WALTER BESANT 
 
 AND 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 THE 
 
 ART OF FICTION 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 STEPHEN E. WHICHER 
 MEMORIAL BOOK COLLECTION 
 
 Gift of 
 MRS. ELIZABETH T. WHICHER 
 
_.. ^ Cornell University Library 
 
 PN 3355.B55 1884a 
 
 . Art of fiction 
 
 3 1924 027 192 941 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027192941 
 
WALTER BESANT 
 
 AND 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 THE 
 
 ART OF FICTION 
 
 BOSTON 
 CUPPLES AND HURD 
 
THE ART OF FICTION: 
 
 A LECTURE 
 Deliveked at the Royal Institution, Apbil 25, 1884. 
 
 I DESiEE, this evening, to consider Fiction as one 
 of the Fine Arts. In order to do this, and before 
 doing it, I have first to advance certain propositions. 
 They are not new, they are not likely to be disputed, 
 and yet they have never been so generally received 
 as to form part, so to speak, of the national mind. 
 These propositions are three, though the last two 
 directly spring from the first. They are : — 
 
 1. That Fiction is an Art in every way worthy 
 to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts 
 of Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry ; that is to 
 say, her field is as boundless, her possibilities as vast, 
 her excellences as worthy of admiration, as may be 
 claimed for any of her sister Arts. 
 
 2. That it is an Art which, like them, is governed 
 and directed by general laws ; and that these laws 
 may be laid down and taught with as much pre- 
 cision and exactness as the laws of harmony, per- 
 spective, and proportion. 
 
 3. That, like the other Fine Arts, Fiction is so 
 far removed from the mere mechanical arts, that 
 
 3 
 
4 THE AET OP FICTION. 
 
 no laws or rules whatever can teach it to those who 
 have not already been endowed with the natural and 
 necessary gifts. 
 
 These are the three propositions which I have to 
 discuss. It follows as a corollary and evident deduc- 
 tion that, these propositions once admitted, those 
 who follow and profess the Art of Fiction must be 
 recognized as artists, in the strictest sense of the 
 word, just as much as those who have delighted 
 and elevated mankind by music and painting ; and 
 that the great Masters of Fiction must be placed on 
 the same level as the great Masters in the other 
 Arts. In other words, I mean that where the highest 
 point, or what seems the highest point, possible in 
 this Art is touched, the man who has reached it is 
 one of the world's greatest men. 
 
 I cannot suppose that there are any in this room 
 who would refuse to admit these propositions; on 
 the contrary, they will seem to most here self-evident ; 
 yet the application of theory to practice, of principle 
 to persons, may be more difficult. For instance, so 
 boundless is the admiration for great Masters such 
 as Raphael or Mozart, that if one were to propose 
 that Thackeray should be placed beside them, on the 
 same level, and as an equal, there would be felt by 
 most a certain shock. I am not suggesting that 
 the art of Thackeray is to be compared with that 
 of Raphael, or that there is any similarity in the 
 work of the two men ; I only say that, Fiction being 
 one Art, and Painting another and a sister Art, 
 
THE ART OP FICTION. 5 
 
 those who attain the highest possible distinction in 
 either are equal. 
 
 Let us, however, go outside this room, among the 
 multitudes by whom a novelist has never been con- 
 sidered an artist at all. To them the claim that a 
 great novelist should be considered to occupy the 
 same level as a great musician, a great painter, or a 
 great poet, would appear at first a thing ludicrous 
 and even painful. Consider for a moment how the 
 world at large regards the novelist. He is, in their 
 eyes, a person who tells stories, just as they used to 
 regard the actor as a man who tumbled on the stage 
 to make the audience laugh, and a musician as a 
 man who fiddled to make the people dance. This 
 is the old way of thinking, and most peojale think 
 first as they have been taught to think ; and next 
 as they see others think. It is therefore quite 
 easy to understand why the art of novel-writing 
 has always been, by the general mass, undervalued. 
 First, while the leaders in every other branch 
 of Art, in every department of Science, and in 
 every kind of profession, receive their share of the 
 ordinary national distinctions, no one ever hears 
 of honors being bestowed upon novelists. Neither 
 Thackeray nor Dickens was ever, so far as I know, 
 offered a Peerage ; neither King, Queen, nor Prince 
 in any country throughout the whole world takes 
 the least notice of them. I do not say they would 
 be any the better for this kind of recognition, but 
 its absence clearly proves, to those who take their 
 
6 THE ART OF PICTIOX. 
 
 opinions from others, that they are not a class at all 
 worthy of special honor. Then again, in the modern 
 craze which exists for every kind of art — so that 
 we meet everywhere, in every household, amateur 
 actors, painters, etchers, sculptors, modellers, musi- 
 cians, and singers, all of them serious and earnest in 
 their aims — amateur novelists alone regard their 
 Art as one which is learned by intuition. Thirdly, 
 novelists are not associated as are painters; they 
 hold no annual exhibitions, dinners, or conversazioni; 
 they put no letters after their name; they have 
 no President or Academy ; and they do not them- 
 selves seem desirous of being treated as followers 
 of a special Art. I do not say that they are wrong, 
 or that much would be gained for Art if all the 
 novelists of England were invited to Court and 
 created into a Royal Academy. But I do say that 
 for these three reasons it is easy to understand 
 how the world at large does not even suspect that 
 the writing of novels is one of the Fine Arts, and 
 why they regard the story-teller with a sort of con- 
 tempt. It is, I acknowledge, a kindly contempt — 
 even an affectionate contempt; it is the contempt 
 which the practical man feels for the dreamer, the 
 strong man for the weak, the man who can do for 
 the man who can only look on and talk. 
 
 The general — the Philistine — view of the Pro- 
 fession is, first of all, that it is not one which a 
 scholar and a man of serious views should take up : 
 the telling of stories is inconsistent with a well- 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 7 
 
 balanced mind ; to be a teller of stories disqualifies 
 one from a hearing on important subjects. At this 
 very day there are thousands of living people who 
 will never understand how the author of "Con- 
 ingsby " and " Vivian Grey " can possibly be re- 
 garded as a serious statesman — all the Disraeli 
 literature, even to the comic cartoons, expresses the 
 popular sentiment that a novelist must not presume 
 to call himself a statesman : the intellect of a novel- 
 ist, it is felt, if he have any intellect at all, which is 
 doubtful, must be one of the most frivolous and 
 lightest kind ; how can a man whose mind is always 
 full of the loves of Corydon and Amaryllis be trusted 
 to form an opinion on practical matters? When 
 Thackeray ventured to contest the city of Oxford, 
 we know what happened. He thought his failure 
 was because the people of Oxford had never even 
 heard of him ; I think otherwise. I think it was 
 because it was whispered from house to house and 
 was carried from shop to shop, and was mentioned 
 in the vestry, that this fellow from London, who 
 asked for their votes, was nothing but a common 
 novelist. 
 
 "With these people must not be confounded 
 another class, not so large, who are prepared to 
 admit that Fiction is in some qualified sense an 
 Art ; but they do this as a concession to the vanity 
 of its followers, and are by no means prepared to 
 allow that it is an Art of the first rank. How can 
 that be an Art, they might ask, which has no 
 
8 THE ART OF FICTION. 
 
 lecturers or teachers, no school or college or Aca- 
 demy, no recognized rules, no text-books, and is not 
 taught in any University? Even the German 
 Universities, which teach everything else, do not 
 have Professors of Fiction, and not one single 
 novelist, so far as I know, has ever pretended to 
 teach his mystery, or spoken of it as a thing which 
 may be taught. Clearly, therefore, they would go 
 on to argue, such art as is required for the making 
 and telling of a story can and must be mastered 
 without study, because no materials exist for the 
 student's use. It may even, perhaps, be acquired 
 unconsciously or by imitation. This view, I am 
 sorry to say, largely prevails among the majority of 
 those who try their chance in the field of fiction. 
 Anyone, they think, can write a novel ; therefore, 
 why not sit down and write one? I would not 
 willingly say one word which might discourage 
 those who are attracted to this branch of litera- 
 ture ; on the contrary, I would encourage them in 
 every possible way. One desires, however, that 
 they should approach their work at the outset with 
 the same serious and earnest appreciation of its 
 importance and its difiiculties with which they 
 undertake the study of music and painting. I 
 would wish, in short, that from the very begin- 
 ning their minds should be fully possessed with the 
 knowledge that Fiction is an Art, and, like all other 
 Arts, that it is governed by certain laws, methods, 
 and rules, which it is their first business to learn. 
 
THE ART OF FICTIOW. 9 
 
 It is then, first and before all, a real Art. It is 
 the oldest, because it was known and practised long 
 before Painting and her sisters were in existence or 
 even thought of ; it is older than any of the Muses 
 from whose company she who tells stories has 
 hitherto been excluded ; it is the most widely 
 spread, because in no race of men under the sun is 
 it unknown, even though the stories may be always 
 the same, and handed down from generation to 
 generation in the same form; it is the most re- 
 ligious of all the Arts, because in every age until 
 the present the lives, exploits, and sufferings of 
 gods, goddesses, saints, and heroes have been the 
 favorite theme ; it has always been the most popu- 
 lar, because it requires neither culture, education, 
 nor natural genius to understand and listen to a 
 story ; it is the most moral, because the world has 
 always been taught whatever little morality it pos- 
 sesses by way of story, fable, apologue, parable, and 
 allegory. It commands the widest influence, be- 
 cause it can be carried easily and everywhere, into 
 regions where pictures are never seen and music 
 is never heard; it is the greatest teaching power, 
 because its lessons are most readily apprehended 
 and understood. All this, which might have been 
 said thousands of years ago, may be said to-day 
 with even greater force and truth. That world 
 which exists not, but is an invention or an imita- 
 tion — that world in which the shadows and shapes 
 of men move about before our eyes as real as if 
 
10 THE ART OP FICTION. 
 
 they were actually living and speaking among us, is 
 like a great theatre accessible to all of every sort, on 
 whose stage are enacted, at our own sweet will, 
 whenever we please to command them, the most 
 beautiful plays : it is, as every theatre should be, the 
 school in which manners are learned : here the ma- 
 jority of reading mankind leani nearly all that 
 they know of life and manners, of philosophy and 
 art ; even of science and religion. The modern 
 novel converts abstract ideas into living models ; it 
 gives ideas, it strengthens faith, it preaches a higher 
 morality than is seen in the actual world ; it com- 
 mands the emotions of pity, admiration, and terror; 
 it creates and keeps alive the sense of sympathy ; it 
 is the universal teacher ; it is the only book which 
 the great mass of reading mankind ever do read ; it 
 is the only way in which people can learn what 
 other men and women are like; it redeems their 
 lives from dulness, puts thoughts, desires, know- 
 ledge, and even ambitions into their hearts : it 
 teaches them to talk, and enriches their speech with 
 epigrams, anecdotes and illustrations. It is an un- 
 failing source of delight to millions, happily not too 
 critical. Why, out of all the books taken down 
 from the shelves of the public libraries, four-fifths 
 are novels, and of all those that are bought nine- 
 tenths are novels. Compared with this tremendous 
 engine of popular influence, what are all the other 
 Arts put together? Can we not alter the old 
 maxim, and say with truth, Let him who pleases 
 make the laws if I may write the novels ? 
 
THE AET OF FICTION. 11 
 
 As for the field with which this Art of Fiction 
 occupies itself, it is, if you please, nothing less than 
 the whole of Humanity. The novelist studies men 
 and women ; he is concerned with their actions and 
 their thoughts, their errors and their follies, their 
 greatness and their meanness ; the countless forms 
 of beauty and constantly varying moods to be seen 
 among them ; the forces which act upon them ; the 
 passions, prejudices, hopes and fears which pull 
 them this way and that. He has to do, above all, 
 and before all, with men and women. No one, for 
 instance, among novelists, can be called a landscape 
 painter, or a painter of sea-pieces, or a painter of 
 fruit and flowers, save only in strict subordination 
 to the group of characters with whom he is dealing. 
 Landscape, sea, sky, and air, are merely accessories 
 introduced in order to set off and bring into greater 
 prominence the figures on the stage. The very first 
 rule in Fiction is that the human interest must 
 absolutely absorb everything else. Some writers 
 never permit anything at all in their pages which 
 shall divert our thoughts one moment from the 
 actors. When, for instance, Charles Reade — Alas ! 
 that we must say the late Charles Reade, for he is 
 dead — when this great Master of Fiction, in his 
 incomparable tale of the " Cloister and the Hearth," 
 sends Gerard and Denis the Burgundian on that 
 journey through France, it is with the fewest pos- 
 sible of words that he suggests the sights and 
 persons met with on the way ; yet, so great is the 
 
12 THE AET OP FICTION. 
 
 ait of the writer, that, almost without beiiig told, 
 we see the road, a mere rough track, winding be- 
 side the river and along the valleys ; we see the 
 silent forests where lurk the routiers and the rob- 
 bers, the cut-throat inn, the merchants, peasants, 
 beggars, soldiers who go riding by ; the writer does 
 not pause in his story to tell us of all this, but yet 
 we feel it — by the mere action of the piece and the 
 dialogue we are compelled to see the scenery : the 
 life of the fifteenth century passes before us, with 
 hardly a word to picture it, because it is always kept 
 in the background, so as not to interfere with the cen- 
 tral figure of the young clerk journeying to Rome. 
 
 The human interest in Fiction, then, must come 
 before aught else. It is of this world, wholly of 
 this world. It might seem at first as if the limita^ 
 tion of this Art to things human placed it on a 
 lower level than the Arts of Painting and Music. 
 That, however, is not so. The stupendous subjects 
 which were undertaken by the old Italian painters 
 are, it is true, beyond the power of Fiction to 
 attempt. It may be questioned whether they are 
 not also, according to modern ideas, beyond the 
 legitimate scope of painting. Certainly, just as there 
 is nothing in the whole of creation more worthy 
 of being studied and painted than the human face 
 and form, so there is nothing more worthy of repre- 
 sentation than men and women in action and in pas- 
 sion. The ancient poet placed the gods themselves 
 upon the stage with the Furies and the Fates. Then 
 
THE ART OF FIOTIOX. 13 
 
 we had the saints, confessors, and martyrs. We 
 next descended to kings and great lords; in our 
 times painter, poet, and novelist alike are contented 
 with plain humanity, whether crowned or in rags. 
 What picture, let us ask, what picture ever painted 
 of angels and blessed souls, even if they are mount- 
 ing the hill on which stands the Four Square City of 
 the jasper wall, is able to command our interest and 
 sympathy more profoundly than the simple and 
 faithful story, truly and faithfully told, of a lover 
 and his mistress ? 
 
 It is, therefore, the especial characteristic of this 
 Art, that, since it deals exclusively with men and 
 women, it not only requires of its followers, but also 
 creates in readers, that sentiment which is destined 
 to be a most mighty engine in deepening and widen- 
 ing the civilization of the world. We call it Sym- 
 pathy, but it means a great deal more than was for- 
 merly understood by the word. It means, in fact, 
 what Professor Seeley once called the Enthusiasm 
 of Humanity, and it first appeared, I think, about a 
 hundred and fifty years ago, when the modern novel 
 came into existence. You will find it, for instance, 
 conspicuous for its absence in Defoe. The modern 
 Sympathy includes not only the power to pity the 
 sufferings of others, but also that of understanding 
 their very souls ; it is the reverence for man, the 
 respect for his personality, the recognition of his in- 
 dividuality, and the enormous value of the one man, 
 the perception of one man's relation to another, his 
 
14 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 duties and responsibilities. Through the strength 
 of this newly-born faculty, and aided by the guid- 
 ance of a great artist, we are enabled to discern the 
 real indestructible man beneath the rags and filth of 
 a common castaway, and the possibilities of the mean- 
 est gutter-child that steals in the streets for its daily 
 bread. Sui-ely that is a wonderful Art which en- 
 dows the people — all the people — with this powei 
 of vision and of feeling. Painting has not done it, 
 and could never do it ; Painting has done more for 
 nature than for humanity. Sculpture could not do it, 
 because it deals with situation and foi-m rather than 
 action. Music cannot do it, because Music (if I un- 
 derstand rightly) appeals especially to the individual 
 concerning himself and his own aspirations. Poetry 
 alone is the rival of Fiction, and in this respect it 
 takes a lower place, not because Poetry fails to teach 
 and interpret, but because Fiction is, and must always 
 be, more popular. 
 
 Again, this Art teaches, like the others, by sup- 
 pression and reticence. Out of the gi-eat procession 
 of Humanity, the Comedie Skimaine which the nov- 
 elist sees passing ever before his eyes, single figures 
 detach themselves one after the other, to be ques- 
 tioned, examined, and received or rejected. This 
 process goes on perpetually. Humanity is so vast a 
 field that to one who goes about watching men and 
 women, and does not sit at home and evolve figures 
 out of inner consciousness, there is not, and can never 
 be, any end or limit to the freshness and interest of 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 15 
 
 these figures. It is the work of the artist to select 
 the figures, to suppress, to copy, to group, and to 
 work up the incidents which each one offers. The 
 daily life of the world is not dramatic — it is monot- 
 onous ; the novelist makes it dramatic by his silences, 
 his suppressions, and his exaggerations. No one, 
 for example, in fiction behaves quite in the same 
 way as in real life ; as on the stage, if an actor un- 
 folds and reads a lettei", the simple action is done 
 with an exaggeration of gesture which calls atten- 
 tion to the thing and to its importance ; so in ro- 
 mance, while nothing should be allowed which does 
 not carry on the story, so everything as it occurs 
 must be accentuated and yet deprived of needless 
 accessory details. The gestures of the characters at 
 an important juncture, their looks, their voices, may 
 all be noted if they help to impress the situation. 
 Even the weather, the wind and the rain, with some 
 writers, have been made to emphasize a mood or a 
 passion of a heroine. To know how to use these 
 aids artistically is to the novelist exactly what to 
 the actor is the right presentation of a letter, the 
 handing of a chair, even the removal of a glove. 
 
 A third characteristic of Fiction, which should 
 alone be sufficient to give it a place among the no- 
 blest forms of Art, is that, like Poetry, Painting, and 
 Music, it becomes a vehicle, not only for the best 
 thoughts of the writer, but also for those of the 
 reader, so that a novelist may write truthfully and 
 faithfully, but simply, and yet be understood in a 
 
16 THE ART OF FICTION. 
 
 far fuller and nobler sense than was present to his 
 own mind. This power is the very highest gift of 
 the poet. He has a vision and sees a thing clearly, 
 yet perhaps afar off ; another who reads him is en- 
 abled to get the same vision, to see the same thing, 
 yet closer and more distinctly. For a lower intel- 
 lect thus to lead and instruct a higher is surely a 
 very great gift, and granted only to the highest 
 forms of Art. And this it is which Fiction of the 
 best kind does for its readers. It is, however, only 
 another way of saying that Truth in Fiction pro- 
 duces effects similar to those produced by Truth in 
 every other Art. 
 
 So far, then, I have showed that this Art of Fic- 
 tion is the most ancient of all Arts and the most 
 popular ; that its field is the whole of humanity ; 
 that it creates and develops that sympathy which is 
 a kind of second sight ; that, like all other Arts, its 
 function is to select, to suppress, and to arrange ; 
 that it suggests as well as narrates. More might be 
 said — a great deal more — but enough has been said 
 to show that in these, the leading characteristics 
 of any Art, Fiction is on exactly the same level as 
 her sisters. Let me only add that in this Art, as in 
 the others, there is, and will be always, whatever 
 has been done already, something new to discover, 
 something new to express, something new to de- 
 scribe. Surgeons dissect the body, and account for 
 every bone and every nerve, so that the body of one 
 man, considered as a collection of bones and nerves. 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 17 
 
 is SO far exactly like the body of another man. But 
 the mind of man cannot be so exhausted : it yields 
 discoveries to every patient student ; it is absolutely 
 inexhaustible ; it is to every one a fresh and virgin 
 field: and the most successful investigator leaves 
 regions and tracts for his successor as vast as those 
 he has himself gone over. Perhaps, after all, the 
 greatest Psychologist is not the metaphysician, but 
 the novelist. 
 
 We come next to speak of the Laws which gov- 
 ern this Art. I mean those general rules and prin- 
 ciples which must necessarily be acquired by every 
 writer of Fiction before he can even hope for suc- 
 cess. Rules will not make a man a novelist, any more 
 than a knowledge of grammar makes a man know a 
 language, or a knowledge of musical science makes 
 a man able to play an instrument. Yet the Rules 
 must be learned. And, in speaking of them, one is 
 compelled, so close is the connection between the 
 sister Arts, to use not only the same terms, but also 
 to adopt the same rules, as those laid down by paint- 
 ers for their students If these Laws appear self- 
 evident, it is a proof that the general principles of 
 the Art are well understood. Considering, however, 
 the vast quantity of bad, inartistic work which is 
 every week laid before the public, one is inclined to 
 think that a statement of these principles may not 
 be without usefulness. 
 
 First, and before eveiything else, there is the Rule 
 that everything in Fiction which is invented and is 
 
18 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 not tlie result of personal experience and observation 
 is worthless. In some other Arts, the design may 
 follow any lines which the designer pleases : it may 
 be fanciful, unreal, or grotesque ; but in modem 
 Fiction, whose sole end, aim, and purpose is to por- 
 tray humanity and human character, the design 
 .must be in accordance with the customs and gen- 
 eral practice of living men and women under any 
 proposed set of circumstances and conditions. That 
 is to say, the characters must be real, and such as 
 might be met with in actual life, or, at least, the 
 natural developments of such people as any of us 
 might meet ; their actions must be natural and con- 
 sistent ; the conditions of place, of manners, and of 
 thought must be drawn from personal observation. 
 To take an extreme case : a young lady brought up 
 in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions 
 of garrison life ; a writer whose friends and personal 
 experiences belong to what we call the lower middle 
 class should carefully avoid introducing his charac- 
 ters into Society; a South-countryman would hesi- 
 tate before attempting to reproduce the North- 
 country accent. This is a very simple Rule, but 
 one to which tliere should be no exception — never 
 to go beyond your own experience.* Remember 
 
 * It has been objected to this Eule that, if followed, it 
 would entirely shut out the historical novel. Kot at all. The 
 interest of tfte historical novel, as of any othernovel, depends 
 upon the experience and knowledge which the writer has of 
 humanity, men and women being pretty much alike in all 
 ages. It is not the setting that we regard, so much as the 
 
THE ART OP FICTION. 19 
 
 that most of the people who read novels, and know 
 nothing about the art of writing them, recognize 
 before any other quality that of fidelity : the great- 
 ness of a novelist they measure chiefly by the 
 knowledge of the world displayed in his pages ; 
 the highest praise they can bestow upon him is that 
 he has drawn the story to the life. It is exactly 
 the same with a picture. If you go to the Academy 
 any day, and listen to the comments of the crowd, 
 
 acting of the characters. The setting in an historical novel 
 is very often absurd, incorrect, and incongruous; but the 
 human interest, the sliill and knowledge of character shown 
 by the writer, may make us forget the errors of the setting. 
 For instance, "Romola" is undoubtedly a great novel, not 
 because it contains a true, and therefore valuable, reproduc- 
 tion of Florentine life in the time of the early Renaissance, 
 for it does not ; nor because it gives us the ideas of the age, 
 for it does not ; the characters, especially that of the heroine, 
 being fully of nineteenth century ideas : but it is great as a 
 study of character. On the other hand, in the "Cloister 
 and the Hearth," we do really have a description of the time 
 and its ideas, taken bodily, sometimes almost literally, from 
 the pages of the man who most truly represents them — 
 Erasmus. So that here is a rule for the historical novelist 
 — when he must describe, he must borrow. If it be objected, 
 again, that he may do the same thing with contemporary 
 life, I reply that he may, if he please, but he will most 
 assuredly be found out through some blunder, omission, or 
 confusion caused by ignorance. No doubt the same blunders 
 are perpetrated by the historical novelist; but these are not 
 so readily found out except by an archaeologist. Of course, 
 one who desires to reproduce a time gone by would not go 
 to the poets, the divines, the historians, so much as to the 
 familiar literature, the letters, comedies, tales, essayists, and 
 newspapers. 
 
20 THE ART OF FICTION. 
 
 ■which is a very instructive thing to do, and one 
 recommended to young novelists, you will presently 
 become aware that the only thing they look for in a 
 picture is the story which it tells, and therefore the 
 fidelity with which it is presented on the canvas. 
 Most of the other qualities of the picture, and of the 
 novel as well, all that has to do with the technique, 
 escape the general observer. 
 
 This being so, the first thing which has to be 
 acquired is the art of description. It seems easy 
 to describe ; any one, it seems, can set down what 
 he sees. But consider. How much does he see? 
 There is everywhere, even in a room, such a quan- 
 tity of things to be seen : far, far more in field and 
 hedge, in mountain and in forest and beside the 
 stream, are there countless things to be seen; the 
 unpractised eye sees nothing, or next to nothing. 
 Here is a tree, here is a flower, there is sunshine 
 lying on the hill. But to the observant and trained 
 eye, the intelligent eye, there lies before him every- 
 where an inexhaustible and bewildering mass of 
 things to see. Remember how Mr. Jefferies sits 
 down in a coppice with his eyes wide open to see 
 what the rest of us never dreamed of looking for. 
 Long before he has half finished telling us what he 
 has seen^ — behold! a volume, and one of the most 
 delightful volumes conceivable. But, then, Mr. 
 Jefferies is a profound naturalist. We cannot all 
 describe after his manner; nor should we try, for 
 the simple reason that descriptions of still life in a 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 21 
 
 novel must be strictly subordinated to the human 
 interest. But while Mr. Jefferies has his hedge and 
 ditch and brook, we have our towns, our villages, 
 and our assemblies of men and women. Among 
 them we must not only observe, but we must select. 
 Here, then, are two distinct faculties which the in- 
 tending novelist must acquire ; viz., observation and 
 selection. As for the power of observation, it may 
 be taught to any one by the simple method adopted 
 by Robert Houdin, the French conjuror. This 
 method consists of noting down continually and 
 remembering all kinds of things remarked in the 
 course of a journey, a walk, or the day's business. 
 The learner must carry his note-book always with 
 him, into the fields, to the theatre, into the streets 
 — wherever he can watch man and his ways, or 
 Nature and her ways. On his return home he 
 should enter his notes in his commonplace-book. 
 There are places where the production of a note- 
 book would be embarrassing ^ say, at a dinner- 
 party, or a street fight ; yet the man who begins to 
 observe will speedily be able to remember every- 
 thing that he sees and hears until he can find an 
 opportunity to note it down, so that nothing is lost.* 
 
 * I earnestly recommend those who desire to study this 
 Art to begin by daily practice in the description of things, 
 even common things, that they have observed, by reporting 
 conversations, and by word portraits of their friends. They 
 will find that the practice gives them firmness of outline, 
 quickness of observation, power of catching important de- 
 tails, and, as regards dialogue, readiness to see what is unim- 
 
22 THE ART OP FICTIOK. 
 
 The materials for the novelist, in short, are not in 
 the books upon the shelves, but in the men and 
 women he meets with everywhere ; he will find 
 them, where Dickens found them, in the crowded 
 streets, in trains, tramcars and omnibuses, at the 
 shop-windows, in churches and chapels: his ma- 
 terials are everywhere — there is nothing too low, 
 nothing too high, nothing too base, nothing too 
 noble, for the novelist. Humanity is like a kaleido- 
 scope, which you may turn about and look into, but 
 you will never get the same picture twice — it can- 
 not be exhausted. But it may be objected, that the 
 broad distinctive types have been long since all used. 
 They have been used, but the comfort is that they 
 can never be used up, and that they may be con- 
 stantly used again and again. Can we ever be tired 
 of them when a master hand takes one of them 
 again and gives him new life ? Are there to be no 
 more hypocrites because we have already had Tar- 
 tufe and Pecksniff? Do we suppose that the old 
 miser, the young spendthrift, the gambler, the ad- 
 venturer, the coquette, the drunkard, the soldier of 
 fortune, are never to reappear, because they have 
 been handled already? As long, on the contrary, 
 as man shall continue story-telling, so long wiU these 
 characters occur again and again, and look as fresh 
 
 portant. Preliminary practice and study of this kind wilt 
 also lead to the saving of a vast quantity of valuable material, 
 which is only wasted by being prematurely worked up into 
 a novel written before the elements of the Art have been 
 acquired. 
 
THE ART 0#*FICTIOK. 23 
 
 each time that they are treated by a master's hand 
 as if they were newly discovered types. 
 
 Fidelity, therefore, can be only assured by acquiring 
 the art of observation, which further assists in filling 
 the mind with stored experience. I am quite sure 
 that most men never see anything at all. I have 
 known men who have even gone all round the world 
 and seen nothing — no, nothing at all. Emerson 
 says, very truly, that a traveller takes away nothing 
 from a place except what he brought into it. Now, 
 the observation of things around us is no part of the 
 ordinary professional and commercial life; it has 
 nothing at all to do with success and the making of 
 money; so that we do not learn to observe. Yet 
 it is very easy to shake people and make them open 
 their eyes. Some of us remember, for instance, the 
 time when Kingsley astonished everybody with his 
 descriptions of the wonders to be seen on the sea- 
 shore and to be fished out of every pond in the field. 
 Then all the world began to poke about the seaweed 
 and to catch tritons and keep water-grubs in little 
 tanks. It was only a fashion, and it presently died 
 out ; but it did people good, because it made them 
 understand, perhaps for the first time, that there 
 really is a good deal more to see than meets the 
 casual eye. At present the lesson which we need 
 is not that the world is full of the most strange and 
 wonderful creatures, all eating each other perpetu- 
 ally, but that the world is full of the most wonderful 
 men and women, not one of whom is mean or 
 
24 THE AElP'OF PICTIOK. 
 
 common, but to each his own personality is a great 
 and awful thing, worthy of the most serious study. 
 
 There are, then, abundant materials waiting to be 
 picked up by any who has the wit to see them lying 
 at his feet and all around him. What is next re- 
 quired is the power of Selection. Can this be taught ? 
 I think not, at least I do not know how, unless it is by 
 reading. In every Art, selection requires that kind 
 of special fitness for the Art which is included in the 
 much abused word Genius. In Fiction the power 
 of selection requires a large share of the dramatic 
 sense. Those who already possess this faculty will 
 not go wrong if they bear in mind the simple rule 
 that nothing should be admitted which does not 
 advance the story, illustrate the characters, bring into 
 stronger relief the hidden forces which act upon them, 
 their emotions, their passions, and their intentions. 
 All descriptions which hinder instead of helping the 
 action, all episodes of whatever kind, all conversation 
 which does not either advance the story or illustrate 
 the characters, ought to be rigidly suppressed. 
 
 Closely connected with selection is dramatic pre- 
 sentation. Given a situation, it should be the first 
 care of the writer to present it as dramatically, that 
 is to say as forcibly, as possible. The grouping and 
 setting of the picture, the due subordination of 
 description to dialogue, the rapidity of the action, 
 those things which naturally suggest themselves to 
 the practised eye, deserve to be very carefully con- 
 sidered by the beginner. In fact, a novel is like a 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 25 
 
 play : it may be divided into scenes and acts, tab- 
 leaus and situations, separated by the end of the 
 chapter instead of the drop-scene: the writer is 
 the dramatist, stage-manager, scene-painter, actor, 
 and carpenter, all in one; it is his single business 
 to see that none of the scenes flag or fall flat : he 
 must never for one moment forget to consider how 
 the piece is looking from the front. 
 
 The next simple Rule is that the drawing of each 
 figure must be clear in outline, and, even if only 
 sketched, must be sketched without hesitation. 
 This can only be done when the writer himself 
 sees his figures clearly. Characters in fiction do 
 not, it must be understood, spring Minervarlike from 
 the brain. They grow : they grow sometimes slowly, 
 sometimes quickly. From the first moment of con- 
 ception, that is to say, from the first moment of 
 their being seen and caught, they grow continuously 
 and almost without mental effort. If they do not 
 grow and become every day clearer, they had better 
 be put aside at once, and forgotten as soon as may 
 be, because that is a proof that the author does not 
 understand the character he has himself endeavored 
 to create. To have on one's hands a half-created 
 being without the power of finishing him must be a 
 truly dreadful thing. The only way out of it is to 
 kill and bury him at once. I have always thought, 
 for instance, that the figure of Daniel Deronda, 
 whose portrait, blurred and uncertain as it is, 
 has been drawn with the most amazing care and 
 
26 THE AKT OF FICTION. 
 
 with endless touches and retouches, must have 
 become at last to George Eliot a kind of awful 
 veiled spectre, always in her brain, always seeming 
 about to reveal his true features and his mind, but 
 never doing it, so that to the end she never clearly 
 perceived what manner of man he was, nor what 
 was his real character. Of course, what the author 
 cannot set down, the reader cannot understand. On 
 the other hand, how possible, how capable of devel- 
 opment, how real becomes a true figure, truly under- 
 stood by the creator, and truly depicted ! Do we 
 not know what they would say and think under all 
 conceivable conditions ? We can dress them as we 
 will ; we can place them in any circumstances of 
 life : we can always trust them because they will 
 never fail us, never disappoint us, never change, 
 because we understand them so thoroughly. So 
 well do we know them that they become our ad- 
 visers, our guides, and our best friends, on whom we 
 model ourselves, our thoughts, and our actions. 
 The writer who has succeeded in drawing to the 
 life, true, clear, distinct, so that all may understand, 
 a single figure of a true man or woman, has added 
 another exemplar or warning to humanity. Nothing, 
 then, it must be insisted upon as of the greatest im- 
 portance, should be begun in writing until the 
 characters are so clear and distinct in the brain, so 
 well known, that they will act their parts, bend 
 their dialogue, and suit their action to whatever 
 situations they may find themselves in, if only they 
 
THE ART OP FICTION. 27 
 
 are becoming to them. Of course, clear outline 
 drawing is best when it is accomplished in the 
 fewest strokes, and the greater part of the figures in 
 Fiction, wherein it differs from Painting, in which 
 everything should be finished, require no more work 
 upon them, in order to make them clear, than half- 
 a-dozen bold, intelligible lines. 
 
 As for the methods of conveying a clear under- 
 standing of a character, they are many. The first 
 and the easiest is to make it clear by reason of some 
 mannerism or personal peculiarity, some trick of 
 speech or of carriage. This is the worst, as may 
 generally be said of the easiest way. Another easy 
 method is to describe your character at length. This 
 also is a bad, because a tedious, method. If, how- 
 ever, you read a page or two of any good writer, 
 you will discover that he first makes a character 
 intelligible by a few words, and then allows him to 
 reveal himself in action and dialogue. On the other 
 hand, nothing is more inartistic than to be constantly 
 calling attention in a dialogue to a gesture or a look, 
 to laughter or to tears. The situation generally 
 requires no such explanation : in some well-known 
 scenes which I could quote, there is not a single 
 word to emphasize or explain the attitude, manner, 
 and look of the speakers, yet they are as intelli- 
 gible as if they were written down and described. 
 That Is the highest art which carries the reader 
 along and makes him see, without being told, the 
 changing expressions, the gestures of the speakers, 
 
28 THE ABT OP FICTIOK. 
 
 and hear the varying tones of their voices. It is as 
 if one should close one's eyes at the theatre, and yet 
 continue to see the actors on the stage as well as 
 hear their voices. The only writer who can do this 
 is he who makes his characters intelligible from the 
 very outset, causes them first to stand before the 
 reader in clear outline, and then with every addi- 
 tional line brings out the figure, fills up the face, 
 and makes his creatures grow from the simple out- 
 line more and more to the perfect and rounded 
 figure. 
 
 Clearness of drawing, which includes clearness of 
 vision, also assists in producing directness of pur- 
 pose. As soon as the actors in the story become 
 real in the mind of the narrator, and not before, the 
 story itself becomes real to him. More than this, he 
 becomes straightway vehemently impelled to tell it, 
 and he is moved to tell it in the best and most 
 direct way, the most dramatic way, the most truth- 
 ful way possible to him. It is, in fact, only when 
 the writer believes his own story, and knows it to be 
 every word true, and feels that he has somehow 
 learned from everyone concerned the secret history 
 of his own part in it, that he can really begin to 
 write it.* We know how sometimes, even from a 
 
 * Hardly anytliing is more important than this — to 
 believe in your own story. Wherefore let the student re- 
 member that unless the characters exist and move about in 
 his brain, all separate, distinct, living, and perpetually en- 
 gaged in the action of the story, sometimes at one part of it, 
 sometimes at another, and that in scenes and places which 
 
THE AET OF FICTION. 29 
 
 practised hand, there comes a work marred with the 
 fatal defect that the writer does not believe in his 
 own story. When this is the case, one may generally 
 find on investigation that one cause at least of the 
 failure is that the characters, or some of them, are 
 blurred and uncertain. 
 
 Again, the modern English novel, whatever form 
 it takes, almost always starts with a conscious moral 
 purpose. When it does not, so much are we ac- 
 customed to expect it, that one feels as if there has 
 been a debasement of the Art. It is, fortunately, 
 not possible in this country for any man to defile 
 and defame humanity and still be called an artist ; 
 the development of modern sympathy, the growing 
 reverence for the individual, the ever-widening love 
 of things beautiful and the appreciation of lives 
 made beautiful by devotion and self-denial, the 
 sense of personal responsibility among the English- 
 speaking races, the deep-seated religion of our peo- 
 ple, even in a time of doubt, are all forces which act 
 strongly upon the artist as well as upon his readers, 
 and lend to his work, whether he will or not, a 
 moral purpose so clearly marked that it has become 
 practically a law of English Fiction. We must 
 acknowledge that this is a truly admirable thing, 
 
 must be omitted in the writing, he has got no story to tell 
 and had better give it up. I do not think it is generally 
 understood that there are thousands of scenes which belong 
 to the story and never get outside the writer's brain at all. 
 Some of these may be very beautiful and touching ; but 
 there is not room for all, and the writer has to select. 
 
30 THE AKT OP FICTION. 
 
 and a great cause for congi-atulation. At the same 
 time, one may be permitted to think that the preach- 
 ing novel is the least desirable of any, and to be 
 unfeignedly rejoiced that the old religious novel, 
 written in the interests of High Church or Low 
 Church or any other Church, has gone out of 
 fashion. 
 
 Next, just as in Painting and Sculpture, not only 
 are fidelity, truth, and harmony to be observed in 
 Fiction, but also beauty of workmanship. It is 
 almost impossible to estimate too highly the value 
 of careful workmanship, that is, of style. Everyone, 
 without exception, of the great Masters in Fiction, 
 has recognized this truth. You wiU hardly find a 
 single page in any of them which is not carefully 
 and even elaborately worked up. I think there is 
 no point on which critics of novels should place 
 greater importance than this, because it is one 
 which young novelists are so very liable to ignore. 
 There ought not to be in a novel, any more than in 
 a poem, a single sentence carelessly worded, a single 
 phrase which has not been considered. Consider, if 
 you please, any one of the great scenes in Fiction — 
 how much of the effect is due to the style, the 
 balanced sentences, the very words used by the 
 narrator ! This, however, is only one more point of 
 similarity between Fiction and the sister Arts. 
 There is, I know, the danger of attaching too much 
 attention to style at the expense of situation, and so 
 falling a prey to priggishness, fashions, and man- 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 31 
 
 nerisms of the day. It is certainly a danger; 
 at the same time, it sometimes seems, when one 
 reads the slipshod, careless English which is often 
 thought good enough for story-telling, that it is 
 almost impossible to overrate the value of style. 
 There is comfort in the thought that no reputation 
 worth having can be made without attending to 
 style, and that there is no style, however rugged, 
 which cannot be made beautiful by attention and 
 pains. " How many times," a writer once asked a 
 girl who brought him her first effort for advice and 
 criticism; "how many times have you re-written 
 this page ? " She confessed that she had written it 
 once for all, had never read it afterwards, and had 
 not the least idea that there was such a thing as 
 style. Is it not presumptuous in the highest degree 
 to believe that what one has produced without 
 pains, thought, or trouble will give any pleasure to 
 the reader ? 
 
 In fact every scene, however unimportant, should 
 be completely and carefully finished. There should 
 be no unfinished places, no sign anywhere of weari- 
 ness or haste — in fact, no scamping. The writer 
 must so love his work as to dwell tenderly on every 
 age and be literally unable to send forth a single 
 page of it without the finishing touches. We all of 
 tis remember that kind of novel in which every 
 scene has the appearance of being hurried and 
 scamped. 
 
 To sum up these few preliminary and general 
 
32 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 laws. The Art of Fiction requires first of all the 
 power of description, truth, and fidelity, observa- 
 tion, selection, clearness of conception and of out- 
 line, dramatic grouping, directness of purpose, a 
 profound belief on the part of the story-teller in the 
 reality of his story, and beauty of workmanship. 
 It is, moreover, an Art which requires of those 
 who follow it seriously that they must be unceas- 
 ingly occupied in studying the ways of mankind, 
 the social laws, the religions, philosophies, ten- 
 dencies, thoughts, prejudices, superstitions of men 
 and women. They must consider as many of the 
 forces which act upon classes and upon 'individuals 
 as they can discover ; they should be always trying 
 to put themselves into the place of another ; they 
 must be as inquisitive and as watchful as a detec- 
 tive, as suspicious as a criminal lawyer, as eager for 
 knowledge as a physicist, and withal fully possessed 
 of that spirit to which nothing appears mean, noth- 
 ing contemptible, nothing unworthy of study, which 
 belongs to human nature. 
 
 I repeat that I submit some of these laws as per- 
 haps self-evident. If that is so, many novels which 
 are daily submitted to the reviewer are written in 
 wilful neglect and disobedience of them. But they 
 are not really self-evident ; those who aspire to be 
 artists in Fiction almost invariably begin without 
 any understanding at all of these laws. Hence the 
 lamentable early failures, the waste of good ma- 
 terial, and the low level of Art with which both the 
 
THE ART OP FICTION. 33 
 
 novel-writer and the novel-reader are too often con- 
 tented. I am certain that if these laws were better 
 known and more generally studied, a very large pro- 
 portion of the bad works of which our critics com- 
 plain would not be produced at all. And I am in 
 great hopes that one effect of the establishment of 
 the newly founded Society of Authors will be to 
 keep young writers of fiction from rushing too 
 hastily into print, to help them to the right under- 
 standing of their Art and its principles, and to 
 guide them into true practice of their principles 
 while they are still young, their imaginations strong, 
 and their personal experiences as yet not wasted in 
 foolish failures. 
 
 After all these preliminary studies there comes the 
 most important point of all — the story. There is a 
 school which pretends that there is no need for a 
 story: all the stories, they say, have been told 
 already ; there is no more room for invention : no- 
 body wants any longer to listen to a story. One 
 hears this kind of talk with the same wonder which 
 one feels when a new monstrous fashion changes the 
 beautiful figure of woman into something grotesque 
 and unnatural. Men say these things gravely to 
 each other, especially men who have no story to 
 tell : other men listen gravely ; in the same way 
 women put on the newest and most preposterous 
 fashions gravely, and look upon each other without 
 either laughing or hiding their faces for shame. It 
 is, indeed, if we think of it, a most strange and 
 
34 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 wonderful theory, that we should continue to care 
 for Fiction and cease to care for the story. We 
 have all along been training ourselves how to tell 
 the story, and here is this new school which steps in, 
 like the needy knife-grinder, to explain that there is 
 no story left at all to tell. Why, the story is every- 
 thing. I cannot conceive of a world going on at all 
 without stories, and those strong ones, with incident 
 in them, and merriment and pathos, laughter and 
 tears, and the excitement of wondering what will 
 happen next. Fortunately, these new theorists con- 
 tradict themselves, because they iind it impossible to 
 write a novel which shall not contain a story, al- 
 though it may be but a puny bantling. Fiction 
 without adventure — a drama without a plot — a 
 novel without surprises — the thing is as impossible 
 as life without uncertainty.* 
 
 As for the story, then. And here theory and 
 teaching can go no farther. For every Art there is 
 the corresponding science which may be taught. 
 We have been speaking of the corresponding 
 science. But the Art itself can neither be taught 
 nor communicated. If the thing is in a man he will 
 bring it out somehow, well or badly, quickly or 
 slowly. If it is not, he can never learn it. Here, 
 
 * A correspondent asks me if I do not like the work of 
 Mr. Howells. Of course one cannot choose hut like his 
 writing. But one cannot also avoid comparing his work 
 with that of his countryman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who 
 added to the cliarm of style the interest of a romantic and 
 exciting story. 
 
THE ART OP FICTION. 35 
 
 then, let us suppose that we have to do with the 
 man to whom the invention of stories is part of his 
 nature. We will also suppose that he has mastered 
 the laws of his Art, and is now anxious to apply 
 them. To such a man one can only recommend 
 that he should with the greatest care and attention 
 analyze and examine the construction of certain 
 works, which are acknowledged to be of the first 
 rank in fiction. Among them, not to speak of Scott, 
 he might pay especial attention, from the construc- 
 tive point of view, to the truly admirable shorter 
 stories of Charles Reade, to George Eliot's " Silas 
 Marner," the most perfect of English novels, Haw- 
 thorne's " Scarlet Letter," Holmes's " Elsie Venner," 
 Blackmore's " Lorna Doone," or Black's " Daughter 
 of Heth." He must not sit down to read them " for 
 the story," as uncritical people say : he must read 
 them slowly and carefully, perhaps backwards, so as 
 to discover for himself how the author built up the 
 novel, and from what original germ or conception it 
 sprang. Let me take another novel by another 
 writer to illustrate my meaning. It is James Payn's 
 " Confidential Agent," a work showing, if I may be 
 permitted to say so, constructive power of the very 
 highest order. You have all, without doubt, read 
 that story. As you know, it turns upon a diamond 
 robbery. To the unpractised hand it would seem 
 as if stories of theft had already been told ad nau- 
 seam. The man of experience knows better: he 
 knows that in his hands every story becomes new, 
 
36 THE AKT OF FICTJUX. 
 
 because he can place it upon his stage with new 
 incidents, new conditions, and new actors. Accord- 
 ingly, Payn connects his diamonds with three or 
 four quite ordinary families : he does not search for 
 strange and eccentric characters, but uses the folk 
 he sees around him, plain middle-class people, to 
 whom most of us belong. He does not try to show 
 these people cleverer, better cultured, or in any 
 respect at all other than they really are, except that 
 some of them talk a little better than in real life 
 they would be likely to do. That is to say, in 
 dialogue he exercises the art of selection. Presently, 
 in this quiet household of age and youth, love and 
 happiness, there happens a dreadful thing: the 
 young husband vanishes amid circumstances which 
 give rise to the most horrible suspicions. How this 
 event acts upon the minds of the household and 
 their friends: how the faith, sorely tried, of one 
 breaks down, and that of another remains steadfast : 
 how the truth is gi-adually disclosed, and the inno- 
 cence of the suspected man is made clear — all this 
 should be carefully examined by the student as a 
 lesson in construction and machinery. He will not, 
 one hopes, neglect the other lesson taught him by 
 this novel, which is the art of telling the story, 
 selecting the actors, and skilfully using the plain 
 and simple materials which lie around us everywhere 
 ready to our hands. I am quite sure that the chief 
 lesson to be learned from the study of nearly all our 
 own modern novelists is that adventure, pathos, 
 
THE AET OF FICTION. 37 
 
 amusement, and interest, are far better sought 
 among lives which seem dull, and among people 
 who seem at first beyond the reach of romance, than 
 from eccentricity and peculiarity of manner, or from 
 violent and extreme reverses and accidents of for- 
 tune. This is, indeed, only another aspect of the 
 increased value which we have learned to attach to 
 individual life. 
 
 One thing more the Art student has to learn. Let 
 him not only believe his own story before he begins 
 to tell it, but let him remember that in story-telling, 
 as in almsgiving, a cheerful countenance works 
 wonders, and a hearty manner greatly helps the 
 teller and pleases the listener. One would not have 
 the novelist make continual efforts at being comic ; 
 but let him not tell his story with eyes full of sad- 
 ness, a face of woe and a shaking voice. His story 
 may be tragic, but continued gloom is a mistake in 
 Art, even for a tragedy. If his story is a comedy, 
 all the more reason to tell it cheerfully and brightly. 
 L'astly, let him tell it without apparent effort : with- 
 out trying to show his cleverness, his wit, his 
 powers of epigram, and his learning. Yet let him 
 pour without stint or measure into his work all that 
 he knows, all that he has seen, all that he has ob- 
 served, and all that he has remembered: all that 
 there is of nobility, sympathy, and enthusiasm in 
 himself. Let him spare nothing, but lavish all that 
 he has, in the full confidence that the wells will not 
 be dried up, and that the springs of fancy and 
 
38 THE ART OF FICTION. 
 
 imagination will flow again, even though he seem to 
 have exhausted himself in this one effort. 
 
 Here, therefore, we may leave the student of this 
 Art.* It remains for him to show whether he does 
 wisely in following it farther. Of one thing for his 
 encouragement he may rest assured ; in the Art of 
 Fiction more than in any other it is easy to gain 
 recognition, far easier than in any of the sister Arts. 
 In the English school of painting, for example, there 
 are already so many good men in the field that it is 
 most difficult to win an acknowledged position ; in 
 the drama it is next to impossible to get a play pro- 
 duced, in spite of our thirty London theatres; in 
 poetry it seems almost hopeless to get a hearing, 
 even if one has reached the second rank ; but in Fic- 
 tion the whole of the English-speaking race are 
 always eager to welcome a newcomer ; good work is 
 instantly recognized, and the only danger is that the 
 universal cry for more may lead to hasty and imma- 
 ture production. I do not mean that ready recog- 
 nition will immediately bring with it a great pecu- 
 niary success. Unfortunately, there has grown up 
 of late a bad fashion of measuring success too much 
 by the money it seems to command. It is not always, 
 remember, the voice of the people which elects the 
 best man, and though in most cases it follows that 
 a successful novelist commands a large sale of his 
 works, it may happen that the Art of a great writer 
 is of such a kind that it may never become widely 
 
 * See Appendix. 
 
THE AET OF FICTION. 39 
 
 popular. There have been among us two or three 
 such writers. One case will immediately occur to most 
 of us here. It is that of a man whose books are 
 filled with wisdom, experience, and epigram : whose 
 characters are most admirably studied from the life, 
 whose plots are ingenious, situations fresh, and dia^ 
 logues extraordinarily clever. Yet he has never 
 been widely popular, and, I am sure, never will be. 
 One may be pretty certain that this writer's money- 
 value in the market is considerably less than that of 
 many another whose genius is not half so great, but 
 his popularity twice as large. So that a failure to 
 hit the popular taste does not always imply failure 
 in Art. How, then, is one to know, when people do 
 not ask for his work, if he has really failed or not ? 
 I think he must know without being told if he has 
 failed to please. If a man sings a song he can tell 
 in a moment, even before he has finished, if he has 
 pleased his audience. So, if a man writes a novel, 
 he can tell by the criticisms in the journals, by read- 
 ing between the lines of what his friends tell him, 
 by the expression of their eyes, by his own inner 
 consciousness, if he has succeeded or failed. And 
 if the latter, let him find out as quickly as may be 
 through what causes. The unlucky dramatist can 
 complain that his piece was badly mounted and badly 
 acted. The novelist cannot, because he is sure not to 
 be badly read. Therefore, if a novelist fail at first, 
 let him be well assured that it is his own fault ; and 
 if, on his second attempt, he cannot amend, let him 
 
40 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 for the future be silent. One is more and more as- 
 tonished at seeing the repeated efforts of writers 
 whose friends should make them understand that 
 they have not the least chance of success unless they 
 unlearn all that they have learned and begin again 
 upon entirely different methods and some knowledge 
 of the science. It must be a cruel blow, after all 
 the work that goes to make even a bad novel, after 
 all the trouble of getting it published, to see it droi> 
 unnoticed, stillborn, thought hardly worthy to re- 
 ceive words of contempt. If the disappointment 
 leads to examination and self-amendment, it may 
 prove the greatest blessing. But he who fails twice 
 probably deserves to fail, because he has learned 
 nothing, and is incapable of learning anything, from 
 the lessons of his first failure. 
 
 Let me say one word upon the present condition 
 of this most delightful Art in England. Remember 
 that great Masters in every Art are rare. Perhaps 
 one or two appear in a century : we ought not to 
 expect more. It may even happen that those 
 modern writers of our own whom we have agreed 
 to call great Masters will have to take lower rank 
 among posterity, who will have great Masters of 
 their own. I am inclined, however, to think that a 
 few of the nineteenth-century novelists will ncA-er 
 be suffered to die, though they may be remembered 
 principally for one book — that Thackeray will be 
 remembered for his " Vanity Fair," Dickens for 
 "David Copperfield," George Meredith for the 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 41 
 
 "Ordeal of Richard Peverel," George Eliot for 
 " Silas Marner'," Charles Reade for the " Cloister 
 and the Hearth," and Blackmore for his "Lorna 
 Doone." On the other hand, without thinking or 
 troubling ourselves at all about the verdict of pos- 
 terity, which matters nothing to us compared with 
 the verdict of our contemporaries, let us acknowledge 
 that it is a bad year indeed when we have not pro- 
 duced some good work, work of a very high kind, 
 if not immortal work. An exhibition of the year's 
 novels would generally show two or three, at least, 
 of which the country may be, say, reasonably proud. 
 Does the Royal Academy of Arts show every year 
 more than two or three pictures — not immortal 
 pictures, but pictures of which we may be reason- 
 ably proud ? One would like, it is true, to see fewer 
 bad novels published, as well as fewer bad pictures 
 exhibited ; the standard of the work which is on the 
 borderland between success and failure should be 
 higher. At the same time I am very sure and cer- 
 tain that there never has been a time when better 
 works of Fiction have been produced, both by men 
 and women. That Art is not declining, but is ad- 
 vancing, which is cultivated on true and not on false 
 or conventional principles. Ought we not to be full 
 of hope for the future, when such women as Mrs. Oli- 
 phant and Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie write for us — 
 when such men as Meredith, Blackmore, Black, Payn, 
 Wilkie Collins, and Hardy are still at their best, and 
 such men at Louis Stevenson, Christie Murray, 
 
42 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 Clark Russell, and Herman Merivale have just be- 
 gun ? I think the fiction, and, indeed, all the imag- 
 inary work of the future will be far fuller in human 
 interest than in the past ; the old stories — no doubt 
 they will still be the old stories — will be fitted to 
 actors who up till recently were only used for the 
 purposes of contrast ; the drama of life which for- 
 merly was assigned to kings and princes will be plaj'ed 
 by figures taken as much from the great struggling, 
 unknown masses. Kings and gi'eat lords are chiefly 
 picturesque and interesting on account of their 
 beautiful costumes, and a traditional belief in their 
 power. Costume is certainly not a strong point in 
 the lower ranks, but I think we shall not miss that, 
 and wherever we go for our material, whether to 
 the higher or the lower ranks, we may be sure of 
 finding everywhere love, sacrifice, and devotion for 
 virtues, with selfishness, cunning, and treachery for 
 vices. Out of these, with their endless combina- 
 tions and changes, that novelist must be poor indeed 
 who cannot make a story. 
 
 Lastly, I said at the outset that I would ask you 
 to accord to novelists the recognition of their place 
 as artists. But after what has been said, I feel that 
 to urge this further would be only a repetition of 
 what has gone before. Therefore, though not all 
 who write novels can reach the first, or even the 
 second, rank, wherever you find good and faithful 
 work, with truth, sympathy, and clearness of pur- 
 pose, I pray you to give the author of that work the 
 
THE AKT OF FICTION. 43 
 
 praise as to an Artist — an Artist like the rest — 
 the praise that you so readily accord to the earnest 
 student of any other Art. As for the great Masters 
 of the Art — Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, 
 "Victor Hugo — I, for one, feel irritated when the 
 critics begin to appraise, compare, and to estimate 
 them : there is nothing, I think, that we can give 
 them but admiration that is unspeakable, and grati- 
 tude that is silent. This silence proves more elo- 
 quently than any words how great, how beautiful an 
 Art is that of Fiction. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 I HAVE been asked not to leave the young novelist 
 at this point. Let me, therefore, venture upon a 
 few words of advice. I do this without apology, 
 because, like most men who write, I receive, every 
 week, letters from young beginners asking for 
 counsel and guidance. To all these I recommend 
 the consideration of the rules I have laid down, and, 
 above all, attention to truth, reality, and style. 
 
 I was once asked to read a MS. novel written by 
 a young lady. The work was hurried, scamped, 
 unreal — in fact, it had every fault. Yet there was 
 something in it which made me think that there was 
 hope for her. I therefore wrote to her, pointing out 
 the faults, without sparing her. I added that, if 
 she was not discouraged, but would begin again, 
 and would prepare carefully the scenario of a novel, 
 fitted with characters duly thought out, I would 
 give her such further advice as was in my power. 
 The very next day she sent me five scenarios. I 
 have not heard from her since, and I hope she has 
 renounced the Art whose very elements she could 
 not understand. 
 
 Let me suppose, then, that the writer has got his 
 novel completed. Here begins the " trouble," as 
 
46 APPENDIX. 
 
 the Americans say. And at this point my advicce 
 may be of use. 
 
 Remember that all publishers are eager to get 
 good work: they are prepared to consider MSS. 
 carefully — most of them pay men, on whose judg- 
 ment they rely, men of literary standing, to read 
 and " taste " for them ; therefore it is a simple and 
 obvious piece of advice that the writer should send 
 his work to some good publisher, and it is perfectly 
 certain that if the work is good it will be accepted 
 and published. There is, as I have said in the 
 lecture, little or no risk, even with an unknown 
 author, over a really good novel. But, then, the 
 first work almost always contains immaturities and 
 errors which prevent it from being really good. 
 More of ten than not, it is on the border line, not so 
 good as to make its publication desirable by a firm 
 which will only issue good work, or by any means 
 safe to pay its expenses. What then? I would 
 advise the author never, from any considerations of 
 vanity or self-confidence, to pay money to a pub- 
 lisher for bringing out his book. There are certain 
 publishing houses, not the best, which bring out 
 yearly quantities of novels, nearly every one of 
 which is paid for by the author, because they are 
 not good enough to pay their own expenses. Do 
 not, I would say, swell the ranks of those who give 
 the enemy reason to blaspheme this Art. Refuse 
 absolutely to publish on such ignominious terms. 
 Remember that to be asked for money to pay for 
 
APPENDIX. 47 
 
 the expense of publication is to be told that your 
 work is not good enough to be published. If you 
 have tried the half-dozen best publishers, and been 
 refused by all, realize that the work will not do. 
 Then, if you can, get the advice of some experi- 
 enced man of letters upon it, and ponder over 
 his judgment. 
 
 If you cannot, reconsider the whole story from 
 the beginning, with special reference to the rules 
 which are here laid down. If necessary, rewrite 
 the whole. Or, if necessary, put the whole into the 
 fire, and, without being disheartened, begin again 
 with another and a better story. Do not aim at 
 producing an absolutely new plot. You cannot do 
 it. But persevere, if you feel that the root of the 
 matter is in you, till your work is accepted ; and 
 never, never, NEVER pay for publishing a novel. 
 
 Let me end with a little piece of personal history. 
 
 A good many years ago, there was a young man 
 of four or five and twenty, who ardently desired 
 before all things to bacome a novelist. He spent a 
 couple of years, giving to the work all his unem- 
 ployed hours, over a novel of modern life. He took 
 immense pains with it, rewrote some of the scenes 
 half a dozen times, and spared neither labor nor 
 thought to make it as good as he could make it. 
 When he really felt that he could do nothing more 
 with it, he rolled it up and sent it to a friend with 
 the request that he would place it anonymously in 
 Mr. Macmillan's hands. Mr. Macmillan had it care- 
 
48 APPENDIX. 
 
 fully read, and sent the author, still through the 
 friend, his reader's opinion. The reader did not 
 sign his opinion, but he was a Cambridge man, a 
 critic of judgment, a man of taste, a kindly man, 
 and he had once been, if he was not still, a mathe- 
 matician. These things were clearly evident from 
 his handwriting, as well as from the wording of his 
 verdict. This was to the effect that the novel 
 should not be published, for certain reasons which 
 he proceeded to give. But he laid down his ob- 
 jections with very great consideration for the writer, 
 indicating for his encouragement what he considered 
 points of promise, suggesting certain practical rules 
 of construction which had been violated, and show- 
 ing where ignorance of the Art and inexperience of 
 life had caused faults such as to make it most unde- 
 sirable for the author, as well as impossible for a 
 publisher of standing, to produce the work. The 
 writer, after the first pangs of disappointment, 
 plucked up heart and began to ponder over the 
 lessons contained in that opinion. The young man 
 has since become a novelist, " of a sort," and he 
 takes this opportunity of returning his most sincere 
 thanks to Mr. Macmillan for his kindness in con- 
 sidering and refusing to publish an immature novel, 
 and to his anonymous critic for his invaluable letter. 
 Would that all publishers' readers were like unto 
 that reader, as conscientious and as kindly, and as 
 anxious to save beginners from putting forth bad 
 work! 
 
THE AKT OF FICTION. 
 
 BY HENRY JAMES. 
 
THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 I SHOULD not have affixed so comprehensive a 
 title to these few remarks, necessarily wanting in 
 any completeness, upon a subject the full considerar 
 tion of which would carry us far, did I not seem to 
 discover a pretext for my temerity in the interest- 
 ing pamphlet lately published under this name by 
 Mr. Walter Besant. Mr. Besant's lecture at the 
 Royal Institution — the original form of his pamph- 
 let — appears to indicate that many persons are 
 interested in the art of fiction, and are not indiffer- 
 ent to such remarks as those who practise it may 
 attempt to make about it. I am therefore anxious 
 not to lose the benefit of this favorable associar 
 tion, and to edge in a few words under cover of the 
 attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. 
 There is something very encouraging in his having 
 put into form certain of his ideas on the mystery of 
 story-telling. 
 
 It is a proof of life and curiosity — curiosity on 
 the part of the brotherhood of novelists, as well as 
 
 51 
 
62 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 on the part of their readers. Only a short time ago 
 it might have been supposed that the English novel 
 was not what the French call discutaMe. It had no 
 air of having a theory, a conviction, a conscious- 
 ness of itself behind it — of being the expression of 
 an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. 
 I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that ; 
 it would take much more courage than I possess to 
 intimate that the form of the novel, as Dickens and 
 
 ■ Thackeray (for instance) saw it, had any taint of 
 incompleteness. It was, however, naif (if I may 
 
 I help myself out with another French word) ; and, 
 evidently, if it is destined to suffer in any way for 
 having lost its naivete, it has now an idea of making 
 sure of the corresponding advantages. During the 
 period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, 
 good-humored feeling abroad that a novel is a 
 novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that this was 
 the end of it. But within a year or two, for some 
 reason or other, there have been signs of returning 
 animation — the era of discussion would apf)ear to 
 have been to a certain extent opened. Art lives 
 upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, 
 upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of 
 views and the comparison of standpoints ; and there 
 is a presumption that those times when no one has 
 anything particular to say about it, and has no 
 reason to give for practice or preference, though 
 they may be times of genius, are not times of devel- 
 opment, are times, possibly even, a little of duhiess. 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 53 
 
 The successful application of any art is a delightful 
 spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting ; and 
 though there is a great deal of the latter without 
 the former, I suspect there has never been a genuine 
 success that has not had a latent core of conviction. 
 Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are 
 fertilizing when they are frank and sincere. Mr. 
 Besant has set an excellent example in saying what 
 he thinks, for his part, about the way in which fic- 
 tion should be written, as well as about the way in 
 which it should be published; for his view of the 
 " art," carried on into an appendix, covers that too. 
 Other laborers in the same field will doubtless take 
 up the argument, they will give it the light of their 
 experience, and the effect will surely be to make 
 our interest in the novel a little more what it had 
 for some time threatened to fail to be — a serious, 
 active, inquiring interest, under protection of which 
 this delightful study may, in moments of confidence, 
 venture to say a little more what it thinks of it- 
 self. 
 
 It must take itself seriously for the public to take </ " 
 it so. The old superstition about fiction being 
 " wicked " has doubtless died out in England ; but 
 the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard 
 directed toward any story which does not more or 
 less admit that it is only a joke. Even the most 
 jocular novel feels in some degree the weight of the 
 proscription that was formerly directed against 
 literary levity ; the jocularity does not always sue- 
 
64 THE ART OF FICTION. 
 
 ceed in passing for gravity. It is still expected, 
 though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a 
 production which is after all only a " make believe " 
 (for what else is a "story?") shall be in some 
 degree apologetic — shall renounce the pretension 
 of attempting really to compete with life. This, of 
 course, any sensible wide-awake story declines to 
 do ; for it quickly perceives that the tolerance 
 granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt 
 to stifle it, disguised in the form of generosity. 
 The old Evangelical hostility to the novel, which 
 was as explicit as it was narrow, and which regarded 
 it as little less favorable to our immortal part than 
 a stage-play, was in reality far less insulting. The 
 only reason for^the existenceoi a noveMs that it 
 does compjte^ with life. When it ceases to com- 
 pete as the canvas of the painter competes, it will 
 have arrived at a very strange pass. It is not 
 expected of the picture that it will make itself 
 humble in order to be forgiven; and the analogy 
 between the art of the painter and the art of the 
 novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. 
 Their inspiration is the same, their j)rocess (allow- 
 ing for the different quality of the vehicle) is the 
 same, their success is the same. They may learn 
 from each other, they may explain and sustain each 
 other. Their cause is the same, and the honor of 
 one is the honor of another. Peculiarities of man- 
 ner, of execution, that correspond on either side, 
 exist in each of them and contribute to their devel- 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 55 
 
 opment. The Mahometans think a picture an 
 unholy thing, but it is a long time since any Chris- 
 tian did, and it is therefore the more odd that in 
 the Christian mind the traces (dissimulated though 
 they may be) of a suspicion of the sister art should 
 linger to this day. The only effectual way to lay it 
 to rest is to emphasize the analogy to which I just 
 alluded — to insist on the fact that, as the p icture is 
 reality, so the no vel is history. That is the only 
 general description (which does it justice) that we 
 may give of the novel. But history also is allowed , 
 to compete with life, as I say ; it is not, any more 
 than painting, expected to apologize. The subject- 
 matter of fiction is stored up likewise in documents 
 and records, and if it will not give itself away, as 
 they say in California, it must s peak with assu raiice, 
 with the tone of the historian. Certain accom- 
 plished novelists have a habit of giving themselves 
 away which must often bring tears to the eyes of 
 people who take their fiction seriously. I was 
 lately struck, in reading over many pages of 
 Anthony Trollope, with his want of discretion in 
 this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an 
 aside, he concedes to the reader that he and this 
 trusting friend are only "making believe." He 
 admits that the events he narrates have not really 
 happened, and that he can give his narrative any 
 turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of 
 a sa cred offi ca seems to me, I confess, a terrible 
 crime ; it is what I mean by the attitude of 
 
56 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 apology, and it shocks me every whit as much in 
 Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or 
 Macaulay. It implies that the novelist is less 
 occupied in looking for the truth than the historian, 
 and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all 
 his standing-room. To repres ent and illus trate the 
 past, the actions of men, is the task of either 
 writer, and the only difference that I can see is, in 
 proportion as he succeeds, to the honor of the 
 novelist, consisting as it does in bis having more 
 difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far 
 from being purely literary. It seems to me to give 
 him a great character, the fact that he has at once 
 so much in common with the philosopher and the 
 painter ; this double analogy is a magnificent heri- 
 tage. 
 
 It is of all this evidently that Mr. Besant is full 
 when he insists upon the fact that fiction is one of 
 the Jine arts, deserving in its turn of all the honors 
 and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved 
 for the successful profession of music, poetry, paint- 
 ing, architecture. It is impossible to insist too much 
 on so important a truth, and the place that Mr. 
 Besant demands for the work of the novelist may be 
 represented, a trifle less abstractly, by saying that 
 he demands not only that it shall be reputed artistic, 
 but that it shall be reputed very artistic indeed. It 
 is excellent that he should have struck this note, for 
 his doing so indicates that there was need of it, that 
 his proposition may be to many people a novelty. 
 
THE ART OP FICTION. 57 
 
 One rubs one's eyes at the thought ; but the rest of 
 Mr. Besant's essay confirms the revelation. I sus- 
 pect, in truth, that it would be possible to confirm 
 it still further, and that one would not be far wrong 
 in saying that in addition to the people to whom it 
 has never occurred that a novel ought to be artistic, 
 there are a gi-eat many others who, if this principle 
 were urged upon them, would be filled with an in- 
 definable mistrust. They would find it difficult to 
 explain their repugnance, but it would operate 
 strongly to put them on their guard. "Art," in 
 our Protestant communities, where so many things 
 have got so strangely twisted about, is supposed, in 
 certain circles, to have some vaguely injurious effect 
 upon those who make it an important consideration, 
 who let it weigh in the balance. It is assumed to 
 be opposed in some mysterious manner to morality, 
 to amusement, to instruction. When it is embodied 
 in the work of the painter (the sculptor is another 
 affair ! ) you know what it is ; it stands there before 
 you, in the honesty of pink and gi'een and a gilt 
 frame ; you can see the worst of it at a glance, and 
 you can be on your guard. But when it is intro- 
 duced into literature it becomes more insidious — 
 there is danger of its hurting you before you know 
 it. Literature should be either instructive or amus-' 
 ing, and there is in many minds an impression that 
 these artistic pre-occupations, the search for form, 
 contribute to neither end, interfere, indeed, with 
 both. They are too frivolous to be edifying, and 
 
58 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 too serious to be diverting ; and they are, moreover, 
 priggish and paradoxical and superfluous. That, I 
 think, represents the manner in which the latent 
 thought of many people who read novels as an ex- 
 ercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to 
 become articulate. They would argue, of course, 
 that a novel ought to be " good," but they would 
 interpret this term in a fashion of their own, which, 
 indeed, would vary considerably from one critic to 
 another. One would say that being good means 
 representing virtuous and aspiring characters, placed 
 in prominent positions ; another would say that 
 it depends for a " happy ending " on a distribution 
 at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, 
 babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful 
 remarks. Another still would say that it means be- 
 ing full of incident and movement, so that we shall 
 wish to jump ahead, to see who was the mysterious 
 stranger, and if the stolen will was ever found, and 
 shall not be distracted from this pleasure by any 
 tiresome analysis or " description." But they would 
 all agree that the " artistic " idea would spoil some 
 of their fun. One would hold it accountable for all 
 the description, another would see it revealed in the 
 absence of sympathy. Its hostility to a happy end- 
 ing would be evident, and it might even, in some 
 cases, render any ending at all impossible. The 
 " ending " of a novel is, for many persons, like that 
 of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and 
 the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddle- 
 
THE AET OF FICTIOlSr. 59 
 
 some doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes. It 
 is therefore true that this conception of Mr. Besant's, 
 of the novel as a superior form, encounters not only 
 a negative but a positive indifference. It matters 
 little that, as a work of art, it should really be as 
 little or as much concerned to supply happy endr 
 ings, sympathetic characters, and an objective tone, 
 as if it were a wbrk of mechanics ; the association 
 of ideas, however incongruous, might easily be too 
 much for it if an eloquent voice were not sometimes 
 raised to call attention to the fact that it is at once 
 as free and as serious a branch of literature as any 
 other. 
 
 Certainly, this might sometimes be doubted in 
 presence of the enormous number of works of fiction 
 that appeal to the credulity of our generation, for it 
 might easily seem that there could be no great sub- 
 stance in a commodity so quickly and easily pro- 
 duced. It must- be admitted that good novels are 
 somewhat compromised by bad ones, and that the 
 field at large suffers discredit from overcrowding. 
 I think, however, that this injury is only superficial, 
 and that the superabundance of written fiction proves 
 nothing against the principle itself. It has been 
 vulgarized, like all other kinds of literature, like 
 everything else to-day, and it has proved more than 
 some kinds accessible to vulgarization. But there 
 is as much difference as there ever was between a 
 good novel and a bad one ; the bad is swept, with 
 all the daubed canvases and spoiled marble, into 
 
60 THE AKT OF FlCTLOif. 
 
 some unvisited limbo or infinite rubbish-yard, be- 
 neath the back-windows of the world, and the good 
 subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire 
 for perfection. As I shall take the liberty of mak- 
 ing but a single criticism of Mr. Besant, whose tone 
 is so full of the love of his art, I may as well have 
 done with it at once. He seems to me to mistake 
 in attempting to say so definitely beforehand what 
 sort of an affair the good novel will be. To indi- 
 cate the danger of such an error as that has been 
 the purpose of these few pages ; to suggest that cer- 
 tain traditions on the subject, applied a priori, have 
 already had much to answer for, and that the good 
 \ health of an art which undertakes so immediately to 
 jireproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. 
 It lives upon exercise, and the very meaning of ex- 
 ercise is freedom. The only obligation to which in 
 advance we may hold a noA'^el without incurring the 
 accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interest- 
 ing. That general responsibility rests upon it, but 
 it is the only one I can think of. The ways in 
 which it is at liberty to accomplish this result (of 
 interesting us) strike me as innumerable and such 
 as can only suffer from being marked out, or fenced 
 in, by prescription. They are as various as the tem- 
 perament of man, and they are successful in propor- 
 tion as they reveal a particular mind, different from 
 others. A novel is in its broadest definit ion a p er- 
 sonal im pression of life; that, to begin with, con- 
 stitutes its valucj which is^ greater or less according 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 61 
 
 to the intensity of the impression. But there will 
 be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless 
 there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a 
 line to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form 
 to be filled out, is a limitation of that freedom and 
 a suppression of the very thing that we are most 
 curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be ^ 
 appreciated after the fact ; then the author's choice 
 has been made, his standard has been indicated ; 
 then we can follow lines and directions and compare 
 tones. Then, in a word, we can enjoy one of the 
 most charming of pleasures, we can estimate quality, 
 we can apply the test of execution. The execution 
 belongs to the author alone ; it is what is most per- 
 sonal to him, and we measure him by that. The ^ 
 advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and 
 responsibility, of the novelist, is that there is no 
 limit to what he may attempt as an executant — no 
 limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, 
 successes. Here it is especially that he works, step 
 by step, like his brother of the brush, of whom we 
 may always say that he has painted his picture in a 
 manner best known to himself. His manner is his 
 secret, not necessarily a deliberate one. He cannot 
 disclose it, as a general thing, if he would ; he would 
 be at a loss to teach it to others. I say this (vith a 
 due recollection of having insisted on the community 
 of method of the artist who paints a picture and the 
 artist who writes a novel. The painter is able to 
 teach the rudiments of his practice, and it is possible. 
 
62 THE AKT OF FICTION. 
 
 from the study of good work (granted the aptitude), 
 both to learn how to paint and to learn how to write. 
 Yet it remains true, without injury to the rapproche- 
 ment, that the literary artist would be obliged to 
 say to his pupU much more than the other, " Ah, 
 well, you must do it as you can ! " It is a question 
 of degree, a matter of delicacy. If there are exact 
 sciences there are also exact arts, and the grammar 
 of painting is so much more definite that it makes 
 the difference. 
 
 I ought to add, however, that if Mr. Besant says 
 at the beginning of his essay that the " laws of fiction 
 may be laid down and taught with as much preci- 
 sion and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspec- 
 tive, and proportion," he mitigates what might ap- 
 pear to be an over-statement by applying his remark 
 to "general" laws, and by expressing most of these 
 rules in a manner with which it would certainly be 
 unaccommodating to disagree. That the novelist 
 must write from his experience, that his " characters ■: 
 must be real and such as might be met with in ac- 
 tual life ; " that -'la young lady brought up in a quiet y 
 country village should avoid descriptions of garri- 
 son life," and " a writer whose friends and personal : 
 experiences belong to the lower middle-class should ^ 
 carefully avoid introducing his characters into Soci- 
 ety;" that one should enter one's notes in a com- 
 monplace book ; that one's figures should be clear in 
 outline ; that making them clear by some trick of 
 speech or of carriage is a bad method, and " describ- 
 
THE AllT OF FICTION. 63 
 
 ing them at length " is a worse one ; that English 
 Fiction should have a " conscious moral purpose ; " 
 that " it is almost impossible to estimate too highly 
 the value of careful vs^orkmanship — that is, of style ; " 
 that " the most important point of all is the stoiy," 
 that " the story is everything " — these are principles 
 with most of which it is surely impossible not to sym- 
 pathize. That remark about the lower middle-class 
 writer and his knowing his place is perhaps rather 
 chilling ; but for the rest, I should find it difficult 
 to dissent from any one of these recommendations. 
 At the same time I should find it difiicult positively 
 to assent to them, with the exception, perhaps, of the 
 injunction as to entering one's jiptes in a common 
 place book. They scarcely'seem to me to have the 
 -q^utriity that Mr. Besant attributes to the rules of the 
 
 novelist — the " precision and exactness " of " the 
 laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion." They 
 are suggestive, they are even inspiring, but they are 
 not exact, though they are doubtless as much so as 
 the case admits of ; which is a proof of that liberty 
 of interpretation for which I just contended. For 
 the value of these different injunctions — so beauti- 
 ful and so vague — is wholly in the meaning one 
 attaches to them. The charactei's, the situation, 
 which strike one as real, will be those that touch and 
 interest one most, but the measure of reality is very 
 difficult to fix. The reality of Don Quixote or Mr. 
 Micawber is a very delicate shade ; it is a reality so 
 colored by the author's vision that, vivid as it may 
 
64 THE ART OF FICTION. 
 
 be, one would hesitate to propose it as a model ; one 
 would expose one's self to some very embarrassing 
 questions on the part of a pupil. It goes without 
 saying that you will not write a good novel unless 
 you possess the sense of rea^lit^; but it will be diffi- 
 cult to give you a recifie for calling that sense into 
 being. Humanity is immense, and reality has a my- 
 riad forms ; the most one can affirm is that some of 
 the flowers of fiction have the odor of it, and others 
 have not ; as for telling you in advance how your 
 nosegay should be composed, that is another affaii'. 
 It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that 
 one must write from exj)erience ; to our suppositi- 
 tious aspirant such a declaration might savor of 
 mockery. What kind of experience is intended, 
 and where does it begin and end ? Experience is 
 never limited, and it is never complete ; it is an im- 
 mense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the 
 finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of 
 consciousness and catching every air-borne particle 
 in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind ; 
 and when the mind is •mTaginative — niuch more 
 when it happens to be that of "a man of genius^ it 
 takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts 
 the very pulses of the air into revelations. The 
 young lady living in a village has only to be a dam- 
 sel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite un- 
 fair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she 
 shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater 
 miracles have been seen than that, imagination as- 
 
THE "art of fiction. 65 
 
 sistiiig, she should speak the truth about some of 
 these gentlemen. I remembei' an English novel- 
 ist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much 
 commended for the impression she had managed 
 to give in one of her tales of the nature and way 
 of life of the French Protestant youth. She had 
 been asked where she learned so much about this 
 recondite being, she had been congratulated on her 
 peculiar opportunities. These opportunities con- 
 sisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended 
 a staircase, passed an open door where, in the house- 
 hold of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants 
 Avere seated at table round a finished meal. The 
 glimpse made a picture ; it lasted only a moment, 
 but that moment was experience. She had got her 
 impression, and she evolved her type. She knew 
 what youth was, and what Protestantism ; she also 
 had the advantage of having seen what it was to be 
 French ; so that she converted these ideas into a 
 concrete image, and produced a reality. Above all, 
 however, she was blessed with the faculty which 
 when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for 
 the artist is a much greater source of strength than 
 any accident of residence or of place in the social 
 ^ scale. The power to guess the unseen from the""! 
 
 ^ seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the 
 whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling 
 life, in general, so completely that you are well on 
 
 -- your way to knowing any particular corner of it — , 
 this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute 
 
66 THE ABT OF FICTION. 
 
 experience, and they occur in country and in town, 
 and in the most differing stages of education. If 
 experience consists of impressions, it may be said 
 that impressions are experience, just as (have we not 
 seen it ?) they are the very air we breathe. There- 
 fore, if I should certainly say to a novice, " Write 
 from experience, and experience only," I should feel 
 that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were 
 not careful immediately to add, " Try to-be one of 
 the people on whom nothing is lost ! " 
 
 I-tini far from intending by this to minimize the 
 importance of exactness — of truth of detail. One 
 can speak best from one's own taste, and I may 
 therefore venture to say that the air of reality (so- 
 lidity of specification) seems to me to be the suiDreme 
 virtue of a novel — the merit in which all its other 
 merits (including that conscious moral purpose of 
 which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submis- 
 sively depend. If it be not there, they are all as 
 nothing, and if these be there they owe their effect 
 to the success with which the autlior has produced 
 the ill usion , of life. The cultivation of this success, 
 the study of this exquisite process, form, to my 
 taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the 
 novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, 
 his reward, his torment, his delight. It is here, 
 in very truth, that he competes with life; it is 
 here that he competes with his brother, the paint- 
 er, in his attempt to render the look of things, 
 the look that conveys their meaning, to catch 
 
THE ART OF FICTIOK. 67 
 
 the color, the relief, the expi-ession, the surface, 
 the substance of the human spectacle. It is in re- 
 gard to this that Mr. Besant is well inspired when 
 he bids him take notes. He cannot possibly take 
 too many, he cannot possibly take enough. All life 
 solicits him, and to " render "-the simplest surface, 
 to produce the most momentary illusion, is a very 
 complicated business. His case would be easier, 
 and the rule would be more exact, if Mr. Besant had 
 been able to tell him what notes to take. But this 
 I fear he can never learn in any hand-book ; it is the 
 business of his life. He has to take a great many 
 in order to select a few, he has to work them up as 
 he can, and even the guides and philosophers who 
 ^ might have most to say to him must leave him alone 
 \ when it comes to the application of precepts, as we 
 leave the painter in communion with his palette. 
 That his characters " must be clear in outline," as 
 Mr. Besant says — he feels that down to his boots ; 
 but how he shall make them so is a secret between 
 his good angel and himself. It would be absurdly 
 simple if he could be taught that a great deal of 
 " description " would make them so, or that, on the 
 contrary, the absence of description and the culti- 
 vation of dialogue, or the absence of dialogue and 
 the multiplication of " incident," would rescue him 
 from his difficulties. Nothing, for instance, is more 
 possible than that he be of a turn of mind for which 
 this odd, literal opposition of description and dia- 
 logue, incident and description, has little meaning 
 
68 THE AKT OP FICTION. 
 
 and light. People often talk of these things as if 
 they had a kind of internecine distinctness, instead 
 of melting into each other at every breath and being 
 intimately associated parts of one general effort of 
 expression. I cannot imagine composition existing in 
 a series of blocks, not- conceive, in any novel worth 
 discussing at all, of a passage of description that is 
 not in its intention narrative, a passage of dialogue 
 that is not in its intention descriptive, a touch of 
 truth of any sort that does not partake of the nature 
 of incident, and an incident that derives its interest 
 from any other source than the general and only 
 source of the success of a vrork of art, — that of 
 . being illustrative. A novel is a living thing, all 
 '■ one and continuous, like every other organism, and 
 j 1 in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, 
 I (that in each of the parts there is something of each 
 of the other parts. The critic who over the close 
 texture of a finished work will pretend to trace a 
 geography of items will mark some frontiers as ar- 
 tificial, I fear, as any that have been known to his- 
 tory. There is an old-fashioned distinction between 
 the novel of character and the novel of incident, 
 which must have cost many a smile to the intending 
 romancer who was keen about his work. It appears 
 to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated 
 distinction between the novel and the romance — 
 to answer as little to any reality. There are bad 
 novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures 
 and good pictures ; but that is the only distinction 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 69 
 
 in -which I see any meaning, and I can as little 
 imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can 
 imagine speaking of a picture of character. "When 
 one says picture, one says of character ; when one 
 says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may 
 be transposed. What is character but the deter- 
 mination of incident? What is incident but the 
 illustration of character ? What is a picture or a 
 novel that is not of character ? What else do we 
 seek in it and find in it ? It is an incident for a 
 woman to stand up with her hand resting on a 
 table and look out at you in a certain way ; or, if 
 it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to 
 say what it is. At the same time it is an expres- 
 sion of character. If you say you don't see it 
 (character in that — allons done !) this is exactly 
 what the. artist, who has reasons of his own for 
 thinking he does see it, undertakes to show you. 
 When a young man makes up his mind that he has 
 not faith enough, after all, to enter the church, as 
 he intended, that is an incident, though you may 
 not hurry to the end of the chapter to see whether 
 perhaps he does n't change once more. I do not 
 say that these are extraordinary or startling inci- 
 dents. I do not pretend to estimate the degree of 
 interest proceeding from them, for this will depend 
 upon the skill of the painter. It sounds almost 
 puerile to say that some incidefits are intrinsically 
 much more important than others, and I need not 
 take this precaution, after having professed my sym- 
 
70 THE AET OP FICTION. 
 
 pathy for the major ones, in remarking that the 
 only classification of the novel that I can under- 
 stand is into the interesting and the uninteresting. 
 
 The novel and the romance, the novel of incident 
 and that of character, — these separations appear 
 to me to have been made by critics and readers for 
 their own convenience, and to help them out of 
 some of their difficulties, but to have little reality 
 or interest for the producer, from whose point of 
 view it is, of course, that we are attempting to con- 
 sider the art of fiction. The case is the same with 
 another shadowy categoiy, which Mr. Besant ap- 
 parently is disposed to set up, — that of the " mod- 
 ern English novel ; " unless, indeed, it be that in 
 this matter he has fallen into an accidental confusion 
 of standpoints. It is not quite clear whether he 
 intends the remarks in which he alludes to it to be 
 didactic or historical. It is as diflScult to suppose a 
 person intending to write a modern English, as to 
 suppose him writing an ancient English novel ; that 
 is a label which begs the question. One writes the 
 novel, one paints the picture of one's language and 
 ■^ of one's time, and calling it modern English, will 
 ,not, alas ! make the diflBcult task any easier. No 
 more, unfortunately, will calling this or that work 
 of one's fellow-artist a romance, — unless it be, of 
 course, simply for the pleasantness of the thing, as, 
 for instance, when Hawthorne gave this heading to 
 his story of Blithedale. The French, who have 
 brought the theory of fiction to remarkable com- 
 
THE ART OP FICTION. 71 
 
 pleteness, have but one word for the novel, and 
 have not attempted smaller things in it, that I can 
 see, for that. I can think of no obligation to which 
 the " romancer " would not be held equally with the 
 novelist ; the standard of execution is equally high 
 for each. Of course it is of execution that we are 
 talking, — that being the only point of a novel that 
 is open to contention. This is, perhaps, too often 
 lost sight of, only to produce interminable confusions 
 and cross-purposes. We must grant the artist his 
 subject, his idea jhat the French o.aU^JnRjTmmf.Aj 
 our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. 
 Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like 
 it or find it interesting ; in case we do not, our 
 course is perfectly simple, to let it alone. We may 
 believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere 
 novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may 
 perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will 
 have been a failure to execute, and it is in the exe- 
 cution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we 
 ])retend to respect the artist at all we must allow 
 him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular 
 cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice 
 will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part 
 of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of 
 presumptions, and some of the most interesting ex- 
 periments of which it is capable are hidden in the 
 bosom of common things. Gustave Flaubert has 
 written a story about the devotion of a servant-girl 
 to a parrot, and the production, highly finished as 
 
72 THE ART OF FICTION. 
 
 it is, cannot on the whole be called a success. We 
 are perfectly free to find it flat, but I think it might 
 have been interesting ; and I, for my part, am ex- 
 tremely glad he should have written it. It is a con- 
 tribution to our knowledge of what can be done — 
 or what cannot. Ivan Turgenieff has written a tale 
 about a deaf and dumb serf and a lap-dog, and the 
 thing is touching, loving, a little masterpiece. He 
 struck the note of life where Gustave Flaubert 
 missed it ; he flew in the face of a presumption and 
 achieved a victory. 
 
 Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the 
 good old fashion of " liking " a work of art or not 
 liking it ; the more improved criticism will not abol- 
 ish that primitive, that ultimate, test. I mention 
 this to guard myself from the accusation of intimat- 
 ing that the idea, the subject, of a novel or a picture 
 does not matter. It matters, to my sense, in the 
 J highest degree, and if I might put up a prayer it 
 would be that artists should select none but the 
 richest. Some, as I have already hastened to admit, 
 are much more substantial than others, and it would 
 be a happily arranged world in which persons in- 
 tending to treat them should be exempt from con- 
 fusions and mistakes. This fortunate condition 
 will arrive only, I fear, on the same day that critics 
 become purged from error. Meanwhile, I repeat, 
 we do not judge the artist with fairness unless we 
 say to him : " Oh, I grant you your starting-point, 
 because if I did not I should seem to prescribe to 
 
THE AET OF FICTION. 73 
 
 you, and heaven forbid I should take that responsi- 
 bility. If I pretend to tell you what you must not 
 take, you will call upon me to tell you then what 
 you must take ; in which case I shall be nicely 
 caught ! Moreover, it is n't till I have accepted 
 your data that I can begin to measure you. I have 
 the standard ; I judge you by what you propose, 
 and you must look out for me there. Of course I 
 may not care for your idea at all ; I may think it 
 sUly, or stale, or unclean ; in which case I wash my 
 hands of you altogether. I may content myself 
 with believing that you will not have succeeded in 
 being interesting, but I shall, of course, not attempt 
 to demonstrate it, and you will be as indifferent to 
 me as I am to you. I needn't remind you that 
 there are all sorts of tastes ; who can know it better ? 
 Some people, for excellent reasons, don't like to 
 read about carpenters ; others, for reasons even bet- 
 ter, don't like to read about courtesans. Many 
 object to Americans. Others (I believe they are 
 mainly editors and publishers) won't look at Ital- 
 ians. Some readers don't like quiet subjects ; others 
 don't like bustling ones. Some enjoy a complete 
 illusion ; others revel in a complete deception. They 
 choose their novels accordingly, and if they don't 
 care about your idea they won't, a fortiori, care 
 about your treatment." 
 
 So that it comes back very quickly, as I have 
 said, to the liking ; in spite of M. Zola, who reasons 
 less powerfully than he represents, and who will 
 
74 THE Art of fictioiJ. 
 
 not reconcile himself to this absoluteness of taste, 
 thinking that there are certain things that people 
 ought to like, and that they can he made to like. 
 I am quite at a loss to imagine anything (at any 
 rate in this matter of fiction) that people ought to 
 like or to dislike. Selection will be sure to take 
 care of itself, for it has a constant motive behind it. 
 That motive is simply experience. As people feel 
 life, so they will feel the art that is most closely 
 related to it. This closeness of relation is what we 
 should never forget in talking of the effort of the 
 novel. Many people speak of it as a factitious, 
 artificial form, a product of ingenuity, the business 
 of which is to alter and arrange the things that 
 surround us, to translate them into conventional, 
 traditional moulds. This, however, is a view of the 
 matter which carries us but a very short way, con- 
 demns the art to an eternal repetition of a few 
 familiar cliches, cuts short its development, and 
 leads us straight up to a dead wall. Catching the 
 very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of 
 life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps 
 Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she 
 offers us we see life without rearrangement, do we 
 feel that we are touching the truth ; in proportion 
 as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we 
 are being put off with a substitute, a compromise 
 _and convention. It is not uncommon to hear an 
 extraordinary assurance of remark in regard to this 
 matter of rearranging, which is often spoken of as 
 
THE AET OP FICTIOK. <^ 
 
 if it were the last word of art. Mr. Besant seems 
 to me in danger of falling into this great error with 
 his rather unguarded talk about " selection." Art is 
 essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main 
 care is to be typical, to be inclusive. For many_ 
 people art means rose-colored windows, and selec- 
 tion means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. 
 They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations 
 have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the 
 ugly; they will rattle off shallow commonplaces 
 about the province of art and the limits of art, till 
 you are moved to some wonder in return as to the 
 province and the limits of ignorance. It appears 
 to me that no one can ever have made a seriously 
 artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an 
 immense increase — a kind of revelation — of free- 
 dom. One perceives, in that case — by the light of 
 a heavenly ray — that the province of art is all life, 
 all feeling, all observati on, all vi sion ., As MrT^e^ 
 
 '. sanj^so justlyjHHinates, it is all exp^irience. That 
 is a sufficient answer to those who maintain that it 
 must not touch the painful, who stick into its divine 
 unconscious bosom little prohibitory inscriptions on 
 the end of sticks, such as we see in public gardens — 
 " It is forbidden to walk on the grass ; it is forbidden 
 to touch the flowers ; it is not allowed to introduce 
 dogs, or to remain after dark ; it is requested to 
 keep to the right." The young aspirant in the line 
 of fiction, whom we continue to imagine, will do 
 nothing without taste, for in that case his freedom 
 
^ THE AET OF PIClIOlf. 
 
 would be of little use to him ; but the first advan- 
 tage of his taste will be to reveal to him the absur- 
 dity of the little sticks and tickets. If he have 
 taste, I must add, of course he will have ingenuity, 
 and my disrespectful reference to that quality just 
 now was not meant to imply that it is useless in 
 fiction. But it is only a secondary aid ; the first is 
 a vivid sense of reality. 
 
 Hr. Besant has some remarks on the question of 
 " the story," which I shall not attempt to criticise, 
 though they seem to me to contain a singular am- 
 biguity, because I do not think I understand them. 
 I cannot see what is meant by talking as if there 
 were a part of a novel which is the story and part 
 of it which for mystical reasons is not — unless in- 
 deed the distinction be made in a sense in which it 
 is difficult to suppose that anyone should attempt 
 to convey anything. " The stoiy," if it represents 
 anything, represents the subject, the idea, the data 
 of the novel ; and there is surely no " school " — 
 Mr. Besant speaks of a school — which urges that a 
 novel should be all treatment and no subject. There 
 must assuredly be something to treat ; every school 
 is intimately conscious of that. 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 punctua- 
 
THE AKT OF FICTIOX. 77 
 
 tion-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. The story and the novel, the idea 
 and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never 
 heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the 
 use of the thread without the needle or the needle 
 without the thread. Mr. Besant is not the only 
 critic who may be observed to have spoken as if 
 there were certain things in life which constitute 
 stories and certain others which do not. I find the 
 same odd implication in an entertaining article in 
 the Pall Mall Gazette, devoted, as it happens, to 
 Mr. Besant's lecture. "The story is the thing!" 
 says this graceful writer, as if with a tone of 
 opposition to another idea. I should think it was, 
 as every painter who, as the time for " sending in " 
 his picture looms in the distance, finds himself still 
 in quest of a subject — as every belated artist, not 
 fixed about his donnee, will heartily agree. There 
 are somfe subjects which speak to us, and others 
 which do not, but he would be a clever man who 
 should undertake to give a rule by which the story 
 and the no-story should be known apart. It is im- 
 possible (to me at least) to imagine any such rule 
 which shall not be altogether arbitrary. The writer 
 in the Pall Mall opposes the delightful (as I sup- 
 pose) novel of " Margot la Balafi-ee " to certain tales 
 in which " Bostonian nymphs " appear to have " re- 
 jected English dukes for psychological reasons." I 
 
78 THE ART or FICTION. 
 
 am not acquainted with the romance just designated, 
 and can scarcely forgive the Pall Mall critic for not 
 mentioning the name of the author; but the title 
 appears to refer to a lady who may have received a 
 scar in some heroic adventure. I am inconsolable 
 at not being acquainted with this episode, but am 
 utterly at a loss to see why it is a story when the 
 rejection (or acceptance) of a duke is not, and why 
 a reason, psychological or other, is not a subject 
 when a cicatrix is. They are all particles of the 
 multitudinous life with which the novel deals, and 
 surely no dogma which pretends to make it lawful 
 to touch the one and unlawful to touch the other 
 will stand for a moment on its feet. It is the 
 special picture that must stand or fall, according as 
 it seems to possess truth or to lack it. Mr. Besant 
 does not, to my sense, light up the subject by inti- 
 mating that a story must, under penalty of not 
 being a story, consist of "adventures." Why of 
 adventures more than of green spectacles? He 
 mentions a category of impossible things, and 
 among them he places " fiction without adventure." 
 Why without adventure more than without matri- 
 mony, or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or 
 hydropathy, or Jansenism? This seems to me to 
 bring the novel back to the hapless little role of 
 being an artificial, ingenious thing — bring it down 
 from its large, free character of an immense and 
 exquisite correspondence with life. And what is 
 adventure, when it comes to that, and by what sign 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 79 
 
 is the listening pupil to recognize it ? It is an ad- 
 venture — an immense one — for me to write this 
 little article ; and for a Bostonian nymph to reject 
 an English duke is an adventure only less stirring, 
 I should say, than for an English duke to be rejected 
 by a Bostonian nymi^h. I see dramas within dramas 
 in that, and innumerable points of view. A psycho- 
 logical reason is, to my imagination, an object ador- 
 ably pictorial ; to catch the tint of its complexion — 
 I feel as if that idea might inspire one to Titian- 
 esque efforts. There are few things more exciting 
 to me, in short, than a psychological reason, and 
 yet, I protest, the novel seems to me the most mag- 
 nificent form of art. I have just been reading, at 
 the same time, the delightful story of "Treasure 
 Island," by Mr. Robert "Louis Stevenson, and the 
 last tale from M. Edmond de Goncourt, which is 
 entitled " Cherie." One of these works treats of 
 murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown, 
 hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences and 
 buried doubloons. The other treats of a little 
 French girl who lived in a fine house in Paris 
 and died of wounded sensibility because no one 
 would marry her. I call " Treasure Island " delight- 
 ful, because it appears to me to have succeeded 
 wondei-fully in what it attempts ; and I venture to 
 bestow no epithet upon " Cherie," which strikes me 
 as having failed in what it attempts — that is, in 
 tracing the development of the moral consciousness 
 of a child. But one of these productions strikes 
 
80 THE ART OF FICTIOK. 
 
 me as exactly as much of a novel as the other, and 
 as having a " story " quite as much. The moral con- 
 sciousness of a child is as much a part of life as the 
 islands of the Spanish Main, and the one sort of 
 geography seems to me to have those " surprises " of 
 which Mr. Besant speaks, quite as much as the other. 
 For myself (since it comes back in the last resort, as 
 I say, to the preference of the individual), the picture 
 of the child's experience has the advantage that I 
 can at successive steps (an immense luxury, near to 
 the " sensual pleasure " of which Mr. Besant's critic 
 in the Pall Mall speaks) say Yes or No, as it may 
 be, to what the artist puts before me. I have been 
 a child, but I have never been on a quest for a 
 buried treasure, and it is a simple accident that 
 with M. de Goncourt I should have for the most 
 part to say No. With George Eliot, when she 
 painted that country, I always said Yes. 
 
 The most interesting part of Mr. Besant's lecture 
 is unfortunately the briefest passage — his very cur- 
 sory allusion to the " conscious moral purpose " of 
 the novel. Here again it is not very clear whether 
 he is recording a fact or laying down a principle; 
 it is a great pity that in the latter case he should 
 not have developed his idea. This branch of the 
 subject is of immense importance, and Mr. Besant's 
 few words point to considerations of the widest 
 reach, not to be lightly disposed of. He will have 
 treated the art of fiction but superficially who is 
 not prepared to go every inch of the way that these 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 81 
 
 considerations will carry him. It is for this reason 
 that at the beginning of these remarks I was care- 
 ful to notify the reader that ray reflections on so 
 large a theme have no pretension to be exhaustive. 
 Like Mr. Besant, I have left the question of the 
 morality of the novel till the last, and at the last I 
 find I have used up my space. It is a question 
 surrounded with difficulties, as witness the very first 
 that meets us, in the form of a definite question, on 
 the threshold. Vagueness, in such a discussion, is 
 fatal, and what is the meaning of your morality and 
 your conscious moral purpose? Will you not de- 
 fine your terms and explain how (a novel being a 
 picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral ? 
 You wish to paint a moral j)icture or carve a moral 
 statue ; will you not tell us how you would set about 
 it? We are discussing the Art of Fiction; ques- 
 tions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of 
 execution ; questions of morality are quite another 
 affair, and will you not let us see how it is that you 
 find it so easy to mix them up ? These things are 
 so clear to Mr. Besant that he has deduced from 
 them a law which he sees embodied in English Fic- 
 tion and which is " a truly admirable thing and a 
 great cause for congratulation." It is a great cause 
 for congratulation, indeed, when such thorny prob- 
 lems become as smooth as silk. I may add that, 
 in so far as Mr. Besant perceives that in point of 
 fact English Fiction has addressed itself jarepon- 
 derantly to these delicate questions, he will appear 
 
82 THE ART OF FICTION. 
 
 to many people to have made a vain discovery. 
 They will have been positively struck, on the con- 
 trary, with the moral timidity of the usual English 
 novelist ; with his (or with her) aversion to face the 
 difficulties with which, on every side, the treatment 
 of reality bristles. He is apt to be extremely sliy 
 (whereas the picture that Mr. Besant draws is a pic- 
 ture of boldness), and the sign of his work, for the 
 most part, is a cautious silence on certain subjects. 
 In the English novel (by which I mean the American 
 as well), more than in any other, there is a tradi- 
 tional difference between that which people know 
 and that which they agree to admit that they know, 
 that which they see and that which they speak of, 
 that which they feel to be a part of life and that 
 which they allow to enter into literature. There is 
 the great diiJerence, in short, between what they 
 talk of in conversation, and what they talk of 
 in print. The essence of moral energy is to sur- 
 vey the whole field, and I should directly reverse 
 Mr. Besant's remark, and say, not that the English 
 novel has a purpose, but that it has a diffidence. 
 To what degree a purpose in a work of art is a 
 source of corruption I shall not attempt to inquire ; 
 the one that seems to me least dangerous is the pur- 
 pose of making a perfect work. As for our novel, 
 I may say, lastly, on this score, that, as we find it 
 in England to-day, it strikes me as addressed in a 
 large degree to " young people," and that this in 
 itself constitutes a presumption that it will be 
 
THE AET OF FICTION. 83 
 
 rather shy. There are certain things which it is 
 generally agreed not to discuss, not even to men- 
 tion, before young people. That is very well, but 
 the absence of discussion is not a symptom of the 
 moral passion. The purpose of the English novel 
 — "a truly admirable thing, and a great cause for 
 congratulation " — strikes me, therefore, as rather 
 negative. 
 
 There is one point at which the moral sense and 
 the artistic sense lie very near together ; that is, in 
 the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest 
 quality of a work of art will always be the quality 
 of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that 
 mind is rich and noble, will the novel, the picture, 
 the statue, partake of the substance of beauty and 
 truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to 
 my vision, to have purpose enough. No good novel 
 will ever proceed from a superficial mind; that 
 seems to me an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, 
 will cover all needful moral ground ; if the youthful 
 aspirant take it to heart, it wUl illuminate for him 
 many of the mysteries of "purpose." There are 
 many other useful things that might be said to him, 
 but I have come to the end of my article, and can 
 only touch them as I pass. The critic in the Pall 
 Mall Gazette, whom I have already quoted, draws 
 attention to the danger, in speaking of the art of 
 fiction, of generalizing. The danger that he has in 
 mind is rather, I imagine, that of particularizing ; 
 for there are some comprehensive remarks which, in 
 
84 THE AET OF FICTION. 
 
 addition to those embodied in Mr. Besant's sugges- 
 tive lecture, might, without fear of misleading him, 
 be addressed to the ingenuous student. I should 
 remind him first of the magnificence of the form 
 that is open to him, whicli offers to sight so few 
 restrictions and such innumerable opportunities. 
 The other arts, in comparison, appear confined and 
 hampered ; the various conditions under which they 
 are exercised are so rigid and definite. But the 
 only condition that I can think of attaching to the 
 composition of the novel is, as I have already said, 
 that it be interesting. This freedom is a splendid 
 privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist 
 is to learn to be worthy of it. "Enjoy it as it 
 deserves," I should say to him ; " take possession of 
 it, explore it to its utmost extent, reveal it, rejoice 
 in it. All life belongs to you, and don't listen either 
 to those who would shut you up into corners of it 
 and tell you that it is only here and there that art 
 inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that • 
 this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of 
 life altogether, breathing a superfine air and turning 
 away her head from the truth of things. ^ There is 
 no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and 
 feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not 
 offer a place ; you have only to remember that 
 talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas 
 and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustavo 
 Flaubert, have worked in this field with equal glory. 
 Don't think too much about optimism and pessim- 
 
THE ART OF FICTION. 85 
 
 ism ; try and catch the color of life itself. In 
 Franco to-day we see a prodigious effort (that of 
 Emile Zola, to whose solid and serious work no ex- 
 plorer of the capacity of the novel can allude with- 
 out respect), we see an extrordinary effort, vitiated 
 by a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis. M. 
 Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader 
 as ignorant ; he has an air of working in the dark ; 
 if he had as much light as energy, his results would 
 be of the highest value. As for the aberrations of 
 a shallow optimism, the ground (of English fiction 
 especially) is strewn with their brittle particles as 
 with broken glass. If you must indulge in conclu- 
 sions, let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. 
 Remember that your first duty is to be as complete 
 as possible — to make as perfect a work. Be 
 generous and delicate, and then, in the vulgar 
 phrase, go in ! " 
 
 Henry James. 
 
 CUPPLE6 A HURD. THE ALGONQUIN PRESS, BOSTON, 
 
Y= Bookworme 
 
 Y« Olde Colonial Time 
 
 Extracts from 
 
 Cupples & Hurd's List, 
 
 Boston. 
 
The Algonquin Press Library. 
 
 Pictures of American Life and Character, Past and 
 Present. 
 
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 I. 
 
 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A NEW ENGLAND 
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 A hook that will take its place, on the shelves of the library , by the 
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 author, at the winter firesides of country people very conservative of 
 old English customs now gone, heard curious talk of kings, Puritan 
 ministers, the war and precedent struggle of our Revolution, and 
 touched a race of jnen and women now passed away. He also heard, 
 chiefly from ancient women, the traditions of ghosts, witches, and In- 
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 II. 
 
 THE SPHINX IN AUBREY PARISH. By N. H. 
 
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 OLD NEW ENGLAND DAYS : A Story of True Life. 
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 AROUND THE GOLDEN DEEP. A Romance of the 
 
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 CLEOPATRA'S DAUGHTER. A Romance of a branch 
 of Roses. Un press. 
 
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 AN ALIEN FROM THE COMMONWEALTH. The 
 
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 VIII. 
 
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 Miss Frances Merley: 
 
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 Autobiography of a New England Farm House: 
 
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