The Craft of Fiction | Page 7

disposes. And
thus the critic receives his guidance, and his work begins.
No selection, no arrangement is required of him; the new world that is
laid before him is the world of art, life liberated from the tangle of
cross-purposes, saved from arbitrary distortion. Instead of a continuous,
endless scene, in which the eye is caught in a thousand directions at
once, with nothing to hold it to a fixed centre, the landscape that opens
before the critic is whole and single; it has passed through an
imagination, it has shed its irrelevancy and is compact with its own
meaning. Such is the world in the book--in Tolstoy's book I do not say;
but it is the world in the book as it may be, in the book where
imagination and execution are perfectly harmonized. And in any case
the critic accepts this ordered, enhanced display as it stands, better or

worse, and uses it all for the creation of the book. There can be no
picking and choosing now; that was the business of the novelist, and it
has been accomplished according to his light; the critic creates out of
life that is already subject to art.
But his work is not the less plastic for that. The impressions that
succeed one another, as the pages of the book are turned, are to be built
into a structure, and the critic is missing his opportunity unless he can
proceed in a workmanlike manner. It is not to be supposed that an artist
who carves or paints is so filled with emotion by the meaning of his
work--the story in it--that he forgets the abstract beauty of form and
colour; and though there is more room for such sensibility in an art
which is the shaping of thought and feeling, in the art of literature, still
the man of letters is a craftsman, and the critic cannot be less. He must
know how to handle the stuff which is continually forming in his mind
while he reads; he must be able to recognize its fine variations and to
take them all into account. Nobody can work in material of which the
properties are unfamiliar, and a reader who tries to get possession of a
book with nothing but his appreciation of the life and the ideas and the
story in it is like a man who builds a wall without knowing the
capacities of wood and clay and stone. Many different substances, as
distinct to the practised eye as stone and wood, go to the making of a
novel, and it is necessary to see them for what they are. So only is it
possible to use them aright, and to find, when the volume is closed, that
a complete, coherent, appraisable book remains in the mind.
And what are these different substances, and how is a mere reader to
learn their right use? They are the various forms of narrative, the forms
in which a story may be told; and while they are many, they are not
indeed so very many, though their modifications and their commixtures
are infinite. They are not recondite; we know them well and use them
freely, but to use them is easier than to perceive their demands and their
qualities. These we gradually discern by using them consciously and
questioningly--by reading, I mean, and reading critically, the books in
which they appear. Let us very carefully follow the methods of the
novelists whose effects are incontestable, noticing exactly the manner
in which the scenes and figures in their books are presented. The scenes

and figures, as I have said, we shape, we detach, without the smallest
difficulty; and if we pause over them for long enough to see by what
arts and devices, on the author's part, we have been enabled to shape
them so strikingly--to see precisely how this episode has been given
relief, that character made intelligible and vivid--we at once begin to
stumble on many discoveries about the making of a novel.
Our criticism has been oddly incurious in the matter, considering what
the dominion of the novel has been for a hundred and fifty years. The
refinements of the art of fiction have been accepted without question,
or at most have been classified roughly and summarily--as is proved by
the singular poverty of our critical vocabulary, as soon as we pass
beyond the simplest and plainest effects. The expressions and the
phrases at our disposal bear no defined, delimited meanings; they have
not been rounded and hardened by passing constantly from one critic's
hand to another's. What is to be understood by a "dramatic" narrative, a
"pictorial" narrative, a "scenic" or a "generalized" story? We must use
such words, as soon as we begin to examine the structure of a novel;
and