in The Critical Tradition edited by David
H. Richter from ‘The Art of Fiction” by Henry
James (1884):
“It goes
without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess a 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 odor of it and others have not; as for
telling you in advance how your nosegay should be composed, that is another
affair. It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say one must write from
experience; to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration might savor of mockery.
What kind of experience is intended and where does it 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 air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the
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 itself to the faintest
hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations…
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications 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 town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience constitutes impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, I should certainly say to the novice, “Write from experience and experience only”, I should feel that this a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add,” Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost!”. . .
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications 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 town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience constitutes impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, I should certainly say to the novice, “Write from experience and experience only”, I should feel that this a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add,” Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost!”. . .
A novel is a
living thing. All one and continuous, like any other organism and in proportion
as it lives it will be found. Many people speak of it as a factitious,
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 molds. This, however, is a view of the matter which carries us but a very short way, condemns 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 note and trick, the strange, irregular rhythm of life, that
is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps fiction on her 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 we feel
we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and convention.”
For Henry James the moral purpose of fiction is free discussion. He puts it like this:
For Henry James the moral purpose of fiction is free discussion. He puts it like this:
“In the
English novel (by which I mean the American as well), more than any other, there
is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree
to admit they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which
they feel to be a part of life and that
which they allow to enter into literature. The essence of moral energy is to
survey the whole field.”
from ‘The Decay of Lying” (1889) by Oscar Wilde
from ‘The Decay of Lying” (1889) by Oscar Wilde
A Dialogue
Vivian[ reading from his manuscript]: ‘ We need not say anything
about the poets, for they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth,
have been really faithful to their high mission, and are universally recognized
as being absolutely unreliable. But in the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of
the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modern scioloists to verify his history,
may justly be called the ‘Father of Lies’; in the published speeches of Cicero
and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny’s Natural History; in Hanno’s Periplus; in all the early chronicles;
in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Mallory; in the travels
of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycosthenes, with
his magnificent Prodigiorum et Ostentorum
Chronicon; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of
Casanova; in Defoe’s History of the
Plague; in Boswell’s Life of Johnson;
in Napoleons dispatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle, whose French Revolution is one of the most fascinating
historical novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper
subordinate opposition, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dullness.
Now, everything is changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is on everything. They are vulgarizing mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington has done more harm, and in a shorter period of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.’
Cyril: My dear boy!
Vivian: I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole thing is that the story of the cherry tree is an absolute myth. However you must not think that I am too despondent about the artistic future either of Americas or our own country. Listen to this:-
' That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based on memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, who is at any time liable to be corroborated by them merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. Who he was who first, without ever gone out to the rude chase, told the wondering cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the Mammoth in single combat and brought back it gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not one of or modern anthropologists, for all their much-boasted science, has had the ordinary courage to tell us. Whatever his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of every liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society and without him a dinner party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Punch’s farcical comedies.
Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life –tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to produce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.’
Now, everything is changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is on everything. They are vulgarizing mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington has done more harm, and in a shorter period of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.’
Cyril: My dear boy!
Vivian: I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole thing is that the story of the cherry tree is an absolute myth. However you must not think that I am too despondent about the artistic future either of Americas or our own country. Listen to this:-
' That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based on memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, who is at any time liable to be corroborated by them merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. Who he was who first, without ever gone out to the rude chase, told the wondering cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the Mammoth in single combat and brought back it gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not one of or modern anthropologists, for all their much-boasted science, has had the ordinary courage to tell us. Whatever his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of every liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society and without him a dinner party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Punch’s farcical comedies.
Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life –tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to produce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.’
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