It is just that which one must perceive in the telling of a story. A person who sees blue all his life probably sees nothing at all, nothing, anyhow, in the least worth recording. He is bound as the wheel of circumstances goes round to see things in other lights. But that is not inconsistency; it is the truly consistent. Who wants, after all, for ever to draw the same conclusion from the same premises? Only fossils, and possibly molluscs.
But pity the sorrows of the story-teller! The quality of the red has to be of the same quality as the blue. The same fire which strikes to the south will indubitably strike to all other points of the compass, and when X is wheeled north, he will not see the same green as Y sees there. He saw it through the alchemy of his own mind; it will be green, but nobody else’s green. Or if it is, he has no individuality to speak of. At least he belongs to a type that sees everything through the eyes of others. That is generally labelled conventional, and there seems no reason to change the name.
How I laboured during those last ten days of January, and how little result there seems to be! Only—I console myself with this—the real labour of writing does not chiefly consist in the effort of putting things down, but in the moral effort of rejecting them. There is nothing easier than to fill pages and pages with improving reflections or inspiring events. But having done that, it is necessary to sound the tuning-fork and see if, as I said at first, the story is in tune, if the key is kept. Usually it is not. On which the fire ought to make to itself a momentary beacon, or the waste-paper basket be replete. But the pile of numbered pages should in any case be starving. That, as a matter of fact, is my sole argument that I have justified my existence during these ten days. I have really worked a great deal, and the waste-paper basket could say how generous has been its diet. I have really left out a very great deal, and I hasten to forestall the critic who will say that I should, in order to act up to this excellent standard, have left out the rest. I do not agree with him.
The key of which I have spoken has to be preserved, not only in matters of consistency in character-drawing, but in style as well. If you lead off with verbiage from the Orient, the East must continue, I submit, to dye your paragraphs till the last page is turned. Though you may have also at your command pure wells of the most limpid simplicity, you will have to reserve them for some other immortal work; they will not mix with the incense and heady draughts from the East. Or should you fancy a mysterious Delphic mode of diction, Delphic you must be to the end. But—as if all this was not so difficult, that, like Dr. Johnson, we almost wish it was frankly impossible—interwoven in your Delphic or Oriental narrative there must be a totally different woof—namely, the thread of the spoken word, the speeches that you put into the mouths of your various characters. And the written word, be it remembered, is never like the spoken word: the two vocabularies, to begin with, are totally distinct, and though I would not go so far as to affirm that the spoken word ought to be ungrammatical, it should, if it is to recall human speech, be colloquial, conversational. In interchange of ideas by means of the mouth real people do not use fine language, especially when their emotions are strongly aroused. Then, instead of becoming high-flown and ornate in their speech, real people go to the opposite extreme, and instinctively use only the very simplest words. When this is stated, it seems natural enough, but you will find it very seldom practised. Novelists have a tendency to let their puppets employ magnificent high-sounding words to express the intensity and splendour of great emotion; in fact, you may gauge the strength of their emotions, as a rule, by the sonorous quality of their adjectives. I believe the very opposite to be the truth of the matter: people in the grip of passion do not use beautiful or highly-coloured words; above all, they do not, like Mr. Wegg, ‘drop into poetry.’ Yet nothing is commoner than to find prose degenerating into blank verse in the spoken records of emotional crises, as if blank verse was a sublime form of prose. Little Nell is continually half-way between prose and poetry, so also is Nicholas Nickleby when his indignation is roused. In fact, in some of his scenes with Ralph they both forget themselves so much in their passion that torrents of decasyllabic lines flow from their lips. But, on the other hand, the language of narrative should undoubtedly grow more coloured, more vivid in such descriptions as are the setting of some very emotional scene. Yet it should not depart from its original key.... Well, as Mr. Tulliver said, ‘It’s puzzling work talking.’
But though the days have been so full, I have seen everything, everything through the two transparencies that seem drawn between external happenings and me.
FEBRUARY
THE seasons, according to the literary and artistic view of things, have been rather out of joint this year. The autumn was not a time of mellow fruitfulness at all, because all the green things upon this earth had exhausted themselves in the long hot summer, and had no more spirit left to be fruitful with. Then January in England had been of the usual warm mugginess and mist which poets say are characteristic of autumn, but which in reality characterize winter. Indeed, I doubt if winter was ever a time of hard frosts and sparkling snow, which is the artistic ideal, and I am disposed to believe that that version of it was really brought from Germany by the Prince Consort, and popularized by Charles Dickens. Then after the mists came the mellow fruitfulness, for I myself saw strawberries in flower on February 2, and on February 9 Helen came in saying she had found a real strawberry. That was strange enough, though perhaps the finding of an unreal strawberry would have been stranger still, so I said, ‘Where?’ and she said, ‘On the strawberry beds, silly.’
Therefore I started up, leaving a most important and epoch-making sentence unfinished (and I have never been able to remember what the end of it was going to be), because I wanted to see the strawberry, and write to the Field about it. So she said, ‘Are you going out already?’ and I said, ‘Yes, just to see the strawberry, and write to the Field, saying I have.’
Then she pointed to half-way down her person (since we are so abstemious of words that indicate the anatomy below the throat), and said:
‘Would X rays help?’