A portion, however, of our modern novelwriters repudiate the idea of having any moral purpose whatever; and, truly, few of their readers can accuse them of it. Amusement pure and simple-not always either simple or pure, but always amusement-is their sole aim. They—that is, the cleverest of them—are satisfied to cut a bit at random out of the wonderful web of life, and present it to you just as it is, wishing you to accept it as such, without investigating it too closely, or pausing to consider whether the pattern is complete, what the mode and reason of the wearing, and whether you only see a part or the whole. That there is a wholethat life is not chance-work, but a great de- | sign, with the hands of the Divine Artificer working behind it all-so seldom comes into their calculations that they do not expect it to come into yours. Therefore, with a daring and sometimes almost blasphemous ingenuity, they put themselves to play Providence, to set up their puppets and knock them down, and make them between whiles play such fantastic tricks before high heaven," that one feels heaven's commonest law of right and wrong would to them be, to say the least, extremely inconvenient. But to return. Certainly whatever my fashionable young friend might think-no one can be taught to write novels. But to suppose that novel-writing comes by accident, or impulse-that the author has only to sit with his pen in his hand and his eyes on the ceiling, waiting for the happy moment of inspiration, is an equal mistake. To make a novel-that is, to construct out of the ever-changing kaleidoscope of human fate a picture of life which shall impress people as being life-like, and stand out to its own and possibly an after generation, as such —this is a task that cannot be accomplished without genius, but which genius, unaided by mechanical skill, generally fails to accomplish thoroughly. Much of what is required comes not by intuition, but experience. "How do you write a novel?" has been asked me hundreds of times; and as half the world now writes novels expecting the other half to read them, my answer, given in plain print, may not be quite useless. The shoemaker who in his time has fitted a good many feet, need not hesitate to explain his mode of measuring, how he cuts and sews his leather, and so on. He can give a hint or two on the workmanship; the materials are beyond his power. What other novelists do I know not, but this has been my own way-ab ovo. For, I contend, all stories that are meant to live must contain the germ of life, the egg, the vital principle. A novel "with a purpose may be intolerable, but a novel without a purpose is more intolerable still-as feeble and flaccid as a man without a backbone. Therefore the first thing is to fix on a central idea, like the spine of a human being or the trunk of a tree. Yet as nature never leaves either bare, but clothes them with muscle and flesh, branches and foliage, so this leading idea of his book will be by the true author so successfully disguised or covered as not to obtrude itself objectionably; indeed, the ordinary reader ought not even to suspect its existence. Yet from it, this one principal idea, proceed all after-growths: the kind of plot which shall best develop it, the characters which must act it out, the incidents which will express these characters, even to the conversations which evolve and describe these incidents. All are sequences, following one another in natural order; even as from the seed-germ result successively the trunk, limbs, branches, twigs, and leafage of a tree. This, if I have put my meaning clearly, shows that a conscientiously written novel is by no means a piece of impulsive, accidental scribbling, but a deliberate work of art: that though in one sense it is also a work of nature, since every part ought to result from and be kept subservient to the whole, still, in another, the novel is the last thing that ought to be allowed to say of itself, like Topsy, "Spects I growed." Not even as to the mere writing of it. Style or composition, though to some it comes naturally, does not come to all. When I was young, an older and more experienced writer once said to me, "Never use two adjectives where one will do; never use an adjective at all where a noun will do. Avoid italics, notes of exclamation, foreign words and quotations. Put full stops instead of colons; make your sentences as short and clear as you possibly can, and whenever you think you have written a particularly fine sentence, cut it out." More valuable advice could not be given to any young author. It strikes at the root of that slip-shod literature of which we find so much nowadays, even in writers of genius. To these latter indeed it is a greater temptation; their rapid, easy pen runs on as the fancy strikes, and they do not pause to consider that in a novel, as in a picture, breadth is indispensable. Every part should be made subservient to the whole. You must have a foreground and background, and a middle distance. If you persist in working-up one character, or finishing up minutely one incident, your perspective will be destroyed, and your book become a mere collection of fragments, not a work of art at all. The true artist will always be ready to sacrifice any pet detail to the perfection of the whole. Sometimes, I allow, this is hard. One gets interested-novel-writers only know how interested!-in some particular character or portion of the plot, and is tempted to work out these, to the injury of the rest. Then there usually comes a flat time, say about the second volume, when the first impetus has subsided, and the excitement of the dénouement has not yet come, yet the story must be spun on somehow, if only to get to something more exciting. This may account for the fact that so many second volumes are rather dull. But a worse failure is when vol. iii. dwindles down, the interest slowly diminishing to nothing. Or else the story is all huddled up, everybody married or killed somehow-not as we novelists try to do it, "comfortably"--but in a hasty, unsatisfactory manner, which makes readers wonder why the end is so unworthy of the beginning. Either mistake is fatal, and both commonly proceed from carelessness, or from the lack of that quality, without which no good work is possible, the infinite capacity of taking trouble. "Look at my MS.," said a voluminous writer once to me; "there is hardly a single correction in it, and this is my first draught. I never copy, and I rarely alter a line." It would have been uncivil to say so, but I could not help thinking that both author and public would have been none the worse if my friend had altered a good many lines, and re-copied not a few pages! An accusation is often made against us novelists, that we paint our characters, especially our ridiculous or unpleasant characters, from life. Doubtless many second-rate writers do this-thereby catching the ill-natured class of readers, which always enjoys seeing its neighbour "shown up." But a really good novelist would scorn to attain popularity by such mean devices. Besides, any artist knows that to paint exactly from life is so difficult as to be almost impossible. Study from life he must-copying suitable heads, arms, or legs, and appropriating bits of character, personal or mental idiosyncrasies, making use of the real to perfect the ideal. But the ideal, his own, should be behind and beyond it all. The nature to which he holds up the mirror should be abstract, not individual; and he must be a poor creator who can only make his book by gibbeting therein real people, like kites and owls on a barndoor, for the amusement and warning of society. We authors cannot but smile when asked if such-and-such a character is "drawn from life," and especially when ingenious critics. fancy they have identified certain persons, places, or incidents-almost always falsely. Of course, we go about the world with our eyes open-but what we see and how we use it, is known only to ourselves. Our sitters are never aware they are being painted, and rarely, if ever, recognise their own likenesses. Whether or not it may be allowable to hold up to public obloquy a bad or contemptible character, I suppose it would be fair to describe a perfect character-if we could find it! which is not too probable. For me, I can only say that during all the years I have studied humanity, I never met one human being who could have been "put in a book," as a whole, without injuring it. The only time I ever attempted (by request) to make a study from nature-absolutely literal Quite the contrary. An un--all the reviewers cried out, to my extreme tidy, useless, illegible MS. is an offence to amusement, "This character is altogether the publisher, dangerous irritation to his unnatural." Hitherto I have considered the novel reader," and to the printer an absolute cruelty. Also, many proof corrections often simply as a literary achievement-a book made so wantonly, and costing so much"clever," "interesting,"-above all, a book trouble and money, are severely to be condemned. Doubtless the genus irritabile has its wrongs, from hard-headed and often hard-hearted men of business, but volumes might be written about the worry, the loss, the actual torment that inaccurate, irregular, impecunious and extravagant authors are to that much-enduring and necessarily silent class—their publishers. While on the question of MSS. let me say one practical word. Authors are apt to think that any sort of "copy" is good enough for the press. "that will sell." But there is a higher and deeper view of it, which no writer can escape, and no conscientious writer would ever wish to escape. If we, poor finite mortals, begin telling stories, we take into our feeble hands the complicated machinery of life, of which none can understand the whole, and very few even the smallest bit; we work it out after our own fancy, moral or no moral; we invent our own puppets, and put them through their marionnette-like antics, in imitation of the great drama which a mysterious Hand is for ever playing with us human beings-and sometimes we think we can do it quite as well, if we had the chance! But do we ever consider that in making up from imagination a picture of reality, we are, in rather a dangerous way, mimicking Providence? much as children do with their dolls when they make them go to school, or be put to bed, or have the measles: imitating ordinary child-life, so far as they understand it, in their innocent way. But our ways are not always innocent, and our wisdom is sometimes less than a child's. A bad novel, which does not "justify the ways of God to men "-as Milton vainly tried to do in Paradise Lost-but leaves behind it the impression that the world is all out of joint, that there is no difference between | right and wrong, and nothing in life worth living for such a novel does more harm than a dozen atheistical books, or a hundred dull, narrow-minded sermons. Poison, taken as such, may find an antidote; there is no defence against it when administered in the form of food. That the novel, not only in its literary but moral form, is an engine of enormous power, no one could doubt who had the reading of the letters received, say in a single year, or even a single month, by any tolerably well-known author, from all parts of the world, and from total strangers of every age, class, and degree. Not merely the everlasting autograph beggars, or the eulogists, generally conceited egotists, who enjoy the vanity of corresponding with celebrated folk, but the honest, well-meaning, and often most-touching letter-writers, who pour out their simple hearts to the unknown friend who has exercised so strong an influence over their lives. To To this friend they appeal not only for sympathy | but advice often of the most extraordinary kind—on love affairs, the education of children, business or domestic difficulties, impulses of gratitude, revelations of perplexing secrets, outcries of intolerable pain, coming sometimes from the very ends of the earth, in a mixture of tragedy and comedy, to the silent recipient of these strange phases of human life-stranger than anything he or she has ever dared to put into any novel. Yet so it is; and any conscientious author can but stand mute and trembling in face of the awful responsibility which follows every written line. I believe a thoroughly "bad" book, as we of the last generation used to style such-bad either for coarseness of style, as Tristram Shandy, or laxity of morals, like Don Juandoes infinitely less harm than many modern novels which we lay on our drawing-room tables, and let our young daughters read ad infinitum, or ad nauseam; novels, chiefly, I grieve to say, written by women, who, either out of pure ignorance, or a boastful morbid pleasure in meddling with forbidden topics, often write things that men would be ashamed to write. Absolute wickedness, crime represented as crime, and licentiousness put forward as licentiousness, is far less dangerous to the young and naturally pure mind than that charming sentimental dallying with sin, which makes it appear so piteous, so interesting, so beautiful. Nay, without even entering upon the merits of the favourite modern style of fiction-in which love to be attractive must necessarily be unlawful— there is a style of novel in which right and wrong are muddled up together into a sort of neutral tint, the author, and consequently the reader, taking no trouble to distinguish between them. The characters are made interesting, not by their virtues but their faults; a good woman worships a bad man, and vice versâ. Now this may be true in real life, though I doubt; but to present it in fiction, to make a really noble woman the abject willing slave of a contemptible brute not worthy to tie her shoes, or an honourable man doing all sorts of erring things for the sake of a feeble or vile woman, whom her own sex, and the best of the other, would heartily despise-the effect of such a picture as this is to confuse all one's notions of good and bad, and produce a blurred and blotted vision of life, which, to those just beginning life, is either infinitely sad or infinitely harmful. or infinitely harmful. Besides, it is not true. Time brings its revenges; and if there is one certainty in life, it is the certainty of retribution-ay, even in this life: and alas! down to the third and fourth generation-a creed, by the young doubted or despised, but which the old, whether optimists or pessimists, know to be only too true. There is another favourite subject of modern fiction: a man or woman married hastily or unhappily, and meeting afterwards some elective affinity," the right man or woman, or apparently such. No doubt this is a terrible position, pathetic, tragic, which may happen to the most guiltless persons, and does happen, perhaps, This, even of the ordinarily good books—oftener than any one knows. Novelists seize but what of the bad ones? upon it as a dramatic position, and paint it in such glowing, tender, and pathetic But, putting aside the question of morality, there is another well deserving the consideration of novelists, viz. whether the subjects they choose are within the fair limits of art? Legitimate comedy ought to be based on humour and wit, free from coarseness and vulgarity; and in true tragedy the terrible becomes the heroic by the elimination of every element which is merely horrible or disgusting. In the dying martyr we ought to see, not the streaming blood or the shrivelling of the burnt flesh, but the gaze of ecstatic faith into an opened heaven; and the noblest battle ever represented is misrepresented when the artist chooses scenes fit only for a hospital operatingtable or a butcher's shambles. I cannot but think that certain modern novels, despite their extreme cleverness, deal with topics beyond the legitimate province | of fiction. Vivid descriptions of hangings, of prison-whippings, of tortures inflicted on sane persons in lunatic asylums, are not fit subjects for art; at least, the art which can choose them and dilate upon them is scarcely of a healthy kind, or likely to conduce to the moral health of the reader. No one The answer to this objection is, that such things are; therefore why not write about them? them? So must medical and surgical books be written; so must the most loathsome details of crime and misery be investigated by statesmen and political economists. But all these are professional studies which, however painful, require to be gone through. would ever enter into them as a matter of mere amusement. Besides, as is almost inevitable in a novel "with a purpose," or one in which the chief interest centres in some ghastly phase of humanity, there is generally a certain amount of, perhaps involuntary, exaggeration, against which the calm, judicial mind instinctively rebels. "Two sides to every subject; I should rather like to hear the other side." Without holding the unwise creed that ignorance is innocence, and that immunity from painful sensations induces strength of character, I still maintain that these are topics which are best kept in shadow, especially from the young, We sometimes admit to our public galleries-though I question if we should-the magnificently painted but gross pictures of a few old masters, and the realistic horrors upon which a certain French school has made its fame. But few of us would choose a Potiphar's Wife or a newly-guillotined Charlotte Corday for the adornment of the domestic hearth. though manipulated by the most delicate and yet the firmest hand, are apt, either in art or literature, to do more harm than the moral drawn from them is likely to do good. Such subjects, Of course, the case may be argued pretty strongly from the other side. Life is not all "roses and lilies and daffydowndillies," therefore why should fiction represent it as such? Men and women are not angels, and bad people are often much more "interesting than good people in real life why should we not make them so in novels ? I answer, simply because it is we who make them-we short-sighted mortals, who take upon us to paint life, and can only do so as far as our feeble vision allows us to see it ; which in some of us is scarcely an inch beyond our own nose. Only a few-but these are always the truly great-can see with larger eyes, and reproduce what they see with a calm, steady, and almost always kindly hand, which seems like the hand of Providence, because its work is done with a belief in Providence-in those " mysterious ways by which, soon or late, everything—and everybody-finds its own level; virtue its reward, and vice its retribution. To judge authors solely by their works is not always fair, because most people put their best selves into their books, which are the cream of their life, and the residuum may be but skimmed-milk for daily use. But, in the department of fiction at least, the individual character gives its stamp to every page. Not all good novelists may be ideal men and women, but I doubt much if any really immoral man, or irreligious woman, ever made a good novelist. I wish not to malign my brethren. Most of them do their best, and I think we may fairly decline to believe such stories as that of the "popular authoress" who, having starved as a moral, prosy, and altogether unpopular authoress for several seasons, was advised to try "spicy" writing, and now makes her thousands a year. And even atter weeding from our ranks the "fast," the sentimental, the ghastly, the feeble and prosy, the clap-trap and altogether silly school, there still remains a good number of moderately clever and moderately wholesome writers of fiction, who redeem our literature from disgrace, or could do so if they chose—if they could be made to feel themselves responsible, not to man only, but to God. "For every idle word that men shall say❞—(how much more write ?)" they shall answer in the day of judgment." To us, who are old enough to have read pretty thoroughly the book of human life, it matters little what we read in mere novels, which are at best a poor imaginary imitation of what we have studied as a solemn reality; but to the young it matters a great deal. Impressions are made, lessons taught, and influences given, which, whether for good or for evil, nothing can afterwards efface. The parental yearning, which only parents can understand, is to save our children from all we can-alas, how little! They must enter upon the battle of life; the utmost we can do is to give them their armour and show them how to fight. But what wise father or mother would thrust them, unarmed, into a premature conflict, putting into their pure minds sinful thoughts that had never been there before, and sickening their tender hearts by needless horrors which should only be faced by those who deal with evil for the express purpose of amending it? Truly, there are certain novels which I have lately read, which I would no more think of leaving about on my drawingroom table, than I would take my son to a casino in order to teach him morals, or make my daughter compassionate-hearted sending her to see a Spanish bull-fight. by Finally, as an example in proof of many, almost all, the arguments and theories here advanced, I would advise any one who has gone through a course of modern fiction, to go through another, considered a little out of date, except by the old, and I am glad to say, the very young. Nothing shows more clearly the taste of the uncorrupted healthy palate for wholesome food, than the eagerness with which almost all children, or children passing into young people, from thirteen and A upwards, devour the Waverley Novels. dozen pages, taken at random this moment from a volume which a youthful reader, I might say gormandiser, has just laid down, will instance what I mean. It is the story of Nanty Ewart, told by himself to Alan Fairford, on board the Jumping Jenny, in Redgauntlet. Herein the author touches deepest tragedy, blackest crime, and sharpest pathos (instance the line where Nanty suddenly stops short with "Poor Jess!"). He deals with elements essentially human, even vicious; his hero is a "miserable sinner," no doubt of that, either in the author's mind, or the impression conveyed to that of the reader. There is no paltering with vice, no sentimental glossing over of sin; the man is a bad man, at least he has done evil, and his sin has found him out, yet we pity him. Though handling pitch, we are not defiled; however and whatever our author paints, it is never with an uncertain or feeble touch. We give him our hand, and are led by him fearlessly into the very darkest places, knowing that he carries the light with him, and that no harm will come. I think it is not too much to say that we might go through the Waverley Novels from beginning to end, without finding one page, perhaps not even one line, that we would hesitate to read aloud to any young people, old enough to understand that evil exists in the world, and that the truly virtuous are those who know how to refuse the evil and to choose the good. And I who having written novels all my life, know more than most readers how to admire a great novelist—should esteem it a good sign of any son or daughter of mine who would throw a whole cart-load of modern fiction into the gutter, often its fittest place, in order to clasp a huge wholesome armful of Walter Scott. |