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’’’
