Slike strani
PDF
ePub

HENRY JAMES ON THE ART OF FICTION

As Stevenson explains at the beginning of his essay, the "Humble Remonstrance" was written in connection with the appearance (in 1884) of an article by Walter Besant, followed by one by Henry James, both entitled "The Art of Fiction." Stevenson objects that their topic is too broad, since fiction is "an element which enters largely into all the arts but architecture," and suggests that what is really discussed is the art of narrative. As we have seen, his argument is concerned mainly with the contention of James that the paramount business of the novelist is to attain such an illusion of reality that his novel shall verily "compete with life."

James accords but qualified approval to the contentions of Besant, finding some of his points merely general or obvious, while others may be true if analyzed and precisely stated. Thus, every novelist should indeed write from experience, but "The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'"

And then the crux of the matter. "I am far from intending by this to minimize the importance of exactness of truth of detail. One can speak best from one's own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel the merit on which all its other merits (including that conscious moral purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his delight. It is here in very truth that he competes with life; it is here that he competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that

conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle."

This suggested analogy with painting should, I think, be carefully considered. If for some one a particular painting may be said to compete with life, because it gives the illusion of reality, it is yet not for a moment regarded as replacing life, or as right painting if for one moment it has deceived the eye and seemed to be actuality, not art—a woman of flesh and blood, say, and not clearly "a phantom of delight." Art can certainly compete with life in interest, interest being attention which implies a feeling of like or dislike—a sign that the exciting presence is or is not definitely in accord with our peculiar mental constitution. Now life, as Maupassant and Stevenson and many others of equally divergent nature have declared, appears inconsequential, brutish, infinitely complicated, continually astonishing to use their own words. And since a great work of art, qua art, has selected, simplified, synthesized, and rationalized as well as spiritualized the discrete substance of life, it satisfies our longings where life does not, by virtue of its being, in Aristotelean phrase, "more philosophical." Or it shows us how to see life as purposeful and significant when we turn again to look.

To return: Henry James can find no validity in the common division of novels into novels of character, novels of incident, and the like, nor in the division of prose fiction into novel and romance. "There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture one says of character, when one says novel one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed at will. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is either a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character."

Of the novelist and his critic, James has a clear thing to say, a thing often paraphrased by critics today, and rarely lived up to. "We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting; in case we do not, our course is perfectly simple-to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the

execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things. Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it: the most improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate test. I mention this to guard myself from the accusation of intimating that the idea, the subject, of a novel or a picture, does not matter. It matters, to my sense, in the highest degree, and if I might put up a prayer it would be that artists should select none but the richest. Some, as I have already hastened to admit, are much more remunerative than others, and it would be a world happily arranged in which persons intending to treat them should be exempt from confusions and mistakes. This fortunate condition will arrive only, I fear, on the same day that critics become purged from error."

Toward the close of his essay, James reverts to the opinion of Besant that the novel should have a "conscious moral purpose." He begins with inquiries. "Will you not define your terms and explain how (a novel being a picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue: will you not tell us how you would set about it? We are discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair, and will you not let us see how it is that you find it so easy to mix them up? ... In the English novel (by which, of course, I mean the American as well), more than in any other, there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature. There is a great difference, in short, between what they talk of in conversation and what they talk of in print. The essence of moral energy is to survey the whole field, and I should directly reverse Mr. Besant's remark and say not that the English novel has a purpose, but that it has a diffidence. To what degree a purpose in a work of art is a source of corruption I shall not attempt to inquire; the one that seems to me least dangerous is the purpose of making a perfect work. ... There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that intelligence is fine will the

novel, the picture, the statue partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind; that seems to be an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, will cover all needful moral ground: if the youthful aspirant take it to heart it will illuminate for him many of the mysteries of 'purpose'."

This essay was included in Partial Portraits, printed by the Macmillan Company in 1888.

ANATOLE FRANCE ON CRITICISM AS SELF

EXPRESSION

As I consider it, . . . criticism, like philosophy and history, is a sort of novel for the use of well-advised and curious minds, and every novel, if rightly interpreted, is an autobiography. The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

Objective criticism no more exists than does objective art, and those who flatter themselves that they are putting anything other than themselves into their works are dupes of the most deceiving illusion. The truth is that one never gets outside oneself. That is one of our greatest misfortunes. What would we not give to see, for even a minute, the sky and the earth with the faceted eye of a fly, or to understand nature with the rude and simple brain of an orang-utang? But that is denied us. One is not able, like Tiresias, to be a man and remember having been a woman. We are locked up in our own personalities as in an eternal prison. The best we can do, it seems to me, is to acknowledge with a good grace this frightful situation and confess that we speak of ourselves every time that we lack the strength to keep silent.

To be candid, the critic ought to say: "Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself apropos of Shakespeare, of Racine, of Pascal, or of Goethe. This gives me a splendid chance."

I had the honor of knowing M. Cuvillier-Fleury, who was an obstinate old critic. One day when I had come to see him in his little house in the Avenue Raphael, he showed me the modest library of which he was proud. "Monsieur," he siad to me, "oratory, belleslettres, philosophy, history-all the kinds are here represented, without counting criticism, which embraces them all. Yes, the critic is by turns orator, philosopher, historian."

M. Cuvillier-Fleury was right. The critic is all that, or at least he can be. He has occasion to show the rarest, the most diverse, and the most opposite intellectual qualities. And when he is a Sainte-Beuve, a Taine, a J.-J. Weiss, a Jules Lemaitre, a Ferdinand Brunetière, he does not fail to do so. Without going beyond himself, he produces the intellectual history of mankind. Criticism is the most recent of the literary forms; it will end perhaps by absorbing all the others. It is admirably adapted to a highly civilized society, of rich memories and long traditions. It is peculiarly appropriate to a curious, learned and polished humanity. To flourish, it presupposes more of culture than do the other literary forms. Its cre

« PrejšnjaNaprej »