The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock (e novels to read online txt) 📕

could never forget. For Densher had not practised that final disloyalty which was begged of him, and Milly had died in full knowledge of their design, and yet she had forgiven, dove-like to the end, and her forgiveness stands between them. Kate recognizes it in the word on which the book closes—"We shall never be again as we were." Whether they accept the situation, whether they try to patch up their old alliance—these questions are no affair of the story. With Kate's word the story is finished; the first fineness of their association is lost, nothing will restore it. Milly has made the change by being what she was, too rare an essence for vulgar uses. Those who wanted the intelligence to understand her must pay their penalty; at least they are intelligent enough to see it.

It is once more the picture of a moral, emotional revolution, the kind of subject that seems to demand a narrator. The story is so little a matter of action that when the revolution is complete there is nothing more to be said. Its result in action is indifferent; the man and the woman may marry or part, the subject is unaffected either way. The progress of the tale lies in the consciousness of the people in it, and somebody is needed, it might have been supposed, to tell us how it all came to pass. Not the author, perhaps, or any of the characters in person; but at least it must be told, at any given juncture, from somebody's point of view, composing and reflecting the story of an experience. But in The Wings of the Dove there is next to no narrative at all, strictly speaking. Who is there that narrates? The author a little, it is true, for the people have to be described, placed, brought on the scene to begin with. But afterwards? Densher, Kate, Milly, Susan Stringham, each in turn seems to take up the story and to provide the point of view, and where it is absolutely needful they really do so; they give the mirror for the visible scene about them, Alpine heights, London streets, Venetian palaces. But that is incidental; of the progress of the tale they offer no account. They act it, and not only in their spoken words, but also and much more in the silent drama that is perpetually going forward within them. They do not describe and review and recapitulate this drama, nor does the author. It is played before us, we see its actual movement.

The effect is found here and there in all well-made fiction, of course. The undercutting, as I call it, of a flat impression is seen wherever a turn of events is carefully prepared and deliberately approached. But I do not know that anywhere, except in the later novels of Henry James, a pictorial subject is thus handed over in its entirety to the method of drama, so that the intervention of a seeing eye and a recording hand, between the reader and the subject, is practically avoided altogether. I take it as evident that unless the presence of a seer and a recorder is made a value in itself, contributing definitely to the effect of the subject, he is better dispensed with and put out of the way; where other things are equal a direct view of the matter in hand is the best. But it has been made clear in the foregoing pages, I hope, that the uses of a narrator are many and various; other things are not equal where the subject asks for no more than to be reflected and pictured. In that case the narrator, standing in front of the story, is in a position to make the most of it, all that can be made; and so he represents the great principle of economy, and is a value in himself, and does contribute to the effect. Many a story, from the large panoramic chronicle to the small and single impression, postulates the story-teller, the picture-maker, and by that method gives its best. Speaking in person or reported obliquely, the narrator serves his turn. But where there is no positive reason for him there is a reason, equally positive, for a different method, one that assigns the point of view to the reader himself. An undramatic subject, we find, can be treated dramatically, so that the different method is at hand.

The story that is concerned, even entirely concerned, with the impact of experience upon a mind (Strether's, say) can be enhanced to the pitch of drama, because thought has its tell-tale gestures and its speaking looks, just as much as an actor on the stage. Make use of these looks and gestures, express the story through them, leave them to enact it—and you have a story which in its manner is effectually drama. Method upon method, the vision of a vision, the process of thinking and feeling and seeing exposed objectively to the view of the reader—it is an ingenious art; criticism seems to have paid it less attention than it deserves. But criticism has been hindered, perhaps, by the fact that these books of Henry James's, in which the art is written large, are so odd and so personal and so peculiar in all their aspects. When the whole volume is full of a strongly-marked idiosyncrasy, quite unlike that of anyone else, it is difficult to distinguish between this, which is solely the author's, and his method of treating a story, which is a general question, discussible apart. And thus it happens that the novelist who carried his research into the theory of the art further than any other—the only real scholar in the art—is the novelist whose methods are most likely to be overlooked or mistaken, regarded as simply a part of his own original quiddity. It should be possible to isolate them, to separate them in thought from the temperament by which they were coloured; they belong to the craft, which belongs to no man in particular. They still wait to be fully assimilated into the criticism of fiction; there is much more in them, no doubt, than the few points that I touch on here. But I pass on to one or two of the rest.

XIII

What, then, is a dramatic subject? Hitherto I have been speaking of novels in which some point of view, other than that of the reader, the impartial onlooker, is prescribed by the subject in hand. In big chronicles like Thackeray's it is clear that the controlling point of view can only be that of the chronicler himself, or of some one whom he sets up to tell the story on his behalf. The expanse of life which the story covers is far too great to be shown to the reader in a series of purely dramatic scenes. It is absolutely necessary for the author or his spokesman to draw back for a general view of the matter from time to time; and whenever he does so the story becomes his impression, summarized and pictured for the reader. In Esmond or The Virginians or The Newcomes, there are tracts and tracts of the story which are bound to remain outside the reader's direct vision; only a limited number of scenes and occasions could possibly be set forth in the form of drama. A large, loose, manifold subject, in short, extensive in time and space, full of crowds and diversions, is a pictorial subject and can be nothing else. However intensely it may be dramatized here and there, on the whole it must be presented as a conspectus, the angle of vision being assigned to the narrator. It is simply a question of amount, of quantity, of the reach of the subject. If it passes a certain point it exceeds the capacity of the straight and dramatic method.

Madame Bovary and The Ambassadors, again, are undramatic in their matter, though their reach is comparatively small; for in both of them the emphasis falls upon changes of mind, heart, character, gradually drawn out, not upon any clash or opposition resolved in action. They might be treated scenically, no doubt; their authors might conceivably have handled them in terms of pure drama, without any direct display of Emma's secret fancies or Strether's brooding imagination. But in neither case could that method make the most of the subject or bring out all that it has to give. The most expressive, most enlightening part of Strether's story lies in the reverberating theatre of his mind, and as for Emma, the small exterior facts of her story are of very slight account. Both these books, therefore, in their general lines, are pictured impressions, not actions—even though in Bovary to some extent, and in The Ambassadors almost wholly, the picture is itself dramatized in the fashion I have indicated. That last effect belongs only to the final method, the treatment of the surface; underneath it there is in both the projection of a certain person's point of view.

But now look at the contrast in The Awkward Age, a novel in which Henry James followed a single method throughout, from top to bottom, denying himself the help of any other. He chose to treat this story as pure drama; he never once draws upon the characteristic resource of the novelist—who is able, as the dramatist is not able, to give a generalized and foreshortened account of the matter in hand. In The Awkward Age everything is immediate and particular; there is no insight into anybody's thought, no survey of the scene from a height, no resumption of the past in retrospect. The whole of the book passes scenically before the reader, and nothing is offered but the look and the speech of the characters on a series of chosen occasions. It might indeed be printed as a play; whatever is not dialogue is simply a kind of amplified stage-direction, adding to the dialogue the expressive effect which might be given it by good acting. The novelist, using this method, claims only one advantage over the playwright; it is the advantage of ensuring the very best acting imaginable, a performance in which every actor is a perfect artist and not the least point is ever missed. The play is not handed over to the chances of interpretation—that is the difference; the author creates the manner in which the words are spoken, as well as the words themselves, and he may keep the manner at an ideal pitch. Otherwise the novelist completely ties his hands, submitting to all the restraints of the playwright in order to secure the compactness and the direct force of true drama.

What is the issue of a certain conjunction of circumstances? The subject of the book is in the question. First of all we see a highly sophisticated circle of men and women, who seem so well practised in the art of living that they could never be taken by surprise. Life in their hands has been refined to a process in which nothing appears to have been left to chance. Their intelligence accounts for everything; they know where they are, they know what they want, and under a network of discretion which they all sustain they thoroughly understand each other. It is a charmed world, altogether self-contained, occupying a corner of modern London. It is carefully protected within and without; and yet oddly enough there is one quite common and regular contingency for which it is not prepared at all. Its handling of life proceeds smoothly so long as all the men and women together are on a level of proficiency, all alike experienced in the art; and they can guard themselves against intruders from elsewhere. But periodically it must happen that their young grow up; the daughter of the house reaches the "awkward age,"