The Craft of Fiction | Page 2

may seem to make
too much of it. In theory, certainly, the book is never present in the
critic's mind, never there in all its completeness; but enough of it, in a
commonly good memory, remains to be discussed and criticized--the
book as we remember it, the book that survives, is sufficient for
practical purposes. Such we assume to be the case, and our criticism is
very little troubled by the thought that it is only directed at certain
fragments of the book which the author wrote, the rest of it having

ceased to exist for us. There is plenty to say of a book, even in this
condition; for the hours of our actual exposure to it were full and
eventful, and after living for a time with people like Clarissa Harlowe
or Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary we have had a lasting experience,
though the novels in which they figured may fall away into dimness
and uncertainty. These women, with some of the scenes and episodes of
their history, remain with us as vividly as though we had known them
in life; and we still keep a general impression of their setting and their
fortunes, a background more or less undefined, but associated with the
thought of them. It all makes a very real and solid possession of a kind,
and we readily accept it as the book itself. One does not need to
remember the smaller detail of the story to perceive the truth and force
of the characters; and if a great deal is forgotten, the most striking
aspects of the case will linger in the mind as we look back. Dramatic
episodes, fine pieces of description, above all the presence of many
interesting and remarkable people--while there is so much that instantly
springs to light when the book is mentioned, it seems perverse to say
that the book is not before us as we write of it. The real heart and
substance of the book, it might even be urged, stands out the more
clearly for the obscurity into which the less essential parts of it subside.
And true it is that for criticism of the author's genius, of the power and
quality of his imagination, the impressions we are able to save from
oblivion are material in plenty. Of Richardson and Tolstoy and Flaubert
we can say at once that their command of life, their grasp of character,
their knowledge of human affections and manners, had a certain range
and strength and depth; we can penetrate their minds and detect the
ideas that ruled there. To have lived with their creations is to have lived
with them as well; with so many hours of familiar intercourse behind us
we have learnt to know them, and it matters little that at any particular
moment our vision of their work is bound to be imperfect. The
forgotten detail has all contributed to our sense of the genius which
built up and elaborated the structure, and that sense abides. Clarissa and
Anna and Emma are positive facts, and so are their authors; the
criticism of fiction is securely founded upon its object, if by fiction we
mean something more, something other, than the novel itself--if we
mean its life-like effects, and the imaginative gifts which they imply in

the novelist. These we can examine as long and as closely as we choose,
for they persist and grow more definite as we cultivate the
remembrance of them. And to these, accordingly, we find our criticism
always tending; we discuss the writer, we discuss the people in his
book, we discuss the kind of life he renders and his success in the
rendering. But meanwhile the book, the thing he made, lies imprisoned
in the volume, and our glimpse of it was too fleeting, it seems, to leave
us with a lasting knowledge of its form. We soon reach the end of so
much as we have to say on that subject.
Perhaps we should have more to say of it if we read the book
differently in the first place. I scarcely think we could any of us claim
that in reading a novel we deliberately watch the book itself, rather than
the scenes and figures it suggests, or that we seek to construct an image
of the book, page by page, while its form is gradually exposed to us.
We are much more inclined to forget, if we can, that the book is an
object of art, and to treat it as a piece of the life around us; we fashion
for ourselves, we objectify, the elements in it that happen to strike us
most keenly, such as an effective scene or a brilliant character. These
things take shape in the mind of the reader; they are recreated and