Therefore the ‘book itself’ is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel, and the more intense the writer’s feeling, the more exact without slip or chink its expression in words. And whenever Mr. Lubbock talks of form it is as if something were interposed between us and the book as we know it. We feel the presence of an alien substance which requires to be visualized imposing itself upon emotions which we feel naturally, and name simply, and range in final order by feeling their right relations to each other. Thus we have reached our conception of ‘Un Cœur Simple’ by working from the emotion outwards, and, the reading over, there is nothing to be seen; there is everything to be felt. And only when the emotion is feeble and the workmanship excellent can we separate what is felt from the expression and remark, for example, what excellence of form Esther Waters possesses in comparison with Jane Eyre. But consider the Princesse de Clèves. There is vision and there is expression. The two blend so perfectly that when Mr. Lubbock asks us to test the form with our eyes we see nothing at all. But we feel with singular satisfaction, and since all our feelings are in keeping, they form a whole which remains in our minds as the book itself. The point is worth labouring, not simply to substitute one word for another, but to insist among all this talk of methods, that both in writing and in reading it is the emotion that must come first.
Still, we have only made a beginning, and a very dangerous one at that. To snatch an emotion and luxuriate in it and tire of it and throw it away is as dissipating in literature as in life. Yet, if we wring this pleasure from Flaubert, the most austere of writers, there is no limit to be put upon the intoxicating effects of Meredith and Dickens and Dostoevsky, of Scott and Charlotte Brontë. Or, rather, there is a limit, and we have found it over and over again in the extremes of satiety and distrust. If we are to read them a second time, we must somehow discriminate. Emotion is our material; but what do we mean by emotion? How many different kinds of emotion are there not in one short story, of how many qualities, and composed of how many different elements? And, therefore, to get our emotion directly, and for ourselves, is only the first step. We must go on to test it and riddle it with questions. If nothing survives, well and good; if something remains, all the better. The resolution is admirable; the only difficulty is how to enforce it. Did we thus wish to examine our impressions of some new play or poem, there are many dead, and five or six living, critics at whose command we cheerfully revise our views. But when it is fiction, and fiction hot from the press, far from accepting the judgment of any living critic or the applause or neglect of the public, we are forced, after competing half-a-dozen judgments, each based on a different conception of the art or on no conception at all, either to do the work for ourselves or to conclude that for some mysterious reason the work cannot be done. There may be something so emotional in fiction that the critics inevitably lose their heads. There may be something so unamenable to discipline in the art itself that it is hopeless either to judge it by the old standards or to devise new ones afresh. But now – at last – Mr. Lubbock applies his Röntgen rays. The voluminous lady submits to examination. The flesh, the finery, even the smile and witchery, together with the umbrellas and brown paper parcels which she has collected on her long and toilsome journey, dissolve and disappear; the skeleton alone remains. It is surprising. It is even momentarily shocking. Our old familiar friend has vanished. But, after all, there is something satisfactory in bone – one can grasp it.
In other words, by concentrating on the novelist’s method, Mr. Lubbock draws our attention to the solid and enduring thing to which we can hold fast when we attack a novel for the second time. Here is something to which we can turn and turn again, and with each clearer view of it our understanding of the whole becomes more definite. Here is something removed (as far as may be) from the influence of our fluctuating and private emotions. The novelist’s method is simply his device for expressing his emotion; but if we discover how that effect is produced we shall undoubtedly deepen the impression. Let us put it to the proof, since words are misleading. It is essential in ‘Un Cœur Simple’ that we should feel the lapse of time; the incidents are significant because they are scattered so sparsely over so long a stretch of years, and the effect must be given in a few short pages. So Flaubert introduces a number of people for no purpose, as we think; but later we hear that they are now all dead, and we realize then for how long Félicité herself has lived. To realize that is to enforce the effect. It fastens our attention upon the story as a work of art, and gives us such a prise on it as we have already, thanks to their more rigid technique, upon drama and poetry, but have to contrive for fiction, afresh, each time we open a book.
But that is one detail in a short story. Can we sharpen our impressions of a long and crowded novel in the same way? Can we make out that the masters – Tolstoy and Flaubert, and Dickens, and Henry James, and Meredith – expressed by methods which we can trace and understand the enormous mass and the myriad detail of their books? If so the novel, the voluminous Victorian novel, is capable of being read, as we read Hamlet, as a whole. And the novelists, children of instinct, purveyors of illusion and distraction at the cheapest rates quoted in literature, are of the blood royal all the same. That is the conclusion to which Mr. Lubbock certainly brings us by means of an argument which is at once fascinating and strangely unfamiliar. We have been along the road so often and have wasted so many matches looking for sign-posts in dark corners. We must have been aware that a novelist, before he can persuade us that his world is real and his people alive, must solve certain questions and acquire certain skill. But until Mr. Lubbock pierced through the flesh and made us look at the skeleton we were almost ready to believe that nothing was needed but genius and ink. The novelists themselves have done little to open our eyes. They have praised the genius and blamed the ink, but they have never, with two famous exceptions, invited us in to see the process at work. Yet obviously there must be a process, and it is at work always and in every novel. The simplest story begins more often than not, as Mr. Lubbock points out, by the use of three different methods: the scene, the retrospect, the summary. And our innocence is gauged by the fact that though we swallow them daily it is with our eyes tight shut. Names have to be found and methods defined now for the first time.
No writer, indeed, has so many methods at his disposal as a novelist. He can put himself at any point of view; he can to some extent combine several different views. He can appear in person, like Thackeray; or disappear (never perhaps completely), like Flaubert. He can state the facts, like Defoe, or give the thought without the fact like Henry James. He can sweep the widest horizons, like Tolstoy, or seize upon one old apple-woman and her basket, like Tolstoy again. Where there is every freedom there is every licence; and the novel, open-armed, free to all comers, claims more victims than the other forms of literature all put together. But let us look at the victors. We are tempted, indeed, to look at them a great deal more closely than space allows. For they too look different if you watch them at work. There is Thackeray always taking measures to avoid a scene, and Dickens (save in David Copperfield) invariably seeking one. There is Tolstoy dashing into the midst of his story without staying to lay foundations, and Balzac laying foundations so deep that the story itself seems never to begin. But we must check the desire to see where Mr. Lubbock’s criticism would lead us in reading particular books. The general view is more striking, and a general view is to be had.
Let us look not at each story separately, but at the method of story-telling – the use, that is, of each of these processes – which runs through them all. Let us look at it in Richardson’s hands, and watch it changing and developing as Thackeray applies it, and Dickens and Tolstoy and Meredith and Flaubert and the rest. Then let us see how in the end Henry James, endowed not with greater genius but with greater knowledge and craftsmanship, surmounts in The Ambassadors problems which baffled Richardson in Clarissa. The view is difficult; the light is bad. At every angle someone rises to prote
st that novels are the outburst of spontaneous inspiration, and that Henry James lost as much by his devotion to art as he gained. We will not silence that protest, for it is the voice of an immediate joy in reading without which second readings would be impossible, for there would be no first. And yet the conclusion seems to us undeniable. Henry James achieved what Richardson attempted. ‘The only real scholar in the art’ beats the amateurs. The late-comer improves upon the pioneers. More is implied than we can even attempt to state.
For from that vantage ground the art of fiction can be seen, not clearly indeed, but in a new proportion. We may speak of infancy, of youth, and of maturity. We may say that Scott is childish and Flaubert by comparison a grown man. We may go on to say that the vigour and splendour of youth almost outweigh the more deliberate virtues of maturity. And then we may pause upon the significance of ‘almost’, and wonder whether, perhaps, it has not some bearing upon our reluctance to read the Victorians twice. The gigantic, sprawling books still seem to reverberate the yawns and lamentations of their makers. To build a castle, sketch a profile, fire off a poem, reform a workhouse, or pull down a prison were occupations more congenial to the writers, or more befitting their manhood, than to sit chained at a desk scribbling novels for a simple-minded public. The genius of Victorian fiction seems to be making its magnificent best of an essentially bad job. But it is never possible to say of Henry James that he is making the best of a bad job. In all the long stretch of The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors there is not the hint of a yawn, not a sign of condescension. The novel is his job. It is the appropriate form for what he has to say. It wins a beauty from that fact – a fine and noble beauty – which it has never worn before. And now at last (so we seem to see) the novel is a form distinct from any other. It will not burden itself with other people’s relics. It will choose to say whatever it says best. Flaubert will take for his subject an old maid and a stuffed parrot. Henry James will find all he needs round a tea-table in a drawing-room. The nightingales and roses are banished – or at least the nightingale sounds strange against the traffic, and the roses in the light of the arc lamps are not quite so red. There are new combinations of old material and the novel, when it is used for the sake of its qualities and not for the sake of its defects, enforces fresh aspects of the perennial story.
Mr. Lubbock prudently carries his survey no further than the novels of Henry James. But already the years have mounted up. We may expect the novel to change and develop as it is explored by the most vigorous minds of a very complex age. What have we not, indeed, to expect from M. Proust alone? But if he will listen to Mr. Lubbock, the common reader will refuse to sit any longer open-mouthed in passive expectation. That is to encourage the charlatan to shock us and the conjuror to play us tricks. We must press close on his heels, and so bring to bear upon the novelist who spins his books in solitude the pressure of an audience. The pressure of an audience will not reduce the novel to a play which we can read through in the four hours between dinner and bedtime. But it will encourage the novelist to find out – and that is all we ask of him – what it is that he means and how best to show it us.
How it Strikes a Contemporary
In the first place a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the fact that two critics at the same table at the same moment will pronounce completely different opinions about the same book. Here, on the right, it is declared a masterpiece of English prose; on the left, simultaneously, a mere mass of waste paper which, if the fire could survive it, should be thrown upon the flames. Yet both critics are in agreement about Milton and about Keats. They display an exquisite sensibility and have undoubtedly a genuine enthusiasm. It is only when they discuss the work of contemporary writers that they inevitably come to blows. The book in question, which is at once a lasting contribution to English literature and a mere farrago of pretentious mediocrity, was published about two months ago. That is the explanation; that is why they differ.
The explanation is a strange one. It is equally disconcerting to the reader who wishes to take his bearings in the chaos of contemporary literature and to the writer who has a natural desire to know whether his own work, produced with infinite pains and in almost utter darkness, is likely to burn for ever among the fixed luminaries of English letters or, on the contrary, to put out the fire. But if we identify ourselves with the reader and explore his dilemma first, our bewilderment is short-lived enough. The same thing has happened so often before. We have heard the doctors disagreeing about the new and agreeing about the old twice a year on the average, in spring and autumn, ever since Robert Elsmere, or was it Stephen Phillips, somehow pervaded the atmosphere, and there was the same disagreement among grown-up people about them. It would be much more marvellous and indeed much more upsetting, if, for a wonder, both gentlemen agreed, pronounced Blank’s book an undoubted masterpiece, and thus faced us with the necessity of deciding whether we should back their judgment to the extent of ten and sixpence. Both are critics of reputation; the opinions tumbled out so spontaneously here will be starched and stiffened into columns of sober prose which will uphold the dignity of letters in England and America.
It must be some innate cynicism, then, some ungenerous distrust of contemporary genius, which determines us automatically as the talk goes on that, were they to agree – which they show no signs of doing – half a guinea is altogether too large a sum to squander upon contemporary enthusiasms, and the case will be met quite adequately by a card to the library. Still the question remains, and let us put it boldly to the critics themselves. Is there no guidance nowadays for a reader who yields to none in reverence for the dead, but is tormented by the suspicion that reverence for the dead is vitally connected with understanding of the living? After a rapid survey both critics are agreed that there is unfortunately no such person. For what is their own judgment worth where new books are concerned? Certainly not ten and sixpence. And from the stores of their experience they proceed to bring forth terrible examples of past blunders; crimes of criticism which, if they had been committed against the dead and not against the living, would have lost them their jobs and imperilled their reputations. The only advice they can offer is to respect one’s own instincts, to follow them fearlessly and, rather than submit them to the control of any critic or reviewer alive, to check them by reading and reading again the masterpieces of the past.
Thanking them humbly, we cannot help reflecting that it was not always so. Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now unknown. That is not to say that the great critic – the Dryden, the Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold – was an impeccable judge of contemporary work, whose verdicts stamped the book indelibly and saved the reader the trouble of reckoning the value for himself. The mistakes of those great men about their own contemporaries are too notorious to be worth recording. But the mere fact of their existence had a centralizing influence. That alone, it is not fantastic to suppose, would have controlled the disagreements of the dinner table and given to random chatter about some book just out an authority now entirely to seek. The diverse schools would have debated as hotly as ever, but at the back of every reader’s mind would have been the consciousness that there was at least one man who kept the main principles of literature closely in view: who, if you had taken to him some eccentricity of the moment, would have brought it into touch with permanence and tethered it by his own authority in the contrary blasts of praise and blame. But when it comes to the making of a critic, Nature must be generous and Society ripe. The scattered dinner tables of the modern world, the chase and eddy of the various currents which compose the Society of our time, could only be dominated by a giant of fabulous dimensions. And where is even the very tall man whom we have the right to expect? Critics, of course, abound. But the too frequent result of their able and industrious pens is a desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones. Nowhere shall we find
the downright vigour of Dryden, or Keats with his fine and natural bearing, or Flaubert and his fanaticism, or Coleridge, above all, brewing in his head the whole of poetry and letting issue now and then one of those profound general statements which are caught up by the mind when hot with the friction of reading as if they were of the soul of the book itself.
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