What, then, is a dramatic subject? Hitherto I have been speaking of
novels in which some point of view, other than that of the reader, the
impartial onlooker, is prescribed by the subject in hand. In big
chronicles like Thackeray's it is clear that the controlling point of
view can only be that of the chronicler himself, or of some one whom
he sets up to tell the story on his behalf. The expanse of life which
the story covers is far too great to be shown to the reader in a
series of purely dramatic scenes. It is absolutely necessary for the
author or his spokesman to draw back for a general view of the matter
from time to time; and whenever he does so the story becomes _his_
impression, summarized and pictured for the reader. In Esmond or The
Virginians or The Newcomes, there are tracts and tracts of the story
which are bound to remain outside the reader's direct vision; only a
limited number of scenes and occasions could possibly be set forth in
the form of drama. A large, loose, manifold subject, in short,
extensive in time and space, full of crowds and diversions, is a
pictorial subject and can be nothing else. However intensely it may be
dramatized here and there, on the whole it must be presented as a
conspectus, the angle of vision being assigned to the narrator. It is
simply a question of amount, of quantity, of the reach of the subject.
If it passes a certain point it exceeds the capacity of the straight
and dramatic method.
Madame Bovary and The Ambassadors, again, are undramatic in their
matter, though their reach is comparatively small; for in both of them
the emphasis falls upon changes of mind, heart, character, gradually
drawn out, not upon any clash or opposition resolved in action. They
_might_ be treated scenically, no doubt; their authors might
conceivably have handled them in terms of pure drama, without any
direct display of Emma's secret fancies or Strether's brooding
imagination. But in neither case could that method make the most of
the subject or bring out all that it has to give. The most expressive,
most enlightening part of Strether's story lies in the reverberating
theatre of his mind, and as for Emma, the small exterior facts of her
story are of very slight account. Both these books, therefore, in
their general lines, are pictured impressions, not actions--even
though in Bovary to some extent, and in The Ambassadors almost wholly,
the picture is itself dramatized in the fashion I have indicated. That
last effect belongs only to the final method, the treatment of the
surface; underneath it there is in both the projection of a certain
person's point of view.
But now look at the contrast in The Awkward Age, a novel in which
Henry James followed a single method throughout, from top to bottom,
denying himself the help of any other. He chose to treat this story as
pure drama; he never once draws upon the characteristic resource of
the novelist--who is able, as the dramatist is not able, to give a
generalized and foreshortened account of the matter in hand. In The
Awkward Age everything is immediate and particular; there is no
insight into anybody's thought, no survey of the scene from a height,
no resumption of the past in retrospect. The whole of the book passes
scenically before the reader, and nothing is offered but the look and
the speech of the characters on a series of chosen occasions. It might
indeed be printed as a play; whatever is not dialogue is simply a kind
of amplified stage-direction, adding to the dialogue the expressive
effect which might be given it by good acting. The novelist, using
this method, claims only one advantage over the playwright; it is the
advantage of ensuring the very best acting imaginable, a performance
in which every actor is a perfect artist and not the least point is
ever missed. The play is not handed over to the chances of
interpretation--that is the difference; the author creates the manner
in which the words are spoken, as well as the words themselves, and he
may keep the manner at an ideal pitch. Otherwise the novelist
completely ties his hands, submitting to all the restraints of the
playwright in order to secure the compactness and the direct force of
true drama.
What is the issue of a certain conjunction of circumstances? The
subject of the book is in the question. First of all we see a highly
sophisticated circle of men and women, who seem so well practised in
the art of living that they could never be taken by surprise. Life in
their hands has been refined to a process in which nothing appears to
have been left to chance. Their intelligence accounts for everything;
they know where they are, they know what they want, and under a
network of discretion which they all sustain they thoroughly
understand each other. It is a charmed world, altogether
self-contained, occupying a corner of modern London. It is carefully
protected within and without; and yet oddly enough there is one quite
common and regular contingency for which it is not prepared at all.
Its handling of life proceeds smoothly so long as all the men and
women together are on a level of proficiency, all alike experienced in
the art; and they can guard themselves against intruders from
elsewhere. But periodically it must happen that their young grow up;
the daughter of the house reaches the "awkward age," becomes suddenly
too old for the school-room and joins her elders below. Then comes the
difficulty; there is an interval in which she is still too young for
the freedom of her elders' style, and it looks as though she might
disconcert them not a little, sitting there with wide eyes. Do they
simply disregard her and continue their game as before? Do they try to
adapt their style to her inexperience? Apparently they have no theory
of their proper course; the difficulty seems to strike them afresh,
every time that it recurs. In other such worlds, not of modern London,
it is foreseen and provided for; the young woman is married and
launched at once, there is no awkward age. But here and now--or rather
here and _then_, in the nineteenth century--it makes a real little
situation, and this is the subject of Henry James's book.
It is clearly dramatic; it is a clean-cut situation, raising the
question of its issue, and by answering the question the subject is
treated. What will these people do, how will they circumvent this
awkwardness? That is what the book is to show--action essentially, not
the picture of a character or a state of mind. Mind and character
enter into it, of course, as soon as the situation is particularized;
the girl becomes an individual, with her own outlook, her own way of
reaching a conclusion, and her point of view must then be understood.
But whatever it may be, it does not constitute the situation. That is
there in advance, it exists in general, and the girl comes upon the
scene, like the rest of the people in the book, to illustrate it. The
subject of the book lies in their behaviour; there are no gradual
processes of change and development to be watched in their minds, it
is their action that is significant. By clever management the author
can avoid the necessity of looking inside their motives; these are
betrayed by visible and audible signs. The story proceeds in the
open, point by point; from one scene to another it shows its curve and
resolves the situation. And very ironic and pleasing and unexpected
the resolution proves. It takes everybody by surprise; no one notices
what is happening till it is over, but it begins to happen from the
start. The girl Nanda, supposably a helpless spectator, takes control
of the situation and works it out for her elders. She is the
intelligent and expert and self-possessed one of them all; they have
only to leave everything to her light manipulation, and the
awkwardness--which is theirs, not hers--is surmounted. By the time she
has displayed all her art the story is at an end; her action has
answered the question and provided the issue.
The theme of the book being what it is, an action merely, and an
action strictly limited in its scope, it requires no narrator. In a
dozen scenes or so the characters may set it forth on their own
account, and we have only to look on; nobody need stand by and
expound. The situation involves no more than a small company of
people, and there is no reason for them to straggle far, in space or
time; on the contrary, the compactness of the situation is one of its
special marks. Its point is that it belongs to a little organized
circle, a well-defined incident in their lives. And since the root of
the matter is in their behaviour, in the manner in which they meet or
fail to meet the incident, their behaviour will sufficiently express
what is in their minds; it is not as though the theme of the story lay
in some slow revulsion or displacement of mood, which it would be
necessary to understand before its issue in action could be
appreciated. What do they _do_?--that is the immediate question; what
they think and feel is a matter that is entirely implied in the
answer. Obviously that was not at all the case with Strether. The
workings of his imagination spread over far more ground, ramified
infinitely further than anything that he _did_; his action depended
upon his view of things and logically flowed from it, but his action
by itself would give no measure at all of his inner life. With the
people of The Awkward Age, on the other hand, their action fully
covers their motives and sentiments--or can be made to do so, by the
care of a dexterous author.
And so the story can be rendered with absolute consistency, on one
method only, if the author chooses. And he does so choose, and The
Awkward Age rounds off the argument I have sought to unwind--the
sequence of method and method, each one in turn pushing its way
towards a completer dramatization of the story. Here at any rate is
one book in which a subject capable of acting itself out from
beginning to end is made to do so, one novel in which method becomes
as consistent and homogeneous as it ever may in fiction. No other
manner of telling a story can be quite so true to itself. For whereas
drama, in this book, depends not at all upon the author's "word of
honour," and deals entirely with immediate facts, the most undramatic
piece of fiction can hardly for long be consistent in its own line,
but must seek the support of scenic presentation. Has anyone tried to
write a novel in which there should be no dialogue, no immediate
scene, nothing at all but a diffused and purely subjective impression?
Such a novel, if it existed, would be a counterpart to The Awkward
Age. Just as Henry James's book never deviates from the straight,
square view of the passing event, so the other would be exclusively
oblique, general, retrospective, a meditation upon the past, bringing
nothing into the foreground, dramatizing nothing in talk or action.
The visionary fiction of Walter Pater keeps as nearly to a method of
that kind, I suppose, as fiction could. In Marius probably, if it is
to be called a novel, the art of drama is renounced as thoroughly as
it has ever occurred to a novelist to dispense with it. I scarcely
think that Marius ever speaks or is spoken to audibly in the whole
course of the book; such at least is the impression that it leaves.
The scenes of the story reach the reader by refraction, as it were,
through the medium of Pater's harmonious murmur. But scenes they must
be; not even Pater at his dreamiest can tell a story without incident
particularized and caught in the act. When Marius takes a journey,
visits a philosopher or enters a church, the event stands out of the
past and makes an appeal to the eye, is presented as it takes place;
and this is a movement in the direction of drama, even if it goes no
further. Pater, musing over the life of his hero, all but lost in the
general sentiment of its grace and virtue, is arrested by the definite
images of certain hours and occasions; the flow of his rumination is
interrupted while he pauses upon these, to make them visible; they
must be given a kind of objectivity, some slight relief against the
dim background. No story-teller, in short, can use a manner as
strictly subjective, as purely personal, as the manner of The Awkward
Age is the reverse.
But as for this book, it not only ends one argument, it is also a
turning-point that begins another. For when we have seen how fiction
gradually aspires to the weight and authority of the thing acted,
purposely limiting its own discursive freedom, it remains to see how
it resumes its freedom when there is good cause for doing so. It is
not for nothing that The Awkward Age is as lonely as it seems to be in
its kind. I have seized upon it as an example of the dramatic method
pursued _à outrance_, and it is very convenient for criticism that it
happens to be there; the book points a sound moral with clear effect.
But when it is time to suggest that even in dealing with a subject
entirely dramatic, a novelist may well find reason to keep to his old
familiar mixed method--_circumspice_: it would appear that he does so
invariably. Where are the other Awkward Ages, the many that we might
expect if the value of drama is so great? I dare say one might
discover a number of small things, short dramatic pieces (I have
mentioned the case of Maupassant), which would satisfy the
requirement; but on the scale of Henry James's book I know of nothing
else. Plenty of people find their theme in matters of action, matters
of incident, like the story of Nanda; it is strange that they should
not sometimes choose to treat it with strict consistency. How is one
to assert a principle which is apparently supported by only one book
in a thousand thousand?
I think it must be concluded, in the first place, that to treat a
subject with the rigour of Henry James is extremely difficult, and
that the practice of the thousand thousand is partly to be explained
by this fact. Perhaps many of them would be more dramatically inclined
if the way were easier. It must always be simpler for a story-teller
to use his omniscience, to dive into the minds of his people for an
explanation of their acts, than to make them so act that no such
explanation is ever needed. Or perhaps the state of criticism may be
to blame, with its long indifference to these questions of theory; or
perhaps (to say all) there is no very lively interest in them even
among novelists. Anyhow we may say from experience that a novel is
more likely to fall below its proper dramatic pitch than to strain
beyond it; in most of the books around us there is an easy-going
reliance on a narrator of some kind, a showman who is behind the
scenes of the story and can tell us all about it. He seems to come
forward in many a case without doing the story any particular service;
sometimes he actually embarrasses it, when a matter of vivid drama is
violently forced into the form of a narration. One can only suspect
that he then exists for the convenience of the author. It _is_ helpful
to be able to say what you like about the characters and their doings
in the book; it may be very troublesome to make their doings as
expressive as they might be, eloquent enough to need no comment.
Yet to see the issue slowly unfolding and flowering out of the middle
of a situation, and to watch it emerge unaided, with everything that
it has to say said by the very lines and masses of its structure--this
is surely an experience apart, for a novel-reader, with its
completeness and cleanness and its hard, pure edge. It is always
memorable, it fills the mind so acceptably that a story-teller might
be ready and eager to aspire to this effect, one would think, whenever
his matter gives him the chance. Again and again I have wished to
silence the voice of the spokesman who is supposed to be helping me to
a right appreciation of the matter in hand--the author (or his
creature) who knows so much, and who pours out his information over
the subject, and who talks and talks about an issue that might be
revealing itself without him. The spokesman has his way too often, it
can hardly be doubted; the instant authority of drama is neglected. It
is the day of the deep-breathed narrator, striding from volume to
volume as tirelessly as the Scudéries and Calprenèdes of old; and it
is true, no doubt, that the novel (in all languages, too, it would
seem) is more than ever inclined to the big pictorial subject, which
requires the voluble chronicler; but still it must happen occasionally
that a novelist prefers a dramatic motive, and might cast it into a
round, sound action and leave it in that form if he chose. Here again
there is plenty of room for enterprise and experiment in fiction, even
now.
But at the same time it must be admitted that there is more in the
general unwillingness of story-tellers to entrust the story to the
people in it--there is more than I have said. If they are much less
dramatic than they might be, still it is not to be asserted that a
subject will often find perfect expression through the uncompromising
method of The Awkward Age. That book itself perhaps suggests, if it
does no more than suggest, that drama cannot always do everything in a
novel, even where the heart of the story seems to lie in its action.
The story of Nanda drops neatly into scenic form--that is obvious; it
is well adapted for treatment as a row of detached episodes or
occasions, through which the subject is slowly developed. But it is a
question whether a story which requires and postulates such a very
particular background, so singular and so artificial, is reasonably
denied the licence to make its background as effective as possible, by
whatever means. Nanda's world is not the kind of society that can be
taken for granted; it is not modernity in general, it is a small and
very definite tract. For the purposes of her story it is important
that her setting should be clearly seen and known, and the method of
telling her story must evidently take this into account. Nanda and her
case are not rendered if the quality of the civilization round her is
left in any way doubtful, and it happens to be a very odd quality
indeed.
Henry James decided, I suppose, that it was sufficiently implied in
the action of his book and needed nothing more; Nanda's little world
would be descried behind the scene without any further picturing. He
may have been right, so far as The Awkward Age is concerned; the
behaviour of the people in the story is certainly packed with many
meanings, and perhaps it is vivid enough to enact the general
character of their lives and ways, as well as their situation in the
foreground; perhaps the charmed circle of Mrs. Brookenham and her
wonderful crew is given all the effect that is needed. But the
question brings me to a clear limitation of drama on the whole, and
that is why I raise it. Here is a difficulty to which the dramatic
method, in its full severity, is not specially accommodated, one that
is not in the line of its strength. To many of the difficulties of
fiction, as we have seen, it brings precisely the right instrument; it
gives validity, gives direct force to a story, and to do so is its
particular property. For placing and establishing a piece of action
it is paramount. But where it is not only a matter of placing the
action in view, but of relating it to its surroundings, strict drama
is at once at a disadvantage. The seeing eye of the author, which can
sweep broadly and generalize the sense of what it sees, will meet this
difficulty more naturally. Drama reinforcing and intensifying picture
we have already seen again and again; and now the process is reversed.
From the point of view of the reader, the spectator of the show, the
dramatic scene is vivid and compact; but it is narrow, it can have no
great depth, and the colour of the atmosphere can hardly tell within
the space. It is likely, therefore, that unless this close direct
vision is supplemented by a wider survey, fronting the story from a
more distant point of view, the background of the action, the manner
of life from which it springs, will fail to make its full impression.
It amounts to this, that the play-form--and with it fiction that is
purely dramatic in its method--is hampered in its power to express the
outlying associations of its scene. It _can_ express them, of course;
in clever hands it may seem to do so as thoroughly as any descriptive
narration. But necessarily it does so with far more expense of effort
than the picture-making faculty which lies in the hand of the
novelist; and that is in general a good reason why the prudent
novelist, with all his tendency to shed his privileges, still clings
to this one. It is possible to imagine that a novel might be as bare
of all background as a play of Racine; there might be a story in which
any hint of continuous life, proceeding behind the action, would
simply confuse and distort the right effect. One thinks of the story
of the Princesse de Clèves, floating serenely in the void, without a
sign of any visible support from a furnished world; and there, no
doubt, nothing would be gained by bringing the lucid action to ground
and fixing it in its setting. It is a drama of sentiment, needing only
to be embodied in characters as far as possible detached from any
pictured surroundings, with nothing but the tradition of fine manners
that is inherent in their grand names. But wherever the effect of the
action depends upon its time and place, a novelist naturally turns to
the obvious method if there is no clear reason for refusing it. In The
Awkward Age, to look back at it once more, it may be that there is
such a reason; the beauty of its resolute consistency is of course a
value in itself, and it may be great enough to justify a _tour de
force_. But a _tour de force_ it is, when a novelist seeks to render
the general life of his story in the particular action, and in the
action alone; for his power to support the drama pictorially is always
there, if he likes to make use of it.