These are the familiar resources of a story-teller, which everybody uses as a matter of course. It is so natural to take advantage of them that unless we purposely keep an eye upon the writer's devices, marking them off as he turns from one to another, we hardly notice the change. He is telling a story in the ordinary way, the obvious and unconstrained. But in fact these variations represent differences of method that are fundamental. If the story is to be shown to us, the question of our relation to the story, how we are placed with regard to it, arises with the first word. Are we placed before a particular scene, an occasion, at a certain selected hour in the lives of these people whose fortunes are to be followed? Or are we surveying their lives from a height, participating in the privilege of the novelist—sweeping their history with a wide range of vision and absorbing a general effect? Here at once is a necessary alternative. Flaubert, as a matter of fact, gives us first a scene—the scene of Bovary's arrival at school, as a small boy; the incident of the particular morning is rendered; and then he leaves that incident, summarizes the background of the boy's life, describes his parents, the conditions of his home, his later career as a student. It is the way in which nine novels out of ten begin—an opening scene, a retrospect, and a summary. And the spectator, the reader, is so well used to it that he is conscious of no violent change in the point of view; though what has happened is that from one moment to another he has been caught up from a position straight in front of the action to a higher and a more commanding level, from which a stretch of time is to be seen outspread. This, then, is one distinction of method; and it is a tell-tale fact that even in this elementary matter our nomenclature is uncertain and ambiguous. How do we habitually discriminate between these absolutely diverse manners of presenting the facts of a story? I scarcely know—it is as though we had no received expressions to mark the difference between blue and red. But let us assume, at any rate, that a "scenic" and a "panoramic" presentation of a story expresses an intelligible antithesis, strictly and technically.

There is our relation, again—ours, the reader's—with regard to the author. Flaubert is generally considered to be a very "impersonal" writer, one who keeps in the background and desires us to remain unaware of his presence; he places the story before us and suppresses any comment of his own. But this point has been over-laboured, I should say; it only means that Flaubert does not announce his opinion in so many words, and thence it has been argued that the opinions of a really artistic writer ought not to appear in his story at all. But of course with every touch that he lays on his subject he must show what he thinks of it; his subject, indeed, the book which he finds in his selected fragment of life, is purely the representation of his view, his judgement, his opinion of it. The famous "impersonality" of Flaubert and his kind lies only in the greater tact with which they express their feelings—dramatizing them, embodying them in living form, instead of stating them directly. It is not to this matter, Flaubert's opinion of Emma Bovary and her history—which indeed is unmistakable—that I refer in speaking of our relation to the writer of the book.

It is a matter of method. Sometimes the author is talking with his own voice, sometimes he is talking through one of the people in the book—in this book for the most part Emma herself. Thus he describes a landscape, the trim country-side in which Emma's lot is cast, or the appearance and manners of her neighbours, or her own behaviour; and in so doing he is using his own language and his own standards of appreciation; he is facing the reader in person, however careful he may be to say nothing to deflect our attention from the thing described. He is making a reproduction of something that is in his own mind. And then later on he is using the eyes and the mind and the standards of another; the landscape has now the colour that it wears in Emma's view, the incident is caught in the aspect which it happens to turn towards her imagination. Flaubert himself has retreated, and it is Emma with whom we immediately deal. Take, for example, the two figures of her lovers, Rodolphe and Leon, the florid country-gentleman and the aspiring student; if Flaubert were to describe these men as he sees them, apart from their significance to Emma, they would not occupy him for long; to his mind, and to any critical mind, they are both of them very small affairs. Their whole effect in the book is the effect they produce upon the sensibility of a foolish and limited little woman. Or again, take the incident of Emma's single incursion into polite society, the ball at the great house which starts so many of her romantic dreams; it is all presented in her terms, it appears as it appeared to her. And occasionally the point of view is shifted away from her to somebody else, and we get a brief glimpse of what she is in the eyes of her husband, her mother-in-law, her lover.

Furthermore, whether the voice is that of the author or of his creature, there is a pictorial manner of treating the matter in hand and there is also a dramatic. It may be that the impression—as in the case of the marquis's ball—is chiefly given as a picture, the reflection of events in the mirror of somebody's receptive consciousness. The reader is not really looking at the occasion in the least, or only now and then; mainly he is watching the surge of Emma's emotion, on which the episode acts with sharp intensity. The thing is "scenic," in the sense in which I used the word just now; we are concerned, that is to say, with a single and particular hour, we are taking no extended, general view of Emma's experience. But though it is thus a scene, it is not dramatically rendered; if you took the dialogue, what there is of it, together with the actual things described, the people and the dresses and the dances and the banquets—took these and placed them on the stage, for a theatrical performance, the peculiar effect of the occasion in the book would totally vanish. Nothing could be more definite, more objective, than the scene is in the book; but there it is all bathed in the climate of Emma's mood, and it is to the nature of this climate that our interest is called for the moment. The lords and ladies are remote, Emma's envying and wondering excitement fills the whole of the foreground. The scene is pictorially treated.

But then look on to the incident of the comices agricoles, the cattle-show at Yonville, with the crowd in the market-place, the prize-giving and the speech-making. This scene, like the other, is rendered on the whole (but Flaubert's method is always a little mixed, for reasons to be noted presently) from Emma's point of view; she sits beside Rodolphe, while he makes his advances to her under cover of the councillor's eloquence, and she looks out upon the assembly—and as she sees it, so the throng and the glare are imparted to the reader. But remark that on this occasion the facts of the scene are well to the fore; Emma's mood counts for very little, and we get a direct view of the things on which her eyes casually rest. We hear the councillor's rhetorical periods, Rodolphe's tender speeches, Emma's replies, with the rumour of the crowd breaking through from time to time. It is a scene which might be put upon the stage, quite conceivably, without any loss of the main impression it is made to convey in the book—an impression of ironic contrast, of the bustle and jostle round the oration of the pompous dignitary, of the commonplace little romance that is being broached unobserved. To receive the force of the contrast the reader has only to see and hear, to be present while the hour passes; and the author places him there accordingly, in front of the visible and audible facts of the case, and leaves it to these to tell the story. It is a scene treated dramatically.

This is a difference of method that constantly catches a critic's eye in reading a novel. Is the author writing, at a given moment, with his attention upon the incidents of his tale, or is he regarding primarily the form and colour they assume in somebody's thought? He will do both, it is probable, in the course of his book, on the same page, perhaps, or even in the same sentence; nothing compels him to forego the advantage of either method, if his story can profit in turn from both. Now and then, indeed, we shall find a writer deliberately confining himself to one method only, treating his whole book with a rigid consistency, and this for the sake of some particular aspect of his theme which an unmixed manner is best fitted to reveal. But generally a novelist retains his liberty to draw upon any of his resources as he chooses, now this one and now that, using drama where drama gives him all he needs, using pictorial description where the turn of the story demands it. The only law that binds him throughout, whatever course he is pursuing, is the need to be consistent on some plan, to follow the principle he has adopted; and of course it is one of the first of his precepts, as with every artist in any kind, to allow himself no more latitude than he requires. A critic, then, looks for the principle on which a novelist's methods are mingled and varied—looks for it, as usual, in the novelist's subject, and marks its application as the subject is developed.

And so with the devices that I distinguish as scenic and panoramic—one watches continually to see how this alternation is managed, how the story is now overlooked from a height and now brought immediately to the level of the reader. Here again the need of the story may sometimes seem to pull decisively in one direction or the other; and we get a book that is mainly a broad and general survey, or mainly a concatenation of particular scenes. But on the whole we expect to find that the scene presently yields to some kind of chronicle or summary, and that this in turn prepares the way and leads into the occasion that fulfils it. The placing of this occasion, at the point where everything is ready for it, where it will thoroughly illuminate a new face of the subject and advance the action by a definite stage, is among the chief cares of the author, I take it, in planning his book. A scene that is not really wanted, and that does nothing in particular—a scene that for lack of preparation fails to make its effect—is a weakness in a story that one would suppose a novelist to be always guarding against. Anyhow there is no doubt that the scene holds the place of honour, that it is the readiest means of starting an interest and raising a question—we drop into a scene on the first page and begin to speculate about the people concerned in it: and that it recurs for a climax of any sort, the resolution of the question—and so the scene completes what it began. In Madame Bovary the scenes are distributed and rendered with very rare skill; not one but seems to have more and more to give with every fresh reading of it. The ball, the comices, the evening at the theatre, Emma's fateful interview with Leon in the Cathedral of Rouen, the remarkable session of the priest and the apothecary at her deathbed—these form the articulation of the book, the scheme of its structure. To the next in order each stage of the story is steadily directed. By the time the scene is reached, nothing is wanting to its opportunity; the action is ripe, the place is resonant; and then the incident takes up the story, conclusively establishes one aspect of it and opens the view towards the next. And the more rapid summary that succeeds, with its pauses for a momentary sight of Emma's daily life and its setting, carries the book on once more to the climax that already begins to appear in the distance.

But the most obvious point of method is no doubt the difficult question of the centre of vision. With which of the characters, if with any of them, is the writer to identify himself, which is he to "go behind"? Which of these vessels of thought and feeling is he to reveal from within? I suppose his unwritten story to rise before him, its main lines settled, as something at first entirely objective, the whole thing seen from without—the linked chain of incident, the men and women in their places. And it may be that the story can be kept in this condition while it is written, and that the completed book will be nothing but an account of things seen from the point of view of the author, standing outside the action, without any divulging of anybody's thought. But this is rare; such restraint is burdensome, unless in a very compact and straightforward tale. Somewhere the author must break into the privacy of his characters and open their minds to us. And again it is doubtless his purpose to shift the point of view no more often than he need; and if the subject can be completely rendered by showing it as it appears to a single one of the figures in the book, then there is no reason to range further. Haphazard and unnecessary plunges into the inner life of the characters only confuse the effect, changing the focus without compensating gain. But which is the centre, which is the mind that really commands the subject? The answer is not always evident at once, nor does it seem to be always correctly divined in the novels that we read. But of course in plenty of stories there can be little doubt; there is somebody in the middle of the action who is clearly the person to interpret it for us, and the action will accordingly be faced from his or her position. In Flaubert's Bovary there could be no question but that we must mainly use the eyes of Emma herself; the middle of the subject is in her experience, not anywhere in the concrete facts around her. And yet Flaubert finds it necessary, as I said, to look at her occasionally, taking advantage of some other centre for the time being; and why he does so a nearer inspection of his subject will soon show.

Here we have, then, the elements of the novelist's method—essentially few and simple, but infinite in their possibilities of fusion and combination. They are arranged in a new design to suit every new theme that a writer takes in hand; we see them alternated, united, imposed one on another, this point of view blended with that, dramatic action treated pictorially, pictorial description rendered dramatically—and these words I use throughout, it will be understood, in the special sense that I have indicated. In well-fashioned work it is always interesting to discover how method tends to be laid upon method, so that we get, as it were, layers and stratifications in the treatment of a story. Some of these I shall try to distinguish, and the search is useful, I think, for an understanding of the novelist himself. For though it is true that a man's method depends upon the particular story he is engaged in telling, yet the story that occurs to him, the subject he happens upon, will be that which asks for the kind of treatment congenial to his hand; and so his method will be a part of himself, and will tell us about the quality of his imagination. But this by the way—my concern is only with the manner in which the thing is done; and having glanced at some of the features of that manner in Flaubert's Bovary, I may now seek the reason of them in a more attentive handling of the book.



VI

If Flaubert allows himself the liberty of telling his story in various ways—with a method, that is to say, which is often modified as he proceeds—it is likely that he has good cause to do so. Weighing every word and calculating every effect so patiently, he could not have been casual and careless over his method; he would not take one way rather than another because it saved him trouble, or because he failed to notice that there were other ways, or because they all seemed to him much the same. And yet at first sight it does seem that his manner of arriving at his subject—if his subject is Emma Bovary—is considerably casual. He begins with Charles, of all people—Charles, her husband, the stupid soul who falls heavily in love with her prettiness and never has the glimmer of an understanding of what she is; and he begins with the early history of Charles, and his upbringing, and the irrelevant first marriage that his mother forces upon him, and his widowhood; and then it happens that Charles has a professional visit to pay to a certain farm, the farmer's daughter happens to be Emma, and so we finally stumble upon the subject of the book. Is that the neatest possible mode of striking it? But Flaubert seems to be very sure of himself, and it is not uninteresting to ask exactly what he means.

As for his subject, it is of course Emma Bovary in the first place; the book is the portrait of a foolish woman, romantically inclined, in small and prosaic conditions. She is in the centre of it all, certainly; there is no doubt of her position in the book. But why is she there? The true subject of the novel is not given, as we saw, by a mere summary of the course which is taken by the story. She may be there for her own sake, simply, or for the sake of the predicament in which she stands; she may be presented as a curious scrap of character, fit to be studied; or Flaubert may have been struck by her as the instrument, the victim, the occasion, of a particular train of events. Perhaps she is a creature portrayed because he thinks her typical and picturesque; perhaps she is a disturbing little force let loose among the lives that surround her; perhaps, on the other hand, she is a hapless sufferer in the clash between her aspirations and her fate. Given Emma and what she is by nature, given her environment and the facts of her story, there are dozens of different subjects, I dare say, latent in the case. The woman, the men, all they say and do, the whole scene behind them—none of it gives any clue to the right manner of treating them. The one irreducible idea out of which the book, as Flaubert wrote it, unfolds—this it is that must be sought.

Now if Emma was devised for her own sake, solely because a nature and a temper like hers seemed to Flaubert an amusing study—if his one aim was to make the portrait of a woman of that kind—then the rest of the matter falls into line, we shall know how to regard it. These conditions in which Emma finds herself will have been chosen by the author because they appeared to throw light on her, to call out her natural qualities, to give her the best opportunity of disclosing what she is. Her stupid husband and her fascinating lovers will enter the scene in order that she may become whatever she has it in her to be. Flaubert elects to place her in a certain provincial town, full of odd characters; he gives the town and its folk an extraordinary actuality; it is not a town quelconque, not a generalized town, but as individual and recognizable as he can make it. None the less—always supposing that Emma by herself is the whole of his subject—he must have lit on this particular town simply because it seemed to explain and expound her better than another. If he had thought that a woman of her sort, rather meanly ambitious, rather fatuously romantic, would have revealed her quality more intensely in a different world—in success, freedom, wealth—he would have placed her otherwise; Charles and Rodolphe and Homard and the rest of them would have vanished, the more illuminating set of circumstances (whatever they might be) would have appeared instead. Emma's world as it is at present, in the book that Flaubert wrote, would have to be regarded, accordingly, as all a consequence of Emma, invented to do her a service, described in order that they may make the description of her. Her world, that is to say, would belong to the treatment of the story; none of it, not her husband, not the life of the market-town, would be a part of the author's postulate, the groundwork of his fable; it would be possible to imagine a different setting, better, it might be, than that which Flaubert has chosen. All this—if the subject of the book is nothing but the portrait of such a woman.

But of course it is not so; one glance at our remembrance of the book is enough to show it. Emma's world could not be other than it is, she could not be shifted into richer and larger conditions, without destroying the whole point and purpose of Flaubert's novel. She by herself is not the subject of his book. What he proposes to exhibit is the history of a woman like her in just such a world as hers, a foolish woman in narrow circumstances; so that the provincial scene, acting upon her, making her what she becomes, is as essential as she is herself. Not a portrait, therefore, not a study of character for its own sake, but something in the nature of a drama, where the two chief players are a woman on one side and her whole environment on the other—that is Madame Bovary. There is a conflict, a trial of strength, and a doubtful issue. Emma is not much of a force, no doubt; her impulses are wild, her emotions are thin and poor, she has no power of passion with which to fight the world. All she has is her romantic dream and her plain, primitive appetite; but these can be effective arms, after all, and she may yet succeed in getting her way and making her own terms. On the other hand the limitations of her life are very blank and uncompromising indeed; they close all round her, hampering her flights, restricting her opportunities. The drama is set, at any rate, whatever may come of it; Emma marries her husband, is established at Yonville and faced with the poverty of her situation. Something will result, the issue will announce itself. It is the mark of a dramatic case that it contains an opposition of some kind, a pair of wills that collide, an action that pulls in two directions; and so far Madame Bovary has the look of a drama. Flaubert might work on the book from that point of view and throw the emphasis on the issue. The middle of his subject would then be found in the struggle between Emma and all that constitutes her life, between her romantic dreams and her besetting facts. The question is what will happen.

But then again—that is not exactly the question in this book. Obviously the emphasis is not upon the commonplace little events of Emma's career. They might, no doubt, be the steps in a dramatic tale, but they are nothing of the kind as Flaubert handles them. He makes it perfectly clear that his view is not centred upon the actual outcome of Emma's predicament, whether it will issue this way or that; what she does or fails to do is of very small moment. Her passages with Rodolphe and with Leon are pictures that pass; they solve nothing, they lead to no climax. Rodolphe's final rejection of her, for example, is no scene of drama, deciding a question that has been held in suspense; it is one of Emma's various mischances, with its own marked effect upon her, but it does not stand out in the book as a turning-point in the action. She goes her way and acts out her history; but of whatever suspense, whatever dramatic value, there might be in it Flaubert makes nothing, he evidently considers it of no account. Who, in recalling the book, thinks of the chain of incident that runs through it, compared with the long and living impression of a few of the people in it and of the place in which they are set? None of the events really matter for their own sake; they might have happened differently, not one of them is indispensable as it is. Emma must certainly have made what she could of her opportunities of romance, but they need not necessarily have appeared in the shape of Leon or Rodolphe; she would have found others if these had not been at hand. The events, therefore, Emma's excursions to Rouen, her forest-rides, her one or two memorable adventures in the world, all these are only Flaubert's way of telling his subject, of making it count to the eye. They are not in themselves what he has to say, they simply illustrate it.

What it comes to, I take it, is that though Madame Bovary, the novel, is a kind of drama—since there is the interaction of this woman confronted by these facts—it is a drama chosen for the sake of the picture in it, for the impression it gives of the manner in which certain lives are lived. It might have another force of its own; it might be a strife of characters and wills, in which the men and women would take the matter into their own hands and make all the interest by their action; it might be a drama, say, as Jane Eyre is a drama, where another obscure little woman has a part to play, but where the question is how she plays it, what she achieves or misses in particular. To Flaubert the situation out of which he made his novel appeared in another light. It was not as dramatic as it was pictorial; there was not the stuff in Emma, more especially, that could make her the main figure of a drama; she is small and futile, she could not well uphold an interest that would depend directly on her behaviour. But for a picture, where the interest depends only on what she is—that is quite different. Her futility is then a real value; it can be made amusing and vivid to the last degree, so long as no other weight is thrown on it; she can make a perfect impression of life, though she cannot create much of a story. Let Emma and her plight, therefore, appear as a picture; let her be shown in the act of living her life, entangled as it is with her past and her present; that is how the final fact at the heart of Flaubert's subject will be best displayed.

Here is the clue, it seems, to his treatment of the theme. It is pictorial, and its object is to make Emma's existence as intelligible and visible as may be. We who read the book are to share her sense of life, till no uncertainty is left in it; we are to see and understand her experience, and to see her while she enjoys or endures it; we are to be placed within her world, to get the immediate taste of it, and outside her world as well, to get the full effect, more of it than she herself could see. Flaubert's subject demands no less, if the picture is to be complete. She herself must be known thoroughly—that is his first care; the movement of her mind is to be watched at work in all the ardour and the poverty of her imagination. How she creates her makeshift romances, how she feeds on them, how they fail her—it is all part of the picture. And then there is the dull and limited world in which her appetite is somehow to be satisfied, the small town that shuts her in and cuts her off; this, too, is to be rendered, and in order to make it clearly tell beside the figure of Emma it must be as distinct and individual, as thoroughly characterized as she is. It is more than a setting for Emma and her intrigue; it belongs to the book integrally, much more so than the accidental lovers who fall in Emma's way. They are mere occasions and attractions for her fancy; the town and the cure and the apothecary and the other indigenous gossips need a sharper definition. And accordingly Flaubert treats the scenery of his book, Yonville and its odd types, as intensely as he treats his heroine; he broods over it with concentration and gives it all the salience he can. The town with its life is not behind his heroine, subdued in tone to make a background; it is with her, no less fully to the front; its value in the picture is as strong as her own.

Such is the picture that Flaubert's book is to present. And what, then, of the point of view towards which it is to be directed? If it is to have that unity which it needs to produce its right effect there can be no uncertainty here, no arbitrary shifting of the place from which an onlooker faces it. And in the tale of Madame Bovary the question of the right point of view might be considerably perplexing. Where is Flaubert to find his centre of vision?—from what point, within the book or without, will the unfolding of the subject be commanded most effectively? The difficulty is this—that while one aspect of his matter can only be seen from within, through the eyes of the woman, another must inevitably be seen from without, through nobody's eyes but the author's own. Part of his subject is Emma's sense of her world; we must see how it impresses her and what she makes of it, how it thwarts her and how her imagination contrives to get a kind of sustenance out of it. The book is not really written at all unless it shows her view of things, as the woman she was, in that place, in those conditions. For this reason it is essential to pass into her consciousness, to make her subjective; and Flaubert takes care to do so and to make her so, as soon as she enters the book. But it is also enjoined by the story, as we found, that her place and conditions should be seen for what they are and known as intimately as herself. For this matter Emma's capacity fails.

Her intelligence is much too feeble and fitful to give a sufficient account of her world. The town of Yonville would be very poorly revealed to us if Flaubert had to keep within the measure of her perceptions; it would be thin and blank, it would be barely more than a dull background for the beautiful apparition of the men she desires. What were her neighbours to her? They existed in her consciousness only as tiresome interruptions and drawbacks, except now and then when she had occasion to make use of them. But to us, to the onlooker, they belong to her portrait, they represent the dead weight of provincial life which is the outstanding fact in her case. Emma's rudimentary idea of them is entirely inadequate; she has not a vestige of the humour and irony that is needed to give them shape. Moreover they affect her far more forcibly and more variously than she could even suspect; a sharper wit than hers must evidently intervene, helping out the primitive workings of her mind. Her pair of eyes is not enough; the picture beheld through them is a poor thing in itself, for she can see no more than her mind can grasp; and it does her no justice either, since she herself is so largely the creation of her surroundings.

It is a dilemma that appears in any story, wherever the matter to be represented is the experience of a simple soul or a dull intelligence. If it is the experience and the actual taste of it that is to be imparted, the story must be viewed as the poor creature saw it; and yet the poor creature cannot tell the story in full. A shift of the vision is necessary. And in Madame Bovary, it is to be noted, there is no one else within the book who is in a position to take up the tale when Emma fails. There is no other personage upon the scene who sees and understands any more than she; perception and discrimination are not to be found in Yonville at all—it is an essential point. The author's wit, therefore, and none other, must supply what is wanting. This necessity, to a writer of Flaubert's acute sense of effect, is one that demands a good deal of caution. The transition must be made without awkwardness, without calling attention to it. Flaubert is not the kind of story-teller who will leave it undisguised; he will not begin by "going behind" Emma, giving her view, and then openly, confessedly, revert to his own character and use his own standards. There is nothing more disconcerting in a novel than to see the writer changing his part in this way—throwing off the character into which he has been projecting himself and taking a new stand outside and away from the story.

Perhaps it is only Thackeray, among the great, who seems to find a positively wilful pleasure in damaging his own story by open maltreatment of this kind; there are times when Thackeray will even boast of his own independence, insisting in so many words on his freedom to say what he pleases about his men and women and to make them behave as he will. But without using Thackeray's licence a novelist may still do his story an ill turn by leaving too naked a contrast between the subjective picture of what passes through Emma's mind—Emma's or Becky's, as it may be—and the objective rendering of what he sees for himself, between the experience that is mirrored in another thought and that which is shaped in his own. When one has lived into the experience of somebody in the story and received the full sense of it, to be wrenched out of the story and stationed at a distance is a shock that needs to be softened and muffled in some fashion. Otherwise it may weaken whatever was true and valid in the experience; for here is a new view of it, external and detached, and another mind at work, the author's—and that sense of having shared the life of the person in the story seems suddenly unreal.

Flaubert's way of disguising the inconsistency is not a peculiar art of his own, I dare say. Even in him it was probably quite unconscious, well as he was aware of most of the refinements of his craft; and perhaps it is only a sleight of hand that might come naturally to any good story-teller. But it is interesting to follow Flaubert's method to the very end, for it holds out so consummately; and I think it is possible to define it here. I should say, then, that he deals with the difficulty I have described by keeping Emma always at a certain distance, even when he appears to be entering her mind most freely. He makes her subjective, places us so that we see through her eyes—yes; but he does so with an air of aloofness that forbids us ever to become entirely identified with her. This is how she thought and felt, he seems to say; look and you will understand; such is the soul of this foolish woman. A hint of irony is always perceptible, and it is enough to prevent us from being lost in her consciousness, immersed in it beyond easy recall. The woman's life is very real, perfectly felt; but the reader is made to accept his participation in it as a pleasing experiment, the kind of thing that appeals to a fastidious curiosity—there is no question of its ever being more than this. The fact of Emma is taken with entire seriousness, of course; she is there to be studied and explored, and no means of understanding her point of view will be neglected. But her value is another matter; as to that Flaubert never has an instant's illusion, he always knows her to be worthless.

He knows it without asserting it, needless to say; his valuation of her is only implied; it is in his tone—never in his words, which invariably respect her own estimate of herself. His irony, none the less, is close at hand and indispensable; he has a definite use for this resource and he could not forego it. His irony gives him perfect freedom to supersede Emma's limited vision whenever he pleases, to abandon her manner of looking at the world, and to pass immediately to his own more enlightened, more commanding height. Her manner was utterly convincing while she exhibited it; but we always knew that a finer mind was watching her display with a touch of disdain. From time to time it leaves her and begins to create the world of Homard and Binet and Lheureux and the rest, in a fashion far beyond any possible conception of hers. Yet there is no dislocation here, no awkward substitution of one set of values for another; very discreetly the same standard has reigned throughout. That is the way in which Flaubert's impersonality, so called, artfully operates.

And now another difficulty; there is still more that is needed and that is not yet provided for. Emma must be placed in her world and fitted into it securely. Some glimpse of her appearance in the sight of those about her—this, too, we look for, to make the whole account of her compact and complete. Her relation to her husband, for instance, is from her side expressed very clearly in her view of him, which we possess; but there are advantages in seeing it from his side too. What did he really think of her, how did she appear to him? Light on this question not only makes a more solid figure of her for the reader, but it also brings her once for all into the company of the people round her, establishes her in the circle of their experience. Emma from within we have seen, and Yonville from the author's point of vantage; and now here is Emma from a point by her very side, when the seeing eye becomes that of her husband. Flaubert manages this ingeniously, making his procedure serve a further purpose at the same time. For he has to remember that his story does not end with the death of Emma; it is rounded off, not by her death, but by her husband's discovery of her long faithlessness, when in the first days of his mourning he lights upon the packet of letters that betrays her. The end of the story is in the final stroke of irony which gives the man this far-reaching glance into the past, and reveals thereby the mental and emotional confusion of his being—since his only response is a sort of stupefied perplexity. Charles must be held in readiness, so to speak, for these last pages; his inner mind, and his point of view, must be created in advance and kept in reserve, so that the force of the climax, when it is reached, may be instantly felt. And so we have the early episodes of Charles's youth and his first marriage, all his history up to the time when he falls in Emma's way; and Flaubert's questionable manner of working round to his subject is explained. Charles will be needed at the end, and Charles is here firmly set on his feet; the impression of Emma on those who encounter her is also needed, and here it is; and the whole book, mainly the affair of Emma herself, is effectively framed in this other affair, that of Charles, in which it opens and closes. Madame Bovary is a well-made book—so we have always been told, and so we find it to be, pulling it to pieces and putting it together again. It never is unrepaying to do so once more.

And it is a book that with its variety of method, and with its careful restriction of that variety to its bare needs, and with its scrupulous use of its resources—it is a book, altogether, that gives a good point of departure for an examination of the methods of fiction. The leading notions that are to be followed are clearly laid down in it, and I shall have nothing more to say that is not in some sense an extension and an amplification of hints to be found in Madame Bovary. For that reason I have lingered in detail over the treatment of a story about which, in other connections, a critic might draw different conclusions. I remember again how Flaubert vilified his subject while he was at work on it; his love of strong colours and flavours was disgusted by the drab prose of such a story—so he thought and said. But as the years went by and he fought his way from one chapter to another, did he begin to feel that it was not much of a subject after all, even of its kind? It is not clear; but after yet another re-reading of the book one wonders afresh. It is not a fertile subject—it is not; it does not strain and struggle for development, it only submits to it. But that aspect is not my subject, and Madame Bovary, a beautifully finished piece of work, is for my purpose singularly fertile.



VII

Of the notions on the subject of method that are suggested by Bovary, the first I shall follow is one that takes me immediately, without any doubt whatever, into the world of Thackeray. I start from that distinction between the "panoramic" and the "scenic" presentation of a story, which I noted a few pages ago; and to turn towards the panorama, away from the scene, is to be confronted at once with Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes, Esmond, all of them. Thackeray saw them as broad expanses, stretches of territory, to be surveyed from edge to edge with a sweeping glance; he saw them as great general, typical impressions of life, populated by a swarm of people whose manners and adventures crowded into his memory. The landscape lay before him, his imagination wandered freely across it, backwards and forwards. The whole of it was in view at once, a single prospect, out of which the story of Becky or Pendennis emerged and grew distinct while he watched. He wrote his novel with a mind full of a surge and wash of memories, the tenor of which was somehow to be conveyed in the outward form of a narrative. And though his novel complies with that form more or less, and a number of events are marshalled in order, yet its constant tendency is to escape and evade the restrictions of a scenic method, and to present the story in a continuous flow of leisurely, contemplative reminiscence.

And that is evidently the right way for the kind of story that Thackeray means to create. For what is the point and purpose of Vanity Fair, where is the centre from which it grows? Can it be described as a "plot," a situation, an entanglement, something that raises a question of the issue? Of plots in this sense there are plenty in Vanity Fair, at least there are two; Becky dominates one, Amelia smiles and weeps in the other. They join hands occasionally, but really they have very little to exchange. Becky and her Crawleys, Becky and her meteoric career in Curzon Street, would have been all as they are if Amelia had never been heard of; and Bloomsbury, too, of the Osbornes and the Sedleys, might have had the whole book to itself, for all that Becky essentially matters to it. Side by side they exist, and for Thackeray's purpose neither is more important than the other, neither is in the middle of the book as it stands. Becky seems to be in the middle, certainly, as we think of her; but that is not where Thackeray placed her. He meant Amelia to be no less appealing than Becky is striking; and if Amelia fails and drops into the background, it is not because she plays a subordinate part, but only because she plays it with so much less than Becky's vivid conviction. They fill the book with incident between the two of them; something is always happening, from the moment when they drive out of Miss Pinkerton's gate at Chiswick till the last word that is told of either. But the book as a whole turns upon nothing that happens, not even upon the catastrophe of Curzon Street; that scene in Becky's drawing-room disposes of her, it leaves the rest of the book quite untouched.

Not in any complication of incident, therefore, nor in any single strife of will, is the subject of Vanity Fair to be discerned. It is now here but in the impression of a world, a society, a time—certain manners of life within a few square miles of London, a hundred years ago. Thackeray flings together a crowd of the people he knows so well, and it matters not at all if the tie that holds them to each other is of the slightest; it may easily chance that his good young girl and his young adventuress set out together upon their journey, their paths may even cross from time to time later on. The light link is enough for the unity of his tale, for that unity does not depend on an intricately woven intrigue. It depends in truth upon one fact only, the fact that all his throng of men and women are strongly, picturesquely typical of the world from which they are taken—that all in their different ways can add to the force of its effect. The book is not the story of any of them, it is the story which they unite to tell, a chapter in the notorious career of well-to-do London. Exactly how the various "plots" evolve is not the main matter; behind them is the presence and the pressure of a greater interest, the mass of life which Thackeray packs into his novel. And if that is the meaning of Vanity Fair, to give the succession of incident a hard, particular, dramatic relief would be to obscure it. Becky's valiant struggle in the world of her ambition might easily be isolated and turned into a play—no doubt it has been; but consider how her look, her value, would in that case be changed. Her story would become a mere personal affair of her own, the mischance of a certain woman's enterprise. Given in Thackeray's way, summarized in his masterly perspective, it is part of an impression of manners.

Such, I take it, is Thackeray's difference, his peculiar mark, the distinction of his genius. He is a painter of life, a novelist whose matter is all blended and harmonized together—people, action, background—in a long retrospective vision. Not for him, on the whole, is the detached action, the rounded figure, the scenic rendering of a story; as surely as Dickens tended towards the theatre, with its clear-cut isolation of events and episodes, its underlining of the personal and the individual in men and women, so Thackeray preferred the manner of musing expatiation, where scene melts into scene, impressions are foreshortened by distance, and the backward-ranging thought can linger and brood as it will. Every novel of his takes the general form of a discursive soliloquy, in which he gradually gathers up the long train of experience that he has in mind. The early chapters of Esmond or Pendennis, the whole fragment of Denis Duval, are perfect examples of Thackeray's way when he is most himself, and when he is least to be approached by any other writer of fiction. All that he has to describe, so it seems, is present to him in the hour of recollection; he hangs over it, and his eye is caught by a point here and there, a child with a book in a window-seat, the Fotheringay cleaning her old shoe, the Major at his breakfast in Pall Mall; the associations broaden away from these glimpses and are followed hither and thither. But still, though the fullness of memory is directed into a consecutive tale, it is not the narrative, not its order and movement, that chiefly holds either Thackeray's attention or ours who read; the narrative is steeped in the suffusion of the general tone, the sensation of the place and the life that he is recalling, and it is out of this effect, insensibly changing and developing, that the novel is created.

For a nearer sight of it I go back to Vanity Fair. The chapters that are concerned with Becky's determined siege of London—"How to live well on nothing a year"—are exactly to the point; the wonderful things that Thackeray could do, the odd lapse of his power when he had to go beyond his particular province, both are here written large. Every one remembers the chapters and their place in the book. Becky, resolutely shaking off old difficulties for the moment, installs herself with her husband in the heart of the world she means to conquer; she all but succeeds, she just fails. Her campaign and its untimely end are to be pictured; it is an interlude to be filled with stir and glitter, with the sense of the passage of a certain time, above all with intimations of insecurity and precarious fortune; and it is to lead (this it must do) to a scene of final and decisive climax. Such is the effect to be drawn from the matter that Thackeray has stored up—the whole hierarchy of the Crawleys, Steyne, Gaunt House, always with Becky in the midst and to the fore. Up to a point it is precisely the kind of juncture in which Thackeray's art delights. There is abundance of vivid stuff, and the picture to be made of it is highly functional in the book. It is not merely a preparation for a story to follow; it is itself the story, a most important part of it. The chapters representing Becky's manner of life in Curzon Street make the hinge of her career; she approaches her turning-point at the beginning of them, she is past it at the end. Functional, therefore, they are to the last degree; but up to the very climax, or the verge of it, there is no need for a set scene of dramatic particularity. An impression is to be created, growing and growing; and it can well be created in the loose panoramic style which is Thackeray's paramount arm. A general view, once more, a summary of Becky's course of action, a long look at her conditions, a participation in her gathering difficulties—that is the nature and the task of these chapters, that is what Thackeray proceeds to give us.

He sets about it with a beautiful ease of assurance. From his height he looks forth, takes in the effect with his sweeping vision, possesses himself of the gradation of its tone; then, stooping nearer, he seizes the detail that renders it. But the sense of the broad survey is first in his thought. When he reflects upon Becky's life in London and all that came of her attempt to establish herself there, he is soon assailed by a score of definite recollections, tell-tale incidents, scraps of talk that show how things were going with her; but these, it would seem, arise by the way, they spring up in his mind as he reviews the past. They illustrate what he has to say, and he takes advantage of them. He brushes past them, however, without much delaying or particularizing; a hint, a moment, a glance suffices for the contribution that some event or colloquy is to make to the picture. Note, for example, how unceremoniously, again and again, and with how little thought of disposing a deliberate scene, he drifts into his account of something that Becky said or did; she begins to talk, you find there is some one else in the room, you find they are in a certain room at a certain hour; definition emerges unawares in a brooding memory. Briefly, to all appearance quite casually, the little incident shows itself and vanishes; there is a pause to watch and listen, and then the stream sets forward again, by so much enriched and reinforced. Or in a heightened mood, as in the picture of the midnight flurry and alarm of the great desolate house, when old Pitt Crawley is suddenly struck down, still it is as though Thackeray circled about the thought of the time and place, offering swift and piercing glimpses of it, giving no continuous and dramatic display of a constituted scene.

That foreshortening and generalizing, that fusion of detail, that subordination of the instance and the occasion to the broad effect, are the elements of the pictorial art in which Thackeray is so great a master. So long as it is a matter of sketching a train of life in broad free strokes, the poise and swing of his style are beyond praise. And its perfection is all the more notable that it stands in such contrast with the curious drop and uncertainty of his skill, so soon as there is something more, something different to be done. For Becky's dubious adventure has its climax, it tends towards a conclusion, and the final scene cannot be recalled and summarized in his indirect, reminiscential manner. It must be placed immediately before us, the collapse of Becky's plotting and scheming must be enacted in full view, if it is to have its proper emphasis and rightly round off her career. Hitherto we have been listening to Thackeray, on the whole, while he talked about Becky—talked with such extraordinary brilliance that he evoked her in all her ways and made us see her with his eyes; but now it is time to see her with our own, his lively interpretation of her will serve no longer. Does Becky fail in the end? After all that we have heard of her struggle it has become the great question, and the force of the answer will be impaired if it is not given with the best possible warrant. The best possible, better even than Thackeray's wonderful account of her, will be the plain and immediate performance of the answer, its embodiment in a scene that shall pass directly in front of us. The method that was not demanded by the preceding phases of the tale is here absolutely prescribed. Becky, Rawdon, Steyne, must now take the matter into their own hands and show themselves without any other intervention. Hitherto, practically throughout, they have been the creatures of Thackeray's thought, they have been openly and confessedly the figures of his vision. Now they must come forward, declare themselves, and be seen for what they are.

And accordingly they do come forward and are seen in a famous passage. Rawdon makes his unexpected return home from prison, and Becky's unfortunate disaster overtakes her, so to say, in our very presence. Perhaps I may seem to exaggerate the change of method which I note at this point; but does it not appear to any one, glancing back at his recollection of the book, that this particular scene is defined and relieved and lighted differently, somehow, from the stream of impressions in which it is set? A space is cleared for it, the stage is swept. This is now no retrospective vision, shared with Thackeray; it is a piece of present action with which we are confronted. It is strictly dramatic, and I suppose it is good drama of its kind. But there is more to be said of it than this—more to be said, even when it has been admitted to be drama of rather a high-pitched, theatrical strain. The foot-lights, it is probably agreed, seem suddenly to flare before Becky and Rawdon, after the clear daylight that reigned in Thackeray's description of them; they appear upon the scene, as they should, but it must be owned that the scene has an artificial look, by comparison with the flowing spontaneity of all that has gone before. And this it is exactly that shows how and where Thackeray's skill betrays him. He is not (like Dickens) naturally inclined to the theatre, the melodramatic has no fatal attraction for him; so that if he is theatrical here, it is not because he inevitably would be, given his chance. It is rather because he must, at all costs, make this climax of his story conclusively tell; and in order to do so he is forced to use devices of some crudity—for him they are crude—because his climax, his scene a faire, has been insufficiently prepared for. Becky, Rawdon, Steyne, in all this matter that has been leading up to the scene, have scarcely before been rendered in these immediate terms; and now that they appear on their own account they can only make a sure and pronounced effect by perceptibly forcing their note. A little too much is expected of them, and they must make an unnatural effort to meet it.

My instance is a small one, no doubt, to be pressed so far; in lingering over these shades of treatment a critic, it may be thought, loses sight of the book itself. But I am not trying, of course, to criticize Vanity Fair; I am looking for certain details of method, and the small instance is surely illuminating. It shows how little Thackeray's fashion of handling a novel allowed for the big dramatic scene, when at length it had to be faced—how he neglected it in advance, how he refused it till the last possible moment. It is as though he never quite trusted his men and women when he had to place things entirely in their care, standing aside to let them act; he wanted to intervene continually, he hesitated to leave them alone save for a brief and belated half-hour. It was perverse of him, because the men and women would have acquitted themselves so strikingly with a better chance; he gave them life and vigour enough for much more independence than they ever enjoyed. The culmination of Becky's adventure offered a clear opening for full dramatic effect, if he had chosen to take advantage of it. He had steadily piled up his impression, carefully brought all the sense of the situation to converge upon a single point; everything was ready for the great scene of Becky's triumph in the face of the world, one memorable night of a party at Gaunt House. It is incredible that he should let the opportunity slip. There was a chance of a straight, unhampered view of the whole meaning of his matter; nothing was needed but to allow the scene to show itself, fairly and squarely. All its force would have been lent to the disaster that follows; the dismay, the disillusion, the snarl of anger and defiance, all would have been made beforehand. By so much would the effect of the impending scene, the scene of catastrophe, have been strengthened. There would have been no necessity for the sudden heightening of the pitch, the thickening of the colour, the incongruous and theatrical tone.

Yet the chance is missed, the triumphal evening passes in a confused haze that leaves the situation exactly where it was before. The episode is only a repetition of the kind of thing that has happened already. There are echoes of festive sound and a rumour of Becky's brilliance; but the significant look that the actual facts might have worn and must have betrayed, the look that by this time Thackeray has so fully instructed his reader to catch—this is not disclosed after all. There is still nothing here but Thackeray's amusing, irrepressible conversation about the scene; he cannot make up his mind to clear a space before it and give the situation the free field it cries out for. And if it is asked what kind of clarity I mean, I need only recall another page, close by, which shows it perfectly. Becky had made an earlier appearance at Gaunt House; she had dined there, near the beginning of her social career, and had found herself in a difficulty; there came a moment when she had to face the frigid hostility of the noble ladies of the party, alone with them in the drawing-room, and her assurance failed. In the little scene that ensues the charming veil of Thackeray's talk is suddenly raised; there is Becky seated at the piano, Lady Steyne listening in a dream of old memories, the other women chattering at a distance, when the jarring doors are thrown open and the men return. It is all over in half a page, but in that glimpse the story is lifted forward dramatically; ocular proof, as it were, is added to Thackeray's account of Becky's doubtful and delicate position. As a matter of curiosity I mention the one moment in the later episode, the evening of those strangely ineffective charades at Gaunt House, which appears to me to open the same kind of rift in the haze; it is a single glimpse of Steyne, applauding Becky's triumph. He is immediately there, an actor in the show, alive and expressive, but he is alone; none of the others so emerges, even Becky is only a luminous spot in the dimness. As for the relation of the three, Steyne, Becky, and her husband, which is on the point of becoming so important, there is nothing to be seen of it.

Right and left in the novels of Thackeray one may gather instances of the same kind—the piercing and momentary shaft of direct vision, the big scene approached and then refused. It is easy to find another in Vanity Fair. Who but Thackeray could have borne to use the famous matter of the Waterloo ball, a wonderful gift for a novelist to find in his path, only to waste it, to dissipate its effect, to get no real contribution from it after all? In the queer, haphazard, polyglot interlude that precedes it Thackeray is, of course, entirely at home; there it is a question of the picture-making he delights in, the large impression of things in general, the evocation of daily life; Brussels in its talkative suspense, waiting for the sound of the guns, feeding on rumour, comes crowding into the chapter. And then the great occasion that should have crowned it, into which the story naturally and logically passes—for again the scene is not a decorative patch, the story needs it—the Waterloo ball is nothing, leaves no image, constitutes no effect whatever; the reader, looking back on the book, might be quite uncertain whether he had been there or not. Nobody could forget the sight of Lady Bareacres, sitting under the porte cochere in her horseless carriage—of good Mrs. O'Dowd, rising in the dawn to equip her warrior for battle—of George Osborne, dead on the field; but these are Thackeray's flashes of revelation, straight and sure, and they are all the drama, strictly speaking, that he extorts from his material. The rest is picture, stirringly, vivaciously reflected in his unfailing memory—with the dramatic occasion to which it tends, the historic affair of the "revelry by night," neglected and lost.

There is scarcely need for more illustration of my point, but it is tempting to look further. In all these well-remembered books Thackeray, in an expansive mood, opens his mind and talks it out on the subject of some big, loosely-knit company of men and women. He remembers, as we all remember, with a strong sense of the tone and air of an old experience, and a sharp recollection of moments that happened for some reason to be salient, significant, peculiarly keen or curious. Ethel Newcome, when she comes riding into the garden in the early morning, full of the news of her wonderful discovery, the letter shut in the old book; Blanche Amory, when she is caught out in her faithlessness, warbling to the new swain at the piano and whipping her handkerchief over his jewel-case as the old one enters; Madam Esmond, on her balcony, defying the mob with "Britons, strike home"; old Sir Pitt, toasting his rasher in the company of the char-woman: I name them at random, they are all instances of the way in which the glance of memory falls on the particular moment, the aspect that hardens and crystallizes an impression. Thackeray has these flashes in profusion; they break out unforgettably as we think of his books. The most exquisite of all, perhaps, is in Esmond, that sight of the dusky choir of Winchester Cathedral, the shine of the candle-light, the clear faces of Rachel and her son as they appear to the returned wanderer. We no longer listen to a story, no longer see the past in a sympathetic imagination; this is a higher power of intensity, a fragment of the past made present and actual. But with Thackeray it is always a fragment, never to any real purpose a deliberate and continuous enactment.

For continuity he always recurs to his pictorial summary. The Newcomes alone would give a dozen examples of this side of his genius—in the pages that recall the lean dignity of the refugees from revolutionary Paris, or the pious opulence of Clapham, or the rustle of fashion round the Mayfair chapel, or the chatter and scandal of Baden-Baden, or the squalid pretensions of English life at Boulogne. I need not lengthen the list; these evocations follow one upon another, and as quickly as Thackeray passes into a new circle he makes us feel and know what it was like to live there and belong to it. The typical look of the place is in his mind, the sense of its habitual life, the savour of the hours that lapse there. But Esmond again has the last word; the early chapters of the old days at Castlewood show a subtlety of effect that is peculiar and rare. It is more than a picture of a place and an impression of romance, it is more than the portrait of a child; besides all this it is the most masterly of "time-pictures," if that is a word that will serve. The effect I am thinking of is different from that of which I spoke in the matter of Tolstoy's great cycles of action; there we saw the march of time recording itself, affirming its ceaseless movement, in the lives of certain people. This of Thackeray's is not like that; time, at Castlewood, is not movement, it is tranquillity—time that stands still, as we say, only deepening as the years go. It cannot therefore be shown as a sequence; and Thackeray roams to and fro in his narrative, caring little for the connected order of events if he can give the sensation of time, deep and soft and abundant, by delaying and returning at ease over this tract of the past. It would be possible, I think, to say very precisely where and how the effect is made—by what leisurely play with the chronology of the story, apparently careless and unmethodical, or by what shifting of the focus, so that the house of Castlewood is now a far-away memory and now a close, benevolent presence. Time, at any rate, is stored up in the description of the child's life there, quiet layers of time in which the recorded incidents sink deep.



VIII

In dealing with the method that I find peculiarly characteristic of Thackeray, the "panoramic" method, I have spoken of it also as "pictorial"; and it will be noticed that I have thus arrived at another distinction which I touched upon in connection with Bovary. Picture and drama—this is an antithesis which continually appears in a novel, and I shall have much to say of it. And first of the names which I give to these contrasted manners of treatment—I do not know that they are the best names, but they express the main point of difference, and they also have this advantage, that they have been used technically in the criticism of fiction, with specific meaning. In writing about novels one is so rarely handling words that have ever been given close definition (with regard to the art of fiction, I mean) that it is natural to grasp at any which have chanced to be selected and strictly applied by a critic of authority. Picture and drama, therefore, I use because Henry James used them in discussing his own novels, when he reviewed them all in his later years; but I use them, I must add, in a rather more extended sense than he did. Anybody who knows the critical prefaces of his books will remember how picture and drama, to him, represented the twofold manner towards which he tended in his last novels, composed as they are in a regular alternation of dramatic dialogue and pictorial description. But his pictorial description was of a very special kind; and when the subject of criticism is fiction generally, not his alone, picture will take a wider meaning, as opposed to drama. It will be found to cover the panoramic manner of Thackeray.

It is a question, I said, of the reader's relation to the writer; in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it. In the drama of the stage, in the acted play, the spectator evidently has no direct concern with the author at all, while the action is proceeding. The author places their parts in the mouths of the players, leaves them to make their own impression, leaves us, the audience, to make what we can of it. The motion of life is before us, the recording, registering mind of the author is eliminated. That is drama; and when we think of the story-teller as opposed to the dramatist, it is obvious that in the full sense of the word there is no such thing as drama in a novel. The novelist may give the very words that were spoken by his characters, the dialogue, but of course he must interpose on his own account to let us know how the people appeared, and where they were, and what they were doing. If he offers nothing but the bare dialogue, he is writing a kind of play; just as a dramatist, amplifying his play with "stage-directions" and putting it forth to be read in a book, has really written a kind of novel. But the difference between the story-teller and the playwright is not my affair; and a new contrast, within the limits of the art of fiction, is apparent when we speak of the novel by itself—a contrast of two methods, to one of which it is reasonable to give the name of drama.

I do not say that a clear line can be drawn between them; criticism does not hope to be mathematically exact. But everybody sees the diversity between the talkative, confidential manner of Thackeray and the severe, discreet, anonymous manner—of whom shall I say?—of Maupassant, for a good example, in many of his stories. It is not only the difference between the personal qualities of the two men, which indeed are also as far apart as the house of Castlewood and the Maison Tellier; it is not the difference between the kinds of story they chose to tell. They approached a story from opposite sides, and thought of it, consequently, in images that had nothing in common: not always, I dare say, but on the whole and characteristically they did so. Maupassant's idea of a story (and not peculiarly Maupassant's, of course, but his name is convenient) would suggest an object that you fashioned and abandoned to the reader, turning away and leaving him alone with it; Thackeray's would be more like the idea of a long and sociable interview with the reader, a companion with whom he must establish definite terms. Enough, the contrast is very familiar. But these are images; how is the difference shown in their written books, in Esmond and La Maison Tellier? Both, it is true, represent a picture that was in the author's mind; but the story passes into Thackeray's book as a picture still, and passes into Maupassant's as something else—I call it drama.

In Maupassant's drama we are close to the facts, against them and amongst them. He relates his story as though he had caught it in the act and were mentioning the details as they passed. There seems to be no particular process at work in his mind, so little that the figure of Maupassant, the showman, is overlooked and forgotten as we follow the direction of his eyes. The scene he evokes is contemporaneous, and there it is, we can see it as well as he can. Certainly he is "telling" us things, but they are things so immediate, so perceptible, that the machinery of his telling, by which they reach us, is unnoticed; the story appears to tell itself. Critically, of course, we know how far that is from being the case, we know with what judicious thought the showman is selecting the points of the scene upon which he touches. But the effect is that he is not there at all, because he is doing nothing that ostensibly requires any judgement, nothing that reminds us of his presence. He is behind us, out of sight, out of mind; the story occupies us, the moving scene, and nothing else.

But Thackeray—in his story we need him all the time and can never forget him. He it is who must assemble and arrange his large chronicle, piecing it together out of his experience. Becky's mode of life, in his story, is a matter of many details picked up on many occasions, and the power that collects them, the mind that contains them, is always and openly Thackeray's; it could not be otherwise. It is no question, for most of the time, of watching a scene at close quarters, where the simple, literal detail, such as anybody might see for himself, would be sufficient. A stretch of time is to be shown in perspective, at a distance; the story-teller must be at hand to work it into a single impression. And thus the general panorama, such as Thackeray displays, becomes the representation of the author's experience, and the author becomes a personal entity, about whom we may begin to ask questions. Thackeray cannot be the nameless abstraction that the dramatist (whether in the drama of the stage or in that of the novel) is naturally. I know that Thackeray, so far from trying to conceal himself, comes forward and attracts attention and nudges the reader a great deal more than he need; he likes the personal relation with the reader and insists on it. But do what he might to disguise it, so long as he is ranging over his story at a height, chronicling, summarizing, foreshortening, he must be present to the reader as a narrator and a showman. It is only when he descends and approaches a certain occasion and sets a scene with due circumspection—rarely and a trifle awkwardly, as we saw—that he can for the time being efface the thought of his active part in the affair.

So much of a novel, therefore, as is not dramatic enactment, not scenic, inclines always to picture, to the reflection of somebody's mind. Confronted with a scene—like Becky's great scene, once more—we forget that other mind; but as soon as the story goes off again into narrative a question at once arises. Who is disposing the scattered facts, whose is this new point of view? It is the omniscient author, and the point of view is his—such would be the common answer, and it is the answer we get in Vanity Fair. By convention the author is allowed his universal knowledge of the story and the people in it. But still it is a convention, and a prudent novelist does not strain it unnecessarily. Thackeray in Vanity Fair is not at all prudent; his method, so seldom strictly dramatic, is one that of its nature is apt to force this question of the narrator's authority, and he goes out of his way to emphasize the question still further. He flourishes the fact that the point of view is his own, not to be confounded with that of anybody in the book. And so his book, as one may say, is not complete in itself, not really self-contained; it does not meet and satisfy all the issues it suggests. Over the whole of one side of it there is an inconclusive look, something that draws the eye away from the book itself, into space. It is the question of the narrator's relation to the story.

However unconsciously—and I dare say the recognition is usually unconscious—the novelist is alive to this difficulty, no doubt; for we may see him, we presently shall, taking various steps to circumvent it. There is felt to be an unsatisfactory want of finish in leaving a question hanging out of the book, like a loose end, without some kind of attempt to pull it back and make it part of an integral design. After all, the book is torn away from its author and given out to the world; the author is no longer a wandering jongleur who enters the hall and utters his book to the company assembled, retaining his book as his own inalienable possession, himself and his actual presence and his real voice indivisibly a part of it. The book that we read has no such support; it must bring its own recognisances. And in the fictitious picture of life the effect of validity is all in all and there can be no appeal to an external authority; and so there is an inherent weakness in it if the mind that knows the story and the eye that sees it remain unaccountable. At any moment they may be questioned, and the only way to silence the question is somehow to make the mind and the eye objective, to make them facts in the story. When the point of view is definitely included in the book, when it can be recognized and verified there, then every side of the book is equally wrought and fashioned. Otherwise it may seem like a thing meant to stand against a wall, with one side left in the rough; and there is no wall for a novel to stand against.

That this is not a fanciful objection to a pictorial book like Vanity Fair, where the point of view is not accounted for, is proved, I think, by the different means that a novelist will adopt to authenticate his story—to dramatize the seeing eye, as I should prefer to put it. These I shall try to deal with in what seems to be their logical order; illuminating examples of any of them are not wanting. I do not suggest that if I were criticizing Vanity Fair I should think twice about this aspect of it; to do so would be very futile criticism of such a book, such a store of life. But then I am not considering it as Vanity Fair, I am considering it as a dominant case of pictorial fiction; and here is the characteristic danger of the method, and a danger which all who practise the method are not likely to encounter and over-ride with the genius of Thackeray. And even Thackeray—he chose to encounter it once again, it is true, in Pendennis, but only once and no more, and after that he took his own precautions, and evidently found that he could move the more freely for doing so.

But to revert yet again for a moment to Bovary—which seemed on scrutiny to be more of a picture than a drama—I think it is clear how Flaubert avoided the necessity of installing himself avowedly as the narrator, in the sight of the reader. I mentioned how he constantly blends his acuter vision with that of Emma, so that the weakness of her gift of experience is helped out; and the help is mutual, for on the other hand her vision is always active as far as it goes, and Flaubert's intervention is so unobtrusive that her point of view seems to govern the story more than it does really. And therefore, though the book is largely a picture, a review of many details and occasions, the question of the narrator is never insistent. The landscape that Thackeray controls is so much wider and fuller that even with all the tact of Flaubert—and little he has of it—he could scarcely follow Flaubert's example. His book is not a portrait of character but a panorama of manners, and there is no disguising the need of some detached spectator, who looks on from without.

It is the method of picture-making that enables the novelist to cover his great spaces of life and quantities of experience, so much greater than any that can be brought within the acts of a play. As for intensity of life, that is another matter; there, as we have seen, the novelist has recourse to his other arm, the one that corresponds with the single arm of the dramatist. Inevitably, as the plot thickens and the climax approaches—inevitably, wherever an impression is to be emphasized and driven home—narration gives place to enactment, the train of events to the particular episode, the broad picture to the dramatic scene. But the limitation of drama is as obvious as its peculiar power. It is clear that if we wish to see an abundance and multitude of life we shall find it more readily and more summarily by looking for an hour into a memory, a consciousness, than by merely watching the present events of an hour, however crowded. Much may happen in that time, but in extent it will be nothing to the regions thrown open by the other method. A novelist, with a large and discursive subject before him, could not hope to show it all dramatically; much of it, perhaps the greater part, must be so marshalled that it may be swept by a travelling glance. Thackeray shows how it is done and how a vista of many facts can be made to fall into line; but he shows, too, how it needs a mind to create that vista, and how the creative mind becomes more and more perceptible, more visibly active, as the prospect widens.

Most novelists, I think, seem to betray, like Thackeray, a preference for one method or the other, for picture or for drama; one sees in a moment how Fielding, Balzac, George Eliot, incline to the first, in their diverse manners, and Tolstoy (certainly Tolstoy, in spite of his big range) or Dostoevsky to the second, the scenic way. But of course every novelist uses both, and the quality of a novelist appears very clearly in his management of the two, how he guides the story into the scene, how he picks it out of the scene, a richer and fuller story than it was before, and proceeds with his narrative. On the whole, no doubt, the possibilities of the scene are greatly abused in fiction, in the daily and familiar novel. They are doubly abused; for the treatment of the scene is neglected, and yet it recurs again and again, much too often, and its value is wasted. It has to be remembered that drama is the novelist's highest light, like the white paper or white paint of a draughtsman; to use it prodigally where it is not needed is to lessen its force where it is essential. And so the economical procedure would be to hoard it rather, reserving it for important occasions—as in Bovary, sure enough.

But before I deal with the question of the novelist's drama I would follow out the whole argument that is suggested by his reflected picture of life. This, after all, is the method which is his very own, which he commands as a story-teller pure and simple. And for a beginning I have tried to indicate its prime disadvantage, consisting of the fact that in its plain form it drags in the omniscient author and may make him exceedingly conspicuous. Why is this a disadvantage, is it asked? It is none, of course, if the author has the power to make us admire and welcome the apparition, or if his picture is so dazzling that a theoretic defect in it is forgotten. But a novel in which either of these feats is accomplished proves only the charm or genius of the author; charm and genius do what they will, there is nothing new in that. And I believe that the defect, even though at first sight it may seem a trifle, is apt to become more and more troublesome in a book as the book is re-read. It makes for a kind of thinness in the general impression, wherever the personal force of the writer is not remarkable. I should say that it may often contribute towards an air of ineffectiveness in a story, which it might otherwise be difficult to explain.

The fiction of Turgenev is on the whole a case in point, to my mind. Turgenev was never shy of appearing in his pages as the reflective story-teller, imparting the fruits of his observation to the reader. He will watch a character, let us say, cross a field and enter a wood and sit down under a tree; good, it is an opportunity for gaining a first impression of the man or woman, it is a little scene, and Turgenev's touch is quick and light. But then with perfect candour he will show his hand; he will draw the reader aside and pour into his ear a flow of information about the man or woman, information that openly comes straight from Turgenev himself, in good pictorial form, no doubt, but information which will never have its due weight with the reader, because it reposes upon nothing that he can test for himself. Who and what is this communicative participator in the business, this vocal author? He does not belong to the book, and his voice has not that compelling tone and tune of its own (as Thackeray's had) which makes a reader enjoy hearing it for its own sake. This is a small matter, I admit, but Turgenev extends it and pursues the same kind of course in more important affairs. He remains the observant narrator, to whom we are indebted for a share in his experience. The result is surely that his picture of life has less authority than its highly finished design would seem to warrant. It is evidently not a picture in which the deeps of character are sounded, and in which the heights of passion are touched, and in which a great breadth of the human world is contained; it is not a picture of such dimensions. But it has so much neat and just and even exquisite work in it that it might seem final of its kind, completely effective in what it attempts; and it falls short of this, I should say, and there is something in that constant sense of Turgenev at one's elbow, proffering the little picture, that may very well damage it. The thing ought to stand out by itself; it could easily be made to do so. But Turgenev was unsuspecting; he had not taken to heart the full importance of dramatizing the point of view—perhaps it was that.

The narrative, then, the chronicle, the summary, which must represent the story-teller's ordered and arranged experience, and which must accordingly be of the nature of a picture, is to be strengthened, is to be raised to a power approaching that of drama, where the intervention of the story-teller is no longer felt. The freedom which the pictorial method gives to the novelist is unknown to the playwright; but that freedom has to be paid for by some loss of intensity, and the question is how to pay as little as possible. In the end, as I think it may be shown, the loss is made good and there is nothing to pay at all, so far may the dramatizing process be followed. Method, I have said, can be imposed upon method, one kind upon another; and in analyzing the manner of certain novelists one discovers how ingeniously they will correct the weakness of one method by the force of another and retain the advantages of both. It is rather a complicated story, but the beginning is clear enough, and the direction which it is to take is also clear. Everything in the novel, not only the scenic episodes but all the rest, is to be in some sense dramatized; that is where the argument tends. As for the beginning of it, the first obvious step, the example of Thackeray is at hand and it could not be bettered. I turn to Esmond.



IX

The novelist, I am supposing, is faced with a situation in his story where for some good reason more is needed than the simple impression which the reader might have formed for himself, had he been present and using his eyes on the spot. It is a case for a general account of many things; or it is a case for a certain view of the facts, based on inner knowledge, to be presented to the reader. Thackeray, for example, has to open his mind on the subject of Becky's ambitions or Amelia's regrets; it would take too long, perhaps it would be impossible, to set them acting their emotions in a form that would tell the reader the whole tale; their creator must elucidate the matter. He cannot forget, however, that this report of their emotions is a subjective affair of his own; it relies upon his memory of Becky's or Amelia's plight, his insight into the workings of their thought, his sense of past action. All this is vivid enough to the author, who has seen and known, but the reader stands at a further remove.

It would be different if this consciousness of the past, the mind which holds the memory, should itself become for the reader a directly perceptible fact. The author must supply his view, but he might treat his view as though it were in its turn a piece of action. It is a piece of action, or of activity, when he calls up these old recollections; and why should not that effort be given the value of a sort of drama on its own account? It would then be like a play within a play; the outer framework at least—consisting of the reflective mind—would be immediately in front of the reader; and its relation to the thing framed, the projected vision, would explain itself. So long as the recorder stands outside and away from his book, as Thackeray stands outside Vanity Fair, a potential value is wasted; the activity that is proceeding in his mind is not in itself an element in the effect of the book, as it might be. And if it were thus drawn into the book it would do double duty; it would authenticate and so enhance the picture; it would add a new and independent interest as well. It seems that there is everything to be said for making a drama of the narrator himself.

And so Thackeray evidently felt, for in all his later work he refused to remain the unaccountable seer from without. He did not carry the dramatizing process very far, indeed, and it may be thought that the change in his method does not amount to much. In The Newcomes and its successors the old Thackerayan display seems essentially the same as ever, still the familiar, easy-going, intimate outpouring, with all the well-known inflexions of Thackeray's voice and the humours of his temperament; certainly Pendennis and Esmond and George Warrington and Thackeray have all of them exactly the same conception of the art of story-telling, they all command the same perfection of luminous style. And not only does Thackeray stop short at an early stage of the process I am considering, but it must be owned that he uses the device of the narrator "in character" very loosely and casually, as soon as it might be troublesome to use it with care. But still he takes the step, and he picks up the loose end I spoke of, and he packs it into his book; and thenceforward we see precisely how the narrator stands towards the story he unfolds. It is the first step in the dramatization of picture.

A very simple and obvious step too, it will be said, the natural device of the story-teller for giving his tale a look of truth. It is so indeed; but the interest of the matter lies in recognizing exactly what it is that is gained, what it is that makes that look. Esmond tells the story quite as Thackeray would; it all comes streaming out as a pictorial evocation of old times; there is just as little that is strictly dramatic in it as there is in Vanity Fair. Rarely, very rarely indeed, is there anything that could be called a scene; there is a long impression that creeps forward and forward, as Esmond retraces his life, with those piercing moments of vision which we remember so well. But to the other people in the book it makes all the difference that the narrator is among them. Now, when Beatrix appears, we know who it is that so sees her, and we know where the seer is placed; his line of sight, striking across the book, from him the seer to her the seen, is measurable, its angle is shown; it gives to Beatrix a new dimension and a sharper relief. Can you remember any moment in Vanity Fair when you beheld Becky as again and again you behold Beatrix, catching the very slant of the light on her face? Becky never suddenly flowered out against her background in that way; some want of solidity and of objectivity there still is in Becky, and there must be, because she is regarded from anywhere, from nowhere, from somewhere in the surrounding void. Thackeray's language about her does not carry the same weight as Esmond's about Beatrix, because nobody knows where Thackeray is, or what his relation may be to Becky.

This, then, is the readiest means of dramatically heightening a reported impression, this device of telling the story in the first person, in the person of somebody in the book; and large in our fiction the first person accordingly bulks. The characterized "I" is substituted for the loose and general "I" of the author; the loss of freedom is more than repaid by the more salient effect of the picture. Precision, individuality is given to it by this pair of eyes, known and named, through which the reader sees it; instead of drifting in space above the spectacle he keeps his allotted station and contemplates a delimited field of vision. There is much benefit in the sense that the picture has now a definite edge; its value is brought out to the best advantage when its bounding line is thus emphasized. Moreover, it is not only the field of vision that is determined by the use of the first person, it is also the quality of the tone. When we are shown what Esmond sees, and nothing else, there is first of all the comfortable assurance of the point of view, and then there is the personal colour which he throws over his account, so that it gains another kind of distinction. It does not matter that Esmond's tone in his story is remarkably like Thackeray's in the stories that he tells; in Esmond's case the tone has a meaning in the story, is part of it, whereas in the other case it is related only to Thackeray, and Thackeray is in the void. When Esmond ruminates and reflects, his manner is the expression of a human being there present, to whom it can be referred; when Thackeray does the same, there is no such compactness, and the manner trails away where we cannot follow it. Dramatically it seems clear that the method of Esmond has the advantage over the method of Vanity Fair.

Here are sound reasons, so far as they go, for the use of the first person in the distinctively pictorial book. David Copperfield, for instance—it is essentially a long glance, working steadily over a tract of years, alone of its kind in Dickens's fiction. It was the one book in which he rejected the intrigue of action for the centre of his design—did not reject it altogether, indeed, but accepted it as incidental only. Always elsewhere it is his chosen intrigue, his "plot," that makes the shape of his book. Beginning with a deceptive air of intending mainly a novel of manners and humours, as Stevenson once pointed out, in Bleak House or in Little Dorrit or in Our Mutual Friend—in his later books generally—he insinuates a thread of action that gradually twists more and more of the matter of the book round itself. The intrigue begins to take the first place, to dominate and at last to fill the pages. That was the form, interesting of its kind, and one to which justice has hardly been done, which he elaborated and made his own. In Copperfield for once he took another way entirely. It is the far stretch of the past which makes the shape of that book, not any of the knots or networks of action which it contains. These, instead of controlling the novel, sink into the level of retrospect. Copperfield has not a few lesser dramas to represent; but the affair of Steerforth, the affair of Uriah Heep, to name a pair of them, which might have developed and taken command of the scene, fall back into the general picture, becoming incidents in the long rhythm of Copperfield's memory. It was a clear case for narration in person, in character; everything was gained and nothing lost by leaving it to the man to give his own impression. Nothing was lost, because the sole need is for the reader to see what David sees; it matters little how his mind works, or what the effect of it all may be upon himself. It is the story of what happened around him, not within. David offers a pair of eyes and a memory, nothing further is demanded of him.

But now let me take the case of another big novel, where again there is a picture outspread, with episodes of drama that are subordinate to the sweep of the expanse. It is Meredith's story of Harry Richmond, a book in which its author evidently found a demand in some way different from that of the rest of his work; for here again the first person is used by a man who habitually avoided it. In Harry Richmond it seemed to Meredith appropriate, I suppose, because the story has a romantic and heroic temper, the kind of chivalrous fling that sits well on a youth of spirit, telling his own tale. It is natural for the youth to pass easily from one adventure to the next, taking it as it comes; and if Meredith proposes to write a story of loose, generous, informal design he had better place it in the mouth of the adventurer. True that in so far as it is romantic, and a story of youth, and a story in which an air from an age of knight-errantry blows into modern times, so that something like a clash of armour and a splintering of spears seems to mingle with the noises of modern life—true that in so far as it is all this, Harry Richmond is not alone among Meredith's books. The author of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington and Beauchamp and Lord Ormont was generally a little vague on the question of the century in which his stories were cast. The events may happen in the nineteenth century, they clearly must; and yet the furniture and the machinery and the conventions of the nineteenth century have a way of appearing in Meredith's pages as if they were anachronisms. But that is by the way; Harry Richmond is certainly, on the face of it, a series of adventures loosely connected—connected only by the fact that they befell a particular young man; and so the method of narration should emphasize the link, Meredith may have concluded, and the young man shall speak for himself.