Novelist

“ It is only slowly that we have developed the distinction of the novel from the romance, as being a story of human beings, absolutely credible and conceivable, as distinguished from human beings frankly endowed with the glamour, the wonder, the brightness, of a less exacting and more vividly eventful world. The novel is a story that demands, or professes to demand, no make-believe. The novelist undertakes to present you people and things as real as any that you can meet in an omnibus. ”

“ Romance and realism, the proven and the impossible, wild stories of youthful passion and sedate studies of middle-aged spinsters, tales of New England villages, tales of Western towns, tales of Scotch hamlets, and tales of the mist-lands beyond the mountains of Africa, are all welcomed and read with avidity. The novelist, unless he be inhumanly dull, is sure of his audience, and he grows didactic from sheer excess of prosperity. ”

“ The shifting position of novelists in our three scales is, perhaps, the most curious outcome of our investigation. Like the poet, the novelist employs as his chief mental implement the faculty of sensuous imagination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The business of the novelist is to create life, and here is life created indeed; the satisfaction of a clean, coherent form is wanting, and it would be well to have it, but that is all. We have a magnificent novel without it. ”

“ In general, the novelist may build as he chooses. He may tell a tale, long or short, happening in few places or in many; and is not, like the dramatist, confined in place to no more than four or five different settings, and in time to the two hours' traffic of the stage. The novel, therefore, is far more serviceable than the drama as a medium for exhibiting the gradual growth of character,—the development of personality under influences extending over long periods of time and exerted in many different places. ”

“ The mission of the historical novelist is to select from them the most brilliant, the most interesting events, which are connected with the chief personage of his story, and to concentrate them into one poetic moment of his romance. ”

“ And I think it is just in this, that the novel is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a study and judgment of conduct, and through that of the ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and increasing value—or perhaps to avoid controversy I had better say the real and increasing importance—of the novel and of the novelist in modern life comes in. ”

“ Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives in his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, amongst imaginary things, happenings, and people. ”

“ I will turn to the making of books—I avoid the term literature—and I will ask you whether it is not the extravagant, the impossible, the deformed, in style and matter, which is most eagerly read. The simplest things in life should convince one. The novelist’s hero is no longer the fine, handsome young fellow of twenty years ago. ”

“ All these things and others are signs of an awakened conscience—of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or neutral—that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot, arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and what not. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or essayist there are three special questions that we may ask—as to the Theme, as to the Form, as to the creation of Character.
It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the novel, as, for instance, The Ring and the Book and Aurora Leigh bear witness. ”

“ The extraordinary interest that they arouse is confined almost entirely to our interest in his men and women; the plot, the narrative, the events are always secondary; he imitated no other novelist, and no other can imitate him. ”

“ The term novel has been made to cover books of such diverse character, now-a-days, that the reader is almost entitled to demand of a novelist that he shall affix some distinct label to the book he is putting forth, and make it clear beforehand whether his work is a dialogue on religion, a satire on morals, a political tract, a study in slum life, or a mere romance. ”

“ Indeed, I believe that there is an opportunity for a new form of novel, in which the novelist, as well as the reader, will skip all the dull people, and merely indicate such of them as are necessary to the action by an outline or a symbol, compressing their familiar psychology, and necessary plot-interferences with the main characters, into recognised formulae. ”

“ The novel is not a new sort of pulpit; humanity is passing out of the phase when men sit under preachers and dogmatic influences. But the novelist is going to be the most potent of artists, because he is going to present conduct, devise beautiful conduct, discuss conduct analyse conduct, suggest conduct, illuminate it through and through. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have scarcely a claim to so many lines as the formal novelist may occupy pages, in the distribution of poetic justice, and the final grouping of his characters into that effective tableau upon which, at last, the curtain gracefully descends. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But however the annals of our History have been exhausted by the industry of romance, the subject you finally pressed on my choice is unquestionably one which, whether in the delineation of character, the expression of passion, or the suggestion of historical truths, can hardly fail to direct the Novelist to paths wholly untrodden by his predecessors in the Land of Fiction. ”

“ The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting. ”

“ The novelist comes to us in the intervals of recreation and relaxation, and by his seductive powers of imagination and sentiment takes possession of the fancy and the heart before judgment and reason are aroused to defend the citadel. ”

“ The Lamp of Ideality.—The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation. ”

“ It gives us a graphic if not elaborate sketch of the personality and development of the great novelist, is particularly full and authentic concerning her earlier years, tells enough of the leading motives in her work to give the general reader a lucid idea of the true drift and purpose of her art, and analyzes carefully her various writings, with no attempt at profound criticism or fine writing, but with appreciation, insight, and a clear grasp of those underlying psychological principles which are so closely interwoven in every production that came from her pen."—Traveller. ”

“ The novelist in the same way builds images of his character in mental matter, and by the exercise of his will moves these puppets from one position or grouping to another, so that the plot of his story is literally acted out before him. ”

“ The novelist is the freest of the three from tightly drawn limitations. Frequently a novel is a fictional biography and starts with the birth, or at least the early childhood of its principal character, moving gradually along through the seven ages to the grave. ”

“ The Lamp of Reality.—The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature. ”

“ Our argument is that each is ideally immersed in his own body of reference, and that immersion in any such degree and to the effect of any such variety, intensity and plausibility is really among us a new feature of the novelist’s range of resource. ”

“ As in literature, this intermediate condition gave way to the expression of ideas rather than of physical force, and artists, like novelists, were led to aim at representing carefully drawn characters and suggestive surroundings. In the novels of the last century we see a gradual development of this stage of the novelist’s art. ”

“ I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. If it does not, it causes me no pain. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. ”

“ Before we proceed to study the technical methods of delineating characters, we must ask ourselves what constitutes a character worth delineating. A novelist is, to speak figuratively, the social sponsor for his own fictitious characters ”

“ So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic revival. To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their own characters,--this was the purpose of our first novelists. ”

“ Among readers, women and girls and young men at least will insist upon having their novels significant and real, and it is to these perpetually renewed elements in the public that the novelist must look for his continuing emancipation from the wearier and more massive influences at work in contemporary British life. ”

“ Turning our attention from the epic and the drama, and confining it to the general type of fiction which in the last chapter was loosely named novelistic, we shall find it possible to distinguish somewhat sharply, on the basis of both material and method, between three several forms,—the novel, the novelette, and the short-story. The French, who are more precise than we in their use of denotative terms, are accustomed to divide their novelistic fiction into what they call the roman, the nouvelle, and the conte. ”

“ If the poets were few after the Restoration, the novelists were many, with transcendent excellences and transcendent faults, reaching the heart by their pathos, insulting the reason by their exaggerations, captivating the imagination while shocking the moral sense; painting manners and dissecting passions with powerful, acute, and vivid touch. ”

“ The novelist, with his artistic insight and his ability to shape his material as he wishes, can highlight his concept of a particular national character with drama and human interest to make this hard-to-define quality come memorably alive on the printed page. ”

“ That is the human make-up—or part of it. Made up like this himself, the novelist takes his pen in his hand, gets into the abnormal state which it is convenient to call "inspiration," and tries to create characters. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist.—Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it's the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly. ”

“ Perhaps no terms have been so injurious to the profession of the novelist as those two words, hero and heroine. In spite of the latitude which is allowed to the writer in putting his own interpretation upon these words, something heroic is still expected; whereas, if he attempt to paint from Nature, how little that is heroic should he describe! ”

“ And it is possible, as we have seen, that modern fiction should be at once epic and novelistic in content and in mood,—epic in resuming all aspects of a certain phase of life and in exhibiting a social struggle, and novelistic in casting emphasis upon personal details of character and in depicting intimate emotions. ”