,,the ,,writing ,,of ,,fiction ,the ,writing of ,fiction ,by ,,edith ,,wharton ,order the beauty even of ,beauty is4 --,,thomas ,,traherne4 ,,charles ,,scribner',s ,,sons ,,new ,,york ,,london #aibe ,,copyright1 #aibd1 #aibe1 ,,by ,,charles ,,scribner',s ,,sons ,,copyright1 #aibe1 ,,by ,,the ,,yale ,,publishing ,,association1 ,,inc4 ,printed in the ,united ,states of ,america ,illustration ,,to ,,gaillard ,,lapsley ,,contents ,,page ,i4 ,,in ,,general #a ,,ii4 ,,telling ,a ,,short ,,story #ca ,,iii4 ,,constructing ,a ,,novel #ei ,,iv4 ,,character ,,and ,,situation ,,in ,,the ,,novel #abc ,v4 ,,marcel ,,proust #adi ,,the ,,writing ,,of ,,fiction ,i ,,in ,,general ,,the ,,writing ,,of ,,fiction ,i ,,in ,,general ,i ,to treat of the practice of fiction is to deal with the newest1 most fluid and least formulated of the arts4 ,the exploration of origins is always fascinating2 but the attempt to relate the modern novel to the tale of ,joseph and his ,brethren is of purely historic interest4 ,modern fiction really began when the 8action0 of the novel was transferred from the street to the soul2 and this step was probably first taken when ,madame de ,la ,fayette1 in the seventeenth century1 wrote a little story called 8,la ,princesse de ,clves10 a story of hopeless love and mute renunciation in which the stately tenor of the lives depicted is hardly ruffled by the exultations and agonies succeeding each other below the surface4 ,the next advance was made when the protagonists of this new inner drama were transformed from conventionalized puppets--the hero1 the heroine1 the villain1 the heavy father and so on--into breathing and recognizable human beings4 ,here again a ,french novelist--the ,abb ,prvost--led the way with 8,manon ,lescaut02 but his drawing of character seems summary and schematic when his people are compared with the first great figure in modern fiction--the appalling 8,neveu de ,rameau40 ,it was not till long after ,diderot's death that the author of so many brilliant tales peopled with eighteenth century puppets was found1 in the creation of that one sordid1 cynical and desolately human figure1 to have anticipated not only ,balzac but ,dostoievsky4 ,but even from 8,manon ,lescaut0 and the 8,neveu de ,rameau10 even from ,lesage1 ,defoe1 ,fielding1 ,smollett1 ,richardson1 and ,scott1 modern fiction is differentiated by the great dividing geniuses of ,balzac and ,stendhal4 ,save for that one amazing accident of ,diderot's1 ,balzac was the first not only to see his people1 physically and morally1 in their habit as they lived1 with all their personal hobbies and infirmities1 and make the reader see them1 but to draw his dramatic action as much from the relation of his characters to their houses1 streets1 towns1 professions1 inherited habits and opinions1 as from their fortuitous contacts with each other4 ,balzac himself ascribed the priority in this kind of realism to ,scott1 from whom the younger novelist avowedly derived his chief inspiration4 ,but1 as ,balzac observed1 ,scott1 so keen and direct in surveying the rest of his field of vision1 became conventional and hypocritical when he touched on love and women4 ,in deference to the wave of prudery which overswept ,england after the vulgar excesses of the ,hanoverian court he substituted sentimentality for passion1 and reduced his heroines to 8,keepsake0 insipidities2 whereas in the firm surface of ,balzac's realism there is hardly a flaw1 and his women1 the young as well as the old1 are living people1 as much compact of human contradictions and torn with human passions as his misers1 his financiers1 his priests or his doctors4 ,stendhal1 though as indifferent as any eighteenth century writer to atmosphere and 8local colour10 is intensely modern and realistic in the individualizing of his characters1 who were never types 7to the extent even of some of ,balzac's7 but always sharply differentiated and particular human beings4 ,more distinctively still does he represent the new fiction by his insight into the springs of social action4 ,no modern novelist has ever gone nearer than ,racine did in his tragedies to the sources of personal1 of individual feeling2 and some of the ,french novelists of the eighteenth century are still unsurpassed 7save by ,racine7 in the last refinements of individual soul-analysis4 ,what was new in both ,balzac and ,stendhal was the fact of their viewing each character first of all as a product of particular material and social conditions1 as being thus or thus because of the calling he pursued or the house he lived in 7,balzac71 or the society he wanted to get into 7,stendhal71 or the acre of ground he coveted1 or the powerful or fashionable personage he aped or envied 7both ,balzac and ,stendhal74 ,these novelists 7with the solitary exception of ,defoe1 when he wrote 8,moll ,flanders07 are the first to seem continuously aware that the bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line1 but that each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things4 ,the characterization of all the novelists who preceded these two masters seems1 in comparison1 incomplete or immature4 ,even ,richardson's seems so1 in the most penetrating pages of 8,clarissa ,harlowe10 even ,goethe's in that uncannily modern novel1 the 8,elective ,affinities0--because1 in the case of these writers1 the people so elaborately dissected are hung in the void1 unvisualized and unconditioned 7or almost7 by the special outward circumstances of their lives4 ,they are subtly analyzed abstractions of humanity1 to whom only such things happen as might happen to almost any one in any walk of life--the inevitable eternal human happenings4 ,since ,balzac and ,stendhal1 fiction has reached out in many new directions1 and made all sorts of experiments2 but it has never ceased to cultivate the ground they cleared for it1 or gone back to the realm of abstractions4 ,it is still1 however1 an art in the making1 fluent and dirigible1 and combining a past full enough for the deduction of certain general principles with a future rich in untried possibilities4 ,,ii ,on the threshold of any theory of art its exponent is sure to be asked3 8,on what first assumption does your theory rest80 ,and in fiction1 as in every other art1 the only answer seems to be that any theory must begin by assuming the need of selection4 ,it seems curious that even now--and perhaps more than ever--one should have to explain and defend what is no more than the rule underlying the most artless verbal statement4 ,no matter how restricted an incident one is trying to give an account of1 it cannot but be fringed with details more and more remotely relevant1 and beyond that with an outer mass of irrelevant facts which may crowd on the narrator simply because of some accidental propinquity in time or space4 ,to choose between all this material is the first step toward coherent expression4 ,a generation ago this was so generally taken for granted that to state it would have seemed pedantic4 ,in every-day intercourse the principle survives in the injunction to stick to the point2 but the novelist who applies--or owns up to applying--this rule to his art1 is nowadays accused of being absorbed in technique to the exclusion of the supposedly contrary element of 8human interest40 ,even now1 the charge would hardly be worth taking up had it not lately helped to refurbish the old trick of the early ,french 8realists10 that group of brilliant writers who invented the once-famous tranche de vie1 the exact photographic reproduction of a situation or an episode1 with all its sounds1 smells1 aspects realistically rendered1 but with its deeper relevance and its suggestions of a larger whole either unconsciously missed or purposely left out4 ,now that half a century has elapsed1 one sees that those among this group of writers who survive are still readable in spite of their constricting theory1 or in proportion as they forgot about it once they closed with their subject4 ,such are ,maupassant1 who packed into his brief masterpieces so deep a psychological significance and so sure a sense of larger relations2 ,zola1 whose 8slices0 became the stuff of great romantic allegories in which the forces of ,nature and ,industry are the huge cloudy protagonists1 as in a ,pilgrim's ,progress of man's material activities2 and the ,goncourts1 whose ,french instinct for psychological analysis always made them seize on the more significant morsel of the famous slices4 ,as for the pupils1 the mere conscientious appliers of the system1 they have all blown away with the theory1 after a briefer popularity than writers of equal talent might have enjoyed had they not thus narrowed their scope4 ,an instance in proof is ,feydeau's 8,fanny10 one of the few 8psychological0 novels of that generation1 and a slight enough adventure in soul-searching compared with the great 8,madame ,bovary0 7which it was supposed at the time to surpass71 but still readable enough to have kept the author's name alive1 while most of his minor contemporaries are buried under the unappetizing dbris of their 8slices40 ,it seemed necessary to revert to the slice-of-life because it has lately reappeared1 marked by certain unimportant differences1 and re-labelled the stream of consciousness2 and1 curiously enough1 without its new exponents' appearing aware that they are not also its originators4 ,this time the theory seems to have sprung up first in ,england and ,america2 but it has already spread to certain of the younger ,french novelists1 who are just now1 confusedly if admiringly1 rather overconscious of recent tendencies in ,english and ,american fiction4 ,the stream of consciousness method differs from the slice-of-life in noting mental as well as visual reactions1 but resembles it in setting them down just as they come1 with a deliberate disregard of their relevance in the particular case1 or rather with the assumption that their very unsorted abundance constitutes in itself the author's subject4 ,this attempt to note down every half-aware stirring of thought and sensation1 the automatic reactions to every passing impression1 is not as new as its present exponents appear to think4 ,it has been used by most of the greatest novelists1 not as an end in itself1 but as it happened to serve their general design3 as when their object was to portray a mind in one of those moments of acute mental stress when it records with meaningless precision a series of disconnected impressions4 ,the value of such 8effects0 in making vivid a tidal rush of emotion has never been unknown since fiction became psychological1 and novelists grew aware of the intensity with which1 at such times1 irrelevant trifles impinge upon the brain2 but they have never been deluded by the idea that the subconscious--that ,mrs4 ,harris of the psychologists--could in itself furnish the materials for their art4 ,all the greatest of them1 from ,balzac and ,thackeray onward1 have made use of the stammerings and murmurings of the half-conscious mind whenever--but only when--such a state of mental flux fitted into the whole picture of the person portrayed4 ,their observation showed them that in the world of normal men life is conducted1 at least in its decisive moments1 on fairly coherent and selective lines1 and that only thus can the great fundamental affairs of bread-getting and home-and-tribe organizing be carried on4 ,drama1 situation1 is made out of the conflicts thus produced between social order and individual appetites1 and the art of rendering life in fiction can never1 in the last analysis1 be anything1 or need to be anything1 but the disengaging of crucial moments from the welter of existence4 ,these moments need not involve action in the sense of external events2 they seldom have1 since the scene of conflict was shifted from incident to character4 ,but there must be something that makes them crucial1 some recognizable relation to a familiar social or moral standard1 some explicit awareness of the eternal struggle between man's contending impulses1 if the tales embodying them are to fix the attention and hold the memory4 ,,iii ,the distrust of technique and the fear of being unoriginal--both symptoms of a certain lack of creative abundance--are in truth leading to pure anarchy in fiction1 and one is almost tempted to say that in certain schools formlessness is now regarded as the first condition of form4 ,not long ago ,i heard a man of letters declare that ,dostoievsky was superior to ,tolstoy because his mind was 8more chaotic10 and he could therefore render more 8truthfully0 the chaos of the ,russian mind in general2 though how chaos can be apprehended and defined by a mind immersed in it1 the speaker did not make clear4 ,the assertion1 of course1 was the result of confusing imaginative emotivity with its objective rendering4 ,what the speaker meant was that the novelist who would create a given group of people or portray special social conditions must be able to identify himself with them2 which is rather a long way of saying that an artist must have imagination4 ,the chief difference between the merely sympathetic and the creative imagination is that the latter is two-sided1 and combines with the power of penetrating into other minds that of standing far enough aloof from them to see beyond1 and relate them to the whole stuff of life out of which they but partially emerge4 ,such an all-round view can be obtained only by mounting to a height2 and that height1 in art1 is proportioned to the artist's power of detaching one part of his imagination from the particular problem in which the rest is steeped4 ,one of the causes of the confusion of judgment on this point is no doubt the perilous affinity between the art of fiction and the material it works in4 ,it has been so often said that all art is re-presentation--the giving back in conscious form of the shapeless raw material of experience--that one would willingly avoid insisting on such a truism4 ,but while there is no art of which the saying is truer than of fiction1 there is none in respect of which there is more danger of the axiom's being misinterpreted4 ,the attempt to give back any fragment of life in painting or sculpture or music presupposes transposition1 8stylization40 ,to re-present in words is far more difficult1 because the relation is so close between model and artist4 ,the novelist works in the very material out of which the object he is trying to render is made4 ,he must use1 to express soul1 the signs which soul uses to express itself4 ,it is relatively easy to separate the artistic vision of an object from its complex and tangled actuality if one has to re-see it in paint or marble or bronze2 it is infinitely difficult to render a human mind when one is employing the very word-dust with which thought is formulated4 ,still1 the transposition does take place as surely1 if not as obviously1 in a novel as in a statue4 ,if it did not1 the writing of fiction could never be classed among works of art1 products of conscious ordering and selecting1 and there would consequently be nothing to say about it1 since there seems to be no way of estimating sthetically anything to which no standard of choice can be applied4 ,another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity1 the dread of doing what has been done before2 for though one of the instincts of youth is imitation1 another1 equally imperious1 is that of fiercely guarding against it4 ,in this respect1 the novelist of the present day is in danger of being caught in a vicious circle1 for the insatiable demand for quick production tends to keep him in a state of perpetual immaturity1 and the ready acceptance of his wares encourages him to think that no time need be wasted in studying the past history of his art1 or in speculating on its principles4 ,this conviction strengthens the belief that the so-called quality of 8originality0 may be impaired by too long brooding on one's theme and too close a commerce with the past2 but the whole history of that past--in every domain of art--disproves this by what survives1 and shows that every subject1 to yield and to retain its full flavour1 should be long carried in the mind1 brooded upon1 and fed with all the impressions and emotions which nourish its creator4 ,true originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision4 ,that new1 that personal1 vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own2 and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience4 ,to know any one thing one must not only know something of a great many others1 but also1 as ,matthew ,arnold long since pointed out1 a great deal more of one's immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly includes2 and ,mr4 ,kipling's 8,what should they know of ,england who only ,england know80 might be taken as the symbolic watchword of the creative artist4 ,one is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the 8fiction course0 is getting the fiction it deserves4 ,at any rate it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous1 and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms4 ,but though the trade-wind in fiction undoubtedly drives many beginners along the line of least resistance1 and holds them there1 it is far from being the sole cause of the present quest for short-cuts in art4 ,there are writers indifferent to popular success1 and even contemptuous of it1 who sincerely believe that this line marks the path of the true vocation4 ,many people assume that the artist receives1 at the outset of his career1 the mysterious sealed orders known as 8,inspiration10 and has only to let that sovereign impulse carry him where it will4 ,inspiration does indeed come at the outset to every creator1 but it comes most often as an infant1 helpless1 stumbling1 inarticulate1 to be taught and guided2 and the beginner1 during this time of training his gift1 is as likely to misuse it as a young parent to make mistakes in teaching his first child4 ,there is no doubt that in this day of general 8speeding up10 the 8inspirational0 theory is seductive even to those who care nothing for easy triumphs4 ,no writer--especially at the beginning of his career--can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that awaits him2 and the young novelist may ask of what use are experience and meditation1 when his readers are so incapable of giving him either4 ,the answer is that he will never do his best till he ceases altogether to think of his readers 7and his editor and his publisher7 and begins to write1 not for himself1 but for that other self with whom the creative artist is always in mysterious correspondence1 and who1 happily1 has an objective existence somewhere1 and will some day receive the message sent to him1 though the sender may never know it4 ,as to experience1 intellectual and moral1 the creative imagination can make a little go a long way1 provided it remains long enough in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon4 ,one good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs1 and the novelist with a considerable number of novels4 ,but they must have hearts that can break4 ,even to the writer least concerned with popularity it is difficult1 at first1 to defend his personality4 ,study and meditation contain their own perils4 ,counsellors intervene with contradictory advice and instances4 ,in such cases these counsellors are most often other people's novels3 the great novels of the past1 which haunt the beginner like a passion1 and the works of his contemporaries1 which pull him this way and that with too-persuasive hands4 ,his impulse1 at first1 will be either to shun them1 to his own impoverishment1 or to let his dawning individuality be lost in theirs2 but gradually he will come to see that he must learn to listen to them1 take all they can give1 absorb it into himself1 and then turn to his own task with the fixed resolve to see life only through his own eyes4 ,even then another difficulty remains2 the mysterious discrepancy which sometimes exists between a novelist's vision of life and his particular kind of talent4 ,not infrequently an innate tendency to see things in large masses is combined with the technical inability to render them otherwise than separately1 meticulously1 on a small scale4 ,perhaps more failures than one is aware of are due to this particular lack of proportion between the powers of vision and expression4 ,at any rate1 it is the cause of some painful struggles and arid dissatisfactions2 and the only remedy is resolutely to abandon the larger for the smaller field1 to narrow one's vision to one's pencil1 and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially4 ,of twenty subjects that tempt the imagination 7subjects one sees one's self doing1 oh so wonderfully1 if only one were ,mrime or ,maupassant1 or ,conrad or ,mr4 ,kipling67 probably but one is 8fit for the hand0 of the limited person one happens to be2 and to learn to renounce the others is a first step toward doing that particular one well4 ,,iv ,these considerations have led straight to the great1 the central1 matter of subject2 and inextricably interwoven with it are the subsidiary points of form and style1 both of which ought1 as it were1 to spring naturally out of the particular theme chosen for representation4 ,form might perhaps1 for present purposes1 be defined as the order1 in time and importance1 in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped2 and style as the way in which they are presented1 not only in the narrower sense of language1 but also1 and rather1 as they are grasped and coloured by their medium1 the narrator's mind1 and given back in his words4 ,it is the quality of the medium which gives these incidents their quality2 style1 in this sense1 is the most personal ingredient in the combination of things out of which any work of art is made4 ,words are the exterior symbols of thought1 and it is only by their exact use that the writer can keep on his subject the close and patient hold which 8fishes the murex up10 and steeps his creation in unfading colours4 ,style in this definition is discipline2 and the self-consecration it demands1 and the bearing it has on the whole of the artist's effort1 have been admirably summed up by ,marcel ,proust in that searching chapter of 8,a l',ombre des ,jeunes ,filles en ,fleurs0 where he analyzes the art of fiction in the person of the great novelist ,bergotte4 8,the severity of his taste1 his unwillingness to write anything of which he could not say1 in his favourite phrase3 #8,c'est doux' harmonious1 delicious1 this determination1 which had caused him to spend so many seemingly fruitless years in the #8precious' carving of trifles1 was in reality the secret of his strength2 for habit makes the style of the writer as it makes the character of the man1 and the author who has several times contented himself with expressing his thought in an approximately pleasing way has once and for all set a boundary to his talent1 and will never pass beyond40 ,these definitions of form and style being established1 and the preliminary need of the harmony between an author's talent and his argument being assumed1 one is next faced by the profounder problem of the inherent fitness of any given subject as material for the imagination4 ,it has been often said that subject in itself is all-important1 and at least as often that it is of no importance whatever4 ,definition is again necessary before the truth can be extracted from these contradictions4 ,subject1 obviously1 is what the story is about2 but whatever the central episode or situation chosen by the novelist1 his tale will be about only just so much of it as he reacts to4 ,a gold mine is worth nothing unless the owner has the machinery for extracting the ore1 and each subject must be considered first in itself1 and next in relation to the novelist's power of extracting from it what it contains4 ,there are subjects trivial in appearance1 and subjects trivial to the core2 and the novelist ought to be able to discern at a glance between the two1 and know in which case it is worth while to set about sinking his shaft4 ,but the novelist may make mistakes4 ,he is exposed to the temptation of the false good-subject1 and learns only by prolonged experience to resist surface-attractions1 and probe his story to the depths before he begins to tell it4 ,there is still another way in which subject must be tested4 ,any subject considered in itself must first of all respond in some way to that mysterious need of a judgment on life of which the most detached human intellect1 provided it be a normal one1 cannot1 apparently1 rid itself4 ,whether the 8moral0 be present in the guise of the hero rescuing the heroine from the villain at the point of the revolver1 or whether it lurk in the quiet irony of such a scene as ,pendennis's visit to the ,grey ,friars' ,chapel1 and his hearing the choir singing 8,i have been young1 and now am old2 yet have ,i not seen the righteous forsaken1 nor his seed begging their bread10 at the very moment when he discovers the bent head of ,colonel ,newcome among the pauper gentlemen--in one form or another there must be some sort of rational response to the reader's unconscious but insistent inner question3 8,what am ,i being told this story for8 ,what judgment on life does it contain for me80 ,there seems to be no escape from this obligation except into a pathological world where the action1 taking place between people of abnormal psychology1 and not keeping time with our normal human rhythms1 becomes an idiot's tale1 signifying nothing4 ,in vain has it been attempted to set up a water-tight compartment between 8art0 and 8morality40 ,all the great novelists whose books have been used to point the argument have invariably declared themselves on the other side1 not only by the inner significance of their work1 but also1 in some cases1 by the most explicit statements4 ,flaubert1 for instance1 so often cited as the example of the writer viewing his themes in a purely 8scientific0 or amoral light1 has disproved the claim by providing the other camp with that perfect formula3 8,plus la pense est belle1 plus la phrase est sonore0--not the metaphor1 not the picture1 but the thought4 ,a good subject1 then1 must contain in itself something that sheds a light on our moral experience4 ,if it is incapable of this expansion1 this vital radiation1 it remains1 however showy a surface it presents1 a mere irrelevant happening1 a meaningless scrap of fact torn out of its context4 ,nor is it more than a half-truth to say that the imagination which probes deep enough can find this germ in any happening1 however insignificant4 ,the converse is true enough3 the limited imagination reduces a great theme to its own measure4 ,but the wide creative vision1 though no fragment of human experience can appear wholly empty to it1 yet seeks by instinct those subjects in which some phase of our common plight stands forth dramatically and typically1 subjects which1 in themselves1 are a kind of summary or foreshortening of life's dispersed and inconclusive occurrences4 ,,ii ,,telling ,a ,,short ,,story ,,ii ,,telling ,a ,,short ,,story ,i ,like the modern novel1 the modern short story seems to have originated--or at least received its present stamp--in ,france4 ,english writers1 in this line1 were slower in attaining the point to which the ,french and ,russians first carried the art4 ,since then the short story has developed1 and reached out in fresh directions1 in the hands of such novelists as ,mr4 ,hardy 7only occasionally at his best in this form71 of ,stevenson1 ,james1 and ,conrad1 all three almost unfailingly excellent in it1 of ,mr4 ,kipling1 past-master of the conte1 and ,sir ,arthur ,quiller-,couch1 whose delightful early volumes1 8,noughts and ,crosses0 and 8,i ,saw ,three ,ships10 are less known than they deserve to be4 ,these writers had long been preceded by ,scott in 8,wandering ,willy's ,tale0 and other short stories1 by ,poe1 the sporadic and unaccountable1 and by ,hawthorne2 but almost all the best tales of ,scott1 ,hawthorne1 and ,poe belong to that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic tradition4 ,when the novel of manners comes to be dealt with1 classification in order of time will have to be reversed1 and in order of merit will be less easy2 for even against ,balzac1 ,tolstoy1 and ,turgenev the genius of the great ,english observers1 from ,richardson and ,jane ,austen to ,thackeray and ,dickens1 will weigh heavily in the balance4 ,with regard to the short story1 however1 and especially to that compactest form of it1 the short short-story or conte1 its first specimens are undoubtedly of continental production2 but happily for ,english letters the generation who took over and adapted the formula were nursed on the ,goethean principle that 8those who remain imprisoned in the false notion of their own originality will always fall short of what they might have accomplished40 ,the sense of form--already defined as the order1 in time and importance1 in which the narrated incidents are grouped--is1 in all the arts1 specifically of the classic1 the ,latin tradition4 ,a thousand years of form 7in the widest disciplinary sense71 of its observance1 its application1 its tacit acceptance as the first condition of artistic expression1 have cleared the ground1 for the ,french writer of fiction1 of many superfluous encumbrances4 ,as the soil of ,france is of all soils the most weeded1 tilled1 and ductile1 so the field of art1 wherever ,french culture extends1 is the most worked-over and the most prepared for whatever seed is to be sown in it4 ,but when the great ,russians 7who owe to ,french culture much more than is generally conceded7 took over that neat thing1 the ,french nouvelle1 they gave it the additional dimension it most often lacked4 ,in any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears2 and the ,russians almost always dig to that depth4 ,the result has been to give to the short story1 as ,french and ,russian art have combined to shape it1 great closeness of texture with profundity of form4 ,instead of a loose web spread over the surface of life they have made it1 at its best1 a shaft driven straight into the heart of human experience4 ,,ii ,though the critic no longer feels that need of classifying and sub-classifying the genres which so preoccupied the contemporaries of ,wordsworth1 there are1 in all the arts1 certain local products that seem to necessitate a parenthesis4 ,such1 in fiction1 is the use of the supernatural4 ,it seems to have come from mysterious ,germanic and ,armorican forests1 from lands of long twilights and wailing winds2 and it certainly did not pass through ,french or even ,russian hands to reach us4 ,sorcerers and magic are of the south1 the ,mediterranean2 the witch of ,theocritus brewed a brew fit for her sister-hags of the ,scottish heath2 but the spectral apparition walks only in the pages of ,english and ,germanic fiction4 ,it has done so1 to great effect1 in some of the most original of our great ,english short stories1 from ,scott's 8,wandering ,willy0 and ,poe's awful hallucinations to ,le ,fanu's 8,watcher10 and from the 8,thrawn ,janet0 of ,stevenson to 8,the ,turn of the ,screw0 of ,henry ,james1 last great master of the eerie in ,english4 ,all these tales1 in which the effect sought is completely achieved1 are models of the subtlest artifice4 ,it is not enough to believe in ghosts1 or even to have seen one1 to be able to write a good ghost story4 ,the greater the improbability to be overcome the more studied must be the approach1 the more perfectly maintained the air of naturalness1 the easy assumption that things are always likely to happen in that way4 ,one of the chief obligations1 in a short story1 is to give the reader an immediate sense of security4 ,every phrase should be a sign-post1 and never 7unless intentionally7 a misleading one3 the reader must feel that he can trust to their guidance4 ,his confidence once gained1 he may be lured on to the most incredible adventures--as the ,arabian ,nights are there to show4 ,a wise critic once said3 8,you may ask your reader to believe anything you can make him believe40 ,it is never the genii who are unreal1 but only their unconvinced historian's description of them4 ,the least touch of irrelevance1 the least chill of inattention1 will instantly undo the spell1 and it will take as long to weave again as to get ,humpty ,dumpty back on his wall4 ,the moment the reader loses faith in the author's sureness of foot the chasm of improbability gapes4 ,improbability in itself1 then1 is never a danger1 but the appearance of improbability is2 unless1 indeed1 the tale be based on what1 in my first chapter1 ,i called pathological conditions--conditions of body or mind outside the field of normal experience4 ,but this term1 of course1 does not apply to states of mind inherited from an earlier phase of race-culture1 such as the belief in ghosts4 ,no one with a spark of imagination ever objected to a good ghost story as 8improbable0--though ,mrs4 ,barbauld1 who doubtless lacked the spark1 is said to have condemned 8,the ,ancient ,mariner0 on this ground4 ,most of us retain the more or less shadowy memory of ancestral terrors1 and airy tongues that syllable men's names4 ,we cannot believe a priori in the probability of the actions of madmen1 or neurasthenics1 because their reasoning processes escape most of us1 or can at best be imagined only as belonging to abnormal and exceptional people2 but everybody knows a good ghost when he reads about him4 ,when the reader's confidence is gained the next rule of the game is to avoid distracting and splintering up his attention4 ,many a would-be tale of horror becomes innocuous through the very multiplication and variety of its horrors4 ,above all1 if they are multiplied they should be cumulative and not dispersed4 ,but the fewer the better3 once the preliminary horror posited1 it is the harping on the same string--the same nerve--that does the trick4 ,quiet iteration is far more racking than diversified assaults2 the expected is more frightful than the unforeseen4 ,the play of 8,emperor ,jones0 is a striking instance of the power of simplification and repetition to excite in an audience a corresponding state of tension4 ,by sheer voodoo-practice it shows how voodoo acts4 ,in 8,the ,turn of the ,screw0--which stands alone among tales of the supernatural in maintaining the ghostliness of its ghosts not only through a dozen pages but through close on two hundred--the economy of horror is carried to its last degree4 ,what is the reader made to expect8 ,always--all through the book--that somewhere in that hushed house of doom the poor little governess will come on one of the two figures of evil with whom she is fighting for the souls of her charges4 ,it will be either ,peter ,quint or the 8horror of horrors10 ,miss ,jessel2 no diversion from this one dread is ever attempted or expected4 ,it is true that the tale is strongly held together by its profound1 its appalling moral significance2 but most readers will admit that1 long before they are conscious of this1 fear1 simple shivering animal fear1 has them by the throat2 which1 after all1 is what writers of ghost stories are after4 ,,iii ,it is sometimes said that a 8good subject0 for a short story should always be capable of being expanded into a novel4 ,the principle may be defendable in special cases2 but it is certainly a misleading one on which to build any general theory4 ,every 8subject0 7in the novelist's sense of the term7 must necessarily contain within itself its own dimensions2 and one of the fiction-writer's essential gifts is that of discerning whether the subject which presents itself to him1 asking for incarnation1 is suited to the proportions of a short story or of a novel4 ,if it appears to be adapted to both the chances are that it is inadequate to either4 ,it would be as great a mistake1 however1 to try to base a hard-and-fast theory on the denial of the rule as on its assertion4 ,instances of short stories made out of subjects that could have been expanded into a novel1 and that are yet typical short stories and not mere stunted novels1 will occur to every one4 ,general rules in art are useful chiefly as a lamp in a mine1 or a hand-rail down a black stairway2 they are necessary for the sake of the guidance they give1 but it is a mistake1 once they are formulated1 to be too much in awe of them4 ,there are at least two reasons why a subject should find expression in novel-form rather than as a tale2 but neither is based on the number of what may be conveniently called incidents1 or external happenings1 which the narrative contains4 ,there are novels of action which might be condensed into short stories without the loss of their distinguishing qualities4 ,the marks of the subject requiring a longer development are1 first1 the gradual unfolding of the inner life of its characters1 and secondly the need of producing in the reader's mind the sense of the lapse of time4 ,outward events of the most varied and exciting nature may without loss of probability be crowded into a few hours1 but moral dramas usually have their roots deep in the soul1 their rise far back in time2 and the suddenest-seeming clash in which they culminate should be led up to step by step if it is to explain and justify itself4 ,there are cases1 indeed1 when the short story may make use of the moral drama at its culmination4 ,if the incident dealt with be one which a single retrospective flash sufficiently lights up1 it is qualified for use as a short story2 but if the subject be so complex1 and its successive phases so interesting1 as to justify elaboration1 the lapse of time must necessarily be suggested1 and the novel-form becomes appropriate4 ,the effect of compactness and instantaneity sought in the short story is attained mainly by the observance of two 8unities0--the old traditional one of time1 and that other1 more modern and complex1 which requires that any rapidly enacted episode shall be seen through only one pair of eyes4 ,it is fairly obvious that nothing is more retarding than the marking of a time-interval long enough to suggest modification in the personages of the tale or in their circumstances4 ,the use of such an interval inevitably turns the short story into a long tale unduly compressed1 the bald scenario of a novel4 ,in the third chapter1 where an attempt will be made to examine the technique of the novel1 it will be needful to explore that central mystery--of which ,tolstoy was perhaps the one complete master--the art of creating in the reader's mind this sense of passing time4 ,meanwhile1 it may be pointed out that a third1 and intermediate1 form of tale--the long short-story--is available for any subject too spreading for conciseness yet too slight in texture to be stretched into a novel4 ,the other unity1 that of vision1 will also be dealt with in considering the novel1 in respect of which it becomes a matter much more complicated4 ,henry ,james1 almost the only novelist who has formulated his ideas about his art1 was the first to lay down the principle1 though it had long 7if intermittently7 been observed by the masters of fiction4 ,it may have occurred to other novelists--presumably it has--to ask themselves1 as they sat down to write3 ,who saw this thing ,i am going to tell about8 ,by whom do ,i mean that it shall be reported8 ,it seems as though such a question must precede any study of the subject chosen1 since the subject is conditioned by the answer2 but no critic appears to have propounded it1 and it was left to ,henry ,james to do so in one of those entangled prefaces to the ,definitive ,edition from which the technical axioms ought some day to be piously detached4 ,it is clear that exactly the same thing never happens to any two people1 and that each witness of a given incident will report it differently4 ,should some celestial task-master set the same theme to ,jane ,austen and ,george ,meredith the bewildered reader would probably have some difficulty in discovering the common denominator4 ,henry ,james1 in pointing this out1 also made the corollary suggestion that the mind chosen by the author to mirror his given case should be so situated1 and so constituted1 as to take the widest possible view of it4 ,one thing more is needful for the ultimate effect of probability2 and that is1 never to let the character who serves as reflector record anything not naturally within his register4 ,it should be the story-teller's first care to choose this reflecting mind deliberately1 as one would choose a building-site1 or decide upon the orientation of one's house1 and when this is done1 to live inside the mind chosen1 trying to feel1 see and react exactly as the latter would1 no more1 no less1 and1 above all1 no otherwise4 ,only thus can the writer avoid attributing incongruities of thought and metaphor to his chosen interpreter4 ,,iv ,it remains to try to see what constitutes 7in any permanent sense7 the underlying norm of the 8good short story40 ,a curious distinction between the successful tale and the successful novel at once presents itself4 ,it is safe to say 7since the surest way of measuring achievement in art is by survival7 that the test of the novel is that its people should be alive4 ,no subject in itself1 however fruitful1 appears to be able to keep a novel alive2 only the characters in it can4 ,of the short story the same cannot be said4 ,some of the greatest short stories owe their vitality entirely to the dramatic rendering of a situation4 ,undoubtedly the characters engaged must be a little more than puppets2 but apparently1 also1 they may be a little less than individual human beings4 ,in this respect the short story1 rather than the novel1 might be called the direct descendant of the old epic or ballad--of those earlier forms of fiction in all of which action was the chief affair1 and the characters1 if they did not remain mere puppets1 seldom or never became more than types--such as the people1 for instance1 in ,molire4 ,the reason of the difference is obvious4 ,type1 general character1 may be set forth in a few strokes1 but the progression1 the unfolding of personality1 of which the reader instinctively feels the need if the actors in the tale are to retain their individuality for him through a succession of changing circumstances--this slow but continuous growth requires space1 and therefore belongs by definition to a larger1 a symphonic plan4 ,the chief technical difference between the short story and the novel may therefore be summed up by saying that situation is the main concern of the short story1 character of the novel2 and it follows that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form1 or presentation4 ,even more--yes1 and much more--than in the construction of the novel1 the impression of vividness1 of presentness1 in the affair narrated1 has to be sought1 and made sure of beforehand1 by that careful artifice which is the real carelessness of art4 ,the short-story writer must not only know from what angle to present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires1 but must understand just why that particular angle and no other is the right one4 ,he must therefore have turned his subject over and over1 walked around it1 so to speak1 and applied to it those laws of perspective which ,paolo ,uccello called 8so beautiful10 before it can be offered to the reader as a natural unembellished fragment of experience1 detached like a ripe fruit from the tree4 ,the moment the writer begins to grope in the tangle of his 8material10 to hesitate between one and another of the points that any actual happening thrusts up in such disorderly abundance1 the reader feels a corresponding hesitancy1 and the illusion of reality vanishes4 ,the non-observance of the optics of the printed page results in the same failure to make the subject 8carry0 as the non-observance of the optics of the stage in presenting a play4 ,by all means let the writer of short stories reduce the technical trick to its minimum--as the cleverest actresses put on the least paint2 but let him always bear in mind that the surviving minimum is the only bridge between the reader's imagination and his4 ,v ,nietzsche said that it took genius to 8make an end0--that is1 to give the touch of inevitableness to the conclusion of any work of art4 ,in the art of fiction this is peculiarly true of the novel1 that slowly built-up monument in which every stone has its particular weight and thrust to carry and of which the foundations must be laid with a view to the proportions of the highest tower4 ,of the short story1 on the contrary1 it might be said that the writer's first care should be to know how to make a beginning4 ,that an inadequate or unreal ending diminishes the short tale in value as much as the novel need hardly be added1 since it is proved with depressing regularity by the machine-made 8magazine story0 to which one or the other of half-a-dozen 8standardized0 endings is automatically adjusted at the four-thousand-five-hundredth word of whatsoever has been narrated4 ,obviously1 as every subject contains its own dimensions1 so is its conclusion ab ovo2 and the failure to end a tale in accordance with its own deepest sense must deprive it of meaning4 ,none the less1 the short-story writer's first concern1 once he has mastered his subject1 is to study what musicians call the 8attack40 ,the rule that the first page of a novel ought to contain the germ of the whole is even more applicable to the short story1 because in the latter case the trajectory is so short that flash and sound nearly coincide4 ,benvenuto ,cellini relates in his ,autobiography that one day1 as a child1 while he sat by the hearth with his father1 they both saw a salamander in the fire4 ,even then the sight must have been unusual1 for the father instantly boxed his son's ears so that he should never forget what he had seen4 ,this anecdote might serve as an apothegm for the writer of short stories4 ,if his first stroke be vivid and telling the reader's attention will be instantly won4 ,the 8#8,hell1' said the ,duchess as she lit her cigar0 with which an ,eton boy is said to have begun a tale for his school magazine1 in days when ,duchesses less commonly smoked and swore1 would undoubtedly have carried his narrative to posterity if what followed had been at the same level4 ,this leads to another point3 it is useless to box your reader's ear unless you have a salamander to show him4 ,if the heart of your little blaze is not animated by a living1 moving something no shouting and shaking will fix the anecdote in your reader's memory4 ,the salamander stands for that fundamental significance that made the story worth telling4 ,the arrest of attention by a vivid opening should be something more than a trick4 ,it should mean that the narrator has so brooded on this subject that it has become his indeed1 so made over and synthesized within him that1 as a great draughtsman gives the essentials of a face or landscape in a half-a-dozen strokes1 the narrator can 8situate0 his tale in an opening passage which shall be a clue to all the detail eliminated4 ,the clue given1 the writer has only to follow4 ,but his grasp must be firm2 he must never for an instant forget what he wants to tell1 or why it seemed worth telling4 ,and this intensity of hold on his subject presupposes1 before the telling of even a short story1 a good deal of thinking over4 ,just because the limits of the form selected prevent his producing the semblance of reality by elaborating his characters1 is the short-story writer the more bound to make real the adventure in itself4 ,a well-known ,french confectioner in ,new ,york was once asked why his chocolate1 good as it was1 was not equal to that made in ,paris4 ,he replied3 8,because1 on account of the expense1 we cannot work it over as many times as the ,french confectioner can40 ,other homely analogies confirm the lesson3 the seemingly simplest sauces are those that have been most cunningly combined and then most completely blent1 the simplest-looking dresses those that require most study to design4 ,the precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience which1 if it be not genius1 must be one of genius's chief reliances in communicating itself4 ,on this point repetition and insistence are excusable3 the shorter the story1 the more stripped of detail and 8cleared for action10 the more it depends for its effect not only on the choice of what is kept when the superfluous has been jettisoned1 but on the order in which these essentials are set forth4 ,,vi ,nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the short-story writer from another danger3 that of contenting himself with a mere sketch of the episode selected4 ,the temptation to do so is all the greater because some critics1 in their resentment of the dense and the prolix1 have tended to overestimate the tenuous and the tight4 ,mrime's tales are often cited as models of the conte2 but they are rather the breathless summaries of longer tales than the bold foreshortening of an episode from which all the significance it has to give has been adroitly extracted4 ,it is easy to be brief and sharply outlined if one does away with one or more dimensions2 the real achievement1 as certain tales of ,flaubert's and ,turgenev's1 of ,stevenson's and of ,maupassant's show1 is to suggest illimitable air within a narrow space4 ,the stories of the ,german 8romantic10 ,heinrich von ,kleist1 have likewise been praised for an extreme economy of material1 but they should rather be held up as an awful warning against waste1 for in their ingenious dovetailing of improbable incidents1 the only economy practised is that of leaving out all that would have enriched the subject1 visually or emotionally4 ,one1 indeed1 8,the ,marquise d',o40 7thrift is carried so far that the characters are known merely by their initials71 has in it the making of a good novel1 not unlike ,goethe's 8,elective ,affinities02 but reduced to the limits of a short story it offers a mere skeleton of its subject4 ,the phrase 8economy of material0 suggests another danger to which the novelist and the writer of short stories are equally exposed4 ,such economy is1 in both cases1 nearly always to be advised in the multiplication of accidental happenings1 minor episodes1 surprises and contrarieties4 ,most beginners crowd into their work twice as much material of this sort as it needs4 ,the reluctance to look deeply enough into a subject leads to the indolent habit of decorating its surface4 ,i was once asked to read a manuscript on the eternal theme of a lovers' quarrel4 ,the quarrelling pair made up1 and the reasons for dispute and reconciliation were clearly inherent in their characters and situation2 but the author1 being new at the trade1 felt obliged to cast about for an additional1 a fortuitous1 pretext for their reunion--so he sent them for a drive1 made the horses run away1 and caused the young man to save the young lady's life4 ,this is a crude example of a frequent fault4 ,again and again the novelist passes by the real meaning of a situation simply for lack of letting it reveal all its potentialities instead of dashing this way and that in quest of fresh effects4 ,if1 when once drawn to a subject1 he would let it grow slowly in his mind instead of hunting about for arbitrary combinations of circumstance1 his tale would have the warm scent and flavour of a fruit ripened in the sun instead of the insipidity of one forced in a hot-house4 ,there is a sense in which the writing of fiction may be compared to the administering of a fortune4 ,economy and expenditure must each bear a part in it1 but they should never degenerate into parsimony or waste4 ,true economy consists in the drawing out of one's subject of every drop of significance it can give1 true expenditure in devoting time1 meditation and patient labour to the process of extraction and representation4 ,it all comes back to a question of expense3 expense of time1 of patience1 of study1 of thought1 of letting hundreds of stray experiences accumulate and group themselves in the memory1 till suddenly one of the number emerges and throws its sharp light on the subject which solicits you4 ,it has been often1 and inaccurately1 said that the mind of a creative artist is a mirror1 and the work of art the reflection of life in it4 ,the mirror1 indeed1 is the artist's mind1 with all his experiences reflected in it2 but the work of art1 from the smallest to the greatest1 should be something projected1 not reflected1 something on which his mirrored experiences1 at the right conjunction of the stars1 are to be turned for its full illumination4 ,,iii ,,constructing ,a ,,novel ,,iii ,,constructing ,a ,,novel ,i ,for convenience of division it may be said that the novel of psychology was born in ,france1 the novel of manners in ,england1 and that out of their union in the glorious brain of ,balzac sprang that strange chameleon-creature1 the modern novel1 which changes its shape and colour with every subject on which it rests4 ,in the general muster the novel of manners will be found to have played the most important part2 and here ,english influences preponderate4 ,if innate aptitude were enough for the producing of a work of art1 the flowering of the ,english novel of manners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries might have surpassed in quality1 and intrinsic importance1 that of all other schools4 ,balzac's debt to ,scott has already been touched on2 that of the earlier ,french fiction to ,richardson and ,sterne is a commonplace in the history of the novel4 ,but the true orientation of ,english fiction was away from the fine-drawn analysis of ,richardson1 the desultory humours of ,sterne1 in the direction of an ample and powerful novel of manners4 ,smollett and ,fielding brought fresh air and noise1 the rough-and-tumble of the street1 the ribaldry of the tavern1 into the ceremonious drawing-rooms depicted by ,richardson and later by ,miss ,burney4 ,the great1 the distinguishing gift of the ,english novelist was a homely simplicity combined with an observation at once keen and indulgent2 good humour was the atmosphere and irony the flavour of this great school of observers1 from ,fielding to ,george ,eliot4 ,till the day of ,jane ,austen it had been possible to treat without apology of the mixed affair of living2 but ,jane ,austen's delicate genius flourished on the very edge of a tidal wave of prudery4 ,already ,scott was averting his eyes from facts on which the maiden novelist in her rectory parlour had looked unperturbed2 when ,thackeray and ,dickens rose in their might the chains were forged and the statues draped4 ,in the melancholy preface to 8,pendennis0 ,thackeray puts the case bitterly and forcibly3 8,since the author of ,tom ,jones was buried1 no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a ,,man02 and the stunted conclusion of a tale so largely begun testifies to the benumbing effect of the new restrictions4 ,the novels of ,charlotte ,bront1 which now seem in some respects so romantically unreal1 were denounced for sensuality and immorality2 and for a time ,english fiction was in danger of dwindling to the pale parables of ,miss ,mulock and ,miss ,yonge4 ,but for this reaction against truth1 this sudden fear of touching on any of the real issues of the human comedy and tragedy1 ,thackeray's natural endowment would have placed him with the very greatest2 ,trollope might conceivably have been a lesser ,jane ,austen2 and ,george ,eliot1 perhaps born with the richest gifts of any ,english novelist since ,thackeray1 might have poured out her treasures of wit and irony and tenderness without continually pausing to denounce and exhort4 ,but the artist depends on atmosphere for the proper development of his gift2 and all these novelists were cramped by the hazard of a social convention from which their continental contemporaries had the good fortune to escape4 ,the artist of other races has always been not only permitted but enjoined to see life whole2 and it is this1 far more than any superiority of genius1 that lifts ,balzac1 ,stendhal and ,tolstoy so high above even ,thackeray when the universal values are to be appraised4 ,the great continental novelists are all the avowed debtors of their ,english predecessors2 they took the ,english novel of manners in its amplitude1 its merriment and pathos1 and in their hands 8the thing became a trumpet40 ,in one respect the ,english novelists are still supreme2 and that is in the diffusion of good humour1 good manners one might almost say1 which envelops their comedy and tragedy4 ,much that is savage and acrimonious in the ,french1 dolorous and overwrought in the ,russians1 is strained away through this fine ,english bonhomie1 leaving a clear1 bright draught1 not very intoxicating or even stimulating1 but refreshing and full of a lasting savour4 ,nor does this prevalent good humour hinder the full expression of tragedy2 it helps rather to extract the final bitterness from certain scenes in 8,pendennis0 and 8,vanity ,fair10 in 8,middlemarch0 and the 8,chronicles of ,barsetshire40 ,the last years of ,lydgate1 the last hour of ,mrs4 ,proudie1 seem the more terrible for being muffled in a secure and decent atmosphere of fair play and plum-pudding4 ,since then all the restraints of prudery which hampered the ,english novelists of the nineteenth century have come down with a crash1 and the 8now-that-it-can-be-told-school0 7as some one has wittily named it7 has rushed to the opposite excess of dirt-for-dirt's sake1 from which no real work of art has ever sprung4 ,such a reaction was inevitable4 ,no one who remembers that ,butler's great novel1 8,the ,way of ,all ,flesh10 remained unpublished for over twenty years because it dealt soberly but sincerely with the chief springs of human conduct can wonder that laborious monuments of school-boy pornography are now mistaken for works of genius by a public ignorant of ,rabelais and unaware of ,apuleius4 ,the balance will right itself with the habit of freedom4 ,the new novelists will learn that it is even more necessary to see life steadily than to recount it whole2 and by that time a more thoughtful public may be ripe for the enjoyment of a riper art4 ,,ii ,most novels1 for convenient survey1 may be grouped under one or the other of three types3 manners1 character 7or psychology7 and adventure4 ,these designations may be thought to describe the different methods sufficiently2 but as a typical example of each1 8,vanity ,fair0 for the first1 8,madame ,bovary0 for the second1 and1 for the third1 8,rob ,roy0 or 8,the ,master of ,ballantrae10 might be named4 ,this grouping must be further stretched to include as subdivisions what might be called the farcical novel of manners1 the romance and the philosophical romance2 and immediately 8,pickwick0 for the first1 8,harry ,richmond10 8,la ,chartreuse de ,parme0 or 8,lorna ,doone0 for the second1 and 8,wilhelm ,meister0 or 8,marius the ,epicurean0 for the third category1 suggest themselves to the reader4 ,lastly1 in the zone of the unclassifiable float such enchanting hybrids as 8,john ,inglesant10 8,lavengro10 and that great ,swiss novel1 8,der ,grne ,heinrich10 in which fantasy1 romance and the homeliest realities are so inimitably mingled4 ,it will be noticed that in the last two groups--of romance pure or hybrid--but one ,french novel has been cited4 ,the ,french genius1 which made 8,romanticism0 its own 7after borrowing it from ,england71 has seldom touched even the hem of ,romance3 ,tristan and ,iseult and their long line of descendants come from ,broceliande1 not from the ,ile de ,france4 ,before going farther it should be added that1 in a study of the modern novel1 the last-named of the three principal groups1 the novel of adventure1 is the least important because the least modern4 ,that this implies any depreciation of the type in itself will not for a moment be admitted by a writer whose memory rings with the joyous clatter of ,dumas the elder1 ,herman ,melville1 ,captain ,marryat and ,stevenson2 but their gallant yarns might have been sung to the minstrel's harp before ,roland and his peers1 and told in ,babylonian bazaars to ,joseph and his ,brethren3 the tale of adventure is essentially the parent-stock of all subsequent varieties of the novel1 and its modern tellers have introduced few innovations in what was already a perfect formula1 created in the dawn of time by the world-old appeal3 8,tell us another story40 ,all attempts at classification may seem to belong to school-examinations and text-books1 and to reduce the matter to the level of the famous examination-paper which1 in reference to ,wordsworth's 8,o cuckoo1 shall ,i call thee bird1 or but a wandering voice80 instructed the student to 8state alternative preferred1 with reasons for your choice40 ,in a sense1 classification is always arbitrary and belittling2 yet to the novelist's mind such distinctions represent organic realities4 ,it does not much matter under what heading a school-girl is taught to class 8,vanity ,fair02 but from the creator's point of view classification means the choice of a manner and of an angle of vision1 and it mattered greatly that ,thackeray knew just how he meant to envisage his subject1 which might have been dealt with merely as the tale of an adventuress1 or merely as the romance of an honest couple1 or merely as an historical novel1 and is all of these1 and how much more besides--is1 indeed1 all that its title promises4 ,the very fact that so many subjects contain the elements of two or three different types of novel makes it one of the novelist's first cares to decide which method he means to use4 ,balzac1 for instance1 gives us in 8,le ,pre ,goriot0 and in 8,eugnie ,grandet0 two different ways of dealing with subjects that contain1 after all1 much the same elements2 in the one1 englobing his tragic father in a vast social panorama1 in the other projecting his miser 7who should have given the tale its name7 in huge ,moliresque relief against the narrow background of a sleepy provincial town peopled by three or four carefully-subordinated characters4 ,there is another kind of hybrid novel1 but in which the manner rather than the matter may be so characterized2 the novel written almost entirely in dialogue1 after the style1 say1 of 8,gyp's0 successful tales4 ,it is open to discussion whether any particular class of subjects calls for this treatment4 ,henry ,james thought so1 and the oddly-contrived 8,awkward ,age0 was a convinced attempt on his part to write 8a little thing in the manner of ,gyp0--a resemblance which few readers would have perceived had he not pointed it out4 ,strangely enough1 he was persuaded that certain subjects not falling into the stage-categories require nevertheless to be chattered rather than narrated2 and1 more strangely still1 that 8,the ,awkward ,age10 that delicate and subtle case1 all half-lights and shades1 all innuendoes1 gradations and transitions1 was typically made for such treatment4 ,his hyper-sensitiveness to any comment on his own work made it difficult to discuss the question with him2 but his greatest admirers will probably feel that 8,the ,awkward ,age0 lost more than it gained by being powdered into dialogue1 and that1 had it been treated as a novel instead of a kind of hybrid play1 the obligation of 8straight0 narrative might have compelled him to face and elucidate the central problem instead of suffering it to lose itself in a tangle of talk4 ,at any rate1 such an instance will probably not do much to convince either novelists or their readers of the advantage of the 8talked0 novel4 ,as a matter of fact1 the mode of presentation to the reader1 that central difficulty of the whole affair1 must always be determined by the nature of the subject2 and the subject which instantly calls for dialogue seems as instantly to range itself among those demanding for their full setting-forth the special artifices of the theatre4 ,the immense superiority of the novel for any subject in which 8situation0 is not paramount is just that freedom1 that ease in passing from one form of presentation to another1 and that possibility of explaining and elucidating by the way1 which the narrative permits4 ,convention is the first necessity of all art2 but there seems no reason for adding the shackles of another form to those imposed by one's own4 ,narrative1 with all its suppleness and variety1 its range from great orchestral effects to the frail vibration of a single string1 should furnish the substance of the novel2 dialogue1 that precious adjunct1 should never be more than an adjunct1 and one to be used as skilfully and sparingly as the drop of condiment which flavours a whole dish4 ,the use of dialogue in fiction seems to be one of the few things about which a fairly definite rule may be laid down4 ,it should be reserved for the culminating moments1 and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore4 ,this lifting and scattering of the wave1 the coruscation of the spray1 even the mere material sight of the page broken into short1 uneven paragraphs1 all help to reinforce the contrast between such climaxes and the smooth effaced gliding of the narrative intervals2 and the contrast enhances that sense of the passage of time for the producing of which the writer has to depend on his intervening narration4 ,thus the sparing use of dialogue not only serves to emphasize the crises of the tale but to give it as a whole a greater effect of continuous development4 ,another argument against the substitution of dialogue for narrative is the wastefulness and round-aboutness of the method4 ,the greater effect of animation1 of presentness1 produced by its excessive use will not help the reader through more than half the book1 whatever its subject2 after that he will perceive that he is to be made to pay before the end for his too facile passage through the earlier chapters4 ,the reason is inherent in the method4 ,when1 in real life1 two or more people are talking together1 all that is understood between them is left out of their talk2 but when the novelist uses conversation as a means not only of accentuating but of carrying on his tale1 his characters have to tell each other many things that each already knows the other knows4 ,to avoid the resulting shock of improbability1 their dialogue must be so diluted with irrelevant touches of realistic commonplace1 with what might be described as by-talk1 that1 as in the least good of ,trollope's tales1 it rambles on for page after page before the reader1 resignedly marking time1 arrives1 bewildered and weary1 at a point to which one paragraph of narrative could have carried him4 ,,iii ,in writing of the short story ,i may have seemed to dwell too much on the need of considering every detail in its plan and development2 yet the short story is an improvisation1 the temporary shelter of a flitting fancy1 compared to the four-square and deeply-founded monument which the novel ought to be4 ,it is not only that the scale is different2 it is because of the reasons for its being so4 ,if the typical short story be the foreshortening of a dramatic climax connecting two or more lives1 the typical novel usually deals with the gradual unfolding of a succession of events divided by intervals of time1 and in which many people1 in addition to the principal characters1 play more or less subordinate parts4 ,no need now to take in sail and clear the decks2 the novelist must carry as much canvas and as many passengers as his subject requires and his seamanship permits4 ,still1 the novel-theme is distinguished from that suited to the short story not so much by the number of characters presented as by the space required to mark the lapse of time or to permit the minute analysis of successive states of feeling4 ,the latter distinction1 it should be added1 holds good even when the states of feeling are all contained in one bosom1 and crowded into a short period1 as they are in 8,the ,kreutzer ,sonata40 ,no one would think of classing 8,the ,kreutzer ,sonata10 or 8,ivan ,ilyitch10 or 8,adolphe10 among short stories2 and such instances prove the difficulty of laying down a hard-and-fast distinction between the forms4 ,the final difference lies deeper4 ,a novel may be all about one person1 and about no more than a few hours in that person's life1 and yet not be reducible to the limits of a short story without losing all significance and interest4 ,it depends on the character of the subject chosen4 ,since the novel-about-one-person has been touched on1 it may be well1 before going farther1 to devote a short parenthesis to its autobiographical or 8subjective0 variety4 ,in the study of novel-technique one might almost set aside the few masterpieces in this class1 such as the 8,princesse de ,clves10 8,adolphe0 and 8,dominique10 as not novels at all1 any more than ,musset's 8,confession d'un ,enfant du ,sicle0 is a novel4 ,they are1 in fact1 all fragments of autobiography by writers of genius2 and the autobiographical gift does not seem very closely related to that of fiction4 ,in the case of the authors mentioned1 none but ,madame de ,la ,fayette ever published another novel1 and her other attempts were without interest4 ,in all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation4 ,it exists on the lowest scale1 and1 in the art of fiction1 belongs as much to the producer of 8railway novels0 as to ,balzac1 ,thackeray or ,tolstoy2 yet it almost always marks the great creative artist4 ,whatever a man has it in him to do really well he usually keeps on doing with an indestructible persistency4 ,there is another sign which sets apart the born novelist from the authors of self-confessions in novel-form2 that is1 the absence of the objective faculty in the latter4 ,the subjective writer lacks the power of getting far enough away from his story to view it as a whole and relate it to its setting2 his minor characters remain the mere satellites of the principal personage 7himself71 and disappear when not lit up by their central luminary4 ,such books are sometimes masterpieces2 but if by the term 8art of fiction0 be understood the creation of imaginary characters and the invention of their imaginary experiences--and there seems no more convenient definition--then the autobiographical tale is not strictly a novel1 since no objectively creative effort has gone to its making4 ,it does not follow that born novelists never write autobiographical novels4 ,instances to the contrary will occur to every one and none more obvious than that of 8,the ,kreutzer ,sonata40 ,there is a gulf between such a book and 8,adolphe40 ,tolstoy's tale1 though almost avowedly the study of his own tortured soul1 is as objective as ,othello4 ,the magic transposition has taken place2 in reading the story we do not feel ourselves to be in a resuscitated real world 7a sort of ,tussaud ,museum of wax figures with actual clothes on71 but in that other world which is the image of life transposed in the brain of the artist1 a world wherein the creative breath has made all things new4 ,if one happened to begin one's acquaintance with ,tolstoy by reading 8,the ,kreutzer ,sonata0 one would not need to be told that it was the creation of a brain working objectively1 a brain which had produced1 or was likely to produce1 other novels of a wholly different kind2 whereas of such books as 8,dominique0 or 8,adolphe10 were one to light on them as unpreparedly1 one would say3 8,this is not the invention of a novelist but the self-analysis of a man of genius40 ,there is one famous book which might be described as the link between the real novel and the autobiography in novel-disguise4 ,this is ,goethe's 8,werther40 ,here a youth of genius1 as yet unpractised in the art of fiction1 has related1 under the thinnest of concealments1 the story of his own unhappy love4 ,the tale is intensely subjective4 ,the hero is never once seen from the outside1 the minor figures are hardly drawn out of the limbo of the unrealized2 yet how instantly the difference between 8,werther0 and 8,adolphe0 declares itself6 ,the latter tale is completely self-contained2 it never suggests in the writer the power or the desire to project a race of imaginary characters4 8,werther0 does4 ,every page thrills with the dawning gift of creation4 ,the lover has not been too much absorbed in his own anguish to turn its light on things external to him4 ,the young ,goethe who has noted ,charlotte's way of cutting the bread-and-butter for her little brothers and sisters1 and set down the bourgeois humours and the sylvan charm of the ball in the forest1 is already a novelist4 ,,iv ,the question of form--already defined as the order1 in time and importance1 in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped--is1 for obvious reasons1 harder to deal with in the novel than in the short story1 and most difficult in the novel of manners1 with its more crowded stage1 and its continual interweaving of individual with social analysis4 ,the ,english novelists of the early nineteenth century were still farther enslaved by the purely artificial necessity of the double plot4 ,two parallel series of adventures1 in which two separate groups of people were concerned1 sometimes with hardly a link between the two1 and always without any deep organic connection1 were served up in alternating sections4 ,throughout the novels of ,dickens1 ,george ,eliot1 ,trollope and the majority of their contemporaries1 this tedious and senseless convention persists1 checking the progress of each series of events and distracting the reader's attention4 ,the artificial trick of keeping two stories going like a juggler's ball is entirely different from the attempt to follow the interwoven movements of typical social groups1 as ,thackeray did in 8,vanity ,fair0 and 8,the ,newcomes10 ,balzac in 8,le ,pre ,goriot40 ,in these cases the separate groups1 either families or larger units1 in a sense impersonate the protagonists of the tale1 and their fates are as closely interwoven as those of the two or three persons on the narrow stage of a tale like 8,silas ,marner40 ,the double plot has long since vanished1 and the 8plot0 itself1 in the sense of an elaborate puzzle into which a given number of characters have to be arbitrarily fitted1 has gone with it to the lumber-room of discarded conventions4 ,but traces of the parallel story linger in the need often felt by young writers of crowding their scene with supernumeraries4 ,the temptation is specially great in composing the novel of manners4 ,if one is undertaking to depict a 8section of life10 how avoid a crowded stage8 ,the answer is1 by choosing as principal characters figures so typical that each connotes a whole section of the social background4 ,it is the unnecessary characters who do the crowding1 who confuse the reader by uselessly dispersing his attention2 but even the number of subordinate yet necessary characters may be greatly reduced by making the principal figures so typical that they adumbrate most of the others4 ,the traditions of the ,thtre ,franais used to require that the number of objects on the stage--chairs1 tables1 even to a glass of water on a table--should be limited to the actual requirements of the drama3 the chairs must all be sat in1 the table carry some object necessary to the action1 the glass of water or decanter of wine be a part of the drama4 ,the stage-realism introduced from ,england a generation ago submerged these scenic landmarks under a flood of irrelevant upholstery2 but as guides in the labyrinth of composition they are still standing1 as necessary to the novelist as to the playwright4 ,in both cases a far profounder effect is produced by the penetrating study of a few characters than by the multiplying of half-drawn figures4 ,neither novelist nor playwright should ever venture on creating a character without first following it out to the end of the projected tale and being sure that the latter will be the poorer for its absence4 ,characters whose tasks have not been provided for them in advance are likely to present as embarrassing problems as other types of the unemployed4 ,in the number of characters introduced1 as much as in the scenic details given1 relevance is the first1 the arch1 necessity4 ,and characters and scenic detail are in fact one to the novelist who has fully assimilated his material4 ,the moon-enchanted hollow of ,wilming ,weir in 8,sandra ,belloni0 is as much the landscape of ,emilia's soul as of a corner of ,england2 it was one of ,george ,meredith's distinguishing merits that he always made his art as a landscape-painter contribute to the interpretation of his tale1 so that such scenes as that of ,wilming ,weir1 the sunrise from the top of ,monte ,motterone in the opening chapter of 8,vittoria10 and the delicious wall-flower-coloured picture of the farm-house in 8,harry ,richmond10 are all necessary parts of the novels in which they figure1 and above all are seen as the people to whom they happened would have seen them4 ,this leads to another important principle4 ,the impression produced by a landscape1 a street or a house should always1 to the novelist1 be an event in the history of a soul1 and the use of the 8descriptive passage10 and its style1 should be determined by the fact that it must depict only what the intelligence concerned would have noticed1 and always in terms within the register of that intelligence4 ,two instances1 illustrating respectively the observance and the neglect of this rule1 may be cited from the novels of ,mr4 ,hardy3 the first1 that memorable evocation of ,egdon ,heath by night1 as ,eustacia ,vye looks forth on it from ,rainbarrow2 the other1 the painfully detailed description1 in all its geological and agricultural details1 of the ,wessex vale through which another of ,mr4 ,hardy's heroines1 unseeing1 wretched1 and incapable at any time of noting such particularities as it has amused her creator to set down1 flies blindly to her doom4 ,v ,the two central difficulties of the novel--both of which may at first appear purely technical--are still to be considered4 ,they have to do with the choice of the point from which the subject is to be seen1 and with the attempt to produce on the reader the effect of the passage of time4 ,both may 8appear purely technical02 but even were it possible to draw a definite line between the technique of a work of art and its informing spirit1 the points in question go too deep to be so classed4 ,they are rooted in the subject2 and--as always1 in the last issue--the subject itself must determine and limit their office4 ,it was remarked in the chapter on the short story that the same experience never happens to any two people1 and that the story-teller's first care1 after the choice of a subject1 is to decide to which of his characters the episode in question happened1 since it could not have happened in that particular way to more than one4 ,applied to the novel this may seem a hard saying1 since the longer passage of time and more crowded field of action presuppose1 on the part of the visualizing character1 a state of omniscience and omnipresence likely to shake the reader's sense of probability4 ,the difficulty is most often met by shifting the point of vision from one character to another1 in such a way as to comprehend the whole history and yet preserve the unity of impression4 ,in the interest of this unity it is best to shift as seldom as possible1 and to let the tale work itself out from not more than two 7or at most three7 angles of vision1 choosing as reflecting consciousnesses persons either in close mental and moral relation to each other1 or discerning enough to estimate each other's parts in the drama1 so that the latter1 even viewed from different angles1 always presents itself to the reader as a whole4 ,the choice of such reflectors is not easy2 still more arduous is the task of determining at what point each is to be turned on the scene4 ,the only possible rule seems to be that when things happen which the first reflector cannot1 with any show of probability1 be aware of1 or is incapable of reacting to1 even if aware1 then another1 an adjoining1 consciousness is required to take up the tale4 ,thus drily stated1 the formula may seem pedantic and arbitrary2 but it will be found to act of itself in the hands of the novelist who has so let his subject ripen in his mind that the characters are as close to him as his own flesh4 ,to the novelist who lives among his creations in this continuous intimacy they should pour out their tale almost as if to a passive spectator4 ,the problem of the co-ordinating consciousness has visibly disturbed many novelists1 and the different solutions attempted are full of interest and instruction4 ,each is of course but another convention1 and no convention is in itself objectionable1 but becomes so only when wrongly used1 as dirt1 according to the happy definition1 is only 8matter in the wrong place40 ,verisimilitude is the truth of art1 and any convention which hinders the illusion is obviously in the wrong place4 ,few hinder it more than the slovenly habit of some novelists of tumbling in and out of their characters' minds1 and then suddenly drawing back to scrutinize them from the outside as the avowed ,showman holding his puppets' strings4 ,all the greatest modern novelists have felt this1 and sought1 though often half-unconsciously1 to find a way out of the difficulty4 ,the most interesting experiments made in this respect have been those of ,james and ,conrad1 to both of whom--though in ways how different6--the novel was always by definition a work of art1 and therefore worthy of the creator's utmost effort4 ,james sought the effect of verisimilitude by rigorously confining every detail of his picture to the range1 and also to the capacity1 of the eye fixed on it4 8,in the ,cage0 is a curiously perfect example of the experiment on a small scale1 only one very restricted field of vision being permitted4 ,in his longer and more eventful novels1 where the transition from one consciousness to another became necessary1 he contrived it with such unfailing ingenuity that the reader's visual range was continuously enlarged by the substitution of a second consciousness whenever the boundaries of the first were exceeded4 8,the ,wings of the ,dove0 gives an interesting example of these transitions4 ,in 8,the ,golden ,bowl10 still unsatisfied1 still in pursuit of an impossible perfection1 he felt he must introduce a sort of co-ordinating consciousness detached from1 but including1 the characters principally concerned4 ,the same attempt to wrest dramatic forms to the uses of the novel that caused 8,the ,awkward ,age0 to be written in dialogue seems to have suggested the creation of ,colonel and ,mrs4 ,assingham as a sort of ,greek chorus to the tragedy of 8,the ,golden ,bowl40 ,this insufferable and incredible couple spend their days in espionage and delation1 and their evenings in exchanging the reports of their eaves'-dropping with a minuteness and precision worthy of ,scotland ,yard4 ,the utter improbability of such conduct on the part of a dull-witted and frivolous couple in the rush of ,london society shows that the author created them for the sole purpose of revealing details which he could not otherwise communicate without lapsing into the character of the mid-,victorian novelist chatting with his readers of 8my heroine0 in the manner of ,thackeray and ,dickens4 ,convention for convention 7and both are bad71 ,james's is perhaps even more unsettling to the reader's confidence than the old-fashioned intrusion of the author among his puppets4 ,both ought to be avoided1 and may be1 as other great novels are there to prove4 ,conrad's preoccupation was the same1 but he sought to solve it in another way1 by creating what some one has aptly called a 8hall of mirrors10 a series of reflecting consciousnesses1 all belonging to people who are outside of the story but accidentally drawn into its current1 and not1 like the ,assinghams1 forced into it for the sole purpose of acting as spies and eaves'-droppers4 ,the method did not originate with ,conrad4 ,in that most perfectly-composed of all short stories1 8,la ,grande ,bretche10 ,balzac showed what depth1 mystery1 and verisimilitude may be given to a tale by causing it to be reflected1 in fractions1 in the minds of a series of accidental participants or mere lookers-on4 ,the relator of the tale1 casually detained in a provincial town1 is struck by the ruinous appearance of one of its handsomest houses4 ,he makes his way into the deserted garden1 and is at once called on by a solicitor who informs him that1 according to the will of the lately deceased owner1 no one is to be permitted on the premises till fifty years after her death4 ,the visitor1 whose curiosity is naturally excited1 next learns from the landlady of his inn that1 though she has never known the exact facts of the tragedy1 she knows there has been one1 and that a person whom she suspects of having played a part in it is actually lodged under her roof4 ,from the landlady the narrator carries his enquiries to the maid-servant of the inn1 who had been in the service of the dead lady1 and who confides to him the dreadful scenes of which she was a helpless and horror-struck witness2 and1 grouping these fragments in his own more comprehending mind1 he finally gives them to the reader in their ghastly completeness4 ,even ,george ,meredith1 whose floods of improvisation seem to have been so rarely hampered by any concern as to the composition of his novels1 was now and then visibly perplexed by the question of how to pass from the mind of one character to another without too violent a jolt to the reader4 ,in one instance--in one of those 8big scenes0 which1 as ,george ,eliot said1 8write themselves0--he attempted1 probably on the spur of the moment1 a solution which proved admirably successful--for that particular occasion4 ,in the memorable talk in the course of which the inarticulate ,rhoda ,fleming and her tongue-tied suitor finally discover themselves to each other1 the novelist1 to show how tongue-tied both were1 and yet convey the emotion beneath their halting monosyllables1 hit on the device of putting in parenthesis1 after each phrase1 what the speaker was actually thinking4 ,it is one of the great pages of the book2 yet even in the enchantment of first reading it one is aware of admiring a mere acrobatic feat1 a sort of breathless chass-crois which could not have been kept up for another page without straining the reader's patience and his sense of likelihood4 ,meredith was a genius1 and his instinct for effect made him1 at a crucial moment1 stumble on a successful trick2 but1 because he was a genius1 he did not prolong or repeat it4 ,the reason why such sudden changes from one mind to another are fatiguing and disillusioning was summed up--though for a different purpose--in a vivid phrase of ,george ,eliot's4 ,it is in the chapter of 8,middlemarch0 which records the talk between ,dorothea and ,celia ,brooke1 after the latter's first meeting with the austere and pompous ,mr4 ,casaubon1 whom her elder sister so unaccountably admires4 ,the frivolous ,celia is profoundly disappointed3 she finds ,mr4 ,casaubon very ugly4 ,dorothea1 at this1 haughtily lets drop that he reminds her of the portraits of ,locke4 ,celia3 8,had ,locke those two white moles with hairs on them80 ,dorothea3 8,oh1 ,i daresay6 when people of a certain sort looked at him40 ,that answer sums up the whole dilemma4 ,before beginning his tale1 the novelist must decide whether it is to be seen through eyes given to noting white moles1 or to discovering 8the visionary butterfly alit0 on faces so disfigured4 ,he cannot have it both ways and still hope to persuade his reader4 ,the other difficulty is that of communicating the effect of the gradual passage of time in such a way that the modifying and maturing of the characters shall seem not an arbitrary sleight-of-hand but the natural result of growth in age and experience4 ,this is the great mystery of the art of fiction4 ,the secret seems incommunicable2 one can only conjecture that it has to do with the novelist's own deep belief in his characters and what he is telling about them4 ,he knows that this and that befell them1 and that in the interval between this and that the months and years have continued their slow task of erosion or accretion2 and he conveys this knowledge by some subterranean process as hard to seize in action as the growth of a plant4 ,a study of the great novelists--and especially of ,balzac1 ,thackeray1 and ,tolstoy--will show that such changes are suggested1 are arrived at1 in the inconspicuous transitional pages of narrative that lead from climax to climax4 ,one of the means by which the effect is produced is certainly that of not fearing to go slowly1 to keep down the tone of the narrative1 to be as colourless and quiet as life often is in the intervals between its high moments4 ,another difficulty connected with this one is that of keeping so firm a hold on the main lines of one's characters that they emerge modified and yet themselves from the ripening or disintegrating years4 ,tolstoy had this gift to a supreme degree4 ,wherever in the dense forest of 8,war and ,peace0 a character reappears1 often after an interval so long that the ear has almost lost the sound to which he rhymes1 he is at once recognized as the same1 profoundly the same1 yet scored by new lines of suffering and experience4 ,natacha1 grown into the fat slovenly mre-de-famille of the last chapters1 is incredibly like and yet different to the phantom of delight who first captivated ,prince ,andrew2 and the ,prince himself1 in those incomparable pages devoted to his long illness1 where one watches the very process of dematerialization1 the detachment from earthly things happening as naturally as the fall of a leaf1 is the same as the restless and unhappy man who appears with his pathetic irritating little wife at the evening party of the first chapter4 ,becky ,sharp1 ,arthur ,pendennis1 ,dorothea ,casaubon1 ,lydgate1 ,charles ,bovary--with what sure and patient touches their growth and decline are set forth6 ,and how mysteriously yet unmistakably1 as they reappear after each interval1 the sense is conveyed that there has been an interval1 not in moral experience only but in the actual lapse of the seasons6 ,the producing of this impression is indeed the central mystery of the art4 ,to its making go patience1 meditation1 concentration1 all the quiet habits of mind now so little practised1 so seldom inculcated2 and to these must be added the final imponderable1 genius1 without which the rest is useless1 and which1 conversely1 would be unusable without the rest4 ,,vi ,the evening party with which 8,war and ,peace0 begins is one of the most triumphant examples in fiction of the difficult art of 8situating0 the chief actors in the opening chapter of what is to be an exceptionally crowded novel4 ,no reader is likely to forget1 or to confuse the one with the other1 the successive arrivals at that dull and trivial ,st4 ,petersburg reception2 ,tolstoy with one mighty sweep gathers up all his principal characters and sets them before us in action4 ,very different--though so notable an achievement in its way--is the first chapter of 8,the ,karamazoff ,brothers0 7in the ,english or ,german translation--for the current ,french translation inexplicably omits it74 ,in this chapter ,dostoievsky has hung a gallery of portraits against a blank wall4 ,he describes all the members of the ,karamazoff family1 one after another1 with merciless precision and infernal insight4 ,but there they remain hanging--or standing4 ,the reader is told all about them1 but is not allowed to surprise them in action4 ,the story about them begins afterward1 whereas in 8,war and ,peace0 the first paragraph leads into the thick of the tale1 and every phrase1 every gesture1 carries it on with that slow yet sweeping movement of which ,tolstoy alone was capable4 ,many thickly-peopled novels begin more gradually--like 8,vanity ,fair10 for example--and introduce their characters in carefully-ordered succession4 ,the process is obviously simpler1 and in certain cases as effective4 ,the morning stroll of ,m4 and ,mme4 ,reynal and their little boys1 in the first chapter of 8,le ,rouge et le ,noir10 sounds a note sufficiently portentous2 and so does ,major ,pendennis's solitary breakfast4 ,in a general way there is much to be said for a quiet opening to a long and crowded novel2 though the novelist might prefer to be able to fling all his characters on the boards at once1 with ,tolstoy's regal prodigality4 ,there is no fixed rule about this1 or about any other method2 each1 in the art of fiction1 to justify itself has only to succeed4 ,but to succeed1 the method must first of all suit the subject1 must find its account1 as best it can1 with the difficulties peculiar to each situation4 ,the question where to begin is the next to confront the novelist2 and the art of seizing on the right moment is even more important than that of being able to present a large number of characters at the outset4 ,here again no general rule can be laid down4 ,one subject may require to be treated from the centre1 in the fashion dear to ,henry ,james1 with its opening in the heart of the action1 and retrospective vistas radiating away from it on all sides1 while others--of which 8,henry ,esmond0 is one of the most beautiful examples--would lose all their bloom were they not allowed to ripen almost imperceptibly under the reader's absorbed contemplation4 ,balzac1 in his preface to 8,la ,chartreuse de ,parme0--almost the only public recognition of ,stendhal's genius during the latter's life-time--reproves the author for beginning the book before its real beginning4 ,balzac knew well enough what the world would have lost had that opening picture of ,waterloo been left out2 but he insists that it is no part of the story ,stendhal had set out to tell1 and sums up with the illuminating phrase3 8,m4 ,beyle has chosen a subject the ,waterloo episode which is real in nature but not in art40 ,that is1 being out of place in that particular work of art1 it loses its reality as art and remains merely a masterly study of a corner of a battle-field1 the greatest the world was to know till ,tolstoy's1 but no part of a composition1 as ,tolstoy's always were4 ,,vii ,the length of a novel1 more surely even than any of its other qualities1 needs to be determined by the subject4 ,the novelist should not concern himself beforehand with the abstract question of length1 should not decide in advance whether he is going to write a long or a short novel2 but in the act of composition he must never cease to bear in mind that one should always be able to say of a novel3 8,it might have been longer10 never3 8,it need not have been so long40 ,length1 naturally1 is not so much a matter of pages as of the mass and quality of what they contain4 ,it is obvious that a mediocre book is always too long1 and that a great one usually seems too short4 ,but beyond this question of quality and weightiness lies the more closely relevant one of the development which this or that subject requires1 the amount of sail it will carry4 ,the great novelists have always felt this1 and1 within an inch or two1 have cut their cloth accordingly4 ,mr4 ,a4 ,c4 ,bradley1 in his book on ,shakespeare's tragedies1 threw a new and striking light on the question of length4 ,in analyzing 8,macbeth10 which is so much shorter than ,shakespeare's other tragedies that previous commentators had always assumed the text to be incomplete1 he puts the following questions3 ,if the text is incomplete1 at what points are the supposed lacun to be found8 ,does any one1 on first reading 8,macbeth10 feel it to be too short1 or even notice that it is appreciably less long than the other tragedies8 ,and if not1 is it not probable that we have virtually the whole play before us1 and that ,shakespeare knew he had made it as long as the subject warranted and the nerves of his audience could stand8 ,whether or not the argument be thought convincing in the given case1 it is an admirable example of the spirit in which works of art should be judged1 and of the only system of weights and measures applicable to them4 ,tolstoy gave to 8,ivan ,ilyitch0 just enough development to make a parable of universal application out of the story of an insignificant man's death4 ,a little more1 and he would have dropped into the fussy and meticulous1 and smothered his meaning under unnecessary detail4 ,maupassant was another writer who had an unerring sense for the amount of sail his subjects could carry2 and his work contains no better proof of it than the tale of 8,yvette0--that harrowing little record of one of the ways in which the bloom may be brushed from a butterfly4 ,henry ,james1 in 8,the ,turn of the ,screw10 showed the same perfect sense of proportion4 ,he had ventured to expand into a short novel the kind of tale usually imposed on the imagination in a single flash of horror2 but his instinct told him that to go farther was impossible4 ,the posthumous fragment1 8,the ,sense of the ,past10 shows that he was again experimenting with the supernatural as a subject for a long novel2 and in this instance one feels that he was about to risk over-burdening his theme4 ,when ,i read ,m4 ,maeterlinck's book on the bee 7which had just made a flight into fame as high as that of the insect it celebrates7 ,i was first dazzled1 then oppressed1 by the number and the choice of his adjectives and analogies4 ,every touch was effective1 every comparison striking2 but when ,i had assimilated them all1 and remade out of them the ideal ,,bee1 that animal had become a winged elephant4 ,the lesson was salutary for a novelist4 ,the great writers of fiction--,balzac1 ,tolstoy1 ,thackeray1 ,george ,eliot 7how one has to return to them67--all had a sense for the proportion of their subjects1 and knew that the great argument requires space4 ,there are few things more exquisite in minor ,english verse than ,ben ,jonson's epitaph on ,salathiel ,pavy2 but 8,paradise ,lost0 needs more room1 and the fact that it does is one of the elements of its greatness4 ,the point is to know at the start if one has in hand a ,salathiel ,pavy theme or a 8,paradise ,lost0 one4 ,in no novelist was this instinct more unerring than in the impeccable ,jane ,austen4 ,never is there any danger of finding any of her characters out of proportion or rattling around in their setting4 ,the same may be said of ,tolstoy1 at the opposite end of the scale4 ,his epic gift--the power of immediately establishing the right proportion between his characters and the scope of their adventure--seems never to have failed him4 8,war and ,peace0 and ,flaubert's 8,education ,sentimentale0 are two of the longest of modern novels4 ,flaubert too was endowed with the rare instinct of scale2 but there are moments when even his most ardent admirers feel that 8,l',education ,sentimentale0 is too long for its carrying-power3 whereas in the very first pages of 8,war and ,peace0 ,tolstoy manages to establish the right relation between subject and length4 ,but there is another difference between the great novel and the merely long one4 ,even the longest and most seemingly desultory novels of such writers as ,balzac1 ,flaubert and ,tolstoy follow a prescribed orbit2 they are true to the eternal effort of art to complete what in life seems incoherent and fragmentary4 ,this sense of the great theme sweeping around on its allotted track in the 8most ancient heavens0 is communicated on the first page of such novels as 8,war and ,peace0 and 8,l',education ,sentimentale02 it is the lack of this intrinsic form that marks the other kind of long novel as merely long4 ,m4 ,romain ,rolland's 8,jean-,christophe0 might be cited as a case in point4 ,in a succession of volumes1 planned at the outset as parts of a great whole1 he tells a series of consecutive soul-adventures1 none without interest2 but such hint of scale as there is in the first volume seems to warrant no more than that one1 and the reader feels that if there are more there is no reason why there should not be any number4 ,this impression is produced not by the lack of a plan1 but of that subtler kind of composition which1 inspired by the sense of form1 and deducing the length of a book from the importance of its argument1 creates figures proportioned to their setting1 and launches them with a sure hand on their destined path4 ,the question of the length of a novel naturally leads to the considering of its end2 but of this there is little to be said that has not already been implied by the way1 since no conclusion can be right which is not latent in the first page4 ,about no part of a novel should there be a clearer sense of inevitability than about its end2 any hesitation1 any failure to gather up all the threads1 shows that the author has not let his subject mature in his mind4 ,a novelist who does not know when his story is finished1 but goes on stringing episode to episode after it is over1 not only weakens the effect of the conclusion1 but robs of significance all that has gone before4 ,but if the form of the end is inevitably determined by the subject1 its style--using the term1 in the sense already defined1 to describe the way in which the episodes of the narrative 8are grasped and coloured by the author's mind0--necessarily depends on his sense of selection4 ,at every stage in the progress of his tale the novelist must rely on what may be called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation4 ,illuminating incidents are the magic casements of fiction1 its vistas on infinity4 ,they are also the most personal element in any narrative1 the author's most direct contribution2 and nothing gives such immediate proof of the quality of his imagination--and therefore of the richness of his temperament--as his choice of such episodes4 ,lucien de ,rubempr 7in 8,les ,illusions ,perdues07 writing drinking songs to pay for the funeral of his mistress1 who lies dying in the next room2 ,henry ,esmond watching ,beatrix come down the stairs in her scarlet stockings with silver clocks2 ,stephen ,guest suddenly dazzled by the curve of ,maggie ,tulliver's arm as she lifts it to pick a flower for him in the conservatory2 ,arabella flinging the offal across the hedge at ,jude2 ,emma losing her temper with ,miss ,bates at the picnic2 the midnight arrival of ,harry ,richmond's father1 in the first chapter of that glorious tale3 all these scenes shed a circle of light far beyond the incident recorded4 ,at the conclusion of a novel the illuminating incident need only send its ray backward2 but it should send a long enough shaft to meet the light cast forward from the first page1 as in that poignant passage at the end of 8,l',education ,sentimentale0 where ,mme4 ,arnoux comes back to see ,frdric ,moreau after long years of separation4 8,he put her endless questions about herself and her husband4 ,she told him that1 in order to economize and pay their debts1 they had settled down in a lost corner of ,brittany4 ,arnoux1 almost always ailing1 seemed like an old man4 ,their daughter was married1 at ,bordeaux2 their son was in the colonial army1 at ,mostaganem4 ,she lifted her head3 #8,but at last ,i see you again6 ,i'm happy'44440 ,she asks him to take her for a walk1 and wanders with him through the ,paris streets4 ,she is the only woman he has ever loved1 and he knows it now4 ,the intervening years have vanished1 and they walk on1 8absorbed in each other1 hearing nothing1 as if they were walking in the country on a bed of dead leaves40 ,then they return to the young man's rooms1 and ,mme4 ,arnoux1 sitting down1 takes off her hat4 8,the lamp1 placed on a console1 lit up her white hair4 ,the sight was like a blow on his chest40 ,he tries to keep up a pretense of sentimentalizing2 but 8she watched the clock1 and he continued to walk up and down1 smoking4 ,neither could find anything to say to the other4 ,in all separations there comes a moment when the beloved is no longer with us40 ,this is all2 but every page that has gone before is lit up by the tragic gleam of ,mme4 ,arnoux's white hair4 ,the same note is sounded in the chapter of 8,the ,golden ,bowl0 where the deeply1 the doubly betrayed ,maggie1 walking up and down in the summer evening on the terrace of ,fawns1 looks in at the window of the smoking-room1 where her father1 her husband and her step-mother 7who is her husband's mistress7 are playing bridge together1 unconscious of her scrutiny4 ,as she looks she knows that she has them at her mercy1 and that they all 7even her father7 know it2 and in the same instant the sight of them tells her that 8to feel about them in any of the immediate1 inevitable1 assuaging ways1 the ways usually open to innocence outraged and generosity betrayed1 would have been to give them up1 and that giving them up was1 marvellously1 not to be thought of40 ,the illuminating incident is not only the proof of the novelist's imaginative sensibility2 it is also the best means of giving presentness1 immediacy1 to his tale4 ,far more than on dialogue does the effect of immediacy depend on the apt use of the illuminating incident2 and the more threads of significance are gathered up into each one1 the more pages of explanatory narrative are spared to writer and reader4 ,there is a matchless instance of this in 8,le ,rouge et le ,noir40 ,the young ,julien ,sorel1 the tutor of the ,reynal children1 believes a love-affair with their mother to be the best way of advancing his ambitions1 and decides to test his audacity by taking ,mme4 ,reynal's hand as they sit in the garden in the summer dusk4 ,he has a long struggle with his natural timidity and her commanding grace before he can make even this shy advance2 and that struggle tells1 in half a page1 more of his fatuities and meannesses1 and the boyish simplicity still underlying them--and more too of the poor proud woman at his side--than a whole chapter of analysis and retrospection4 ,this power to seize his characters in their habit as they live is always the surest proof of a novelist's mastery4 ,but the choice of the illuminating incident1 though so much1 is not all4 ,as the ,french say1 there is the manner4 ,in ,stendhal's plain and straightforward report of the scene in the garden every word1 every stroke1 tells4 ,and this question of manner--of the particular manner adapted to each scene--brings one to another point at which the novelist's vigilance must never flag4 ,as every tale contains its own dimension1 so it implies its own manner1 the particular shade of style most fitted to convey its full meaning4 ,most novelists who have a certain number of volumes to their credit1 and have sought1 as the subject required1 to vary their manner1 have been taken to task alike by readers and reviewers1 and either accused of attempting to pass off earlier works on a confiding public1 or pitied for a too-evident decline in power4 ,any change disturbs the intellectual indolence of the average reader2 and nothing1 for instance1 has done more to deprive ,stevenson of his proper rank among ,english novelists than his deplorable habit of not conceiving a boy's tale in the same spirit as a romantic novel or a burlesque detective story1 of not even confining himself to fiction1 but attempting travels1 criticism and verse1 and doing them all so well that there must obviously be something wrong about it4 ,the very critics who extol the versatility of the artists of the ,renaissance rebuke the same quality in their own contemporaries2 and their eagerness to stake out each novelist's territory1 and to confine him to it for life1 recalls the story of the verger in an ,english cathedral1 who1 finding a stranger kneeling in the sacred edifice between services1 tapped him on the shoulder with the indulgent admonition3 8,sorry1 sir1 but we can't have any praying here at this hour40 ,this habit of the reader of wanting each author to give only what he has given before exercises the same subtly suggestive influence as all other popular demands4 ,it is one of the most insidious temptations to the young artist to go on doing what he already knows how to do1 and knows he will be praised for doing4 ,but the mere fact that so many people want him to write in a certain way ought to fill him with distrust of that way4 ,it would be a good thing for letters if the perilous appeal of popularity were oftener met in the spirit of the ,new ,england shop-keeper who1 finding a certain penknife in great demand1 did not stock that kind the following year because1 as he said1 too many people came bothering him about it4 ,,viii ,goethe declared that only the ,tree of ,life was green1 and that all theories were gray2 and he also congratulated himself on never 8having thought about thinking40 ,but if he never thought about thinking he did think a great deal about his art1 and some of the axioms he laid down for its practice go deeper than those of the professed philosophers4 ,the art of fiction1 as now practised1 is a recent one1 and the arts in their earliest stages are seldom theorized on by those engaged in creating them2 but as soon as they begin to take shape their practitioners1 or at least those of the number who happen to think as well as to create1 perforce begin to ask themselves questions4 ,some may not have ,goethe's gift for formulating the answers1 even to themselves2 but these answers will eventually be discoverable in an added firmness of construction and appropriateness of expression4 ,other writers do consciously lay down rules1 and in the search for new forms and more complex effects may even become the slaves of their too-fascinating theories4 ,these are the true pioneers1 who are never destined to see their own work fulfilled1 but build intellectual houses for the next generation to live in4 ,henry ,james was of this small minority4 ,as he became more and more preoccupied with the architecture of the novel he unconsciously subordinated all else to his ever-fresh complexities of design1 so that his last books are magnificent projects for future masterpieces rather than living creations4 ,such an admission may seem to reinforce the argument against theorizing about one's art2 but there are few ,jameses and fewer ,goethes in any generation1 nor is there ever much danger in urging mankind to follow a counsel of perfection4 ,in the case of most novelists1 such thought as they spare to the art1 its range and limitations1 far from sterilizing their talent will stimulate it by giving them a surer command of their means1 and will perhaps temper their eagerness for popular recognition by showing them that the only reward worth having is in the quality of the work done4 ,the foregoing considerations on the writing of fiction may seem to some dry and dogmatic1 to others needlessly complicated2 still others may feel that in the quest for an intelligible working theory the gist of the matter has been missed4 ,no doubt there is some truth in all these objections2 there would be1 even had the subject been far more fully and adequately treated4 ,it would appear that in the course of such enquiries the gist of the matter always does escape4 ,just as one thinks to cast a net over it1 a clap of the wings1 and it is laughing down on one from the topmost bough of the ,tree of ,life6 ,is all seeking vain1 then8 ,is it useless to try for a clear view of the meaning and method of one's art8 ,surely not4 ,if no art can be quite pent-up in the rules deduced from it1 neither can it fully realize itself unless those who practise it attempt to take its measure and reason out its processes4 ,it is true that the gist of the matter always escapes1 since it nests1 the elusive bright-winged thing1 in that mysterious fourth-dimensional world which is the artist's inmost sanctuary and on the threshold of which enquiry perforce must halt2 but though that world is inaccessible1 the creations emanating from it reveal something of its laws and processes4 ,here another parenthesis must be opened to point out once more that1 though this world the artist builds about him in the act of creation reaches us and moves us through its resemblance to the life we know1 yet in the artist's consciousness its essence1 the core of it1 is other4 ,all worthless fiction and inefficient reviewing are based on the forgetting of this fact4 ,to the artist his world is as solidly real as the world of experience1 or even more so1 but in a way entirely different2 it is a world to and from which he passes without any sense of effort1 but always with an uninterrupted awareness of the passing4 ,in this world are begotten and born the creatures of his imagination1 more living to him than his own flesh-and-blood1 but whom he never thinks of as living1 in the reader's simplifying sense4 ,unless he keeps his hold on this dual character of their being1 visionary to him1 and to the reader real1 he will be the slave of his characters and not their master4 ,when ,i say their master1 ,i do not mean that they are his marionettes and dangle from his strings4 ,once projected by his fancy they are living beings who live their own lives2 but their world is the one consciously imposed on them by their creator4 ,only by means of this objectivity of the artist can his characters live in art4 ,i have never been much moved by the story of the tears ,dickens is supposed to have shed over the death of ,little ,nell2 that is1 if they were real material tears1 and not distilled from the milk of ,paradise4 ,the business of the artist is to make weep1 and not to weep1 to make laugh1 and not to laugh2 and unless tears and laughter1 and flesh-and-blood1 are transmuted by him into the substance that art works in1 they are nothing to his purpose1 or to ours4 ,yet to say this1 though it seems the last word1 is not all4 ,the novelist to whom this magic world is not open has not even touched the borders of the art1 and to its familiars the power of expression may seem innate4 ,but it is not so4 ,the creatures of that fourth-dimensional world are born as helpless as the human animal2 and each time the artist passes from dream to execution he will need to find the rules and formulas on the threshold4 ,,iv ,,character ,,and ,,situation ,,in ,,the ,,novel ,,iv ,,character ,,and ,,situation ,,in ,,the ,,novel ,i ,definitions1 however difficult and inadequate1 are the necessary 8tools of criticism40 ,to begin1 therefore1 one may distinguish the novel of situation from that of character and manners by saying that1 in the first1 the persons imagined by the author almost always spring out of a vision of the situation1 and are inevitably conditioned by it1 whatever the genius of their creator2 whereas in the larger freer form1 that of character and manners 7or either of the two71 the author's characters are first born1 and then mysteriously proceed to work out their own destinies4 ,let it1 at any rate1 be understood that this rough distinction shall serve in the following pages to mark the difference between the two ways of presenting the subject since most subjects lend themselves to being treated from either point of view4 ,it is not easy to find1 among great novels written in ,english1 examples of novels of pure situation1 that is1 in which the situation is what the book is remembered by4 ,perhaps 8,the ,scarlet ,letter0 might be cited as one of the few obvious examples4 ,in 8,tess of the d',urbervilles10 which one is tempted to name also1 the study of character is so interwoven with the drama as to raise the story--for all its obvious shortcomings--to the level of those supreme novels which escape classification4 ,for if one remembers ,tess's tragedy1 still more vividly does one remember ,tess herself4 ,in continental literature several famous books at once present themselves in the situation group4 ,one of the earliest1 as it is the most famous1 is ,goethe's 8,elective ,affinities10 where a great and terrible drama involves characters of which the creator has not managed quite to sever the marionette wires4 ,who indeed remembers those vague initialled creatures1 whom the author himself forgot to pull out of their limbo in his eagerness to mature and polish their ingenious misfortunes8 ,tolstoy's 8,the ,kreutzer ,sonata0 is another book which lives only by force of situation1 sustained1 of course1 by the profound analysis of a universal passion4 ,no one remembers who the people in 8,the ,kreutzer ,sonata0 were1 or what they looked like1 or what sort of a house they lived in--but the very roots of human jealousy are laid bare in the picture of the vague undifferentiated husband1 a puppet who comes to life only in function of his one ferocious passion4 ,balzac alone1 perhaps1 managed to make of his novels of situation--such as 8,csar ,birotteau0 or 8,le ,cur de ,tours0--such relentless and penetrating character studies that their protagonists and the difficulties which beset them leap together to the memory whenever the tales are named4 ,but this fusion of categories is the prerogative of the few1 of those who know how to write all kinds of novels1 and who choose1 each time1 the way best suited to the subject in hand4 ,novels preeminently of character1 and in which situation1 dramatically viewed1 is reduced to the minimum1 are far easier to find4 ,jane ,austen has given the norm1 the ideal1 of this type4 ,of her tales it might almost be said that the reader sometimes forgets what happens to her characters in his haunting remembrance of their foibles and oddities1 their little daily round of preoccupations and pleasures4 ,they are 8speaking0 portraits1 following one with their eyes in that uncannily lifelike way that good portraits have1 rather than passionate disordered people dragging one impetuously into the tangle of their tragedy1 as one is dragged by the characters of ,stendhal1 ,thackeray and ,balzac4 ,not that ,jane ,austen's characters do not follow their predestined orbit4 ,they evolve as real people do1 but so softly1 noiselessly1 that to follow the development of their history is as quiet a business as watching the passage of the seasons4 ,a sense of her limitations as certain as her sense of her power must have kept her--unconsciously or not--from trying to thrust these little people into great actions1 and made her choose the quiet setting which enabled her to round out her portraits as imperceptibly as the sun models a fruit4 8,emma0 is perhaps the most perfect example in ,english fiction of a novel in which character shapes events quietly but irresistibly1 as a stream nibbles away its banks4 ,next to 8,emma0 one might place1 in this category1 the masterpiece of a very different hand3 8,the ,egoist0 of ,meredith4 ,in this book1 though by means so alien to ,miss ,austen's delicate procedure that one balks at the comparison1 the fantastic novelist1 whose antics too often make one forget his insight1 discarding most of his fatiguing follies1 gives a rich and deliberate study of a real human being4 ,but he does not quite achieve ,jane ,austen's success4 ,his ,willoughby ,patterne is typical before he is individual1 while every character in 8,emma0 is both1 and in degrees always perfectly proportioned4 ,still1 the two books are preeminent achievements in the field of pure character-drawing1 and one must turn to the greatest continental novelists--to ,balzac again 7as always71 to ,stendhal1 ,flaubert1 ,dostoievsky1 ,turgenev1 ,marcel ,proust1 and perhaps to the very occasional best of ,trollope--to match such searching and elaborate studies4 ,but among the continental novelists--with few exceptions--the delineation of character is inextricably combined with the study of manners1 as for instance in the novels of ,tolstoy1 of ,balzac and of ,flaubert4 ,turgenev1 in 8,dmitri ,rudin10 gave the somewhat rare example of a novel made almost entirely out of the portrayal of a single character2 as1 at the opposite extreme1 ,samuel ,butler's 8,way of all ,flesh10 for all its brilliant character-drawing1 is essentially the portrait of a family and a social group--one of the most distinctive novels of 8manners0 it is possible to find4 ,such preliminary suggestions1 cursory as they are1 may help1 better than mere definitions1 to keep in mind the differing types of novel in which either character or situation weighs down the scales4 ,,ii ,the novel1 in the hands of ,english-speaking writers1 has always tended1 as it rose in value1 to turn to pictures of character and manners1 however much blent with dramatic episodes1 or entangled in what used to be vaguely known as a plot4 ,the plot1 in the traditional sense of the term1 consisted in some clash of events1 or1 less often1 of character4 ,but it was an arbitrarily imposed and rather spaciously built framework1 inside of which the people concerned had room to develop their idiosyncrasies and be themselves1 except in the crucial moments when they became the puppets of the plot4 ,the real novel of situation1 a compacter and above all a more inevitable affair1 did not1 at least on ,english soil1 take shape till 8plot10 in the old-fashioned sense of a coil of outward happenings1 was giving way to the discovery that real drama is soul-drama4 ,the novel of situation1 indeed1 has never really acclimatized itself in ,english-speaking countries2 whereas in ,france it seems to have grown naturally from the psychological novel of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries1 wherein the conflict of characters tended from the first to simplify the drawing of character and to turn the protagonists into embodiments of a particular passion rather than of a particular person4 ,from this danger the ,english novelist has usually been guarded by an inexhaustible interest in personality1 and a fancy for loitering by the way4 ,the plots of ,scott1 ,thackeray1 ,dickens1 ,george ,eliot and their successors are almost detachable at will1 so arbitrarily are they imposed on the novel of character which was slowly but steadily developing within their lax support1 and which became1 as the nineteenth century advanced1 the typical form of ,english fiction4 ,the novel of situation is a different matter4 ,the situation1 instead of being imposed from the outside1 is the kernel of the tale and its only reason for being4 ,it seizes the characters in its steely grip1 and jiu-jitsus them into the required attitude with a relentlessness against which only genius can prevail4 ,in every form of novel it is noticeable that the central characters tend to be the least real4 ,this seems to be partly explained by the fact that these characters1 survivors of the old 8hero0 and 8heroine10 whose business it was not to be real but to be sublime1 are still1 though often without the author's being aware of it1 the standard-bearers of his convictions or the expression of his secret inclinations4 ,they are his in the sense of tending to do and say what he would do1 or imagines he would do1 in given circumstances1 and being mere projections of his own personality they lack the substance and relief of the minor characters1 whom he views coolly and objectively1 in all their human weakness and inconsequence4 ,but there remains another reason1 less often recognized1 for the unreality of novel 8heroes0 and 8heroines10 a reason especially applicable to the leading figures in the novel of situation4 ,it is that the story is about them1 and forces them into the shape which its events impose1 while the subordinate characters1 moving at ease in the interstices of the tale1 and free to go about their business in the illogical human fashion1 remain real to writer and readers4 ,this fact1 exemplified in all novels1 becomes most vivid in the novel of situation1 where the characters tend to turn into ,laocons1 and die in the merciless coils of their adventure4 ,this is the extreme point of the difference between the novel of situation and of character1 and the cause of the common habit of regarding them as alternative methods of fiction4 ,,iii ,the thoughtful critic who would be rid of the cheap formulas of fiction-reviewing1 and reach some clearer and deeper expression of the sense and limitations of the art1 is sure to resent the glib definition of the novel of situation and the novel of character 7or manners7 as necessarily antithetical and mutually exclusive4 ,the thoughtful critic will be right2 and the thoughtful novelist will share his view4 ,what sense is there in such arbitrary divisions1 such opposings of one manner to another1 when almost all the greatest novels are there1 in their versatility and their abundance1 to show the glorious possibility of welding both types of fiction into a single masterpiece8 ,in what category1 for instance1 should 8,anna ,karenina0 be placed8 ,undoubtedly in that of novels of character and manners4 ,yet if one sums up the tale in its rapidity and its vehemence1 what situation did ,dumas ,fils ever devise for his theatre 8of situation0 half so poignant or so dramatic as that which ,tolstoy manages to keep conspicuously afloat on the wide tossing expanse of the ,russian social scene8 ,in 8,vanity ,fair10 again1 so preeminently a novel of manners1 a novel of character1 with what dramatic intensity the situation between ,becky1 ,rawdon and ,lord ,steyne stands out from the rich populous pages1 and gathers up into itself all their diffused significance6 ,the answer is evident3 above a certain height of creative capacity the different methods1 the seemingly conflicting points of view1 are merged in the artist's comprehensive vision1 and the situations inherent in his subject detach themselves in strong relief from the fullest background without disturbing the general composition4 ,but though this is true1 it is true only of the greatest novelists--those who1 as ,matthew ,arnold said of ,shakespeare1 do not abide our question but are free4 ,in them1 vast vision is united to equivalent powers of co-ordination2 but more often the novelist who has the creative vision lacks the capacity for co-ordinating and rendering his subject1 or at least is unable1 in the same creation1 to give an equal part to the development of character and to the clash of situation4 ,owing to the lack of that supreme equipment which always rises above classification most of the novelists have tended to let their work fall into one of the two categories of situation or character1 thus fortifying the theory of the superficial critics that life in fiction must be presented either as conflict or as character4 ,the so-called novel of character1 even in less than the most powerful hands1 does not1 of course1 preclude situation in the sense of a dramatic clash4 ,but the novelist develops his tale through a succession of episodes1 all in some way illustrative of the manners or the characters out of which the situation is eventually to spring2 he lingers on the way1 is not afraid of by-paths1 and enriches his scene with subordinate pictures1 as the medival miniaturist encloses his chief subjects in a border of beautiful ornament and delicate vignettes2 whereas the novel of situation is1 by definition1 one in which the problem to be worked out in a particular human conscience1 or the clash between conflicting wills1 is the novelist's chief if not his only theme1 and everything not directly illuminative of it must be left out as irrelevant4 ,this does not mean that in the latter type of tale--as1 for instance1 in 8,tess of the d',urbervilles0--the episode1 the touch of colour or character1 is forbidden4 ,the modern novelist of situation does not seem likely to return to the monochrome starkness of 8,adolphe0 or 8,la ,princesse de ,clves40 ,he uses every scrap of colour1 every picturesque by-product of his subject which that subject yields2 but he avoids adding to it a single touch1 however decoratively tempting1 which is not part of the design4 ,if the two methods are thus contrasted1 the novel of character and manners may seem superior in richness1 variety and play of light and shade4 ,this does not prove that it is necessarily capable of a greater total effect than the other2 yet so far the greatest novels have undoubtedly dealt with character and manners rather than with mere situation4 ,the inference is indeed almost irresistible that the farther the novel is removed in treatment from theatrical modes of expression1 the more nearly it attains its purpose as a freer art1 appealing to those more subtle imaginative requirements which the stage can never completely satisfy4 ,when the novelist has been possessed by a situation1 and sees his characters hurrying to its culmination1 he must have unusual keenness of vision and sureness of hand to fix their lineaments and detain them on their way long enough for the reader to recognize them as real human beings4 ,in the novel of pure situation it is doubtful if this has ever been done with more art than in 8,the ,wrong ,box10 where ,stevenson launched on his roaring torrent of farce a group of real people1 alive and individual1 who keep their reality and individuality till the end4 ,the tears of laughter that the book provokes generally blind the reader to its subtle character-drawing2 but1 save for the people in 8,gil ,blas10 and the memorable figures of ,chicot and ,gorenflot in the ,dumas cycle headed by 8,la ,dame de ,monsoreau10 it would be hard1 in any tale of action1 to find characters as vivid and individual as those which rollick through this glorious farce4 ,the tendency of the situation to take hold of the novelist's imagination1 and to impose its own tempo on his tale1 can be resisted only by richness and solidity of temperament4 ,the writer must have a range wide enough to include1 within the march of unalterable law1 all the inconsequences of human desire1 ambition1 cruelty1 weakness and sublimity4 ,he must1 above all1 bear in mind at each step that his business is not to ask what the situation would be likely to make of his characters1 but what his characters1 being what they are1 would make of the situation4 ,this question1 which is the tuning-fork of truth1 never needs to be more insistently applied than in writing the dialogue which usually marks the culminating scenes in fiction4 ,the moment the novelist finds that his characters are talking not as they naturally would1 but as the situation requires1 are visibly lending him a helping hand in the more rapid elucidation of his drama1 the moment he hears them saying anything which the stress of their predicament would not naturally bring to their lips1 his effect has been produced at the expense of reality1 and he will find them turning to sawdust on his hands4 ,some novelists1 conscious of the danger1 and not sufficiently skilled to meet it1 have tried to turn it by interlarding these crucial dialogues with irrelevant small-talk1 in the hope of thus producing a greater air of reality4 ,but this is to fall again into the trap of what ,balzac called 8a reality in nature which is not one in art40 ,the object of dialogue is to gather up the loose strands of passion and emotion running through the tale2 and the attempt to entangle these threads in desultory chatter about the weather or the village pump proves only that the narrator has not known how to do the necessary work of selection4 ,all the novelist's art is brought into play by such tests4 ,his characters must talk as they would in reality1 and yet everything not relevant to his tale must be eliminated4 ,the secret of success lies in his instinct of selection4 ,these difficulties are not a reason for condemning the novel of situation as an inferior or at least as a not-worth-while form of the art4 ,inferior to the larger form1 the novel of character and manners1 it probably is1 if only in the matter of scale2 but certainly also worth while1 since it is the natural vehicle of certain creative minds4 ,as long as there are novelists whose inventive faculty presents them first with the form1 and only afterward with the substance1 of the tales they want to tell1 the novel of situation will fill a purpose4 ,but it is precisely this type of mind which needs to be warned against the dangers of the form4 ,when the problem comes to the novelist before he sees the characters engaged in it1 he must be all the more deliberate in dealing with it1 must let it lie in his mind till it brings forth of itself the kind of people who would naturally be involved in that particular plight4 ,the novelist's permanent problem is that of making his people at once typical and individual1 universal and particular1 and in adopting the form of the novel of situation he perpetually runs the risk of upsetting that nice balance of attributes unless he persists in thinking of his human beings first1 and of their predicament only as the outcome of what they are4 ,,iv ,the predicament--the situation--must still be borne in mind if the novelist approaches his task in another way1 and sees his tale as situation illustrating character instead of the reverse4 ,even the novel of character and manners can never be without situation1 that is1 without some sort of climax caused by the contending forces engaged4 ,the conflict1 the shock of forces1 is latent in every attempt to detach a fragment of human experience and transpose it in terms of art1 that is1 of completion4 ,the seeming alternative is to fall back on the 8stream of consciousness0--which is simply the 8slice-of-life0 of the 'eighties renamed--but that method1 as has already been pointed out1 contains its own condemnation1 since every attempt to employ it of necessity involves selection1 and selection in the long run must eventually lead to the transposition1 the 8stylization10 of the subject4 ,let it be assumed1 then1 that a predicament there must be1 whether worked out in one soul1 or created by the shock of opposing purposes4 ,the larger the canvas of the novel--supposing the novelist's powers to be in scale with his theme--the larger will be the scale of the predicament4 ,in the great novel of manners in which ,balzac1 ,thackeray and ,tolstoy were preeminent1 the conflict engages not only individuals but social groups1 and the individual plight is usually the product--one of the many products--of the social conflict4 ,there is a sense in which situation is the core of every tale1 and as truly present in the quiet pages of 8,eugnie ,grandet0 or 8,le ,lys dans la ,valle0 as in the tense tragedy of 8,the ,return of the ,native10 the epic clash of 8,war and ,peace0 or the dense social turmoil of 8,vanity ,fair40 ,but the main advantage of the novelist to whom his subject first presents itself in terms of character1 either individual or social1 is that he can quietly watch his people or his group going about their business1 and let the form of his tale grow out of what they are1 out of their idiosyncrasies1 their humours and their prejudices1 instead of fitting a situation onto them before he really knows them1 either personally or collectively4 ,it is manifest that every method of fiction has its dangers1 and that the study of character pursued to excess may tend to submerge the action necessary to illustrate that character4 ,in the inevitable reaction against the arbitrary 8plot0 many novelists have gone too far in the other direction1 either swamping themselves in the tedious 8stream of consciousness10 or else--another frequent error--giving an exaggerated importance to trivial incidents when the tale is concerned with trivial lives4 ,there is a sense in which nothing which receives the touch of art is trivial2 but to rise to this height the incident1 insignificant in itself1 must illustrate some general law1 and turn on some deep movement of the soul4 ,if the novelist wants to hang his drama on a button1 let it at least be one of ,lear's4 ,all things hold together in the practice of any art1 and character and manners1 and the climaxes springing out of them1 cannot1 in the art of fiction1 be dealt with separately without diminution to the subject4 ,it is a matter for the novelist's genius to combine all these ingredients in their due proportion2 and then we shall have 8,emma0 or 8,the ,egoist0 if character is to be given the first place1 8,le ,pre ,goriot0 or 8,madame ,bovary0 if drama is to be blent with it1 and 8,war and ,peace10 8,vanity ,fair10 8,l',education ,sentimentale0 if all the points of view and all the methods are to be harmonized in the achievement of a great picture wherein the individual1 the group and their social background have each a perfectly apportioned share in the composition4 8,four great walls in the ,new ,jerusalem ,meted on each side by the angel's reed--0 ,yes2 but to cover such spaces adequately happens even to the greatest artists only once or twice in their career4 ,v ,,marcel ,,proust ,v ,,marcel ,,proust ,i ,the difficulty of speaking at all adequately of ,marcel ,proust has grown with the number of volumes of 8,a la ,recherche du ,temps ,perdu10 and also with the lapse of time since the first were published4 ,the cycle1 moreover1 is still incomplete 7though we now know that its conclusion will appear72 and the critic who ventures to see a definite intention in the dense and branching pages already published does so at his peril1 and on the faith of that sense of inner continuity communicated from the outset by all the greatest novels1 from the rambling and extravagant 8,gil ,blas0 to the compact and thrifty 8,emma40 ,the death of ,marcel ,proust1 premature though it was1 yet did not happen till his dying hand had put the last words to the last page of his vast narrative4 ,last words2 but unhappily not last touches4 ,the appearance of 8,la ,prisonnire0 confirms the report circulated after his death that the volumes then unpublished were left without those innumerable enriching strokes which gave their golden ripeness to the others4 ,but1 whether or not these final chapters1 written in illness1 and clouded 7as one perceives from 8,la ,prisonnire07 by physical weakness and deep mental distress1 fulfil the promise of that unity to which all the strands of the elaborate fabric seem to tend1 the first volumes 7by which the author's greatness will perhaps finally be measured7 make it clear that he himself felt the need of such unity1 and would have submitted his restless genius to it if illness had not disintegrated his powers4 ,on this inference the critic will probably have to rest2 and it is enough to justify treating the fragment before us as already potentially a whole4 ,more serious for the critic is the obstacle caused by the long lapse of years since 8,du ,ct de chez ,swann0 led off the astounding procession4 ,since then the conception of the art of fiction1 as it had taken shape during the previous half-century1 has been unsettled by a series of experiments1 each one too promptly heralded as the final and only way of novel-writing4 ,the critics who have handed down these successive ultimata have apparently decided that no interest1 even archological1 attaches any longer to the standards and the vocabulary of their predecessors2 and this wholesale rejection of past principles has led to a confusion in terms which makes communication difficult and conclusions ambiguous4 ,an unexpected result of the contradictory clamour has been to transfer ,proust1 who ten or twelve years ago seemed to many an almost unintelligible innovator1 back to his rightful place in the great line of classic tradition4 ,if1 therefore1 the attempt to form a judgment of his art has become doubly arduous it has also become doubly interesting2 for ,proust1 almost alone of his kind1 is apparently still regarded as a great novelist by the innovators1 and yet is already far enough off to make it clear that he was himself that far more substantial thing in the world of art1 a renovator4 ,with a general knowledge of letters extending far beyond the usual limits of ,french culture he combined a vision peculiarly his own2 and he was thus exceptionally fitted to take the next step forward in a developing art without disowning its past1 or wasting the inherited wealth of experience4 ,it is as much the lack of general culture as of original vision which makes so many of the younger novelists1 in ,europe as in ,america1 attach undue importance to trifling innovations4 ,original vision is never much afraid of using accepted forms2 and only the cultivated intelligence escapes the danger of regarding as intrinsically new what may be a mere superficial change1 or the reversion to a discarded trick of technique4 ,the more one reads of ,proust the more one sees that his strength is the strength of tradition4 ,all his newest and most arresting effects have been arrived at through the old way of selection and design4 ,in the construction of these vast1 leisurely1 and purposeful compositions nothing is really wasted1 or brought in at random4 ,if at first ,proust seemed so revolutionary it was partly because of his desultory manner and parenthetical syntax1 and chiefly because of the shifting of emphasis resulting from his extremely personal sense of values4 ,the points on which ,proust lays the greatest stress are often those inmost tremors1 waverings1 and contradictions which the conventions of fiction have hitherto subordinated to more generalized truths and more rapid effects4 ,proust bends over them with unwearied attention4 ,no one else has carried as far the analysis of half-conscious states of mind1 obscure associations of thought and gelatinous fluctuations of mood2 but long and closely as he dwells on them he never loses himself in the submarine jungle in which his lantern gropes4 ,though he arrives at his object in so roundabout a way1 that object is always to report the conscious1 purposive conduct of his characters4 ,in this respect he is distinctly to be classed among those whom the jargon of recent philosophy has labelled 8behaviourists0 because they believe that the proper study of mankind is man's conscious and purposive behaviour rather than its dim unfathomable sources4 ,proust is in truth the aware and eager inheritor of two great formulas3 that of ,racine in his psychology1 that of ,saint-,simon in its anecdotic and discursive illustration4 ,in both respects he is deliberately traditional4 ,,ii ,fashions in the arts come and go1 and it is of little interest to try to analyze the work of any artist who does not give one the sense of being in some sort above them4 ,in the art of one's contemporaries it is not always easy to say what produces that sense2 and perhaps the best way of trying to find out is to apply a familiar touchstone4 ,out of all the flux of judgments and theories which have darkened counsel in respect of novel-writing1 one stable fact seems always to emerge2 the quality the greatest novelists have always had in common is that of making their people live4 ,to ask why this matters more than anything else would lead one into the obscurest mazes of sthetic2 but the fact is generally enough admitted to serve as a ground for discussion4 ,not all the other graces and virtues combined seem to have in them that aseptic magic4 ,vivacity1 virtuosity1 an abundance of episodes1 skill in presenting them3 what power of survival have these1 compared with the sight of the doddering ,baron ,hulot climbing his stairs to a senile tryst1 to ,beatrix ,esmond descending hers in silver clocks and red-heeled shoes8 ,m4 ,jusserand1 in his 8,literary ,history of the ,english ,people10 says of ,shakespeare that he was un grand distributeur de vie1 a great life-giver2 it is the very epithet one needs for ,proust4 ,his gallery of living figures is immense1 almost past reckoning2 so far1 in that ever-growing throng1 it is only the failures that one can count4 ,and ,proust's power of evocation extends from the background and middle distance 7where some mysterious law of optics seems to make it relatively easy for the novelist to animate his puppets7 to that searching 8centre front0 where his principal characters1 so scrutinized1 explained1 re-explained1 pulled about1 taken apart and put together again1 resist in their tough vitality his perpetual nervous manipulation1 and keep carelessly on their predestined way4 ,swann himself1 subjected to so merciless an examination1 ,swann1 as to whose haberdashery1 hats1 boots1 gloves1 taste in pictures1 books1 and women we are informed with an impartial abundance1 is never more alive than when1 in that terrible scene of the fifth volume1 he quietly tells the ,duchesse de ,guermantes that he cannot promise to go to ,italy the following spring with her and the ,duke because he happens to be dying4 ,equally vivid are the invalid aunt in the pale twilight of her provincial bedroom1 and the servant ,franoise who waits on her1 and at her death passes as a matter of course to the rest of the family--amazing composite picture of all the faults and virtues of the old-fashioned ,french maid-servant4 ,and then there is the hero's grandmother1 who fills the pages with a subdued yet tingling vitality from the moment when we first see her dashing out for one of her lonely walks in the rain to that other day1 far on in the tale1 when1 fiercely and doggedly nursed by ,franoise1 she dies in an equal loneliness2 there is the ,marquis de ,saint-,loup1 impetuous1 selfish1 and sentimental1 with his artless veneration for the latest thing in 8culture10 his snobbishness in the ,bohemian world1 his simplicity and good-breeding in his own2 the ,jewish actress1 his mistress1 who despises him because he is a mere 8man of the world0 and not one of her own crew of sthetic charlatans2 the great1 the abject1 the abominable and magnificent ,monsieur de ,charlus1 and the shy scornful ,duchesse de ,guermantes1 with her quickness of wit and obtuseness of heart1 her consuming worldliness and her sincere belief that nothing bores her as much as the world--the poor ,duchess1 mistress of all the social arts1 yet utterly nonplussed1 and furious1 because ,swann's announcement that he is dying is made as she is getting into her carriage to go to a big dinner1 and nothing in her code teaches her how to behave to a friend tactless enough to blurt out such news at such a moment6 ,ah1 how they all live1 and abound each in his or her own sense--and how1 each time they reappear 7sometimes after disconcertingly long eclipses71 they take up their individual rhythm as unerringly as the performers in some great orchestra6 ,the sense that1 through all his desultoriness1 ,proust always knows whither his people are tending1 and which of their words1 gestures and thoughts are worth recording2 his ease in threading his way through their crowded ranks1 fills the reader1 from the first1 with the feeling of security which only the great artists inspire4 ,certain novels1 beginning very quietly--carelessly1 almost--yet convey on the opening page the same feeling of impending fatality as the first bars of the ,fifth ,symphony4 ,destiny is knocking at the gate4 ,the next knock may not come for a long time2 but the reader knows that it will come1 as surely as ,tolstoy's ,ivan ,ilyitch knew that the mysterious little intermittent pain which used to disappear for days would come back oftener and more insistently till it destroyed him4 ,there are many ways of conveying this sense of the foot-fall of ,destiny2 and nothing shows the quality of the novelist's imagination more clearly than the incidents he singles out to illuminate the course of events and the inner workings of his people's souls4 ,when ,imogen1 setting forth to meet her adored ,posthumus at ,milford ,haven1 asks his servant ,pisanio 7who has been ordered by the jealous ,posthumus to murder her on the way73 8,how many score of miles may we well ride 'twixt hour and hour80 and1 getting the man's anguished answer3 8,one score 'twixt sun and sun1 ,madam1 's enough for you1 and too much too10 exclaims3 8,why1 one that rode to's execution1 man1 could never go so slow--0 or when ,gretchen1 opening her candid soul to ,faust1 tells him how she mothered her little sister from the cradle--8,my mother was so ill 444 ,i brought the poor little creature up on milk and water 444 the cradle stood by my bed1 she could hardly stir without my waking4 ,i had to feed her1 take her into the bed with me1 walk the floor with her all night1 and be early the next morning at the wash-tub2 but ,i loved her so that ,i was glad to do it0--when the swift touch of genius darts such rays on the path to come1 one is almost tempted to exclaim3 ,there is nothing in mere 8situation0--the whole of the novelist's art lies in the particular way in which he brings the given conjuncture home to the imagination6 ,proust had an incredible sureness of touch in shedding this prophetic ray on his characters4 ,again and again he finds the poignant word1 the significant gesture1 as when1 in that matchless first chapter 78,combray07 of 8,du ,ct de chez ,swann0 he depicts the suspense of the lonely little boy 7the narrator7 who1 having been hurried off to bed without a goodnight kiss because ,m4 ,swann is coming to dine1 persuades the reluctant ,franoise to carry to his mother a little note in which he implores her to come up and see him 8about something very important40 ,so far1 the episode is like many in which the modern novelist has analyzed--especially since 8,sinister ,street0--the inarticulate tragedies of childhood4 ,but for ,proust such an episode1 in addition to its own significance1 has a deeper illuminative use4 8,i thought to myself10 he goes on1 8how ,swann would have laughed at my anguish if he had read my letter1 and guessed its real object0 7which was1 of course1 to get his mother's goodnight kiss72 8but1 on the contrary1 as ,i learned later1 for years an anguish of the same kind was the torture of ,swann's own life4 ,that anguish1 which consists in knowing that the being one loves is in some gay scene lieu de plaisir where one is not1 where there is no hope of one's being2 that anguish1 it was through the passion of love that he experienced it--that passion to which it is in some sort predestined1 to which it peculiarly and specifically pertains0--and then1 when ,franoise has been persuaded to take the child's letter1 and his mother 7engaged with her guest7 does not come1 but says curtly3 8,there is no answer0--8,alas60 the narrator continues1 8,swann also had had that experience1 had learned that the good intentions of a third person are powerless to move a woman who is irritated at feeling herself pursued in scenes of enjoyment by some one whom she does not love--0 and suddenly1 by one touch1 in the first pages of that quiet opening chapter in which a little boy's drowsy memories reconstitute an old friend's visit to his parents1 a light is flashed on the central theme of the book3 the hopeless incurable passion of a sensitive man for a stupid uncomprehending woman4 ,the foot-fall of ,destiny has echoed through that dull provincial garden1 her touch has fallen on the shoulder of the idle man of fashion1 and in an instant1 and by the most natural of transitions1 the quiet picture of family life falls into its place in the great design of the book4 ,proust's pages abound in such anticipatory flashes1 each one of which would make the fortune of a lesser novelist4 ,a peculiar duality of vision enabled him to lose himself in each episode as it unrolled itself before him--as in this delicious desultory picture of ,swann's visit to his old friends--and all the while to keep his hand on the main threads of the design1 so that no slightest incident contributing to that design ever escapes him4 ,this degree of saturation in one's subject can be achieved only through something like the slow ripening processes of nature4 ,tyndall said of the great speculative minds3 8,there is in the human intellect a power of expansion--,i might almost call it a power of creation--which is brought into play by the simple brooding upon facts02 and he might have added that this brooding is one of the most distinctive attributes of genius1 is perhaps as near an approach as can be made to the definition of genius4 ,nothing can be farther from the mechanical ingenuities of 8plot0-weaving than this faculty of penetrating into a chosen subject and bringing to light its inherent properties4 ,neither haste to have done1 nor fear lest the reader shall miss his emphasis1 ever affects the leisurely movement of ,proust's narrative1 or causes him to give unnatural relief to the passages intended to serve as sign-posts4 ,a tiny 8blaze10 here and there1 on the bark of one of the trees in his forest1 suffices to show the way2 and the explorer who has not enough wood-craft to discover these signs had best abstain from the adventure4 ,,iii ,it was one of the distinctive characters of ,proust's genius that he combined with his great sweep of vision an exquisite delicacy of touch1 a solicitous passion for detail4 ,many of his pages recall those medival manuscripts where the roving fancy of the scribe has framed some solemn gospel or epistle in episodes drawn from the life of towns and fields1 or the pagan extravagances of the ,bestiary4 ,jane ,austen never surpassed in conciseness of irony some of the conversations between ,marcel's maiden aunts1 or the description of ,madame de ,cambremer and ,madame de ,franquetot listening to music2 and one must turn to 8,cranford0 for such microscopic studies of provincial life as that of the bed-ridden aunt1 ,madame ,octave1 who is always going to get up the next day1 and meanwhile lies beside her bottle of ,vichy and her purple velvet prayer-book 8bursting with pious images10 and listens to ,franoise's report of what is going on in the street1 down which ,madame ,goupil1 just before a thunder-storm1 is seen walking without her umbrella in the new silk dress she has had made at ,chteaudun6 ,but just as the reader is sinking delectably into the feather-bed of the small town1 ,proust snatches him up in eagle's talons and swings him over the darkest abysses of passion and intrigue--showing him1 in the slow tortures of ,swann's love for ,odette1 and of ,saint-,loup's for ,rachel1 the last depths and involutions of moral anguish1 or setting the frivolous careers of the two great ,guermantes ladies1 the ,duchess and the ,princess1 on a stage vaster than any since ,balzac's1 and packed with a human comedy as multifarious4 ,this changing but never confusing throng is composed of most of the notable types of a society which still keeps its aristocratic framework3 the old nobility of the 8,faubourg0 with their satellites2 rich and cultivated ,jews 7such as ,swann and ,bloch71 celebrated painters1 novelists1 actresses1 diplomatists1 lawyers1 doctors1 ,academicians2 men of fashion and vice1 dclasses ,grand ,duchesses1 intriguing vulgarians1 dowdy great ladies1 and all the other figures composing the most various1 curious1 and restless of modern societies4 ,without visible effort ,proust's art marshals these throngs and then turns serenely aside to put the last tender touches to his description of the hawthorns at ,combray1 or the lovely episode of ,marcel's first visit to ,rachel1 where the young man walks up and down under the blossoming pear-trees while ,saint-,loup goes to fetch his mistress4 ,every reader enamoured of the art must brood in amazement over the way in which ,proust maintains the balance between these two manners--the broad and the minute4 ,his endowment as a novelist--his range of presentation combined with mastery of his instruments--has probably never been surpassed4 ,fascinating as it is to the professional to dwell on this amazing virtuosity1 yet the lover of ,proust soon comes to feel that his rarest quality lies beyond and above it--lies in the power to reveal1 by a single allusion1 a word1 an image1 those depths of soul beyond the soul's own guessing4 ,the man who could write of the death of ,marcel's grandmother3 8,a few hours ago her beautiful hair1 just beginning to turn gray 444 had seemed less old than herself4 ,now1 on the contrary1 it placed the crown of age on a face grown young again1 and from which the wrinkles1 the contractions1 the heaviness1 the tension1 the flaccidity caused by suffering had all disappeared4 ,as in the far-off time when her parents had chosen her bridegroom for her1 the features of her face were delicately traced in lines of purity and submission1 the cheeks shone with chaste hopes1 with a dream of bliss1 even with an innocent gaiety that the years1 one by one1 had slowly destroyed4 ,life1 in leaving her had taken with it the disillusionments of life4 ,a smile seemed to rest upon my grandmother's lips4 ,on that funeral bed1 death1 like the medival sculptor1 had laid her down in the guise of a young girl--0 the man who could find words in which to express the inexpressible emotion with which one comes suddenly1 in some apparently unknown landscape1 upon a scene long known to the soul 7like that mysterious group of trees encountered by ,marcel in the course of a drive with ,madame de ,villeparisis7--the man who could touch with so sure and compassionate a hand on the central mysteries of love and death1 deserves at such moments to be ranked with ,tolstoy when he describes the death of ,prince ,andrew1 with ,shakespeare when he makes ,lear say3 8,pray you1 undo this button44440 ,,iv ,hitherto ,i have only praised4 ,in writing of a great creative artist1 and especially of one whose work is over1 it is always better worth while to dwell on the beauties than to hunt down the blemishes4 ,where the qualities outweigh the defects the latter lose much of their importance1 even when1 as sometimes in ,proust's case1 they are defects in the moral sensibility1 that tuning-fork of the novelist's art4 ,it is vain to deny1 or to try to explain away1 this particular blemish--deficiency1 it should be rather called--in ,proust's work4 ,undoubtedly there are blind spots in his books1 as there are in ,balzac's1 in ,stendhal's1 in ,flaubert's2 but ,proust's blind spots are peculiarly disconcerting because they are intermittent4 ,one cannot dismiss the matter by saying that a whole category of human emotions is invisible to him1 since at certain times his vision is acutest at the precise angle where the blindness had previously occurred4 ,a well-known ,english critic1 confusing the scenes in which ,proust's moral sense has failed him with those 7far more numerous7 in which he deliberately portrays the viler aspects of the human medley1 suggests that timorous readers might find unmingled enjoyment in the perusal of 8,a la ,recherche du ,temps ,perdu0 by the simple expedient of 8thinking away0 ,m4 de ,charlus--as who should propose 8thinking away0 ,falstaff from the plays in which he figures6 ,it would1 in fact1 be almost as difficult to dismiss ,m4 de ,charlus with an 8,i know thee not1 old man10 as ,falstaff2 and quite as unnecessary4 ,it is not by daring to do 8in the round0 a mean or corrupt character--an ,iago1 a ,lord ,steyne1 a ,philippe ,bridau1 or a ,valrie ,marneffe--that a novelist diminishes the value of his work4 ,on the contrary1 he increases it4 ,only when the vileness and the cruelty escape him1 when he fails to see the blackness of the shadow they project1 and thus unconsciously flattens his modelling1 does he correspondingly empoverish the picture2 and this ,proust too often did--but never in drawing ,m4 de ,charlus1 whose ignominy was always as vividly present to him as ,iago's or ,goneril's to their creator4 ,there is one deplorable page where the hero and narrator1 with whose hyper-sensitiveness a hundred copious and exquisite passages have acquainted us1 describes with complacency how he has deliberately hidden himself to spy on an unedifying scene4 ,this episode--and several others marked by the same abrupt lapse of sensibility--might be 8thought away0 with all the less detriment that1 at such moments1 ,proust's characters invariably lose their probableness and begin to stumble through their parts like good actors vainly trying to galvanize a poor play4 ,all through his work there are pages literally trembling with emotion2 but wherever the moral sensibility fails1 the tremor1 the vibration1 ceases4 ,when he is unaware of the meanness of an act committed by one of his characters1 that character loses by so much of its life-likeness1 and1 reversing ,pygmalion's gesture1 the author turns living beings back to stone4 ,but what are these lapses in a book where countless pages throb with passionate pity and look at one with human eyes8 ,the same man who thus offends at one moment1 at the next has one by the heartstrings in a scene such as that where the hero1 hearing his grandmother speak for the first time over the telephone1 is startled into thoughts of death and separation by the altered sound of a familiar voice2 or that in which ,saint-,loup comes up to ,paris on twenty-four hours' leave1 and his adoring mother first exults at the thought that he is going to spend his evening with her1 then bitterly divines that he is not1 and finally trembles lest1 by betraying her disappointment1 she shall have spoilt his selfish pleasure4 ,and it is almost always at the very moment when the reader thinks3 8,oh1 if only he doesn't fail me now60 that he floods his squalid scene with the magic of an inexhaustible poetry1 so that one could cry out1 like ,sigmund when the gale blows open the door of the hut3 8,no one went--some one came6 ,it is the spring40 ,m4 ,benjamin ,crmieux1 whose article on ,proust is the most thoughtful study of his work yet published1 has come upon the obstacle of ,proust's lapses of sensibility1 and tried1 not very successfully1 to turn it4 ,according to this critic1 ,proust's satire is never 8based on a moral ideal10 but is always merely 8complementary to his psychological analysis4 ,the only occasion0 7,m4 ,crmieux continues7 8where ,proust incidentally speaks of a moral ideal is in the description of the death of ,bergotte40 ,he then cites the beautiful passage in question3 8,everything happens in our lives as though we had entered upon them with a burden of obligations contracted in an anterior existence2 there is nothing in our earthly condition to make us feel that we are under an obligation to be good1 to be morally sensitive tre dlicats1 even to be polite2 nor1 to the artist1 to begin over again twenty times a passage which will probably be admired only when his body has been devoured by worms4444 ,all these obligations1 which have no sanction in our present life1 seem to belong to a different world1 a world founded on goodness1 on moral scruple1 on sacrifice1 a world entirely different from this one1 a world whence we come when we are born on earth1 perhaps to return there and live once more under the rule of the unknown laws which we have obeyed here because we carried their principles within ourselves1 without knowing who decreed that they should be2 those laws to which every deep intellectual labour draws us nearer1 and which are invisible only--and not always6--to fools40 ,it is difficult to see how so deliberate a profession of faith in a moral ideal can be brushed aside as 8incidental40 ,the passage quoted would rather seem to be the key to ,proust's whole attitude3 to its weakness as well as to its strength4 ,for it will be noticed that1 among the mysterious 8obligations0 brought with us from that other 8entirely different0 world1 he omits one2 the old stoical quality of courage4 ,that quality1 moral or physical1 seems never to have been recognized by him as one of the mainsprings of human action4 ,he could conceive of human beings as good1 as pitiful1 as self-sacrificing1 as guided by the most delicate moral scruples2 but never1 apparently1 as brave1 either by instinct or through conscious effort4 ,fear ruled his moral world3 fear of death1 fear of love1 fear of responsibility1 fear of sickness1 fear of draughts1 fear of fear4 ,it formed the inexorable horizon of his universe and the hard delimitation of his artist's temperament4 ,in saying so one touches on the narrow margin between the man's genius and his physical disabilities1 and at this point criticism must draw back1 or linger only in reverent admiration of the great work achieved1 the vast register covered1 in spite of that limitation1 in conflict with those disabilities4 ,nietzsche's great saying1 8,everything worth while is accomplished notwithstanding0 trotzdem1 might serve as the epitaph of ,proust4 ,,transcriber',s ,,notes3 ,italicized text is surrounded by underscores3 italics4 ,obvious typographical errors have been corrected4 ,inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized4 ,archaic or variant spelling has been retained4 ,new original cover art included with this e,book is granted to the public domain4