Literary agent

“ His mastery of language, his knowledge of human impulses, his interpretation of the forces of nature and of the power of inanimate objects over human beings, all pronounce him a writer of no mean rank.... He can express philosophy in terms of narrative without prostituting his art; he can suggest an answer without drawing a moral; with a clearer vision he could stand among the masters in literary achievement. ”

“ And so anyone who practises literary composition, even of a pedestrian sort, will find at least one reward for his pains in a growing insight into the personality of great writers. He will come to feel that such a word was chosen or such a sentence framed in just that way, under the influence of such a purpose or sentiment, and by putting these impressions together, will presently arrive at some personal acquaintance with any author whose character and aims are at all congenial with his own. ”

“ The drama and the choicest forms of prose and poetry in their literary aspects furnish means of presenting great thoughts and high ideals, and, thus combined with the beauty of expression, not only furnish the best evidence of moral and intellectual progress but make a perennial source of information in modern social life. ”

“ But the readers that rouse the moral sentiments, that touch the imagination, that elevate and establish character by selections chosen from the wisest writers in English in all the centuries that have passed since our language assumed a comparatively fixed literary form, have a much more valuable function to perform. Character is more valuable than knowledge and a taste for pure and ennobling literature is a safeguard for the young that cannot be safely ignored. ”

“ The public—that is, the reading world made up of those who love the products of authorship—always takes an interest in the methods of work adopted by literary men, and is fond of gaining information about authorship in the act, and of getting a glimpse of its favorite, the author, at work in that "sanctum sanctorum"—the study. ”

“ From his familiar handling of all questions connected with the literary profession, and his confident judgements on them, it would be easy to tell that the author of the Lives was a professional man of letters. ”

“ Possibly a denominational religious weekly and another journal of fashion or business. Then come the thousands who read the best magazines, and whatever else is for the moment popular in novels and poetry—the last dialect story, the fashionable poem, the questionable but talked-of novel. Let a violent attack be made on the decency of a new story and instantly, if only it is clever, its author becomes famous. ”

“ The case ought, surely, to put us occasionally upon reflecting. May an author not, in some degree, by choosing his literary company, choose also his literary character, and so, when he comes to51 write, write himself back to his masters? ”

“ On the other hand, should the story-teller be a poet—one who, like the writer of ‘John Ball,’ has been accustomed to write under the conditions of a form of literary art where the diction is always and necessarily concrete, p. ”

“ Politics, Essays, Travels, Biography, History;—are these subjects on which one is more likely to obtain a decent, a tolerably durable reputation, than one is by the composition of novels? I fear not. Let us look around! What encouragement to any of these subjects is held out to us? Are not writings of this sort far more the ephemerals of literature than writings of fiction? [3] Does the biography, or the essay, or the treatise, last even the year for which a novel endures? And if it does not exceed the novel in durability, it can scarcely equal it, you will allow, in popularity. ”

“ But it is very evident that all poems which might be judged unsuitable for such recitation, would necessarily be excluded from competition, whatever might be their “literary merits,” and the successful production could only be that which among the “suitable” was regarded as possessing the greatest literary excellence. ”

“ The publisher introduced him to me as a gentleman scarcely less eminent in literature than in music, and me to him as an aspirant critic—a young gentleman scarcely less eminent in philosophy than in philology. ”

“ The inculcation of literary ideals, the stimulation of original talent and the enriching of our national letters are all excellent themes for papers to be read before high-brow clubs and respectable societies, but as practical propositions, in a practical world, they do not lead anywhere. ”

“ Nothing is further from our thought than to undervalue saturation and possession, the fact of the particular experience, the state and degree of acquaintance incurred, however such a consciousness may have been determined; for these things represent on the part of the novelist, as on the part of any painter of things seen, felt or imagined, just one half of his authority—the other half being represented of course by the application he is inspired to make of them. ”

“ But such an ambitious task is in no way incumbent on the novelist. Whether he looks to his pride or his pocket, to fame or to a sufficient circulation, it is quite enough for him to please a section of the public. ”

“ It is one of the ways where science may enlarge the novel, by giving it fresh subject matter. But the help has not been given yet, and until it comes we may say that the actors in a story are, or pretend to be, human beings.
Since the novelist is himself a human being, there is an affinity between him and his subject matter which is absent in many other forms of art. ”

“ They are persons hemmed in by the close environment of facts.
This realism, this objectifying of thought, this living form of knowledge, is characteristic of all great [Pg 193] writers in prose or verse. The novelist, the romancer, the poet, the orator, and even the essayist, will always put the breath of reality into his work by an infusion of concreteness, of graphic personification. The poet's fancy, building out of the abundant materials of sense-experience, is what gives color and warmth to all his thoughts. Strong writers make incessant use of figures of speech. ”

“ But finally, when several publishers offered to take the story as fiction, I cut short all negotiations and decided to publish it myself. Where I am known at all, it is my misfortune to be known as a writer of fiction. ”

“ The fashion in which the poet’s impulses must tally with those of his readers, will now be moderately clear. The poet is in the least favourable position, perhaps, among the artists, but as a compensation the range and fullness of the communications open to him is, if he can overcome the difficulties, very great. ”

“ These various elements are worthy of separate consideration.
(1) The characters of a novel are of prime importance. As in actual life, they give tone to the society to which we are introduced. They should be clearly individualized, as in the drama, and maintain throughout a reasonable consistency. They may be taken from any class of society; and writers of large creative genius, like Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, Balzac, will be distinguished both for the number and for the variety of their characters. ”

“ Thus records of prime truths sometimes remain a dead letter to plain folk; the writers have left so much to the imagination, and imagination is so rare a gift. Here, then, the writer of fiction may be of use to the public—as an interpreter. ”

“ For the romance of romancing soon disappears. After the production of one, two, three, or half-a-dozen novels, if the writer is really what we call “a professional,” and must go on writing as a business, he discovers how serious is the occupation in which he is engaged. Half-a-dozen books, or less, will make a reputation; ten will sustain one; twenty are in ordinary cases a career. ”

“ But in spite of this, and of similar concessions, he deliberately held the opinion that Literature, rather than Science, was the chief agent in culture. In 1872 he wrote to an enquirer: "A single line of poetry, working in the mind, may produce more thought and lead to more light, which is what man wants, than the fullest acquaintance (to take your own instance) with the processes of digestion." ”

“ Certain materials of fiction are inherently epic, or dramatic, or novelistic, as the case may be. Also, an author, according to his mental attitude toward life and toward the subject-matter of his fictions, may cast his stories either in the epic, the dramatic, or the novelistic mood. In order to understand this distinction, we must examine the nature of the epic and the drama, and then study the novel in comparison with these two elder types of fiction. ”

“ In it the real or invented characters appear to us; the novelist's aim is to represent and interpret the actions of a human being, the critic's, to represent and interpret a work, in such a manner that the reader may see both the actions and the work to be results produced with real or apparent inevitability, when certain inward qualities or tendencies are acted upon by suggestions from without. ”

“ The English novelist who enters my house (no foreign novelist will be admitted) must understand his art as the healthy-minded English reader understands it in our time. He must know that our purer modern taste, our higher modern morality, limits him to doing exactly two things for us, when he writes us a book. ”

“ These, then, are the three merits to be striven for in equal measure by aspirants to the art of fiction: momentous material, masterly method, and important personality. To discover certain truths of human life that are eminently worth the telling, to embody them in imagined facts with a mastery both of structure and of style, and, behind and beyond the work itself, to be all the time a person worthy of being listened to: this is, for the fiction-writer, the ultimate ideal. ”

“ This matter is well worth dwelling upon, for, apart from merit in point of executive artistry, the only standard whereby a story can be estimated as relatively significant or relatively insignificant is the standard of interest, that is, interest for the ideal reader, the reader of open and able mind and sympathetic heart. The aim of fiction is to interest, and the story which most deeply interests most completely fulfils the ideals of the art. ”

“ Those were not days, be it remembered, when people wrote fiction for the sake of introducing discussions. There still lingered in the novelist's mind the time-worn heresy that he had a story to tell, and that his people must act as well as talk. The plot—delightful and obsolete word!—was then in good repute, and conversation was mainly useful in helping on the tale, in providing copious love scenes, and, with really good novelists, in illustrating and developing character. ”

“ But those original works of genius, of which language is the expression, scarcely admit of fellowship, either in conception or execution. One book must be the product of one brain, in which, to constitute excellence, there ought to be as strict unity of thought and diction as the ancient critic required of time and place in dramatic action. ”

“ It is because this modern form of fiction upon which we fix the name Novel to indicate its new features has seized the idea of personality, has stood for truth and grown ever more democratic, that it has attained to the immense power which marks it at the present time. ”

“ And yet, if talents equal to those of the foremost novelists had been or were devoted to writing biography, the popularity—at least among cultivated readers—of the two branches of literature might be reversed. As I have said, the utmost achievement for the novelist is to create an illusion so perfect that the characters in his books shall seem to be real. ”

“ The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. ”

“ If in my first published volume my efforts to portray men and manners needed the assistance of my powers as a novelist, so in this book my knowledge of men and manners has to help me in my labors as a novelist. Sometimes the one side of my character takes the upper hand, and sometimes the other; but still they are at bottom inseparable, and it has always been my endeavor to describe facts artistically. However the novelist may be judged, the portrayer of men and manners demands that his words should be believed. ”

“ One of the most clearly expressed and continually reiterated aims of prose fiction, as of other species of writing from time immemorial, was that of conveying to the reader a moral through the agreeable channel of example. ”

“ There is in fact an enormous quantity of what I may call floating unwritten literature of considerable value; for any tale or poem which happens to hit the taste of an audience soon becomes public property, and is learned by rote and repeated by other less successful orators, so that the author's fame becomes widespread. ”

“ An unfailing sign of the amateur, at least of the amateur with no innate sense of fictional values, is a story made up of hard and angular blocks of narration, description, and dialogue. The skilled writer—if the particular story permits, a proviso always to be understood—will intermingle speech with action and description with both. ”

“ To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are, for the most part, suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. ”

“ It is the business of the story-teller to produce, not a photograph of one who sits in a chair, but a kinetoscope, with every limb in motion. The analytical novelist, when he has written his analytical novel, should regard it as merely a preparatory study, and should tear it up and then write a real novel in which the characters so carefully analysed will by their movements disclose [viii] all those traits of which their creator has laboured to convince himself. ”

“ But today even campus-pump critics are more or less aware of her, and one hears no more gabble about imitations. The plain fact is that she is now discovered to be a novelist of original methods and quite extraordinary capacities—penetrating and accurate in observation, delicate in feeling, brilliant and charming in manner, and full of a high sense of the dignity and importance of her work. Bit by bit, patiently and laboriously, she has mastered the trade of the novelist; in each succeeding book she has shown an unmistakable advance. ”