We have recently {168b} enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing, in
some detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, of Mr. Walter
Besant and Mr. Henry James; two men certainly of very different calibre:
Mr. James so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupulous of
finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, with so persuasive and
humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James the very type of the deliberate
artist, Mr. Besant the impersonation of good nature. That such doctors
should differ will excite no great surprise; but one point in which they
seem to agree fills me, I confess, with wonder. For they are both
content to talk about the “art of fiction”; and Mr. Besant, waxing
exceedingly bold, goes on to oppose this so-called “art of fiction” to
the “art of poetry.” By the art of poetry he can mean nothing but the
art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of
prose. For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to call
by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; present,
at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom present
in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic. Fiction
is the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element which enters
largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias,
Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose that
either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any
degree into the scope of Mr. Besant’s interesting lecture or Mr. James’s
charming essay. The art of fiction, then, regarded as a definition, is
both too ample and too scanty. Let me suggest another; let me suggest
that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant had in view was neither more nor
less than the art of narrative.
But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of “the modern English novel,”
the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author of the most
pleasing novel on that roll, _All Sorts and Conditions of Men_, the
desire is natural enough. I can conceive, then, that he would hasten to
propose two additions, and read thus: the art of _fictitious_ narrative
_in prose_.
Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be
denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded
lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature;
but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to
build our definitions on some more fundamental ground then binding. Why,
then, are we to add “in prose”? _The Odyssey_ appears to me the best of
romances; _The Lady of the Lake_ to stand high in the second order; and
Chaucer’s tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of
the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether a
narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long
period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles
of the art of narrative must be equally observed. The choice of a noble
and swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration in the same
way, if not to the same degree, as the choice of measured verse; for both
imply a closer synthesis of events, a higher key of dialogue, and a more
picked and stately strain of words. If you are to refuse _Don Juan_, it
is hard to see why you should include _Zanoni_ or (to bracket works of
very different value) _The Scarlet Letter_; and by what discrimination
are you to open your doors to _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ and close them on
_The Faery Queen_? To bring things closer home, I will here propound to
Mr. Besant a conundrum. A narrative called _Paradise Lost_ was written
in English verse by one John Milton; what was it then? It was next
translated by Chateaubriand into French prose; and what was it then?
Lastly, the French translation was, by some inspired compatriot of George
Gilfillan (and of mine) turned bodily into an English novel; and, in the
name of clearness, what was it then?
But, once more, why should we add “fictitious”? The reason why is
obvious. The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not want
for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is
applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or
of an imaginary series. Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ (a work of cunning
and inimitable art) owes its success to the same technical manœuvres as
(let us say) _Tom Jones_: the clear conception of certain characters of
man, the choice and presentation of certain incidents out of a great
number that offered, and the invention (yes, invention) and preservation
of a certain key in dialogue. In which these things are done with the
more art—in which with the greater air of nature—readers will differently
judge. Boswell’s is, indeed, a very special case, and almost a generic;
but it is not only in Boswell, it is in every biography with any salt of
life, it is in every history where events and men, rather than ideas, are
presented—in Tacitus, in Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay—that the
novelist will find many of his own methods most conspicuously and
adroitly handled. He will find besides that he, who is free—who has the
right to invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more
precious still, of wholesale omission—is frequently defeated, and, with
all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of reality and
passion. Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming fervour on the
sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more careful examination truth
will seem a word of very debateable propriety, not only for the labours
of the novelist, but for those of the historian. No art—to use the
daring phrase of Mr. James—can successfully “compete with life”; and the
art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish _montibus aviis_. Life
goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most various
and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the
mind—the seat of wonder, to the touch—so thrillingly delicate, and to the
belly—so imperious when starved. It combines and employs in its
manifestation the method and material, not of one art only, but of all
the arts, Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few of life’s
majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of light and
colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of incident, of
moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony, with which
it teems. To “compete with life,” whose sun we cannot look upon, whose
passions and diseases waste and slay us—to compete with the flavour of
wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of
death and separation—here is, indeed, a projected escalade of heaven;
here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a
pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed with a tube of
superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the insufferable sun. No
art is true in this sense: none can “compete with life”: not even
history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of
their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of the sack of a city
or the fall of an empire, we are surprised, and justly commend the
author’s talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark, for a last
differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every case,
purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of experience, even at
their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in
the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.
What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the
source of its power? The whole secret is that no art does “compete with
life.” Man’s one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut
his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. The arts, like
arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from the gross, coloured
and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary
abstraction. Geometry will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in
nature; asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it lays its hand
upon its mouth. So with the arts. Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine
and flake-white, gives up truth of colour, as it had already given up
relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme
of harmonious tints. Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the
mood of narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues
instead an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all,
it imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but the
emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells of them.
The real art that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who
told their stories round the savage camp-fire. Our art is occupied, and
bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making
them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in
marshalling all of them towards a common end. For the welter of
impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it
substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most
feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of
the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like
the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters, from all
its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and
re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every
incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in
unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another way,
the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller
without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant;
a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational,
flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate
thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience,
like an air artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition of
geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a
fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both
untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.
The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to
life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of
leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed
and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.
The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible
magazine from which subjects are to be selected; the name of these is
legion; and with each new subject—for here again I must differ by the
whole width of heaven from Mr. James—the true artist will vary his method
and change the point of attack. That which was in one case an
excellence, will become a defect in another; what was the making of one
book, will in the next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, and
then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I will take, for
instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the novel
of adventure, which appeals to certain almost sensual and quite illogical
tendencies in man; second, the novel of character, which appeals to our
intellectual appreciation of man’s foibles and mingled and inconstant
motives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff
as the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature and moral
judgment.
And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James refers, with singular
generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for hidden treasure;
but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words. In this book
he misses what he calls the “immense luxury” of being able to quarrel
with his author. The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our judgment,
to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin
to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the volume laid
aside. Still more remarkable is Mr. James’s reason. He cannot criticise
the author, as he goes, “because,” says he, comparing it with another
work, “_I have been a child_, _but I have never been on a quest for
buried treasure_.” Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if he has
never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he
has never been a child. There never was a child (unless Master James)
but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a
bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and
prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the
lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and beauty. Elsewhere
in his essay Mr. James has protested with excellent reason against too
narrow a conception of experience; for the born artist, he contends, the
“faintest hints of life” are converted into revelations; and it will be
found true, I believe, in a majority of cases, that the artist writes
with more gusto and effect of those things which he has only wished to
do, than of those which he has done. Desire is a wonderful telescope,
and Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while it is true that neither Mr.
James nor the author of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly
sense, gone questing after gold, it is probable that both have ardently
desired and fondly imagined the details of such a life in youthful
day-dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and well aware (cunning
and low-minded man!) that this class of interest, having been frequently
treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to the sympathies of
the reader, addressed himself throughout to the building up and
circumstantiation of this boyish dream. Character to the boy is a sealed
book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers and a liberal
complement of pistols. The author, for the sake of circumstantiation and
because he was himself more or less grown up, admitted character, within
certain limits, into his design; but only within certain limits. Had the
same puppets figured in a scheme of another sort, they had been drawn to
very different purpose; for in this elementary novel of adventure, the
characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities—the
warlike and formidable. So as they appear insidious in deceit and fatal
in the combat, they have served their end. Danger is the matter with
which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it idly
trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realise the
sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear. To add more traits, to
be too clever, to start the hare of moral or intellectual interest while
we are running the fox of material interest, is not to enrich but to
stultify your tale. The stupid reader will only be offended, and the
clever reader lose the scent.
The novel of character has this difference from all others: that it
requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in the case of
_Gil Blas_, it is sometimes called the novel of adventure. It turns on
the humours of the persons represented; these are, to be sure, embodied
in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being tributary, need not
march in a progression; and the characters may be statically shown. As
they enter, so they may go out; they must be consistent, but they need
not grow. Here Mr. James will recognise the note of much of his own
work: he treats, for the most part, the statics of character, studying it
at rest or only gently moved; and, with his usual delicate and just
artistic instinct, he avoids those stronger passions which would deform
the attitudes he loves to study, and change his sitters from the
humorists of ordinary life to the brute forces and bare types of more
emotional moments. In his recent _Author of Beltraffio_, so just in
conception, so nimble and neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed
employed; but observe that it is not displayed. Even in the heroine the
working of the passion is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true
tragedy, the _scène-à-faire_ passes unseen behind the panels of a locked
door. The delectable invention of the young visitor is introduced,
consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. James, true to his method,
might avoid the scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose me
guilty of undervaluing this little masterpiece. I mean merely that it
belongs to one marked class of novel, and that it would have been very
differently conceived and treated had it belonged to that other marked
class, of which I now proceed to speak.
I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because it
enables me to point out by the way a strange and peculiarly English
misconception. It is sometimes supposed that the drama consists of
incident. It consists of passion, which gives the actor his opportunity;
and that passion must progressively increase, or the actor, as the piece
proceeded, would be unable to carry the audience from a lower to a higher
pitch of interest and emotion. A good serious play must therefore be
founded on one of the passionate _cruces_ of life, where duty and
inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I
call, for that reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a few worthy
specimens, all of our own day and language; Meredith’s _Rhoda Fleming_,
that wonderful and painful book, long out of print, {178} and hunted for
at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy’s _Pair of Blue Eyes_; and two of
Charles Reade’s, _Griffith Gaunt_ and the _Double Marriage_, originally
called _White Lies_, and founded (by an accident quaintly favourable to
my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas. In
this kind of novel the closed door of _The Author of Beltraffio_ must be
broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last word;
passion is the be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solution, the
protagonist and the _deus ex machinâ_ in one. The characters may come
anyhow upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before they
leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of themselves by
passion. It may be part of the design to draw them with detail; to
depict a full-length character, and then behold it melt and change in the
furnace of emotion. But there is no obligation of the sort; nice
portraiture is not required; and we are content to accept mere abstract
types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A novel of this class
may be even great, and yet contain no individual figure; it may be great,
because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart and the
impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the second class
it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue has thus been
narrowed and the whole force of the writer’s mind directed to passion
alone. Cleverness again, which has its fair field in the novel of
character, is debarred all entry upon this more solemn theatre. A
far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead of
a passionate turn, offend us like an insincerity. All should be plain,
all straightforward to the end. Hence it is that, in _Rhoda Fleming_,
Mrs. Lovell raises such resentment in the reader; her motives are too
flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength of her
surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader when Balzac, after
having begun the _Duchesse de Langeais_ in terms of strong if somewhat
swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the hero’s clock.
Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of character; they are
out of place in the high society of the passions; when the passions are
introduced in art at their full height, we look to see them, not baffled
and impotently striving, as in life, but towering above circumstance and
acting substitutes for fate.
And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to intervene. To
much of what I have said he would apparently demur; in much he would,
somewhat impatiently, acquiesce. It may be true; but it is not what he
desired to say or to hear said. He spoke of the finished picture and its
worth when done; I, of the brushes, the palette, and the north light. He
uttered his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; I, with
the emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student. But the point,
I may reply, is not merely to amuse the public, but to offer helpful
advice to the young writer. And the young writer will not so much be
helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest, as
by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms. The best that we
can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character or
passion; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an
illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it
a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as
sometimes in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of
the main intrigue; suffer not his style to flag below the level of the
argument; pitch the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men
talk in parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may
be called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative nor
any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that
is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of
the problem involved. Let him not regret if this shortens his book; it
will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to
bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps
unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let him not care
particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material
detail of the day’s manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the
environment. These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent,
and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better
depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. In this age of
the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract, the great
books of the past, the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and before
Balzac. And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind that
his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude;
but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by
its significant simplicity. For although, in great men, working upon
great motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet
underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that simplification
was their method, and that simplicity is their excellence.
II
Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly the
lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; and none
ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. His own work and those
of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he is the bondslave,
the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance in art like what there
is in science; he thinks of past things as radically dead; he thinks a
form can be outlived: a strange immersion in his own history; a strange
forgetfulness of the history of the race! Meanwhile, by a glance at his
own works (could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of
this illusion would be dispelled. For while he holds all the poor little
orthodoxies of the day—no poorer and no smaller than those of yesterday
or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as they are
exclusive—the living quality of much that he has done is of a contrary, I
had almost said of a heretical, complexion. A man, as I read him, of an
originally strong romantic bent—a certain glow of romance still resides
in many of his books, and lends them their distinction. As by accident
he runs out and revels in the exceptional; and it is then, as often as
not, that his reader rejoices—justly, as I contend. For in all this
excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central human
thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect: I mean himself?
A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the appearances of life, a
cunning reader of the mind, he has other passions and aspirations than
those he loves to draw. And why should he suppress himself and do such
reverence to the Lemuel Barkers? The obvious is not of necessity the
normal; fashion rules and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the
contemporary shape, and thus attain, in the eyes of the true observer,
only a higher power of insignificance; and the danger is lest, in seeking
to draw the normal, a man should draw the null, and write the novel of
society instead of the romance of man.
* * * * *
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
Edinburgh & London
Footnotes:
{1} 1881.
{15} Written for the “Book” of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair.
{17} Professor Tait’s laboratory assistant.
{84} In Dr. Murray’s admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw
_sub voce_ Beacon. In its express, technical sense, a beacon may be
defined as “a founded, artificial sea-mark, not lighted.”
{100} The late Fleeming Jenkin.
{105} This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in _The
Spectator_.
{128} Waiter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under which
last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago. Glory was his aim
and he attained it; for his icon, by the hand of Caldecott, now lies
among the treasures of the nation.
{153} Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of
Charles Kingsley.
{155} Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat with
my own hands in _Kidnapped_. Some day, perhaps, I may try a rattle at
the shutters.
{157} 1882.
{168a} This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present volume, is
reprinted here as the proper continuation of the last.
{168b} 1884
{178} Now no longer so, thank Heaven!