F. Marion Crawford

“ IT has always seemed to me that the perfect novel, as it ought to be, exists somewhere in the state of the Platonic idea, waiting to be set down on paper by the first man of genius who receives a direct literary inspiration. It must deal chiefly with love; for in that passion all men and women are most generally interested, either for its present reality, or for the memories that soften the coldly vivid recollection of an active past, and shed a tender light in the dark places of bygone struggles, or because the hope of it brightens and gladdens the path of future dreams. ”

“ What we call a novel may educate the taste and cultivate the intelligence; under the hand of genius it may purify the heart and fortify the mind; it should never under any circumstances be suffered to deprave the one nor to weaken the other; it may stand for scores of years—and a score of years is a long time in our day—as the exposition of all that is noble, heroic, honest, and true in the life of woman or man ”

“ We do not all know one another’s tricks, but we have a fair idea of the general principle on which they are done and a very definite opinion about our own business as compared with that of the parson or the professor. We know our books from the inside and we see the strings of the puppets, while the public only guesses at the mechanism as it sits before the stage, watching the marionettes and listening to the voice from behind the scenes. A novel is, after all, a play, and perhaps it is nothing but a substitute for the real play with live characters, scene-shifting, and footlights. ”

“ When they call him names they forget that he writes for a great public of men and women, not for young girls—and when they read him he makes them remember that he is a great man—mistaken perhaps, possibly bad, mightily coarse to no purpose, but great nevertheless—a Nero of fiction. But Zola’s shadow, seen through the veil of the English realistic novel, is a monstrosity not to be tolerated. We see the apparent contradiction in our own taste between our theory and our practice in reading, but we feel instinctively that there is a foundation of justice to account for the seeming discrepancy. ”

“ In trying to amuse, let us be consistent each in his own way, never giving our public a pretext of appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober. If we have poetry within us, let us put such of it as is worth anything into our books, for almost all poetry which deserves the name is good. But let us keep out of our novels all that savours of preaching and teaching, for our readers’ sakes; and for our own, all such matter as is limited by modern science, present fashion, and actual taste, and which consequently imposes too wilful a limitation upon the permanence of our own work. ”

“ There are, I believe, two recognised ways of looking at art: art for the public or “art for art,” to adopt the current French phrase. Might we not say, Art for the buyer and art for the seller? Or is that too practical a view to take of what is supposed to be so eminently unpractical as art itself? Has it not been said similarly, and with truth, that religion is for man, and not man for religion? Is it our province to please those who read our works, or to force them to please us by buying them? Do not these questions lie at the root of the conflict between realism and romance? ”

“ The novel, therefore, is an intellectual artistic luxury—a definition which can be made to include a good deal, but which is, in reality, a closer one than it appears to be at first sight. No one, I think, will deny that it covers the three principal essentials of the novel as it should be, of a story or romance, which in itself and in the manner of telling it shall appeal to the intellect, shall satisfy the requirements of art, and shall be a luxury, in that it can be of no use to a man when he is at work, but may conduce to peace of mind and delectation during his hours of idleness. ”

“ But then, there are plenty of works of fiction written in ordinary English which have not even that one merit, and of these I do not wish to say anything. Take a really good novel, however, in which more than half the pages are filled with dialogues in a language not familiar to the English-speaking public as a whole. Is not the writer wilfully limiting his audience, if not himself? Is he not sacrificing his privilege of addressing all men, for the sake of addressing a few in terms which they especially prefer? ”

“ The foundation of good fiction and good poetry seems to be ethic rather than æsthetic. Everything in either which appeals to the taste, that is, to the æsthetic side, may ultimately perish as a mere matter of fashion; but that which speaks to man as man, independently of his fashions, his habits, and his tastes, must live and find a hearing with humanity so long as humanity is human. The right understanding of men and women leads to the right relations of men and women, and in this way, if in any, a novel may do good ”

“ Assuredly every man has a prime right to make use of the material at his disposal; and if some particular dialect forms a part of this stock in trade, he is as free to employ it as an African traveller, for instance, is free to introduce his own reminiscences into a novel, if he writes one. Colour alone amuses some people, chiefly children. Small boys and girls do not despise a kaleidoscope as a toy on a rainy day, and dialect without dramatic interest is colour without form or outline, and some novels in dialect are nothing more. ”

“ There are not in existence, I believe, enough really interesting, and yet perfectly harmless, novels to occupy the vast amount of spare time which the young seem ready to devote to literature, and which we, the workers, seek in vain. It is not always easy to see—it is certainly not easy for us to explain—why we novelists occasionally introduce a thought, a page, or a chapter in a novel otherwise fit for a child’s ears, which may have the effect, so to say, of turning weak tea into bad whiskey. ”

“ It is his business to present his readers with something which I have called the pocket-theatre, something which every man may carry in his pocket, believing that he has only to open it in order to look in upon the theatre of the living world. To produce it, to prepare it, to put it into a portable and serviceable shape, the writer must know what that living world is, what the men in it do and what the women think, why women shed tears and children laugh and young men make love and old men repeat themselves. ”

“ Its religion must be of such grand and universal span as to hold all worthy religions in itself. Conceive, if possible, such a story, told in language that can be now simple, now keen, now passionate, and now sublime—or rather, pray, do not conceive it, for the modern novelist’s occupation would suddenly be gone, and that one book would stand alone of its kind, making all others worse than useless—ridiculous, if not sacrilegious, by comparison. ”

“ On the whole, therefore, the historical novel is always likely to prove more dangerous to the writer than to the reader, since, when it fails to be a great book, it will in all likelihood be an absurd one. For historical facts are limitations, and he who subjects himself to them must be willing to undertake all the responsibility they imply. Nothing is easier than to write a fantastic tale against which no criticism can be brought beyond a vague statement that it is dull or worthless, and not worth reading ”

“ When our lives are not filled with emotions, they are too often crammed with insignificant details too insignificant to bear recording in a novel, but yet making up for each of us all the significance life has. The great emotions are not every-day phenomena, and it is the desire to experience them vicariously which creates the demand for fiction and thereby and at the same time a demand for emotion. ”

“ Far be it from me to appeal in any way to the public pity, for my own sake or in behalf of others. We are no more to be pitied when we break down than an old shoemaker who can no longer see the point of his bristles, and not so much as a broken-winded cab-horse that has never had any option in the choice of a career. ”

“ It is one thing to exhibit an ideal worthy to be imitated, though inimitable in all its perfection, but so clearly noble as to appeal directly to the sympathetic string that hangs untuned in the dullest human heart; to make man brave without arrogance, woman pure without prudishness, love enduring yet earthly, not angelic, friendship sincere but not ridiculous. ”

“ The brave man’s beats as strongly in battle to-day, the coward’s stands as suddenly still in the face of danger, boys and girls still play with love, men and women still suffer for love, and the old still warn youth and manhood against love’s snares—all that and much more comes from depths not reached by civilisations nor changed by fashions. ”

“ It is very unlikely that mankind will ever agree as to the relative merits of these two, and the discussion which was practically begun in Plato’s time is not likely to end so long as people care what they read or what they think. The most any one can do is to give a personal opinion, and that means, of course, that he who expresses it commits himself and publicly takes either the one side or the other. For my part, I believe that more good can be done by showing men what they may be, ought to be, or can be, than by describing their greatest weaknesses with the highest art. ”

“ The most dramatic scene of real life, if it actually took place on the stage of a theatre, would seem a very dull and tame affair to any one who chanced to find himself in the body of the house. The fundamental lack of interest, until it has been artificially aroused, is a gulf not to be bridged by such simple means as being really “natural.” The art of the actor lies in knowing the precise degree of exaggeration necessary to produce the impression that he is not exaggerating at all—but exaggeration there must be. ”

“ Evil communications corrupt good manners, and it is not a play upon words to say that the increased facility of actual communications has widened and deepened those channels of communication which are evil, and increased at the same time the demand for all sorts of emotion, bad or good. Not that emotion of itself is bad. It is often the contrary. Even the momentary reflection of true love is a good thing in itself. It is good that men and women should realise that a great affection is, or can be, a reality to many as well as a convenient amusement or a heart-rending drama to a few. ”

“ Sentiment heightens the value of works of fiction as sentimentality lowers it. Sentimentality is to sentiment as sensuality to passion. The distinction is not a fine one and has grown common enough in our day to be universally understood. We owe it, I think, to the international balance of sentiment and sentimentality that the novelists of the present day are the French, Anglo-Saxons, and Russians. With all due respect to the great German intelligence, it does not seem capable of producing what we call a novel though it turns out most excellent plays. ”

“ Where there is success of the right kind, the talent and power of application must be taken for granted. The education is and always must be a question of circumstance. With regard to novel-writing, when I speak of education I am not referring to it in the ordinary sense. Some people take a great deal of interest in concrete things, while others care more for humanity. The education of a novelist is the experience of men and women which he has got at first hand in the course of his own life, for he is of that class to whom humanity offers a higher interest than inanimate nature. ”

“ Could he not, by the skilful use of description, by a clever handling of grammar and a careful selection of words, produce an impression which should be more widely felt, though less warmly received, perhaps, in that one small public to which he appeals? Is he not, although he be a first-rate man, often tempted to lapses of literary conscience by the peculiar facilities he finds in the literary by-way he has chosen? How much of what is screaming farce in the dialect of the few, would be funny if translated into plain English for the many? ”

“ The advocate of a broader license in the English fiction of the future may answer that the whole body of novels already in existence should be more than sufficient for the delectation of “the young.” Should the development of the new school, however, lead to the creation of a literature in our language, resembling, as a whole, that of the French, our novel, in its present form, would soon cease to be written, and those of the type which are already in existence would in a short time be regarded as antiquated, dull, and savouring of the Sunday-school. ”

“ IT may fairly be claimed that humanity has, within the past hundred years, found a way of carrying a theatre in its pocket; and so long as humanity remains what it is, it will delight in taking out its pocket-stage and watching the antics of the actors, who are so like itself and yet so much more interesting. Perhaps that is, after all, the best answer to the question, “What is a novel?” ”

“ ALL this is rather frivolous, perhaps; but a little frivolity is to the point here, since there can be no amusement without a dash of it, and we profess to provide diversion to meet the public demand. With most men who have moulded, hacked, and chiselled the world into history, to think has been to act. With us novelists, so far as the world need know us, to think is to dream, and perhaps to dream only little dreams of merely passing significance. Few novelists are poets; only one or two have been statesmen; none have been conquerors. ”

“ But there was nothing absurd about the plays for all that, because they did not depend upon such trifles as dresses, ruffles—or fire-engines for the emotions they excited in the hearts of their listeners.
THE danger of falling into absurdities lies not in anachronisms of dress, but in speeches that contradict sentiments, and actions that belie the character. We need not go far to find truth, but having begun our search in one direction, we must not wander to another, or we shall fall out of the natural sequence of events upon which we depend for the effect of reality. ”

“ One may be pardoned for asking sometimes whether the advance of science does not almost mean the retreat of thought. Again I protest against the accusation of smart writing, which is so easily brought, so hard to bear, and so difficult to refute. I do not mean that science thinks less as she progresses, but I do mean to say that there is much in favour of the homo unius libri—the man of one book—the man who reads less and thinks more than his fellows. ”