Chapter 22 art of fiction

The novel is a lady, and a lady who for some reason is already in trouble, as her admirers must often have thought.Many gallant gentlemen had ridden to her rescue, chief among them Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr Percy Lubbock.Both of them, however, took a slightly too formal approach, giving the impression that while they knew a lot about the lady, they weren't very intimate with her.Now came a Mr. Foster who did not think he knew her very well, though it cannot be denied that he was quite acquainted with the lady.If he lacks the authoritative knowledge of others, he enjoys the privileges that only lovers have.He knocked on the bedroom door, and the lady received him in pajamas and slippers.They pulled up their chairs in front of the fire, and talked with ease, wit, and wit, like two old friends who have lost their illusions, despite the fact that the bedroom was a school-room in a different place. It is a very serious institution of higher learning-Cambridge.

Mr. Foster's informal attitude was, of course, deliberate.He is not a scholar; nor does he refuse to be a pseudo-academic.This leaves the presenter with an unassuming but conveniently useful vantage point.According to Mr. Foster, he could "think of English novelists not as beings who float in the stream of time and be swept away by it if one is not careful, but as a group of In a circular room like a museum reading room, people who are writing novels at the same time.”In fact, they emphasize simultaneity so much that they insist that they do not have to write in their chronological order.Richardson insisted that he was a contemporary of Henry James.Wells could write a passage that could well have been written by Dickens.As a novelist himself, Mr. Foster was not troubled by this discovery.Experience taught him what a confused and illogical machine the writer's mind is.He knows: how little they think about the way of creation; how thoroughly they forget about their ancestors;Therefore, although the scholars were greatly admired by him, he felt sympathy for the rough and troubled people who were writing and writing.He did not look down upon them from some great height, but, as he said, he looked over their shoulders as he passed, and recognized certain forms and thoughts which tended to recur in their minds, No matter what era they belong to.Stories, as long as they have been told, have always been composed of very similar elements; these elements he calls story, character, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm, and he now sets out to examine these elements.

There are many judgments we are happy to argue about, and many points of view to revisit, as Mr. Foster walks briskly along.Scott is nothing more than a storyteller; stories are the lowest of the literary organisms; and the novelist's unnatural prejudices against love are largely a reflection of his own state of mind when he writes—in On every page there is some hint or opinion of some sort which makes us pause for thought or to object.Mr. Foster never raised his voice above the level of ordinary conversation, but he has mastered the art of speaking, and the words he utters slip lightly into the hearts of his hearers, stay there, and bloom like those Japanese flowers in deep water. It usually blooms.But although these words arouse our keen interest, at certain definite points we ask to be stopped; we ask Mr. Foster to stop and make his opinion.For, if the novel does get into trouble, as we say, it may be because no one holds her fast enough to set her strict boundaries.No criteria were set for her, and very little consideration was given to her.Though rules may be wrong, and must be broken, yet they have these advantages—they give dignity and order to the subject to whom they belong; they allow her a place in civilized society; they prove her to be worthy of consideration.Yet this part of his duty - if it were his duty - Mr. Foster expressly denies.Except by accident, he did not intend to engage in theories about the novel; he even doubted whether she could be approached by a critic, and if so, did not know what critical weapons he would use.All we can do is place him in a position where we can definitely see his footing.Perhaps the best way to do this is to quote in a very condensed summary his valuation of three great men—Meredith, Hardy, and Henry James.Meredith is a philosopher who has been exposed.His perception of nature is "loose but rich".When he becomes serious and dignified, he is domineering. "In his novels most of the social value is fictional. A tailor is not a tailor and a cricket game is not a cricket game." Hardy was a far greater writer.As a novelist, however, he was less successful because his characters "accommodate the plot too much; their vitality is drained of them except their rustic character, they become thin and dry—his sense of cause and effect The emphasis on the relationship has exceeded the load of his form of expression.Henry James pursued, and succeeded, along the narrow path of the novel's aesthetic function.However, at what sacrifice? "Much of human life had to fade away before he could create us a novel. Only crippled creatures could breathe in his novels. His characters were not only few in number but poor in line."

If we now look at these assertions, and examine them alongside some of the things Mr. Confined, we can also point out that he is limited to a certain point of view.There is something--let's avoid being more explicit for the moment--something he calls "life."That's what he compares with the work of Meredith, or Hardy, or James.Where they fail, there is always some relation to life.Opposite to the aesthetic concept of the novel is the concept of human nature.It insists on "infiltrating human nature in novels" and insists that "people should have great opportunities to express themselves in novels"; victory at the expense of life is actually a failure.And so we have that apparently harsh conclusion about Henry James.For Henry James brings something impersonal into the novel.He creates patterns that, while beautiful in their own right, run counter to human nature.Mr. Foster said that because Henry James neglected life, he would perish.

Yet assiduous students may demand an explanation: "What is this 'life' that keeps popping up in treatises on fiction so mysteriously and smugly? Why is it in a pattern No life, and it comes at a tea party? Why do we have less pleasure in the mode of The Golden Bowl than Trollope's description of a lady drinking tea in a parsonage excites us? Evidently, this definition of life is too arbitrary and needs to be expanded." To all these inquiries Mr. Foster would perhaps reply that he has not set any criteria: for him The novel seems to be a substance too soft to be dissected like other art forms; he is merely telling us what moves him and what disinterests him.In fact, there is no other standard.So we are back to the original dilemma, no one has any understanding of the principles of fiction, and no one understands how fiction relates to life, or how it affects them.We can only trust our instincts.If instinct leads one reader to call Scotus a storyteller and another a master of romance, if one reader is moved by art and another by life, they are both right, They can each build a theoretical house of paper on top of their own views as high as he can build.But the assumption that the novel is more intimately and submissively subordinate to the end of service to man than any other form of art leads to a further insight which is restated in Mr. Foster's treatise.There is no need to discuss in detail the various aesthetic functions of the novel, since they are so weak that they can be ignored without risk.Thus, although it is inconceivable in a treatise on painting not to mention a single word about the expressive means by which the painter works, it is still possible to write a book like Forster's by briefly mentioning the expressive means by which the novelist works. Such a wise and brilliant monograph of fiction by Mr.In this work, there is little mention of the text used in the novel.Unless a reader has read those novels, he may suspect that a sentence means the same thing to Sterne or Wells, and is used to the same end.He might conclude that the language in which Triston Shandy was written did not add much luster to the novel.The same is true of the other aesthetic qualities of the novel.The mode of the novel, as we have seen, is recognized, but it is severely condemned because it tends to obscure the character of humanity.Beauty is revealed, yet she is doubted.She takes on a sly look—“A novelist should never aim at beauty, though failure to achieve it is failure”—and the interesting few moments at the end of the monograph In page 1, the author briefly discusses the possibility of aesthetic re-emergence in the form of rhythm.But, beyond that, the novel is treated as a parasitic animal that feeds on life and must reciprocate by portraying it beautifully, or it perishes.In poetry and drama, the words themselves can excite and excite and deepen the aesthetic effect without this fidelity to life; Once it is found to be lacking in life, it is considered to be poor in content.

While this non-aesthetic attitude would be surprising in any other kind of art criticism, we should not be surprised in fiction criticism.First, this is an extremely complex and difficult problem.In the process of reading, a book gradually disappears before our eyes, like a wisp of smoke or a pillow of yellow beams.How can we take a stick to point out tones and relations in vanishing pages as Mr. Roger Fry used his wand to point out lines and colors in the picture that unfolded before him?Moreover, a novel in particular has, in the course of its development, aroused a thousand ordinary human emotions.To force art into such a relationship seems a bit prim and callous.This will likely tarnish the image of such a critic as a man with feelings and various family ties.Thus, while painters, musicians, and poets accept criticism against them, novelists are not.His character will be discussed; his morality, or perhaps his lineage, will be examined; but his writing will be immune to judgment.There is not a living critic who would consider a novel a work of art, and would judge her as such.

Perhaps, as Mr. Foster suggests, those critics are right.Fiction is not a work of art, at least in Britain.There is nothing quite like The Brothers Karamazov or Remembrance of Time.When we accept this fact, however, we cannot suppress a final surmise.In France and Russia, novels are taken seriously.It took Flaubert a month to find the right phrase to describe a cabbage.Tolstoy rewrote it seven times.Their outstanding achievements may be partly due to their hard work, and partly due to the strict judgment they received.English novelists would perhaps have been braver if their critics had not been so family-minded, if they had not been so tireless in defending the right to what they like to call life.He would have left the eternal tea-table and those plausible and absurd routines which have been supposed to represent the whole of our human adventure.In that case, the story might falter; the plot might crumble; the characters might be destroyed.In short, a novel has the potential to become a work of art.

This is the dream Mr. Foster leads us to envision.Because his monograph is a book that encourages dreams.About that poor lady--with perhaps false chivalry we insist on calling the art of fiction as such--could never have been more instructive than this book.