Chapter II

That last sentence quite misses the point--or at least seemed to miss it quite hopelessly to those who were young in the ’nineties: whose favourite models were French or Russian--Balzac, Stendhal, Mérimée, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgueniev, the Tolstoy of _Sevastopol_ and _War and Peace_.

It is a long while ago: but passions of faith we had; the first commanding us (poor fellows!) to agonise in search of the right or most expressive word; the second to keep _our_selves out of any given story making the persons exhibit their characters of themselves and by the actions, the actions again explain themselves by what the persons had said or done previously. In other words these young men attempted to apply to the novel Aristotle’s dictum concerning the Epic, of which they conceived the novel to be (as Fielding had maintained) the artistic successor. (And here let me advise all you who have read the _Poetics_ to study Fielding’s reasoned application of that treatise in his prefaces to the several Books of _Tom Jones_):

“Admirable on all counts,” says Aristotle, “Homer has the special
merit of being the only poet who understands the part he should
take himself. In his own person he should intrude as little as
possible. It is not in _that_ way he imitates life. Other writers
force themselves into the business throughout and imitate but
little and rarely. Homer, after a few words of preface, at once
brings in a man or a woman as it may be, never characterless but
each distinctively characteristic.”

To put it in another way--and to employ for once a couple of terms which as a rule these discourses banish, a story should be as purely objective as possible, the author’s meaning infused indeed (as it must be in any story worth the telling) but his own person, with his own commentary, as rigidly excluded as from a stage-play--say, as from _King Lear_ or _Tartuffe_. _Madame Bovary_ and _Boule de Suif_ were the exemplars (to name but two); any chat by the author himself ranked as an offence against art.