Aspects of the novel
sympathetic character, and if you meet him in a year's time he will
probably ask you how many brothers and sisters you have, his mouth again
sagging open, his eyes still bulging from his head. It is difficult to
be friends with such a man, and for two inquisitive people to be friends
must be impossible. Curiosity by itself takes us a very little way, nor
does it take us far into the novel--only as far as the story. If we
would grasp the plot we must add intelligence and memory.
Intelligence first. The intelligent novel-reader, unlike the inquisitive
one who just runs his eye over a new fact, mentally picks it up. He sees
it from two points of view: isolated, and related to the other facts
that he has read on previous pages. Probably he does not understand it,
but he does not expect to do so yet awhile. The facts in a highly
organized novel (like _The Egoist_) are often of the nature of
cross-correspondences and the ideal spectator cannot expect to view them
properly until he is sitting up on a hill at the end. This element of
surprise or mystery--the detective element as it is sometimes rather
emptily called--is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a
suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it
occurs crudely, as in "Why did the queen die?" and more subtly in
half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns
pages ahead. Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated
without intelligence. To the curious it is just another "and then----"
To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding,
while the other part goes marching on.
That brings us to our second qualification: memory.
Memory and intelligence are closely connected, for unless we remember we
cannot understand. If by the time the queen dies we have forgotten the
existence of the king we shall never make out what killed her. The
plot-maker expects us to remember, we expect him to leave no loose ends.
Every action or word ought to count; it ought to be economical and
spare; even when complicated it should be organic and free from dead
matter. It may be difficult or easy, it may and should contain
mysteries, but it ought not to mislead. And over it, as it unfolds, will
hover the memory of the reader (that dull glow of the mind of which
intelligence is the bright advancing edge) and will constantly rearrange
and reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect, and
the final sense (if the plot has been a fine one) will not be of clues
or chains, but of something æsthetically compact, something which might
have been shown by the novelist straight away, only if he had shown it
straight away it would never have become beautiful. We come up against
beauty here--for the first time in our enquiry: beauty at which a
novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it. I
will conduct beauty to her proper place later on. Meanwhile please
accept her as part of a completed plot. She looks a little surprised at
being there, but beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the
emotion that best suits her face, as Botticelli knew when he painted her
risen from the waves, between the winds and the flowers. The beauty who
does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due--she
reminds us too much of a prima donna.
But let us get back to the plot, and we will do so via George Meredith.
Meredith is not the great name he was twenty or thirty years ago, when
much of the universe and all Cambridge trembled. I remember how
depressed I used to be by a line in one of his poems: "We live but to be
sword or block." I did not want to be either and I knew that I was not a
sword. It seems though that there was no real cause for depression, for
Meredith is himself now rather in the trough of a wave, and though
fashion will turn and raise him a bit, he will never be the spiritual
power he was about the year 1900. His philosophy has not worn well. His
heavy attacks on sentimentality--they bore the present generation, which
pursues the same quarry but with neater instruments, and is apt to
suspect any one carrying a blunderbuss of being a sentimentalist
himself. And his visions of Nature--they do not endure like Hardy's,
there is too much Surrey about them, they are fluffy and lush. He could
no more write the opening chapter of _The Return of the Native_ than Box
Hill could visit Salisbury Plain. What is really tragic and enduring in
the scenery of England was hidden from him, and so is what is really
tragic in life. When he gets serious and noble-minded there is a
strident overtone, a bullying that becomes distressing. I feel indeed
that he was like Tennyson in one respect: through not taking himself
quietly enough he strained his inside. And his novels: most of the
social values are faked. The tailors are not tailors, the cricket
matches are not cricket, the railway trains do not even seem to be
trains, the county families give the air of having been only just that
moment unpacked, scarcely in position before the action starts, the
straw still clinging to their beards. It is surely very odd, the social
scene in which his characters are set: it is partly due to his fantasy,
which is legitimate, but partly a chilly fake, and wrong. What with the
faking, what with the preaching, which was never agreeable and is now
said to be hollow, and what with the home counties posing as the
universe, it is no wonder Meredith now lies in the trough. And yet he is
in one way a great novelist. He is the finest contriver that English
fiction has ever produced, and any lecture on plot must do homage to
him.
Meredith's plots are not closely knit. We cannot describe the action of
_Harry Richmond_ in a phrase, as we can that of _Great Expectations_,
though both books turn on the mistake made by a young man as to the
sources of his fortune. A Meredithian plot is not a temple to the tragic
or even to the comic Muse, but rather resembles a series of kiosks most
artfully placed among wooded slopes, which his people reach by their own
impetus, and from which they emerge with altered aspect. Incident
springs out of character, and having occurred it alters that character.
People and events are closely connected, and he does it by means of
these contrivances. They are often delightful, sometimes touching,
always unexpected. This shock, followed by the feeling, "Oh, that's all
right," is a sign that all is well with the plot: characters, to be
real, ought to run smoothly, but a plot ought to cause surprise. The
horse-whipping of Dr. Shrapnel in _Beauchamp's Career_ is a surprise. We
know that Everard Romfrey must dislike Shrapnel, must hate and
misunderstand his radicalism, and be jealous of his influence over
Beauchamp: we watch too the growth of the misunderstanding over
Rosamund, we watch the intrigues of Cecil Baskelett. As far as
characters go, Meredith plays with his cards on the table, but when the
incident comes what a shock it gives us and the characters too! The
tragicomic business of one old man whipping another from the highest
motives--it reacts upon all their world, and transforms all the
personages of the book. It is not the centre of _Beauchamp's Career_,
which indeed has no centre. It is essentially a contrivance, a door
through which the book is made to pass, emerging in an altered form.
Towards the close, when Beauchamp is drowned and Shrapnel and Romfrey
are reconciled over his body, there is an attempt to elevate the plot to
Aristotelian symmetry, to turn the novel into a temple wherein dwells
interpretation and peace. Meredith fails here: _Beauchamp's Career_
remains a series of contrivances (the visit to France is another of
them), but contrivances that spring from the characters and react upon
them.
And now briefly to illustrate the mystery element in the plot: the
formula of "The queen died, it was afterwards discovered through grief."
I will take an example, not from Dickens (though _Great Expectations_
provides a fine one), nor from Conan Doyle (whom my priggishness
prevents me from enjoying), but again from Meredith: an example of a
concealed emotion from the admirable plot of _The Egoist_: it occurs in
the character of Laetitia Dale.
We are told, at first, all that passes in Laetitia's mind. Sir
Willoughby has twice jilted her, she is sad, resigned. Then, for
dramatic reasons, her mind is hidden from us, it develops naturally
enough, but does not re-emerge until the great midnight scene where he
asks her to marry him because he is not sure about Clara, and this time,
a changed woman, Laetitia says "No." Meredith has concealed the change.
It would have spoiled his high comedy if we had been kept in touch with
it throughout. Sir Willoughby has to have a series of crashes, to catch
at this and that, and find everything rickety. We should not enjoy the
fun, in fact it would be boorish, if we saw the author preparing the
booby traps beforehand, so Laetitia's apathy has been hidden from us.
This is one of the countless examples in which either plot or character
has to suffer, and Meredith with his unerring good sense here lets the
plot triumph.
As an example of mistaken triumph, I think of a slip--it is no more than
a slip--which Charlotte Brontë makes in _Villette_. She allows Lucy
Snowe to conceal from the reader her discovery that Dr. John is the same
as her old playmate Graham. When it comes out, we do get a good plot
thrill, but too much at the expense of Lucy's character. She has seemed,
up to then, the spirit of integrity, and has, as it were, laid herself
under a moral obligation to narrate all that she knows. That she stoops
to suppress is a little distressing, though the incident is too trivial
to do her any permanent harm.
Sometimes a plot triumphs too completely. The characters have to suspend
their natures at every turn, or else are so swept away by the course of
Fate that our sense of their reality is weakened. We shall find
instances of this in a writer who is far greater than Meredith, and yet
less successful as a novelist--Thomas Hardy. Hardy seems to me
essentially a poet, who conceives of his novels from an enormous height.
They are to be tragedies or tragi-comedies, they are to give out the
sound of hammer-strokes as they proceed; in other words Hardy arranges
events with emphasis on causality, the ground plan is a plot, and the
characters are ordered to acquiesce in its requirements. Except in the
person of Tess (who conveys the feeling that she is greater than
destiny) this aspect of his work is unsatisfactory. His characters are
involved in various snares, they are finally bound hand and foot, there
is ceaseless emphasis on fate, and yet, for all the sacrifices made to
it, we never see the action as a living thing as we see it in _Antigone_
or _Berenice_ or _The Cherry Orchard_. The fate above us, not the fate
working through us--that is what is eminent and memorable in the Wessex
novels. Egdon Heath before Eustada Vye has set foot upon it. The woods
without the Woodlanders. The downs above Budmouth Regis with the royal
princesses, still asleep, driving across them through the dawn. Hardy's
success in _The Dynasts_ (where he uses another medium) is complete,
there the hammer-strokes are heard, cause and effect enchain the
characters despite their struggles, complete contact between the actors
and the plot is established. But in the novels, though the same superb
and terrible machine works, it never catches humanity in its teeth;
there is some vital problem that has not been answered, or even posed,
in the misfortunes of Jude the Obscure. In other words the characters
have been required to contribute too much to the plot; except in their
rustic humours, their vitality has been impoverished, they have gone dry