I
The novelist is he who, having seen
life, and being so excited by it that he absolutely
must transmit the vision to others, chooses narrative
fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of
his feelings. He is like other artists he
cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to himself,
he is bursting with the news; he is bound to tell the
affair is too thrilling! Only he differs from
most artists in this that what most chiefly
strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature,
the large general manner of existing. Of course,
he is the result of evolution from the primitive.
And you can see primitive novelists to this day transmitting
to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude visions
of life in the cafe or the club, or on the kerbstone.
They belong to the lowest circle of artists; but they
are artists; and the form that they adopt is the very
basis of the novel. By innumerable entertaining
steps from them you may ascend to the major artist
whose vision of life, inclusive, intricate and intense,
requires for its due transmission the great traditional
form of the novel as perfected by the masters of a
long age which has temporarily set the novel higher
than any other art-form.
I would not argue that the novel should
be counted supreme among the great traditional forms
of art. Even if there is a greatest form, I do
not much care which it is. I have in turn been
convinced that Chartres Cathedral, certain Greek sculpture,
Mozart’s Don Juan, and the juggling of
Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest thing in the world not
to mention the achievements of Shakspere or Nijinsky.
But there is something to be said for the real pre-eminence
of prose fiction as a literary form. (Even the modern
epic has learnt almost all it knows from prose-fiction.)
The novel has, and always will have, the advantage
of its comprehensive bigness. St Peter’s
at Rome is a trifle compared with Tolstoi’s
War and Peace; and it is as certain as anything
can be that, during the present geological epoch at
any rate, no epic half as long as War and Peace
will ever be read, even if written.
Notoriously the novelist (including
the playwright, who is a sub-novelist) has been taking
the bread out of the mouths of other artists.
In the matter of poaching, the painter has done a lot,
and the composer has done more, but what the painter
and the composer have done is as naught compared to
the grasping deeds of the novelist. And whereas
the painter and the composer have got into difficulties
with their audacious schemes, the novelist has poached,
colonised, and annexed with a success that is not
denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the interestingness
of life which is not now rendered in prose fiction from
landscape-painting to sociology and none
which might not be. Unnecessary to go back to
the ante-Scott age in order to perceive how the novel
has aggrandised itself! It has conquered enormous
territories even since Germinal. Within
the last fifteen years it has gained. Were it
to adopt the hue of the British Empire, the entire
map of the universe would soon be coloured red.
Wherever it ought to stand in the hierarchy of forms,
it has, actually, no rival at the present day as a
means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life.
It is, and will be for some time to come, the form
to which the artist with the most inclusive vision
instinctively turns, because it is the most inclusive
form, and the most adaptable. Indeed, before we
are much older, if its present rate of progress continues,
it will have reoccupied the dazzling position to which
the mighty Balzac lifted it, and in which he left it
in 1850. So much, by the way, for the rank of
the novel.
II
In considering the equipment of the
novelist there are two attributes which may always
be taken for granted. The first is the sense of
beauty indispensable to the creative artist.
Every creative artist has it, in his degree.
He is an artist because he has it. An artist works
under the stress of instinct. No man’s instinct
can draw him towards material which repels him the
fact is obvious. Obviously, whatever kind of
life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed
and seduced by it, he is under its spell that
is, he has seen beauty in it. He could have no
other reason for writing about it. He may see
a strange sort of beauty; he may indeed
he does see a sort of beauty that nobody
has quite seen before; he may see a sort of beauty
that none save a few odd spirits ever will or can
be made to see. But he does see beauty. To
say, after reading a novel which has held you, that
the author has no sense of beauty, is inept. (The
mere fact that you turned over his pages with interest
is an answer to the criticism a criticism,
indeed, which is not more sagacious than that of the
reviewer who remarks: “Mr Blank has produced
a thrilling novel, but unfortunately he cannot write.”
Mr Blank has written; and he could, anyhow, write
enough to thrill the reviewer.) All that a wise person
will assert is that an artist’s sense of beauty
is different for the time being from his own.
The reproach of the lack of a sense
of beauty has been brought against nearly all original
novelists; it is seldom brought against a mediocre
novelist. Even in the extreme cases it is untrue;
perhaps it is most untrue in the extreme cases.
I do not mean such a case as that of Zola, who never
went to extremes. I mean, for example, Gissing,
a real extremist, who, it is now admitted, saw a clear
and undiscovered beauty in forms of existence which
hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to examine.
And I mean Huysmans, a case even more extreme.
Possibly no works have been more abused for ugliness
than Huysman’s novel En Ménage and his
book of descriptive essays De Tout. Both
reproduce with exasperation what is generally regarded
as the sordid ugliness of commonplace daily life.
Yet both exercise a unique charm (and will surely
be read when La Cathédrale is forgotten).
And it is inconceivable that Huysmans whatever
he may have said was not ravished by the
secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in
it.
The other attribute which may be taken
for granted in the novelist, as in every artist, is
passionate intensity of vision. Unless the vision
is passionately intense the artist will not be moved
to transmit it. He will not be inconvenienced
by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus not
exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader
has been, and must have been, previously felt by the
writer, but in a far greater degree. It is not
altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has
been desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain
that the writer is unemotional. Such people have
no notion at all of the processes of artistic creation.
III
A sense of beauty and a passionate
intensity of vision being taken for granted, the one
other important attribute in the equipment of the
novelist the attribute which indeed by itself
practically suffices, and whose absence renders futile
all the rest is fineness of mind. A
great novelist must have great qualities of mind.
His mind must be sympathetic, quickly responsive,
courageous, honest, humorous, tender, just, merciful.
He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing
sight of the fact that it is a human world we live
in. Above all, his mind must be permeated and
controlled by common sense. His mind, in a word,
must have the quality of being noble. Unless his
mind is all this, he will never, at the ultimate bar,
be reckoned supreme. That which counts, on every
page, and all the time, is the very texture of his
mind the glass through which he sees things.
Every other attribute is secondary, and is dispensable.
Fielding lives unequalled among English novelists
because the broad nobility of his mind is unequalled.
He is read with unreserved enthusiasm because the
reader feels himself at each paragraph to be in close
contact with a glorious personality. And no advance
in technique among later novelists can possibly imperil
his position. He will take second place when
a more noble mind, a more superb common sense, happens
to wield the narrative pen, and not before. What
undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction
that the texture of his mind was common, that he fell
short in courageous facing of the truth, and in certain
delicacies of perception. As much may be said
of Thackeray, whose mind was somewhat incomplete for
so grandiose a figure, and not free from defects which
are inimical to immortality.
It is a hard saying for me, and full
of danger in any country whose artists have shown
contempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, as
the years pass, I attach less and less importance to
good technique in fiction. I love it, and I have
fought for a better recognition of its importance
in England, but I now have to admit that the modern
history of fiction will not support me. With
the single exception of Turgenev, the great novelists
of the world, according to my own standards, have
either ignored technique or have failed to understand
it. What an error to suppose that the finest
foreign novels show a better sense of form than the
finest English novels! Balzac was a prodigious
blunderer. He could not even manage a sentence,
not to speak of the general form of a book. And
as for a greater than Balzac Stendhal his
scorn of technique was notorious. Stendhal was
capable of writing, in a masterpiece: “By
the way I ought to have told you earlier that the Duchess !”
And as for a greater than either Balzac or Stendhal Dostoievsky what
a hasty, amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the
unapproachable Brothers Karamazov! Any
tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction
by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky
was clumsy and careless. What would have been
Flaubert’s detailed criticism of that book?
And what would it matter? And, to take a minor
example, witness the comically amateurish technique
of the late “Mark Rutherford” nevertheless
a novelist whom one can deeply admire.
And when we come to consider the great
technicians, Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert, can we
say that their technique will save them, or atone
in the slightest degree for the defects of their minds?
Exceptional artists both, they are both now inevitably
falling in esteem to the level of the second-rate.
Human nature being what it is, and de Maupassant being
tinged with eroticism, his work is sure to be read
with interest by mankind; but he is already classed.
Nobody, now, despite all his brilliant excellences,
would dream of putting de Maupassant with the first
magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is
one of the outstanding phenomena of modern French
criticism. It is being discovered that Flaubert’s
mind was not quite noble enough that, indeed,
it was a cruel mind, and a little anæmic. Bouvard
et Pecuchet was the crowning proof that Flaubert
had lost sight of the humanness of the world, and
suffered from the delusion that he had been born on
the wrong planet. The glitter of his technique
is dulled now, and fools even count it against him.
In regard to one section of human activity only did
his mind seem noble namely, literary technique.
His correspondence, written, of course, currently,
was largely occupied with the question of literary
technique, and his correspondence stands forth to-day
as his best work a marvellous fount of
inspiration to his fellow artists. So I return
to the point that the novelist’s one important
attribute (beyond the two postulated) is fundamental
quality of mind. It and nothing else makes both
the friends and the enemies which he has; while the
influence of technique is slight and transitory.
And I repeat that it is a hard saying.
I begin to think that great writers
of fiction are by the mysterious nature of their art
ordained to be “amateurs.” There may
be something of the amateur in all great artists.
I do not know why it should be so, unless because,
in the exuberance of their sense of power, they are
impatient of the exactitudes of systematic study
and the mere bother of repeated attempts to arrive
at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great artist
was ever a profound scholar. The great artist
has other ends to achieve. And every artist,
major and minor, is aware in his conscience that art
is full of artifice, and that the desire to proceed
rapidly with the affair of creation, and an excusable
dislike of re-creating anything twice, thrice, or
ten times over unnatural task! are
responsible for much of that artifice. We can
all point in excuse to Shakspere, who was a very rough-and-ready
person, and whose methods would shock Flaubert.
Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has been mightily
exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care.
If Flaubert had been a greater artist he might have
been more of an amateur.
IV
Of this poor neglected matter of technique
the more important branch is design or
construction. It is the branch of the art of
all arts which comes next after “inspiration” a
capacious word meant to include everything that the
artist must be born with and cannot acquire. The
less important branch of technique far less
important may be described as an ornamentation.
There are very few rules of design
in the novel; but the few are capital. Nevertheless,
great novelists have often flouted or ignored them to
the detriment of their work. In my opinion the
first rule is that the interest must be centralised;
it must not be diffused equally over various parts
of the canvas. To compare one art with another
may be perilous, but really the convenience of describing
a novel as a canvas is extreme. In a well-designed
picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one particular
spot. If the eye is drawn with equal force to
several different spots, then we reproach the painter
for having “scattered” the interest of
the picture. Similarly with the novel. A
novel must have one, two, or three figures that easily
overtop the rest. These figures must be in the
foreground, and the rest in the middle-distance or
in the back-ground.
Moreover, these figures whether
they are saints or sinners must somehow
be presented more sympathetically than the others.
If this cannot be done, then the inspiration is at
fault. The single motive that should govern the
choice of a principal figure is the motive of love
for that figure. What else could the motive be?
The race of heroes is essential to art. But what
makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure chosen
than the understanding sympathy of the artist with
the figure. To say that the hero has disappeared
from modern fiction is absurd. All that has happened
is that the characteristics of the hero have changed,
naturally, with the times. When Thackeray wrote
“a novel without a hero,” he wrote a novel
with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this better
than Thackeray. What he meant was that he was
sick of the conventional bundle of characteristics
styled a hero in his day, and that he had changed
the type. Since then we have grown sick of Dobbins,
and the type has been changed again more than once.
The fateful hour will arrive when we shall be sick
of Ponderevos.
The temptation of the great novelist,
overflowing with creative force, is to scatter the
interest. In both his major works Tolstoi found
the temptation too strong for him. Anna Karenina
is not one novel, but two, and suffers accordingly.
As for War and Peace, the reader wanders about
in it as in a forest, for days, lost, deprived of a
sense of direction, and with no vestige of a sign-post;
at intervals encountering mysterious faces whose identity
he in vain tries to recall. On a much smaller
scale Meredith committed the same error. Who could
assert positively which of the sisters Fleming is the
heroine of Rhoda Fleming? For nearly two
hundred pages at a stretch Rhoda scarcely appears.
And more than once the author seems quite to forget
that the little knave Algernon is not, after all,
the hero of the story.
The second rule of design perhaps
in the main merely a different view of the first is
that the interest must be maintained. It may increase,
but it must never diminish. Here is that special
aspect of design which we call construction, or plot.
By interest I mean the interest of the story itself,
and not the interest of the continual play of the author’s
mind on his material. In proportion as the interest
of the story is maintained, the plot is a good one.
In so far as it lapses, the plot is a bad one.
There is no other criterion of good construction.
Readers of a certain class are apt to call good the
plot of that story in which “you can’t
tell what is going to happen next.” But
in some of the most tedious novels ever written you
can’t tell what is going to happen next and
you don’t care a fig what is going to happen
next. It would be nearer the mark to say that
the plot is good when “you want to make sure
what will happen next”! Good plots set you
anxiously guessing what will happen next.
When the reader is misled not
intentionally in order to get an effect, but clumsily
through amateurishness then the construction
is bad. This calamity does not often occur in
fine novels, but in really good work another calamity
does occur with far too much frequency namely,
the tantalising of the reader at a critical point
by a purposeless, wanton, or negligent shifting of
the interest from the major to the minor theme.
A sad example of this infantile trick is to be found
in the thirty-first chapter of Rhoda Fleming,
wherein, well knowing that the reader is tingling
for the interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author,
unable to control his own capricious and monstrous
fancy for Algernon, devotes some sixteen pages to
the young knave’s vagaries with an illicit thousand
pounds. That the sixteen pages are excessively
brilliant does not a bit excuse the wilful unshapeliness
of the book’s design.
The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out
defenders of Victorian fiction are wont to argue that
though the event-plot in sundry great novels may be
loose and casual (that is to say, simply careless),
the “idea-plot” is usually close-knit,
coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able
to comprehend how an idea-plot can exist independently
of an event-plot (any more than how spirit can be
conceived apart from matter); but assuming that an
idea-plot can exist independently, and that the mysterious
thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow, the
event-plot (which I positively do not believe), even
then I still hold that sloppiness in the fabrication
of the event-plot amounts to a grave iniquity.
In this connection I have in mind, among English novels,
chiefly the work of “Mark Rutherford,”
George Eliot, the Brontes, and Anthony Trollope.
The one other important rule in construction
is that the plot should be kept throughout within
the same convention. All plots even
those of our most sacred naturalistic contemporaries are
and must be a conventionalisation of life. We
imagine we have arrived at a convention which is nearer
to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
Perhaps we have but so little nearer that
the difference is scarcely appreciable! An aviator
at midday may be nearer the sun than the motorist,
but regarded as a portion of the entire journey to
the sun, the aviator’s progress upward can safely
be ignored. No novelist has yet, or ever will,
come within a hundred million miles of life itself.
It is impossible for us to see how far we still are
from life. The defects of a new convention disclose
themselves late in its career. The notion that
“naturalists” have at last lighted on a
final formula which ensures truth to life is ridiculous.
“Naturalist” is merely an epithet expressing
self-satisfaction.
Similarly, the habit of deriding as
“conventional” plots constructed in an
earlier convention, is ridiculous. Under this
head Dickens in particular has been assaulted; I have
assaulted him myself. But within their convention,
the plots of Dickens are excellent, and show little
trace of amateurishness, and every sign of skilled
accomplishment. And Dickens did not blunder out
of one convention into another, as certain of ourselves
undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned
for the conventionalism of his plots. And yet
Hardy happens to be one of the rare novelists who
have evolved a new convention to suit their idiosyncrasy.
Hardy’s idiosyncrasy is a deep conviction of
the whimsicality of the divine power, and again and
again he has expressed this with a virtuosity of skill
which ought to have put humility into the hearts of
naturalists, but which has not done so. The plot
of The Woodlanders is one of the most exquisite
examples of subtle symbolic illustration of an idea
that a writer of fiction ever achieved; it makes the
symbolism of Ibsen seem crude. You may say that
The Woodlanders could not have occurred in
real life. No novel could have occurred in real
life. The balance of probabilities is incalculably
against any novel whatsoever; and rightly so.
A convention is essential, and the duty of a novelist
is to be true within his chosen convention, and not
further. Most novelists still fail in this duty.
Is there any reason, indeed, why we should be so vastly
cleverer than our fathers? I do not think we
are.
V
Leaving the seductive minor question
of ornamentation, I come lastly to the question of
getting the semblance of life on to the page before
the eyes of the reader the daily and hourly
texture of existence. The novelist has selected
his subject; he has drenched himself in his subject.
He has laid down the main features of the design.
The living embryo is there, and waits to be developed
into full organic structure. Whence and how does
the novelist obtain the vital tissue which must be
his material? The answer is that he digs it out
of himself. First-class fiction is, and must
be, in the final resort autobiographical. What
else should it be? The novelist may take notes
of phenomena likely to be of use to him. And
he may acquire the skill to invent very apposite illustrative
incident. But he cannot invent psychology.
Upon occasion some human being may entrust him with
confidences extremely precious for his craft.
But such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible.
From outward symptoms he can guess something of the
psychology of others. He can use a real person
as the unrecognisable but helpful basis for each of
his characters.... And all that is nothing.
And all special research is nothing. When the
real intimate work of creation has to be done and
it has to be done on every page the novelist
can only look within for effective aid. Almost
solely by arranging and modifying what he has felt
and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he
accomplish his end. An inquiry into the career
of any first-class novelist invariably reveals that
his novels are full of autobiography. But, as
a fact, every good novel contains far more autobiography
than any inquiry could reveal. Episodes, moods,
characters of autobiography can be detected and traced
to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate
autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising
it, may not be detected. In dealing with each
character in each episode the novelist must for a
thousand convincing details interrogate that part of
his own individuality which corresponds to the particular
character. The foundation of his equipment is
universal sympathy. And the result of this (or
the cause I don’t know which) is that
in his own individuality there is something of everybody.
If he is a born novelist he is safe in asking himself,
when in doubt as to the behaviour of a given personage
at a given point: “Now, what should I
have done?” And incorporating the answer!
And this in practice is what he does. Good fiction
is autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.
The necessarily autobiographical nature
of fiction accounts for the creative repetition to
which all novelists including the most
powerful are reduced. They monotonously
yield again and again to the strongest predilections
of their own individuality. Again and again they
think they are creating, by observation, a quite new
character and lo! when finished it is an
old one autobiographical psychology has
triumphed! A novelist may achieve a reputation
with only a single type, created and re-created in
varying forms. And the very greatest do not contrive
to create more than half a score genuine separate types.
In Cerfberr and Christophe’s biographical dictionary
of the characters of Balzac, a tall volume of six
hundred pages, there are some two thousand entries
of different individuals, but probably fewer than a
dozen genuine distinctive types. No creative
artist ever repeated himself more brazenly or more
successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious
delightful actress, his vicious delightful duchess,
his young man-about-town, his virtuous young man,
his heroic weeping virgin, his angelic wife and mother,
his poor relation, and his faithful stupid servant each
is continually popping up with a new name in the Human
Comedy. A similar phenomenon, as Frank Harris
has proved, is to be observed in Shakspere. Hamlet
of Denmark was only the last and greatest of a series
of Shaksperean Hamlets.
It may be asked, finally: What
of the actual process of handling the raw material
dug out of existence and of the artist’s self the
process of transmuting life into art? There is
no process. That is to say, there is no conscious
process. The convention chosen by an artist is
his illusion of the truth. Consciously, the artist
only omits, selects, arranges. But let him beware
of being false to his illusion, for then the process
becomes conscious, and bad. This is sentimentality,
which is the seed of death in his work. Every
artist is tempted to sentimentalise, or to be cynical practically
the same thing. And when he falls to the temptation,
the reader whispers in his heart, be it only for one
instant: “That is not true to life.”
And in turn the reader’s illusion of reality
is impaired. Readers are divided into two classes the
enemies and the friends of the artist. The former,
a legion, admire for a fortnight or a year. They
hate an uncompromising struggle for the truth.
They positively like the artist to fall to temptation.
If he falls, they exclaim, “How sweet!”
The latter are capable of savouring the fine unpleasantness
of the struggle for truth. And when they whisper
in their hearts: “That is not true to life,”
they are ashamed for the artist. They are few,
very few; but a vigorous clan. It is they who
confer immortality.