WRITING NOVELS
I
The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so excited by it
that he absolutely must transmit the vision to others, chooses narrative
fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of his feelings. He is
like other artists--he cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to
himself, he is bursting with the news; he is bound to tell--the affair
is too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in this--that what
most chiefly strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature,
the large general manner of existing. Of course, he is the result of
evolution from the primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to
this day transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude
visions of life in the café or the club, or on the kerbstone. They
belong to the lowest circle of artists; but they are artists; and the
form that they adopt is the very basis of the novel. By innumerable
entertaining steps from them you may ascend to the major artist whose
vision of life, inclusive, intricate and intense, requires for its due
transmission the great traditional form of the novel as perfected by the
masters of a long age which has temporarily set the novel higher than
any other art-form.
I would not argue that the novel should be counted supreme among the
great traditional forms of art. Even if there is a greatest form, I do
not much care which it is. I have in turn been convinced that Chartres
Cathedral, certain Greek sculpture, Mozart's _Don Juan_, and the
juggling of Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest thing in the world--not to
mention the achievements of Shakspere or Nijinsky. But there is
something to be said for the real pre-eminence of prose fiction as a
literary form. (Even the modern epic has learnt almost all it knows from
prose-fiction.) The novel has, and always will have, the advantage of
its comprehensive bigness. St Peter's at Rome is a trifle compared with
Tolstoi's _War and Peace_; and it is as certain as anything can be that,
during the present geological epoch at any rate, no epic half as long as
_War and Peace_ will ever be read, even if written.
Notoriously the novelist (including the playwright, who is a
sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of other
artists. In the matter of poaching, the painter has done a lot, and the
composer has done more, but what the painter and the composer have done
is as naught compared to the grasping deeds of the novelist. And whereas
the painter and the composer have got into difficulties with their
audacious schemes, the novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with
a success that is not denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the
interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose fiction--from
landscape-painting to sociology--and none which might not be.
Unnecessary to go back to the ante-Scott age in order to perceive how
the novel has aggrandised itself! It has conquered enormous territories
even since _Germinal_. Within the last fifteen years it has gained. Were
it to adopt the hue of the British Empire, the entire map of the
universe would soon be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand in the
hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present day as a
means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life. It is, and will
be for some time to come, the form to which the artist with the most
inclusive vision instinctively turns, because it is the most inclusive
form, and the most adaptable. Indeed, before we are much older, if its
present rate of progress continues, it will have reoccupied the dazzling
position to which the mighty Balzac lifted it, and in which he left it
in 1850. So much, by the way, for the rank of the novel.
II
In considering the equipment of the novelist there are two attributes
which may always be taken for granted. The first is the sense of
beauty--indispensable to the creative artist. Every creative artist has
it, in his degree. He is an artist because he has it. An artist works
under the stress of instinct. No man's instinct can draw him towards
material which repels him--the fact is obvious. Obviously, whatever kind
of life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed and seduced by
it, he is under its spell--that is, he has seen beauty in it. He could
have no other reason for writing about it. He may see a strange sort of
beauty; he may--indeed he does--see a sort of beauty that nobody has
quite seen before; he may see a sort of beauty that none save a few odd
spirits ever will or can be made to see. But he does see beauty. To
say, after reading a novel which has held you, that the author has no
sense of beauty, is inept. (The mere fact that you turned over his pages
with interest is an answer to the criticism--a criticism, indeed, which
is not more sagacious than that of the reviewer who remarks: "Mr Blank
has produced a thrilling novel, but unfortunately he cannot write." Mr
Blank has written; and he could, anyhow, write enough to thrill the
reviewer.) All that a wise person will assert is that an artist's sense
of beauty is different for the time being from his own.
The reproach of the lack of a sense of beauty has been brought against
nearly all original novelists; it is seldom brought against a mediocre
novelist. Even in the extreme cases it is untrue; perhaps it is most
untrue in the extreme cases. I do not mean such a case as that of Zola,
who never went to extremes. I mean, for example, Gissing, a real
extremist, who, it is now admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered beauty
in forms of existence which hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to
examine. And I mean Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no
works have been more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel _En
Ménage_ and his book of descriptive essays _De Tout_. Both reproduce
with exasperation what is generally regarded as the sordid ugliness of
commonplace daily life. Yet both exercise a unique charm (and will
surely be read when _La Cathédrale_ is forgotten). And it is
inconceivable that Huysmans--whatever he may have said--was not ravished
by the secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in it.
The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the novelist, as
in every artist, is passionate intensity of vision. Unless the vision is
passionately intense the artist will not be moved to transmit it. He
will not be inconvenienced by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus
not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must
have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree.
It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been
desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is
unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes of
artistic creation.
III
A sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being taken for
granted, the one other important attribute in the equipment of the
novelist--the attribute which indeed by itself practically suffices, and
whose absence renders futile all the rest--is fineness of mind. A great
novelist must have great qualities of mind. His mind must be
sympathetic, quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender,
just, merciful. He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing
sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. Above all, his
mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense. His mind, in a
word, must have the quality of being noble. Unless his mind is all this,
he will never, at the ultimate bar, be reckoned supreme. That which
counts, on every page, and all the time, is the very texture of his
mind--the glass through which he sees things. Every other attribute is
secondary, and is dispensable. Fielding lives unequalled among English
novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is unequalled. He is
read with unreserved enthusiasm because the reader feels himself at each
paragraph to be in close contact with a glorious personality. And no
advance in technique among later novelists can possibly imperil his
position. He will take second place when a more noble mind, a more
superb common sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before.
What undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that the
texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in courageous facing
of the truth, and in certain delicacies of perception. As much may be
said of Thackeray, whose mind was somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a
figure, and not free from defects which are inimical to immortality.
It is a hard saying for me, and full of danger in any country whose
artists have shown contempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, as
the years pass, I attach less and less importance to good technique in
fiction. I love it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its
importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern history
of fiction will not support me. With the single exception of Turgenev,
the great novelists of the world, according to my own standards, have
either ignored technique or have failed to understand it. What an error
to suppose that the finest foreign novels show a better sense of form
than the finest English novels! Balzac was a prodigious blunderer. He
could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general form of a
book. And as for a greater than Balzac--Stendhal--his scorn of technique
was notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece: "By
the way I ought to have told you earlier that the Duchess--!" And as for
a greater than either Balzac or Stendhal--Dostoievsky--what a hasty,
amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the unapproachable _Brothers
Karamazov_! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction
by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was clumsy and
careless. What would have been Flaubert's detailed criticism of that
book? And what would it matter? And, to take a minor example,
witness the comically amateurish technique of the late "Mark
Rutherford"--nevertheless a novelist whom one can deeply admire.
And when we come to consider the great technicians, Guy de Maupassant
and Flaubert, can we say that their technique will save them, or atone
in the slightest degree for the defects of their minds? Exceptional
artists both, they are both now inevitably falling in esteem to the
level of the second-rate. Human nature being what it is, and de
Maupassant being tinged with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with
interest by mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite
all his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant with
the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is one of the
outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It is being discovered
that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble enough--that, indeed, it was a
cruel mind, and a little anæmic. _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ was the crowning
proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the humanness of the world, and
suffered from the delusion that he had been born on the wrong planet.
The glitter of his technique is dulled now, and fools even count it
against him. In regard to one section of human activity only did his
mind seem noble--namely, literary technique. His correspondence,
written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the question of
literary technique, and his correspondence stands forth to-day as his
best work--a marvellous fount of inspiration to his fellow artists. So I
return to the point that the novelist's one important attribute (beyond
the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind. It and nothing else
makes both the friends and the enemies which he has; while the influence
of technique is slight and transitory. And I repeat that it is a hard
saying.
I begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the mysterious
nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." There may be something of
the amateur in all great artists. I do not know why it should be so,
unless because, in the exuberance of their sense of power, they are
impatient of the exactitudes of systematic study and the mere bother of
repeated attempts to arrive at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great
artist was ever a profound scholar. The great artist has other ends to
achieve. And every artist, major and minor, is aware in his conscience
that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to proceed rapidly
with the affair of creation, and an excusable dislike of re-creating
anything twice, thrice, or ten times over--unnatural task!--are
responsible for much of that artifice. We can all point in excuse to
Shakspere, who was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods
would shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has been
mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care. If Flaubert
had been a greater artist he might have been more of an amateur.
IV
Of this poor neglected matter of technique the more important branch is
design--or construction. It is the branch of the art--of all arts--which
comes next after "inspiration"--a capacious word meant to include
everything that the artist must be born with and cannot acquire. The
less important branch of technique--far less important--may be described
as an ornamentation.
There are very few rules of design in the novel; but the few are
capital. Nevertheless, great novelists have often flouted or ignored
them--to the detriment of their work. In my opinion the first rule is
that the interest must be centralised; it must not be diffused equally
over various parts of the canvas. To compare one art with another may be
perilous, but really the convenience of describing a novel as a canvas
is extreme. In a well-designed picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one
particular spot. If the eye is drawn with equal force to several
different spots, then we reproach the painter for having "scattered" the
interest of the picture. Similarly with the novel. A novel must have
one, two, or three figures that easily overtop the rest. These figures
must be in the foreground, and the rest in the middle-distance or in the
back-ground.
Moreover, these figures--whether they are saints or sinners--must
somehow be presented more sympathetically than the others. If this
cannot be done, then the inspiration is at fault. The single motive that
should govern the choice of a principal figure is the motive of love for
that figure. What else could the motive be? The race of heroes is
essential to art. But what makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure
chosen than the understanding sympathy of the artist with the figure. To
say that the hero has disappeared from modern fiction is absurd. All
that has happened is that the characteristics of the hero have changed,
naturally, with the times. When Thackeray wrote "a novel without a
hero," he wrote a novel with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this
better than Thackeray. What he meant was that he was sick of the
conventional bundle of characteristics styled a hero in his day, and
that he had changed the type. Since then we have grown sick of Dobbins,
and the type has been changed again more than once. The fateful hour
will arrive when we shall be sick of Ponderevos.
The temptation of the great novelist, overflowing with creative force,
is to scatter the interest. In both his major works Tolstoi found the
temptation too strong for him. _Anna Karenina_ is not one novel, but
two, and suffers accordingly. As for _War and Peace_, the reader wanders
about in it as in a forest, for days, lost, deprived of a sense of
direction, and with no vestige of a sign-post; at intervals
encountering mysterious faces whose identity he in vain tries to recall.
On a much smaller scale Meredith committed the same error. Who could
assert positively which of the sisters Fleming is the heroine of _Rhoda
Fleming_? For nearly two hundred pages at a stretch Rhoda scarcely
appears. And more than once the author seems quite to forget that the
little knave Algernon is not, after all, the hero of the story.
The second rule of design--perhaps in the main merely a different view
of the first--is that the interest must be maintained. It may increase,
but it must never diminish. Here is that special aspect of design which
we call construction, or plot. By interest I mean the interest of the
story itself, and not the interest of the continual play of the author's
mind on his material. In proportion as the interest of the story is
maintained, the plot is a good one. In so far as it lapses, the plot is
a bad one. There is no other criterion of good construction. Readers of
a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which
"you can't tell what is going to happen next." But in some of the most
tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen
next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. It would be
nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to make sure
what will happen next"! Good plots set you anxiously guessing what will
happen next.
When the reader is misled--not intentionally in order to get an effect,
but clumsily through amateurishness--then the construction is bad. This
calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work
another calamity does occur with far too much frequency--namely, the
tantalising of the reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wanton,
or negligent shifting of the interest from the major to the minor theme.
A sad example of this infantile trick is to be found in the thirty-first
chapter of _Rhoda_ _Fleming_, wherein, well knowing that the reader is
tingling for the interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable
to control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for Algernon, devotes
some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with an illicit
thousand pounds. That the sixteen pages are excessively brilliant does
not a bit excuse the wilful unshapeliness of the book's design.
The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out defenders of Victorian fiction
are wont to argue that though the event-plot in sundry great novels may
be loose and casual (that is to say, simply careless), the "idea-plot"
is usually close-knit, coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able
to comprehend how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot
(any more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but
assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that the
mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow, the
event-plot (which I positively do not believe),--even then I still hold
that sloppiness in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave
iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English novels,
chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot, the Brontës, and
Anthony Trollope.
The one other important rule in construction is that the plot should be
kept throughout within the same convention. All plots--even those of our
most sacred naturalistic contemporaries--are and must be a
conventionalisation of life. We imagine we have arrived at a convention
which is nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
Perhaps we have--but so little nearer that the difference is scarcely
appreciable! An aviator at midday may be nearer the sun than the
motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire journey to the sun,
the aviator's progress upward can safely be ignored. No novelist has
yet, or ever will, come within a hundred million miles of life itself.
It is impossible for us to see how far we still are from life. The
defects of a new convention disclose themselves late in its career. The
notion that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula which
ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "Naturalist" is merely an epithet
expressing self-satisfaction.
Similarly, the habit of deriding as "conventional" plots constructed in
an earlier convention, is ridiculous. Under this head Dickens in
particular has been assaulted; I have assaulted him myself. But within
their convention, the plots of Dickens are excellent, and show little
trace of amateurishness, and every sign of skilled accomplishment. And
Dickens did not blunder out of one convention into another, as certain
of ourselves undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned for
the conventionalism of his plots. And yet Hardy happens to be one of the
rare novelists who have evolved a new convention to suit their
idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idiosyncrasy is a deep conviction of the
whimsicality of the divine power, and again and again he has expressed
this with a virtuosity of skill which ought to have put humility into
the hearts of naturalists, but which has not done so. The plot of _The
Woodlanders_ is one of the most exquisite examples of subtle symbolic
illustration of an idea that a writer of fiction ever achieved; it makes
the symbolism of Ibsen seem crude. You may say that _The Woodlanders_
could not have occurred in real life. No novel could have occurred in
real life. The balance of probabilities is incalculably against any
novel whatsoever; and rightly so. A convention is essential, and the
duty of a novelist is to be true within his chosen convention, and not
further. Most novelists still fail in this duty. Is there any reason,
indeed, why we should be so vastly cleverer than our fathers? I do not
think we are.
V
Leaving the seductive minor question of ornamentation, I come lastly to
the question of getting the semblance of life on to the page before the
eyes of the reader--the daily and hourly texture of existence. The
novelist has selected his subject; he has drenched himself in his
subject. He has laid down the main features of the design. The living
embryo is there, and waits to be developed into full organic structure.
Whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital tissue which must be
his material? The answer is that he digs it out of himself. First-class
fiction is, and must be, in the final resort autobiographical. What else
should it be? The novelist may take notes of phenomena likely to be of
use to him. And he may acquire the skill to invent very apposite
illustrative incident. But he cannot invent psychology. Upon occasion
some human being may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for
his craft. But such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible. From
outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology of others. He
can use a real person as the unrecognisable but helpful basis for each
of his characters.... And all that is nothing. And all special research
is nothing. When the real intimate work of creation has to be done--and
it has to be done on every page--the novelist can only look within for
effective aid. Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he has felt
and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he accomplish his end.
An inquiry into the career of any first-class novelist invariably
reveals that his novels are full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every
good novel contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could
reveal. Episodes, moods, characters of autobiography can be detected and
traced to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate
autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may not be
detected. In dealing with each character in each episode the novelist
must for a thousand convincing details interrogate that part of his own
individuality which corresponds to the particular character. The
foundation of his equipment is universal sympathy. And the result of
this (or the cause--I don't know which) is that in his own individuality
there is something of everybody. If he is a born novelist he is safe in
asking himself, when in doubt as to the behaviour of a given personage
at a given point: "Now, what should _I_ have done?" And incorporating
the answer! And this in practice is what he does. Good fiction is
autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.
The necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction accounts for the
creative repetition to which all novelists--including the most
powerful--are reduced. They monotonously yield again and again to the
strongest predilections of their own individuality. Again and again they
think they are creating, by observation, a quite new character--and lo!
when finished it is an old one--autobiographical psychology has
triumphed! A novelist may achieve a reputation with only a single type,
created and re-created in varying forms. And the very greatest do not
contrive to create more than half a score genuine separate types. In
Cerfberr and Christophe's biographical dictionary of the characters of
Balzac, a tall volume of six hundred pages, there are some two thousand
entries of different individuals, but probably fewer than a dozen
genuine distinctive types. No creative artist ever repeated himself more
brazenly or more successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious
delightful actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young
man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping virgin, his
angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his faithful stupid
servant--each is continually popping up with a new name in the Human
Comedy. A similar phenomenon, as Frank Harris has proved, is to be
observed in Shakspere. Hamlet of Denmark was only the last and greatest
of a series of Shaksperean Hamlets.
It may be asked, finally: What of the actual process of handling the raw
material dug out of existence and of the artist's self--the process of
transmuting life into art? There is no process. That is to say, there is
no conscious process. The convention chosen by an artist is his illusion
of the truth. Consciously, the artist only omits, selects, arranges. But
let him beware of being false to his illusion, for then the process
becomes conscious, and bad. This is sentimentality, which is the seed of
death in his work. Every artist is tempted to sentimentalise, or to be
cynical--practically the same thing. And when he falls to the
temptation, the reader whispers in his heart, be it only for one
instant: "That is not true to life." And in turn the reader's illusion
of reality is impaired. Readers are divided into two classes--the
enemies and the friends of the artist. The former, a legion, admire for
a fortnight or a year. They hate an uncompromising struggle for the
truth. They positively like the artist to fall to temptation. If he
falls, they exclaim, "How sweet!" The latter are capable of savouring
the fine unpleasantness of the struggle for truth. And when they whisper
in their hearts: "That is not true to life," they are ashamed for the
artist. They are few, very few; but a vigorous clan. It is they who
confer immortality.