A
MANUAL OF THE ART
OF FICTION

A Manual of

THE ART OF FICTION

Prepared for the Use of Schools and Colleges

By
CLAYTON HAMILTON

Member of the National Institute of Arts
and Letters; Extension Lecturer in
English, Columbia University

With an Introduction by

BRANDER MATTHEWS

Member of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters; Professor of Dramatic
Literature, Columbia University

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1919

Copyright, 1918, by
Doubleday, Page & Company

All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian.

TO

FREDERIC TABER COOPER

WITH ADMIRATION FOR THE CRITIC
WITH AFFECTION FOR THE FRIEND

vii

FOREWORD

This MANUAL OF THE ART OF FICTION is a revised and amplified edition of “Materials and Methods of Fiction,” by Clayton Hamilton, which was first published in 1908. The earlier work was immediately recognized as an important piece of constructive criticism and has held its position ever since as one of the leading books in its field. On the tenth anniversary of its appearance, the publishers have asked the author to prepare this annotated and enlarged edition, particularly for the use of students and teachers in schools and colleges.

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY.
Garden City, New York, 1918.

CONTENTS

xiii

INTRODUCTION

In our time, in these early years of the twentieth century, the novel is the prosperous parvenu of literature, and only a few of those who acknowledge its vogue and who laud its success take the trouble to recall its humble beginnings and the miseries of its youth. But like other parvenus it is still a little uncertain of its position in the society in which it moves. It is a newcomer in the literary world; and it has the self-assertiveness and the touchiness natural to the situation. It brags of its descent, although its origins are obscure. It has won its way to the front and it has forced its admission into circles where it was formerly denied access. It likes to forget that it was once but little better than an outcast, unworthy of recognition from those in authority. Perhaps it is still uneasily conscious that not a few of those who were born to good society may look at it with cold suspicion as though it was still on sufferance.

Story-telling has always been popular, of course; and the desire is deep-rooted in all of us to hear and to tell some new thing and to tell again something deserving remembrance. But the novel itself, and the short-story also, must confess that they have only of late been able to claim equality with the epic and the lyric, and with comedy and tragedy, literary forms consecrated by antiquity. There were nine Muses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters of Apollo was expected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction. Whoever had then a xiv story to tell, which he wished to treat artistically, never dreamed of expressing it except in the nobler medium of verse, in the epic, in the idyl, in the drama. Prose seemed to the Greeks, and even to the Latins who followed in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian purposes. Even oratory and history were almost rhythmic; and mere prose was too humble an instrument for those whom the Muses cherished. The Alexandrian vignettes of the gentle Theocritus may be regarded as anticipations of the modern short-story of urban local color; but this delicate idyllist used verse for the talk of his Tanagra figurines.

Even when the modern languages entered into the inheritance of Latin and Greek, verse held to its ancestral privileges, and the brief tale took the form of the ballad, and the longer narrative called itself a chanson de geste. Boccaccio and Rabelais and Cervantes might win immediate popularity and invite a host of imitators; but it was long after their time before a tale in prose, whether short or long, achieved recognition as worthy of serious critical consideration. In his study of Balzac, Brunetière recorded the significant fact that no novelist, who was purely and simply a novelist, was elected to the French Academy in the first two centuries of its existence. And the same acute critic, in his “History of Classical French Literature,” pointed out that French novels were under a cloud of suspicion even so far back as the days of Erasmus, in 1525. It was many scores of years thereafter before the self-appointed guardians of French literature esteemed the novel highly enough to condescend to discuss it.

Perhaps this was not altogether a disadvantage. French tragedy was discussed only too abundantly; and the theorists laid down rules for it which were not a little cramping. Another French critic, M. Le Breton, xv in his account of the growth of French prose-fiction in the first half of the nineteenth century, has asserted that this exemption from criticism really redounded to the benefit of the novel, since the despised form was allowed to develop naturally, spontaneously, free from all the many artificial restrictions which the dogmatists succeeded in imposing on tragedy and on comedy, and which resulted at last in the sterility of the French drama toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. While this advantage is undeniable, one may question whether it was not bought at too great a price and whether there would not have been a certain profit for prose-fiction if its practitioners had been kept up to the mark by a criticism which educated the public to demand greater care in structure, more logic in the conduct of events, and stricter veracity in the treatment of characters.

However much it might then be deemed unworthy of serious consideration, the novel in the eighteenth century began to attract to itself more and more authors of rich natural endowment. In English literature especially, prose-fiction tempted men as unlike as Defoe and Swift, Richardson and Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, Goldsmith and Johnson. And a little earlier the eighteenth century essayists, with Steele and Addison at the head of them, had developed the art of character-delineation, a development out of which the novelists were to make their profit. The influence of the English eighteenth-century essay on the growth of prose-fiction, not only in the British Isles, but also on the continent of Europe, is larger than is generally admitted. Indeed, there is a sense in which the successive papers depicting the character and the deeds of Sir Roger de Coverley may be accepted as the earliest of serial stories.

But it was only in the nineteenth century that the xvi novel reached its full expansion and succeeded in winning recognition as the heir of the epic and the rival of the drama. This victory was the direct result of the overwhelming success of the Waverley novels and of the countless stories written more or less in accordance with Scott’s formula, by Cooper, by Victor Hugo and Dumas, by Manzoni, and by all the others who followed in their footsteps in every modern language. Not only born story-tellers but writers who were by natural gift poets or dramatists, seized upon the novel as a form in which they could express themselves freely and by which they might hope to gain a proper reward in money as well as in fame. The economic interpretation of literary history has not received the attention it deserves; and the future investigator will find a rich field in his researches for the causes of the expansion of the novel in the nineteenth century simultaneous with the decline of the drama in the literature of almost every modern language except French.

As the nineteenth century drew toward its maturity, the influence of Balzac reinforced the influence of Scott; and realism began to assert its right to substitute itself for romance. The adjustment of character to its appropriate background, the closer connection of fiction with the actual facts of life, the focussing of attention on the normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal and the exceptional––all these steps in advance were more easily taken in the freer form of the novel than they could be in the more restricted formula of the drama; and for the first time in its history prose-fiction found itself a pioneer, achieving a solidity of texture which the theatre had not yet been able to attain.

The novel revealed itself at last as a fit instrument for applied psychology, for the use of those delicate artists who are interested rather in what character is than in xvii what it may chance to do. In the earliest fictions, whether in prose or verse, the hero had been merely a type, little more than a lay-figure capable of violent attitudes, a doer of deeds who, as Professor Gummere has explained, “answered the desire for poetic expression at a time when an individual is merged in the clan.” And as the realistic writers perfected their art, the more acute readers began to perceive that the hero who is a doer of deeds can represent only the earlier stages of culture which we have long outgrown. This hero came to be recognized as an anachronism, out of place in a more modern social organization based on a full appreciation of individuality. He was too much a type and too little an individual to satisfy the demands of those who looked to literature as the mirror of life itself and who had taught themselves to relish what Lowell terms the “punctilious veracity which gives to a portrait its whole worth.”

Thus it was only in the middle years of the nineteenth century, after Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, after Thackeray and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, that the novel found out its true field. And yet it was in the middle years of the seventeenth century that the ideal to which it was aspiring had been proclaimed frankly by the forgotten Furetière in the preface to his “Roman Bourgeois.” Furetière lacked the skill and the insight needful for the satisfactory attainment of the standard he set up––indeed, the attainment of that standard is beyond the power of most novelists even now. But Furetière’s declaration of the principles which he proposed to follow is as significant now as it was in 1666, when neither the writer himself nor the reader to whom he had to appeal was ripe for the advance which he insisted upon. “I shall tell you,” said Furetière, “sincerely and faithfully, several stories or adventures which happened to persons who are neither heroes nor heroines, xviii who will raise no armies and overthrow no kingdoms, but who will be honest folk of mediocre condition, and who will quietly make their way. Some of them will be good-looking and others ugly. Some of them will be wise and others foolish; and these last, in fact, seem likely to prove the larger number.”

II

The novel had a long road to travel before it became possible for novelists to approach the ideal that Furetière proclaimed and before they had acquired the skill needed to make their readers accept it. And there had also to be a slow development of our own ideas concerning the relation of art to life. For one thing, art had been expected to emphasize a moral; there was even a demand on the drama to be overtly didactic. Less than a score of years after Furetière’s preface there was published an English translation of the Abbé d’Aubignac’s “Pratique du Théâtre” which was entitled the “Whole Art of the Stage” and in which the theory of “poetic justice” was set forth formally. “One of the chiefest, and indeed the most indispensable Rule of Drammatick Poems is that in them Virtues always ought to be rewarded, or at least commended, in spite of all the Injuries of Fortune; and that likewise Vices be always punished or at least detested with Horrour, though they triumph upon the Stage for that time.”

Doctor Johnson was so completely a man of his own century that he found fault with Shakespeare because Shakespeare did not preach, because in the great tragedies virtue is not always rewarded and vice is not always punished. Doctor Johnson and the Abbé d’Aubignac wanted the dramatist to be false to life as we all know it. Beyond all peradventure the wages of sin is death; and yet we have all seen the evil-doer dying in the midst of xix his devoted family and surrounded by all the external evidences of worldly success. To insist that virtue shall be outwardly triumphant at the end of a play or of a novel is to require the dramatist or the novelist to falsify. It is to introduce an element of unreality into fiction. It is to require the story-teller and the playmaker to prove a thesis that common sense must reject.

Any attempt to require the artist to prove anything is necessarily cramping. A true representation of life does not prove one thing only, it proves many things. Life is large, unlimited, and incessant; and the lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are not single but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral contained in the “Œdipus” of Sophocles, the “Hamlet” of Shakespeare, the “Tartufe” of Molière? No two spectators of these masterpieces would agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of them would deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of their essential truth. Morality, a specific moral––this is what the artist cannot deliberately put into his work without destroying its veracity. But morality is also what he cannot leave out if he has striven only to handle his subject sincerely. Hegel is right when he tells us that art has its moral––but the moral depends on him who draws it. The didactic drama and the novel-with-a-purpose are necessarily unartistic and unavoidably unsatisfactory.

This is what the greater artists have always felt; this is what they have often expressed unhesitatingly. Corneille, for one, though he was a man of his time, a creature of the seventeenth century, had the courage to assert that “the utility of a play is seen in the simple depicting of vices and virtues, which never fails to be effective if it is well done and if the traits are so recognizable that they cannot be confounded or mistaken; virtue xx always gets itself loved, however unfortunate, and vice gets itself hated, even though triumphant.” Dryden, again, a contemporary of d’Aubignac and a predecessor of Johnson, had a clearer vision than either of them; and his views are far in advance of theirs. “Delight,” he said, “is the chief if not the only end of poesy,” and by poesy he meant fiction in all its forms; “instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry only instructs as it delights.” And once more, when we pass from the seventeenth century of Corneille and Dryden to the nineteenth century when the novel has asserted its rivalry with the drama, we find the wise Goethe declaring to Eckermann the doctrine which is now winning acceptance everywhere. “If there is a moral in the subject it will appear, and the poet has nothing to consider but the effective and artistic treatment of his subject; if he has as high a soul as Sophocles, his influence will always be moral, let him do what he will.”

A high soul is not given to all writers of fiction, and yet there is an obligation on them all to aspire to the praise bestowed on Sophocles as one who “saw life steadily and saw it whole.” Even the humblest of story-tellers ought to feel himself bound, not to preach, not to point a moral ostentatiously, not to warp the march of events for the sake of so-called “poetic justice,” but to report life as he knows it, making it neither better nor worse, to represent it honestly, to tell the truth about it and nothing but the truth, even if he does not tell the whole truth––which is given to no man to know. This is an obligation that not a few of the foremost writers of fiction have failed to respect. Dickens, for example, is delighted to reform a character in the twinkling of an eye, transforming a bad man into a good man over night, and contradicting all that we know about the permanence of character.

xxi

Other novelists have asked us to admire violent and unexpected acts of startling self-sacrifice, when a character is made to take on himself the responsibility for the delinquency of some other character. They have invited our approbation for a moral suicide, which is quite as blameworthy as any physical suicide. With his keen insight into ethics and with his robust common sense, Huxley stated the principle which these novelists have failed to grasp. A man, he tells us, “may refuse to commit another, but he ought not to allow himself to be believed worse than he actually is,” since this results in “a loss to the world of moral force which cannot be afforded.” The final test of the fineness of fiction lies in its veracity. “Romance is the poetry of circumstance,” as Stevenson tells us, and “drama is the poetry of conduct”; we may be tolerant and easy-going in our acceptance of a novelist’s circumstances, but we ought to be rigorous as regards conduct. As far as the successive happenings of his story are concerned, the mere incidents, the author may on occasion ask our indulgence and tax our credulity a little; but he must not expect us to forgive him for any violation of the fundamental truths of human nature.

It is this stern veracity, unflinching and inexorable, which makes “Anna Karénina” one of the noblest works of art that the nineteenth century devised to the twentieth, just as it is the absence of this fidelity to the facts of life, the twisting of character to prove a thesis, which vitiates the “Kreutzer Sonata,” and makes it unworthy of the great artist in fiction who wrote the earlier work. It is not too much to say that the development of Tolstoi as a militant moralist is coincident with his decline as an artist. He is no longer content to picture life as he sees it; he insists on preaching. And when he uses his art, not as an end in itself, but as an instrument to advocate his own individual theories, although his great xxii gifts are not taken from him, the result is that his later novels lack the broad and deep moral effect which gave his earlier studies of life and character their abiding value.

Stevenson had in him “something of the shorter catechist”; and the Scotch artist in letters, enamored of words as he was, seized firmly the indispensable law. “The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction,” he declared. “They do not pin their reader to a dogma, which he must afterward discover to be inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he must afterward unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintances of others, and they show us the web of experience not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change––that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction.” This is well thought and well put, although many of us might demand that novels should be more than “reasonably true.” But even if Stevenson was here a little lax in the requirements he imposed on others, he was stricter with himself when he wrote “Markheim” and the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Another story-teller, also cut off before he had displayed the best that was in him, set up the same standards for his fellow-craftsmen in fiction. In his striking discussion of the responsibility of the novelist, Frank Norris asserted that the readers of fiction have “a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is not right that they be exploited and deceived with false views of life, false characters, false sentiment, false morality, false history, false xxiii philosophy, false emotions, false heroism, false notions of self-sacrifice, false views of religion, of duty, of conduct, and of manners.”

III

Even if there may have been a certain advantage to the novel, as M. Le Breton maintains, because it was long left alone unfettered by any critical code, to expand as best it could, to find its own way unaided and to work out its own salvation, the time has now come when it may profit by a criticism which shall force it to consider its responsibilities and to appraise its technical resources, if it is to claim artistic equality with the drama and the epic. It has won its way to the front; and there are few who now question its right to the position it has attained. There is no denying that in English literature, in the age of Victoria, the novel established itself as the literary form most alluring to all men of letters and that it succeeded to the place held by the essay in the days of Anne and by the play in the days of Elizabeth.

And like the play and the essay in those earlier times, the novel now attracts writers who have no great natural gift for the form. Just as Peele and Greene wrote plays because play-writing was popular and advantageous, in spite of their inadequate dramaturgic equipment, and just as Johnson wrote essays because essay-writing was popular and advantageous in spite of his deficiency in the ease and lightness which the essay demands, so Brougham and Motley and Froude adventured themselves in fiction. We may even doubt whether George Eliot was a born story-teller and whether she would not have been more successful in some other epoch when some other literary form than the novel had happened to be in fashion. In France the novel tempted Victor Hugo, who was essentially a lyric poet, and the elder Dumas, xxiv who was essentially a playwright. There are not lacking signs of late that the drama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalry with prose-fiction; and novelists like Sir James Barrie and the late Paul Hervieu have relinquished the easier narrative for the more difficult and more dangerous stage-play. But there is no evidence that the novel is soon to lose its vogue. It has come to stay; and as the nineteenth century left it to the twentieth so the twentieth will probably bequeath it to the twenty-first unimpaired in prosperity.

Perhaps the best evidence of the solidity of its position is to be found in the critical consideration which it is at last receiving. Histories of fiction in all literatures and biographies of the novelists in all languages are multiplying abundantly. We are beginning to take our fiction seriously and to inquire into its principles. Long ago Freytag’s “Technic of the Drama” was followed by Spielhagen’s “Technic of the Novel,” rather Teutonically philosophic, both of them, and already a little out of date. Studies of prose-fiction are getting themselves written, none of them more illuminative than Professor Bliss Perry’s. The novelists themselves are writing about the art of fiction, as Sir Walter Besant did, and they are asking what the novel is, as the late Marion Crawford has done. They are beginning to resent the assertion of the loyal adherents of the drama, that the novel is too loose a form to call forth the best efforts of the artist, and that a play demands at least technical skill whereas a novel may be often the product of unskilled labor.

Questions of all kinds are presenting themselves for discussion. Has the rise of realism made romance impossible? Is there a valid distinction between romance and romanticism? Is the short-story a definite form, differing from the novel in purpose as well as in length? What is the best way to tell a story––in the third person, xxv as in the epic––in the first person, as in an autobiography––or in letters? Which is of most importance, character or incident or atmosphere? Is the novel-with-a-purpose legitimate? Why is it that dramatized novels often fail in the theatre? Ought a novelist to take sides with his characters and against them, or ought he to suppress his own opinions and remain impassive, as the dramatist must? Does a prodigality in the invention of incidents reveal a greater imagination in the novelist than is required for the sincere depicting of simple characters in every-day life? Why has the old trick of inserting brief tales inside a long novel––such as we find in “Don Quixote” and “Tom Jones” and the “Pickwick Papers”––been abandoned of late years? How far is a novelist justified in taking his characters so closely from actual life that they are recognizable by his readers? What are the advantages and disadvantages of local color? How much dialect may a novelist venture to employ? Is the historical novel really a loftier type of fiction than the novel of contemporary life? Is it really possible to write a veracious novel about any other than the novelist’s native land? Why is it that so many of the greater writers of fiction have brought forth their first novel only after they had attained to half the allotted three score years and ten? Is the scientific spirit going to be helpful or harmful to the writer of fiction? Which is the finer form for fiction, a swift and direct telling of the story, with the concentration of a Greek tragedy, such as we find in the “Scarlet Letter” and in “Smoke,” or an ampler and more leisurely movement more like that of the Elizabethan plays, such as we may see in “Vanity Fair” and in “War and Peace”?

These questions, and many another, we may expect to hear discussed, even if they cannot all of them be answered, in any consideration of the materials and the xxvi methods of fiction. And the result of these inquiries cannot fail to be beneficial, both to the writer of fiction and to the reader of fiction. To the story-teller himself they will serve as a stimulus and a guide, calling attention to the technic of his craft and broadening his knowledge of the principles of his art. To the idle reader even they ought to be helpful, because they will force him to think about the novels he may read and because they will lead him to be more exacting, to insist more on veracity in the portrayal of life, and to demand more care in the method of presentation. Every art profits by a wider understanding of its principles, of its possibilities and of its limitations, as well as by a more diffused knowledge of its technic.

Brander Matthews.
Columbia University: 1908.

Postscript: It is a good sign for the future of the novel that in the ten years which have elapsed since this introduction was written, the professors of literature in our colleges and in our graduate schools have been paying increased attention to the study of prose fiction. They had, first of all, to inform themselves more abundantly as to its past history, and as to the relation it has borne to the epic on the one hand and to the drama on the other. Then, secondly, they have been encouraged to pass on to the students they were guiding the results of their researches and of their reflections. And as a result the significance of the novel is day by day made more manifest.

Brander Matthews.
Columbia University: 1918.

A
MANUAL OF THE ART
OF FICTION

3

CHAPTER I

THE PURPOSE OF FICTION

Fiction a Means of Telling Truth––Fact and Fiction––Truth and Fact––The Search for Truth––The Necessary Triple Process––Different Degrees of Emphasis––The Art of Fiction and the Craft of Chemistry––Fiction and Reality––Fiction and History––Fiction and Biography––Biography, History, and Fiction––Fiction Which Is True––Fiction Which Is False––Casual Sins against the Truth in Fiction––More Serious Sins against the Truth––The Futility of the Adventitious––The Independence of Created Characters––Fiction More True Than a Casual Report of Fact––The Exception and the Law––Truthfulness the only Title to Immortality––Morality and Immorality in Fiction––The Faculty of Wisdom––Wisdom and Technic––General and Particular Experience––Extensive and Intensive Experience––The Experiencing Nature––Curiosity and Sympathy.

Fiction a Means of Telling Truth.––Before we set out upon a study of the materials and methods of fiction, we must be certain that we appreciate the purpose of the art and understand its relation to the other arts and sciences. The purpose of fiction is to embody certain truths of human life in a series of imagined facts. The importance of this purpose is scarcely ever appreciated by the casual careless reader of the novels of a season. Although it is commonly believed that such a reader overestimates the weight of works of fiction, the opposite is true––he underestimates it. Every novelist of genuine importance seeks not merely to divert but also to instruct––to instruct, not abstractly, like the essayist, but concretely, by presenting to the reader characters and actions which are true. For the best fiction, although it deals with the lives of imaginary people, is no less true than the best history and biography, 4 which record actual facts of human life; and it is more true than such careless reports of actual occurrences as are published in the daily newspapers. The truth of worthy fiction is evidenced by the honor in which it has been held in all ages among all races. “You can’t fool all the people all the time”; and if the drama and the epic and the novel were not true, the human race would have rejected them many centuries ago. Fiction has survived, and flourishes to-day, because it is a means of telling truth.

Fact and Fiction.––It is only in the vocabulary of very careless thinkers that the words truth and fiction are regarded as antithetic. A genuine antithesis subsists between the words fact and fiction; but fact and truth are not synonymous. The novelist forsakes the realm of fact in order that he may better tell the truth, and lures the reader away from actualities in order to present him with realities. It is of prime importance, in our present study, therefore, that we should understand at the very outset the relation between fact and truth, the distinction between the actual and the real.

Truth and Fact.––A fact is a specific manifestation of a general law: this general law is the truth because of which that fact has come to be. It is a fact that when an apple-tree is shaken by the wind, such apples as may be loosened from their twigs fall to the ground: it is a truth that bodies in space attract each other with a force that varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. Fact is concrete, and is a matter of physical experience: truth is abstract, and is a matter of mental theory. Actuality is the realm of fact, reality the realm of truth. The universe as we apprehend it with our senses is actual; the laws of the universe as we comprehend them with our understanding are real.

The Search for Truth.––All human science is an 5 endeavor to discover the truths which underlie the facts that we perceive: all human philosophy is an endeavor to understand and to appraise those truths when once they are discovered: and all human art is an endeavor to utter them clearly and effectively when once they are appraised and understood. The history of man is the history of a constant and continuous seeking for the truth. Amazed before a universe of facts, he has striven earnestly to discover the truth which underlies them––striven heroically to understand the large reality of which the actual is but a sensuously perceptible embodiment. In the earliest centuries of recorded thought the search was unmethodical; truth was apprehended, if at all, by intuition, and announced as dogma: but in modern centuries certain regular methods have been devised to guide the search. The modern scientist begins his work by collecting a large number of apparently related facts and arranging them in an orderly manner. He then proceeds to induce from the observation of these facts an apprehension of the general law that explains their relation. This hypothesis is then tested in the light of further facts, until it seems so incontestable that the minds of men accept it as the truth. The scientist then formulates it in an abstract theoretic statement, and thus concludes his work.

But it is at just this point that the philosopher begins. Accepting many truths from many scientists, the philosopher compares, reconciles, and correlates them, and thus builds out of them a structure of belief. But this structure of belief remains abstract and theoretic in the mind of the philosopher. It is now the artist’s turn. Accepting the correlated theoretic truths which the scientist and the philosopher have given him, he endows them with an imaginative embodiment perceptible to the senses. He translates them back into concrete 6 terms; he clothes them in invented facts; he makes them imaginatively perceptible to a mind native and indued to actuality; and thus he gives expression to the truth.

The Necessary Triple Process.––This triple process of the scientific discovery, the philosophic understanding, and the artistic expression of truth has been explained at length, because every great writer of fiction must pass through the entire mental process. The fiction-writer differs from other seekers for the truth, not in the method of his thought, but merely in its subject-matter. His theme is human life. It is some truth of human life that he endeavors to discover, to understand, and to announce; and in order to complete his work, he must apply to human life an attention of thought which is successively scientific, philosophic, and artistic. He must first observe carefully certain facts of actual life, study them in the light of extended experience, and induce from them the general laws which he deems to be the truths which underlie them. In doing this, he is a scientist. Next, if he be a great thinker, he will correlate these truths and build out of them a structure of belief. In doing this, he is a philosopher. Lastly, he must create imaginatively such scenes and characters as will illustrate the truths he has discovered and considered, and will convey them clearly and effectively to the minds of his readers. In doing this, he is an artist.

Different Degrees of Emphasis.––But although this triple mental process (of scientific discovery, philosophic understanding, and artistic expression) is experienced in full by every master of fiction, we find that certain authors are interested most in the first, or scientific phase of the process, others in the second, or philosophic phase, and still others in the third, or artistic phase. Evidently Emile Zola is interested chiefly in a scientific investigation of the actual facts of life, George Eliot in a 7 philosophic contemplation of its underlying truths, and Gabriele D’Annunzio in an artistic presentation of the dream-world that he imagines. Washington Irving is mainly an artist, Tolstoi mainly a philosopher, and Jane Austen mainly a scientifically accurate observer. Few are the writers, even among the greatest masters of the art, of whom we feel, as we feel of Hawthorne, that the scientist, the philosopher, and the artist reign over equal precincts of their minds. Hawthorne the scientist is so thorough, so accurate, and so precise in his investigations of provincial life that no less a critic than James Russell Lowell declared the “House of the Seven Gables” to be “the most valuable contribution to New England history that has yet been made.” Hawthorne the philosopher is so wise in his understanding of crime and retribution, so firm in his structure of belief concerning moral truth, that it seems that he, if any one, might give an answer to that poignant cry of a despairing murderer,––

And Hawthorne the artist is so delicate in his sensitive and loving presentation of the beautiful, so masterly both in structure and in style, that his work, in artistry alone, is its own excuse for being. Were it not for the confinement of his fiction––its lack of range and sweep, both in subject-matter and in attitude of mind––his work on this account might be regarded as an illustration of all that may be great in the threefold process of creation.

8

The Art of Fiction and the Craft of Chemistry.––Fiction, to borrow a figure from chemical science, is life distilled. In the author’s mind, the actual is first evaporated to the real, and the real is then condensed to the imagined. The author first transmutes the concrete actualities of life into abstract realities; and then he transmutes these abstract realities into concrete imaginings. Necessarily, if he has pursued this mental process without a fallacy, his imaginings will be true; because they represent realities, which in turn have been induced from actualities.

Fiction and Reality.––In one of his criticisms of the greatest modern dramatist, Mr. William Archer has called attention to the fact that “habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the compliment (so often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing certain of his female characters as though they were real women, living lives apart from the poet’s creative intelligence.” [It is evident that Mr. Archer, in saying “real women,” means what is more precisely denoted by the words “actual women.”] Such a compliment is also paid instinctively to every master of the art of fiction; and the reason is not hard to understand. If the general laws of life which the novelist has thought out be true laws, and if his imaginative embodiment of them be at all points thoroughly consistent, his characters will be true men and women in the highest sense. They will not be actual, but they will be real. The great characters of fiction––Sir Willoughby Patterne, Tito Melema, D’Artagnan, Père Grandet, Rosalind, Tartufe, Hamlet, Ulysses––embody truths of human life that have been arrived at only after thorough observation of facts and patient induction from them. Cervantes must have observed a multitude of dreamers before he learned the truth of the idealist’s character which he has expressed 9 in Don Quixote. The great people of fiction are typical of large classes of mankind. They live more truly than do you and I, because they are made of us and of many men besides. They have the large reality of general ideas, which is a truer thing than the actuality of facts. This is why we know them and think of them as real people––old acquaintances whom we knew (perhaps) before we were born, when (as is conceivable) we lived with them in Plato’s Realm of Ideas. In France, instead of calling a man a miser, they call him an Harpagon. We know Rosalind as we know our sweetest summer love; Hamlet is our elder brother, and understands our own wavering and faltering.

Fiction and History.––Instinctively also we regard the great people of fiction as more real than many of the actual people of a bygone age whose deeds are chronicled in dusty histories. To a modern mind, if you conjure with the name of Marcus Brutus, you will start the spirit of Shakespeare’s fictitious patriot, not of the actual Brutus, of a very different nature, whose doings are dimly reported by the chroniclers of Rome. The Richelieu of Dumas père may bear but slight resemblance to the actual founder of the French Academy; but he lives for us more really than the Richelieu of many histories. We know Hamlet even better than we know Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who in many ways was like him; even though Amiel has reported himself more thoroughly than almost any other actual man. We may go a step further and declare that the actual people of any age can live in the memory of after ages only when the facts of their characters and their careers have been transmuted into a sort of fiction by the minds of creative historians. Actually, in 1815, there was but one Napoleon; now there are as many Napoleons as there are biographies and histories of him. He has been 10 recreated in one way by one author, in another by another; and you may take your choice. You may accept the Julius Cæsar of Mr. Bernard Shaw, or the Julius Cæsar of Thomas De Quincey. The first is frankly fiction; and the second, not so frankly, is fiction also––just as far from actuality as Shakespeare’s adaptation of Plutarch’s portraiture.

Fiction and Biography.––One of the most vivid illustrations of how a great creative mind, honestly seeking to discover, to understand, and to express the truth concerning actual characters of the past, necessarily makes fiction of those characters, is given by Thomas Carlyle in his “Heroes and Hero-Worship.” Here, in Carlyle’s method of procedure, it is easy to discern that threefold process of creation which is undergone by the fiction-making mind. An examination of recorded facts concerning Mohammed, Dante, Luther, or Burns leads him to a discovery and a formulation of certain abstract truths concerning the Hero as Prophet, as Poet, as Priest, or as Man of Letters; and thereafter, in composing his historical studies, he sets forth only such actual facts as conform with his philosophic understanding of the truth and will therefore represent this understanding with the utmost emphasis. He makes fiction of his heroes, in order most emphatically to tell the truth about them.

Biography, History, and Fiction.––In this way biography and history at their best are doomed to employ the methods of the art of fiction; and we can therefore understand without surprise why the average reader always says of the histories of Francis Parkman that they read like novels, even though the most German-minded scientists of history assure us that Parkman is always faithful to his facts. Facts, to the mind of this model of historians, were indicative of truths; and 11 those truths he endeavored to express with faultless art. Like the best of novelists, he was at once a scientist, a philosopher, and an artist; and this is not the least of reasons why his histories will endure. They are as true as fiction.

Fiction Which Is True.––Not only do the great characters of fiction convince us of reality: in the mere events themselves of worthy fiction we feel a fitness that makes us know them real. Sentimental Tommy really did lose that literary competition because he wasted a full hour searching vainly for the one right word; Hetty Sorrel really killed her child; and Mr. Henry must have won that midnight duel with the Master of Ballantrae, though the latter was the better swordsman. These incidents conform to truths we recognize. And not only in the fiction that clings close to actuality do we feel a sense of truth. We feel it just as keenly in fairy tales like those of Hans Christian Andersen, or in the worthiest wonder-legends of an earlier age. We are told of The Steadfast Tin Soldier that, after he was melted in the fire, the maid who took away the ashes next morning found him in the shape of a small tin heart; and remembering the spangly little ballet-dancer who fluttered to him like a sylph and was burned up in the fire with him, we feel a fitness in this little fancy which opens vistas upon human truth. Mr. Kipling’s fable of “How the Elephant Got His Trunk” is just as true as his reports of Mrs. Hauksbee. His theory may not conform with the actual facts of zoological science; but at any rate it represents a truth which is perhaps more important for those who have become again like little children.

Fiction Which Is False.––Just as we feel by instinct the reality of fiction at its best, so also with a kindred instinct equally keen we feel the falsity of fiction when 12 the author lapses from the truth. Unless his characters act and think at all points consistently with the laws of their imagined existence, and unless these laws are in harmony with the laws of actual life, no amount of sophistication on the part of the author can make us finally believe his story; and unless we believe his story, his purpose in writing it will have failed. The novelist, who has so many means of telling truth, has also many means of telling lies. He may be untruthful in his very theme, if he is lacking in sanity of outlook upon the things that are. He may be untruthful in his characterization, if he interferes with his people after they are once created and attempts to coerce them to his purposes instead of allowing them to work out their own destinies. He may be untruthful in his plotting, if he devises situations arbitrarily for the sake of mere immediate effect. He may be untruthful in his dialogue, if he puts into the mouths of his people sentences that their nature does not demand that they shall speak. He may be untruthful in his comments on his characters, if the characters belie the comments in their actions and their words.

Casual Sins Against the Truth in Fiction.––With the sort of fiction that is a tissue of lies, the present study does not concern itself; but even in the best fiction we come upon passages of falsity. There is little likelihood, however, of our being led astray by these: we revolt instinctively against them with a feeling that may best be expressed in that famous sentence of Ibsen’s Assessor Brack, “People don’t do such things.” When Shakespeare tells us, toward the end of “As You Like It,” that the wicked Oliver suddenly changed his nature and won the love of Celia, we know that he is lying. The scene is not true to the great laws of human life. When George Eliot, at a loss for a conclusion to “The Mill on 13 the Floss,” tells us that Tom and Maggie Tulliver were drowned together in a flood, we disbelieve her; just as we disbelieve Sir James Barrie when he invents that absurd accident of Tommy’s death. These three instances of falsity have been selected from authors who know the truth and almost always tell it; and all three have a certain palliation. They come at or near the very end of lengthy stories. In actual life, of course, there are no very ends: life exhibits a continuous sequence of causation stretching on: and since a story has to have an end, its conclusion must in any case belie a law of nature. Probably the truth is that Tommy didn’t die at all: he is living still, and always will be living. And since Sir James Barrie couldn’t write forever, he may be pardoned a makeshift ending that he himself apparently did not believe in. So also we may forgive that lie of Shakespeare’s, since it contributes to a general truthfulness of good-will at the conclusion of his story; and as for George Eliot––well, she had been telling the truth stolidly for many hundred pages.

More Serious Sins Against the Truth.––But when Charlotte Brontë, in “Jane Eyre,” tells us that Mr. Rochester first said and then repeated the following sentence, “I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative to-night,” we find it more difficult to pardon the apparent falsity. In the same chapter, the author states that Mr. Rochester emitted the following remark:––“Then, in the first place, do you agree with me that I have a right to be a little masterful, abrupt, perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I stated, namely, that I am old enough to be your father, and that I have battled through a varied experience with many men of many nations, and roamed over half the globe, while you have lived quietly with one set of people in one house?”

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Such writing is inexcusably untrue. We cannot believe that any human being ever asked a direct question so elaborately lengthy. People do not talk like that. As a contrast, let us notice for a moment the poignant truthfulness of speech in Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s story, “Only a Subaltern.” A fever-stricken private says to Bobby Wick, “Beg y’ pardon, sir, disturbin’ of you now, but would you min’ ’oldin’ my ’and, sir”?––and later, when the private becomes convalescent and Bobby in his turn is stricken down, the private suddenly stares in horror at his bed, and cries, “Oh, my Gawd! It can’t be ’im!” People talk like that.

The Futility of the Adventitious.––Arbitrary plotting, as a rule, is of no avail in fiction: almost always, we know when a story is true and when it is not. We seldom believe in the long-lost will that is discovered at last on the back of a decaying picture-canvas; or in the chance meeting and mutual discovery of long-separated relatives; or in such accidental circumstances as the one, for instance, because of which Romeo fails to receive the message from Friar Laurence. The incidents of fiction at its best are not only probable but inevitable: they happen because in the nature of things they have to happen, and not because the author wants them to. Similarly, the truest characters of fiction are so real that even their creator has no power to make them do what they will not. It has been told of Thackeray that he grew so to love Colonel Newcome that he wished ardently that the good man might live happily until the end. Yet, knowing the circumstances in which the Colonel was enmeshed, and knowing also the nature of the people who formed the little circle round about him, Thackeray realized that his last days would of necessity be miserable; and realizing this, the author told the bitter truth, though it cost him many tears.

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The Independence of Created Characters.––The careless reader of fiction usually supposes that, since the novelist invents his characters and incidents, he can order them always to suit his own desires: but any honest artist will tell you that his characters often grow intractable and stubbornly refuse at certain points to accept the incidents which he has foreordained for them, and that at other times they take matters into their own hands and run away with the story. Stevenson has recorded this latter experience. He said, apropos of “Kidnapped,” “In one of my books, and in one only, the characters took the bit in their teeth; all at once, they became detached from the flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; and from that time my task was stenographic––it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of the story.”

The laws of life, and not the author’s will, must finally decide the destinies of heroes and of heroines. On the evening of February 3, 1850, just after he had written the last scene of “The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne read it to his wife––“tried to read it, rather,” he wrote the next day in a letter to his friend, Horatio Bridge, “for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it for many months.” Is it not conceivable that, in the “great diversity of emotion” which the author experienced while bringing his story to a close, he was tempted more than once to state that Hester and Dimmesdale escaped upon the Bristol ship and thereafter expiated their offense in holy and serviceable lives? But if such a thought occurred to him, he put it by, knowing that the revelation of the scarlet letter was inexorably demanded by the highest moral law.

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Fiction More True Than a Casual Report of Fact.––We are now ready to understand the statement that fiction at its best is much more true than such careless reports of actual occurrences as are published in the daily newspapers. Water that has been distilled is much more really H₂O than the muddied natural liquid in the bulb of the retort; and life that has been clarified in the threefold alembic of the fiction-writer’s mind is much more really life than the clouded and unrealized events that are reported in daily chronicles of fact. The newspaper may tell us that a man who left his office in an apparently normal state of mind went home and shot his wife; but people don’t do such things; and though the story states an actual occurrence, it does not tell the truth. The only way in which the reporter could make this story true would be for him to trace out all the antecedent causes which led inevitably to the culminating incident. The incident itself can become true for us only when we are made to understand it.

Robert Louis Stevenson once remarked that whenever, in a story by a friend of his, he came upon a passage that was notably untrue, he always suspected that it had been transcribed directly from actual life. The author had been too sure of the facts to ask himself in what way they were representative of the general laws of life. But facts are important to the careful thinker only as they are significant of truth. Doubtless an omniscient mind would realize a reason for every accidental and apparently insignificant occurrence of actual life. Doubtless, for example, the Universal Mind must understand why the great musical-director, Anton Seidl, died suddenly of ptomaine poisoning. But to a finite mind such occurrences seem unsignificant of truth; they do not seem to be indicative of a necessary law. And since the fiction-writer has a finite mind, the 17 laws of life which he can understand are more restrictedly logical than those undiscovered laws of actual life which pass his understanding. Many a casual occurrence of the actual world would therefore be inadmissible in the intellectually-ordered world of fiction. A novelist has no right to set forth a sequence of events which, in its causes and effects, he cannot make the reader understand.

The Exception and the Law.––We are now touching on a principle which is seldom appreciated by beginners in the art of fiction. Every college professor of literary composition who has accused a student of falsity in some passage of a story that the student has submitted has been met with the triumphant but unreasonable answer, “Oh, no, it’s true! It happened to a friend of mine!” And it has then become necessary for the professor to explain as best he could that an actual occurrence is not necessarily true for the purposes of fiction. The imagined facts of a genuinely worthy story are exhibited merely because they are representative of some general law of life held securely in the writer’s consciousness. A transcription, therefore, of actual facts fails of the purposes of fiction unless the facts in themselves are evidently representative of such a law. And many things may happen to a friend of ours without evidencing to a considerate mind any logical reason why they had to happen.

Truthfulness the only Title to Immortality.––It is necessary that the student should appreciate the importance of this principle at the very outset of his apprenticeship to the art. For it is only by adhering rigorously to the truth that fiction can survive. In every period of literature, many clever authors have appeared who have diverted their contemporaries with ingenious invention, brilliant incident, unexpected novelty of 18 character, or alluring eloquence of style, but who have been discarded and forgotten by succeeding generations merely because they failed to tell the truth. Probably in the whole range of English fiction there is no more skilful weaver of enthralling plots, no more clever master of invention or manipulator of suspense, than Wilkie Collins; but Collins is already discarded and well-nigh forgotten, because the reading world has found that he exhibited no truths of genuine importance, but rather sacrificed the eternal realities of life for mere momentary plausibilities. Probably, also, there is no artist in French prose more seductive in his eloquence than René de Chateaubriand; but his fiction is no longer read, because the world has found that his sentimentalism was to this extent a sham––it was false to the nature of normal human beings. “Alice in Wonderland” will survive the works of both these able authors, because of the many and momentous human truths that look upon us through its drift of dreams.

Morality and Immorality in Fiction.––The whole question of the morality or immorality of a work of fiction is a question merely of its truth or falsity. To appreciate this point, we must first be careful to distinguish immorality from coarseness. The morality of a fiction-writer is not dependent on the decency of his expression. In fact, the history of literature shows that authors frankly coarse, like Rabelais or Swift for instance, have rarely or never been immoral; and that the most immoral books have been written in the most delicate language. Swift and Rabelais are moral, because they tell the truth with sanity and vigor; we may object to certain passages in their writings on esthetic, but not on ethical, grounds. They may offend our taste; but they are not likely to lead astray our judgment––far less likely than D’Annunzio, for instance, who, although he 19 never offends the most delicate esthetic taste, sicklies o’er with the pale cast of his poetry a sad unsanity of outlook upon the ultimate deep truths of human life. In the second place, we must bravely realize that the morality of a work of fiction has little or no dependence on the subject that it treats. It is utterly unjust to the novelist to decide, as many unreasonable readers do, that such a book as Daudet’s “Sapho” must be of necessity immoral because it exhibits immoral characters in a series of immoral acts. There is no such thing as an immoral subject for a novel: in the treatment of the subject, and only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethical judgment of the work. The one thing needful in order that a novel may be moral is that the author shall maintain throughout his work a sane and healthy insight into the soundness or unsoundness of the relations between his characters. He must know when they are right and know when they are wrong, and must make clear to us the reasons for his judgment. He cannot be immoral unless he is untrue. To make us pity his characters when they are vile, or love them when they are noxious, to invent excuses for them in situations where they cannot be excused, to leave us satisfied when their baseness has been unbetrayed, to make us wonder if after all the exception is not greater than the rule––in a single word, to lie about his characters––this is, for the fiction-writer, the one unpardonable sin.

The Faculty of Wisdom.––But it is not an easy thing to tell the truth of human life, and nothing but the truth. The best of fiction-writers fall to falsehood now and then; and it is only by honest labor and sincere strife for the ideal that they contrive in the main to fulfil the purpose of their art. But the writer of fiction must be not only honest and sincere; he must be wise as well. Wisdom is the faculty of seeing through and all around an 20 object of contemplation, and understanding totally and at once its relations to all other objects. This faculty cannot be acquired; it has to be developed: and it is developed by experience only. Experience ordinarily requires time; and though, for special reasons which will be noted later on, most of the great short-story writers have been young, we are not surprised to notice that most of the great novelists have been men mature in years. They have ripened slowly to a realization of those truths which later they have labored to impart. Richardson, the father of the modern English novel, was fifty-one years old when “Pamela” was published; Scott was forty-three when “Waverley” appeared; Hawthorne was forty-six when he wrote “The Scarlet Letter”; Thackeray and George Eliot were well on their way to the forties when they completed “Vanity Fair” and “Adam Bede”; and these are the first novels of each writer.

Wisdom and Technic.––The young author who aspires to write novels must not only labor to acquire the technic of his art: it is even more important that he should so order his life as to grow cunning in the basic truths of human nature. His first problem––the problem of acquiring technic––is comparatively easy. Technic may be learned from books––the master-works of art in fiction. It may be studied empirically. The student may observe what the masters have, and have not, done; and he may puzzle out the reasons why. And he may perhaps be helped by constructive critics of fiction in his endeavor to understand these reasons. But his second problem––the problem of developing wisdom––is more difficult; and he must grapple with it without any aid from books. What he learns of human life, he must learn in his own way, without extraneous assistance.

It is easy enough for the student to learn, for instance, 21 how the great short-stories have been constructed. It is easy enough for the critic, on the basis of such knowledge, to formulate empirically the principles of this special art of narrative. But it is not easy for the student to discover, or for the critic to suggest, how a man in his early twenties may develop such a wise insight into human life as is displayed, for example, in Mr. Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy.” A few suggestions may, perhaps, be offered; but they must be considered merely as suggestions, and must not be overvalued.

General and Particular Experience.––At the outset, it may be noted that the writer of fiction needs two different endowments of experience:––first, a broad and general experience of life at large; and second, a deep and specific experience of that particular phase of life which he wishes to depict. A general and broad experience is common to all masters of the art of fiction: it is in the particular nature of their specific and deep experience that they differ one from another. Although in range and sweep of general knowledge Sir Walter Scott was far more vast than Jane Austen, he confessed amazement at the depth of her specific knowledge of every-day English middle-class society. Most of the great novelists have made, like Jane Austen, a special study of some particular field. Hawthorne is an authority on Puritan New England, Thackeray on London high society, Henry James on cosmopolitan super-civilization. It would seem, therefore, that a young author, while keeping his observation fresh for all experience, should devote especial notice to experience of some particular phase of life. But along comes Mr. Rudyard Kipling, with his world-engirdling knowledge, to jostle us out of faith in too narrow a focus of attention.

Extensive and Intensive Experience.––Experience is of two sorts, extensive and intensive. A mere glance at 22 the range of Mr. Kipling’s subjects would show us the breadth of his extensive experience: evidently he has lived in many lands and looked with sympathy upon the lives of many sorts of people. But in certain stories, like his “They” for instance, we are arrested rather by the depth of his intensive experience. “They” reveals to us an author who not necessarily has roamed about the world, but who necessarily has felt all phases of the mother-longing in a woman. The things that Mr. Kipling knows in “They” could never have been learned except through sympathy.

Intensive experience is immeasurably more valuable to the fiction-writer than extensive experience: but the difficulty is that, although the latter may be gained through the obvious expedients of travel and voluntary association with many and various types of people, the former can never be gained through any amount of deliberate and conscious seeking. The great intensive experiences of life, like love and friendship, must come unsought if they are to come at all; and no man can gain a genuine experience of any joy or sorrow by experimenting purposely with life. The deep experiences must be watched and waited for. The author must be ever ready to realize them when they come: when they knock upon his door, he must not make the mistake of answering that he is not at home. But he must not make the contrary mistake of going out into the highways and hedges to compel them to come within his gates.

The Experiencing Nature.––Undoubtedly, very few people are always at home for every real experience that knocks upon their doors; very few people, to say the thing more simply, have an experiencing nature. But great fiction may be written only by men of an experiencing nature; and here is a basis for confession that, after all, fiction-writers are born, not made. The 23 experiencing nature is difficult to define; but two of its most evident qualities, at any rate, are a lively curiosity and a ready sympathy. A combination of these two qualities gives a man that intensity of interest in human life which is a condition precedent to his ever growing to understand it. Curiosity, for instance, is the most obvious asset in Mr. Kipling’s equipment. We did not need his playful confession in the “Just So Stories”––

to convince us that from his very early youth he has been an indefatigable asker of questions. It was only through a healthy curiosity that he could have acquired the enormous stores of specific knowledge concerning almost every walk of life that he has displayed in his successive volumes. On the other hand, it was obviously through his vast endowment of sympathy that Dickens was able to learn so thoroughly all phases of the life of the lowly in London.

Curiosity and Sympathy.––Experience gravitates to the man who is both curious and sympathetic. The kingdom of adventure is within us. Just as we create beauty in an object when we look upon it beautifully, so we create adventure all around us when we walk the world inwardly aglow with love of life. Things of interest happened to Robert Louis Stevenson every day of his existence, because he incorporated the faculty of being interested in things. In one of his most glowing essays, “The Lantern-Bearers,” he declared that never an hour of his life had gone dully yet; if it had been spent waiting at a railway junction, he had had some scattering thoughts, he had counted some grains of 24 memory, compared to which the whole of many romances seemed but dross. The author who aspires to write fiction should cultivate the faculty of caring for all things that come to pass; he should train himself rigorously never to be bored; he should look upon all life that swims into his ken with curious and sympathetic eyes, remembering always that sympathy is a deeper faculty than curiosity: and because of the profound joy of his interest in life, he should endeavor humbly to earn that heritage of interest by developing a thorough understanding of its source. In this way, perhaps, he may grow aware of certain truths of life which are materials for fiction. If so, he will have accomplished the better half of his work: he will have found something to say.

[1]

Macbeth: Act V; Scene 3.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What is the logical relation (1) between fact and truth, (2) between fact and fiction, and (3) between truth and fiction?

2. Define the spheres of the respective contributions of art, philosophy, and science to the search for truth.

3. In what way is a well-imagined work of fiction more true to life than a newspaper report of actual occurrences?

4. Explain the logical basis for distinguishing between morality and immorality in a work of art.

SUGGESTED READING

Frank Norris:––“A Problem in Fiction,” in “The Responsibilities of the Novelist.”

Clayton Hamilton:––“On Telling the Truth,” in “The Art World” for September, 1917.

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CHAPTER II

REALISM AND ROMANCE

Two Methods of Exhibiting the Truth––Every Mind Either Realistic or Romantic––Marion Crawford’s Faulty Distinction––A Second Unsatisfactory Distinction––A Third Unsatisfactory Distinction––Bliss Perry’s Negative Definition––The True Distinction One of Method, Not of Material––Scientific Discovery and Artistic Expression––The Testimony of Hawthorne––A Philosophic Formula––Induction and Deduction––The Inductive Method of the Realist––The Deductive Method of the Romantic––Realism, Like Inductive Science, a Strictly Modern Product––Advantages of Realism––Advantages of Romance––The Confinement of Realism––The Freedom of Romance––Neither Method Better Than the Other––Abuses of Realism––Abuses of Romance.

Two Methods of Exhibiting the Truth.––Although all writers of fiction who take their work seriously and do it honestly are at one in their purpose––namely, to embody certain truths of human life in a series of imagined facts––they diverge into two contrasted groups according to their manner of accomplishing this purpose,––their method of exhibiting the truth. Consequently we find in practice two contrasted schools of novelists, which we distinguish by the titles Realistic and Romantic.

Every Mind Either Realistic or Romantic.––The distinction between realism and romance is fundamental and deep-seated; for every man, whether consciously or not, is either a romantic or a realist in the dominant habit of his thought. The reader who is a realist by nature will prefer George Eliot to Scott; the reader who is romantic will rather read Victor Hugo than Flaubert; and neither taste is better than the other. Each reader’s 26 preference is born with his brain, and has its origin in his customary processes of thinking. In view of this fact, it seems strange that no adequate definition has ever yet been made of the difference between realism and romance.[2] Various superficial explanations have been offered, it is true; but none of them has been scientific and satisfactory.

Marion Crawford’s Faulty Distinction.––One of the most common of these superficial explanations is the one which has been phrased by the late F. Marion Crawford in his little book upon “The Novel: What It Is”:––“The realist proposes to show men what they are; the romantist (sic) tries to show men what they should be.” The trouble with this distinction is that it utterly fails to distinguish. Surely all novelists, whether realistic or romantic, try to show men what they are––what else can be their reason for embodying in imagined facts the truths of human life? Victor Hugo, the romantic, in “Les Misérables,” endeavors just as honestly and earnestly to show men what they are as does Flaubert, the realist, in “Madame Bovary.” And on the other hand, Thackeray, the realist, in characters like Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome, shows men what they should be just as thoroughly as the romantic Scott. Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive how any novelist, whether romantic or realistic, could devise a means of showing the one thing without at the same time showing the other also. Every important fiction-writer, no matter to which of the two schools he happens to belong, strives to accomplish, in a single effort of creation, both of the purposes noted by Marion Crawford. He may be realistic or romantic in his way of showing men what they are; realistic or romantic in his way of showing 27 them what they should be: the difference lies, not in which of the two he tries to show, but in the way he tries to show it.

A Second Unsatisfactory Distinction.––Again, we have been told that, in their stories, the romantics dwell mainly upon the element of action, while the realists are interested chiefly in the element of character. But this explanation fails many times to fit the facts: for the great romantic characters, like Leather-Stocking, Don Quixote, Monte Cristo, Claude Frollo, are just as vividly drawn as the great characters of realism; and the great events of realistic novels, like Rawdon Crawley’s discovery of his wife with Lord Steyne, or Adam Bede’s fight with Arthur Donnithorne, are just as thrilling as the resounding actions of romance. Furthermore, if we should accept this explanation, we should find ourselves unable to classify as either realistic or romantic the very large body of novels in which neither element––of action or of character––shows any marked preponderance over the other. Henry James, in his genial essay on “The Art of Fiction,” has cast a vivid light on this objection. “There is an old-fashioned distinction,” he says, “between the novel of character and the novel of incident which must have cost many a smile to the intending fabulist who was keen about his work.... What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?... It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character.”

A Third Unsatisfactory Distinction.––We have been told also that the realists paint the manners of their own place and time, while the romantics deal with more 28 remote materials. But this distinction, likewise, often fails to hold. No stories were ever more essentially romantic than Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights,” which depict details of London and Parisian life at the time when the author wrote them; and no novel is more essentially realistic than “Romola,” which carries us back through many centuries to a medieval city far away. Thackeray, the realist, in “Henry Esmond,” and its sequel “The Virginians,” departed further from his own time and place than Hawthorne, the romantic, in “The House of the Seven Gables”; and while the realistic Meredith frequently fares abroad in his stories, especially to Italy, the romantic Barrie looks upon life almost always from his own little window in Thrums.

Bliss Perry’s Negative Definition.––In his interesting and suggestive “Study of Prose Fiction,” Professor Bliss Perry has devoted a chapter to realism and another to romance; but he has not succeeded in defining either term. He has, to be sure, essayed a negative definition of realism:––“Realistic fiction is that which does not shrink from the commonplace or from the unpleasant in its effort to depict things as they are, life as it is.” But we have seen that the effort of all fiction, whether realistic or romantic, is to depict life as it really (though not necessarily as it actually) is. Does not “The Brushwood Boy,” although it suggests the super-actual, set forth a common truth of the most intimate human relationship, which every lover recognizes as real? Every great writer of fiction tries, in his own romantic or realistic way, to “draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are.” We must therefore focus our attention mainly on the earlier phrases of Professor Perry’s definition. He states that realistic fiction does not shrink from the commonplace. That depends. The realism of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt does not, to 29 be sure; but most assuredly the realism of George Meredith does. You will find far less shrinking from the commonplace in many passages of the romantic Fenimore Cooper than in the pages of George Meredith. Whether or not realistic fiction shrinks from the unpleasant depends also on the particular nature of the realist. Zola’s realism certainly does not; Jane Austen’s decidedly does. You will find far less shrinking from the unpleasant, of one sort, in Poe, of another sort, in Catulle Mendès––both of them romantics––than in the novels of Jane Austen. What is the use, then, of Professor Perry’s definition of realism, since it remains open to so many exceptions? And in his chapter on romance the critic does not even attempt to formulate a definition.

The True Distinction One of Method, Not of Material.––We have now examined several of the current explanations of the difference between romance and realism and have found that each is wanting. The trouble with all of them seems to be that they attempt to find a basis for distinguishing between the two schools of fiction in the subject-matter, or materials, of the novelist. Does not the real distinction lie rather in the novelist’s attitude of mind toward his materials, whatever those materials may be? Surely there is no such thing inherently as a realistic subject or a romantic subject. The very same subject may be treated realistically by one novelist and romantically by another. George Eliot would have built a realistic novel on the theme of “The Scarlet Letter”; and Hawthorne would have made a romance out of the materials of “Silas Marner.” The whole of human life, or any part of it, offers materials for romantic and realist alike. Therefore no distinction between the schools is possible upon the basis of subject-matter: the real distinction must be one of method in setting subject-matter 30 forth. The distinction is not external, but internal; it dwells in the mind of the novelist; it is a matter for philosophic, not for literary, investigation.

Scientific Discovery and Artistic Expression.––If we seek within the mental habits of the novelist for a philosophic distinction between realism and romance, we shall have to return to a consideration of that threefold process of the fiction-making mind which was expounded in the preceding chapter of this book. Scientific discovery, philosophic understanding, and artistic expression of the truths of human life are phases of creation common to romantics and realists alike; but though the writers of both schools meet equally upon the central ground of philosophic understanding, is it not evident that the realists are most interested in looking backward over the antecedent ground of scientific discovery, and the romantics are most interested in looking forward over the subsequent ground of artistic expression? Suppose, for the purpose of illustration, that two novelists of equal ability––the one a realist, the other a romantic––have observed and studied carefully the same events and characters of actual life; and suppose further that they agree in their conception of the truth behind the facts. Suppose now that each of them writes a novel to embody this conception of the truth, in which they are agreed. Will not the realist regard as most important the scientific process of discovery by means of which he arrived at his conception; and will he not therefore strive to make that process clear to the reader by turning back to the point at which he began his observations and then leading the reader forward through a similar scientific study of imagined facts until the reader joins him on the ground of philosophic understanding? And, on the other hand, will not the romantic regard as most important the artistic process of embodying his conception; and will he 31 not therefore be satisfied with any means of embodying it clearly and effectively, without caring whether or not the imagined facts which he selects for this purpose are similar to the actual facts from which he first induced his philosophic understanding?

The Testimony of Hawthorne.––This thought was apparently in Hawthorne’s mind when, in the preface to “The House of the Seven Gables,” he wrote his well-known distinction between the Romance and the (realistic) Novel:––“When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former––while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart––has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”

A Philosophic Formula.––But Hawthorne’s statement, although it covers the ground, is not succinct and definitive; and if we are to examine the thesis thoroughly, we had better first state it in philosophic terms and then elucidate the statement by explanation and by illustration. So stated, the distinction is as follows: In setting forth his view of life, the realist follows the inductive method of presentment, and the romantic follows the deductive method.

Induction and Deduction.––The distinction between inductive and deductive processes of thinking is very simple and is known to all: it is based upon the direction 32 of the train of thought. When we think inductively, we reason from the particular to the general; and when we think deductively, the process proceeds in the reverse direction and we reason from the general to the particular. In our ordinary conversation, we speak inductively when we first mention a number of specific facts and then draw from them some general inference; and we speak deductively when we first express a general opinion and then elucidate it by adducing specific illustrations. That old dichotomy of the psychologists which divides all men, according to their habits of thought, into Platonists and Aristotelians (or, to substitute a modern nomenclature, into Cartesians and Baconians) is merely an assertion that every man, in the prevailing direction of his thinking, is either deductive or inductive. Most of the great ethical philosophers have had inductive minds; from the basis of admitted facts of experience they have reasoned out their laws of conduct. Most of the great religious teachers have had deductive minds: from the basis of certain sublime assumptions they have asserted their commandments. Most of the great scientists have thought inductively: they have reasoned from specific facts to general truths, as Newton reasoned from the fall of an apple to the law of gravitation. Most of the great poets have thought deductively: they have reasoned from general truths to specific facts, as Dante reasoned from a general moral conception of cosmogony to the particular appropriate details of every circle in hell and purgatory and paradise. Now is not the thesis tenable that it is in just this way that realism differs from romance? In their endeavor to exhibit certain truths of human life, do not the realists work inductively and the romantics deductively?

The Inductive Method of the Realist.––In order to bring to our knowledge the law of life which he wishes 33 to make clear, the realist first leads us through a series of imagined facts as similar as possible to the details of actual life which he studied in order to arrive at his general conception. He elaborately imitates the facts of actual life, so that he may say to us finally, “This is the sort of thing that I have seen in the world, and from this I have learned the truth I have to tell you.” He leads us step by step from the particular to the general, until we gradually grow aware of the truths he wishes to express. And in the end, we have not only grown acquainted with these truths, but have also been made familiar with every step in the process of thought by which the author himself became aware of them. “Adam Bede” tells us not only what George Eliot knew of life, but also how she came to learn it.

The Deductive Method of the Romantic.––But the romantic novelist leads us in the contrary direction––namely, from the general to the particular. He does not attempt to show us how he arrived at his general conception. His only care is to convey his general idea effectively by giving it a specific illustrative embodiment. He feels no obligation to make the imagined facts of his story resemble closely the details of actual life; he is anxious only that they shall represent his idea adequately and consistently. Stevenson knew that man has a dual nature, and that the evil in him, when pampered, will gradually gain the upper hand over the good. In his story of the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” he did not attempt to set forth this truth inductively, showing us the kind of facts from the observation of which he had drawn this conclusion. He merely gave his thought an illustrative embodiment, by conceiving a dual character in which a man’s uglier self should have a separate incarnation. He constructed his tale deductively: beginning with a general conception, 34 he reduced it to particular terms. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is, of course, a thoroughly true story, even though its incidents are contrary to the actual facts of life. It is just as real as a realistic novel; but in order to make it so, its author, because he was working deductively, was not obliged to imitate the details of actual life which he had studied. “I have learned something in the world,” he says to us: “Here is a fable that will make it clear to you.”

Realism, Like Inductive Science, a Strictly Modern Product.––This philosophic distinction between the methods of romance and realism shows two manifest advantages over all the other attempts at a distinction which have been examined in this chapter: first, it really does distinguish; and secondly, it will be found in every case to fit the facts. Furthermore, it is supported in an overwhelming manner by the history of human thought. Every student of philosophy will tell you that the world’s thought was prevailingly deductive till the days of Francis Bacon. Bacon was the first philosopher to insist that induction, rather than deduction, was the most effective method of searching for the truth. Science, which is based upon induction, was in its infancy when Bacon taught; since then it has matured, largely because he and his successors in philosophy pointed out the only method through which it might develop. Deduction has of course survived as a method of conducting thought; but it has lost the undisputed empery which it held over the ancient and the medieval mind. Now, if we turn to the history of fiction, we shall notice the significant fact that realism is a strictly modern product. All fiction was romantic till the days of Bacon. Realism is contemporaneous with modern science and the other applications of inductive thought. Romance survives, of course; but it has lost the undisputed empery of fiction 35 which it held in ancient and in medieval times. If Bacon had written fiction, he would have been a realist––the first realist in the history of literature; and this is the only reply that is necessary to those who still maintain (if any do) that he was capable of writing the romantic plays of Shakespeare.

If it be granted now that the realist, by induction, leads his reader up from a consideration of imagined facts to a comprehension of truth, and that the romantic, by deduction, leads his reader down from an apprehension of truth to a consideration of imagined facts, we may next examine certain advantages and disadvantages of each method in comparison with the other.

Advantages of Realism.––In the first place, we notice, that, while the imagined facts of the romantic are selected merely to illustrate the truth he wishes to convey, the imagined facts of the realist are selected not only to illustrate, but also to support, the truth that lies inherent in them. The realist, then, has this advantage, over the romantic in his method of expressing truth: he has the opportunity to prove his case by presenting the evidence on which his truth is based. It is therefore less difficult for him to conquer credence from a skeptical and wary reader: and we must remember always that even though a story tells the truth, it is still a failure unless it gets that truth believed. The romantic necessarily demands a deeper faith in his wisdom than the realist need ask for; and he can evoke deep faith only by absolute sincerity and utter clearness in the presentation of his fable. Unless the reader of “The Brushwood Boy” and “They” has absolute faith that Mr. Kipling knows the truth of his themes, the stories are reduced to nonsense; for they present no evidence (through running parallel to actuality) which proves that the author does know the truth. Unless the reader has faith that 36 Stevenson deeply understands the nature of remorse, the conversation between Markheim and his ghostly visitant becomes incredible and vain. The author gives himself no opportunity to prove (through analogy with actual experience) that such a colloquy consistently presents the inner truth of conscience.

Advantages of Romance.––But this great advantage of the realist––that he supports his theme with evidence––carries with it an attendant disadvantage. Since he lays his evidence bare before the reader, he makes it simpler for the reader to detect him in a lie. The romantic says, “These things are so, because I know they are”; and unless we reject him at once and in entirety as a colossal liar, we are almost doomed to take his word in the big moments of his story. But the realist says, “These things are so, because they are supported by actual facts similar to the imagined facts in which I clothe them”; and we may answer at any point in the story, “Not at all! On the very basis of the facts you show us, we know better than to take your word.” In other words, when the reader disbelieves a romance, he does so by instinct, without necessarily knowing why; but when he disbelieves a realistic novel, he does so by logic, with the evidence before him.

A great romantic, therefore, must have the wisdom that convinces by its very presence and conquers credence through the reader’s intuition. Who could disbelieve the author of “The Scarlet Letter”? We do not need to see his evidence in order to know that he knows. A great realist, on the other hand, while he need not have the triumphant and engaging mental personality necessary to a great romantic, must have a thorough and complete equipment of evidence discerned from observation of the actual. He must have eyes and ears, though he need not have a soul.

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The Confinement of Realism.––A novelist of realistic vent is, therefore, almost doomed to confine his fiction to his own place and time. In no other period or nation can he be so certain of his evidence. We know the enormous labor with which George Eliot amassed the materials for “Romola,” a realistic study of Florence during the Renaissance; but though we recognize the work as that of a thorough student, the details still fail to convince us as do the details of her studies of contemporary Warwickshire. The young aspirant to the art of fiction who knows himself to be an incipient realist had therefore best confine his efforts to attempted reproduction of the life he sees about him. He had better accept the common-sensible advice which the late Sir Walter Besant gave in his lecture on “The Art of Fiction”: “A young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life; a writer whose friends and personal experiences belong to what we call the lower middle class should carefully avoid introducing his characters into society; a South-countryman would hesitate before attempting to reproduce the North-country accent. This is a very simple rule, but one to which there should be no exception––never to go beyond your own experience.”

The Freedom of Romance.––The incipient realist is almost obliged to accept this advice; but the incipient romantic need not necessarily do so. That final injunction of Besant’s––“never to go beyond your own experience”––seems somewhat stultifying to the imagination; and there is a great deal of very wise suggestion in Henry James’ reply to it: “What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end?... The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she 38 shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen.” The romantic “upon whom nothing is lost,” may, “imagination assisting,” project his truth into some other region of experience than those which he has actually observed. Edgar Allan Poe is indubitably one of the great masters of the art of fiction; but there is nothing in any of his stories to indicate that he was born in Boston, lived in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, and died in Baltimore. “The Assignation” indicates that he had lived in Venice––where, in fact, he had never been; others of his stories have the atmosphere of other times and lands; and most of them pass in a dream-world of his own creation, “out of space, out of time.”

So long as the romantic is sure of his truth and certain of his power to convince the reader, he need not support his truth by an accumulation of evidence imitated from the actual life he has observed. But on the other hand, there is nothing to prevent his doing so; and unless he be very headstrong––so headstrong as to be almost unreliable––he will be extremely chary of his freedom. He will not subvert the actual unless there is no other equally effective means of conveying the truth he has to tell. Many times a close adherence to actuality is as advisable for the deductive author as it is for the inductive; many times the romantic writer gains as much as the realist by confining his fiction to his own environment of time and place. Scott, after all, was less successful with his medieval kings and knights than with his homely and simple Scottish characters. Hawthorne, in “The Marble Faun,” lost a certain completeness of effect by stepping off his own New England shadow. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” with its subversion of the actual, is the sort of story that might be set out of space, out 39 of time; but Stevenson enhanced the effect of its imaginative plausibility by setting it in contemporary London. More and more, in recent years, the romantics have followed the lead of the realists in embodying their truth in scenes and characters imitated from actuality. The early stories of the thoroughly romantic Mr. Kipling were set in his own country, India, and in his own time; and it was not until his actual experience had broadened to other lands, that, to any great extent, his subjects broadened geographically. In his stories of his own people, Mr. Kipling just as faithfully portrays the every-day existence he has actually observed as any realist. His method is romantic always: he deduces his details from his theme, instead of inducing his theme from his details. He is entirely romantic in the direction of his thought; but it is very suggestive of the tenor of contemporary romance, to notice that he has taken the advice of the realists and seldom gone beyond his own experience.

The range of romance is therefore far wider than the range of realism; for all that may be treated realistically may be treated romantically also, and much else that may be treated romantically is hardly susceptible of realistic treatment. Granted that a romantic have truths enough in his head, there is scarcely any limit to the stories he may deduce from them; while, on the other hand, the work of the inductive novelist is limited by the limits of his premises. But the greater freedom of romance is attended by a more difficult responsibility. If it be easier for the romantic to tell the truth, because he has more ways of telling it, it is surely harder for him to tell nothing but the truth. More often than the realist he is tempted to assert uncertainties––tempted to say with vividness and charm things of which he cannot quite be sure.

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Neither Method Better Than the Other.––But whatever may be the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each method of exhibiting the truth, it is absolutely certain that either method of presentment is natural and logical; and hence all criticism that aims to exalt romance above realism, or realism above romance, must be forever futile. Guy de Maupassant, in his valuable preface to “Pierre et Jean,” has spoken very wisely on this point. The ideal critic, he says, should demand of the artist merely to “create something beautiful, in the form most convenient to him, according to his temperament.” And he states further:––“The critic should appraise the result only according to the nature of the effort.... He should admit with an equal interest the contrasted theories of art, and judge the works resultant from them only from the standpoint of their artistic worth, accepting a priori the general ideas from which they owe their origin. To contest the right of an author to make a romantic or a realistic work is to wish to force him to modify his temperament, refuse to recognize his originality, and not permit him to employ the eye and the intellect which nature has given him. Let us allow him the liberty to understand, to observe, and to conceive in whatever way he wishes, provided that he be an artist.”

Surely this is the only sane view of the situation. Therefore, when Mr. W. D. Howells, in his dexterous little book on “Criticism and Fiction,” pleads engagingly for realism as the only valid method for the modern novelist, and when Stevenson, in many an alluring essay, blows blasts upon the trumpet of romance, and challenges the realists to show excuse for their existence, each is fighting an unnecessary battle, since each is at the same time right and wrong. Each is right in asserting the value of his own method, and wrong in denying 41 the value of the other’s. The minds of men have always moved in two directions, and always will; and as long as men shall write, we shall have, and ought to have, both inductive and deductive fiction.

Abuses of Realism.––Neither of the two methods is truer than the other; and both are great when they are well employed. Each, however, lends itself to certain abuses which it will be well for us to notice briefly. The realist, on the one hand, in his careful imitation of actual life, may grow near-sighted and come to value facts for their own sake, forgetting that his primary purpose in setting them forth should be to lead us to understand the truths which underlie them. More and more, as the realist advances in technic and gains in ability to represent the actual, he is tempted to make photographs of life instead of pictures. A picture differs from a photograph mainly in its artistic repression of the unsignificant; it exhibits life more truly because it focusses attention on essentials. But any novel that dwells sedulously upon non-essentials and exalts the unsignificant obscures the truth. This is the fallacy of the photographic method; and from this fallacy arise the tedious minuteness of George Eliot in her more pedestrian moments, the interminable tea-cups of Anthony Trollope, and the mire of the imitators of Zola. Realism latterly, especially in France, has shown a tendency to degenerate into so-called “naturalism,” a method of art which casts the unnatural emphasis of photographic reproduction upon phases of actual life which are base in themselves and unsignificant of the eternal instinct which leads men more naturally to look upward at the stars than downward at the mud. The “naturalistic” writers are deceived in thinking that they represent life as it really is. If their thesis were true, the human race would have dwindled to extinction long ago. Surely a photograph 42 of a slattern in the gutter is no more natural than a picture of Rosalind in the Forest of Arden; and no accuracy of imitated actuality can make it more significant of truth.

Abuses of Romance.––The romantic, on the other hand, because he works with greater freedom than the realist, may overleap himself and express in a loose fashion general conceptions which are hasty and devoid of truth. To this defect is owing the vast deal of rubbish which has been foisted on us recently by feeble imitators of Scott and Dumas père––imitators who have assumed the trappings and the suits of the accredited masters of romance, but have not inherited their clarity of vision into the inner truth of things that are. To such degenerate romance, Professor Brander Matthews has applied the term “romanticism”; and though his use of the term itself may be considered a little too special for general currency, no exception can be taken to the distinction which he enforces in the following paragraph: “The Romantic calls up the idea of something primary, spontaneous, and perhaps medieval, while the Romanticist suggests something secondary, conscious, and of recent fabrication. Romance, like many another thing of beauty, is very rare; but Romanticism is common enough nowadays. The truly Romantic is difficult to achieve; but the artificial Romanticist is so easy as to be scarce worth the attempting. The Romantic is ever young, ever fresh, ever delightful; but the Romanticist is stale and second-hand and unendurable. Romance is never in danger of growing old, for it deals with the spirit of man without regard to times and seasons; but Romanticism gets out of date with every twist of the kaleidoscope of literary fashion. The Romantic is eternally and essentially true, but the Romanticist is inevitably false. Romance is sterling, but Romanticism is shoddy.”

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But the Scylla and the Charybdis of fiction-writing may both be avoided. The realists gain nothing by hooting at the abuses of romance; and the romantics gain as little by yawning over realism at its worst. “The conditions”––to use a phase of Emerson’s––“are hard but equal”: and at their best, the realist, working inductively, and the romantic, working deductively, are equally able to present the truth of fiction.

[2]

The theory which follows in this chapter was first announced by the present writer in The Dial for November 16, 1904.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Define the difference between realism and romance.

2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the realistic method?

3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the romantic method?

4. Which method is more natural to your own mind?

5. Upon what evidence have you based your answer to the foregoing question?

SUGGESTED READING

Bliss Perry: “A Study of Prose Fiction”––Chapter IX, on “Realism,” and Chapter X, on “Romanticism.”

F. Marion Crawford: “The Novel: What It Is.”

Henry James: “The Art of Fiction.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Preface to “The House of the Seven Gables.”

Sir Walter Besant: “The Art of Fiction.”

Guy de Maupassant: Preface to “Pierre et Jean.”

William Dean Howells: “Criticism and Fiction.”

Robert Louis Stevenson: “The Lantern-Bearers.”

Brander Matthews: “Romance Against Romanticism,” in “The Historical Novel.”

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CHAPTER III

THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE

Transition from Material to Method––The Four Methods of Discourse––1. Argumentation; 2. Exposition; 3. Description; 4. Narration, the Natural Mood of Fiction––Series and Succession––Life Is Chronological, Art Is Logical––The Narrative Sense––The Joy of Telling Tales––The Missing of This Joy––Developing the Sense of Narrative––The Meaning of the Word “Event”––How to Make Things Happen––The Narrative of Action––The Narrative of Character––Recapitulation.

Transition from Material to Method.––We have now considered the subject-matter of fiction and also the contrasted attitudes of mind of the two great schools of fiction-writers toward setting forth that subject-matter. We must next turn our attention to the technical methods of presenting the materials of fiction, and notice in detail the most important devices employed by all fiction-writers in order to fulfil the purpose of their art.

The Four Methods of Discourse––1. Argumentation.––Rhetoricians, as everybody knows, arbitrarily but conveniently distinguish four forms, or moods, or methods, of discourse: namely, narration, description, exposition, and argumentation. It may be stated without fear of well-founded contradiction that the natural mood, or method, of fiction is the first of these,––narration. Argumentation, for its own sake, has no place in a work of fiction. There is, to be sure, a type of novel, which is generally called in English “the novel with a purpose,” the aim of which is to persuade the reader to accept some special thesis that the author holds concerning politics, religion, social ethics, or some other of the phases of life 45 that are readily open to discussion. But such a novel usually fails of its purpose if it attempts to accomplish it by employing the technical devices of argument. It can best fulfil its purpose by exhibiting indisputable truths of life, without persuasive comment, ex cathedra, on the part of the novelist. In vain he argues, denounces, or defends, appeals to us or coaxes us, unless his story in the first place convinces by its very truthfulness. If his thesis be as incontestable as the author thinks it is, it can prove itself by narrative alone.

2. Exposition.––Exposition, for its own sake, is also out of place in fiction. The aim of exposition is to explain,––an aim necessarily abstract; but the purpose of fiction is to represent life,––a purpose necessarily concrete. To discourse of life in abstract terms is to subvert the natural mood of art; and the novelist may make his meaning just as clear by representing life concretely, without a running commentary of analysis and explanation. Life truly represented will explain itself. There are, to be sure, a number of great novelists, of whom George Eliot may be taken as the type, who frequently halt their story to write an essay about it. These essays are often instructive in themselves, but they are not fiction, because they do not embody their truths in imagined facts of human life. George Eliot is at one moment properly a novelist, and at the next moment a discursive expositor. She would be still greater as a novelist, and a novelist merely, if she could make her meaning clear without digressing to another art.

3. Description.––Description also, in the most artistic fiction, is used only as subsidiary and contributive to narration. The aim of description––which is to suggest the look of things at a certain characteristic moment––is an aim necessarily static. But life––which the novelist purposes to represent––is not static but dynamic. The 46 aim of description is pictorial: but life does not hold its pictures; it melts and merges them one into another with headlong hurrying progression. A novelist who devotes two successive pages to the description of a landscape or a person, necessarily makes his story stand still while he is doing it, and thereby belies an obvious law of life. Therefore, as writers of fiction have progressed in art, they have more and more eliminated description for its own sake.

4. Narration, the Natural Mood of Fiction.––Since, then, the natural mood, or method, of fiction is narration, it is necessary that we should devote especial study to the nature of narrative. And in a study frankly technical we may be aided at the outset by a definition, which may subsequently be explained in all its bearings.

A narrative is a representation of a series of events. This is a very simple definition; and only two words of it can possibly demand elucidation. These words are series and event. The word event will be explained fully in a later section of this chapter: meanwhile it may be understood loosely as synonymous with happening. Let us first examine the exact meaning of the word series.

Series and Succession.––The word series implies much more than the word succession: it implies a relation not merely chronological but also logical; and the logical relation it implies is that of cause and effect. In any section of actual life which we examine, the events are likely to appear merely in succession and not in series. One event follows another immediately in time, but does not seem linked to it immediately by the law of causation. What you do this morning does not often necessitate as a logical consequence what you do this afternoon; and what you do this evening is not often a logical result of what you have done during the day. Any transcript from actual life that is not 47 deliberately arranged and logically patterned is therefore likely not to be a narrative. A passage from a diary, for instance, which states events in the order of their happening but makes no attempt to present them as links in a chain of causation, is not, technically speaking, narrative in method. To illustrate this point, let us open at random the diary of Samuel Pepys. Here is his entry for April 29, 1666:––

“To Church, where Mr. Mills, a lazy sermon upon the Devil’s having no right to anything in this world. To Mr. Evelyn’s, where I walked in his garden till he come from Church, with great pleasure reading Ridley’s discourse, all my way going and coming, upon the Civil and Ecclesiastical Law. He being come home, he and I walked together in the garden with mighty pleasure, he being a very ingenious man; and, the more I know him, the the more I love him. Weary to bed, after having my hair of my head cut shorter, even close to my skull, for coolness, it being mighty hot weather.”

There is no logical continuity in the worthy diarist’s faithful chronicle of actuality. What occasioned the weariness with which he went to bed? It could not have been the company of Mr. Evelyn, whom he loved; it could hardly have been the volume on the civil and ecclesiastical law, though its title does suggest the soporific. Was his strength, like Samson’s, shorn away with the hair of his head; or can it be that that lazy sermon of Mr. Mills’ got in its deadening effects at bedtime? We notice, at any rate, that the diarist’s remarks need considerable re-arrangement to make them really narrative.

Life Is Chronological, Art Is Logical.––Yet it is just in this way that commonly event succeeds event in the daily life of every one. It is only in the great passionate crises of existence that event treads upon event in uninterrupted 48 sequence of causation. And here is the main formal difference between life as it actually happens and life as it is artistically represented in history, biography, and fiction. In every art there are two steps; first, the selection of essentials, and secondly, the arrangement of these essentials according to a pattern. In the art of narration, events are first selected because they suggest an essential logical relation to each other; and they are then arranged along the lines of a pattern of causation. Let us compare with the haphazard passage from Pepys a bit of narrative that is artistically patterned. Here is the conclusion to Stevenson’s story of “Markheim.” The hero, having slain a dealer in his shop on Christmas day, spends a long time alone, ransacking the dealer’s effects and listening to the voice of conscience. He is interrupted by a ringing of the door-bell. The dealer’s maid has returned from holidaying.––

“He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as a chance-medley––a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamor.

“He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

“‘You had better go for the police,’ said he: ‘I have killed your master.’”

The last sentence of this passage is an effect which is logically led up to by many causes that are rapidly reviewed in the preceding sentences. Stevenson has here 49 patterned a passage of life along lines of causation; he has employed the logical method of narration: but Pepys, in the selection quoted, looked upon events with no narrative sense whatever.

The Narrative Sense.––The narrative sense is, primarily, an ability to trace an event back to its logical causes and to look forward to its logical effects. It is the sense through which we realize, for instance, that what happened at two o’clock to-day, although it may not have resulted necessarily from what happened an hour before, was the logical outcome of something else that happened at noon on the preceding Thursday, let us say, and that this in turn was the result of causes stretching back through many months. A well-developed narrative sense in looking on at life is very rare. Every one, of course, is able to refer the headache of the morning after to the hilarity if the night before; and even, after some experience, to foresee the headache at the time of the hilarity: but life, to the casual eye of the average man, hides in the main the secrets of its series, and betrays only an illogical succession of events. Minds cruder than the average see only a jumble of happenings in the life they look upon, and group them, if at all, by propinquity in time, rather than by any deeper law of relation. Such a mind had Dame Quickly, the loquacious Hostess in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV.” Consider the famous speech in which she accuses Falstaff of breach of promise to marry her:––

“Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife 50 Keech, the butcher’s wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound? And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere long they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath: deny it, if thou canst.”

There are, of course, many deficiencies in Dame Quickly’s mental make-up; but the one for us to notice here is her utter lack of the narrative sense. She would never be able to tell a story: because, in the first place, she could not select from a muddle of events those which bore an intelligible relation to one another, and in the second place, she could not arrange them logically instead of chronologically. She has no sense of series. And although Dame Quickly’s mind is an exaggeration of the type it represents, the type, in less exaggerated form, is very common; and everybody will agree that the average man, who has never taken pains to train himself in narrative, is not able in his ordinary conversation to tell with ease a logically connected story.

The Joy of Telling Tales.––The better sort of narrative sense is not merely an abstract intellectual understanding of the relation of cause and effect subsisting between events often disparate in time; it is, rather, a concrete feeling of the relation. It is an intuitive feeling; and, being such, it is possessed instinctively by certain minds. There are people in the world who are natural born story-tellers; all of us have met with them in actual life: and to this class belong the story-telling giants, like Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Dumas père, Stevenson, and Mr. Kipling. Narrative is natural to their minds. 51 They sense events in series; and a series once started in their imagination propels itself with hurrying progression. Some novelists, like Wilkie Collins, have nothing else to recommend them but this native sense of narrative; but it is a gift that is not to be despised. Authors with something important to say about life have need of it, in order that the process of reading their fiction may be, in Stevenson’s phrase, “absorbing and voluptuous.” In the great story-tellers, there is a sort of self-enjoyment in the exercise of the sense of narrative; and this, by sheer contagion, communicates enjoyment to the reader. Perhaps it may be called (by analogy with the familiar phrase, “the joy of living”) the joy of telling tales. The joy of telling tales which shines through “Treasure Island” is perhaps the main reason for the continued popularity of the story. The author is having such a good time in telling his tale that he gives us necessarily a good time in reading it.

The Missing of This Joy.––But many of the novelists who have had great things to say about human life have been singularly deficient in this native sense of narrative. George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, for example, almost never evidence the joy of telling tales. George Eliot’s natural habit of mind was abstract rather than concrete; she was born an essayist. But, largely through the influence of George Henry Lewes, she deliberately decided that fiction was the most effective medium for expressing her philosophy of life. Thereafter she strove earnestly to develop that sense of narrative which, at the outset, was largely lacking in her mind. To many readers who are not without appreciation of the importance and profundity of her understanding of human nature, her stories are wearisome and unalluring, because she told them with labor, not with ease. She does not seem to have had a good time with them, as 52 Stevenson had with “Treasure Island,” a story in other ways of comparative unimportance. And surely it is not frivolous to state that the most profound and serious of thoughts are communicated best when they are communicated with the greatest interest.

Developing the Sense of Narrative.––It could hardly be hoped that a person entirely devoid of the narrative sense should acquire it by any amount of labor; but nearly every one possesses it in at least a rudimentary degree, and any one possessing it at all may develop it by exercise. A simple and common-sensible exercise is to seize hold of some event that happens in our daily lives, and then think back over all the antecedent events we can remember, until we discern which ones among them stand in a causal relation to the event we are considering. Next, it will be well to look forward and imagine the sort of events which will logically carry on the series. The great generals of history have won their most signal victories by an exercise of the narrative sense. Holding at the moment of planning a campaign the past and present terms of a logical series of events, they have imagined forward and foreseen the probable progression of the series. This may perhaps explain why the great commanders, like Cæsar and Grant, have written such able narrative when they have turned to literature.

The young author who is trying to develop his narrative sense may find unending exercise in the endeavor to ferret out the various series of events which lie entangled in the confused and apparently unrelated successions of incidents which pass before his observation. When he sees something happen in the street, he will not be satisfied, like the casual looker-on, merely with that solitary happening; he will try to find out what other happenings led up to it, and again what other happenings must logically follow from it. When he sees an interesting 53 person in a street-car, he will wonder where that person has come from and whither he is going, what he has just done and what he is about to do; he will look before and after, and pine for what is not. This exercise is in itself interesting; and if the result of it be written down, the young author will gain experience in expression at the same time that he is developing his sense of narrative.

The Meaning of the Word “Event.”––It remains for us now to consider philosophically the significance of the word event. Every event has three elements: the thing that is done, the agents that do it, and the circumstances of time and place under which it is done; or, to say the matter in three words,––action, actors, and setting. Only when all three elements conspire can something happen. Life suggests to the mind of a contemplative observer many possible events which remain unrealized because only one or two of the necessary three elements are present,––events that are waiting, like unborn children on the other side of Lethe, until the necessary conditions shall call them into being. We observe a man who could do a great thing of a certain sort if only that sort of thing were demanded to be done at the time and in the place in which he loiters wasted. We grow aware of a great thing longing to be done, when there is no one present who is capable of doing it. We behold conditions of place and time entirely fitted for a certain sort of happening; but nothing happens, because the necessary people are away. “Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!” sang Robert Browning; and then he dreamed upon an event which was waiting to be born,––waiting for the imagined meeting and marriage of its elements.

How to Make Things Happen.––It is the function of the master of creative narrative to call events into being. 54 He does this by assembling and marrying the elements without which events cannot occur. Granted the conception of a character who is capable of doing certain things, he finds things of that sort for the character to do; granted a sense of certain things longing to be done, he finds people who will do them; or granted the time and the place that seem expectant of a certain sort of happening, he finds the agents proper to the setting. There is a conversation of Stevenson’s, covering this point, which has been often quoted. His biographer, Mr. Graham Balfour, tells us: “Either on that day or about that time I remember very distinctly his saying to me: ‘There are, so far as I know, three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or lastly––you must bear with me while I try to make this clear’––(here he made a gesture with his hand as if he were trying to shape something and give it outline and form)––‘you may take a certain atmosphere and get action and persons to express it and realize it. I’ll give you an example––“The Merry Men.” There I began with the feeling of one of those islands on the west coast of Scotland, and I gradually developed the story to express the sentiment with which the coast affected me.’”

In other words, starting with any one of the three elements––action, actors, or setting––the writer of narrative may create events by imagining the other two. Comparatively speaking, there have been very few stories, like “The Merry Men,” in which the author has started out from a sense of setting; and nearly all of them have been written recently. The feeling for setting as the initial element in narrative hardly dates back further than the nineteenth century. We may therefore best consider it in a later and more special chapter, and devote 55 our attention for the present to the two methods of creating narrative that have been most often used––that in which the author has started with the element of action, and that in which he has started with the element of character.

Very few of the great masters of narrative have, like Honoré de Balzac, employed both one and the other method with equal success: nearly all of them have shown an habitual mental predilection for the one or for the other. The elder Dumas, for example, habitually devised a scheme of action and then selected characters to fit into his plot; and George Meredith habitually created characters and then devised the elements of action necessary to exhibit and develop them. Readers, like the novelists themselves, usually feel a predilection for one method rather than the other; but surely each method is natural and reasonable, and it would be injudicious for the critic to exalt either of them at the expense of the other. There is plenty of material in life to allure a mind of either habit. Certain things that are done are in themselves so interesting that it matters comparatively little who is doing them; and certain characters are in themselves so interesting that it matters comparatively little what they do. To conceive a potent train of action and thereby foreordain the nature of such characters as will accomplish it, or to conceive characters pregnant with potentiality for certain sorts of deeds and thereby foreordain a train of action,––either is a legitimate method for planning out a narrative. That method is best for any author which is most natural for him; he will succeed best working in his own way; and that critic is not catholic who states that either the narrative of action or the narrative of character is a better type of work than the other. The truth of human life may be told equally well by those who sense primarily its element of action and by those 56 who sense primarily its element of character; for both elements must finally appear commingled in any story that is real.

The critic may, however, make a philosophical distinction between the two methods, in order to lead to a better understanding of them both. Those writers who sense life primarily as action may be said to work from the outside in; and those who sense it primarily as character may be said to work from the inside out. The first method requires the more objective, and the second the more subjective, consciousness of life. Of the two, the objective consciousness of life is (at its weakest) more elementary and (at its strongest) more elemental than the subjective.

The Narrative of Action.––Stevenson, in his “Gossip on Romance,” has eloquently voiced the potency of an objective sense of action as the initial factor in the development of a narrative. He is speaking of the spell cast over him by certain books he read in boyhood. “For my part,” he says, “I liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, ‘towards the close of the year 17––,’ several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words ‘post-chaise,’ the ‘great north road,’ ‘ostler,’ and ‘nag’ still sound in my ears like poetry. One and all, at least, and 57 each with his particular fancy, we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some quality of the brute incident.” For the writer who works from the outside in, it is entirely possible to develop from “some quality of the brute incident” a narrative that shall be not only stirring in its propulsion of events but also profound in its significance of elemental truth.

The Narrative of Character.––The method of working from the inside out––of using a subjective sense of character as the initial factor in the development of a narrative––is wonderfully exemplified in the work of Ivan Turgénieff; and the method is very clearly explained in Henry James’ intimate essay on the great Russian master. Henry James remarks: “The germ of a story, with him, was never an affair of plot––that was the last thing he thought of: it was the representation of certain persons. The first form in which a tale appeared to him was as the figure of an individual, or a combination of individuals, whom he wished to see in action, being sure that such people must do something very special and interesting. They stood before him definite, vivid, and he wished to know, and to show, as much as possible of their nature. The first thing was to make clear to himself what he did know, to begin with; and to this end he wrote out a sort of biography of each of his characters, and everything that they had done and that had happened to them up to the opening of the story. He had their dossier, as the French say, and as the police has of that of every conspicuous criminal. With this material in his hand he was able to proceed; the story all lay in the question, What shall I make them do? He always made them do things that showed them completely; but, as he said, the defect of his manner and the reproach that was made him was his want of ‘architecture’––in 58 other words, of composition. The great thing, of course, is to have architecture as well as precious material, as Walter Scott had them, as Balzac had them. If one reads Turgénieff’s stories with the knowledge that they were composed––or rather that they came into being––in this way, one can trace the process in every line. Story, in the conventional sense of the word––a fable constructed, like Wordsworth’s phantom, ‘to startle and waylay’––there is as little as possible. The thing consists of the motions of a group of selected creatures, which are not the result of a preconceived action, but a consequence of the qualities of the actors.”––And yet, for the writer who, like Turgénieff, works from the inside out, it is entirely possible to develop from “the qualities of the actors” a train of action that shall be as stirring as it is significant.

Recapitulation.––The main principle of narrative to bear in mind is that action alone, or character alone, is not its proper subject-matter. The purpose of narrative is to represent events; and an event occurs only when both character and action, with contributory setting, are assembled and commingled. Indeed, in the greatest and most significant events, it is impossible to decide whether the actor or the action has the upper hand; it is impossible, in regarding such events, for the imagination to conceive what is done and who is doing it as elements divorced. A novelist who has started out with either element and has afterward evoked the other may arrive by imagination at this final complete sense of an event. The best narratives of action and of character are indistinguishable, one from another, in their ultimate result: they differ only in their origin: and the author who aspires to a mastery of narrative should remember that, in narrative at its best, character and action and even setting are one and inseparable.

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For the conveniences of study, however, it is well to examine the elements of narrative one by one; and we shall therefore devote three separate chapters to a technical consideration of plot, and characters, and setting.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What is a narrative?

2. Distinguish between a succession and a series of events.

3. What are the two steps in any art?

4. What are the three component elements of every event?

5. Is life itself narrative in pattern?

6. Can the foregoing question be answered without qualification?

7. Discuss the comparative advantages of the narrative of action and the narrative of character.

SUGGESTED READING

William Tenney Brewster: Introduction to “Specimens of Prose Narration.”

Robert Louis Stevenson: “A Gossip on Romance.”

Henry James: Essay on Turgénieff, in “Partial Portraits.”

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CHAPTER IV

PLOT

Narrative a Simplification of Life––Unity in Narrative––A Definite Objective Point––Construction, Analytic and Synthetic––The Importance of Structure––Elementary Narrative––Positive and Negative Events––The Picaresque Pattern––Definition of Plot––Complication of the Network––The Major Knot––“Beginning, Middle, and End”––The Sub-Plot––Discursive and Compacted Narratives––Telling Much or Little of a Story––Where to Begin a Story––Logical Sequence and Chronological Succession––Tying and Untying––Transition to the Next Chapter.

Narrative a Simplification of Life.––Robert Louis Stevenson, in his spirited essay entitled “A Humble Remonstrance,” has given very valuable advice to the writer of narrative. In concluding his remarks he says, “And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity. For although, in great men, working upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their excellence.” Indeed, as we have already noted in passing, simplification is the method of every art. Every artist, in his own way, simplifies life: first by selecting essentials from the helter-skelter of details that life presents to him, and then by arranging these essentials in accordance with a pattern. And we have noted also that the method of the artist in narrative is to select events which bear an essential logical relation 61 to each other and then to arrange them along the lines of a pattern of causation.

Unity in Narrative.––Of course the prime structural necessity in narrative, as indeed in every method of discourse, is unity. Unity in any work of art can be attained only by a definite decision of the artist as to what he is trying to accomplish, and by a rigorous focus of attention on his purpose to accomplish it,––a focus of attention so rigorous as to exclude consideration of any matter which does not contribute, directly or indirectly, to the furtherance of his aim. The purpose of the artist in narrative is to represent a series of events,––wherein each event stands in a causal relation, direct or indirect, to its logical predecessor and its logical successor in the series. Obviously the only way to attain unity of narrative is to exclude consideration of any event which does not, directly or indirectly, contribute to the progress of the series. For this reason, Stevenson states in his advice to the young writer, from which we have already quoted: “Let him choose a motive, whether of character or passion: carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or contrast; ... and allow neither himself in the narrative, nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of the problem involved. Let him not regret if this shortens his book; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen.” And earlier in the same essay, he says of the novel: “For the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed 62 most feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters, from all its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller without it.”

A Definite Objective Point.––The only way in which the writer of narrative may attain the unity that Stevenson has so eloquently pleaded for is to decide upon a definite objective point, to bear in mind constantly the culmination of his series of events, and to value the successive details of his material only in so far as they contribute, directly or indirectly, to the progress of the series toward that culmination. To say the thing more simply, he must see the end of his story from the beginning and must give the reader always a sense of rigorous movement toward that end. His narrative, as a matter of construction, must be finished, before, as a matter of writing, it is begun. He must know as definitely as possible all that is to happen and all that is not to happen in his story before he ventures to represent in words the very first of his events. He must not, as some beginners try to do, attempt to make his story up as he goes along; for unless he holds the culmination of his series constantly in mind, he will not be able to decide whether any event that suggests itself during the progress of his composition does or does not form a logical factor in the series.

Construction, Analytic and Synthetic.––The preliminary process of construction may be accomplished in either of two ways. Authors with synthetic minds will more 63 naturally reason from causes to effects; and authors with analytic minds will more naturally reason from effects to causes. The former will construct forward through time, the latter backward. Standing at the outset of a narrative, it is possible to imagine forward along a series of events until the logical culmination is divined; or standing at the culmination, it is possible to imagine backward along the series to its far-away beginnings. Thackeray apparently constructed in the former manner; Guy de Maupassant apparently constructed in the latter. The latter method––the method of building backward from the culmination––is perhaps more efficacious toward the conservation of the strictest unity. It seems on the whole a little easier to exclude the extraneous in thinking from effects to causes than in thinking from causes to effects, because analysis is a stricter and more focussed mood of mind than synthesis.

The Importance of Structure.––But in whichever way the process of construction be accomplished, the best stories are always built before they are written; and that is the reason why, in reading them, we feel at every point that we are getting somewhere, and that the author is leading us step by step toward a definite culmination. Although, as is usually the case, we cannot, even midway through the story, foresee what the culmination is to be, we feel a certain reassurance in the knowledge that the author has foreseen it from the start. This feeling is one of the main sources of interest in reading narrative. In looking on at life itself, we are baffled by a muddle of events leading every whither; their succession is chaotic and lacking in design; they are not marshaled and processional; and we have an uncomfortable feeling that no mind but that of God can foresee their veiled and hidden culminations. But in reading a narrative arrangement of life, we have a comfortable 64 sense of order, which comes of our knowledge that the author knows beforehand whither the events are tending and can make us understand the sequence of causation through which they are moving to their ultimate result. He makes life more interesting by making it more intelligible; and he does this mainly by his power of construction.

Elementary Narrative.––The simplest of all structures for a narrative is a straightway arrangement of events along a single strand of causation. In such a narrative, the first event is the direct cause of the second, the second of the third, the third of the fourth, and so on to the culmination of the series. This very simple structure is exhibited in many of the tales which have come down to us from early centuries. It is frequently employed in the “Gesta Romanorum,” and scarcely less frequently in the “Decameron” of Boccaccio. It has the advantage of being completely logical and entirely direct. But we feel, in reading stories so constructed, that the method of simplification has been carried too far, and that simplicity has therefore ceased to be an excellence. Such a story is in this way misrepresentative of life:––it fails utterly to suggest “the welter of impressions which life presents,” the sudden kaleidoscopic shifts of actual life from one series of events to another, and the consequent intricacy and apparent chaos of life’s successive happenings. The structure is too straightforward, too direct, too unwavering and unhesitant.

Positive and Negative Events.––The simplest way to introduce the element of hesitance and wavering, and thereby make the story more truly suggestive of the intricate variety of life, is to interrupt the series by the introduction of events whose apparent tendency is to hinder its progress, and in this way emphasize the ultimate triumph of the series in attaining its predestined 65 culmination. Such events are not extraneous; because, although they tend directly to dispute the progress of the series, they tend also indirectly to further it through their failure to arrest it. The events in any skilfully selected narrative may, therefore, be divided into two classes: events direct or positive, and events indirect or negative. By a direct, or positive, event is meant one whose immediate tendency is to aid the progress of the series toward its predetermined objective point; and by an indirect, or negative, event is meant one whose immediate tendency is to thwart this predetermined outcome. It would be an easy matter, for example, in examining “Pilgrim’s Progress,” to class as positive those events which directly further the advance of Christian toward the Celestial City, and to class as negative those events whose immediate tendency is to turn him aside from the straight and narrow path. And yet both classes of events, positive and negative, make up really only a single series; because the negative events are conquered one by one by the preponderant power of the positive events, and contribute therefore indirectly, through their failure, to the ultimate attainment of the culmination.

When a straightway arrangement of positive events along a single strand of causation is varied and emphasized in this way by the admission of negative events, whose tendency is to thwart the progress of the series, the structure may be made very suggestive of that conflict of forces which we feel to be ever present in actual life. This structure is exhibited, for example, in Hawthorne’s little tale of “David Swan.” The point of the story is that nothing happens to David; the interest of the story lies in the events that almost happen to him. The young man falls asleep at noon-time under the shade of a clump of maples which cluster around a spring beside the highroad. Three people, or sets of people, observe 66 him in his sleep. The first would confer upon him Wealth, the second Love, the third Death, if he should waken at the moment. But David Swan sleeps deeply; the people pass on; and all that almost happened to him subsides forever to the region of the might-have-been.

The Picaresque Pattern.––A simple series of this sort, wherein the events proceed, now directly, now indirectly, along a single logical line, may be succeeded by another simple series of the same sort, which in turn may be succeeded by a third, and so on indefinitely. In this way is constructed the type of story known as picaresque, because in Spain, where the type was first developed, the hero was usually a picaro, or rogue. The narrative expedient in such stories is merely to select a hero capable of adventure, to fling him loose into the roaring and tremendous world, and to let things happen to him one after another. The most widely known example of the type is not a Spanish story, but a French,––the “Gil Blas” of Alain René Le Sage. As soon as Gil Blas arrives at the culmination of one series of adventures, the author starts him on another. Each series is complete in itself and distinct from all the rest; and the structure of the whole book may be likened, in a homely figure, to a string of sausages. The relation between the different sections of the story is not organic; they are merely tied together by the continuance of the same central character from one to another. Any one of the sections might be discarded without detriment to the others; and the order of them might be rearranged. Plays, as well as novels, have been constructed in this inorganic way,––for example, Molière’s “L’Etourdi” and “Les Facheux.” If the actors, in performing either of these plays, should omit one or two units of the sausage-string of incidents, the audience would not become aware of any gap in structure. 67 Yet a story built in this straightforward and successive way may give a vast impression of the shifting maze of life. Mr. Kipling’s “Kim,” which is picaresque in structure, shows us nearly every aspect of the labyrinthine life of India. He selects a healthy and normal, but not a clever, boy, and allows all India to happen to him. The book is without beginning and without end; but its very lack of neatness and compactness of plan contributes to the general impression it gives of India’s immensity.

Definition of Plot.––But a simple series of events arranged along a single strand of causation, or a succession of several series of this kind strung along one after the other, may not properly be called a plot. The word plot signifies a weaving together; and a weaving together presupposes the coexistence of more than one strand. The simplest form of plot, properly so called, is a weaving together of two distinct series of events; and the simplest way of weaving them together is by so devising them that, though they may be widely separate at their beginnings, they progress, each in its own way, toward a common culmination,––a single momentous event which stands therefore at the apex of each series. This event is the knot which ties together the two strands of causation. Thus, in “Silas Marner,” the culminating event, which is the redemption of Marner from a misanthropic aloofness from life, through the influence of Eppie, a child in need of love, is led up to by two distinct series of events, of which it forms the knot. The one series, which concerns itself with Marner, may be traced back to the unmerited wrong which he suffered in his youth; and the other series, which concerns itself with Eppie, may be traced back to the clandestine marriage of Eppie’s father, Godfrey Cass. The initial event of one series has no immediate logical relation to the initial event of 68 the other; but each series, as it progresses, approaches nearer and nearer to the other, until they meet and blend.

Complication of the Network.––A type of plot more elaborate than this may be devised by leading up to the culmination along three or more distinct lines of causation, instead of merely two. In the “Tale of Two Cities,” Sydney Carton’s voluntary death upon the scaffold stands at the apex of several series of events. And a plot may be still further complicated by tying the strands together at other points beside the culmination. In “The Merchant of Venice,” the two chief series of events are firmly knotted in the trial scene, when Shylock is circumvented by Portia; but they are also tied together, though less firmly, at the very outset of the play, when Antonio borrows from Shylock the money which makes it possible for Bassanio to woo and win the Lady of Belmont. Furthermore, any event in one of the main strands of causation may stand at the culmination of a minor strand, and thus may form a little knot in the general network of the plot. In the same play, the minor strand of the elopement of Lorenzo and Jessica attains its culmination in a scene which stands only midway along the progress of the two main strands, that of the bond and that of the caskets, toward their common result in the defeat of Shylock.

The Major Knot.––But however intricately woven a plot may be, and however many minor knots may tie together the various strands which enter into it, there is almost always one point of greatest complication, one big knot which ties together all the strands at once, and stands as the common culmination of all the series, major and minor. The story concerns itself chiefly with telling the reader how the major knot came to be tied; but in a plot of any complexity, the reader naturally 69 desires to be told how the knot became untied again. Therefore this point of greatest complication, this culmination of all the strands of causation which are woven in the plot, this objective point of the entire narrative, is seldom set at the very end of a story, but usually at a point about three quarters of the way from the beginning to the end. The first three quarters of the story, speaking roughly, exhibit the antecedent causes of the major knot; and the last quarter of the story exhibits its subsequent effects. A plot, therefore, in its general aspects, may be figured as a complication followed by an explication, a tying followed by an untying, or (to say the same thing in French words which are perhaps more connotative) a nouement followed by a dénouement. The events in the dénouement bear a closer logical relation to each other than the events in the nouement, because all of them have a common cause in the major knot, whereas the major knot is the ultimate effect of several distinct series of causes which were quite separate one from another at the time when the nouement was begun. For this reason the dénouement shows usually a more hurried movement than the nouement––one event treading on another’s heels.

“Beginning, Middle, and End.”––Undoubtedly it was this threefold aspect of a plot––1. The Complication; 2. The Major Knot; 3. The Explication––which Aristotle had in mind when he stated that every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. These words were not intended to connote a quantitative equality. What Aristotle called the “middle” may, in a modern novel, be stated in a single page, and is much more likely to stand near the close of the book than at the centre. But everything that comes after it, in what Aristotle called the “end,” should be an effect of which it is the cause; and everything that comes before it, in what Aristotle 70 called the “beginning,” should be, directly or indirectly, a cause of which it is the effect. Only under these conditions will the plot be, as Aristotle said it should be, an organic whole. Only in this way can it conform to the principle of unity, which is the first principle of all artistic endeavor.

The Sub-Plot.––Bearing the principle of unity ever in his mind, Stevenson, in a phrase omitted for the moment in one of the quotations from “A Humble Remonstrance” set forth at the beginning of this chapter, advised the fiction-writer to “avoid a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main intrigue.” It seems safe to state that a sub-plot is of use in a novel only for the purpose of tying minor knots in the leading strands of causation, and should be discarded unless it serves that purpose. There is no reason, however, why a novel should not tell at once several stories of equal importance, provided that these stories be deftly interlinked, as in that masterpiece of plotting, “Our Mutual Friend.” In this novel, the chief expedient which Dickens has employed to bind his different stories together is to make the same person an actor in more than one of them, so that a particular event that happens to him may be at the same time a factor in both one and the other series of events. Through the skilful use of this expedient, Dickens has contrived to give his novel unity of plot, in spite of the diversity of its narrative elements. But on the other hand, in “Middlemarch,” George Eliot has told three stories instead of one. She has failed to make her plot an organic whole by deftly interweaving the three strands which she has spun. And therefore this monumental novel, so great in other ways, is faulty in structure, because it violates the principle of unity.

Discursive and Compacted Narratives.––According 71 to the extent of complication in the plot, novels may be grouped into two classes,––the discursive and the compacted. Thackeray wrote novels of the former type, Hawthorne of the latter. In “Vanity Fair” there are over half a hundred characters; in “The Scarlet Letter” there are three, or possibly four. The discursive novel gives a more extensive, and the compacted novel a more intensive, view of life. English authors for the most part have tended toward the discursive type, and Continental authors toward the compacted. The latter type demands a finer and a firmer art, the former a broader and more catholic outlook on the world.

Telling Much or Little of a Story.––The distinction between the two types depends chiefly upon how much or how little of his entire story the author chooses to tell. In actual life, as was stated in a former chapter, there are no very ends; and it may now be added that also there are no absolute beginnings. Any event that happens is, in Whitman’s words, “an acme of things accomplished” and “an encloser of things to be”; and in thinking back along its causes or forward along its effects, we may continue the series until our thought loses itself in an eternity. In any narrative, therefore, we are doomed to begin and end in mid-career; and the question is merely how extended a section of the entire imaginable and unimaginable series we shall choose to represent to the reader. For instance, it would be a very simple matter to trace the composition of Rossetti’s “House of Life” back along a causal series to the birth of a boy in Arezzo in 1304; for it is hardly likely that Rossetti would have written a cycle of love sonnets if many other poets, such as Shakespeare and Ronsard, had not done so before him; and Shakespeare and Ronsard, as Sir Sidney Lee has proved, were literary legatees of Petrarch, the aforesaid native of Arezzo. And yet, if we were to tell the story of 72 how Rossetti’s sonnets came to be composed, it is doubtful if we should go further back in time than the occasion when his friend Deverell introduced him to the beautiful daughter of a Sheffield cutler who became the immediate inspiration of his poetry of love.

Dickens, in many novels, of which “David Copperfield” may be taken as an example, has chosen to tell the entire life-story of his hero from birth up to maturity. But other novelists, like George Meredith in “The Egoist,” have chosen to represent events that pass, for the most part, in one place, and in an exceedingly short stretch of time. It is by no means certain that Meredith does not know as much about the boyhood and youth of Sir Willoughby Patterne as Dickens knew about the early years of David Copperfield; but he has chosen to compact his novel by presenting only a brief series of events which exhibit his hero at maturity. Surely Turgénieff, after writing out that dossier of each of his characters to which Henry James referred, must have known a great many events in their lives which he chose to omit from his finished novel. It is interesting to imagine the sort of plot that George Eliot would have built out of the materials of “The Scarlet Letter.” Probably she would have begun the narrative in England at the time when Hester was a young girl. She would have set forth the meeting of Hester and Chillingworth and would have analyzed the causes culminating in their marriage. Then she would have taken the couple overseas to the colony of Massachusetts. Here Hester would have met Arthur Dimmesdale; and George Eliot would have expended all her powers as an analyst of life in tracing the sweet thoughts and imperious desires that led the lovers to the dolorous pass. The fall of Hester would have been the major knot in George Eliot’s entire narrative. It would have stood at the culmination 73 of the nouement of her plot: the subsequent events would have been merely steps in the dénouement. Yet the fall of Hester was already a thing of the past at the outset of the story that Hawthorne chose to represent. He was interested only in the after-effects of Hester’s sin upon herself and her lover and her husband. The major knot, or culmination, of his plot was therefore the revelation of the scarlet letter,––a scene which would have been only an incident in George Eliot’s dénouement. It will be seen from this that any story which is extended in its implications may offer a novelist materials for any one of several plot-structures, according to whichever section of the entire story happens most to interest his mind.

It will be seen, also, that much of the entire story must, in any case, remain unwritten. A plot is not only, as Stevenson stated, a simplification of life; it is also a further simplification of the train of events which, in simplifying life, the novelist has first imagined. The entire story, with all its implications, is selected from life; and the plot is then selected from the entire story. Often a novelist may suggest as much through deliberately omitting from his plot certain events in his imagined story as he could suggest by representing them. Perhaps the most powerful character in George Meredith’s “Evan Harrington” is the great Mel, whose death is announced in the very first sentence of the novel. Hawthorne, in “The Marble Faun,” never clears away the mystery of Miriam’s shadowy pursuer, nor tells us what became of Hilda when she disappeared for a time from the sight and knowledge of her friends.

Where to Begin a Story.––After the novelist has selected from his entire story the materials he means to represent, and has patterned these materials into a plot, he enjoys considerable liberty in regard to the point 74 at which he may commence his narrative. He may begin at the beginning of one or another of his main strands of causation, as Scott usually does; or he may adopt the Homeric device, commended by Horace, of plunging into the midst of his plot and working his way back only afterward to its beginning. In the first chapter of “Pendennis,” the hero is seventeen years old; the second chapter narrates the marriage of his father and mother, and his own birth and boyhood; and at the outset of the third chapter he is only sixteen years of age.

Logical Sequence and Chronological Succession.––It is obvious that, so long as the novelist represents his events in logical sequence, it is not at all necessary that he should present them in chronological succession. Stories may be told backward through time as well as forward. Thackeray often begins a chapter with an event that happened one day, and ends it with an event that happened several days before; he works his way backward from effects to causes, instead of forward from causes to effects. In carrying on a plot which is woven out of several strands, it is hardly ever possible to represent events in uninterrupted chronological succession, even when the author consistently works forward from causes to effects; for after he has pursued one strand of his plot to a certain point in time, he is obliged to turn backward several days or weeks, or possibly a longer period, to pick up another strand and carry it forward to the same point in time at which he left the first. Retrogression in time, therefore, is frequently not only permissible but necessary. But it is only common-sensible to state that chronological sequence should be sacrificed merely for the sake of making clear the logical relation of events; and whenever juggling with chronology tends to obscure instead of clarify that logical relation, it is evidence of an error of judgment on the part of 75 the narrator. Turgénieff is often guilty of this error of judgment. He has a disconcerting habit of bringing a new character into the scene which stands for the moment before the eye of the reader, and then turning the narrative backward several years in order to recount the past life of the newcomer. Frequently, before this parenthetic recital is completed, the reader has forgotten the scene from which the author turned to the digression.

Tying and Untying.––In most plots, as has been stated, the nouement is more significant than the dénouement, and the causes leading to the tying of the major knot are more interesting than the effects traced during the process of untying it. This is the reason why the culmination is usually set well along toward the conclusion of the story. Sometimes even, when the major knot has been tied with a Gordian intricacy, the author sets it at the very end of his narrative, and suddenly cuts it instead of carefully untying it. But there is no absolutely necessary reason why it should stand at the end, or, as is more frequently the case, at a point about three quarters through the story. It may even be set at the very beginning; and the narrative may concern itself entirely with an elaborate dénouement. This is the case, for example, in the detective story, where a very intricate knot is assumed at the outset, and the narrative proceeds to exhibit the prowess of the detective-hero in untying it.

Transition to the Next Chapter.––A well-constructed plot, like any other sort of well-articulated pattern, is interesting in itself; and certain novels and short-stories, like Wilkie Collins’ “Moonstone” and Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” maintain their interest almost through the element of plot alone. But since the purpose of fiction is to represent reality, a story will fail of the highest effect unless the people acting in its pattern of events produce upon the reader the illusion of living human beings. 76 We must therefore turn our attention next to a study of the element of character.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. How may unity be best attained in narrative?

2. Distinguish between the analytic and synthetic methods of construction.

3. Distinguish between positive and negative events.

4. Explain the pattern of picaresque romance.

5. What are the essential phases of a plot?

6. Explain the meaning of nouement and dénouement.

7. Must a story always follow the order of chronology?

8. At what point in the exposition of a plot is the major knot most usually found? What is the logical reason for this usual position?

SUGGESTED READING

Robert Louis Stevenson: “A Humble Remonstrance.”

Bliss Perry: “A Study of Prose Fiction”––Chapter VI, on “The Plot.”

O. Henry: “Roads of Destiny.”––The plotting of this story illustrates in practice most of the important points expounded in this chapter.

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CHAPTER V

CHARACTERS

Characters Should Be Worth Knowing––The Personal Equation of the Audience––The Universal Appeal of Great Fictitious Characters––Typical Traits––Individual Traits––The Defect of Allegory––The Defect of Caricature––Static and Kinetic Characters––Direct and Indirect Delineation––Subdivisions of Both Methods––I. Direct Delineation: 1. By Exposition; 2. By Description; [Gradual Portrayal]; 3. By Psychological Analysis; 4. By Reports from other Characters––II. Indirect Delineation: 1. By Speech; 2. By Action; 3. By Effect on other Characters; 4. By Environment.

Characters Should Be Worth Knowing.––Before we proceed to study the technical methods of delineating characters, we must ask ourselves what constitutes a character worth delineating. A novelist is, to speak figuratively, the social sponsor for his own fictitious characters; and he is guilty of a social indiscretion, as it were, if he asks his readers to meet fictitious people whom it is neither of value nor of interest to know. Since he aims to make his readers intimate with his characters, he must first of all be careful that his characters are worth knowing intimately. Most of us, in actual life, are accustomed to distinguish people who are worth our while from people who are not; and those of us who live advisedly are accustomed to shield ourselves from people who cannot, by the mere fact of what they are, repay us for the expenditure of time and energy we should have to make to get to know them. And whenever a friend of ours asks us deliberately to meet another friend of his, we take it for granted that our friend has reasons for believing that the acquaintanceship will be of benefit or of 78 interest to both. Now the novelist stands in the position of a friend who asks us to meet certain people whom he knows; and he runs the risk of our losing faith in his judgment unless we find his people worth our while. By the mere fact that we bother to read a novel, thus expending time which might otherwise be passed in company with actual people, we are going out of our way to meet the characters to whom the novelist wishes to introduce us. He therefore owes us an assurance that they shall be even more worth our while than the average actual person. This is not to say that they should necessarily be better; they may, of course, be worse: but they should be more clearly significant of certain interesting elements of human nature, more thoroughly representative of certain phases of human life which it is well for us to learn and know.

The Personal Equation of the Audience.––In deciding on the sort of characters that will be worth his readers’ while, the novelist must of course be influenced by the nature of the audience he is writing for. The characters of “Little Women” may be worth the while of children; and it is not an adverse criticism of Louisa M. Alcott to say that they are not worth the while of mature men and women. Similarly, it is not an adverse criticism of certain Continental novelists to say that their characters are decidedly unfit companions for adolescent girls. Our judgment of the characters in a novel should be conditioned always by our sense of the sort of readers to whom the novel is addressed. Henry James, in his later years, wrote usually for the super-civilized; and his characters should be judged by different standards than the pirates of “Treasure Island,”––a story which was written for boys, both young and old. One reader may be bored by pirates, another by super-subtle cosmopolitans; and each reader has the privilege of 79 avoiding the society of the characters that weary him.

The Universal Appeal of Great Fictitious Characters.––But the very greatest characters of fiction are worth everybody’s while; and surely the masters need have felt no hesitancy in asking any one to meet Sancho Panza, Robinson Crusoe, Henry Esmond, Jean Valjean, or Terence Mulvaney. In fact, the most amazing thing about a great fictitious figure is the multitude of very different people that the character is capable of interesting. Many times we willingly absent ourselves from actual society to pass an evening in the company of a fictitious personage of a class with which we never associate in actual life. Perhaps in the actual world we would never bother to converse with illiterate provincial people; and yet we may not feel it a waste of time and energy to meet them in the pages of “Middlemarch.” For my own part, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the sort of people that appear in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”; and yet I find it not only interesting but profitable to associate with them through the entire extent of a rather lengthy novel. Why is it that a reader, who, although he has crossed the ocean many times, has never cared to enter the engine-room of a liner, is yet willing enough to meet on intimate terms Mr. Kipling’s engineer, Mac Andrew? And why is it that ladies who, in actual society, are fastidious of their acquaintanceship, should yet associate throughout a novel with the Sapho of Daudet? What is the reason why these fictitious characters should seem, for nearly every reader, more worth while than the very same sort of people in actual life?

Typical Traits.––The reason is that great fictitious characters are typical of their class, to an extent rarely to be noticed in any actual member of the class they typify. They “contain multitudes,” to borrow Whitman’s 80 phrase. All idealistic visionaries are typified in Don Quixote, all misers in Harpagon, all hypocrites in Tartufe, all egoists in Sir Willoughby Patterne, all clever, tricksy women in Becky Sharp, all sentimentalists in Barrie’s Tommy. But the average actual man is not of sufficient magnitude to contain a multitude of others; he is comparatively lacking in typical traits; he is not, to such a great extent, illustrative of life, because only in a small measure is he representative of his class. There are, of course, in actual life, certain people of unusual magnitude who justify Emerson’s title of “Representative Men.” Benjamin Franklin, for example, is such a man. He is the only actual person entirely typical of eighteenth-century America; and that is the main reason why, as an exhibition of character, his autobiography is just as profitable a book as the master-works of fiction. But men so representative are rare in actual life; and the chief business of fiction is therefore to supply them.

Individual Traits.––It is mainly by supplying this need for representative men and women that the novelist can make his characters worth the while of every reader. But after he has made them quintessential of a class, he must be careful also to individualize them. Unless he endows them with certain personal traits that distinguish them from all other representatives or members of their class, whether actual or fictitious, he will fail to invest them with the illusion of reality. Every great character of fiction must exhibit, therefore, an intimate combination of typical and individual traits. It is through being typical that the character is true; it is through being individual that the character is convincing.

The Defect of Allegory.––The reason why most allegorical figures are ineffective is that, although they are typical, they are not at the same time individual. They are abstractly representative of a class; but they are not 81 concretely distinguishable from other representatives or members of the class. We know them, therefore, not as persons but merely as ideas. We feel very little human interest nowadays in reading over the old morality plays, whose characters are merely allegorical abstractions. But in criticising them we must remember that they were designed not so much to be read as to be performed upon the stage; and that the actors who represented their abstract and merely typical characters must necessarily have endowed them with concreteness and with individuality. Though a character in one of these allegorical plays might be called “Everyman,” it was one particular man who walked and talked upon the boards; and he evoked sympathy not so much for the type as for the individual. But allegory written to be read is less likely to produce the illusion of reality; and it is only when allegorical characters are virtually conceived as individuals, instead of mere abstractions, that they touch the heart. Christian, in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” is so conceived. He is entirely representative of seventeenth-century Christianity; in a sense he is all men of Bunyan’s time and Bunyan’s religion; but he is also one man and one only, and we could never in our thought confuse him with any other character in or out of fiction.

The Defect of Caricature.––But just as a character may be ineffective through being merely typical, so also a character may be unsignificant through being merely individual. The minor figures in Ben Jonson’s Comedies of Humours are mere personifications of exaggerated individual traits. They are caricatures rather than characters. Dickens frequently commits the error of exhibiting figures devoid of representative traits. Tommy Traddles is sharply individualized by the fact that his hair is always standing on end; but he exhibits no essential truth of human nature. Barkis, who is always 82 willin’, and Micawber, who is always waiting for something to turn up, are emphatically distinguished from everybody else in or out of fiction; but they lack the large reality of representative characters. They are individualities instead of individuals. They do not exhibit an agglomeration of many different but consistent traits rendered unified and single by a dominant and informing characteristic, such as ambition in Macbeth, senility in Lear, or irresoluteness in Hamlet. A great fictitious character must be at once generic and specific; it must give concrete expression to an abstract idea; it must be an individualized representation of the typical qualities of a class. It is only figures of this sort that are finally worth while in fiction,––more worth the reader’s while than the average actual man.

Static and Kinetic Characters.––But there is yet another reason why it is often more valuable for the reader to meet fictitious characters than to meet people of the same class in actual life; and this reason is that during the day or two it takes to read a novel he may review the most significant events of many years, and thus get to know a fictitious character more completely in a brief space of time than he could get to know him, if the character were actual, in several years of continuous acquaintanceship. We meet two sorts of characters in the pages of the novelists,––characters which may be called static, and characters which may be called kinetic. The first remain unchanged throughout the course of the story: the second grow up or down, as the case may be, through the influence of circumstances, of their own wills, or of the wills of other people. The recurrent characters of Mr. Kipling’s early tales, such as Mrs. Hauksbee, Strickland, Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, are static figures. Although they do different things in different stories, their characters remain always 83 the same. But Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are kinetic figures; they grow and change throughout the novel; they are, each in his own way, bigger and wiser people when we leave them than they were when first we met them. To show a character developing under stress or ripening easily beneath beneficent influences is one of the greatest possibilities of fiction. And to exhibit the gradual disintegration of a character, as George Eliot does in the case of Tito Melema, is to teach us more of the tragedy of life than we might learn in many years of actual experience.

Direct and Indirect Delineation.––Only after the process of creation is completed, and a character stands living in the mind of the novelist, need he consider the various technical expedients which may be employed to make the reader conscious of the character as a personal presence. These technical expedients are many; but they may all be grouped as phases of one or the other of two contrasted methods of delineating character, which may be called, for convenience, direct and indirect. According to the first method, traits of character are conveyed directly to the reader through some sort of statement by the writer of the story: according to the second method, characteristics are conveyed indirectly to the reader through a necessary inference, on his part, from the narrative itself. In employing the first, or direct, method, the author (either in his own person or in that of some character which he assumes) stands between the reader and the character he is portraying, in the attitude, more or less frankly confessed, of showman or expositor. In employing the second, or indirect, method, the author seeks to obliterate himself as much as possible from the reader’s consciousness; and having brought the reader face to face with the character he desires to portray, leaves the reader to make his own acquaintance 84 with the character. The indirect method is of course more difficult, and, when successfully employed, is more artistic, than the direct method. But seldom is either used to the exclusion of the other; and it would be possible to illustrate by successive quotations from any first-rate novel, like “The Egoist” for example, how the same characteristics are portrayed first by the one and then by the other method.

Subdivisions of Both Methods.––Each of the two methods shows itself in many different phases. There are several distinct ways of delineating character directly, and also several distinct means of indirect delineation. It is perhaps serviceable for the purposes of study to distinguish them somewhat sharply one from another; but it must always be remembered that the masters of fiction usually employ a commingling of them all, without conscious awareness of any critical distinction between them. Bearing this ever in mind, let us venture on a critical examination of some of the most frequently recurrent phases, first, of the direct, and secondly, of the indirect, method.

I. Direct Delineation: 1. By Exposition.––The most obvious, and at the same time the most elementary, means of direct portrayal is by a deliberate expository statement of the leading traits of the character to be portrayed. Thus, at the outset of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” the author, writing in the person of the Vicar, thus expounds the traits of Mrs. Primrose:––

“I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well. To do 85 her justice, she was a good-natured notable woman; and as for breeding, there were few country ladies who could show more. She could read any English book without much spelling; but for pickling, preserving, and cookery, none could excel her. She prided herself also upon being an excellent contriver in housekeeping; though I could never find that we grew richer with all her contrivances.”

This elementary means of portrayal has the obvious advantage of succinctness. The reader is told at once, and with a fair measure of completeness, what he is to think about the character in question. For this reason the expedient is highly serviceable at the outset of a story. So excellent an artist as Stevenson, in the “New Arabian Nights,” began each tale in the collection with a paragraph in which he expounded the main traits of the leading character. But the expedient has also several disadvantages. In the first place, being expository, it is not narrative in mood; it savors of the essay rather than the story; and if it be used not at the outset but during the course of a narrative, it halts the progress of the action. In the second place, it is abstract rather than concrete; it does not bring the reader into the presence of a character, but merely into the presence of an explanation; and it leaves the reader in an attitude exactly like that which he holds toward certain actual people, concerning whom he has been told a great deal by their friends, but whom he has never met himself. The whole first chapter of “The Vicar of Wakefield” is a series of little essays on the various members of the Primrose family. Nothing happens in the chapter; the characters never step bodily into view; and we feel at the end that we have heard a great deal of talk about people whom we should like to meet but whom as yet we have not seen.

2. By Description.––It is therefore in certain ways 86 more satisfactory to portray character directly through a descriptive, rather than an expository, statement. Thus, in the second chapter of “Martin Chuzzlewit,” we are told of Mr. Pecksniff:––

“His very throat was moral. You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld the tie, for he fastened it behind), and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed to say, on the part of Mr. Pecksniff, ‘There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me.’ So did his hair, just grizzled with an iron-gray, which was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt upright, or slightly drooped in kindred action with his heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was sleek though free from corpulency. So did his manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even his plain black suit, and state of widower, and dangling double eye-glass, all tended to the same purpose, and cried aloud, ‘Behold the moral Pecksniff!’”

This statement, being in the main concretely descriptive rather than abstractly expository, brings us face to face with the character at the same time that it tells us what to think of him. And whereas we feel that we have merely heard about Mrs. Primrose, we feel that we have really seen Mr. Pecksniff.

[Gradual Portrayal.]––It was the custom of Sir Walter Scott, at the introduction of a character, to furnish the reader with an elaborate set portrayal, partly expository and partly descriptive, of the traits and features of the character; and to allow this initial direct statement to do duty through the remainder of the novel. The trouble with this off-hand expedient is that the reader inevitably forgets the set statement of the author before the narrative has very far progressed. It is therefore more effective 87 to make a direct portrayal of character, whether expository or descriptive, little by little rather than all in a lump; and to present at any one time to the reader only such traits or features as he needs to be reminded of in order to appreciate the scene before him. Thus, in Mr. Kipling’s masterpiece, called “They,” we catch this initial glimpse of Miss Florence:––

“The garden door––heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall––opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.

“‘I heard you,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that a motor car?’”

And it is only after five pages of narrative that the writer deems it the proper time to add:––

“She stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the first time that she was beautiful.”

3. By Psychological Analysis.––The point that a direct statement of characteristics should preferably be delivered to the reader little by little rather than all in a lump is particularly patent when the statement is not external and objective like those already quoted, but internal and subjective. In a certain type of fiction, which is commonly called “the psychological novel,” the usual expedient for delineating character is a statement partly narrative and partly expository of what is taking place within the mind of the fictitious person, based upon an analysis of his thoughts and his emotions, at important moments of the story. This expedient of portraying character by mental analysis is George Eliot’s favorite technical device. Here is a typical passage, from “The Mill on the Floss,” Chapter V:––

“Maggie soon thought she had been hours in the attic, 88 and it must be tea-time, and they were all having their tea, and not thinking of her. Well, then, she would stay up there and starve herself––hide herself behind the tub, and stay there all night; and then they would all be frightened, and Tom would be sorry. Thus Maggie thought in the pride of her heart, as she crept behind the tub; but presently she began to cry again at the idea that they didn’t mind her being there. If she went down again to Tom now––would he forgive her?––perhaps her father would be there, and he would take her part. But then she wanted Tom to forgive her because he loved her, not because his father told him. No, she would never go down if Tom didn’t come to fetch her. This resolution lasted in great intensity for five dark minutes behind the tub; but then the need of being loved, the strongest need in poor Maggie’s nature, began to wrestle with her pride, and soon threw it. She crept from behind her tub into the twilight of the long attic, but just then she heard a quick footstep on the stairs.

“Tom had been too much interested in his talk with Luke, in going the round of the premises, walking in and out where he pleased, and whittling sticks without any particular reason, except that he didn’t whittle sticks at school, to think of Maggie, and the effect his anger had produced on her. He meant to punish her, and that business having been performed, he occupied himself with other matters, like a practical person.”––

And so on. It is only after four hundred words more of this sort of analysis that the author tells us: “It was Tom’s step, then, that Maggie heard on the stairs.” This is George Eliot’s way of portraying the characters of two children who have quarreled.

Much is to be said in favor of this expedient of depicting character by analysis. It is the only means by which the reader may be informed directly of those thoughts 89 and emotions of a character which are the mainsprings of his acts. And since we cannot feel that we know a person intimately unless we understand the workings of his mind at characteristic moments, we derive a great advantage from this immediate presentation of his mental processes. On the other hand, the use of the expedient destroys the very desirable illusion that the reader is an observer actually looking at the action, since the details depicted do not happen to the eye but rather to the analytic understanding. The expedient has the disadvantages of being exceedingly abstract, and of halting happenings while the author tells us why they happened. It is certainly unfortunate, for instance, that it should take Tom a whole long page to get to Maggie after she has heard his “quick footstep on the stairs.” Furthermore, this expedient tends to destroy the illusion of reality by forcing the reader into a mental attitude which he seldom assumes in looking on at actual life. During actual occurrences people almost never pause to analyze each other and seldom even analyze themselves. They act, and watch other people act, without a microscopic insight into motives. And surely the purpose of narrative should be to represent events as they seem to occur in actuality, rather than to present a dissertation on their causes in the manner of an essay.

An important point, however, remains to be considered. Events are of two kinds, external and internal; things happen subjectively as well as objectively: and in representing the sort of occurrence which takes place only inside a person’s mind, the expedient of analysis is by far the most serviceable means of making clear the elements of character that contribute to it. But if the same expedient be employed habitually in the depiction of external events as well, it is likely to give the impression of unwarrantable vivisection. There is a certain falsity of 90 mood in giving an objective event a subjective rendering.

4. By Reports from Other Characters.––When, therefore, it is desired to depict a character by direct comment on his actions or his personality, there is a great advantage in allowing the comment to be made by one of the other characters in the story, instead of by the author himself in an attitude of assumed omniscience. Jane Austen deftly exhibits this subtler phase of the expedient in many admirable passages. For instance, in Chapter XXXIII of “Emma,” Mrs. Elton thus chatters to Emma Woodhouse:––

“‘Jane Fairfax is absolutely charming, Miss Woodhouse. I quite rave about Jane Fairfax––a sweet, interesting creature. So mild and lady-like––and with such talents! I assure you I think she has very extraordinary talents. I do not scruple to say that she plays extremely well. I know enough of music to speak decidedly on that point. Oh! she is absolutely charming! You will laugh at my warmth––but upon my word, I talk of nothing but Jane Fairfax.’”

In Chapter XXI the same character has been thus commented on by Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley. Emma speaks first:––

“‘Miss Fairfax is reserved.’

“‘I always told you she was––a little; but you will soon overcome all that part of her reserve which ought to be overcome, all that has its foundation in diffidence. What arises from discretion must be honored.’