“He put her endless questions about herself and her husband. She told him that, in order to economize and pay their debts, they had settled down in a lost corner of Brittany. Arnoux, almost always ailing, seemed like an old man. Their daughter was married, at Bordeaux; their son was in the colonial army, at Mostaganem. She lifted her head: ‘But at last I see you again! I’m happy’....” She asks him to take her for a walk, and wanders with him through the Paris streets. She is the only woman he has ever loved, and he knows it now. The intervening years have vanished, and they walk on, “absorbed in each other, hearing nothing, as if they were walking in the country on a bed of dead leaves.” Then they return to the young man’s rooms, and Mme. Arnoux, sitting down, takes off her hat.
“The lamp, placed on a console, lit up her white hair. The sight was like a blow on his chest.” He tries to keep up a pretense of sentimentalizing; but “she watched the clock, and he continued to walk up and down, smoking. Neither could find anything to say to the other. In all separations there comes a moment when the beloved is no longer with us.” This is all; but every page that has gone before is lit up by the tragic gleam of Mme. Arnoux’s white hair.
The same note is sounded in the chapter of “The Golden Bowl” where the deeply, the doubly betrayed Maggie, walking up and down in the summer evening on the terrace of Fawns, looks in at the window of the smoking-room, where her father, her husband and her step-mother (who is her husband’s mistress) are playing bridge together, unconscious of her scrutiny. As she looks she knows that she has them at her mercy, and that they all (even her father) know it; and in the same instant the sight of them tells her that “to feel about them in any of the immediate, inevitable, assuaging ways, the ways usually open to innocence outraged and generosity betrayed, would have been to give them up, and that giving them up was, marvellously, not to be thought of.”
The illuminating incident is not only the proof of the novelist’s imaginative sensibility; it is also the best means of giving presentness, immediacy, to his tale. Far more than on dialogue does the effect of immediacy depend on the apt use of the illuminating incident; and the more threads of significance are gathered up into each one, the more pages of explanatory narrative are spared to writer and reader. There is a matchless instance of this in “Le Rouge et le Noir.” The young Julien Sorel, the tutor of the Reynal children, believes a love-affair with their mother to be the best way of advancing his ambitions, and decides to test his audacity by taking Mme. Reynal’s hand as they sit in the garden in the summer dusk. He has a long struggle with his natural timidity and her commanding grace before he can make even this shy advance; and that struggle tells, in half a page, more of his fatuities and meannesses, and the boyish simplicity still underlying them—and more too of the poor proud woman at his side—than a whole chapter of analysis and retrospection. This power to seize his characters in their habit as they live is always the surest proof of a novelist’s mastery.
But the choice of the illuminating incident, though so much, is not all. As the French say, there is the manner. In Stendhal’s plain and straightforward report of the scene in the garden every word, every stroke, tells. And this question of manner—of the particular manner adapted to each scene—brings one to another point at which the novelist’s vigilance must never flag. As every tale contains its own dimension, so it implies its own manner, the particular shade of style most fitted to convey its full meaning.
Most novelists who have a certain number of volumes to their credit, and have sought, as the subject required, to vary their manner, have been taken to task alike by readers and reviewers, and either accused of attempting to pass off earlier works on a confiding public, or pitied for a too-evident decline in power. Any change disturbs the intellectual indolence of the average reader; and nothing, for instance, has done more to deprive Stevenson of his proper rank among English novelists than his deplorable habit of not conceiving a boy’s tale in the same spirit as a romantic novel or a burlesque detective story, of not even confining himself to fiction, but attempting travels, criticism and verse, and doing them all so well that there must obviously be something wrong about it. The very critics who extol the versatility of the artists of the Renaissance rebuke the same quality in their own contemporaries; and their eagerness to stake out each novelist’s territory, and to confine him to it for life, recalls the story of the verger in an English cathedral, who, finding a stranger kneeling in the sacred edifice between services, tapped him on the shoulder with the indulgent admonition: “Sorry, sir, but we can’t have any praying here at this hour.”
This habit of the reader of wanting each author to give only what he has given before exercises the same subtly suggestive influence as all other popular demands. It is one of the most insidious temptations to the young artist to go on doing what he already knows how to do, and knows he will be praised for doing. But the mere fact that so many people want him to write in a certain way ought to fill him with distrust of that way. It would be a good thing for letters if the perilous appeal of popularity were oftener met in the spirit of the New England shop-keeper who, finding a certain penknife in great demand, did not stock that kind the following year because, as he said, too many people came bothering him about it.
VIII
Goethe declared that only the Tree of Life was green, and that all theories were gray; and he also congratulated himself on never “having thought about thinking.” But if he never thought about thinking he did think a great deal about his art, and some of the axioms he laid down for its practice go deeper than those of the professed philosophers.
The art of fiction, as now practised, is a recent one, and the arts in their earliest stages are seldom theorized on by those engaged in creating them; but as soon as they begin to take shape their practitioners, or at least those of the number who happen to think as well as to create, perforce begin to ask themselves questions. Some may not have Goethe’s gift for formulating the answers, even to themselves; but these answers will eventually be discoverable in an added firmness of construction and appropriateness of expression. Other writers do consciously lay down rules, and in the search for new forms and more complex effects may even become the slaves of their too-fascinating theories. These are the true pioneers, who are never destined to see their own work fulfilled, but build intellectual houses for the next generation to live in.