IV

But now suppose that Tolstoy had not been drawn aside from his first

story in the midst of it, suppose he had left the epic of his country

and "the historians" to be dealt with in another book, suppose that

the interpolated scenes of War and Peace, as we possess it, were to

disappear and to leave the subject entirely to the young heroes and

heroines--what shall we find to be the form of the book which is thus

disencumbered? I would try to think away from the novel all that is

not owned and dominated by these three brilliant households, Besukhov,

Bolkonsky, Rostov; there remains a long succession of scenes, in a

single and straightforward train of action. It is still a novel of

ample size; it spreads from the moment when Peter, amiably uncouth,

first appears in a drawing-room of the social world, to the evening,

fifteen years later, when he is watched with speechless veneration by

the small boy Nicolenka, herald of the future. The climax of his life,

the climax of half a dozen lives, is surmounted between these two

points, and now their story stands by itself. It gains, I could feel,

by this process of liberation, summary as it is.

At any rate, it is one theme and one book, and the question of its

form may be further pressed. The essential notion out of which this

book sprang, I suggested, was that of the march of life, the shift of

the generations in their order--a portentous subject to master, but

Tolstoy's hand is broad and he is not afraid of great spaces. Such a

subject could not be treated at all without a generous amount of room

for its needs. It requires, to begin with, a big and various

population; a few selected figures may hold the main thread of the

story and represent its course, but it is necessary for their typical

truth that their place in the world should be clearly seen. They are

choice examples, standing away from the mass, but their meaning would

be lost if they were taken to be utterly exceptional, if they appeared

to be chosen _because_ they are exceptional. Their attachment to the

general drama of life must accordingly be felt and understood; the

effect of a wide world must be given, opening away to far distances

round the action of the centre. The whole point of the action is in

its representative character, its universality; this it must plainly

wear.

It begins to do so at once, from the very first. With less hesitation,

apparently, than another man might feel in setting the scene of a

street or parish, Tolstoy proceeds to make his world. Daylight seems

to well out of his page and to surround his characters as fast as he

sketches them; the darkness lifts from their lives, their conditions,

their outlying affairs, and leaves them under an open sky. In the

whole of fiction no scene is so continually washed by the common air,

free to us all, as the scene of Tolstoy. His people move in an

atmosphere that knows no limit; beyond the few that are to the fore

there stretches a receding crowd, with many faces in full light, and

many more that are scarcely discerned as faces, but that swell the

impression of swarming life. There is no perceptible horizon, no hard

line between the life in the book and the life beyond it. The

communication between the men and women of the story and the rest of

the world is unchecked. It is impossible to say of Peter and Andrew

and Nicholas that they inhabit a "world of their own," as the people

in a story-book so often appear to do; they inhabit _our_ world, like

anybody else. I do not mean, of course, that a marked horizon, drawn

round the action of a book and excluding everything that does not

belong to it, is not perfectly appropriate, often enough; their own

world may be all that the people need, may be the world that best

reveals what they are to be and to do; it all depends on the nature of

the fable. But to Tolstoy's fable space is essential, with the sense

of the continuity of life, within and without the circle of the book.

He never seems even to know that there can be any difficulty in

providing it; while he writes, it is there.

He is helped, one might imagine, by the simple immensity of his

Russian landscape, filled with the suggestion of distances and

unending levels. The Russian novelist who counts on this effect has

it ready to his hand. If he is to render an impression of space that

widens and widens, a hint is enough; the mere association of his

picture with the thought of those illimitable plains might alone

enlarge it to the utmost of his need. The imagination of distance is

everywhere, not only in a free prospect, where sight is lost, but on

any river-bank, where the course of the stream lies across a

continent, or on the edge of a wood, whence the forest stretches round

the curve of the globe. To isolate a patch of that huge field and to

cut it off from the encompassing air might indeed seem to be the

greater difficulty; how can the eye be held to a point when the very

name of Russia is extent without measure? At our end of Europe, where

space is more precious, life is divided and specialized and

differentiated, but over there such economies are unnecessary; there

is no need to define one's own world and to live within it when there

is a single world large enough for all. The horizon of a Russian story

would naturally be vague and vast, it might seem.

It might seem so, at least, if the fiction of Dostoevsky were not

there with an example exactly opposed to the manner of Tolstoy. The

serene and impartial day that arches from verge to verge in War and

Peace, the blackness that hems in the ominous circle of the Brothers

Karamazov--it is a perfect contrast. Dostoevsky needed no lucid

prospect round his strange crew; all he sought was a blaze of light on

the extraordinary theatre of their consciousness. He intensified it

by shutting off the least glimmer of natural day. The illumination

that falls upon his page is like the glare of a furnace-mouth; it

searches the depths of the inner struggles and turmoils in which his

drama is enacted, relieving it with sharp and fantastic shadows. That

is all it requires, and therefore the curtain of darkness is drawn

thickly over the rest of the world. Who can tell, in Dostoevsky's grim

town-scenery, what there is at the end of the street, what lies round

the next corner? Night stops the view--or rather no ordinary, earthly

night, but a sudden opacity, a fog that cannot be pierced or breathed.

With Tolstoy nobody doubts that an ample vision opens in every

direction. It may be left untold, but his men and women have only to

lift their eyes to see it.

How is it contrived? The mere multiplication of names and households

in the book does not account for it; the effect I speak of spreads far

beyond them. It is not that he has imagined so large an army of

characters, it is that he manages to give them such freedom, such an

obvious latitude of movement in the open world. Description has

nothing to do with it; there is very little description in War and

Peace, save in the battle-scenes that I am not now considering. And it

is not enough to say that if Tolstoy's people have evident lives of

their own, beyond the limits of the book, it is because he understands

and knows them so well, because they are so "real" to him, because

they and all their circumstances are so sharply present to his

imagination. Who has ever known so much about his own creations as

Balzac?--and who has ever felt that Balzac's people had the freedom of

a bigger world than that very solid and definite habitation he made

for them? There must be another explanation, and I think one may

discern where it lies, though it would take me too far to follow it.

It lies perhaps in the fact that with Tolstoy's high poetic genius

there went a singularly normal and everyday gift of experience. Genius

of his sort generally means, I dare say, that the possessor of it is

struck by special and wonderful aspects of the world; his vision falls

on it from a peculiar angle, cutting into unsuspected sides of common

facts--as a painter sees a quality in a face that other people never

saw. So it is with Balzac, and so it is, in their different ways, with

such writers as Stendhal and Maupassant, or again as Dickens and

Meredith; they all create a "world of their own." Tolstoy seems to

look squarely at the same world as other people, and only to make so

much more of it than other people by the direct force of his genius,

not because he holds a different position in regard to it. His

experience comes from the same quarter as ours; it is because he

absorbs so much more of it, and because it all passes into his great

plastic imagination, that it seems so new. His people, therefore, are

essentially familiar and intelligible; we easily extend their lives

in any direction, instead of finding ourselves checked by the

difficulty of knowing more about them than the author tells us in so

many words. Of this kind of genius I take Tolstoy to be the supreme

instance among novelists; Fielding and Scott and Thackeray are of the

family. But I do not linger over a matter that for my narrow argument

is a side-issue.

The continuity of space and of daylight, then, so necessary to the

motive of the book, is rendered in War and Peace with absolute

mastery. There is more, or there is not so much, to be said of the way

in which the long flight of time through the expanse of the book is

imagined and pictured. The passage of time, the effect of time,

belongs to the heart of the subject; if we could think of War and

Peace as a book still to be written, this, no doubt, would seem to be

the greatest of its demands. The subject is not given at all unless

the movement of the wheel of time is made perceptible. I suppose there

is nothing that is more difficult to ensure in a novel. Merely to

lengthen the series of stages and developments in the action will not

ensure it; there is no help in the simple ranging of fact beside fact,

to suggest the lapse of a certain stretch of time; a novelist might as

well fall back on the row of stars and the unsupported announcement

that "years have fled." It is a matter of the build of the whole book.

The form of time is to be represented, and that is something more than

to represent its contents in their order. If time is of the essence

of the book, the lines and masses of the book must show it.

Time is all-important in War and Peace, but that does not necessarily

mean that it will cover a great many years; they are in fact no more

than the years between youth and middle age. But though the wheel may

not travel very far in the action as we see it, there must be no doubt

of the great size of the wheel; it must seem to turn in a large

circumference, though only a part of its journey is to be watched. The

revolution of life, marked by the rising and sinking of a certain

generation--such is the story; and the years that Tolstoy treats,

fifteen or so, may be quite enough to show the sweep of the curve. At

five-and-twenty a man is still beginning; at forty--I do not say that

at forty he is already ending, though Tolstoy in his ruthless way is

prepared to suggest it; but by that time there are clear and

intelligent eyes, like the boy Nicolenka's, fixed enquiringly upon a

man--the eyes of the new-comers, who are suddenly everywhere and all

about him, making ready to begin in their turn. As soon as that

happens the curve of time is apparent, the story is told. But it must

be _made_ apparent in the book; the shape of the story must give the

reason for telling it, the purpose of the author in chronicling his

facts.

Can we feel that Tolstoy has so represented the image of time, the

part that time plays in his book? The problem was twofold; there was

first of all the steady progression, the accumulation of the years,

to be portrayed, and then the rise and fall of their curve. It is the

double effect of time--its uninterrupted lapse, and the cycle of which

the chosen stretch is a segment. I cannot think there is much doubt

about the answer to my question. Tolstoy has achieved one aspect of

his handful of years with rare and exquisite art, he has troubled

himself very little about the other. Time that evenly and silently

slips away, while the men and women talk and act and forget it--time

that is read in their faces, in their gestures, in the changing

texture of their thought, while they only themselves awake to the

discovery that it is passing when the best of it has gone--time in

this aspect is present in War and Peace more manifestly, perhaps, than

in any other novel that could be named, unless it were another novel

of Tolstoy's. In so far as it is a matter of the _length_ of his

fifteen years, they are there in the story with their whole effect.

He is the master of the changes of age in a human being. Under his

hand young men and women grow older, cease to be young, grow old, with

the noiseless regularity of life; their mutability never hides their

sameness, their consistency shows and endures through their

disintegration. They grow as we all do, they change in the only

possible direction, that which results from the clash between

themselves and their conditions. If I looked for the most beautiful

illustration in all fiction of a woman at the mercy of time, exposed

to the action of the years, now facing it with what she is, presently

betraying and recording it with what she becomes, I should surely find

it in the story of Anna Karenina. Various and exquisite as she is, her

whole nature is sensitive to the imprint of time, and the way in which

time invades her, steals throughout her, finally lays her low, Tolstoy

tracks and renders from end to end. And in War and Peace his hand is

not less delicate and firm. The progress of time is never broken;

inexorably it does what it must, carrying an enthusiastic young

student forward into a slatternly philosopher of middle life, linking

an over-blown matron with the memory of a girl dancing into a crowded

room. The years move on and on, there is no missing the sense of their

flow.

But the meaning, the import, what I should like to call the moral of

it all--what of that? Tolstoy has shown us a certain length of time's

journey, but to what end has he shown it? The question has to be

answered, and it is not answered, it is only postponed, if we say that

the picture itself is all the moral, all the meaning that we are

entitled to ask for. It is of the picture that we speak; its moral is

in its design, and without design the scattered scenes will make no

picture. Our answer would be clear enough, as I have tried to suggest,

if we could see in the form of the novel an image of the circling

sweep of time. But to a broad and single effect, such as that, the

chapters of the book refuse to adapt themselves; they will not draw

together and announce a reason for their collocation. The story is

started with every promise, and it ceases at the end with an air of

considerable finality. But between these points its course is full of

doubt.

It is admirably started. Nothing could be more right and true than the

bubbling merriment and the good faith and the impatient aspiration

with which the young life of the earlier chapters of the book comes

surging upon the scene of its elders. A current of newness and

freshness is set flowing in the atmosphere of the generation that is

still in possession. The talk of a political drawing-room is stale and

shrill, an old man in his seclusion is a useless encumbrance, an

easy-going and conventional couple are living without plan or

purpose--all the futility of these people is obvious to an onlooker

from the moment when their sons and daughters break in upon them. It

was time for the new generation to appear--and behold it appearing in

lively strength. Tolstoy, with his power of making an eloquent event

out of nothing at all, needs no dramatic apparatus to set off the

effect of the irruption. Two people, an elderly man of the world and a

scheming hostess, are talking together, the room fills, a young man

enters; or in another sociable assembly there is a shriek and a rush,

and the children of the house charge into the circle; that is quite

enough for Tolstoy, his drama of youth and age opens immediately with

the right impression. The story is in movement without delay; there

are a few glimpses of this kind, and then the scene is ready, the

action may go forward; everything is attuned for the effect it is to

make.

And at the other end of the book, after many hundreds of pages, the

story is brought to a full close in an episode which gathers up all

the threads and winds them together. The youths and maidens are now

the parents of another riotous brood. Not one of them has ended where

he or she expected to end, but their lives have taken a certain shape,

and it is unmistakable that this shape is final. Nothing more will

happen to them which an onlooker cannot easily foretell. They have

settled down upon their lines, and very comfortable and very estimable

lines on the whole, and there may be many years of prosperity before

them; but they no longer possess the future that was sparkling with

possibility a few years ago. Peter is as full of schemes as ever, but

who now supposes that he will _do_ anything? Natasha is absorbed in

her children like a motherly hen; Nicholas, the young cavalier, is a

country gentleman; they are all what they were bound to be, though

nobody foresaw it. But shyly lurking in a corner, late in the evening,

with eyes fixed upon the elders of the party who are talking and

arguing--here once more is that same uncertain, romantic, incalculable

future; the last word is with the new generation, the budding morrow,

old enough now to be musing and speculating over its own visions.

"Yes, I will do such things--!" says Nicolenka; and that is the

natural end of the story.

But meanwhile the story has rambled and wandered uncontrolled--or

controlled only by Tolstoy's perfect consistency in the treatment of his

characters. They, as I have said, are never less than absolutely true to

themselves; wherever we meet them, in peace or war, they are always the

people we know, the same as ever, and yet changing and changing (like

all the people we know) under the touch of time. It is not they, it is

their story that falters. The climax, I suppose, must be taken to fall

in the great scenes of the burning of Moscow, with which all their lives

are so closely knit. Peter involves himself in a tangle of misfortunes

(as he would, of course) by his slipshod enthusiasm; Natasha's courage

and good sense are surprisingly aroused--one had hardly seen that she

possessed such qualities, but Tolstoy is right; and presently it is

Andrew, the one clear-headed and far-sighted member of the circle, who

is lost to it in the upheaval, wounded and brought home to die. It is a

beautiful and human story of its kind; but note that it has entirely

dropped the representative character which it wore at the beginning and

is to pick up again at the end. Tolstoy has forgotten about this; partly

he has been too much engrossed in his historical picture, and partly he

has fallen into a new manner of handling the loves and fortunes of his

young people. It is now a tale of a group of men and women, with their

cross-play of affinities, a tale of which the centre of interest lies in

the way in which their mutual relations will work out. It is the kind

of story we expect to find in any novel, a drama of young

affections--extraordinarily true and poetic, as Tolstoy traces it, but a

limited affair compared with the theme of his first chapters.

Of that theme there is no continuous development. The details of the

charming career of Natasha, for example, have no bearing on it at all.

Natasha is the delightful girl of her time and of all time, as

Nicholas is the delightful boy, and she runs through the sequence of

moods and love-affairs that she properly should; she is one whose

fancy is quick and who easily follows it. But in the large drama of

which she is a part it is not the actual course of her love-affairs

that has any importance, it is the fact that she has them, that she is

what she is, that every one loves her and that she is ready to love

nearly every one. To do as Tolstoy does, to bring into the middle of

the interest the question whether she will marry this man or

that--especially when it is made as exquisitely interesting as he

makes it--this is to throw away the value that she had and to give her

another of a different sort entirely. At the turning-point of the

book, and long before the turning-point is reached, she is simply the

heroine of a particular story; what she _had_ been--Tolstoy made it

quite clear--was the heroine of a much more general story, when she

came dancing in on the crest of the new wave.

It is a change of attitude and of method on Tolstoy's part. He sees

the facts of his story from a different point of view and represents

them in a fresh light. It does not mean that he modifies their course,

that he forces them in a wrong direction and makes Natasha act in a

manner conflicting with his first idea. She acts and behaves

consistently with her nature, exactly as the story demands that she

should; not one of her impulsive proceedings need be sacrificed. But

it was for Tolstoy, representing them, to behave consistently too, and

to use the facts in accordance with his purpose. He had a reason for

taking them in hand, a design which he meant them to express; and his

vacillation prevents them from expressing it. How would he have

treated the story, supposing that he had kept hold of his original

reason throughout? Are we prepared to improve upon his method, to

re-write his book as we think it ought to have been written? Well, at

any rate, it is possible to imagine the different effect it would show

if a little of that large, humane irony, so evident in the tone of the

story at the start, had persisted through all its phases. It would not

have dimmed Natasha's charm, it would have heightened it. While she is

simply the heroine of a romance she is enchanting, no doubt; but when

she takes her place in a drama so much greater than herself, her

beauty is infinitely enhanced. She becomes representative, with all

her gifts and attractions; she is there, not because she is a

beautiful creature, but because she is the spirit of youth. Her charm

is then universal; it belongs to the spirit of youth and lasts for

ever.

With all this I think it begins to be clear why the broad lines of

Tolstoy's book have always seemed uncertain and confused. Neither his

subject nor his method were fixed for him as he wrote; he ranged

around his mountain of material, attacking it now here and now there,

never deciding in his mind to what end he had amassed it. None of his

various schemes is thus completed, none of them gets the full

advantage of the profusion of life which he commands. At any moment

great masses of that life are being wasted, turned to no account; and

the result is not merely negative, for at any moment the wasted life,

the stuff that is not being used, is dividing and weakening the effect

of the picture created out of the rest. That so much remains, in spite

of everything, gives the measure of Tolstoy's genius; _that_ becomes

the more extraordinary as the chaotic plan of his book is explored. He

could work with such lordly neglect of his subject and yet he could

produce such a book--it is surely as much as to say that Tolstoy's is

the supreme genius among novelists.

V

And next of the different methods by which the form of a novel is

created--these must be watched in a very different kind of book from

Tolstoy's. For a sight of the large and general masses in which a

novel takes shape, War and Peace seemed to promise more than another;

but something a great deal more finely controlled is to be looked for,

when it is a question of following the novelist's hand while it is

actually at work. Not indeed that anybody's hand is more delicate than

Tolstoy's at certain moments and for certain effects, and a critic is

bound to come back to him again in connection with these. But we have

seen how, in dealing with his book, one is continually distracted by

the question of its subject; the uncertainty of Tolstoy's intention is

always getting between the reader and the detail of his method. What I

now want, therefore, will be a book in which the subject is absolutely

fixed and determined, so that it may be possible to consider the

manner of its treatment with undivided attention. It is not so easy to

find as might be supposed; or rather it might be difficult to find,

but for the fact that immediately in a critic's path, always ready to

hand and unavoidable, there lies one book of exactly the sort I seek,

Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Whatever this book may be or may not be,

after much re-reading, it remains perpetually the novel of all novels

which the criticism of fiction cannot overlook; as soon as ever we

speak of the principles of the art, we must be prepared to engage with

Flaubert.

This is an accepted necessity among critics, and no doubt there is

every reason why it should be so. The art of Flaubert gives at any

rate a perfectly definite standard; there is no mistaking or

mis-reading it. He is not of those who present many aspects, offering

the support of one or other to different critical doctrines; Flaubert

has only one word to say, and it is impossible to find more than a

single meaning in it. He establishes accordingly a point in the sphere

of criticism, a point which is convenient to us all; we can refer to

it at any time, in the full assurance that its position is the same in

everybody's view; he provides the critic with a motionless pole. And

for my particular purpose, just now, there is no such book as his

Bovary; for it is a novel in which the subject stands firm and clear,

without the least shade of ambiguity to break the line which bounds

it. The story of its treatment may be traced without missing a single

link.

It is copiously commented upon, as we know, in the published letters

of its author, through the long years in which phrase was being added

to phrase; and it is curious indeed to listen to him day by day, and

to listen in vain for any hint of trouble or embarrassment in the

matter of his subject. He was capable of hating and reviling his

unfortunate story, and of talking about it with a kind of exasperated

spite, as though it had somehow got possession of him unfairly and he

owed it a grudge for having crossed his mind. That is strange enough,

but that is quite a different affair; his personal resentment of the

intrusion of such a book upon him had nothing to do with the

difficulty he found in writing it. His classic agonies were caused by

no unruliness in the story he had to tell; his imagined book was

rooted in his thought, and never left its place by a hair's breadth.

Year after year he worked upon his subject without finding anything in

it, apparently, to disturb or distract him in his continuous effort to

treat it, to write it out to his satisfaction. This was the only

difficulty; there was no question of struggling with a subject that he

had not entirely mastered, one that broke out with unforeseen demands;

Bovary never needed to be held down with one hand while it was written

with the other. Many a novelist, making a further and fuller

acquaintance with his subject as he proceeds, discovering more in it

to reckon with than he had expected, has to meet the double strain, it

would seem. But Flaubert kept his book in a marvellous state of

quiescence during the writing of it; through all the torment which it

cost him there was no hour when it presented a new or uncertain look

to him. He might hate his subject, but it never disappointed or

disconcerted him.

In Bovary, accordingly, the methods of the art are thrown into clear

relief. The story stands obediently before the author, with all its

developments and illustrations, the characters defined, the small

incidents disposed in order. His sole thought is how to present the

story, how to tell it in a way that will give the effect he desires, how

to show the little collection of facts so that they may announce the

meaning he sees in them. I speak of his "telling" the story, but of

course he has no idea of doing that and no more; the art of fiction does

not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be

_shown_, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself. To hand over to

the reader the facts of the story merely as so much information--this is

no more than to state the "argument" of the book, the groundwork upon

which the novelist proceeds to create. The book is not a row of facts,

it is a single image; the facts have no validity in themselves, they are

nothing until they have been used. It is not the simple art of

narrative, but the comprehensive art of fiction that I am considering;

and in fiction there can be no appeal to any authority outside the book

itself. Narrative--like the tales of Defoe, for example--must look

elsewhere for support; Defoe produced it by the assertion of the

historic truthfulness of his stories. But in a novel, strictly so

called, attestation of this kind is, of course, quite irrelevant; the

thing has to _look_ true, and that is all. It is not made to look true

by simple statement.

And yet the novelist must state, must tell, must narrate--what else

can he do? His book is a series of assertions, nothing more. It is so,

obviously, and the difference between the art of Defoe and the art of

Flaubert is only in their different method of placing their

statements. Defoe takes a directer way, Flaubert a more roundabout;

but the deviations open to Flaubert are innumerable, and by his

method, by his various methods, we mean his manner of choosing his

path. Having chosen he follows it, certainly, by means of a plain

narrative; he relates a succession of facts, whether he is describing

the appearance of Emma, or one of her moods, or something that she

did. But this common necessity of statement, at the bottom of it all,

is assumed at the beginning; and in criticizing fiction we may proceed

as though a novelist could really deal immediately with appearances.

We may talk of the picture or the drama that he creates, we may

plainly say that he avoids mere statement altogether, because at the

level of fiction the whole interest is in another region; we are

simply concerned with the method by which he selects the information

he offers. A writer like Flaubert--or like any novelist whose work

supports criticism at all--is so far from telling a story as it might

be told in an official report, that we cease to regard him as

reporting in any sense. He is making an effect and an impression, by

some more or less skilful method. Contemplating his finished work we

can distinguish the method, perhaps define it, notice how it changes

from time to time, and account for the novelist's choice of it.

There is plenty of diversity of method in Madame Bovary, though the

story is so simple. What does it amount to, that story? Charles

Bovary, a simple and slow-witted young country doctor, makes a prudent

marriage, and has the fortune to lose his tiresome and elderly wife

after no long time. Then he falls in love with the daughter of a

neighbouring farmer, a pretty and fanciful young woman, who marries

him. She is deeply bored by existence in a small market town, finds a

lover, wearies of him and finds another, gets wildly into debt,

poisons herself and dies. After her death Bovary discovers the proof

of her infidelity, but his slow brain is too much bewildered by sorrow

and worry, by life generally, to feel another pang very distinctly. He

soon dies himself. That is all the story, given as an "argument," and

so summarized it tells us nothing of Flaubert's subject. There might

be many subjects in such an anecdote, many different points of view

from which the commonplace facts might make a book. The way in which

they are presented will entirely depend on the particular subject that

Flaubert sees in them; until this is apparent the method cannot be

criticized.

But the method can be watched; and immediately it is to be noted that

Flaubert handles his material quite differently from point to point.

Sometimes he seems to be describing what he has seen himself, places

and people he has known, conversations he may have overheard; I do not

mean that he is literally retailing an experience of his own, but that

he writes as though he were. His description, in that case, touches

only such matters as you or I might have perceived for ourselves, if

we had happened to be on the spot at the moment. His object is to

place the scene before us, so that we may take it in like a picture

gradually unrolled or a drama enacted. But then again the method

presently changes. There comes a juncture at which, for some reason,

it is necessary for us to know more than we could have made out by

simply looking and listening. Flaubert, the author of the story, must

intervene with his superior knowledge. Perhaps it is something in the

past of the people who have been moving and talking on the scene; you

cannot rightly understand this incident or this talk, the author

implies, unless you know--what I now proceed to tell you. And so, for

a new light on the drama, the author recalls certain circumstances

that we should otherwise have missed. Or it may be that he--who

naturally knows everything, even the inmost, unexpressed thought of

the characters--wishes us to share the mind of Bovary or of Emma, not

to wait only on their words or actions; and so he goes below the

surface, enters their consciousness, and describes the train of

sentiment that passes there.

These are the familiar resources of a story-teller, which everybody

uses as a matter of course. It is so natural to take advantage of them

that unless we purposely keep an eye upon the writer's devices,

marking them off as he turns from one to another, we hardly notice the

change. He is telling a story in the ordinary way, the obvious and

unconstrained. But in fact these variations represent differences of

method that are fundamental. If the story is to be _shown_ to us, the

question of our relation to the story, how we are placed with regard

to it, arises with the first word. Are we placed before a particular

scene, an occasion, at a certain selected hour in the lives of these

people whose fortunes are to be followed? Or are we surveying their

lives from a height, participating in the privilege of the

novelist--sweeping their history with a wide range of vision and

absorbing a general effect? Here at once is a necessary alternative.

Flaubert, as a matter of fact, gives us first a scene--the scene of

Bovary's arrival at school, as a small boy; the incident of the

particular morning is rendered; and then he leaves that incident,

summarizes the background of the boy's life, describes his parents,

the conditions of his home, his later career as a student. It is the

way in which nine novels out of ten begin--an opening scene, a

retrospect, and a summary. And the spectator, the reader, is so well

used to it that he is conscious of no violent change in the point of

view; though what has happened is that from one moment to another he

has been caught up from a position straight in front of the action to

a higher and a more commanding level, from which a stretch of time is

to be seen outspread. This, then, is one distinction of method; and it

is a tell-tale fact that even in this elementary matter our

nomenclature is uncertain and ambiguous. How do we habitually

discriminate between these absolutely diverse manners of presenting

the facts of a story? I scarcely know--it is as though we had no

received expressions to mark the difference between blue and red. But

let us assume, at any rate, that a "scenic" and a "panoramic"

presentation of a story expresses an intelligible antithesis, strictly

and technically.

There is our relation, again--ours, the reader's--with regard to the

author. Flaubert is generally considered to be a very "impersonal"

writer, one who keeps in the background and desires us to remain

unaware of his presence; he places the story before us and suppresses

any comment of his own. But this point has been over-laboured, I

should say; it only means that Flaubert does not announce his opinion

in so many words, and thence it has been argued that the opinions of a

really artistic writer ought not to appear in his story at all. But of

course with every touch that he lays on his subject he must show what

he thinks of it; his subject, indeed, the book which he finds in his

selected fragment of life, is purely the representation of his view,

his judgement, his opinion of it. The famous "impersonality" of

Flaubert and his kind lies only in the greater tact with which they

express their feelings--dramatizing them, embodying them in living

form, instead of stating them directly. It is not to this matter,

Flaubert's opinion of Emma Bovary and her history--which indeed is

unmistakable--that I refer in speaking of our relation to the writer

of the book.

It is a matter of method. Sometimes the author is talking with his own

voice, sometimes he is talking _through_ one of the people in the

book--in this book for the most part Emma herself. Thus he describes a

landscape, the trim country-side in which Emma's lot is cast, or the

appearance and manners of her neighbours, or her own behaviour; and in

so doing he is using his own language and his own standards of

appreciation; he is facing the reader in person, however careful he

may be to say nothing to deflect our attention from the thing

described. He is making a reproduction of something that is in his own

mind. And then later on he is using the eyes and the mind and the

standards of another; the landscape has now the colour that it wears

in Emma's view, the incident is caught in the aspect which it happens

to turn towards her imagination. Flaubert himself has retreated, and

it is Emma with whom we immediately deal. Take, for example, the two

figures of her lovers, Rodolphe and Léon, the florid country-gentleman

and the aspiring student; if Flaubert were to describe these men as

_he_ sees them, apart from their significance to Emma, they would not

occupy him for long; to his mind, and to any critical mind, they are

both of them very small affairs. Their whole effect in the book is the

effect they produce upon the sensibility of a foolish and limited

little woman. Or again, take the incident of Emma's single incursion

into polite society, the ball at the great house which starts so many

of her romantic dreams; it is all presented in her terms, it appears

as it appeared to her. And occasionally the point of view is shifted

away from her to somebody else, and we get a brief glimpse of what

_she_ is in the eyes of her husband, her mother-in-law, her lover.

Furthermore, whether the voice is that of the author or of his

creature, there is a pictorial manner of treating the matter in hand

and there is also a dramatic. It may be that the impression--as in the

case of the marquis's ball--is chiefly given as a picture, the

reflection of events in the mirror of somebody's receptive

consciousness. The reader is not really looking _at_ the occasion in

the least, or only now and then; mainly he is watching the surge of

Emma's emotion, on which the episode acts with sharp intensity. The

thing is "scenic," in the sense in which I used the word just now; we

are concerned, that is to say, with a single and particular hour, we

are taking no extended, general view of Emma's experience. But though

it is thus a _scene_, it is not dramatically rendered; if you took the

dialogue, what there is of it, together with the actual things

described, the people and the dresses and the dances and the

banquets--took these and placed them on the stage, for a theatrical

performance, the peculiar effect of the occasion in the book would

totally vanish. Nothing could be more definite, more objective, than

the scene is in the book; but there it is all bathed in the climate of

Emma's mood, and it is to the nature of this climate that our interest

is called for the moment. The lords and ladies are remote, Emma's

envying and wondering excitement fills the whole of the foreground.

The scene is pictorially treated.

But then look on to the incident of the _comices agricoles_, the

cattle-show at Yonville, with the crowd in the market-place, the

prize-giving and the speech-making. This scene, like the other, is

rendered on the whole (but Flaubert's method is always a little mixed,

for reasons to be noted presently) from Emma's point of view; she sits

beside Rodolphe, while he makes his advances to her under cover of the

councillor's eloquence, and she looks out upon the assembly--and as

she sees it, so the throng and the glare are imparted to the reader.

But remark that on this occasion the facts of the scene are well to

the fore; Emma's mood counts for very little, and we get a direct view

of the things on which her eyes casually rest. We hear the

councillor's rhetorical periods, Rodolphe's tender speeches, Emma's

replies, with the rumour of the crowd breaking through from time to

time. It is a scene which might be put upon the stage, quite

conceivably, without any loss of the main impression it is made to

convey in the book--an impression of ironic contrast, of the bustle

and jostle round the oration of the pompous dignitary, of the

commonplace little romance that is being broached unobserved. To

receive the force of the contrast the reader has only to see and hear,

to be present while the hour passes; and the author places him there

accordingly, in front of the visible and audible facts of the case,

and leaves it to these to tell the story. It is a scene treated

dramatically.

This is a difference of method that constantly catches a critic's eye

in reading a novel. Is the author writing, at a given moment, with his

attention upon the incidents of his tale, or is he regarding primarily

the form and colour they assume in somebody's thought? He will do

both, it is probable, in the course of his book, on the same page,

perhaps, or even in the same sentence; nothing compels him to forego

the advantage of either method, if his story can profit in turn from

both. Now and then, indeed, we shall find a writer deliberately

confining himself to one method only, treating his whole book with a

rigid consistency, and this for the sake of some particular aspect of

his theme which an unmixed manner is best fitted to reveal. But

generally a novelist retains his liberty to draw upon any of his

resources as he chooses, now this one and now that, using drama where

drama gives him all he needs, using pictorial description where the

turn of the story demands it. The only law that binds him throughout,

whatever course he is pursuing, is the need to be consistent on

_some_ plan, to follow the principle he has adopted; and of course it

is one of the first of his precepts, as with every artist in any kind,

to allow himself no more latitude than he requires. A critic, then,

looks for the principle on which a novelist's methods are mingled and

varied--looks for it, as usual, in the novelist's subject, and marks

its application as the subject is developed.

And so with the devices that I distinguish as scenic and

panoramic--one watches continually to see how this alternation is

managed, how the story is now overlooked from a height and now brought

immediately to the level of the reader. Here again the need of the

story may sometimes seem to pull decisively in one direction or the

other; and we get a book that is mainly a broad and general survey, or

mainly a concatenation of particular scenes. But on the whole we

expect to find that the scene presently yields to some kind of

chronicle or summary, and that this in turn prepares the way and leads

into the occasion that fulfils it. The placing of this occasion, at

the point where everything is ready for it, where it will thoroughly

illuminate a new face of the subject and advance the action by a

definite stage, is among the chief cares of the author, I take it, in

planning his book. A scene that is not really wanted, and that _does_

nothing in particular--a scene that for lack of preparation fails to

make its effect--is a weakness in a story that one would suppose a

novelist to be always guarding against. Anyhow there is no doubt that

the scene holds the place of honour, that it is the readiest means of

starting an interest and raising a question--we drop into a scene on

the first page and begin to speculate about the people concerned in

it: and that it recurs for a climax of any sort, the resolution of the

question--and so the scene completes what it began. In Madame Bovary

the scenes are distributed and rendered with very rare skill; not one

but seems to have more and more to give with every fresh reading of

it. The ball, the _comices_, the evening at the theatre, Emma's

fateful interview with Léon in the Cathedral of Rouen, the remarkable

session of the priest and the apothecary at her deathbed--these form

the articulation of the book, the scheme of its structure. To the next

in order each stage of the story is steadily directed. By the time the

scene is reached, nothing is wanting to its opportunity; the action is

ripe, the place is resonant; and then the incident takes up the story,

conclusively establishes one aspect of it and opens the view towards

the next. And the more rapid summary that succeeds, with its pauses

for a momentary sight of Emma's daily life and its setting, carries

the book on once more to the climax that already begins to appear in

the distance.

But the most obvious point of method is no doubt the difficult

question of the centre of vision. With which of the characters, if

with any of them, is the writer to identify himself, which is he to

"go behind"? Which of these vessels of thought and feeling is he to

reveal from within? I suppose his unwritten story to rise before him,

its main lines settled, as something at first entirely objective, the

whole thing seen from without--the linked chain of incident, the men

and women in their places. And it may be that the story can be kept in

this condition while it is written, and that the completed book will

be nothing but an account of things seen from the point of view of the

author, standing outside the action, without any divulging of

anybody's thought. But this is rare; such restraint is burdensome,

unless in a very compact and straightforward tale. Somewhere the

author must break into the privacy of his characters and open their

minds to us. And again it is doubtless his purpose to shift the point

of view no more often than he need; and if the subject can be

completely rendered by showing it as it appears to a single one of the

figures in the book, then there is no reason to range further.

Haphazard and unnecessary plunges into the inner life of the

characters only confuse the effect, changing the focus without

compensating gain. But which _is_ the centre, which is the mind that

really commands the subject? The answer is not always evident at once,

nor does it seem to be always correctly divined in the novels that we

read. But of course in plenty of stories there can be little doubt;

there is somebody in the middle of the action who is clearly the

person to interpret it for us, and the action will accordingly be

faced from his or her position. In Flaubert's Bovary there could be no

question but that we must mainly use the eyes of Emma herself; the

middle of the subject is in her experience, not anywhere in the

concrete facts around her. And yet Flaubert finds it necessary, as I

said, to look _at_ her occasionally, taking advantage of some other

centre for the time being; and why he does so a nearer inspection of

his subject will soon show.

Here we have, then, the elements of the novelist's method--essentially

few and simple, but infinite in their possibilities of fusion and

combination. They are arranged in a new design to suit every new theme

that a writer takes in hand; we see them alternated, united, imposed

one on another, this point of view blended with that, dramatic action

treated pictorially, pictorial description rendered dramatically--and

these words I use throughout, it will be understood, in the special

sense that I have indicated. In well-fashioned work it is always

interesting to discover how method tends to be laid upon method, so

that we get, as it were, layers and stratifications in the treatment

of a story. Some of these I shall try to distinguish, and the search

is useful, I think, for an understanding of the novelist himself. For

though it is true that a man's method depends upon the particular

story he is engaged in telling, yet the story that occurs to him, the

subject he happens upon, will be that which asks for the kind of

treatment congenial to his hand; and so his method will be a part of

himself, and will tell us about the quality of his imagination. But

this by the way--my concern is only with the manner in which the thing

is done; and having glanced at some of the features of that manner in

Flaubert's Bovary, I may now seek the reason of them in a more

attentive handling of the book.