The distrust of technique and the fear of being unoriginal--both
symptoms of a certain lack of creative abundance--are in truth leading
to pure anarchy in fiction, and one is almost tempted to say that in
certain schools formlessness is now regarded as the first condition of
form.
Not long ago I heard a man of letters declare that Dostoievsky was
superior to Tolstoy because his mind was “more chaotic,” and he could
therefore render more “truthfully” the chaos of the Russian mind in
general; though how chaos can be apprehended and defined by a mind
immersed in it, the speaker did not make clear. The assertion, of
course, was the result of confusing imaginative emotivity with its
objective rendering. What the speaker meant was that the novelist
who would create a given group of people or portray special social
conditions must be able to identify himself with them; which is rather
a long way of saying that an artist must have imagination.
The chief difference between the merely sympathetic and the creative
imagination is that the latter is two-sided, and combines with the
power of penetrating into other minds that of standing far enough aloof
from them to see beyond, and relate them to the whole stuff of life
out of which they but partially emerge. Such an all-round view can
be obtained only by mounting to a height; and that height, in art,
is proportioned to the artist’s power of detaching one part of his
imagination from the particular problem in which the rest is steeped.
One of the causes of the confusion of judgment on this point is
no doubt the perilous affinity between the art of fiction and the
material it works in. It has been so often said that all art is
re-presentation--the giving back in conscious form of the shapeless
raw material of experience--that one would willingly avoid insisting
on such a truism. But while there is no art of which the saying is
truer than of fiction, there is none in respect of which there is more
danger of the axiom’s being misinterpreted. The attempt to give back
any fragment of life in painting or sculpture or music presupposes
transposition, “stylization.” To re-present in words is far more
difficult, because the relation is so close between model and artist.
The novelist works in the very material out of which the object he is
trying to render is made. He must use, to express soul, the signs
which soul uses to express itself. It is relatively easy to separate
the artistic vision of an object from its complex and tangled actuality
if one has to re-see it in paint or marble or bronze; it is infinitely
difficult to render a human mind when one is employing the very
word-dust with which thought is formulated.
Still, the transposition does take place as surely, if not as
obviously, in a novel as in a statue. If it did not, the writing
of fiction could never be classed among works of art, products of
conscious ordering and selecting, and there would consequently be
nothing to say about it, since there seems to be no way of estimating
æsthetically anything to which no standard of choice can be applied.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of
immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though
one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another, equally imperious,
is that of fiercely guarding against it. In this respect, the novelist
of the present day is in danger of being caught in a vicious circle,
for the insatiable demand for quick production tends to keep him in
a state of perpetual immaturity, and the ready acceptance of his
wares encourages him to think that no time need be wasted in studying
the past history of his art, or in speculating on its principles.
This conviction strengthens the belief that the so-called quality of
“originality” may be impaired by too long brooding on one’s theme and
too close a commerce with the past; but the whole history of that
past--in every domain of art--disproves this by what survives, and
shows that every subject, to yield and to retain its full flavour,
should be long carried in the mind, brooded upon, and fed with all the
impressions and emotions which nourish its creator.
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That
new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at
the object represented to make it the writer’s own; and the mind which
would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it
with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. To know any
one thing one must not only know something of a great many others, but
also, as Matthew Arnold long since pointed out, a great deal more of
one’s immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly
includes; and Mr. Kipling’s “What should they know of England who only
England know?” might be taken as the symbolic watchword of the creative
artist.
One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has
invented the “fiction course” is getting the fiction it deserves. At
any rate it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art
is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that
notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms. But though
the trade-wind in fiction undoubtedly drives many beginners along the
line of least resistance, and holds them there, it is far from being
the sole cause of the present quest for short-cuts in art. There are
writers indifferent to popular success, and even contemptuous of
it, who sincerely believe that this line marks the path of the true
vocation. Many people assume that the artist receives, at the outset
of his career, the mysterious sealed orders known as “Inspiration,”
and has only to let that sovereign impulse carry him where it will.
Inspiration does indeed come at the outset to every creator, but it
comes most often as an infant, helpless, stumbling, inarticulate, to be
taught and guided; and the beginner, during this time of training his
gift, is as likely to misuse it as a young parent to make mistakes in
teaching his first child.
There is no doubt that in this day of general “speeding up,” the
“inspirational” theory is seductive even to those who care nothing
for easy triumphs. No writer--especially at the beginning of his
career--can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that
awaits him; and the young novelist may ask of what use are experience
and meditation, when his readers are so incapable of giving him
either. The answer is that he will never do his best till he ceases
altogether to think of his readers (and his editor and his publisher)
and begins to write, not for himself, but for that _other self_ with
whom the creative artist is always in mysterious correspondence, and
who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day
receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it.
As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination
can make a little go a long way, provided it remains long enough in
the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. One good heart-break will
furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable
number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break.
Even to the writer least concerned with popularity it is difficult,
at first, to defend his personality. Study and meditation contain
their own perils. Counsellors intervene with contradictory advice
and instances. In such cases these counsellors are most often other
people’s novels: the great novels of the past, which haunt the
beginner like a passion, and the works of his contemporaries, which
pull him this way and that with too-persuasive hands. His impulse, at
first, will be either to shun them, to his own impoverishment, or to
let his dawning individuality be lost in theirs; but gradually he will
come to see that he must learn to listen to them, take all they can
give, absorb it into himself, and then turn to his own task with the
fixed resolve to see life only through his own eyes.
Even then another difficulty remains; the mysterious discrepancy which
sometimes exists between a novelist’s vision of life and his particular
kind of talent. Not infrequently an innate tendency to see things in
large masses is combined with the technical inability to render them
otherwise than separately, meticulously, on a small scale. Perhaps
more failures than one is aware of are due to this particular lack of
proportion between the powers of vision and expression. At any rate, it
is the cause of some painful struggles and arid dissatisfactions; and
the only remedy is resolutely to abandon the larger for the smaller
field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing
closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.
Of twenty subjects that tempt the imagination (subjects one sees one’s
self doing, oh so wonderfully, if only one were Mérimée or Maupassant,
or Conrad or Mr. Kipling!) probably but one is “fit for the hand” of
the limited person one happens to be; and to learn to renounce the
others is a first step toward doing that particular one well.