The Art of Fiction, critical essay by Henry James,
published in 1884 in Longman’s Magazine. It was written as a rebuttal
to “Fiction as One of the Fine Arts,” a lecture given by Sir Walter Besant
in 1884, and is a manifesto of literary realism that decries the
popular demand for novels that are saturated with sentimentality or
pessimism. It was published separately in 1885.
In
The Art of Fiction, James disagrees with Besant’s assertions that plot
is more important than characterization, that fiction must have a
“conscious moral purpose,” and that experience and observation outweigh
imagination as creative tools. James argues against these restrictive
rules for writing fiction, responding that “no good novel will ever
proceed from a superficial mind.”
I SHOULD not
have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks, necessarily
wanting in any completeness, upon a subject the full consideration of
which would carry us far, did I not seem to discover a pretext for my
temerity in the interesting pamphlet lately published under this name by
Mr. Walter Besant. Mr. Besant's lecture at the Royal Institution--the
original form of his pamphlet--appears to indicate that many persons are
interested in the art of fiction and are not indifferent to such
remarks as those who practise it may attempt to make about it. I am
therefore anxious not to lose the benefit of this favourable
association, and to edge in a few words under cover of the attention
which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. There is something very
encouraging in his having put into form certain of his ideas on the
mystery of story-telling.
It is a proof of life and
curiosity--curiosity on the part of the brotherhood of novelists, as
well as on the part of their readers. Only a short time ago it might
have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call
discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a
consciousness of itself behind it-of being the expression of an artistic
faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was
necessarily the worse for that; it would take much more courage than I
possess to intimate that the form of the novel, as Dickens and Thackeray
(for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however,
naïf (if I may help myself out with another French word); and,
evidently, if it is destined to suffer in any way for having lost its
naïveté it has now an idea of making sure of the corresponding
advantages. During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable,
good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a
pudding, and that this was the end of it. But within a year or two, for
some reason or other, there have been signs of returning animation-the
era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened.
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety
of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of
standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has
anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for
practice or preference, though they may be times of genius, are not
times of development, are times possibly even, a little, of dulness. The
successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the
theory, too, is interesting; and though there is a great deal of the
latter without the former, I suspect there has never been a genuine
success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion,
suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are
frank and sincere. Mr. Besant has set an excellent example in saying
what he thinks, for his part, about the way in which fiction should be
written, as well as about the way in which it should be published; for
his view of the "art," carried on into an appendix, covers that too.
Other labourers in the same field will doubtless take up the argument,
they will give it the light of their experience, and the effect will
surely be to make our interest in the novel a little more what it had
for some time threatened to fail to be--a serious, active, inquiring
interest, under protection of which this delightful study may, in
moments of confidence, venture to say a little more what it thinks of
itself.
It must take itself seriously for the public to
take it so. The old superstition about fiction being "wicked" has
doubtless died out in England; but the spirit of it lingers in a certain
oblique regard directed toward any story which does not more or less
admit that it is only a joke. Even the most jocular novel feels in some
degree the weight of the proscription that was formerly directed against
literary levity; the jocularity does not always succeed in passing for
gravity. It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say
it, that a production which is after all only a "make believe" (for what
else is a "story"?) shall be in some degree apologetic--shall renounce
the pretension of attempting really to compete with life. This, of
course, any sensible wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly
perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only
an attempt to stifle it, disguised in the form of generosity. The old
evangelical hostility to the novel, which was as explicit as it was
narrow, and which regarded it as little less favourable to our immortal
part than a stage-play, was in reality far less insulting. The only
reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.
When it ceases to compete as the canvas of the painter competes, it will
have arrived at a very strange pass. It is not expected of the picture
that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven; and the analogy
between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far
as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same, their
process (allowing for the different quality of the vehicle) is the same,
their success is the same. They may learn from each other, they may
explain and sustain each other. Their cause is the same, and the honour
of one is the honour of another. Peculiarities of manner, of execution,
that correspond on either side, exist in each of them and contribute to
their development. The Mahometans think a picture an unholy thing, but
it is a long time since any Christian did, and it is therefore the more
odd that in the Christian mind the traces (dissimulated though they may
be) of a suspicion of the sister art should linger to this day. The only
effectual way to lay it to rest is to emphasize the analogy to which I
just alluded--to insist on the fact that as the picture is reality, so
the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does
it justice) that we may give the novel. But history also is allowed to
compete with life, as I say; it is not, any more than painting, expected
to apologize. The subject-matter of fiction is stored up likewise in
documents and records, and if it will not give itself away, as they say
in California, it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the
historian. Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving
themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who
take their fiction seriously. I was lately struck, in reading over many
pages of Anthony Trollope, with his want of discretion in this
particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he concedes to
the reader that he and this trusting friend are only "making believe."
He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that
he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a
betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime; it
is what I mean by the attitude of apology, and it shocks me every whit
as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay.
It implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth
(the truth, of course I mean, that he assumes, the premises that we must
grant him, whatever they may be) than the historian, and in doing so it
deprives him at a stroke of all his standing-room. To represent and
illustrate the past, the actions of men, is the task of either writer,
and the only difference that I can see is, in proportion as he succeeds,
to the honour of the novelist, consisting as it does in his having more
difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from being
purely literary. It seems to me to give him a great character, the fact
that he has at once so much in common with the philosopher and the
painter; this double analogy is a magnificent heritage.
It
is of all this evidently that Mr. Besant is full when he insists upon
the fact that fiction is one of the fine arts, deserving in its turn of
all the honours and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved for the
successful profession of music, poetry, painting, architecture. It is
impossible to insist too much on so important a truth, and the place
that Mr. Besant demands for the work of the novelist may be represented,
a trifle less abstractly, by saying that he demands not only that it
shall be reputed artistic, but that it shall be reputed very artistic
indeed. It is excellent that he should have struck this note, for his
doing so indicates that there was need of it, that his proposition may
be to many people a novelty. One rubs one's eyes at the thought; but the
rest of Mr. Besant's essay confirms the revelation. I suspect, in
truth, that it would be possible to confirm it still further, and that
one would not be far wrong in saying that in addition to the people to
whom it has never occurred that a novel ought to be artistic, there are a
great many others who, if this principle were urged upon them, would be
filled with an indefinable mistrust. They would find it difficult to
explain their repugnance, but it would operate strongly to put them on
their guard. "Art," in our Protestant communities, where so many things
have got so strangely twisted about, is supposed, in certain circles, to
have some vaguely injurious effect upon those who make it an important
consideration, who let it weigh in the balance. It is assumed to be
opposed in some mysterious manner to morality, to amusement, to
instruction. When it is embodied in the work of the painter (the
sculptor is another affair!) you know what it is; it stands there before
you, in the honesty of pink and green and a gilt frame; you can see the
worst of it at a glance, and you can be on your guard. But when it is
introduced into literature it becomes more insidious--there is danger of
its hurting you before you know it. Literature should be either
instructive or amusing, and there is in many minds an impression that
these artistic preoccupations, the search for form, contribute to
neither end, interfere indeed with both. They are too frivolous to be
edifying, and too serious to be diverting; and they are, moreover,
priggish and paradoxical and superfluous. That, I think, represents the
manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an
exercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to become
articulate. They would argue, of course, that a novel ought to be
"good," but they would interpret this term in a fashion of their own,
which, indeed would vary considerably from one critic to another. One
would say that being good means representing virtuous and aspiring
characters, placed in prominent positions; another would say that it
depends for a "happy ending" on a distribution at the last of prizes,
pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and
cheerful remarks. Another still would say that it means being full of
incident and movement, so that we shall wish to jump ahead, to see who
was the mysterious stranger, and if the stolen will was ever found, and
shall not be distracted from this pleasure by any tiresome analysis or
"description." But they would all agree that the "artistic'" idea would
spoil some of their fun. One would hold it accountable for all the
description, another would see it revealed in the absence of sympathy.
Its hostility to a happy ending would be evident, and it might even, in
some cases, render any ending at all impossible. The "ending" of a novel
is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert
and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome
doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes. It is therefore true that this
conception of Mr. Besant's of the novel as a superior form encounters
not only a negative but a positive indifference. It matters little that,
as a work of art, it should really be as little or as much concerned to
supply happy endings, sympathetic characters, and an objective tone, as
if it were a work of mechanics; the association of ideas, however
incongruous, might easily be too much for it if an eloquent voice were
not sometimes raised to call attention to the fact that it is at once as
free and as serious a branch of literature as any other.
Certainly,
this might sometimes be doubted in presence of the enormous number of
works of fiction that appeal to the credulity of our generation, for it
might easily seem that there could be no great substance in a commodity
so quickly and easily produced. It must be admitted that good novels are
somewhat compromised by bad ones, and that the field, at large, suffers
discredit from overcrowding. I think, however, that this injury is only
superficial, and that the superabundance of written fiction proves
nothing against the principle itself. It has been vulgarised, like all
other kinds of literature, like everything else, to-day, and it has
proved more than some kinds accessible to vulgarisation. But there is as
much difference as there ever was between a good novel and a bad one:
the bad is swept, with all the daubed canvases and spoiled marble, into
some unvisited limbo or infinite rubbish-yard, beneath the back-windows
of the world, and the good subsists and emits its light and stimulates
our desire for perfection. As I shall take the liberty of making but a
single criticism of Mr. Besant, whose tone is so full of the love of his
art, I may as well have done with it at once. He seems to me to mistake
in attempting to say so definitely beforehand what sort of an affair
the good novel will be. To indicate the danger of such an error as that
has been the purpose of these few pages; to suggest that certain
traditions on the subject, applied a priori, have already had much to
answer for, and that the good health of an art which undertakes so
immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It
lives upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The
only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without
incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
That general responsibility rests upon it, but it is the only one I can
think of. The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result
(of interesting us) strike me as innumerable and such as can only suffer
from being marked out, or fenced in, by prescription. They are as
various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in proportion
as they reveal a particular mind, different from others. A novel is in
its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin
with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the
intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and
therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing
of a line to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled
out, is a limitation of that freedom and a suppression of the very
thing that we are most curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be
appreciated after the fact; then the author's choice has been made, his
standard has been indicated; then we can follow lines and directions
and compare tones. Then, in a word, we can enjoy one of the most
charming of pleasures, we can estimate quality, we can apply the test of
execution. The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is
most personal to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the
luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is
that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant--no limit
to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. Here it is
especially that he works, step by step, like his brother of the brush,
of whom we may always say that he has painted his picture in a manner
best known to himself. His manner is his secret, not necessarily a
deliberate one. He cannot disclose it, as a general thing, if he would;
he would be at a loss to teach it to others. I say this with a due
recollection of having insisted on the community of method of the artist
who paints a picture and the artist who writes a novel. The painter is
able to teach the rudiments of his practice, and it is possible, from
the study of good work (granted the aptitude), both to learn how to
paint and to learn how to write. Yet it remains true, without injury to
the rapprochement, that the literary artist would be obliged to say to
his pupil much more than the other, "Ah, well, you must do it as you
can!" It is a question of degree, a matter of delicacy. If there are
exact sciences there are also exact arts, and the grammar of painting is
so much more definite that it makes the difference.
I
ought to add, however, that if Mr. Besant says at the beginning of his
essay that the "laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with as much
precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and
proportion," he mitigates what might appear to be an over-statement by
applying his remark to "general" laws, and by expressing most of these
rules in a manner with which it would certainly be unaccommodating to
disagree. That the novelist must write from his experience, that his
"characters must be real and such as might be met with in actual life;"
that "a young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid
descriptions of garrison life," and "a writer whose friends and personal
experiences belong to the lower middle-class should carefully avoid
introducing his characters into Society;" that one should enter one's
notes in a common-place book; that one's figures should be clear in
outline; that making them clear by some trick of speech or of carriage
is a bad method, and "describing them at length" is a worse one; that
English Fiction should have a "conscious moral purpose;" that "it is
almost impossible to estimate too highly the value of careful
workmanship-that is, of style;" that "the most important point of all is
the story," that "the story is everything"--these are principles with
most of which it is surely impossible not to sympathise. That remark
about the lower middle-class writer and his knowing his place is perhaps
rather chilling; but for the rest, I should find it difficult to
dissent from any one of these recommendations. At the same time I should
find it difficult positively to assent to them, with the exception,
perhaps, of the injunction as to entering one's notes in a common-place
book. They scarcely seem to me to have the quality that Mr. Besant
attributes to the rules of the novelist--the "precision and exactness"
of "the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion." They are
suggestive, they are even inspiring, but they are not exact, though they
are doubtless as much so as the case admits of; which is a proof of
that liberty of interpretation for which I just contended. For the value
of these different injunctions--so beautiful and so vague--is wholly in
the meaning one attaches to them. The characters, the situation, which
strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most, but
the measure of reality is very difficult to fix. The reality of Don
Quixote or of Mr. Micawber is a very delicate shade; it is a reality so
coloured by the author's vision that, vivid as it may be, one would
hesitate to propose it as a model; one would expose one's self to some
very embarrassing questions on the part of a pupil. It goes without
saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense
of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling
that sense into being. Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad
forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction
have the odour of it, and others have not; as for telling you in advance
how your nosegay should be composed, that is another affair. It is
equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from
experience; to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration might
savour of mockery. What kind of experience is intended, and where does
it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete;
it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest
silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching
every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the
mind; and when the mind is imaginative--much more when it happens to be
that of a man of genius--it takes to itself the faintest hints of life,
it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. 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
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. I remember an English novelist, a woman of
genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she
had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of
the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so
much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her
peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having
once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where,
in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated
at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted
only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her
impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what
Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to
be French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and
produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty
which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist
is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or
of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the
seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by
the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely
that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of
it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience,
and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages
of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that
impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the
very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice,
"Write from experience, and experience only," I should feel that this
was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to
add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"
I
am far from intending by this to minimise the importance of
exactness-of truth of detail. One can speak best from one's own taste,
and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of
specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel--the
merit on which all its other merits (including that conscious moral
purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submissively depend.
If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they
owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the
illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this
exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the
art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward,
his torment, his delight. It is here, in very truth, that he competes
with life; it is here that he competes with his brother the painter in
his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their
meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface,
the substance of the human spectacle. It is in regard to this that Mr.
Besant is well inspired when he bids him take notes. He cannot possibly
take too many, he cannot possibly take enough. All life solicits him,
and to "render" the simplest surface, to produce the most momentary
illusion, is a very complicated business. His case would be easier, and
the rule would be more exact, if Mr. Besant had been able to tell him
what notes to take. But this I fear he can never learn in any hand-book;
it is the business of his life. He has to take a great many in order to
select a few, he has to work them up as he can, and even the guides and
philosophers who might have most to say to him must leave him alone
when it comes to the application of precepts, as we leave the painter in
communion with his palette. That his characters "must be clear in
outline," as Mr. Besant says--he feels that down to his boots; but how
he shall make them so is a secret between his good angel and himself. It
would be absurdly simple if he could be taught that a great deal of
"description" would make them so, or that, on the contrary, the absence
of description and the cultivation of dialogue, or the absence of
dialogue and the multiplication of "incident," would rescue him from his
difficulties. Nothing, for instance, is more possible than that he be
of a turn of mind for which this odd, literal opposition of description
and dialogue, incident and description, has little meaning and light.
People often talk of these things as if they had a kind of internecine
distinctness, instead of melting into each other at every breath and
being intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression. I
cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor
conceive, in any novel worth discussing at all, of a passage of
description that is not in its intention narrative, a passage of
dialogue that is not in its intention descriptive, a touch of truth of
any sort that does not partake of the nature of incident, and an
incident that derives its interest from any other source than the
general and only source of the success of a work of art-that of being
illustrative. A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like
every other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I
think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other
parts. The critic who over the close texture of a finished work will
pretend to trace a geography of items will mark some frontiers as
artificial, I fear, as any that have been known to history. There is an
old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel
of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer
who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as
the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance-
to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good
novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the
only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine
speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture
of character. When one says picture, one says of character, when one
says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What
is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the
illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of
character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? 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. If you say you don't see it (character in that-allons donc!)
this is exactly what the artist who has reasons of his own for thinking
he does see it undertakes to show you. When a young man makes up his
mind that he has not faith enough, after all, to enter the Church, as he
intended, that is an incident, though you may not hurry to the end of
the chapter to see whether perhaps he doesn't change once more. I do not
say that these are extraordinary or startling incidents. I do not
pretend to estimate the degree of interest proceeding from them, for
this will depend upon the skill of the painter. It sounds almost puerile
to say that some incidents are intrinsically much more important than
others, and I need not take this precaution after having professed my
sympathy for the major ones in remarking that the only classification of
the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the
uninteresting.
The novel and the romance, the novel of
incident and that of character--these separations appear to me to have
been made by critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help
them out of some of their difficulties, but to have little reality or
interest for the producer, from whose point of view it is, of course,
that we are attempting to consider the art of fiction. The case is the
same with another shadowy category, which Mr. Besant apparently is
disposed to set up-that of the "modern English novel;" unless, indeed,
it be that in this matter he has fallen into an accidental confusion of
standpoints. It is not quite clear whether he intends the remarks in
which he alludes to it to be didactic or historical. It is as difficult
to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose
him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the
question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's
language and of one's time, and calling it modern English will not,
alas! make the difficult task any easier. No more, unfortunately, will
calling this or that work of one's fellow artist a romance-unless it be,
of course, simply for the pleasantness of the thing, as, for instance,
when Hawthorne gave this heading to his story of Blithedale. The French,
who have brought the theory of fiction to remarkable completeness, have
but one word for the novel, and have not attempted smaller things in
it, that I can see, for that. I can think of no obligation to which the
'romancer' would not be held equally with the novelist; the standard of
execution is equally high for each. Of course it is of execution that we
are talking-that being the only point of a novel that is open to
contention. This is perhaps too often lost sight of, only to produce
interminable confusions and cross-purposes. We must grant the artist his
subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is
applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are
bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course
is perfectly simple--to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain
idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the
event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a
failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness
is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow
him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of
innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a
considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of
presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it
is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things. Gustave Flaubert
has written a story about the devotion of a servant-girl to a parrot,
and the production, highly finished as it is, cannot on the whole be
called a success. We are perfectly free to find it flat, but I think it
might have been interesting; and I, for my part, am extremely glad he
should have written it; it is a contribution to our knowledge of what
can be done or what cannot. Ivan Turgénieff has written a tale about a
deaf and dumb serf and a lap-dog, and the thing is touching, loving, a
little masterpiece. He struck the note of life where Gustave Flaubert
missed it-he flew in the face of a presumption and achieved a victory.
Nothing,
of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of "liking"
a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not
abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test. I mention this to guard
myself from the accusation of intimating that the idea, the subject, of a
novel or a picture, does not matter. It matters, to my sense, in the
highest degree, and if I might put up a prayer it would be that artists
should select none but the richest. Some, as I have already hastened to
admit, are much more substantial than others , and it would be a happily
arranged world in which persons intending to treat them should be
exempt from confusions and mistakes. This fortunate condition will
arrive only, I fear, on the same day that critics become purged from
error. Meanwhile, I repeat, we do not judge the artist with fairness
unless we say to him, "Oh, I grant you your starting point, because if I
did not I should seem to prescribe to you, and heaven forbid I should
take that responsibility. If I pretend to tell you what you must not
take, you will call upon me to tell you then what you must take; in
which case I shall be nicely caught! Moreover, it isn't till I have
accepted your data that I can begin to measure you. I have the standard;
I judge you by what you propose, and you must look out for me there. Of
course I may not care for your idea at all; I may think it silly, or
stale, or unclean; in which case I wash my hands of you altogether. I
may content myself with believing that you will not have succeeded in
being interesting, but I shall of course not attempt to demonstrate it,
and you will be as indifferent to me as I am to you. I needn't remind
you that there are all sorts of tastes: who can know it better? Some
people, for excellent reasons, don't like to read about carpenters;
others, for reasons even better, don't like to read about courtesans.
Many object to Americans. Others (I believe they are mainly editors and
publishers) won't look at Italians. Some readers don't like quiet
subjects; others don't like bustling ones. Some enjoy a complete
illusion; others revel in a complete deception. They choose their novels
accordingly, and if they don't care about your idea they won't, a
fortiori, care about your treatment."
So that it comes
back very quickly, as I have said, to the liking; in spite of M. Zola,
who reasons less powerfully than he represents, and who will not
reconcile himself to this absoluteness of taste, thinking that there are
certain things that people ought to like, and that they can be made to
like. I am quite at a loss to imagine anything (at any rate in this
matter of fiction) that people ought to like or to dislike. Selection
will be sure to take care of itself, for it has a constant motive behind
it. That motive is simply experience. As people feel life, so they will
feel the art that is most closely related to it. This closeness of
relation is what we should never forget in talking of the effort of the
novel. Many people speak of it as a factitious, artificial form, a
product of ingenuity, the business of which is to alter and arrange the
things that surround us, to translate them into conventional,
traditional moulds. This, however, is a view of the matter which carries
us but a very short way, condemns the art to an eternal repetition of a
few familiar clichés, cuts short its development, and leads us straight
up to a dead wall. Catching the very note and trick, the strange
irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force
keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she offers us we
see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the
truth; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we
are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and convention. It is
not uncommon to hear an extraordinary assurance of remark in regard to
this matter of rearranging, which is often spoken of as if it were the
last word of art. Mr. Besant seems to me in danger of falling into this
great error with his rather unguarded talk about "selection." Art is
essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be
typical, to be inclusive. For many people art means rose-coloured
windows, and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They
will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do
with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off shallow
commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art, till you
are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and the limits of
ignorance. It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously
artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase--a
kind of revelation--of freedom. One perceives, in that case-by the light
of a heavenly ray-that the province of art is all life, all feeling,
all observation, all vision. As Mr. Besant so justly intimates, it is
all experience. That is a sufficient answer to those who maintain that
it must not touch the painful, who stick into its divine unconscious
bosom little prohibitory inscriptions on the end of sticks, such as we
see in public gardens--"It is forbidden to walk on the grass; it is
forbidden to touch the flowers; it is not allowed to introduce dogs, or
to remain after dark; it is requested to keep to the right." The young
aspirant in the line of fiction, whom we continue to imagine, will do
nothing without taste, for in that case his freedom would be of little
use to him; but the first advantage of his taste will be to reveal to
him the absurdity of the little sticks and tickets. If he have taste, I
must add, of course he will have ingenuity, and my disrespectful
reference to that quality just now was not meant to imply that it is
useless in fiction. But it is only a secondary aid; the first is a vivid
sense of reality.
Mr. Besant has some remarks on the
question of "the story," which I shall not attempt to criticise, though
they seem to me to contain a singular ambiguity, because I do not think I
understand them. I cannot see what is meant by talking as if there were
a part of a novel which is the story and part of it which for mystical
reasons is not--unless indeed the distinction be made in a sense in
which it is difficult to suppose that anyone should attempt to convey
anything. "The story," if it represents anything, represents the
subject, the idea, the data of the novel; and there is surely no
"school"--Mr. Besant speaks of a school--which urges that a novel should
be all treatment and no subject. There must assuredly be something to
treat; every school is intimately conscious of that. This sense of the
story being the idea, the starting-point, of the novel is the only one
that I see in which it can be spoken of as something different from its
organic whole; and since, in proportion as the work is successful, the
idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every
word and every punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression,
in that proportion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade
which may be drawn more or less out of its sheath. The story and the
novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never
heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread
without the needle or the needle without the thread. Mr. Besant is not
the only critic who may be observed to have spoken as if there were
certain things in life which constitute stories and certain others which
do not. I find the same odd implication in an entertaining article in
the Pall Mall Gazette, devoted, as it happens, to Mr. Besant's lecture.
"The story is the thing!" says this graceful writer, as if with a tone
of opposition to another idea. I should think it was, as every painter
who, as the time for 'sending in' his picture looms in the distance,
finds himself still in quest of a subject-as every belated artist, not
fixed about his donnée, will heartily agree. There are some subjects
which speak to us and others which do not, but he would be a clever man
who should undertake to give a rule by which the story and the no-story
should be known apart. It is impossible (to me at least) to imagine any
such rule which shall not be altogether arbitrary. The writer in the
Pall Mall opposes the delightful (as I suppose) novel of Margot la
Balafrée to certain tales in which "Bostonian nymphs" appear to have
"rejected English dukes for psychological reasons." I am not acquainted
with the romance just designated, and can scarcely forgive the Pall Mall
critic for not mentioning the name of the author, but the title appears
to refer to a lady who may have received a scar in some heroic
adventure. I am inconsolable at not being acquainted with this episode,
but am utterly at a loss to see why it is a story when the rejection (or
acceptance) of a duke is not, and why a reason, psychological or other,
is not a subject when a cicatrix is. They are all particles of the
multitudinous life with which the novel deals, and surely no dogma which
pretends to make it lawful to touch the one and unlawful to touch the
other will stand for a moment on its feet. It is the special picture
that must stand or fall, according as it seems to possess truth or to
lack it. Mr. Besant does not, to my sense, light up the subject by
intimating that a story must, under penalty of not being a story,
consist of "adventures." Why of adventures more than of green
spectacles? He mentions a category of impossible things, and among them
he places "fiction without adventure." Why without adventure, more than
without matrimony, or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or
hydropathy, or Jansenism? This seems to me to bring the novel back to
the hapless little rôle of being an artificial, ingenious thing-bring it
down from its large, free character of an immense and exquisite
correspondence with life. And what is adventure, when it comes to that,
and by what sign is the listening pupil to recognise it? It is an
adventure--an immense one--for me to write this little article; and for a
Bostonian nymph to reject an English duke is an adventure only less
stirring, I should say, than for an English duke to be rejected by a
Bostonian nymph. I see dramas within dramas in that, and innumerable
points of view. A psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object
adorably pictorial; to catch the tint of its complexion-I feel as if
that idea might inspire one to Titianesque efforts. There are few things
more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason, and yet, I
protest, the novel seems to me the most magnificent form of art. I have
just been reading, at the same time, the delightful story of Treasure
Island, by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, and the last tale from M. Edmond
de Goncourt, which is entitled Chérie. One of these works treats of
murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes,
miraculous coincidences and buried doubloons. The other treats of a
little French girl who lived in a fine house in Paris and died of
wounded sensibility because no one would marry her. I call Treasure
Island delightful, because it appears to me to have succeeded
wonderfully in what it attempts; and I venture to bestow no epithet upon
Chérie, which strikes me as having failed in what it attempts-that is,
in tracing the development of the moral consciousness of a child. But
one of these productions strikes me as exactly as much of a novel as the
other, and as having a 'story' quite as much. The moral consciousness
of a child is as much a part of life as the islands of the Spanish Main,
and the one sort of geography seems to me to have those 'surprises' of
which Mr. Besant speaks quite as much as the other. For myself (since it
comes back in the last resort, as I say, to the preference of the
individual), the picture of the child's experience has the advantage
that I can at successive steps (an immense luxury, near to the 'sensual
pleasure' of which Mr. Besant's critic in the Pall Mall speaks) say Yes
or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before me. I have been a
child, but I have never been on a quest for a buried treasure, and it is
a simple accident that with M. de Goncourt I should have for the most
part to say No. With George Eliot, when she painted that country, I
always said Yes.
The most interesting part of Mr.
Besant's lecture is unfortunately the briefest passage--his very cursory
allusion to the "conscious moral purpose" of the novel. Here again it
is not very clear whether he is recording a fact or laying down a
principle; it is a great pity that in the latter case he should not have
developed his idea. This branch of the subject is of immense
importance, and Mr. Besant's few words point to considerations of the
widest reach, not to be lightly disposed of. He will have treated the
art of fiction but superficially who is not prepared to go every inch of
the way that these considerations will carry him. It is for this reason
that at the beginning of these remarks I was careful to notify the
reader that my reflections on so large a theme have no pretension to be
exhaustive. Like Mr. Besant, I have left the question of the morality of
the novel till the last, and at the last I find I have used up my
space. It is a question surrounded with difficulties, as witness the
very first that meets us, in the form of a definite question, on the
threshold. Vagueness, in such a discussion, is fatal, and what is the
meaning of your morality and your conscious moral purpose? Will you not
define your terms and explain how (a novel being a picture) a picture
can be either moral or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture or
carve a moral statue; will you not tell us how you would set about it?
We are discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in
the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another
affair, and will you not let us see how it is that you find it so easy
to mix them up? These things are so clear to Mr. Besant that he has
deduced from them a law which he sees embodied in English Fiction and
which is "a truly admirable thing and a great cause for congratulation."
It is a great cause for congratulation, indeed, when such thorny
problems become as smooth as silk. I may add that, in so far as Mr.
Besant perceives that in point of fact English Fiction has addressed
itself preponderantly to these delicate questions, he will appear to
many people to have made a vain discovery. They will have been
positively struck, on the contrary, with the moral timidity of the usual
English novelist; with his (or with her) aversion to face the
difficulties with which, on every side, the treatment of reality
bristles. He is apt to be extremely shy (whereas the picture that Mr.
Besant draws is a picture of boldness), and the sign of his work, for
the most part, is a cautious silence on certain subjects. In the English
novel (by which I mean the American as well), more than in any other,
there is a traditional difference between that which people know and
that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and
that which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and
that which they allow to enter into literature. There is the great
difference, in short, between what they talk of in conversation and what
they talk of in print. The essence of moral energy is to survey the
whole field, and I should directly reverse Mr. Besant's remark, and say
not that the English novel has a purpose, but that it has a diffidence.
To what degree a purpose in a work of art is a source of corruption I
shall not attempt to inquire; the one that seems to me least dangerous
is the purpose of making a perfect work. As for our novel, I may say,
lastly, on this score, that, as we find it in England to-day, it strikes
me as addressed in a large degree to "young people," and that this in
itself constitutes a presumption that it will be rather shy. There are
certain things which it is generally agreed not to discuss, not even to
mention, before young people. That is very well, but the absence of
discussion is not a symptom of the moral passion. The purpose of the
English novel--"a truly admirable thing, and a great cause for
congratulation"--strikes me, therefore, as rather negative.
There
is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very
near together; that is, in the light of the very obvious truth that the
deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind
of the producer. In proportion as that mind is rich and noble will the
novel, the picture, the statue, partake of the substance of beauty and
truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have
purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind;
that seems to me an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, will cover
all needful moral ground; if the youthful aspirant take it to heart it
will illuminate for him many of the mysteries of "purpose." There are
many other useful things that might be said to him, but I have come to
the end of my article, and can only touch them as I pass. The critic in
the Pall Mall Gazette, whom I have already quoted, draws attention to
the danger, in speaking of the art of fiction, of generalizing. The
danger that he has in mind is rather, I imagine, that of
particularizing, for there are some comprehensive remarks which, in
addition to those embodied in Mr. Besant's suggestive lecture, might,
without fear of misleading him, be addressed to the ingenuous student. I
should remind him first of the magnificence of the form that is open to
him, which offers to sight so few restrictions and such innumerable
opportunities. The other arts, in comparison, appear confined and
hampered; the various conditions under which they are exercised are so
rigid and definite. But the only condition that I can think of attaching
to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be
interesting. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson
of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. "Enjoy it as it
deserves," I should say to him; "take possession of it, explore it to
its utmost extent, reveal it, rejoice in it. All life belongs to you,
and don't listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of
it and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to
those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way
outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air and turning away
her head from the truth of things. There is no impression of life, no
manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist
may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so
dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens
and Gustave Flaubert, have worked in this field with equal glory. Don't
think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the colour of
life itself. In France to-day we see a prodigious effort (that of Emile
Zola, to whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of
the novel can allude without respect), we see an extraordinary effort
vitiated by a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis. M. Zola is
magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he has an air
of working in the dark; if he had as much light as energy his results
would be of the highest value. As for the aberrations of a shallow
optimism, the ground (of English fiction especially) is strewn with
their brittle particles as with broken glass. If you must indulge in
conclusions let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember that
your first duty is to be as complete as possible-to make as perfect a
work. Be generous and delicate, and then, in the vulgar phrase, go in!"
OR
Listen to the LibriVox recording MP3 of "The Art of Fiction", by Henry James and Walter Besant
A lecture on the art of fiction, given by the English critic Walter
Besant on April 25, 1884, and an answer to the lecture by American
writer Henry James in the same year.
- Lecture Part 1 - 00:04:45
- Lecture Part 2 - 00:40:17
- Response to the Lecture - 01:03:26
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