Talks on Writing English. First Series

by Arlo Bates

The more fascinating any literary work, the more difficult it is to write about it satisfactorily. The mention of the D’Artagnan Romances brings up so vivid a suggestion of life and stir, of adventure and fire, that any essay which discourses of these superb novels is almost sure to seem tame by contrast. In the mere names of “Tom Jones,” “Henry Esmond,” “The Scarlet Letter,” there is so much potency that simply to use them as illustrations involves the danger of rendering dull and opaque by contrast the surface of exposition in which they are set like jewels. Even the specification of Narration as a division of composition connotes so many pleasant sensations that he must be a clever man who can deal with the technicalities of this sort of writing without boring his readers.

It is to be remembered, however, that before “The Lesson in Anatomy” could be painted Rembrandt had to learn how canvas is prepared and how colors are mixed; that the Ninth Symphony could not be composed until dry details of counterpoint and harmony had been mastered. It is apt to seem to the inexperienced writer as if to study the technique of art is to brush the bloom from the peach. He likes to feel that only what is spontaneous can be fresh and vital; and he forgets that in art spontaneity is impossible until the technical method has been so perfectly mastered that the creative impulse is unhampered by inability to express itself. It is not the untrained and the inexperienced who are able to be naïve and fresh in art, but only the master to whom technical excellence has become a second nature.

Having in a former talk declared Description to be the most difficult sort of composition, I am tempted now to make a bull, and to declare that Narration is more difficult still! Indeed, this would hardly be extravagant, were it not that the natural, instinctive interest of mankind in whatever is a story comes to the aid of him who writes a narrative. Narration as it exists in practice, however, is hardly to be considered alone. Of all varieties of composition, this is the one which most comprehensively embraces all other forms. It demands all the resources of the literary artist. Exposition, Argument, and Description are all enlisted in the services of the story-teller; and are so blended in the woof of his web that they can scarcely be disassociated from the narrative itself.

A succession of events can be fully told only in words. Even when we see a clever pantomime—as, for example, “L’Enfant Prodigue,” which was extensively played in this country by a French company a year or two ago,—we are forced to supply in our minds a sort of running interpretation of the acts as they go on before us. Music may interpret continuous emotions, but its inadequacy to tell a definite tale is abundantly shown by that odd hybrid known as “programme music.” Painting may give a succession of related themes, but between the moments chosen for representation there are gaps which break the continuity. To convey a complete and continuous account of events there is no resource in all the arts but words. It naturally follows that Narration is more intimately connected with actual life than any other sort of writing. It is the events of life which move us, and the history of these arouses the feelings as no expository or argumentative page can arouse them.

It is hardly necessary to enumerate all the many forms which Narration takes. Histories, biographies, plays, novels, romances, anecdotes, epics, stories long and stories short, the account of a journey and the folk-tale through which the fairies frisk fantastically, are all included under this division. The tedious twaddle and sea-water of “The Voyage of the Sunbeam,” and the quivering pages of “Les Misérables,” the account of a fire or a burglary in the morning paper, the anecdote over which a pair of drummers chuckle in a Western railway car, and the delicate romances of Hawthorne,—beautiful and pure as delicate frost-work seen by moonlight,—all these belong here, and all these are but a part. It is manifestly impossible to take up each variety separately, even were it at all worth while. We must be content to concern ourselves with general principles. Fortunately it is not difficult so to phrase these that they shall be applicable to narratives of all sorts. So many so-called stories written by inexperienced writers are merely memoranda for tales, undigested and unarranged, that there is sufficient excuse for being somewhat rudimentary in our treatment of the subject. While young authors continue to give us the material for narratives instead of properly formed and finished Narration there is at least the chance of doing good.

The first requisite in setting out to tell a story is to have a story to tell. It is true that not a few modern novels might be cited as seeming to prove the opposite of this proposition. There is a recent school of fiction in which the first principle seems to be that if one is to attempt to tell a story he must above all things else be careful not to have one in his remotest thought. The patron saint of such writers seems to be the needy knife-grinder of Canning, with his

“Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir.”

The world in general, however, still holds logically to the old theory, and believes that to have something to relate is essential in Narration.

It is not that the theme of a narrative need be elaborate. There are many successful novels and stories with plots extremely simple. Not one of Miss Wilkins’ New England idyls—those charming sublimations of the homely—has complexity or intricacy of subject. The only point is that the writer have in mind some definite and consecutive narrative, with a beginning and an end, and that he tell it as a narrative, and not as an Exposition or an Argument. The whole matter is well summed up in the phrase of Anthony Trollope: “The writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell.”

It would hardly do at this late day to insist, however, that the object of a story shall be simply or even primarily the narration of incident. It has been greatly the fashion during the last score of years to subordinate incident to any one of several things. Many of the greatest novelists of the present half-century have deliberately subordinated events to the study of character. There are not a few modern novels which can be adequately described only as emotional dissecting-rooms. They display the most wonderful cleverness in dismembering emotions,—too often without having a living figure or a convincing incident from one cover to the other. It is but fair to add that there are also fictions which seem to justify this method, whether we like it or not.