IX

The novelist, I am supposing, is faced with a situation in his story

where for some good reason more is needed than the simple impression

which the reader might have formed for himself, had he been present

and using his eyes on the spot. It is a case for a general account of

many things; or it is a case for a certain view of the facts, based on

inner knowledge, to be presented to the reader. Thackeray, for

example, has to open his mind on the subject of Becky's ambitions or

Amelia's regrets; it would take too long, perhaps it would be

impossible, to set them acting their emotions in a form that would

tell the reader the whole tale; their creator must elucidate the

matter. He cannot forget, however, that this report of their emotions

is a subjective affair of his own; it relies upon his memory of

Becky's or Amelia's plight, his insight into the workings of their

thought, his sense of past action. All this is vivid enough to the

author, who has seen and known, but the reader stands at a further

remove.

It would be different if this consciousness of the past, the mind

which holds the memory, should itself become for the reader a directly

perceptible fact. The author must supply his view, but he might treat

his view as though it were in its turn a piece of action. It _is_ a

piece of action, or of activity, when he calls up these old

recollections; and why should not that effort be given the value of a

sort of drama on its own account? It would then be like a play within

a play; the outer framework at least--consisting of the reflective

mind--would be immediately in front of the reader; and its relation to

the thing framed, the projected vision, would explain itself. So long

as the recorder stands outside and away from his book, as Thackeray

stands outside Vanity Fair, a potential value is wasted; the activity

that is proceeding in his mind is not in itself an element in the

effect of the book, as it might be. And if it were thus drawn into the

book it would do double duty; it would authenticate and so enhance the

picture; it would add a new and independent interest as well. It seems

that there is everything to be said for making a drama of the narrator

himself.

And so Thackeray evidently felt, for in all his later work he refused

to remain the unaccountable seer from without. He did not carry the

dramatizing process very far, indeed, and it may be thought that the

change in his method does not amount to much. In The Newcomes and its

successors the old Thackerayan display seems essentially the same as

ever, still the familiar, easy-going, intimate outpouring, with all

the well-known inflexions of Thackeray's voice and the humours of his

temperament; certainly Pendennis and Esmond and George Warrington and

Thackeray have all of them exactly the same conception of the art of

story-telling, they all command the same perfection of luminous style.

And not only does Thackeray stop short at an early stage of the

process I am considering, but it must be owned that he uses the device

of the narrator "in character" very loosely and casually, as soon as

it might be troublesome to use it with care. But still he takes the

step, and he picks up the loose end I spoke of, and he packs it into

his book; and thenceforward we see precisely how the narrator stands

towards the story he unfolds. It is the first step in the

dramatization of picture.

A very simple and obvious step too, it will be said, the natural

device of the story-teller for giving his tale a look of truth. It is

so indeed; but the interest of the matter lies in recognizing exactly

what it is that is gained, what it is that makes that look. Esmond

tells the story quite as Thackeray would; it all comes streaming out

as a pictorial evocation of old times; there is just as little that is

strictly dramatic in it as there is in Vanity Fair. Rarely, very

rarely indeed, is there anything that could be called a scene; there

is a long impression that creeps forward and forward, as Esmond

retraces his life, with those piercing moments of vision which we

remember so well. But to the other people in the book it makes all the

difference that the narrator is among them. Now, when Beatrix appears,

we know who it is that so sees her, and we know where the seer is

placed; his line of sight, striking across the book, from him the seer

to her the seen, is measurable, its angle is shown; it gives to

Beatrix a new dimension and a sharper relief. Can you remember any

moment in Vanity Fair when you beheld Becky as again and again you

behold Beatrix, catching the very slant of the light on her face?

Becky never suddenly flowered out against her background in that way;

some want of solidity and of objectivity there still is in Becky, and

there must be, because she is regarded from anywhere, from nowhere,

from somewhere in the surrounding void. Thackeray's language about her

does not carry the same weight as Esmond's about Beatrix, because

nobody knows where Thackeray is, or what his relation may be to Becky.

This, then, is the readiest means of dramatically heightening a

reported impression, this device of telling the story in the first

person, in the person of somebody in the book; and large in our

fiction the first person accordingly bulks. The characterized "I" is

substituted for the loose and general "I" of the author; the loss of

freedom is more than repaid by the more salient effect of the picture.

Precision, individuality is given to it by this pair of eyes, known

and named, through which the reader sees it; instead of drifting in

space above the spectacle he keeps his allotted station and

contemplates a delimited field of vision. There is much benefit in the

sense that the picture has now a definite edge; its value is brought

out to the best advantage when its bounding line is thus emphasized.

Moreover, it is not only the field of vision that is determined by the

use of the first person, it is also the quality of the tone. When we

are shown what Esmond sees, and nothing else, there is first of all

the comfortable assurance of the point of view, and then there is the

personal colour which he throws over his account, so that it gains

another kind of distinction. It does not matter that Esmond's tone in

his story is remarkably like Thackeray's in the stories that _he_

tells; in Esmond's case the tone has a meaning in the story, is part

of it, whereas in the other case it is related only to Thackeray, and

Thackeray is in the void. When Esmond ruminates and reflects, his

manner is the expression of a human being there present, to whom it

can be referred; when Thackeray does the same, there is no such

compactness, and the manner trails away where we cannot follow it.

Dramatically it seems clear that the method of Esmond has the

advantage over the method of Vanity Fair.

Here are sound reasons, so far as they go, for the use of the first

person in the distinctively pictorial book. David Copperfield, for

instance--it is essentially a long glance, working steadily over a

tract of years, alone of its kind in Dickens's fiction. It was the one

book in which he rejected the intrigue of action for the centre of his

design--did not reject it altogether, indeed, but accepted it as

incidental only. Always elsewhere it is his chosen intrigue, his

"plot," that makes the shape of his book. Beginning with a deceptive

air of intending mainly a novel of manners and humours, as Stevenson

once pointed out, in Bleak House or in Little Dorrit or in Our Mutual

Friend--in his later books generally--he insinuates a thread of action

that gradually twists more and more of the matter of the book round

itself. The intrigue begins to take the first place, to dominate and

at last to fill the pages. That was the form, interesting of its kind,

and one to which justice has hardly been done, which he elaborated and

made his own. In Copperfield for once he took another way entirely. It

is the far stretch of the past which makes the shape of that book, not

any of the knots or networks of action which it contains. These,

instead of controlling the novel, sink into the level of retrospect.

Copperfield has not a few lesser dramas to represent; but the affair

of Steerforth, the affair of Uriah Heep, to name a pair of them, which

might have developed and taken command of the scene, fall back into

the general picture, becoming incidents in the long rhythm of

Copperfield's memory. It was a clear case for narration in person, in

character; everything was gained and nothing lost by leaving it to the

man to give his own impression. Nothing was lost, because the sole

need is for the reader to see what David sees; it matters little how

his mind works, or what the effect of it all may be upon himself. It

is the story of what happened around him, not within. David offers a

pair of eyes and a memory, nothing further is demanded of him.

But now let me take the case of another big novel, where again there

is a picture outspread, with episodes of drama that are subordinate to

the sweep of the expanse. It is Meredith's story of Harry Richmond, a

book in which its author evidently found a demand in some way

different from that of the rest of his work; for here again the first

person is used by a man who habitually avoided it. In Harry Richmond

it seemed to Meredith appropriate, I suppose, because the story has a

romantic and heroic temper, the kind of chivalrous fling that sits

well on a youth of spirit, telling his own tale. It is natural for the

youth to pass easily from one adventure to the next, taking it as it

comes; and if Meredith proposes to write a story of loose, generous,

informal design he had better place it in the mouth of the adventurer.

True that in so far as it is romantic, and a story of youth, and a

story in which an air from an age of knight-errantry blows into modern

times, so that something like a clash of armour and a splintering of

spears seems to mingle with the noises of modern life--true that in so

far as it is all this, Harry Richmond is not alone among Meredith's

books. The author of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington and Beauchamp

and Lord Ormont was generally a little vague on the question of the

century in which his stories were cast. The events may happen in the

nineteenth century, they clearly must; and yet the furniture and the

machinery and the conventions of the nineteenth century have a way of

appearing in Meredith's pages as if they were anachronisms. But that

is by the way; Harry Richmond is certainly, on the face of it, a

series of adventures loosely connected--connected only by the fact

that they befell a particular young man; and so the method of

narration should emphasize the link, Meredith may have concluded, and

the young man shall speak for himself.

The use of the first person, no doubt, is a source of relief to a

novelist in the matter of composition. It composes of its own accord,

or so he may feel; for the hero gives the story an indefeasible unity

by the mere act of telling it. His career may not seem to hang

together logically, artistically; but every part of it is at least

united with every part by the coincidence of its all belonging to one

man. When he tells it himself, that fact is serviceably to the fore;

the first person will draw a rambling, fragmentary tale together and

stamp it after a fashion as a single whole. Does anybody dare to

suggest that this is a reason for the marked popularity of the method

among our novelists? Autobiography--it is a regular literary form, and

yet it is one which refuses the recognized principles of literary

form; its natural right is to seem wayward and inconsequent; its charm

is in the fidelity with which it follows the winding course of the

writer's thought, as he muses upon the past, and the writer is not

expected to guide his thought in an orderly design, but to let it

wander free. Formlessness becomes actually the mark of right form in

literature of this class; and a novel presented as fictitious

autobiography gets the same advantage. And there the argument brings

us back to the old question; fiction must _look_ true, and there is no

look of truth in inconsequence, and there is no authority at the back

of a novel, independent of it, to vouch for the truth of its apparent

wilfulness. But it is not worth while to linger here; the use of the

first person has other and more interesting snares than this, that it

pretends to disguise unmeaning, inexpressive form in a story.

Now with regard to Harry Richmond, ostensibly it _is_ rather like a

chronicle of romantic adventure--not formless, far from it, but freely

flowing as a saga, with its illegitimate dash of blood-royal and its

roaring old English squire-archy and its speaking statue and its quest

of the princess; it _contains_ a saga, and even an exceedingly

fantastic one. But Harry Richmond is a deeply compacted book, and

mixed with its romance there is a novel of another sort. For the

fantasy it is only necessary that Harry himself should give a picture

of his experience, of all that he has seen and done; on this side the

story is in the succession of rare, strange, poetic events, with the

remarkable people concerned in them. But the aim of the book goes far

beyond this; it is to give the portrait of Harry Richmond, and that

is the real reason why the story is told. All these striking episodes,

which Harry is so well placed to describe, are not merely pictures

that pass, a story that Meredith sets him to tell because it is of

high interest on its own account. Meredith's purpose is that the hero

himself shall be in the middle of the book, with all the interest of

the story reflected back upon his character, his temper, his growth.

The subject is Harry Richmond, a youth of spirit; the subject is _not_

the cycle of romance through which he happens to have passed.

In the case of Copperfield, to go back to him, Dickens had exactly the

opposite intention. He found his book in the expanse of life which his

David had travelled over; Dickens's only care was to represent the

wonderful show that filled his hero's memory. The whole phantasmagoria

is the subject of the book, a hundred men and women, populating

David's past and keeping his pen at full speed in the single-minded

effort to portray them. Alone among the assembly David himself is

scarcely of the subject at all. He has substance enough, and amply, to

be a credible, authoritative reporter--Dickens sees well to that; but

he is a shadow compared with Betsy Trotwood and the Micawbers and the

Heeps, with all the hundred of them, and there is no call for him to

be more. In this respect his story, again, is contrasted with that of

Pendennis, which is, or is evidently meant to be in the first place, a

portrait of the young man--or with the story of Tom Jones perhaps,

though in this case more doubtfully, for Fielding's shrewd eye was apt

to be drawn away from the young man to the bustle of life around him.

But in Copperfield the design is very plain and is consistently

pursued; it would be a false patch in the story if at any point David

attracted more attention to himself than to the people of his

vision--he himself, as a child, being of course one of them, a little

creature that he sees in the distance, but he himself, in later years,

becoming merely the mirror of his experience, which he not unnaturally

considers worthy of being pictured for its own sake.

Look back then at Harry Richmond, and it is obvious that Harry himself

is all the subject of the book, there is no other. His father and his

grandfather, Ottilia and Janet, belong to the book by reason of him;

they stand about him, conditions of his life, phases of his career,

determining what he is and what he becomes. That is clearly Meredith's

thought in undertaking this chronicle; he proposes to show how it

makes the history, the moral and emotional history, of the man through

whom it is uttered. Harry's adventures, ambitions, mistakes,

successes, are the gradual and elaborate expression of him, complete

in the end; they round him into the figure of the man in whom Meredith

saw his book. The book started from Harry Richmond, the rest of it is

there to display him. A youth of considerable parts and attractions,

and a youth characteristic of his time and country, and a youth whose

circumstances are such as to give him very free play and to test and

prove him very effectually--there is the burden of Meredith's saga, as

I call it, and he never forgets it, though sometimes he certainly

pushes the brilliant fantasy of the saga beyond his strict needs. The

romance of the blood-royal, for instance--it would be hard to argue

that the book honestly requires the high colour of that infusion, and

all the pervading thrill that Meredith gets from it; Richmond Roy is

largely gratuitous, a piece of indulgence on Meredith's part. But that

objection is not likely to be pressed very severely, and anyhow Harry

is firmly established in the forefront. He tells his story, he

describes the company and the scenes he has lived through; and all the

time it is by them that he is himself described.

It comes to this, that the picture which Harry Richmond gives of his

career has a function essentially dramatic; it has a part to perform

in the story, a part it must undertake as a whole, over and above its

pictorial charge. It must do something as well as be, it must create

even while it is created. In Esmond and in Copperfield it is

otherwise; there the unrolling scene has little or no part to play, as

a scene, over against another actor; it holds no dialogue, so to

speak, sustains no interchange, or none of principal importance, with

the figure of the narrator. He narrates, he creates the picture; but

for us who look on, reading the book, there is nothing in the picture

to make us perpetually turn from it and face towards the man in the

foreground, watching for the effect it may produce in him. Attention

is all concentrated in the life that he remembers and evokes. He

himself, indeed, though the fact of his presence is very clear to us,

tends to remain in shadow; it is as though he leant from a window,

surveying the world, his figure outlined against the lighted square,

his features not very distinctly discerned by the reader within. It is

enough that he should make Micawber live again, make Beatrix appear on

the staircase of the old house, with her scarlet ribbon and the taper

in her hand. _They_ owe everything to the presence of the man who

calls them back from the past; they receive their being, they do

little in return.

This picture, this bright vision, spied through the clever

ministration of a narrator, is not enough for Harry Richmond. Here the

peopled view, all of it together, is like an actor in a play, and the

interlocutor, the protagonist, is the man in the foreground, Harry

himself. There is no question of simply seeing through his eyes,

sharing his memory, perhaps even a little forgetting him from time to

time, when the figured scene is particularly delightful. The thought,

the fancy, the emotion of Harry Richmond are the centre of the play;

from these to the men and women who shape his fate, from them again to

the mind that recalls them, attention passes and returns; we who look

on are continually occupied with the fact of Harry's consciousness,

its gradual enlargement and enrichment. That is the process which

Ottilia and Janet and the rest of them are expected to forward, and

they contribute actively. Harry before the quest of the princess and

Harry when it has finally failed are different beings, so far as a man

is changed by an experience that is absorbed into the whole of his

nature. How is the change effected, what does it achieve?--the

episode, bringing the change into view, dramatizes it, and the

question is answered. The young knight-errant has run an eventful

course, and he gives his account of it; but the leading event of his

tale is himself. His account illustrates that event, helps towards the

enactment of it. Pictorial, therefore, in form, dramatic in

function--such was the story that Meredith elected to tell in the

first person.

And in so doing he showed, as it seems to me, precisely where the

defect of the method begins to be felt. The method has a certain

dramatic energy, we have seen, making a visible fact of the relation,

otherwise unexplained, between the narrator and the tale. It has this;

but for a subject like Meredith's it is really too little, and the use

of the first person is overtaxed. Does he contrive to conceal the

trouble, does he make us exceedingly unconscious of it while we read

the book? I have no doubt that he does, with the humanity and poetry

and wisdom that he pours into it--the novel of which it has been said

that if Shakespeare revisited the globe and asked for a book of our

times to read, this would be the volume to offer him, the book more

likely than another to convince him at once that literature is still

in our midst. There is small doubt that Meredith disguises the

trouble, and there is still less that he was quite unaware of it

himself. But it is there, and it shows plainly enough in some novels,

where a personal narrator is given the same kind of task; and in

Meredith's book too, I think, it is not to be missed when one

considers what might have been, supposing Meredith had chosen another

way. The other way was open; he cannot have noticed it.

The young man Harry--this is the trouble--is only a recorder, a

picture-maker, so long as he speaks for himself. He is very well

placed for describing his world, which _needs_ somebody to describe

it; his world is much too big and complex to be shown scenically, in

those immediate terms I spoke of just now in connection with

Maupassant's story. Scenes of drama there may be from time to time,

there are plenty in Meredith's novel; but still on the whole the story

must be given as the view of an onlooker, and Harry is clearly the

onlooker indicated, the only possible one. That is certain; but then

there is laid upon him the task which is not laid, or barely at all,

upon Copperfield or Esmond. Before the book is out he must have grown

to ten times the weight that we dream of looking for in either of

them. He must be distinct to see; _he_ cannot remain a dim silhouette

against the window, the light must fall full upon his face. How can he

manage it? How can he give that sharp impression of himself that he

easily gives of his world? It is a query that he is in no position to

meet, for the impossible is asked of him. He is expected to lend us

his eyes (which he does), and yet at the same time to present himself

for us to behold with our own; the subject of his story requires no

less.

It is not merely a matter of seeing his personal aspect and address;

these are readily given by implication. When we have watched for a

while the behaviour of the people round him, and have heard something

of his experience and of the way in which he fared in the world, we

shall very well know what he was like to meet, what others saw in him.

There is no difficulty here. But Harry needs a great deal more

substance than this, if his story is to be rightly understood. What it

was like to _be_ Harry, with all that action and reaction of character

and fortune proceeding within him--that is the question, the chief

question; and since it is the most important affair in the book, it

should obviously be rendered as solidly as possible, by the most

emphatic method that the author can command. But Harry, speaking of

himself, can only report; he can only recall the past and _tell_ us

what he was, only _describe_ his emotion; and he may describe very

vividly, and he does, but it would necessarily be more convincing if

we could get behind his description and judge for ourselves. Drama we

want, always drama, for the central, essential, paramount affair,

whatever it is; Harry's consciousness ought to be dramatized.

Something is lost if it is represented solely by his account of it.

Meredith may enable Harry to give an account so brilliant that the

defect is forgotten; that is not the point. But could he have done

more? I think so; only it would have meant the surrender of the method

of autobiography.

Here then, I conclude, the dramatizing force of the first person gives

out. It is very useful for enhancing the value of a picture, where

none but the pictorial method is available, where we are bound to rely

upon an intervening story-teller in some guise or other; it is much

more satisfactory to know who the story-teller is, and to see him as a

part of the story, than to be deflected away from the book by the

author, an arbitrary, unmeasurable, unappraisable factor. But when the

man in the book is expected to make a picture of himself, a searching

and elaborate portrait, then the limit of his capacity is touched and

passed; or rather there is a better method, one of finer capacity,

then ready to the author's hand, and there is no reason to be content

with the hero's mere report. The figure of the story-teller is a

dramatic fact in Meredith's book, and that is all to the good; but the

story-teller's inner history--it is not clear that we need the

intervention of anybody in this matter, and if it might be dramatized,

made immediately visible, dramatized it evidently should be. By all

means let us have Harry's account if we must have somebody's, but

perhaps there is no such need. There seems to be none; it is surely

time to take the next step in the process I am trying to track.

X

And the next step is to lay aside the autobiographic device which the

novelist was seen to adopt, a few pages ago, in the interest of drama.

When it has served as Dickens and Thackeray made it serve, it seems to

have shown the extent of its power; if the picture of a life is to be

still further dramatized, other arts must be called into play. I am

still assuming that the novel under consideration is one that

postulates--as indeed most novels do--a point of view which is not

that of the reader; I am supposing that the story requires a seeing

eye, in the sense I suggested in speaking of Vanity Fair. If no such

selecting, interpreting, composing minister is needed, then we have

drama unmixed; and I shall come across an example or so in fiction

later on. It is drama unmixed when the reader is squarely in front of

the scene, all the time, knowing nothing about the story beyond so

much as may be gathered from the aspect of the scene, the look and

speech of the people. That does not happen often in fiction, except in

short pieces, small _contes_. And still I am concerned with the kind

of book that preponderantly needs the seeing eye--the kind of novel

that I call distinctively pictorial.

The novelist, therefore, returns to the third person again, but he

returns with a marked difference. He by no means resumes his original

part, that of Thackeray in Vanity Fair; for his hero's personal

narration he does not substitute his own once more. It is still the

man in the book who sees and judges and reflects; all the picture of

life is still rendered in the hero's terms. But the difference is that

instead of receiving his report we now see him in the act of judging

and reflecting; his consciousness, no longer a matter of hearsay, a

matter for which we must take his word, is now before us in its

original agitation. Here is a spectacle for the reader, with no

obtrusive interpreter, no transmitter of light, no conductor of

meaning. This man's interior life is cast into the world of

independent, rounded objects; it is given room to show itself, it

appears, it _acts_. A distinction is made between the scene which the

man surveys, and the energy within him which converts it all into the

stuff of his own being. The scene, as much as ever, is watched through

his eyes; but now there is this other fact, in front of the scene,

actually under the hand of the reader. To this fact the value of drama

has accrued.

Meredith would have sacrificed nothing, so far as I can see, by

proceeding to the further stage in Harry Richmond--unless perhaps the

story, told in the third person, might seem to lose some of its

airings of romance. On the other hand, the advantage of following the

stir of Harry's imagination _while_ it is stirring would be great;

the effect would be straighter, the impression deeper, the reader

would have been nearer to Harry throughout, and more closely

implicated in his affair. Think of the young man, for instance, in

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment--there is a young man whose

experience surrounds and presses upon the reader, is felt and tasted

and endured by the reader; and any one who has been through the book

has truly become Raskolnikov, and knows exactly what it was to be that

young man. Drama is there pushed into the theatre of a mind; the play

proceeds with the reading of the book, accompanying the eye that falls

on it. How could a retrospect in the words of the young man--only of

course Dostoevsky had no choice in the matter, such a method was ruled

out--but supposing the story had admitted it, how could a retrospect

have given Raskolnikov thus bodily into the reader's possession? There

could have been no conviction in his own account comparable with the

certainty which Dostoevsky has left to us, and left because he neither

spoke for himself (as the communicative author) nor allowed

Raskolnikov to speak, but uncovered the man's mind and made us look.

It seems, then, to be a principle of the story-teller's art that a

personal narrator will do very well and may be extremely helpful, so

long as the story is only the reflection of life beyond and outside

him; but that as soon as the story begins to find its centre of

gravity in his own life, as soon as the main weight of attention is

claimed for the speaker rather than for the scene, then his report of

himself becomes a matter which might be strengthened, and which should

accordingly give way to the stronger method. This I take to be a

general principle, and where it appears to be violated a critic would

instinctively look for the particular reason which makes it

inapplicable to the particular case. No reflection, no picture, where

living drama is possible--it is a good rule; do not let the hero come

between us and his active mind, do not let the heroine stand in front

of her emotions and portray them--unless for cause, for some needful

effect that would otherwise be missed. I see the reason and the effect

very plainly in Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, to take a casual example,

where the point of the whole thing is that the man should give himself

away unknowingly; in Jane Eyre, to take another, I see neither--but it

is hard to throw such a dry question upon tragic little Jane.

If it should still be doubted, however, whether the right use of

autobiography is really so limited, it might be a good answer to point

to Henry James's Strether, in The Ambassadors; Strether may stand as a

living demonstration of all that autobiography cannot achieve. He is

enough to prove finally how far the intricate performance of thought

is beyond the power of a man to record in his own language.

Nine-tenths of Strether's thought--nine-tenths, that is to say, of the

silvery activity which makes him what he is--would be lost but for the

fact that its adventures are caught in time, while they are

proceeding, and enacted in the book. Pictured by him, as he might

himself look back on them, they would drop to the same plane as the

rest of the scene, the picture of the other people in the story; his

state of mind would figure in his description on the same terms as the

world about him, it would simply be a matter for him to describe like

another. In the book as it is, Strether personally has nothing to do

with the impression that is made by the mazy career of his

imagination, he has no hand in the effect it produces. It speaks for

itself, it spreads over the scene and colours the world just as it did

for Strether. It is immediately in the foreground, and the "seeing

eye" to which it is presented is not his, but the reader's own.

No longer a figure that leans and looks out of a window, scanning a

stretch of memory--that is not the image suggested by Henry James's

book. It is rather as though the reader himself were at the window,

and as though the window opened straight into the depths of Strether's

conscious existence. The energy of his perception and discrimination

is there seen at work. His mind is the mirror of the scene beyond it,

and the other people in the book exist only in relation to him; but

his mind, his own thought of them, is there absolutely, its restless

evolution is in full sight. I do not say that this is a complete

account of the principle on which the book is constructed; for indeed

the principle goes further, encompassing points of method to be dealt

with later. But for the moment let the book stand as the type of the

novel in which a mind is dramatized--reflecting the life to which it

is exposed, but itself performing its own peculiar and private life.

This last, in the case of Strether, involves a gradual, long-drawn

change, from the moment when he takes up the charge of rescuing his

young friend from the siren of Paris, to the moment when he finds

himself wishing that his young friend would refuse to be rescued. Such

is the curve in the unexpected adventure of his imagination. It is

given as nobody's view--not his own, as it would be if he told the

story himself, and not the author's, as it would be if Henry James

told the story. The author does not tell the story of Strether's mind;

he makes it tell itself, he dramatizes it.

Thus it is that the novelist pushes his responsibility further and

further away from himself. The fiction that he devises is ultimately

his; but it looks poor and thin if he openly claims it as his, or at

any rate it becomes much more substantial as soon as he fathers it

upon another. This is not _my_ story, says the author; you know

nothing of me; it is the story of this man or woman in whose words you

have it, and he or she is a person whom you _can_ know; and you may

see for yourselves how the matter arose, the man and woman being such

as they are; it all hangs together, and it makes a solid and

significant piece of life. And having said this, the author has only

moved the question a stage further, and it reappears in exactly the

same form. The man or the woman, after all, is only telling and

stating, and we are still invited to accept the story upon somebody's

authority. The narrator may do his best, and may indeed do so well

that to hear his account is as good as having seen what he describes,

and nothing could be better than that; the matter might rest there, if

this were all. But it must depend considerably on the nature of his

story, for it may happen that he tells and describes things that a man

is never really in a position to substantiate; his account of himself,

for example, cannot be thoroughly valid, not through any want of

candour on his part, but simply because no man can completely

objectify himself, and a credible account of anything must appear to

detach it, to set it altogether free for inspection. And so the

novelist passes on towards drama, gets behind the narrator, and

represents the mind of the narrator as in itself a kind of action.

By so doing, be it noted, he forfeits none of his special freedom, as

I have called it, the picture-making faculty that he enjoys as a

story-teller. He is not constrained, like the playwright, to turn his

story into dramatic action and nothing else. He has dramatized his

novel step by step, until the mind of the picture-maker, Strether or

Raskolnikov, is present upon the page; but Strether and Raskolnikov

are just as free to project their view of the world, to picture it

for the reader, as they might be if they spoke in person. The

difference is in the fact that we now see the very sources of the

activity within them; we not only share their vision, we watch them

absorbing it. Strether in particular, with a mind working so

diligently upon every grain of his experience, is a most luminous

painter of the world in which he moves--a small circle, but nothing in

it escapes him, and he imparts his summary of a thousand matters to

the reader; the view that he opens is as panoramic, often enough, as

any of Thackeray's sweeping surveys, only the scale is different, with

a word barely breathed in place of a dialogue, minutes for months, a

turn of a head or an intercepted glance for a chronicle of crime or

adulterous intrigue. That liberty, therefore, of standing above the

story and taking a broad view of many things, of transcending the

limits of the immediate scene--nothing of this is sacrificed by the

author's steady advance in the direction of drama. The man's mind has

become visible, phenomenal, dramatic; but in acting its part it still

lends us eyes, is still an opportunity of extended vision.

It thus becomes clear why the prudent novelist tends to prefer an

indirect to a direct method. The simple story-teller begins by

addressing himself openly to the reader, and then exchanges this

method for another and another, and with each modification he reaches

the reader from a further remove. The more circuitous procedure on the

part of the author produces a straighter effect for the reader; that

is why, other things being equal, the more dramatic way is better than

the less. It is indirect, as a method; but it places the thing itself

in view, instead of recalling and reflecting and picturing it. For any

story, no doubt, there is an ideal point upon this line of progress

towards drama, where the author finds the right method of telling the

story. The point is indicated by the subject of the story itself, by

the particular matter that is to be brought out and made plain; and

the author, while he regards the subject and nothing else, is guided

to the best manner of treatment by a twofold consideration. In the

first place he wishes the story so far as possible to speak for

itself, the people and the action to appear independently rather than

to be described and explained. To this end the method is raised to the

highest dramatic power that the subject allows, until at last,

perhaps, it is found that nothing need be explained at all; there need

be no revelation of anybody's thought, no going behind any of the

appearances on the surface of the action; even the necessary

description, as we shall see later on, may be so treated that this too

gains the value of drama. Such is the first care of the prudent

novelist, and I have dwelt upon it in detail. But it is accompanied

and checked by another, not less important.

This is his care for economy; the method is to be pushed as far as the

subject can profit by it, but no further. It may happen (for instance

in David Copperfield) that the story _needs_ no high dramatic value,

and that it would get no advantage from a more dramatic method. If it

would gain nothing, it would undoubtedly lose; the subject would be

over-treated and would suffer accordingly. Nothing would have been

easier than for Dickens to take the next step, as I call it--to treat

his story from the point of view of David, but not as David's own

narration. Dickens might have laid bare the mind of his hero and

showed its operation, as Dostoevsky did with his young man. There was

no reason for doing so, however, since the subject is not essentially

in David at all, but in the linked fortunes of a number of people

grouped around him. David's consciousness, if we watched it instead of

listening to his story, would be unsubstantial indeed; Dickens would

be driven to enrich it, giving him a more complicated life within;

with the result that the centre would be displaced and the subject so

far obscured. A story is damaged by too much treatment as by too

little, and the severely practical need of true economy in all that

concerns a novel is demonstrated once more.

I go no further for the moment, I do not yet consider how the picture

of a man's mind is turned into action, induced to assume the look of

an objective play. It is a very pretty achievement of art, perhaps the

most interesting effect that fiction is able to produce, and I think

it may be described more closely. But I return meanwhile to the device

of the first person, and to another example of the way in which it is

used for its dramatic energy. For my point is so oddly illustrated by

the old contrivance of the "epistolary" novel that I cannot omit to

glance at it briefly; the kind of enhancement which is sought by the

method of The Ambassadors is actually the very same as that which is

sought by the method of Clarissa and Grandison. Richardson and Henry

James, they are both faced by the same difficulty; one of them is

acutely aware of it, and takes very deep-laid precautions to

circumvent it; the other, I suppose, does not trouble about the theory

of his procedure, but he too adopts a certain artifice which carries

him past the particular problem, though at the same time it involves

him in several more. Little as Richardson may suspect it, he--and

whoever else has the idea of making a story out of a series of

letters, or a running diary written from day to day--is engaged in the

attempt to show a mind in action, to give a dramatic display of the

commotion within a breast. He desires to get into the closest touch

with Clarissa's life, and to set the reader in the midst of it; and

this is a possible expedient, though it certainly has its drawbacks.

He wishes to avoid throwing Clarissa's agitations into the past and

treating them as a historical matter. If they were to become the

subject of a record, compiled by her biographer, something would be

lost; there would be no longer the same sense of meeting Clarissa

afresh, every morning, and of witnessing the new development of her

wrongs and woes, already a little more poignant than they were last

night. Even if he set Clarissa to write the story in after days,

preserving her life for the purpose, she could not quite give us this

recurring suspense and shock of sympathy; the lesson of her fortitude

would be weakened. Reading her letters, you hear the cry that was

wrung from her at the moment; you look forward with her in dismay to

the ominous morrow; the spectacle of her bearing under such terrible

trials is immediate and urgent. You accompany her step by step, the

end still in the future, knowing no more than she how the next corner

is to be turned. This is truly to share her life, to lead it by her

side, to profit by her example; at any rate her example is eloquently

present. Richardson or another, whoever first thought of making her

tell her story while she is still in the thick of it, invented a

fashion of dramatizing her sensibility that is found to be serviceable

occasionally, even now, though scarcely for an enterprise on

Clarissa's scale.

Her emotion, like Strether's, is caught in passing; like him she

dispenses with the need of a seer, a reflector, some one who will form

an impression of her state of mind and reproduce it. The struggles of

her heart are not made the material of a chronicle. She reports them,

indeed, but at such brief and punctual intervals that her report is

like a wheel of life, it reveals her heart in its very pulsation. The

queer and perverse idea of keeping her continually bent over her

pen--she must have written for many hours every day--has at least this

advantage, that for the spectator it keeps her long ordeal always in

the foreground. Clarissa's troubles fall within the book, as I have

expressed it; they are contemporaneous, they are happening while she

writes, this latest agony is a new one since she wrote last, which was

only yesterday. Much that is denied to autobiography is thus gained by

Clarissa's method, and for her story the advantage is valuable. The

subject of her story is not in the distressing events, but in her

emotion and her comportment under the strain; how a young gentlewoman

suffers and conducts herself in such a situation--that was what

Richardson had to show, and the action of the tale is shaped round

this question. Lovelace hatches his villainies in order that the

subject of the book may be exhaustively illustrated. It is therefore

necessary that the conflict within Clarissa should hold the centre,

and for this the epistolary method does indeed provide.

Richardson makes the most of it, without doubt; he has strained it to

its utmost capacity before he has done with it. A writer who thinks of

constructing a novel out of somebody's correspondence may surely

consult Clarissa upon all the details of the craft. And Clarissa, and

Grandison still more, will also give the fullest warning of the

impracticability of the method, after all; for Richardson is forced to

pay heavily for its single benefit. He pays with the desperate shifts

to which he is driven in order to maintain any kind of verisimilitude.

The visible effort of keeping all Clarissa's friends at a distance all

the time, so that she may be enabled to communicate only by letter,

seems always on the point of bearing him down; while in the case of

Grandison it may be said to do so finally, when Miss Byron is reduced

to reporting to her friend what another friend has reported concerning

Sir Charles's report of his past life among the Italians. I only speak

of these wonderful books, however, for the other aspect of their

method--because it shows a stage in the natural struggle of the mere

record to become something more, to develop independent life and to

appear as action. Where the record is one of emotions and sentiments,

delicately traced and disentangled, it is not so easy to see how they

may be exposed to an immediate view; and here is a manner, not very

handy indeed, but effective in its degree, of meeting the difficulty.