History of Fiction – Henry James

History of Fiction – Henry James

" Rare are the writers in whom there is such a happy coalescence of critic and creator; who produce great works and at the same time major criticism. “In every century we have had but one or two-Ben Jonson and Dryden, Coleridge and Arnold and in our times the Americans —James and Eliot”—observes Leon Edel in his introduction to The House of Fiction by Henry James. This is partly true-partly because; quite a few other names can be added to this list of distinguished creative writers indulging in criticism as well. To mention some at random, we have Dr. Johnson , Wordsworth and Shelley among the poet-critics; and a host of them in the field of fiction right from Fielding down to Forster. In fact, almost every one of the novelists has aired his views on the art of fiction-either in defence of his own performance, or in dis­paragement of what the others have done. This disparagement of the predecessors starts with Cervantes, as you know. It was he that started that new literary genre as a revolt against the Romances of old. He decried those  ‘unnatural, literary monsters,’ and gave to the world his immortal classic Don Quixote. In the course of that monumental work, Cervantes lays down his views on the novel.

His successor in England was Henry Fielding, whose first novel—The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams written in imitations of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. In his preface to Joseph Andrews, Field­ing defines the novels as a “comic epic-poem in prose”. He calls it an ‘epic-poem’ because, “when any kind of writing contains all its other parts such as fable, action, characters, sentiments and diction, and is deficient in metre only; it seems I think, reasonable to refer to it as the epic. It differs from comedy in that its action is more extended and com­prehensive it contains a much larger circle of incidents; and "introduces a greater variety of characters. It differs form the serious romance in its fable and action in this; that as is one those are grave and solemn, so in the other they are light and ridiculous; it differs in its characters, by introducing persons of inferior rank and consequently of inferior manners—, lastly, in it sentiment and diction, by presenting the ludicrous instead of the sublime”. And in writing this, “ we should ever confine ourselves strictly to Nature, from the just imitation of which, will, flow all the pleasure we can this way convey to a sensible reader”. And he concludes: “Though everything is copied from the book of Nature, and scarce a character or action produced which I have not taken from my own observations and experience; yet I have used the utmost care to obscure the persons by such different circumstances, degrees and colours that it will be impossible to guess at them.”

In his magnum opus—Tom Jones-Fielding looked upon himself as the founder and lawgiver of a new province of writing. The introductory chapters to each one of the books there are looked upon as resting places where the novelist talks to the readers as their friend, philosopher and guide and tells them what to expect next in the novel, or how to appreciate a character or an incident that follows. In these chapters of reflection, Fielding lays down the qualification necessary for a novelist as genius, learning, experience in line and a good heart. He warns the critic not to be a reptile but to judge with understanding. He asserts that his fare is Human Nature, and having been admitted behind this great theatre of Nature, he paints humanity as he has found it. He confines himself to the middle and lower classes, in country rather than town, because he knew them there intimately. Therefore, a firsthand knowledge of men and manners was the bedrock on which Fielding built his comic-epics, which are all alive with swarming individuals. And this new writing got the stamp of approval of the literary dictator of the day, Dr. Johnson, who wrote in Rambler No. 4 (175O) that: “The works of fiction with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind”. They were not merely “just copies of human manners”, but they would also serve as “ lectures of conduct, and introductions to life”. This was how a new species of writing hit upon luckily by Richardson in Pamela (1740), got established in England by Fielding who claimed that his Joseph Andrews (1742) was “a kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language.” And this new species of writing, continues to be ‘new’ even to this day, in spite of (or is it because of?) its being handled by scores of writers—men and women, young and old rich and poor, scholars and laymen. What is the secret of its vitality? How has this elastic malleable form of literature shaped itself in the course of these two hundred and odd years?

Even as Fielding has given “a local habitation and a name” to this new form of writing, his contemporaries were shaping it in different forms to suit different purposes. Richardson used the epistolary form to moralize and show “ Virtue Rewarded” and “Virtue Triumphant” in his two novels Pamela and Clarissa. ““There was a great difference between them, as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate”. Fielding’s “was but the knowledge of the outside of a clockwork machine while (Richardson’s) was that of all the finer springs and movement of the inside “. A dial-plate novelist like Fielding creates out of the collections of mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, which he calls his  ‘characters’ an illusion of vivid and vigorous comic life, an illusion strengthened in Fielding’s case by the adroit variations of ironic tone in the author’s personal commentary. The “inner-workings” novelist like Richardson is more interested in what makes ‘character’; his real concern is with what we call personality: he explores beneath the surface appearance of things to draw near to the central areas of tragic experience. (Is it not this that Henry James and his school of stream of consciousness technique novelists do in their novels?). So, even as the novel was being defined as “a comic epic-poem in prose” Richardson was stressing the tragic aspect of it, as if to prove that comedy and tragedy are but the two sides of the same coin called life.

Similarly, even as Fielding and Smollett were stressing the ‘fable’ and ‘action’ in their picaresque novels, their contemporary Sterne was shifting the emphasis on to character. His humorous (in more senses than one) novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman is built round the undying trio— Walter Shandy, Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim- The last two are but variations of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They are on a lower plane, perhaps, but the relation between them is full of beauty and humour. But what is more significant about this novel is that it is no longer a chronicle of contemporary life and manners “Sterne invented for English literature the fantasia—novel, which could be a channel for outpouring of the author’s own personality, idiosyncrasy, humors and opinions. Instead of form there was apparently formlessness; but only apparently, for Sterne was the master of his .own improvisation. Sterne may therefore be called a liberator— even the first of the ‘expressionists’. His success left the novel the most flexible of all literary forms.

If Sterne used the novel humourously to exhibit his sentimentality} Dr. Johnson used it with dignity to express the vanity of human wishes in Rasselas, the adventures of an Abyssinian prince. Though it is in the form of an adventure story, it may also be looked upon as symbolic of the eternal quest for happiness; and the “conclusion where nothing is concluded” is typical of the unending quest that is going on even to this day. Could you recognize this theme of quest in contemporary fiction? In addition, Dr Johnson shifted the place and time of action from contemporary England to Abyssinian past.

This shifting of time and place of action is more marked in what is familiarly called the historical novel, the founder of which, Horace Walpole, was also a contemporary of Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne. His novel Castle of Otranto, “ though slight and even a little absurd has the importance of being the first of its kind in English. It was written in conscious reaction against the domesticities of Richardson, and sought both to substitute for the interest of the present the appeal of the past, and to extend the world of experience by the addition of the mysterious and the supernatural. The performance is bungling; but the design is original and effective. Walpole

gave us the first ‘Gothic’ romance.”

However, this did pot deter a writer like Goldsmith form bringing it back to the English countryside. His only novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, is an excellent example of domestic comedy. “Its power lives in its unforced range from the world of idyllic simplicity to the world of complete rascaldom.”

It was this domestic comedy of the English countryside that Jane Austin perfected in her half a dozen novels. In her hands the English novel was no longer a comic epic ; it became a country house comedy. The technique’ of the novel had undergone a revolution. It was no longer the epic narrative that the reader was listening to ; he was witnessing the drama of life being enacted before his mental eyes. The voice of novelist was no longer to be heard; the novelist had erased herself completely, and allowed the characters to talk and reveal themselves. Instead of being a ‘comic epic’ the novel had become a ‘pocket theatre’.

When Jane Austen was carving her “criticism of life on two inches of ivory” with her inimitable feminine felicity and charm, Sir Walter Scott was extending the frontiers of the novel by writing his Historical Romances. Waverly was an entirely new phenomenon in the world of novel-new setting, in incident, in character, in historical interest -and in the authoritative touch of a master’s hand.” This “ardent worshipper of the past” breathed new life into the dry bones of history and made the past live before the mental eyes of his readers,

“With him, romance was not primarily the romance of love, but the general romance of human life of the world and its activities, more especially, of the warring adventurous past.... The vogue of Scott extended to Europe and greatly influenced the course of romantic story.”

Nineteenth century English literature is dominated by novels. You know what twists and turns; what depth and dignity the form got in the hands of novelists like Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy. If Dickens and Thackeray appeared to be continuing the tradition of Fielding, George Eliot and Hardy appear to stress the tragic view of life like Richardson. However, note the change in technique.

The novel is no longer epistolary; it has forged a novel method to lay bare the working of the human mind—and the human heart as well. There are wheels within wheels, which the novelist tries to explore and expose in portraying his characters. The emphasis is no longer on the external features of the characters (as in Dickens), or on their talk (as In Jane Austin), or even on their action; it is on the ‘why’ it is the Motif of it all that we ‘see’ in these novels. The novel is no longer a ‘comic epic’ or a pocket theatre, it has changed over from the epical to the lyrical- It is ‘an impression not an argument’, as Hardy has put it.

It was at this stage of the development of the English novel that two distinguished ‘foreigners’—Henry James and Joseph Conrad gate crashed into the House of Fiction with their new theories and techniques. James was a scholar who had studied the French and Russian novelists carefully, and wanted to import their, form and ‘depth’ into the English novel, which he somehow felt, was rather formless and lacking in depth. He was a conscientious artist who took his art seriously, and wanted others to recognize the art of fiction as one of the fine arts. So he wrote quite a lot on the novelists he had admired, pointing out the reasons for his admiration. He tried to imbibe all that was best in them, and shaped his novels, always with an eye on ‘form’. In his prefaces to his own novels— like Bernard Shaw in his prefaces to his plays-James aired his ‘ views on the art of fiction, always taking care to justify his own performance. These prefaces, together with his studies of other novelists, form a considerable quantum of critical literature on the art of fiction Almost a parallel to this can be seen in the writings of two other later novelists. E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. These three form a formidable trio of novelist critics like the formidable pentagon of poet critics-Dry den, Wordsworth, Cole ridge, Arnold, and T. S. Eliot.

What, then, are the views of this ‘only real scholar in the art’ on the art of fiction? The essay which bears that title; and which you have to study with great care was written in reply to a lecture delivered by Walter Besant—a minorVictorian novelistand historian at The Royal Institution on 25 April 1884. Besant had put into form certain of his ideas on the mystery of story telling in his lecture, and James examines them in the light of his own scholarship and experience in the field of fiction.

At the very outset he observes that the English novel ‘had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it- of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison.. But he admits that he has not the courage to say that it was the worse for it, nor to say that it had any taint of incompleteness, about it. Still he feels that the English novel was naïf, and the time had come for it to lose its naiveté. This type of tightrope walking by the scholar-critic who is prepared to strike but afraid to wound, is amusing. He is glad the era of discussion had opened; and asserts that “Art lives upon discussion, upon curiosity upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints…Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilising when they are frank and sincere.” Therefore, he justifies this public discussion with Walter Besant on the art of fiction.

“The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life” (Hadn’t Fielding said the same?) ‘When it relinquishes this attempt, the same attempt that we see on the canvas of the painters, it will have arrived at a very strange pass. It is not expected of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven: and the analog between the art of tile painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the different quality of the vehicle, is the same, their success is the same. They may learn from each other, they may explain and sustain each other, their cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of another.” This long quotation must tell you how James looked upon the novel as a Portrait—” a prose picture of life,” as he has put it elsewhere. He emphasize the analogy and insists ‘ on the fact that has the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel.” {Does it not echo the words of Fielding who had insisted on calling his novels ‘histories?) What is common between the historian and the novelist is to represent and illustrate the past,” but the novelist has something more to do as M he has at once so much in common with the philosopher and the painter.” To combine the three in one, the novelist requires extraordinary skill; and so his work must be looked upon asone of the fine arts, deserving in its turn all the honour and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved for the successful profession of music, poetry, painting (and) architecture .

Then he speaks of the fear “ in our Protestant Communities” that Art is “ opposed in some mysterious mannerto morality, to amusement to instruction.” They grant that literature should be either instructive or amusing or both, but “ there is in many minds an impression that these artistic preoccupations, the search for form, contribute to neither and interfere indeed with both.” In the same ironic vein he speaks of “many people who read novels as an exercise in skipping”, who naturally “ shallnot be distracted from this pleasure by any tiresome analysis, or description”. Such readers expect the ‘ending’of a novel to be like that of a good dinner, a course of desert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes.” He refuses such views on fiction vehemently, and raises his eloquent voice “ to call attention to the fact that it is at once as free and serious a branch of literature as any other.” He is aware that “it has been vulgarized, like all other kinds of literature like every thing else to-day.” But he is certain that the bad novel will be swept into some unvisited limbo, and that the good novel “sub stats and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection.”

Then he poses the question as to what we mean by a ‘ good ‘ novel, and answers that it must be interesting. “The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this results (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable—They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in proportions as they reveal a particular mind, different from others. Novel is in its broadest definition a personal a direct impression of life that to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say.”“ He then pleads for the liberty of the artist to shape the form to suit his ‘impression of life.’ “The advantage the luxury, as well as the torment and the responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt—no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, success. His mannerism his secret. He cannot disclose it as a general thing if he would, he would be at a loss to teach it to others/’ It is purely personal.

Then he summarises the views of Besant and accepts most of them as almost axiomatic That the novelist must write from his experience; that his characters must be real and such as might be met within actual life’’ that one should centre one’s notes in a common-place book ; that once figures should be clear in outline ;that making them clear by some trick of speech or of carriage is a bad method ; and ‘describing them at length’ is a worse one; that English Fiction should have a ‘ conscious moral purpose,: that ‘ it is almost impossible to estimate too highly the value of careful workmanship that is of style : that the most important point of all is the story, ‘the story is every thing1—these are principles with most of which it is surely impossible not to sympathize’. But he has his own way of explaining the two important words in the quotation—reality and experience-”The characters, the situation, which strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most,but the measure of reality is very difficult to fix The reality of Quixote or of Mr Micawber is a very delicate shade, it is a reality so coloured by the author’s vision that, vivid as it may be, one would hesitate to propose it as a model — Humanity is immense and reality, has a myriad form ; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not. So it is left to the individual’ reader to judge the ‘reality’ of a given situation or character, depending on his ‘experience’ What kind of experience is intended, and addressed to the adults) “ There are certain things which it is generally agreed not to discuss, not even to mention, before young people.” However, this negative attitude does not make the novel any the more moral. Surely, “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 park able of the substance of beauty and truth’ To be constituted of such elements is to my vision to have purpose enough.

He concludes the essay with an exhortation to the youth aspirant in the art of fiction to be ‘ sincere’T’y and catch the colour of life itself, Remember that your first duty is to be as complete as possible—to make as perfect a work. Be generous and dedicate and pursue the prize.

To put it in e nutshell, James has viewed the art of fiction irom the artist’s point of view. He has tried to establish that. The novel is a 4 prose picture ‘ of life. The novelist must “see that actual, and ‘point it’. He must have the freedom to select the u impressions f> and to give them a definite “from’’. His aim is to embody M truth and beauty M as he sees it and make it •’ interesting to his readers’’’