Chapter I: Part 1

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THE WRITING OF FICTION

The Writing of Fiction

_By_
EDITH WHARTON

_Order the beauty even of Beauty is._
--THOMAS TRAHERNE.

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
1925

Printed in the United States of America

TO
GAILLARD LAPSLEY

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. IN GENERAL 1

II. TELLING A SHORT STORY 31

III. CONSTRUCTING A NOVEL 59

IV. CHARACTER AND SITUATION IN THE NOVEL 123

V. MARCEL PROUST 149

THE WRITING OF FICTION

IN GENERAL

THE WRITING OF FICTION

IN GENERAL

To treat of the practice of fiction is to deal with the newest, most fluid and least formulated of the arts. The exploration of origins is always fascinating; but the attempt to relate the modern novel to the tale of Joseph and his Brethren is of purely historic interest.

Modern fiction really began when the “action” of the novel was transferred from the street to the soul; and this step was probably first taken when Madame de La Fayette, in the seventeenth century, wrote a little story called “La Princesse de Clèves,” a story of hopeless love and mute renunciation in which the stately tenor of the lives depicted is hardly ruffled by the exultations and agonies succeeding each other below the surface.

The next advance was made when the protagonists of this new inner drama were transformed from conventionalized puppets--the hero, the heroine, the villain, the heavy father and so on--into breathing and recognizable human beings. Here again a French novelist--the Abbé Prévost--led the way with “Manon Lescaut”; but his drawing of character seems summary and schematic when his people are compared with the first great figure in modern fiction--the appalling “Neveu de Rameau.” It was not till long after Diderot’s death that the author of so many brilliant tales peopled with eighteenth century puppets was found, in the creation of that one sordid, cynical and desolately human figure, to have anticipated not only Balzac but Dostoievsky.

But even from “Manon Lescaut” and the “Neveu de Rameau,” even from Lesage, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Scott, modern fiction is differentiated by the great dividing geniuses of Balzac and Stendhal. Save for that one amazing accident of Diderot’s, Balzac was the first not only to see his people, physically and morally, in their habit as they lived, with all their personal hobbies and infirmities, and make the reader see them, but to draw his dramatic action as much from the relation of his characters to their houses, streets, towns, professions, inherited habits and opinions, as from their fortuitous contacts with each other.

Balzac himself ascribed the priority in this kind of realism to Scott, from whom the younger novelist avowedly derived his chief inspiration. But, as Balzac observed, Scott, so keen and direct in surveying the rest of his field of vision, became conventional and hypocritical when he touched on love and women. In deference to the wave of prudery which overswept England after the vulgar excesses of the Hanoverian court he substituted sentimentality for passion, and reduced his heroines to “Keepsake” insipidities; whereas in the firm surface of Balzac’s realism there is hardly a flaw, and his women, the young as well as the old, are living people, as much compact of human contradictions and torn with human passions as his misers, his financiers, his priests or his doctors.

Stendhal, though as indifferent as any eighteenth century writer to atmosphere and “local colour,” is intensely modern and realistic in the individualizing of his characters, who were never types (to the extent even of some of Balzac’s) but always sharply differentiated and particular human beings. More distinctively still does he represent the new fiction by his insight into the springs of social action. No modern novelist has ever gone nearer than Racine did in his tragedies to the sources of personal, of individual feeling; and some of the French novelists of the eighteenth century are still unsurpassed (save by Racine) in the last refinements of individual soul-analysis. What was new in both Balzac and Stendhal was the fact of their viewing each character first of all as a product of particular material and social conditions, as being thus or thus because of the calling he pursued or the house he lived in (Balzac), or the society he wanted to get into (Stendhal), or the acre of ground he coveted, or the powerful or fashionable personage he aped or envied (both Balzac and Stendhal). These novelists (with the solitary exception of Defoe, when he wrote “Moll Flanders”) are the first to seem continuously aware that the bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but that each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.

The characterization of all the novelists who preceded these two masters seems, in comparison, incomplete or immature. Even Richardson’s seems so, in the most penetrating pages of “Clarissa Harlowe,” even Goethe’s in that uncannily modern novel, the “Elective Affinities”--because, in the case of these writers, the people so elaborately dissected are hung in the void, unvisualized and unconditioned (or almost) by the special outward circumstances of their lives. They are subtly analyzed abstractions of humanity, to whom only such things happen as might happen to almost any one in any walk of life--the inevitable eternal human happenings.

Since Balzac and Stendhal, fiction has reached out in many new directions, and made all sorts of experiments; but it has never ceased to cultivate the ground they cleared for it, or gone back to the realm of abstractions. It is still, however, an art in the making, fluent and dirigible, and combining a past full enough for the deduction of certain general principles with a future rich in untried possibilities.

On the threshold of any theory of art its exponent is sure to be asked: “On what first assumption does your theory rest?” And in fiction, as in every other art, the only answer seems to be that any theory must begin by assuming the need of selection. It seems curious that even now--and perhaps more than ever--one should have to explain and defend what is no more than the rule underlying the most artless verbal statement. No matter how restricted an incident one is trying to give an account of, it cannot but be fringed with details more and more remotely relevant, and beyond that with an outer mass of irrelevant facts which may crowd on the narrator simply because of some accidental propinquity in time or space. To choose between all this material is the first step toward coherent expression.

A generation ago this was so generally taken for granted that to state it would have seemed pedantic. In every-day intercourse the principle survives in the injunction to stick to the point; but the novelist who applies--or owns up to applying--this rule to his art, is nowadays accused of being absorbed in technique to the exclusion of the supposedly contrary element of “human interest.”

Even now, the charge would hardly be worth taking up had it not lately helped to refurbish the old trick of the early French “realists,” that group of brilliant writers who invented the once-famous _tranche de vie_, the exact photographic reproduction of a situation or an episode, with all its sounds, smells, aspects realistically rendered, but with its deeper relevance and its suggestions of a larger whole either unconsciously missed or purposely left out. Now that half a century has elapsed, one sees that those among this group of writers who survive are still readable in spite of their constricting theory, or in proportion as they forgot about it once they closed with their subject. Such are Maupassant, who packed into his brief masterpieces so deep a psychological significance and so sure a sense of larger relations; Zola, whose “slices” became the stuff of great romantic allegories in which the forces of Nature and Industry are the huge cloudy protagonists, as in a Pilgrim’s Progress of man’s material activities; and the Goncourts, whose French instinct for psychological analysis always made them seize on the more significant morsel of the famous slices. As for the pupils, the mere conscientious appliers of the system, they have all blown away with the theory, after a briefer popularity than writers of equal talent might have enjoyed had they not thus narrowed their scope. An instance in proof is Feydeau’s “Fanny,” one of the few “psychological” novels of that generation, and a slight enough adventure in soul-searching compared with the great “Madame Bovary” (which it was supposed at the time to surpass), but still readable enough to have kept the author’s name alive, while most of his minor contemporaries are buried under the unappetizing _débris_ of their “slices.”

It seemed necessary to revert to the slice-of-life because it has lately reappeared, marked by certain unimportant differences, and re-labelled the stream of consciousness; and, curiously enough, without its new exponents’ appearing aware that they are not also its originators. This time the theory seems to have sprung up first in England and America; but it has already spread to certain of the younger French novelists, who are just now, confusedly if admiringly, rather overconscious of recent tendencies in English and American fiction.

The stream of consciousness method differs from the slice-of-life in noting mental as well as visual reactions, but resembles it in setting them down just as they come, with a deliberate disregard of their relevance in the particular case, or rather with the assumption that their very unsorted abundance constitutes in itself the author’s subject.

This attempt to note down every half-aware stirring of thought and sensation, the automatic reactions to every passing impression, is not as new as its present exponents appear to think. It has been used by most of the greatest novelists, not as an end in itself, but as it happened to serve their general design: as when their object was to portray a mind in one of those moments of acute mental stress when it records with meaningless precision a series of disconnected impressions. The value of such “effects” in making vivid a tidal rush of emotion has never been unknown since fiction became psychological, and novelists grew aware of the intensity with which, at such times, irrelevant trifles impinge upon the brain; but they have never been deluded by the idea that the subconscious--that Mrs. Harris of the psychologists--could in itself furnish the materials for their art. All the greatest of them, from Balzac and Thackeray onward, have made use of the stammerings and murmurings of the half-conscious mind whenever--but only when--such a state of mental flux fitted into the whole picture of the person portrayed. Their observation showed them that in the world of normal men life is conducted, at least in its decisive moments, on fairly coherent and selective lines, and that only thus can the great fundamental affairs of bread-getting and home-and-tribe organizing be carried on. Drama, situation, is made out of the conflicts thus produced between social order and individual appetites, and the art of rendering life in fiction can never, in the last analysis, be anything, or need to be anything, but the disengaging of crucial moments from the welter of existence. These moments need not involve action in the sense of external events; they seldom have, since the scene of conflict was shifted from incident to character. But there must be something that _makes_ them crucial, some recognizable relation to a familiar social or moral standard, some explicit awareness of the eternal struggle between man’s contending impulses, if the tales embodying them are to fix the attention and hold the memory.

III

The distrust of technique and the fear of being unoriginal--both symptoms of a certain lack of creative abundance--are in truth leading to pure anarchy in fiction, and one is almost tempted to say that in certain schools formlessness is now regarded as the first condition of form.

Not long ago I heard a man of letters declare that Dostoievsky was superior to Tolstoy because his mind was “more chaotic,” and he could therefore render more “truthfully” the chaos of the Russian mind in general; though how chaos can be apprehended and defined by a mind immersed in it, the speaker did not make clear. The assertion, of course, was the result of confusing imaginative emotivity with its objective rendering. What the speaker meant was that the novelist who would create a given group of people or portray special social conditions must be able to identify himself with them; which is rather a long way of saying that an artist must have imagination.

The chief difference between the merely sympathetic and the creative imagination is that the latter is two-sided, and combines with the power of penetrating into other minds that of standing far enough aloof from them to see beyond, and relate them to the whole stuff of life out of which they but partially emerge. Such an all-round view can be obtained only by mounting to a height; and that height, in art, is proportioned to the artist’s power of detaching one part of his imagination from the particular problem in which the rest is steeped.

One of the causes of the confusion of judgment on this point is no doubt the perilous affinity between the art of fiction and the material it works in. It has been so often said that all art is re-presentation--the giving back in conscious form of the shapeless raw material of experience--that one would willingly avoid insisting on such a truism. But while there is no art of which the saying is truer than of fiction, there is none in respect of which there is more danger of the axiom’s being misinterpreted. The attempt to give back any fragment of life in painting or sculpture or music presupposes transposition, “stylization.” To re-present in words is far more difficult, because the relation is so close between model and artist. The novelist works in the very material out of which the object he is trying to render is made. He must use, to express soul, the signs which soul uses to express itself. It is relatively easy to separate the artistic vision of an object from its complex and tangled actuality if one has to re-see it in paint or marble or bronze; it is infinitely difficult to render a human mind when one is employing the very word-dust with which thought is formulated.

Still, the transposition does take place as surely, if not as obviously, in a novel as in a statue. If it did not, the writing of fiction could never be classed among works of art, products of conscious ordering and selecting, and there would consequently be nothing to say about it, since there seems to be no way of estimating æsthetically anything to which no standard of choice can be applied.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another, equally imperious, is that of fiercely guarding against it. In this respect, the novelist of the present day is in danger of being caught in a vicious circle, for the insatiable demand for quick production tends to keep him in a state of perpetual immaturity, and the ready acceptance of his wares encourages him to think that no time need be wasted in studying the past history of his art, or in speculating on its principles. This conviction strengthens the belief that the so-called quality of “originality” may be impaired by too long brooding on one’s theme and too close a commerce with the past; but the whole history of that past--in every domain of art--disproves this by what survives, and shows that every subject, to yield and to retain its full flavour, should be long carried in the mind, brooded upon, and fed with all the impressions and emotions which nourish its creator.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer’s own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. To know any one thing one must not only know something of a great many others, but also, as Matthew Arnold long since pointed out, a great deal more of one’s immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly includes; and Mr. Kipling’s “What should they know of England who only England know?” might be taken as the symbolic watchword of the creative artist.

One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the “fiction course” is getting the fiction it deserves. At any rate it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms. But though the trade-wind in fiction undoubtedly drives many beginners along the line of least resistance, and holds them there, it is far from being the sole cause of the present quest for short-cuts in art. There are writers indifferent to popular success, and even contemptuous of it, who sincerely believe that this line marks the path of the true vocation. Many people assume that the artist receives, at the outset of his career, the mysterious sealed orders known as “Inspiration,” and has only to let that sovereign impulse carry him where it will. Inspiration does indeed come at the outset to every creator, but it comes most often as an infant, helpless, stumbling, inarticulate, to be taught and guided; and the beginner, during this time of training his gift, is as likely to misuse it as a young parent to make mistakes in teaching his first child.

There is no doubt that in this day of general “speeding up,” the “inspirational” theory is seductive even to those who care nothing for easy triumphs. No writer--especially at the beginning of his career--can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that awaits him; and the young novelist may ask of what use are experience and meditation, when his readers are so incapable of giving him either. The answer is that he will never do his best till he ceases altogether to think of his readers (and his editor and his publisher) and begins to write, not for himself, but for that _other self_ with whom the creative artist is always in mysterious correspondence, and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it. As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination can make a little go a long way, provided it remains long enough in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break.

Even to the writer least concerned with popularity it is difficult, at first, to defend his personality. Study and meditation contain their own perils. Counsellors intervene with contradictory advice and instances. In such cases these counsellors are most often other people’s novels: the great novels of the past, which haunt the beginner like a passion, and the works of his contemporaries, which pull him this way and that with too-persuasive hands. His impulse, at first, will be either to shun them, to his own impoverishment, or to let his dawning individuality be lost in theirs; but gradually he will come to see that he must learn to listen to them, take all they can give, absorb it into himself, and then turn to his own task with the fixed resolve to see life only through his own eyes.

Even then another difficulty remains; the mysterious discrepancy which sometimes exists between a novelist’s vision of life and his particular kind of talent. Not infrequently an innate tendency to see things in large masses is combined with the technical inability to render them otherwise than separately, meticulously, on a small scale. Perhaps more failures than one is aware of are due to this particular lack of proportion between the powers of vision and expression. At any rate, it is the cause of some painful struggles and arid dissatisfactions; and the only remedy is resolutely to abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially. Of twenty subjects that tempt the imagination (subjects one sees one’s self doing, oh so wonderfully, if only one were Mérimée or Maupassant, or Conrad or Mr. Kipling!) probably but one is “fit for the hand” of the limited person one happens to be; and to learn to renounce the others is a first step toward doing that particular one well.

These considerations have led straight to the great, the central, matter of subject; and inextricably interwoven with it are the subsidiary points of form and style, both of which ought, as it were, to spring naturally out of the particular theme chosen for representation.

Form might perhaps, for present purposes, be defined as the order, in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped; and style as the way in which they are presented, not only in the narrower sense of language, but also, and rather, as they are grasped and coloured by their medium, the narrator’s mind, and given back in his words. It is the quality of the medium which gives these incidents their quality; style, in this sense, is the most personal ingredient in the combination of things out of which any work of art is made. Words are the exterior symbols of thought, and it is only by their exact use that the writer can keep on his subject the close and patient hold which “fishes the murex up,” and steeps his creation in unfading colours.

Style in this definition is discipline; and the self-consecration it demands, and the bearing it has on the whole of the artist’s effort, have been admirably summed up by Marcel Proust in that searching chapter of “A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs” where he analyzes the art of fiction in the person of the great novelist Bergotte. “The severity of his taste, his unwillingness to write anything of which he could not say, in his favourite phrase: ‘_C’est doux_’ [harmonious, delicious], this determination, which had caused him to spend so many seemingly fruitless years in the ‘precious’ carving of trifles, was in reality the secret of his strength; for habit makes the style of the writer as it makes the character of the man, and the author who has several times contented himself with expressing his thought in an approximately pleasing way _has once and for all set a boundary to his talent, and will never pass beyond_.”

These definitions of form and style being established, and the preliminary need of the harmony between an author’s talent and his argument being assumed, one is next faced by the profounder problem of the inherent fitness of any given subject as material for the imagination.

It has been often said that subject in itself is all-important, and at least as often that it is of no importance whatever. Definition is again necessary before the truth can be extracted from these contradictions. Subject, obviously, is _what the story is about_; but whatever the central episode or situation chosen by the novelist, his tale will be about only just so much of it as he reacts to. A gold mine is worth nothing unless the owner has the machinery for extracting the ore, and each subject must be considered first in itself, and next in relation to the novelist’s power of extracting from it what it contains. There are subjects trivial in appearance, and subjects trivial to the core; and the novelist ought to be able to discern at a glance between the two, and know in which case it is worth while to set about sinking his shaft. But the novelist may make mistakes. He is exposed to the temptation of the false good-subject, and learns only by prolonged experience to resist surface-attractions, and probe his story to the depths before he begins to tell it.

There is still another way in which subject must be tested. Any subject considered in itself must first of all respond in some way to that mysterious need of a judgment on life of which the most detached human intellect, provided it be a normal one, cannot, apparently, rid itself. Whether the “moral” be present in the guise of the hero rescuing the heroine from the villain at the point of the revolver, or whether it lurk in the quiet irony of such a scene as Pendennis’s visit to the Grey Friars’ Chapel, and his hearing the choir singing “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread,” at the very moment when he discovers the bent head of Colonel Newcome among the pauper gentlemen--in one form or another there must be some sort of rational response to the reader’s unconscious but insistent inner question: “What am I being told this story for? What judgment on life does it contain for me?”

There seems to be no escape from this obligation except into a pathological world where the action, taking place between people of abnormal psychology, and not keeping time with our normal human rhythms, becomes an idiot’s tale, signifying nothing. In vain has it been attempted to set up a water-tight compartment between “art” and “morality.” All the great novelists whose books have been used to point the argument have invariably declared themselves on the other side, not only by the inner significance of their work, but also, in some cases, by the most explicit statements. Flaubert, for instance, so often cited as the example of the writer viewing his themes in a purely “scientific” or amoral light, has disproved the claim by providing the other camp with that perfect formula: “_Plus la pensée est belle, plus la phrase est sonore_”--not the metaphor, not the picture, but _the thought_.

A good subject, then, must contain in itself something that sheds a light on our moral experience. If it is incapable of this expansion, this vital radiation, it remains, however showy a surface it presents, a mere irrelevant happening, a meaningless scrap of fact torn out of its context. Nor is it more than a half-truth to say that the imagination which probes deep enough can find this germ in any happening, however insignificant. The converse is true enough: the limited imagination reduces a great theme to its own measure. But the wide creative vision, though no fragment of human experience can appear wholly empty to it, yet seeks by instinct those subjects in which some phase of our common plight stands forth dramatically and typically, subjects which, in themselves, are a kind of summary or foreshortening of life’s dispersed and inconclusive occurrences.

TELLING A SHORT STORY

Like the modern novel, the modern short story seems to have originated--or at least received its present stamp--in France. English writers, in this line, were slower in attaining the point to which the French and Russians first carried the art.

Since then the short story has developed, and reached out in fresh directions, in the hands of such novelists as Mr. Hardy (only occasionally at his best in this form), of Stevenson, James, and Conrad, all three almost unfailingly excellent in it, of Mr. Kipling, past-master of the _conte_, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose delightful early volumes, “Noughts and Crosses” and “I Saw Three Ships,” are less known than they deserve to be. These writers had long been preceded by Scott in “Wandering Willy’s Tale” and other short stories, by Poe, the sporadic and unaccountable, and by Hawthorne; but almost all the best tales of Scott, Hawthorne, and Poe belong to that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic tradition.

When the novel of manners comes to be dealt with, classification in order of time will have to be reversed, and in order of merit will be less easy; for even against Balzac, Tolstoy, and Turgenev the genius of the great English observers, from Richardson and Jane Austen to Thackeray and Dickens, will weigh heavily in the balance. With regard to the short story, however, and especially to that compactest form of it, the short short-story or _conte_, its first specimens are undoubtedly of continental production; but happily for English letters the generation who took over and adapted the formula were nursed on the Goethean principle that “those who remain imprisoned in the false notion of their own originality will always fall short of what they might have accomplished.”

The sense of form--already defined as the order, in time and importance, in which the narrated incidents are grouped--is, in all the arts, specifically of the classic, the Latin tradition. A thousand years of form (in the widest disciplinary sense), of its observance, its application, its tacit acceptance as the first condition of artistic expression, have cleared the ground, for the French writer of fiction, of many superfluous encumbrances. As the soil of France is of all soils the most weeded, tilled, and ductile, so the field of art, wherever French culture extends, is the most worked-over and the most prepared for whatever seed is to be sown in it.

But when the great Russians (who owe to French culture much more than is generally conceded) took over that neat thing, the French _nouvelle_, they gave it the additional dimension it most often lacked. In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears; and the Russians almost always dig to that depth. The result has been to give to the short story, as French and Russian art have combined to shape it, great closeness of texture with profundity of form. Instead of a loose web spread over the surface of life they have made it, at its best, a shaft driven straight into the heart of human experience.

Though the critic no longer feels that need of classifying and sub-classifying the _genres_ which so preoccupied the contemporaries of Wordsworth, there are, in all the arts, certain local products that seem to necessitate a parenthesis.

Such, in fiction, is the use of the supernatural. It seems to have come from mysterious Germanic and Armorican forests, from lands of long twilights and wailing winds; and it certainly did not pass through French or even Russian hands to reach us. Sorcerers and magic are of the south, the Mediterranean; the witch of Theocritus brewed a brew fit for her sister-hags of the Scottish heath; but the spectral apparition walks only in the pages of English and Germanic fiction.

It has done so, to great effect, in some of the most original of our great English short stories, from Scott’s “Wandering Willy” and Poe’s awful hallucinations to Le Fanu’s “Watcher,” and from the “Thrawn Janet” of Stevenson to “The Turn of the Screw” of Henry James, last great master of the eerie in English.

All these tales, in which the effect sought is completely achieved, are models of the subtlest artifice. It is not enough to believe in ghosts, or even to have seen one, to be able to write a good ghost story. The greater the improbability to be overcome the more studied must be the approach, the more perfectly maintained the air of naturalness, the easy assumption that things are always likely to happen in that way.

One of the chief obligations, in a short story, is to give the reader an immediate sense of security. Every phrase should be a sign-post, and never (unless intentionally) a misleading one: the reader must feel that he can trust to their guidance. His confidence once gained, he may be lured on to the most incredible adventures--as the Arabian Nights are there to show. A wise critic once said: “You may ask your reader to believe anything you can _make_ him believe.” It is never the _genii_ who are unreal, but only their unconvinced historian’s description of them. The least touch of irrelevance, the least chill of inattention, will instantly undo the spell, and it will take as long to weave again as to get Humpty Dumpty back on his wall. The moment the reader loses faith in the author’s sureness of foot the chasm of improbability gapes.

Improbability in itself, then, is never a danger, but the appearance of improbability is; unless, indeed, the tale be based on what, in my first chapter, I called pathological conditions--conditions of body or mind outside the field of normal experience. But this term, of course, does not apply to states of mind inherited from an earlier phase of race-culture, such as the belief in ghosts. No one with a spark of imagination ever objected to a good ghost story as “improbable”--though Mrs. Barbauld, who doubtless lacked the spark, is said to have condemned “The Ancient Mariner” on this ground. Most of us retain the more or less shadowy memory of ancestral terrors, and airy tongues that syllable men’s names. We cannot believe _a priori_ in the probability of the actions of madmen, or neurasthenics, because their reasoning processes escape most of us, or can at best be imagined only as belonging to abnormal and exceptional people; but everybody knows a good ghost when he reads about him.

When the reader’s confidence is gained the next rule of the game is to avoid distracting and splintering up his attention. Many a would-be tale of horror becomes innocuous through the very multiplication and variety of its horrors. Above all, if they are multiplied they should be cumulative and not dispersed. But the fewer the better: once the preliminary horror posited, it is the harping on the same string--the same nerve--that does the trick. Quiet iteration is far more racking than diversified assaults; the expected is more frightful than the unforeseen. The play of “Emperor Jones” is a striking instance of the power of simplification and repetition to excite in an audience a corresponding state of tension. By sheer voodoo-practice it shows how voodoo acts.

In “The Turn of the Screw”--which stands alone among tales of the supernatural in maintaining the ghostliness of its ghosts not only through a dozen pages but through close on two hundred--the economy of horror is carried to its last degree. What is the reader made to expect? Always--all through the book--that somewhere in that hushed house of doom the poor little governess will come on one of the two figures of evil with whom she is fighting for the souls of her charges. It will be either Peter Quint or the “horror of horrors,” Miss Jessel; no diversion from this one dread is ever attempted or expected. It is true that the tale is strongly held together by its profound, its appalling moral significance; but most readers will admit that, long before they are conscious of this, fear, simple shivering animal fear, has them by the throat; which, after all, is what writers of ghost stories are after.

III

It is sometimes said that a “good subject” for a short story should always be capable of being expanded into a novel.

The principle may be defendable in special cases; but it is certainly a misleading one on which to build any general theory. Every “subject” (in the novelist’s sense of the term) must necessarily contain within itself its own dimensions; and one of the fiction-writer’s essential gifts is that of discerning whether the subject which presents itself to him, asking for incarnation, is suited to the proportions of a short story or of a novel. If it appears to be adapted to both the chances are that it is inadequate to either.

It would be as great a mistake, however, to try to base a hard-and-fast theory on the denial of the rule as on its assertion. Instances of short stories made out of subjects that could have been expanded into a novel, and that are yet typical short stories and not mere stunted novels, will occur to every one. General rules in art are useful chiefly as a lamp in a mine, or a hand-rail down a black stairway; they are necessary for the sake of the guidance they give, but it is a mistake, once they are formulated, to be too much in awe of them.

There are at least two reasons why a subject should find expression in novel-form rather than as a tale; but neither is based on the number of what may be conveniently called incidents, or external happenings, which the narrative contains. There are novels of action which might be condensed into short stories without the loss of their distinguishing qualities. The marks of the subject requiring a longer development are, first, the gradual unfolding of the inner life of its characters, and secondly the need of producing in the reader’s mind the sense of the lapse of time. Outward events of the most varied and exciting nature may without loss of probability be crowded into a few hours, but moral dramas usually have their roots deep in the soul, their rise far back in time; and the suddenest-seeming clash in which they culminate should be led up to step by step if it is to explain and justify itself.

There are cases, indeed, when the short story may make use of the moral drama at its culmination. If the incident dealt with be one which a single retrospective flash sufficiently lights up, it is qualified for use as a short story; but if the subject be so complex, and its successive phases so interesting, as to justify elaboration, the lapse of time must necessarily be suggested, and the novel-form becomes appropriate.

The effect of compactness and instantaneity sought in the short story is attained mainly by the observance of two “unities”--the old traditional one of time, and that other, more modern and complex, which requires that any rapidly enacted episode shall be seen through only one pair of eyes.

It is fairly obvious that nothing is more retarding than the marking of a time-interval long enough to suggest modification in the personages of the tale or in their circumstances. The use of such an interval inevitably turns the short story into a long tale unduly compressed, the bald scenario of a novel. In the third chapter, where an attempt will be made to examine the technique of the novel, it will be needful to explore that central mystery--of which Tolstoy was perhaps the one complete master--the art of creating in the reader’s mind this sense of passing time. Meanwhile, it may be pointed out that a third, and intermediate, form of tale--the _long_ short-story--is available for any subject too spreading for conciseness yet too slight in texture to be stretched into a novel.

The other unity, that of vision, will also be dealt with in considering the novel, in respect of which it becomes a matter much more complicated. Henry James, almost the only novelist who has formulated his ideas about his art, was the first to lay down the principle, though it had long (if intermittently) been observed by the masters of fiction. It may have occurred to other novelists--presumably it has--to ask themselves, as they sat down to write: Who saw this thing I am going to tell about? By whom do I mean that it shall be reported? It seems as though such a question must precede any study of the subject chosen, since the subject is conditioned by the answer; but no critic appears to have propounded it, and it was left to Henry James to do so in one of those entangled prefaces to the Definitive Edition from which the technical axioms ought some day to be piously detached.

It is clear that exactly the same thing never happens to any two people, and that each witness of a given incident will report it differently. Should some celestial task-master set the same theme to Jane Austen and George Meredith the bewildered reader would probably have some difficulty in discovering the common denominator. Henry James, in pointing this out, also made the corollary suggestion that the mind chosen by the author to mirror his given case should be so situated, and so constituted, as to take the widest possible view of it.

One thing more is needful for the ultimate effect of probability; and that is, never to let the character who serves as reflector record anything not naturally within his register. It should be the story-teller’s first care to choose this reflecting mind deliberately, as one would choose a building-site, or decide upon the orientation of one’s house, and when this is done, to live inside the mind chosen, trying to feel, see and react exactly as the latter would, no more, no less, and, above all, no otherwise. Only thus can the writer avoid attributing incongruities of thought and metaphor to his chosen interpreter.

It remains to try to see what constitutes (in any permanent sense) the underlying norm of the “good short story.”

A curious distinction between the successful tale and the successful novel at once presents itself. It is safe to say (since the surest way of measuring achievement in art is by survival) that the test of the novel is that its people should be _alive_. No subject in itself, however fruitful, appears to be able to keep a novel alive; only the characters in it can. Of the short story the same cannot be said. Some of the greatest short stories owe their vitality entirely to the dramatic rendering of a situation. Undoubtedly the characters engaged must be a little more than puppets; but apparently, also, they may be a little less than individual human beings. In this respect the short story, rather than the novel, might be called the direct descendant of the old epic or ballad--of those earlier forms of fiction in all of which action was the chief affair, and the characters, if they did not remain mere puppets, seldom or never became more than types--such as the people, for instance, in Molière. The reason of the difference is obvious. Type, general character, may be set forth in a few strokes, but the progression, the unfolding of personality, of which the reader instinctively feels the need if the actors in the tale are to retain their individuality for him through a succession of changing circumstances--this slow but continuous growth requires space, and therefore belongs by definition to a larger, a symphonic plan.

The chief technical difference between the short story and the novel may therefore be summed up by saying that situation is the main concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form, or presentation. Even more--yes, and much more--than in the construction of the novel, the impression of vividness, of _presentness_, in the affair narrated, has to be sought, and made sure of beforehand, by that careful artifice which is the real carelessness of art. The short-story writer must not only know from what angle to present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires, but must understand just _why_ that particular angle and no other is the right one. He must therefore have turned his subject over and over, walked around it, so to speak, and applied to it those laws of perspective which Paolo Uccello called “so beautiful,” before it can be offered to the reader as a natural unembellished fragment of experience, detached like a ripe fruit from the tree.

The moment the writer begins to grope in the tangle of his “material,” to hesitate between one and another of the points that any actual happening thrusts up in such disorderly abundance, the reader feels a corresponding hesitancy, and the illusion of reality vanishes. The non-observance of the optics of the printed page results in the same failure to make the subject “carry” as the non-observance of the optics of the stage in presenting a play. By all means let the writer of short stories reduce the technical trick to its minimum--as the cleverest actresses put on the least paint; but let him always bear in mind that the surviving minimum is the only bridge between the reader’s imagination and his.

Nietzsche said that it took genius to “make an end”--that is, to give the touch of inevitableness to the conclusion of any work of art. In the art of fiction this is peculiarly true of the novel, that slowly built-up monument in which every stone has its particular weight and thrust to carry and of which the foundations must be laid with a view to the proportions of the highest tower. Of the short story, on the contrary, it might be said that the writer’s first care should be to know how to make a beginning.

That an inadequate or unreal ending diminishes the short tale in value as much as the novel need hardly be added, since it is proved with depressing regularity by the machine-made “magazine story” to which one or the other of half-a-dozen “standardized” endings is automatically adjusted at the four-thousand-five-hundredth word of whatsoever has been narrated. Obviously, as every subject contains its own dimensions, so is its conclusion _ab ovo_; and the failure to end a tale in accordance with its own deepest sense must deprive it of meaning.

None the less, the short-story writer’s first concern, once he has mastered his subject, is to study what musicians call the “attack.” The rule that the first page of a novel ought to contain the germ of the whole is even more applicable to the short story, because in the latter case the trajectory is so short that flash and sound nearly coincide.

Benvenuto Cellini relates in his Autobiography that one day, as a child, while he sat by the hearth with his father, they both saw a salamander in the fire. Even then the sight must have been unusual, for the father instantly boxed his son’s ears so that he should never forget what he had seen.

This anecdote might serve as an apothegm for the writer of short stories. If his first stroke be vivid and telling the reader’s attention will be instantly won. The “‘Hell,’ said the Duchess as she lit her cigar” with which an Eton boy is said to have begun a tale for his school magazine, in days when Duchesses less commonly smoked and swore, would undoubtedly have carried his narrative to posterity if what followed had been at the same level.

This leads to another point: it is useless to box your reader’s ear unless you have a salamander to show him. If the heart of your little blaze is not animated by a living, moving _something_ no shouting and shaking will fix the anecdote in your reader’s memory. The salamander stands for that fundamental significance that made the story worth telling.

The arrest of attention by a vivid opening should be something more than a trick. It should mean that the narrator has so brooded on this subject that it has become his indeed, so made over and synthesized within him that, as a great draughtsman gives the essentials of a face or landscape in a half-a-dozen strokes, the narrator can “situate” his tale in an opening passage which shall be a clue to all the detail eliminated.

The clue given, the writer has only to follow. But his grasp must be firm; he must never for an instant forget what he wants to tell, or why it seemed worth telling. And this intensity of hold on his subject presupposes, before the telling of even a short story, a good deal of thinking over. Just because the limits of the form selected prevent his producing the semblance of reality by elaborating his characters, is the short-story writer the more bound to make real the adventure in itself. A well-known French confectioner in New York was once asked why his chocolate, good as it was, was not equal to that made in Paris. He replied: “Because, on account of the expense, we cannot _work it over_ as many times as the French confectioner can.” Other homely analogies confirm the lesson: the seemingly simplest sauces are those that have been most cunningly combined and then most completely blent, the simplest-looking dresses those that require most study to design.

The precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience which, if it be not genius, must be one of genius’s chief reliances in communicating itself. On this point repetition and insistence are excusable: the shorter the story, the more stripped of detail and “cleared for action,” the more it depends for its effect not only on the choice of what is kept when the superfluous has been jettisoned, but on the order in which these essentials are set forth.

Nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the short-story writer from another danger: that of contenting himself with a mere sketch of the episode selected. The temptation to do so is all the greater because some critics, in their resentment of the dense and the prolix, have tended to overestimate the tenuous and the tight. Mérimée’s tales are often cited as models of the _conte_; but they are rather the breathless summaries of longer tales than the bold foreshortening of an episode from which all the significance it has to give has been adroitly extracted. It is easy to be brief and sharply outlined if one does away with one or more dimensions; the real achievement, as certain tales of Flaubert’s and Turgenev’s, of Stevenson’s and of Maupassant’s show, is to suggest illimitable air within a narrow space.

The stories of the German “romantic,” Heinrich von Kleist, have likewise been praised for an extreme economy of material, but they should rather be held up as an awful warning against waste, for in their ingenious dovetailing of improbable incidents, the only economy practised is that of leaving out all that would have enriched the subject, visually or emotionally. One, indeed, “The Marquise d’O.” (thrift is carried so far that the characters are known merely by their initials), has in it the making of a good novel, not unlike Goethe’s “Elective Affinities”; but reduced to the limits of a short story it offers a mere skeleton of its subject.

The phrase “economy of material” suggests another danger to which the novelist and the writer of short stories are equally exposed. Such economy is, in both cases, nearly always to be advised in the multiplication of accidental happenings, minor episodes, surprises and contrarieties. Most beginners crowd into their work twice as much material of this sort as it needs. The reluctance to look deeply enough into a subject leads to the indolent habit of decorating its surface. I was once asked to read a manuscript on the eternal theme of a lovers’ quarrel. The quarrelling pair made up, and the reasons for dispute and reconciliation were clearly inherent in their characters and situation; but the author, being new at the trade, felt obliged to cast about for an additional, a fortuitous, pretext for their reunion--so he sent them for a drive, made the horses run away, and caused the young man to save the young lady’s life. This is a crude example of a frequent fault. Again and again the novelist passes by the real meaning of a situation simply for lack of letting it reveal all its potentialities instead of dashing this way and that in quest of fresh effects. If, when once drawn to a subject, he would let it grow slowly in his mind instead of hunting about for arbitrary combinations of circumstance, his tale would have the warm scent and flavour of a fruit ripened in the sun instead of the insipidity of one forced in a hot-house.

There is a sense in which the writing of fiction may be compared to the administering of a fortune. Economy and expenditure must each bear a part in it, but they should never degenerate into parsimony or waste. True economy consists in the drawing out of one’s subject of every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting time, meditation and patient labour to the process of extraction and representation.

It all comes back to a question of expense: expense of time, of patience, of study, of thought, of letting hundreds of stray experiences accumulate and group themselves in the memory, till suddenly one of the number emerges and throws its sharp light on the subject which solicits you. It has been often, and inaccurately, said that the mind of a creative artist is a mirror, and the work of art the reflection of life in it. The mirror, indeed, is the artist’s mind, with all his experiences reflected in it; but the work of art, from the smallest to the greatest, should be something projected, not reflected, something on which his mirrored experiences, at the right conjunction of the stars, are to be turned for its full illumination.

III

CONSTRUCTING A NOVEL

III

CONSTRUCTING A NOVEL

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The writing of fictionChapter I: Part 1

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