Context
From The Art of Fiction
Henry James
The only obligation to which in advance we
may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary,
is that it be interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it,
but it is the only one I can think of. The ways it is at liberty to
accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable,
and such as can only suffer from being marked out or fenced in by
prescription. They are as various as the temperament of man, and they
are successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind,
different from others. A 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. The tracing of a line
to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a
limitation of that freedom and a suppression of that very thing that we
are most curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated
after the fact: then the author’s choice has been made, his standard
has been indicated; then we can follow lines and directions and compare
tones and resemblances. Then in a word we can enjoy one of the most
charming of pleasures, we can estimate quality, we can apply the test
of execution. The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is
most personal to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the
luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is
that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant—no limit
to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. Here it
is especially that he works, step by step, like his brother of the
brush, of whom we may always say that he has painted his picture in a
manner best known to himself. His manner is his secret, not necessarily
a jealous one. He cannot disclose it as a general thing if he would; he
would be at a loss to teach it to others. I say this with a due
recollection of having insisted on the community of method of the
artist who paints a picture and the artist who writes a novel. The
painter is able to teach the rudiments of his practice, and it
is possible, from the study of good work (granted the aptitude), both
to learn how to paint and to learn how to write. Yet it remains true,
without injury to the rapprochement, that the literary artist
would be obliged to say to his pupil much more than the other, “Ah,
well, you must do it as you can!” It is a question of degree, a matter
of delicacy. If there are exact sciences, there are also exact arts,
and the grammar of painting is so much more definite that it makes the
difference. I
ought to add, however, that if Mr. Besant says at the beginning of his
essay that the “laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with as
much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and
proportion,” he mitigates what might appear to be an extravagance by
applying his remark to “general” laws, and by expressing most of these
rules in a manner with which it would certainly be unaccommodating to
disagree. That the novelist must write from his experience, that his
“characters must be real and such as might be met with in actual life;”
that “a young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid
descriptions of garrison life,” and “a writer whose friends and
personal experiences belong to the lower middle-class should carefully
avoid introducing his characters into society;” that one should enter
one’s notes in a common-place book; that one’s 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,” that “the story is everything”: these are principles
with most of which it is surely impossible not to sympathize. That
remark about the lower middle-class writer and knowing his place is
perhaps rather chilling; but for the rest I should find it difficult to
dissent from any one of these recommendations. At the same time, I
should find it difficult positively to assent to them, with the
exception, perhaps, of the injunction as to entering one’s notes in a
common-place book. They scarcely seem to me to have the quality that
Mr.Besant attributes to the rules of the novelist—the “precision and
exactness” of “the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion.” They
are suggestive, they are even inspiring, but they are not exact, though
they are doubtless as much so as the case admits of: which is a proof
of that liberty of interpretation for which I just contended. For
the value of these different injunctions—so beautiful and so vague—is
wholly in the meaning one attaches to them. 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 Don 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: one would expose
one’s self to some very embarrassing questions on the part of a pupil.
It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you
possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a
recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense, and
reality has a myriad forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the
flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not; as for
telling you in advance how your nosegay should be composed, that is
another affair. It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that
one must write from experience; to our supposititious aspirant such a
declaration might savour of mockery. What kind of experience is
intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited,
and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge
spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of
consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It
is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is
imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it
takes itself to the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses
of the air into revelations. The young lady living in the village has
only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair
(as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to
say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that,
imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these
gentlemen. I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling
me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to
give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French
Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about
this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar
opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in
Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the
household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were
seated at a table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it
lasted only a moment, but the moment was experience. She had got her
direct personal impression, and she had turned out her type. She knew
what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of
having seen what it was to be French, so that she converted these ideas
into a concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she
was blessed with the faculty which when you give an inch it takes an
ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than
any accident of residence or place in the social scale. The power to
guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to
judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in
general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any
particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to
constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in
the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of
impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience,
just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe.
Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, “Write from
experience and experience only,” I should feel that this was rather a
tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, “Try to
be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”
