The Craft of Fiction

by Percy Lubbock

But now let me take the case of another big novel, where again there is a picture outspread, with episodes of drama that are subordinate to the sweep of the expanse. It is Meredith's story of Harry Richmond, a book in which its author evidently found a demand in some way different from that of the rest of his work; for here again the first person is used by a man who habitually avoided it. In Harry Richmond it seemed to Meredith appropriate, I suppose, because the story has a romantic and heroic temper, the kind of chivalrous fling that sits well on a youth of spirit, telling his own tale. It is natural for the youth to pass easily from one adventure to the next, taking it as it comes; and if Meredith proposes to write a story of loose, generous, informal design he had better place it in the mouth of the adventurer. True that in so far as it is romantic, and a story of youth, and a story in which an air from an age of knight-errantry blows into modern times, so that something like a clash of armour and a splintering of spears seems to mingle with the noises of modern life—true that in so far as it is all this, Harry Richmond is not alone among Meredith's books. The author of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington and Beauchamp and Lord Ormont was generally a little vague on the question of the century in which his stories were cast. The events may happen in the nineteenth century, they clearly must; and yet the furniture and the machinery and the conventions of the nineteenth century have a way of appearing in Meredith's pages as if they were anachronisms. But that is by the way; Harry Richmond is certainly, on the face of it, a series of adventures loosely connected—connected only by the fact that they befell a particular young man; and so the method of narration should emphasize the link, Meredith may have concluded, and the young man shall speak for himself.

The use of the first person, no doubt, is a source of relief to a novelist in the matter of composition. It composes of its own accord, or so he may feel; for the hero gives the story an indefeasible unity by the mere act of telling it. His career may not seem to hang together logically, artistically; but every part of it is at least united with every part by the coincidence of its all belonging to one man. When he tells it himself, that fact is serviceably to the fore; the first person will draw a rambling, fragmentary tale together and stamp it after a fashion as a single whole. Does anybody dare to suggest that this is a reason for the marked popularity of the method among our novelists? Autobiography—it is a regular literary form, and yet it is one which refuses the recognized principles of literary form; its natural right is to seem wayward and inconsequent; its charm is in the fidelity with which it follows the winding course of the writer's thought, as he muses upon the past, and the writer is not expected to guide his thought in an orderly design, but to let it wander free. Formlessness becomes actually the mark of right form in literature of this class; and a novel presented as fictitious autobiography gets the same advantage. And there the argument brings us back to the old question; fiction must look true, and there is no look of truth in inconsequence, and there is no authority at the back of a novel, independent of it, to vouch for the truth of its apparent wilfulness. But it is not worth while to linger here; the use of the first person has other and more interesting snares than this, that it pretends to disguise unmeaning, inexpressive form in a story.

Now with regard to Harry Richmond, ostensibly it is rather like a chronicle of romantic adventure—not formless, far from it, but freely flowing as a saga, with its illegitimate dash of blood-royal and its roaring old English squire-archy and its speaking statue and its quest of the princess; it contains a saga, and even an exceedingly fantastic one. But Harry Richmond is a deeply compacted book, and mixed with its romance there is a novel of another sort. For the fantasy it is only necessary that Harry himself should give a picture of his experience, of all that he has seen and done; on this side the story is in the succession of rare, strange, poetic events, with the remarkable people concerned in them. But the aim of the book goes far beyond this; it is to give the portrait of Harry Richmond, and that is the real reason why the story is told. All these striking episodes, which Harry is so well placed to describe, are not merely pictures that pass, a story that Meredith sets him to tell because it is of high interest on its own account. Meredith's purpose is that the hero himself shall be in the middle of the book, with all the interest of the story reflected back upon his character, his temper, his growth. The subject is Harry Richmond, a youth of spirit; the subject is not the cycle of romance through which he happens to have passed.

In the case of Copperfield, to go back to him, Dickens had exactly the opposite intention. He found his book in the expanse of life which his David had travelled over; Dickens's only care was to represent the wonderful show that filled his hero's memory. The whole phantasmagoria is the subject of the book, a hundred men and women, populating David's past and keeping his pen at full speed in the single-minded effort to portray them. Alone among the assembly David himself is scarcely of the subject at all. He has substance enough, and amply, to be a credible, authoritative reporter—Dickens sees well to that; but he is a shadow compared with Betsy Trotwood and the Micawbers and the Heeps, with all the hundred of them, and there is no call for him to be more. In this respect his story, again, is contrasted with that of Pendennis, which is, or is evidently meant to be in the first place, a portrait of the young man—or with the story of Tom Jones perhaps, though in this case more doubtfully, for Fielding's shrewd eye was apt to be drawn away from the young man to the bustle of life around him. But in Copperfield the design is very plain and is consistently pursued; it would be a false patch in the story if at any point David attracted more attention to himself than to the people of his vision—he himself, as a child, being of course one of them, a little creature that he sees in the distance, but he himself, in later years, becoming merely the mirror of his experience, which he not unnaturally considers worthy of being pictured for its own sake.

Look back then at Harry Richmond, and it is obvious that Harry himself is all the subject of the book, there is no other. His father and his grandfather, Ottilia and Janet, belong to the book by reason of him; they stand about him, conditions of his life, phases of his career, determining what he is and what he becomes. That is clearly Meredith's thought in undertaking this chronicle; he proposes to show how it makes the history, the moral and emotional history, of the man through whom it is uttered. Harry's adventures, ambitions, mistakes, successes, are the gradual and elaborate expression of him, complete in the end; they round him into the figure of the man in whom Meredith saw his book. The book started from Harry Richmond, the rest of it is there to display him. A youth of considerable parts and attractions, and a youth characteristic of his time and country, and a youth whose circumstances are such as to give him very free play and to test and prove him very effectually—there is the burden of Meredith's saga, as I call it, and he never forgets it, though sometimes he certainly pushes the brilliant fantasy of the saga beyond his strict needs. The romance of the blood-royal, for instance—it would be hard to argue that the book honestly requires the high colour of that infusion, and all the pervading thrill that Meredith gets from it; Richmond Roy is largely gratuitous, a piece of indulgence on Meredith's part. But that objection is not likely to be pressed very severely, and anyhow Harry is firmly established in the forefront. He tells his story, he describes the company and the scenes he has lived through; and all the time it is by them that he is himself described.

It comes to this, that the picture which Harry Richmond gives of his career has a function essentially dramatic; it has a part to perform in the story, a part it must undertake as a whole, over and above its pictorial charge. It must do something as well as be, it must create even while it is created. In Esmond and in Copperfield it is otherwise; there the unrolling scene has little or no part to play, as a scene, over against another actor; it holds no dialogue, so to speak, sustains no interchange, or none of principal importance, with the figure of the narrator. He narrates, he creates the picture; but for us who look on, reading the book, there is nothing in the picture to make us perpetually turn from it and face towards the man in the foreground, watching for the effect it may produce in him. Attention is all concentrated in the life that he remembers and evokes. He himself, indeed, though the fact of his presence is very clear to us, tends to remain in shadow; it is as though he leant from a window, surveying the world, his figure outlined against the lighted square, his features not very distinctly discerned by the reader within. It is enough that he should make Micawber live again, make Beatrix appear on the staircase of the old house, with her scarlet ribbon and the taper in her hand. They owe everything to the presence of the man who calls them back from the past; they receive their being, they do little in return.

This picture, this bright vision, spied through the clever ministration of a narrator, is not enough for Harry Richmond. Here the peopled view, all of it together, is like an actor in a play, and the interlocutor, the protagonist, is the man in the foreground, Harry himself. There is no question of simply seeing through his eyes, sharing his memory, perhaps even a little forgetting him from time to time, when the figured scene is particularly delightful. The thought, the fancy, the emotion of Harry Richmond are the centre of the play; from these to the men and women who shape his fate, from them again to the mind that recalls them, attention passes and returns; we who look on are continually occupied with the fact of Harry's consciousness, its gradual enlargement and enrichment. That is the process which Ottilia and Janet and the rest of them are expected to forward, and they contribute actively. Harry before the quest of the princess and Harry when it has finally failed are different beings, so far as a man is changed by an experience that is absorbed into the whole of his nature. How is the change effected, what does it achieve?—the episode, bringing the change into view, dramatizes it, and the question is answered. The young knight-errant has run an eventful course, and he gives his account of it; but the leading event of his tale is himself. His account illustrates that event, helps towards the enactment of it. Pictorial, therefore, in form, dramatic in function—such was the story that Meredith elected to tell in the first person.

And in so doing he showed, as it seems to me, precisely where the defect of the method begins to be felt. The method has a certain dramatic energy, we have seen, making a visible fact of the relation, otherwise unexplained, between the narrator and the tale. It has this; but for a subject like Meredith's it is really too little, and the use of the first person is overtaxed. Does he contrive to conceal the trouble, does he make us exceedingly unconscious of it while we read the book? I have no doubt that he does, with the humanity and poetry and wisdom that he pours into it—the novel of which it has been said that if Shakespeare revisited the globe and asked for a book of our times to read, this would be the volume to offer him, the book more likely than another to convince him at once that literature is still in our midst. There is small doubt that Meredith disguises the trouble, and there is still less that he was quite unaware of it himself. But it is there, and it shows plainly enough in some novels, where a personal narrator is given the same kind of task; and in Meredith's book too, I think, it is not to be missed when one considers what might have been, supposing Meredith had chosen another way. The other way was open; he cannot have noticed it.

The young man Harry—this is the trouble—is only a recorder, a picture-maker, so long as he speaks for himself. He is very well placed for describing his world, which needs somebody to describe it; his world is much too big and complex to be shown scenically, in those immediate terms I spoke of just now in connection with Maupassant's story. Scenes of drama there may be from time to time, there are plenty in Meredith's novel; but still on the whole the story must be given as the view of an onlooker, and Harry is clearly the onlooker indicated, the only possible one. That is certain; but then there is laid upon him the task which is not laid, or barely at all, upon Copperfield or Esmond. Before the book is out he must have grown to ten times the weight that we dream of looking for in either of them. He must be distinct to see; he cannot remain a dim silhouette against the window, the light must fall full upon his face. How can he manage it? How can he give that sharp impression of himself that he easily gives of his world? It is a query that he is in no position to meet, for the impossible is asked of him. He is expected to lend us his eyes (which he does), and yet at the same time to present himself for us to behold with our own; the subject of his story requires no less.

It is not merely a matter of seeing his personal aspect and address; these are readily given by implication. When we have watched for a while the behaviour of the people round him, and have heard something of his experience and of the way in which he fared in the world, we shall very well know what he was like to meet, what others saw in him. There is no difficulty here. But Harry needs a great deal more substance than this, if his story is to be rightly understood. What it was like to be Harry, with all that action and reaction of character and fortune proceeding within him—that is the question, the chief question; and since it is the most important affair in the book, it should obviously be rendered as solidly as possible, by the most emphatic method that the author can command. But Harry, speaking of himself, can only report; he can only recall the past and tell us what he was, only describe his emotion; and he may describe very vividly, and he does, but it would necessarily be more convincing if we could get behind his description and judge for ourselves. Drama we want, always drama, for the central, essential, paramount affair, whatever it is; Harry's consciousness ought to be dramatized. Something is lost if it is represented solely by his account of it. Meredith may enable Harry to give an account so brilliant that the defect is forgotten; that is not the point. But could he have done more? I think so; only it would have meant the surrender of the method of autobiography.