essay that the “laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with as much
precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and
proportion,” he mitigates what might appear to be an extravagance by
applying his remark to “general” laws, and by expressing most of these
rules in a manner with which it would certainly be unaccommodating to
disagree. That the novelist must write from his experience, that his
“characters must be real and such as might be met with in actual life;”
that “a young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid
descriptions of garrison life,” and “a writer whose friends and personal
experiences belong to the lower middle-class should carefully avoid
introducing his characters into society;” that one should enter one’s
notes in a common-place book; that one’s figures should be clear in
outline; that making them clear by some trick of speech or of carriage
is a bad method, and “describing them at length” is a worse one; that
English Fiction should have a “conscious moral purpose;” that “it is
almost impossible to estimate too highly the value of careful
workmanship--that is, of style;” that “the most important point of all
is the story,” that “the story is everything”: these are principles with
most of which it is surely impossible not to sympathise. That remark
about the lower middle-class writer and his knowing his place is perhaps
rather chilling; but for the rest I should find it difficult to dissent
from any one of these recommendations. At the same time, I should find
it difficult positively to assent to them, with the exception, perhaps,
of the injunction as to entering one’s notes in a common-place book.
They scarcely seem to me to have the quality that Mr. Besant attributes
to the rules of the novelist--the “precision and exactness” of “the laws
of harmony, perspective, and proportion.” They are suggestive, they are
even inspiring, but they are not exact, though they are doubtless as
much so as the case admits of: which is a proof of that liberty of
interpretation for which I just contended. For the value of these
different injunctions--so beautiful and so vague--is wholly in the
meaning one attaches to them. The characters, the situation, which
strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most, but
the measure of reality is very difficult to fix. The reality of Don
Quixote or of Mr. Micawber is a very delicate shade; it is a reality so
coloured by the author’s vision that, vivid as it may be, one would
hesitate to propose it as a model: one would expose one’s self to some
very embarrassing questions on the part of a pupil. It goes without
saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense
of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling
that sense into being. Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad
forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction
have the odour of it, and others have not; as for telling you in advance
how your nosegay should be composed, that is another affair. It is
equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from
experience; to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration might
savour of mockery. What kind of experience is intended, and where does
it begin and end? Experience is never limited, and it is never complete;
it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest
silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching
every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the
mind; and when the mind is imaginative--much more when it happens to be
that of a man of genius--it takes to itself the faintest hints of life,
it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. The young lady
living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to
make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she
shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been
seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about
some of these gentlemen. I remember an English novelist, a woman of
genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she
had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of
the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so
much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her
peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having
once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where,
in the household of a _pasteur_, some of the young Protestants were
seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it
lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her
direct personal impression, and she turned out her type. She knew what
youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having
seen what it was to be French, so that she converted these ideas into a
concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she was
blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell,
and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any
accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to
guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to
judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in
general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any
particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said to
constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the
most differing stages of education. If experience consists of
impressions, it may be said that impressions _are_ experience, just as
(have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I
should certainly say to a novice, “Write from experience and experience
only,” I should feel that this was rather a tantalising monition if I
were not careful immediately to add, “Try to be one of the people on
whom nothing is lost!”
I am far from intending by this to minimise the importance of
exactness--of truth of detail. One can speak best from one’s own taste,
and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of
specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel--the
merit on which all its other merits (including that conscious moral
purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submissively depend.
If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they
owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the
illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this
exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the
art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward,
his torment, his delight. It is here in very truth that he competes with
life; it is here that he competes with his brother the painter in _his_
attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their
meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface,
the substance of the human spectacle. It is in regard to this that Mr.
Besant is well inspired when he bids him take notes. He cannot possibly
take too many, he cannot possibly take enough. All life solicits him,
and to “render” the simplest surface, to produce the most momentary
illusion, is a very complicated business. His case would be easier, and
the rule would be more exact, if Mr. Besant had been able to tell him
what notes to take. But this, I fear, he can never learn in any manual;
it is the business of his life. He has to take a great many in order to
select a few, he has to work them up as he can, and even the guides and
philosophers who might have most to say to him must leave him alone when
it comes to the application of precepts, as we leave the painter in
communion with his palette. That his characters “must be clear in
outline,” as Mr. Besant says--he feels that down to his boots; but how
he shall make them so is a secret between his good angel and himself. It
would be absurdly simple if he could be taught that a great deal of
“description” would make them so, or that on the contrary the absence of
description and the cultivation of dialogue, or the absence of dialogue
and the multiplication of “incident,” would rescue him from his
difficulties. Nothing, for instance, is more possible than that he be of
a turn of mind for which this odd, literal opposition of description and
dialogue, incident and description, has little meaning and light. People
often talk of these things as if they had a kind of internecine
distinctness, instead of melting into each other at every breath, and
being intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression. I
cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive,
in any novel worth discussing at all, of a passage of description that
is not in its intention narrative, a passage of dialogue that is not in
its intention descriptive, a touch of truth of any sort that does not
partake of the nature of incident, or an incident that derives its
interest from any other source than the general and only source of the
success of a work of art--that of being illustrative. A novel is a
living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in
proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the
parts there is something of each of the other parts. The critic who over
the close texture of a finished work shall pretend to trace a geography
of items will mark some frontiers as artificial, I fear, as any that
have been known to history. There is an old-fashioned distinction
between the novel of character and the novel of incident which must have
cost many a smile to the intending fabulist who was keen about his work.
It appears to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated
distinction between the novel and the romance--to answer as little to
any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad
pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I
see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of
character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one
says picture one says of character, when one says novel one says of
incident, and the terms may be transposed at will. What is character but
the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of
character? What is either a picture or a novel that is _not_ of
character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident
for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at
you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident I think it will be
hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of
character. If you say you don’t see it (character in _that--allons
donc_!), this is exactly what the artist who has reasons of his own for
thinking he _does_ see it undertakes to show you. When a young man makes
up his mind that he has not faith enough after all to enter the church
as he intended, that is an incident, though you may not hurry to the end
of the chapter to see whether perhaps he doesn’t change once more. I do
not say that these are extraordinary or startling incidents. I do not
pretend to estimate the degree of interest proceeding from them, for
this will depend upon the skill of the painter. It sounds almost puerile
to say that some incidents are intrinsically much more important than
others, and I need not take this precaution after having professed my
sympathy for the major ones in remarking that the only classification of
the novel that I can understand is into that which has life and that
which has it not.
The novel and the romance, the novel of incident and that of
character--these clumsy separations appear to me to have been made by
critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help them out of
some of their occasional queer predicaments, but to have little reality
or interest for the producer, from whose point of view it is of course
that we are attempting to consider the art of fiction. The case is the
same with another shadowy category which Mr. Besant apparently is
disposed to set up--that of the “modern English novel”; unless indeed it
be that in this matter he has fallen into an accidental confusion of
standpoints. It is not quite clear whether he intends the remarks in
which he alludes to it to be didactic or historical. It is as difficult
to suppose a person intending to write a modern English as to suppose
him writing an ancient English novel: that is a label which begs the
question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one’s
language and of one’s time, and calling it modern English will not,
alas! make the difficult task any easier. No more, unfortunately, will
calling this or that work of one’s fellow-artist a romance--unless it
be, of course, simply for the pleasantness of the thing, as for instance
when Hawthorne gave this heading to his story of _Blithedale_. The
French, who have brought the theory of fiction to remarkable
completeness, have but one name for the novel, and have not attempted
smaller things in it, that I can see, for that. I can think of no
obligation to which the “romancer” would not be held equally with the
novelist; the standard of execution is equally high for each. Of course
it is of execution that we are talking--that being the only point of a
novel that is open to contention. This is perhaps too often lost sight
of, only to produce interminable confusions and cross-purposes. We must
grant the artist his subject, his idea, his _donnée_: our criticism is
applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are
bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is
perfectly simple--to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea
even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event
may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a
failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness
is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow
him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of
innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives
a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face
of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which
it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things. Gustave Flaubert
has written a story about the devotion of a servant-girl to a parrot,
and the production, highly finished as it is, cannot on the whole be
called a success. We are perfectly free to find it flat, but I think it
might have been interesting; and I, for my part, am extremely glad he
should have written it; it is a contribution to our knowledge of what
can be done--or what cannot. Ivan Turgénieff has written a tale about a
deaf and dumb serf and a lap-dog, and the thing is touching, loving, a
little masterpiece. He struck the note of life where Gustave Flaubert
missed it--he flew in the face of a presumption and achieved a victory.
Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of
“liking” a work of art or not liking it: the most improved criticism
will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate test. I mention this to
guard myself from the accusation of intimating that the idea, the
subject, of a novel or a picture, does not matter. It matters, to my
sense, in the highest degree, and if I might put up a prayer it would be
that artists should select none but the richest. Some, as I have already
hastened to admit, are much more remunerative than others, and it would
be a world happily arranged in which persons intending to treat them
should be exempt from confusions and mistakes. This fortunate condition
will arrive only, I fear, on the same day that critics become purged
from error. Meanwhile, I repeat, we do not judge the artist with
fairness unless we say to him, “Oh, I grant you your starting-point,
because if I did not I should seem to prescribe to you, and heaven
forbid I should take that responsibility. If I pretend to tell you what
you must not take, you will call upon me to tell you then what you must
take; in which case I shall be prettily caught. Moreover, it isn’t till
I have accepted your data that I can begin to measure you. I have the
standard, the pitch; I have no right to tamper with your flute and then
criticise your music. Of course I may not care for your idea at all; I
may think it silly, or stale, or unclean; in which case I wash my hands
of you altogether. I may content myself with believing that you will not
have succeeded in being interesting, but I shall, of course, not attempt
to demonstrate it, and you will be as indifferent to me as I am to you.
I needn’t remind you that there are all sorts of tastes: who can know it
better? Some people, for excellent reasons, don’t like to read about
carpenters; others, for reasons even better, don’t like to read about
courtesans. Many object to Americans. Others (I believe they are mainly
editors and publishers) won’t look at Italians. Some readers don’t like
quiet subjects; others don’t like bustling ones. Some enjoy a complete
illusion, others the consciousness of large concessions. They choose
their novels accordingly, and if they don’t care about your idea they
won’t, _a fortiori_, care about your treatment.”
So that it comes back very quickly, as I have said, to the liking: in
spite of M. Zola, who reasons less powerfully than he represents, and
who will not reconcile himself to this absoluteness of taste, thinking
that there are certain things that people ought to like, and that they
can be made to like. I am quite at a loss to imagine anything (at any
rate in this matter of fiction) that people _ought_ to like or to
dislike. Selection will be sure to take care of itself, for it has a
constant motive behind it. That motive is simply experience. As people
feel life, so they will feel the art that is most closely related to it.
This closeness of relation is what we should never forget in talking of
the effort of the novel. Many people speak of it as a factitious,
artificial form, a product of ingenuity, the business of which is to
alter and arrange the things that surround us, to translate them into
conventional, traditional moulds. This, however, is a view of the
matter which carries us but a very short way, condemns the art to an
eternal repetition of a few familiar _clichés_, cuts short its
development, and leads us straight up to a dead wall. Catching the very
note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the
attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion
as in what she offers us we see life _without_ rearrangement do we feel
that we are touching the truth; in proportion as we see it _with_
rearrangement do we feel that we are being put off with a substitute, a
compromise and convention. It is not uncommon to hear an extraordinary
assurance of remark in regard to this matter of rearranging, which is
often spoken of as if it were the last word of art. Mr. Besant seems to
me in danger of falling into the great error with his rather unguarded
talk about “selection.” Art is essentially selection, but it is a
selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive. For many
people art means rose-coloured window-panes, and selection means picking
a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell you glibly that artistic
considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly;
they will rattle off shallow commonplaces about the province of art and
the limits of art till you are moved to some wonder in return as to the
province and the limits of ignorance. It appears to me that no one can
ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious
of an immense increase--a kind of revelation--of freedom. One perceives
in that case--by the light of a heavenly ray--that the province of art
is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision. As Mr. Besant so
justly intimates, it is all experience. That is a sufficient answer to
those who maintain that it must not touch the sad things of life, who
stick into its divine unconscious bosom little prohibitory inscriptions
on the end of sticks, such as we see in public gardens--“It is forbidden
to walk on the grass; it is forbidden to touch the flowers; it is not
allowed to introduce dogs or to remain after dark; it is requested to
keep to the right.” The young aspirant in the line of fiction whom we
continue to imagine will do nothing without taste, for in that case his
freedom would be of little use to him; but the first advantage of his
taste will be to reveal to him the absurdity of the little sticks and
tickets. If he have taste, I must add, of course he will have ingenuity,
and my disrespectful reference to that quality just now was not meant to
imply that it is useless in fiction. But it is only a secondary aid; the
first is a capacity for receiving straight impressions.
Mr. Besant has some remarks on the question of “the story” which I shall
not attempt to criticise, though they seem to me to contain a singular
ambiguity, because I do not think I understand them. I cannot see what
is meant by talking as if there were a part of a novel which is the
story and part of it which for mystical reasons is not--unless indeed
the distinction be made in a sense in which it is difficult to suppose
that any one should attempt to convey anything. “The story,” if it
represents anything, represents the subject, the idea, the _donnée_ of
the novel; and there is surely no “school”--Mr. Besant speaks of a
school--which urges that a novel should be all treatment and no subject.
There must assuredly be something to treat; every school is intimately
conscious of that. This sense of the story being the idea, the
starting-point, of the novel, is the only one that I see in which it can
be spoken of as something different from its organic whole; and since in
proportion as the work is successful the idea permeates and penetrates
it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every
punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression, in that
proportion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may be
drawn more or less out of its sheath. The story and the novel, the idea
and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of
tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle, or the
needle without the thread. Mr. Besant is not the only critic who may be
observed to have spoken as if there were certain things in life which
constitute stories, and certain others which do not. I find the same odd
implication in an entertaining article in the _Pall Mall Gazette_,
devoted, as it happens, to Mr. Besant’s lecture. “The story is the
thing!” says this graceful writer, as if with a tone of opposition to
some other idea. I should think it was, as every painter who, as the
time for “sending in” his picture looms in the distance, finds himself
still in quest of a subject--as every belated artist not fixed about his
theme will heartily agree. There are some subjects which speak to us and
others which do not, but he would be a clever man who should undertake
to give a rule--an index expurgatorius--by which the story and the
no-story should be known apart. It is impossible (to me at least) to
imagine any such rule which shall not be altogether arbitrary. The
writer in the _Pall Mall_ opposes the delightful (as I suppose) novel of
_Margot la Balafrée_ to certain tales in which “Bostonian nymphs” appear
to have “rejected English dukes for psychological reasons.” I am not
acquainted with the romance just designated, and can scarcely forgive
the _Pall Mall_ critic for not mentioning the name of the author, but
the title appears to refer to a lady who may have received a scar in
some heroic adventure. I am inconsolable at not being acquainted with
this episode, but am utterly at a loss to see why it is a story when the
rejection (or acceptance) of a duke is not, and why a reason,
psychological or other, is not a subject when a cicatrix is. They are
all particles of the multitudinous life with which the novel deals, and
surely no dogma which pretends to make it lawful to touch the one and
unlawful to touch the other will stand for a moment on its feet. It is
the special picture that must stand or fall, according as it seem to
possess truth or to lack it. Mr. Besant does not, to my sense, light up
the subject by intimating that a story must, under penalty of not being
a story, consist of “adventures.” Why of adventures more than of green
spectacles? He mentions a category of impossible things, and among them
he places “fiction without adventure.” Why without adventure, more than
without matrimony, or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or
hydropathy, or Jansenism? This seems to me to bring the novel back to
the hapless little _rôle_ of being an artificial, ingenious thing--bring
it down from its large, free character of an immense and exquisite
correspondence with life. And what _is_ adventure, when it comes to
that, and by what sign is the listening pupil to recognise it? It is an
adventure--an immense one--for me to write this little article; and for
a Bostonian nymph to reject an English duke is an adventure only less
stirring, I should say, than for an English duke to be rejected by a
Bostonian nymph. I see dramas within dramas in that, and innumerable
points of view. A psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object
adorably pictorial; to catch the tint of its complexion--I feel as if
that idea might inspire one to Titianesque efforts. There are few things
more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason, and yet, I
protest, the novel seems to me the most magnificent form of art. I have
just been reading, at the same time, the delightful story of _Treasure
Island_, by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson and, in a manner less
consecutive, the last tale from M. Edmond de Goncourt, which is
entitled _Chérie_. One of these works treats of murders, mysteries,
islands of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences
and buried doubloons. The other treats of a little French girl who lived
in a fine house in Paris, and died of wounded sensibility because no one
would marry her. I call _Treasure Island_ delightful, because it appears
to me to have succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts; and I venture
to bestow no epithet upon _Chérie_, which strikes me as having failed
deplorably in what it attempts--that is in tracing the development of
the moral consciousness of a child. But one of these productions strikes
me as exactly as much of a novel as the other, and as having a “story”
quite as much. The moral consciousness of a child is as much a part of
life as the islands of the Spanish Main, and the one sort of geography
seems to me to have those “surprises” of which Mr. Besant speaks quite
as much as the other. For myself (since it comes back in the last
resort, as I say, to the preference of the individual), the picture of
the child’s experience has the advantage that I can at successive steps
(an immense luxury, near to the “sensual pleasure” of which Mr. Besant’s
critic in the _Pall Mall_ speaks) say Yes or No, as it may be, to what
the artist puts before me. I have been a child in fact, but I have been
on a quest for a buried treasure only in supposition, and it is a simple
accident that with M. de Goncourt I should have for the most part to say
No. With George Eliot, when she painted that country with a far other
intelligence, I always said Yes.