Since he practically always does so, readily enough, it may seem
unnecessary to insist upon the matter. Not often have we seen a
novelist pushing his self-denial beyond reason, rejecting the easy way
for the difficult without good cause. But in order to make sure of
breaking a sound rule at the right point, and not before--to take
advantage of laxity when strictness becomes unrewarding, and only
then--it is as well to work both ways, from the easy extreme to the
difficult and back again. The difficult extreme, in fiction, is the
dramatic rule absolute and unmitigated; having reached it from the
other end, having begun with the pictorial summary and proceeded from
thence to drama, we face the same stages reversed. And it is now, I
think, that we best appreciate the liberties taken with the resources
of the novelist by Balzac. His is a case that should be approached
indirectly. If one plunges straight into Balzac, at the beginning of
criticism, it is hard to find the right line through the abundance of
good and bad in his books; there is so much of it, and all so strong
and staring. It looks at first sight as though his good and his bad
alike were entirely conspicuous and unmistakable. His devouring
passion for life, his grotesque romance, his truth and his falsity,
these cover the whole space of the Comédie between them, and nobody
could fail to recognize the full force of either. He is tremendous,
his taste is abominable--what more is there to say of Balzac? And that
much has been said so often, in varied words, that there can be no
need to say it again for the ten-thousandth time.
Such is the aspect that Balzac presents, I could feel, when a critic
tries to face him immediately; his obviousness seems to hide
everything else. But if one passes him by, following the track of the
novelist's art elsewhere, and then returns to him with certain
definite conclusions, his aspect is remarkable in quite a new way. His
badness is perhaps as obvious as before; there is nothing fresh to
discover about that. His greatness, however, wears a different look;
it is no longer the plain and open surface that it was. It has depths
and recesses that did not appear till now, enticing to criticism,
promising plentiful illustration of the ideas that have been gathered
by the way. One after another, the rarer, obscurer effects of fiction
are all found in Balzac, behind his blatant front. He illustrates
everything, and the only difficulty is to know where to begin.
The effect of the generalized picture, for example, supporting the
play of action, is one in which Balzac particularly delights. He
constantly uses it, he makes it serve his purpose with a very high
hand. It becomes more than a support, it becomes a kind of propulsive
force applied to the action at the start. Its value is seen at its
greatest in such books as Le Curé de Village, Père Goriot, La
Recherche de l'Absolu, Eugénie Grandet--most of all, perhaps, in this
last. Wherever, indeed, his subject requires to be lodged securely in
its surroundings, wherever the background is a main condition of the
story, Balzac is in no hurry to precipitate the action; that can
always wait, while he allows himself the leisure he needs for massing
the force which is presently to drive the drama on its way. Nobody
gives such attention as Balzac does in many of his books, and on the
whole in his best, to the setting of the scene; he clearly considers
these preparatory pictures quite as important as the events which they
are to enclose.
And so, in Père Goriot, all the potent life of the Maison Vauquer is
deliberately collected and hoarded up to the point where it is enough,
when it is let loose, to carry the story forward with a strong sweep.
By the time the story itself is reached the Maison Vauquer is a fully
created impression, prepared to the last stroke for the drama to come.
Anything that may take place there will have the whole benefit of its
setting, without more ado; all the rank reality of the house and its
inmates is immediately bestowed on the action. When the tale of Goriot
comes to the front it is already more than the tale of a certain old
man and his woes. Goriot, on the spot, is one of Maman Vauquer's
boarders, and the mere fact is enough, by now, to differentiate him,
to single him out among miserable old men. Whatever he does he carries
with him the daily experience of the dingy house and the clattering
meals and the frowzy company, with Maman Vauquer, hard and hungry and
harassed--Mrs. Todgers would have met her sympathetically, they would
have understood each other--at the head of it. Into Goriot's yearnings
over his fashionable daughters the sounds and sights and smells of his
horrible home have all been gathered; they deepen and strengthen his
poor story throughout. Balzac's care in creating the scene, therefore,
is truly economical; it is not merely a manner of setting the stage
for the drama, it is a provision of character and energy for the drama
when it begins.
His pictures of country towns, too, Saumur, Limoges, Angoulême, have
the same kind of part to play in the Scènes de la vie de province.
When Balzac takes in hand the description of a town or a house or a
workshop, he may always be suspected, at first, of abandoning himself
entirely to his simple, disinterested craving for facts. There are
times when it seems that his inexhaustible knowledge of facts is
carrying him where it will, till his only conscious purpose is to set
down on paper everything that he knows. He is possessed by the lust of
description for its own sake, an insatiable desire to put every detail
in its place, whether it is needed or no. So it seems, and so it is
occasionally, no doubt; there is nothing more tiresome in Balzac than
his zest, his delight, his triumph, when he has apparently succeeded
in forgetting altogether that he is a novelist. He takes a proper
pride in Grandet or Goriot or Lucien, of course; but his heart never
leaps quite so high, it might be thought, as when he sees a chance for
a discourse upon money or commerce or Italian art. And yet the result
is always the same in the end; when he has finished his lengthy
research among the furniture of the lives that are to be evoked, he
has created a scene in which action will move as rapidly as he
chooses, without losing any of its due emphasis. He has illustrated,
in short, the way in which a pictorial impression, wrought to the
right pitch, will speed the work of drama--will become an effective
agent in the book, instead of remaining the mere decorative
introduction that it may seem to be.
Thus it is that Balzac was able to pack into a short book--he never
wrote a long one--such an effect of crowds and events, above all such
an effect of time. Nobody knows how to compress so much experience
into two or three hundred pages as Balzac did unfailingly. I cannot
think that this is due in the least to the laborious interweaving of
his books into a single scheme; I could believe that in general a book
of Balzac's suffers, rather than gains, by the recurrence of the old
names that he has used already elsewhere. It is an amusing trick, but
exactly what is its object? I do not speak of the ordinary "sequel,"
where the fortunes of somebody are followed for another stage, and
where the second part is simply the continuation of the first in a
direct line. But what of the famous idea of making book after book
overlap and encroach and entangle itself with the rest, by the device
of setting the hero of one story to figure more or less obscurely in a
dozen others? The theory is, I suppose, that the characters in the
background and at the corners of the action, if they are Rastignac and
Camusot and Nucingen, retain the life they have acquired elsewhere,
and thereby swell the life of the story in which they reappear. We are
occupied for the moment with some one else, and we discover among his
acquaintances a number of people whom we already know; that fact, it
is implied, will add weight and authority to the story of the man in
the foreground--who is himself, very likely, a man we have met
casually in another book. It ought to make, it must make, his
situation peculiarly real and intelligible that we find him surrounded
by familiar friends of our own; and that is the artistic reason of the
amazing ingenuity with which Balzac keeps them all in play.
Less artistic and more mechanical, I take it, his ingenuity seems than
it did of old. I forget how few are the mistakes and contradictions of
which Balzac has been convicted, in the shuffling and re-shuffling of
his characters; but when his accuracy has been proved there still
remains the question of its bearing upon his art. I only touch upon
the question from a single point of view, when I consider whether the
density of life in so many of his short pieces can really owe
anything to the perpetual flitting of the men and women from book to
book. Suppose that for the moment Balzac is evoking the figure and
fortunes of Lucien de Rubempré, and that a woman who appears
incidentally in his story turns out to be our well-remembered
Delphine, Goriot's daughter. We know a great deal about the past of
Delphine, as it happens; but at this present juncture, in Lucien's
story, her past is entirely irrelevant. It belongs to another
adventure, where it mattered exceedingly, an adventure that took place
before Lucien was heard of at all. As for his story, and for the
reality with which it may be endowed, this depends solely upon our
understanding of _his_ world, _his_ experience; and if Delphine's old
affairs are no part of it, our previous knowledge of her cannot help
us with Lucien. It detracts, rather, from the force of his effect; it
sets up a relation that has nothing to do with him, a relation between
Delphine and the reader, which only obstructs our view of the world as
Lucien sees it. Of the characters in the remoter planes of the action
(and that is Delphine's position in his story) no more is expected
than their value for the purpose of the action in the foreground. That
is all that can be _used_ in the book; whatever more they may bring
will lie idle, will contribute nothing, and may even become an
embarrassment. The numberless people in the Comédie who carry their
lengthening train of old associations from book to book may give the
Comédie, as a whole, the look of unity that Balzac desired; that is
another point. But in any single story, such of these people as appear
by the way, incidentally, must for the time being shed their
irrelevant life; if they fail to do so, they disturb the unity of the
story and confuse its truth.
Balzac's unrivalled power of placing a figure in its surroundings is
not to be explained, then, by his skill in working his separate pieces
together into one great web; the design of the Human Comedy, so
largely artificial, forced upon it as his purpose widened, is no
enhancement of the best of his books. The fullness of experience which
is rendered in these is exactly the same--is more expressive, if
anything--when they are taken out of their context; it is all to be
attributed to their own art. I come back, therefore, to the way in
which Balzac handled his vast store of facts, when he set out to tell
a story, and made them count in the action which he brought to the
fore. He seldom, I think, regards them as material to be disguised, to
be given by implication in the drama itself. He is quite content to
offer his own impression of the general landscape of the story, a
leisurely display which brings us finally to the point of action. Then
the action starts forward with a reserve of vigour that helps it in
various ways. The more important of these, as I see them, will be
dealt with in the next chapter; but meanwhile I may pick out another,
one that is often to be seen in Balzac's work and that he needed only
too often. It was not the best of his work that needed it; but the
effect I mean is an interesting one in itself, and it appeals to a
critic where it occurs. It shows how a novelist, while in general
seeking to raise the power of his picture by means of drama, will
sometimes reverse the process, deliberately, in order to rescue the
power of his drama from becoming violence. If fiction always aims at
the appearance of truth, there are times when the dramatic method is
too much for it, too searching and too betraying. It leaves the story
to speak for itself, but perhaps the story may then say too much to be
reasonably credible. It must be restrained, qualified, toned down, in
order to make its best effect. Where the action, in short, is likely
to seem harsh, overcharged, romantic, it is made to look less so, less
hazardous and more real, by recourse to the art of the picture-maker.
Balzac, it cannot be denied, had frequent cause to look about him for
whatever means there might be of extenuating, and so of confirming, an
incredible story. His passion for truth was often in conflict with his
lust for marvels, and the manner in which they were mixed is the chief
interest, I dare say, of some of his books. See him, for example, in
the Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes, trying with one hand to
write a novel of Parisian manners, with the other a romance of
mystery, and to do full justice to both. Trompe-la-Mort, the Napoleon
of crime, and Esther, the inspired courtesan, represent the romance,
and Balzac sets himself to absorb the extravagant tale into a study
of actual life. If he can get the tale firmly embedded in a background
of truth, its falsity may be disguised, the whole book may even pass
for a scene of the human comedy; it may be accepted as a piece of
reality, on the same level, say, as Eugénie Grandet or Les Parents
Pauvres. That is evidently his aim, and if only his romance were a
little less gaudy, or his truth not quite so true, he would have no
difficulty in attaining it; the action would be subdued and kept in
its place by the pictorial setting. The trouble is that Balzac's idea
of a satisfying crime is as wild as his hold upon facts is sober, so
that an impossible strain is thrown upon his method of reconciling the
two. Do what he will, his romance remains staringly false in its
contrast with his reality; there is an open gap between the wonderful
pictures of the town in Illusions Perdues and the theatrical drama of
the old convict which they introduce. Yet his method was a right one,
though it was perverse of Balzac to be occupied at all with such
devices, when he might have rejected his falsity altogether. In
another man's work, where there is never this sharp distinction
between true and false, where both are merged into something different
from either--in Dickens's work--the method I refer to is much more
successfully followed; and there, in any of Dickens's later books, we
find the clearest example of it.
I have already been reminded of Stevenson's word upon this matter;
Stevenson noted how Dickens's way of dealing with his romantic
intrigues was to lead gradually into them, through well-populated
scenes of character and humour; so that his world is actual, its air
familiar, by the time that his plot begins to thicken. He gives
himself an ample margin in which to make the impression of the kind of
truth he needs, before beginning to concentrate upon the fabulous
action of the climax. Bleak House is a very good case; the highly
coloured climax in that book is approached with great skill and
caution, all in his most masterly style. A broad stream of diversified
life moves slowly in a certain direction, so deliberately at first
that its scope, its spread, is much more evident than its movement.
The book is a big survey of a quantity of odd and amusing people, and
it is only by degrees that the discursive method is abandoned and the
narrative brought to a point. Presently we are in the thick of the
story, hurrying to the catastrophe, without having noticed at all, it
may be, that our novel of manners has turned into a romantic drama,
with a mysterious crime to crown it. Dickens manages it far more
artfully than Balzac, because his imagination is not, like Balzac's,
divided against itself. The world which he peopled with Skimpole and
Guppy and the Bayham Badgers was a world that could easily include
Lady Dedlock, for though she is perhaps of the theatre, they are
certainly not of the common earth. They and she alike are at the same
angle to literal fact, they diverging one way, she another; they
accordingly make a kind of reality which can assimilate her romance.
Dickens was saved from trying to write two books at once by the fact
that one completely satisfied him. It expressed the exciting, amazing,
exhilarating world he lived in himself, with its consistent
transmutation of all values, and he knew no other.
The method which he finally worked out for himself was exactly what he
required. There might be much to say of it, for it is by no means
simple, but I am only concerned with one or two points in it. The
chief characteristic I take to be this careful introduction of violent
drama into a scene already prepared to vouch for it--a scene so alive
that it compels belief, so queer that almost anything might happen
there naturally. The effect which Dickens gets from the picture in his
novels, as opposed to the action, is used as a sort of attestation of
the action; and it surely fulfils its mission very strikingly in the
best of his work--the best from this point of view--Bleak House,
Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend. His incurable love of labyrinthine
mystification, when it really ran away with him, certainly defeated
all precautions; not even old Dorrit's Marshalsea, not even Flora and
Mr. F.'s Aunt, can do anything to carry off the story of the Clennams.
But so long as he was content with a fairly straightforward romance,
all went well; the magnificent life that he projected was prepared to
receive and to speed it. Blimber and Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Tox, the
Podsnaps and Twemlow and the Veneerings, all contribute out of their
overflow of energy to the force of a drama--a drama in which they may
take no specific part, but which depends on them for the furnishing of
an appropriate scene, a favouring background, a world attuned. This
and so much more they do that it may seem like insulting them even to
think for a moment of their subordination to the general design, which
is indeed a great deal less interesting than they. But Dickens's
method is sound and good, and not the less so because he used it for
comparatively trivial purposes. It is strange that he should have
known how to invent such a scene, and then have found no better drama
to enact on it--strange and always stranger, with every re-reading.
That does not affect his handling of a subject, which is all that I
deal with here.
The life which he creates and distributes right and left, in such a book
as Bleak House, before bending to his story--this I call his picture,
for picture it is in effect, not dramatic action. It exhibits the world
in which Lady Dedlock is to meditate murder, the fog of the suit in
Chancery out of which the intrigue of the book is to emerge. It is the
summary of a situation, with its elements spreading widely and touching
many lives; it gathers them in and gives an impression of them all. It
is pictorial as a whole, and quite as much so as any of Thackeray's
broad visions. But I have noted before how inevitably Dickens's
picture, unlike Thackeray's, is presented in the _form_ of scenic
action, and here is a case in point. All this impression of life,
stretching from the fog-bound law courts to the marshes of Chesney Wold,
from Krook and Miss Flite to Sir Leicester and Volumnia, is rendered as
incident, as a succession of particular occasions--never, or very
seldom, as general and far-seeing narrative, after Thackeray's manner.
Dickens continually holds to the immediate scene, even when his object
is undramatic; he is always readier to work in action and dialogue than
to describe at large; he is happier in placing a character there before
us, as the man or woman talked and behaved in a certain hour, on a
certain spot, than in reflecting a long impression of their manner of
living. In Thackeray's hands the life of Miss Flite, for instance, would
have become a legend, recalled and lingered over, illustrated by passing
glimpses of her ways and oddities. With Dickens she is always a little
human being who figures upon a scene, in a group, a visible creature
acting her small part; she is always dramatic.
And Dickens, using this method everywhere, even in such a case as
hers--even where his purpose, that is to say, is pictorial, to give
the sense of a various and vivacious background--is forced to
crystallize and formulate his characters very sharply, if they are to
make their effect; it is why he is so often reduced to the expedient
of labelling his people with a trick or a phrase, which they have to
bring with them every time they appear. Their opportunities are
strictly limited; the author does not help them out by glancing freely
into their lives and sketching them broadly. Flite, Snagsby, Chadband
and the rest of them--whatever they are, they must be all of it within
narrow bounds, within the few scenes that can be allotted to them; and
if one of them fails now and then it is not surprising, the wonder is
that most of them succeed so brilliantly. In thus translating his
picture into action Dickens chose the most exigent way, but it was
always the right way for him. He was curiously incapable in the other;
when occasionally he tries his hand at picture-making, in Thackeray's
manner--attempting to summarize an impression of social life among the
Veneerings, of official life among the Barnacles--his touch is wild
indeed. Away from a definite episode in an hour prescribed he is
seldom at ease.
But though the actual presentation is thus dramatic, his books are in
fact examples of the pictured scene that opens and spreads very
gradually, in order to make a valid world for a drama that could not
be precipitated forthwith, a drama that would be naked romance if it
stood by itself. Stevenson happened upon this point, with regard to
Dickens, in devising the same method for a story of his own, The
Wrecker, a book in which he too proposed to insinuate an abrupt and
violent intrigue into credible, continuous life. He, of course, knew
precisely what he was doing--where Dickens followed, as I suppose, an
uncritical instinct; the purpose of The Wrecker is clearly written
upon it, and very ingeniously carried out. But I doubt whether
Stevenson himself noticed that in all his work, or nearly, he was
using an artifice of the same kind. He spoke of his habitual
inclination towards the story told in the first person as though it
were a chance preference, and he may not have perceived how logically
it followed from the subjects that mostly attracted him. They were
strongly romantic, vividly dramatic; he never had occasion to use the
first person for the effect I considered a while ago, its enhancement
of a plain narrative. I called it the first step towards the
dramatization of a story, and so it is in a book like Esmond, a
broadly pictured novel of manners. But it is more than this in a book
like The Master of Ballantrae, where the subject is a piece of
forcible, closely knit action. The value of rendering it as somebody's
narrative, of placing it in the mouth of a man who was there on the
spot, is in this book the value of working the drama into a picture,
of passing it through a man's thought and catching his reflection of
it. As the picture in Esmond is enhanced, so the drama in Ballantrae
is toned and qualified by the method of presentation. The same method
has a different effect, according to the subject upon which it is
used; as a splash of the same grey might darken white surface and
lighten a black. In Esmond the use of the first person raises the book
in the direction of drama, in Ballantrae it thrusts the book in the
other direction, towards the pictured impression. So it would seem;
but perhaps it is a fine distinction that criticism can afford to pass
by.