* * * *
*
Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding
to an examination I once made of the mechanism of
Barnaby Rudge, says—“By the
way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his Caleb Williams
backwards? He first involved his hero in a web
of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then,
for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting
for what had been done.”
I cannot think this the precise mode of procedure
on the part of Godwin—and indeed what he
himself acknowledges is not altogether in accordance
with Mr. Dickens’s idea—but the author
of Caleb Williams was too good an artist not
to perceive the advantage derivable from at least
a somewhat similar process. Nothing is more clear
than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated
to its denouement before anything be attempted
with the pen. It is only with the denouement
constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable
air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents,
and especially the tone at all points, tend to the
development of the intention.
There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode
of constructing a story. Either history affords
a thesis—or one is suggested by an incident
of the day—or, at best, the author sets
himself to work in the combination of striking events
to form merely the basis of his narrative—–designing,
generally, to fill in with description, dialogue,
or autorial comment, whatever crevices of fact or action
may, from page to page, render themselves apparent.
I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect.
Keeping originality always in view—for
he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with
so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest—I
say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable
effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect,
or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what
one shall I, on the present occasion, select?”
Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid
effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by
incident or tone—whether by ordinary incidents
and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity
both of incident and tone—afterwards looking
about me (or rather within) for such combinations
of events or tone as shall best aid me in the construction
of the effect.
I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper
might be written by any author who would—that
is to say, who could—detail, step by step,
the processes by which any one of his compositions
attained its ultimate point of completion. Why
such a paper has never been given to the world, I
am much at a loss to say—but perhaps the
autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission
than any one other cause. Most writers—poets
in especial—prefer having it understood
