How to Read/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
HOW TO READ A NOVEL
I
Thus far we have dealt almost exclusively with the subjective side of reading: with the internal mechanisms of the process; with the character of the raw materials in which we work; with the sources from which we draw these materials; with the urges, largely unconscious, that we obey in building up, out of these materials, our versions of the author's work; with the limitations imposed upon us, and the general character and trend of the opportunities opened out to us by the fact of our having to read under these generally unrealized and disregarded conditions.
And we have perhaps seemed, in consequence, to be assuming that authors have no rights that a reader is bound to respect, and that the normally accepted and generally read-for objectivity of a book's contents is either non-existent or of negligible value.
But there has been a definite purpose in this order of procedure. For whereas there are two distinct factors in right reading, and whereas we ordinarily overestimate the importance of one of these factors while ignoring the very existence of the other, it has been necessary to restore the balance by a compensating overemphasis. And we have attempted to do this while at the same time acquiring a first-hand and vivid realization of the living actuality and the finally governing character of the habitually ignored subjective factor. Moreover, this is the logical approach to a systemized understanding of right reading. For, while individual readers do constantly arrive at an intelligent and expert practice of right reading through the instinctive, unconscious, and unanalyzed adapting of these subjective means to the complex ends involved, the methods of these individual arrivals are unsystemized and incommunicable. And not alone the best routes of approach to right reading, but the true nature of its rewards and the real goals toward which it leads, cannot be made systematically clear to the inquiring, would-be practitioner of the art while he or she continues to regard the author's conception as a concrete thing actually imprisoned in the text and identically derivable therefrom by each of us.
II
The conception of the author is, of course, forever un-get-at-able except in approximation by any of us. It is not and cannot be "imprisoned in the text." It exists, and can exist, nowhere in the world except in the author's consciousness. And yet this conception of the author is for us, as a matter of fact, more nearly an objectively sharable entity than our inquiries into our subjective reading processes have thus far led us to see.
For in spite of the variousness (when closely examined) of our personal experiences, temperamental biases, intellectual predispositions, and complex character make-ups, our type resemblances in these matters are (when viewed from a little distance) more noticeable than our individual differences. So that while no two of us ever make for ourselves identical formulations of an author's conception, our individual formulations fall inevitably into type classifications—into groups within which the general agreements outweigh the specific differences. And as even these type differences, and even racial distinctions and historical alterations of outlook, merge at last into the basic solidarity of our shared humanity, it follows that in something very like a direct proportion to the universal human relevancy of an author's conception our readings of his work tend to a consensus of practical agreement. They will, let us say, group themselves into a central core of similar formulations, surrounded by smaller groups of aberrant type readings, and fringe out into individual freak interpretations.
Let me illustrate this statement by an example.
In the last chapter we used a fancied reading of "The Brushwood Boy" as a means of examining the extreme individuality of our personal reading processes. Yet thousands upon thousands of English-speaking readers, in spite of their thousands of individual readings of the tale, have found themselves in essential agreement in their formulation of Kipling's elusive conception of youth's universal longing. And at the same time other, although fewer, thousands have found themselves in equally essential agreement over their various impatient inabilities to "see anything in it." And a woman once actually and seriously declared to me that she thought "The Brushwood Boy" the "most indecent story she had ever read."
III
We have now arrived, then, at a point where we can agree to define right reading as a constructive and critical attempt to formulate, each one for himself, the thing that the author is trying to show us in the terms of those subjective processes and materials that we have discussed in the preceding chapters. And it remains for us to discuss the broader practical problems involved in our "adventure of learning to read" when right reading is thus regarded.
And I have elected to discuss these broader problems under the chapter heading of "How to Read a Novel," because, while every kind of right reading is demanded of us in specialized and concentratedly developed form in some other-than-fiction kind of reading, it is in fiction especially (and more and more so as the modern novel continues to claim the whole of life as its field and to include all of life's attainments and relationships in its successive and many-angled "criticisms of life") that all kinds of right reading are demanded of us in turn and in constructive and critical combination. And, moreover, because it is especially in reading fiction that we are given to muddling along without any active exercise of right reading at all and without, therefore, deriving any of the enhancements that should result to us.
IV
Let us begin with the statement that the right reading of a novel consists in a constructive and critical formulation for ourselves, in the fullest possible terms of our own experience, of the particular fictional conception that the author is trying to place before us. And in order to get the problems involved in this task intelligently stated, let us examine our relations to fiction and to fictional conceptions.
Children and young people, as we have already seen, love fiction because it gives form to their unformulated experience; because it supplies an imaginative concreteness to their longing for adventure; because it makes articulate their unvoiced dreams of personal achievement. They instinctively use it, in other words, even when taking refuge in it from their immediate griefs and boredom, as an approach to wider living. And we, if we would have it continue to serve us, even as a refuge, must do the same.
But we are no longer children. We are no longer, on the stream of youth's development, being carried swiftly forward in a constantly altering approach to life and having our dreams automatically changed for us in consequence. We have, relatively speaking, arrived. Our development, to put it more accurately, has slowed down; so that our dreams, more and more, impinge upon reality; and experience, more and more, intervenes to contradict and correct our hopes. And our relation to fiction, even as a refuge, changes accordingly.
If, under these new conditions, we gradually come to shrink from experience; gradually accept life as a treadmill; gradually close our eyes to its tangled and contradictory implications and seek to take refuge from its new puzzles in the unaltered redreaming of old dreams;—we soon come to the using of fiction as a mere drug to deaden consciousness with. And as this is to drift, both in our living and our reading development, into the most vicious of all vicious circles of stagnation, we may, for our present purpose, dismiss such reading of fiction from our consideration.
But if, as we come in contact with the realities of living, we begin, in any measure whatever, to develop an interest in the meaning of life; if we experience the slightest promptings of a will to inquire; if, hesitatingly at first, but with growing curiosity and deepening interest, we begin to ask questions of experience; if, from thus asking questions of experience, we come little by little to the seeking of experience in order to question it,—then more and more consciously and purposefully we find ourselves turning to fiction and enjoying it because it synthesizes our own observations of life and extends and amplifies and interprets them.
Yet this is only one of its functions. For, since new attitudes toward experience are the source of all new hopes and new dreams, it follows that the more we face life from this interested angle, and the more we practice the right reading of science and history and philosophy and fiction itself as aids to such facing, the more constantly can fiction reassume for us its legitimate function toward the "young"—the more often, that is to say, can it serve us afresh as the mould for new hopes, as the concrete expression of new dreams; in short, as the means of making tentative imaginary syntheses of the broader life we are thus approaching.
It was to these constantly readjusted and reorganized functions of fiction that we referred in the fifth chapter, in saying that "there are nursery rhymes for every mile of the way; love-stories for every stage of growth; adventure-tales for every enlargement of our consciousness and understanding."
V
When looked at from this point of view, all reading matter becomes an invitation to us in some way to compare notes with another observer; either upon the actuality of the facts of existence, or upon the relations that these facts conceivably bear to one another and to ourselves. And the distinctive feature of fiction is that it invites us to undertake this comparing of notes by formulating for ourselves some particular, imaginative arrangement of the more or less characteristic and familiar facts of our common experience, so contrived by the author as to form an artificial synthesis, or appearance of completeness, in the human drama that is being tumultuously enacted before our eyes and within ourselves.
And the first thing that, as prospective acceptors of such fictional invitations, it is important for us to realize, is that the ultimate basis of every such artificial synthesis or appearance of completeness—and hence the fundamental factor of our personal formulation of it—is always a particular way of looking at things, a special attitude of mind, a mood of observation. This ultimate fictional basis is never, even in the shallowest and trashiest yellow-backed time-killer, the plot of the story. And it is never, even in the most stirring romance or in the most shuddersome tragedy, that less tangible but more living thing that we call "the story itself." It is always an angle of observance, a human mood. Thus the ultimate basis of all detective stories and mystery tales is the mood of momentarily looking at life as a challenge to our ingenuity. And the ultimate basis of all tales of adventurous action is the mood of looking at the world as an openable oyster. And the ultimate basis of all romance is the mood of imagining our dreams fulfilled. And the ultimate basis of all real tragedy is the mood of looking at the inevitable as the great consoler, the one final and sanctioned assumer of our responsibilities.
So that in electing to read a novel,—in accepting the invitation of a writer of fiction,—we have to become the guests of the author's mood before we can intelligently act as his collaborators. We should in no case forget our guestship until we have felt our way to at least a tentative recognition of the mood the author is asking us to share with him. And so the first thing that is demanded of us in beginning a novel is an attitude of active and open-minded inquiry with this fact in mind. If this attitude does not come easy to us, we should force ourselves to assume it until it does. And the first and most effective preliminary to the assuming of this attitude is the deliberate and intentional clearing from our minds of all preferences, preconceptions, expectations, and demands with regard to what it is that the author is going to ask of us and show us; at the same time holding ourselves ready, as soon as we have found the clue, to put our entire equipment unreservedly at his disposal for those purposes of "constructive and critical formulation" that we shall presently examine.
VI
But before going on to examine these, it will be well to make absolutely certain that we understand, not only the need for this initial open-mindedness, but the importance of consciously recognizing and falling in with the author's mood at the earliest possible moment. For we do not, as a rule, realize how constantly, in every kind of trying to see what others are pointing out to us, we are hindered and handicapped and defeated by preconceptions.
For example, one of the surprises we encounter on our first sea voyage is the discovery of how difficult it is to see a whale.
It is, let us say, the third day out. Good weather has enabled us to acquire what we ignorantly imagine to be our "sea legs." We no longer speak of "going down stairs." And at seven bells we no longer do surreptitious arithmetic on our fingers and verify the result by covert glances at our watches. Indeed, we quite fancy ourselves old salts. And then, in passing our steamer chair, a ship's acquaintance asks us if we have seen the whale.
"Whale?" we exclaim eagerly. "No. Where is it?"
And he explains that it is a mile or so off the weather bow and offers to show it to us. But when we've rushed to the opposite rail and joined the knot of excited people gathered there, we can see nothing—nothing, that is, except water and waves and sun-glints and white caps. And our self-appointed cicerone points and says, "There! Did n't you see him then?" And we squint in the direction of his extended arm and say no, we did n't. And he becomes more and more explanatory, and we grow more and more obfuscated. Until, just as he is on the point of giving us up as hopeless, we happen quite by accident to notice an insignificant feather of white spray spurt up away off on the horizon, and to hear the girl next to us cry, "There he blows!"
And we say, "That! Is that a whale?"
And our friend says, "Why, of course. What did you think it was?"
And then (according as we happen to be constituted) we either go back to our steamer chair and our novel, saying "Pooh! A nice fuss over nothing!" or else, our curiosity having been aroused, we take the trouble to backtrack our recent mental processes and so discover that as a matter of fact we had not once tried to see what our friend was pointing out to us, but had, instead, been looking demandingly for a large, square-headed, black fish with forked flukes and a miniature Old Faithful spouting intermittently from its head. In fine we discover that we had been unable to see the whale, not at all because we did not know what a whale looked like, but precisely because we thought we knew.
VII
A few years ago Mr. Will Irwin published a little volume called "The Confessions of a Con Man." And I remember, at the time it appeared, calling the attention of a friend to it and being rather taken to task by him in consequence. "Did you enjoy that?" he asked me with fine scorn. And when I had owned up that I had, he said, "Why, good heavens, the man does n't give away a single confidence trick that has not been public property for years."
And this, as it happened, was perfectly true. But it was also, in view of the author's invitation and intention, perfectly immaterial. It was, indeed, the tacit condition upon which the "con man's" unintentional and far more interesting "confessions" had been obtained. For Mr. Irwin, having gained the partial confidence of a confidence man, had been wise enough not to make him restive or suspicious by trying to get out of him the latest secrets of his profession—those tricks, new to-day and old to-morrow, by whose newness he gained his living, He had been glad to accept, in lieu of "modern instances," the histories of deceits now out-moded; because, in reminiscing about these, the man spoke openly and revealed himself without guile. Mr. Irwin had thus surprised a secret far more elusive and enduring than that of the "latest" confidence tricks. He had induced the man, without his knowing it, to "confess" his philosophy of life and to disclose the sanctions of his self-esteem. And in his book Mr. Irwin was offering us the interesting opportunity of looking, in imagination, through a grafter's eyes upon a grafter's world; of finding out, in imagination, what it might be like to be the proud possessor of sharp wits and to roam a happy hunting-ground where the only animals were the Gullibles and the Ungullibles.
But my friend, what with looking intently for a large, square-headed, black fish spouting geysers, had failed to see the whale.
He had, in fact, when he read the title of Mr. Irwin's book, made up his mind what he wanted Mr. Irwin to show him. He had kept on wanting this and looking for it to the end. And in condemning Mr. Irwin as a writer because Mr. Irwin had been trying to show him something else and he had refused to let him, he had passed judgment on nothing but his own skill as a reader.
Of course he might not have cared to accept Mr. Irwin's real invitation. And he might quite properly have laid the book down as soon as he had discovered the actual character of its offering. But in omitting a preliminary, open-minded seeking-out of the author's attitude of observation, and then, on that basis, either looking at his whale or refusing to bother with it, he had failed in the first requirement of the intelligent reader.
VIII
Five years ago John Galsworthy published his novel "The Patrician." And in the months that followed its appearance I met several confirmed admirers of Galsworthy's work who seemed disappointed in the new book. They were even inclined to be a bit grouchy over—well, that was exactly where the trouble came in—over, let us say, some indefinable injustice toward them, whether of omission or of commission they could not tell, of which they dimly felt Mr. Galsworthy to have been guilty. This fact interested me at the time and may well interest us now; for its explanation illuminates one of the pitfalls that our preconceptions are constantly digging for our appreciation.
To begin with, knowing the men, I am persuaded that "The Patrician," divested of Mr. Galsworthy's name as author, would at once have been recognized by them as the very beautiful piece of work and as the sound and subtle criticism of life that it is. But having, through a series of years and of novels, accustomed themselves to reading Galsworthy in the attitude of mind that he had theretofore maintained toward life in his work, they had insisted upon reading "The Patrician" in that mood and had ascribed their consequent puzzlement to the author.
Galsworthy, in his earlier novels, is succinctly describable as a man who saw with unusual clearness the hidden interdependences and masked reciprocal relations of human intercourse, and who presented these to us in terms of the ironies resulting from their non-recognition. While utterly free from any rancor against the individual exponents of the amiable and well-intentioned narrow-mindedness that he had portrayed, he was never content until, by the exercise of just that sympathetic and tolerant understanding of them that he possessed, he had, as it were, given them enough rope to hang themselves by. Naturally enough, he had been called a cynic. And although behind the openly caustic irony of his novels there had ever lain the essentially cleansing humor and healing charity of his comprehension, yet having dubbed him "cynic" his readers had come to seek him out in the confident expectation of finding a sly dog.
And lo, the author of "The Patrician" was a poet!
The novel is a wonderful word-picture of a family of aristocrats with its three generations subtly differentiated by their successively lessening consciousness of caste; with its many members, clean-cut as cameos, seen from the authentic and indicative angles of their individual outlooks; with its patriarchs resigned or desperately at bay before the inroads of modernity, and its high-hearted and stern-minded youths equally yet variously fretting at the curb of caste-tradition. The story is wrought with infinite loving labor, in words weighed to the fraction of intrinsic appositeness and in phrases of exquisite imagery. Yet for all its beauty there is a sardonic note in its dénouement—the echo of a knell. For the work is not only a portrait, but a prophecy. It is a valedictory as well as an appreciation. It is the swan song of a type.
In writing it, Mr. Galsworthy asked his readers to assume in turn the outlooks of three generations and from these to construct with him a particular mood of observation toward the passing order of the English nobility. But these guests of his mood in "The Man of Property" and "The Country House" had accepted his new invitation in the spirit of the old and so missed its meaning.
IX
Fortunately for the student of right reading, it is in the simpler forms of fiction—in love-stories proper, in mystery-mongering tales, in stories of action and adventure and the like—that the mood of the author, the angle of observation from which the novel is written, is most single-minded in itself; is most quickly and openly and once-for-all revealed; and is thus most easily and certainly to be recognized and fallen in with. In many of these cases the first paragraph or the first page contains a full clue to it. In many such instances one senses the book's mood instinctively and adjusts one's self to it spontaneously and without ever consciously recognizing that it has one. But to allow one's self to do this is bad practice. For it is by the habit and consequent training of consciously establishing this mood relation with one's more naïve and obvious authors that one acquires most quickly the ability to collaborate intelligently with authors who are dealing with life in more sophisticated and more complex moods.
For one thing it is very easy to fall into the habit of expecting to have this simple mood-relationship instantly established for us by the author, and of then being "uninterested" if an author does so simple a thing as to begin by thoroughly outlining a situation before he develops his way of looking at what happens there. Yet this is constantly being done. It is, indeed, the rule rather than the exception for us to need to maintain our open-minded attitude toward the author's selected way of looking at things until we have actively cooperated with him in the formulation of his scenic setting and in the initial conception of his characters.
And perhaps the large majority of those readers who are naturally inclined toward right reading do this much automatically and without any actual recognition of what they are doing. But it is none the less bad practice on that account. For it is exactly by doing this consciously and watchfully that we can best develop that quick responsiveness to mood, that instant ability to recognize disclosed angles of observation, and that supple readiness to assume them as they are revealed, that is the first requisite for our intelligent reading of an author whose own fictional attitude is really that of observing the comedy aspects or the tragedy aspects of the conflicting attitudes of others. It is perhaps not too much to say that the failure to develop, in one way or another, this responsiveness and quickness in recognition and, adaptation is what most frequently prevents our progressing beyond the beginnings of fictional right reading. And it is certain that the higher we go in the scale of fiction, the more necessary does this development become for us. For modern fiction tends more and more toward being a dramatization of outlook, a demonstration of the varying possibilities of points of view. Not only are there countless novels written to-day that invite us, as novels have never invited us before, to look at life through the eyes of the "other half"; whose way of living as well as whose point of view has been ignored or despised by us; but much modern fiction of the first order is, in its final intention, a mood-constructor; that is to say, an invitation to us to formulate for ourselves, under the guidance of the author, and out of the gradually assembled implications of the development of his story, a final, tentative, point of view of our own—a "one way of looking at life," an achieved synthesis of estimating outlook.
Take, for example, Arnold Bennett's "The Old Wives' Tale." Here is a novel which follows, in the minutest and most "realistic" detail, the personal histories and interwoven attitudes of two and a half generations of a middle-class English family. In a leisurely, apparently "plotless," and (by reason of its unemotional treatment of "events") superficially uneventful, manner, it carries us, from the youth of its two leading characters and from the middle age of their parents, to the ultimate deaths of every one closely connected with the story except a single and, by then, middle-aged and utterly worthless representative of the third generation—a survivor who by his mere surviving stands before us as the sole and completely negligible result, humanly speaking, of the whole intensely human and many-sidedly interesting struggle. Yet it achieves, for those of its readers who have read it with this open-minded and progressively constructive responsiveness, a complete, dramatic amalgamation of two points of view that had never before been successfully combined in fiction:—that of the supreme importance and significance of life to the individual; and that of the supreme insignificance and unimportance of the individual or of any line of individuals to the mysterious, long-sighted purposes of Life.
X
Let us assume, now, that we have grasped the principle involved in this initial, active, and open-minded seeking-out of the attitude the author is asking us to share with him. And let us assume (deferring for the present our consideration of novels wherein the controlling mood of the author does not reveal itself either early or simply) that we have determined, in every obviously mooded novel that we read, definitely to identify the author's attitude at the earliest possible moment.
The important point that we next have to note in formulating rules for the right reading of novels, is this: That having recognized the mood of the author and having either spontaneously "fallen in with it" or placed ourselves in sympathetic readiness to do so, we must, from then on, view the entire world. of the story—its unfolding situations, its developing characters, their deploying relations to each other, and all questions of the relations of ourselves or of the author to these—from the point of view of this governing and basic attitude.
Do not misunderstand me. I do not for a moment mean that we should not, in the most ordinary and unself-conscious and zestful sense of the words, "read our book." I mean that we must deal with all upwelling inquiries as to probability, consistency, truth to type, and mutual attitude of characters, with each out-cropping manifestation of personal like and dislike of actors or actions, with all disappointments of unconsciously aroused expectation, or impulses toward resentment based on conventional attitudes of mind,—in short, with any and all subsidiary curiosities and any and all promptings to pass judgment that arise in the course of "reading our book,"—with primary and specific relation to this established angle of observation.
Suppose that an author's story deals with a man torn between the conflicting urges of an adventurous Wanderlust and a persistent dream of a wife, children, and the coziness of the feathered nest.
The author's mood of observation may be that of the romantic portraying of sentiment triumphant over obstacles. Or it may be that of the romanic portrayal of the rolling stone's toying with successive mossbeds. Or it may be a mood of good-natured irony, smiling in sympathetic understanding of the irreconcilability of human desires. Or it may be that of looking with hilarious amusement at the spectacle of a human donkey, now running frantically toward this haystack and now toward that, and finally starving between them. It may be the mood of looking at this hero-of-divided-allegiance through the eyes of any one of a dozen types of human onlookers. Or it may be a mood of looking at the world and at life through the bi-focused eyes of the hero himself.
Any one of these attitudes will be humanly valid. The author's development of his story from the chosen point of view may be consistently true to mood and revealingly or amusingly interpretative of our own hearts and natures when so regarded. But in just so far as we allow the criteria of judgment that belong to another way of looking at things to color our reactions to the story as presented, in exactly so far shall we fail in our right reading of it, and shall we miss whatever dividends of enjoyment or of added responsiveness to life our proper collaboration with the author might have brought to us.
And of course, since this is manifestly true in the case of a simply conceived and singly mooded story of idealized sentiment or smiling satire, it is progressively true, in a geometric ratio of importance, in novels where we are asked to look, first from one angle and then from another, at the same series of human actions; or to maintain the attitude of impersonal and inquiring observers toward a conflict of clashing moods and their resulting misunderstandings; or to build up a new mood of observation never before attained by us, by the constructive and dramatic juxtaposition of successive and interrelated and mood-derived realizations of relationship.
So that one of the most important habits that the reader can form—a habit that consciously or unconsciously he must acquire and develop if he is going to increase his ability to read better, and more revealing and more "up-channel" fiction—is this habit of differential criticism based on the criteria of outlook.
XI
And this brings us finally face to face with those problems of the "constructive and critical" activity demanded of the right readers of a novel that we have repeatedly referred to.
The phrase has a somewhat portentous sound. It suggests responsibilities to be assumed; and we are prone to shirk the conscious assumption of responsibilities. It suggests work; and we are apt to look askance at the idea of work in connection with the reading of fiction, which is always undertaken and always should be undertaken in some degree in the spirit of "play" as we have already de- fined that impulse. But the truth is that we are invariably both constructive and critical in all our reading; and the only real problem before us is that of so directing these perfectly normal but often misapplied functionings of our minds that they may more and more correctly and coöperatively minister to our formulation for ourselves of the author's conception.
XII
We have already armed ourselves with a realization of the constructive methods we employ in reading, and of the more or less unconscious accompaniment of critical activity, corrective, recognitional, and comparative, that is automatically maintained at the backs of our minds as we read. And we have already agreed that it is important for us to identify and fall in with the main observational mood of the novel we are reading; to be ready to do the same with any subsidiary moods (as the points of view of individual characters) that are introduced as parts of its subject-matter; and that we must scrupulously view the entire world of the story, including its subsidiary ways of looking at things, from the selected angle of envisagement. But the very act of identifying this angle is a critical act. And every glance by which we assure ourselves that we are maintaining it, or discover that we are not, is an act of criticism. So that our problem is largely one of directive application.
Let us, however, begin by considering the simpler problems of construction.
And the first rule that we should keep in mind in the matter of "constructive" coöperation with the author, is that we should hold ourselves ready at any moment, and quite irrespective of our having or not having discovered the trend of his intention, to put our entire experiential equipment and the best efforts of our "mental movie" outfit and of our "idea distillery" at his disposal for the production of whatever scenes, character conceptions, or details of situational development he may ask to have produced. We may, or may not, see why he wants them. The inference is that they are going to be needed. Later on, if we discover that he is given to wasteful or unwarranted demands on us in this regard (as, for instance, if he proves to be a landscape-describing crank, or interpolates airings of his own views that are irrelevant and do not "pay their own way"), we may skim or skip judiciously. But "skimming" and "skipping," whether we realize it or not, is a critical act. It is either a conscious criticism of the author, or an unconscious criticism of ourselves. So it should be used with care and in full realization of its meaning. It is an excellent rule to read at least a hundred pages of any novel before refusing the fullest constructive coöperation in our power to any passage of it.
XIII
But there is another kind of constructive activity and ability that is demanded of us in novel-reading besides this simple visualizing of scenes and of action, this preparatory recognition of ideas and attitudes, this primary conceiving of characters and motives. All these things are, so to say, the manufactured parts (manufactured by us at the author's order out of our own stock of experience) that we are gradually, under the author's direction, to assemble into the completed structure of his artificial synthesis—that is to say, into our formulation of his conception of it. And it is because we cannot tell, beforehand, what use is going to be made of these parts, or how important any least one of them may prove to be, that we should coöperate whole-heartedly in their construction as they are called for, and should then keep them open-mindedly at hand ready for whatever use the story requires us to make of them. We are likely at any moment to be required to bring separate characters, ideas, impulses, and attitudes into imaginary contact and to construct the atmosphere and implications of their conjunction; and we should be as alertly and whole-heartedly coöperative in this secondary construction as in the first.
But whereas, thus far, we have been considering our constructive duties separately, we now arrive at a point where it is no longer possible to leave our critical activities out of account.
XIV
The least critical reader of us all passes constant judgment as he reads (1) upon the author; (2) upon the characters of the story; and (3) upon himself.
(1) He yawns and says to himself that the author is a bore. Or he grins and owns that the author is a clever wag. Or he bristles up and says that the author must be an atheist or a libertine.
(2) He is very charitable to the characters who exhibit his own pet weaknesses. Or he is bitterly condemnatory of the character who yields to his own most dreaded vice. Or he approves the character who acts as he likes to think he acts, and condemns the character who acts, without justification, as he often acts himself, but with a perfectly good excuse.
(3) He says to himself that he "can't understand" how any one can do this or that. Or he tells himself that he "would have done the same thing" as some one in the story. Or he says that he "has no time" for hard-luck stories, or that this, that, or the other point of view "makes him tired."
But of course the reader who experiences these feelings or expresses them to himself as he reads, does not necessarily recognize them as criticisms; and is still less likely to recognize the self-criticism involved in the third division. But as soon as we see these feelings tabulated as above, we recognize the critical nature of them. And, moreover, a little examination suffices to show us that they are not, really, three kinds of criticism, but three different employments of a criticism that is always three-sided. For reading a novel is a triangular operation in which (1) the author, (2) the reader, and (3) their joint production are inseparably linked. There are two creators of every character, of every situation, of every outcome of the conjunction of characters and situations—the author and the reader. Both are responsible, not only for, but to, their joint production. Every criticism felt or expressed by the reader involves all three. And every judgment of the reader, to be a self-helpful and self-guiding judgment, must take into account the relations of the thing judged to the other two.
XV
Going back, then, to our interrupted consideration of the more complex "construction" involved in the bringing of separate characters, ideas, and attitudes into the imagined contacts of developing situations, and thus, stage by stage, assembling the total conception of a novel, we see that this must be done, not only in open-minded and wholehearted coöperation of reader with author, but with a discriminating, three-pointed criticism always ready, at the back of the reader's mind, to examine, correct, and co-relate his own instinctive reactions to these combinations and to their results.
Among the commonest errors of novel-reading, for example, are: For a reader to ascribe to the author the opinions of one of his characters, and to judge the author's mind or morals or character accordingly, and to read the rest of his book under the bias of that uncritical ascription. Or for a reader to criticize a character, or the author, or both, because the character acts, or fails to act, in accordance with the conventional requirements of another way of looking at things. Or for a reader to call the author a pessimist, or some other hard name, because the logical development of the adopted point of view discloses inevitable human attitudes that the reader did n't anticipate when he consented to adopt it.
And not only are these errors manifestly due to a lack of "critical" as well as "constructive" activity on the reader's part, or to criticism misapplied and ill-directed, or to a one-sided, or two-sided, instead of the required three-sided criticism of a three-sided problem, but it is also evident that any reader's final formulation of the author's complete conception will be discolored or actually deformed by such carelessly conducted reading.
XVI
And this brings us to the last points we have to consider under the head of "How to Read a Novel"; namely, our real relation to fictions as wholes: and the importance (1) of keeping this relation in mind as we read them; (2) of. employing it as a criterion of judgment when we face our completed formulations of them; and (3) of remembering it when, as we constantly do, we employ past fictional formulations as bases of other judgments and as elements in other idea and attitude constructions.
In an early chapter we spoke of one of our unconscious urges toward reading as the need, experienced by us all, of somehow creating "oases of orderliness" in the chaos of our relations to life.
And more recently we defined fiction as a contrived synthesis or appearance of complete- ness in the tumultuous flux and flow of the human drama that goes endlessly on within us and about us.
And here, in a nutshell, either expressed or implied, are our real relations to novels as wholes.
We cannot, being ourselves a part of the flux of life, conceive its entirety. Nor can we conceive of the million-stranded, beginningless and endless portion of it that we do perceive, as forming in itself a completeness.
All that we can do, and what by the inescapable necessity of our inborn needs we are constantly forced to do, is to keep variously cutting chaos up into sections that can, from certain points of view, be regarded as complete in themselves, and thus examine it piecemeal. That is what physics and biology and psychology and agriculture and chemistry and astronomy—what science, in a word, is busy doing. That is what fetishism and superstition and faith and theology and morals and ethics and philosophy are at. And that, in its field, is the function of fiction; which variously uses as part of its constructive material the common activities and special attitudes of all these other decipherers of chaos.
But there is an esthetic as well as an intellectual appeal in fiction; and the novel is not alone an "appearance of completeness," playful, diverting, or explanatory, presented to our understanding, but an art form—which is to say a means of at once arousing and satisfying our emotional need for self-fulfillment.
XVII
If you will turn to the first chapter of Genesis and will read its account of God's first labors; his dividing the primal void and formlessness into light and darkness, and his placing of the sun and moon in the firmament; you will find upon reading the sentence—
And the morning and the evening were the first day
—that you experience a distinct and pleasurable satisfaction in the statement. That satisfaction is essentially an esthetic one. Your mind has found an appearance of completeness to recognize and rest upon. Moreover, if you will examine the form of this statement, you will find that no little part of your pleasure in it derives from the perfect fitness and rhythm of the words—a fitness that is a constituting element of beauty, and a rhythm that first helps to arouse in you an emotional anticipation, and then guides it to its fulfillment.
And here, again in a nutshell, we have the germs both of esthetic reaction and of the functioning of art.
XVIII
The novel, then, is a contrived appearance of completeness in the chaotic drama of life; an imagined phase of that drama, more or less arbitrarily fenced off so that from a certain point of view we can regard it as complete in itself; and at the same time so constructed that it rhythmically arouses in us, and then momentarily satisfies, some inherent need of self-fulfillment.
Manifestly no reading of a novel that does not take all these facts into account, and constructively and critically cooperate in their realization, can, in the full sense, be a right reading.
And it is therefore important that, in reading a novel, we keep our real relation to fictions as wholes in mind.
Yet this involves a difficulty.
We only succeed in imagining the phase of living that a novel presents in proportion as we achieve an illusion of its reality in reading it.
Yet if, even in the reading, we regard its ultimate "truth" as anything but relative, we risk missing its real significance to us.
Yet to the beginner, a full recognition of either of these aspects is destructive of the other.
However, the two recognitions are not incompatible. On the contrary, the more we practice the binocular vision of their coincident employment, the more will they prove to enhance our enjoyment and to cross-fertilize our intellectual and esthetic reactions to the story. But personal practice, and a persistent and interested experimenting in first alternating and then combining these ways of looking at a story, is the only rule for attaining their joint employment.
A child, suddenly recalled to the fact that a theatrical performance he is witnessing is all make-believe, has his illusions roughly destroyed and his pleasure killed. An alert and understanding onlooker at a performance of John Galsworthy's "The Pigeon," on the other hand, is simultaneously conscious and draws the final flavor of his appreciation from the combined realization of the play's fine illusion of reality, its purely relative "truth" as an ironic criticism of life, and the inherent art of its complexly aroused and subtly satisfied emotions. And the gap between these two attitudes, or between similar attitudes in the reading of fiction, is not to be bridged without personal interest and personal effort. Yet it is well worth bridging. And the realization that it is bridgable, the reasons for bridging it, and the advice to keep trying with these understandings in mind, are here offered as incentives to the undertaking and as directions for going about it. And the reasons for wanting to bridge the gap are that it is only by gradually doing so that we grow into a full responsiveness to fiction's many-faceted offerings to us and consequently into profiting by its many-phased ministerings to our needs. Also that failure to do this is the cause of most of our driftings into stagnation in the reading of fiction.
And to give a single yet adequate illustration of this it is necessary only to point out that it is by a realization of fiction's synthetic and artistic relations to us as above outlined, and by a more and more interested reading of it with these in mind, that we gradually escape from the dwarfing tyranny of our demand for a "happy ending" into a realization that we need the self-fulfillment of imagined failure as well as that of imagined success; and that the interpretatively valid completeness of any fictional synthesis, and not its "happy" or "unhappy" "ending," is the ultimate source of all real intellectual profit, or esthetic pleasure, or emotional fulfillment to be derived from it.
XIX
As to the importance of employing our ripening realization of these relationships as the criterion of our judgment when we face the completed formulation of a novel, and as to the importance of remembering these relationships and these judgments when, as we constantly do, we employ past fictional formulations as bases of other judgments on life, and as elements in other idea and attitude constructions:—the importance of these practices and the value of gradually developing them are by now self-evident.
For, since the novel is an imaginary synthesis by means of which we at once isolate and examine our own conceptions of life and compare notes with the author, not to learn to read it as such, and judge it as such, and employ our memories of the experience as such, is to fail in learning to read. And, since the novel is also an art form; not to learn to read it, constructively aware of its rhythmic arousings of emotional anticipation, and not to learn to judge it critically by its valid or invalid satisfyings of their requirements, and not to remember and use the memory of these things for what they are, is to fail both in the flowering and the seeding of fictional right reading.