dO<^-
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNrVCRSlTY OF 
 
 calipoqnia 
 SAN DfEGO ,
 
 THE NOVEL
 
 J?«^
 
 THE NOVEL 
 
 WHAT IT IS 
 
 BY 
 
 F. MARION CRAWFORD 
 
 Author of " Mr. Isaacs," " Dr. Claudius," " A Roman 
 Singer," etc. 
 
 f cfe fork 
 MACMILLAN AND COMPANY 
 
 AND LONDON 
 1893 
 
 A II rights reserved
 
 Copyright, 1893, 
 By MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith. 
 Boston, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 WHAT IS A NOVEL? 
 
 i\ /I Y answer can only be a statement 
 of opinion, which I make with 
 much deference to the prejudices of 
 my brethren. Whether it will be of 
 interest to general readers I do not 
 know ; but the question I propose is in 
 itself more or less vital as regards novel- 
 writing. No one will deny that truism. 
 Before going to work it is important to 
 know what one means to do. I pre- 
 tend, however, to no special gift for 
 solving problems in general or this one 
 in particular. To give " the result of 
 one's experience," as the common 
 5
 
 6 THE NOVEL 
 
 phrase puts it, is by no means so easy 
 as it sounds. An intelligent man most- 
 ly knows what he means by his own 
 words, but it does not follow that he 
 can convey that meaning to others. 
 Almost all discussion and much mis- 
 understanding may fairly be said to be 
 based upon the difference between the 
 definitions of common terms as under- 
 stood by the two parties. In the exact 
 sciences there is no such thing as 
 discussion ; there is the theorem and 
 its demonstration, there is the problem 
 and its solution, from which solution 
 and demonstration there is no appeal. 
 That is because, in mathematics, every 
 word is defined before it is used and is 
 almost meaningless until it has been 
 defined.
 
 WHAT IT IS 7 
 
 It has been remarked by a very great 
 authority concerning the affairs of men 
 that " of making many books there is 
 no end," and to judge from appear- 
 ances the statement is even more true 
 to-day than when it was first made. 
 Especially of making novels there is 
 no end, in these times of latter-day 
 literature. No doubt many wise and 
 good persons and many excellent crit- 
 ics devoutly wish that there might be ; 
 but they are not at present strong 
 enough to stand against us, the army 
 of fiction-makers, because we are many, 
 and most of us do not know how to do 
 anything else, and have grown grey in 
 doing this particular kind of work, and 
 are dependent upon it for bread as well 
 as butter; and lastly and chiefly, be-
 
 8 THE NOVEL 
 
 cause we are heavily backed, as a 
 body, by the capital of the publisher, 
 of which we desire to obtain for our- 
 selves as much as possible. Therefore 
 novels will continue to be written, per- 
 haps for a long time to come. There 
 is a demand for them and there is 
 profit in producing them. Who shall 
 prevent us, authors and publishers, 
 from continuing the production and 
 supplying the demand ? 
 
 This brings with it a first answer to 
 the question, ''What is a novel?" 
 A novel is a marketable commodity, 
 of the class collectively termed " lux- 
 uries," as not contributing directly to 
 the support of life or the maintenance 
 of health. It is of the class " artistic 
 luxuries " because it does not appeal
 
 WHAT IT IS 9 
 
 to any of the three material senses — 
 touch, taste, smell ; and it is of the 
 class "intellectual artistic luxuries," be- 
 cause it is not judged by the superior 
 senses — sight and hearing. The novel, 
 therefore, is an intellectual artistic lux- 
 ury — a definition which can be made 
 to include a good deal, but which is, 
 in reaUty, a closer one than it appears 
 to be at first sight. No one, I think, 
 will deny that it covers the three prin- 
 cipal essentials of the novel as it should 
 be, of a story or romance, which in 
 itself and in the manner of telling it 
 shall appeal to the intellect, shall sat- 
 isfy the requirements of art, and shall 
 be a luxury, in that it can be of no use 
 to a man when he is at work, but may 
 conduce to peace of mind and delecta-
 
 lO THE NOVEL 
 
 tion during his hours of idleness. The 
 point upon which people differ is the 
 artistic one, and the fact that such 
 differences of opinion exist makes it 
 possible that two writers as widely sep- 
 arated as Mr. Henry James and Mr. 
 Rider Haggard, for instance, find ap- 
 preciative readers in the same year of 
 the same century — a fact which the 
 literary history of the future will find it 
 hard to explain.
 
 WHAT IT IS II 
 
 P ROB ABLY no one denies that the 
 first object of the novel is to amuse 
 and interest the reader. But it is often 
 said that the novel should instruct as 
 well as afford amusement, and the 
 *' novel- with-a-purpose " is the realisa- 
 tion of this idea. We might invent a 
 better expression than that clumsy 
 translation of the neat German ^^Ten- 
 denz-RomanT Why not compound 
 the words and call the odious thing a 
 " purpose-novel " ? The purpose-novel, 
 then, proposes to serve two masters, 
 besides procuring a reasonable amount 
 of bread and butter for its writer and 
 publisher. It proposes to escape from
 
 12 THE NOVEL 
 
 my definition of the novel in general 
 and make itself an " intellectual moral 
 lesson" instead of an "intellectual 
 artistic luxury." It constitutes a vio- 
 lation of the unwritten contract tacitly 
 existing between writer and reader. So 
 far as supply and demand are con- 
 cerned, books in general and works 
 of fiction in particular are commodities 
 and subject to the same laws, statutory 
 and traditional, as other articles of 
 manufacture. A toy-dealer would not 
 venture to sell real pistols to little boys 
 as pop-guns, and a gun-maker who 
 should try to sell the latter for army 
 revolvers would get into trouble, even 
 though he were able to prove that the 
 toy was as expensive to manufacture as 
 the real article, or more so, silver-
 
 WHAT IT IS 13 
 
 mounted, chiselled, and lying in a 
 Russia-leather case. I am not sure 
 that the law might not support the 
 purchaser in an action for damages if 
 he discovered at a critical moment 
 that his revolver was a plaything. It 
 seems to me that there is a similar case 
 in the matter of novels. A man buys 
 what purports to be a work of fiction, a 
 romance, a novel, a story of adventure, 
 pays his money, takes his book home, 
 prepares to enjoy it at his ease, and 
 discovers that he has paid a dollar for 
 somebody's views on socialism, religion, 
 or the divorce laws. 
 
 Such books are generally carefully 
 suited with an attractive title. The 
 binding is as frivolous as can be de- 
 sired. The bookseller says it is " a
 
 14 THE NOVEL 
 
 work of great power," and there is 
 probably a sentimental dedication on 
 the fly-leaf to a number of initials to 
 which a romantic appearance is given 
 by the introduction of a stray " St." 
 and a few hyphens. The buyer is 
 possibly a conservative person, of luke- 
 warm religious convictions, whose hfe 
 is made " barren by marriage, or death, 
 or division" — and who takes no sort 
 of interest in the laws relating to di- 
 vorce, in the invention of a new religion, 
 or the position of the labour question. 
 He has simply paid money, on the 
 ordinary tacit contract between fur- 
 nisher and purchaser, and he has been 
 swindled, to use a very plain term for 
 which a substitute does not occur to 
 me. Or say that a man buys a seat
 
 WHAT IT IS 15 
 
 in one of the regular theatres. He 
 enters, takes his place, preparing to be 
 amused, and the curtain goes up. The 
 stage is set as a church, there is a 
 pulpit before the prompter's box, and 
 the Right Reverend the Bishop of the 
 Diocese is on the point of delivering 
 a sermon. The man would be legally 
 justified in demanding his money at 
 the door, I fancy, and would probably 
 do so, though he might admit that 
 the Bishop was the most learned and 
 edifying of preachers. There are in- 
 deed certain names and prefixes to 
 names which suggest serious reading, 
 independently of the words printed on 
 the title-page of the book. If the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, or General 
 Booth, or the Emperor William pub-
 
 1 6 THE NOVEL 
 
 lished a novel, for instance, the work 
 might reasonably be expected to con- 
 tain an exposition of personal views 
 on some question of the day. But in 
 ordinary cases the purpose-novel is a 
 simple fraud, besides being a failure in 
 nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out 
 of a thousand. 
 
 What we call a novel may educate 
 the taste and cultivate the intelligence ; 
 under the hand of genius it may purify 
 the heart and fortify the mind ; it 
 should never under any circumstances 
 be suffered to deprave the one nor to 
 weaken the other; it may stand for 
 scores of years — and a score of years 
 is a long time in our day — as the 
 exposition of all that is noble, heroic, 
 honest, and true in the Hfe of woman
 
 WHAT IT IS 17 
 
 or man ; but it has no right to tell us 
 what its writer thinks about the rela- 
 tions of labour and capital, nor to set 
 up what the author conceives to be a 
 nice, original, easy scheme of salvation, 
 any more than it has a right to take 
 for its theme the relative merits of the 
 " broomstick-car " and the *' storage 
 system," temperance, vivisection, or the 
 "Ideal Man" of Confucius. Lessons, 
 lectures, discussions, sermons, and di- 
 dactics generally belong to institutions 
 set apart for especial purposes and 
 carefully avoided, after a certain age, 
 by the majority of those who wish to 
 be amused. The purpose-novel is an 
 odious attempt to lecture people who 
 hate lectures, to preach at people who 
 prefer their own church, and to teach
 
 1 8 THE NOVEL 
 
 people who think they know enough 
 already. It is an ambush, a lying-in- 
 wait for the unsuspecting public, a 
 violation of the social contract — and 
 as such it ought to be either mercilessly 
 crushed or forced by law to bind itself 
 in black and label itself " Purpose " in 
 very big letters.
 
 WHAT IT IS 19 
 
 IN art of all kinds the moral lesson 
 is a mistake. It is one thing to ex- 
 hibit an ideal worthy to be imitated, 
 though inimitable in all its perfection, 
 but so clearly noble as to appeal di- 
 rectly to the sympathetic string that 
 hangs untuned in the dullest human 
 heart ; to make man brave without 
 arrogance, woman pure without prud- 
 ishness, love enduring yet earthly, not 
 angelic, friendship sincere but not 
 ridiculous. It is quite another matter 
 to write a "guide to morality" or a 
 "hand-book for practical sinners" and 
 call either one a novel, no matter how 
 much fiction it may contain. Words-
 
 20 THE NOVEL 
 
 worth tried the moral lesson and spoiled 
 some of his best work with botany 
 and the Bible. A good many smaller 
 men than he have tried the same 
 thing since, and have failed. Perhaps 
 "Cain" and "Manfred" have taught 
 the human heart more wisdom than 
 "Matthew" or the unfortunate "idiot 
 boy " over whom Byron was so merci- 
 lessly merry. And yet Byron probably 
 never meant to teach any one anything 
 in particular, and Wordsworth meant 
 to teach everybody, including and be- 
 ginning with himself. 
 
 There are, I believe, two recognised 
 ways of looking at art : art for the pub- 
 lic or " art for art," to adopt the current 
 French phrase. Might we not say. Art 
 for the buyer and art for the seller?
 
 WHAT IT IS 21 
 
 Or is that too practical a view to take 
 of what is supposed to be so eminently 
 unpractical as art itself ? Has it not 
 been said similarly, and with truth, that 
 religion is for man, and not man for 
 rehgion? Is it our province to please 
 those who read our works, or to force 
 them to please us by buying them? 
 Do not these questions lie at the root 
 of the conflict between realism and 
 romance? Are we to take Talleyrand's 
 speech as our guide ? — "I have fur- 
 nished you with an argument ; I am not 
 bound to furnish you with an under- 
 standing." The story is old, but the 
 position it defines is as old as humanity. 
 When a novelist turns prophet, it will 
 be time enough for him to convert his 
 readers at the point of the pen. Are
 
 2 2 THE NOVEL 
 
 we writers so vain as a class, and so 
 proud of ourselves as men, as to 
 be above affording amusement to our 
 readers without attempting to comfort 
 them, to teach or to preach to them? 
 We are not poets, because we cannot 
 be. We are not genuine playwriters 
 for many reasons ; chiefly, perhaps, 
 because we are not clever enough, 
 since a successful play is incomparably 
 more lucrative than a successful novel. 
 We are not preachers, and few of us 
 would be admitted to the pulpit. We 
 are not, as a class, teachers or pro- 
 fessors, nor lawyers, nor men of busi- 
 ness. We are nothing more than pubHc 
 amusers. Unless we choose we need 
 not be anything less. Let us, then, 
 accept our position cheerfully, and do
 
 WHAT IT IS 23 
 
 the best we can to fulfil our mission, 
 without attempting to dignify it with 
 titles too imposing for it to bear, and 
 without degrading it by bringing its 
 productions down even a little way, 
 from the lowest level of high comedy 
 to the highest level of buffoonery. It 
 is good to make people laugh ; it is 
 sometimes salutary to make them shed 
 tears ; it is best of all to make our 
 readers think — not too serious thoughts, 
 nor such as require an intimate knowl- 
 edge of science and philosophy to be 
 called thoughts at all — but to think, 
 and, thinking, to see before them char- 
 acters whom they might really like to 
 resemble, acting in scenes in which 
 they themselves would like to take 
 a part. In trying to amuse, let us
 
 24 THE NOVEL 
 
 be consistent each in his own way, 
 never giving our pubHc a pretext of 
 appeaUng from PhiHp drunk to Phihp 
 sober. If we have poetry within us, 
 let us put such of it as is worth any- 
 thing into our books, for almost all 
 poetry which deserves the name is 
 good. But let us keep out of our 
 novels all that savours of preaching and 
 teaching, for our readers' sakes ; and 
 for our own, all such matter as is 
 limited by modern science, present 
 fashion, and actual taste, and which 
 consequently imposes too wilful a 
 hmitation upon the permanence of 
 our own work.
 
 WHAT IT IS 25 
 
 OUT I perceive that although this 
 Httle essay is not a work of fiction, 
 I myself am falling into one of the errors 
 which I have wished to point out, for 
 I am beginning to preach where I 
 have no right to inculcate a lesson, and 
 mean only to express a purely personal 
 opinion in the only matter upon which 
 a novehst is justified in expressing one 
 at all. Moreover, I hereby disclaim all 
 intention of setting an example, since in 
 many points upon which I have touched 
 I admit that I myself am the last of 
 literary sinners ; and wUh this admis- 
 sion of fallibility and confession of
 
 2 6 THE NOVEL 
 
 weakness I cry peccavi, and ask ab- 
 solution of the public. 
 
 I do not wish to be accused of what 
 is called smart writing. It is much 
 easier to attack than to defend and 
 much more blessed to give hard knocks 
 than to receive them. A professed 
 novelist is perhaps not a competent 
 judge of novels from the point of view 
 which interests the reader, and which 
 is of course the reader's own. We 
 know the technique of the trick bet- 
 ter than the effect it produces, just 
 as it is hard for a conjuror to realise 
 the sensations of the old gentleman in 
 the audience who finds a bowl of gold- 
 fish in his waistcoat pocket. We do 
 not all know one another's tricks, but 
 we have a fair idea of the general
 
 WHAT IT IS 27 
 
 principle on which they are done and 
 a very definite opinion about our own 
 business as compared with that of the 
 parson or the professor. We know 
 our books from the inside and we see 
 the strings of the puppets, while the 
 public only guesses at the mechanism 
 as it sits before the stage, watching the 
 marionettes and Hstening to the voice 
 from behind the scenes. A novel is, 
 after all, a play, and perhaps it is 
 nothing but a substitute for the real 
 play with live characters, scene-shifting, 
 and footlights. But miracle-plays have 
 gone out of fashion in modern times, 
 except at Ober-Ammergau. The pur- 
 pose-novel is a miracle-play — and if 
 it be true that any really good novel 
 can be dramatised, nothing short of a
 
 28 THE NOVEL 
 
 miracle could put a purpose-novel on 
 the boards. 
 
 Most people have a very clear con- 
 ception of what a good play ought 
 to be, and of the precise extent to 
 which realism can be effective without 
 being offensive. But it is strange, and 
 it is a bad sign of the times, that per- 
 sons who would not tolerate a coarse 
 play read novels little, if at all, short 
 of indecent. An answer suggests itself 
 which may be comprehensive as an 
 explanation, but is insufficient as an 
 excuse. In our Anglo-Saxon social 
 system the young girl is everywhere, 
 and, if the shade of Sterne will allow 
 me to say so, we temper the wind of 
 our realism to the sensitive innocence 
 of the ubiquitous shorn lamb. Once
 
 WHAT IT IS 29 
 
 admit that the young girl is to have the 
 freedom of our theatre, and it follows, 
 and ought to follow, and very generally 
 does follow, that our plays must be 
 suited to maiden ears and eyes. It is 
 a good thing that this should be so, 
 but the effect is rather strange. The 
 men who hear plays in English are 
 not, perhaps, more moral than their 
 contemporaries of Paris, Vienna, and 
 Berlin. We like to believe that our 
 women are better than those of foreign 
 nations. We owe it to them to put 
 more faith in them because they are 
 our own, our dear mothers and wives 
 and sisters and daughters, for whom, if 
 we be men, we mean to do all that 
 men can do. But we are all men and 
 women nevertheless, and human, and
 
 30 THE NOVEL 
 
 we have the thoughts and the under- 
 standing of men and women and not of 
 school-girls. Yet the school-girl prac- 
 tically decides what we are to hear at 
 the theatre and, so far as our own 
 language is concerned, determines to a 
 great extent what we are to read. 
 
 But if we do not write for the young 
 girl, who will? We have not the ad- 
 vantage possessed by the French of 
 satisfying the demands of young people 
 by translations from works in other 
 languages. The young girl in France, 
 as a matter of fact, reads Walter Scott, 
 Bulwer, and Dickens, while her mother 
 diverts her leisure with the more lively 
 productions of Paul Bourget, Guy de 
 Maupassant, or possibly Balzac, whom 
 all educated Frenchmen and French-
 
 WHAT IT IS 31 
 
 women are at least supposed to have 
 read. The advocate of a broader 
 license in the English fiction of the 
 future may answer that the whole body 
 of novels already in existence should 
 be more than sufficient for the delec- 
 tation of " the young." Should the 
 development of the new school, how- 
 ever, lead to the creation of a litera- 
 ture in our language, resembling, as a 
 whole, that of the French, our novel, 
 in its present form, would soon cease 
 to be written, and those of the type 
 which are already in existence would 
 in a short time be regarded as anti- 
 quated, dull, and savouring of the Sun- 
 day-school. Youth, too, dislikes to be 
 treated as youth. The old, who regret- 
 fully long to be young again, may find
 
 32 THE NOVEL 
 
 some consolation in the ardent desire 
 of youth for mature years. Moreover, 
 it is easier to lower the reader's moral 
 tone than to raise it ever so little. 
 The ambition of all boys, and probably 
 of very many young girls, is to read 
 such novels as their parents do not 
 habitually leave on the drawing-room 
 table. Every boy wants to read " Guy 
 Livingstone," and most boys do, with 
 or without their mamma's permission, 
 at a very early age. If we advanced 
 so far as the French realistic point of 
 view, that book would become a com- 
 mon property of boys and girls, and 
 perhaps "Nana," or "Les Mensonges," 
 would take its place in the estimation 
 of our children, — a consummation 
 devoutly to be prayed against. Our
 
 WHAT IT IS 33 
 
 '^ books for the young" are not, on the 
 whole, a success, unless we are willing 
 to modify the expression, and call them 
 books for the very young. There are 
 not in existence, I believe, enough 
 really interesting, and yet perfectly 
 harmless, novels to occupy the vast 
 amount of spare time which the young 
 seem ready to devote to literature, and 
 which we, the workers, seek in vain. 
 It is not always easy to see — it is cer- 
 tainly not easy for us to explain — why 
 we novelists occasionally introduce a 
 thought, a page, or a chapter in a novel 
 otherwise fit for a child's ears, which 
 may have the effect, so to say, of turn- 
 ing weak tea into bad whiskey. Yet 
 most of us have done it, contemplate 
 doing it, or at least go so far as to wish
 
 34 
 
 THE NOVEL 
 
 that we might allow ourselves the lib- 
 erty. Perhaps, if that liberty were 
 universally granted, we should desire 
 it less. Perhaps a number of my col- 
 leagues will not admit that they desire 
 it at all. I believe that in most cases 
 it is only a desire to escape from limi- 
 tations not unhke those overstepped 
 when an author writes much in dialect. 
 It looks as though it might be easier to 
 write interesting books with the help 
 of the knowledge of evil, as well as 
 with the help of the knowledge of 
 good; and after a certain number of 
 years of hard work a novelist instinc- 
 tively leans towards any method of 
 lightening his labours which presents 
 itself to his tired imagination. If he 
 yields once, he will probably yield again
 
 WHAT IT IS 35 
 
 and fall into the slipshod, careless ways 
 for which the overworked man is often 
 cruelly, if not altogether unjustly, 
 blamed. For the pubUc, which most 
 of us acknowledge to be a perfectly 
 just body in the long run, is as thor- 
 oughly unforgiving as Justice herself. 
 " He has written himself out." How 
 carelessly that little phrase is often 
 uttered ! How terrible it is for any 
 author to hear ! It is indeed a solemn 
 me7nento mori, the phrase of all others 
 of which we dread the application to 
 ourselves. For the romance of ro- 
 mancing soon disappears. After the 
 production of one, two, three, or half- 
 a-dozen novels, if the writer is really 
 what we call " a professional," and 
 must go on writing as a business, he
 
 36 THE NOVEL 
 
 discovers how serious is the occupation 
 in which he is engaged. Half-a-dozen 
 books, or less, will make a reputation ; 
 ten will sustain one ; twenty are in 
 ordinary cases a career. Does any 
 one, not an author, who reads these 
 lines guess at the labour, the imagina- 
 tion, the industry, the set purpose, the 
 courage, which are necessary to produce 
 a score of novels of an average good 
 quality? And if not, how can he 
 understand the intense longing for a 
 removal of restraint, for a little more 
 liberty that tempts the overwrought 
 intelligence into error? Far be it 
 from me to appeal in any way to the 
 public pity, for my own sake or in be- 
 half of others. We are no more to be 
 pitied when we break down than an old
 
 WHAT IT IS 37 
 
 shoemaker who can no longer see the 
 point of his bristles, and not so much 
 as a broken-winded cab-horse that has 
 never had any option in the choice of 
 a career. Let this be taken as an 
 explanation, not as an apology. To 
 judge from the standards of some peo- 
 ple, however, the worn-out noveHst, 
 whose works have filled the shelves of 
 the young girl of the period, might 
 find profitable employment if he would 
 adopt the tenets of realism and write 
 for the jaded taste of those who, 
 whether already old or what is called 
 still young, have exhausted their capac- 
 ity for bread and milk and crave red 
 pepper and stimulants. 
 
 The taste for " reahsm " is abroad, 
 and in opposition to all this. Out
 
 38 THE NOVEL 
 
 of the conflict arises that very curi- 
 ous production, the reaUstic novel 
 in English — than which no effort of 
 human genius has sailed nearer to the 
 wind, so to say, since Goethe wrote his 
 " Elective Affinities," which an Anglo- 
 Saxon young girl pronounced to be " a 
 dull book all about gardening." That 
 our prevailing moral literary purity is 
 to some extent assumed — not ficti- 
 tious — is shown by the undeniable 
 fact that women who blush scarlet, and 
 men who feel an odd sensation of 
 repulsion in reading some pages of 
 " Tom Jones " or " Peregrine Pickle," 
 are not conscious of any particular 
 shock when their sensibilities are 
 attacked in French. Some of them 
 call Zola a "pig" with great direct-
 
 WHAT IT IS 39 
 
 ness, but read all his books indus- 
 triously, and very often admit the fact. 
 When they call him names they for- 
 get that he writes for a great public 
 of men and women, not for young girls 
 
 — and when they read him he makes 
 them remember that he is a great man 
 
 — mistaken perhaps, possibly bad, 
 mightily coarse to no purpose, but 
 great nevertheless — a Nero of fiction. 
 But Zola's shadow, seen through the 
 veil of the English realistic novel, is 
 a monstrosity not to be tolerated. We 
 see the apparent contradiction in our 
 own taste between our theory and our 
 practice in reading, but we feel instinc- 
 tively that there is a foundation of 
 justice to account for the seeming dis- 
 crepancy. Both are coarse, but the
 
 40 THE NOVEL 
 
 one is great and bold, and the other is 
 damned by its own smallness and 
 meanness. The result of the desire 
 for realism in men who try to write 
 realistic novels for the clean-minded 
 American and English girl is unsatis- 
 factory. It is generally a photograph, 
 not a picture — a catalogue, not a 
 description. 
 
 A community of vices is a closer and 
 more direct bond between human be- 
 ings than a community of virtues. 
 This may be because vice needs sol- 
 idarity among those who yield to it in 
 order to be tolerated at all, whereas 
 virtue is its own reward, as the proverb 
 says, and is happily very often its own 
 protection — far more often than not, 
 in our day. This seems to be the rea-
 
 WHAT IT IS 41 
 
 son why the reahstic method is better 
 suited to the exposition of what is bad 
 than of what is good. Wordsworth 
 and Swinburne are two reahstic poets. 
 Most people do not hesitate to call 
 Wordsworth the greater man. I need 
 not express an opinion which few 
 would care to hear, but so far as the 
 relative effect of their work is con- 
 cerned it can hardly be denied that, 
 of the two, Swinburne appeals far more 
 strongly and directly to sinful human- 
 ity as it is. Wordsworth speaks to the 
 higher and more spiritual part of us, 
 indeed, but too often in language 
 which rouses no response in the more 
 human side of man's nature which is 
 most generally uppermost. These are 
 but illustrations of my meaning, not
 
 42 THE NOVEL 
 
 examples, which latter should be taken 
 among novelists — a task, however, 
 which may be left to the discriminating 
 reader.
 
 WHAT IT IS 43 
 
 TT has always seemed to me that the 
 perfect novel, as it ought to be, exists 
 somewhere in the state of the Platonic 
 idea, waiting to be set down on paper 
 by the first man of genius who receives 
 a direct literary inspiration. It must 
 deal chiefly with love ; for in that pas- 
 sion all men and women are most gen- 
 erally interested, either for its present 
 reality, or for the memories that soften 
 the coldly vivid recollection of an active 
 past, and shed a tender light in the 
 dark places of bygone struggles, or 
 because the hope of it brightens and 
 gladdens the path of future dreams. 
 The perfect novel must be clean and
 
 44 THE NOVEL 
 
 sweet, for it must tell its tale to all 
 mankind, to saint and sinner, pure and 
 defiled, just and unjust. It must have 
 the magic to fascinate and the power 
 to hold its reader from first to last. 
 Its realism must be real, of three 
 dimensions, not flat and photographic ; 
 its romance must be of the human 
 heart and truly human, that is, of the 
 earth as we all have found it ; its ideal- 
 ism must be transcendent, not measured 
 to man's mind, but proportioned to 
 man's soul. Its religion must be of 
 such grand and universal span as to 
 hold all worthy religions in itself. Con- 
 ceive, if possible, such a story, told in 
 language that can be now simple, now 
 keen, now passionate, and now sublime 
 — or rather, pray, do not conceive it, for
 
 WHAT IT IS 45 
 
 the modern novelist's occupation would 
 suddenly be gone, and that one book 
 would stand alone of its kind, making 
 all others worse than useless — ridicu- 
 lous, if not sacrilegious, by comparison. 
 Why must a novel-writer be either a 
 " realist " or a " romantist " ? And, if 
 the latter, why "romanticist" any more 
 than " reaUsticist " ? Why should a 
 good novel not combine romance and 
 reaHty in just proportions? Is there 
 any reason to suppose that the one 
 element must necessarily shut out the 
 other? Both are included in every- 
 day life, which would be a very dull 
 affair without something of the one, 
 and would be decidedly incoherent 
 without the other. Art, if it is "to 
 create and foster agreeable illusions,"
 
 46 THE NOVEL 
 
 as Napoleon is believed to have said 
 of it, should represent the real, but in 
 such a way as to make it seem more 
 agreeable and interesting than it actu- 
 ally is. That is the only way to create 
 "an agreeable illusion," and by no 
 other means can a novel do good while 
 remaining a legitimate novel and not 
 becoming a sermon, a treatise, or a 
 polemic. 
 
 It may reasonably be inquired whether 
 the prevailing and still growing taste for 
 fiction expresses a new and enduring 
 want of educated men and women. 
 The novel, as we understand the word, 
 is after all a very recent invention. 
 Considering that we do not find it in 
 existence until late in the last century, 
 its appearance must be admitted to 
 
 I
 
 WHAT IT IS 47 
 
 have been very sudden, its growth 
 fabulously rapid, and its development 
 enormous. The ancients had nothing 
 more like it than a few collections of 
 humorous and pathetic stories. The 
 Orientals, who might be supposed to 
 feel the need of it even more than we 
 do, had nothing but their series of fan- 
 tastic tales strung rather loosely to- 
 gether without general plan. Men and 
 women seem to have survived the dul- 
 ness of the dark age with the help of 
 the itinerant story-teller. The novel is 
 a distinctly modern invention, satisfy- 
 ing a modern want. In the ideal state 
 described with so much accuracy by 
 Mr. Bellamy, I believe the novel would 
 not sell. It would be incomprehensible, 
 or it would not be a novel at all, ac-
 
 48 THE NOVEL 
 
 cording to our understanding. Do away 
 practically with the struggle for life, 
 eliminate all the unfit and make the 
 surviving fittest perfectly comfortable 
 — men and women might still take a 
 curious interest in our present civihsa- 
 tion, but it would be of a purely his- 
 torical nature. To gratuitously invent 
 a tale of a poor man fighting for suc- 
 cess would seem to them a piece of 
 monstrously bad taste and ridiculously 
 useless. Are we tending to such a 
 state as that? There are those who 
 believe that we are — but a faith able 
 to remove mountains at " cut rates " 
 will not be more than enough to realise 
 their hopes.
 
 WHAT IT IS 
 
 49 
 
 TT may fairly be claimed that human- 
 ity has, within the past hundred 
 years, found a way of carrying a theatre 
 in its pocket ; and so long as humanity 
 remains what it is, it will delight in 
 taking out its pocket-stage and watch- 
 ing the antics of the actors, who are 
 so like itself and yet so much more 
 interesting. Perhaps that is, after all, 
 the best answer to the question, "What 
 is a novel?" It is, or ought to be, a 
 pocket-stage. Scenery, hght, shade, 
 the actors themselves, are made of 
 words, and nothing but words, more 
 or less cleverly put together. A play 
 is good in proportion as it represents
 
 50 THE NOVEL 
 
 the more dramatic, passionate, roman- 
 tic, or humorous sides of real hfe. A 
 novel is excellent according to the 
 degree in which it produces the illu- 
 sions of a good play — but it must not 
 be forgotten that the play is the thing, 
 and that illusion is eminently necessary 
 to success. 
 
 Every writer who has succeeded has 
 his own methods of creating such illu- 
 sion. Some of us are found out, and 
 some of us are not ; but we all do the 
 same thing in one way or another, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously. The tricks 
 of the art are without number, simple 
 or elaborate, easily learned or hard to 
 imitate, and many of us consider that 
 we have a monopoly of certain tricks 
 we call our own, and are unreasonably
 
 WHAT IT IS 
 
 51 
 
 angry when a competitor makes use of 
 them. 
 
 The means, all subservient to lan- 
 guage, are many, but the object is al- 
 ways one : to make the reader realise 
 as far as possible the writer's concep- 
 tion of his story. 
 
 That word " realise " has a greater 
 value and a wider application upon 
 the question which I am endeavouring 
 to treat so briefly than in ordinary 
 conversation. To realise means to 
 make real from one's own standpoint, 
 to see as vividly through the imagi- 
 nation what is partially imaginary as 
 what is altogether imagined ; in other 
 words, to call up an image as coinci- 
 dent with the representations of fact as 
 truth itself. Of course, in a printed
 
 52 THE NOVEL 
 
 book, the author has no means to at- 
 tain this end excepting language, and 
 upon the terms of language employed 
 must depend a very large part of his 
 success. Language is the tool with 
 which he makes his weapons, and these 
 in their turn may vary in manufacture 
 and temper according to his require- 
 ments. The most powerful weapon of 
 all is what is most commonly called 
 truth to nature. Goethe said of his 
 " Wilhelm Meister," " there is nothing 
 in it which I have not lived and nothing 
 exactly as I lived it" ; yet most people 
 would call "Wilhelm Meister" a fan- 
 tastic book. Other means of pro- 
 ducing an impression are local colour, 
 the use of dialects and foreign lan- 
 guages. Here I know I am touching
 
 WHAT IT IS 53 
 
 upon a very delicate point, and that I 
 risk wounding the sensibiHties of many- 
 writers and attacking the individual 
 tastes of many readers of fiction. Never- 
 theless, the mention of the dialect-novel 
 raises a question which is before the 
 literary grand jury of the world. As- 
 suredly every man has a prime right to 
 make use of the material at his dis- 
 posal; and if some particular dialect 
 forms a part of this stock in trade, he 
 is as free to employ it as an African 
 traveller, for instance, is free to intro- 
 duce his own reminiscences into a 
 novel, if he writes one. Colour alone 
 amuses some people, chiefly children. 
 Small boys and girls do not despise a 
 kaleidoscope as a toy on a rainy day, 
 and dialect without dramatic interest
 
 54 THE NOVEL 
 
 is colour without form or outline, and 
 some novels in dialect are nothing 
 more. But then, there are plenty of 
 works of fiction written in ordinary Eng- 
 lish which have not even that one 
 merit, and of these I do not wish to 
 say anything. Take a really good novel, 
 however, in which more than half the 
 pages are filled with dialogues in a lan- 
 guage not familiar to the EngHsh- 
 speaking public as a whole. Is not 
 the writer wilfully limiting his audience, 
 if not himself ? Is he not sacrificing 
 his privilege of addressing all men, for 
 the sake of addressing a few in terms 
 which they especially prefer? Is he not 
 preferring local popularity to broader 
 and more enduring reputation ? Could 
 he not, by the skilful use of description,
 
 WHAT IT IS 55 
 
 by a clever handling of grammar and 
 a careful selection of words, produce 
 an impression which should be more 
 widely felt, though less warmly received, 
 perhaps, in that one small public to 
 which he appeals ? Is he not, although 
 he be a first-rate man, often tempted 
 to lapses of literary conscience by 
 the peculiar facilities he finds in the 
 literary by-way he has chosen ? How 
 much of what is screaming farce in the 
 dialect of the few, would be funny if 
 translated into plain English for the 
 many? Wit and humour are intellect- 
 ual, and when genuine are susceptible 
 of being translated into almost all lan- 
 guages ; but dialect seems to me to 
 rank with puns, and with puns of a 
 particular local character. A practical
 
 56 THE NOVEL 
 
 demonstration of this is found in the 
 fact that stories in dialect, when told 
 and not read, are duller than any other 
 stories, unless the teller has the power 
 of imitating accents. Almost all Hm- 
 itations which a man willingly assumes 
 afford facihties for the sake of which 
 he assumes them.
 
 WHAT IT IS 57 
 
 OUT this is not the place for a study 
 of methods. So far as I have been 
 able, I have answered the question I 
 asked, and which stands at the head 
 of this essay. But I have answered it 
 in my own way. What am I, a novel- 
 writer, trying to do ? I am trying, with 
 such limited means as I have at my 
 disposal, to make httle pocket-theatres 
 out of words. I am trying to be archi- 
 tect, scene-painter, upholsterer, drama- 
 tist and stage-manager, all at once. 
 Is it any wonder if we novelists do 
 not succeed as well as we could wish, 
 when we try to be masters of so many 
 trades ?
 
 58 THE NOVEL 
 
 Nor is this all. The great develop- 
 ment of the modern superficial educa- 
 tion in society has brought with it a 
 thirst for knowledge which adds con- 
 siderably to the difficulties of the nov- 
 elist's art. There are few sciences, 
 few of the arts, few of the branches of 
 learning, in which the reading public 
 does not take some sort of interest. 
 That interest is not a profound one, 
 but with its growth encyclopaedias, 
 primers, and " cram-books " have mul- 
 tiplied exceedingly on the face of the 
 earth. Upon the slightest suspicion 
 the reader accuses the author of in- 
 accuracy, goes to his own, or his 
 friend's, or the Public Library's book- 
 shelves, takes down the " Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica," the "Century Dictionary,"
 
 WHAT IT IS 59 
 
 or " Larousse," and with cruel direct- 
 ness sets the author right. We are 
 expected to be omniscient, to under- 
 stand the construction of the telephone, 
 the latest theories concerning the chol- 
 era microbe, the mysteries of hypno- 
 tism, the Russian language, and the 
 nautical dictionary. We are supposed 
 to be intimately acquainted with the 
 writings of Macrobius, the music of 
 Wagner, and the Impressionist school 
 of painting. In these days when there 
 has been much discussion concerning 
 the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, 
 — concerning which "Punch" wisely 
 said they were probably written by 
 another man of the same name, — 
 the principal argument against Bacon's 
 authorship of them seems to me to be
 
 6o THE NOVEL 
 
 this : No one man of whom we have 
 ever known anything can be conceived 
 capable of having produced such an 
 enormous body of thoughtful work as 
 is contained in what is attributed to 
 Shakespeare and in what is known to 
 have been written by Bacon. And yet, 
 for the sake of a Httle profit and the 
 inducement of a modicum of glory, we 
 authors are sometimes expected to 
 rival both. The absurdity of this is 
 apparent to the most ordinary mind 
 and painfully so to the ordinary critic, 
 who, though he may never have written 
 a book, may very possibly know more 
 than we do about some subjects upon 
 which we are obliged to write. Dr. 
 Johnson, it will be remembered, said 
 that a man need not be a coach-builder
 
 WHAT IT IS 6 1 
 
 in order to say that a carriage is well 
 made. I am aware that many persons 
 will think my statement exaggerated, 
 or, if they do not, will say that they 
 prefer an honest love story to a tale 
 involving the intricacies of the modern 
 invention. And I believe there has 
 been a reaction in this respect. With 
 regard to the play, it is the opinion 
 of some of the best actors and most 
 successful managers now alive, that the 
 public, if it really knew what it wanted, 
 instead of being forced to feed upon 
 what it gets, would demand real, old- 
 fashioned love pieces rather than com- 
 edies, dramas and melodramas, in 
 which the leading actor is the mechani- 
 cian and the hero of the piece is 
 little more than a '• walking gentle-
 
 62 THE NOVEL 
 
 man." On my theory that the novel 
 is, or should be, a play, the same must 
 be approximately true about fiction. 
 An acquaintance with the developments 
 of modern science cannot do more 
 than lend a modern colour to the story, 
 and so far as that goes the more closely 
 acquainted we are with such things, 
 the better for us. But no one has a 
 right to demand that we should know 
 everything, in order to find fault with 
 us if we lose our heads over the revers- 
 ing gear of a locomotive or the most 
 approved fashion of rigging a top-gal- 
 lant studding-sail boom. 
 
 One may be pardoned for asking 
 sometimes whether the advance of sci- 
 ence does not almost mean the retreat 
 of thought. Again I protest against
 
 WHAT IT IS 63 
 
 the accusation of smart writing, which 
 is so easily brought, so hard to bear, 
 and so difficult to refute. I do not 
 mean that science thinks less as she 
 progresses, but I do mean to say that 
 there is much in favour of the homo 
 unius libri — the man of one book — 
 the man who reads less and thinks 
 more than his fellows. The wonders 
 of science are very attractive, many of 
 them are decidedly spectacular and may 
 be used by the author to amuse when 
 he cannot interest, but I doubt whether 
 books which depend upon them for suc- 
 cess will be much more popular fifty 
 years hence than " Sandford and Mer- 
 ton " or Paley's " Evidences of Chris- 
 tianity " are in our time. At that not 
 distant future date, our grandchildren
 
 64 THE NOVEL 
 
 will probably look upon our quoted won- 
 ders and marvels with about as much in- 
 terest as we regard the experiment of 
 asphyxiating a mouse under the receiver 
 of an air-pump, or making a piece of 
 paper stick to a piece of rubbed seahng- 
 wax and explaining that it is electricity. 
 Yet, to take an instance, medicine and 
 surgery play a considerable part in 
 modern light literature, and the fire- 
 engine is a distinct feature on the 
 modern stage. Generally speaking, I 
 venture to say that anything which 
 fixes the date of the novel not intended 
 to be historical is a mistake, from a lit- 
 erary point of view. It is not wise to 
 describe the cut of the hero's coat, nor 
 the draping of the heroine's gown, the 
 shape of her hat, nor the colour of his
 
 WHAT IT IS 65 
 
 tie. Ten years hence somebody may 
 buy the book and turn up his nose at 
 "those times." Until a date which 
 may still be called recent, it was cus- 
 tomary to play Shakespeare with the 
 dress of modern times. Garrick, I 
 think, played Macbeth in a full bot- 
 tomed wig. I may be wrong, but 
 I have the impression that what we 
 call stage costume first became com- 
 mon in his days and to some extent by 
 his individual efforts. In Shakespeare's 
 times, Achilles in "Troilus and Cres- 
 sida" dressed like Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 and Cymbeline perhaps hke Henry 
 VIII., to give himself an air of 
 antiquity. But there was nothing 
 absurd about the plays for all that, be- 
 cause they did not depend upon such
 
 66 THE NOVEL 
 
 trifles as dresses, ruffles — or fire- 
 engines for the emotions they excited 
 in the hearts of their listeners.
 
 WHAT IT IS 67 
 
 'T^HE danger of falling into absurdities 
 lies not in anachronisms of dress, 
 but in speeches that contradict senti- 
 ments, and actions that belie the char- 
 acter. We need not go far to find truth, 
 but having begun our search in one di- 
 rection, we must not wander to another, 
 or we shall fall out of the natural se- 
 quence of events upon which we depend 
 for the effect of reality. For a man of 
 superior gifts there is an easy but dan- 
 gerous way out of the difficulty. In- 
 stead of inventing his characters he may 
 take men and women who have really 
 lived and played parts in the world's 
 story and have made love, so to say, in
 
 68 THE NOVEL 
 
 the face of all humanity. In other 
 words, he may write an historical novel. 
 The historical novel occupies a po- 
 sition apart and separate from others, 
 but it does not follow that it should not 
 conform exactly to the conditions re- 
 quired of an ordinary work of fiction, 
 though it must undoubtedly possess 
 other qualities pecuhar to itself. It is 
 doubtful whether any genuine historical 
 novel has ever yet been written for the 
 sake of the history it contains. In nine 
 cases out of ten the writer has selected 
 his subject because it interests him, 
 because it has dramatic elements, and 
 possibly because he hopes to interest 
 his readers more readily by means of 
 characters and events altogether beyond 
 the reach of the carping critic. If this
 
 WHAT IT IS 69 
 
 is not the case, it is hard indeed to see 
 why the historical novel should be writ- 
 ten at all, seeing that it is neither fish, 
 flesh, nor fowl, but salad. It is indeed 
 a regrettable fact, but also an indubitable 
 one, that a good many people of our 
 time have derived their knowledge of 
 French history from the novels of Alex- 
 andre Dumas, and of some of the most 
 important events in the story of the 
 British Empire from those of Walter 
 Scott. But no one pretends that such 
 books are history deserving to be taught 
 as such, and the writers certainly made 
 no such pretensions themselves. Where 
 fact and fiction are closely linked to- 
 gether, the elements may obviously be 
 mixed in an infinite variety, and in any 
 possible degree of relative intensity —
 
 70 THE NOVEL 
 
 all wine and no water, or almost all 
 water and no wine to speak of. Pro- 
 vided that no attempt is made to palm 
 off the historical novel as a school-book, 
 there can be no real objection to it on 
 other grounds. 
 
 It seems quite certain that the oldest 
 form of dramatic art dealt solely with 
 subjects considered at the time to be 
 historical, or which constituted arti- 
 cles of belief. The Greek dramatists 
 founded all their plays, without excep- 
 tion, so far as I know, upon history, 
 myths, or traditions, either religious or 
 secular, and produced works of un- 
 rivalled beauty and enduring strength. 
 Some one once called the novel the 
 " modern epic." There is just enough 
 truth in the saying to give it social
 
 WHAT IT IS 71 
 
 currency in conversation, but it is true, 
 so far as we know, that the ancient epic 
 preceded the ancient drama, creating 
 the taste and the demand for emo- 
 tions which the dramatists subsequently 
 satisfied, and it was perhaps because 
 the epic was wholly historical in a 
 measure, that the drama was founded 
 upon an historical basis. The average 
 noveUst likes to make use of historical 
 facts principally because he knows that 
 his critics cannot impugn the possibility 
 of the situations he uses, while the latter 
 are so strong in themselves as to bear 
 the burden of the writer's faults with 
 comparative ease, if his talents are not 
 remarkable. If he is a man of genius, 
 he gets a certain amount of very valua- 
 able liberty by doing his "sensation
 
 72 THE NOVEL 
 
 work " with tragic facts widely known, 
 which help to produce in the reader's 
 mind an a priori impression of interest, 
 perfectly legitimate because perfectly 
 well grounded, but enormously in the 
 writer's favour. Altogether there is 
 much to be said for the historical novel, 
 if we take the view that the novel itself 
 is but a portable play ; and there is no 
 especial reason why we should be so 
 desperately true to the definitions of 
 common parlance as to say that the 
 novel must be a work of fiction and 
 nothing else. But in the case of the 
 historical novel there is a very impor- 
 tant proviso which must never be for- 
 gotten under any circumstances. It 
 must be good. The ordinary story 
 may be bad from an artistic point of
 
 WHAT IT IS 73 
 
 view, and may nevertheless succeed as 
 a literary speculation; but in treating 
 of history, where the personages are 
 great and the events are of stupendous 
 import, the distance which separates 
 the sublime from the ridiculous is even 
 less than the step to which Tom Payne 
 limited it. No author can make Julius 
 Caesar, Mary Stuart, or Louis XIV 
 ridiculous ; but no writer should forget 
 that they can make a laughing-stock of 
 him in his book almost as easily as 
 they could have done in real hfe. On 
 the whole, therefore, the historical 
 novel is always likely to prove more 
 dangerous to the writer than to the 
 reader, since, when it fails to be a great 
 book, it will in all likelihood be an 
 absurd one. For historical facts are
 
 74 THE NOVEL 
 
 limitations, and he who subjects him- 
 self to them must be willing to under- 
 take all the responsibility they imply. 
 Nothing is easier than to write a fan- 
 tastic tale against which no criticism 
 can be brought beyond a vague state- 
 ment that it is dull or worthless, and 
 not worth reading ; but . so soon as a 
 man deals with events which have 
 actually taken place, he is bounded on 
 all sides by a multitude of details with 
 which he must be acquainted and from 
 which he cannot escape. I have some- 
 times wondered whether Walter Savage 
 Landor did not really meditate writing 
 an historical novel at some time during 
 the evolution of the " Imaginary Conver- 
 sations." More than one work of the 
 kind, and assuredly of the highest order,
 
 WHAT IT IS 75 
 
 must have presented itself to his mind, 
 since he possessed in a supreme de- 
 gree the power most necessary to the 
 historical novehst, that of seizing the 
 dramatic points in the lives of historical 
 personages and of creating splendid 
 dramatic dialogues without at any time 
 compromising undoubted facts. In 
 other words, he knew how to combine 
 the romantic and the real in such true 
 and just proportions as to demonstrate 
 clearly that they may and should go 
 hand in hand. And this brings us 
 back to the great question of romance 
 and realism, two words which can 
 hardly fail to drop from the modern 
 writer's pen in treating of such a 
 subject.
 
 76 THE NOVEL 
 
 'T^HERE is much talk in our day of 
 the reahstic school of fiction, and 
 the romantic school, though not often 
 mentioned, is understood to be opposed 
 to it. Of course, it is easy to enter into 
 a long discussion about the exact mean- 
 ings of the two words ; but, on the 
 whole, it seems to be true that if the 
 people who talk about schools of fiction 
 mean anything or wish to mean any- 
 thing, which sometimes seems doubt- 
 ful, they mean this : the reahst pro- 
 poses to show men what they are ; the 
 romantist tries to show men what they 
 should be. It is very unlikely that 
 mankind will ever agree as to the rela-
 
 WHAT IT IS 77 
 
 tive merits of these two, and the dis- 
 cussion which was practically begun in 
 Plato's time is not likely to end so 
 long as people care what they read 
 or what they think. The most any one 
 can do is to give a personal opinion, 
 and that means, of course, that he who 
 expresses it commits himself and pub- 
 licly takes either the one side or the 
 other. For my part, I beheve that 
 more good can be done by showing 
 men what they may be, ought to be, 
 or can be, than by describing their 
 greatest weaknesses with the highest 
 art. We all know how bad we are; 
 but it needs much encouragement to 
 persuade some of us to beheve that we 
 can really be any better. To create 
 genuine interest, and afford rest and
 
 yS . THE NOVEL 
 
 legitimate amusement, without losing 
 sight of that fact, and to do so in a 
 more or less traditional way, seems to 
 be the profession of the novelist who 
 belongs to the romantic persuasion. 
 
 That novel-writing is a business I am 
 credibly informed by my publishers. 
 And since that is the case, it must be 
 taken for granted that it is a business 
 which to some extent must be practised 
 like any other and which will succeed 
 or fail in the hands of any particular 
 man according as he is more or less 
 fitted to carry it on. The quaUfications 
 for any business are three : native tal- 
 ent, education, and industry. Where 
 there is success of the right kind, the 
 talent and power of application must 
 be taken for granted. The education
 
 WHAT IT IS 79 
 
 is and always must be a question of cir- 
 cumstance. With regard to novel-writ- 
 ing, when I speak of education I am 
 not referring to it in the ordinary sense. 
 Some people take a great deal of inter- 
 est in concrete things, while others care 
 more for humanity. The education of 
 a novehst is the experience of men and 
 women which he has got at first hand 
 in the course of his own life, for he is 
 of that class to whom humanity offers a 
 higher interest than inanimate nature. 
 He can use nature and art only as a 
 scene and background upon which and 
 before which his personages move and 
 have their being. It is his business 
 to present his readers with something 
 which I have called the pocket-theatre, 
 something which every man may carry
 
 8o THE NOVEL 
 
 in his pocket, believing that he has only 
 to open it in order to look in upon the 
 theatre of the living world. To pro- 
 duce it, to prepare it, to put it into 
 a portable and serviceable shape, the 
 writer must know what that living world 
 is, what the men in it do and what the 
 women think, why women shed tears 
 and children laugh and young men make 
 love and old men repeat themselves. 
 While he is writing his book, his human 
 beings must be with him, before him, 
 moving before the eye of his mind and 
 talking into the ear of his heart. He 
 must have hved himself; he must have 
 loved, fought, suffered, and struggled 
 in the human battle. I would almost 
 say that to describe another's death 
 he must himself have died.
 
 WHAT IT IS 8 1 
 
 All this accounts perhaps for the 
 fact that readers are many and writers 
 few. The reader knows one side of 
 Hfe, his own, better than the writer 
 possibly can, and he reads with the 
 greatest interest those books which 
 treat of lives like his own. But the 
 writer must have seen and known many 
 phases of existence, and this is what 
 the education of the novelist means : 
 to know and understand, so far as he 
 is able, men and women who have 
 been placed in unusual circumstances. 
 And this need not and should not lead 
 him into creating altogether imaginary 
 characters, nor men and women whose 
 circumstances are not only unusual, 
 but altogether impossible. We see 
 grotesque pieces given at the theatre
 
 82 THE NOVEL 
 
 — too grotesque and too often given 
 
 — which make us laugh, but never 
 make us think. They would not make 
 good novels. The novel must amuse, 
 indeed, but should amuse reasonably, 
 from an intellectual point of view, 
 rather than as a piece of good fun. 
 Its object is to make one see men and 
 women who might really live, talk, and 
 act as they do in the book, and some 
 of whom one would perhaps like to 
 imitate. Its intention is to amuse and 
 please, and certainly not to teach or 
 preach ; but in oider to amuse well it 
 must be a finely- balanced creation, 
 neither hysterical with tears nor con- 
 vulsed with perpetual laughter. The 
 one is as tiring as the other and, in the 
 long run, as unnatural.
 
 WHAT IT IS 83 
 
 TT is easy, comparatively speaking, 
 to appeal to the emotions, but it is 
 hard to appeal to the heart. This may 
 sound somewhat contradictory at first, 
 but there is truth in it, nevertheless. 
 The outward emotions are in real life 
 much more the expressions of the tem- 
 perament than of what we call the heart. 
 We all know that there are men and 
 women who laugh and cry more easily 
 than others, and we are rather inclined 
 to beUeve that these are not they who 
 feel most deeply. A very difficult 
 question here presents itself. Bacon 
 says somewhere that we are apt to 
 extol the powers of the human intellect
 
 54 THE NOVEL 
 
 without invoking its aid as often as we 
 might. This extolHng of humanity has 
 been a fashion of late years, and it has 
 not yet disappeared, though its popu- 
 larity is waning fast. In England Sir 
 Andrew Clarke, M.D., has recently 
 talked learnedly of " the reHgion of the 
 body," and Lord Coleridge with elo- 
 quence of "the religion of the mind." 
 These things are good enough, no 
 doubt, but what of the religion of the 
 heart, which is after all the only relig- 
 ion there is — if the heart is the 
 earthly representative of the soul? 
 There are some people — fewer than 
 is generally supposed — who really do 
 not believe in the existence of the soul. 
 Let me tell them that they are very 
 near to denying the existence of the
 
 WHAT IT IS 85 
 
 heart. Perhaps some of them do, and 
 they may live to repent of their un- 
 behef in this world, if not in the next. 
 What is the heart, or, rather, what do 
 we in common conversation and writ- 
 ing understand by that word ? It looks 
 a great deal like attempting to define 
 belief, but belief has received an ex- 
 cellent definition, for belief is knowl- 
 edge and nothing else, so far as the 
 individual who holds it is concerned. 
 What we call the heart in each man 
 and woman seems to mean the whole 
 body of innate and inherited instincts, 
 impulses, and beliefs, taken together, 
 and in that relation to one another in 
 which they stand after they have been 
 acted upon throughout the individual's 
 life by the inward vicissitudes and the
 
 86 THE NOVEL 
 
 outward circumstances to which he has 
 been exposed. When all this is quies- 
 cent I think we call it Self. When 
 roused to emotional activity we call it 
 the Heart. But whatever we call it, 
 it is to this Self or Heart that every- 
 thing which is ethic and therefore per- 
 manent must appeal. 
 
 The foundation of good fiction and 
 good poetry seems to be ethic rather 
 than aesthetic. Everything in either 
 which appeals to the taste, that is, to 
 the aesthetic side, may ultimately per- 
 ish as a mere matter of fashion ; but 
 that which speaks to man as man, in- 
 dependently of his fashions, his habits, 
 and his tastes, must live and find a hear- 
 ing with humanity so long as humanity 
 is human. The right understanding of
 
 WIL\T IT IS 87 
 
 men and women leads to the right re- 
 lations of men and women, and in this 
 way, if in any, a novel may do good ; 
 when written to attain this end, it may 
 live; when addressed to the constant 
 element in human nature, it has as 
 good a right and as good a chance of 
 pleasing the men and women of the 
 world in our day, as it had to appeal to 
 the intellect of Pericles or to thrill the 
 delicate sensibilities of Aspasia. Their 
 novels were plays in outward effect, as 
 ours should be in inward substance, 
 and we must needs confess that the 
 form in which their intellectual artistic 
 luxuries were presented to them was 
 superior to that of the modern effort 
 included in four hundred pages at one 
 dollar and twenty-five cents. Possibly,
 
 88 THE NOVEL 
 
 even probably, it is unfair to us to com- 
 pare ourselves with Sophocles, Euripi- 
 des, and Aristophanes ; yet the com- 
 parison suggests itself if the definition 
 be true and if our novels really aspire 
 to be plays. 
 
 We have indeed something in our 
 favour which the genuine playwright 
 has not. We appeal entirely to the 
 imagination, and, unless we use alge- 
 braic fonnulcB or scientific discussion, 
 we give no standard measure in our 
 books by which to judge the whole. 
 We can call up surroundings which 
 never were and never can be possible 
 in the world, and if we are able to do it 
 well enough we can put impossible char- 
 acters upon our stage and make them 
 do impossible things, and the whole,
 
 WHAT IT IS 89 
 
 acting upon a predisposed imagina- 
 tion, may create for the moment some- 
 thing almost like belief in the mind of 
 the reader. We can conceive a tale 
 fantastic beyond the bounds of proba- 
 bility, and if there be a touch of nature 
 in it, we may for a while transport our 
 readers into Fairyland. We can clothe 
 all of this in poetic language if our 
 command of the English tongue be 
 equal to the occasion, and we can lend 
 pathos to a monster and heroism to 
 a burlesque man. But the writer of 
 plays for the real theatre cannot do 
 this ; if he does, he makes that which 
 in theatrical language is called a " bur- 
 lesque " or a "spectacle " ; or, if he be 
 a follower of the '' decadent school," 
 he may produce what he has decided
 
 90 THE NOVEL 
 
 to call by a new name — a production 
 not always conducive to a high belief 
 in human nature. 
 
 The writer of plays, if he write them 
 for actual performance, has living 
 interpreters, and they and he are 
 judged by the standards of real life. 
 He is to a great extent dependent upon 
 his actors for the effect he hopes to 
 produce, and they are dependent not 
 only upon him, upon their individual 
 education, depth of feeling, and power 
 of expression, but also upon the mate- 
 rial conditions and surroundings in which 
 they have to do their work. The most 
 dramatic scene of real life, if it actually 
 took place on the stage of a theatre, 
 would seem a very dull and tame affair 
 to any one who chanced to find him-
 
 WILA.T IT IS 91 
 
 self in the body of the house. The 
 fundamental lack of interest, until it 
 has been artificially aroused, is a gulf 
 not to be bridged by such simple means 
 as being really " natural." The art of 
 the actor lies in knowing the precise 
 degree of exaggeration necessary to 
 produce the impression that he is not 
 exaggerating at all — but exaggeration 
 there must be. Without it, neither the 
 words nor the actions can speak or 
 appeal to the intelligence of the spec- 
 tator. 
 
 But we noveUsts are in an easier 
 position in our relation to our audi- 
 ence. We are granted many privileges 
 and have many advantages which the 
 playwright has not ; for we can appeal 
 to the heart almost directly without
 
 92 THE NOVEL 
 
 the conscious intervention of practised 
 eyes and ears, used to realities and 
 eager to judge by real standards. We 
 speak of Edwin's great height, broad 
 shoulders, noble features and silken 
 moustache, and are not obhged to look 
 out for an actor who shall fulfil these 
 conditions of manly beauty before we 
 can be heard without being ridiculous. 
 Angelina's heavy hair is a fact on 
 paper; on the stage it is a wig, and 
 must be a good one. Her liquid blue 
 eyes are blue because we say they are ; 
 but it would annoy a playwright to find 
 that his leading actress had light gray 
 ones, when Edwin must compare them 
 to the depths of the blackest night.
 
 WHAT IT IS 93 
 
 A LL this is rather frivolous, perhaps ; 
 but a Httle frivolity is to the point 
 here, since there can be no amusement 
 without a dash of it, and we profess to 
 provide diversion to meet the public 
 demand. With most men who have 
 moulded, hacked, and chiselled the 
 world into history, to think has been 
 to act. With us novelists, so far as 
 the world need know us, to think is 
 to dream, and perhaps to dream only 
 little dreams of merely passing signifi- 
 cance. Few novelists are poets ; only 
 one or two have been statesmen ; none 
 have been conquerors. I suppose we 
 are very insignificant figures compared
 
 94 THE NOVEL 
 
 with the great ones of this earth ; but 
 to our comfort we may dream, and if 
 we need consolation we may console 
 ourselves, as Montaigne puts it, with 
 the art which small souls have to in- 
 terest great ones, ^'L'art qu'ont les 
 petites dines d''intei-esser les grandes.'^ 
 
 Frivolity is not weakness, though in 
 excess it may be a weakness. ^'Carpe 
 diem " is a good motto for the morning, 
 but in the evening " Didce desipere in 
 loco " is not to be despised as a piece 
 of advice. The frivohties of great men 
 and famous women have filled volumes 
 of memoirs, and are not without in- 
 terest to the Httle, as our little interests 
 do not always seem dull to the great. 
 The greater men are, the more heart 
 they have, good or bad, and the easier
 
 \VIL\T IT IS 95 
 
 it is to affect them through it, through 
 the multiform feeUngs which their 
 varied Hves have created within them, 
 or through the few strong sentiments 
 by which most of them are ruled, 
 guided, or impelled according as they 
 are conscientious, calculating, or im- 
 pulsive, and to some extent according 
 to their nationality, a matter which has 
 almost as much to do with the author's 
 dream as with the reader's subjective 
 interpretation of it, and which largely 
 determines the balance between senti- 
 ment and sentimentality. 
 
 Sentiment heightens the value of 
 works of fiction as sentimentality lowers 
 it. Sentimentality is to sentiment as 
 sensuality to passion. The distinction 
 is not a fine one and has grown common
 
 g6 THE NOVEL 
 
 enough in our day to be universally 
 understood. We owe it, I think, to the 
 international balance of sentiment and 
 sentimentality that the novelists of the 
 present day are the French, Anglo- 
 Saxons, and Russians. With all due 
 respect to the great German intelligence, 
 it does not seem capable of producing 
 what we call a novel though it turns out 
 most excellent plays. The German 
 mind, measured by our standard, is sen- 
 timental, not romantic. Perhaps there 
 is as much romance to be found in the 
 history and traditions of Germany up 
 to a date which I should place at about 
 forty years ago as there is anywhere 
 in the civilised world. Yet for some 
 reason or other, the modern German, as 
 I have said, seems to be more senti-
 
 WHAT IT IS 97 
 
 mental than romantic in his habits of 
 thought and feehng. 
 
 It is not possible in a paper of this 
 length to inquire into the foundations 
 of sentimentality and romance. Prac- 
 tically, however, what we call a roman- 
 tic life is one full of romantic incidents 
 which come unsought, as the natural 
 consequence and result of a man's or 
 a woman's character. It is therefore 
 necessarily an exceptional life, and as 
 such should have exceptional interest 
 for the majority. When our lives are 
 not filled with emotions, they are too 
 often crammed with insignificant de- 
 tails too insignificant to bear recording 
 in a novel, but yet making up for each 
 of us all the significance life has. The 
 great emotions are not every-day phe-
 
 98 THE NOVEL 
 
 nomena, and it is the desire to experi- 
 ence them vicariously which creates 
 the demand for fiction and thereby 
 and at the same time a demand for 
 emotion. This is felt more particularly 
 nowadays than formerly. 
 
 There was a great deal of artificiality 
 in the last century, and I believe very 
 Httle real emotion or true sentiment. 
 The evidences of the truth of this state- 
 ment appear sufficiently, I think, in 
 the current literature, the music, and 
 the social manners of that time. Of the 
 three the music alone has survived. 
 Musicians constitute, in a certain sense, 
 a caste, not unlike the Christian priest- 
 hood or the Buddhist brotherhood. 
 Their art is more distinctly handed 
 down from teacher to scholar, from
 
 WHAT IT IS 99 
 
 master to pupil, than any other, and 
 this may perhaps account for their 
 unwilHngness to break through their 
 traditions and accepted rules. Few 
 persons, however, can listen to an aver- 
 age symphony for orchestra, or sonata 
 for piano, especially to the allegro 
 movements, without being struck by 
 the utter conventionality and artifici- 
 ality of many parts of the production. 
 This, it seems to me, is not due to the 
 instinct of the musician, nor to the taste 
 of the musical public, but is a distinct 
 survival of a former existence, as much 
 as the caudal appendage or the buttons 
 on the backs of our coats. This is 
 probably rank heresy from the musical 
 point of view, and, like all I say here, 
 is a mere personal opinion; but to
 
 lOO THE NOVEL 
 
 judge by analogy from the remains of 
 other arts cultivated a hundred years 
 ago, there seems to be some founda- 
 tion for it. Can any one see such plays 
 acted, for instance, as Sheridan's, with- 
 out being forcibly struck by the total 
 absence of spontaneity and the absolute 
 submission to social routine of the av- 
 erage society man and woman of those 
 days. Sheridan's comedies are un- 
 doubtedly as true to their times on the 
 one hand as they are to human nature 
 on the other, but the humanity of them 
 is thrown into vivid and strong relief 
 by the artificiality of the elements in 
 the midst of which the chief actors 
 have their being. As for the literature, 
 it is hardly necessary for me to defend 
 the statement that it was conventional.
 
 WHAT IT IS lOI 
 
 There was an intellectual dress, as it 
 were, put on by the man of genius of 
 those times. It hung loosely upon 
 Goldsmith's irregular frame. It sat 
 close, well-fitting and fashionable upon 
 Addison, but Samuel Johnson's mighty 
 Hmbs almost burst its seams and be- 
 trayed at every movement the giant 
 who wore it. On a sudden the fashion 
 changed, and it has not done changing 
 yet. 
 
 The French Revolution seems to 
 have introduced an emotional phase 
 into social history, and to it we must 
 attribute directly or indirectly many of 
 our present tastes and fashions. With 
 it began the novel in France. With it 
 the novel in the English language made 
 a fresh start and assumed a new form.
 
 I02 THE NOVEL 
 
 To take a very simple view of the ques- 
 tion, I should like to hazard, as a guess, 
 the theory that when the world had 
 lived at a very high pressure during the 
 French Revolution, the wars of Napo- 
 leon, and what has been called the 
 "awakening of the peoples," it had 
 acquired permanently "the emotional 
 habit," just as a man who takes opium 
 or morphia cannot do without the one 
 or the other. There was a general 
 desire felt to go on experiencing with- 
 out dangerous consequences those vary- 
 ing conditions of hope, fear, disap- 
 pointment and triumph in which the 
 whole world's nervous system had 
 thrilled daily during so many years and 
 at such fearful cost. The children of 
 the women who had gone to the scaffold
 
 WHAT IT IS 103 
 
 with Marie Antoinette, the sons of the 
 men who had charged with Murat, 
 who had stood by La Tour d'Auvergne, 
 or who had fired their parting shot 
 with Ney, were not satisfied to dwell in 
 returning peace and reviving prosper- 
 ity with nothing but insipid tales of 
 shepherds and shepherdesses to amuse 
 them. They wanted sterner, rougher 
 stuff. They created a demand, and it 
 was forthwith supphed, and their chil- 
 dren and children's children have fol- 
 lowed their progenitors' footsteps in 
 war and have adopted their tastes in 
 peace.
 
 104 THE NOVEL 
 
 I\ A ODERN civilisation, too, has done 
 what it could to stir the hearts of 
 men. Evil communications corrupt 
 good manners, and it is not a play 
 upon words to say that the increased 
 facility of actual communications has 
 widened and deepened those channels 
 of communication which are evil, and 
 increased at the same time the demand 
 for all sorts of emotion, bad or good. 
 Not that emotion of itself is bad. It 
 is often the contrary. Even the mo- 
 mentary reflection of true love is a 
 good thing in itself. It is good that 
 men and women should realise that a 
 great affection is, or can be, a reality
 
 WHAT IT IS 105 
 
 to many as well as a convenient amuse- 
 ment or a heart-rending drama to a 
 few. 
 
 Modern civilisation has created mod- 
 ern vices, modern crimes, modern vir- 
 tues, austerities, and generosities. The 
 crimes of to-day were not dreamed of 
 a hundred years ago, any more than 
 the subhmity of the good deeds done 
 in our time to remedy our time's mis- 
 takes. And between the angel and 
 the beast of this ending century lie 
 great multitudes of ever-shifting, ever- 
 changing lives, neither very bad nor 
 very good, but in all cases very differ- 
 ent from what lives used to be in the 
 good old days when time meant time 
 and not money. There, too, in that 
 vast land of mediocrities, emotions
 
 I06 THE NOVEL 
 
 play a part of which our grandfathers 
 never heard, and being real, of the liv- 
 ing, and of superior interest to those 
 who feel them, reflect themselves in 
 the novel of to-day, diverting the course 
 of true love into very tortuous chan- 
 nels and varying the tale that is ever 
 young with features that are often new. 
 Within a short few months I myself 
 have lived in a land where modern 
 means of communication are not, and 
 I have come to live here, where applied 
 science is doing her best to eliminate 
 distance as a factor from the equation 
 of exchanges, financial and intellectual. 
 The difference between the manifesta- 
 tions of human feeling in Southern 
 Italy and North America is greater 
 and wider than can be explained in
 
 WHAT IT IS 107 
 
 intelligible terms. Yet it is but skin- 
 deep. Sentiment, sentimentality, taste, 
 fashion, daily speech, acquired science, 
 and transmitted tradition cleanse, soil, 
 model, or deface the changing shell of 
 mutable mortality, and nothing which 
 appeals to that shell alone can have 
 permanent hfe ; but the prime im- 
 pulses of the heart are, broadly speak- 
 ing, the same in all ages and almost 
 in all races. The brave man's beats 
 as strongly in battle to-day, the cow- 
 ard's stands as suddenly still in the 
 face of danger, boys and girls still play 
 with love, men and women still suffer 
 for love, and the old still warn youth 
 and manhood against love's snares — 
 all that and much more comes from 
 depths not reached by civilisations nor
 
 Io8 THE NOVEL 
 
 changed by fashions. Those deep 
 waters the real novel must fathom, 
 sounding the tide-stream of passion 
 and bringing up such treasures as lie 
 far below and out of sight — out of 
 reach of the individual in most cases 
 — until the art of the story-teller makes 
 him feel that they are or might be his. 
 Caesar commanded his legionaries to 
 strike at the face. Humanity, the nov- 
 elist's master, bids him strike only at 
 the heart. 
 
 THE END
 
 LIST OF WORKS 
 
 BY 
 
 Mr. F. Marion Crawford. 
 
 Uniformly bound in Cloth. i2mo. 
 Price, $1.00 each. 
 
 Jtist JPublished. 
 
 CHILDREN OF THE KING. 
 
 A Tale of Southern Italy. 
 
 Macmillan & Co. take pleasure in announcing that 
 they have made arrangements to add the following vol- 
 umes (with the author's latest revisions) to their uni- 
 form edition of the works of Mr. F. Marion Crawford, 
 thereby enabling them to issue a complete edition of all 
 his novels. 
 
 A ROMAN SINGER. 
 
 A'ocu Ready. 
 New Edition, revised and corrected. 
 
 TO LEEWARD. 
 
 February. 
 
 PAUL PATOFF. 
 
 March. 
 
 AN AMERICAN POLITICIAN. 
 
 April. 
 New Edition, revised and partly rewritten. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., NEW YORK.
 
 EJe Saractnesca $txm. 
 
 " His greatest achievement is the group of 
 three novels on Modern Italy. The three 
 books present a wonderfully vivid picture of 
 Italian social life." — N'. Y. Life. 
 
 SARACINESCA. 
 
 " His highest achievement, as yet, in the 
 realms of fiction. The work has two distinct 
 merits, either of which would serve to make 
 it great, — that of telling a perfect story in a 
 perfect way, and of giving a graphic picture 
 of Roman society in the last days of the Pope's 
 temporal power. . . . The story is exquisitely 
 told." — Boston Traveller. 
 
 " One of the most engrossing novels we have 
 ever read." — Boston Times. 
 
 SANT' ILARIO. 
 A Sequel to "Saracinesca.'' 
 
 " A singularly powerful and beautiful story. 
 . . . Admirably developed, with a natural- 
 ness beyond praise. ... It brings out what 
 is most impressive in human action, without 
 owing any of its effectiveness to sensationalism 
 or artifice." — New York Tribune. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., NEW YORK.
 
 DON ORSINO. 
 
 A Continuation of *' Saracinesca " and 
 " Sant' Ilario." 
 
 " The third in a remarkable series of novels 
 dealing with three generations of the Saraci- 
 nesca family, entitled respectively ' Saraci- 
 nesca,' ' Sant' Ilario,' and * Don Orsino,' and 
 these novels present an important study of 
 Italian life, customs, and conditions during the 
 present century. The ' new Italy ' is strikingly 
 revealed in ' Don Orsino.' " — Boston Budget. 
 
 " We are inclined to regard the book as the 
 most ingenious of all Mr. Crawford's fictions. 
 Certainly it is the best novel of the season." — 
 Evening Bulletin. 
 
 " The plot of the story (' Don Orsino ') is one 
 of the best that the author has constructed. The 
 mystery of ]Maria Consuelo's birth and her re- 
 lation to Spicca is most ingenious, continually 
 suggesting a false trail to the reader, and its 
 end surprising and satisfying him with its ade- 
 quateness. When you combine all these things 
 with a wonderful beauty of diction and facility 
 of expression, you have that very difficult 
 achievement — a thoroughly good modern 
 romance." — Life. 
 
 The three volumes in a box, $3.00, 
 Half morocco, $8.00. Half calf , $7.50. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., NEW YORK. 
 3
 
 THE THREE FATES. 
 
 " Mr. Crawford has manifestly brought his 
 best qualities as a student of human nature and 
 his finest resources as a master of an original 
 and picturesque style to bear upon this story. 
 Taken for all in all it is one of the most pleas- 
 ing of all his productions in fiction, and it 
 affords a view of certain phases of American, 
 or perhaps we should say of New York, life 
 that have not hitherto been treated with any- 
 thing like the same adequacy and felicity." — 
 Boston Beacon. 
 
 THE WITCH OF PRAGUE. 
 
 A Fantastic Tale. 
 Illustrated by W. J. Hennessy. 
 
 "Mr. Crawford has written in many keys, 
 but never in so strange a one as that which 
 dominates 'The Witch of Prague,' . . . The 
 artistic skill with which this extraordinary story 
 is constructed and carried out is admirable and 
 delightful. . . . Mr. Crawford has scored a 
 decided triumph, for the interest of the tale is 
 sustained throughout. ... A very remarkable, 
 powerful, and interesting story." — New York 
 Tribune. 
 
 "Mr. Crawford has not lost his oft-proved 
 skill in holding his readers' attention, and there 
 are single scenes and passages in this book that 
 rival in intensity anything he has ever writ- 
 ten." — Christian Union. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., NEW YORK. 
 
 4
 
 MR. ISAACS. 
 
 A Tale of Modern India. 
 
 " The characters are original, and one does not 
 recognize any of the hackneyed personages who 
 are so apt to be considered indispensable to nov- 
 ehsts, and which, dressed in one guise or another, 
 are but the marionettes, which are all dominated 
 by the same mind, moved by the same motive 
 force. The men are all endowed with individual- 
 ism and independent life and thought. . . . There 
 is a strong tinge of mysticism about the book 
 which is one of its greatest charms." — Boston 
 Transcript. 
 
 " This is a fine and noble story. It has fresh- 
 ness like a new and striking scene on which one 
 has never looked before. It has character and 
 individuality. It has meaning. It is lofty and 
 uplifting. It is strongly, sweetly, tenderly written. 
 It is in all respects an uncommon novel. ... In 
 fine, ' Mr. Isaacs ' is an acquaintance to be made." 
 — The Literary World. 
 
 DR. CLAUDIUS. 
 
 A True Story. 
 
 " ' Dr. Claudius ' is surprisingly good, coming 
 after a story of so much merit as ' Mr. Isaacs.' 
 The hero is a magnificent specimen of humanity, 
 and sympathetic readers will be fascinated by 
 his chivalrous wooing of the beautiful American 
 countess." — Boston Traveller. 
 
 " The characters are strongly marked without 
 any suspicion of caricature, and the author's 
 ideas on social and political subjects are often 
 briUiant and always striking. It is no exaggera- 
 tion to say that there is not a dull page in the 
 book, which is peculiarly adapted for the recrea- 
 tion of student or thinker." — Living Church. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., NEV/ YORK. 
 
 5
 
 WITH THE IMMORTALS. 
 
 "Altogether an admirable piece of art worked 
 in the spirit of a thorough artist. Every reader 
 of cultivated tastes will find it a book prolific in 
 entertainment of the most refined description, 
 and to all such we commend it heartily." — Bos- 
 ton Saturday Evening Gazette. 
 
 " The book will be found to have a fascination 
 entirely new for the habitual reader of novels. 
 Indeed, Mr. Crawford has succeeded in taking 
 his readers quite above the ordinary plane of 
 novel interest." — Boston Advertiser. 
 
 MARZIO'S CRUCIFIX. 
 
 " We take the liberty of saying that this work 
 belongs to the highest department of character- 
 painting in words." — Churchman. 
 
 " ' Marzio's Crucifix ' is another of those tales 
 of modern Rome which show the author so much 
 at his ease. A subtle compound of artistic feel- 
 ing, avarice, malice, and criminal frenzy is this 
 carver of silver chalices and crucifixes." — The 
 Times. 
 
 " It is as if it could not have been written 
 otherwise, so naturally does the story unfold it- 
 self, and so logical and consistent is the sequence 
 of incident after incident. As a story, ' Marzio's 
 Crucifix ' is perfectly constructed." — New York 
 Commercial Advertiser. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., NEW YORK.
 
 KHALED. 
 
 A Story of Arabia. 
 
 " That it is beautifully written and holds the 
 interest of the reader, fanciful as it all is, to the 
 very end, none who know the depth and artistic 
 finish of Mr. Crawford's work need be told." — 
 The Chicago Times. 
 
 " It abounds in stirring incidents and barbaric 
 picturesqueness ; and the love struggle of the 
 unloved Khaled is manly in its simplicity and 
 noble in its ending. Mr. Crawford has done 
 nothing better than, if he has done anything as 
 good as, ' Khaled.' " — The Mail and Express. 
 
 A TALE OF A LONELY 
 PARISH. 
 
 " It is a pleasure to have anything so perfect 
 of its kind as this brief and vivid story. ... It is 
 doubly a success, being full of human sympathy, 
 as well as thoroughly artistic in its nice balancing 
 of the unusual with the commonplace, the clever 
 juxtaposition of innocence and guilt, comedy 
 and tragedy, simplicity and intrigue." — Critic. 
 
 " It has no defects. It is neither trifling nor 
 trivial. It is a work of art. It is perfect." — Bos- 
 ion Beacon. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., NEW YORK. 
 
 7
 
 ZOROASTER. 
 
 " The field of Mr. Crawford's imagination ap- 
 pears to be unbounded. ... In ' Zoroaster ' Mr. 
 Crawford's winged fancy ventures a daring flight. 
 . . . Yet ' Zoroaster ' is a novel rather than a 
 drama. It is a drama in the force of its situa- 
 tions and in the poetry and dignity of its lan- 
 guage ; but its men and women are not men and 
 women of a play. By the naturalness of their 
 conversation and behavior they seem to live and 
 lay hold of our human sympathy more than the 
 same characters on a stage could possibly do." 
 — The Ti7nes. 
 
 A CIGARETTE MAKER'S 
 ROMANCE. 
 
 " It is a touching romance, filled with scenes 
 of great dramatic power." — Boston Commercial 
 Bulletin, 
 
 " It is full of life and movement, and is one of 
 the best of Mr. Crawford's books." — Boston Sat- 
 urday Evening Gazette. 
 
 GREIFENSTEIN. 
 
 " Another notable contribution to the literature 
 of the day. It possesses originality in its con- 
 ception and is a work of unusual ability. Its 
 interest is sustained to the close, and it is an ad- 
 vance even on the previous work of this talented 
 author. Like all Mr. Crawford's work, this novel 
 is crisp, clear, and vigorous, and will be read with 
 a great deal of interest." — New York Evening 
 Telegram. 
 
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