Writing and day dreaming

writing and day dreaming

I have spoken of fiction as having something to do with dreaming: let me distinguish it at once from that idle and irresponsible day-dreaming in which, at odd times, we all lose ourselves with a certain vision¬ary of modern fiction, "forgetting the bitterness of toil and strife in the vision of a great and splendid re¬ward." We all lie awake at night and plan for ourselves impossible golden futures in which we are the impossible heroes and heroines, achieving the prodigious with hardly the effort which in real life we must give to the commonplace, getting our enemies humbled and our supreme deserts acknowledged and rewarded, and having our own way generally. There is a superstition abroad that the genetic im¬pulse of fiction is like this, and fiction itself the writer's dream, his escape from burdensome actuali¬ties. And certainly many readers take their fiction as an escape, a drug or anodyne—a kind of vicarious day-dreaming.

Not so, I believe, the artist. The only day-dreams really worth while are those in which we lose our¬selves, transcending reality as on wings, breathing upper airs of impossible rarity; but the only novels really worth while are those in which the novelist never for an instant loses his complete sense of self- possession, the perfect awareness of what he is about. ---His dreaming is purposed and controlled; it differs in a dozen sharp and unequivocal ways from the purely subjective dreams through which the best of us at times let ourselves beautifully drift. Our dreams are exceptional and lawless, we conjure up delights that never were on land or sea; the novelist's dream is typical and regulated. Our dreams are very likely to be patched copies of other dreams heard or read, as every cheap popular song is a mosaic of all other cheap popular songs ; whereas the novelist's dream must be, in its central nature, an original thing, or it would better not be at all. What we distort, he re¬duces to shape and balance; what we leave to its own unobstructed play on our charitable credulity, he cannot leave until it is presentable to the uncharitable incredulity of mankind in general. Our day-dream is a result of inhibitions broken down and swept away : we let ourselves go. The novelist, however like his creative instinct may be to ours, cannot do that; half the worth of his dream is in the checks and inhibi¬tions which govern the unfolding of it. All these differences reduce themselves on inspec¬tion to a single inclusive difference: we dream day¬dreams for pure self-delight, using the gift of fancy to glut ourselves; whereas the novelist writes stories in order to give himself, for the delight of readers whom he has never seen and cannot know. The con¬ditions of his work are determined by the fact that it is work and not play; by the fact that he has an audience with a receptivity subservient to a set of laws which he must master; a set of exceedingly subtle and elusive laws whose working is of a nicety almost past finding out. The one faculty upon which he cannot play at will is that self-love which is in every one of us, and which is alone sufficient to give our day-dreams the temporary illusion of reality. We can believe in anything so long as it is ours, part of us. But the novelist asks us to enter into something which is not ours at all, something to which our self- interest can give no hue of reality, since no self-inter¬est is at hazard. The artist is always trying to ap¬peal to an attention outside and other than his own. Without this will to appeal there is no art.