Goethe declared that only the Tree of Life was green, and that all
theories were gray; and he also congratulated himself on never “having
thought about thinking.” But if he never thought about thinking he did
think a great deal about his art, and some of the axioms he laid down
for its practice go deeper than those of the professed philosophers.
The art of fiction, as now practised, is a recent one, and the arts
in their earliest stages are seldom theorized on by those engaged
in creating them; but as soon as they begin to take shape their
practitioners, or at least those of the number who happen to think
as well as to create, perforce begin to ask themselves questions.
Some may not have Goethe’s gift for formulating the answers, even
to themselves; but these answers will eventually be discoverable in
an added firmness of construction and appropriateness of expression.
Other writers do consciously lay down rules, and in the search for new
forms and more complex effects may even become the slaves of their
too-fascinating theories. These are the true pioneers, who are never
destined to see their own work fulfilled, but build intellectual houses
for the next generation to live in.
Henry James was of this small minority. As he became more and more
preoccupied with the architecture of the novel he unconsciously
subordinated all else to his ever-fresh complexities of design, so that
his last books are magnificent projects for future masterpieces rather
than living creations. Such an admission may seem to reinforce the
argument against theorizing about one’s art; but there are few Jameses
and fewer Goethes in any generation, nor is there ever much danger
in urging mankind to follow a counsel of perfection. In the case of
most novelists, such thought as they spare to the art, its range and
limitations, far from sterilizing their talent will stimulate it by
giving them a surer command of their means, and will perhaps temper
their eagerness for popular recognition by showing them that the only
reward worth having is in the quality of the work done.
The foregoing considerations on the writing of fiction may seem to some
dry and dogmatic, to others needlessly complicated; still others may
feel that in the quest for an intelligible working theory the gist of
the matter has been missed. No doubt there is some truth in all these
objections; there would be, even had the subject been far more fully
and adequately treated. It would appear that in the course of such
enquiries the gist of the matter always does escape. Just as one thinks
to cast a net over it, a clap of the wings, and it is laughing down on
one from the topmost bough of the Tree of Life!
Is all seeking vain, then? Is it useless to try for a clear view
of the meaning and method of one’s art? Surely not. If no art can
be quite pent-up in the rules deduced from it, neither can it fully
realize itself unless those who practise it attempt to take its measure
and reason out its processes. It is true that the gist of the matter
always escapes, since it nests, the elusive bright-winged thing, in
that mysterious fourth-dimensional world which is the artist’s inmost
sanctuary and on the threshold of which enquiry perforce must halt;
but though that world is inaccessible, the creations emanating from it
reveal something of its laws and processes.
Here another parenthesis must be opened to point out once more that,
though this world the artist builds about him in the act of creation
reaches us and moves us through its resemblance to the life we know,
yet in the artist’s consciousness its essence, the core of it, is
other. All worthless fiction and inefficient reviewing are based on the
forgetting of this fact. To the artist his world is as solidly real
as the world of experience, or even more so, but in a way entirely
different; it is a world to and from which he passes without any sense
of effort, but always _with an uninterrupted awareness of the passing_.
In this world are begotten and born the creatures of his imagination,
more living to him than his own flesh-and-blood, but whom he never
thinks of as living, in the reader’s simplifying sense. Unless he keeps
his hold on this dual character of their being, visionary to him, and
to the reader real, he will be the slave of his characters and not
their master. When I say their master, I do not mean that they are his
marionettes and dangle from his strings. Once projected by his fancy
they are living beings who live their own lives; but their world is
the one consciously imposed on them by their creator. Only by means of
this objectivity of the artist can his characters live in art. I have
never been much moved by the story of the tears Dickens is supposed to
have shed over the death of Little Nell; that is, if they were real
material tears, and not distilled from the milk of Paradise. The
business of the artist is to make weep, and not to weep, to make laugh,
and not to laugh; and unless tears and laughter, and flesh-and-blood,
are transmuted by him into the substance that art works in, they are
nothing to his purpose, or to ours.
Yet to say this, though it seems the last word, is not all. The
novelist to whom this magic world is not open has not even touched the
borders of the art, and to its familiars the power of expression may
seem innate. But it is not so. The creatures of that fourth-dimensional
world are born as helpless as the human animal; and each time the
artist passes from dream to execution he will need to find the rules
and formulas on the threshold.