II
That last sentence quite misses the point—or at least seemed to miss it quite hopelessly to those who were young in the ’nineties: whose favourite models were French or Russian—Balzac, Stendhal, Mérimée, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgueniev, the Tolstoy of Sevastopol and War and Peace.
It is a long while ago: but passions of faith we had; the first commanding us (poor fellows!) to agonise in search of the right or most expressive word; the second to keep ourselves out of any given story making the persons exhibit their characters of themselves and by the actions, the actions again explain themselves by what the persons had said or done previously. In other words these young men attempted to apply to the novel Aristotle’s dictum concerning the Epic, of which they conceived the novel to be (as Fielding had maintained) the artistic successor. (And here let me advise all you who have read the Poetics to study Fielding’s reasoned application of that treatise in his prefaces to the several Books of Tom Jones):
“Admirable on all counts,” says Aristotle, “Homer has the special merit of being the only poet who understands the part he should take himself. In his own person he should intrude as little as possible. It is not in that way he imitates life. Other writers force themselves into the business throughout and imitate but little and rarely. Homer, after a few words of preface, at once brings in a man or a woman as it may be, never characterless but each distinctively characteristic.”
To put it in another way—and to employ for once a couple of terms which as a rule these discourses banish, a story should be as purely objective as possible, the author’s meaning infused indeed (as it must be in any story worth the telling) but his own person, with his own commentary, as rigidly excluded as from a stage-play—say, as from King Lear or Tartuffe. Madame Bovary and Boule de Suif were the exemplars (to name but two); any chat by the author himself ranked as an offence against art.