The Purpose and the Meaning of Fiction

The Purpose and the Meaning of Fiction

There is a reason for the apparent repetition in a general title such as "The Purpose and the Meaning of Fiction. " The purpose of fiction is one thing : the) meaning of fiction is, or may be, quite another. We can see and admit forthwith, as an axiom of good sense, that high merit in fiction is likely to have something to do with the incidence of purpose and meaning; the best novel, other things being equal, is that in which the effect sensed by the reader is most like that intended by the author, and the poorest novel, other things remaining equal, is that in which the effect sensed is least like that intended. One does, to be sure, hear music discussed by seemingly intelligent persons who profess to believe that the composer merely surrenders himself to inexplicable impulses and emotions, creating he knows not what, and caring not at all whether his impulses and emotions are reproduced in the listener, so long as some sufficiently intense effects are produced. To anyone who traces in music primarily its Design or pattern—or, let us say, to whom music is unintelligible without its pattern— this is an abhorrent theory of inspiration. Still, many persons do hold it ; and perhaps it may be extended without flagrant irrationality to lyric poetry, and even to some kinds of plastic representation. But hardly to imaginative literature as we have known it in prose. We dispute now and again about what Shakespeare meant by certain parts of Hamlet; but no one doubts that he meant something, that he was deliberately trying to communicate the same meaning to us all, and that either the play or the audience relatively fails whenever the audience misses community of impression. In this discussion of the relation between purveyor and public, it makes little difference which fails: the point is all in the success or failure of the relation. There is no consummation of art except in the audience.

It is quite true that, in some rare instances, the artist may profit by an effect not in his intention ; may actually, without knowing it, build better than his Design. Every reader of Fielding will remember two gentlemen, or rather two animated and diverting caricatures, by name Thwackum and Square, who had charge of the upbringing of Tom Jones. Mr. Square the philosopher is always talking about "the natural beauty of virtue"; to Mr. Thwackum the clergyman there is no power except "the divine power of grace. " Probably Fielding intended to represent, in these two

quaint ethical theorists, simply two characteristic 18th century notions which he hated and wished to hold up to ridicule : the notion that thinking straight is the way of salvation however crooked one's conduct, and the notion that straight conduct is worthless unless it is inspired by a prescribed way of thinking—in this instance the creed of the Church of England. Both figures are incomplete as men ; they remain simply walking embodiments of their respective narrow doctrines, in spite of Fielding's evident desire to give them human nature and make them humanly live. It takes a more modern detachment than Fielding ever knew to see the fitness of his failure. There is an almost symbolic appropriateness in the hollow unreality of Messrs. Thwackum and Square : how could such ideas, so held, produce actual human beings? The limitations of these two as men prove, as no amount of calculated satire could, the limitations of their doctrines. It takes the capacity for spontaneous warm-hearted action, plus the sense of legitimate impersonal law imposed from without, to make the rounded man ; to be complete and real is to adjust the natural inward impulses to the artificial codes by which we must needs partly live. How fitting, then, that it should take Thwackum and Square together to come somewhere near making up one average piece of human nature ! Here is an instance which shows the artist gaining something through his failure to carry out his intention : if the characters were complete as men, they would be pointless and inconsistent as doctrinaires. And I have sometimes thought that

so great an artist as Jane Austen gains as a social comedist by revealing in the world of her persons a moral poverty and narrowness which she hardly saw their herself.

Such examples are, however, not frequent. In general the novelist loses by missing his design. Jane Eyre is weakened, however far from crucially; because Rochester, who was intended for a gentleman, is so obviously a cad. The history of fiction is full of writers who lost much through the illusion that they could portray types they did not know and manage scenes they had never caught the spirit of.

We want fiction, then, to understand what it is about and plan the effect which it can produce. But this is not to say that the plan and the effect are the same thing. The given effect may follow from the given cause, but cause is still one thing and effect another. In considering fiction, it happens to be of singular importance to keep this disjunction in mind, to the end that we may understand something of the all-important relation between subjective and objective.