In dealing with the method that I find peculiarly characteristic of
Thackeray, the "panoramic" method, I have spoken of it also as
"pictorial"; and it will be noticed that I have thus arrived at
another distinction which I touched upon in connection with Bovary.
Picture and drama--this is an antithesis which continually appears in
a novel, and I shall have much to say of it. And first of the names
which I give to these contrasted manners of treatment--I do not know
that they are the best names, but they express the main point of
difference, and they also have this advantage, that they _have_ been
used technically in the criticism of fiction, with specific meaning.
In writing about novels one is so rarely handling words that have ever
been given close definition (with regard to the art of fiction, I
mean) that it is natural to grasp at any which have chanced to be
selected and strictly applied by a critic of authority. Picture and
drama, therefore, I use because Henry James used them in discussing
his own novels, when he reviewed them all in his later years; but I
use them, I must add, in a rather more extended sense than he did.
Anybody who knows the critical prefaces of his books will remember how
picture and drama, to him, represented the twofold manner towards
which he tended in his last novels, composed as they are in a regular
alternation of dramatic dialogue and pictorial description. But _his_
pictorial description was of a very special kind; and when the subject
of criticism is fiction generally, not his alone, picture will take a
wider meaning, as opposed to drama. It will be found to cover the
panoramic manner of Thackeray.
It is a question, I said, of the reader's relation to the writer; in
one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him,
in the other he turns towards the story and watches it. In the drama
of the stage, in the acted play, the spectator evidently has no direct
concern with the author at all, while the action is proceeding. The
author places their parts in the mouths of the players, leaves them to
make their own impression, leaves _us_, the audience, to make what we
can of it. The motion of life is before us, the recording, registering
mind of the author is eliminated. That is drama; and when we think of
the story-teller as opposed to the dramatist, it is obvious that in
the full sense of the word there is no such thing as drama in a novel.
The novelist may give the very words that were spoken by his
characters, the dialogue, but of course he must interpose on his own
account to let us know how the people appeared, and where they were,
and what they were doing. If he offers nothing but the bare dialogue,
he is writing a kind of play; just as a dramatist, amplifying his play
with "stage-directions" and putting it forth to be read in a book,
has really written a kind of novel. But the difference between the
story-teller and the playwright is not my affair; and a new contrast,
within the limits of the art of fiction, is apparent when we speak of
the novel by itself--a contrast of two methods, to one of which it is
reasonable to give the name of drama.
I do not say that a clear line can be drawn between them; criticism
does not hope to be mathematically exact. But everybody sees the
diversity between the talkative, confidential manner of Thackeray and
the severe, discreet, anonymous manner--of whom shall I say?--of
Maupassant, for a good example, in many of his stories. It is not only
the difference between the personal qualities of the two men, which
indeed are also as far apart as the house of Castlewood and the Maison
Tellier; it is not the difference between the kinds of story they
chose to tell. They approached a story from opposite sides, and
thought of it, consequently, in images that had nothing in common: not
always, I dare say, but on the whole and characteristically they did
so. Maupassant's idea of a story (and not peculiarly Maupassant's, of
course, but his name is convenient) would suggest an object that you
fashioned and abandoned to the reader, turning away and leaving him
alone with it; Thackeray's would be more like the idea of a long and
sociable interview with the reader, a companion with whom he must
establish definite terms. Enough, the contrast is very familiar. But
these are images; how is the difference shown in their written books,
in Esmond and La Maison Tellier? Both, it is true, represent a picture
that was in the author's mind; but the story passes into Thackeray's
book as a picture still, and passes into Maupassant's as something
else--I call it drama.
In Maupassant's drama we are close to the facts, against them and
amongst them. He relates his story as though he had caught it in the
act and were mentioning the details as they passed. There seems to be
no particular process at work in his mind, so little that the figure
of Maupassant, the showman, is overlooked and forgotten as we follow
the direction of his eyes. The scene he evokes is contemporaneous, and
there it is, we can see it as well as he can. Certainly he is
"telling" us things, but they are things so immediate, so perceptible,
that the machinery of his telling, by which they reach us, is
unnoticed; the story appears to tell itself. Critically, of course, we
know how far that is from being the case, we know with what judicious
thought the showman is selecting the points of the scene upon which he
touches. But the _effect_ is that he is not there at all, because he
is doing nothing that ostensibly requires any judgement, nothing that
reminds us of his presence. He is behind us, out of sight, out of
mind; the story occupies us, the moving scene, and nothing else.
But Thackeray--in _his_ story we need him all the time and can never
forget him. He it is who must assemble and arrange his large
chronicle, piecing it together out of his experience. Becky's mode of
life, in his story, is a matter of many details picked up on many
occasions, and the power that collects them, the mind that contains
them, is always and openly Thackeray's; it could not be otherwise. It
is no question, for most of the time, of watching a scene at close
quarters, where the simple, literal detail, such as anybody might see
for himself, would be sufficient. A stretch of time is to be shown in
perspective, at a distance; the story-teller must be at hand to work
it into a single impression. And thus the general panorama, such as
Thackeray displays, becomes the representation of the author's
experience, and the author becomes a personal entity, about whom we
may begin to ask questions. Thackeray _cannot_ be the nameless
abstraction that the dramatist (whether in the drama of the stage or
in that of the novel) is naturally. I know that Thackeray, so far from
trying to conceal himself, comes forward and attracts attention and
nudges the reader a great deal more than he need; he likes the
personal relation with the reader and insists on it. But do what he
might to disguise it, so long as he is ranging over his story at a
height, chronicling, summarizing, foreshortening, he _must_ be present
to the reader as a narrator and a showman. It is only when he descends
and approaches a certain occasion and sets a scene with due
circumspection--rarely and a trifle awkwardly, as we saw--that he can
for the time being efface the thought of his active part in the
affair.
So much of a novel, therefore, as is not dramatic enactment, not
_scenic_, inclines always to picture, to the reflection of somebody's
mind. Confronted with a scene--like Becky's great scene, once more--we
forget that other mind; but as soon as the story goes off again into
narrative a question at once arises. _Who_ is disposing the scattered
facts, whose is this new point of view? It is the omniscient author,
and the point of view is his--such would be the common answer, and it
is the answer we get in Vanity Fair. By convention the author is
allowed his universal knowledge of the story and the people in it. But
still it is a convention, and a prudent novelist does not strain it
unnecessarily. Thackeray in Vanity Fair is not at all prudent; his
method, so seldom strictly dramatic, is one that of its nature is apt
to force this question of the narrator's authority, and he goes out of
his way to emphasize the question still further. He flourishes the
fact that the point of view is his own, not to be confounded with that
of anybody in the book. And so his book, as one may say, is not
complete in itself, not really self-contained; it does not meet and
satisfy all the issues it suggests. Over the whole of one side of it
there is an inconclusive look, something that draws the eye away from
the book itself, into space. It is the question of the narrator's
relation to the story.
However unconsciously--and I dare say the recognition is usually
unconscious--the novelist is alive to this difficulty, no doubt; for
we may see him, we presently shall, taking various steps to circumvent
it. There is felt to be an unsatisfactory want of finish in leaving a
question hanging out of the book, like a loose end, without some kind
of attempt to pull it back and make it part of an integral design.
After all, the book is torn away from its author and given out to the
world; the author is no longer a wandering _jongleur_ who enters the
hall and utters his book to the company assembled, retaining his book
as his own inalienable possession, himself and his actual presence and
his real voice indivisibly a part of it. The book that we read has no
such support; it must bring its own recognisances. And in the
fictitious picture of life the effect of validity is all in all and
there can be no appeal to an external authority; and so there is an
inherent weakness in it if the mind that knows the story and the eye
that sees it remain unaccountable. At any moment they may be
questioned, and the only way to silence the question is somehow to
make the mind and the eye objective, to make them facts in the story.
When the point of view is definitely included in the book, when it can
be recognized and verified there, then every side of the book is
equally wrought and fashioned. Otherwise it may seem like a thing
meant to stand against a wall, with one side left in the rough; and
there is no wall for a novel to stand against.
That this is not a fanciful objection to a pictorial book like Vanity
Fair, where the point of view is _not_ accounted for, is proved, I
think, by the different means that a novelist will adopt to
authenticate his story--to dramatize the seeing eye, as I should
prefer to put it. These I shall try to deal with in what seems to be
their logical order; illuminating examples of any of them are not
wanting. I do not suggest that if I were criticizing Vanity Fair I
should think twice about this aspect of it; to do so would be very
futile criticism of such a book, such a store of life. But then I am
not considering it as Vanity Fair, I am considering it as a dominant
case of pictorial fiction; and here is the characteristic danger of
the method, and a danger which all who practise the method are not
likely to encounter and over-ride with the genius of Thackeray. And
even Thackeray--he chose to encounter it once again, it is true, in
Pendennis, but only once and no more, and after that he took his own
precautions, and evidently found that he could move the more freely
for doing so.
But to revert yet again for a moment to Bovary--which seemed on
scrutiny to be more of a picture than a drama--I think it is clear how
Flaubert avoided the necessity of installing himself avowedly as the
narrator, in the sight of the reader. I mentioned how he constantly
blends his acuter vision with that of Emma, so that the weakness of
her gift of experience is helped out; and the help is mutual, for on
the other hand her vision is always active as far as it goes, and
Flaubert's intervention is so unobtrusive that her point of view seems
to govern the story more than it does really. And therefore, though
the book is largely a picture, a review of many details and occasions,
the question of the narrator is never insistent. The landscape that
Thackeray controls is so much wider and fuller that even with all the
tact of Flaubert--and little he has of it--he could scarcely follow
Flaubert's example. His book is not a portrait of character but a
panorama of manners, and there is no disguising the need of some
detached spectator, who looks on from without.
It is the method of picture-making that enables the novelist to cover
his great spaces of life and quantities of experience, so much greater
than any that can be brought within the acts of a play. As for
intensity of life, that is another matter; there, as we have seen, the
novelist has recourse to his other arm, the one that corresponds with
the single arm of the dramatist. Inevitably, as the plot thickens and
the climax approaches--inevitably, wherever an impression is to be
emphasized and driven home--narration gives place to enactment, the
train of events to the particular episode, the broad picture to the
dramatic scene. But the limitation of drama is as obvious as its
peculiar power. It is clear that if we wish to see an abundance and
multitude of life we shall find it more readily and more summarily by
looking for an hour into a memory, a consciousness, than by merely
watching the present events of an hour, however crowded. Much may
happen in that time, but in extent it will be nothing to the regions
thrown open by the other method. A novelist, with a large and
discursive subject before him, could not hope to show it all
dramatically; much of it, perhaps the greater part, must be so
marshalled that it may be swept by a travelling glance. Thackeray
shows how it is done and how a vista of many facts can be made to fall
into line; but he shows, too, how it needs a mind to create that
vista, and how the creative mind becomes more and more perceptible,
more visibly active, as the prospect widens.
Most novelists, I think, seem to betray, like Thackeray, a preference
for one method or the other, for picture or for drama; one sees in a
moment how Fielding, Balzac, George Eliot, incline to the first, in
their diverse manners, and Tolstoy (certainly Tolstoy, in spite of his
big range) or Dostoevsky to the second, the scenic way. But of course
every novelist uses both, and the quality of a novelist appears very
clearly in his management of the two, how he guides the story into the
scene, how he picks it out of the scene, a richer and fuller story
than it was before, and proceeds with his narrative. On the whole, no
doubt, the possibilities of the scene are greatly abused in fiction,
in the daily and familiar novel. They are doubly abused; for the
treatment of the scene is neglected, and yet it recurs again and
again, much too often, and its value is wasted. It has to be
remembered that drama is the novelist's highest light, like the white
paper or white paint of a draughtsman; to use it prodigally where it
is not needed is to lessen its force where it is essential. And so the
economical procedure would be to hoard it rather, reserving it for
important occasions--as in Bovary, sure enough.
But before I deal with the question of the novelist's drama I would
follow out the whole argument that is suggested by his reflected
picture of life. This, after all, is the method which is his very own,
which he commands as a story-teller pure and simple. And for a
beginning I have tried to indicate its prime disadvantage, consisting
of the fact that in its plain form it drags in the omniscient author
and may make him exceedingly conspicuous. Why is this a disadvantage,
is it asked? It is none, of course, if the author has the power to
make us admire and welcome the apparition, or if his picture is so
dazzling that a theoretic defect in it is forgotten. But a novel in
which either of these feats is accomplished proves only the charm or
genius of the author; charm and genius do what they will, there is
nothing new in that. And I believe that the defect, even though at
first sight it may seem a trifle, is apt to become more and more
troublesome in a book as the book is re-read. It makes for a kind of
thinness in the general impression, wherever the personal force of the
writer is not remarkable. I should say that it may often contribute
towards an air of ineffectiveness in a story, which it might otherwise
be difficult to explain.
The fiction of Turgenev is on the whole a case in point, to my mind.
Turgenev was never shy of appearing in his pages as the reflective
story-teller, imparting the fruits of his observation to the reader.
He will watch a character, let us say, cross a field and enter a wood
and sit down under a tree; good, it is an opportunity for gaining a
first impression of the man or woman, it is a little scene, and
Turgenev's touch is quick and light. But then with perfect candour he
will show his hand; he will draw the reader aside and pour into his
ear a flow of information about the man or woman, information that
openly comes straight from Turgenev himself, in good pictorial form,
no doubt, but information which will never have its due weight with
the reader, because it reposes upon nothing that he can test for
himself. Who and what is this communicative participator in the
business, this vocal author? He does not belong to the book, and his
voice has not that compelling tone and tune of its own (as Thackeray's
had) which makes a reader enjoy hearing it for its own sake. This is a
small matter, I admit, but Turgenev extends it and pursues the same
kind of course in more important affairs. He remains the observant
narrator, to whom we are indebted for a share in his experience. The
result is surely that his picture of life has less authority than its
highly finished design would seem to warrant. It is evidently not a
picture in which the deeps of character are sounded, and in which the
heights of passion are touched, and in which a great breadth of the
human world is contained; it is not a picture of such dimensions. But
it has so much neat and just and even exquisite work in it that it
might seem final of its kind, completely effective in what it
attempts; and it falls short of this, I should say, and there is
something in that constant sense of Turgenev at one's elbow,
_proffering_ the little picture, that may very well damage it. The
thing ought to stand out by itself; it could easily be made to do so.
But Turgenev was unsuspecting; he had not taken to heart the full
importance of dramatizing the point of view--perhaps it was that.
The narrative, then, the chronicle, the summary, which must represent
the story-teller's ordered and arranged experience, and which must
accordingly be of the nature of a picture, is to be strengthened, is
to be raised to a power approaching that of drama, where the
intervention of the story-teller is no longer felt. The freedom which
the pictorial method gives to the novelist is unknown to the
playwright; but that freedom has to be paid for by some loss of
intensity, and the question is how to pay as little as possible. In
the end, as I think it may be shown, the loss is made good and there
is nothing to pay at all, so far may the dramatizing process be
followed. Method, I have said, can be imposed upon method, one kind
upon another; and in analyzing the manner of certain novelists one
discovers how ingeniously they will correct the weakness of one method
by the force of another and retain the advantages of both. It is
rather a complicated story, but the beginning is clear enough, and the
direction which it is to take is also clear. Everything in the novel,
not only the scenic episodes but all the rest, is to be in some sense
dramatized; that is where the argument tends. As for the beginning of
it, the first obvious step, the example of Thackeray is at hand and it
could not be bettered. I turn to Esmond.