The driving concept behind the moniker ‘The Watchful Scribe’ should come as no surprise to the observant reader, given that it is emblazoned across this website’s homepage; a maxim written by Henry James in 1884, that implores any budding novelist to ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’. While it was originally penned as advice for aspiring artists, this rule is undoubtedly something invaluable to keep in mind throughout all walks of life. But what exactly did Henry James mean when he declared that the novelist should be, above all, watchful? And why did he feel it so crucial, especially at a time when the fate of the novel form as a whole was in serious debate? Within this essay, I intend to shed light both on the dilemma that hounded even the greatest novelists of the age, and how Henry James’ simple rule provided an equally simple, but infinitely useful, solution.
When, in his 1884 essay ‘The Art of Fiction’, American novelist Henry James proposed his memorable mantra ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’, he was writing at a pivotal time for the novel form. Two centuries earlier, Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and John Locke had turned their backs on rigid, pre-established traditions of thought to instead ‘Look at the facts and think for [themselves]’,[1] and early eighteenth-century writers such as Daniel Defoe and Robert Fielding were subsequently inspired to search for stories beyond the narrow, well-trodden confines of existing literary convention. In doing so, though it would not be given its name until later, these authors had inadvertently conceived the novel form— an artistic medium which, as its name well suggests, ‘fully reflects’ the Enlightenment’s ‘individualist and innovating reorientation’ and strives, above all else, to capture ‘truth to individual experience— individual experience which is always unique and therefore new’.[2] However, this burgeoning art form’s desire to forsake traditional, universal narrative templates and instead capture the particularities of the individual experience made it nebulous and unfocused, and its practitioners often found themselves at a loss when trying to definitively discern how, when faced with the limitless source material of real life, a novelist should best select what should be included within the very limited scope of their works. Some figures sought to solve this problem of selection and exclusion by imposing harsh restrictions on where the novelist should dare search for subjects and ideas; Henry James, in contrast, insisted that the solution lay in the very qualities that had birthed the novel form in the first place.
The Novel Problem
As literary historian Ian Watts asserts, ‘the defining characteristic which differentiates the work of the early eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction’ is realism. Whilst the classical and the renaissance epic lifted their stories and characters from pre-established literary traditions; historical, mythological, or otherwise; the realist novel sought to ‘place an unprecedented value on originality’ and gave a far greater amount of attention ‘both to the individualisation of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment’. It was a development away from the focus on the ideal and the abstract prevalent in epic and romantic convention, and towards an effort to ‘portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective’.[3] As a result, novelists were given a wider space for authorial expression and experimentation; their characters no longer had to fit to type, come from a certain class or mythology, speak in a certain kind of manner, or symbolise particular ideals.
However, in gleefully casting off the yoke of classical artistic tradition and instead aiming to focus on portraying all aspects of human experience, even and especially those rejected by previous moral convention, this liberating innovation also led, as Watts expounds, to a ‘poverty of […] formal conventions’ that was ‘the price it must pay for its realism’. Indeed, unhampered artistic freedom can walk a fine line between innovation and chaos, and when the realist movement set its primary task as being ‘to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience’, it meant that any reliance on a pre-established literary convention, no matter how slight, could ‘only endanger its success’. As such, there became a self-imposed ‘formlessness’ that ran throughout the novel form, as novelists were technically unable to draw inspiration from existing literary theory, lest they undermine their focus on the original and particularised human experience.[4]
This lack of a formal structure to guide the composition of the novel led into a deeper problem, that lay at the root of realism itself. There is a tension in realist writing, between the endeavour to accurately portray an individual’s experience as true to life as possible, and creating an effective piece of artwork. The French Realists boldly claimed their novels to be ‘the product of a more dispassionate and scientific scrutiny of life than had ever been attempted before’;[5] but as Watts points out, it is unclear as to whether such an ideal of scientific objectivity is at all desirable in art. Indeed, Habib articulates the principle aim of realism as to ‘offer a truthful, accurate, and objective representation of the real world, both the external world and the human self’— yet the scope of human experience is limitless, and artistic forms very much are not. As such, the process of distilling reality into literature is ultimately one of selection, and as a result, exclusion. What ends up being excluded is naturally down to the discretion of the novelist, and thus the novel’s composition becomes a subjective act, entirely antithetical to the realist’s aim of a dispassionate, objective illustration of real life. As Habib explains, this was an unavoidable discrepancy between the critical views of realist writers and their creative works themselves, as they necessarily deployed ‘sophisticated techniques of symbolism and authorial perspective’, giving ‘scathing critiques of oppressive social conditions’ and often being ‘guilty (inevitably) of manipulating so-called facts’ in order to craft their fictional narratives.[6]
Therefore, due both to the novel’s resistance to literary convention and the innate impossibility of creating a work of literature that was entirely true-to-life, as the realist movement progressed into the nineteenth century, its participants began to differ in their struggles to accurately distil the endless, objective multiplicity of life into their works. George Eliot, Habib expounds, wrestled with the ‘gulf between language and experience’ and ‘the inadequacy of words to express our actual psychological states’. Gustave Flaubert was eventually reconciled to the fact that ‘the raw material of life or experience needed to be worked on by art’,[7] and Emile Zola’s militant scientific naturalism came almost at the expense of the artistic scope itself (Henry James described the Frenchman’s efforts as being ‘vitiated by a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis’)[8]. This was a problem at the heart of realist fiction; its desire to reflect wholly objective, individual human experience was one that seemed entirely incompatible with the artistic endeavour. Its limitless wealth of potential source material from which to draw from lent it an unprecedented scope for artistic expression, but its lack of any literary convention or tradition to provide a cohesive structural foundation meant that the novel was an art form more ambiguous and directionless than it was empowered by its liberty.
Walter Besant and the Art of Fiction
Despite this turmoil at the heart of the realist endeavour, by 1884, the novel form at last had a ‘definite history, a distinct variety of forms, and a large body of important work behind it’, and so some of its most vociferous advocates began to argue its place as one of the finer arts. A huge stride in this endeavour came from Walter Besant, whom Mark Spilka describes as ‘probably the most popular author of his day in England’ for his East End novels and ‘shallow’ romances,[9] and who that very year gave a lecture to the Royal Institution in which he declared that he would argue the case for fiction (by which he meant novel writing) to be considered ‘as an Art in every way worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry’. In order to do this, Besant determined to articulate a coherent, overarching technique for the art of novel writing; like the other fine arts, Besant viewed his own as being ‘governed and directed by general laws’ that ‘may be laid down and taught with as much precision as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion’ (TAF, 3). After all, as Spilka puts it, Besant believed that ‘powers and faculties could be acquired by simple rules and methods’, and so by outlining a definitive compositional process, his ‘chief concern’ was the ‘teaching of fiction to young people with a talent for it’ (creative writing at this point was not yet considered worthy of academic tutelage).[10]
However, with the context of the novel problem in mind, it is clear that any attempt to impose a definitive methodology onto such an informal artform as novel writing, whose origin specifically came from a complete rejection of unifying literary conventions, would be far harder than it may first seem. Besant, unfortunately, was simply not up to the task; he was an ‘incorrigible enthusiast with a flair for unplanned incongruities’, and his lecture, while impassioned and earnest, was full of inconsistency and contradiction. Spilka goes as far as to condemn it as ‘mindless babble’.[11] There are many instances where Walter Besant falls short of convincingly establishing a clear set of universally teachable rules for novel writing, but a particularly egregious example is his first rule, that ‘everything in Fiction which is invented and is not the result of personal experience is worthless’. Besant claims, reasonably, that the ‘sole end’ of modern realist fiction is to ‘portray humanity and human character’ in a way that ‘must be real, and such as might be met with in actual life’, but then deems that the only way that a budding novelist can achieve this is by only seeking to illustrate subjects derived from their own personal experience. Examples that the English novelist provides to elucidate this most stifling of strictures only serve to further emphasise its absurdity, such as that a ‘young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life’ or that a writer from a lower middle-class background should never attempt to introduce his characters into other levels of society (TAF, 17-18). Henry James, in his own essay, takes particular umbrage with this latter example, labelling it as ‘rather chilling’ (TAF, 63).
Indeed, in his response to Besant’s argument, James is careful to laud the Englishman’s efforts to propose the novel as a high form of art— after all, as Spilka articulates, Besant’ popularity made him a ‘register for the national mind’,[12] and if anyone could have improved the public’s respect for the artistic discipline that they both shared, it would be he— but also carefully dismantles his attempt to rampart a rather claustrophobic set of rules around the process of novel writing. He writes that Besant’s efforts are ‘suggestive’, even ‘inspiring’, and that he would find it ‘difficult to dissent’ from any of the Englishman’s ‘recommendations’; at the same time, he also admits that he would find it ‘difficult positively to assent to them’, for they ‘scarcely […] have the quality that Mr Besant attributes to the rules of the novelist— the “precision and exactness” of “the laws of harmony, perspective and proportion”’ (TAF, 63).
Ultimately, though, James doesn’t simply find fault with the content of Besant’s rules for the aspiring novelist. His issue instead lies with the Englishman’s entire endeavour to ‘say so definitively beforehand what sort of an affair the good novel will be’ (TAF, 60).
Henry James’ Portrait of the Imagination
As a realist writer in the tradition of Eliot and Thackeray, Henry James agreed with Besant that one ‘will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality’. At the same time, he was very conscious of the novel problem; as he writes in ‘The Art of Fiction’, ‘Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms’, and therefore it would be a ‘difficult’ task to ‘give […] a recipe for calling that sense [of reality] into being’ (TAF, 64). But to impose rules and restrictions onto what a novelist is allowed to take from reality and implement into their work would not only be misguided and futile for this reason, it would also waste the very potential of realist writing that makes it so appealing; as Spilka writes, such an imposition would have ‘denied the ranges of imagination’, to say the least.[13]
When Besant states that one should only write from their own experience, James counters by questioning what could be meant by ‘experience’ in the first place. After all, as the American writes, ‘Experience is never limited, and it is never complete’; he characterises it as 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’ (TAF, 64). Interestingly for a realist writer such as James, this analogy, with its use of symbolic, natural imagery, is very reminiscent of the Romantic poets from the beginning of the century, such as Percy Shelley’s depiction of poetry in ‘Mont Blanc’; a witch who sits in a ‘still cave’ and seeks ‘among the shadows that pass by/Ghosts of all things that are’ to provide inspiration for its verses.[14] It is not to the rational, scientific, empirical world of the realist writer that James turns to solve the problem of selection and exclusion inherent in the novel’s composition, but instead to the speculative faculty of the imagination. Indeed, to approach a problem so ill-defined and intangible as the paradox between an objective depiction of reality and the subjective artistic process, one perhaps requires a solution that is equally intangible, and so James insists that a truly successful novelist requires a mind that is ‘imaginative— much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius’ to take the ‘faintest hints of life’ and convert ‘the very pulses of the air into revelations’. (Here we see further application of Romantic metaphor, this time reminiscent of Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’.) James differs from those such as Besant who believe that the novel serves simply to illustrate life— for therein lurks the hazard of choosing exactly what is worth illustrating— but instead argues it must ‘compete’ with it, to hold up unabashed its own particular imagining of reality and proclaim it ‘with assurance, with the tone of the historian’. As such, that young village girl whom Besant so airily dismissed is instead invited by James to take whatever aspect of human experience that she so desires as an artistic subject, as long as she possesses a well-trained imagination, ‘the faculty which when you give an inch takes an ell’; if so, she will be able to transform the slightest hint of a life otherwise alien to her, the briefest snatch of conversation, the sudden glimpse of a life’s story scrawled across a man’s fleeting expression, into a vibrant and beautiful novel (TAF, 54-64).
Indeed, this was Henry James’ own compositional method. As Joseph Warren Beach describes in his The Method of Henry James, the novelist ‘builds his novels primarily upon a motive, or an idea’ that could often be as general as a ‘morsel of real life picked up perhaps in conversation’. This glimmer of a subject would then be ‘worked upon by his prepared imagination, to be assimilated to the general substance of his mental world’, Then, following a logical evolution and extrapolation of the idea that is based in ‘his own imagination and experience of life’, narrative developments ‘fall together, as by the neat action of their own weight and form’ almost independently of the artist’s conscious intention, until he can only assume that the final work was ‘always well in advance’ of his own cognition of it.[15] Henry James seems to view the artistic process as something that could never be truly understood in rational terms, and thus implores the overseers of the novel form to refrain from imposing any rigid set of quantifiable rules onto its composition; instead, they must only ‘grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée’, and to reserve judgement of its merit for what work they subsequently build off of it. No externally inflicted morality or rigorous imposition of technique should attempt to stifle an artistic process that we could never truly understand; an artist needs to be granted whatever subject they desire, whether moral or amoral, personally experienced or fabricated, and how they choose to cultivate it through their personal experience, and their imaginative faculty, is ‘a secret between his good angel and himself’ (TAF, 67-71).
Thus, when Henry James is faced with the omnipresent problem at the heart of the realist novel, his recommendation of ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’ is at once a solution, and an invitation to other writers. While Walter Besant, in his efforts to establish novel writing as a respected, teachable artistic institution, sought to solve the innate inauthenticity of fiction by simply barring novelists from writing anything outside of their own life experience, Henry James instead believed that the ‘good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free’ (TAF, 60). The only way in which an entirely authentic expression of the human condition can be produced, is by giving the human writing it the unmediated liberty to express themselves in whichever way they choose. As he articulates in the final few pages of his essay, the beauty of novel writing in comparison to the other arts is that it ‘offers to sight so few restrictions and such innumerable opportunities’, so that ‘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’. In fact, the single condition that Henry James does attach to the composition of a novel is that it be ‘interesting’ (TAF, 84). Beyond that, it is the novelist’s endeavour to use their own imagination, their own genius, in the work of catching even the briefest whisper of a muse heard in their own lives and cultivating it into a work entirely fabricated, and yet somehow, undeniably real.
With the whole broad scope of reality at their disposal, all the novelist need do is be ever watchful for the next story to tell.
Further Reading
- Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Pimlico, 2000)
Literary historian Ian Watt describes how the avenues of thought paved by the Enlightenment philosophers birthed the realist novel, and how this new form differed from previous literary traditions in its prioritising of artistic liberty and originality. He specifically focuses on arguably the three progenitors of the novel, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson, and speaks of how their works set the standard for the novel form to follow.
- Mark Spilka, ‘Henry James and Walter Besant: “The Art of Fiction” Controversy’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 6:2 (Winter, 1973)
Spilka goes into far greater detail about the controversy around the novel in 1884 than I had space in this essay for, and also explains further how Henry James’ essay responded to and politely critiqued the assertions that Walter Besant made in his own lecture.
- M.A.R Habib, A History of Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008)
A staggeringly ambitious and comprehensive overview of the development of literary criticism and theory throughout the ages. Though I only referred to the small section on realism, the work covers thought and work from every post-Plato era of Western literature and philosophy.
Bibliography
Besant, Walter and James, Henry, The Art of Fiction (Boston: Cupples and Hurd).
Beach, Joseph Warren, The Method of Henry James (Albert Saifer, 1954).
Habib, M.A.R, A History of Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008).
Magee, Bryan, The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy (London: BBC Books, 1987).
Poems of Byron, Keats and Shelley, ed. Elliot Coleman (International Collectors Library).
Spilka, Mark, ‘Henry James and Walter Besant: “The Art of Fiction” Controversy’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 6:2 (Winter, 1973).
Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Pimlico, 2000)
[1] Bryan Magee, The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy (London: BBC Books, 1987) p 120.
[2] Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Pimlico, 2000) p 13.
[3] Watt, pp 11-18.
[4] Watt, p 13.
[5] Watt, p 11.
[6] M.A.R Habib, A History of Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) pp 471-474.
[7] Habib, pp 474-477.
[8] Walter Besant and Henry James, The Art of Fiction (Boston: Cupples and Hurd) p 85 (hereafter parenthesised as (TAF, p)).
[9] Mark Spilka, ‘Henry James and Walter Besant: “The Art of Fiction” Controversy’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 6:2 (Winter, 1973) pp 104-108.
[10] Spilka, pp 107-109.
[11] Spilka, p 102.
[12] Spilka, p 104.
[13] Spilka, p 109.
[14] Poems of Byron, Keats and Shelley, ed. Elliot Coleman (International Collectors Library) p 488.
[15] Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (Albert Saifer, 1954) pp 11-23.