The Craft of Fiction Part 3

Becky had made an earlier appearance at Gaunt House; she had dined there, near the beginning of her social career, and had found herself in a difficulty; there came a moment when she had to face the frigid hostility of the n.o.ble ladies of the party, alone with them in the drawing-room, and her a.s.surance failed. In the little scene that ensues the charming veil of Thackeray's talk is suddenly raised; there is Becky seated at the piano, Lady Steyne listening in a dream of old memories, the other women chattering at a distance, when the jarring doors are thrown open and the men return. It is all over in half a page, but in that glimpse the story is lifted forward dramatically; ocular proof, as it were, is added to Thackeray's account of Becky's doubtful and delicate position. As a matter of curiosity I mention the one moment in the later episode, the evening of those strangely ineffective charades at Gaunt House, which appears to me to open the same kind of rift in the haze; it is a single glimpse of Steyne, applauding Becky's triumph. He is immediately there, an actor in the show, alive and expressive, but he is alone; none of the others so emerges, even Becky is only a luminous spot in the dimness. As for the relation of the three, Steyne, Becky, and her husband, which is on the point of becoming so important, there is nothing to be seen of it.

Right and left in the novels of Thackeray one may gather instances of the same kind--the piercing and momentary shaft of direct vision, the big scene approached and then refused. It is easy to find another in Vanity Fair. Who but Thackeray could have borne to use the famous matter of the Waterloo ball, a wonderful gift for a novelist to find in his path, only to waste it, to dissipate its effect, to get no real contribution from it after all? In the queer, haphazard, polyglot interlude that precedes it Thackeray is, of course, entirely at home; there it is a question of the picture-making he delights in, the large impression of things in general, the evocation of daily life; Brussels in its talkative suspense, waiting for the sound of the guns, feeding on rumour, comes crowding into the chapter. And then the great occasion that should have crowned it, into which the story naturally and logically pa.s.ses--for again the scene is not a decorative patch, the story needs it--the Waterloo ball is nothing, leaves no image, const.i.tutes no effect whatever; the reader, looking back on the book, might be quite uncertain whether he had been there or not. n.o.body could forget the sight of Lady Bareacres, sitting under the _porte cochere_ in her horseless carriage--of good Mrs. O'Dowd, rising in the dawn to equip her warrior for battle--of George Osborne, dead on the field; but these are Thackeray's flashes of revelation, straight and sure, and they are all the drama, strictly speaking, that he extorts from his material. The rest is picture, stirringly, vivaciously reflected in his unfailing memory--with the dramatic occasion to which it tends, the historic affair of the "revelry by night," neglected and lost.

There is scarcely need for more ill.u.s.tration of my point, but it is tempting to look further. In all these well-remembered books Thackeray, in an expansive mood, opens his mind and talks it out on the subject of some big, loosely-knit company of men and women. He remembers, as we all remember, with a strong sense of the tone and air of an old experience, and a sharp recollection of moments that happened for some reason to be salient, significant, peculiarly keen or curious. Ethel Newcome, when she comes riding into the garden in the early morning, full of the news of her wonderful discovery, the letter shut in the old book; Blanche Amory, when she is caught out in her faithlessness, warbling to the new swain at the piano and whipping her handkerchief over his jewel-case as the old one enters; Madam Esmond, on her balcony, defying the mob with "Britons, strike home"; old Sir Pitt, toasting his rasher in the company of the char-woman: I name them at random, they are all instances of the way in which the glance of memory falls on the particular moment, the aspect that hardens and crystallizes an impression. Thackeray has these flashes in profusion; they break out unforgettably as we think of his books. The most exquisite of all, perhaps, is in Esmond, that sight of the dusky choir of Winchester Cathedral, the s.h.i.+ne of the candle-light, the clear faces of Rachel and her son as they appear to the returned wanderer. We no longer listen to a story, no longer see the past in a sympathetic imagination; this is a higher power of intensity, a fragment of the past made present and actual. But with Thackeray it is always a fragment, never to any real purpose a deliberate and continuous enactment.

For continuity he always recurs to his pictorial summary. The Newcomes alone would give a dozen examples of this side of his genius--in the pages that recall the lean dignity of the refugees from revolutionary Paris, or the pious opulence of Clapham, or the rustle of fas.h.i.+on round the Mayfair chapel, or the chatter and scandal of Baden-Baden, or the squalid pretensions of English life at Boulogne. I need not lengthen the list; these evocations follow one upon another, and as quickly as Thackeray pa.s.ses into a new circle he makes us feel and know what it was like to live there and belong to it. The typical look of the place is in his mind, the sense of its habitual life, the savour of the hours that lapse there. But Esmond again has the last word; the early chapters of the old days at Castlewood show a subtlety of effect that is peculiar and rare. It is more than a picture of a place and an impression of romance, it is more than the portrait of a child; besides all this it is the most masterly of "time-pictures," if that is a word that will serve. The effect I am thinking of is different from that of which I spoke in the matter of Tolstoy's great cycles of action; there we saw the march of time recording itself, affirming its ceaseless movement, in the lives of certain people. This of Thackeray's is not like that; time, at Castlewood, is not movement, it is tranquillity--time that stands still, as we say, only deepening as the years go. It cannot therefore be shown as a sequence; and Thackeray roams to and fro in his narrative, caring little for the connected order of events if he can give the sensation of time, deep and soft and abundant, by delaying and returning at ease over this tract of the past. It would be possible, I think, to say very precisely where and how the effect is made--by what leisurely play with the chronology of the story, apparently careless and unmethodical, or by what s.h.i.+fting of the focus, so that the house of Castlewood is now a far-away memory and now a close, benevolent presence. Time, at any rate, is stored up in the description of the child's life there, quiet layers of time in which the recorded incidents sink deep.

VIII

In dealing with the method that I find peculiarly characteristic of Thackeray, the "panoramic" method, I have spoken of it also as "pictorial"; and it will be noticed that I have thus arrived at another distinction which I touched upon in connection with Bovary.

Picture and drama--this is an ant.i.thesis which continually appears in a novel, and I shall have much to say of it. And first of the names which I give to these contrasted manners of treatment--I do not know that they are the best names, but they express the main point of difference, and they also have this advantage, that they _have_ been used technically in the criticism of fiction, with specific meaning.

In writing about novels one is so rarely handling words that have ever been given close definition (with regard to the art of fiction, I mean) that it is natural to grasp at any which have chanced to be selected and strictly applied by a critic of authority. Picture and drama, therefore, I use because Henry James used them in discussing his own novels, when he reviewed them all in his later years; but I use them, I must add, in a rather more extended sense than he did.

Anybody who knows the critical prefaces of his books will remember how picture and drama, to him, represented the twofold manner towards which he tended in his last novels, composed as they are in a regular alternation of dramatic dialogue and pictorial description. But _his_ pictorial description was of a very special kind; and when the subject of criticism is fiction generally, not his alone, picture will take a wider meaning, as opposed to drama. It will be found to cover the panoramic manner of Thackeray.

It is a question, I said, of the reader's relation to the writer; in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it. In the drama of the stage, in the acted play, the spectator evidently has no direct concern with the author at all, while the action is proceeding. The author places their parts in the mouths of the players, leaves them to make their own impression, leaves _us_, the audience, to make what we can of it. The motion of life is before us, the recording, registering mind of the author is eliminated. That is drama; and when we think of the story-teller as opposed to the dramatist, it is obvious that in the full sense of the word there is no such thing as drama in a novel.

The novelist may give the very words that were spoken by his characters, the dialogue, but of course he must interpose on his own account to let us know how the people appeared, and where they were, and what they were doing. If he offers nothing but the bare dialogue, he is writing a kind of play; just as a dramatist, amplifying his play with "stage-directions" and putting it forth to be read in a book, has really written a kind of novel. But the difference between the story-teller and the playwright is not my affair; and a new contrast, within the limits of the art of fiction, is apparent when we speak of the novel by itself--a contrast of two methods, to one of which it is reasonable to give the name of drama.

I do not say that a clear line can be drawn between them; criticism does not hope to be mathematically exact. But everybody sees the diversity between the talkative, confidential manner of Thackeray and the severe, discreet, anonymous manner--of whom shall I say?--of Maupa.s.sant, for a good example, in many of his stories. It is not only the difference between the personal qualities of the two men, which indeed are also as far apart as the house of Castlewood and the Maison Tellier; it is not the difference between the kinds of story they chose to tell. They approached a story from opposite sides, and thought of it, consequently, in images that had nothing in common: not always, I dare say, but on the whole and characteristically they did so. Maupa.s.sant's idea of a story (and not peculiarly Maupa.s.sant's, of course, but his name is convenient) would suggest an object that you fas.h.i.+oned and abandoned to the reader, turning away and leaving him alone with it; Thackeray's would be more like the idea of a long and sociable interview with the reader, a companion with whom he must establish definite terms. Enough, the contrast is very familiar. But these are images; how is the difference shown in their written books, in Esmond and La Maison Tellier? Both, it is true, represent a picture that was in the author's mind; but the story pa.s.ses into Thackeray's book as a picture still, and pa.s.ses into Maupa.s.sant's as something else--I call it drama.

In Maupa.s.sant's drama we are close to the facts, against them and amongst them. He relates his story as though he had caught it in the act and were mentioning the details as they pa.s.sed. There seems to be no particular process at work in his mind, so little that the figure of Maupa.s.sant, the showman, is overlooked and forgotten as we follow the direction of his eyes. The scene he evokes is contemporaneous, and there it is, we can see it as well as he can. Certainly he is "telling" us things, but they are things so immediate, so perceptible, that the machinery of his telling, by which they reach us, is unnoticed; the story appears to tell itself. Critically, of course, we know how far that is from being the case, we know with what judicious thought the showman is selecting the points of the scene upon which he touches. But the _effect_ is that he is not there at all, because he is doing nothing that ostensibly requires any judgement, nothing that reminds us of his presence. He is behind us, out of sight, out of mind; the story occupies us, the moving scene, and nothing else.

But Thackeray--in _his_ story we need him all the time and can never forget him. He it is who must a.s.semble and arrange his large chronicle, piecing it together out of his experience. Becky's mode of life, in his story, is a matter of many details picked up on many occasions, and the power that collects them, the mind that contains them, is always and openly Thackeray's; it could not be otherwise. It is no question, for most of the time, of watching a scene at close quarters, where the simple, literal detail, such as anybody might see for himself, would be sufficient. A stretch of time is to be shown in perspective, at a distance; the story-teller must be at hand to work it into a single impression. And thus the general panorama, such as Thackeray displays, becomes the representation of the author's experience, and the author becomes a personal ent.i.ty, about whom we may begin to ask questions. Thackeray _cannot_ be the nameless abstraction that the dramatist (whether in the drama of the stage or in that of the novel) is naturally. I know that Thackeray, so far from trying to conceal himself, comes forward and attracts attention and nudges the reader a great deal more than he need; he likes the personal relation with the reader and insists on it. But do what he might to disguise it, so long as he is ranging over his story at a height, chronicling, summarizing, foreshortening, he _must_ be present to the reader as a narrator and a showman. It is only when he descends and approaches a certain occasion and sets a scene with due circ.u.mspection--rarely and a trifle awkwardly, as we saw--that he can for the time being efface the thought of his active part in the affair.

So much of a novel, therefore, as is not dramatic enactment, not _scenic_, inclines always to picture, to the reflection of somebody's mind. Confronted with a scene--like Becky's great scene, once more--we forget that other mind; but as soon as the story goes off again into narrative a question at once arises. _Who_ is disposing the scattered facts, whose is this new point of view? It is the omniscient author, and the point of view is his--such would be the common answer, and it is the answer we get in Vanity Fair. By convention the author is allowed his universal knowledge of the story and the people in it. But still it is a convention, and a prudent novelist does not strain it unnecessarily. Thackeray in Vanity Fair is not at all prudent; his method, so seldom strictly dramatic, is one that of its nature is apt to force this question of the narrator's authority, and he goes out of his way to emphasize the question still further. He flourishes the fact that the point of view is his own, not to be confounded with that of anybody in the book. And so his book, as one may say, is not complete in itself, not really self-contained; it does not meet and satisfy all the issues it suggests. Over the whole of one side of it there is an inconclusive look, something that draws the eye away from the book itself, into s.p.a.ce. It is the question of the narrator's relation to the story.

However unconsciously--and I dare say the recognition is usually unconscious--the novelist is alive to this difficulty, no doubt; for we may see him, we presently shall, taking various steps to circ.u.mvent it. There is felt to be an unsatisfactory want of finish in leaving a question hanging out of the book, like a loose end, without some kind of attempt to pull it back and make it part of an integral design.

After all, the book is torn away from its author and given out to the world; the author is no longer a wandering _jongleur_ who enters the hall and utters his book to the company a.s.sembled, retaining his book as his own inalienable possession, himself and his actual presence and his real voice indivisibly a part of it. The book that we read has no such support; it must bring its own recognisances. And in the fict.i.tious picture of life the effect of validity is all in all and there can be no appeal to an external authority; and so there is an inherent weakness in it if the mind that knows the story and the eye that sees it remain unaccountable. At any moment they may be questioned, and the only way to silence the question is somehow to make the mind and the eye objective, to make them facts in the story.

When the point of view is definitely included in the book, when it can be recognized and verified there, then every side of the book is equally wrought and fas.h.i.+oned. Otherwise it may seem like a thing meant to stand against a wall, with one side left in the rough; and there is no wall for a novel to stand against.

That this is not a fanciful objection to a pictorial book like Vanity Fair, where the point of view is _not_ accounted for, is proved, I think, by the different means that a novelist will adopt to authenticate his story--to dramatize the seeing eye, as I should prefer to put it. These I shall try to deal with in what seems to be their logical order; illuminating examples of any of them are not wanting. I do not suggest that if I were criticizing Vanity Fair I should think twice about this aspect of it; to do so would be very futile criticism of such a book, such a store of life. But then I am not considering it as Vanity Fair, I am considering it as a dominant case of pictorial fiction; and here is the characteristic danger of the method, and a danger which all who practise the method are not likely to encounter and over-ride with the genius of Thackeray. And even Thackeray--he chose to encounter it once again, it is true, in Pendennis, but only once and no more, and after that he took his own precautions, and evidently found that he could move the more freely for doing so.

But to revert yet again for a moment to Bovary--which seemed on scrutiny to be more of a picture than a drama--I think it is clear how Flaubert avoided the necessity of installing himself avowedly as the narrator, in the sight of the reader. I mentioned how he constantly blends his acuter vision with that of Emma, so that the weakness of her gift of experience is helped out; and the help is mutual, for on the other hand her vision is always active as far as it goes, and Flaubert's intervention is so un.o.btrusive that her point of view seems to govern the story more than it does really. And therefore, though the book is largely a picture, a review of many details and occasions, the question of the narrator is never insistent. The landscape that Thackeray controls is so much wider and fuller that even with all the tact of Flaubert--and little he has of it--he could scarcely follow Flaubert's example. His book is not a portrait of character but a panorama of manners, and there is no disguising the need of some detached spectator, who looks on from without.

It is the method of picture-making that enables the novelist to cover his great s.p.a.ces of life and quant.i.ties of experience, so much greater than any that can be brought within the acts of a play. As for intensity of life, that is another matter; there, as we have seen, the novelist has recourse to his other arm, the one that corresponds with the single arm of the dramatist. Inevitably, as the plot thickens and the climax approaches--inevitably, wherever an impression is to be emphasized and driven home--narration gives place to enactment, the train of events to the particular episode, the broad picture to the dramatic scene. But the limitation of drama is as obvious as its peculiar power. It is clear that if we wish to see an abundance and mult.i.tude of life we shall find it more readily and more summarily by looking for an hour into a memory, a consciousness, than by merely watching the present events of an hour, however crowded. Much may happen in that time, but in extent it will be nothing to the regions thrown open by the other method. A novelist, with a large and discursive subject before him, could not hope to show it all dramatically; much of it, perhaps the greater part, must be so marshalled that it may be swept by a travelling glance. Thackeray shows how it is done and how a vista of many facts can be made to fall into line; but he shows, too, how it needs a mind to create that vista, and how the creative mind becomes more and more perceptible, more visibly active, as the prospect widens.

Most novelists, I think, seem to betray, like Thackeray, a preference for one method or the other, for picture or for drama; one sees in a moment how Fielding, Balzac, George Eliot, incline to the first, in their diverse manners, and Tolstoy (certainly Tolstoy, in spite of his big range) or Dostoevsky to the second, the scenic way. But of course every novelist uses both, and the quality of a novelist appears very clearly in his management of the two, how he guides the story into the scene, how he picks it out of the scene, a richer and fuller story than it was before, and proceeds with his narrative. On the whole, no doubt, the possibilities of the scene are greatly abused in fiction, in the daily and familiar novel. They are doubly abused; for the treatment of the scene is neglected, and yet it recurs again and again, much too often, and its value is wasted. It has to be remembered that drama is the novelist's highest light, like the white paper or white paint of a draughtsman; to use it prodigally where it is not needed is to lessen its force where it is essential. And so the economical procedure would be to h.o.a.rd it rather, reserving it for important occasions--as in Bovary, sure enough.

But before I deal with the question of the novelist's drama I would follow out the whole argument that is suggested by his reflected picture of life. This, after all, is the method which is his very own, which he commands as a story-teller pure and simple. And for a beginning I have tried to indicate its prime disadvantage, consisting of the fact that in its plain form it drags in the omniscient author and may make him exceedingly conspicuous. Why is this a disadvantage, is it asked? It is none, of course, if the author has the power to make us admire and welcome the apparition, or if his picture is so dazzling that a theoretic defect in it is forgotten. But a novel in which either of these feats is accomplished proves only the charm or genius of the author; charm and genius do what they will, there is nothing new in that. And I believe that the defect, even though at first sight it may seem a trifle, is apt to become more and more troublesome in a book as the book is re-read. It makes for a kind of thinness in the general impression, wherever the personal force of the writer is not remarkable. I should say that it may often contribute towards an air of ineffectiveness in a story, which it might otherwise be difficult to explain.

The fiction of Turgenev is on the whole a case in point, to my mind.

Turgenev was never shy of appearing in his pages as the reflective story-teller, imparting the fruits of his observation to the reader.

He will watch a character, let us say, cross a field and enter a wood and sit down under a tree; good, it is an opportunity for gaining a first impression of the man or woman, it is a little scene, and Turgenev's touch is quick and light. But then with perfect candour he will show his hand; he will draw the reader aside and pour into his ear a flow of information about the man or woman, information that openly comes straight from Turgenev himself, in good pictorial form, no doubt, but information which will never have its due weight with the reader, because it reposes upon nothing that he can test for himself. Who and what is this communicative partic.i.p.ator in the business, this vocal author? He does not belong to the book, and his voice has not that compelling tone and tune of its own (as Thackeray's had) which makes a reader enjoy hearing it for its own sake. This is a small matter, I admit, but Turgenev extends it and pursues the same kind of course in more important affairs. He remains the observant narrator, to whom we are indebted for a share in his experience. The result is surely that his picture of life has less authority than its highly finished design would seem to warrant. It is evidently not a picture in which the deeps of character are sounded, and in which the heights of pa.s.sion are touched, and in which a great breadth of the human world is contained; it is not a picture of such dimensions. But it has so much neat and just and even exquisite work in it that it might seem final of its kind, completely effective in what it attempts; and it falls short of this, I should say, and there is something in that constant sense of Turgenev at one's elbow, _proffering_ the little picture, that may very well damage it. The thing ought to stand out by itself; it could easily be made to do so.

But Turgenev was unsuspecting; he had not taken to heart the full importance of dramatizing the point of view--perhaps it was that.

The narrative, then, the chronicle, the summary, which must represent the story-teller's ordered and arranged experience, and which must accordingly be of the nature of a picture, is to be strengthened, is to be raised to a power approaching that of drama, where the intervention of the story-teller is no longer felt. The freedom which the pictorial method gives to the novelist is unknown to the playwright; but that freedom has to be paid for by some loss of intensity, and the question is how to pay as little as possible. In the end, as I think it may be shown, the loss is made good and there is nothing to pay at all, so far may the dramatizing process be followed. Method, I have said, can be imposed upon method, one kind upon another; and in a.n.a.lyzing the manner of certain novelists one discovers how ingeniously they will correct the weakness of one method by the force of another and retain the advantages of both. It is rather a complicated story, but the beginning is clear enough, and the direction which it is to take is also clear. Everything in the novel, not only the scenic episodes but all the rest, is to be in some sense dramatized; that is where the argument tends. As for the beginning of it, the first obvious step, the example of Thackeray is at hand and it could not be bettered. I turn to Esmond.

IX

The novelist, I am supposing, is faced with a situation in his story where for some good reason more is needed than the simple impression which the reader might have formed for himself, had he been present and using his eyes on the spot. It is a case for a general account of many things; or it is a case for a certain view of the facts, based on inner knowledge, to be presented to the reader. Thackeray, for example, has to open his mind on the subject of Becky's ambitions or Amelia's regrets; it would take too long, perhaps it would be impossible, to set them acting their emotions in a form that would tell the reader the whole tale; their creator must elucidate the matter. He cannot forget, however, that this report of their emotions is a subjective affair of his own; it relies upon his memory of Becky's or Amelia's plight, his insight into the workings of their thought, his sense of past action. All this is vivid enough to the author, who has seen and known, but the reader stands at a further remove.

It would be different if this consciousness of the past, the mind which holds the memory, should itself become for the reader a directly perceptible fact. The author must supply his view, but he might treat his view as though it were in its turn a piece of action. It _is_ a piece of action, or of activity, when he calls up these old recollections; and why should not that effort be given the value of a sort of drama on its own account? It would then be like a play within a play; the outer framework at least--consisting of the reflective mind--would be immediately in front of the reader; and its relation to the thing framed, the projected vision, would explain itself. So long as the recorder stands outside and away from his book, as Thackeray stands outside Vanity Fair, a potential value is wasted; the activity that is proceeding in his mind is not in itself an element in the effect of the book, as it might be. And if it were thus drawn into the book it would do double duty; it would authenticate and so enhance the picture; it would add a new and independent interest as well. It seems that there is everything to be said for making a drama of the narrator himself.

And so Thackeray evidently felt, for in all his later work he refused to remain the unaccountable seer from without. He did not carry the dramatizing process very far, indeed, and it may be thought that the change in his method does not amount to much. In The Newcomes and its successors the old Thackerayan display seems essentially the same as ever, still the familiar, easy-going, intimate outpouring, with all the well-known inflexions of Thackeray's voice and the humours of his temperament; certainly Pendennis and Esmond and George Warrington and Thackeray have all of them exactly the same conception of the art of story-telling, they all command the same perfection of luminous style.

And not only does Thackeray stop short at an early stage of the process I am considering, but it must be owned that he uses the device of the narrator "in character" very loosely and casually, as soon as it might be troublesome to use it with care. But still he takes the step, and he picks up the loose end I spoke of, and he packs it into his book; and thenceforward we see precisely how the narrator stands towards the story he unfolds. It is the first step in the dramatization of picture.

A very simple and obvious step too, it will be said, the natural device of the story-teller for giving his tale a look of truth. It is so indeed; but the interest of the matter lies in recognizing exactly what it is that is gained, what it is that makes that look. Esmond tells the story quite as Thackeray would; it all comes streaming out as a pictorial evocation of old times; there is just as little that is strictly dramatic in it as there is in Vanity Fair. Rarely, very rarely indeed, is there anything that could be called a scene; there is a long impression that creeps forward and forward, as Esmond retraces his life, with those piercing moments of vision which we remember so well. But to the other people in the book it makes all the difference that the narrator is among them. Now, when Beatrix appears, we know who it is that so sees her, and we know where the seer is placed; his line of sight, striking across the book, from him the seer to her the seen, is measurable, its angle is shown; it gives to Beatrix a new dimension and a sharper relief. Can you remember any moment in Vanity Fair when you beheld Becky as again and again you behold Beatrix, catching the very slant of the light on her face?

Becky never suddenly flowered out against her background in that way; some want of solidity and of objectivity there still is in Becky, and there must be, because she is regarded from anywhere, from nowhere, from somewhere in the surrounding void. Thackeray's language about her does not carry the same weight as Esmond's about Beatrix, because n.o.body knows where Thackeray is, or what his relation may be to Becky.

This, then, is the readiest means of dramatically heightening a reported impression, this device of telling the story in the first person, in the person of somebody in the book; and large in our fiction the first person accordingly bulks. The characterized "I" is subst.i.tuted for the loose and general "I" of the author; the loss of freedom is more than repaid by the more salient effect of the picture.

Precision, individuality is given to it by this pair of eyes, known and named, through which the reader sees it; instead of drifting in s.p.a.ce above the spectacle he keeps his allotted station and contemplates a delimited field of vision. There is much benefit in the sense that the picture has now a definite edge; its value is brought out to the best advantage when its bounding line is thus emphasized.

Moreover, it is not only the field of vision that is determined by the use of the first person, it is also the quality of the tone. When we are shown what Esmond sees, and nothing else, there is first of all the comfortable a.s.surance of the point of view, and then there is the personal colour which he throws over his account, so that it gains another kind of distinction. It does not matter that Esmond's tone in his story is remarkably like Thackeray's in the stories that _he_ tells; in Esmond's case the tone has a meaning in the story, is part of it, whereas in the other case it is related only to Thackeray, and Thackeray is in the void. When Esmond ruminates and reflects, his manner is the expression of a human being there present, to whom it can be referred; when Thackeray does the same, there is no such compactness, and the manner trails away where we cannot follow it.

Dramatically it seems clear that the method of Esmond has the advantage over the method of Vanity Fair.

Here are sound reasons, so far as they go, for the use of the first person in the distinctively pictorial book. David Copperfield, for instance--it is essentially a long glance, working steadily over a tract of years, alone of its kind in d.i.c.kens's fiction. It was the one book in which he rejected the intrigue of action for the centre of his design--did not reject it altogether, indeed, but accepted it as incidental only. Always elsewhere it is his chosen intrigue, his "plot," that makes the shape of his book. Beginning with a deceptive air of intending mainly a novel of manners and humours, as Stevenson once pointed out, in Bleak House or in Little Dorrit or in Our Mutual Friend--in his later books generally--he insinuates a thread of action that gradually twists more and more of the matter of the book round itself. The intrigue begins to take the first place, to dominate and at last to fill the pages. That was the form, interesting of its kind, and one to which justice has hardly been done, which he elaborated and made his own. In Copperfield for once he took another way entirely. It is the far stretch of the past which makes the shape of that book, not any of the knots or networks of action which it contains. These, instead of controlling the novel, sink into the level of retrospect.

Copperfield has not a few lesser dramas to represent; but the affair of Steerforth, the affair of Uriah Heep, to name a pair of them, which might have developed and taken command of the scene, fall back into the general picture, becoming incidents in the long rhythm of Copperfield's memory. It was a clear case for narration in person, in character; everything was gained and nothing lost by leaving it to the man to give his own impression. Nothing was lost, because the sole need is for the reader to see what David sees; it matters little how his mind works, or what the effect of it all may be upon himself. It is the story of what happened around him, not within. David offers a pair of eyes and a memory, nothing further is demanded of him.

But now let me take the case of another big novel, where again there is a picture outspread, with episodes of drama that are subordinate to the sweep of the expanse. It is Meredith's story of Harry Richmond, a book in which its author evidently found a demand in some way different from that of the rest of his work; for here again the first person is used by a man who habitually avoided it. In Harry Richmond it seemed to Meredith appropriate, I suppose, because the story has a romantic and heroic temper, the kind of chivalrous fling that sits well on a youth of spirit, telling his own tale. It is natural for the youth to pa.s.s easily from one adventure to the next, taking it as it comes; and if Meredith proposes to write a story of loose, generous, informal design he had better place it in the mouth of the adventurer.

True that in so far as it is romantic, and a story of youth, and a story in which an air from an age of knight-errantry blows into modern times, so that something like a clash of armour and a splintering of spears seems to mingle with the noises of modern life--true that in so far as it is all this, Harry Richmond is not alone among Meredith's books. The author of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington and Beauchamp and Lord Ormont was generally a little vague on the question of the century in which his stories were cast. The events may happen in the nineteenth century, they clearly must; and yet the furniture and the machinery and the conventions of the nineteenth century have a way of appearing in Meredith's pages as if they were anachronisms. But that is by the way; Harry Richmond is certainly, on the face of it, a series of adventures loosely connected--connected only by the fact that they befell a particular young man; and so the method of narration should emphasize the link, Meredith may have concluded, and the young man shall speak for himself.

The use of the first person, no doubt, is a source of relief to a novelist in the matter of composition. It composes of its own accord, or so he may feel; for the hero gives the story an indefeasible unity by the mere act of telling it. His career may not seem to hang together logically, artistically; but every part of it is at least united with every part by the coincidence of its all belonging to one man. When he tells it himself, that fact is serviceably to the fore; the first person will draw a rambling, fragmentary tale together and stamp it after a fas.h.i.+on as a single whole. Does anybody dare to suggest that this is a reason for the marked popularity of the method among our novelists? Autobiography--it is a regular literary form, and yet it is one which refuses the recognized principles of literary form; its natural right is to seem wayward and inconsequent; its charm is in the fidelity with which it follows the winding course of the writer's thought, as he muses upon the past, and the writer is not expected to guide his thought in an orderly design, but to let it wander free. Formlessness becomes actually the mark of right form in literature of this cla.s.s; and a novel presented as fict.i.tious autobiography gets the same advantage. And there the argument brings us back to the old question; fiction must _look_ true, and there is no look of truth in inconsequence, and there is no authority at the back of a novel, independent of it, to vouch for the truth of its apparent wilfulness. But it is not worth while to linger here; the use of the first person has other and more interesting snares than this, that it pretends to disguise unmeaning, inexpressive form in a story.

Now with regard to Harry Richmond, ostensibly it _is_ rather like a chronicle of romantic adventure--not formless, far from it, but freely flowing as a saga, with its illegitimate dash of blood-royal and its roaring old English squire-archy and its speaking statue and its quest of the princess; it _contains_ a saga, and even an exceedingly fantastic one. But Harry Richmond is a deeply compacted book, and mixed with its romance there is a novel of another sort. For the fantasy it is only necessary that Harry himself should give a picture of his experience, of all that he has seen and done; on this side the story is in the succession of rare, strange, poetic events, with the remarkable people concerned in them. But the aim of the book goes far beyond this; it is to give the portrait of Harry Richmond, and that is the real reason why the story is told. All these striking episodes, which Harry is so well placed to describe, are not merely pictures that pa.s.s, a story that Meredith sets him to tell because it is of high interest on its own account. Meredith's purpose is that the hero himself shall be in the middle of the book, with all the interest of the story reflected back upon his character, his temper, his growth.

The subject is Harry Richmond, a youth of spirit; the subject is _not_ the cycle of romance through which he happens to have pa.s.sed.

In the case of Copperfield, to go back to him, d.i.c.kens had exactly the opposite intention. He found his book in the expanse of life which his David had travelled over; d.i.c.kens's only care was to represent the wonderful show that filled his hero's memory. The whole phantasmagoria is the subject of the book, a hundred men and women, populating David's past and keeping his pen at full speed in the single-minded effort to portray them. Alone among the a.s.sembly David himself is scarcely of the subject at all. He has substance enough, and amply, to be a credible, authoritative reporter--d.i.c.kens sees well to that; but he is a shadow compared with Betsy Trotwood and the Micawbers and the Heeps, with all the hundred of them, and there is no call for him to be more. In this respect his story, again, is contrasted with that of Pendennis, which is, or is evidently meant to be in the first place, a portrait of the young man--or with the story of Tom Jones perhaps, though in this case more doubtfully, for Fielding's shrewd eye was apt to be drawn away from the young man to the bustle of life around him.

But in Copperfield the design is very plain and is consistently pursued; it would be a false patch in the story if at any point David attracted more attention to himself than to the people of his vision--he himself, as a child, being of course one of them, a little creature that he sees in the distance, but he himself, in later years, becoming merely the mirror of his experience, which he not unnaturally considers worthy of being pictured for its own sake.

Look back then at Harry Richmond, and it is obvious that Harry himself is all the subject of the book, there is no other. His father and his grandfather, Ottilia and Janet, belong to the book by reason of him; they stand about him, conditions of his life, phases of his career, determining what he is and what he becomes. That is clearly Meredith's thought in undertaking this chronicle; he proposes to show how it makes the history, the moral and emotional history, of the man through whom it is uttered. Harry's adventures, ambitions, mistakes, successes, are the gradual and elaborate expression of him, complete in the end; they round him into the figure of the man in whom Meredith saw his book. The book started from Harry Richmond, the rest of it is there to display him. A youth of considerable parts and attractions, and a youth characteristic of his time and country, and a youth whose circ.u.mstances are such as to give him very free play and to test and prove him very effectually--there is the burden of Meredith's saga, as I call it, and he never forgets it, though sometimes he certainly pushes the brilliant fantasy of the saga beyond his strict needs. The romance of the blood-royal, for instance--it would be hard to argue that the book honestly requires the high colour of that infusion, and all the pervading thrill that Meredith gets from it; Richmond Roy is largely gratuitous, a piece of indulgence on Meredith's part. But that objection is not likely to be pressed very severely, and anyhow Harry is firmly established in the forefront. He tells his story, he describes the company and the scenes he has lived through; and all the time it is by them that he is himself described.

It comes to this, that the picture which Harry Richmond gives of his career has a function essentially dramatic; it has a part to perform in the story, a part it must undertake as a whole, over and above its pictorial charge. It must do something as well as be, it must create even while it is created. In Esmond and in Copperfield it is otherwise; there the unrolling scene has little or no part to play, as a scene, over against another actor; it holds no dialogue, so to speak, sustains no interchange, or none of princ.i.p.al importance, with the figure of the narrator. He narrates, he creates the picture; but for us who look on, reading the book, there is nothing in the picture to make us perpetually turn from it and face towards the man in the foreground, watching for the effect it may produce in him. Attention is all concentrated in the life that he remembers and evokes. He himself, indeed, though the fact of his presence is very clear to us, tends to remain in shadow; it is as though he leant from a window, surveying the world, his figure outlined against the lighted square, his features not very distinctly discerned by the reader within. It is enough that he should make Micawber live again, make Beatrix appear on the staircase of the old house, with her scarlet ribbon and the taper in her hand. _They_ owe everything to the presence of the man who calls them back from the past; they receive their being, they do little in return.

This picture, this bright vision, spied through the clever ministration of a narrator, is not enough for Harry Richmond. Here the peopled view, all of it together, is like an actor in a play, and the interlocutor, the protagonist, is the man in the foreground, Harry himself. There is no question of simply seeing through his eyes, sharing his memory, perhaps even a little forgetting him from time to time, when the figured scene is particularly delightful. The thought, the fancy, the emotion of Harry Richmond are the centre of the play; from these to the men and women who shape his fate, from them again to the mind that recalls them, attention pa.s.ses and returns; we who look on are continually occupied with the fact of Harry's consciousness, its gradual enlargement and enrichment. That is the process which Ottilia and Janet and the rest of them are expected to forward, and they contribute actively. Harry before the quest of the princess and Harry when it has finally failed are different beings, so far as a man is changed by an experience that is absorbed into the whole of his nature. How is the change effected, what does it achieve?--the episode, bringing the change into view, dramatizes it, and the question is answered. The young knight-errant has run an eventful course, and he gives his account of it; but the leading event of his tale is himself. His account ill.u.s.trates that event, helps towards the enactment of it. Pictorial, therefore, in form, dramatic in function--such was the story that Meredith elected to tell in the first person.

And in so doing he showed, as it seems to me, precisely where the defect of the method begins to be felt. The method has a certain dramatic energy, we have seen, making a visible fact of the relation, otherwise unexplained, between the narrator and the tale. It has this; but for a subject like Meredith's it is really too little, and the use of the first person is overtaxed. Does he contrive to conceal the trouble, does he make us exceedingly unconscious of it while we read the book? I have no doubt that he does, with the humanity and poetry and wisdom that he pours into it--the novel of which it has been said that if Shakespeare revisited the globe and asked for a book of our times to read, this would be the volume to offer him, the book more likely than another to convince him at once that literature is still in our midst. There is small doubt that Meredith disguises the trouble, and there is still less that he was quite unaware of it himself. But it is there, and it shows plainly enough in some novels, where a personal narrator is given the same kind of task; and in Meredith's book too, I think, it is not to be missed when one considers what might have been, supposing Meredith had chosen another way. The other way was open; he cannot have noticed it.

The young man Harry--this is the trouble--is only a recorder, a picture-maker, so long as he speaks for himself. He is very well placed for describing his world, which _needs_ somebody to describe it; his world is much too big and complex to be shown scenically, in those immediate terms I spoke of just now in connection with Maupa.s.sant's story. Scenes of drama there may be from time to time, there are plenty in Meredith's novel; but still on the whole the story must be given as the view of an onlooker, and Harry is clearly the onlooker indicated, the only possible one. That is certain; but then there is laid upon him the task which is not laid, or barely at all, upon Copperfield or Esmond. Before the book is out he must have grown to ten times the weight that we dream of looking for in either of them. He must be distinct to see; _he_ cannot remain a dim silhouette against the window, the light must fall full upon his face. How can he manage it? How can he give that sharp impression of himself that he easily gives of his world? It is a query that he is in no position to meet, for the impossible is asked of him. He is expected to lend us his eyes (which he does), and yet at the same time to present himself for us to behold with our own; the subject of his story requires no less.

It is not merely a matter of seeing his personal aspect and address; these are readily given by implication. When we have watched for a while the behaviour of the people round him, and have heard something of his experience and of the way in which he fared in the world, we shall very well know what he was like to meet, what others saw in him.

There is no difficulty here. But Harry needs a great deal more substance than this, if his story is to be rightly understood. What it was like to _be_ Harry, with all that action and reaction of character and fortune proceeding within him--that is the question, the chief question; and since it is the most important affair in the book, it should obviously be rendered as solidly as possible, by the most emphatic method that the author can command. But Harry, speaking of himself, can only report; he can only recall the past and _tell_ us what he was, only _describe_ his emotion; and he may describe very vividly, and he does, but it would necessarily be more convincing if we could get behind his description and judge for ourselves. Drama we want, always drama, for the central, essential, paramount affair, whatever it is; Harry's consciousness ought to be dramatized.

Something is lost if it is represented solely by his account of it.

Meredith may enable Harry to give an account so brilliant that the defect is forgotten; that is not the point. But could he have done more? I think so; only it would have meant the surrender of the method of autobiography.