The evening party with which “War and Peace” begins is one of the most
triumphant examples in fiction of the difficult art of “situating” the
chief actors in the opening chapter of what is to be an exceptionally
crowded novel. No reader is likely to forget, or to confuse the one
with the other, the successive arrivals at that dull and trivial
St. Petersburg reception; Tolstoy with one mighty sweep gathers up
all his principal characters and sets them before us in action.
Very different--though so notable an achievement in its way--is the
first chapter of “The Karamazoff Brothers” (in the English or German
translation--for the current French translation inexplicably omits it).
In this chapter Dostoievsky has hung a gallery of portraits against a
blank wall. He describes all the members of the Karamazoff family, one
after another, with merciless precision and infernal insight. But there
they remain hanging--or standing. The reader is told all about them,
but is not allowed to surprise them in action. The story about them
begins afterward, whereas in “War and Peace” the first paragraph leads
into the thick of the tale, and every phrase, every gesture, carries
it on with that slow yet sweeping movement of which Tolstoy alone was
capable.
Many thickly-peopled novels begin more gradually--like “Vanity Fair,”
for example--and introduce their characters in carefully-ordered
succession. The process is obviously simpler, and in certain cases
as effective. The morning stroll of M. and Mme. Reynal and their
little boys, in the first chapter of “Le Rouge et le Noir,” sounds a
note sufficiently portentous; and so does Major Pendennis’s solitary
breakfast. In a general way there is much to be said for a quiet
opening to a long and crowded novel; though the novelist might prefer
to be able to fling all his characters on the boards at once, with
Tolstoy’s regal prodigality. There is no fixed rule about this, or
about any other method; each, in the art of fiction, to justify itself
has only to succeed. But to succeed, the method must first of all
suit the subject, must find its account, as best it can, with the
difficulties peculiar to each situation.
The question _where to begin_ is the next to confront the novelist;
and the art of seizing on the right moment is even more important
than that of being able to present a large number of characters at the
outset.
Here again no general rule can be laid down. One subject may require
to be treated from the centre, in the fashion dear to Henry James,
with its opening in the heart of the action, and retrospective vistas
radiating away from it on all sides, while others--of which “Henry
Esmond” is one of the most beautiful examples--would lose all their
bloom were they not allowed to ripen almost imperceptibly under
the reader’s absorbed contemplation. Balzac, in his preface to “La
Chartreuse de Parme”--almost the only public recognition of Stendhal’s
genius during the latter’s life-time--reproves the author for beginning
the book before its real beginning. Balzac knew well enough what the
world would have lost had that opening picture of Waterloo been left
out; but he insists that it is no part of the story Stendhal had set
out to tell, and sums up with the illuminating phrase: “M. Beyle has
chosen a subject [the Waterloo episode] _which is real in nature but
not in art_.” That is, being out of place in that particular work of
art, it loses its reality _as art_ and remains merely a masterly study
of a corner of a battle-field, the greatest the world was to know till
Tolstoy’s, but no part of a composition, as Tolstoy’s always were.