The Over-Furnished Novel

• The novel, for a long time, was over-furnished
• The importance of material objects and their vivid presentation was stressed
• The ability to observe and write in English is often seen as enough to write a novel, with the latter sometimes considered unnecessary.
• Discussions of novels should clarify whether it's being addressed as amusement or art
• Amusement and art serve different purposes in different ways
• Novels made to entertain are viewed as cheap, like soap, perfume, or furniture
• Quality is a disadvantage in items made for many people
• People want quantity, not quality
• They don't want something that "wears" well but instead a succession of new things that wear out quickly and can be tossed
• Amusement is one thing and the enjoyment of art is another

Power of Observation

• A writer who is an artist knows his powers of observation and description are only a small part of his equipment, though necessary
• Trivial writers often possess good observation skills
• Merimee stated in his essay on Gogol that choosing from the innumerable traits nature offers is more difficult than observing and rendering them with exactitude.

Realism

• There's a superstition that realism is cataloging material objects, explaining mechanical processes, operating manufacturies and trades, and describing physical sensations
• Realism is more an attitude of mind towards the material: the sympathy and candor with which the writer accepts, rather than chooses, the theme
• A story of a banker unfaithful to his wife who ruins himself speculating is at all reinforced by an exposition of the banking system / Stock Exchange
• The banking system and Stock Exchange are not necessarily worth writing about or have any place in imaginative art

Balzac and Literalness

• Balzac tested the value of literalness in the novel just as Wagner did with scenic literalness in music drama
• Balzac tried literalness with the passion of discovery and curiosity
• If Balzac's furnace heat couldn't give hardness and sharpness to material accessories, no other brain can
• Reproducing the actual city of Paris, houses, etc., was a stupendous ambition but unworthy of an artist
• His success in pouring out mass of brick, mortar, furniture, proceedings of bankruptcy defeated his end
• The types of greed, avarice, ambition, vanity, and lost innocence he created are timeless
• The eye glides over the material surroundings he labored over
• There's been too much of the interior decorator and "romance of business" since Balzac
• Stevenson wanted to blue-pencil much of Balzac's "presentation" even though he loved him
• No one can cut a sentence from Merimee's stories
• No one wants detail on how Carmencita and her fellow factory girls made cigars
• A different kind of novel is better

Tolstoi

• Tolstoi loved material things almost as much as Balzac and was interested in how dishes were cooked, people dressed, and houses furnished
• The clothes, dishes, and interiors of old Moscow houses are part of the people's emotions, synthesized
• They exist in the emotional penumbra of characters, not the author's mind
• When literalness is fused, it ceases to be literalness and becomes part of the experience.

Imaginative Art

• If a novel is imaginative art, it can't be a vivid/brilliant form of journalism
• From the teeming present, it must select the eternal material of art
• Younger writers are breaking away from verisimilitude
• Following modern painting developments, they interpret the material and social investiture of characters imaginatively
• They present their scene by suggestion instead of enumeration
• Higher art processes are simplification processes
• The novelist must learn to write, then unlearn it, as the modern painter learns to draw, then disregard accomplishment to subordinate it to a higher effect
• In this direction, the novel can develop in more varied and perfect forms than before

The Scarlet Letter

• The Scarlet Letter is an early American novel that might serve as such a suggestion
• The mise-en-scene is presented truly in the spirit of art
• The theme-writing student can't get information on the manners, dress, and Puritan interiors
• The story's material investiture is presented unconsciously through the reserved, fastidious artist's hand, not through a showman or window-dresser
• In the twilight melancholy of the book, surroundings are felt in the dusk

Mood

• Whatever's felt on the page without being named is created
• It's the inexplicable presence of the unnamed, the overtone divined (but unheard), the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact/thing/deed which gives high quality to the novel, drama, poetry.
• Literalness in presenting reactions of mind/physical sensations isn't effective when applied to material things
• A novel crowded with physical sensations is a catalogue like one filled with furniture
• A book like The Rainbow shows how far away emotion is from sensory reactions
• Characters can be dehumanized through bodily organ behavior laboratory studies under sensory stimuli and be reduced to animal pulp.
• Throw out the furniture, meaningless reiterations of physical sensations, and old patterns, and leave the room bare like a Greek theatre or the house into which Pentecost descended
• Leave the scene bare for emotions, great and small
• Nursery tales and tragedies are killed by tasteless amplitude
• Dumas said that to make a drama, a man needed one passion and four walls.