Here then, I conclude, the dramatizing force of the first person gives out. It is very useful for enhancing the value of a picture, where none but the pictorial method is available, where we are bound to rely upon an intervening story-teller in some guise or other; it is much more satisfactory to know who the story-teller is, and to see him as a part of the story, than to be deflected away from the book by the author, an arbitrary, unmeasurable, unappraisable factor. But when the man in the book is expected to make a picture of himself, a searching and elaborate portrait, then the limit of his capacity is touched and passed; or rather there is a better method, one of finer capacity, then ready to the author's hand, and there is no reason to be content with the hero's mere report. The figure of the story-teller is a dramatic fact in Meredith's book, and that is all to the good; but the story-teller's inner history—it is not clear that we need the intervention of anybody in this matter, and if it might be dramatized, made immediately visible, dramatized it evidently should be. By all means let us have Harry's account if we must have somebody's, but perhaps there is no such need. There seems to be none; it is surely time to take the next step in the process I am trying to track.
X
And the next step is to lay aside the autobiographic device which the novelist was seen to adopt, a few pages ago, in the interest of drama. When it has served as Dickens and Thackeray made it serve, it seems to have shown the extent of its power; if the picture of a life is to be still further dramatized, other arts must be called into play. I am still assuming that the novel under consideration is one that postulates—as indeed most novels do—a point of view which is not that of the reader; I am supposing that the story requires a seeing eye, in the sense I suggested in speaking of Vanity Fair. If no such selecting, interpreting, composing minister is needed, then we have drama unmixed; and I shall come across an example or so in fiction later on. It is drama unmixed when the reader is squarely in front of the scene, all the time, knowing nothing about the story beyond so much as may be gathered from the aspect of the scene, the look and speech of the people. That does not happen often in fiction, except in short pieces, small contes. And still I am concerned with the kind of book that preponderantly needs the seeing eye—the kind of novel that I call distinctively pictorial.
The novelist, therefore, returns to the third person again, but he returns with a marked difference. He by no means resumes his original part, that of Thackeray in Vanity Fair; for his hero's personal narration he does not substitute his own once more. It is still the man in the book who sees and judges and reflects; all the picture of life is still rendered in the hero's terms. But the difference is that instead of receiving his report we now see him in the act of judging and reflecting; his consciousness, no longer a matter of hearsay, a matter for which we must take his word, is now before us in its original agitation. Here is a spectacle for the reader, with no obtrusive interpreter, no transmitter of light, no conductor of meaning. This man's interior life is cast into the world of independent, rounded objects; it is given room to show itself, it appears, it acts. A distinction is made between the scene which the man surveys, and the energy within him which converts it all into the stuff of his own being. The scene, as much as ever, is watched through his eyes; but now there is this other fact, in front of the scene, actually under the hand of the reader. To this fact the value of drama has accrued.
Meredith would have sacrificed nothing, so far as I can see, by proceeding to the further stage in Harry Richmond—unless perhaps the story, told in the third person, might seem to lose some of its airings of romance. On the other hand, the advantage of following the stir of Harry's imagination while it is stirring would be great; the effect would be straighter, the impression deeper, the reader would have been nearer to Harry throughout, and more closely implicated in his affair. Think of the young man, for instance, in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment—there is a young man whose experience surrounds and presses upon the reader, is felt and tasted and endured by the reader; and any one who has been through the book has truly become Raskolnikov, and knows exactly what it was to be that young man. Drama is there pushed into the theatre of a mind; the play proceeds with the reading of the book, accompanying the eye that falls on it. How could a retrospect in the words of the young man—only of course Dostoevsky had no choice in the matter, such a method was ruled out—but supposing the story had admitted it, how could a retrospect have given Raskolnikov thus bodily into the reader's possession? There could have been no conviction in his own account comparable with the certainty which Dostoevsky has left to us, and left because he neither spoke for himself (as the communicative author) nor allowed Raskolnikov to speak, but uncovered the man's mind and made us look.
It seems, then, to be a principle of the story-teller's art that a personal narrator will do very well and may be extremely helpful, so long as the story is only the reflection of life beyond and outside him; but that as soon as the story begins to find its centre of gravity in his own life, as soon as the main weight of attention is claimed for the speaker rather than for the scene, then his report of himself becomes a matter which might be strengthened, and which should accordingly give way to the stronger method. This I take to be a general principle, and where it appears to be violated a critic would instinctively look for the particular reason which makes it inapplicable to the particular case. No reflection, no picture, where living drama is possible—it is a good rule; do not let the hero come between us and his active mind, do not let the heroine stand in front of her emotions and portray them—unless for cause, for some needful effect that would otherwise be missed. I see the reason and the effect very plainly in Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, to take a casual example, where the point of the whole thing is that the man should give himself away unknowingly; in Jane Eyre, to take another, I see neither—but it is hard to throw such a dry question upon tragic little Jane.
If it should still be doubted, however, whether the right use of autobiography is really so limited, it might be a good answer to point to Henry James's Strether, in The Ambassadors; Strether may stand as a living demonstration of all that autobiography cannot achieve. He is enough to prove finally how far the intricate performance of thought is beyond the power of a man to record in his own language. Nine-tenths of Strether's thought—nine-tenths, that is to say, of the silvery activity which makes him what he is—would be lost but for the fact that its adventures are caught in time, while they are proceeding, and enacted in the book. Pictured by him, as he might himself look back on them, they would drop to the same plane as the rest of the scene, the picture of the other people in the story; his state of mind would figure in his description on the same terms as the world about him, it would simply be a matter for him to describe like another. In the book as it is, Strether personally has nothing to do with the impression that is made by the mazy career of his imagination, he has no hand in the effect it produces. It speaks for itself, it spreads over the scene and colours the world just as it did for Strether. It is immediately in the foreground, and the "seeing eye" to which it is presented is not his, but the reader's own.
No longer a figure that leans and looks out of a window, scanning a stretch of memory—that is not the image suggested by Henry James's book. It is rather as though the reader himself were at the window, and as though the window opened straight into the depths of Strether's conscious existence. The energy of his perception and discrimination is there seen at work. His mind is the mirror of the scene beyond it, and the other people in the book exist only in relation to him; but his mind, his own thought of them, is there absolutely, its restless evolution is in full sight. I do not say that this is a complete account of the principle on which the book is constructed; for indeed the principle goes further, encompassing points of method to be dealt with later. But for the moment let the book stand as the type of the novel in which a mind is dramatized—reflecting the life to which it is exposed, but itself performing its own peculiar and private life. This last, in the case of Strether, involves a gradual, long-drawn change, from the moment when he takes up the charge of rescuing his young friend from the siren of Paris, to the moment when he finds himself wishing that his young friend would refuse to be rescued. Such is the curve in the unexpected adventure of his imagination. It is given as nobody's view—not his own, as it would be if he told the story himself, and not the author's, as it would be if Henry James told the story. The author does not tell the story of Strether's mind; he makes it tell itself, he dramatizes it.