Yet to see the issue slowly unfolding and flowering out of the middle of a situation, and to watch it emerge unaided, with everything that it has to say said by the very lines and masses of its structure—this is surely an experience apart, for a novel-reader, with its completeness and cleanness and its hard, pure edge. It is always memorable, it fills the mind so acceptably that a story-teller might be ready and eager to aspire to this effect, one would think, whenever his matter gives him the chance. Again and again I have wished to silence the voice of the spokesman who is supposed to be helping me to a right appreciation of the matter in hand—the author (or his creature) who knows so much, and who pours out his information over the subject, and who talks and talks about an issue that might be revealing itself without him. The spokesman has his way too often, it can hardly be doubted; the instant authority of drama is neglected. It is the day of the deep-breathed narrator, striding from volume to volume as tirelessly as the Scuderies and Calprenedes of old; and it is true, no doubt, that the novel (in all languages, too, it would seem) is more than ever inclined to the big pictorial subject, which requires the voluble chronicler; but still it must happen occasionally that a novelist prefers a dramatic motive, and might cast it into a round, sound action and leave it in that form if he chose. Here again there is plenty of room for enterprise and experiment in fiction, even now.

But at the same time it must be admitted that there is more in the general unwillingness of story-tellers to entrust the story to the people in it—there is more than I have said. If they are much less dramatic than they might be, still it is not to be asserted that a subject will often find perfect expression through the uncompromising method of The Awkward Age. That book itself perhaps suggests, if it does no more than suggest, that drama cannot always do everything in a novel, even where the heart of the story seems to lie in its action. The story of Nanda drops neatly into scenic form—that is obvious; it is well adapted for treatment as a row of detached episodes or occasions, through which the subject is slowly developed. But it is a question whether a story which requires and postulates such a very particular background, so singular and so artificial, is reasonably denied the licence to make its background as effective as possible, by whatever means. Nanda's world is not the kind of society that can be taken for granted; it is not modernity in general, it is a small and very definite tract. For the purposes of her story it is important that her setting should be clearly seen and known, and the method of telling her story must evidently take this into account. Nanda and her case are not rendered if the quality of the civilization round her is left in any way doubtful, and it happens to be a very odd quality indeed.

Henry James decided, I suppose, that it was sufficiently implied in the action of his book and needed nothing more; Nanda's little world would be descried behind the scene without any further picturing. He may have been right, so far as The Awkward Age is concerned; the behaviour of the people in the story is certainly packed with many meanings, and perhaps it is vivid enough to enact the general character of their lives and ways, as well as their situation in the foreground; perhaps the charmed circle of Mrs. Brookenham and her wonderful crew is given all the effect that is needed. But the question brings me to a clear limitation of drama on the whole, and that is why I raise it. Here is a difficulty to which the dramatic method, in its full severity, is not specially accommodated, one that is not in the line of its strength. To many of the difficulties of fiction, as we have seen, it brings precisely the right instrument; it gives validity, gives direct force to a story, and to do so is its particular property. For placing and establishing a piece of action it is paramount. But where it is not only a matter of placing the action in view, but of relating it to its surroundings, strict drama is at once at a disadvantage. The seeing eye of the author, which can sweep broadly and generalize the sense of what it sees, will meet this difficulty more naturally. Drama reinforcing and intensifying picture we have already seen again and again; and now the process is reversed. From the point of view of the reader, the spectator of the show, the dramatic scene is vivid and compact; but it is narrow, it can have no great depth, and the colour of the atmosphere can hardly tell within the space. It is likely, therefore, that unless this close direct vision is supplemented by a wider survey, fronting the story from a more distant point of view, the background of the action, the manner of life from which it springs, will fail to make its full impression.

It amounts to this, that the play-form—and with it fiction that is purely dramatic in its method—is hampered in its power to express the outlying associations of its scene. It can express them, of course; in clever hands it may seem to do so as thoroughly as any descriptive narration. But necessarily it does so with far more expense of effort than the picture-making faculty which lies in the hand of the novelist; and that is in general a good reason why the prudent novelist, with all his tendency to shed his privileges, still clings to this one. It is possible to imagine that a novel might be as bare of all background as a play of Racine; there might be a story in which any hint of continuous life, proceeding behind the action, would simply confuse and distort the right effect. One thinks of the story of the Princesse de Cleves, floating serenely in the void, without a sign of any visible support from a furnished world; and there, no doubt, nothing would be gained by bringing the lucid action to ground and fixing it in its setting. It is a drama of sentiment, needing only to be embodied in characters as far as possible detached from any pictured surroundings, with nothing but the tradition of fine manners that is inherent in their grand names. But wherever the effect of the action depends upon its time and place, a novelist naturally turns to the obvious method if there is no clear reason for refusing it. In The Awkward Age, to look back at it once more, it may be that there is such a reason; the beauty of its resolute consistency is of course a value in itself, and it may be great enough to justify a tour de force. But a tour de force it is, when a novelist seeks to render the general life of his story in the particular action, and in the action alone; for his power to support the drama pictorially is always there, if he likes to make use of it.



XIV

Since he practically always does so, readily enough, it may seem unnecessary to insist upon the matter. Not often have we seen a novelist pushing his self-denial beyond reason, rejecting the easy way for the difficult without good cause. But in order to make sure of breaking a sound rule at the right point, and not before—to take advantage of laxity when strictness becomes unrewarding, and only then—it is as well to work both ways, from the easy extreme to the difficult and back again. The difficult extreme, in fiction, is the dramatic rule absolute and unmitigated; having reached it from the other end, having begun with the pictorial summary and proceeded from thence to drama, we face the same stages reversed. And it is now, I think, that we best appreciate the liberties taken with the resources of the novelist by Balzac. His is a case that should be approached indirectly. If one plunges straight into Balzac, at the beginning of criticism, it is hard to find the right line through the abundance of good and bad in his books; there is so much of it, and all so strong and staring. It looks at first sight as though his good and his bad alike were entirely conspicuous and unmistakable. His devouring passion for life, his grotesque romance, his truth and his falsity, these cover the whole space of the Comedie between them, and nobody could fail to recognize the full force of either. He is tremendous, his taste is abominable—what more is there to say of Balzac? And that much has been said so often, in varied words, that there can be no need to say it again for the ten-thousandth time.

Such is the aspect that Balzac presents, I could feel, when a critic tries to face him immediately; his obviousness seems to hide everything else. But if one passes him by, following the track of the novelist's art elsewhere, and then returns to him with certain definite conclusions, his aspect is remarkable in quite a new way. His badness is perhaps as obvious as before; there is nothing fresh to discover about that. His greatness, however, wears a different look; it is no longer the plain and open surface that it was. It has depths and recesses that did not appear till now, enticing to criticism, promising plentiful illustration of the ideas that have been gathered by the way. One after another, the rarer, obscurer effects of fiction are all found in Balzac, behind his blatant front. He illustrates everything, and the only difficulty is to know where to begin.

The effect of the generalized picture, for example, supporting the play of action, is one in which Balzac particularly delights. He constantly uses it, he makes it serve his purpose with a very high hand. It becomes more than a support, it becomes a kind of propulsive force applied to the action at the start. Its value is seen at its greatest in such books as Le Cure de Village, Pere Goriot, La Recherche de l'Absolu, Eugenie Grandet—most of all, perhaps, in this last. Wherever, indeed, his subject requires to be lodged securely in its surroundings, wherever the background is a main condition of the story, Balzac is in no hurry to precipitate the action; that can always wait, while he allows himself the leisure he needs for massing the force which is presently to drive the drama on its way. Nobody gives such attention as Balzac does in many of his books, and on the whole in his best, to the setting of the scene; he clearly considers these preparatory pictures quite as important as the events which they are to enclose.

And so, in Pere Goriot, all the potent life of the Maison Vauquer is deliberately collected and hoarded up to the point where it is enough, when it is let loose, to carry the story forward with a strong sweep. By the time the story itself is reached the Maison Vauquer is a fully created impression, prepared to the last stroke for the drama to come. Anything that may take place there will have the whole benefit of its setting, without more ado; all the rank reality of the house and its inmates is immediately bestowed on the action. When the tale of Goriot comes to the front it is already more than the tale of a certain old man and his woes. Goriot, on the spot, is one of Maman Vauquer's boarders, and the mere fact is enough, by now, to differentiate him, to single him out among miserable old men. Whatever he does he carries with him the daily experience of the dingy house and the clattering meals and the frowzy company, with Maman Vauquer, hard and hungry and harassed—Mrs. Todgers would have met her sympathetically, they would have understood each other—at the head of it. Into Goriot's yearnings over his fashionable daughters the sounds and sights and smells of his horrible home have all been gathered; they deepen and strengthen his poor story throughout. Balzac's care in creating the scene, therefore, is truly economical; it is not merely a manner of setting the stage for the drama, it is a provision of character and energy for the drama when it begins.

His pictures of country towns, too, Saumur, Limoges, Angouleme, have the same kind of part to play in the Scenes de la vie de province. When Balzac takes in hand the description of a town or a house or a workshop, he may always be suspected, at first, of abandoning himself entirely to his simple, disinterested craving for facts. There are times when it seems that his inexhaustible knowledge of facts is carrying him where it will, till his only conscious purpose is to set down on paper everything that he knows. He is possessed by the lust of description for its own sake, an insatiable desire to put every detail in its place, whether it is needed or no. So it seems, and so it is occasionally, no doubt; there is nothing more tiresome in Balzac than his zest, his delight, his triumph, when he has apparently succeeded in forgetting altogether that he is a novelist. He takes a proper pride in Grandet or Goriot or Lucien, of course; but his heart never leaps quite so high, it might be thought, as when he sees a chance for a discourse upon money or commerce or Italian art. And yet the result is always the same in the end; when he has finished his lengthy research among the furniture of the lives that are to be evoked, he has created a scene in which action will move as rapidly as he chooses, without losing any of its due emphasis. He has illustrated, in short, the way in which a pictorial impression, wrought to the right pitch, will speed the work of drama—will become an effective agent in the book, instead of remaining the mere decorative introduction that it may seem to be.

Thus it is that Balzac was able to pack into a short book—he never wrote a long one—such an effect of crowds and events, above all such an effect of time. Nobody knows how to compress so much experience into two or three hundred pages as Balzac did unfailingly. I cannot think that this is due in the least to the laborious interweaving of his books into a single scheme; I could believe that in general a book of Balzac's suffers, rather than gains, by the recurrence of the old names that he has used already elsewhere. It is an amusing trick, but exactly what is its object? I do not speak of the ordinary "sequel," where the fortunes of somebody are followed for another stage, and where the second part is simply the continuation of the first in a direct line. But what of the famous idea of making book after book overlap and encroach and entangle itself with the rest, by the device of setting the hero of one story to figure more or less obscurely in a dozen others? The theory is, I suppose, that the characters in the background and at the corners of the action, if they are Rastignac and Camusot and Nucingen, retain the life they have acquired elsewhere, and thereby swell the life of the story in which they reappear. We are occupied for the moment with some one else, and we discover among his acquaintances a number of people whom we already know; that fact, it is implied, will add weight and authority to the story of the man in the foreground—who is himself, very likely, a man we have met casually in another book. It ought to make, it must make, his situation peculiarly real and intelligible that we find him surrounded by familiar friends of our own; and that is the artistic reason of the amazing ingenuity with which Balzac keeps them all in play.

Less artistic and more mechanical, I take it, his ingenuity seems than it did of old. I forget how few are the mistakes and contradictions of which Balzac has been convicted, in the shuffling and re-shuffling of his characters; but when his accuracy has been proved there still remains the question of its bearing upon his art. I only touch upon the question from a single point of view, when I consider whether the density of life in so many of his short pieces can really owe anything to the perpetual flitting of the men and women from book to book. Suppose that for the moment Balzac is evoking the figure and fortunes of Lucien de Rubempre, and that a woman who appears incidentally in his story turns out to be our well-remembered Delphine, Goriot's daughter. We know a great deal about the past of Delphine, as it happens; but at this present juncture, in Lucien's story, her past is entirely irrelevant. It belongs to another adventure, where it mattered exceedingly, an adventure that took place before Lucien was heard of at all. As for his story, and for the reality with which it may be endowed, this depends solely upon our understanding of his world, his experience; and if Delphine's old affairs are no part of it, our previous knowledge of her cannot help us with Lucien. It detracts, rather, from the force of his effect; it sets up a relation that has nothing to do with him, a relation between Delphine and the reader, which only obstructs our view of the world as Lucien sees it. Of the characters in the remoter planes of the action (and that is Delphine's position in his story) no more is expected than their value for the purpose of the action in the foreground. That is all that can be used in the book; whatever more they may bring will lie idle, will contribute nothing, and may even become an embarrassment. The numberless people in the Comedie who carry their lengthening train of old associations from book to book may give the Comedie, as a whole, the look of unity that Balzac desired; that is another point. But in any single story, such of these people as appear by the way, incidentally, must for the time being shed their irrelevant life; if they fail to do so, they disturb the unity of the story and confuse its truth.

Balzac's unrivalled power of placing a figure in its surroundings is not to be explained, then, by his skill in working his separate pieces together into one great web; the design of the Human Comedy, so largely artificial, forced upon it as his purpose widened, is no enhancement of the best of his books. The fullness of experience which is rendered in these is exactly the same—is more expressive, if anything—when they are taken out of their context; it is all to be attributed to their own art. I come back, therefore, to the way in which Balzac handled his vast store of facts, when he set out to tell a story, and made them count in the action which he brought to the fore. He seldom, I think, regards them as material to be disguised, to be given by implication in the drama itself. He is quite content to offer his own impression of the general landscape of the story, a leisurely display which brings us finally to the point of action. Then the action starts forward with a reserve of vigour that helps it in various ways. The more important of these, as I see them, will be dealt with in the next chapter; but meanwhile I may pick out another, one that is often to be seen in Balzac's work and that he needed only too often. It was not the best of his work that needed it; but the effect I mean is an interesting one in itself, and it appeals to a critic where it occurs. It shows how a novelist, while in general seeking to raise the power of his picture by means of drama, will sometimes reverse the process, deliberately, in order to rescue the power of his drama from becoming violence. If fiction always aims at the appearance of truth, there are times when the dramatic method is too much for it, too searching and too betraying. It leaves the story to speak for itself, but perhaps the story may then say too much to be reasonably credible. It must be restrained, qualified, toned down, in order to make its best effect. Where the action, in short, is likely to seem harsh, overcharged, romantic, it is made to look less so, less hazardous and more real, by recourse to the art of the picture-maker.

Balzac, it cannot be denied, had frequent cause to look about him for whatever means there might be of extenuating, and so of confirming, an incredible story. His passion for truth was often in conflict with his lust for marvels, and the manner in which they were mixed is the chief interest, I dare say, of some of his books. See him, for example, in the Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, trying with one hand to write a novel of Parisian manners, with the other a romance of mystery, and to do full justice to both. Trompe-la-Mort, the Napoleon of crime, and Esther, the inspired courtesan, represent the romance, and Balzac sets himself to absorb the extravagant tale into a study of actual life. If he can get the tale firmly embedded in a background of truth, its falsity may be disguised, the whole book may even pass for a scene of the human comedy; it may be accepted as a piece of reality, on the same level, say, as Eugenie Grandet or Les Parents Pauvres. That is evidently his aim, and if only his romance were a little less gaudy, or his truth not quite so true, he would have no difficulty in attaining it; the action would be subdued and kept in its place by the pictorial setting. The trouble is that Balzac's idea of a satisfying crime is as wild as his hold upon facts is sober, so that an impossible strain is thrown upon his method of reconciling the two. Do what he will, his romance remains staringly false in its contrast with his reality; there is an open gap between the wonderful pictures of the town in Illusions Perdues and the theatrical drama of the old convict which they introduce. Yet his method was a right one, though it was perverse of Balzac to be occupied at all with such devices, when he might have rejected his falsity altogether. In another man's work, where there is never this sharp distinction between true and false, where both are merged into something different from either—in Dickens's work—the method I refer to is much more successfully followed; and there, in any of Dickens's later books, we find the clearest example of it.

I have already been reminded of Stevenson's word upon this matter; Stevenson noted how Dickens's way of dealing with his romantic intrigues was to lead gradually into them, through well-populated scenes of character and humour; so that his world is actual, its air familiar, by the time that his plot begins to thicken. He gives himself an ample margin in which to make the impression of the kind of truth he needs, before beginning to concentrate upon the fabulous action of the climax. Bleak House is a very good case; the highly coloured climax in that book is approached with great skill and caution, all in his most masterly style. A broad stream of diversified life moves slowly in a certain direction, so deliberately at first that its scope, its spread, is much more evident than its movement. The book is a big survey of a quantity of odd and amusing people, and it is only by degrees that the discursive method is abandoned and the narrative brought to a point. Presently we are in the thick of the story, hurrying to the catastrophe, without having noticed at all, it may be, that our novel of manners has turned into a romantic drama, with a mysterious crime to crown it. Dickens manages it far more artfully than Balzac, because his imagination is not, like Balzac's, divided against itself. The world which he peopled with Skimpole and Guppy and the Bayham Badgers was a world that could easily include Lady Dedlock, for though she is perhaps of the theatre, they are certainly not of the common earth. They and she alike are at the same angle to literal fact, they diverging one way, she another; they accordingly make a kind of reality which can assimilate her romance. Dickens was saved from trying to write two books at once by the fact that one completely satisfied him. It expressed the exciting, amazing, exhilarating world he lived in himself, with its consistent transmutation of all values, and he knew no other.

The method which he finally worked out for himself was exactly what he required. There might be much to say of it, for it is by no means simple, but I am only concerned with one or two points in it. The chief characteristic I take to be this careful introduction of violent drama into a scene already prepared to vouch for it—a scene so alive that it compels belief, so queer that almost anything might happen there naturally. The effect which Dickens gets from the picture in his novels, as opposed to the action, is used as a sort of attestation of the action; and it surely fulfils its mission very strikingly in the best of his work—the best from this point of view—Bleak House, Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend. His incurable love of labyrinthine mystification, when it really ran away with him, certainly defeated all precautions; not even old Dorrit's Marshalsea, not even Flora and Mr. F.'s Aunt, can do anything to carry off the story of the Clennams. But so long as he was content with a fairly straightforward romance, all went well; the magnificent life that he projected was prepared to receive and to speed it. Blimber and Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Tox, the Podsnaps and Twemlow and the Veneerings, all contribute out of their overflow of energy to the force of a drama—a drama in which they may take no specific part, but which depends on them for the furnishing of an appropriate scene, a favouring background, a world attuned. This and so much more they do that it may seem like insulting them even to think for a moment of their subordination to the general design, which is indeed a great deal less interesting than they. But Dickens's method is sound and good, and not the less so because he used it for comparatively trivial purposes. It is strange that he should have known how to invent such a scene, and then have found no better drama to enact on it—strange and always stranger, with every re-reading. That does not affect his handling of a subject, which is all that I deal with here.

The life which he creates and distributes right and left, in such a book as Bleak House, before bending to his story—this I call his picture, for picture it is in effect, not dramatic action. It exhibits the world in which Lady Dedlock is to meditate murder, the fog of the suit in Chancery out of which the intrigue of the book is to emerge. It is the summary of a situation, with its elements spreading widely and touching many lives; it gathers them in and gives an impression of them all. It is pictorial as a whole, and quite as much so as any of Thackeray's broad visions. But I have noted before how inevitably Dickens's picture, unlike Thackeray's, is presented in the form of scenic action, and here is a case in point. All this impression of life, stretching from the fog-bound law courts to the marshes of Chesney Wold, from Krook and Miss Flite to Sir Leicester and Volumnia, is rendered as incident, as a succession of particular occasions—never, or very seldom, as general and far-seeing narrative, after Thackeray's manner. Dickens continually holds to the immediate scene, even when his object is undramatic; he is always readier to work in action and dialogue than to describe at large; he is happier in placing a character there before us, as the man or woman talked and behaved in a certain hour, on a certain spot, than in reflecting a long impression of their manner of living. In Thackeray's hands the life of Miss Flite, for instance, would have become a legend, recalled and lingered over, illustrated by passing glimpses of her ways and oddities. With Dickens she is always a little human being who figures upon a scene, in a group, a visible creature acting her small part; she is always dramatic.

And Dickens, using this method everywhere, even in such a case as hers—even where his purpose, that is to say, is pictorial, to give the sense of a various and vivacious background—is forced to crystallize and formulate his characters very sharply, if they are to make their effect; it is why he is so often reduced to the expedient of labelling his people with a trick or a phrase, which they have to bring with them every time they appear. Their opportunities are strictly limited; the author does not help them out by glancing freely into their lives and sketching them broadly. Flite, Snagsby, Chadband and the rest of them—whatever they are, they must be all of it within narrow bounds, within the few scenes that can be allotted to them; and if one of them fails now and then it is not surprising, the wonder is that most of them succeed so brilliantly. In thus translating his picture into action Dickens chose the most exigent way, but it was always the right way for him. He was curiously incapable in the other; when occasionally he tries his hand at picture-making, in Thackeray's manner—attempting to summarize an impression of social life among the Veneerings, of official life among the Barnacles—his touch is wild indeed. Away from a definite episode in an hour prescribed he is seldom at ease.

But though the actual presentation is thus dramatic, his books are in fact examples of the pictured scene that opens and spreads very gradually, in order to make a valid world for a drama that could not be precipitated forthwith, a drama that would be naked romance if it stood by itself. Stevenson happened upon this point, with regard to Dickens, in devising the same method for a story of his own, The Wrecker, a book in which he too proposed to insinuate an abrupt and violent intrigue into credible, continuous life. He, of course, knew precisely what he was doing—where Dickens followed, as I suppose, an uncritical instinct; the purpose of The Wrecker is clearly written upon it, and very ingeniously carried out. But I doubt whether Stevenson himself noticed that in all his work, or nearly, he was using an artifice of the same kind. He spoke of his habitual inclination towards the story told in the first person as though it were a chance preference, and he may not have perceived how logically it followed from the subjects that mostly attracted him. They were strongly romantic, vividly dramatic; he never had occasion to use the first person for the effect I considered a while ago, its enhancement of a plain narrative. I called it the first step towards the dramatization of a story, and so it is in a book like Esmond, a broadly pictured novel of manners. But it is more than this in a book like The Master of Ballantrae, where the subject is a piece of forcible, closely knit action. The value of rendering it as somebody's narrative, of placing it in the mouth of a man who was there on the spot, is in this book the value of working the drama into a picture, of passing it through a man's thought and catching his reflection of it. As the picture in Esmond is enhanced, so the drama in Ballantrae is toned and qualified by the method of presentation. The same method has a different effect, according to the subject upon which it is used; as a splash of the same grey might darken white surface and lighten a black. In Esmond the use of the first person raises the book in the direction of drama, in Ballantrae it thrusts the book in the other direction, towards the pictured impression. So it would seem; but perhaps it is a fine distinction that criticism can afford to pass by.



XV

As for the peculiar accent and stir of life, the life behind the story, Balzac's manner of finding and expressing it is always interesting. He seems to look for it most readily, not in the nature of the men and women whose action makes the story, or not there to begin with, but in their streets and houses and rooms. He cannot think of his people without the homes they inhabit; with Balzac to imagine a human being is to imagine a province, a city, a corner of the city, a building at a turn of the street, certain furnished rooms, and finally the man or woman who lives in them. He cannot be satisfied that the tenor of this creature's existence is at all understood without a minute knowledge of the things and objects that surround it. So strong is his conviction upon this point that it gives a special savour to the many pages in which he describes how the doorway is approached, how the passage leads to the staircase, how the parlour-chairs are placed, in the house which is to be the scene of his drama. These descriptions are clear and business-like; they are offered as an essential preliminary to the story, a matter that must obviously be dealt with, once for all, before the story can proceed. And he communicates his certainty to the reader, he imposes his belief in the need for precision and fullness; Balzac is so sure that every detail must be known, down to the vases on the mantelpiece or the pots and pans in the cupboard, that his reader cannot begin to question it. Everything is made to appear as important as the author feels it to be.

His manner is well to be watched in Eugenie Grandet. That account of the great bare old house of the miser at Saumur is as plain and straightforward as an inventory; no attempt is made to insinuate the impression of the place by hints and side-lights. Balzac marches up to it and goes steadily through it, until our necessary information is complete, and there he leaves it. There is no subtlety in such a method, it seems; a lighter, shyer handling of the facts, more suggestion and less statement, might be expected to make a deeper effect. And indeed Balzac's confident way is not one that would give a good result in most hands; it would produce the kind of description that the eye travels over unperceivingly, the conscientious introduction that tells us nothing. Yet Balzac contrives to make it tell everything; and the simple explanation is that he, more than anyone else, knows everything. The place exists in his thought; it is not to him the mere sensation of a place, with cloudy corners, uncertain recesses, which only grow definite as he touches and probes them with his phrases. A writer of a different sort, an impressionist who is aware of the effect of a scene rather than of the scene itself, proceeds inevitably after another fashion; if he attempted Balzac's method he would have to feel his way tentatively, adding fact to fact, and his account would consist of that mechanical sum of details which makes no image. Balzac is so thoroughly possessed of his image that he can reproduce it inch by inch, fact by fact, without losing the effect of it as a whole; he can start from the edge of his scene, from a street of old houses, from the doorstep of one old house, and leave a perfectly firm and telling impression behind him as he proceeds. When his description is finished and the last detail in its place, the home of the Grandets is securely built for the needs of the story, possessing all the significance that Balzac demands of it.

It will presently be seen that he demands a great deal. I said that his drama has always the benefit of a reserve of force, stored up for it beforehand in the general picture; and though in this picture is included the fortunes and characters of the men and women, of the Grandets and their neighbours, a large part of it is the material scene, the very walls that are to witness the coming events. The figure of Grandet, the old miser, is indeed called up and accounted for abundantly, in all the conditions of his past; but the house too, within and without, is laid under strict contribution, is used to the full in the story. It is a presence and an influence that counts throughout—and counts particularly in a matter that is essential to the book's effect, a matter that could scarcely be provided for in any other way, as it happens. Of this I shall speak in a moment; but at once it is noticeable how the Maison Grandet, like the Maison Vauquer, helps the book on its way. It incarnates all the past of its old owner, and visibly links it to the action when the story opens. The elaborate summary of Grandet's early life, the scrupulously exact account of the building of his prosperity, is brought to an issue in the image of the "cold, dreary and silent house at the upper end of the town," from whence the drama widens again in its turn. How it is that Balzac has precisely the right scene in his mind, a house that perfectly expresses his donnee and all its associations—that, of course, is Balzac's secret; his method would be nothing without the quality of his imagination. His use of the scene is another matter, and there it is possible to reckon how much of his general effect, the sense of the moral and social foundation of his story, is given by its inanimate setting. He has to picture a character and a train of life, and to a great extent he does so by describing a house.

Beyond old Grandet and the kind of existence imposed upon his household, the drama needs little by way of preparation. The miser's daughter Eugenie, with her mother, must stand out clearly to the fore; but a very few touches bring these two women to life in their shadowy abode. They are simple and patient and devoted; between the dominance of the old man and the monotony of the provincial routine Eugenie and her mother are easily intelligible. The two local aspirants to the girl's fortune, and their supporters on either side—the Cruchotins and the Grassinistes—are subsidiary figures; they are sufficiently rendered by their appearance in a flock, for a sociable evening with the Grandets. The faithful maid-servant, the shrewd and valiant Nanon, is quickly sketched. And there, then, is the picture that Balzac prepares for the action, which opens with the arrival of Charles, Eugenie's young and unknown cousin. Except for Charles, all the material of the drama is contained in the first impression of the household and the small country-town; Eugenie's story is implied in it; and her romance, from the moment it begins, inherits the reality and the continuity of the experience. Charles himself is so light a weight that in his case no introduction is needed at all; a single glance at him is enough to show the charm of his airy elegance. His only function in the story is to create the long dream of Eugenie's life; and for that he needs nothing but his unlikeness to the Cruchotins and the Grassinistes. They and Eugenie, therefore, between them, provide for his effect before he appears, they by their dull provinciality, she by her sensitive ignorance. The whole scene, on the verge of the action, is full of dormant echoes, and the first movement wakes them. The girl placed as she is, her circumstances known as they are, all but make the tale of their own accord; only the simple facts are wanting, their effect is already in the air.

And accordingly the story slips away from its beginning without hesitation. In a sense it is a very slight story; there is scarcely anything in it but Eugenie's quick flush of emotion, and then her patient cherishing of its memory; and this simplicity may seem to detract, perhaps, from the skilfulness of Balzac's preparation. Where there is so little in the way of incident or clash of character to provide for, where the people are so plain and perspicuous and next to nothing happens to them, it should not be difficult to make an expressive scene for the drama and its few facts. All that occurs in the main line of the story is that Eugenie falls in love with her cousin, bids him good-bye when he goes to make his fortune in the Indies, trustfully awaits him for a number of years, and discovers his faithlessness when he returns. Her mother's death, and then her father's, are almost the only events in the long interval of Charles's absence. Simple indeed, but this is exactly the kind of story which it is most puzzling to handle. The material is scanty, and yet it covers a good many years; and somehow the narrative must render the length of the years without the help of positive and concrete stuff to fill them. The whole point of the story is lost unless we are made to feel the slow crawling of time, while Eugenie waited; but what is there in her life to account for the time, to bridge the interval, to illustrate its extent? Balzac has to make a long impression of vacuity; Eugenie Grandet contains a decidedly tough subject.

In such a case I suppose the first instinct of almost any story-teller would be to lengthen the narrative of her loneliness by elaborating the picture of her state of mind, drawing out the record of expectancy and patience and failing hope. If nothing befalls her from without, or so little, the time must be filled with the long drama of her experience within; the centre of the story would then be cast in her consciousness, in which there would be reflected the gradual drop of her emotion from glowing newness to the level of daily custom, and thence again to the chill of disillusion. It is easy to imagine the kind of form which the book would take. In order to assure its full value to Eugenie's monotonous suffering, the story would be given from her point of view, entirely from hers; the external facts of her existence would all be seen through her eyes, making substance for her thought. We should live with Eugenie, throughout; we should share her vigil, morning and evening, summer and winter, while she sat in the silent house and listened to the noises of life in the street, while the sun shone for others and not for her, while the light waned, the wind howled, the snow fell and hushed the busy town—still Eugenie would sit at her window, still we should follow the flow of her resigned and uncomplaining meditations; until at last the author could judge that five years, ten years, whatever it may be, had been sufficiently shown in their dreary lapse, and that Charles might now come back from the Indies. So it would be and so it would have to be, a novelist might easily feel. How else could the due suggestion of time be given, where there is so little to show for it in dramatic facts?

But Balzac's treatment of the story is quite unexpected. He lays it out in a fashion that is worth noting, as a good example of the freedom of movement that his great pictorial genius allowed him. With his scene and its general setting so perfectly rendered, the story takes care of itself on every side, with the minimum of trouble on his part. His real trouble is over when the action begins; he is not even disturbed by this difficulty of presenting the sense of time. The plan of Eugenie Grandet, as the book stands, seems to have been made without any regard to the chief and most exacting demand of the story; where another writer would be using every device he could think of to mark the effect of the succeeding years, Balzac is free to tell the story as straightforwardly as he chooses. To Eugenie the great and only adventure of her life was contained in the few days or weeks of Charles's first visit; nothing to compare with that excitement ever happened to her again. And Balzac makes this episode bulk as largely in the book as it did in her life; he pauses over it and elaborates it, unconcerned by the fact that in the book—in the whole effect it is to produce—the episode is only the beginning of Eugenie's story, only the prelude to her years of waiting and watching.

He extends his account of it so far, nevertheless, that he has written two thirds of the book by the time the young man is finally despatched to the Indies. It means that the duration of the story—and the duration is the principal fact in it—is hardly considered at all, after the opening of the action. There is almost no picture of the slowly moving years; there is little but a concise chronicle of the few widely spaced events. Balzac is at no pains to sit with Eugenie in the twilight, while the seasons revolve; not for him to linger, gazing sympathetically over her shoulder, tenderly exploring her sentiments. He is actually capable of beginning a paragraph with the casual announcement, "Five years went by in this way," as though he belonged to the order of story-tellers who imagine that time may be expressed by the mere statement of its length. Yet there is time in his book, it is very certain—time that lags and loiters till the girl has lost her youth and has dropped into the dull groove from which she will evidently never again be dislodged. Balzac can treat the story as concisely as he will, he can record Eugenie's simple experience from without, and yet make the fading of her young hope appear as gradual and protracted as need be; and all because he has prepared in advance, with his picture of the life of the Grandets, a complete and enduring impression.

His preliminary picture included the representation of time, secured the sense of it so thoroughly that there is no necessity for recurring to it again. The routine of the Maison Grandet is too clearly known to be forgotten; the sight of the girl and her mother, leading their sequestered lives in the shadow of their old tyrant's obsession, is a sensation that persists to the end of their story. Their dreary days accumulate and fill the year with hardly a break in its monotony; the next year and the next are the same, except that old Grandet's meanness is accentuated as his wealth increases; the present is like the past, the future will prolong the present. In such a scene Eugenie's patient acquiescence in middle age becomes a visible fact, is divined and accepted at once, without further insistence; it is latent in the scene from the beginning, even at the time of the small romance of her youth. To dwell upon the shades of her long disappointment is needless, for her power of endurance and her fidelity are fully created in the book before they are put to the test. "Five years went by," says Balzac; but before he says it we already see them opening and closing upon the girl, bearing down upon her solitude, exhausting her freshness but not the dumb resignation in which she sits and waits. The endlessness, the sameness, the silence, which another writer would have to tackle somehow after disposing of the brief episode of Charles's visit, Balzac has it all in hand, he can finish off his book without long delay. His deliberate approach to the action, through the picture of the house and its inmates, has achieved its purpose; it has given him the effect which the action most demands and could least acquire by itself, the effect of time.

And there is no doubt that the story immensely gains by being treated in Balzac's way, rather than as the life of a disappointed girl, studied from within. In that case the subject of the book might easily seem to be wearing thin, for the fact is that Eugenie has not the stuff of character to give much interest to her story, supposing it were seen through her eyes. She is good and true and devoted, but she lacks the poetry, the inner resonance, that might make a living drama of her simple emotions. Balzac was always too prosaic for the creation of virtue; his innocent people—unless they may be grotesque as well as innocent, like Pons or Goriot—live in a world that is not worth the trouble of investigation. The interest of Eugenie would infallibly be lowered, not heightened, by closer participation in her romance; it is much better to look at it from outside, as Balzac does for the most part, and to note the incidents that befell her, always provided that the image of lagging time can be fashioned and preserved. As for that, Balzac has no cause to be anxious; it is as certain that he can do what he will with the subject of a story, handle it aright and compel it to make its impression, as that he will fail to understand the sensibility of a good-natured girl.

I cannot imagine that the value of the novelist's picture, as preparation for his drama, could be proved more strikingly than it is proved in this book, where so much is expected of it. Eugenie Grandet is typical of a natural bent on the part of any prudent writer of fiction, the instinct to relieve the climax of the story by taxing it as little as possible when it is reached. The climax ought to complete, to add the touch that makes the book whole and organic; that is its task, and that only. It should be free to do what it must without any unnecessary distraction, and nothing need distract it that can be dealt with and despatched at an earlier stage. The climax in Grandet is not a dramatic point, not a single incident; it lies in the slow chill that very gradually descends upon Eugenie's hope. Balzac carefully refrains from making the book hinge on anything so commonplace as a sudden discovery of the young man's want of faith. The worst kind of disappointment does not happen like that, falling as a stroke; it steals into a life and spreads imperceptibly. Charles's final act of disloyalty is only a kind of coda to a drama that is practically complete without it. Here, then, is a climax that is essentially pictorial, an impression of change and decay, needing time in plenty above all; and Balzac leads into it so cunningly that a short summary of a few plain facts is all that is required, when it comes to the point. He saves his climax, in other words, from the burden of deliberate expatiation, which at first sight it would seem bound to incur; he leaves nothing for it to accomplish but just the necessary touch, the movement that declares and fulfils the intention of the book.

There is the same power at work upon material even more baffling, apparently, in La Recherche de l'Absolu. The subject of that perfect tale is of course the growth of a fixed idea, and Balzac was faced with the task of showing the slow aggravation of a man's ruin through a series of outbreaks, differing in no way one from another, save in their increasing violence. Claes, the excellent and prosperous young burgher of Douai, pillar of the old civic stateliness of Flanders, is dragged and dragged into his calamitous experiments by the bare failure (as he is persuaded) of each one in turn; each time his researches are on the verge of yielding him the "absolute," the philosopher's stone, and each time the prospect is more shining than before; success, wealth enough to restore his deepening losses a thousand times over, is assured by one more attempt, the money to make it must be found. And so all other interest in life is forgotten, his pride and repute are sacrificed, the splendid house is gradually stripped of its treasures, his family are thrust into poverty; and he himself dies degraded, insane, with success—surely, surely success, this time—actually in his grasp. That is all, and on that straight, sustained movement the book must remain throughout, reiterating one effect with growing intensity—always at the pitch of high hope and sharp disappointment, always prepared to heighten and sharpen it a little further. There can be no development through any variety of incident; it is the same suspense and the same shock, again and again, constantly more disastrous than before.

Here, too, Balzac amasses in his opening picture the reserve of effect that he needs. He recognizes the ample resource of the dignity, the opulence, the worth, the tradition inherited by families like that of Claes—merchant-princes of honourable line, rulers of rich cities, patrons of great art. The house of Claes, with its fine architecture, its portraits, its dark furniture and gleaming silver, its garden of rare tulips—Balzac's imagination is poured into the scene, it is exactly the kind of opportunity that he welcomes. He knows the place by heart; his description of it is in his most methodical style. Steadily it all comes out, a Holbein-picture with every orderly detail duly arranged, the expression of good manners, sound taste and a solid position. On such a world, created as he knows how to create it, he may draw without hesitation for the repeated demands of the story; the protracted havoc wrought by the man's infatuation is represented, step by step, as the visible scene is denuded and destroyed. His spirit is worn away and his sanity breaks down, and the successive strokes that fall on it, instead of losing force (for the onlooker) by repetition, are renewed and increased by the sight of the spreading devastation around him, as his precious things are cast into the devouring expense of his researches. Their disappearance is the outward sign of his own personal surrender to his idea, and each time that he is thrown back upon disappointment the ravage of the scene in which he was placed at the beginning of the book is more evident than before. It spreads through his pictures and treasures to his family, and still further into his relations with the respectable circle about him. His position is shaken, his situation in that beautiful Holbein-world is undermined; it is slowly shattered as his madness extends. And having built and furnished that world so firmly and richly, Balzac can linger upon its overthrow as long as is necessary for the rising effect of his story. He has created so much that there is plenty to destroy; only at last, with the man's dying cry of triumph, is the wreck complete.

Thus the climax of the story, as in Grandet, is laid up betimes in the descriptive picture. It is needless, I suppose, to insist on the esthetic value of economy of this kind. Everybody feels the greater force of the climax that assumes its right place without an effort, when the time comes, compared with that in which a strain and an exaggerated stress are perceptible. The process of writing a novel seems to be one of continual forestalling and anticipating; far more important than the immediate page is the page to come, still in the distance, on behalf of which this one is secretly working. The writer makes a point and reserves it at the same time, creates an effect and holds it back, till in due course it is appropriated and used by the page for which it is intended. It must be a pleasure to the writer, it is certainly a great pleasure to the critic, when the stroke is cleanly brought off. It is the same pleasure indeed; the novelist makes the stroke, but the critic makes it again by perceiving it, and is legitimately satisfied by the sense of having perceived it with good artistry. It is spoilt, of course, if the stroke is handled tactlessly and obtrusively; the art of preparation is no art if it betrays itself at the outset, calling attention to its purpose. By definition it is unrecognizable until it attains its end; it is the art of rendering an impression that is found to have been made, later on, but that evades detection at the moment. The particular variety I have been considering is one of which Balzac is a great master; and perhaps his mastery will appear still more clearly if I look at a book in which his example is not followed in this respect. It is a finer book, for all that, than most of Balzac's.



XVI

It is Anna Karenina; and I turn to it now, not for its beauty and harmony, not because it is one of the most exquisitely toned, shaded, gradated pieces of portraiture in fiction, but because it happens to show very clearly how an effect may be lost for want of timely precaution. Tolstoy undoubtedly damaged a magnificent book by his refusal to linger over any kind of pictorial introduction. There is none in this story, the reader will remember. The whole of the book, very nearly, is scenic, from the opening page to the last; it is a chain of particular occasions, acted out, talked out, by the crowd of people concerned. Each of these scenes is outspread before the spectator, who watches the characters and listens to their dialogue; there is next to no generalization of the story at any point. On every page, I think, certainly on all but a very few of the many hundred pages, the hour and the place are exactly defined. Something is happening there, or something is being discussed; at any rate it is an episode singled out for direct vision.

The plan of the book, in fact, is strictly dramatic; it allows no such freedom as Balzac uses, freedom of exposition and retrospect. Tolstoy never draws back from the immediate scene, to picture the manner of life that his people led or to give a foreshortened impression of their history. He unrolls it all as it occurs, illustrating everything in action. It is an extraordinary feat, considering the amount of experience he undertakes to display, with an interweaving of so many lives and fortunes. And it is still more extraordinary, considering the nature of the story, which is not really dramatic at all, but a pictorial contrast, Anna and her affair on one side of it, Levin and his on the other. The contrast is gradually extended and deepened through the book; but it leads to no clash between the two, no opposition, no drama. It is an effect of slow and inevitable change, drawn out in minute detail through two lives, with all the others that cluster round each—exactly the kind of matter that nobody but Tolstoy, with his huge hand, would think of trying to treat scenically. Tolstoy so treats it, however, and apparently never feels any desire to break away from the march of his episodes or to fuse his swarming detail into a general view. It means that he must write a very long book, with scores and scores of scenes, but he has no objection to that.

It is only in its plan, of course, that Anna Karenina is strictly dramatic; its method of execution is much looser, and there indeed Tolstoy allows himself as much freedom as he pleases. In the novel of pure drama the point of view is that of the reader alone, as we saw; there is no "going behind" the characters, no direct revelation of their thought. Such consistency is out of the question, however, even for Tolstoy, on the great scale of his book; and he never hesitates to lay bare the mind of any of his people, at any moment, if it seems to help the force or the lucidity of the scene. And so we speedily grow familiar with the consciousness of many of them, for Tolstoy's hand is always as light and quick as it is broad. He catches the passing thought that is in a man's mind as he speaks; and though it may be no more than a vague doubt or an idle fancy, it is somehow a note of the man himself, a sign of his being, an echo of his inner tone. From Anna and the other figures of the forefront, down to the least of the population of the background, I could almost say to the wonderful little red baby that in one of the last chapters is disclosed to Levin by the triumphant nurse—each of them is a centre of vision, each of them looks out on a world that is not like the world of the rest, and we know it. Without any elaborate research Tolstoy expresses the nature of all their experience; he reveals the dull weight of it in one man's life or its vibrating interest in another's; he shows how for one it stirs and opens, with troubling enlargement, how for another it remains blank and inert. He does so unconsciously, it might seem, not seeking to construct the world as it appears to Anna or her husband or her lover, but simply glancing now and then into their mood of the moment, and indicating what he happens to find there. Yet it is enough, and each of them is soon a human being whose privacy we share. They are actors moving upon a visible scene, watched from the reader's point of view; but they are also sentient lives, understood from within.

Here, then, is a mixed method which enables Tolstoy to deal with his immense subject on the lines of drama. He can follow its chronology step by step, at an even pace throughout, without ever interrupting the rhythm for that shift of the point of view—away from the immediate scene to a more commanding height—which another writer would certainly have found to be necessary sooner or later. He can create a character in so few words—he can make the manner of a man's or a woman's thought so quickly intelligible—that even though his story is crowded and over-crowded with people he can render them all, so to speak, by the way, give them all their due without any study of them outside the passing episode. So he can, at least, in general; for in Anna Karenina, as I said, his method seems to break down very conspicuously at a certain juncture. But before I come to that, I would dwell further upon this peculiar skill of Tolstoy's, this facility which explains, I think, the curious flaw in his beautiful novel. He would appear to have trusted his method too far, trusted it not only to carry him through the development and the climax of his story, but also to constitute his donnee, his prime situation in the beginning. This was to throw too much upon it, and it is critically of high interest to see where it failed, and why. The miscalculations of a great genius are enlightening; here, in Anna Karenina, is one that calls attention to Tolstoy's characteristic fashion of telling a story, and declares its remarkable qualities.

The story of Anna, I suggested, is not essentially dramatic. Like the story of Emma Bovary or of Eugenie Grandet, it is a picture outspread, an impression of life, rather than an action. Anna at first has a life that rests on many supports, with her husband and her child and her social possessions; it is broadly based and its stability is assured, if she chooses to rely on it. But her husband is a dull and pedantic soul, and before long she chooses to exchange her assured life for another that rests on one support only, a romantic passion. Her life with Vronsky has no other security, and in process of time it fails. Its gradual failure is her story—the losing battle of a woman who has thrown away more resources than she could afford. But the point and reason of the book is not in the dramatic question—what will happen, will Anna lose or win? It is in the picture of her gathering and deepening difficulties, difficulties that arise out of her position and her mood, difficulties of which the only solution is at last her death. And this story, with the contrasted picture of Levin's domesticity that completes it, is laid out exactly as Balzac did not lay out his story of Eugenie; it is all presented as action, because Tolstoy's eye was infallibly drawn, whenever he wrote, to the instant aspect of his matter, the play itself. He could not generalize it, and on the whole there was no need for him to do so; for there was nothing, not the least stir of motive or character, that could not be expressed in the movement of the play as he handled it. Scene is laid to scene, therefore, as many as he requires; he had no thought of stinting himself in that respect. And within the limit of the scene he was always ready to vary his method, to enter the consciousness of any or all the characters at will, without troubling himself about the possible confusion of effect which this might entail. He could afford the liberty, because the main lines of his structure were so simple and clear; the inconsistencies of his method are dominated by the broad scenic regularity of his plan.

Balzac had not the master-hand of Tolstoy in the management of a dramatic scene, an episode. When it comes to rendering a piece of action Balzac's art is not particularly felicitous, and if we only became acquainted with his people while they are talking and acting, I think they might often seem rather heavy and wooden, harsh of speech and gesture. Balzac's general knowledge of them, and his power of offering an impression of what he knows—these are so great that his people are alive before they begin to act, alive with an energy that is all-sufficient. Tolstoy's grasp of a human being's whole existence, of everything that goes to make it, is not as capacious as Balzac's; but on the other hand he can create a living scene, exquisitely and easily expressive, out of anything whatever, the lightest trifle of an incident. If he describes how a child lingered at the foot of the stairs, teasing an old servant, or how a peasant-woman stood in a doorway, laughing and calling to the men at work in the farmyard, the thing becomes a poetic event; in half a page he makes an unforgettable scene. It suddenly glows and flushes, and its effect in the story is profound. A passing glimpse of this kind is caught, say, by Anna in her hungry desperation, by Levin as he wanders and speculates; and immediately their experience is the fuller by an eloquent memory. The vividness of the small scene becomes a part of them, for us who read; it is something added to our impression of their reality. And so the half-page is not a diversion or an interlude; it speeds the story by augmenting the tone and the value of the lives that we are watching. It happens again and again; that is Tolstoy's way of creating a life, of raising it to its full power by a gradual process of enrichment, till Anna or Levin is at length a complete being, intimately understood, ready for the climax of the tale.

But of course it takes time, and it chanced that this deliberation made a special difficulty in the case of Anna's story. As for Levin, it was easy to give him ample play; he could be left to emerge and to assume his place in the book by leisurely degrees, for it is not until much has passed that his full power is needed. Meanwhile he is a figure in the crowd, a shy and disappointed suitor, unobtrusively sympathetic, and there are long opportunities of seeing more of him in his country solitude. Later on, when his fortunes come to the front with his marriage, he has shown what he is; he steps fully fashioned into the drama. With Anna it is very different; her story allows no such pause, for a growing knowledge of the manner of woman she may be. She is at once to the front of the book; the situation out of which the whole novel develops is made by a particular crisis in her life. She meets and falls in love with Vronsky—that is the crisis from which the rest of her story proceeds; it is the beginning of the action, the subject of the earliest chapters. And the difficulty lies in this, that she must be represented upon such a critical height of emotion before there is time, by Tolstoy's method, to create the right effect for her and to make her impulse really intelligible. For the reader it is all too abrupt, the step by which she abandons her past and flings herself upon her tragic adventure. It is impossible to measure her passion and her resolution, because she herself is still incompletely rendered. She has appeared in a few charming scenes, a finished and graceful figure, but that is not enough. If she is so soon to be seen at this pitch of exaltation, it is essential that her life should be fully shared by the onlooker; but as Tolstoy has told the story, Anna is in the midst of her crisis and has passed it before it is possible to know her life clearly from within. Alive and beautiful she is from the very first moment of her appearance; Tolstoy's art is much too sure to miss the right effect, so far as it goes. And if her story were such that it involved her in no great adventure at the start—if she could pass from scene to scene, like Levin, quietly revealing herself—Tolstoy's method would be perfect. But as it is, there is no adequate preparation; Anna is made to act as a deeply stirred and agitated woman before she has the value for such emotions. She has not yet become a presence familiar enough, and there is no means of gauging the force of the storm that is seen to shake her.

It is a flaw in the book which has often been noticed, and it is a flaw which Tolstoy could hardly have avoided, if he was determined to hold to his scenic plan. Given his reluctance to leave the actually present occasion, from the first page onwards, from the moment Anna's erring brother wakes to his own domestic troubles at the opening of the book, there is not room for the due creation of Anna's life. Her turning-point must be reached without delay, it cannot be deferred, for it is there that the development of the book begins. All that precedes her union with Vronsky is nothing but the opening stage, the matter that must be displayed before the story can begin to expand. The story, as we have seen, is in the picture of Anna's life after her critical choice, so that the first part of the book, the account of the given situation, cannot extend its limits. If, therefore, the situation is to be really made and constituted, the space it may cover must be tightly packed; the method should be that which most condenses and concentrates the representation. A great deal is to be expressed at once, all Anna's past and present, the kind of experience that has made her and that has brought her to the point she now touches. Without this her action is arbitrary and meaningless; it is vain to say that she acted thus and thus unless we perfectly understand what she was, what she had, what was around her, in the face of her predicament. Obviously there is no space to lose; and it is enough to look at Tolstoy's use of it, and then to see how Balzac makes the situation that he requires—the contrast shows exactly where Tolstoy's method could not help him. His refusal to shape his story, or any considerable part of it, as a pictorial impression, his desire to keep it all in immediate action, prevents him from making the most of the space at his command; the situation is bound to suffer in consequence.

For suppose that Balzac had had to deal with the life of Anna. He would certainly have been in no hurry to plunge into the action, he would have felt that there was much to treat before the scene was ready to open. All the initial episodes of Tolstoy's book, from Anna's first appearance until she drops into Vronsky's arms, Balzac might well have ignored entirely. He would have been too busy with his prodigious summary of the history and household of the Karenins to permit himself a glance in the direction of any particular moment, until the story could unfold from a situation thoroughly prepared. If Tolstoy had followed this course we should have lost some enchanting glimpses, but Balzac would have left not a shadow of uncertainty in the matter of Anna's disastrous passion. He would have shown precisely how she was placed in the conditions of her past, how she was exposed to this new incursion from without, and how it broke up a life which had satisfied her till then. He would have started his action in due time with his whole preliminary effect completely rendered; there would be no more question of it, no possibility that it would prove inadequate for the sequel. And all this he would have managed, no doubt, in fewer pages than Tolstoy needs for the beautiful scenes of his earlier chapters, scenes which make a perfect impression of Anna and her circle as an onlooker might happen to see them, but which fail to give the onlooker the kind of intimacy that is needed. Later on, indeed, her life is penetrated to the depths; but then it is too late to save the effect of the beginning. To the very end Anna is a wonderful woman whose early history has never been fully explained. The facts are clear, of course, and there is nothing impossible about them; but her passion for this man, the grand event of her life, has to be assumed on the word of the author. All that he really showed, to start with, was a slight, swift love-story, which might have ended as easily as it began.

The method of the book, in short, does not arise out of the subject; in treating it Tolstoy simply used the method that was congenial to him, without regarding the story that he had to tell. He began it as though Anna's break with her past was the climax to which the story was to mount, whereas it is really the point from which the story sets out for its true climax in her final catastrophe. And so the first part of the book is neither one thing nor the other; it is not an independent drama, for it cannot reach its height through all the necessary sweep of development; and on the other hand it is not a sufficient preparation for the great picture of inevitable disaster which is to follow. Tolstoy doubtless counted on his power—and not without reason, for it is amazing—to call people into life by means of a few luminous episodes; he knew he could make a living creature of Anna by bringing her into view in half a dozen scenes. She descends, accordingly, upon her brother's agitated household like a beneficent angel, she shines resplendent at some social function, she meets Vronsky, she talks to her husband; and Tolstoy is right, she becomes a real and exquisite being forthwith. But he did not see how much more was needed than a simple personal impression of her, in view of all that is to come. Not she only, but her world, the world as she sees it, her past as it affects her—this too is demanded, and for this he makes no provision. It is never really shown how she was placed in her life, and what it meant to her; and her flare of passion has consequently no importance, no fateful bigness. There is not enough of her, as yet, for such a crisis.

It is not because Vronsky seems an inadequate object of her passion; though it is true that with the figure of Vronsky Tolstoy was curiously unsuccessful. Vronsky was his one failure—there is surely no other in all his gallery to match it. The spoilt child of the world, but a friendly soul, and a romantic and a patient lover—and a type fashioned by conditions that Tolstoy, of course, knew by heart—why should Tolstoy manage to make so little of him? It is unfortunate, for when Anna is stirred by the sight of him and his all-conquering speciosity, any reader is sure to protest. Tolstoy should have created Vronsky with a more certain touch before he allowed him to cause such a disturbance. But this is a minor matter, and it would count for little if the figure of Anna were all it should be. Vronsky's importance in the story is his importance to Anna, and her view of him is a part of her; and he might be left lightly treated on his own account, the author might be content to indicate him rather summarily, so long as Anna had full attention. It returns upon that again; if Anna's own life were really fashioned, Vronsky's effect would be there, and the independent effect he happens to make, or to fail to make, on the reader would be an irrelevant affair. Tolstoy's vital failure is not with him, but with her, in the prelude of his book.

It may be that there is something of the same kind to be seen in another of his novels, in Resurrection, though Resurrection is more like a fragment of an epic than a novel. It cannot be said that in that tremendous book Tolstoy pictured the rending of a man's soul by sudden enlightenment, striking in upon him unexpectedly, against his will, and destroying his established life—and that is apparently the subject in the author's mind. It is the woman, the accidental woman through whom the stroke is delivered, who is actually in the middle of the book; it is her epic much rather than the man's, and Tolstoy did not succeed in placing him where he clearly meant him to be. The man's conversion from the selfishness of his commonplace prosperity is not much more than a fact assumed at the beginning of the story. It happens, Tolstoy says it happens, and the man's life is changed; and thereafter the sombre epic proceeds. But the unrolling of the story has no bearing upon the revolution wrought in the man; that is complete, as soon as he flings over his past and follows the convoy of prisoners into Siberia, and the succession of strange scenes has nothing more to accomplish in him. The man is the mirror of the scenes, his own drama is finished. And if Tolstoy intended to write the drama of a soul, all this presentation of the deadly journey into exile, given with the full force of his genius, is superfluous; his subject lay further back. But Resurrection, no doubt, is a fragment, a wonderful shifting of scenes that never reached a conclusion; and it is not to be criticized as a book in which Tolstoy tried and failed to carry out his purpose. I only mention it because it seems to illustrate, like Anna Karenina, his instinctive evasion of the matter that could not be thrown into straightforward scenic form, the form in which his imagination was evidently happiest. His great example, therefore, is complementary to that of Balzac, whose genius looked in the other direction, who was always drawn to the general picture rather than to the particular scene. And with these two illustrious names I reach the end of the argument I have tried to follow from book to book, and it is time to gather up the threads.



XVII

The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of the point of view—the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story. He tells it as he sees it, in the first place; the reader faces the story-teller and listens, and the story may be told so vivaciously that the presence of the minstrel is forgotten, and the scene becomes visible, peopled with the characters of the tale. It may be so, it very often is so for a time. But it is not so always, and the story-teller himself grows conscious of a misgiving. If the spell is weakened at any moment, the listener is recalled from the scene to the mere author before him, and the story rests only upon the author's direct assertion. Is it not possible, then, to introduce another point of view, to set up a fresh narrator to bear the brunt of the reader's scrutiny? If the story-teller is in the story himself, the author is dramatized; his assertions gain in weight, for they are backed by the presence of the narrator in the pictured scene. It is advantage scored; the author has shifted his responsibility, and it now falls where the reader can see and measure it; the arbitrary quality which may at any time be detected in the author's voice is disguised in the voice of his spokesman. Nothing is now imported into the story from without; it is self-contained, it has no associations with anyone beyond its circle.

Such is the first step towards dramatization, and in very many a story it may be enough. The spokesman is there, in recognizable relation with his matter; no question of his authority can arise. But now a difficulty may be started by the nature of the tale that he tells. If he has nothing to do but to relate what he has seen, what anyone might have seen in his position, his account will serve very well; there is no need for more. Let him unfold his chronicle as it appears in his memory. But if he is himself the subject of his story, if the story involves a searching exploration of his own consciousness, an account in his own words, after the fact, is not by any means the best imaginable. Far better it would be to see him while his mind is actually at work in the agitation, whatever it may be, which is to make the book. The matter would then be objective and visible to the reader, instead of reaching him in the form of a report at second hand. But how to manage this without falling back upon the author and his report, which has already been tried and for good reasons, as it seemed, abandoned? It is managed by a kind of repetition of the same stroke, a further shift of the point of view. The spectator, the listener, the reader, is now himself to be placed at the angle of vision; not an account or a report, more or less convincing, is to be offered him, but a direct sight of the matter itself, while it is passing. Nobody expounds or explains; the story is enacted by its look and behaviour at particular moments. By the first stroke the narrator was brought into the book and set before the reader; but the action appeared only in his narrative. Now the action is there, proceeding while the pages are turned; the narrator is forestalled, he is watched while the story is in the making. Such is the progress of the writer of fiction towards drama; such is his method of evading the drawbacks of a mere reporter and assuming the advantages, as far as possible, of a dramatist. How far he may choose to push the process in his book—that is a matter to be decided by the subject; it entirely depends upon the kind of effect that the theme demands. It may respond to all the dramatization it can get, it may give all that it has to give for less. The subject dictates the method.

And now let the process be reversed, let us start with the purely dramatic subject, the story that will tell itself in perfect rightness, unaided, to the eye of the reader. This story never deviates from a strictly scenic form; one occasion or episode follows another, with no interruption for any reflective summary of events. Necessarily it must be so, for it is only while the episode is proceeding that no question of a narrator can arise; when the scene closes the play ceases till the opening of the next. To glance upon the story from a height and to give a general impression of its course—this is at once to remove the point of view from the reader and to set up a new one somewhere else; the method is no longer consistent, no longer purely dramatic. And the dramatic story is not only scenic, it is also limited to so much as the ear can hear and the eye see. In rigid drama of this kind there is naturally no admission of the reader into the private mind of any of the characters; their thoughts and motives are transmuted into action. A subject wrought to this pitch of objectivity is no doubt given weight and compactness and authority in the highest degree; it is like a piece of modelling, standing in clear space, casting its shadow. It is the most finished form that fiction can take.

But evidently it is not a form to which fiction can aspire in general. It implies many sacrifices, and these will easily seem to be more than the subject can usefully make. It is out of the question, of course, wherever the main burden of the story lies within some particular consciousness, in the study of a soul, the growth of a character, the changing history of a temperament; there the subject would be needlessly crossed and strangled by dramatization pushed to its limit. It is out of the question, again, wherever the story is too big, too comprehensive, too widely ranging, to be treated scenically, with no opportunity for general and panoramic survey; it has been discovered, indeed, that even a story of this kind may fall into a long succession of definite scenes, under some hands, but it has also appeared that in doing so it incurs unnecessary disabilities, and will likely suffer. These stories, therefore, which will not naturally accommodate themselves to the reader's point of view, and the reader's alone, we regard as rather pictorial than dramatic—meaning that they call for some narrator, somebody who knows, to contemplate the facts and create an impression of them. Whether it is the omniscient author or a man in the book, he must gather up his experience, compose a vision of it as it exists in his mind, and lay that before the reader. It is the reflection of an experience; and though there may be all imaginable diversity of treatment within the limits of the reflection, such is its essential character. In a pictorial book the principle of the structure involves a point of view which is not the reader's.

It is open to the pictorial book, however, to use a method in its picture-making that is really no other than the method of drama. It is somebody's experience, we say, that is to be reported, the general effect that many things have left upon a certain mind; it is a fusion of innumerable elements, the deposit of a lapse of time. The straightforward way to render it would be for the narrator—the author or his selected creature—to view the past retrospectively and discourse upon it, to recall and meditate and summarize. That is picture-making in its natural form, using its own method. But exactly as in drama the subject is distributed among the characters and enacted by them, so in picture the effect may be entrusted to the elements, the reactions of the moment, and performed by these. The mind of the narrator becomes the stage, his voice is no longer heard. His voice is heard so long as there is narrative of any sort, whether he is speaking in person or is reported obliquely; his voice is heard, because in either case the language and the intonation are his, the direct expression of his experience. In the drama of his mind there is no personal voice, for there is no narrator; the point of view becomes the reader's once more. The shapes of thought in the man's mind tell their own story. And that is the art of picture-making when it uses the dramatic method.

But it cannot always do so. Constantly it must be necessary to offer the reader a summary of facts, an impression of a train of events, that can only be given as somebody's narration. Suppose it were required to render the general effect of a certain year in a man's life, a year that has filled his mind with a swarm of many memories. Looking into his consciousness after the year has gone, we might find much there that would indicate the nature of the year's events without any word on his part; the flickers and flashes of thought from moment to moment might indeed tell us much. But we shall need an account from him too, no doubt; too much has happened in a year to be wholly acted, as I call it, in the movement of the man's thought. He must narrate—he must make, that is to say, a picture of the events as he sees them, glancing back. Now if he speaks in the first person there can, of course, be no uncertainty in the point of view; he has his fixed position, he cannot leave it. His description will represent the face that the facts in their sequence turned towards him; the field of vision is defined with perfect distinctness, and his story cannot stray outside it. The reader, then, may be said to watch a reflection of the facts in a mirror of which the edge is nowhere in doubt; it is rounded by the bounds of the narrator's own personal experience.

This limitation may have a convenience and a value in the story, it may contribute to the effect. But it need not be forfeited, it is clear, if the first person is changed to the third. The author may use the man's field of vision and keep as faithfully within it as though the man were speaking for himself. In that case he retains this advantage and adds to it another, one that is likely to be very much greater. For now, while the point of view is still fixed in space, still assigned to the man in the book, it is free in time; there no longer stretches, between the narrator and the events of which he speaks, a certain tract of time, across which the past must appear in a more or less distant perspective. All the variety obtainable by a shifting relation to the story in time is thus in the author's hand; the safe serenity of a far retrospect, the promising or threatening urgency of the present, every gradation between the two, can be drawn into the whole effect of the book, and all of it without any change of the seeing eye. It is a liberty that may help the story indefinitely, raising this matter into strong relief, throwing that other back into vaguer shade.

And next, still keeping mainly and ostensibly to the same point of view, the author has the chance of using a much greater latitude than he need appear to use. The seeing eye is with somebody in the book, but its vision is reinforced; the picture contains more, becomes richer and fuller, because it is the author's as well as his creature's, both at once. Nobody notices, but in fact there are now two brains behind that eye; and one of them is the author's, who adopts and shares the position of his creature, and at the same time supplements his wit. If you analyse the picture that is now presented, you find that it is not all the work of the personage whose vision the author has adopted. There are touches in it that go beyond any sensation of his, and indicate that some one else is looking over his shoulder—seeing things from the same angle, but seeing more, bringing another mind to bear upon the scene. It is an easy and natural extension of the personage's power of observation. The impression of the scene may be deepened as much as need be; it is not confined to the scope of one mind, and yet there is no blurring of the focus by a double point of view. And thus what I have called the sound of the narrator's voice (it is impossible to avoid this mixture of metaphors) is less insistent in oblique narration, even while it seems to be following the very same argument that it would in direct, because another voice is speedily mixed and blended with it.

So this is another resource upon which the author may draw according to his need; sometimes it will be indispensable, and generally, I suppose, it will be useful. It means that he keeps a certain hold upon the narrator as an object; the sentient character in the story, round whom it is grouped, is not utterly subjective, completely given over to the business of seeing and feeling on behalf of the reader. It is a considerable point; for it helps to meet one of the great difficulties in the story which is carefully aligned towards a single consciousness and consistently so viewed. In that story the man or woman who acts as the vessel of sensation is always in danger of seeming a light, uncertain weight compared with the other people in the book—simply because the other people are objective images, plainly outlined, while the seer in the midst is precluded from that advantage, and must see without being directly seen. He, who doubtless ought to bulk in the story more massively than any one, tends to remain the least recognizable of the company, and even to dissolve in a kind of impalpable blur. By his method (which I am supposing to have been adopted in full strictness) the author is of course forbidden to look this central figure in the face, to describe and discuss him; the light cannot be turned upon him immediately. And very often we see the method becoming an embarrassment to the author in consequence, and the devices by which he tries to mitigate it, and to secure some reflected sight of the seer, may even be tiresomely obvious. But the resource of which I speak is of a finer sort.

It gives to the author the power of imperceptibly edging away from the seer, leaving his consciousness, ceasing to use his eyes—though still without substituting the eyes of another. To revert for a moment to the story told in the first person, it is plain that in that case the narrator has no such liberty; his own consciousness must always lie open; the part that he plays in the story can never appear in the same terms, on the same plane, as that of the other people. Though he is not visible in the story to the reader, as the others are, he is at every moment nearer than they, in his capacity of the seeing eye, the channel of vision; nor can he put off his function, he must continue steadily to see and to report. But when the author is reporting him there is a margin of freedom. The author has not so completely identified himself, as narrator, with his hero that he can give him no objective weight whatever. If necessary he can allow him something of the value of a detached and phenomenal personage, like the rest of the company in the story, and that without violating the principle of his method. He cannot make his hero actually visible—there the method is uncompromising; he cannot step forward, leaving the man's point of view, and picture him from without. But he can place the man at the same distance from the reader as the other people, he can almost lend him the same effect, he can make of him a dramatic actor upon the scene.