“ Those who should write The art of novel-writing is not to be picked up along the primrose path, even when the gift is present; nor is literature, especially in its higher walks, a lucrative profession; it is, as of old, a crutch, but not a staff. It is doubtless comparatively easy, a certain knack being inborn and skill having been acquired, to reel off story after story at the same dead level of mediocrity, but no writer has produced many good novels, or ever will. ”

“ The perfection of art The novel of “manners” reaches its highest perfection in the products of Thackeray and Jane Austen. I may be laughed at for naming these two together, but I know who would not have laughed—Lord Macaulay would not have laughed, neither would Sir Walter Scott, nor some more of the greatest of our literary critics. What I mean is that neither Thackeray nor Miss Austen have plots—in the accepted sense of the word—at all. They alike take a page of human life and place it beneath the microscope. We perceive all the creatures, large and small, wriggling about. ”

“ A great soldier can be clearly introduced much more freely than a great poet. The speech of the man of action need not have anything very remarkable about it. It will suffice if it be concise and vigorous. A poet, on the contrary, must not be allowed to talk commonplaces. As a matter of fact, poets often do so talk—non semper arcum—but they must not do so in a tale-writer’s pages. If I were to write a story of Stratford-on-Avon, I should not venture to do more than let Shakespeare be seen in his garden. ”

“ When engaged on a novel, I live in that world about which I am writing. Whilst writing a Cheshire novel, I have tasted the salt crystallising on my lips, smelt the smoke from the chimneys, walked warily among the subsidences, and have had the factory before my eyes, for a while, and then dashed away to smell the pines, and lie in the heather and hear the bees hum. ”

“ When your characters become alive to you, as they will to all those who have even the slightest touch of inspiration in writing, you will find a strange thing [Pg 137] happen. They will begin to dominate you, not you them. They will grow in spite of you, and take a certain direction and fulfil their destinies just as surely as if they really lived. You may wish to make a villain of a certain character, but in spite of you he may turn out a saint or vice-versâ. This is a mystery which I cannot pretend to account for, but I think all fiction writers have felt it more or less. ”

“ Stephen Guest should have been but an incident in the Sturm-und-Drang-Periode inevitable to a nature so turbulent and so complex as hers. Maggie’s death, which is an accident and a climax to nothing, must be regarded as an artistic murder, for the wanton slaying of a personage whose death is not artistically necessary in a fiction, is more than a blunder, it is a capital crime. But the charm and interest of The Mill on the Floss are not in the development of Maggie so much as in that of her father and mother and those matchless aunts and uncles of hers. ”

“ The “pretty-pretty” school For Heaven’s sake don’t let your friends say of your short story, “How pretty!” The “goody-goody” school has had its day, and is laughed out of fashion, but the “pretty-pretty” still flourishes in full vigour, though in its own way it is quite as objectionable. Avoid mere prettiness as you do all those things which lead to destruction. The merely pretty writer gets weaker and weaker the older he grows, until at last he is sheer inanity. ”

“ Power to create character If the power to create and develop character is great, it is also rare, and discoverable only in fiction of the highest order. It is this that makes Hawthorne so incomparably grand; this that gives his chief, though not his whole, magic to that master of English fiction, Thackeray, and his peer, George Eliot; that impresses in Manzoni’s splendid romance, I Promessi Sposi; that enchains in Jane Austen, though she does but brush the surface of character, leaving the depths unplumbed ”

“ This denying spirit, this Paganism, which acknowledges matter because itself is material, and which denies soul and the supernatural, sees in man a mere organism, bound in an eternal ring of sense, a being whose deepest emotions are but animal instincts, variously developed, and whose subtlest thoughts are but emanations from an organ resembling curds; therefore it has only the human animal for its subject in art and literature, and can depict nothing in moral life but its decay. ”

“ Writing for the young I wish thus to preface the little I have to say of possible service to others on that branch of writing as to which I am credited with some experience—fiction for the young, more especially for children—because, underlying any information or advice I can give, is the very strongest belief in every writer taking his or her own path, trusting to his or her own intuitions. ”

“ It was Dickens’ inability to recognise his own limitation in this respect which chiefly contributed, with his outrageous vanity, to wreck his later works; for he always aimed at developing character, probably because it was the only thing he could not do. Because the gods, as a sort of make-weight, with their gifts of genius and talent, always throw in a perverse blindness to the nature and limits of those endowments. ”

“ And though it would not be right, because it would not be sincere, to make of our stories for children a fool’s paradise, where all the big people are perfect, and only the boys and girls in fault, still the obtruding or emphasising parental mistakes and failings should surely be avoided when writing for the tender little ones, whose lovely belief in “mother” is the very breath and sunshine of their lives—and the greatest possible incentive to mother herself to be in some faint degree worthy of this exquisite trust. ”

“ When a messenger who has witnessed with his own eyes some terrible scene, dashes into the midst of an awe-struck circle, and pours forth the tale of woe with sobbing breath and bursting bombshells of words, who cares what those words are? Their meaning is enough. But at another time, when in cheerful, social intercourse, the same voice is raised to tell a quiet tale, or recount a simple reminiscence, the tone, the look by which the narration is accompanied, the phrases in which it is presented to the listening audience, are everything to its success. ”

“ In style it is impossible to be consistent or logical. If I write a tale of the first Jacobite Rebellion, I naturally make my characters talk as people talked in the early years of the eighteenth century. For this there are models in abundance, a few of the best kind. The Spectator papers, for instance, give a writer exactly what he wants in this respect. And if he wishes to see how admirably they can be imitated, let him study Thackeray’s Esmond, one of the very finest masterpieces of style that is to be found in English literature. ”

“ We are mediocrities at best, most of us; we know that we are mediocrities, and we are not going to cry about it. But let us acknowledge, with the humility which beseems us, how immeasurably he was our superior, not in genius alone, but in industry, in conscientiousness, in self-sacrifice. We mediocre folks, who have acquired a certain facility of expression, are apt to be only too lenient with ourselves. The exact word that we want, the precise phrase suitable to our purpose, are not forthcoming; but others are ready and will serve well enough. ”

“ Writing for children calls for a peculiar gift. It is not so much a question of taking up one’s stand on the lower rungs of the literary ladder, as of standing on another ladder altogether—one which has its own steps, its higher and lower positions of excellence. ”

“ There are certain conventionalities in the social novel: the purse-proud new man, who drops his H’s: the haughty lady of rank, and so on; just as there is the conventional lawyer on the stage, who is a rogue. If we want to be bold and original, we vary or change our pieces, and make the nouveau riche all that is desirable, and the lady of rank all that is humble; but the range of alteration in this respect is not great, and the range of varieties in character is not great, and of local colours influencing the characters there can be none at all. ”

“ An idea may be caught or a long train of thought may be fired by the idiosyncrasy of some one present in person before the writer; but to say that the whole character when completely developed is drawn from life because of the hint, as it were, which [Pg 33] began it, is like saying that an animal is copied from life because a single bone has been placed in the hands of the artist, from which he has been enabled—as anatomists know can be done—to piece together the entire creature, and in his mind’s eye behold it. ”

“ Essential qualities for writing fiction The outcome of the question, then, seems to be that beginners in the art of novel-writing are able to test themselves as to their power of Vision with regard to Fiction; they will soon discover whether they can master the difficulty of creating a forcible and distinct picture in their minds of the subject they propose to treat; they must see it distinctly, and it must be lasting; they must see not only the outer forms of characters, but their inner feelings; they must think their thoughts, they must try to hear their words. ”

“ The principles of literature It seems to me that the principles of Literature, or, to speak simply, the ways in which writing should be done, reveal themselves during its practice, and probably much of the originality which, whatever may be their shortcomings as novelists, distinguishes many English writers, is due in a measure to this personal, unaided way of groping after truth. Writers who possess a natural faculty often work for years with an intuitive rather than a conscious adherence to distinct principles ”

“ A Short Story, if good, is likely to find a market somewhere—but then it must be good—by this I mean terse and full of plot, without a single unnecessary word, and with the whole range of subject clearly mapped out in the author’s mind before a word is written. The short story can be a character sketch, although this is very often intensely stupid, and has a by-way of clever air about it, which quickly vanishes as you approach it, or it can be a good exciting incident with plenty of movement. ”

“ Thus from your own experience you may gather useful hints as to the kind of condensation desirable for the short story. Others may, and ought to, be acquired by the study of the best literature; but in this, as in every form of creative work, the artist, in the beginning as at the end, must draw his chief inspiration from life itself. ”

“ Evils of modern fiction Naturalism and irreverence are unquestionably the crying evils of modern fiction. And it by no means follows that they are essential to the construction of the ethical novel. Mr. Leslie Stephen has said that to be a good writer a man must be a preacher; and surely there are enough subjects to preach about without touching on unsavoury topics. Are not men and women prone to faults of character, besides those of unlawful passion and open rebellion against God; and are there not social wrongs and inequalities to be inveighed against. ”

“ The novel of Reform To men and women of sympathetic temperaments and ready pens, the temptation to sermonise on the evils and wrongs of the world around them must be well nigh irresistible, and what more easy and telling way can there possibly be than by haranguing their fellow-men in fiction! ”

“ To me it seems, as a rule, that in writing stories for either old or young, the great thing is to make the acquaintance of your characters, and get to know them as well and intimately as you possibly can. Some of course take much more knowing than others; some are quickly read through; some are interesting because they are meant apparently not to be thoroughly known, and in this light you truthfully depict them, though this last class is hardly the type of character to be introduced into a story for children. ”

“ The main thing The art of writing fiction has of late years been made the subject of innumerable articles by persons most, if not quite all, of whom are doubtless competent and well-informed; and it seems to be pretty generally agreed upon between them, as a nice, definite sort of dogma to start with, that “the main thing is to have a story to tell.” Possibly that may be the main thing: possibly also the main thing—if, indeed, there be one where several things are indispensable—may be, not that the writer should have a story to tell, but that he should be able to tell it. ”