The Craft of Fiction Part 7

The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of the point of view--the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story. He tells it as _he_ sees it, in the first place; the reader faces the story-teller and listens, and the story may be told so vivaciously that the presence of the minstrel is forgotten, and the scene becomes visible, peopled with the characters of the tale. It may be so, it very often is so for a time. But it is not so always, and the story-teller himself grows conscious of a misgiving. If the spell is weakened at any moment, the listener is recalled from the scene to the mere author before him, and the story rests only upon the author's direct a.s.sertion. Is it not possible, then, to introduce another point of view, to set up a fresh narrator to bear the brunt of the reader's scrutiny? If the story-teller is _in_ the story himself, the author is dramatized; his a.s.sertions gain in weight, for they are backed by the presence of the narrator in the pictured scene. It is advantage scored; the author has s.h.i.+fted his responsibility, and it now falls where the reader can see and measure it; the arbitrary quality which may at any time be detected in the author's voice is disguised in the voice of his spokesman. Nothing is now imported into the story from without; it is self-contained, it has no a.s.sociations with anyone beyond its circle.

Such is the first step towards dramatization, and in very many a story it may be enough. The spokesman is there, in recognizable relation with his matter; no question of his authority can arise. But now a difficulty may be started by the nature of the tale that he tells. If he has nothing to do but to relate what he has seen, what anyone might have seen in his position, his account will serve very well; there is no need for more. Let him unfold his chronicle as it appears in his memory. But if he is himself the subject of his story, if the story involves a searching exploration of his own consciousness, an account in his own words, after the fact, is not by any means the best imaginable. Far better it would be to see him while his mind is actually at work in the agitation, whatever it may be, which is to make the book. The matter would then be objective and visible to the reader, instead of reaching him in the form of a report at second hand. But how to manage this without falling back upon the author and _his_ report, which has already been tried and for good reasons, as it seemed, abandoned? It is managed by a kind of repet.i.tion of the same stroke, a further s.h.i.+ft of the point of view. The spectator, the listener, the reader, is now himself to be placed at the angle of vision; not an account or a report, more or less convincing, is to be offered him, but a direct sight of the matter itself, while it is pa.s.sing. n.o.body expounds or explains; the story is enacted by its look and behaviour at particular moments. By the first stroke the narrator was brought into the book and set before the reader; but the action appeared only in his narrative. Now the action is there, proceeding while the pages are turned; the narrator is forestalled, he is watched while the story is in the making. Such is the progress of the writer of fiction towards drama; such is his method of evading the drawbacks of a mere reporter and a.s.suming the advantages, as far as possible, of a dramatist. How far he may choose to push the process in his book--that is a matter to be decided by the subject; it entirely depends upon the kind of effect that the theme demands. It may respond to all the dramatization it can get, it may give all that it has to give for less. The subject dictates the method.

And now let the process be reversed, let us start with the purely dramatic subject, the story that will tell itself in perfect rightness, unaided, to the eye of the reader. This story never deviates from a strictly scenic form; one occasion or episode follows another, with no interruption for any reflective summary of events.

Necessarily it must be so, for it is only while the episode is proceeding that no question of a narrator can arise; when the scene closes the play ceases till the opening of the next. To glance upon the story from a height and to give a general impression of its course--this is at once to remove the point of view from the reader and to set up a new one somewhere else; the method is no longer consistent, no longer purely dramatic. And the dramatic story is not only scenic, it is also limited to so much as the ear can hear and the eye see. In rigid drama of this kind there is naturally no admission of the reader into the private mind of any of the characters; their thoughts and motives are trans.m.u.ted into action. A subject wrought to this pitch of objectivity is no doubt given weight and compactness and authority in the highest degree; it is like a piece of modelling, standing in clear s.p.a.ce, casting its shadow. It is the most finished form that fiction can take.

But evidently it is not a form to which fiction can aspire in general.

It implies many sacrifices, and these will easily seem to be more than the subject can usefully make. It is out of the question, of course, wherever the main burden of the story lies within some particular consciousness, in the study of a soul, the growth of a character, the changing history of a temperament; there the subject would be needlessly crossed and strangled by dramatization pushed to its limit.

It is out of the question, again, wherever the story is too big, too comprehensive, too widely ranging, to be treated scenically, with no opportunity for general and panoramic survey; it has been discovered, indeed, that even a story of this kind _may_ fall into a long succession of definite scenes, under some hands, but it has also appeared that in doing so it incurs unnecessary disabilities, and will likely suffer. These stories, therefore, which will not naturally accommodate themselves to the reader's point of view, and the reader's alone, we regard as rather pictorial than dramatic--meaning that they call for some narrator, somebody who _knows_, to contemplate the facts and create an impression of them. Whether it is the omniscient author or a man in the book, he must gather up his experience, compose a vision of it as it exists in his mind, and lay _that_ before the reader. It is the reflection of an experience; and though there may be all imaginable diversity of treatment within the limits of the reflection, such is its essential character. In a pictorial book the principle of the structure involves a point of view which is not the reader's.

It is open to the pictorial book, however, to use a method in its picture-making that is really no other than the method of drama. It is somebody's experience, we say, that is to be reported, the general effect that many things have left upon a certain mind; it is a fusion of innumerable elements, the deposit of a lapse of time. The straightforward way to render it would be for the narrator--the author or his selected creature--to view the past retrospectively and discourse upon it, to recall and meditate and summarize. That is picture-making in its natural form, using its own method. But exactly as in drama the subject is distributed among the characters and enacted by them, so in picture the effect may be entrusted to the elements, the reactions of the moment, and _performed_ by these. The mind of the narrator becomes the stage, his voice is no longer heard.

His voice _is_ heard so long as there is narrative of any sort, whether he is speaking in person or is reported obliquely; his voice is heard, because in either case the language and the intonation are his, the direct expression of his experience. In the drama of his mind there is no personal voice, for there is no narrator; the point of view becomes the reader's once more. The shapes of thought in the man's mind tell their own story. And that is the art of picture-making when it uses the dramatic method.

But it cannot always do so. Constantly it must be necessary to offer the reader a summary of facts, an impression of a train of events, that can only be given as somebody's narration. Suppose it were required to render the general effect of a certain year in a man's life, a year that has filled his mind with a swarm of many memories.

Looking into his consciousness after the year has gone, we might find much there that would indicate the nature of the year's events without any word on his part; the flickers and flashes of thought from moment to moment might indeed tell us much. But we shall need an account from him too, no doubt; too much has happened in a year to be wholly acted, as I call it, in the movement of the man's thought. He must narrate--he must make, that is to say, a picture of the events as he sees them, glancing back. Now if he speaks in the first person there can, of course, be no uncertainty in the point of view; he has his fixed position, he cannot leave it. His description will represent the face that the facts in their sequence turned towards _him_; the field of vision is defined with perfect distinctness, and his story cannot stray outside it. The reader, then, may be said to watch a reflection of the facts in a mirror of which the edge is nowhere in doubt; it is rounded by the bounds of the narrator's own personal experience.

This limitation may have a convenience and a value in the story, it may contribute to the effect. But it need not be forfeited, it is clear, if the first person is changed to the third. The author may use the man's field of vision and keep as faithfully within it as though the man were speaking for himself. In that case he retains this advantage and adds to it another, one that is likely to be very much greater. For now, while the point of view is still fixed in s.p.a.ce, still a.s.signed to the man in the book, it is free in _time_; there no longer stretches, between the narrator and the events of which he speaks, a certain tract of time, across which the past must appear in a more or less distant perspective. All the variety obtainable by a s.h.i.+fting relation to the story in time is thus in the author's hand; the safe serenity of a far retrospect, the promising or threatening urgency of the present, every gradation between the two, can be drawn into the whole effect of the book, and all of it without any change of the seeing eye. It is a liberty that may help the story indefinitely, raising this matter into strong relief, throwing that other back into vaguer shade.

And next, still keeping mainly and ostensibly to the same point of view, the author has the chance of using a much greater lat.i.tude than he need appear to use. The seeing eye is with somebody in the book, but its vision is reinforced; the picture contains more, becomes richer and fuller, because it is the author's as well as his creature's, both at once. n.o.body notices, but in fact there are now two brains behind that eye; and one of them is the author's, who adopts and shares the _position_ of his creature, and at the same time supplements his wit. If you a.n.a.lyse the picture that is now presented, you find that it is not all the work of the personage whose vision the author has adopted. There are touches in it that go beyond any sensation of his, and indicate that some one else is looking over his shoulder--seeing things from the same angle, but seeing more, bringing another mind to bear upon the scene. It is an easy and natural extension of the personage's power of observation. The impression of the scene may be deepened as much as need be; it is not confined to the scope of one mind, and yet there is no blurring of the focus by a double point of view. And thus what I have called the sound of the narrator's voice (it is impossible to avoid this mixture of metaphors) is less insistent in oblique narration, even while it seems to be following the very same argument that it would in direct, because another voice is speedily mixed and blended with it.

So this is another resource upon which the author may draw according to his need; sometimes it will be indispensable, and generally, I suppose, it will be useful. It means that he keeps a certain hold upon the narrator _as an object_; the sentient character in the story, round whom it is grouped, is not utterly subjective, completely given over to the business of seeing and feeling on behalf of the reader. It is a considerable point; for it helps to meet one of the great difficulties in the story which is carefully aligned towards a single consciousness and consistently so viewed. In that story the man or woman who acts as the vessel of sensation is always in danger of seeming a light, uncertain weight compared with the other people in the book--simply because the other people are objective images, plainly outlined, while the seer in the midst is precluded from that advantage, and must see without being directly seen. He, who doubtless ought to bulk in the story more ma.s.sively than any one, tends to remain the least recognizable of the company, and even to dissolve in a kind of impalpable blur. By his method (which I am supposing to have been adopted in full strictness) the author is of course forbidden to look this central figure in the face, to describe and discuss him; the light cannot be turned upon him immediately. And very often we see the method becoming an embarra.s.sment to the author in consequence, and the devices by which he tries to mitigate it, and to secure some reflected sight of the seer, may even be tiresomely obvious. But the resource of which I speak is of a finer sort.

It gives to the author the power of imperceptibly edging away from the seer, leaving his consciousness, ceasing to use his eyes--though still without subst.i.tuting the eyes of another. To revert for a moment to the story told in the first person, it is plain that in that case the narrator has no such liberty; his own consciousness must always lie open; the part that he plays in the story can never appear in the same terms, on the same plane, as that of the other people. Though he is not visible in the story to the reader, as the others are, he is at every moment _nearer_ than they, in his capacity of the seeing eye, the channel of vision; nor can he put off his function, he must continue steadily to see and to report. But when the author is reporting _him_ there is a margin of freedom. The author has not so completely identified himself, as narrator, with his hero that he can give him no objective weight whatever. If necessary he can allow him something of the value of a detached and phenomenal personage, like the rest of the company in the story, and that without violating the principle of his method. He cannot make his hero actually visible--there the method is uncompromising; he cannot step forward, leaving the man's point of view, and picture him from without. But he can place the man at the same distance from the reader as the other people, he can almost lend him the same effect, he can make of him a dramatic actor upon the scene.

And how? Merely by closing (when it suits him) the open consciousness of the seer--which he can do without any look of awkwardness or violence, since it conflicts in no way with the rule of the method.

That rule only required that the author, having decided to share the point of view of his character, should not proceed to set up another of his own; it did not debar him from allowing his hero's act of vision to lapse, his function as the sentient creature in the story to be intermitted. The hero (I call him so for convenience--he may, of course, be quite a subordinate onlooker in the story) can at any moment become impenetrable, a human being whose thought is sealed from us; and it may seem a small matter, but in fact it has the result that he drops into the plane of the people whom he has. .h.i.therto been seeing and judging. Hitherto subjective, communicative in solitude, he has been in a category apart from them; but now he may mingle with the rest, engage in talk with them, and his presence and his talk are no more to the fore than theirs. As soon as some description or discussion of them is required, then, of course, the seer must resume his part and unseal his mind; but meanwhile, though the reader gets no direct view of him, still he is there in the dialogue with the rest, his speech (like theirs) issues from a hidden mind and has the same dramatic value. It is enough, very likely, to harden our image of him, to give precision to his form, to save him from dissipation into that luminous blur of which I spoke just now. For the author it is a resource to be welcomed on that account, and not on that account alone.

For besides the greater definition that the seer acquires, thus detached from us at times and relegated to the plane of his companions, there is much benefit for the subject of the story. In the tale that is quite openly and nakedly somebody's narrative there is this inherent weakness, that a scene of true drama is impossible. In true drama n.o.body _reports_ the scene; it _appears_, it is const.i.tuted by the aspect of the occasion and the talk and the conduct of the people. When one of the people who took part in it sets out to report the scene, there is at once a mixture and a confusion of effects; for his own contribution to the scene has a different quality from the rest, cannot have the same crispness and freshness, cannot strike in with a new or unexpected note. This weakness may be well disguised, and like everything else in the whole craft it may become a positive and right effect in a particular story, for a particular purpose; it is always there, however, and it means that the full and unmixed effect of drama is denied to the story that is rigidly told from the point of view of one of the actors. But when that point of view is held in the manner I have described, when it is open to the author to withdraw from it silently and to leave the actor to play his part, true drama--or something so like it that it pa.s.ses for true drama--is always possible; all the figures of the scene are together in it, one no nearer than another. Nothing is wanting save only that direct, unequivocal sight of the hero which the method does indeed absolutely forbid.

Finally there is the old, immemorial, unguarded, unsuspicious way of telling a story, where the author entertains the reader, the minstrel draws his audience round him, the listeners rely upon his word. The voice is then confessedly and alone the author's; he imposes no limitation upon his freedom to tell what he pleases and to regard his matter from a point of view that is solely his own. And if there is anyone who can proceed in this fas.h.i.+on without appearing to lose the least of the advantages of a more cautious style, for him the minstrel's licence is proper and appropriate; there is no more to be said. But we have yet to discover him; and it is not very presumptuous in a critic, as things are, to declare that a story will never yield its best to a writer who takes the easiest way with it. He curtails his privileges and chooses a narrower method, and immediately the story responds; its better condition is too notable to be forgotten, when once it has caught the attention of a reader. The advantages that it gains are not nameless, indefinable graces, pleasing to a critic but impossible to fix in words; they are solid, we can describe and recount them. And I can only conclude that if the novel is still as full of energy as it seems to be, and is not a form of imaginative art that, having seen the best of its day, is preparing to give place to some other, the novelist will not be willing to miss the inexhaustible opportunity that lies in its treatment. The easy way is no way at all; the only way is that by which the most is made of the story to be told, and the most was never made of any story except by a choice and disciplined method.

XVIII

In these pages I have tried to disengage the various elements of the craft, one from another, and to look at them separately; and this has involved much rude simplification of matters that are by no means simple. I have chosen a novel for the sake of some particular aspect, and I have disregarded all else in it; I could but seek for the book which seemed to display that aspect most plainly, and keep it in view from that one angle for ill.u.s.tration of my theme. And the result is, no doubt, that while some tentative cla.s.sification of the ways of a novelist has been possible, the question that now arises, at the point I have reached, must be left almost untouched. It is the question that confronts a writer when he has possessed himself of his subject and determined the point of view from which it is to be approached. How is its development to be handled? Granted that the instruments of the craft, dramatic and pictorial and so forth, are such as they have been described, which of them is the appropriate one for this or that stage in the progress of the story to be told? The point of view gives only a general indication, deciding the look that the story is to wear as a whole; but whether the action is to run scenically, or to be treated on broader lines, or both--in short, the matter of the treatment in detail is still unsettled, though the main look and att.i.tude of the book has been fixed by its subject.

My a.n.a.lysis of the making of a few novels would have to be pushed very much further before it would be possible to reach more than one or two conclusions in this connection. In the handling of his book a novelist must have some working theory, I suppose, to guide him--some theory of the relative uses and values of the different means at his disposal; and yet, when it is discovered how one writer tends perpetually towards one mode of procedure, another to another, it hardly seems that between them they have arrived at much certainty. Each employs the manner that is most congenial to him; n.o.body, it may be, gives us the material for elaborating the hierarchy of values that now we need, if this argument is to be extended. We have picked out the modes of rendering a story and have seen how they differ from each other; but we are not nearly in a position to give a reasoned account of their conjunction, how each is properly used in the place where its peculiar strength is required, how the course of a story demands one here, another there, as it proceeds to its culmination. I can imagine that by examining and comparing in detail the workmans.h.i.+p of many novels by many hands a critic might arrive at a number of inductions in regard to the relative properties of the scene, the incident dramatized, the incident pictured, the panoramic impression and the rest; there is scope for a large enquiry, the results of which are greatly needed by a critic of fiction, not to speak of the writers of it. The few books that I have tried to take to pieces and to re-construct are not enough--or at least it would be necessary to deal with them more searchingly. But such slight generalizations as I have chanced upon by the way may as well be re-stated here, before I finish.

And first of the dramatic incident, the scene, properly so called--this comes first in importance, beyond doubt. A novelist instinctively sees the chief turns and phases of his story expressed in the form of a thing acted, where narrative ceases and a direct light falls upon his people and their doings. It must be so, for this is the sharpest effect within his range; and the story must naturally have the benefit of it, wherever the emphasis is to fall most strongly. To the scene, therefore, all other effects will appear to be subordinated in general; and the placing of the scenes of the story will be the prime concern. But precisely because it has this high value it will need to be used prudently. If it is wasted it loses force, and if it is weakened the climax--of the story, of a particular turn in the story--has no better resource to turn to instead. And so it is essential to recognize its limitations and to note the purposes which it does _not_ well serve; since it is by using it for these that it is depreciated.

In the scene, it is clear, there can be no foreshortening of time or s.p.a.ce; I mean that as it appears to the eye of the reader, it displays the whole of the time and s.p.a.ce it occupies. It cannot cover more of either than it actually renders. And therefore it is, for its length, expensive in the matter of time and s.p.a.ce; an oblique narrative will give the effect of further distances and longer periods with much greater economy. A few phrases, casting backwards over an incident, will yield the sense of its mere dimensions, where the dramatized scene might cover many pages. Its salience is another matter; but it has to be remembered that though the scene acts vividly, it acts slowly, in relation to its length. I am supposing that it stands alone and unsupported, and must accordingly make its effect from the beginning, must prepare as well as achieve; and evidently in that case a burden is thrown upon it for which it is not specially equipped. At any moment there may be reasons for forcing it to bear the burden--other considerations may preponderate; but nevertheless a scene which is not in some way prepared in advance is a scene which in point of fact is wasting a portion of its strength. It is accomplis.h.i.+ng expensively what might have been accomplished for less.

That is the disability of the dramatic scene; and I imagine the novelist taking thought to ensure that he shall press upon it as little as possible. As far as may be he will use the scene for the purpose which it fulfils supremely--to clinch a matter already pending, to demonstrate a result, to crown an effect half-made by other means. In that way he has all the help of its strength without taxing its weakness. He secures its salient relief, and by saving it from the necessity of doing all the work he enables it to act swiftly and sharply. And then the scene exhibits its value without drawback; it becomes a power in a story that is entirely satisfying, and a thing of beauty that holds the mind of the reader like nothing else. It has often seemed that novelists in general are over-shy of availing themselves of this opportunity. They squander the scene; they are always ready to break into dialogue, into dramatic presentation, and often when there is nothing definitely to be gained by it; but they neglect the fully wrought and unified scene, amply drawn out and placed where it gathers many issues together, showing their outcome.

Such a scene, in which every part of it is active, advancing the story, and yet in which there is no forced effort, attempting a task not proper to it, is a rare pleasure to see in a book. One immediately thinks of Bovary, and how the dramatic scenes mark and affirm the structural lines of that story.

Drama, then, gives the final stroke, it is the final stroke which it is adapted to deliver; and picture is to be considered as subordinate, preliminary and preparatory. This seems a plain inference, on the whole, from all the books I have been concerned with, not Bovary only.

Picture, the general survey, with its command of time and s.p.a.ce, finds its opportunity where a long reach is more needed than sharp visibility. It is entirely independent where drama is circ.u.mscribed.

It travels over periods and expanses, to and fro, pausing here, driving off into the distance there, making no account of the bounds of a particular occasion, but seeking its material wherever it chooses. Its office is to pile up an acc.u.mulated impression that will presently be completed by another agency, drama, which lacks what picture possesses, possesses what it lacks. Something of this kind, broadly speaking, is evidently their relation; and it is to be expected that a novelist will hold them to their natural functions, broadly speaking, in building his book. It is only a rough contrast, of course, the first and main difference between them that strikes the eye; comparing them more closely, one might find other divergences that would set their relation in a new light. But closer comparison is what I have not attempted; much more material would have to be collected and studied before it could begin.

Of the art of picture there is more to be said, however. It has appeared continually how the novelist is conscious of the thinness of a mere pictorial report of things; for thin and flat must be the reflection that we receive from the mind of another. There is a constant effort throughout the course of fiction to counteract the inherent weakness of this method of picture, the method that a story-teller is bound to use and that indeed is peculiarly his; and after tracing the successive stages of the struggle, in that which I have taken to be their logical order, we may possibly draw the moral.

The upshot seems to be this--that the inherent weakness is to be plainly admitted and recognized, and not only that, but a.s.serted and emphasized--and that then it ceases to be a weakness and actually becomes a new kind of strength. Is not this the result that we have seen? When you recall and picture an impression in words you give us, listeners and readers, no more than a sight of things in a mirror, not a direct view of them; but at the same time there is something of which you do indeed give us a direct view, as we may say, and that is the mirror, your mind itself. Of the mirror, then, you may make a solid and defined and visible object; you may dramatize this thing at least, this mind, if the things that appear in it must remain as pictures only. And so by accepting and using what looked like a mere disability in the method, you convert it into a powerful and valuable arm, with a keen effect of its own.

That is how the story that is centred in somebody's consciousness, pa.s.sed through a fas.h.i.+oned and const.i.tuted mind--not poured straight into the book from the mind of the author, which is a far-away matter, vaguely divined, with no certain edge to it--takes its place as a story dramatically pictured, and as a story, therefore, of stronger stuff than a simple and undramatic report. Thus may be expressed the reason which underlies the novelist's reluctance to _tell_ his story and his desire to interpose another presence between himself and the reader. It seems a good reason, good enough to be acted upon more consistently than it is by the masters of the craft. For though their reluctance has had a progressive history, though there are a few principles in the art of fiction that have appeared to emerge and to become established in the course of time, a reader of novels is left at last amazed by the chaos in which the art is still pursued--frankly let it be said. Different schools, debatable theories, principles upheld by some and rejected by others--such disagreement would all be right and natural, it would be the mark of vigour in the art and the criticism of it. But no connected argument, no definition of terms, no formulation of claims, not so much as any ground really cleared and prepared for discussion--what is a novel-reader to make of such a condition and how is he to keep his critical interest alive and alert?

The business of criticism in the matter of fiction seems clear, at any rate. There is nothing more that can usefully be said about a novel until we have fastened upon the question of its making and explored it to some purpose. In all our talk about novels we are hampered and held up by our unfamiliarity with what is called their technical aspect, and that is consequently the aspect to confront. That Jane Austen was an acute observer, that d.i.c.kens was a great humourist, that George Eliot had a deep knowledge of provincial character, that our living romancers are so full of life that they are neither to hold nor to bind--we know, we have repeated, we have told each other a thousand times; it is no wonder if attention flags when we hear it all again.

It is their books, as well as their talents and attainments, that we aspire to see--their books, which we must recreate for ourselves if we are ever to behold them. And in order to recreate them durably there is the one obvious way--to study the craft, to follow the process, to read constructively. The practice of this method appears to me at this time of day, I confess, the only interest of the criticism of fiction.

It seems vain to expect that discourse upon novelists will contain anything new for us until we have really and clearly and accurately seen their books.

And after all it is impossible--that is certain; the book vanishes as we lay hands on it. Every word we say of it, every phrase I have used about a novel in these pages, is loose, approximate, a little more or a little less than the truth. We cannot exactly hit the mark; or if we do, we cannot be sure of it. I do not speak of the just judgement of quality; as for that, any critic of any art is in the same predicament; the value of a picture or a statue is as bodiless as that of a book. But there are times when a critic of literature feels that if only there were one single tangible and measurable fact about a book--if it could be weighed like a statue, say, or measured like a picture--it would be a support in a world of shadows. Such an ingenuous confession, I think it must be admitted, goes to the root of the matter--could we utter our sense of helplessness more candidly?

But still among the shadows there is a spark of light that tempts us, there is a hint of the possibility that behind them, beyond them, we may touch a region where the shadows become at least a little more substantial. If that is so, it seems that our chance must lie in the direction I have named. The author of the book was a craftsman, the critic must overtake him at his work and see how the book was made.