FICTION AS ART AND LIFE
ROBERT SAUNDERS DOWST
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
IN MEMORY OF
Ernest Dawson
PRESENTED BY
Robert B. Campbell
"The the wise man all the world's a soil." — Ben Johnson.
Fiction as Art and Life
By
ROBERT SAUNDERS DOWST
Author of
"The Technique of Fiction Writing"
"A TheoiT of Prose Fiction"
THE EDITOR COMPANY
RIDGEWOOD, NEW JERSEY
Copyright 1919 by
THE EDITOR COMPANY
The Station Place Presa
William R. Kane
TO MY MOTHER
BOOKS BY ROBERT SAUNDERS DOWST
The Technique of Fiction Writing $1.75
A Theory of Prose Fiction , 60
Fiction as Art and Life 60
PREFACE
The present essay, like its predecessor, "A Theory of Prose Fiction," has to do with matters taken up from the technical angle in "The Technique of Fiction
Writing," but the treatment is historical and critical, rather than directly expositive. However, it has not been my purpose to write a conventional text-book, with all its neat little docketings and labelings of schools and tendencies; instead, I have sought to indicate and discuss briefly the one great process of development in fiction, the emergence of the more or less conscious conception of the art as a means to exhibit life, and thereby to interest, rather than as a means merely to entertain through narration of a conventional plot or story, attractive largely by its novelty, marvelousness, or complexity of intrigue. It is trite enough to say that a story should be a "phase of life," "slice of life," "heart throb," or what not — and all the professional and professorial exhorters on fiction technique and allied matters duly say it — but in reading discussion of the art of fiction I never have met with any intelligible statement of the relation between a story as a work of art, that is, a definite, organic thing, with beginning and end, and as a vehicle to exhibit the stuff of life, real or ideal. To do work that is worthy, work that will impress a reader by subjecting him to the power of each story, the artist in fiction must grasp that relation in all its implications, and thousands fail
where one succeeds. Properly approached, the matter
is a simple one to understand; the writer who does
understand it will come to his work with deeper insight,
new zest, and greater resources. I have often thought
it a pity that so many deft technicians should whittle
and pare away at their carefully elaborated, conventional stories, when a little consideration of the plain
nature of their art would show them the way to become
masters rather than craftsmen — at least would permit
their substantive powers to reach full growth. In "A
Theory of Prose Fiction" I attempted briefly to state
the relation between a story as a work of art and as
a bit of life, the co-existence of form and content;
here I develop the same matter historically. It is of
the very greatest importance, both to one who would
write fiction and to one who would estimate the work
of others justly and adequately, and its importance
is my excuse for this book and the other.
To avoid possible misunderstanding, let me dis-
claim any intention to spread the current propaganda
of "realism." So many reverberating artillery-salvos
have been exchanged between the critical schools over
"realism" and "romanticism" as opposed artistic philosophies that it is quite impossible to mention "life" as
the content proper for fiction without setting up in a
reader's mind unfortunate currents of association. I
might have mentioned the matter in the text, but, in
so small a book, space, like time, is fleeting, and I desired to develop my own argument in peace. It should
be enough to state here that when I mention "life" I
do not mean "real" life, that assumed verity impossible
to test, but rather use the term to indicate that the
proper content of fiction is man's possible or conceivable experience, presented as experience and not merely
as a series of events physically related as items of a conventional plot or intrigue. In other words, the
writer of fiction who displays a phase of life, of man's
experience, as he has seen or guessed it in reality or
imagined it in his dreams, is dealing with "life" within
my use of the term. The specific work he finally exhibits may be the "Legeia" of a Poe, the "Scarlet Letter" of a Hawthorne, the "Crime and Punishment" of a
Dostoievsky, the "Way of All Flesh" of a Butler, or
the "Don Quixote" of a Cervantes, even the "Alice in
Wonderland" of a Carroll.
I
Tales and stories — prose fictions, in the dry modern phrase — have been told since first there were men
to tell them and to enjoy the telling, and in an art of
an antiquity so respectable one must expect to discover a process of growth and development, at least of
change. And the art of fiction indeed has altered under
the hands of those who have practiced it, in accordance
with an alteration in their more or less unconscious
conception of its proper content and purpose. If one
examines the fairy-tales of the East and the Teutonic
peoples, the earliest fictions that have been preserved
to us, apart from the semi-philosophical myths of all
primitive races, one sees that the apparent purpose of
fiction was to entertain through exhibition of men
and women involved in novel, bizarre, or even impossible courses of action ; but if one flutters over the leaves of the centuries and comes to the finest, most significant
fiction of the past hundred years — the work of Balzac,
Hawthorne, Thackeray, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, Butler,
and others — one discovers that the great moderns, in
their great works, at any rate, have forsaken bare
novelty and the marvelous as means to appeal to
readers, and have turned instead to the portrayal of life, real or ideal, as they have seen, imagined, or
dreamed it.
In its broad outlines, this process of change or development is sufficiently obvious. Traced piecemeal,
step by step, from book to book and author to author,
it reveals itself with some loss of emphasis, for no
course of natural development functions evenly and
uniformly. As the greater number of human societies
have progressed for a time, then lost the initiative of
advance and foully stagnated, so the stream of fiction,
at various times, with various peoples, and in various
tongues, has stagnated in periods of imitation, decadence, and mere trash. But if one examines the works
that mark the beginning and end of the developmental
process — passes from tales of "Cinderella" and "Alladin
and the Wonderful Lamp" to the stories in Barrie's "A
Window in Thrums," from Ann Radchffe's "Mysteries of
Udolpho" or Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" to Balzac's
"Lost Illusions" or Butler's "The Way of All Flesh"—
one cannot but be impressed not only with the fact of
change but of radical change. Where the earlier fictions were strictly inhuman in that they stressed the
purely marvelous and all the mechanism of fairyland,
or, as a concession to rationalism, turned for sensation
and appeal to the grotesque and horrible, the later
works are strictly human in that they affirm by example the natural eloquence, appeal, and general fictional
worth of the more or less normal lives of more or less
normal men and women.
It is broadly true that the art of fiction has developed thus, gaining in plain human significance — and
hence in power to interest and influence cultured readers, if not in power merely to entertain those who
seek in reading only to escape from reality — as it
reached out for and embraced the world of common
men and common facts, finding in the natural joys,
sorrows, and passions of toiling humanity a gamut
capable of tones sweeter than the elvish mirth of
fairies, sadder than the woes of forsaken princesses,
more dreadful and more thrilling than any cry that
has ever burst from the dungeons of any castle of
romance. The taproot of true interest is sympathy,
fellow-feeling — witness the discerning critic (probably
feminine) who complained of the Arabian Nights
stories that one is apt to lose interest in a hero who
may turn into a camel — and the story that shows the
marvelous and nothing else, or displays neat interaction
of intrigue and nothing else, lacks capacity to reach
the hearts and minds of men through the appeal of
something like their own experience. Jack may slay
the giant and Jill may wed the prince — after his discovery of "the papers" proving her to be the gypsy-stolen daughter of the Grand Duke of Neverwasenstein
— but the real Jack and Jill who read, unless they have
the great luck to be children, find it all a trifle unreal
and greatly insignificant, that is, unmeaning, in relation to them and their own personal lives. In the great books, on the other hand, they glimpse friendly human
faces, grasp for a moment friendly human hands,
witness the realization or defeat of spiritual or material
aspirations and aims that they themselves have entertained in their degree, and are bound to the page by
mutuality of experience, actual or potential.
As the race slowly has developed through the centuries, discovering and exercising new powers and
capacities, feeling the concomitant new responsibilities
of social life, its individual members, in so far as they
have participated in and contributed to the advance,
have lost the primal capacity to take keen interest in
the merely miraculous or the merely ingenious relation ;
and fiction, likewise, to interest the newer human type,
must have put aside very largely its function of miracle-monger and mechanical problem-poser. There is
more in life than the men of bygone ages ever knew or
even guessed, more in men, both of powers and duties.
To interest a mind that is at once able and representative of the present a work of fiction must embody a
reality of human experience, a reality of fact, caught
from observation, or a reality of conception, snared
from dreams. Not all minds are able; still less are
all able minds representative of the best of present
humanity in that they possess what can be characterized roughly as social sensitiveness ; so it is that books
of the earlier type, harping painfully upon their one
string of wonder or mystery, still find readers. Fiction,
written by man for man, has developed only with man,
not in a smooth chronological progression. Jane Austen was a contemporary of Horace Walpole, or nearly
so, of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, with their
horrent claptrap; Balzac in one book would approach
the heights of fictional achievement and in the next
descend to the cheapest melodrama; the mass of English fiction went astray most woefully after Fielding,
perhaps never has regained the straight and difficult
path of complete sincerity and freedom from mawkishness. Only in Russian can be found a fictional literature
which in the mass presents a relatively sincere, relatively undistorted content of human experience, and
the exception is not adverse to the general argument
because the whole of Russian literary expression is so
comparatively recent that it has been influenced almost
in its totality by the thought-currents of the new age.
Moreover, though fictional sincerity does not consist
in presenting the life-experience of the poor, nevertheless the tacit alliance in Russia between radicalism and
literature in all its forms has tended to focus the attention of novelists and short-story writers upon the
poor and oppressed, Gorky's "creatures that once
were men," and it is certain that the writer who concerns himself with the spiritual and material adventures of the poor — the stark, struggling bulk of mankind — is least likely to lose touch with the genuine
realties of human experience and to build in froth.
The unique and surprising excellence of Russian fiction
as a whole serves chiefly to emphasize the greatly
varying capacities of writers and tastes of readers in
countries where literature has been more a thing of
the market-place and less a propaganda.
What has just been said was not intended in the
least to imply that the office of fiction is to present
socially important phases of contemporary life, to be
a mere tool in the work of social betterment, for the
one office and aim of fiction is to interest, some minds,
at any rate, the best minds if possible; but it is true
that the abler reader, the reader accustomed to dwell
upon matter humanly significant and to dismiss matter
humanly insignificant,- is to be engaged most easily
and completely by some reality of contemporary human
experience, presented as experience because it is significant — hence interesting — only as experience, and
not as novelty, mystery, or mechanism. To put it
briefly, the general advance of mankind has caused a
similar development in fiction, which has changed
from a mere vehicle of entertainment into a source of
interest, appealing to the mind of a reader through
the real human significance of its matter and to his
heart through its men and women, at once concrete —
which the people of older fiction often were — and
intelligible — which they often were not. Truly man
has changed, and the art of the story has changed
with him, for the narrator has gained insight, and
sees in his human material a more delicate complex, a
deeper pathos, and a finer triumph.
The dual aspect of fiction as art and as life or
experience, the co-existence of form and content, will
be discussed in the following sections ; here the necessity is to clear the way for the discussion, for what
will be said as to the artistic coherence of a story depending upon the actual coherence of the phase of
experience exhibited would not be true of the older
type of fiction, from fairy-tale to mechanical romance,
where coherence depends upon the mere physical dove-tailing of happening and happening. In the mechanical
romance, for instance, a marriage certificate, perhaps,
is lost or stolen, and the relation is coherent only in
that it states more or less plausibly the woes occasioned
by the loss, but a relation of the newer type, seeking
to interest through the just exhibition of human experience, is coherent in that the phase of experience
presented is one phase, the finked actions and reactions
of some individual human spirit during a part or the
whole of its life-pilgrimage. Flaubert's "Madame
Bovary" is an example, coherent, as it is, not by virtue
of the necessary physical connection between the happenings, but because each incident springs directly or
indirectly from the follies and vices of the heroine. In
the older type of story the relation between events is
physical, in the newer, physical and psychical, and discussion true of the one is false of the other.
The newer type of fiction, then, seeks to interest
by showing experience as such, rather than to entertain by displaying marvels or complicating events, and
if it were my purpose to demonstrate the superiority
of the new over the old I could not do better than to call
attention to Stevenson's "Kidnapped" and "The Ebb-Tide," stories which interest because they present
justly worth-while phases of human experience, but
which also possess "plot" in the mechanical sense. I
am not concerned with the point of merit, but these
two books are useful to point the difference between
the old and the new types of fiction, as each combines
berth. The conventional plot of "Kidnapped" consists
in David's ignorance of his right to the estate of Shaws
and in the frustration of his usurping uncle's scheme
tc remove him ; the real interest of the story, however,
does not reside in this mechanism, but in the boy's
experience on the brig, on the Isle of Earraid, and in
the heather, Alan Breck sustaining him and hostile
elements and hostile men opposing him. The conventional plot of "The Ebb-Tide" utilizes the circumstance
that a schooner laden with bottled water is stolen by
men who believe her laden with champagne; but the
interest of the story resides exclusively in its exhibition
of the unavailing struggle of an essentially weak man
tp be other than weak, whatever the enterprize engaging him, a justly conceived and justly presented phase
of human experience. Exceptionally perfect as was
Stevenson's technique, still it was not a new but rather
the old technique, with its conventional plot-mechanism
— the fraud on David, the piratical enterprize of Robert
Herrick and his companions — employed less as the
story and an end in itself than as a mere means to
initiate definitely and sharply the phase of experience
selected for presentation, also as a means to end it with
equal definition. Stevenson devises the mechanism of
"Kidnapped" to place David on the brig and in the
heather, as he devises the mechanism of "The Ebb-Tide" to place Herrick on the schooner and the pearl-island, not because the mechanism in either case is
greatly interesting. David's struggle with hostile
elements and hostile men, an item of human experience,
and the inner struggle between Herrick's stronger and weaker selves, a less tangible item, supply the substance, the source of interest, in each book. The
mechanism is a mere adjunct, furnishing a definite beginning, the physical movement of the story, and a
definite end. It is possible to write artistically coherent fiction without employing the mechanism of a conventional plot— Butler's "The Way of All Flesh," in
English, and many Russian novels are examples — but
mechanism, justly and understandingly employed, is a
source of strength. In the particular case of Stevenson, whose artistic development can be traced clearly
through each successive book, one cannot fail to note
the ealier insistence upon the bare story for the story's
sake and the later insistence upon specific human
experience as such, the emphasis deepening, to the
final point of "Weir of Hermiston," as the writer's
understanding gains in power and his hand in craft.
The inevitable movement in the work of any able and
developing writer from the story as mechanism to the
story as experience reproduces in miniature the general process of fictional development that has been discussed, and is a sure indication of the necessary character of the process. On the one hand, an able reader
cannot lose himself in a relation humanly insignificant; on the other, the able writer has business more
pressing than to spin complexities or to retail marvels.
To trace in detail the evolution of fiction from
mechanism to experience, from a means to amuse to a
means to interest and subject a reader, would involve a
separate examination of the two chief fictional literatures of Europe, the English and the French, and it
would be difficult to avoid some treatment of Russian
work; but perhaps enough has been said to serve as
foundation for discussion directed to show that the
presentation of experience as such and for its own
sake does not involve incoherence, any failure in point
of form and art, because coherence in the substance
of a story, the phase of experience it presents, implies
coherence in its form and outer texture. First, then,
of the artistic question, the point of form.
II
Perhaps not too many professors of aesthetics
would dissent from the definition that a work of art
is something that gives pleasure in the mere act of
perception, apart from all considerations of utility, but
my present concern with fiction as an art requires
some more immediately practical statement of artistic
quality, a statement that shall emphasize the formal
and technical elements of the matter rather than the
philosophical. From the technical viewpoint, then,
any work of art is a creation or adaptation in some
one of various materials — sounds, words, pigments,
stone, even mimicry, in the case of the dramatic artist —
which gives pleasure in perception less because the
perceiving person dwells lovingly upon the thousand
and one little miracles of execution in detail that go
to make the whole —which is the pleasure of a brother worker in the craft — than because the finished work
is an organic whole, without loose ends or interpolated
fragments, and preaches a single message of truth,
which is beauty. The sole fundamental technical oi
formal quality of a work of art is unity, singleness of
function as a whole.
One need not be an amateur in painting or music,
for instance, to appreciate the singleness or unity of a
landscape or a song, or to realize that in the unity of
each resides its formal artistic quality. But the art of fiction is another and a more complicated matter,
manipulating, as it does, a dual or twofold substance,
words, visual and — in a sense — audible symbols, and the
underlying realities symbolized, so that the complete
adequacy of the statement that the formal artistic
quality of a work of fiction resides in its unity or singleness may not at once appear. What is this much
mooted unity ? how can a work of fiction, dealing with
a thing so heterogeneous as human experience, possibly manifest it? are legitimate questions; but it can
be shown that the idea of coherence, singleness, unity,
has real meaning in relation to fiction. The only condition precedent to the demonstration is that the reader
dismiss entirely from his mind all the vaporous modern
discussion of the short story and the esoteric and undefined "unity" by possession of which it is alleged
to be unique among all forms of prose fiction. Also it
will be useful to remember that the present discussion
purports to deal only with matters of substance, not
with verbal treatment of substance, style, which will
be touched upon incidentally.
In the first place, there are two chief methods or
modes whereby a work of fiction achieves essential
unity and thereby becomes a work of art indeed. Since
my argument is novel, I have no convenient catchwords at hand rendered intelligible by repeated and
contrasting use, but it will not be too extreme to
characterize these two basic methods to achieve
fictional unity as the mechanical and the natural. The
shifting of emphasis from the first to the second has
made the process of fictional growth or development
hastily reviewed in the introductory section. The
mechanical mode to achieve unity is to take some
mechanical complication, intrigue, plot — examples are
the matter of the slipper in "Cinderella," of the lamp
in "Alladin," of David's inheritance in "Kidnapped," of
the theft of the schooner in "The Ebb-Tide"— and to
develop the mechanism fully. Since the plot-mechaism is single, self-contained and self-sufficient, the
completed fiction is a unity, in the mechanical sense,
at least, and, if the events and personalities dealt with
have true relation, are mutually influential, the fiction
is also substantially organic and a true natural unity.
So far as can be ascertained — the great antiquity of
the fairy-story and the constant employment of
mechanism to unify the type bear witness here — fiction
in fact did appear first as mechanism in the sense in
which I have employed the term. But the material
or content of fiction is human experience, and there
have been, are, and will be innumerable aspects or
phases of human experience, supremely interesting and
therefore supremely worthy of relation, which contain
no element of mechanism, of conventional plot-complication, and which would suffer only distortion if told
in connection with a mechanism devised solely because
of the tradition of plot. These worth-while phases of
human experience in the last analysis consist of the
actions and reactions of individual men and women in
relation to themselves, their fellows, and their natural
environment, and to present any straightforward, uncomplicated phase of experience simply as it is and
for what it is invariably results in a unified, organic
fiction, a fiction more essentially and closely a single
whole than any mere mechanism, for the single phase
of human experience is the natural unit of fiction. Adequate presentment of a phase of experience, then, is the
second and a more effective, as well as the more natural
way to achieve in fiction the unity which is essential
to artistry. Of course both it and the device of mechanism may be employed in the same story; I have
already cited "Kidnapped" and "The Ebb-Tide" in this
connection.
The term "phase of experience," which I have
been forced to use for lack of a better one equally brief,
is ineffective by reason of its abstractness, and a little
discussion and amplification may render more clear
just what is meant by the foregoing statement of the
natural mode to unify a work of fiction. All life, all
human life is a struggle, wherein the individual
wrestles with the elements to win a living and a foot-
hold on the earth, with his fellows as their desires and
necessities interfere with and cross his, even with him-
self as his soul is buffeted by conflicting impulses.
The result is an infinite succession of dramatic conflicts,
frequently within the individual alone, as when opposed
motives seize him, frequently between the individual
and his natural environment, but more frequently between a group of individuals placed in opposition by
incompatible motives and purposes. And any such
struggle or dramatic .conflict constitutes a phase of
human experience, as the term has been used, a substantial, and, in fiction, an artistic unity, having a
definite beginning, the actual beginning of the conflict,
L definite climax, the point of highest tension between
the opposed forces of personality, and a definite end, the
end of the particular conflict, when some one or some
combination among the forces involved has shaped the
others. These small and great unities of human experience, utilized by the artist in fiction, will stand alone,
fair and shapely, without the support of mechanism.
They need only be related simply as they would be perceived by an observer or experienced by a participant.
Thus it appears that any single phase of human
experience is a true fictional unit, an artistic conception as well as an objective or a subjective fact. (Of
course the item of experience may be purely imaginary,
a subjective reality only.) A phase of experience, that
is, some particular struggle or conflict between forces
of personality, between personality and nature, or between opposed motives in the same person, is one of
life's indivisible atoms, likewise one of fiction's, self-sufficient and self-contained, beginning when the forces
involved first come to grips and ending when some one
has compelled the others to yield to its imperious
power. Quite apart from mechanism and formal complication of intrigue, each small desire and each great
purpose of all real and all imaginable men and women
furnish material for artistically coherent fiction, for
each is certain to meet opposition either within the
person, from his fellows, or from nature, and the defeat
or realization of the motive is the story.
In the short story, the unifying opposition or dramatic struggle must be strictly single, because space
for subsidiary conflicts or plots and the resulting by-
play of action is not available save at expense of the
main opposition; in the novel ox the romance, on the
other hand, ideally — and, indeed, most commonly — unified by a main line of opposition between the chief
characters, the minor persons of the story frequently
become involved in secondary intrigues of their own,
at least play their little parts in the main intrigue.
And the story does not lose unity and consequently
artistic status thereby, provided the secondary characters have some relation to the chief persons, and their
doings are in fact ramifications and developments of
the main business of the fiction. Yet arbitrarily to tell
three or four essentially unrelated stories in one book,
as did Dickens in "Our Mutual Friend," is to sacrifice
unity and force to presumptive breadth of appeal.
The short story is a form of fiction somewhat artificial
in that it presents a flash of life in the bare essentials
of personality and action; the longer forms are not
less coherent and unified simply because they seek
more leisurely to present a broader aspect of experience
in a richer texture of detail. The short story can
pretend to no higher artistry than that achieved by
novel or romance justly treated.
A brief review of a few well known works of fiction, long and short, will demonstrate the truth that mechanism, the conventional plot-complication, is not
indispensable to unity, coherence, the fundamental
artistic quality. "Don Quixote" exhibits man under
domination of a dream, a delusion, therefore misunderstanding and misunderstood by all the world, and the
book is a rounded whole because it does present that
phase of experience. "Robinson Crusoe" displays life
in its rawest terms, the struggle of naked and hungry
man against elemental forces for food, shelter, and raiment; since the work develops that one struggle, a
single phase of experience, it is a symmetrical unit and
a thing of art. Stevenson's short story, "Markheim,"
shows a struggle, after the deed, within a murderer,
and Dostoievsky's "Crime and Punishment" shows like-wise a struggle within a murderer, before and after
the fact, both single phases of human experience and
both substantial and fictional unities. "The Scarlet
Letter" presents the knot of opposition between a
woman, her husband, and her lover, and is a strict
artistic unity because it is concerned only with the
initiation, development, and solution of that single
dramatic problem. "Madame Bovary" utilizes the same
theme, with emphasis more exclusively upon the
woman, and is a coherent artistic whole for the same
reason. Samuel Butler's fine novel "The Way of All
Flesh," Dickens' "David Copperfield," Romain Rolland's
"Jean Christophe," and several of Thackeray's works
present a whole significant life instead of a single
significant phase of a life, and find unity and artistic
coherence less in one specific dramatic conflict than in
the succession of dramatic conflicts that makes the
particular life, though, of course, usually with one
dominant emphasis, while a book such as Tolstoi's
"War and Peace" still more ambitiously seeks unity by
presenting the conflict between masses of men, be-
tween societies and nations — in the particular case of
"War and Peace" the bloody duel between France and
Russia, Napoleon and Alexander. Yet in each story,
slight or pretentious, the human opposition is the
unifying, the artistic principle. To take a fiction
known somewhat less than those just mentioned,
"Asra," the first work in August Strindberg's collection of short stories entitled "Married," presents the
struggle between a boy and his sexual impulses. Sincerely, therefore without the least evil suggestion,the
author shows the personal conflict within the boy, and
utilizes that conflict to show the more general opposition between young manhood and society in the particular concerned; the story is an artistic unit because
it is a substantial unit, presents a single phase of human experience. Thomas Hardy's novels, "Tess," "The
Return of the Native," "The Mayor of Casterbridge,"
and the others, find unity through the various human
oppositions they develop, also through adequate treatment of the natural environment of the characters, or,
more truly, a strange, Hardyesque compound of nature
and inscrutable fate. As the persons buffet one an-
other they turn, from time to time, to fend off
elemental and supernatural forces.
The list and rapid analysis might be extended indefinitely, but enough has been said, I think, to demonstrate that mechanism is no essential of artistry, which
is true unity, in fiction, that any conventional plot- or
story-idea may be dispensed with quite without loss
of coherence, and that the writer has much to learn
who conceives his story found when he has chanced
upon an interlocking series of events involving elements of mystery or of final surprise, of mechanical
complication or of wonder. His business is with his
human material, the men and women about him or the
creatures of his musings, not because it is more difficult, more "literary," or more anything else to present
life as it is or might be than to present artificially arranged events for their own sake, but because the
cultured reader, the reader we would all wish at once
to be and to serve, appreciates the value, the triumph
and pathos, the zest, at any rate, of life, and can lose
himself in its presentation more readily and more completely than in any exhibition of events, merely an events, however neatly dovetailing or arranged.
As was pointed out in relation to some of Stevenson's work, one may show life justly while utilizing the
device of mechanism, the conventional "story," but the
value of one's fable, its power to stimulate real interest,
will depend upon its substance, not upon its physical
outline. Whatever third-rate writers of fiction may
seem to imply by their work, the god of things as they
are did not create man solely as an actor in highly
polished intrigues, and some great spirits — a few are
named a page or two back — have realized that truth,
and worked and written accordingly. More honor to
them.
Even in the case of the story that is a unit only by
virtue of its mechanism, the pat interaction of events,
the events in fact do dovetail and interact in building
up to a definite end of the whole sequence; thereby the
fiction is in some sense a work of art, the bearer of a
single message, though that message is superficial and
does not touch the heart of things. And in the case of
the story that is a unit because its substance is a unit,
a single phase of human experience, the events like-
wise build up to a definite end of the whole sequence,
but they are more closely knit, more truly a progression, than the events which go to make a story of the
mechanical, physical type, in that they spring more
naturally from the human material, the people of the
fiction, unforced by any bondage to the lines of a conventional plot or intrigue. Cinderella is tied to the
slipper, and all we know of her is that her foot was
small, but Bret Harte's M'lis lives far more at large
and naturally, and so is far more interesting.
The complication of events in the older, more
mechanical type of fiction, the intrigue, has always been
known as "plot," and the term, despite its unfortunate
associations and connotations, perhaps is the best at
hand to denote the essence of the newer, more natural
type of narration, the complication of opposition between men, between man and nature, or within the
same man, which determines and shapes the events and
so generates the living substance of the whole story.
But some fictions lack completely this unifying principle of plot, presenting neither an old-fashioned intrigue
nor a natural human opposition, a true phase of life;
instead, they exhibit a mere succession of episodes —
"Sinbad the Sailor" and "Gil Bias" are examples —
interesting in themselves and by themselves, completely
independent, no one essential to the others, and told
together purely by chance. These tales, as the tend-
ency seems to be to call them — in distinction from the
story, which possesses plot and where the events function together as a whole — in no sense are works of
fictional art. They are fictions, truly, as they may be
works of art, an art purely literary, that is, but they
cannot pretend to strict fictional artistry because they
lack the principle of unity of substance. The point is of
value to enforce the general argument. A tale perfectly told in point of language, of rhetoric, is a work
of literary art, as any perfect bit of writing is a work
of literary art, but it is not a work of fictional art and
cannot be, for the definition of a tale is a fiction that
lacks unity, the fundamental artistic quality, in that
its component parts, the various events, do not function together as a whole, as steps of a progression,
but stand in juxtaposition purely by chance, the caprice
of the narrator. And one might be subtracted from the
whole, but to subtract one of its events from a story is
to destroy the fiction in its entirety, a negative test of
artistry. The writer of fiction who subconsciously regards his chosen art as predominantly literary, as a
mere matter of arranging words in pattern, has gone
far astray. His function is to estimate life, to sift out
for presentation its aspects most significant to him,
hence most interesting to some others, and to seek to
present them with maximum force by the exclusion of
all irrelevant matter, which is to achieve unity and
artistry. The substance of a story must be presented
by words apt and proper for that purpose, but the literary task is, in fact, secondary, and for the same reason
that a tale, however well told, is not a work of fictional
art.
The impossibility to unify substance by devices
merely literary and rhetorical is sufficiently obvious.
The tale is not a form of fiction lower than the story,
the fiction of plot; it is simply a different thing. The
former is a mere relation, of something, of anything,
and the only perfection it can achieve is in point of
expression; the latter is a drama, a progression, an
opposition of forces, a whole, and it can touch perfection as a drama, a work of fictional art, and also in
point of expression, a work of literary art, like the
tale. But in it painstaking manipulation of language
cannot supply defects of substance.
The matter of verbal treatment of substance is not
quite inclusive of the matter of style, of which so much
is airily said and written, for the former concerns only
fitness to substance while the latter imports a certain
individuality of rhetoric and verbal pattern. Fitness
of expression is essential to art, whether literary or
fictional, whether the work be tale or story, but real
individuality of expression, the reflection of a bent of
mind, is not an essential of literary or fictional artistry ; style is rather the accompaniment of a fine spirit
to its own particular song of life.*
* The statement that a tale may be a work of literary, but,
by definition, cannot be a work of fictional art, may seem extreme
to one who recalls the many prose fictions that are tales, in that
they lack the unifying principle of a central opposition, and yet
are interesting and striking relations by virtue of the novelty
of their matter — the case of "Sinbad the Sailor" — or because of
the engaging character of the events, plus adequate treatment
of personality — the case of "Gil Bias," "Rip Van Winkle," and
many others. Certainly the statement is novel; that it is true
is equally certain. In fact, I should incline to make complete
acceptance of it the test of an individual's comprehension of the
art, the essence of the art, of fiction. The term "fictional," of
course, is used in the special and limited sense in which alone
it can have real meaning in connection with "art." And I think
that a reader who will take pains to realize the many matters
implied by "literary" — the intelligent choice and the just and
pleasing arrangement of matter, whether or not in a true
fictional progression, as well as verbal treatment of matter —
will be the less likely to condemn my characterization of the
tale as a work of an art literary rather than fictional. These
points of classification are of small importance in one way; it
matters little whether any particular work the artistic character of which is debatable — as "Gil Bias" — is episodal, therefore
a tale, or substantially n true fictional progression, therefore
a story; but classification is essential to discussion.
III
Just as in discussing the point of form and art it
was necessary to treat of matters of substance, so, in
treating of substance, in discussing fiction as the
presentation of human experience, it will be necessary
always to imply the existence of form and frequently
to touch upon its influence; naturally my purpose is
not the ambitious one to discuss life at large, but merely
tc discuss it as it may be presented in fiction. Though
fiction as a whole is potentially inclusive of all life,
nevertheless any given story can be only itself, a given
substance in a given shape, and the profitable way to
examine the material of the story-teller, the palpitating tissue of life, real or imaginary, is to seek for and
realize the permeating tie or magnetism which is at
once the sign and essence of each symmetrical atom of
fiction-material.
As I have stated already, this unifying principle
is the principle of opposition, of dramatic opposition,
that is, wherein personalty is involved. For the writer
of stories the world of fact or of fancy, the world
he chooses or is able to see, exists as a solid tissue of
drama, an involved and mighty spectacle of the realization and defeat of human effort. He finds his separate
fables in the separate conflicts between individuals that
go to make the sum of life, real or ideal. As substance,
each story is life; as art, each is single and coherent.
By developing a dramatic opposition the writer of fiction achieves both of these conditions, to present life
as it is or might be — for life is the tussle between the
individual human spirit and its environment, personal
or impersonal — and to present the particular opposition with maximum force through directness and
singleness of appeal. He need trouble about nothing
else. All the isms of the critics, all their precise analyses and pretentious syntheses, he may forget quite
without loss to his work. Such discussion virtually is
but rough characterization of the particular story in
hand, written along lines more or less conventional for
readers more or less gullible. And it is always aridly
negative. What the writer should remember is that he
seeks to interest as completely as possible, that life as
such is supremely interesting to those who live it, and
that, because the single presentment is the more force-
ful presentment, a single phase of life, a single struggle,
should be displayed rather than an indiscriminate welter of incidents and persons.
Thus his aim to interest the able reader dictates that
the artist in fiction turn to life, to human experience as
such, for his material; his aim to interest as deeply
and corapletely as possible dictates that he select from
the whole mighty coil of physical struggle and spiritual
aspiration one single dramatic opposition. He must
show life if he really would interest at all, and he must
show a single phase of life, a single struggle, if he
would realize to the full the possibilities of his matter.
These twin necessities have come into being with
the growth of a public cultured to react to the spectacle
of life, to feel its zest and know its worth, and they
will become more urgent as the whole reading public
frees its soul from all bondage to trivial sensations,
whether the barbaric and primitive sensation of pure
wonder at a novel spectacle or the highly artificial sensation of pleasure in mere complication and mechanical ingenuity. Certainly that emancipation was not
hindered by the terrific forces that recently played upon
the world.
The deteraiinant characteristic of all fiction, short
or long", new or old, good, bad, and indifferent, whether
tale or story, is movement; something happens. The
tale passes from episode to episode, and though each is
complete in itself a reader always can look forward to
yet another. If what he has read was piquant and
interesting, he expects to find more of the sort, and is
tempted to read on. And the tale, on that account, in
a way can be said to function as a unit, to interest as a
whole. Of course there is continuity as to some person
or group of persons in every tale, and, if the author
has an eye for personality, that binding thread may
count for much, as in "Gil Bias" ; it is the events of a
tale, essentially isolated episodes, that do not function
together to a single purpose and end. Apart from his
interest in the people of the fiction, the reader of a tale
can experience continued interest only in the low sense
that he always can expect something else to happen.
In the story, on the other hand, whether unified by possession of a conventional plot-mechanism or because it
presents a true dramatic opposition, a reader not only
can look forward to future action of some sort, he can
look forward also and more specifically to a more or less
definite range of occurrence limited by the conditions of
personality and situation stated by the author at the
outset, and it needs no argument to enforce the point
that such a definite expectation is more stimulating and
causes a higher degree of suspense. The story at once
presents and solves a single specific problem. What will
this particular person do in this particular situation?
rather than the vague query, what will happen next?
is the question constantly agitating the reader of a story, and the definition of the problem, the narrow
range of conjecture left open, is precisely the condition needed to deepen interest by confining it within
bounds. The story unified by mechanism and the story
unified by a natural, unforced, dramatic opposition both
achieve this necessary concentration of attention and
conjecture; a reader who is following out to the bitter
end the involutions and compilations of a conventional
plot knows at least that the whole is working together
obscurely to a single solution, a single end ; but a story
which presents a phase of life as it is and for its own
sake subjects its reader to a further spell. He knows
that the whole fiction is pointed to a definite and conclusive end determined by the conditions of personality
and situation involved, and in addition — since the thing
is an atom of life, a plain recital of the actions and reactions of men and women at once vital and intelligible,
human, in a word — he is caught and held by the detailed attraction of the human spectacle. The swift
interplay of intellect and intuition, the rising tide of
passion, misunderstandings and miscalculations, the
alternation of stormy days and peaceful nights, the
awakening of birth and the slumber of death, the pain
and joy of labor and the ease of rest — all the great and
trivial facts of life appeal in detail and as items just
as the whole story appeals as a fact of life in itself. The
attraction of such a spectacle for the sensitive reader
is truly irresistible. Though a story is a spectacle, its
reading is an experience.
The tale, episodal and without a central movement,
was sufficient to claim the attention of simpler men in
simpler ages; the story of mechanism, of conventional
plot, largely — as written today and in the more recent
past — a product of competition with the stage and its
artificialities of intrigue, shaped itself as the artist in
fiction groped for means of appeal more incisive when
confronted by a public less naive and receptive than
the audience which had heard the wonderful or merry
fables of an older time. And the story which is true
drama, which is life, which depends for interest upon
the intrinsic value of its human spectacle, took form
beneath the hands of creators great enough to pierce
through the conventional husks of their art to the
living substance below, shut from the eyes of mere
formalists, and found a welcome from the less articulate spirits here and there who yet could react to the
vital, the profound magnetism of such matter. Like
the story which is fictional art, a forceful unity, by
virtue of a plain human opposition, the story of mechanism has to do with life and the long march of man-
kind toward distant, ever-vanishing goals, but its
human substance must follow a rigidly prearranged
course of mere physical action, its great moments of
climax must occur at definite points fixed by the
mechanism — here two characters must go into ecstasies
as father and son reunited, there the mother must lament her lost child — while the scope of personality as
such is limited by the action, for action alone can realize
character adequately in fiction, and the action is simply
that of a mechanism, mechanical and usually trite. And
smce the real interest of any fiction for an able reader
resides in the human spectacle, mechanism at the
best is inessential and at the worst is crippling. Life,
the natural actions and reactions of personality, is more
compelling than the barren workings of a plot.
It has been a long process, this passage of fiction
from tale to mechanism and from mechanism to life,
but in its final stage of development — for it can go no
further than to present life, real or ideal — the art of
the story stands supreme among all the arts in point
of capacity to speak to the whole miraculous complex
of the human soul. Poetry and music, verbal cadence
and pure harmony, through the ear can stir most
readily the still depths of instinctive being that underlie consciousness ; painting most completely can satisfy
the craving for reality — for truth — of the eye, of the
whole faculty of sight, as architecture and sculpture
most completely satisfy the eye's craving for proportion; but fiction that is life alone can satisfy at once
and completely the longing of the human mind for
stimulus to thought and the longing of the human
heart for stimulus to emotion. The art of the stage,
kindred in point of substance — life, and aim — to
stimulate mind and heart, is equally supreme where
efficient at all, but there are phases of life which
cannot be precipitated in action and speech on a few
square feet of boards ; fiction, written drama, is potentially inclusive of all life, the play, acted drama, is not.
It is not to depreciate the power of dramatic art — in
the usual narrow sense of stage-art — to assert for
fiction the primacy which is legitimately its own, standing, as it does, first in power to pleasure sense, heart,
and intellect, not one, but all, and without limitation
as to substance.
The fact of dramatic opposition, of struggle, the
essence of life and therefore of the fiction which is life,
calls for some examination in detail apart from its office
to unify a work of fiction and thereby render it a coherent work of art, a single thing of a single significance. The opposition which man must meet in his
pilgrimage through this or an ideal world may come
from his natural environment, from himself, or from
his fellows ; each bar to his heart's desire is a natural
unit of fiction; and by reviewing each in turn some
attempt may be made to cover the substance of life.
The conflict between humanity and the elemental
forces that play upon the earth, even between humanity
and the earth, sea and land, itself, can serve as sole
material for fiction, like any other opposition involving individual men. "Robinson Crusoe" is such a story ;
the best of the book contains little of social emphasis,
of the attrition of personality against personality; it
presents the long, unimpassioned strife between puny
man the the wild strength of the heavens and the sea,
his slow toil upon the obdurate land for food and
shelter. Or this primal drama may serve less to mo-
tive a fiction than to round it, to give the natural term
of the equation of life as well as the social. In his
paper on Victor Hugo's romances Stevenson has
pointed that the natural environment of "The Toilers
of the Sea" is an inherent force of the drama rather
than a mere adjunct or setting, and that is indeed the
case. Nothing of the sort can be found in English
fiction — with the exception of Defoe's greatest book —
prior to Hardy; the eighteenth century was a time
peculiarly unlikely to produce such work. But in
Hardy, whether or not influenced by the mid-Victorian
emphasis on scientific inquiry, a point that matters
little, the determinative influence of environment,
natural environment, that is, finds its way into fiction.
His people are men and women, as Scott's are
men and women, but they are shaped to the impress
of the Wessex moors in person, heart, and mind; the
countryside that cherishes and buffets them has sealed
them with its unrelaxing finger. No such principle of
natural determinism can be found in Scott, where the
rain falls only to drive the wanderer to shelter, in Austen, or in Fielding, and the seeming flash of it in
Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" is only apparent,
not real. Hardy first and almost alone in English, with
the very trifling exception of Stevenson himself in
"The Merry Men," and the very real and very promising exception of Joseph Conrad, has shown the life of
man in relation to nature as well as to himself and his
fellows.
The somewhat solitary position of the author of
"The Return of the Native" is an indication of the loss
sustained by fiction as a whole through unintelligent
insistence upon mechanism, "plot" in the narrow sense.
The opposition between man and nature presents too
little opportunity for complication and involution of
events to have attracted the attention of writers who
sought to draw the crowd by superficial mystery. But
the opposition is drama, though not in the sharp, personal sense of a conflict between individuals ; it affords
a climactic movement equally effective in sustaining
interest when once aroused; and it is a phase of life
of real human significance, hence interesting, even to
the city-dweller. Fiction is vicarious experience, and
not the least of its attraction is its offer of an escape
from life, the life the reader lives and knows. In "The
Nigger of the Narcissus" Conrad shows us old Single-
ton, bronzed by the suns of all the seas, reading Bulwer-
Lytton's "Pelham" in the forecastle, and wonders what
interest such a book could have for such a man, but
we, snug in our easy-chairs, feet on radiator, perhaps,
read Conrad's book, see all the wrath of winds and
waters play upon the laboring ship — and do not wonder
that we read. These stark phases of life in the open,
the experiences of men whom mere commerce, blind
fate, or their own unrest has sent to toil through desert
sands and arctic snow and ice, attract by virtue of a
genuine and worthy novelty, perhaps by appeal to the
ancient, inherited experience of the whole race. And
the books which show nature less as cruel destroyer
than as a cherishing if stern parent, which present the
natural as well as the social element of life, impress by
their manifest adequacy and body even those of us who
scratch paper for a living. The kiss and cuff of social
life are not the whole of humanity's troubled journey;
mankind, like an army, travels on its stomach; grain
must be sowed for reaping, and the sowers must bend
to the earth. They also serve, in life and in fiction.
Like the opposition between man and nature, an
opposition between conflicting desires or motives in the
same individual can be utilized as sole material for a
story; Stevenson's "Markheim" is an instance, where
the murderer comes to see that he is marked for failure,
even in murder, by quality of soul, and hastens to bring
the dreary farce of his life to an end. In "Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde" also, the unifying opposition is within
one man alone, the symbolism of dual personality as
a physical fact being employed for the sake of concrete realization of the opposition, the drama. Dostoievsky's "Crime and Punishment" exhibits the struggle of a soul with itself; it has the force of a scream
of agony at night. Once the irretrievable step is
taken, once the hatchet has fallen on the old woman's
head, then begins the heart-shaking spectacle of retribution as the murderer's mind feeds upon itself. Usually,
of course, the story that depends for unity upon an
inner conflict will be short; "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,"
perhaps the longest fiction we have of a strictly single
psychological emphasis, is yet somewhat brief, and
Dostoievsky was able to protract his spectacle of a
slayer's conscience as he did only by creating a little
human circle from which the unfortunate might creep
apart, a self-branded pariah. But his reactions to those
about him relate only to his crime, a phase of himself.
Thus the struggle of man with himself may motive
a story, though the intrinsic difficulty to present such
matter, to devise action to give movement to an opposition so intangible, is much greater than any difficulty
to develop a story more thoroughly physical in texture.
But the inner conflict, the indecision of the soul, is of
further use to the writer of fiction. His work may be
of the more usual sort, of a social emphasis, presenting
the competition of men among themselves for love or
money, place or power ; still, if he would be sufficiently-
specific as to personality, he must show directly, not
by mere inference from speech and action, the inner
workings of his people, at least of the one from whose
viewpoint he has chosen to narrate, in whole or in part.
The writer's object is the same as in the rest of his
work — to interest and subject a reader by developing
a dramatic opposition — and he must realize personality
with definition and adequately because the drama is a
conflict of specific personalities; if the conflicting
forces, the opposed persons, are not shown as probable
sources of the particular drama, the drama itself, the
whole physical and psychical complex of action and
motive, becomes unintelligible, lifeless and formal, non-
existent, indeed. It is not so much a matter of char-
acterization, strictly, of dwelling upon personality for
its own sake, as it is a matter of clearing and throwing
into relief the obscure spirit-roots of action. The conflict is not within a single personality, but the genesis
of the opposed motives in the opposed persons must be
given if the interwoven texture of the spectacle as true
experience is to be preserved. It is only in feeble fiction that we find the pure-black villain or pure-white
hero, the one oppressively forbidding, the other oppressively virtuous, or, worse, unreally forbidding and unreally virtuous. In real life or a life evolved by a competent imagination the implications of personality are
delicate and finely shaded, neither to be neglected nor
smeared in black and white save at risk of total failure.
The plain fact, of course, is that genuine and worthy
novelty of story at this late period can be achieved only
by dealing with the more subtle and unobtrusive
ruances of soul and intellect — the task successfully attempted by Butler in "The Way of All Flesh," and by
Conrad in "Victory" with the personality of Heyst.
Such shadings cannot be developed in action without
first being stated; at least there must be some comment, some interpretation during the action.
The social struggle, the opposition of man and
man, is the third fundamental phase of life which may
serve as artistically coherent material for fiction. With
the other phases, the struggle of man with himself and
of man with nature, it makes the sum of life, real or
ideal, probable, possible, or conceivable. Also, it is the
broadest of the three phases by virtue of the infinite
complication and diversity of man's life in relation to
his fellows, the million possible directions for his activity, the million satisfactions for which he may strive.
To present the attrition between man and man is peculiarly the function of the novel, in the strict sense of a
spectacle of persons and manners, with its insistence
upon socialites and the busy, workaday turmoil of
the world, but such material is utilized by fiction of all
forms and types; the romance, for instance, likewise
deals with men and women in opposition, reading their
fates in the cold or glowing eyes of their adversaries,
though the form is less specifically concrete than the
novel as to its human material, even its happenings,
tending, rather, in the direction of a greater abstraction and ideality. Most of the stories we read, from
"Tom Jones" to the latest work of the newest author,
show us this most obvious side of life, man against
woman and against man, clique against clique, and
nation against nation. As in the other sorts of struggle
involving personality, there is a climactic movement or
progression as the opposed forces come to closer grips,
until some one force prevails, and the story ends because the opposition has ended. It is needless to expatiate on the life of man in relation to his fellows as
fiction-material, for the matter has been utilized as
story-stuff from the beginning, not always intelligently,
with understanding that its worth was as experience,
not as mechanism, but nevertheless utilized in some
shape.
The fact that man has relations with himself, with
nature, and with other men determines three phases
of human experience ; all or any may serve as the sub-
stance of fiction, and all have been touched upon. It
remains to discuss briefly another simple scale of differences in life, in human experience, which exists in
fact and which determines the artistic character of any
story, a phase of life presented for what it is. I have
reference, to state it in terms of life, apart from fictional art, to the difference between typical human
experience and individual, personal human experience.
The first, presented in fiction, results in the story,
simply, without qualification; the second, so presented,
results in the story of character.
If a writer chooses to deal with persons of no
marked idiosyncracy, merely on that account he must
choose also a unifying struggle or opposition involving
traits or motives such as are common to nearly all men,
as jealousy, the will to struggle for bare life, the will
to love. But if he chooses to deal with persons of a
high individuality, unique as only the individual soul
can be unique, he must devise also a unifying conflict
involving the peculiar traits and motives of his people,
as Conrad, in "Victory," devised an opposition adequate
to realize Heyst's most striking and most peculiar attribute, his wish to withdraw from life to escape its
blows. The difference is between typical human experience and personal, individual human experience; the
one story is the story, simply, with emphasis, it may be
said, on the events, the forces of personality involved
being so common ; the other is the story of character,
with emphasis on personality, the events having no
value except in relation to the particular — and peculiar
— persons. As Stevenson has said, to write a story
one either must take a sequence of events and create
people competent to enact them — a process likely to
result in a spectacle of typical human experience, or else
take certain characters, and then devise action to involve their peculiar attributes, a process likely to result
in a story of character.*
The point that human experience is a complex of
man's relations with nature, with himself, and with
his fellows will be useful for the writer to remember
when searching for material ; the point that experience
is either typical or individual will be useful for him to
remember that he may know precisely what is beneath
his hands, once his story, his phase of life, is found. I
have no intention to insist pedantically that a story
should present but one single kind of human opposition,
social, natural, or psychological, should present highly
individualized people or else mere human dynamos of
action ; it is only that one cannot discuss these matters
at all except in order, each exclusively. In the interests of artistry, force of appeal, that is, each story
should have one central motive of human opposition
natural, social, or psychological, but incidental, subordinate oppositions of the other sorts usually will be
necessary to round the whole, to reproduce the complete spectacle of life, whatever its dominant emphasis. And as a matter of fact people in life or story are either somewhat negative, typical, that is, of the broad outlines of their race and time, or else positive and individual, men, not man.
* Stevenson also mentions the story of atmosphere, and
cites "The Merry Men" as an example. In his phrasing, it is.
an attempt to express the "sentiment" with which a stretch of
coast affected him. The type — Poe's own by right of first invention and analysis — seeks to produce upon a reader a single
emotional impression, and stresses personality even less than
the story of typical human experience. Since the characters
must function in deepening the particular emotional impression, they are little more than personifications of the "sentient" itself — as Darnaway in "The Merry Men," or Usher in
"The Fall of the House of Usher" — and on that account the type
of story is so little normal that it may be disregarded here.
Statements such as these, that insist upon the
plain, matter-of-fact character of the fiction-artist's
material, that emphasize the necessity, the utility, at
least, to present life as it is seen in fact or guessed in
dream, but always as life, not as mechanism, are apt
to win acceptance from a reader so easily that they are
as speedily forgotten, should he chance to attempt a
story himself. To reinforce my armament that fiction
seeks to interest by exhibiting human experience as
such, I will ask the reader to consider for a moment
the character of the bulk of critical comment on fiction.
How does the professional estimator weigh the books
that fall upon his desk? Usually he has a little to say
about form and technique, whether or not he knows
anything about such matters; usually he has a little
to say about the author's artistic affiliations, the tendencies he represents or goes against; but always he
has much to say upon the human values of the book,
existent or non-existent. He takes up the characters,
one by one, and inquires whether they are natural and
believable or mere author-twitched puppets. He estimates them as real people in a real world, commenting
upon their moral and intellectual qualities, their attraction or repulsion. He seeks their motives, to inquire
whether they are adequate, and he views their acts,
to see whether they accord with the motives developed.
In a word, through the characters he estimates the
story as a phase of life; if to him it appears a thing
of real human significance, not a compound of trivialities, he praises it, but if the whole is a vapid spectacle
of vapid automatons he condemns it. And justly.
The function of any story is to interest competent
readers, an end to be achieved only by presenting life,
the experience of the individual body and soul as it is
or might be; the function of the writer of any story
is to search the life he knows or creates in order to
find and reveal its compelling phases. No other task
can satisfy an able mind ; no other result can effect the
stimulation of a reader implied by the word interest.
For to entertain, merely, is not to interest. Life, then,
simply as such, without qualification or exclusion of
parts, is the substance, the material of fiction. And
by the inherent nature of the vital process, the opposition between the living individual and his or her environment, all life is comprised of separate progressions
of opposition which are the coherent units of fiction as
well as of life itself.
IV
The ultimate utility of fiction — for all arts have a
cultural utility, a capacity to develop in those who
enjoy them new powers of self-realization, new capacities to react to the magnetism of life — is not far to
seek ; all knowledge is empirical, the human mind learns
only through experience, primary or secondary, and
fiction is vicarious experience. I would not suggest
that the inveterate reader of stories profits essentially
by the great mass of facts he must absorb, for mere
information, undigested and incoherent, can impart
neither strength of mind nor soul. But contact,
through fiction, with other lives and other times, other
aims and other fears, cannot fail to correct a narrow
conception of the limits of human experience and to
initiate or deepen realization of the dignity and worth
of life. The written spectacle of life, real or ideal, at
once broadens our view of the world, and concentrates,
intensifies it ; we see our fellows seeking strange coasts
beneath strange skies, and we see them intimately,
knowing the urge of spirit or circumstance that has
driven them forth and the hope or despair that buoys
up or weighs down their hearts. And this intimacy of
vicarious experience, this microscopic examination of
alien souls, takes us from our accustomed ruts of
thought and feeling into new spheres of emotion and
understanding where we may experience the zest and
sting of life as something fresh and new, not an old
routine of outworn sensations. It is this capacity of
fiction to reanimate the soul, to soften or steel the heart
for the sweet or bitter fortunes of each new day, that
marks the high station of the art and invests it with
vitality to go forward with the race and endure. In
our bustling, industrial world, sculpture, for instance,
perhaps pictorial art, tends to become academic, the
preoccupation of few artists and a narrow public, but
fiction, as it has ceased to be a toy and has embraced
the stirring life of man, has become a significant fact
and an influential force, significant as an interpretation, influential as a .means to wake the multitude to
the worth of the life they are called upon to five.
At once to present and interpret life, thereby to
interest, subject, and influence its readers, a story, a
form of art, must depend for artistic coherence upon
the substantial, actual coherence of the phase of life
with which it is concerned. And actual coherence,
true unity, therefore, both of form and substance, is
present only in the various human oppositions that
confusedly intermingle to form the quick, breathing
tissue of life as a whole. The task and office of the
artist in fiction is to detect with ready insight the
human significance of some particular thread of opposition, to strip from it the obscuring tangle of other
and immaterial oppositions, and, finally, to body it
forth for what it is, a logical progression evolving from
its own proper forces of personality and nature, the
whole interfused with the light of his superior intellect,
the warmth of his warmer heart.
If the task be performed, if the central drama be
significant and adequately exhibited, the writer's basic
aim to interest will have been achieved, and his collateral function as an artist, to enforce realization of
the worth of fife, will have been fulfilled.
In a review, published in 1841, of Bulwer-Lytton's
"Night and Morning," Poe says, after defining plot as
"that in which no part can be displaced without ruin
to the whole": "Drawing near the denouement of his
tale, our novelist had proceeded so far as to render it
necessary that means should be devised for the dis-covery of the missing marriage record. This record is
in the old bureau ... at Fernside. . . . Two things
now strike the writer — first, that the retrieval of the
hero's fortune should be brought about by no less a
personage than the heroine — by some lady who should
in the end be his bride — and, secondly, that this lady
must procure access to Fernside. Up to this period in
the narrative, it had been the design to make Camilla
Beaufort, Phihp's cousin, the heroine ; but in such case,
the cousin and Lord Lilburne being friends, the docu-
ment must have been obtained by fair means ; whereas
foul means are the most dramatic. There would have
been no difficulties in introducing Camilla into the
house in question. . . . Moreover, in getting the paper,
she would have had no chance of getting up a scene.
The lady is therefore dropped as the heroine; Mr.
Bulwer retraces his steps, creates Fanny, brings Philip
to love her, and employs Lilburne (a courtly villain,
invented for all the high dirty work, as De Burgh
Smith for all the low dirty work of the story) — em-
ploys Lilburne to abduct her to Fernside, where the
capture of the document is at length (more dramatically than naturally) contrived."
I do not reproduce this from any desire to injure
Poe's reputation — he, poor fellow, was not responsible
for the books he had to review — but merely to show,
as emphatically as possible in brief space, the essential
feebleness and frivolity of the story that is mechanism
and not life. In such fiction there is literally nothing
to interest a reader by virtue of its plain human worth
and significance. "Documents" — dear to the heart of
the fiction-mechanic because a mechanism must have
some such hard, physical pivot — are lost and recovered ; it is all as devoid of the breath of hf e as a stone,
and would not interest an idiot. Consider Joseph Conrad, in "Falk," that grisly story of the mate of a ship,
dismasted and lost in antarctic seas, who lurks by the
fresh-water pump and shoots down the men as they
come to drink that he may devour them and preserve
the life within him that will not let him die. "Why
continue the story of that ship, that story before
which, with its fresh-water pump, like a spring of
death, its man with the weapon, the sea ruled by iron
necessity, its spectral band swayed by terror and hope,
its mute and unhearing heaven? — the fable of the
'Flying Dutchman' with its convention of crime and
its sentimental retribution fades like a graceful wraith,
like a wisp of white mist." Or the same writer, in the
preface to "The Nigger of the Narcissus" ;".... the
artist . . . speaks to our capacity for delight and
wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives :
to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain : to the latent
feeling of fellowship with all creation — and to the
subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits
together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the
solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in
illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each
other, which binds together all humanity — the dead to
the living and the living to the unborn.
"It is only some such train of thought, or rather
or feeling, that can in a measure explain the aim of the
attempt, made in the tale which follows, to present an
unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless. For, if there any part of truth in the belief confessed above, it
becomes evident that there is not a place of splendor or
a dark comer of the earth that does not deserve, if
only a passing glance of wonder and pity."
The artist in fiction has the world before him, the
world of fact about him or the world of conception
within; he has but to choose. From all the four corners of the earth he may catch the enduring and vivid
voice of humanity crying for expression, in whispers
of love and moans of pain, resonant in victory, cravenly
whimpering, it may be, in defeat, but always speaking
loudly to him and to all men of the heart-shaking interest of the fate of the individual soul, passing by obscure
ways to unknown ends. And he has before him the
world of books, the work of his brothers in spirit gone
before, wherein he may trace the living current of the
fiction that is life from its small and unregarded source
to its full and much analyzed tide of the recent past
and the present, a task, a pleasure that can react upon
him only to his profit, the gain of his own work. Let
him first realize his function and his task — to interest,
to do his part in making the race more keenly alive, a
finer human precipitate; let him fire his mind with
curiosity and warm his heart with sympathy''; then, if
he is chosen of the gods, let him snare in a few drops
of ink a soul in its supreme moment of triumph or
agony. Though the soul and its agony or triumph be
poor and common, of the earth, earthy, the triumph
of the artist will not. For by the singleness of his aim,
the repeated suggestion to one end of word and sub-
stance, he will have seized from out the turmoil of life a shining or sombre vision of joy or terror, not less
human than the reality because presented with some-
thing of the emphasis of obsession, not less worthy as
art because it is life and not lies.
NOTICE
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BOOKS FOR WRITERS
Roget's Thesaurus, (New large type edition) $1.65
The Writer's Book, Compiled by William R. Kane 2.50
1001 Places To Sell Manuscripts,
Compiled by William R. Kane 2.00
Practical Authorship, James Knapp Reeve 1.50
The Fiction Factory, John Milton Edwards 1.50
Photoplay Making, Howard T. Dimick 1.00
The American Short Story, Elias Lieberman 1.00
Points About Poetry, Donald G. French 60
The Editor Manuscript Record 60
Rhymes and Meters, Horatio Winslow 50
Fiction Writer's Workshop, Duncan Francis Young 50
The Way Into Print 25
Essays on Authorship 25
What Editor's Want 25
How to Be a Reporter 15
How to Write a Short Story, Leslie W. Quirk 50
The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, Georges Polti 1.20
Eighty-Eight Ways to Make Money by Writing,
Homer Cvoy 1.00
Idols and Ideals, Charles Leonard Moore 1.75
An Alphabet Book for Writers, F. G. Webster 1.00
Writing for the Trade Press, Frank Farrington 1.00
The Technique of Fiction Writing, Robert Saunders Dowst. 1.75
Thoughts and Opinions on Writing, William R. Kane 15
The Making of Contemporary Verse, Marguerite Wilkinson. .35
The Soldier's Scrap Book, Compiled by William R. Kane. . . .60
A Theory of Prose Fiction, Robert Saunders Dowst 60
The Newspaper Correspondent's Guide, Alton D. Spencer. . .60
The Country Publisher, E. A. Little 75
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