characteristic of the English mind. The same episode fifty times
repeated--a hundred “revolutions of taste,” accompanied with an infinite
expenditure of money--would fail to convince certain observant and
possibly too sceptical strangers that the English are an æsthetic
people. They have not a spontaneous artistic life; their taste is a
matter of conscience, reflection, duty, and the writer who in our time
has appealed to them most eloquently on behalf of art has rested his
plea on moral standards--has talked exclusively of right and wrong. It
is impossible to live much among them, to be a spectator of their
habits, their manners, their arrangements, without perceiving that the
artistic point of view is the last that they naturally take. The sense
of manner is not part of their constitution. They arrive at it, as they
have arrived at so many things, because they are ambitious, resolute,
enlightened, fond of difficulties; but there is always a strange
element either of undue apology or of exaggerated defiance in their
attempts at the cultivation of beauty. They carry on their huge broad
back a nameless mountain of conventions and prejudices, a dusky cloud of
inaptitudes and fears, which casts a shadow upon the frank and confident
practice of art. The consequence of all this is that their revivals of
taste are even stranger than the abuses they are meant to correct. They
are violent, voluntary, mechanical; wanting in grace, in tact, in the
sense of humour and of proportion. A genuine artist like Du Maurier
could not fail to perceive all this, and to perceive also that it gave
him a capital opportunity. None of his queer people are so queer as some
of these perverted votaries of joy. “Excuse me, it is not a
Botticelli--before a Botticelli I am dumb,” one of them says to a poor
plain man who shows him a picture which has been attributed to that
master. We have said already, and repeated, that Du Maurier has a great
deal of irony--the irony of the thorough-going artist and of the
observer who has a strain of foreign blood in his veins. There are
certain pretensions that such a mind can never take seriously; in the
artist there is of necessity, as it appears to us, a touch of the
democrat--though, perhaps, he is as unlikely to have more than a certain
dose of this disposition as he is to be wholly without it. Some of his
drawings seem to us to have for the public he addresses a stinging
democratic meaning; like the adventure of M. Dubois (of whom we have
spoken), who had had the inconvenience of dining with a duke; or the
reply of the young man to whom Miss Midas remarks that he is the first
commoner she has ever danced with: “And why is it the commoners have
avoided you so?”--or the response of the German _savant_ to Mrs. Lyon
Hunter, who invites him to dine, without his wife, though she is on his
arm, to meet various great ladies whom she enumerates: “And pray, do you
think they would not be respectable company for my wife?” Du Maurier
possesses in perfection the independence of the genuine artist in the
presence of a hundred worldly superstitions and absurdities. We have
said, however, that the morality, so to speak, of his drawings was a
subordinate question: what we wished to insist upon is their
completeness, their grace, their beauty, their rare pictorial character.
It is an accident that the author of such things should not have been a
painter--that he has not been an ornament of the English school. Indeed,
with the restrictions to which he has so well accommodated himself, he
is such an ornament. No English artistic work in these latter years has,
in our opinion, been more exquisite in quality.
1883.
XI
THE ART OF FICTION
I should not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks,
necessarily wanting in any completeness upon a subject the full
consideration of which would carry us far, did I not seem to discover a
pretext for my temerity in the interesting pamphlet lately published
under this name by Mr. Walter Besant. Mr. Besant’s lecture at the Royal
Institution--the original form of his pamphlet--appears to indicate that
many persons are interested in the art of fiction, and are not
indifferent to such remarks, as those who practise it may attempt to
make about it. I am therefore anxious not to lose the benefit of this
favourable association, and to edge in a few words under cover of the
attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. There is something
very encouraging in his having put into form certain of his ideas on the
mystery of story-telling.
It is a proof of life and curiosity--curiosity on the part of the
brotherhood of novelists as well as on the part of their readers. Only a
short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was
not what the French call _discutable_. It had no air of having a theory,
a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it--of being the
expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I
do not say it was necessarily the worse for that: it would take much
more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel as
Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of
incompleteness. It was, however, _naïf_ (if I may help myself out with
another French word); and evidently if it be destined to suffer in any
way for having lost its _naïveté_ it has now an idea of making sure of
the corresponding advantages. During the period I have alluded to there
was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel,
as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be
to swallow it. But within a year or two, for some reason or other, there
have been signs of returning animation--the era of discussion would
appear to have been to a certain extent opened. Art lives upon
discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt,
upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there
is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to
say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference,
though they may be times of honour, are not times of development--are
times, possibly even, a little of dulness. The successful application of
any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory too is interesting;
and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former I
suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent
core of conviction. Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things
are fertilising when they are frank and sincere. Mr. Besant has set an
excellent example in saying what he thinks, for his part, about the way
in which fiction should be written, as well as about the way in which it
should be published; for his view of the “art,” carried on into an
appendix, covers that too. Other labourers in the same field will
doubtless take up the argument, they will give it the light of their
experience, and the effect will surely be to make our interest in the
novel a little more what it had for some time threatened to fail to
be--a serious, active, inquiring interest, under protection of which
this delightful study may, in moments of confidence, venture to say a
little more what it thinks of itself.
It must take itself seriously for the public to take it so. The old
superstition about fiction being “wicked” has doubtless died out in
England; but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard
directed toward any story which does not more or less admit that it is
only a joke. Even the most jocular novel feels in some degree the weight
of the proscription that was formerly directed against literary levity:
the jocularity does not always succeed in passing for orthodoxy. It is
still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a
production which is after all only a “make-believe” (for what else is a
“story”?) shall be in some degree apologetic--shall renounce the
pretension of attempting really to represent life. This, of course, any
sensible, wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that
the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to
stifle it disguised in the form of generosity. The old evangelical
hostility to the novel, which was as explicit as it was narrow, and
which regarded it as little less favourable to our immortal part than a
stage-play, was in reality far less insulting. The only reason for the
existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. When it
relinquishes this attempt, the same attempt that we see on the canvas of
the painter, it will have arrived at a very strange pass. It is not
expected of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be
forgiven; and the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of
the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration
is the same, their process (allowing for the different quality of the
vehicle), is the same, their success is the same. They may learn from
each other, they may explain and sustain each other. Their cause is the
same, and the honour of one is the honour of another. The Mahometans
think a picture an unholy thing, but it is a long time since any
Christian did, and it is therefore the more odd that in the Christian
mind the traces (dissimulated though they may be) of a suspicion of the
sister art should linger to this day. The only effectual way to lay it
to rest is to emphasise the analogy to which I just alluded--to insist
on the fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history.
That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may
give of the novel. But history also is allowed to represent life; it is
not, any more than painting, expected to apologise. The subject-matter
of fiction is stored up likewise in documents and records, and if it
will not give itself away, as they say in California, it must speak with
assurance, with the tone of the historian. Certain accomplished
novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring
tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I was
lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, with his
want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or
an aside, he concedes to the reader that he and this trusting friend are
only “making believe.” He admits that the events he narrates have not
really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader
may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I
confess, a terrible crime; it is what I mean by the attitude of apology,
and it shocks me every whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked
me in Gibbon or Macaulay. It implies that the novelist is less occupied
in looking for the truth (the truth, of course I mean, that he assumes,
the premises that we must grant him, whatever they may be), than the
historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his
standing-room. To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men,
is the task of either writer, and the only difference that I can see is,
in proportion as he succeeds, to the honour of the novelist, consisting
as it does in his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence,
which is so far from being purely literary. It seems to me to give him a
great character, the fact that he has at once so much in common with the
philosopher and the painter; this double analogy is a magnificent
heritage.
It is of all this evidently that Mr. Besant is full when he insists upon
the fact that fiction is one of the _fine_ arts, deserving in its turn
of all the honours and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved for
the successful profession of music, poetry, painting, architecture. It
is impossible to insist too much on so important a truth, and the place
that Mr. Besant demands for the work of the novelist may be represented,
a trifle less abstractly, by saying that he demands not only that it
shall be reputed artistic, but that it shall be reputed very artistic
indeed. It is excellent that he should have struck this note, for his
doing so indicates that there was need of it, that his proposition may
be to many people a novelty. One rubs one’s eyes at the thought; but the
rest of Mr. Besant’s essay confirms the revelation. I suspect in truth
that it would be possible to confirm it still further, and that one
would not be far wrong in saying that in addition to the people to whom
it has never occurred that a novel ought to be artistic, there are a
great many others who, if this principle were urged upon them, would be
filled with an indefinable mistrust. They would find it difficult to
explain their repugnance, but it would operate strongly to put them on
their guard. “Art,” in our Protestant communities, where so many things
have got so strangely twisted about, is supposed in certain circles to
have some vaguely injurious effect upon those who make it an important
consideration, who let it weigh in the balance. It is assumed to be
opposed in some mysterious manner to morality, to amusement, to
instruction. When it is embodied in the work of the painter (the
sculptor is another affair!) you know what it is: it stands there before
you, in the honesty of pink and green and a gilt frame; you can see the
worst of it at a glance, and you can be on your guard. But when it is
introduced into literature it becomes more insidious--there is danger of
its hurting you before you know it. Literature should be either
instructive or amusing, and there is in many minds an impression that
these artistic preoccupations, the search for form, contribute to
neither end, interfere indeed with both. They are too frivolous to be
edifying, and too serious to be diverting; and they are moreover
priggish and paradoxical and superfluous. That, I think, represents the
manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an
exercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to become
articulate. They would argue, of course, that a novel ought to be
“good,” but they would interpret this term in a fashion of their own,
which indeed would vary considerably from one critic to another. One
would say that being good means representing virtuous and aspiring
characters, placed in prominent positions; another would say that it
depends on a “happy ending,” on a distribution at the last of prizes,
pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and
cheerful remarks. Another still would say that it means being full of
incident and movement, so that we shall wish to jump ahead, to see who
was the mysterious stranger, and if the stolen will was ever found, and
shall not be distracted from this pleasure by any tiresome analysis or
“description.” But they would all agree that the “artistic” idea would
spoil some of their fun. One would hold it accountable for all the
description, another would see it revealed in the absence of sympathy.
Its hostility to a happy ending would be evident, and it might even in
some cases render any ending at all impossible. The “ending” of a novel
is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert
and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome
doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes. It is therefore true that this
conception of Mr. Besant’s of the novel as a superior form encounters
not only a negative but a positive indifference. It matters little that
as a work of art it should really be as little or as much of its essence
to supply happy endings, sympathetic characters, and an objective tone,
as if it were a work of mechanics: the association of ideas, however
incongruous, might easily be too much for it if an eloquent voice were
not sometimes raised to call attention to the fact that it is at once as
free and as serious a branch of literature as any other.
Certainly this might sometimes be doubted in presence of the enormous
number of works of fiction that appeal to the credulity of our
generation, for it might easily seem that there could be no great
character in a commodity so quickly and easily produced. It must be
admitted that good novels are much compromised by bad ones, and that the
field at large suffers discredit from overcrowding. I think, however,
that this injury is only superficial, and that the superabundance of
written fiction proves nothing against the principle itself. It has been
vulgarised, like all other kinds of literature, like everything else
to-day, and it has proved more than some kinds accessible to
vulgarisation. But there is as much difference as there ever was between
a good novel and a bad one: the bad is swept with all the daubed
canvases and spoiled marble into some unvisited limbo, or infinite
rubbish-yard beneath the back-windows of the world, and the good
subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection.
As I shall take the liberty of making but a single criticism of Mr.
Besant, whose tone is so full of the love of his art, I may as well have
done with it at once. He seems to me to mistake in attempting to say so
definitely beforehand what sort of an affair the good novel will be. To
indicate the danger of such an error as that has been the purpose of
these few pages; to suggest that certain traditions on the subject,
applied _a priori_, have already had much to answer for, and that the
good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life
must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise, and the
very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which in
advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being
arbitrary, is that it be interesting. That general responsibility rests
upon it, but it is the only one I can think of. The ways in which it is
at liberty to accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as
innumerable, and such as can only suffer from being marked out or fenced
in by prescription. They are as various as the temperament of man, and
they are successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind,
different from others. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal,
a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value,
which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression.
But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless
there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be followed,
of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of
that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most
curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated after the
fact: then the author’s choice has been made, his standard has been
indicated; then we can follow lines and directions and compare tones and
resemblances. Then in a word we can enjoy one of the most charming of
pleasures, we can estimate quality, we can apply the test of execution.
The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal
to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well
as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no
limit to what he may attempt as an executant--no limit to his possible
experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. Here it is especially that
he works, step by step, like his brother of the brush, of whom we may
always say that he has painted his picture in a manner best known to
himself. His manner is his secret, not necessarily a jealous one. He
cannot disclose it as a general thing if he would; he would be at a loss
to teach it to others. I say this with a due recollection of having
insisted on the community of method of the artist who paints a picture
and the artist who writes a novel. The painter _is_ able to teach the
rudiments of his practice, and it is possible, from the study of good
work (granted the aptitude), both to learn how to paint and to learn how
to write. Yet it remains true, without injury to the _rapprochement_,
that the literary artist would be obliged to say to his pupil much more
than the other, “Ah, well, you must do it as you can!” It is a question
of degree, a matter of delicacy. If there are exact sciences, there are
also exact arts, and the grammar of painting is so much more definite
that it makes the difference.