V

HE two central difficulties of the novel-both of which may at first appear purely technical-are still to be considered. They have to do with the choice of the point from which the subject is to be seen, and the attempt to produce on the reader the effect of the passage of time. Both "appear purely technical"; but they go too deep to be so classed, even were it possible to draw a definite line between the technique of a work of art and its informing spirit. They are rooted in the subject; and as always, in the last issue the subject itself must determine and limit their office.

It was remarked in the article on the Short Story that the same experience never happens to any two people, and that the story-teller's first care, after the choice of a subject, is to decide to which of his characters the episode in question happened, since it could not have happened in that particular way to more than one. Applied to the novel this may seem a hard saying, since the longer passage of time and more crowded field of action presuppose, on the part of the visualizing character, a state of omniscience and omnipresence likely to shake the reader's sense of probability. The difficulty is most often met by shifting the point of vision from one character to another, in such a way as to comprehend the whole history and yet preserve the unity of impression. In the interest of this unity it is best to shift as seldom as possible, and to let the tale work itself out from not more than two (or at most three) angles of vision, choosing as reflecting consciousnesses persons either in close

mental and moral relation to each other, or discerning enough to estimate each other's parts in the drama, so that the latter, even viewed from different angles, always presents itself to the reader as a whole.

The choice of such reflectors is not easy; still more arduous is the task of determining at what point each is to be turned on the scene. The only solution seems to be that when things happen which the first reflector cannot, with any show of probability, be aware of, or is incapable of reacting to, even if aware, then another, an adjoining, consciousness is required to take up the tale.

Thus drily stated, the formula may seem pedantic and arbitrary; 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 flesh. To the novelist who lives among his creations in this continuous intimacy they should pour out their tale almost as if to a passive spectator.

The problem of the co-ordinating consciousness has visibly disturbed many novelists, and the different solutions attempted are full of interest and instruction. Each is of course only another convention, and no convention is in itself objectionable, but becomes so only when wrongly used, as dirt, according to the happy definition, is only "matter in the wrong place."

Verisimilitude is the truth of art, and any convention which hinders the illusion is obviously in the wrong place. Few hinder it more than the slovenly habit of some novelists of tumbling in and out of their characters' minds, and then suddenly drawing back to scrutinize them from the outside as the avowed Showman holding his puppets' strings. All the greatest modern novelists have felt this,

sense is conveyed that there has been an interval, not in moral experience only but in the actual lapse of the seasons! The producing of this impression is indeed the central mystery of the art. To its making go patience, meditation, concentration, all the quiet habits of mind now so little practised, so seldom inculcated; and to these must be added the final imponderable, genius, without which the rest is useless, and which, conversely, would be unusable without the rest.

VI

THE evening party with which "War and Peace" begins is one of the most triumphant examples in fiction of the difficult art of "situating" the chief actors in the opening chapter of what is to be an exceptionally crowded novel. No reader is likely to forget, or to confuse the one with the other, the successive arrivals at that dull and trivial St. Petersburg reception; Tolstoy with one mighty sweep gathers up all his principal characters and sets them before us in action. Very different-though so notable an achievement in its way-is the first chapter of "The Karamazoff Brothers" (in the English or German translation-for the current French translation inexplicably omits it). In this chapter Dostoievsky has hung a gallery of portraits against a blank wall. He describes all the members of the Karamazoff family, one after another, with merciless precision and infernal insight. But there they remain hanging-or standing. The reader is told all about them, but is not allowed to surprise them in action. The story about them begins afterward, whereas in "War and Peace" the first paragraph leads into the thick of the tale, and every phrase, every gesture, carries it on with that slow yet sweeping movement of which Tolstoy alone was capable.

Many thickly-peopled novels begin more gradually-like "Vanity Fair," for example and introduce their characters in carefully-ordered succession. The process is obviously simpler, and in certain cases as effective. The morning stroll of M. and Mme. Reynal and their little boys, in the first chapter of "Le Rouge et le Noir," sounds a note sufficiently portentous; and so does Major

In a

Pendennis's solitary breakfast. general way there is much to be said for a quiet opening to a long and crowded novel; though the novelist might prefer to be able to fling all his characters on the boards at once, with Tolstoy's regal prodigality. There is no fixed rule about this, or about any other method; each, in the art of fiction, to justify itself has only to succeed. But to succeed, the method must first of all suit the subject, must find its account, as best it can, with the difficulties peculiar to each situation.

The question where to begin is the next to confront the novelist; 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 outset.

Here again no general rule can be laid down. One subject may require to be treated from the centre, in the fashion dear to Henry James, with its opening in the heart of the action, and retrospective vistas radiating away from it on all sides, while others of which "Henry Esmond" is one of the most beautiful exampleswould lose all their bloom were they not allowed to ripen almost imperceptibly under the reader's absorbed contemplation. Balzac, in his preface to "La Chartreuse de Parme"-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 beginning. Balzac knew well enough what the world would have lost had that opening picture of Waterloo been left out; but he insists that it is no part of the story Stendhal had set out to tell, and sums up with the illuminating phrase: "M. Beyle has chosen a subject [the Waterloo episode] which is real in nature but not in art." That is, being out of place in that particular work of art, it loses its reality as art and remains merely a masterly study of a corner of a battlefield, the greatest the world was to know till Tolstoy's, but no part of a composition, as Tolstoy's always were.

The length of a novel, more surely even than any of its other qualities, needs to be determined by the subject. The novelist should not concern himself beforehand with the abstract question of length, should not decide in advance whether he is going to write a long or a

short novel; but in the act of composition he must never cease to bear in mind that one should always be able to say of a novel: "It might have been longer," never: "It need not have been so long."

Length, naturally, is not so much a matter of pages as of the mass and quality of what they contain. It is obvious that a mediocre book is always too long, and that a great one usually seems too short. But beyond this question of quality and weightiness lies the more closely relevant one of the development which this or that subject requires, the amount of sail it will carry. The great novelists have always felt this, and, within an inch or two, have cut their cloth accordingly.

Mr. A. C. Bradley, in his book on Shakespeare's tragedies, threw a new and striking light on the question of length. In analyzing Macbeth, which is so much shorter than Shakespeare's other tragedies that previous commentators had always assumed the text to be incomplete, he puts the following questions: If the text is incomplete, at what points are the supposed lacunæ to be found? Does any one, on first reading Macbeth, feel it to be too short, or even notice that it is appreciably less long than the other tragedies? And if not, is it not probable that we have virtually the whole play before us, and that Shakespeare knew he had made it as long as the subject warranted and the nerves of his audience could stand? Whether or not the argument be thought convincing in the given case, it is an admirable example of the spirit in which works of art should be judged, and of the only system of weights and measures applicable to them.

Tolstoy gave to Ivan Ilyitch just enough development to make a parable of universal application out of the story of an insignificant man's death. A little more, and he would have dropped into the fussy and meticulous, and smothered his meaning under unnecessary detail. Maupassant was another writer who had an unerring sense for the amount of sail his subjects could carry; and his work contains no better proof of it than the tale of "Yvette"-that harrowing little record of one of the ways in which the bloom may be brushed from a butterfly.

Henry James, in "The Turn of the

Screw," showed the same perfect sense of proportion. He had ventured to expand into a short novel the kind of tale usually imposed on the imagination in a single flash of horror; but his instinct told him that to go farther was impossible. The posthumous fragment, "The Sense of the Past," shows that he was again experimenting with the supernatural as a subject for a long novel; and in this instance one feels that he was about to risk over-burdening his theme. When I read M. Maeterlinck's book on the bee (which had just made a flight into fame as high as that of the insect it celebrates) I was first dazzled, then oppressed, by the number and the choice of his adjectives and analogies. Every touch was effective, every comparison striking; but when I had assimilated them all, and remade out of them the ideal Bee, that animal had become a winged elephant. The lesson was salutary for a novelist.

The great writers of fiction-Balzac, Tolstoy, Thackeray, George Eliot (how one has to return to them!)-all had a sense for the proportion of their subjects, and knew that the great argument requires space. There are few things more exquisite in minor English verse than Ben Jonson's epitaph on Salathiel Pavy; but "Paradise Lost" needs more room, and the fact that it does is one of the elements of its greatness. The point is to know at the start if one has in hand a Salathiel-Pavy theme or a Paradise-Lost one.

In no novelist was this instinct more unerring than in the impeccable Jane Austen. Never is there any danger of finding any of her characters out of proportion or rattling around in their setting. The same may be said of Tolstoy at the opposite end of the scale. His epic giftthe power of immediately establishing the right proportion between his characters and the scope of their adventureseems never to have failed him. "War and Peace" and Flaubert's "L'Education Sentimentale" are two of the longest of modern novels. Flaubert too was endowed with the rare instinct of scale; but there are moments when even his most ardent admirers feel that "L'Education Sentimentale" is too long for its carrying-power: whereas in the very first pages of "War and Peace" Tolstoy

manages to establish the right relation between subject and length. But there is another difference between the great novel and the merely long one. Even the longest and most seemingly desultory novels of such writers as Balzac, Flaubert and Tolstoy follow a prescribed orbit; they are true to the eternal effort of art to complete what in life is incoherent and fragmentary. This sense of the great theme sweeping around on its allotted track in the "most ancient heavens" is communicated on the first page of such novels as "War and Peace" and "L'Education Sentimentale"; it is the lack of this intrinsic form that makes the other kind of long novel merely long.

M. Romain Rolland's "Jean-Christophe❞ might be cited as a case in point. In a succession of volumes, planned at the outset as parts of a great whole, he tells a series of consecutive soul-adventures, none without interest; but such hint of scale as there is in the first volume seems to warrant no more than that one, and the reader feels that if there are more there is no reason why there should not be any number. This impression is produced not by the lack of a plan, but of that subtler kind of composition which, inspired by the sense of form, and deducing the length of a book from the importance of its argument, creates figures proportioned to their setting, and launches them with a sure hand on their destined path.

VII

THE question of the length of a novel naturally leads to the considering of its end; but of this there is little to be said that has not already been implied by the way, since no conclusion can be right which is not latent in the first page. About no part of a novel should there be a clearer sense of inevitability than about its end; any hesitation, any failure to gather up all the threads, shows that the author has not let his subject mature in his mind. A novelist who does not know when his story is finished, but goes on stringing episode to episode after it is over, not only weakens the effect of the conclusion, but robs of significance all that has gone before.

using the term, in the sense already defined, to describe the way in which the episodes of the narrative "are grasped and coloured by the author's mind"necessarily depends on his sense of selection. 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 situation. Illuminating incidents are the magic casements of fiction, its vistas on infinity. They are also the most personal element in any narrative, the author's most direct contribution; 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 episodes.

Lucien de Rubempré (in "Les Illusions Perdues") writing drinking songs to pay for the funeral of his mistress, who lies dying in the next room; Henry Esmond watching Beatrix come down the stairs in the scarlet stockings with silver clocks; Stephen Guest suddenly dazzled by the curve of Maggie Tulliver's arm as she lifts it to pick a flower for him in the conservatory; Arabella flinging the offal across the hedge at Jude; Emma losing her temper with Miss Bates at the picnic; the midnight arrival of Harry Richmond's father, in the first chapter of that glorious tale: all these scenes shed a circle of light far beyond the incident recorded.

At the conclusion of a novel the illuminating incident need only send its ray backward; but it should send a long enough shaft to meet the light cast forward from the first page, as in that poignant passage at the end of "L'Education Sentimentale" where Mme. Arnoux comes back to see Frédéric Moreau after long years of separation.

tervening years have vanished, and they walk on, "absorbed in each other, hearing nothing, as if they were walking in the country on a bed of dead leaves." Then they return to the young man's rooms, and Mme. Arnoux, sitting down, takes off her hat.

"The lamp, placed on a console, lit up her white hair. The sight was like a blow on his chest." He tries to keep up a pretense of sentimentalizing; but "she watched the clock, and he continued to walk up and down, smoking. Neither could find anything to say to the other. In all separations there comes a moment when the beloved is no longer with us." This is all; but every page that has gone before is lit up by the tragic gleam of Mme. Arnoux's white hair.

The same note is sounded in the chapter of "The Golden Bowl" where the deeply, the doubly betrayed Maggie, walking up and down in the summer evening on the terrace of Fawns, looks in at the window of the smoking-room, where her father, her husband and her stepmother (who is her husband's mistress) are playing bridge together, unconscious of her scrutiny. As she looks she knows that she has them at her mercy, and that they all (even her father) know it; and in the same instant the sight of them tells her that "to feel about them in any of the immediate, inevitable, assuaging ways, the ways usually open to innocence outraged and generosity betrayed, would have been to give them up, and that giving them up was, marvellously, not to be thought of."

The illuminating incident is not only the proof of the novelist's imaginative sensibility; it is also the best means of giving presentness, immediacy, to his tale. Far more than on dialogue does the effect of immediacy depend on the apt use of the illuminating incident; and the more threads of significance are gathered up into each one, the more pages of explanatory narrative are spared to writer and reader. There is a matchless instance of this in "Le Rouge et le Noir." The young Julien Sorel, the tutor of the Reynal children, believes a love-affair with their mother to be the best way of advancing his ambitions, and decides to test his audacity by taking Mme. Reynal's hand as they sit in the garden in the summer

dusk. He has a long struggle with his natural timidity and her commanding grace before he can make even this shy advance; and that struggle tells, in half a page, more of his fatuities and meannesses, 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 retrospection. This power to seize his characters in their habit as they live is always the surest proof of a novelist's mastery.

In

But the choice of the illuminating incident, though so much, is not all. As the French say, there is the manner. Stendhal's plain and straightforward report of the scene in the garden every word, every touch, tells. 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 flag. As every tale contains its own dimension, so it implies its own manner, the particular shade of style most fitted to convey its full meaning.

Most novelists who have a certain number of volumes to their credit, and have sought, as the subject required, to vary their manner, have been taken to task alike by readers and reviewers, and either accused of attempting to pass off earlier works on a confiding public, or pitied for a too-evident decline in power. Any change disturbs the intellectual indolence of the average reader; and nothing, for instance, 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 story, of not even confining himself to fiction, but attempting travels, criticism and verse, and doing them all so well that there must obviously be something wrong about it. The very critics who extol the versatility of the artists of the Renaissance rebuke the same quality in their own contemporaries; and their eagerness to stake out each novelist's territory, and to confine him to it for life, recalls the story of the verger in an English cathedral, who, finding a stranger kneeling in the sacred edifice between services, tapped him on the shoulder with the indulgent admonition: "Sorry, sir, but we can't have any praying here at this hour."