A Manual of the Art of Fiction

by Clayton Meeker Hamilton

Other novelists have asked us to admire violent and unexpected acts of startling self-sacrifice, when a character is made to take on himself the responsibility for the delinquency of some other character. They have invited our approbation for a moral suicide, which is quite as blameworthy as any physical suicide. With his keen insight into ethics and with his robust common sense, Huxley stated the principle which these novelists have failed to grasp. A man, he tells us, “may refuse to commit another, but he ought not to allow himself to be believed worse than he actually is,” since this results in “a loss to the world of moral force which cannot be afforded.” The final test of the fineness of fiction lies in its veracity. “Romance is the poetry of circumstance,” as Stevenson tells us, and “drama is the poetry of conduct”; we may be tolerant and easy-going in our acceptance of a novelist’s circumstances, but we ought to be rigorous as regards conduct. As far as the successive happenings of his story are concerned, the mere incidents, the author may on occasion ask our indulgence and tax our credulity a little; but he must not expect us to forgive him for any violation of the fundamental truths of human nature.

It is this stern veracity, unflinching and inexorable, which makes “Anna Karénina” one of the noblest works of art that the nineteenth century devised to the twentieth, just as it is the absence of this fidelity to the facts of life, the twisting of character to prove a thesis, which vitiates the “Kreutzer Sonata,” and makes it unworthy of the great artist in fiction who wrote the earlier work. It is not too much to say that the development of Tolstoi as a militant moralist is coincident with his decline as an artist. He is no longer content to picture life as he sees it; he insists on preaching. And when he uses his art, not as an end in itself, but as an instrument to advocate his own individual theories, although his great xxii gifts are not taken from him, the result is that his later novels lack the broad and deep moral effect which gave his earlier studies of life and character their abiding value.

Stevenson had in him “something of the shorter catechist”; and the Scotch artist in letters, enamored of words as he was, seized firmly the indispensable law. “The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction,” he declared. “They do not pin their reader to a dogma, which he must afterward discover to be inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he must afterward unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintances of others, and they show us the web of experience not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change––that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction.” This is well thought and well put, although many of us might demand that novels should be more than “reasonably true.” But even if Stevenson was here a little lax in the requirements he imposed on others, he was stricter with himself when he wrote “Markheim” and the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Another story-teller, also cut off before he had displayed the best that was in him, set up the same standards for his fellow-craftsmen in fiction. In his striking discussion of the responsibility of the novelist, Frank Norris asserted that the readers of fiction have “a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is not right that they be exploited and deceived with false views of life, false characters, false sentiment, false morality, false history, false xxiii philosophy, false emotions, false heroism, false notions of self-sacrifice, false views of religion, of duty, of conduct, and of manners.”

III

Even if there may have been a certain advantage to the novel, as M. Le Breton maintains, because it was long left alone unfettered by any critical code, to expand as best it could, to find its own way unaided and to work out its own salvation, the time has now come when it may profit by a criticism which shall force it to consider its responsibilities and to appraise its technical resources, if it is to claim artistic equality with the drama and the epic. It has won its way to the front; and there are few who now question its right to the position it has attained. There is no denying that in English literature, in the age of Victoria, the novel established itself as the literary form most alluring to all men of letters and that it succeeded to the place held by the essay in the days of Anne and by the play in the days of Elizabeth.

And like the play and the essay in those earlier times, the novel now attracts writers who have no great natural gift for the form. Just as Peele and Greene wrote plays because play-writing was popular and advantageous, in spite of their inadequate dramaturgic equipment, and just as Johnson wrote essays because essay-writing was popular and advantageous in spite of his deficiency in the ease and lightness which the essay demands, so Brougham and Motley and Froude adventured themselves in fiction. We may even doubt whether George Eliot was a born story-teller and whether she would not have been more successful in some other epoch when some other literary form than the novel had happened to be in fashion. In France the novel tempted Victor Hugo, who was essentially a lyric poet, and the elder Dumas, xxiv who was essentially a playwright. There are not lacking signs of late that the drama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalry with prose-fiction; and novelists like Sir James Barrie and the late Paul Hervieu have relinquished the easier narrative for the more difficult and more dangerous stage-play. But there is no evidence that the novel is soon to lose its vogue. It has come to stay; and as the nineteenth century left it to the twentieth so the twentieth will probably bequeath it to the twenty-first unimpaired in prosperity.

Perhaps the best evidence of the solidity of its position is to be found in the critical consideration which it is at last receiving. Histories of fiction in all literatures and biographies of the novelists in all languages are multiplying abundantly. We are beginning to take our fiction seriously and to inquire into its principles. Long ago Freytag’s “Technic of the Drama” was followed by Spielhagen’s “Technic of the Novel,” rather Teutonically philosophic, both of them, and already a little out of date. Studies of prose-fiction are getting themselves written, none of them more illuminative than Professor Bliss Perry’s. The novelists themselves are writing about the art of fiction, as Sir Walter Besant did, and they are asking what the novel is, as the late Marion Crawford has done. They are beginning to resent the assertion of the loyal adherents of the drama, that the novel is too loose a form to call forth the best efforts of the artist, and that a play demands at least technical skill whereas a novel may be often the product of unskilled labor.

Questions of all kinds are presenting themselves for discussion. Has the rise of realism made romance impossible? Is there a valid distinction between romance and romanticism? Is the short-story a definite form, differing from the novel in purpose as well as in length? What is the best way to tell a story––in the third person, xxv as in the epic––in the first person, as in an autobiography––or in letters? Which is of most importance, character or incident or atmosphere? Is the novel-with-a-purpose legitimate? Why is it that dramatized novels often fail in the theatre? Ought a novelist to take sides with his characters and against them, or ought he to suppress his own opinions and remain impassive, as the dramatist must? Does a prodigality in the invention of incidents reveal a greater imagination in the novelist than is required for the sincere depicting of simple characters in every-day life? Why has the old trick of inserting brief tales inside a long novel––such as we find in “Don Quixote” and “Tom Jones” and the “Pickwick Papers”––been abandoned of late years? How far is a novelist justified in taking his characters so closely from actual life that they are recognizable by his readers? What are the advantages and disadvantages of local color? How much dialect may a novelist venture to employ? Is the historical novel really a loftier type of fiction than the novel of contemporary life? Is it really possible to write a veracious novel about any other than the novelist’s native land? Why is it that so many of the greater writers of fiction have brought forth their first novel only after they had attained to half the allotted three score years and ten? Is the scientific spirit going to be helpful or harmful to the writer of fiction? Which is the finer form for fiction, a swift and direct telling of the story, with the concentration of a Greek tragedy, such as we find in the “Scarlet Letter” and in “Smoke,” or an ampler and more leisurely movement more like that of the Elizabethan plays, such as we may see in “Vanity Fair” and in “War and Peace”?

These questions, and many another, we may expect to hear discussed, even if they cannot all of them be answered, in any consideration of the materials and the xxvi methods of fiction. And the result of these inquiries cannot fail to be beneficial, both to the writer of fiction and to the reader of fiction. To the story-teller himself they will serve as a stimulus and a guide, calling attention to the technic of his craft and broadening his knowledge of the principles of his art. To the idle reader even they ought to be helpful, because they will force him to think about the novels he may read and because they will lead him to be more exacting, to insist more on veracity in the portrayal of life, and to demand more care in the method of presentation. Every art profits by a wider understanding of its principles, of its possibilities and of its limitations, as well as by a more diffused knowledge of its technic.