 Section 3 of the Art of Fiction, this is a LibriVox recording, or LibriVox recordings are in the public domain, for more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Shuleefa Mulgham. The Art of Fiction by Walter Beeson and Henry James. Section 3. Henry James's response to the lecture. The Art of Fiction. I should not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks, necessarily wanting in any completeness upon a subject the full consideration of which would carry us far. Did I not seem to discover a pretext for my temerity in the interesting pamphlet lately published under this name by Mr Walter Beeson? Mr Beeson's lecture at the Royal Institution, the original form of his pamphlet, appears to indicate that many persons are interested in the Art of Fiction and are not indifferent to such remarks as if those who practice it may attempt to make about it. I am therefore anxious not to lose the benefit of this favourable association and to edge in a few words and a cover of the attention which Mr Beeson is sure to have excited. There is something very encouraging in his having put into form certain of his ideas on the mystery of storytelling. It is a proof of life and curiosity. Curiosity on the part of the brotherhood of novelists, as well as on the part of their readers. Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what a French call discute de blu. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it, of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worst for that, it would take much more courage than I possessed intimate that the form of the novelist Dickens and Sacrae, for instance, or it, had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, naive, if I may help myself out with another French word, and evidently it is destined to suffer in any way for having lost its naivety. It has now an idea of making sure of the corresponding advantages. During the period I have alluded to, there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that this was the end of it. But was in a year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning animation. The era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened. Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints. And there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice of reference, though they may be times of genius, are not times of development, are times possibly even a little of dullness. The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but a Syria II is interesting, and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former, I suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion, suggestion, formulation—these things are fertilising when they are frank and sincere. Mr Beesant has had an excellent example in saying that he thinks, for his part, about the way in which fiction should be written, as well as about the way in which it should be published. For his view of the art carried on into an appendix covers that too. It must take itself seriously for the public to take it so. The old superstition about fiction being wicked has doubtless died out in England, but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed toward any story which does not more or less admit that it is only a joke. Even the most jocular novel fears, in some degree, the weight of the prescription that was formally directed against literary levity. The jocularity does not always succeed in passing for gravity. It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a make-belief, for what else is a story, shall be in some degree apologetic. Shall renounce the pretension of attempting rarely to compete with life. This, of course, any sensible wide awake, story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that a tolerance granted to it on such a condition as early attempt to stifle it, disguised in the form of generosity. The old evangelical hostility to the novel, which was as explicit as it was narrow, and which regarded it as little less favourable to our immortal part than a stage play, was in reality far less insulting. The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life. When it seizes to compete as a canvas of the painter competes, it will have arrived at a very strange pass. It is not expected of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven, and the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same. Their process, allowing for the different quality of the vehicle, is the same. The success is the same. They may learn from each other. They may explain and sustain each other. Their cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of another. Beculiarities of manner of execution that correspond on either side exist in each of them and contribute to their development. The Mammetons think a picture an unholy thing, but it is a long time since any Christian did, and it is therefore a more odd that in the Christian mind the traces, assimilated as they may be, of a suspicion of the sister art should linger to this day. The only effectual way to lay it to rest is to emphasise the analogy to which I just alluded, to insist on the fact that, as a picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description which does a justice that we may give of the novel. But history also is allowed to compete with life, as I say. It is not any more than painting expected to apologise. The subject matter of fiction is stored up likewise in documents and records, and if it will not give itself away, as I say in California, it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian. Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away, which must often ring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I was lately struck in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, with his wand of discretion of this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis, or an aside, he concedes to his reader that he and this drastic friend are only making belief. He admits that the event he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any term the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred offer seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime. It is what I mean by the attitude of apology, and it shocks me every word as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon on Macaulay. It implies that a novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth than the historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his standing room. To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men is a task of eyes a writer, and the only difference that I can see in proportion as he succeeds to the honour of the novelist, consisting as a dozen his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from being purely literary. It seems to me to give him a great character, the fact that he has it once so much in common with the philosopher and the painter. This double analogy is a magnificent heritage. It is of all this evidently that Mr Beeson is full when he insists upon the fact that fiction is one of the fine arts deserving in its turn of all the honours and emuluments that have his ato been reserved for the successful profession of music, poetry, painting, architecture. It is impossible to insist too much on so important a truth, and the plays that Mr Beeson demands for the work of the novelist may be represented are tried for less abstractly by saying that he demands not only that it shall be reputed to artistic, but that it shall be reputed very artistic indeed. It is excellent that he should have struck this note, for his doing so indicates that there was need of it that his proposition may be to many people a novelty. One robs one's eyes at a sword, but the rest of Mr Beeson's essay confirms the revelation. I suspect in truth that it would be possible to confirm it still further, and that one would not be far wrong in saying that in addition to the people to whom it has never occurred that a novel ought to be artistic, there are a great many others who, if this principle were urged upon them, would be filled with an indefinable mistrust. They would find it difficult to explain their repugnance, but it would operate strongly to put them on their guard. Art, in our Protestant communities, where so many things have got so strangely twisted about, is supposed in certain circles to have some vaguely injurious effect upon those who make it an important consideration who let it weigh in the balance. It is assumed to be opposed in some mysterious manner to morality, to amusement, to instruction. When it is embodied in the work of the painter, the sculptor is another affair, you know what it is. It stands there before you in the honest of pink and green and a gilt frame. You can see the worst of it at a glance, and you can be on your guard. But when it is introduced into literature, it becomes more insidious. There is danger of it hurting you before you know it. Literature should be either instructive or amusing, and there is in many minds an impression that these artistic preoccupations, the search for form, contribute to neither end, interfere indeed with both. They are too frivolous to be edifying, and too serious to be diverting, and they are moreover priggish and paradoxical and superfluous. That, I think, represents the manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an exercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to become articulate. They would argue, of course, that another ought to be good, but they would interpret this term in a fashion of their own, which indeed would vary considerably from one critic to another. One would say that being good means representing virtues and aspiring characters, place in prominent positions. Another would say that it depends for a happy ending on a distribution of the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, a panned paragraph and cheerful remarks. Another still would say that it means being full of incident and movement, so that we shall wish to jump ahead to see who was the mysterious stranger, and if the stolen will was ever found, and shall not be distracted from this pleasure by any tiresome analysis or description. They would all agree that the artistic idea would spoil some of their fun. One would hold it accountable for all the description. Another would see the revealed in the absence of sympathy. Its hostility to a happy ending would be evident, and it might even in some cases render any ending at all impossible. The ending of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a cause of dessert and dices, and the artist and fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes. It is therefore true that this conception of Mr Beasons, of the novel as superior form, encounters not only a negative but a positive indifference. It matters little, said, as a work of art. It should be really as little or as much concerned to supply happy endings, sympathetic characters, and an objective tone, as if it were a work of mechanics. The association of ideas, however incongoras, might easily be too much for it if an eloquent voice were not sometimes raised to caught attention to the fact that it is at once as free and as serious a branch of literature as any other. Certainly this might sometimes be doubted in the presence of the enormous number of works of fiction that appeal to the credulity of our generation, for it might easily seem that there could be no great substance in a commodity so quickly and easily produced. It must be admitted that good novels are somewhat compromised by bad ones, and that a field at large suffers discredit from overcrowding. I think, however, that this injury is only superficial, and that a superabondance of written fiction proves nothing against principle itself. It has been vulgarised, like all other kinds of literature, like everything else today, and it has proved more than some kinds accessible to vulgarisation. There is as much difference as there ever was between a good novel and a bad one. The bad is swept with all the drauped canvases and spoiled marbles into some unvisited limbo or infinite rubbish yard beneath the back windows of the world, and the good subsists and amidst its slide and stimulate our desire for perfection. As I shall take the liberty of making but a single criticism of Mr Beeson, whose tone is so full of the love of his art, I may as well have done with it at once. He seems to me to mistake, in attempting to say so definitely beforehand, what sort of an affair the good novel will be, to indicate the danger of such an error as that has been the purpose of these few pages, to suggest that certain traditions on the subject applied a priori have already had much to answer for, and that a good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which an advance who may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary is that it be interesting. Interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it, but it is the only one I can think of. The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result of interestingers strike me as innumerable, and such as can only suffer from being marked out, or fenced in by prescription. They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in proportion as a reveal of a particular mind different from others. A novel is, in its broadest definition, a personal impression of life. That, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of that freedom and the suppression of the very thing that we are most curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated after the fact. Then the author's choice has been made, his standard has been indicated. Then we can follow lines and directions and compare tones. Then, in a word, we can enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures. We can estimate quality. We can apply the test of execution. The execution belongs to the author alone. It is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant, no limit to his possible experience, efforts, discoveries, successes. Here it is especially that he works step by step like his brother of the brush, of whom we may always say that he has painted his picture in a manner best known to himself. His manner is a secret, not necessarily a deliberate one. He cannot disclose it as a general thing if he would. He would be at a loss to teach it to others. I say this with a due recollection of having insisted on the community of method of the artist who paints a picture and the artist who writes a novel. The painter is able to teach a rudiment of his practice, and it is possible, from the study of good work, granted the aptitude, both to learn how to paint and to learn how to write. Yet it remains true, without injury to the rapprochement, that a literary artist would be obliged to say to his pupil much more than the other. Ah, well, you must do it as you can. It is a question of degree, a matter of delicacy. There are exact sciences, there are also exact arts, and the grammar of painting is so much more definite that it makes the difference. I ought to add, however, that if Mr Beeson says at the beginning of his essay that the laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective and proportion, he mitigates what might appear to be an overstatement by applying his remark to general laws and by expressing most of these rules in a manner with which it would certainly be unaccommodating to disagree. That a novelist must write from his experience, that his characters must be real and such as might be met with in actual life, that a young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life, and a writer whose friends and personal experiences belong to the lower middle class should carefully avoid introducing his characters into society. That one should enter one's note in a commonplace book, that one's figures should be clear and outline, that making them clear by some trick of speech or of courage is a bad method, and describing them at length is a worse one, that English fiction should have a conscious moral purpose, that it is almost impossible to estimate who highly the value of care for workmanship, that is of style, that the most important point of all is the story, that the story is everything. These are principles with most of which it is surely impossible not to sympathise. That remark about the lower middle class writer and his knowing his plays is perhaps rather chilling, but for the rest I should find it difficult to descend from any one of these recommendations. At the same time, I should find it difficult positively to a centrism, with the exception perhaps of the injunction as to entering one's note in a commonplace book. They scarcely seem to me to have the quality that Mr Beeson attributes to the rules of the novelist, the precision and exactness of the laws of harmony, perspective and proportion. They are suggestive, they are even inspiring, they are not exact, though they are doubtless as much as so as a case admits of, which is a proof of that liberty of interpretation for which I just contended. For the value of these different injunctions, so beautiful and so vague, it's wholly and demeaning one attaches to them. The characters, the situation which strikes one as real, will be those that touch and interest one most. But the matter of reality is very difficult to fix. The reality of Don Quixote or Mr Macabre is a very delicate shade. It is a reality so coloured by the author's vision that, vivid as it may be, one would hesitate to propose it as a model. One would expose oneself to some very embarrassing questions on the part of a pupil. It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality. But it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms. The most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it and others have not. As for telling you in advance how your nose-gay should be composed, that is another affair. It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience. To our superstitious aspirant such a declaration might savor of mockery. What kind of experience is intended and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete. It is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is a very atmosphere of the mind and when the mind is imaginative much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius it takes to itself the faintest tense of life. It converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. The young lady living in the 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 a military. Greater miracles have been seen than that. Imagination assisting she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she had learnt so much about this recognized being. She had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having ones in Paris as she sat at a staircase past an open door where in the household of a pasteur some of the young Protestants were seated at a table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture, it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her impression and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was and what Protestantism. She also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with a faculty which, when you give it an inch, takes an L and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the scene, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it. This cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience and they occur in country and in town and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experiences just as have you not seen it, they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to another's, right from experience and experience only, I should feel that this was a rather tantalising munition if I were not careful immediately to add. I have tried to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost. I am far from intending by this to minimise the importance of exactness, of truth of detail. One can speak best from one's own taste, and I made therefore venture to say that the air of reality, solidity of specification, seemed to me the supreme virtue of a novel, the merit in which all its other merits, including that conscious moral purpose to be some speaks, helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art is a novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his delight. It is here, in very truth, that he competes with life. It is here that he competes with his brother, the painter, in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle. It is in regard to this, that Mr Beesant is well inspired when he bids him take notes. He cannot possibly take too many, he cannot possibly take enough. All life solicits him, and to render the simplest surface, to produce the most momentary illusion is a very complicated business. His case would be easier, and the rule would be more exact if Mr Beesant had been able to tell him what notes to take. But this I fear he can never learn in any handbook. It is the business of his life. He has to take a great many in order to select a few. He has to work them up as he can, and even the guides and philosophers who might have most to say to him must leave him alone when it comes to the application of precepts, because he is the painter in communion with his palette. That his characters must be clear and outline, as Mr Beesant says, he feels that, down to his boots, but how he shall make them so is a secret between his good angel and himself. It would be absurdly simple if he could be taught that a great deal of description would make them so, or that, on the contrary, the absence of description and the cultivation of dialogue, or the absence of dialogue and the multiplication of incident would rescue him from his difficulties. Nothing, for instance, is more possible than that he be of a turn of mind for which this odd literal opposition of description and dialogue, incident and description, has little meaning and light. People often talk of these things as if they had a kind of international distinctness instead of melting into each other at every breath and being intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression. I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive in any other worse discussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative, a passage of dialogue that is not in its intention descriptive, a touch of truth of any sort that does not partake of the nature of incident and an incident that derives its interest from any other source than the general and only source of the successor for work of art, that of being illustrative. A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every 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. The critic, whoever the closed texture of unfinished work, will pretend to trace a geography of items, will mark some franchises as artificial, I fear, as any that have been known to history. There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance, to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures, but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character, as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture, one says of character. When one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident, but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with a hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way. Or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time, it is an expression of character. If you say you don't see it, character in that, a londong. This is exactly what the artist wears reasons of his own for thinking he does see it, and it takes to show you. When a young man makes up his mind that he has not faced enough, after all, to enter the church, as he intended, that is an incident, though you may not hurry to the end of the chapter to see whether perhaps he doesn't change once more. I do not say that these are extraordinary or startling incidents. I do not pretend to estimate the degree of interest proceeding from them, for this will depend upon the skill of the painter. It sounds almost purile to say that some incidents are intrinsically much more important than others, and I need not take this precaution, after having professed my sympathy for the major ones, in remarking that the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting. The novel and the romance, the novel of incident and that of character, these separations appear to me to have been made by critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help them out of some of their difficulties, but to have little reality or interest for the producer, from his point of view it is, of course, that you are attempting to consider the art of fiction. The case is the same with another shadow category, which Mr Beaton apparently disposed to set up, that of the modern English novel, unless indeed it be, that in this matter he has fallen into an accidental confusion of standpoints. It is not quite clear whether he intends to remark in which he alludes to it to be didactic or historical. It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English as to suppose in writing an ancient English novel. That is labour which breaks the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture of one's language and of one's time, and calling it modern English will not, alas, make the difficult task any easier. No more, unfortunately, while calling this or that work, of one's fellow artist romance, unless it be, of course, simply for the pleasantness of the thing, as for instance, when Hassan gave this heading to a story of Blisdale, the French who have brought the theory of fiction to remarkable completeness have but one word for the novel and have not attempted smaller things in it that I can see for that. I can think of no obligation to which the romance would not be held equally with the novelist. The standard of execution is equally high for each. Of course, it is of execution that you're talking that being the only point of a novel that is open to contention. This is perhaps too often lost sight of only to reduce interminable confusions and cross purposes. We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his doni. Our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally, I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting, in case we do not, our cause is perfectly simple, to let it alone. We may believe that, of a certain idea, even a most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief that a failure will have been a failure to execute, as it is in the execution that a fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases of innumerable presumptions, that a choice will not rectify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the phase of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments, of which it is capable, are hidden in the bosom of common things. Gustaf Llober has written a story about the devotion of a servant girl to a parrot, and the production, highly finished as it is, cannot on the whole be called a success. We are perfectly free to find it flat, but I think it might have been interesting, and I, for my part, am extremely glad you should have written it. It is a contribution to our knowledge of what can be done, or what cannot. Ivan Terginyev has written a tale about a deaf and dumb servant and a lab dog, and a thing is touching, loving, a little masterpiece. He struck a note of life where Gustaf Llober missed it. He flew in the phase of a presumption and achieved a victory. Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of liking a work of art or not liking it. The more improved criticism will not abolish of that primitive, that ultimate test. I mentioned this to guard myself from the accusation of intimating that the idea that the subject of a novel or a picture does not matter. It matters to my sense in the highest degree, and if I might put up a prayer, it would be that artists should select a none but the richest. Some, as I have already hastened to admit, are much more substantial than others, and it would be a happily arranged world in which persons intending to treat them should be exempt from confusions and mistakes. This fortunate condition will arrive only, I fear, on the same day that critics become perched from error. Meanwhile, I repeat, we do not judge the artist with fairness unless we say to him, O, I grant you your starting point, because if I did not, I should seem to be scribe to you, and haven't forbid I should take that responsibility. If I pretend to tell you what you must not take, you will call upon me to tell you then what you must take. At which cage I shall be nicely called? Moreover, it is until I have accepted your data that I can begin to measure you. I have the standard. I judge you by what you propose, and you must look out for me there. Of course I may not care for your idea at all. I may think it silly, or stale, or unclean, in which case I wash my hands of you altogether. I may content myself with believing that you will not have succeeded in being interesting, but I shall of course not attempt to demonstrate it, and you will be as indifferent to me as I am to you. I needn't remind you that there are all sorts of tastes, who can know it better. Some people for excellent reasons don't like to read about carpenters. Others, for reasons even better, don't like to read about courtesans. Many object to Americans. Others, I believe they are mainly editors and publishers, won't look at Italians. Some readers don't like quiet subjects. Others don't like bustling ones. Some enjoy complete illusion. Others revel in a complete deception. They choose enough as accordingly, and if they don't care about your idea, they won't, for theory, care about your treatment. So that it comes back very quickly, as I have said, to the liking, inspired of M. Zula, whose reasons less powerfully than he represents, and who will not reconcile himself to this absoluteness of taste, thinking that there are certain things that people ought to like, that they can be made to like. I am quite at a loss to imagine anything, at an irate of this matter of fiction, that people ought to like, ought to dislike. Selection will be sure to take care of itself, for it has a constant motive behind it. That motive is simply experience. As people feel life, so they will feel the art that is most closely related to it. This closeness of relation is what we should never forget in talking of the effort of the novel. Many people speak of it as a fictitious, artificial form, a product of ingenuity, the business of which is to alter and arrange the things that surround us, to translate them into conventional, traditional moulds. This, however, is a view of the matter which carries it but a very short way, condemns of the art to an eternal repetition of a few familiar clichés, cuts short its development, and leads us straight up to a dead wall. Catching the very node and trick, the strange irregularism of life, that is, the attempt to strain us forth keeps fiction upon our feet. In proportion, as in what she offers us, we see life without rearrangement. Do we feel that we are touching the truth? In proportion, as we see it with rearrangement, do we feel that we are being put off with the substitute, a compromise, and convention? It is not uncommon to hear an extraordinary assurance of remark in regard to this matter of rearranging, which is often spoke of as if it were of the last word of art. Mr Beeson seems to be in danger of falling into this great error. Mrs Rada un-gada talk about selection. Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive. For many people, art means rose-coloured windows, and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs Grandi. They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with Yurkley. They will rattle off shallow commonplaces about the province of art, and the limits of art, till you are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and the limits of ignorance. It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase, a kind of revelation of freedom. One perceives in that case, by the light of a heavenly ray, that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision. As Mr Beeson so justly intimates, it is all experience. That is a sufficient answer to those who maintain, that it must not touch if they're painful, who stick it into its divine and conscious bosom, little prohibitory inscriptions on the end of sticks, such as we see in public gardens. It is forbidden to walk on the grass. It is forbidden to touch the flowers. It is not allowed to introduce dogs, or to remain after dog. It is requested to keep sooth right. The young aspirant in the line of fiction, whom we continue to imagine, will do nothing without taste, for in that case his freedom would be of little use to him, but the first advantage of his taste will be to reveal to him the absurdity of the little sticks and tickets. If you have taste, I must add, of course you will have ingenuity, and my disrespectful reference to that quality just now was not meant to imply that it is useless in fiction, but it is only a secondary aid. The first is the vivid sense of reality. Mr Beeson has some remarks on the question of this story, which I shall not attempt to criticise, though they seem to me to contain a singular ambiguity, because I do not think I understand some. I cannot see what is meant by talking, as if there were a part of a novel, which is the story, and part of it which for mystical reasons is not, unless indeed the distinction be made in a sense in which it is difficult to suppose that anyone should attempt to convey anything. The story, if it represents anything, represents the subject, the idea, the date of the novel, and there is surely no school, Mr Beeson speaks of a school, which urges that a novel should be all treatment and no subject. There must assuredly be something to treat, every school is intimately conscious of that. This sense of the story being the idea, the starting point of the novel, is the only one that I see in which it can be spoken of as something different from its organic whole, and since in proportion as a work is successful, the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, says that every word and every punctuation point contribute directly to the expression, in that proportion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may be drawn more or less out of its sheath. The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommend the use of the thread without a needle, or the needle without a thread. Mr Beeson is not the only critic who may be observed as bogan, as if there were certain things in life which constitute stories and certain others which do not. I find the same odd implication in an entertaining article in the Palmargazed devoted as it happens to Mr Beeson's lecture. This story is the thing, says this graceful writer, as if with the tone of opposition to another idea. I should think it was, as every painter who, as a time for sending in his picture, looms in the distance, finds himself still in quest of a subject, as every belated art is, not fixed about his donee, will heartily agree. There are some subjects which speak to us and others which do not, but he would be clever man who should undertake to give a rule by which the story and the no story should be known apart. It is impossible, to me at least, to imagine any such rule which shall not be altogether arbitrary. The writer in the Palmarg opposes the delightful, as I suppose, novel of Margaux la Balafry, to certain tales in which bestonian nims appear to have rejected English dukes for psychological reasons. I am not acquainted with the romance, just designated, and can scarcely forgive the Palmarg critic for not mentioning the name of the author, but the title appears to refer to a lady who may have received a scar in some heroic adventure. I am inconsolable at not being acquainted with this episode, but I am utterly at a loss to see why it is a story when the rejection or acceptance of a duke is not, and why a reason, psychological or other, is not a subject when the citrix is. They are all particles of the multitude in his life with which the novel deals, and surely no dogma which pretends to make it lawful to touch the one and unlawful to touch the other will stand for a moment on its feet. It is a special picture that must stand or fall, according as it seems to possess truth or to lack it. Mr Beeson does not, to my sense, light up the subject by intimating that a story must, under penalty of not being a story, consist of adventures. Why of adventures more than of green spectacles? He imagines a category of impossible things, and among them he places fiction without adventure. Why without adventure more than without matrimony, or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or hydropathy, or jensenism? This seems to me to bring the novel back to the hapless little role of being an artificial ingenious thing. Bring it down from its large free character of an immense and exquisite correspondence with life. And what is adventure, and it comes to that? And by what sign is a listening pupil to recognize it? It is an adventure, an immense one for me to write this little article. And for a bestonian nymph to reject an English duke is an adventure only less stirring, I should say, than for an English duke to be rejected by a bestonian nymph. I see dramas within dramas in that, and innumerable points of view, a psychological reason is to my imagination an object adorably pictorial, to catch the tint of its complexion. I feel as if that idea might inspire one to titianesque efforts. There are a few things more exciting to me in short than a psychological reason, and yet I protest. The novel seems to me the most magnificent form of art. I have just been reading at the same time the delightful story of Treasure Island by Mr Robert Lewis Stevenson, and the last tale from Mr Edmond Gungour, which is entitled Chyri. One of these works, treat of murders, mysteries, islands of drotor renown, hair breasts escapes, miraculous coincidences and buried doublins. The other treats of a little French girl who lived in a fine house in Paris, and died of wounded sensibility because no one would marry her. I call Treasure Island delightful, because it appears to me to have succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts, and I venture to bestow no epithet upon Chyri, which strikes me as having failed in what it attempts, that is, in tracing the development of the moral consciousness of a child. But one of these productions strikes me as exactly as much of a novel as the other, and is having a story quite as much. The moral consciousness of a child is as much a part of life as the island of the Spanish main, and the bond sort of geography seems to me to have those surprises, of which Mr Beeson speaks, quite as much as the other. For myself, since it comes back in the last resort, as I say to the preference of the individual, the picture of the child's experience has the advantage that I can, at successive steps, in a man's luxury near to the central pleasure of which Mr Beeson's critic in The Palmar speaks, say yes or no as it may be to what the artist puts before me. I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for a buried treasure, and it is a simple accident that with Monsieur de Gongul I should have thought the most part to say no. Miss George Elliot, when she painted that country, I always said yes. The most interesting part of Mr Beeson's lecture is unfortunately the briefest passage. It's very cursory allusion to the conscious moral purpose of the novel. Here again it is not very clear whether he is recording a fact or laying down a principle. It is a great pity that in the latter case he should not have developed his idea. This branch of the subject is of immense importance, and Mr Beeson's few words point to the consideration of the widest reach not to be likely dispaced of. He will have treated the art of fiction, but superficially, who is not prepared to go every inch of the way that these considerations will carry him. It is for this reason that at the beginning of these remarks I was careful to notify the reader that my reflections on so large a theme have no pretension to be exhaustive. Like Mr Beeson I have left the question of the morality of the novel till the last, and at the last I find I have used up my space. It is a question surrounded with difficulties, as witness is the very first that meets us, in the form of a definite question on the threshold. Veigness in such a discussion is fatal, and what is the meaning of your morality and your conscious moral purpose? Will you not define your terms and explain how, another being a picture, a picture can be either moral or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture, or carve a moral statue, will you not tell us how you would set about it? We are discussing the art of fiction, questions of art are questions in the widest sense of execution. Questions of morality are quite another affair, and will you not let us see how it is that you find it so easy to mix them up? These things are so clear to Mr Beeson that he has deduced from them a law which he sees embodied in English fiction, and which is a truly admirable thing, and a great cause for congratulation. It is a great cause for congratulation indeed, when such thorny problems become a smoother silk. I may add that insofar as Mr Beeson perceives that in point of fact English fiction has addressed itself preponderantly to these delicate questions, he will appear to many people to have made a vain discovery. They will have been positively struck on the country with the moral timidity of the usual English novelist, with his or with her aversion to face the difficulties with which on every side the treatment of reality bristles. He is apt to be extremely shy, rears the picture that Mr Beeson draws is a picture of baldness, and the sign of his work for the most part is a cautious silence on certain subjects. In the English novel, by which I mean the American as well, more than in any other, there is a traditional difference between that which people know, and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see, and that which they speak of, that which if they feel to be a part of life, and that which if they allow to enter into literature. There is a great difference ensured between what they talk of in conversation, and what they talk of in print. The essence of moral energy is to survey the whole field, and I should directly reverse Mr Beeson's remark and say, not that the English novel has a purpose, but that it has a diffidence. Do what degree a purpose in a work of art is a sort of corruption I shall not attempt to inquire? The one that seems to me least dangerous is the purpose of making a perfect work. As for our novel, I may say lastly on this call, that as we find it in England today, it strikes me as addressed in a large degree to young people, and that this in itself constitutes a presumption that it will be rather shy. There are certain things which it has generally agreed not to discuss, not even to mention before young people. That is very well, but the absence of discussion is not a symptom of the moral passion. The purpose of the English novel, a truly admirable thing and a great cause for congratulation, strikes me therefore as rather negative. 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. In proportionate at that mind is rich and noble, will the novel, the picture, the statue partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough. 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 needle-moral ground. If the useful aspirant take it to heart, it will illuminate for him many of the mysteries of purpose. There are many other useful things that might be such of him, but I have come to the end of my article and can only touch them as I pass. The critic in the pal Marker's Ed, whom I have already quoted, draws attention to the danger, in speaking of the art of fiction, of generalising. The danger that he has in mind is rather, I imagine, that of particularising. For there are some comprehensive remarks, which, in addition to those embodied in Mr Beeson's suggestive lecture, might without fear of misleading him, be addressed to the ingenious student. I should remind him first of the magnificence of the form that is open to him, which offers to side so few restrictions and such innumerable opportunities. The other arts in comparison appear confined and hampered. The various conditions under which they are exercised are so rigid and definite. But the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be interesting. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. Enjoy it as it deserves, I should say to him. Take possession of it, explore it with its utmost extent, reveal it, rejoice in it. All life belongs to you and don't listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of it, and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether. Breathing is super fine air and turning away her head from the truth of things. There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place. You have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumont and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustave Lebert, have worked in this field with equal glory. Don't think too much about optimism and pessimism. Try and catch the colour of life itself. In France today we see a prodigious effort, that of Emile Zola, to whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of the novel can elude without respect. We see an extraordinary effort, vitiated by spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis. Monsieur Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant. He has an air of working in the dark. If he had as much light as energy, his results would be of the highest value. As for the aberrations of a shallow optimism, the ground of English fiction especially is strewn with their brittle particles as with broken glass. If you must indulge in conclusions, let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember that your first duty is to be as complete as possible, to make us perfect at work, be generous and delicate and then in the vulgar phrase go in. End of second three. End of the art of fiction by Walter Beeson and Henry James.