as apart of the story, than to be deflected away from the book by theauthor, an arbitrary, unmeasurable, unappraisable factor. But when theman in the book is expected to make a picture of himself, a searchingand elaborate portrait, then the limit of his capacity is touched andpassed; or rather there is a better method, one of finer capacity,then ready to the author's hand, and there is no reason to be contentwith the hero's mere report. The figure of the story-teller is adramatic fact in Meredith's book, and that is all to the good; but thestory-teller's inner history--it is not clear that we need theintervention of anybody in this matter, and if it might be dramatized,made immediately visible, dramatized it evidently should be. By allmeans let us have Harry's account if we must have somebody's, butperhaps there is no such need. There seems to be none; it is surelytime to take the next step in the process I am trying to track.