The Art of Fiction

This volume pairs two essays on the craft and status of novel-writing: a lecture by Walter Besant, delivered at the Royal Institution on April 25, 1884, and a direct response by Henry James. Together, the essays debate whether fiction qualifies as a fine art, what laws govern it, and how much freedom the novelist should possess.

Besant opens by advancing three propositions. First, fiction is an art equal in stature to painting, sculpture, music, and poetry. Second, fiction is governed by general laws that can be taught with precision. Third, as with other fine arts, no rules can teach fiction to those who lack natural gifts. He draws a corollary: If these propositions are accepted, novelists must be recognized as artists in the strictest sense, and the great masters of fiction must stand on the same level as those in any other art.

Besant diagnoses why the public fails to grant fiction this recognition. Novelists receive no national honors; neither William Makepeace Thackeray nor Charles Dickens was ever offered a peerage. Amateur novelists, unlike their counterparts in painting or music, treat their craft as something learned by intuition rather than study. Fiction also lacks the institutional trappings of other arts: no academies, exhibitions, or professional credentials. A prevailing view holds that novel-writing is inconsistent with a serious mind, and a more moderate class of skeptics may concede fiction is some kind of art but deny it first-rank status.

Against these views, Besant argues for fiction's supremacy. He calls it the oldest art, the most widely spread, the most religious in its traditional subjects, the most popular, and the most moral, since the world has always learned its morality through story, fable, and allegory. He defines the field of fiction as "nothing less than the whole of Humanity," with landscape and setting serving as subordinate accessories to human figures. Fiction's exclusive focus on humanity, Besant contends, creates in readers a faculty he calls Sympathy: not merely pity but the understanding of others' souls, reverence for the individual, and recognition of each person's value.

Besant then lays down the general laws governing fiction. His foremost rule is that everything not drawn from personal experience and observation is worthless: Characters must be real and natural, actions consistent, and conditions of place and manners based on firsthand knowledge. He identifies observation and selection as the two essential faculties the aspiring novelist must acquire, recommending that writers carry notebooks and continuously record details from daily life. Selection requires the dramatic sense included in genius; nothing should be admitted that does not advance the story or illustrate the characters.

Besant articulates further laws. He compares the novel to a play, with the writer serving as dramatist, stage-manager, and actor. Each character must be drawn with clear outline; if a character does not become clearer daily in the writer's mind, the author does not understand that character. He insists the writer must believe in the story and argues that the modern English novel almost always starts with a conscious moral purpose. Style and careful workmanship are equally critical; there should not be a single carelessly worded sentence in a novel. On the centrality of story, Besant declares that "the story is everything" (34) and dismisses the school claiming all stories have been told. He acknowledges that while the rules of fiction can be taught, the art of inventing stories cannot. In closing remarks and an appended section of practical advice, Besant counsels novelists to tell their stories cheerfully, warns young writers never to pay a publisher to bring out a book, and urges the public to recognize novelists as artists.

Henry James opens his response by welcoming Besant's lecture as a sign that fiction is entering an era of productive discussion. He observes that until recently the English novel carried no air of having a theory behind it, with the comfortable assumption prevailing that "a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding" (51). Art thrives on discussion, experiment, and variety of attempt.

James insists the novel must take itself seriously and refuse to apologize for being fiction. The only reason for a novel's existence is that it competes with life, and the analogy between painting and novel-writing is complete. He criticizes the novelist Anthony Trollope for breaking the novelistic illusion by conceding in asides that narrated events have not really happened, calling this "a betrayal of a sacred office" (55). The novel should be understood as a form of history: The novelist's task, like the historian's, is to represent and illustrate the actions of men.

James affirms fiction's status as a fine art but diverges from Besant on a crucial point. Besant attempts to say too definitively what a good novel will be, but the good health of an art that undertakes to reproduce life demands perfect freedom. The only obligation a novel can be held to without being arbitrary is that it be interesting. James defines a novel as "a personal impression of life" (60), whose value depends on the intensity of the impression. He illustrates the unpredictability of artistic success by contrasting a highly finished story by Gustave Flaubert about a servant-girl's devotion to a parrot, which cannot be called a success, with a tale by Ivan Turgenev about a deaf and mute serf and a lapdog that became a touching masterpiece.

James finds Besant's specific rules suggestive but imprecise. He redefines experience as far broader than Besant allows: "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" (64). For a gifted imagination, a single moment of observation constitutes sufficient experience. Telling a young lady in a village she cannot write about the military is unfair; what matters is the power to guess the unseen from the seen.

James identifies the "air of reality (solidity of specification)" as "the supreme virtue of a novel" (66), the merit upon which all other merits depend. He rejects rigid distinctions between the novel of character and the novel of incident, arguing they are inseparable: "What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" (69). He challenges Besant's insistence that fiction requires adventure, contrasting Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island with Edmond de Goncourt's Chérie, about a French girl who dies of wounded sensibility, and arguing both are equally valid novels.

On moral purpose, James directly reverses Besant's claim: English fiction is characterized not by moral purpose but by moral diffidence, a cautious silence on certain subjects and an orientation toward young readers that keeps the novel shy. James proposes instead that the deepest quality of any work of art is the quality of the mind that produced it; in proportion as that mind is rich and noble, the novel will partake of beauty and truth. James closes by celebrating the novel's freedom, citing the dissimilar talents of Alexandre Dumas, Jane Austen, Dickens, and Flaubert as proof that fiction accommodates every temperament. The novelist's first duty is to be as complete as possible, to make as perfect a work, and then to commit fully to the endeavor.