The question of form--already defined as the order, in time and
importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped--is,
for obvious reasons, harder to deal with in the novel than in the
short story, and most difficult in the novel of manners, with its more
crowded stage, and its continual interweaving of individual with social
analysis.
The English novelists of the early nineteenth century were still
farther enslaved by the purely artificial necessity of the double
plot. Two parallel series of adventures, in which two separate groups
of people were concerned, sometimes with hardly a link between the
two, and always without any deep organic connection, were served up in
alternating sections. Throughout the novels of Dickens, George Eliot,
Trollope and the majority of their contemporaries, this tedious and
senseless convention persists, checking the progress of each series of
events and distracting the reader’s attention. The artificial trick of
keeping two stories going like a juggler’s ball is entirely different
from the attempt to follow the interwoven movements of typical social
groups, as Thackeray did in “Vanity Fair” and “The Newcomes,” Balzac in
“Le Père Goriot.” In these cases the separate groups, either families
or larger units, in a sense impersonate _the protagonists of the tale_,
and their fates are as closely interwoven as those of the two or three
persons on the narrow stage of a tale like “Silas Marner.”
The double plot has long since vanished, and the “plot” itself, in the
sense of an elaborate puzzle into which a given number of characters
have to be arbitrarily fitted, has gone with it to the lumber-room
of discarded conventions. But traces of the parallel story linger in
the need often felt by young writers of crowding their scene with
supernumeraries. The temptation is specially great in composing the
novel of manners. If one is undertaking to depict a “section of life,”
how avoid a crowded stage? The answer is, by choosing as principal
characters figures so typical that each connotes a whole section of
the social background. It is the unnecessary characters who do the
crowding, who confuse the reader by uselessly dispersing his attention;
but even the number of subordinate yet necessary characters may be
greatly reduced by making the principal figures so typical that they
adumbrate most of the others.
The traditions of the Théâtre Français used to require that the number
of objects on the stage--chairs, tables, even to a glass of water on a
table--should be limited to the actual requirements of the drama: the
chairs must all be sat in, the table carry some object necessary to the
action, the glass of water or decanter of wine be a part of the drama.
The stage-realism introduced from England a generation ago submerged
these scenic landmarks under a flood of irrelevant upholstery; but
as guides in the labyrinth of composition they are still standing,
as necessary to the novelist as to the playwright. In both cases a
far profounder effect is produced by the penetrating study of a few
characters than by the multiplying of half-drawn figures. Neither
novelist nor playwright should ever venture on creating a character
without first following it out to the end of the projected tale
and being sure that the latter will be the poorer for its absence.
Characters whose tasks have not been provided for them in advance
are likely to present as embarrassing problems as other types of the
unemployed.
In the number of characters introduced, as much as in the scenic
details given, relevance is the first, the arch, necessity. And
characters and scenic detail are in fact one to the novelist who has
fully assimilated his material. The moon-enchanted hollow of Wilming
Weir in “Sandra Belloni” is as much the landscape of Emilia’s soul as
of a corner of England; it was one of George Meredith’s distinguishing
merits that he always made his art as a landscape-painter contribute to
the interpretation of his tale, so that such scenes as that of Wilming
Weir, the sunrise from the top of Monte Motterone in the opening
chapter of “Vittoria,” and the delicious wall-flower-coloured picture
of the farm-house in “Harry Richmond,” are all necessary parts of the
novels in which they figure, and above all are seen as the people _to
whom they happened_ would have seen them.
This leads to another important principle. The impression produced by
a landscape, a street or a house should always, to the novelist, be
an event in the history of a soul, and the use of the “descriptive
passage,” and its style, should be determined by the fact that it
must depict only what the intelligence concerned would have noticed,
and always in terms within the register of that intelligence. Two
instances, illustrating respectively the observance and the neglect
of this rule, may be cited from the novels of Mr. Hardy: the first,
that memorable evocation of Egdon Heath by night, as Eustacia Vye
looks forth on it from Rainbarrow; the other, the painfully detailed
description, in all its geological and agricultural details, of the
Wessex vale through which another of Mr. Hardy’s heroines, unseeing,
wretched, and incapable at any time of noting such particularities as
it has amused her creator to set down, flies blindly to her doom.
V
The two central difficulties of the novel--both of which may at first
appear purely technical--are still to be considered. They have to do
with the choice of the point from which the subject is to be seen, and
with the attempt to produce on the reader the effect of the passage of
time. Both may “appear purely technical”; but even were it possible to
draw a definite line between the technique of a work of art and its
informing spirit, the points in question go too deep to be so classed.
They are rooted in the subject; and--as always, in the last issue--the
subject itself must determine and limit their office.
It was remarked in the chapter on the short story that the
same experience never happens to any two people, and that the
story-teller’s first care, after the choice of a subject, is to
decide to which of his characters the episode in question happened,
since it could not have happened in that particular way to more than
one. Applied to the novel this may seem a hard saying, since the
longer passage of time and more crowded field of action presuppose,
on the part of the visualizing character, a state of omniscience and
omnipresence likely to shake the reader’s sense of probability. The
difficulty is most often met by shifting the point of vision from one
character to another, in such a way as to comprehend the whole history
and yet preserve the unity of impression. In the interest of this unity
it is best to shift as seldom as possible, and to let the tale work
itself out from not more than two (or at most three) angles of vision,
choosing as reflecting consciousnesses persons either in close mental
and moral relation to each other, or discerning enough to estimate
each other’s parts in the drama, so that the latter, even viewed from
different angles, always presents itself to the reader _as a whole_.
The choice of such reflectors is not easy; still more arduous is the
task of determining at what point each is to be turned on the scene.
The only possible rule seems to be that when things happen which the
first reflector cannot, with any show of probability, be aware of, or
is incapable of reacting to, even if aware, then another, an adjoining,
consciousness is required to take up the tale.
Thus drily stated, the formula may seem pedantic and arbitrary; but it
will be found to act of itself in the hands of the novelist who has so
let his subject ripen in his mind that the characters are as close to
him as his own flesh. To the novelist who lives among his creations in
this continuous intimacy they should pour out their tale almost as if
to a passive spectator.
The problem of the co-ordinating consciousness has visibly disturbed
many novelists, and the different solutions attempted are full of
interest and instruction. Each is of course but another convention,
and no convention is in itself objectionable, but becomes so only when
wrongly used, as dirt, according to the happy definition, is only
“matter in the wrong place.”
Verisimilitude is the truth of art, and any convention which hinders
the illusion is obviously in the wrong place. Few hinder it more than
the slovenly habit of some novelists of tumbling in and out of their
characters’ minds, and then suddenly drawing back to scrutinize them
from the outside as the avowed Showman holding his puppets’ strings.
All the greatest modern novelists have felt this, and sought, though
often half-unconsciously, to find a way out of the difficulty. The most
interesting experiments made in this respect have been those of James
and Conrad, to both of whom--though in ways how different!--the novel
was always by definition a work of art, and therefore worthy of the
creator’s utmost effort.
James sought the effect of verisimilitude by rigorously confining
every detail of his picture to the range, and also to the capacity,
of the eye fixed on it. “In the Cage” is a curiously perfect example
of the experiment on a small scale, only one very restricted field
of vision being permitted. In his longer and more eventful novels,
where the transition from one consciousness to another became
necessary, he contrived it with such unfailing ingenuity that the
reader’s visual range was continuously enlarged by the substitution
of a second consciousness whenever the boundaries of the first were
exceeded. “The Wings of the Dove” gives an interesting example of
these transitions. In “The Golden Bowl,” still unsatisfied, still in
pursuit of an impossible perfection, he felt he must introduce a sort
of _co-ordinating consciousness_ detached from, but including, the
characters principally concerned. The same attempt to wrest dramatic
forms to the uses of the novel that caused “The Awkward Age” to be
written in dialogue seems to have suggested the creation of Colonel
and Mrs. Assingham as a sort of Greek chorus to the tragedy of “The
Golden Bowl.” This insufferable and incredible couple spend their
days in espionage and delation, and their evenings in exchanging the
reports of their eaves’-dropping with a minuteness and precision worthy
of Scotland Yard. The utter improbability of such conduct on the part
of a dull-witted and frivolous couple in the rush of London society
shows that the author created them for the sole purpose of revealing
details which he could not otherwise communicate without lapsing into
the character of the mid-Victorian novelist chatting with his readers
of “my heroine” in the manner of Thackeray and Dickens. Convention for
convention (and both are bad), James’s is perhaps even more unsettling
to the reader’s confidence than the old-fashioned intrusion of the
author among his puppets. Both ought to be avoided, and may be, as
other great novels are there to prove.
Conrad’s preoccupation was the same, but he sought to solve it in
another way, by creating what some one has aptly called a “hall of
mirrors,” a series of reflecting consciousnesses, all belonging to
people who are outside of the story but accidentally drawn into its
current, and not, like the Assinghams, forced into it for the sole
purpose of acting as spies and eaves’-droppers.
The method did not originate with Conrad. In that most perfectly-composed
of all short stories, “La Grande Bretèche,” Balzac showed what depth,
mystery, and verisimilitude may be given to a tale by causing it to
be reflected, in fractions, in the minds of a series of accidental
participants or mere lookers-on. The relator of the tale, casually
detained in a provincial town, is struck by the ruinous appearance
of one of its handsomest houses. He makes his way into the deserted
garden, and is at once called on by a solicitor who informs him that,
according to the will of the lately deceased owner, no one is to
be permitted on the premises till fifty years after her death. The
visitor, whose curiosity is naturally excited, next learns from the
landlady of his inn that, though she has never known the exact facts
of the tragedy, she knows there has been one, and that a person whom
she suspects of having played a part in it is actually lodged under
her roof. From the landlady the narrator carries his enquiries to the
maid-servant of the inn, who had been in the service of the dead lady,
and who confides to him the dreadful scenes of which she was a helpless
and horror-struck witness; and, grouping these fragments in his own
more comprehending mind, he finally gives them to the reader in their
ghastly completeness.
Even George Meredith, whose floods of improvisation seem to have been
so rarely hampered by any concern as to the composition of his novels,
was now and then visibly perplexed by the question of how to pass from
the mind of one character to another without too violent a jolt to the
reader. In one instance--in one of those “big scenes” which, as George
Eliot said, “write themselves”--he attempted, probably on the spur of
the moment, a solution which proved admirably successful--for that
particular occasion. In the memorable talk in the course of which the
inarticulate Rhoda Fleming and her tongue-tied suitor finally discover
themselves to each other, the novelist, to show how tongue-tied both
were, and yet convey the emotion beneath their halting monosyllables,
hit on the device of putting in parenthesis, after each phrase, what
the speaker was actually thinking. It is one of the great pages of the
book; yet even in the enchantment of first reading it one is aware of
admiring a mere acrobatic feat, a sort of breathless _chassé-croisé_
which could not have been kept up for another page without straining
the reader’s patience and his sense of likelihood. Meredith was a
genius, and his instinct for effect made him, at a crucial moment,
stumble on a successful trick; but, because he was a genius, he did not
prolong or repeat it.
The reason why such sudden changes from one mind to another are
fatiguing and disillusioning was summed up--though for a different
purpose--in a vivid phrase of George Eliot’s. It is in the chapter
of “Middlemarch” which records the talk between Dorothea and Celia
Brooke, after the latter’s first meeting with the austere and pompous
Mr. Casaubon, whom her elder sister so unaccountably admires. The
frivolous Celia is profoundly disappointed: she finds Mr. Casaubon very
ugly. Dorothea, at this, haughtily lets drop that he reminds her of the
portraits of Locke. Celia: “Had Locke those two white moles with hairs
on them?” Dorothea: “_Oh, I daresay! when people of a certain sort
looked at him._”
That answer sums up the whole dilemma. Before beginning his tale, the
novelist must decide whether it is to be seen through eyes given to
noting white moles, or to discovering “the visionary butterfly alit”
on faces so disfigured. He cannot have it both ways and still hope to
persuade his reader.
The other difficulty is that of communicating the effect of the gradual
passage of time in such a way that the modifying and maturing of the
characters shall seem not an arbitrary sleight-of-hand but the natural
result of growth in age and experience. This is the great mystery of
the art of fiction. The secret seems incommunicable; one can only
conjecture that it has to do with the novelist’s own deep belief in
his characters and what he is telling about them. He _knows_ that
this and that befell them, and that in the interval between this and
that the months and years have continued their slow task of erosion
or accretion; and he conveys this knowledge by some subterranean
process as hard to seize in action as the growth of a plant. A study
of the great novelists--and especially of Balzac, Thackeray, and
Tolstoy--will show that such changes are suggested, are arrived at,
in the inconspicuous transitional pages of narrative that lead from
climax to climax. One of the means by which the effect is produced is
certainly that of not fearing to go slowly, to keep down the tone of
the narrative, to be as colourless and quiet as life often is in the
intervals between its high moments.
Another difficulty connected with this one is that of keeping so firm
a hold on the main lines of one’s characters that they emerge modified
and yet themselves from the ripening or disintegrating years. Tolstoy
had this gift to a supreme degree. Wherever in the dense forest of
“War and Peace” a character reappears, often after an interval so long
that the ear has almost lost _the sound to which he rhymes_, he is at
once recognized as the same, profoundly the same, yet scored by new
lines of suffering and experience. Natacha, grown into the fat slovenly
_mère-de-famille_ of the last chapters, is incredibly like and yet
different to the phantom of delight who first captivated Prince Andrew;
and the Prince himself, in those incomparable pages devoted to his long
illness, where one watches the very process of dematerialization, the
detachment from earthly things happening as naturally as the fall of
a leaf, is the same as the restless and unhappy man who appears with
his pathetic irritating little wife at the evening party of the first
chapter.
Becky Sharp, Arthur Pendennis, Dorothea Casaubon, Lydgate, Charles
Bovary--with what sure and patient touches their growth and decline
are set forth! And how mysteriously yet unmistakably, as they reappear
after each interval, the sense is conveyed that there _has_ been an
interval, not in moral experience only but in the actual lapse of the
seasons! The producing of this impression is indeed the central mystery
of the art. To its making go patience, meditation, concentration, all
the quiet habits of mind now so little practised, so seldom inculcated;
and to these must be added the final imponderable, genius, without
which the rest is useless, and which, conversely, would be unusable
without the rest.