Aspects of the novel
roundness, but so diffidently that they seem more like bubbles than
solids). Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there
is this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality
of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they
borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own. It is a conjuring
trick; at any moment we may look at Mr. Pickwick edgeways and find him
no thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the sideway view.
Mr. Pickwick is far too adroit and well trained. He always has the air
of weighing something, and when he is put into the cupboard of the young
ladies' school he seems as heavy as Falstaff in the buck-basket at
Windsor. Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and
caricatures, people whom we recognize the instant they re-enter, and yet
achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that
is not shallow. Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He
ought to be bad. He is actually one of our big writers, and his immense
success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the
severer critics admit.
Or take H. G. Wells. With the possible exceptions of Kipps and the
aunt in _Tono Bungay_, all Wells' characters are as flat as a photograph.
But the photographs are agitated with such vigour that we forget their
complexities lie on the surface and would disappear if it was scratched
or curled up. A Wells character cannot indeed be summed up in a single
phrase; he is tethered much more to observation, he does not create
types. Nevertheless his people seldom pulsate by their own strength. It
is the deft and powerful hands of their maker that shake them and trick
the reader into a sense of depth. Good but imperfect novelists, like
Wells and Dickens, are very clever at transmitting force. The part of
their novel that is alive galvanizes the part that is not, and causes
the characters to jump about and speak in a convincing way. They are
quite different from the perfect novelist who touches all his material
directly, who seems to pass the creative finger down every sentence and
into every word. Richardson, Defoe, Jane Austen, are perfect in this
particular way; their work may not be great but their hands are always
upon it; there is not the tiny interval between the touching of the
button and the sound of the bell which occurs in novels where the
characters are not under direct control.
For we must admit that flat people are not in themselves as big
achievements as round ones, and also that they are best when they are
comic. A serious or tragic flat character is apt to be a bore. Each time
he enters crying "Revenge!" or "My heart bleeds for humanity!" or
whatever his formula is, our hearts sink. One of the romances of a
popular contemporary writer is constructed round a Sussex farmer who
says, "I'll plough up that bit of gorse." There is the farmer, there is
the gorse; he says he'll plough it up, he does plough it up, but it is
not like saying "I'll never desert Mr. Micawber," because we are so
bored by his consistency that we do not care whether he succeeds with
the gorse or fails. If his formula was analysed and connected up with
the rest of the human outfit, we should not be bored any longer, the
formula would cease to be the man and become an obsession in the man;
that is to say he would have turned from a flat farmer into a round one.
It is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length
of time and can move us to any feelings except humour and
appropriateness.
So now let us desert these two-dimensional people, and by way of
transition to the round, let us go to _Mansfield Park_, and look at
Lady Bertram, sitting on her sofa with pug. Pug is flat, like most
animals in fiction. He is once represented as straying into a rose-bed
in a cardboard kind of way, but that is all, and during most of the
book his mistress seems to be cut out of the same simple material as
her dog. Lady Bertram's formula is, "I am kindly, but must not be
fatigued," and she functions out of it. But at the end there is a
catastrophe. Her two daughters come to grief--to the worst grief known
to Miss Austen's universe, far worse than the Napoleonic wars. Julia
elopes; Maria, who is unhappily married, runs off with a lover. What
is Lady Bertram's reaction? The sentence describing it is significant:
"Lady Bertram did not think deeply, but, guided by Sir Thomas, she
thought justly on all important points, and she saw therefore in all
its enormity, what had happened, and neither endeavoured herself, nor
required Fanny to advise her, to think little of guilt and infamy."
These are strong words, and they used to worry me because I thought
Jane Austen's moral sense was getting out of hand. She may, and of
course does, deprecate guilt and infamy herself, and she duly causes
all possible distress in the minds of Edmund and Fanny, but has she any
right to agitate calm, consistent Lady Bertram? Is not it like giving
pug three faces and setting him to guard the gates of Hell? Ought not
her ladyship to remain on the sofa saying, "This is a dreadful and
sadly exhausting business about Julia and Maria, but where is Fanny
gone? I have dropped another stitch"?
I used to think this, through misunderstanding Jane Austen's
method--exactly as Scott misunderstood it when he congratulated her for
painting on a square of ivory. She is a miniaturist, but never
two-dimensional. All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity.
Even Miss Bates has a mind, even Elizabeth Eliot a heart, and Lady
Bertram's moral fervour ceases to vex us when we realize this: the disk
has suddenly extended and become a little globe. When the novel is
closed, Lady Bertram goes back to the flat, it is true; the dominant
impression she leaves can be summed up in a formula. But that is not how
Jane Austen conceived her, and the freshness of her reappearances are
due to this. Why do the characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new
pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive
pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens? Why do they combine
so well in a conversation, and draw one another out without seeming to
do so, and never perform? The answer to this question can be put in
several ways: that, unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, that she
never stooped to caricature, etc. But the best reply is that her
characters though smaller than his are more highly organized. They
function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them
than it does, they would still be adequate. Suppose that Louisa Musgrove
had broken her neck on the Cobb. The description of her death would have
been feeble and ladylike--physical violence is quite beyond Miss
Austen's powers--but the survivors would have reacted properly as soon
as the corpse was carried away, they would have brought into view new
sides of their character, and though _Persuasion_ would have been
spoiled as a book, we should know more than we do about Captain
Wentworth and Anne. All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an
extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires
them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so
satisfactorily. Let us return to Lady Bertram and the crucial sentence.
See how subtly it modulates from her formula into an area where the
formula does not work. "Lady Bertram did not think deeply." Exactly: as
per formula. "But guided by Sir Thomas she thought justly on all
important points." Sir Thomas' guidance, which is part of the formula,
remains, but it pushes her ladyship towards an independent and undesired
morality. "She saw therefore in all its enormity what had happened."
This is the moral fortissimo--very strong but carefully introduced. And
then follows a most artful decrescendo, by means of negatives. "She
neither endeavoured herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think
little of guilt or infamy." The formula is reappearing, because as a
rule she does try to minimize trouble, and does require Fanny to advise
her how to do this; indeed Fanny has done nothing else for the last ten
years. The words, though they are negatived, remind us of this, her
normal state is again in view, and she has in a single sentence been
inflated into a round character and collapsed back into a flat one. How
Jane Austen can write! In a few words she has extended Lady Bertram, and
by so doing she has increased the probability of the elopements of Maria
and Julia. I say probability because the elopements belong to the domain
of violent physical action, and here, as already indicated, Jane Austen
is feeble and ladylike. Except in her school-girl novels, she cannot
stage a crash. Everything violent has to take place "off"--Louisa's
accident and Marianne Dashwood's putrid throat are the nearest
exceptions--and consequently all the comments on the elopement must be
sincere and convincing, otherwise we should doubt whether it occurred.
Lady Bertram helps us to believe that her daughters have run away, and
they have to run away, or there would be no apotheosis for Fanny. It is
a little point, and a little sentence, yet it shows us how delicately a
great novelist can modulate into the round.
All through her works we find these characters, apparently so simple and
flat, never needing reintroduction and yet never out of their
depth--Henry Tilney, Mr. Woodhouse, Charlotte Lucas. She may label her
characters "Sense," "Pride," "Sensibility," "Prejudice," but they are
not tethered to those qualities.
As for the round characters proper, they have already been defined by
implication and no more need be said. All I need do is to give some
examples of people in books who seem to me round so that the definition
can be tested afterwards:
All the principal characters in _War and Peace_, all the Dostoevsky
characters, and some of the Proust--for example, the old family servant,
the Duchess of Guermantes, M. de Charlus, and Saint Loup; Madame
Bovary--who, like Moll Flanders, has her book to herself, and can expand
and secrete unchecked; some people in Thackeray--for instance, Becky and
Beatrix; some in Fielding--Parson Adams, Tom Jones; and some in
Charlotte Brontë, most particularly Lucy Snowe. (And many more--this is
not a catalogue.) The test of a round character is whether it is capable
of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If
it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the
incalculability of life about it--life within the pages of a book. And
by using it sometimes alone, more often in combination with the other
kind, the novelist achieves his task of acclimatization and harmonizes
the human race with the other aspects of his work.
ii. Now for the second device: the point of view from which the story
may be told.
To some critics this is the fundamental device of novel-writing. "The
whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction," says Mr.
Percy Lubbock, "I take to be governed by the question of the _point of
view_--the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the
story." And his book _The Craft of Fiction_ examines various points of
view with genius and insight. The novelist, he says, can either describe
the characters from outside, as an impartial or partial onlooker; or he
can assume omniscience and describe them from within; or he can place
himself in the position of one of them and affect to be in the dark as
to the motives of the rest; or there are certain intermediate attitudes.
Those who follow him will lay a sure foundation for the æsthetics of
fiction--a foundation which I cannot for a moment promise. This is a
ramshackly survey and for me the "whole intricate question of method"