Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. It is thus that English literature will survive this war and cross the gulf — if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and to write, how to preserve, and how to create.
On Re-reading Novels
SO there are to be new editions of Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Meredith. Left in trains, forgotten in lodging-houses, thumbed and tattered to destruction, the old ones have served their day, and for the new-comers in their new houses there are to be new editions and new readings and new friends. It speaks very well for the Georgians. It is still more to the credit of the Victorians. In spite of the mischief-makers, the grandchildren, it seems, get along very nicely with the grandparents; and the sight of their concord points inevitably to the later breach between the generations, a breach more complete than the other, and perhaps more momentous. The failure of the Edwardians, comparative yet disastrous — that is a question which waits to be discussed. How the year 1860 was a year of empty cradles; how the reign of Edward the Seventh was barren of poet, novelist, or critic; how it followed that the Georgians read Russian novels in translations; how they benefited and suffered; how, different a story we might have told today had there been living heroes to worship and destroy — all this we find significant in view of the new editions of the old books. The Georgians, it seems, are in the odd predicament of turning for solace and guidance not to their parents who are alive, but to their grandparents who are dead. And so, as likely as not, we shall be faced one of these days by a young man reading Meredith for the first time. But before, inspired by his example, we risk the dangerous experiment of reading Harry Richmond for a second time, let us consider a few of the questions which the prospect of reading a long Victorian novel at once arouses in us.
First, there is the boredom of it. The national habit of reading has been formed by the drama, and the drama has always recognised the fact that human beings cannot sit for more than five hours at a stretch in front of a stage. Read Harry Richmond for five hours at a stretch and we shall only have broken off a fragment. Days may pass before we can add to it; meanwhile the plan is lost; the book pours to waste; we blame ourselves; we abuse the author; nothing is more exasperating and dispiriting. That is the first obstacle to be overcome. Next, we cannot doubt that we are by temperament and tradition poetic. There still lingers among us the belief that poetry is the senior branch of the service. If we have an hour to spend, we feel that we lay it out to better advantage with Keats than with Macaulay. Novels, however, besides being so long and so badly written, are all about the old familiar things; what we do, week in, week out, between breakfast and bedtime; they are about life, and one has life enough on one’s hands already without living it all over again in prose.
That is another obstacle. Yet these stock complaints which we begin to hear and, perhaps, to utter (as we get on in life) lose nothing of their acrimony if with the same breath we have to admit that we owe more to Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Hardy than we can measure; that if we wish to recall our happier hours, they would be those Conrad has given us and Henry James; and that to have seen a young man bolting Meredith whole recalls the pleasure of so many first readings that we are even ready to venture a second. The question is whether, if we venture ourselves a second time with Vanity Fair, the Copperfields, the Richmonds we shall be able to find some other form of pleasure to take the place of that careless rapture which floated us along so triumphantly in the first instance. The pleasure we shall now look for will lie not so obviously on the surface; and we shall find ourselves hard pressed to make out what is the lasting quality, if such there be, which justifies these long books about modern life in prose.
Some months ago Mr. Percy Lubbock applied himself to answer some of these questions in The Craft of Fiction, a book which is likely to have much influence upon readers and may perhaps eventually reach the critics and the writers. The subject is vast and the book short; but it will be our fault, not Mr. Lubbock’s, if we talk as vaguely about novels in the future as we have done in the past. For example, do we say that we cannot read Harry Richmond twice? We are led by Mr. Lubbock to suspect that it was our first reading that was to blame. A strong but vague emotion, two or three characters, half a dozen scattered scenes — if that is all that Harry Richmond recalls to us, the fault lies perhaps not with Meredith, but with ourselves. Did we read the book as he meant it to be read, or did we not reduce it to chaos through our own incompetency? Novels, above all other books, we are reminded, bristle with temptations. We identify ourselves with this person or with that. We fasten upon the character or the scene which is congenial. We swing our imaginations capriciously from spot to spot. We compare the world of fiction with the real world and judge it by the same standards. Undoubtedly we do all this and easily find excuses for so doing. “But meanwhile the book, the thing he made, lies imprisoned in the volume, and our glimpse of it was too fleeting, it seems, to leave us with a lasting knowledge of its form.” That is the point. There is something lasting that we can know, something solid that we can lay hands on. There is, Mr. Lubbock argues, such a thing as the book itself. To perceive this we should read at arm’s length from the distractions we have named. We must receive impressions but we must relate them to each other as the author intended. And it is when we have shaped our impressions as the author intended that we are then in a position to perceive the form itself, and it is this which endures, however mood or fashion may change. In Mr. Lubbock’s own words:
But with the book in this condition of a defined shape, firm of outline, its form shows for what it is indeed — not an attribute, one of many and possibly not the most important, but the book itself, as the form of the statue is the statue itself.
Now, as Mr. Lubbock laments, the criticism of fiction is in its infancy, and its language, though not all of one syllable, is baby language. This word “form,” of course, comes from the visual arts, and for our part we wish that he could have seen his way to do without it. It is confusing. The form of the novel differs from the dramatic form — that is true; we can, if we choose, say that we see the difference in our mind’s eyes. But can we see that the form of The Egoist differs from the form of Vanity Fair? We do not raise the question in order to stickle for accuracy where most words are provisional, many metaphorical, and some on trial for the first time. The question is not one of words only. It goes deeper than that, into the very process of reading itself. Here we have Mr. Lubbock telling us that the book itself is equivalent to its form, and seeking with admirable subtlety and lucidity to trace out those methods by which novelists build up the final and enduring structure of their books. The very patness with which the image comes to the pen makes us suspect that it fits a little loosely. And in these circumstances it is best to shake oneself free from images and start afresh with a definite subject to work upon. Let us read a story and set down our impressions as we go along, and so perhaps discover what it is that bothers us in Mr. Lubbock’s use of the word form. For this purpose there is no more appropriate author than Flaubert; and, not to strain our space, let us choose a short story, Un Coeur Simple, for example, for, as it happens, it is one that we have practically forgotten.
The title gives us our bearings, and the first words direct our attention to Madame Aubain’s faithful servant Félicité. And now the impressions begin to arrive. Madame’s character; the look of her house; Félicité’s appearance; her love affair with Théodore; Madame’s children; her visitors; the angry bull. We accept them, but we do not use them. We lay them aside in reserve. Our attention flickers this way and that, from one to another. Still the impressions accumulate, and still, almost ignoring their individual quality, we read on, noting the pity, the irony, hastily observing certain relations and contrasts, but stressing nothing; alwa
ys awaiting the final signal. Suddenly we have it. The mistress and the maid are turning over the dead child’s clothes. “Et des papillons s’envolèrent de l’armoire.” The mistress kisses the servant for the first time. “Félicité lui en fut reconnaissante comme d’un bienfait, et désormais la chérit avec un dévouement bestial et une vénération religieuse.”
A sudden intensity of phrase, something which for good reasons or for bad we feel to be emphatic, stardes us into a flash of understanding. We see now why the story was written. Later in the same way we are roused by a sentence with a very different intention: “Et Félicité priait en regardant l’image, mais de temps à autre se tournait un peu vers l’oiseau.” Again we have the same conviction that we know why the story was written. And then it is finished. All the observations which we have put aside now come out and range themselves according to the directions we have received. Some are relevant; others we can find no place for. On a second reading we are able to use our observations from the start, and they are much more precise; but they are still controlled by these moments of understanding.
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 visualised 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 and 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 disillusionment. If we are to read them again we must somehow discriminate. Emotion is our material; but what value do we put on the 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; toss it into the waste-paper basket and have done with it. If something survives, place it for ever among the treasures of the universe. Is there not something beyond emotion, something which though it is inspired by emotion, tranquillises it, orders it, composes it? — that which Mr. Lubbock calls form, which, for simplicity’s sake, we will call art? Can we not discover even in the vortex and whirlpool of Victorian fiction some constraint which the most ebullient of novelists forced himself to lay on his material, to reduce it to symmetry? Of a playwright it would scarcely be necessary to ask so simple-minded a question. The most casual visitor to the theatre must instantly perceive how straitly even the crudest drama is shepherded by conventions; and can bring to mind subtler instances of dramatic technique which have been in force and have obtained recognition these many hundred years. In Macbeth, for instance, critic after critic points out the effect of change from tragedy to comedy in the scene of the porter; and in the Antigone of Sophocles we are bidden to remark how the messenger rearranges the story so as to make the discovery of the death of Antigone succeed, instead of preceding, the funeral.
The drama, however, is hundreds of years in advance of the novel. We must have known that a novelist, before he can persuade us that his world is real and his people alive, before he can begin to move us by the sight of their joys and sufferings, must solve certain questions and acquire certain skill. But so far we have swallowed our fiction with our eyes shut. We have not named and therefore presumably not recognised the simplest of devices by which every novel has to come into being. We have not taken the pains to watch our story-teller as he decides which method he will use; we have not applauded his choice, deplored his lack of judgment, or followed with delight and interest his use of some dangerous new device which, for all we know, may do his job to perfection or blow the whole book to smithereens.
In excuse of our slovenliness it must be admitted, not only that the methods are unnamed, but that no writer has so many 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 telling stories as a whole, and its development from generation to generation. 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 some one rises to protest 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 latecomer 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 wer
e 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 it has worked itself free and made itself distinct from its companions. 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.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 412
