John Kendrick Bangs

“ I never encountered a heroine like her in all my life before, and the one object of my future career will be to catch her finally in the meshes of a romance. Romance will come into her life some time. She is not at all of an unsentimental nature—only fractious—new-womanish, perhaps; but none the less lovable, and Cupid will have a shot at her when she least expects it; and when it does come, I’ll be on hand to report the attempted assassination for the delectation of the Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick public. ”

“ He thinks of you day and night—he wants you for his heroine; he wants to make you happy, but he wants you to be happy in your own way; and when he thinks he has discovered your way, he works along that line, and all of a sudden, by some act wholly unforeseen, and, if I may say so, unforeseeable, you treat him and his work with contempt, draw yourself out of it—and he has to begin again. ”

“ Willard. “Mr. Harley never compels. No compulsion is the corner-stone of his literary structure; free will is his creed: you may count on that. If he means to make you his heroine still, it will be at Newport if you are at Newport, at Riverdale if you happen to be at Riverdale. Do come with me, even if he does impress you as endeavoring to force you; for at Newport I shall be your chaperon, and I should dearly love to be put in a book—with you. Bob has asked Jack Perkins down, and Mrs. Howlett writes me that Count Bonetti, of Naples, is there, and is a really delightful fellow. ”

“ Whether it was as Kelly said or not, that Harley went into a trance and poked his nose into the private life of the people he wrote about, it was a fact that while meditating upon the possible output of his pen our author was as deaf to his surroundings as though he had departed into another world, and it rarely happened that his mind emerged from that condition without bringing along with it something of value to him in his work. ”

“ Woman’s intuitions are great, and there be those who say they are unerringly true. One by one, with the exception of Count Bonetti, the young men among Mrs. Howlett’s guests are presented—Bonetti prefers to await a more favorable opportunity—and to all Marguerite appears to be the beautiful woman she is. Hers is an instant success. A new beauty has dawned upon the Newport horizon. ”

“ If that play was realism, what sort of a nightmare do you suppose a romantic drama would be?”
“Well, maybe London women in real life haven’t any minds,” I said, growing rather weary of the subject. I admired Miss Andrews myself, but there were other things I could talk about—“like lemonade and elephants,” as the small boy said. “Let it go at that. It was an interesting play, and that’s all plays ought to be. Realism in plays is not to be encouraged. A man goes to the theatre to be amused and entertained, not to be reminded of home discomforts.” ”

“ There was no doubt about it that Harley, true to his purpose, was making a good fight to conquer without compulsion, and appreciated as much as I the necessity of reducing his heroine to concrete form as speedily as possible, lest some other should prove more successful, and so deprive him of the laurels for which he had worked so hard and suffered so much. ”

“ Harley never could do two things at once. The task he had in hand always absorbed his whole being until he was able to write the word finis on the last page of his manuscript, and until the finis to this elusive book he was now struggling with was written, I knew that he would write no other. His pot-boilers he could do, of course, and so earn a living, but pot-boilers destroy rather than make reputations, and Harley was too young a man to rest upon past achievements ”

“ On the whole, Harley was very like most other realists, who pretend that they merely put down life as it is, and who go through their professional careers serenely unconscious of the truth that their fancies, after all, serve them when their facts are lacking. ”

“ I threw my pen down in disgust, slammed to the cover of my ink-well, and for two hours paced madly through the maze-like walks of the Central Park, angry and depressed; and from that moment until I undertook the narration of this pathetic story I gave Harley’s heroine up as unavailable material for my purposes. She was worse, if anything, in imaginative work than in realism, because she absolutely defied the imagination, p. 110while the realist she would be glad to help so long as his realism was kept in strict accord with her ideas of what the real really was. ”

“ He was a man of great determination, and once he set about doing something he was not an easy man to turn aside, and now that, for the first time in his life, he found himself baffled at every point, and by a heroine of no very great literary importance, he became more determined than ever. ”

“ Later on he burst out with, “If my Miss Andrews had been the heroine of that play, the man who falls over the precipice in the second act would have been alive at this moment.” And finally he demanded: “Do you suppose a heroine like Marguerite Andrews would have overlooked the comma on the postal card that woman read in the third act, and so made the fourth act possible? Not she. She’s a woman with a mind. ”

“ I said, laughing inwardly at his plight. “Brazen it out; keep a stiff upper lip, and Darrow will never know. He has insight, of course, but he can’t see as far in as you and he think.”
“It’s a devilish situation,” he cried, impatiently striding up and down the room, “that a man of my age should be so hopelessly in love with a woman he can’t find; and that he can’t find her is such a cruel sarcasm upon his literary creed! What cursed idiosyncrasy of fate is it that has brought this thing upon me?”
“It’s the punishment that fits your p. 217crime, Harley,” I said. ”

“ In this respect Harley was commonplace; to his mind the villain always had to be the rival of the hero, p. 20just as in opera the tenor is always virtuous at heart if not otherwise, and the baritone a scoundrel, which in real life is not an invariable rule by any means. Indeed, there have been many instances in real life where the villain and the hero have been on excellent terms, and to the great benefit of the hero too. But in this case Balderstone was to follow in the rut, and become the rival of Osborne for the hand of Marguerite Andrews—the heroine. ”

“ Stuart Harley, despite his authorship of many novels, still considered himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not write his books; that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw it, and he insisted always that he saw life as it was.
p. 2“The mission of the novelist, my dear Professor,” he had once been heard to say at his club, “is not to amuse merely; his work is that of an historian, and he should be quite as careful to write truthfully as is the historian. ”

“ Do you or do you not exist? Are you a bit of the really real or a bit of Mr. Harley’s realism? In short, are you here at Profile Lake, walking and talking with me, or are you not?”
A realizing sense of my true position crept over me. In reality I was not there talking to her, but in my den in New York writing about her. I may not be a realist, but I am truthful. I p. 163could not deceive her, so I replied, hesitatingly:
“Well, Miss Andrews, I am—no, I am not here, except in spirit.” ”

“ We shall have—”
“You simply confirm my fears,” interrupted p. 62Marguerite. “You are to be Harley’s chaperon, Professor Perkins is his hero, and Count Bonetti is the villain—”
“Why, Marguerite, how you talk!” cried Mrs. Willard. “Do you exist merely in Stuart Harley’s brain? Do I? Are we none of us living creatures to do as we will? Are we nothing more than materials pigeon-holed for Mr. Harley’s future use? Has Count Bonetti crossed the ocean just to please Mr. Harley?” ”

“ I am to believe he is a real nobleman, and all that; and a stupid wiseacre from the York University, who can’t dance, and who thinks of nothing but his books and his club, is to come in at the right moment p. 67and expose the Count, and all such trash as that. I know at the outset how it all is to be. You couldn’t deceive a sensible girl five minutes with Count Bonetti, any more than that Balderstone man, who is now making a useless trip across the Atlantic with my aunt and her twins, could have exerted a ‘baleful influence’ over me with his diluted spiritualism. ”

“ You’d better be careful how you force your heroine.”
“Ha, ha!” he laughed. “I should think so, and for more reasons than one. I never really intended to do horrible things with her, my boy. Trust me, if I do lead her, to lead her gently. My persuasion will be suggestive rather than mandatory.”
“And that hero—from the Brooklyn dry-goods shop?” I asked, with a smile.
“I’d like to see him so much as—tell her the price of anything,” cried Harley. “A man like that has no business to live in the same hemisphere with a p. 185woman like Marguerite Andrews. ”

“ Darrow’s soul of the stain he has put upon it by deserting Dame Realism for a moment to flirt with p. 178Romance, when it comes to the Judgment Day.
“As I want it to be, so must it be,” quoth Harley.
“Good,” thought I. “It will no doubt be excellent; but be honest, and don’t insist that you’ve taken down life as it is; for you may have an astigmatism, for all you know, and life may not be at all what it has seemed to you while you were putting it down.” ”

“ So Harley went on and tried to explain how the true realist must be an inspired sort of person, who can rise above purely physical limitations; whose eye shall be able to pierce the most impenetrable of veils; to whom nothing in the p. 6way of obtaining information as to the doings of such specimens of mankind as he has selected for his pages is an insurmountable obstacle.
“Your author, then, is to be a mixture of a New York newspaper reporter and the Recording Angel?” suggested Kelly. ”

“ Too many Americans of the brass-band type travel on it. Stuart Harley said so himself in his last book of foreign travel; p. 34but he sends me out on it just the same, and expects me to be satisfied. Perhaps he thinks I like that sort of American. If he does, he’s got more imagination than he ever showed in his books.”
“You must get to the other side in some way,” said Mrs. Corwin. “It is at Venice that the trouble with Balderstone is to come, and that Osborne topples him over into the Grand Canal, and rescues you from his baleful influence.” ”

“ To a fellow-workman in literary fields this chapter is of pathetic interest, though it may not so appear to the reader who knows little of the difficulties of authorship. I can hardly read it myself without a feeling of most intense pity for poor Harley. I can imagine the sleepless nights which followed the shattering of his hopes as to what his story might be by the recalcitrant attitude of the young woman he had honored p. 75so highly by selecting her for his heroine. ”

“ She had once chilled the heart of a young poet by calling Venice malarious (Harley little realized when he wrote this how he would have suffered had he carried out his original intention and transplanted Marguerite to the City of the Sea!) , and a conservatory to her was a thing for mid-day, and not for midnight. ”