Tome

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lesley flushed hotly as she was shown into the smoky, little den. It was a scene of confusion, such as she had never beheld before. The table was heaped high with papers: books and maps strewed every chair: even the floor was littered with bulky tomes and piles of manuscript. At a knee-hole table Caspar Brooke was sitting, writing hard, as if for dear life, his loose hair falling heavily over his big forehead, his left hand grasping his thick brown beard. He looked up as Lesley entered, and gave her a nod. ”

“ I scarcely think we could any of us claim that in reading a novel we deliberately watch the book itself, rather than the scenes and figures it suggests, or that we seek to construct an image of the book, page by page, while its form is gradually exposed to us. ”

“ Yet, even in the very act of ending, qualms arise. Thinking of what lies under one’s hand, no longer as a sheaf of familiar manuscript, but as a full-blown book, printed, bound, stitched, and a’ the lave o’ it, misgivings awake, and are lively. ”

“ After studying the tale as folk-lore, know it as literature. Master it as a classic, test it as literature, to see wherein lies its appeal to the emotions, its power of imagination, its basis of truth, and its quality of form; study it as a short-story and view it as a piece of narration. It is rather interesting to note that you can get all there is in a tale from any one point of view. If you follow the sequence as setting, through association you get the whole, as may be seen by referring to Chanticleer and Partlet under the heading, "Setting," in the chapter on the "Short-Story." ”

“ Every faculty casts itself into an art, and memory into the art of writing, that is, the book. The sedge Papyrus, which gave its name to our word paper, is of more importance to history than cotton, or silver, or gold. ”

“ Hence, the Plot is the imitation of the action: for by plot I here mean the arrangement of the incidents. By Character I mean that in virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents. Thought is required wherever a statement is proved, or, it may be, a general truth enunciated. Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality—namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. Two of the parts constitute the medium of imitation, one the manner, and three the objects of imitation. ”

“ Library This brilliant and original novel is one of the notable additions to the fiction list of the year, in respect both of literary quality and of popular appeal. It is bubbling over with life and humor, buoyant with youth and courage, picturesque in local color, and powerful in the intensity of its emotional interest. ”

“ The extent of his achievements is the most striking quality. Seventeen volumes represent the poet's legacy to his countrymen. And what volumes! Crammed with thought, suffused with imagination, crowded with figures with life more real than half the people we meet, filled with suggestion, historic, ethical, artistic, and contemporary, they represent at least fifty volumes, if their full meaning were drawn out and displayed. Nor has this huge bulk been attained by harping on a limited set of themes. ”

“ One must confess that regarded strictly as a piece of fiction the book makes rather hard reading today. But examined with some knowledge of the mystery upon which it is founded, the old novel becomes a genuine human document. ”

“ Say that the new methods in literature concentrate all styles, comedy and tragedy, description, character-drawing and dialogues, in a series of pictures set in the brilliant frame of a plot which holds the reader's interest. The Novel, which demands sentiment, style, and imagery, is the greatest creation of modern days ”

“ At nightfall the uproar lessens, and as the evening wanes, the unaccustomed sounds diminish, though till midnight, ever and anon, the tired and sleepy citizens are startled from their dreams by whoops, hurrahs, snatches of songs, and outbursts of rude laughter ringing through the frosty air and mingling with the clattering of horses' feet and the whirring rumble of swift-revolving wheels, as some party of roystering blades, excited by deep potations, drive shouting homewards from the village inns. ”

“ It is not without considerable apprehension that I offer myself as an avowed Author at the bar of public opinion,—and that apprehension is heightened by its being the general custom to give indiscriminately the name of Novel to every thing in Prose that comes in the shape of a Story, however simple it be in its construction, and humble in its pretensions. ”

“ First each novel, and then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I will take, for instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the novel of adventure, which appeals to certain almost sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man; second, the novel of character, which appeals to our intellectual appreciation of man’s foibles and mingled and inconstant motives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature and moral judgment. ”

“ I claim, then, that here we have the touchstone which will infallibly separate the higher from the lower in literature, which will range the innumerable multitude of books in two great divisions, which can be applied with equal justice to a Greek drama, an eighteenth century novelist, and a modern poet, to an epic in twelve books, and to a lyric in twelve lines. ”

“ Literature of Fantasy includes primarily adult prose fiction published in book form in English. The first part is a list of novels and collections—as well as bibliographies—accompanied by summaries, with occasional evaluative comments, for novels and lists of contents for collections. ”

“ All who have at heart the best interests of literature, and welcome further the spread of a taste for the world’s classics, will welcome the appearance of this series, which will place a complete, rich and uniform library of the highest character within the reach of all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Know that the moment that a mortal manuscript is written in a legible hand and the word End or Finis attached thereto, whatever characters happen to be sketched therein acquire the quality of creating a soul or spirit which takes flight and ascends immediately through the regions of the air till it arrives at the moon, where it is embodied and becomes a living creature, the precise counterpart of the literary prototype. ”

“ We may talk of the fidelity of books, but no man ever wrote even his own biography without being compelled to omit at least nine-tenths of the most important materials. What are three—what six volumes? We live six volumes in a day! Thought, emotion, joy, sorrow, hope, fear, how prolix would they be if they might each tell their hourly tale! ”

“ The three consist of a Romance, an Epic in twelve books, and an Inquiry into the Human Mind, in three volumes. I, Paul, will tickle the Romance; you this very evening shall plaster the Epic, and slash the Inquiry! ”

“ Having decided this, learned critics write volumes upon volumes, so that the praise and explanation of the greatness and importance of the representation of the character of a man who has no character form in volume a library. ”

“ I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch the materials; it is the play of thought, and sentiment, and language, the weaving in of characters, lightly yet expressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life ”

“ There are many such,—dramas on the stage of history, life scenes that are pictures in action, tales pathetic, stirring, enlivening, full of the element of the unusual, of the stuff the novel and the romance are made of, yet with the advantage of being actual fact. ”

“ The order in which the drama simply says things gives it all its form, while the story told and the picture painted, as the novel at the pass we have brought it to embraces them, reports of an infinite diversity of matters, gathers together and gives out again a hundred sorts, and finds its order and its structure, its unity and its beauty, in the alternation of parts and the adjustment of differences. ”

“ No novel is anything, for the purposes either of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages. Let an author so tell his tale as to touch his reader's heart and draw his tears, and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be,—truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational. ”

“ It is this dearth of real enlightenment that makes so many first attempts—whether poetry or prose, essays, stories or special articles—sheer guess-work, gropings in the dark. Hundreds of first manuscripts, and second and third manuscripts, too, are written with tremulous hopes and fears, absurdly overvalued one moment and blackly despaired of the next. ”

“ This sense of the story being the idea, the starting-point, of the novel, is the only one that I see in which it can be spoken of as something different from its organic whole; and since in proportion as the work is successful the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression, in that proportion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may be drawn more or less out of its sheath. ”

“ While narration, description, exposition and argument are the four forms of prose composition, we do not find frequently that selections are exclusively one or another. Nearly every story contains description, and exposition is not infrequent; expositions often contain description and narration, and arguments are often based upon narration and exposition. Excellent language lessons may be given by examining masterpieces to see what forms of composition they represent or which form predominates. ”

“ On the form side, this work is prose and it is art—the first English prose fiction, so announced and so taken. It is literary legend. An artist conscious of his art offered the material not as history or religion, but as a thing of beauty. ”

“ Nearly all our prose romance, and most of our poetry, history, and miscellaneous literature, belong to the steam age in origin and spirit. We now write ten times as many books, and publish fifty times as many volumes annually, as they did in the last century. ”

“ Just as description of characters or of scene and setting is one method of beginning short stories and novels, so also it constitutes a form of introduction for an article. In both cases the aim is to create immediate interest by vivid portrayal of definite persons and places. The concrete word picture, like the concrete instance in a narrative beginning, makes a quick and strong appeal. An element of suspense or mystery may be introduced into the description, if a person, a place, or an object is described without being identified by name until the end of the portrayal. ”

“ A marvel came to pass, my first book was an enormous success. The whole world talked of it. A leading journal, delighted to have discovered someone, wrote it up; other journals followed suit to be in the movement. ”

“ There is, indeed, an astonishing vitality and movement throughout the work, and, elaborate though the plot is, with all varieties and all contrasts of people and conditions, with constant shiftings of the scene, the story yet moves, and moves the interest of the reader too, along the rapid current of events towards the powerful culmination. ”

“ The novel of life and manners which is largely descriptive and in which the exigencies of the plot give way to the study of customs. (3) The novel of incident in which the plot is everything and description and character study are avoided or subordinated to action. (4) The romance which usually deals with things as they were in days long past and with actions that little concern the present. Marvelous and even supernatural incidents crowd its pages. (5) The idealistic novel which paints the world as it should be and makes its actors more nearly perfect than the world accepts as typical. ”

“ There is, to be sure, a type of novel, which is generally called in English "the novel with a purpose," the aim of which is to persuade the reader to accept some special thesis that the author holds concerning politics, religion, social ethics, or some other of the phases of life that are readily open to discussion. ”

“ The faculty which by a daring leap fixes on the evolutionary hypothesis, or with imaginative subtlety suggests the plot of a novel, is the self-same one which enables us to say, “Our Father, which art in heaven.” ”