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

certainly not of the common earth. They and she alike are at the same angle to literal fact, they diverging one way, she another; they accordingly make a kind of reality which can assimilate her romance. Dickens was saved from trying to write two books at once by the fact that one completely satisfied him. It expressed the exciting, amazing, exhilarating world he lived in himself, with its consistent transmutation of all values, and he knew no other.

The method which he finally worked out for himself was exactly what he required. There might be much to say of it, for it is by no means simple, but I am only concerned with one or two points in it. The chief characteristic I take to be this careful introduction of violent drama into a scene already prepared to vouch for it—a scene so alive that it compels belief, so queer that almost anything might happen there naturally. The effect which Dickens gets from the picture in his novels, as opposed to the action, is used as a sort of attestation of the action; and it surely fulfils its mission very strikingly in the best of his work—the best from this point of view—Bleak House, Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend. His incurable love of labyrinthine mystification, when it really ran away with him, certainly defeated all precautions; not even old Dorrit's Marshalsea, not even Flora and Mr. F.'s Aunt, can do anything to carry off the story of the Clennams. But so long as he was content with a fairly straightforward romance, all went well; the magnificent life that he projected was prepared to receive and to speed it. Blimber and Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Tox, the Podsnaps and Twemlow and the Veneerings, all contribute out of their overflow of energy to the force of a drama—a drama in which they may take no specific part, but which depends on them for the furnishing of an appropriate scene, a favouring background, a world attuned. This and so much more they do that it may seem like insulting them even to think for a moment of their subordination to the general design, which is indeed a great deal less interesting than they. But Dickens's method is sound and good, and not the less so because he used it for comparatively trivial purposes. It is strange that he should have known how to invent such a scene, and then have found no better drama to enact on it—strange and always stranger, with every re-reading. That does not affect his handling of a subject, which is all that I deal with here.

The life which he creates and distributes right and left, in such a book as Bleak House, before bending to his story—this I call his picture, for picture it is in effect, not dramatic action. It exhibits the world in which Lady Dedlock is to meditate murder, the fog of the suit in Chancery out of which the intrigue of the book is to emerge. It is the summary of a situation, with its elements spreading widely and touching many lives; it gathers them in and gives an impression of them all. It is pictorial as a whole, and quite as much so as any of Thackeray's broad visions. But I have noted before how inevitably Dickens's picture, unlike Thackeray's, is presented in the form of scenic action, and here is a case in point. All this impression of life, stretching from the fog-bound law courts to the marshes of Chesney Wold, from Krook and Miss Flite to Sir Leicester and Volumnia, is rendered as incident, as a succession of particular occasions—never, or very seldom, as general and far-seeing narrative, after Thackeray's manner. Dickens continually holds to the immediate scene, even when his object is undramatic; he is always readier to work in action and dialogue than to describe at large; he is happier in placing a character there before us, as the man or woman talked and behaved in a certain hour, on a certain spot, than in reflecting a long impression of their manner of living. In Thackeray's hands the life of Miss Flite, for instance, would have become a legend, recalled and lingered over, illustrated by passing glimpses of her ways and oddities. With Dickens she is always a little human being who figures upon a scene, in a group, a visible creature acting her small part; she is always dramatic.

And Dickens, using this method everywhere, even in such a case as hers—even where his purpose, that is to say, is pictorial, to give the sense of a various and vivacious background—is forced to crystallize and formulate his characters very sharply, if they are to make their effect; it is why he is so often reduced to the expedient of labelling his people with a trick or a phrase, which they have to bring with them every time they appear. Their opportunities are strictly limited; the author does not help them out by glancing freely into their lives and sketching them broadly. Flite, Snagsby, Chadband and the rest of them—whatever they are, they must be all of it within narrow bounds, within the few scenes that can be allotted to them; and if one of them fails now and then it is not surprising, the wonder is that most of them succeed so brilliantly. In thus translating his picture into action Dickens chose the most exigent way, but it was always the right way for him. He was curiously incapable in the other; when occasionally he tries his hand at picture-making, in Thackeray's manner—attempting to summarize an impression of social life among the Veneerings, of official life among the Barnacles—his touch is wild indeed. Away from a definite episode in an hour prescribed he is seldom at ease.

But though the actual presentation is thus dramatic, his books are in fact examples of the pictured scene that opens and spreads very gradually, in order to make a valid world for a drama that could not be precipitated forthwith, a drama that would be naked romance if it stood by itself. Stevenson happened upon this point, with regard to Dickens, in devising the same method for a story of his own, The Wrecker, a book in which he too proposed to insinuate an abrupt and violent intrigue into credible, continuous life. He, of course, knew precisely what he was doing—where Dickens followed, as I suppose, an uncritical instinct; the purpose of The Wrecker is clearly written upon it, and very ingeniously carried out. But I doubt whether Stevenson himself noticed that in all his work, or nearly, he was using an artifice of the same kind. He spoke of his habitual inclination towards the story told in the first person as though it were a chance preference, and he may not have perceived how logically it followed from the subjects that mostly attracted him. They were strongly romantic, vividly dramatic; he never had occasion to use the first person for the effect I considered a while ago, its enhancement of a plain narrative. I called it the first step towards the dramatization of a story, and so it is in a book like Esmond, a broadly pictured novel of manners. But it is more than this in a book like The Master of Ballantrae, where the subject is a piece of forcible, closely knit action. The value of rendering it as somebody's narrative, of placing it in the mouth of a man who was there on the spot, is in this book the value of working the drama into a picture, of passing it through a man's thought and catching his reflection of it. As the picture in Esmond is enhanced, so the drama in Ballantrae is toned and qualified by the method of presentation. The same method has a different effect, according to the subject upon which it is used; as a splash of the same grey might darken white surface and lighten a black. In Esmond the use of the first person raises the book in the direction of drama, in Ballantrae it thrusts the book in the other direction, towards the pictured impression. So it would seem; but perhaps it is a fine distinction that criticism can afford to pass by.

XV

As for the peculiar accent and stir of life, the life behind the story, Balzac's manner of finding and expressing it is always interesting. He seems to look for it most readily, not in the nature of the men and women whose action makes the story, or not there to begin with, but in their streets and houses and rooms. He cannot think of his people without the homes they inhabit; with Balzac to imagine a human being is to imagine a province, a city, a corner of the city, a building at a turn of the street, certain furnished rooms, and finally the man or woman who lives in them. He cannot be satisfied that the tenor of this creature's existence is at all understood without a minute knowledge of the things and objects that surround it. So strong is his conviction upon this point that it gives a special savour to the many pages in which he describes how the doorway is approached, how the passage leads to the staircase, how the parlour-chairs are placed, in the house which is to be the scene of his drama. These descriptions are clear and business-like; they are offered as an essential preliminary to the story, a matter that must obviously be dealt with, once for all, before the story can proceed. And he communicates his certainty to the reader, he imposes his belief in the need for precision and fullness; Balzac is so sure that every detail must be known, down to the vases on the mantelpiece or the pots and pans in the cupboard, that his reader cannot begin to question it. Everything is made to appear as important as the author feels it to be.

His manner is well to be watched in Eugénie Grandet. That account of the great bare old house of the miser at Saumur is as plain and straightforward as an inventory; no attempt is made to insinuate the impression of the place by hints and side-lights. Balzac marches up to it and goes steadily through it, until our necessary information is complete, and there he leaves it. There is no subtlety in such a method, it seems; a lighter, shyer handling of the facts, more suggestion and less statement, might be expected to make a deeper effect. And indeed Balzac's confident way is not one that would give a good result in most hands; it would produce the kind of description that the eye travels over unperceivingly, the conscientious introduction that tells us nothing. Yet Balzac contrives to make it tell everything; and the simple explanation is that he, more than anyone else, knows everything. The place exists in his thought; it is not to him the mere sensation of a place, with cloudy corners, uncertain recesses, which only grow definite as he touches and probes them with his phrases. A writer of a different sort, an impressionist who is aware of the effect of a scene rather than of the scene itself, proceeds inevitably after another fashion; if he attempted Balzac's method he would have to feel his way tentatively, adding fact to fact, and his account would consist of that mechanical sum of details which makes no image. Balzac is so thoroughly possessed of his image that he can reproduce it inch by inch, fact by fact, without losing the effect of it as a whole; he can start from the edge of his scene, from a street of old houses, from the doorstep of one old house, and leave a perfectly