true, and out of it arises another question: may the writer take the
reader into his confidence about his characters? Answer has already been
indicated: better not. It is dangerous, it generally leads to a drop in
the temperature, to intellectual and emotional laxity, and worse still
to facetiousness, and to a friendly invitation to see how the figures
hook up behind. "Doesn't A look nice--she always was my favourite."
"Let's think of why B does that--perhaps there's more in him than meets
the eye--yes, see--he has a heart of gold--having given you this peep at
it I'll pop it back--I don't think he's noticed." "And C--he always was
the mystery man." Intimacy is gained but at the expense of illusion and
nobility. It is like standing a man a drink so that he may not criticize
your opinions. With all respect to Fielding and Thackeray it is
devastating, it is bar-parlour chattiness, and nothing has been more
harmful to the novels of the past. To take your reader into your
confidence about the universe is a different thing. It is not dangerous
for a novelist to draw back from his characters, as Hardy and Conrad do,
and to generalize about the conditions under which he thinks life is
carried on. It is confidences about the individual people that do harm,
and beckon the reader away from the people to an examination of the
novelist's mind. Not much is ever found in it at such a moment, for it
is never in the creative state: the mere process of saying, "Come along,
let's have a chat," has cooled it down.
Our comments on human beings must now come to an end. They may take
fuller shape when we come to discuss the plot.
[Footnote 4: Translated by Dorothy Bussy as _The Counterfeiters_
(Knopf).]
V
THE PLOT
"CHARACTER," says Aristotle, "gives us qualities, but it is in
actions--what we do--that we are happy or the reverse." We have already
decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must face the consequences of
disagreeing with him. "All human happiness and misery," says Aristotle,
"take the form of action." We know better. We believe that happiness and
misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to
which (in his characters) the novelist has access. And by the secret
life we mean the life for which there is no external evidence, not, as
is vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a chance word or a sigh.
A chance word or sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder:
the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action.
There is, however, no occasion to be hard on Aristotle. He had read few
novels and no modern ones--the _Odyssey_ but not _Ulysses_--he was by
temperament apathetic to secrecy, and indeed regarded the human mind as
a sort of tub from which everything can finally be extracted; and when
he wrote the words quoted above he had in view the drama, where no doubt
they hold true. In the drama all human happiness and misery does and
must take the form of action. Otherwise its existence remains unknown,
and this is the great difference between the drama and the novel.
The speciality of the novel is that the writer can talk about his
characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when
they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that
level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious. A man
does not talk to himself quite truly--not even to himself; the happiness
or misery that he secretly feels proceed from causes that he cannot
quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the
explicable they lose their native quality. The novelist has a real pull
here. He can show the subconscious short-circuiting straight into action
(the dramatist can do this too); he can also show it in its relation to
soliloquy. He commands all the secret life, and he must not be robbed of
this privilege. "How did the writer know that?" it is sometimes said.
"What's his standpoint? He is not being consistent, he's shifting his
point of view from the limited to the omniscient, and now he's edging
back again." Questions like these have too much the atmosphere of the
law courts about them. All that matters to the reader is whether the
shifting of attitude and the secret life are convincing, whether it is
_πιθανόν_ in fact, and with his favourite word ringing in his
ears Aristotle may retire.
However, he leaves us in some confusion, for what, with this enlargement
of human nature, is going to become of the plot? In most literary works
there are two elements: human individuals, whom we have recently
discussed, and the element vaguely called art. Art we have also dallied
with, but with a very low form of it: the story: the chopped-off length
of the tapeworm of time. Now we arrive at a much higher aspect: the
plot, and the plot, instead of finding human beings more or less cut to
its requirements, as they are in the drama, finds them enormous, shadowy
and intractable, and three-quarters hidden like an iceberg. In vain it
points out to these unwieldy creatures the advantages of the triple
process of complication, crisis, and solution so persuasively expounded
by Aristotle. A few of them rise and comply, and a novel which ought to
have been a play is the result. But there is no general response. They
want to sit apart and brood or something, and the plot (whom I here
visualize as a sort of higher government official) is concerned at their
lack of public spirit: "This will not do," it seems to say.
"Individualism is a most valuable quality; indeed my own position
depends upon individuals; I have always admitted as much freely.
Nevertheless there are certain limits, and those limits are being
overstepped. Characters must not brood too long, they must not waste
time running up and down ladders in their own insides, they must
contribute, or higher interests will be jeopardised." How well one knows
that phrase, "a contribution to the plot"! It is accorded, and of
necessity, by the people in a drama: how necessary is it in a novel?
Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events
arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events,
the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen
died," is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is
a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality
overshadows it. Or again: "The queen died, no one knew why, until it was
discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king." This is
a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It
suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its
limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a
story we say "and then?" If it is in a plot we ask "why?" That is the
fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot
cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave men or to a tyrannical
sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be
kept awake by "and then--and then----" They can only supply curiosity.
But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have
noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly
always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom. The man who
begins by asking you how many brothers and sisters you have, is never a
sympathetic character, and if you meet him in a year's time he will
probably ask you how many brothers and sisters you have, his mouth again
sagging open, his eyes still bulging from his head. It is difficult to
be friends with such a man, and for two inquisitive people to be friends
must be impossible. Curiosity by itself takes us a very little way, nor
does it take us far into the novel--only as far as the story. If we
would grasp the plot we must add intelligence and memory.
Intelligence first. The intelligent novel-reader, unlike the inquisitive
one who just runs his eye over a new fact, mentally picks it up. He sees
it from two points of view: isolated, and related to the other facts
that he has read on previous pages. Probably he does not understand it,
but he does not expect to do so yet awhile. The facts in a highly
organized novel (like _The Egoist_) are often of the nature of
cross-correspondences and the ideal spectator cannot expect to view them
properly until he is sitting up on a hill at the end. This element of
surprise or mystery--the detective element as it is sometimes rather
emptily called--is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a
suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it
occurs crudely, as in "Why did the queen die?" and more subtly in
half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns
pages ahead. Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated
without intelligence. To the curious it is just another "and then----"
To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding,
while the other part goes marching on.
That brings us to our second qualification: memory.
Memory and intelligence are closely connected, for unless we remember we
cannot understand. If by the time the queen dies we have forgotten the
existence of the king we shall never make out what killed her. The
plot-maker expects us to remember, we expect him to leave no loose ends.
Every action or word ought to count; it ought to be economical and
spare; even when complicated it should be organic and free from dead
matter. It may be difficult or easy, it may and should contain
mysteries, but it ought not to mislead. And over it, as it unfolds, will
hover the memory of the reader (that dull glow of the mind of which
intelligence is the bright advancing edge) and will constantly rearrange
and reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect, and
the final sense (if the plot has been a fine one) will not be of clues
or chains, but of something æsthetically compact, something which might
have been shown by the novelist straight away, only if he had shown it
straight away it would never have become beautiful. We come up against
beauty here--for the first time in our enquiry: beauty at which a
novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it. I
will conduct beauty to her proper place later on. Meanwhile please
accept her as part of a completed plot. She looks a little surprised at
being there, but beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the
emotion that best suits her face, as Botticelli knew when he painted her
risen from the waves, between the winds and the flowers. The beauty who
does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due--she
reminds us too much of a prima donna.
But let us get back to the plot, and we will do so via George Meredith.
Meredith is not the great name he was twenty or thirty years ago, when
much of the universe and all Cambridge trembled. I remember how
depressed I used to be by a line in one of his poems: "We live but to be
sword or block." I did not want to be either and I knew that I was not a
sword. It seems though that there was no real cause for depression, for
Meredith is himself now rather in the trough of a wave, and though
fashion will turn and raise him a bit, he will never be the spiritual
power he was about the year 1900. His philosophy has not worn well. His
heavy attacks on sentimentality--they bore the present generation, which
pursues the same quarry but with neater instruments, and is apt to
suspect any one carrying a blunderbuss of being a sentimentalist
himself. And his visions of Nature--they do not endure like Hardy's,
there is too much Surrey about them, they are fluffy and lush. He could
no more write the opening chapter of _The Return of the Native_ than Box
Hill could visit Salisbury Plain. What is really tragic and enduring in
the scenery of England was hidden from him, and so is what is really
tragic in life. When he gets serious and noble-minded there is a
strident overtone, a bullying that becomes distressing. I feel indeed
that he was like Tennyson in one respect: through not taking himself
quietly enough he strained his inside. And his novels: most of the
social values are faked. The tailors are not tailors, the cricket
matches are not cricket, the railway trains do not even seem to be
trains, the county families give the air of having been only just that
moment unpacked, scarcely in position before the action starts, the
straw still clinging to their beards. It is surely very odd, the social
scene in which his characters are set: it is partly due to his fantasy,
which is legitimate, but partly a chilly fake, and wrong. What with the
faking, what with the preaching, which was never agreeable and is now
said to be hollow, and what with the home counties posing as the
universe, it is no wonder Meredith now lies in the trough. And yet he is
in one way a great novelist. He is the finest contriver that English
fiction has ever produced, and any lecture on plot must do homage to
him.
Meredith's plots are not closely knit. We cannot describe the action of
_Harry Richmond_ in a phrase, as we can that of _Great Expectations_,
though both books turn on the mistake made by a young man as to the
sources of his fortune. A Meredithian plot is not a temple to the tragic
or even to the comic Muse, but rather resembles a series of kiosks most
artfully placed among wooded slopes, which his people reach by their own
impetus, and from which they emerge with altered aspect. Incident
springs out of character, and having occurred it alters that character.
People and events are closely connected, and he does it by means of
these contrivances. They are often delightful, sometimes touching,
always unexpected. This shock, followed by the feeling, "Oh, that's all
right," is a sign that all is well with the plot: characters, to be
real, ought to run smoothly, but a plot ought to cause surprise. The
horse-whipping of Dr. Shrapnel in _Beauchamp's Career_ is a surprise. We
know that Everard Romfrey must dislike Shrapnel, must hate and
misunderstand his radicalism, and be jealous of his influence over
Beauchamp: we watch too the growth of the misunderstanding over
Rosamund, we watch the intrigues of Cecil Baskelett. As far as
characters go, Meredith plays with his cards on the table, but when the
incident comes what a shock it gives us and the characters too! The
tragicomic business of one old man whipping another from the highest
motives--it reacts upon all their world, and transforms all the
personages of the book. It is not the centre of _Beauchamp's Career_,
which indeed has no centre. It is essentially a contrivance, a door
through which the book is made to pass, emerging in an altered form.
Towards the close, when Beauchamp is drowned and Shrapnel and Romfrey
are reconciled over his body, there is an attempt to elevate the plot to
Aristotelian symmetry, to turn the novel into a temple wherein dwells
interpretation and peace. Meredith fails here: _Beauchamp's Career_
remains a series of contrivances (the visit to France is another of
them), but contrivances that spring from the characters and react upon
them.
And now briefly to illustrate the mystery element in the plot: the
formula of "The queen died, it was afterwards discovered through grief."
I will take an example, not from Dickens (though _Great Expectations_
provides a fine one), nor from Conan Doyle (whom my priggishness
prevents me from enjoying), but again from Meredith: an example of a
concealed emotion from the admirable plot of _The Egoist_: it occurs in
the character of Laetitia Dale.
We are told, at first, all that passes in Laetitia's mind. Sir
Willoughby has twice jilted her, she is sad, resigned. Then, for
dramatic reasons, her mind is hidden from us, it develops naturally
enough, but does not re-emerge until the great midnight scene where he
asks her to marry him because he is not sure about Clara, and this time,
a changed woman, Laetitia says "No." Meredith has concealed the change.
It would have spoiled his high comedy if we had been kept in touch with
it throughout. Sir Willoughby has to have a series of crashes, to catch
at this and that, and find everything rickety. We should not enjoy the
fun, in fact it would be boorish, if we saw the author preparing the
booby traps beforehand, so Laetitia's apathy has been hidden from us.
This is one of the countless examples in which either plot or character
has to suffer, and Meredith with his unerring good sense here lets the
plot triumph.
As an example of mistaken triumph, I think of a slip--it is no more than
a slip--which Charlotte Brontë makes in _Villette_. She allows Lucy
Snowe to conceal from the reader her discovery that Dr. John is the same
as her old playmate Graham. When it comes out, we do get a good plot
thrill, but too much at the expense of Lucy's character. She has seemed,
up to then, the spirit of integrity, and has, as it were, laid herself
under a moral obligation to narrate all that she knows. That she stoops
to suppress is a little distressing, though the incident is too trivial
to do her any permanent harm.
Sometimes a plot triumphs too completely. The characters have to suspend
their natures at every turn, or else are so swept away by the course of
Fate that our sense of their reality is weakened. We shall find
instances of this in a writer who is far greater than Meredith, and yet
less successful as a novelist--Thomas Hardy. Hardy seems to me
essentially a poet, who conceives of his novels from an enormous height.
They are to be tragedies or tragi-comedies, they are to give out the
sound of hammer-strokes as they proceed; in other words Hardy arranges
events with emphasis on causality, the ground plan is a plot, and the
characters are ordered to acquiesce in its requirements. Except in the
person of Tess (who conveys the feeling that she is greater than
destiny) this aspect of his work is unsatisfactory. His characters are
involved in various snares, they are finally bound hand and foot, there
is ceaseless emphasis on fate, and yet, for all the sacrifices made to
it, we never see the action as a living thing as we see it in _Antigone_
or _Berenice_ or _The Cherry Orchard_. The fate above us, not the fate
working through us--that is what is eminent and memorable in the Wessex
novels. Egdon Heath before Eustada Vye has set foot upon it. The woods
without the Woodlanders. The downs above Budmouth Regis with the royal
princesses, still asleep, driving across them through the dawn. Hardy's
success in _The Dynasts_ (where he uses another medium) is complete,
there the hammer-strokes are heard, cause and effect enchain the
characters despite their struggles, complete contact between the actors
and the plot is established. But in the novels, though the same superb
and terrible machine works, it never catches humanity in its teeth;
there is some vital problem that has not been answered, or even posed,
in the misfortunes of Jude the Obscure. In other words the characters
have been required to contribute too much to the plot; except in their
rustic humours, their vitality has been impoverished, they have gone dry
and thin. This, as far as I can make out, is the flaw running through
Hardy's novels: he has emphasized causality more strongly than his
medium permits. As a poet and prophet and visualizer George Meredith is
nothing by his side--just a suburban roarer--but Meredith did know what
the novel could stand, where the plot could dun the characters for a
contribution, where it must let them function as they liked. And the
moral--well, I see no moral, because the work of Hardy is my home and
that of Meredith cannot be: still the moral from the point of these
lectures is again unfavourable to Aristotle. In the novel, all human
happiness and misery does not take the form of action, it seeks means of
expression other than through the plot, it must not be rigidly
canalized.
In the losing battle that the plot fights with the characters, it often
takes a cowardly revenge. Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This
is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why
is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he
feels muddled or bored? Alas, he has to round things off, and usually
the characters go dead while he is at work, and our final impression of
them is through deadness. _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is in this way a
typical novel, so clever and fresh in the first half, up to the painting
of the family group with Mrs. Primrose as Venus, and then so wooden and
imbecile. Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake
now have to contribute to the dénouement. In the end even the author
feels he is being a little foolish. "Nor can I go on," he says, "without
a reflection on those accidental meetings which, though they happen
every day, seldom excite our surprise but upon some extraordinary
occasion." Goldsmith is of course a light-weight, but most novels do
fail here--there is this disastrous standstill while logic takes over
the command from flesh and blood. If it was not for death and marriage
I do not know how the average novelist would conclude. Death and
marriage are almost his only connection between his characters and his
plot, and the reader is more ready to meet him here, and take a bookish
view of them, provided they occur later on in the book: the writer, poor
fellow, must be allowed to finish up somehow, he has his living to get
like any one else, so no wonder that nothing is heard but hammering and
screwing.
This--as far as one can generalize--is the inherent defect of novels:
they go off at the end: and there are two explanations of it: firstly,
failure of pep, which threatens the novelist like all workers: and
secondly, the difficulty which we have been discussing. The characters
have been getting out of hand, laying foundations and declining to build
on them afterwards, and now the novelist has to labour personally, in
order that the job may be done to time. He pretends that the characters
are acting for him. He keeps mentioning their names and using inverted
commas. But the characters are gone or dead.
The plot, then, is the novel in its logical intellectual aspect: it
requires mystery, but the mysteries are solved later on: the reader may
be moving about in worlds unrealized, but the novelist has no
misgivings. He is competent, poised above his work, throwing a beam of
light here, popping on a cap of invisibility there, and (qua plot-maker)
continually negotiating with himself qua character-monger as to the best
effect to be produced. He plans his book beforehand: or anyhow he stands
above it, his interest in cause and effect give him an air of
predetermination.
And now we must ask ourselves whether the framework thus produced is the
best possible for a novel. After all, why has a novel to be planned?
Cannot it grow? Why need it close, as a play closes? Cannot it open out?
Instead of standing above his work and controlling it, cannot the
novelist throw himself into it and be carried along to some goal that he
does not foresee? The plot is exciting and may be beautiful, yet is it
not a fetich, borrowed from the drama, from the spatial limitations of
the stage? Cannot fiction devise a framework that is not so logical yet
more suitable to its genius?
Modern writers say that it can, and we will now examine a recent
example--a violent onslaught on the plot as we have defined it: a
constructive attempt to put something in the place of the plot.
I have already mentioned the novel in question: _Les Faux Monnayeurs_ by
André Gide. It contains within its covers both the methods. Gide has
also published the diary he kept while he was writing the novel, and
there is no reason why he should not publish in the future the
impressions he had when rereading both the diary and the novel, and in
the future-perfect a still more final synthesis in which the diary, the
novel, and his impressions of both will interact. He is indeed a little
more solemn than an author should be about the whole caboodle, but
regarded as a caboodle it is excessively interesting, and repays careful
study by critics.