Edith Wharton

“ In a general way there is much to be said for a quiet opening to a long and crowded novel; though the novelist might prefer to be able to fling all his characters on the boards at once, with Tolstoy’s regal prodigality. There is no fixed rule about this, or about any other method; each, in the art of fiction, to justify itself has only to succeed. But to succeed, the method must first of all suit the subject, must find its account, as best it can, with the difficulties peculiar to each situation. ”

“ Nor is it more than a half-truth to say that the imagination which probes deep enough can find this germ in any happening, however insignificant. The converse is true enough: the limited imagination reduces a great theme to its own measure. But the wide creative vision, though no fragment of human experience can appear wholly empty to it, yet seeks by instinct those subjects in which some phase of our common plight stands forth dramatically and typically, subjects which, in themselves, are a kind of summary or foreshortening of life’s dispersed and inconclusive occurrences. ”

“ All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world founded on goodness, on moral scruple, on sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one, a world whence we come when we are born on earth, perhaps to return there and live once more under the rule of the unknown laws which we have obeyed here because we carried their principles within ourselves, without knowing who decreed that they should be; those laws to which every deep intellectual labour draws us nearer, and which are invisible only—and not always!—to fools. ”

“ They are “speaking” portraits, following one with their eyes in that uncannily lifelike way that good portraits have, rather than passionate disordered people dragging one impetuously into the tangle of their tragedy, as one is dragged by the characters of Stendhal, Thackeray and Balzac. Not that Jane Austen’s characters do not follow their predestined orbit. They evolve as real people do, but so softly, noiselessly, that to follow the development of their history is as quiet a business as watching the passage of the seasons. ”

“ The tendency of the situation to take hold of the novelist’s imagination, and to impose its own tempo on his tale, can be resisted only by richness and solidity of temperament. The writer must have a range wide enough to include, within the march of unalterable law, all the inconsequences of human desire, ambition, cruelty, weakness and sublimity. He must, above all, bear in mind at each step that his business is not to ask what the situation would be likely to make of his characters, but what his characters, being what they are, would make of the situation. ”

“ When the novelist has been possessed by a situation, and sees his characters hurrying to its culmination, he must have unusual keenness of vision and sureness of hand to fix their lineaments and detain them on their way long enough for the reader to recognize them as real human beings. In the novel of pure situation it is doubtful if this has ever been done with more art than in “The Wrong Box,” where Stevenson launched on his roaring torrent of farce a group of real people, alive and individual, who keep their reality and individuality till the end. ”

“ Here a youth of genius, as yet unpractised in the art of fiction, has related, under the thinnest of concealments, the story of his own unhappy love. The tale is intensely subjective. The hero is never once seen from the outside, the minor figures are hardly drawn out of the limbo of the unrealized; yet how instantly the difference between “Werther” and “Adolphe” declares itself! The latter tale is completely self-contained; it never suggests in the writer the power or the desire to project a race of imaginary characters. “Werther” does. Every page thrills with the dawning gift of creation. ”

“ It has been so often said that all art is re-presentation—the giving back in conscious form of the shapeless raw material of experience—that one would willingly avoid insisting on such a truism. But while there is no art of which the saying is truer than of fiction, there is none in respect of which there is more danger of the axiom’s being misinterpreted. The attempt to give back any fragment of life in painting or sculpture or music presupposes transposition, “stylization.” To re-present in words is far more difficult, because the relation is so close between model and artist. ”

“ This conviction strengthens the belief that the so-called quality of “originality” may be impaired by too long brooding on one’s theme and too close a commerce with the past; but the whole history of that past—in every domain of art—disproves this by what survives, and shows that every subject, to yield and to retain its full flavour, should be long carried in the mind, brooded upon, and fed with all the impressions and emotions which nourish its creator. ”

“ At every stage in the progress of his tale the novelist must rely on what may be called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation. Illuminating incidents are the magic casements of fiction, its vistas on infinity. They are also the most personal element in any narrative, the author’s most direct contribution; and nothing gives such immediate proof of the quality of his imagination—and therefore of the richness of his temperament—as his choice of such episodes. ”

“ Let it be assumed, then, that a predicament there must be, whether worked out in one soul, or created by the shock of opposing purposes. The larger the canvas of the novel—supposing the novelist’s powers to be in scale with his theme—the larger will be the scale of the predicament. In the great novel of manners in which Balzac, Thackeray and Tolstoy were preeminent, the conflict engages not only individuals but social groups, and the individual plight is usually the product—one of the many products—of the social conflict. ”

“ In writing of a great creative artist, and especially of one whose work is over, it is always better worth while to dwell on the beauties than to hunt down the blemishes. Where the qualities outweigh the defects the latter lose much of their importance, even when, as sometimes in Proust’s case, they are defects in the moral sensibility, that tuning-fork of the novelist’s art. ”

“ Fashions in the arts come and go, and it is of little interest to try to analyze the work of any artist who does not give one the sense of being in some sort above them. In the art of one’s contemporaries it is not always easy to say what produces that sense; and perhaps the best way of trying to find out is to apply a familiar touchstone.
Out of all the flux of judgments and theories [157] which have darkened counsel in respect of novel-writing, one stable fact seems always to emerge; the quality the greatest novelists have always had in common is that of making their people live. ”

“ A curious distinction between the successful tale and the successful novel at once presents itself. It is safe to say (since the surest way of measuring achievement in art is by survival) that the test of the novel is that its people should be alive. No subject in itself, however fruitful, appears to be able to keep a novel alive; only the characters in it can. Of the short story the same cannot be said. Some of the greatest short stories owe their vitality entirely to the dramatic rendering of a situation. Undoubtedly the characters engaged must be a little more than puppets ”

“ But for this reaction against truth, this sudden fear of touching on any of the real issues of the human comedy and tragedy, Thackeray’s natural endowment would have placed him with the very greatest; Trollope might conceivably have been a lesser Jane Austen; and George Eliot, perhaps born with the richest gifts of any English novelist [64] since Thackeray, might have poured out her treasures of wit and irony and tenderness without continually pausing to denounce and exhort. ”

“ One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the “fiction course” is getting the fiction it deserves. At any rate it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms. But though the trade-wind in fiction undoubtedly drives many beginners along the line of least resistance, and holds them there, it is far from being the sole cause of the present quest for short-cuts in art. ”

“ It does not much matter under what heading a school-girl is taught to class “Vanity Fair”; but from the creator’s point of view classification means the choice of a manner and of an angle of vision, and it mattered greatly that Thackeray knew just how he meant to envisage his subject, which might have been dealt with merely as the tale of an adventuress, or merely as the romance of an honest couple, or merely as an historical novel, and is all of these, and how much more besides—is, indeed, all that its title promises. ”

“ As long as there are novelists whose inventive faculty presents them first with the form, and only afterward with the substance, of the tales they want to tell, the novel of situation will fill a purpose. But it is precisely this type of mind which needs to be warned against the dangers of the form. When the problem comes to the novelist before he sees the characters engaged in it, he must be all the more deliberate in dealing with it, must let it lie in his mind till it brings forth of itself the kind of people who would naturally be involved in that particular plight. ”

“ Inspiration does indeed come at the outset to every creator, but it comes most often as an infant, helpless, stumbling, inarticulate, to be taught and guided; and the beginner, during this time of training his gift, is as likely to misuse it as a young parent to make mistakes in teaching his first child.
There is no doubt that in this day of general “speeding up,” the “inspirational” theory is seductive even to those who care nothing for easy triumphs. No writer—especially at the beginning of his career—can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that awaits him ”

“ But the main advantage of the novelist to whom his subject first presents itself in terms of character, either individual or social, is that he can quietly watch his people or his group going about their business, and let the form of his tale grow out of what they are, out of their idiosyncrasies, their humours and their prejudices, instead of fitting a situation onto them before he really knows them, either personally or collectively. ”

“ And in fiction, as in every other art, the only answer seems to be that any theory must begin by assuming the need of selection. It seems [9] curious that even now—and perhaps more than ever—one should have to explain and defend what is no more than the rule underlying the most artless verbal statement. No matter how restricted an incident one is trying to give an account of, it cannot but be fringed with details more and more remotely relevant, and beyond that with an outer mass of irrelevant facts which may crowd on the narrator simply because of some accidental propinquity in time or space. ”

“ But there is another difference between the great novel and the merely long one. Even the longest and most seemingly desultory novels of such writers as Balzac, Flaubert and Tolstoy follow a prescribed orbit; they are true to the eternal effort of art to complete what in life seems incoherent and fragmentary. ”

“ Unless he keeps his hold on this dual character of their being, visionary to him, and to the reader real, he will be the slave of his characters and not their master. When I say their master, I do not mean that they are his marionettes and dangle from his strings. Once projected by his fancy they are living beings who live their own lives; but their world is the one consciously imposed on them by their creator. Only by means of this objectivity of the artist can his characters live in art. ”

“ True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer’s own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be [19] able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. To know any one thing one must not only know something of a great many others, but also, as Matthew Arnold long since pointed out, a great deal more of one’s immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly includes ”

“ If, when once drawn to a subject, he would let it grow slowly in his mind instead of hunting about for arbitrary combinations of circumstance, his tale would have the warm scent and flavour of a fruit ripened in the sun instead of the insipidity of one forced in a hot-house.
There is a sense in which the writing of fiction may be compared to the administering of a fortune. Economy and expenditure must each bear a part in it, but they should never degenerate into parsimony or waste. ”

“ But though this is true, it is true only of the greatest novelists—those who, as Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare, do not abide our question but are free. In them, vast vision is united to equivalent powers of co-ordination; but more often the novelist who has the creative vision lacks the capacity for co-ordinating and rendering his subject, or at least is unable, in the same creation, to give an equal part to the development of character and to the clash of situation. ”

“ A wise critic once said: “You may ask your reader to believe anything you can make him believe.” It is never the genii who are unreal, but only their unconvinced historian’s description of them. The least touch of irrelevance, the least chill of inattention, will instantly undo the spell, and it will take as long to weave again as to get Humpty Dumpty back on his wall. ”