These considerations have led straight to the great, the central,
matter of subject; and inextricably interwoven with it are the
subsidiary points of form and style, both of which ought, as it
were, to spring naturally out of the particular theme chosen for
representation.
Form might perhaps, for present purposes, be defined as the order,
in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are
grouped; and style as the way in which they are presented, not only
in the narrower sense of language, but also, and rather, as they are
grasped and coloured by their medium, the narrator’s mind, and given
back in his words. It is the quality of the medium which gives these
incidents their quality; style, in this sense, is the most personal
ingredient in the combination of things out of which any work of art
is made. Words are the exterior symbols of thought, and it is only by
their exact use that the writer can keep on his subject the close and
patient hold which “fishes the murex up,” and steeps his creation in
unfading colours.
Style in this definition is discipline; and the self-consecration it
demands, and the bearing it has on the whole of the artist’s effort,
have been admirably summed up by Marcel Proust in that searching
chapter of “A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs” where he analyzes
the art of fiction in the person of the great novelist Bergotte. “The
severity of his taste, his unwillingness to write anything of which he
could not say, in his favourite phrase: ‘_C’est doux_’ [harmonious,
delicious], this determination, which had caused him to spend so many
seemingly fruitless years in the ‘precious’ carving of trifles, was
in reality the secret of his strength; for habit makes the style of
the writer as it makes the character of the man, and the author who
has several times contented himself with expressing his thought in an
approximately pleasing way _has once and for all set a boundary to his
talent, and will never pass beyond_.”
These definitions of form and style being established, and the
preliminary need of the harmony between an author’s talent and his
argument being assumed, one is next faced by the profounder problem
of the inherent fitness of any given subject as material for the
imagination.
It has been often said that subject in itself is all-important, and
at least as often that it is of no importance whatever. Definition
is again necessary before the truth can be extracted from these
contradictions. Subject, obviously, is _what the story is about_; but
whatever the central episode or situation chosen by the novelist, his
tale will be about only just so much of it as he reacts to. A gold mine
is worth nothing unless the owner has the machinery for extracting
the ore, and each subject must be considered first in itself, and
next in relation to the novelist’s power of extracting from it what
it contains. There are subjects trivial in appearance, and subjects
trivial to the core; and the novelist ought to be able to discern at
a glance between the two, and know in which case it is worth while to
set about sinking his shaft. But the novelist may make mistakes. He is
exposed to the temptation of the false good-subject, and learns only by
prolonged experience to resist surface-attractions, and probe his story
to the depths before he begins to tell it.
There is still another way in which subject must be tested. Any subject
considered in itself must first of all respond in some way to that
mysterious need of a judgment on life of which the most detached human
intellect, provided it be a normal one, cannot, apparently, rid itself.
Whether the “moral” be present in the guise of the hero rescuing the
heroine from the villain at the point of the revolver, or whether it
lurk in the quiet irony of such a scene as Pendennis’s visit to the
Grey Friars’ Chapel, and his hearing the choir singing “I have been
young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor
his seed begging their bread,” at the very moment when he discovers the
bent head of Colonel Newcome among the pauper gentlemen--in one form or
another there must be some sort of rational response to the reader’s
unconscious but insistent inner question: “What am I being told this
story for? What judgment on life does it contain for me?”
There seems to be no escape from this obligation except into a
pathological world where the action, taking place between people
of abnormal psychology, and not keeping time with our normal human
rhythms, becomes an idiot’s tale, signifying nothing. In vain has it
been attempted to set up a water-tight compartment between “art” and
“morality.” All the great novelists whose books have been used to point
the argument have invariably declared themselves on the other side,
not only by the inner significance of their work, but also, in some
cases, by the most explicit statements. Flaubert, for instance, so
often cited as the example of the writer viewing his themes in a purely
“scientific” or amoral light, has disproved the claim by providing the
other camp with that perfect formula: “_Plus la pensée est belle, plus
la phrase est sonore_”--not the metaphor, not the picture, but _the
thought_.
A good subject, then, must contain in itself something that sheds a
light on our moral experience. If it is incapable of this expansion,
this vital radiation, it remains, however showy a surface it presents,
a mere irrelevant happening, a meaningless scrap of fact torn out
of its context. Nor is it more than a half-truth to say that the
imagination which probes deep enough can find this germ in any
happening, however insignificant. The converse is true enough: the
limited imagination reduces a great theme to its own measure. But the
wide creative vision, though no fragment of human experience can appear
wholly empty to it, yet seeks by instinct those subjects in which some
phase of our common plight stands forth dramatically and typically,
subjects which, in themselves, are a kind of summary or foreshortening
of life’s dispersed and inconclusive occurrences.