The Craft of Fiction | Page 3

set
up where the mind's eye can rest on them. They become works of art,
no doubt, in their way, but they are not the book which the author
offers us. That is a larger and more complex form, one that it is much
more difficult to think of as a rounded thing. A novel, as we say, opens
a new world to the imagination; and it is pleasant to discover that
sometimes, in a few novels, it is a world which "creates an illusion"--so
pleasant that we are content to be lost in it. When that happens there is
no chance of our finding, perceiving, recreating, the form of the book.
So far from losing ourselves in the world of the novel, we must hold it
away from us, see it all in detachment, and use the whole of it to make
the image we seek, the book itself.
It is difficult to treat a large and stirring piece of fiction in this way.
The landscape opens out and surrounds us, and we proceed to create
what is in effect a novel within the novel which the author wrote. When,
for example, I try to consider closely the remnant that exists in my
memory of a book read and admired years ago--of such a book as

Clarissa Harlowe--I well understand that in reading it I was
unconsciously making a selection of my own, choosing a little of the
story here and there, to form a durable image, and that my selection
only included such things as I could easily work into shape. The girl
herself, first of all--if she, though so much of her story has faded away,
is still visibly present, it is because nothing is simpler than to create for
oneself the idea of a human being, a figure and a character, from a
series of glimpses and anecdotes. Creation of this kind we practise
every day; we are continually piecing together our fragmentary
evidence about the people around us and moulding their images in
thought. It is the way in which we make our world; partially,
imperfectly, very much at haphazard, but still perpetually, everybody
deals with his experience like an artist. And his talent, such as it may be,
for rounding and detaching his experience of a man or a woman, so that
the thing stands clear in his thought and takes the light on every
side--this can never lie idle, it is exercised every hour of the day.
As soon as he begins to hear of Clarissa, therefore, on the first page of
Richardson's book, the shaping, objectifying mind of the reader is at
work on familiar material. It is so easy to construct the idea of the
exquisite creature, that she seems to step from the pages of her own
accord; I, as I read, am aware of nothing but that a new acquaintance is
gradually becoming better and better known to me. No conscious effort
is needed to make a recognizable woman of her, though in fact I am
fitting a multitude of small details together, as I proceed to give her the
body and mind that she presently possesses. And so, too, with the lesser
people in the book, and with their surroundings; so, too, with the
incidents that pass; a succession of moments are visualized, are
wrought into form by the reader, though perhaps very few of them are
so well made that they will last in memory. If they soon disappear, the
fault may be the writer's or the reader's, Richardson's if he failed to
describe them adequately, mine if my manner of reading has not been
sufficiently creative. In any case the page that has been well read has
the best chance of survival; it was soundly fashioned, to start with, out
of the material given me by the writer, and at least it will resist the
treachery of a poor memory more resolutely than a page that I did not
thoroughly recreate.

But still, as I say, the aspects of a book that for the most part we detach
and solidify are simply those which cost us no deliberate pains. We
bring to the reading of a book certain imaginative faculties which are in
use all the day long, faculties that enable us to complete, in our minds,
the people and the scenes which the novelist describes--to give them
dimensions, to see round them, to make them "real." And these
faculties, no doubt, when they are combined with a trained taste, a
sense of quality, seem to represent all that is needed for the criticism of
fiction. The novel (and in these pages I speak only of the modern novel,
the picture of life that we are in a position to understand without the
knowledge of a student or