The
Art of Fiction by Henry James
The
Art of Fiction was
a response to remarks by English critic Walter Besant, who wrote an article
that literally attempted to lay down the "laws of fiction." For
instance, Besant insisted that novelists should confine themselves to their own
experience: "A young lady brought up in a quiet country village should
avoid descriptions of garrison life." James argued that a sufficiently
alert novelist could catch knowledge from everywhere and use it to good purpose:
"The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom
nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her
that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have
been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about
some of these gentlemen."
James continually argues for the
fullest freedom in the novelist's choice of subject and method of treatment:
"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without
incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting."
In particular, James is suspicious of restraining fiction with specific moral
guidelines: "No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind; that
seems to me an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, will cover all needful
moral ground."
James
followed his own advice in criticizing the various writers included in Partial Portraits. In his long, engrossing essay on
Maupassant, for instance, he couldn't help noticing the Frenchman's propensity
for what James called the "monkeys' cage" view of human existence.
But that didn't stop James from approving wholeheartedly of Maupassant's
vigour, precision and conciseness in describing life as he saw it.
James
followed his own advice in criticizing the various writers included in Partial Portraits. In his long, engrossing essay on
Maupassant, for instance, he couldn't help noticing the Frenchman's propensity
for what James called the "monkeys' cage" view of human existence.
But that didn't stop James from approving wholeheartedly of Maupassant's
vigour, precision and conciseness in describing life as he saw it.
Similarly, James found much to appreciate in the
intellectual force of George Eliot, the stolid but comprehensive detail-work of
Anthony Trollope, the unbounded imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the
genial common sense of Alphonse Daudet. All very different writers, but all
speak with validity from their personal view on life. This wide range presages
the "house of fiction" image James would include in the New York Edition preface to The Portrait of a Lady,
where each novelist looks at life from a particular window of the house and
thus composes a unique and personally characteristic account.***
Henry James and The Art of Fiction
The novel has struggled to be taken
seriously as an art form. The very title of James’s essay begins
his campaign on its behalf: ‘art’ and ‘fiction’, often seen at odds with each
other, are placed side by side here. Prose fiction includes short stories,
novellas (longer short stories), and the novel. James regarded the novel as
supreme in its importance, not least because of the possibilities it provided
for larger-scale plot development and characterization. In this essay, as Mark
Spilka has argued, James began ‘an adventure of immense importance to the
novel’s history’ (1977: 208).
James begins by referring to ‘the
mystery of story-telling’ (1884: 44), and it is worth reminding ourselves that
the word ‘mystery’ originally referred to the secrets of a particular trade, or
craft, and that ‘art’ was generally applied in mediaeval times and beyond to
practical skills. James’s perspective in this essay is very much that of the
producer, of the novelist, and he wants to retrieve this older, practical sense
of ‘art’, together with the meaning that developed in the Romantic period (in
literature, from around the 1780s through to the 1830s). In that period,
artists were regarded as creative geniuses involved in the production of
beautiful artefacts. What defined art, increasingly in the nineteenth century,
was its detachment from the world, or its apparent lack of a specifiable
purpose. The best fiction, for James, is an art because it involves both the
kind of proficiency in a craft that comes with a long apprenticeship and the
individual creative genius celebrated by Romantic writers such as the English
poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
and John Keats (1795– 1821). By combining these meanings of ‘art’, James
attempts to fend off those who attack the novel for having ‘no great character’
and for being a ‘commodity so quickly and easily produced’ (1884: 49).
At the core of James’s definition of the novel is what he sees as its
responsibility to represent life. He states that this is ‘the only reason for
the existence of a novel’ (1884: 46). But it soon emerges that James is
committed to a complex and shifting sense of what this responsibility amounts
to. Part of the reason for these complications is James’s belief that ‘a novel
ought to be artistic’ (1884: 47) as well as a representation of life. In an era
of burgeoning popular photography, James wants to put as much distance as
possible between the novel and crude realism. He argues that ‘[a] novel is in
its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life’ (1884: 50).
Crucially important here is the imaginative power of the writer; and this is
what distinguishes the good novel from the bad, or popular, novel. To write
artistic novels, rather than novels merely, the author must have ‘[t]he power
to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge
the whole piece by the pattern’ (1884: 53).
A novel should seek not only to represent life, then, but to refract
that representation through faculties of the imagination sharpened by sensitive
and responsive observations in the world of experience. To say that novels
represent experience realistically and leave it at that is to fail to acknowledge
‘that experience is never limited’, and that ‘it is never complete’ (1884: 52).
It is also to overlook that ‘the measure of reality is very difficult to fix’
(1884: 51). James is less interested in ‘reality’, much more in the ‘air of
reality’ (1884: 53). The central appeal of the novel is in its ability to
represent life so interestingly that it actually ‘competes’ with it (1884: 53).
Indeed, James was to go much further than this in a letter to the English
novelist H. G. Wells (1866–1946), arguing there that ‘it is art that makes
life’ (1915: 770). At the very least – because of its scope, flexibility of
form, and openness towards experimentation – the novel can have the ‘large,
free character of an immense and exquisite correspondence with life’ (1884: 61).
If the novel is a representation of life, its own vitality comes in part
from the fusion of that representation with the writer’s own impressions.
James’s insistence on the need for novels to be vital, on the analogy between
the novel as a form and life, has a significant bearing on his theories of
fiction and definition of the novel:
I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of
blocks . . . A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other
organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each
of the parts there is something of each of the other parts. (1884: 54)
What matters here is the emphasis on the artificial nature of any
boundaries between character and story, or plot, dialogue, description, and narration.
James saw novels, in keeping with his description of them as ‘the most human
form of art’ (1880: 868), as ‘organic’ in form. This fear of writing in
‘blocks’ is partly what propels James into condemning novels where the author’s
voice, or that of his narrator, is obtrusive. James was unhappy with
facile connections between text and author, and anxious about destructive
interferences from the reader at large.
Further at issue are what James regarded
as fruitless distinctions, then common, between ‘the novel of character and the
novel of incident’ (1884: 54). James was often criticized for focusing too much
on psychological analysis at the expense of telling a good story, for
elaborating on character rather than concentrating on the plot; and his defence
is that the boundaries between these are useless. Such separations result in a
dead rather than a living work of art. He regarded characters as analogous to
the seeds of a plant: the novel should develop outwardly from the nature of
those characters, the plot resulting from their characteristics and not the
other way round.
James extends his application of the
biological metaphor of an organism when identifying the ‘search for form’
(1884: 48) as a central feature of the art of fiction. The search, among other
things, is for the most effective way of structuring and narrating the story as
a whole; and it can only be found from within the subject itself, not by
imposing existing patterns or applying sterile rules. In his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, James calls this ‘the logic of the
particular case’ (1907–9: 1139). This view leads not just to a rejection of any
externally imposed purpose on the novel, in keeping with the idea of organic
form, but to the repudiation of any kind of ‘conscious moral purpose’ (1884:
62). The alternative is to confine the subject to ‘conventional, traditional
moulds’, thereby reducing it to ‘an eternal repetition of a few familiar
clichés’ (1884: 58). It is a ‘mistake’ to ‘say so definitely beforehand what
sort of an affair the good novel will be’; the ‘only obligation to which in
advance we may hold a novel . . . is that it be interesting’ (1884: 49).
The Art of Fiction is in large measure a
rebuttal of the English novelist and critic Walter Besant’s The Art of
Fiction (1884), from where James initially took his title, and its
insistence on the novel as an ‘Art’ which is ‘governed and directed by general
laws’ (Besant 1884: 3). The most important of these laws was that there should
be a ‘conscious moral purpose’ (Besant 1884: 24). Against this, James asserts
that ‘[t]here are bad novels and good novels’, but ‘that is the only
distinction in which I see any meaning’ (James 1884: 55). The implications of
what he goes on to say for the relation between the novel and morality are
discussed below:
There is one point at which the moral sense and the
artistic sense lie very near together; that is in the light of the very obvious
truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of
the mind of the producer . . . No good novel will ever proceed from a
superficial mind. (1884: viii)
The author should be granted his
‘subject’ (1884: 56), the form of which ‘is to be appreciated after the fact’
(1884: 50). If the reader dislikes the subject, then the novel can be
abandoned. The measure of a novel’s success is that of how the subject is
treated; whether it develops organically, that is, like a seed into a plant,
from the centre of its chosen subject. ‘[W]e can estimate quality’, James
believed, only by applying the ‘test of execution’ (1884: 50), by judging what
an author has done with his or her subject. James criticized George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2),
for example, for being a ‘treasure-house of details’, but an ‘indifferent
whole’ (Rawlings 2002: 2: 301). He saw the character of Dorothea as central to
the novel and felt that excursions into other characters and stories were a
distraction. For James, George Eliot’s novel not only dealt with its subject in
too scattered and distracting a way, it was ultimately irresponsive and
irresponsible to what should have been its subject, Dorothea, thereby failing
the ‘test of execution’.
The
Moral Sense and the Artistic Sense in The Art Of Fiction
James writes in The Art of Fiction that:
There is one point at which the moral sense and the
artistic sense lie very near together; that is in the light of the very obvious
truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of
the mind of the producer . . . No good novel will ever proceed from a
superficial mind. (1884: 63–4)
A similar idea is expressed in the
preface to The Portrait of a Lady. The ‘ “moral” sense of a work of
art’ depends ‘on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it’: ‘The
question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and degree of the artist’s
prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs’.
‘Sense’, especially the peculiarly intense sense of the highly intelligent
novelist, connects the moral and the aesthetic for James. This is part of a
long tradition of thinking that goes all the way back to the Greek
philosopher Plato and
beyond. One of its most well-known manifestations is in Keats’s ‘Ode on a
Grecian Urn’: ‘Beauty is Truth, – Truth Beauty, – that is all / Ye know on
earth, and all ye need to know’ (1820: 321). Experience is at the core of the
moral and the aesthetic. The moral and the artistic senses converge if we
become ‘one on whom nothing is lost’ (James 1884: 53) as we encounter complex,
ambiguous experiences.
We start to become moral, as James defines the word, only as we begin to
realize that our perspective is partial and needs to take account of the
perspectives of others. Art and morality are social affairs. Novelists and readers,
like James’s characters, need to develop their moral intelligence as they steep
themselves in the complexity of experiencing the world. But for James
‘experience is never limited and is never complete’. What matters is the extent
to which ‘The Art of Fiction’ unites the experiencing subject with experience
by suggesting that an ‘immense sensibility’ is the ‘very atmosphere’ of the
‘mind’ (James 1884: 52). Sensibility is always transitive; to be sensible,
ultimately, is to be sensible of the world of experience. At this point, as a
way of grasping just how inseparable art and morality are for James, you might
find it helpful to review the discussion of perspective and consciousness in
Chapter 4 (pp. 82–6).
Quite simply, James believes that to become an intelligent novelist is
to reach a moral stature beyond narrow, conventional, thinking. He further
believes that this should be a general aspiration, while still holding to the
view that intelligence is often the preserve of the few. In such a world, he
observes wistfully, ‘are we not moreover – and let it pass this time as a happy
hope! – pretty well all novelists now?’ (1902a: 346). The novel, for both the
writer and the reader, is the road not to moral principles, but to the moral
sense; and developing the reader’s own intelligence. The novel is ‘the great
extension, great beyond all others, of experience and of consciousness’
(1907–9: 1061); and ‘experience’ is, for James, ‘our appreciation and our
measure of what happens to us as social creatures’ (1907–9: 1091). If the novel
is intelligently controlled, all the necessary moral ground will be covered,
and ‘all prate of its representative character, its meaning and its bearing,
its morality and humanity, [is] an impudent thing’ (1907–9: 1068). Novels
should not transmit moral principles and rules as such, but renovate and
develop the mind by attempting to engage the reader in the pursuit of intricate
combinations of form, content, and germinating subjects.
James connects morality and realism
in The Art of Fiction by arguing that novelists should
not limit what they represent to the morally exemplary by excluding aspects of
human experience: ‘the essence of moral energy is to survey the whole field’
(1884: 63). Two things will guarantee the broader moral reach of the novel: the
acuity of the novelist, and the degree to which his or her novels can stimulate
critical investigation and reflection. James strikingly defined ‘moral
consciousness’ as ‘stirred intelligence’ (1907–9: 1095) in his New York
prefaces; and he believed that a sharp, responsive intellect and a sense of
morality were much the same thing. The clarifying expression of some of these
ideas came eight years before The Art of Fiction in an essay entitled The
Minor French Novelists (1876):
Every
out-and-out realist who provokes curious meditation may claim that he is a
moralist, for that, after all, is the most that the moralists can do for us.
They sow the seeds of virtue; they can hardly pretend to raise the crop. (1876:
169–70,)
