The Craft of Fiction | Page 6

admitted
and discounted; at any rate an imposing object ought to remain,
Tolstoy's great imaginative sculpture, sufficiently representing his
intention. And again and again, at this point, I make the same discovery;
I have been watching the story, that is to say, forgetful of the fact that

there was more for me to do than to watch receptively and passively,
forgetful of the novel that I should have been fashioning out of the
march of experience as it passed. I have been treating it as life; and that
is all very well, and is the right manner as far as it goes, but my
treatment of life is capricious and eclectic, and this life, this story of
Anna, has suffered accordingly. I have taken much out of it and carried
away many recollections; I have omitted to think of it as matter to be
wrought into a single form. What wonder if I search my mind in vain, a
little later, for the book that Tolstoy wrote?
But how is one to construct a novel out of the impressions that Tolstoy
pours forth from his prodigious hands? This is a kind of "creative
reading" (the phrase is Emerson's) which comes instinctively to few of
us. We know how to imagine a landscape or a conversation when he
describes it, but to gather up all these sights and sounds into a compact
fabric, round which the mind can wander freely, as freely as it strays
and contemplates and loses its way, perhaps, in Tolstoy's wonderful
world--this is a task which does not achieve itself without design and
deliberation on the part of the reader. It is an effort, first of all, to keep
the world of Anna (I cling to this illustration) at a distance; and yet it
must be kept at a distance if it is to be impressed with the form of art;
no artist (and the skilful reader is an artist) can afford to be swayed and
beset by his material, he must stand above it. And then it is a further
effort, prolonged, needing practice and knowledge, to recreate the
novel in its right form, the best form that the material, selected and
disposed by the author, is capable of accepting.
The reader of a novel--by which I mean the critical reader--is himself a
novelist; he is the maker of a book which may or may not please his
taste when it is finished, but of a book for which he must take his own
share of the responsibility. The author does his part, but he cannot
transfer his book like a bubble into the brain of the critic; he cannot
make sure that the critic will possess his work. The reader must
therefore become, for his part, a novelist, never permitting himself to
suppose that the creation of the book is solely the affair of the author.
The difference between them is immense, of course, and so much so
that a critic is always inclined to extend and intensify it. The opposition

that he conceives between the creative and the critical task is a very real
one; but in modestly belittling his own side of the business he is apt to
forget an essential portion of it. The writer of the novel works in a
manner that would be utterly impossible to the critic, no doubt, and
with a liberty and with a range that would disconcert him entirely. But
in one quarter their work coincides; both of them make the novel.
Is it necessary to define the difference? That is soon done if we picture
Tolstoy and his critic side by side, surveying the free and formless
expanse of the world of life. The critic has nothing to say; he waits,
looking to Tolstoy for guidance. And Tolstoy, with the help of some
secret of his own, which is his genius, does not hesitate for an instant.
His hand is plunged into the scene, he lifts out of it great fragments,
right and left, ragged masses of life torn from their setting; he selects.
And upon these trophies he sets to work with the full force of his
imagination; he detects their significance, he disengages and throws
aside whatever is accidental and meaningless; he re-makes them in
conditions that are never known in life, conditions in which a thing is
free to grow according to its own law, expressing itself unhindered; he
liberates and completes. And then, upon all this new life--so like the
old and yet so different, more like the old, as one may say, than the old
ever had the chance of being--upon all this life that is now so much
more intensely living than before, Tolstoy directs the skill of his art; he
distributes it in a single, embracing design; he orders and