The Craft of Fiction | Page 8

yet they are words which have no technical acceptation in regard to
a novel, and one cannot be sure how they will be taken. The want of a
received nomenclature is a real hindrance, and I have often wished that
the modern novel had been invented a hundred years sooner, so that it
might have fallen into the hands of the critical schoolmen of the
seventeenth century. As the production of an age of romance, or of the
eve of such an age, it missed the advantage of the dry light of academic
judgement, and I think it still has reason to regret the loss. The critic
has, at any rate; his language, even now, is unsettled and unformed.
And we still suffer from a kind of shyness in the presence of a novel.
From shyness of the author or of his sentiments or of his imagined
world, no indeed; but we are haunted by a sense that a novel is a piece
of life, and that to take it to pieces would be to destroy it. We begin to
analyse it, and we seem to be like Beckmesser, writing down the
mistakes of the spring-time upon his slate. It is an obscure delicacy, not
clearly formulated, not admitted, perhaps, in so many words; but it has
its share in restraining the hand of criticism. We scarcely need to be
thus considerate; the immense and necessary difficulty of closing with

a book at all, on any terms, might appear to be enough, without adding
another; the book is safe from rude violation. And it is not a piece of
life, it is a piece of art like another; and the fact that it is an ideal shape,
with no existence in space, only to be spoken of in figures and
metaphors, makes it all the more important that in our thought it should
be protected by no romantic scruple. Or perhaps it is not really the book
that we are shy of, but a still more fugitive phantom--our pleasure in it.
It spoils the fun of a novel to know how it is made--is this a reflection
that lurks at the back of our minds? Sometimes, I think.
But the pleasure of illusion is small beside the pleasure of creation, and
the greater is open to every reader, volume in hand. How a novelist
finds his subject, in a human being or in a situation or in a turn of
thought, this indeed is beyond us; we might look long at the very world
that Tolstoy saw, we should never detect the unwritten book he found
there; and he can seldom (he and the rest of them) give any account of
the process of discovery. The power that recognizes the fruitful idea
and seizes it is a thing apart. For this reason we judge the novelist's eye
for a subject to be his cardinal gift, and we have nothing to say,
whether by way of exhortation or of warning, till his subject is
announced. But from that moment he is accessible, his privilege is
shared; and the delight of treating the subject is acute and perennial.
From point to point we follow the writer, always looking back to the
subject itself in order to understand the logic of the course he pursues.
We find that we are creating a design, large or small, simple or intricate,
as the chapter finished is fitted into its place; or again there is a flaw
and a break in the development, the author takes a turn that appears to
contradict or to disregard the subject, and the critical question, strictly
so called, begins. Is this proceeding of the author the right one, the best
for the subject? Is it possible to conceive and to name a better? The
hours of the author's labour are lived again by the reader, the pleasure
of creation is renewed.
So it goes, till the book is ended and we look back at the whole design.
It may be absolutely satisfying to the eye, the expression of the subject,
complete and compact. But with the book in this condition of a defined
shape, firm of outline, its form shows for what it is indeed--not an

attribute, one of many and possibly not the most important, but the
book itself, as the form of a statue is the statue itself. If the form is to
the eye imperfect, it means that the subject is somehow and somewhere
imperfectly expressed, it means that the story has suffered. Where then,
and how? Is it because the treatment has not started from the heart of
the subject, or has diverged from the line of its true development--or is
it that the subject itself was poor and unfruitful? The question ramifies
quickly. But anyhow here is