The Craft of Fiction | Page 5

approached, perhaps the book can be seen, a little
more closely in one way than in another. It is a modest claim, and my
own attempt to assert it will be still more modest. A few familiar novels,
possibly a dozen, by still fewer writers--it will be enough if I can view
this small handful with some particularity. And I shall consider them,
too, with no idea of criticizing all their aspects, or even more than one.
How they are made is the only question I shall ask; and though indeed
that is a question which incidentally raises a good many
others--questions of the intention of the novelist, his choice of a subject,
the manner of his imagination, and so forth--these I shall follow no
further than I can help. And as for the few novels that I shall speak of,
they will be such as appear to illustrate most plainly the various
elements of the craft; one need not range widely to find them, nor does
it matter if the selection, from any other point of view, should seem
arbitrary. Many great names may be passed over, for it is not always
the greatest whose method of work gives the convenient example; on
the other hand the best example is always to be found among the great,
and it is essential to keep to their company.
But something may first be said of the reading of a novel. The
beginning of criticism is to read aright, in other words to get into touch
with the book as nearly as may be. It is a forlorn enterprise--that is
admitted; but there are degrees of unsuccess.

II
A book has a certain form, we all agree; what the form of a particular
book may be, whether good or bad, and whether it matters--these are
points of debate; but that a book has a form, this is not disputed. We
hear the phrase on all sides, an unending argument is waged over it.
One critic condemns a novel as "shapeless," meaning that its shape is
objectionable; another retorts that if the novel has other fine qualities,
its shape is unimportant; and the two will continue their controversy till
an onlooker, pardonably bewildered, may begin to suppose that "form"
in fiction is something to be put in or left out of a novel according to
the taste of the author. But though the discussion is indeed confusingly

worded at times, it is clear that there is agreement on this article at
least--that a book is a thing to which a shape is ascribable, good or bad.
I have spoken of the difficulty that prevents us from ever seeing or
describing the shape with perfect certainty; but evidently we are
convinced that it is there, clothing the book.
Not as a single form, however, but as a moving stream of impressions,
paid out of the volume in a slender thread as we turn the pages--that is
how the book reaches us; or in another image it is a procession that
passes before us as we sit to watch. It is hard to think of this lapse and
flow, this sequence of figures and scenes, which must be taken in a
settled order, one after another, as existing in the condition of an
immobile form, like a pile of sculpture. Though we readily talk of the
book as a material work of art, our words seem to be crossed by a sense
that it is rather a process, a passage of experience, than a thing of size
and shape. I find this contradiction dividing all my thought about books;
they are objects, yes, completed and detached, but I recall them also as
tracts of time, during which Clarissa and Anna moved and lived and
endured in my view. Criticism is hampered by the ambiguity; the two
books, the two aspects of the same book, blur each other; a critic seems
to shift from this one to that, from the thing carved in the stuff of
thought to the passing movement of life. And on the whole it is the
latter aspect of the two which asserts itself; the first, the novel with its
formal outline, appears for a moment, and then the life contained in it
breaks out and obscures it.
But the procession which passes across our line of sight in the reading
must be marshalled and concentrated somewhere; we receive the story
of Anna bit by bit, all the numerous fragments that together make
Tolstoy's book; and finally the tale is complete, and the book stands
before us, or should stand, as a welded mass. We have been given the
material, and the book should now be there. Our treacherous memory
will have failed to preserve it all, but that disability we have