The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I
take to be governed by the question of the point of view--the question
of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story. He tells it
as _he_ sees it, in the first place; the reader faces the story-teller
and listens, and the story may be told so vivaciously that the
presence of the minstrel is forgotten, and the scene becomes visible,
peopled with the characters of the tale. It may be so, it very often
is so for a time. But it is not so always, and the story-teller
himself grows conscious of a misgiving. If the spell is weakened at
any moment, the listener is recalled from the scene to the mere author
before him, and the story rests only upon the author's direct
assertion. Is it not possible, then, to introduce another point of
view, to set up a fresh narrator to bear the brunt of the reader's
scrutiny? If the story-teller is _in_ the story himself, the author is
dramatized; his assertions gain in weight, for they are backed by the
presence of the narrator in the pictured scene. It is advantage
scored; the author has shifted his responsibility, and it now falls
where the reader can see and measure it; the arbitrary quality which
may at any time be detected in the author's voice is disguised in the
voice of his spokesman. Nothing is now imported into the story from
without; it is self-contained, it has no associations with anyone
beyond its circle.
Such is the first step towards dramatization, and in very many a story
it may be enough. The spokesman is there, in recognizable relation
with his matter; no question of his authority can arise. But now a
difficulty may be started by the nature of the tale that he tells. If
he has nothing to do but to relate what he has seen, what anyone might
have seen in his position, his account will serve very well; there is
no need for more. Let him unfold his chronicle as it appears in his
memory. But if he is himself the subject of his story, if the story
involves a searching exploration of his own consciousness, an account
in his own words, after the fact, is not by any means the best
imaginable. Far better it would be to see him while his mind is
actually at work in the agitation, whatever it may be, which is to
make the book. The matter would then be objective and visible to the
reader, instead of reaching him in the form of a report at second
hand. But how to manage this without falling back upon the author and
_his_ report, which has already been tried and for good reasons, as it
seemed, abandoned? It is managed by a kind of repetition of the same
stroke, a further shift of the point of view. The spectator, the
listener, the reader, is now himself to be placed at the angle of
vision; not an account or a report, more or less convincing, is to be
offered him, but a direct sight of the matter itself, while it is
passing. Nobody expounds or explains; the story is enacted by its look
and behaviour at particular moments. By the first stroke the narrator
was brought into the book and set before the reader; but the action
appeared only in his narrative. Now the action is there, proceeding
while the pages are turned; the narrator is forestalled, he is watched
while the story is in the making. Such is the progress of the writer
of fiction towards drama; such is his method of evading the drawbacks
of a mere reporter and assuming the advantages, as far as possible, of
a dramatist. How far he may choose to push the process in his
book--that is a matter to be decided by the subject; it entirely
depends upon the kind of effect that the theme demands. It may respond
to all the dramatization it can get, it may give all that it has to
give for less. The subject dictates the method.
And now let the process be reversed, let us start with the purely
dramatic subject, the story that will tell itself in perfect
rightness, unaided, to the eye of the reader. This story never
deviates from a strictly scenic form; one occasion or episode follows
another, with no interruption for any reflective summary of events.
Necessarily it must be so, for it is only while the episode is
proceeding that no question of a narrator can arise; when the scene
closes the play ceases till the opening of the next. To glance upon
the story from a height and to give a general impression of its
course--this is at once to remove the point of view from the reader
and to set up a new one somewhere else; the method is no longer
consistent, no longer purely dramatic. And the dramatic story is not
only scenic, it is also limited to so much as the ear can hear and the
eye see. In rigid drama of this kind there is naturally no admission
of the reader into the private mind of any of the characters; their
thoughts and motives are transmuted into action. A subject wrought to
this pitch of objectivity is no doubt given weight and compactness and
authority in the highest degree; it is like a piece of modelling,
standing in clear space, casting its shadow. It is the most finished
form that fiction can take.
But evidently it is not a form to which fiction can aspire in general.
It implies many sacrifices, and these will easily seem to be more than
the subject can usefully make. It is out of the question, of course,
wherever the main burden of the story lies within some particular
consciousness, in the study of a soul, the growth of a character, the
changing history of a temperament; there the subject would be
needlessly crossed and strangled by dramatization pushed to its limit.
It is out of the question, again, wherever the story is too big, too
comprehensive, too widely ranging, to be treated scenically, with no
opportunity for general and panoramic survey; it has been discovered,
indeed, that even a story of this kind _may_ fall into a long
succession of definite scenes, under some hands, but it has also
appeared that in doing so it incurs unnecessary disabilities, and will
likely suffer. These stories, therefore, which will not naturally
accommodate themselves to the reader's point of view, and the reader's
alone, we regard as rather pictorial than dramatic--meaning that they
call for some narrator, somebody who _knows_, to contemplate the facts
and create an impression of them. Whether it is the omniscient author
or a man in the book, he must gather up his experience, compose a
vision of it as it exists in his mind, and lay _that_ before the
reader. It is the reflection of an experience; and though there may be
all imaginable diversity of treatment within the limits of the
reflection, such is its essential character. In a pictorial book the
principle of the structure involves a point of view which is not the
reader's.
It is open to the pictorial book, however, to use a method in its
picture-making that is really no other than the method of drama. It is
somebody's experience, we say, that is to be reported, the general
effect that many things have left upon a certain mind; it is a fusion
of innumerable elements, the deposit of a lapse of time. The
straightforward way to render it would be for the narrator--the author
or his selected creature--to view the past retrospectively and
discourse upon it, to recall and meditate and summarize. That is
picture-making in its natural form, using its own method. But exactly
as in drama the subject is distributed among the characters and
enacted by them, so in picture the effect may be entrusted to the
elements, the reactions of the moment, and _performed_ by these. The
mind of the narrator becomes the stage, his voice is no longer heard.
His voice _is_ heard so long as there is narrative of any sort,
whether he is speaking in person or is reported obliquely; his voice
is heard, because in either case the language and the intonation are
his, the direct expression of his experience. In the drama of his mind
there is no personal voice, for there is no narrator; the point of
view becomes the reader's once more. The shapes of thought in the
man's mind tell their own story. And that is the art of picture-making
when it uses the dramatic method.
But it cannot always do so. Constantly it must be necessary to offer
the reader a summary of facts, an impression of a train of events,
that can only be given as somebody's narration. Suppose it were
required to render the general effect of a certain year in a man's
life, a year that has filled his mind with a swarm of many memories.
Looking into his consciousness after the year has gone, we might find
much there that would indicate the nature of the year's events without
any word on his part; the flickers and flashes of thought from moment
to moment might indeed tell us much. But we shall need an account from
him too, no doubt; too much has happened in a year to be wholly acted,
as I call it, in the movement of the man's thought. He must
narrate--he must make, that is to say, a picture of the events as he
sees them, glancing back. Now if he speaks in the first person there
can, of course, be no uncertainty in the point of view; he has his
fixed position, he cannot leave it. His description will represent the
face that the facts in their sequence turned towards _him_; the field
of vision is defined with perfect distinctness, and his story cannot
stray outside it. The reader, then, may be said to watch a reflection
of the facts in a mirror of which the edge is nowhere in doubt; it is
rounded by the bounds of the narrator's own personal experience.
This limitation may have a convenience and a value in the story, it
may contribute to the effect. But it need not be forfeited, it is
clear, if the first person is changed to the third. The author may use
the man's field of vision and keep as faithfully within it as though
the man were speaking for himself. In that case he retains this
advantage and adds to it another, one that is likely to be very much
greater. For now, while the point of view is still fixed in space,
still assigned to the man in the book, it is free in _time_; there no
longer stretches, between the narrator and the events of which he
speaks, a certain tract of time, across which the past must appear in
a more or less distant perspective. All the variety obtainable by a
shifting relation to the story in time is thus in the author's hand;
the safe serenity of a far retrospect, the promising or threatening
urgency of the present, every gradation between the two, can be drawn
into the whole effect of the book, and all of it without any change
of the seeing eye. It is a liberty that may help the story
indefinitely, raising this matter into strong relief, throwing that
other back into vaguer shade.
And next, still keeping mainly and ostensibly to the same point of
view, the author has the chance of using a much greater latitude than
he need appear to use. The seeing eye is with somebody in the book,
but its vision is reinforced; the picture contains more, becomes
richer and fuller, because it is the author's as well as his
creature's, both at once. Nobody notices, but in fact there are now
two brains behind that eye; and one of them is the author's, who
adopts and shares the _position_ of his creature, and at the same time
supplements his wit. If you analyse the picture that is now presented,
you find that it is not all the work of the personage whose vision the
author has adopted. There are touches in it that go beyond any
sensation of his, and indicate that some one else is looking over his
shoulder--seeing things from the same angle, but seeing more, bringing
another mind to bear upon the scene. It is an easy and natural
extension of the personage's power of observation. The impression of
the scene may be deepened as much as need be; it is not confined to
the scope of one mind, and yet there is no blurring of the focus by a
double point of view. And thus what I have called the sound of the
narrator's voice (it is impossible to avoid this mixture of metaphors)
is less insistent in oblique narration, even while it seems to be
following the very same argument that it would in direct, because
another voice is speedily mixed and blended with it.
So this is another resource upon which the author may draw according
to his need; sometimes it will be indispensable, and generally, I
suppose, it will be useful. It means that he keeps a certain hold upon
the narrator _as an object_; the sentient character in the story,
round whom it is grouped, is not utterly subjective, completely given
over to the business of seeing and feeling on behalf of the reader. It
is a considerable point; for it helps to meet one of the great
difficulties in the story which is carefully aligned towards a single
consciousness and consistently so viewed. In that story the man or
woman who acts as the vessel of sensation is always in danger of
seeming a light, uncertain weight compared with the other people in
the book--simply because the other people are objective images,
plainly outlined, while the seer in the midst is precluded from that
advantage, and must see without being directly seen. He, who doubtless
ought to bulk in the story more massively than any one, tends to
remain the least recognizable of the company, and even to dissolve in
a kind of impalpable blur. By his method (which I am supposing to have
been adopted in full strictness) the author is of course forbidden to
look this central figure in the face, to describe and discuss him; the
light cannot be turned upon him immediately. And very often we see the
method becoming an embarrassment to the author in consequence, and
the devices by which he tries to mitigate it, and to secure some
reflected sight of the seer, may even be tiresomely obvious. But the
resource of which I speak is of a finer sort.
It gives to the author the power of imperceptibly edging away from the
seer, leaving his consciousness, ceasing to use his eyes--though still
without substituting the eyes of another. To revert for a moment to
the story told in the first person, it is plain that in that case the
narrator has no such liberty; his own consciousness must always lie
open; the part that he plays in the story can never appear in the same
terms, on the same plane, as that of the other people. Though he is
not visible in the story to the reader, as the others are, he is at
every moment _nearer_ than they, in his capacity of the seeing eye,
the channel of vision; nor can he put off his function, he must
continue steadily to see and to report. But when the author is
reporting _him_ there is a margin of freedom. The author has not so
completely identified himself, as narrator, with his hero that he can
give him no objective weight whatever. If necessary he can allow him
something of the value of a detached and phenomenal personage, like
the rest of the company in the story, and that without violating the
principle of his method. He cannot make his hero actually
visible--there the method is uncompromising; he cannot step forward,
leaving the man's point of view, and picture him from without. But he
can place the man at the same distance from the reader as the other
people, he can almost lend him the same effect, he can make of him a
dramatic actor upon the scene.
And how? Merely by closing (when it suits him) the open consciousness
of the seer--which he can do without any look of awkwardness or
violence, since it conflicts in no way with the rule of the method.
That rule only required that the author, having decided to share the
point of view of his character, should not proceed to set up another
of his own; it did not debar him from allowing his hero's act of
vision to lapse, his function as the sentient creature in the story to
be intermitted. The hero (I call him so for convenience--he may, of
course, be quite a subordinate onlooker in the story) can at any
moment become impenetrable, a human being whose thought is sealed from
us; and it may seem a small matter, but in fact it has the result that
he drops into the plane of the people whom he has hitherto been seeing
and judging. Hitherto subjective, communicative in solitude, he has
been in a category apart from them; but now he may mingle with the
rest, engage in talk with them, and his presence and his talk are no
more to the fore than theirs. As soon as some description or
discussion of them is required, then, of course, the seer must resume
his part and unseal his mind; but meanwhile, though the reader gets no
direct view of him, still he is there in the dialogue with the rest,
his speech (like theirs) issues from a hidden mind and has the same
dramatic value. It is enough, very likely, to harden our image of him,
to give precision to his form, to save him from dissipation into that
luminous blur of which I spoke just now. For the author it is a
resource to be welcomed on that account, and not on that account
alone.
For besides the greater definition that the seer acquires, thus
detached from us at times and relegated to the plane of his
companions, there is much benefit for the subject of the story. In the
tale that is quite openly and nakedly somebody's narrative there is
this inherent weakness, that a scene of true drama is impossible. In
true drama nobody _reports_ the scene; it _appears_, it is constituted
by the aspect of the occasion and the talk and the conduct of the
people. When one of the people who took part in it sets out to report
the scene, there is at once a mixture and a confusion of effects; for
his own contribution to the scene has a different quality from the
rest, cannot have the same crispness and freshness, cannot strike in
with a new or unexpected note. This weakness may be well disguised,
and like everything else in the whole craft it may become a positive
and right effect in a particular story, for a particular purpose; it
is always there, however, and it means that the full and unmixed
effect of drama is denied to the story that is rigidly told from the
point of view of one of the actors. But when that point of view is
held in the manner I have described, when it is open to the author to
withdraw from it silently and to leave the actor to play his part,
true drama--or something so like it that it passes for true drama--is
always possible; all the figures of the scene are together in it, one
no nearer than another. Nothing is wanting save only that direct,
unequivocal sight of the hero which the method does indeed absolutely
forbid.
Finally there is the old, immemorial, unguarded, unsuspicious way of
telling a story, where the author entertains the reader, the minstrel
draws his audience round him, the listeners rely upon his word. The
voice is then confessedly and alone the author's; he imposes no
limitation upon his freedom to tell what he pleases and to regard his
matter from a point of view that is solely his own. And if there is
anyone who can proceed in this fashion without appearing to lose the
least of the advantages of a more cautious style, for him the
minstrel's licence is proper and appropriate; there is no more to be
said. But we have yet to discover him; and it is not very presumptuous
in a critic, as things are, to declare that a story will never yield
its best to a writer who takes the easiest way with it. He curtails
his privileges and chooses a narrower method, and immediately the
story responds; its better condition is too notable to be forgotten,
when once it has caught the attention of a reader. The advantages that
it gains are not nameless, indefinable graces, pleasing to a critic
but impossible to fix in words; they are solid, we can describe and
recount them. And I can only conclude that if the novel is still as
full of energy as it seems to be, and is not a form of imaginative art
that, having seen the best of its day, is preparing to give place to
some other, the novelist will not be willing to miss the inexhaustible
opportunity that lies in its treatment. The easy way is no way at all;
the only way is that by which the most is made of the story to be
told, and the most was never made of any story except by a choice and
disciplined method.