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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12743 ***
+
+THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
+
+By
+
+ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+NOVELS
+
+A Man from the North
+Anna of the Five Towns
+Leonora
+A Great Man
+Sacred and Profane Love
+Whom God hath Joined
+Buried Alive
+The Old Wives' Tale
+The Glimpse
+Helen with the High Hand
+Clayhanger
+The Card
+Hilda Lessways
+The Regent
+
+FANTASIAS
+
+The Grand Babylon Hotel
+The Gates of Wrath
+Teresa of Watling Street
+The Loot of Cities
+Hugo
+The Ghost
+The City of Pleasure
+
+SHORT STORIES
+
+Tales of the Five Towns
+The Grim Smile of the Five Towns
+The Matador of the Five Towns
+
+BELLES-LETTRES
+
+Journalism for Women
+Fame and Fiction
+How to become an Author
+The Reasonable Life
+How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
+The Human Machine
+Literary Taste
+The Feast of St Friend
+Those United States
+The Plain Man and His Wife
+Paris Nights
+
+DRAMA
+
+Polite Farces
+Cupid and Common Sense
+What the Public Wants
+The Honeymoon
+The Great Adventure
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+(_In Collaboration with EDEN PHILLPOTTS_)
+The Sinews of War: A Romance
+The Statue: A Romance
+
+(_In Collaboration with EDWARD KNOBLAUCH_)
+Milestones: A Play
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
+
+By
+
+ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
+
+
+Printed in 1914
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I.
+SEEING LIFE
+
+PART II.
+WRITING NOVELS
+
+PART III.
+WRITING PLAYS
+
+PART IV.
+THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+SEEING LIFE
+
+
+I
+
+
+A young dog, inexperienced, sadly lacking in even primary education,
+ambles and frisks along the footpath of Fulham Road, near the mysterious
+gates of a Marist convent. He is a large puppy, on the way to be a dog
+of much dignity, but at present he has little to recommend him but that
+gawky elegance, and that bounding gratitude for the gift of life, which
+distinguish the normal puppy. He is an ignorant fool. He might have
+entered the convent of nuns and had a fine time, but instead he steps
+off the pavement into the road, the road being a vast and interesting
+continent imperfectly explored. His confidence in his nose, in his
+agility, and in the goodness of God is touching, absolutely painful to
+witness. He glances casually at a huge, towering vermilion construction
+that is whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded by a glint of
+brass and a wisp of steam; and then with disdain he ignores it as less
+important than a mere speck of odorous matter in the mud. The next
+instant he is lying inert in the mud. His confidence in the goodness of
+God had been misplaced. Since the beginning of time God had ordained him
+a victim.
+
+An impressive thing happens. The motor-bus reluctantly slackens and
+stops. Not the differential brake, nor the foot-brake, has arrested the
+motor-bus, but the invisible brake of public opinion, acting by
+administrative transmission. There is not a policeman in sight.
+Theoretically, the motor-'bus is free to whiz onward in its flight to
+the paradise of Shoreditch, but in practice it is paralysed by dread. A
+man in brass buttons and a stylish cap leaps down from it, and the
+blackened demon who sits on its neck also leaps down from it, and they
+move gingerly towards the puppy. A little while ago the motor-bus might
+have overturned a human cyclist or so, and proceeded nonchalant on its
+way. But now even a puppy requires a post-mortem: such is the force of
+public opinion aroused. Two policemen appear in the distance.
+
+"A street accident" is now in being, and a crowd gathers with calm joy
+and stares, passive and determined. The puppy offers no sign whatever;
+just lies in the road. Then a boy, destined probably to a great future
+by reason of his singular faculty of initiative, goes to the puppy and
+carries him by the scruff of the neck, to the shelter of the gutter.
+Relinquished by the boy, the lithe puppy falls into an easy horizontal
+attitude, and seems bent upon repose. The boy lifts the puppy's head to
+examine it, and the head drops back wearily. The puppy is dead. No cry,
+no blood, no disfigurement! Even no perceptible jolt of the wheel as it
+climbed over the obstacle of the puppy's body! A wonderfully clean and
+perfect accident!
+
+The increasing crowd stares with beatific placidity. People emerge
+impatiently from the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus and slip down
+from its back, and either join the crowd or vanish. The two policemen
+and the crew of the motor-bus have now met in parley. The conductor and
+the driver have an air at once nervous and resigned; their gestures are
+quick and vivacious. The policemen, on the other hand, indicate by their
+slow and huge movements that eternity is theirs. And they could not be
+more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had them manacled and
+leashed. The conductor and the driver admit the absolute dominion of the
+elephantine policemen; they admit that before the simple will of the
+policemen inconvenience, lost minutes, shortened leisure, docked wages,
+count as less than naught. And the policemen are carelessly sublime,
+well knowing that magistrates, jails, and the very Home Secretary on his
+throne--yes, and a whole system of conspiracy and perjury and
+brutality--are at their beck in case of need. And yet occasionally in
+the demeanour of the policemen towards the conductor and the driver
+there is a silent message that says: "After all, we, too, are working
+men like you, over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in
+the service of the pitiless and dishonest public. We, too, have wives
+and children and privations and frightful apprehensions. We, too, have
+to struggle desperately. Only the awful magic of these garments and of
+the garter which we wear on our wrists sets an abyss between us and
+you." And the conductor writes and one of the policemen writes, and they
+keep on writing, while the traffic makes beautiful curves to avoid them.
+
+The still increasing crowd continues to stare in the pure blankness of
+pleasure. A close-shaved, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with a copy of
+_The Sportsman_ in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus,
+starts stamping his feet. "I was knocked down by a taxi last year," he
+says fiercely. "But nobody took no notice of _that_! Are they going to
+stop here all the blank morning for a blank tyke?" And for all his
+respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet
+of disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity into the
+thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare. Then a man passes
+wheeling a muck-cart. And he stops and talks a long time with the other
+uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd
+never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops and picks
+up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and
+yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and passes on. And only that
+which is immortal and divine of the puppy remains behind, floating
+perhaps like an invisible vapour over the scene of the tragedy.
+
+The crowd is tireless, all eyes. The four principals still converse and
+write. Nobody in the crowd comprehends what they are about. At length
+the driver separates himself, but is drawn back, and a new parley is
+commenced. But everything ends. The policemen turn on their immense
+heels. The driver and conductor race towards the motor-bus. The bell
+rings, the motor-bus, quite empty, disappears snorting round the corner
+into Walham Green. The crowd is now lessening. But it separates with
+reluctance, many of its members continuing to stare with intense
+absorption at the place where the puppy lay or the place where the
+policemen stood. An appreciable interval elapses before the "street
+accident" has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon.
+
+The members of the crowd follow their noses, and during the course of
+the day remark to acquaintances:
+
+"Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the Fulham Road this morning!
+Killed dead!"
+
+And that is all they do remark. That is all they have witnessed. They
+will not, and could not, give intelligible and interesting particulars
+of the affair (unless it were as to the breed of the dog or the number
+of the bus-service). They have watched a dog run over. They analyse
+neither their sensations nor the phenomenon. They have witnessed it
+whole, as a bad writer uses a _cliché_. They have observed--that is to
+say, they have really seen--nothing.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+It will be well for us not to assume an attitude of condescension
+towards the crowd. Because in the matter of looking without seeing we
+are all about equal. We all go to and fro in a state of the observing
+faculties which somewhat resembles coma. We are all content to look and
+not see.
+
+And if and when, having comprehended that the _rôle_ of observer is not
+passive but active, we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves from
+the coma and really to see the spectacle of the world (a spectacle
+surpassing circuses and even street accidents in sustained dramatic
+interest), we shall discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act
+of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. Let a man
+resolve: "I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of a
+morning," and the probability if that for many mornings he will see
+naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective will be
+absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly
+attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental and universal.
+Travel makes observers of us all, but the things which as travellers we
+observe generally show how unskilled we are in the new activity.
+
+A man went to Paris for the first time, and observed right off that the
+carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof like a tramcar. He
+was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that he observed almost
+nothing else. This enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his
+perspective. He returned home and announced that Paris was a place where
+people rode on the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the
+first time--and no English person would ever guess the phenomenon which
+vanquished all others in her mind on the opening day. She saw a cat
+walking across a street. The vision excited her. For in Paris cats do
+not roam in thoroughfares, because there are practically no houses with
+gardens or "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement
+of cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first
+presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very early and
+making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn in quest of
+interesting material. And the one note I gathered was that the ground in
+front of the all-night coffee-stalls was white with egg-shells! What I
+needed then was an operation for cataract. I also remember taking a man
+to the opera who had never seen an opera. The work was _Lohengrin_. When
+we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather stiff." And it was all
+he did say. We went and had a drink. He was not mistaken. His
+observation was most just; but his perspective was that of those
+literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out three slips of
+syntax, and three lines to an ungrammatical admission that the novel
+under survey is not wholly tedious.
+
+But a man may acquire the ability to observe even a large number of
+facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of observation. I have
+read, in some work of literary criticism, that Dickens could walk up one
+side of a long, busy street and down the other, and then tell you in
+their order the names on all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an
+illustration of his great powers of observation. Dickens was a great
+observer, but he would assuredly have been a still greater observer had
+he been a little less pre-occupied with trivial and unco-ordinated
+details. Good observation consists not in multiplicity of detail, but in
+co-ordination of detail according to a true perspective of relative
+importance, so that a finally just general impression may be reached in
+the shortest possible time. The skilled observer is he who does not have
+to change his mind. One has only to compare one's present adjusted
+impression of an intimate friend with one's first impression of him to
+perceive the astounding inadequacy of one's powers of observation. The
+man as one has learnt to see him is simply not the same man who walked
+into one's drawing-room on the day of introduction.
+
+There are, by the way, three sorts of created beings who are
+sentimentally supposed to be able to judge individuals at the first
+glance: women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a mystic gift with which
+rumour credits them, they are never mistaken. It is merely not true.
+Women are constantly quite wrong in the estimates based on their
+"feminine instinct"; they sometimes even admit it; and the matrimonial
+courts prove it _passim_. Children are more often wrong than women. And
+as for dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by
+plausible scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. Not seldom
+have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion of deceived dogs.
+Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the infallibility of women,
+children, and dogs, will persist in Anglo-Saxon countries.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+One is curious about one's fellow-creatures: therefore one watches them.
+And generally the more intelligent one is, the more curious one is, and
+the more one observes. The mere satisfaction of this curiosity is in
+itself a worthy end, and would alone justify the business of
+systematised observation. But the aim of observation may, and should, be
+expressed in terms more grandiose. Human curiosity counts among the
+highest social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest
+defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of character
+and temperament and thereby to a better understanding of the springs of
+human conduct. Observation is not practised directly with this high end
+in view (save by prigs and other futile souls); nevertheless it is a
+moral act and must inevitably promote kindliness--whether we like it or
+not. It also sharpens the sense of beauty. An ugly deed--such as a deed
+of cruelty--takes on artistic beauty when its origin and hence its
+fitness in the general scheme begin to be comprehended. In the
+perspective of history we can derive an æsthetic pleasure from the
+tranquil scrutiny of all kinds of conduct--as well, for example, of a
+Renaissance Pope as of a Savonarola. Observation endows our day and our
+street with the romantic charm of history, and stimulates charity--not
+the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious charity which
+puts itself to the trouble of understanding. The one condition is that
+the observer must never lose sight of the fact that what he is trying to
+see is life, is the woman next door, is the man in the train--and not a
+concourse of abstractions. To appreciate all this is the first inspiring
+preliminary to sound observation.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The second preliminary is to realise that all physical phenomena are
+interrelated, that there is nothing which does not bear on everything
+else. The whole spectacular and sensual show--what the eye sees, the ear
+hears, the nose scents, the tongue tastes and the skin touches--is a
+cause or an effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as
+negligible, as not forming part of the equation. Hence he who would
+beyond all others see life for himself--I naturally mean the novelist
+and playwright--ought to embrace all phenomena in his curiosity. Being
+finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot! But he can, by obtaining a broad
+notion of the whole, determine with some accuracy the position and
+relative importance of the particular series of phenomena to which his
+instinct draws him. If he does not thus envisage the immense background
+of his special interests, he will lose the most precious feeling for
+interplay and proportion without which all specialism becomes distorted
+and positively darkened.
+
+Now, the main factor in life on this planet is the planet itself. Any
+logically conceived survey of existence must begin with geographical and
+climatic phenomena. This is surely obvious. If you say that you are not
+interested in meteorology or the configurations of the earth, I say that
+you deceive yourself. You are. For an east wind may upset your liver and
+cause you to insult your wife. Beyond question the most important fact
+about, for example, Great Britain is that it is an island. We sail amid
+the Hebrides, and then talk of the fine qualities and the distressing
+limitations of those islanders; it ought to occur to us English that we
+are talking of ourselves in little. In moments of journalistic vainglory
+we are apt to refer to the "sturdy island race," meaning us. But that we
+are insular in the full significance of the horrid word is certain. Why
+not? A genuine observation of the supreme phenomenon that Great Britain
+is surrounded by water--an effort to keep it always at the back of the
+consciousness--will help to explain all the minor phenomena of British
+existence. Geographical knowledge is the mother of discernment, for the
+varying physical characteristics of the earth are the sole direct
+terrestrial influence determining the evolution of original vital
+energy.
+
+All other influences are secondary, and have been effects of character
+and temperament before becoming causes. Perhaps the greatest of them are
+roads and architecture. Nothing could be more English than English
+roads, or more French than French roads. Enter England from France, let
+us say through the gate of Folkestone, and the architectural
+illustration which greets you (if you can look and see) is absolutely
+dramatic in its spectacular force. You say that there is no architecture
+in Folkestone. But Folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of
+architecture as a wood is full of trees. As the train winds on its
+causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you thousands of squat
+little homes, neat, tended, respectable, comfortable, prim, at once
+unostentatious and conceited. Each a separate, clearly-defined entity!
+Each saying to the others: "Don't look over my wall, and I won't look
+over yours!" Each with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its own
+individuality! Each a stronghold--an island! And all careless of the
+general effect, but making a very impressive general effect. The English
+race is below you. Your own son is below you insisting on the
+inviolability of his own den of a bedroom! ... And contrast all that
+with the immense communistic and splendid façades of a French town, and
+work out the implications. If you really intend to see life you cannot
+afford to be blind to such thrilling phenomena.
+
+Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity would be capable of walking
+through a French street and through an English street, and noting
+chiefly that whereas English lamp-posts spring from the kerb, French
+lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! Not that that detail is not
+worth noting. It is--in its place. French lamp-posts are part of what we
+call the "interesting character" of a French street. We say of a French
+street that it is "full of character." As if an English street was not!
+Such is blindness--to be cured by travel and the exercise of the logical
+faculty, most properly termed common sense. If one is struck by the
+magnificence of the great towns of the Continent, one should
+ratiocinate, and conclude that a major characteristic of the great towns
+of England is their shabby and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. It is so.
+But there are people who have lived fifty years in Manchester, Leeds,
+Hull and Hanley without noticing it. The English idiosyncrasy is in that
+awful external slovenliness too, causing it, and being caused by it.
+Every street is a mirror, an illustration, an exposition, an
+explanation, of the human beings who live in it. Nothing in it is to be
+neglected. Everything in it is valuable, if the perspective is
+maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow individualistic novels of
+English literature--and in some of the best--you will find a domestic
+organism described as though it existed in a vacuum, or in the Sahara,
+or between Heaven and earth; as though it reacted on nothing and was
+reacted on by nothing; and as though it could be adequately rendered
+without reference to anything exterior to itself. How can such novels
+satisfy a reader who has acquired or wants to acquire the faculty of
+seeing life?
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The net result of the interplay of instincts and influences which
+determine the existence of a community is shown in the general
+expression on the faces of the people. This is an index which cannot lie
+and cannot be gainsaid. It is fairly easy, and extremely interesting, to
+decipher. It is so open, shameless, and universal, that not to look at
+it is impossible. Yet the majority of persons fail to see it. We hear of
+inquirers standing on London Bridge and counting the number of
+motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, and white horses that pass over
+the bridge in an hour. But we never hear of anybody counting the number
+of faces happy or unhappy, honest or rascally, shrewd or ingenuous, kind
+or cruel, that pass over the bridge. Perhaps the public may be surprised
+to hear that the general expression on the faces of Londoners of all
+ranks varies from the sad to the morose; and that their general mien is
+one of haste and gloomy preoccupation. Such a staring fact is paramount
+in sociological evidence. And the observer of it would be justified in
+summoning Heaven, the legislature, the county council, the churches, and
+the ruling classes, and saying to them: "Glance at these faces, and
+don't boast too much about what you have accomplished. The climate and
+the industrial system have so far triumphed over you all."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+When we come to the observing of the individual--to which all human
+observing does finally come if there is any right reason in it--the
+aforesaid general considerations ought to be ever present in the
+hinterland of the consciousness, aiding and influencing, perhaps
+vaguely, perhaps almost imperceptibly, the formation of judgments. If
+they do nothing else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to the
+highly important idea of the correlation of all phenomena. Especially in
+England a haphazard particularity is the chief vitiating element in the
+operations of the mind.
+
+In estimating the individual we are apt not only to forget his
+environment, but--really strange!--to ignore much of the evidence
+visible in the individual himself. The inexperienced and ardent
+observer, will, for example, be astonishingly blind to everything in an
+individual except his face. Telling himself that the face must be the
+reflection of the soul, and that every thought and emotion leaves
+inevitably its mark there, he will concentrate on the face, singling it
+out as a phenomenon apart and self-complete. Were he a god and
+infallible, he could no doubt learn the whole truth from the face. But
+he is bound to fall into errors, and by limiting the field of vision he
+minimises the opportunity for correction. The face is, after all, quite
+a small part of the individual's physical organism. An Englishman will
+look at a woman's face and say she is a beautiful woman or a plain
+woman. But a woman may have a plain face, and yet by her form be
+entitled to be called beautiful, and (perhaps) _vice versâ_. It is true
+that the face is the reflexion of the soul. It is equally true that the
+carriage and gestures are the reflection of the soul. Had one eyes, the
+tying of a bootlace is the reflection of the soul. One piece of
+evidence can be used to correct every other piece of evidence. A refined
+face may be refuted by clumsy finger-ends; the eyes may contradict the
+voice; the gait may nullify the smile. None of the phenomena which every
+individual carelessly and brazenly displays in every motor-bus
+terrorising the streets of London is meaningless or negligible.
+
+Again, in observing we are generally guilty of that particularity which
+results from sluggishness of the imagination. We may see the phenomenon
+at the moment of looking at it, but we particularise in that moment,
+making no effort to conceive what the phenomenon is likely to be at
+other moments.
+
+For example, a male human creature wakes up in the morning and rises
+with reluctance. Being a big man, and existing with his wife and
+children in a very confined space, he has to adapt himself to his
+environment as he goes through the various functions incident to
+preparing for his day's work. He is just like you or me. He wants his
+breakfast, he very much wants to know where his boots are, and he has
+the usually sinister preoccupations about health and finance. Whatever
+the force of his egoism, he must more or less harmonise his
+individuality with those of his wife and children. Having laid down the
+law, or accepted it, he sets forth to his daily duties, just a fraction
+of a minute late. He arrives at his office, resumes life with his
+colleagues sympathetic and antipathetic, and then leaves the office for
+an expedition extending over several hours. In the course of his
+expedition he encounters the corpse of a young dog run down by a
+motor-bus. Now you also have encountered that corpse and are gazing at
+it; and what do you say to yourself when he comes along? You say: "Oh!
+Here's a policeman." For he happens to be a policeman. You stare at him,
+and you never see anything but a policeman--an indivisible phenomenon of
+blue cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face, and a helmet; "a
+stalwart guardian of the law"; to you little more human than an
+algebraic symbol: in a word--a policeman.
+
+Only, that word actually conveys almost nothing to you of the reality
+which it stands for. You are satisfied with it as you are satisfied with
+the description of a disease. A friend tells you his eyesight is
+failing. You sympathise. "What is it?" you ask. "Glaucoma." "Ah!
+Glaucoma!" You don't know what glaucoma is. You are no wiser than you
+were before. But you are content. A name has contented you. Similarly
+the name of policeman contents you, seems to absolve you from further
+curiosity as to the phenomenon. You have looked at tens of thousands of
+policemen, and perhaps never seen the hundredth part of the reality of a
+single one. Your imagination has not truly worked on the phenomenon.
+
+There may be some excuse for not seeing the reality of a policeman,
+because a uniform is always a thick veil. But you--I mean you, I, any
+of us--are oddly dim-sighted also in regard to the civil population. For
+instance, we get into the empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the
+street accident, and examine the men and women who gradually fill it.
+Probably we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of
+life. All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past and are
+moving towards a future. But how often does our imagination put itself
+to the trouble of realising this? We may observe with some care, yet
+owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are observing not the human
+individuals, but a peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in
+motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present! No
+human phenomenon is adequately seen until the imagination has placed it
+back into its past and forward into its future. And this is the final
+process of observation of the individual.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not begin with seeing the
+individual. Neither does it end with seeing the individual. Particular
+and unsystematised observation cannot go on for ever, aimless, formless.
+Just as individuals are singled out from systems, in the earlier process
+of observation, so in the later processes individuals will be formed
+into new groups, which formation will depend upon the personal bent of
+the observer. The predominant interests of the observer will ultimately
+direct his observing activities to their own advantage. If he is excited
+by the phenomena of organisation--as I happen to be--he will see
+individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation, and will
+insist on the variations from type due to that grouping. If he is
+convinced--as numbers of people appear to be--that society is just now
+in an extremely critical pass, and that if something mysterious is not
+forthwith done the structure of it will crumble to atoms--he will see
+mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to him, the
+human dilemma demands. And so on! These tendencies, while they should
+not be resisted too much, since they give character to observation and
+redeem it from the frigidity of mechanics, should be resisted to a
+certain extent. For, whatever they may be, they favour the growth of
+sentimentality, the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common
+sense.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+WRITING NOVELS
+
+
+I
+
+
+The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so excited by it
+that he absolutely must transmit the vision to others, chooses narrative
+fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of his feelings. He is
+like other artists--he cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to
+himself, he is bursting with the news; he is bound to tell--the affair
+is too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in this--that what
+most chiefly strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature,
+the large general manner of existing. Of course, he is the result of
+evolution from the primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to
+this day transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude
+visions of life in the café or the club, or on the kerbstone. They
+belong to the lowest circle of artists; but they are artists; and the
+form that they adopt is the very basis of the novel. By innumerable
+entertaining steps from them you may ascend to the major artist whose
+vision of life, inclusive, intricate and intense, requires for its due
+transmission the great traditional form of the novel as perfected by the
+masters of a long age which has temporarily set the novel higher than
+any other art-form.
+
+I would not argue that the novel should be counted supreme among the
+great traditional forms of art. Even if there is a greatest form, I do
+not much care which it is. I have in turn been convinced that Chartres
+Cathedral, certain Greek sculpture, Mozart's _Don Juan_, and the
+juggling of Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest thing in the world--not to
+mention the achievements of Shakspere or Nijinsky. But there is
+something to be said for the real pre-eminence of prose fiction as a
+literary form. (Even the modern epic has learnt almost all it knows from
+prose-fiction.) The novel has, and always will have, the advantage of
+its comprehensive bigness. St Peter's at Rome is a trifle compared with
+Tolstoi's _War and Peace_; and it is as certain as anything can be that,
+during the present geological epoch at any rate, no epic half as long as
+_War and Peace_ will ever be read, even if written.
+
+Notoriously the novelist (including the playwright, who is a
+sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of other
+artists. In the matter of poaching, the painter has done a lot, and the
+composer has done more, but what the painter and the composer have done
+is as naught compared to the grasping deeds of the novelist. And whereas
+the painter and the composer have got into difficulties with their
+audacious schemes, the novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with
+a success that is not denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the
+interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose fiction--from
+landscape-painting to sociology--and none which might not be.
+Unnecessary to go back to the ante-Scott age in order to perceive how
+the novel has aggrandised itself! It has conquered enormous territories
+even since _Germinal_. Within the last fifteen years it has gained. Were
+it to adopt the hue of the British Empire, the entire map of the
+universe would soon be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand in the
+hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present day as a
+means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life. It is, and will
+be for some time to come, the form to which the artist with the most
+inclusive vision instinctively turns, because it is the most inclusive
+form, and the most adaptable. Indeed, before we are much older, if its
+present rate of progress continues, it will have reoccupied the dazzling
+position to which the mighty Balzac lifted it, and in which he left it
+in 1850. So much, by the way, for the rank of the novel.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+In considering the equipment of the novelist there are two attributes
+which may always be taken for granted. The first is the sense of
+beauty--indispensable to the creative artist. Every creative artist has
+it, in his degree. He is an artist because he has it. An artist works
+under the stress of instinct. No man's instinct can draw him towards
+material which repels him--the fact is obvious. Obviously, whatever kind
+of life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed and seduced by
+it, he is under its spell--that is, he has seen beauty in it. He could
+have no other reason for writing about it. He may see a strange sort of
+beauty; he may--indeed he does--see a sort of beauty that nobody has
+quite seen before; he may see a sort of beauty that none save a few odd
+spirits ever will or can be made to see. But he does see beauty. To
+say, after reading a novel which has held you, that the author has no
+sense of beauty, is inept. (The mere fact that you turned over his pages
+with interest is an answer to the criticism--a criticism, indeed, which
+is not more sagacious than that of the reviewer who remarks: "Mr Blank
+has produced a thrilling novel, but unfortunately he cannot write." Mr
+Blank has written; and he could, anyhow, write enough to thrill the
+reviewer.) All that a wise person will assert is that an artist's sense
+of beauty is different for the time being from his own.
+
+The reproach of the lack of a sense of beauty has been brought against
+nearly all original novelists; it is seldom brought against a mediocre
+novelist. Even in the extreme cases it is untrue; perhaps it is most
+untrue in the extreme cases. I do not mean such a case as that of Zola,
+who never went to extremes. I mean, for example, Gissing, a real
+extremist, who, it is now admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered beauty
+in forms of existence which hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to
+examine. And I mean Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no
+works have been more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel _En
+Ménage_ and his book of descriptive essays _De Tout_. Both reproduce
+with exasperation what is generally regarded as the sordid ugliness of
+commonplace daily life. Yet both exercise a unique charm (and will
+surely be read when _La Cathédrale_ is forgotten). And it is
+inconceivable that Huysmans--whatever he may have said--was not ravished
+by the secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in it.
+
+The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the novelist, as
+in every artist, is passionate intensity of vision. Unless the vision is
+passionately intense the artist will not be moved to transmit it. He
+will not be inconvenienced by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus
+not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must
+have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree.
+It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been
+desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is
+unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes of
+artistic creation.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+A sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being taken for
+granted, the one other important attribute in the equipment of the
+novelist--the attribute which indeed by itself practically suffices, and
+whose absence renders futile all the rest--is fineness of mind. A great
+novelist must have great qualities of mind. His mind must be
+sympathetic, quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender,
+just, merciful. He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing
+sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. Above all, his
+mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense. His mind, in a
+word, must have the quality of being noble. Unless his mind is all this,
+he will never, at the ultimate bar, be reckoned supreme. That which
+counts, on every page, and all the time, is the very texture of his
+mind--the glass through which he sees things. Every other attribute is
+secondary, and is dispensable. Fielding lives unequalled among English
+novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is unequalled. He is
+read with unreserved enthusiasm because the reader feels himself at each
+paragraph to be in close contact with a glorious personality. And no
+advance in technique among later novelists can possibly imperil his
+position. He will take second place when a more noble mind, a more
+superb common sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before.
+What undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that the
+texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in courageous facing
+of the truth, and in certain delicacies of perception. As much may be
+said of Thackeray, whose mind was somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a
+figure, and not free from defects which are inimical to immortality.
+
+It is a hard saying for me, and full of danger in any country whose
+artists have shown contempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, as
+the years pass, I attach less and less importance to good technique in
+fiction. I love it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its
+importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern history
+of fiction will not support me. With the single exception of Turgenev,
+the great novelists of the world, according to my own standards, have
+either ignored technique or have failed to understand it. What an error
+to suppose that the finest foreign novels show a better sense of form
+than the finest English novels! Balzac was a prodigious blunderer. He
+could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general form of a
+book. And as for a greater than Balzac--Stendhal--his scorn of technique
+was notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece: "By
+the way I ought to have told you earlier that the Duchess--!" And as for
+a greater than either Balzac or Stendhal--Dostoievsky--what a hasty,
+amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the unapproachable _Brothers
+Karamazov_! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction
+by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was clumsy and
+careless. What would have been Flaubert's detailed criticism of that
+book? And what would it matter? And, to take a minor example,
+witness the comically amateurish technique of the late "Mark
+Rutherford"--nevertheless a novelist whom one can deeply admire.
+
+And when we come to consider the great technicians, Guy de Maupassant
+and Flaubert, can we say that their technique will save them, or atone
+in the slightest degree for the defects of their minds? Exceptional
+artists both, they are both now inevitably falling in esteem to the
+level of the second-rate. Human nature being what it is, and de
+Maupassant being tinged with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with
+interest by mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite
+all his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant with
+the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is one of the
+outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It is being discovered
+that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble enough--that, indeed, it was a
+cruel mind, and a little anæmic. _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ was the crowning
+proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the humanness of the world, and
+suffered from the delusion that he had been born on the wrong planet.
+The glitter of his technique is dulled now, and fools even count it
+against him. In regard to one section of human activity only did his
+mind seem noble--namely, literary technique. His correspondence,
+written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the question of
+literary technique, and his correspondence stands forth to-day as his
+best work--a marvellous fount of inspiration to his fellow artists. So I
+return to the point that the novelist's one important attribute (beyond
+the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind. It and nothing else
+makes both the friends and the enemies which he has; while the influence
+of technique is slight and transitory. And I repeat that it is a hard
+saying.
+
+I begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the mysterious
+nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." There may be something of
+the amateur in all great artists. I do not know why it should be so,
+unless because, in the exuberance of their sense of power, they are
+impatient of the exactitudes of systematic study and the mere bother of
+repeated attempts to arrive at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great
+artist was ever a profound scholar. The great artist has other ends to
+achieve. And every artist, major and minor, is aware in his conscience
+that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to proceed rapidly
+with the affair of creation, and an excusable dislike of re-creating
+anything twice, thrice, or ten times over--unnatural task!--are
+responsible for much of that artifice. We can all point in excuse to
+Shakspere, who was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods
+would shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has been
+mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care. If Flaubert
+had been a greater artist he might have been more of an amateur.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Of this poor neglected matter of technique the more important branch is
+design--or construction. It is the branch of the art--of all arts--which
+comes next after "inspiration"--a capacious word meant to include
+everything that the artist must be born with and cannot acquire. The
+less important branch of technique--far less important--may be described
+as an ornamentation.
+
+There are very few rules of design in the novel; but the few are
+capital. Nevertheless, great novelists have often flouted or ignored
+them--to the detriment of their work. In my opinion the first rule is
+that the interest must be centralised; it must not be diffused equally
+over various parts of the canvas. To compare one art with another may be
+perilous, but really the convenience of describing a novel as a canvas
+is extreme. In a well-designed picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one
+particular spot. If the eye is drawn with equal force to several
+different spots, then we reproach the painter for having "scattered" the
+interest of the picture. Similarly with the novel. A novel must have
+one, two, or three figures that easily overtop the rest. These figures
+must be in the foreground, and the rest in the middle-distance or in the
+back-ground.
+
+Moreover, these figures--whether they are saints or sinners--must
+somehow be presented more sympathetically than the others. If this
+cannot be done, then the inspiration is at fault. The single motive that
+should govern the choice of a principal figure is the motive of love for
+that figure. What else could the motive be? The race of heroes is
+essential to art. But what makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure
+chosen than the understanding sympathy of the artist with the figure. To
+say that the hero has disappeared from modern fiction is absurd. All
+that has happened is that the characteristics of the hero have changed,
+naturally, with the times. When Thackeray wrote "a novel without a
+hero," he wrote a novel with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this
+better than Thackeray. What he meant was that he was sick of the
+conventional bundle of characteristics styled a hero in his day, and
+that he had changed the type. Since then we have grown sick of Dobbins,
+and the type has been changed again more than once. The fateful hour
+will arrive when we shall be sick of Ponderevos.
+
+The temptation of the great novelist, overflowing with creative force,
+is to scatter the interest. In both his major works Tolstoi found the
+temptation too strong for him. _Anna Karenina_ is not one novel, but
+two, and suffers accordingly. As for _War and Peace_, the reader wanders
+about in it as in a forest, for days, lost, deprived of a sense of
+direction, and with no vestige of a sign-post; at intervals
+encountering mysterious faces whose identity he in vain tries to recall.
+On a much smaller scale Meredith committed the same error. Who could
+assert positively which of the sisters Fleming is the heroine of _Rhoda
+Fleming_? For nearly two hundred pages at a stretch Rhoda scarcely
+appears. And more than once the author seems quite to forget that the
+little knave Algernon is not, after all, the hero of the story.
+
+The second rule of design--perhaps in the main merely a different view
+of the first--is that the interest must be maintained. It may increase,
+but it must never diminish. Here is that special aspect of design which
+we call construction, or plot. By interest I mean the interest of the
+story itself, and not the interest of the continual play of the author's
+mind on his material. In proportion as the interest of the story is
+maintained, the plot is a good one. In so far as it lapses, the plot is
+a bad one. There is no other criterion of good construction. Readers of
+a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which
+"you can't tell what is going to happen next." But in some of the most
+tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen
+next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. It would be
+nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to make sure
+what will happen next"! Good plots set you anxiously guessing what will
+happen next.
+
+When the reader is misled--not intentionally in order to get an effect,
+but clumsily through amateurishness--then the construction is bad. This
+calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work
+another calamity does occur with far too much frequency--namely, the
+tantalising of the reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wanton,
+or negligent shifting of the interest from the major to the minor theme.
+A sad example of this infantile trick is to be found in the thirty-first
+chapter of _Rhoda_ _Fleming_, wherein, well knowing that the reader is
+tingling for the interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable
+to control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for Algernon, devotes
+some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with an illicit
+thousand pounds. That the sixteen pages are excessively brilliant does
+not a bit excuse the wilful unshapeliness of the book's design.
+
+The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out defenders of Victorian fiction
+are wont to argue that though the event-plot in sundry great novels may
+be loose and casual (that is to say, simply careless), the "idea-plot"
+is usually close-knit, coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able
+to comprehend how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot
+(any more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but
+assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that the
+mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow, the
+event-plot (which I positively do not believe),--even then I still hold
+that sloppiness in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave
+iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English novels,
+chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot, the Brontës, and
+Anthony Trollope.
+
+The one other important rule in construction is that the plot should be
+kept throughout within the same convention. All plots--even those of our
+most sacred naturalistic contemporaries--are and must be a
+conventionalisation of life. We imagine we have arrived at a convention
+which is nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
+Perhaps we have--but so little nearer that the difference is scarcely
+appreciable! An aviator at midday may be nearer the sun than the
+motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire journey to the sun,
+the aviator's progress upward can safely be ignored. No novelist has
+yet, or ever will, come within a hundred million miles of life itself.
+It is impossible for us to see how far we still are from life. The
+defects of a new convention disclose themselves late in its career. The
+notion that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula which
+ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "Naturalist" is merely an epithet
+expressing self-satisfaction.
+
+Similarly, the habit of deriding as "conventional" plots constructed in
+an earlier convention, is ridiculous. Under this head Dickens in
+particular has been assaulted; I have assaulted him myself. But within
+their convention, the plots of Dickens are excellent, and show little
+trace of amateurishness, and every sign of skilled accomplishment. And
+Dickens did not blunder out of one convention into another, as certain
+of ourselves undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned for
+the conventionalism of his plots. And yet Hardy happens to be one of the
+rare novelists who have evolved a new convention to suit their
+idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idiosyncrasy is a deep conviction of the
+whimsicality of the divine power, and again and again he has expressed
+this with a virtuosity of skill which ought to have put humility into
+the hearts of naturalists, but which has not done so. The plot of _The
+Woodlanders_ is one of the most exquisite examples of subtle symbolic
+illustration of an idea that a writer of fiction ever achieved; it makes
+the symbolism of Ibsen seem crude. You may say that _The Woodlanders_
+could not have occurred in real life. No novel could have occurred in
+real life. The balance of probabilities is incalculably against any
+novel whatsoever; and rightly so. A convention is essential, and the
+duty of a novelist is to be true within his chosen convention, and not
+further. Most novelists still fail in this duty. Is there any reason,
+indeed, why we should be so vastly cleverer than our fathers? I do not
+think we are.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Leaving the seductive minor question of ornamentation, I come lastly to
+the question of getting the semblance of life on to the page before the
+eyes of the reader--the daily and hourly texture of existence. The
+novelist has selected his subject; he has drenched himself in his
+subject. He has laid down the main features of the design. The living
+embryo is there, and waits to be developed into full organic structure.
+Whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital tissue which must be
+his material? The answer is that he digs it out of himself. First-class
+fiction is, and must be, in the final resort autobiographical. What else
+should it be? The novelist may take notes of phenomena likely to be of
+use to him. And he may acquire the skill to invent very apposite
+illustrative incident. But he cannot invent psychology. Upon occasion
+some human being may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for
+his craft. But such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible. From
+outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology of others. He
+can use a real person as the unrecognisable but helpful basis for each
+of his characters.... And all that is nothing. And all special research
+is nothing. When the real intimate work of creation has to be done--and
+it has to be done on every page--the novelist can only look within for
+effective aid. Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he has felt
+and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he accomplish his end.
+An inquiry into the career of any first-class novelist invariably
+reveals that his novels are full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every
+good novel contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could
+reveal. Episodes, moods, characters of autobiography can be detected and
+traced to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate
+autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may not be
+detected. In dealing with each character in each episode the novelist
+must for a thousand convincing details interrogate that part of his own
+individuality which corresponds to the particular character. The
+foundation of his equipment is universal sympathy. And the result of
+this (or the cause--I don't know which) is that in his own individuality
+there is something of everybody. If he is a born novelist he is safe in
+asking himself, when in doubt as to the behaviour of a given personage
+at a given point: "Now, what should _I_ have done?" And incorporating
+the answer! And this in practice is what he does. Good fiction is
+autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.
+
+The necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction accounts for the
+creative repetition to which all novelists--including the most
+powerful--are reduced. They monotonously yield again and again to the
+strongest predilections of their own individuality. Again and again they
+think they are creating, by observation, a quite new character--and lo!
+when finished it is an old one--autobiographical psychology has
+triumphed! A novelist may achieve a reputation with only a single type,
+created and re-created in varying forms. And the very greatest do not
+contrive to create more than half a score genuine separate types. In
+Cerfberr and Christophe's biographical dictionary of the characters of
+Balzac, a tall volume of six hundred pages, there are some two thousand
+entries of different individuals, but probably fewer than a dozen
+genuine distinctive types. No creative artist ever repeated himself more
+brazenly or more successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious
+delightful actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young
+man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping virgin, his
+angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his faithful stupid
+servant--each is continually popping up with a new name in the Human
+Comedy. A similar phenomenon, as Frank Harris has proved, is to be
+observed in Shakspere. Hamlet of Denmark was only the last and greatest
+of a series of Shaksperean Hamlets.
+
+It may be asked, finally: What of the actual process of handling the raw
+material dug out of existence and of the artist's self--the process of
+transmuting life into art? There is no process. That is to say, there is
+no conscious process. The convention chosen by an artist is his illusion
+of the truth. Consciously, the artist only omits, selects, arranges. But
+let him beware of being false to his illusion, for then the process
+becomes conscious, and bad. This is sentimentality, which is the seed of
+death in his work. Every artist is tempted to sentimentalise, or to be
+cynical--practically the same thing. And when he falls to the
+temptation, the reader whispers in his heart, be it only for one
+instant: "That is not true to life." And in turn the reader's illusion
+of reality is impaired. Readers are divided into two classes--the
+enemies and the friends of the artist. The former, a legion, admire for
+a fortnight or a year. They hate an uncompromising struggle for the
+truth. They positively like the artist to fall to temptation. If he
+falls, they exclaim, "How sweet!" The latter are capable of savouring
+the fine unpleasantness of the struggle for truth. And when they whisper
+in their hearts: "That is not true to life," they are ashamed for the
+artist. They are few, very few; but a vigorous clan. It is they who
+confer immortality.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+WRITING PLAYS
+
+
+I
+
+
+There is an idea abroad, assiduously fostered as a rule by critics who
+happen to have written neither novels nor plays, that it is more
+difficult to write a play than a novel. I do not think so. I have
+written or collaborated in about twenty novels and about twenty plays,
+and I am convinced that it is easier to write a play than a novel.
+Personally, I would sooner _write_ two plays than one novel; less
+expenditure of nervous force and mere brains would be required for two
+plays than for one novel. (I emphasise the word "write," because if the
+whole weariness between the first conception and the first performance
+of a play is compared with the whole weariness between the first
+conception and the first publication of a novel, then the play has it. I
+would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels produced than one play. But my
+immediate object is to compare only writing with writing.) It seems to
+me that the sole persons entitled to judge of the comparative difficulty
+of writing plays and writing novels are those authors who have succeeded
+or failed equally well in both departments. And in this limited band I
+imagine that the differences of opinion on the point could not be
+marked. I would like to note in passing, for the support of my
+proposition, that whereas established novelists not infrequently venture
+into the theatre with audacity, established dramatists are very cautious
+indeed about quitting the theatre. An established dramatist usually
+takes good care to write plays and naught else; he will not affront the
+risks of coming out into the open; and therein his instinct is quite
+properly that of self-preservation. Of many established dramatists all
+over the world it may be affirmed that if they were so indiscreet as to
+publish a novel, the result would be a great shattering and a great
+awakening.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+An enormous amount of vague reverential nonsense is talked about the
+technique of the stage, the assumption being that in difficulty it far
+surpasses any other literary technique, and that until it is acquired a
+respectable play cannot be written. One hears also that it can only be
+acquired behind the scenes. A famous actor-manager once kindly gave me
+the benefit of his experience, and what he said was that a dramatist who
+wished to learn his business must live behind the scenes--and study the
+works of Dion Boucicault! The truth is that no technique is so crude and
+so simple as the technique of the stage, and that the proper place to
+learn it is not behind the scenes but in the pit. Managers, being the
+most conservative people on earth, except compositors, will honestly try
+to convince the naïve dramatist that effects can only be obtained in
+the precise way in which effects have always been obtained, and that
+this and that rule must not be broken on pain of outraging the public.
+
+And indeed it is natural that managers should talk thus, seeing the low
+state of the drama, because in any art rules and reaction always
+flourish when creative energy is sick. The mandarins have ever said and
+will ever say that a technique which does not correspond with their own
+is no technique, but simple clumsiness. There are some seven situations
+in the customary drama, and a play which does not contain at least one
+of those situations in each act will be condemned as "undramatic," or
+"thin," or as being "all talk." It may contain half a hundred other
+situations, but for the mandarin a situation which is not one of the
+seven is not a situation. Similarly there are some dozen character
+types in the customary drama, and all original--that is,
+truthful--characterisation will be dismissed as a total absence of
+characterisation because it does not reproduce any of these dozen types.
+Thus every truly original play is bound to be indicted for bad
+technique. The author is bound to be told that what he has written may
+be marvellously clever, but that it is not a play. I remember the
+day--and it is not long ago--when even so experienced and sincere a
+critic as William Archer used to argue that if the "intellectual" drama
+did not succeed with the general public, it was because its technique
+was not up to the level of the technique of the commercial drama!
+Perhaps he has changed his opinion since then. Heaven knows that the
+so-called "intellectual" drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all
+literary art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama could
+hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the most successful
+commercial plays of modern times. I tremble to think what the mandarins
+and William Archer would say to the technique of _Hamlet_, could it by
+some miracle be brought forward as a new piece by a Mr Shakspere. They
+would probably recommend Mr Shakspere to consider the ways of Sardou,
+Henri Bernstein, and Sir Herbert Tree, and be wise. Most positively they
+would assert that _Hamlet_ was not a play. And their pupils of the daily
+press would point out--what surely Mr Shakspere ought to have perceived
+for himself--that the second, third, or fourth act might be cut
+wholesale without the slightest loss to the piece.
+
+In the sense in which mandarins understand the word technique, there is
+no technique special to the stage except that which concerns the moving
+of solid human bodies to and fro, and the limitations of the human
+senses. The dramatist must not expect his audience to be able to see or
+hear two things at once, nor to be incapable of fatigue. And he must not
+expect his interpreters to stroll round or come on or go off in a
+satisfactory manner unless he provides them with satisfactory reasons
+for strolling round, coming on, or going off. Lastly, he must not expect
+his interpreters to achieve physical impossibilities. The dramatist who
+sends a pretty woman off in street attire and seeks to bring her on
+again in thirty seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail in stage
+technique, but he has not proved that stage technique is tremendously
+difficult; he has proved something quite else.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+One reason why a play is easier to write than a novel is that a play is
+shorter than a novel. On the average, one may say that it takes six
+plays to make the matter of a novel. Other things being equal, a short
+work of art presents fewer difficulties than a longer one. The contrary
+is held true by the majority, but then the majority, having never
+attempted to produce a long work of art, are unqualified to offer an
+opinion. It is said that the most difficult form of poetry is the
+sonnet. But the most difficult form of poetry is the epic. The proof
+that the sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged to be in the
+fewness of perfect sonnets. There are, however, far more perfect sonnets
+than perfect epics. A perfect sonnet may be a heavenly accident. But
+such accidents can never happen to writers of epics. Some years ago we
+had an enormous palaver about the "art of the short story," which
+numerous persons who had omitted to write novels pronounced to be more
+difficult than the novel. But the fact remains that there are scores of
+perfect short stories, whereas it is doubtful whether anybody but
+Turgenev ever did write a perfect novel. A short form is easier to
+manipulate than a long form, because its construction is less
+complicated, because the balance of its proportions can be more easily
+corrected by means of a rapid survey, because it is lawful and even
+necessary in it to leave undone many things which are very hard to do,
+and because the emotional strain is less prolonged. The most difficult
+thing in all art is to maintain the imaginative tension unslackened
+throughout a considerable period.
+
+Then, not only does a play contain less matter than a novel--it is
+further simplified by the fact that it contains fewer kinds of matter,
+and less subtle kinds of matter. There are numerous delicate and
+difficult affairs of craft that the dramatist need not think about at
+all. If he attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree of subtlety,
+he is merely wasting his time. What passes for subtle on the stage would
+have a very obvious air in a novel, as some dramatists have unhappily
+discovered. Thus whole continents of danger may be shunned by the
+dramatist, and instead of being scorned for his cowardice he will be
+very rightly applauded for his artistic discretion. Fortunate
+predicament! Again, he need not--indeed, he must not--save in a
+primitive and hinting manner, concern himself with "atmosphere." He may
+roughly suggest one, but if he begins on the feat of "creating" an
+atmosphere (as it is called), the last suburban train will have departed
+before he has reached the crisis of the play. The last suburban train is
+the best friend of the dramatist, though the fellow seldom has the sense
+to see it. Further, he is saved all descriptive work. See a novelist
+harassing himself into his grave over the description of a landscape, a
+room, a gesture--while the dramatist grins. The dramatist may have to
+imagine a landscape, a room, or a gesture; but he has not got to write
+it--and it is the writing which hastens death. If a dramatist and a
+novelist set out to portray a clever woman, they are almost equally
+matched, because each has to make the creature say things and do things.
+But if they set out to portray a charming woman, the dramatist can
+recline in an easy chair and smoke while the novelist is ruining temper,
+digestion and eyesight, and spreading terror in his household by his
+moodiness and unapproachability. The electric light burns in the
+novelist's study at three a.m.,--the novelist is still endeavouring to
+convey by means of words the extraordinary fascination that his heroine
+could exercise over mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and
+he never has really succeeded and never will. The dramatist writes
+curtly, "Enter Millicent." All are anxious to do the dramatist's job for
+him. Is the play being read at home--the reader eagerly and with
+brilliant success puts his imagination to work and completes a charming
+Millicent after his own secret desires. (Whereas he would coldly decline
+to add one touch to Millicent were she the heroine of a novel.) Is the
+play being performed on the stage--an experienced, conscientious, and
+perhaps lovely actress will strive her hardest to prove that the
+dramatist was right about Millicent's astounding fascination. And if she
+fails, nobody will blame the dramatist; the dramatist will receive
+naught but sympathy.
+
+And there is still another region of superlative difficulty which is
+narrowly circumscribed for the spoilt dramatist: I mean the whole
+business of persuading the public that the improbable is probable. Every
+work of art is and must be crammed with improbabilities and artifice;
+and the greater portion of the artifice is employed in just this
+trickery of persuasion. Only, the public of the dramatist needs far less
+persuading than the public of the novelist. The novelist announces that
+Millicent accepted the hand of the wrong man, and in spite of all the
+novelist's corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader
+declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident as
+unconvincing. The dramatist decides that Millicent must accept the hand
+of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage in flesh and blood,
+veritably doing it! Not easy for even the critical beholder to maintain
+that Millicent could not and did not do such a silly thing when he has
+actually with his eyes seen her in the very act! The dramatist, as
+usual, having done less, is more richly rewarded by results.
+
+Of course it will be argued, as it has always been argued, by those who
+have not written novels, that it is precisely the "doing less"--the
+leaving out--that constitutes the unique and fearful difficulty of
+dramatic art. "The skill to leave out"--lo! the master faculty of the
+dramatist! But, in the first place, I do not believe that, having regard
+to the relative scope of the play and of the novel, the necessity for
+leaving out is more acute in the one than in the other. The adjective
+"photographic" is as absurd applied to the novel as to the play. And, in
+the second place, other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and
+it requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. To know when
+to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is even harder.
+Sometimes, listening to partisans of the drama, I have been moved to
+suggest that, if the art of omission is so wondrously difficult, a
+dramatist who practised the habit of omitting to write anything whatever
+ought to be hailed as the supreme craftsman.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The more closely one examines the subject, the more clear and certain
+becomes the fact that there is only one fundamental artistic difference
+between the novel and the play, and that difference (to which I shall
+come later) is not the difference which would be generally named as
+distinguishing the play from the novel. The apparent differences are
+superficial, and are due chiefly to considerations of convenience.
+
+Whether in a play or in a novel the creative artist has to tell a
+story--using the word story in a very wide sense. Just as a novel is
+divided into chapters, and for a similar reason, a play is divided into
+acts. But neither chapters nor acts are necessary. Some of Balzac's
+chief novels have no chapter-divisions, and it has been proved that a
+theatre audience can and will listen for two hours to "talk," and even
+recitative singing, on the stage, without a pause. Indeed, audiences,
+under the compulsion of an artist strong and imperious enough, could, I
+am sure, be trained to marvellous feats of prolonged receptivity.
+However, chapters and acts are usual, and they involve the same
+constructional processes on the part of the artist. The entire play or
+novel must tell a complete story--that is, arouse a curiosity and
+reasonably satisfy it, raise a main question and then settle it. And
+each act or other chief division must tell a definite portion of the
+story, satisfy part of the curiosity, settle part of the question. And
+each scene or other minor division must do the same according to its
+scale. Everything basic that applies to the technique of the novel
+applies equally to the technique of the play.
+
+In particular, I would urge that a play, any more than a novel, need not
+be dramatic, employing the term as it is usually employed. In so far as
+it suspends the listener's interest, every tale, however told, may be
+said to be dramatic. In this sense _The Golden Bowl_ is dramatic; so are
+_Dominique_ and _Persuasion_. A play need not be more dramatic than
+that. Very emphatically a play need not be dramatic in the stage sense.
+It need never induce interest to the degree of excitement. It need have
+nothing that resembles what would be recognisable in the theatre as a
+situation. It may amble on--and it will still be a play, and it may
+succeed in pleasing either the fastidious hundreds or the unfastidious
+hundreds of thousands, according to the talent of the author. Without
+doubt mandarins will continue for about a century yet to excommunicate
+certain plays from the category of plays. But nobody will be any the
+worse. And dramatists will go on proving that whatever else divides a
+play from a book, "dramatic quality" does not. Some arch-Mandarin may
+launch at me one of those mandarinic epigrammatic questions which are
+supposed to overthrow the adversary at one dart. "Do you seriously mean
+to argue, sir, that drama need not be dramatic?" I do, if the word
+dramatic is to be used in the mandarinic signification. I mean to state
+that some of the finest plays of the modern age differ from a
+psychological novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling.
+Example, Henri Becque's _La Parisienne_, than which there is no better.
+If I am asked to give my own definition of the adjective "dramatic," I
+would say that that story is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined
+to be spoken by actors and actresses on the stage, and that any narrower
+definition is bound to exclude some genuine plays universally accepted
+as such--even by mandarins. For be it noted that the mandarin is never
+consistent.
+
+My definition brings me to the sole technical difference between a play
+and a novel--in the play the story is told by means of a dialogue. It is
+a difference less important than it seems, and not invariably even a
+sure point of distinction between the two kinds of narrative. For a
+novel may consist exclusively of dialogue. And plays may contain other
+matter than dialogue. The classic chorus is not dialogue. But nowadays
+we should consider the device of the chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays,
+it indeed would be. We have grown very ingenious and clever at the
+trickery of making characters talk to the audience and explain
+themselves and their past history while seemingly innocent of any such
+intention. And here, I admit, the dramatist has to face a difficulty
+special to himself, which the novelist can avoid. I believe it to be the
+sole difficulty which is peculiar to the drama, and that it is not acute
+is proved by the ease with which third-rate dramatists have generally
+vanquished it. Mandarins are wont to assert that the dramatist is also
+handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of material.
+This is not so. Rigid economy in the use of material is equally
+advisable in every form of art. If it is a necessity, it is a necessity
+which all artists flout from time to time, and occasionally with
+gorgeous results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been
+less guilty of flouting it than the novelist or any other artist.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+And now, having shown that some alleged differences between the play and
+the novel are illusory, and that a certain technical difference, though
+possibly real, is superficial and slight, I come to the fundamental
+difference between them--a difference which the laity does not suspect,
+which is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which nobody
+who is well versed in the making of both plays and novels can fail to
+feel profoundly. The emotional strain of writing a play is not merely
+less prolonged than that of writing a novel, it is less severe even
+while it lasts, lower in degree and of a less purely creative character.
+And herein is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write
+than a novel. The drama does not belong exclusively to literature,
+because its effect depends on something more than the composition of
+words. The dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the
+sole creator of it. Without him nothing can be done, but, on the other
+hand, he cannot do everything himself. He begins the work of creation,
+which is finished either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by
+the creative imagination of the reader in the study. It is as if he
+carried an immense weight to the landing at the turn of a flight of
+stairs, and that thence upward the lifting had to be done by other
+people. Consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist
+is the base--but he is not the apex. A play is a collaboration of
+creative faculties. The egotism of the dramatist resents this
+uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. And further, the creative
+faculties are not only those of the author, the stage-director
+("producer") and the actors--the audience itself is unconsciously part
+of the collaboration.
+
+Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation before
+the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the functions of others,
+and will fail of proper accomplishment at the end. The dramatist must
+deliberately, in performing his share of the work, leave scope for a
+multitude of alien faculties whose operations he can neither precisely
+foresee nor completely control. The point is not that in the writing of
+a play there are various sorts of matters--as we have already
+seen---which the dramatist must ignore; the point is that even in the
+region proper to him he must not push the creative act to its final
+limit. He must ever remember those who are to come after him. For
+instance, though he must visualise a scene as he writes it, he should
+not visualise it completely, as a novelist should. The novelist may
+perceive vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright
+insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real actors and
+hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such real actors, or he
+will perceive imaginary faces, and the ultimate interpretation will
+perforce falsify his work and nullify his intentions. This aspect of the
+subject might well be much amplified, but only for a public of
+practising dramatists.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+When the play is "finished," the processes of collaboration have yet to
+begin. The serious work of the dramatist is over, but the most
+desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do not refer to the business
+of arranging with a theatrical manager for the production of the play.
+For, though that generally partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also
+partakes of the nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that
+theatrical managers are--no doubt inevitably--theatrical. Nevertheless,
+even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming the slightest interest in
+anything more vital to the stage than the box-office, is himself in some
+degree a collaborator, and is the first to show to the dramatist that a
+play is not a play till it is performed. The manager reads the play,
+and, to the dramatist's astonishment, reads quite a different play from
+that which the dramatist imagines he wrote. In particular the manager
+reads a play which can scarcely hope to succeed--indeed, a play against
+whose chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be adduced.
+It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees failure in a
+manuscript, and very seldom success. The manager's profoundest
+instinct--self-preservation again!--is to refuse a play; if he accepts,
+it is against the grain, against his judgment--and out of a mad spirit
+of adventure. Some of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed
+in an atmosphere of settled despair. The dramatist naturally feels an
+immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the manager,
+and he is therein justified. The manager's vocation is not to write
+plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to direct the rehearsals of
+them, and even his knowledge of the vagaries of his own box-office has
+often proved to be pitiably delusive. The manager's true and only
+vocation is to refrain from producing plays. Despite all this, however,
+the manager has already collaborated in the play. The dramatist sees it
+differently now. All sorts of new considerations have been presented to
+him. Not a word has been altered; but it is noticeably another play.
+Which is merely to say that the creative work on it which still remains
+to be done has been more accurately envisaged. This strange experience
+could not happen to a novel, because when a novel is written it is
+finished.
+
+And when the director of rehearsals, or producer, has been chosen, and
+this priceless and mysterious person has his first serious confabulation
+with the author, then at once the play begins to assume new
+shapes--contours undreamt of by the author till that startling moment.
+And even if the author has the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals,
+similar disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a producer
+is a different fellow from the author as author. The producer is up
+against realities. He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually
+condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... He suggests the
+casting. "What do you think of X. for the old man?" asks the producer.
+The author is staggered. Is it conceivable that so renowned a producer
+can have so misread and misunderstood the play? X. would be preposterous
+as the old man. But the producer goes on talking. And suddenly the
+author sees possibilities in X. But at the same time he sees a different
+play from what he wrote. And quite probably he sees a more glorious
+play. Quite probably he had not suspected how great a dramatist he
+is.... Before the first rehearsal is called, the play, still without a
+word altered, has gone through astounding creative transmutations; the
+author recognises in it some likeness to his beloved child, but it is
+the likeness of a first cousin.
+
+At the first rehearsal, and for many rehearsals, to an extent perhaps
+increasing, perhaps decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an
+apologetic and self-conscious mood; and his mien is something between
+that of a criminal who has committed a horrid offence and that of a
+father over the crude body of a new-born child. Now in truth he deeply
+realises that the play is a collaboration. In extreme cases he may be
+brought to see that he himself is one of the less important factors in
+the collaboration. The first preoccupation of the interpreters is not
+with his play at all, but--quite rightly--with their own careers; if
+they were not honestly convinced that their own careers were the chief
+genuine excuse for the existence of the theatre and the play they would
+not act very well. But, more than that, they do not regard his play as a
+sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their careers. At the most
+favourable, what they secretly think is that if they are permitted to
+exercise their talents on his play there is a chance that they may be
+able to turn it into a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their
+careers. The attitude of every actor towards his part is: "My part is
+not much of a part as it stands, but if my individuality is allowed to
+get into free contact with it, I may make something brilliant out of
+it." Which attitude is a proper attitude, and an attitude in my opinion
+justified by the facts of the case. The actor's phrase is that he
+_creates_ a part, and he is right. He completes the labour of creation
+begun by the author and continued by the producer, and if reasonable
+liberty is not accorded to him--if either the author or the producer
+attempts to do too much of the creative work--the result cannot be
+satisfactory.
+
+As the rehearsals proceed the play changes from day to day. However
+autocratic the producer, however obstinate the dramatist, the play will
+vary at each rehearsal like a large cloud in a gentle wind. It is never
+the same play for two days together. Nor is this surprising, seeing
+that every day and night a dozen, or it may be two dozen, human beings
+endowed with the creative gift are creatively working on it. Every
+dramatist who is candid with himself--I do not suggest that he should be
+candid to the theatrical world--well knows that though his play is often
+worsened by his collaborators it is also often improved,--and improved
+in the most mysterious and dazzling manner--without a word being
+altered. Producer and actors do not merely suggest possibilities, they
+execute them. And the author is confronted by artistic phenomena for
+which lawfully he may not claim credit. On the other hand, he may be
+confronted by inartistic phenomena in respect to which lawfully he is
+blameless, but which he cannot prevent; a rehearsal is like a
+battle,--certain persons are theoretically in control, but in fact the
+thing principally fights itself. And thus the creation goes on until the
+dress-rehearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. And the
+dramatist lying awake in the night reflects, stoically, fatalistically:
+"Well, that is the play that they have made of _my_ play!" And he may be
+pleased or he may be disgusted. But if he attends the first performance
+he cannot fail to notice, after the first few minutes of it, that he was
+quite mistaken, and that what the actors are performing is still another
+play. The audience is collaborating.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+THE ARTIST AND THE
+PUBLIC
+
+
+I
+
+
+I can divide all the imaginative writers I have ever met into two
+classes--those who admitted and sometimes proclaimed loudly that they
+desired popularity; and those who expressed a noble scorn or a gentle
+contempt for popularity. The latter, however, always failed to conceal
+their envy of popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose
+truculent bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or
+religious life. And indeed, since (as I have held in a previous chapter)
+the object of the artist is to share his emotions with others, it would
+be strange if the normal artist spurned popularity in order to keep his
+emotions as much as possible to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest
+nonsense has been and will be written by uncreative critics, of course
+in the higher interests of creative authors, about popularity and the
+proper attitude of the artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a
+first-class artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.
+
+The _Letters of George Meredith_ (of which the first volume is a
+magnificent unfolding of the character of a great man) are full of
+references to popularity, references overt and covert. Meredith could
+never--and quite naturally--get away from the idea of popularity. He was
+a student of the English public, and could occasionally be unjust to it.
+Writing to M. André Raffalovich (who had sent him a letter of
+appreciation) in November, 1881, he said: "I venture to judge by your
+name that you are at most but half English. I can consequently believe
+in the feeling you express for the work of an unpopular writer.
+Otherwise one would incline to be sceptical, for the English are given
+to practical jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors who are
+supposed to languish in the shade amuses them." A remark curiously
+unfair to the small, faithful band of admirers which Meredith then had.
+The whole letter, while warmly and touchingly grateful, is gloomy.
+Further on in it he says: "Good work has a fair chance to be recognised
+in the end, and if not, what does it matter?" But there is constant
+proof that it did matter very much. In a letter to William Hardman,
+written when he was well and hopeful, he says: "Never mind: if we do but
+get the public ear, oh, my dear old boy!" To Captain Maxse, in reference
+to a vast sum of £8,000 paid by the _Cornhill_ people to George Eliot
+(for an unreadable novel), he exclaims: "Bon Dieu! Will aught like this
+ever happen to me?"
+
+And to his son he was very explicit about the extent to which
+unpopularity "mattered": "As I am unpopular I am ill-paid, and therefore
+bound to work double tides, hardly ever able to lay down the pen. This
+affects my weakened stomach, and so the round of the vicious circle is
+looped." (Vol. I., p. 322.) And in another letter to Arthur Meredith
+about the same time he sums up his career thus: "As for me, I have
+failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." (Vol. I., p.
+318.) This letter is dated June 23rd, 1881. Meredith was then
+fifty-three years of age. He had written _Modern Love_, _The Shaving of
+Shagpat_, _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, _Rhoda Fleming_, _The Egoist_
+and other masterpieces. He knew that he had done his best and that his
+best was very fine. It would be difficult to credit that he did not
+privately deem himself one of the masters of English literature and
+destined to what we call immortality. He had the enthusiastic
+appreciation of some of the finest minds of the epoch. And yet, "As for
+me, I have failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." But
+he had not failed in his industry, nor in the quality of his work, nor
+in achieving self-respect and the respect of his friends. He had failed
+only in one thing--immediate popularity.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Assuming then that an author is justified in desiring immediate
+popularity, instead of being content with poverty and the unheard
+plaudits of posterity, another point presents itself. Ought he to limit
+himself to a mere desire for popularity, or ought he actually to do
+something, or to refrain from doing something, to the special end of
+obtaining popularity? Ought he to say: "I shall write exactly what and
+how I like, without any regard for the public; I shall consider nothing
+but my own individuality and powers; I shall be guided solely by my own
+personal conception of what the public ought to like"? Or ought he to
+say: "Let me examine this public, and let me see whether some compromise
+between us is not possible"?
+
+Certain authors are never under the necessity of facing the
+alternative. Occasionally, by chance, a genius may be so fortunately
+constituted and so brilliantly endowed that he captures the public at
+once, prestige being established, and the question of compromise never
+arises. But this is exceedingly rare. On the other hand, many mediocre
+authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample appreciation
+in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are never troubled by any
+problem worse than the vagaries of their fountain-pens. Such authors
+enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as happiness. Of nearly all really
+original artists, however, it may be said that they are at loggerheads
+with the public--as an almost inevitable consequence of their
+originality; and for them the problem of compromise or no-compromise
+acutely exists.
+
+George Meredith was such an artist. George Meredith before anything else
+was a poet. He would have been a better poet than a novelist, and I
+believe that he thought so. The public did not care for his poetry. If
+he had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents usually
+have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said: "I shall keep on
+writing poetry, even if I have to become a stockbroker in order to do
+it." But when he was only thirty-three--a boy, as authors go--he had
+already tired of no-compromise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: "It may be
+that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained Song....
+The worst is that having taken to prose delineations of character and
+life, one's affections are divided.... And in truth, being a servant of
+the public, _I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously
+to singing_." (Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example as one is
+likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the futility of
+writing what will not be immediately read, when he can write something
+else, less to his taste, that will be read. The same sentiment has
+actuated an immense number of first-class creative artists, including
+Shakspere, who would have been a rare client for a literary agent.... So
+much for refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer
+to do because it is not appreciated by the public.
+
+There remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain because the
+public appreciates it--otherwise the pot-boiler. In 1861 Meredith wrote
+to Mrs Ross: "I am engaged in extra potboiling work which enables me to
+do this," i.e., to write an occasional long poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh,
+base compromise! Seventeen years later he wrote to R.L. Stevenson: "Of
+potboilers let none speak. Jove hangs them upon necks that could soar
+above his heights but for the accursed weight." (Vol. I., p. 291.) It
+may be said that Meredith was forced to write potboilers. He was no more
+forced to write potboilers than any other author. Sooner than wallow in
+that shame, he might have earned money in more difficult ways. Or he
+might have indulged in that starvation so heartily prescribed for
+authors by a plutocratic noble who occasionally deigns to employ the
+English tongue in prose. Meredith subdued his muse, and Meredith wrote
+potboilers, because he was a first-class artist and a man of profound
+common sense. Being extremely creative, he had to arrive somehow, and he
+remembered that the earth is the earth, and the world the world, and men
+men, and he arrived as best he could. The great majority of his peers
+have acted similarly.
+
+The truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from the public on
+his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is either a god or a
+conceited and impractical fool. And he is somewhat more likely to be the
+latter than the former. He wants too much. There are two sides to every
+bargain, including the artistic. The most fertile and the most powerful
+artists are the readiest to recognise this, because their sense of
+proportion, which is the sense of order, is well developed. The lack of
+the sense of proportion is the mark of the _petit maître_. The sagacious
+artist, while respecting himself, will respect the idiosyncrasies of his
+public. To do both simultaneously is quite possible. In particular, the
+sagacious artist will respect basic national prejudices. For example, no
+first-class English novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his
+pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which Continental writers
+enjoy as a matter of course. The British public is admittedly wrong on
+this important point--hypocritical, illogical and absurd. But what would
+you? You cannot defy it; you literally cannot. If you tried, you would
+not even get as far as print, to say nothing of library counters. You
+can only get round it by ingenuity and guile. You can only go a very
+little further than is quite safe. You can only do one man's modest
+share in the education of the public.
+
+In Valery Larbaud's latest novel, _A.O. Barnabooth,_ occurs a phrase of
+deep wisdom about women: "_La femme est une grande realite, comme la
+guerre_." It might be applied to the public. The public is a great
+actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you
+cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. There it is! You can do
+something with it, but not much. And what you do not do with it, it must
+do with you, if there is to be the contact which is essential to the
+artistic function. This contact may be closened and completed by the
+artist's cleverness--the mere cleverness of adaptability which most
+first-class artists have exhibited. You can wear the fashions of the
+day. You can tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to distract his
+attention while you stab him in the chest. You can cajole money out of
+him by one kind of work in order to gain leisure in which to force him
+to accept later on something that he would prefer to refuse. You can use
+a thousand devices on the excellent simpleton.... And in the process you
+may degrade yourself to a mere popularity-hunter! Of course you may; as
+you may become a drunkard through drinking a glass of beer. Only, if you
+have anything to say worth saying, you usually don't succumb to this
+danger. If you have anything to say worth saying, you usually manage
+somehow to get it said, and read. The artist of genuine vocation is apt
+to be a wily person. He knows how to sacrifice inessentials so that he
+may retain essentials. And he can mysteriously put himself even into a
+potboiler. _Clarissa Harlowe_, which influenced fiction throughout
+Europe, was the direct result of potboiling. If the artist has not the
+wit and the strength of mind to keep his own soul amid the collisions of
+life, he is the inferior of a plain, honest merchant in stamina, and
+ought to retire to the upper branches of the Civil Service.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+When the author has finished the composition of a work, when he has put
+into the trappings of the time as much of his eternal self as they will
+safely hold, having regard to the best welfare of his creative career as
+a whole, when, in short, he has done all that he can to ensure the
+fullest public appreciation of the essential in him--there still remains
+to be accomplished something which is not unimportant in the entire
+affair of obtaining contact with the public. He has to see that the work
+is placed before the public as advantageously as possible. In other
+words, he has to dispose of the work as advantageously as possible. In
+other words, when he lays down the pen he ought to become a merchant,
+for the mere reason that he has an article to sell, and the more
+skilfully he sells it the better will be the result, not only for the
+public appreciation of his message, but for himself as a private
+individual and as an artist with further activities in front of him.
+
+Now this absolutely logical attitude of a merchant towards one's
+finished work infuriates the dilettanti of the literary world, to whom
+the very word "royalties" is anathema. They apparently would prefer to
+treat literature as they imagine Byron treated it, although as a fact no
+poet in a short life ever contrived to make as many pounds sterling out
+of verse as Byron made. Or perhaps they would like to return to the
+golden days when the author had to be "patronised" in order to exist; or
+even to the mid-nineteenth century, when practically all authors save
+the most successful--and not a few of the successful also--failed to
+obtain the fair reward of their work. The dilettanti's snobbishness and
+sentimentality prevent them from admitting that, in a democratic age,
+when an author is genuinely appreciated, either he makes money or he is
+the foolish victim of a scoundrel. They are fond of saying that
+agreements and royalties have nothing to do with literature. But
+agreements and royalties have a very great deal to do with literature.
+Full contact between artist and public depends largely upon publisher or
+manager being compelled to be efficient and just. And upon the
+publisher's or manager's efficiency and justice depend also the dignity,
+the leisure, the easy flow of coin, the freedom, and the pride which are
+helpful to the full fruition of any artist. No artist was ever assisted
+in his career by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by
+overwork, by economic inferiority. See Meredith's correspondence
+everywhere.
+
+Nor can there be any satisfaction in doing badly that which might be
+done well. If an artist writes a fine poem, shows it to his dearest
+friend, and burns it--I can respect him. But if an artist writes a fine
+poem, and then by sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to be
+inefficiently published, and fails to secure his own interests in the
+transaction, on the plea that he is an artist and not a merchant, then I
+refuse to respect him. A man cannot fulfil, and has no right to fulfil,
+one function only in this complex world. Some, indeed many, of the
+greatest creative artists have managed to be very good merchants also,
+and have not been ashamed of the double _rôle_. To read the
+correspondence and memoirs of certain supreme artists one might be
+excused for thinking, indeed, that they were more interested in the
+_rôle_ of merchant than in the other _rôle_; and yet their work in no
+wise suffered. In the distribution of energy between the two _rôles_
+common sense is naturally needed. But the artist who has enough common
+sense--or, otherwise expressed, enough sense of reality--not to disdain
+the _rôle_ of merchant will probably have enough not to exaggerate it.
+He may be reassured on one point--namely, that success in the _rôle_ of
+merchant will never impair any self-satisfaction he may feel in the
+_rôle_ of artist. The late discovery of a large public in America
+delighted Meredith and had a tonic effect on his whole system. It is
+often hinted, even if it is not often said, that great popularity ought
+to disturb the conscience of the artist. I do not believe it. If the
+conscience of the artist is not disturbed during the actual work itself,
+no subsequent phenomenon will or should disturb it. Once the artist is
+convinced of his artistic honesty, no public can be too large for his
+peace of mind. On the other hand, failure in the _rôle_ of merchant will
+emphatically impair his self-satisfaction in the _rôle_ of artist and
+his courage in the further pursuance of that _rôle_.
+
+But many artists have admittedly no aptitude for merchantry. Not only is
+their sense of the bindingness of a bargain imperfect, but they are apt
+in business to behave in a puerile manner, to close an arrangement out
+of mere impatience, to be grossly undiplomatic, to be victimised by
+their vanity, to believe what they ought not to believe, to discredit
+what is patently true, to worry over negligible trifles, and generally
+to make a clumsy mess of their affairs. An artist may say: "I cannot
+work unless I have a free mind, and I cannot have a free mind if I am to
+be bothered all the time by details of business."
+
+Apart from the fact that no artist who pretends also to be a man can in
+this world hope for a free mind, and that if he seeks it by neglecting
+his debtors he will be deprived of it by his creditors--apart from that,
+the artist's demand for a free mind is reasonable. Moreover, it is
+always a distressing sight to see a man trying to do what nature has not
+fitted him to do, and so doing it ill. Such artists, however--and they
+form possibly the majority--can always employ an expert to do their
+business for them, to cope on their behalf with the necessary middleman.
+Not that I deem the publisher or the theatrical manager to be by nature
+less upright than any other class of merchant. But the publisher and the
+theatrical manager have been subjected for centuries to a special and
+grave temptation. The ordinary merchant deals with other merchants--his
+equals in business skill. The publisher and the theatrical manager deal
+with what amounts to a race of children, of whom even arch-angels could
+not refrain from taking advantage.
+
+When the democratisation of literature seriously set in, it inevitably
+grew plain that the publisher and the theatrical manager had very
+humanly been giving way to the temptation with which heaven in her
+infinite wisdom had pleased to afflict them,--and the Society of Authors
+came into being. A natural consequence of the general awakening was the
+self-invention of the literary agent. The Society of Authors, against
+immense obstacles, has performed wonders in the economic education of
+the creative artist, and therefore in the improvement of letters. The
+literary agent, against obstacles still more immense, has carried out
+the details of the revolution. The outcry--partly sentimental, partly
+snobbish, but mainly interested--was at first tremendous against these
+meddlers who would destroy the charming personal relations that used to
+exist between, for example, the author and the publisher. (The less said
+about those charming personal relations the better. Documents exist.)
+But the main battle is now over, and everyone concerned is beautifully
+aware who holds the field. Though much remains to be done, much has been
+done; and today the creative artist who, conscious of inability to
+transact his own affairs efficiently, does not obtain efficient advice
+and help therein, stands in his own light both as an artist and as a
+man, and is a reactionary force. He owes the practice of elementary
+common sense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at large.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The same dilettante spirit which refuses to see the connection between
+art and money has also a tendency to repudiate the world of men at
+large, as being unfit for the habitation of artists. This is a still
+more serious error of attitude--especially in a storyteller. No artist
+is likely to be entirely admirable who is not a man before he is an
+artist. The notion that art is first and the rest of the universe
+nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity and futility in art. The artist
+who is too sensitive for contacts with the non-artistic world is thereby
+too sensitive for his vocation, and fit only to fall into gentle
+ecstasies over the work of artists less sensitive than himself.
+
+The classic modern example of the tragedy of the artist who repudiates
+the world is Flaubert. At an early age Flaubert convinced himself that
+he had no use for the world of men. He demanded to be left in solitude
+and tranquillity. The morbid streak in his constitution grew rapidly
+under the fostering influences of peace and tranquillity. He was
+brilliantly peculiar as a schoolboy. As an old man of twenty-two,
+mourning over the vanished brio of youth, he carried morbidity to
+perfection. Only when he was travelling (as, for example, in Egypt) do
+his letters lose for a time their distemper. His love-letters are often
+ignobly inept, and nearly always spoilt by the crass provincialism of
+the refined and cultivated hermit. His mistress was a woman difficult to
+handle and indeed a Tartar in egotism, but as the recipient of
+Flaubert's love-letters she must win universal sympathy.
+
+Full of a grievance against the whole modern planet, Flaubert turned
+passionately to ancient times (in which he would have been equally
+unhappy had he lived in them), and hoped to resurrect beauty when he
+had failed to see it round about him. Whether or not he did resurrect
+beauty is a point which the present age is now deciding. His fictions of
+modern life undoubtedly suffer from his detestation of the material; but
+considering his manner of existence it is marvellous that he should have
+been able to accomplish any of them, except _Un Coeur Simple_. The final
+one, _Bouvard et Pécuchet_, shows the lack of the sense of reality which
+must be the inevitable sequel of divorce from mankind. It is realism
+without conviction. No such characters as Bouvard and Pecuchet could
+ever have existed outside Flaubert's brain, and the reader's resultant
+impression is that the author has ruined a central idea which was well
+suited for a grand larkish extravaganza in the hands of a French Swift.
+But the spectacle of Flaubert writing in _mots justes_ a grand larkish
+extravaganza cannot be conjured up by fancy.
+
+There are many sub-Flauberts rife in London. They are usually more
+critical than creative, but their influence upon creators, and
+especially the younger creators, is not negligible. Their aim in
+preciosity would seem to be to keep themselves unspotted from the world.
+They are for ever being surprised and hurt by the crudity and coarseness
+of human nature, and for ever bracing themselves to be not as others
+are. They would have incurred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just
+discipline for them would be that they should be cross-examined by the
+great bully in presence of a jury of butchers and sentenced accordingly.
+The morbid Flaubertian shrinking from reality is to be found to-day even
+in relatively robust minds. I was recently at a provincial cinema, and
+witnessed on the screen with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama
+entitled "Gold is not All." My friend, who combines the callings of
+engineer and general adventurer with that of serving his country, leaned
+over to me in the darkness amid the violent applause, and said: "You
+know, this kind of thing always makes me ashamed of human nature." I
+answered him as Johnsonially as the circumstances would allow. Had he
+lived to the age of fifty so blind that it needed a cinema audience to
+show him what the general level of human nature really is? Nobody has
+any right to be ashamed of human nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother?
+Is one ashamed of the cosmic process of evolution? Human nature _is_.
+And the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts, absorbs that
+supreme fact into his brain, the better for his work.
+
+There is a numerous band of persons in London--and the novelist and
+dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their circle--who spend so
+much time and emotion in practising the rites of the religion of art
+that they become incapable of real existence. Each is a Stylites on a
+pillar. Their opinion on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John,
+Cyril Scott, Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James Stephens, E.A. Rickards,
+Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc., may not be without value, and
+their genuine feverish morbid interest in art has its usefulness; but
+they know no more about reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They
+never approach normal life. They scorn it. They have a horror of it.
+They class politics with the differential calculus. They have heard of
+Lloyd George, the rise in the price of commodities, and the eternal
+enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must open a newspaper
+to look at the advertisements and announcements relating to the arts.
+The occasional frequenting of this circle may not be disadvantageous to
+the creative artist. But let him keep himself inoculated against its
+disease by constant steady plunges into the cold sea of the general
+national life. Let him mingle with the public, for God's sake! No
+phenomenon on this wretched planet, which after all is ours, is meet for
+the artist's shrinking scorn. And the average man, as to whom the
+artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever constitute the
+main part of the material in which he works.
+
+Above all, let not the creative artist suppose that the antidote to the
+circle of dilettantism is the circle of social reform. It is not. I
+referred in the first chapter to the prevalent illusion that the
+republic has just now arrived at a crisis, and that if something is not
+immediately done disaster will soon be upon us. This is the illusion to
+which the circle of social reforms is naturally prone, and it is an
+illusion against which the common sense of the creative artist must
+mightily protest. The world is, without doubt, a very bad world; but it
+is also a very good world. The function of the artist is certainly
+concerned more with what is than with what ought to be. When all
+necessary reform has been accomplished our perfected planet will be
+stone-cold. Until then the artist's affair is to keep his balance amid
+warring points of view, and in the main to record and enjoy what is....
+But is not the Minimum Wage Bill urgent? But when the minimum wage is as
+trite as the jury-system, the urgency of reform will still be tempting
+the artist too far out of his true path. And the artist who yields is
+lost.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Author's Craft, by Arnold Bennett
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12743 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12743 ***</div>
+
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+    <h1>THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT</h1>
+
+    <h3>By</h3>
+
+    <h2>ARNOLD BENNETT</h2>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 1 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page__i" name="page__i">[pg i]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>WORKS BY ARNOLD BENNETT</h2>
+
+    <dl>
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        NOVELS</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>A Man from the North</li>
+
+          <li>Anna of the Five Towns</li>
+
+          <li>Leonora</li>
+
+          <li>A Great Man</li>
+
+          <li>Sacred and Profane Love</li>
+
+          <li>Whom God hath Joined</li>
+
+          <li>Buried Alive</li>
+
+          <li>The Old Wives' Tale</li>
+
+          <li>The Glimpse</li>
+
+          <li>Helen with the High Hand</li>
+
+          <li>Clayhanger</li>
+
+          <li>The Card</li>
+
+          <li>Hilda Lessways</li>
+
+          <li>The Regent</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        FANTASIAS</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>The Grand Babylon Hotel</li>
+
+          <li>The Gates of Wrath</li>
+
+          <li>Teresa of Watling Street</li>
+
+          <li>The Loot of Cities</li>
+
+          <li>Hugo</li>
+
+          <li>The Ghost</li>
+
+          <li>The City of Pleasure</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        SHORT STORIES</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>Tales of the Five Towns</li>
+
+          <li>The Grim Smile of the Five Towns</li>
+
+          <li>The Matador of the Five Towns</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        BELLES-LETTRES</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>Journalism for Women</li>
+
+          <li>Fame and Fiction</li>
+
+          <li>How to become an Author</li>
+
+          <li>The Reasonable Life</li>
+
+          <li>How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day</li>
+
+          <li>The Human Machine</li>
+
+          <li>Literary Taste</li>
+
+          <li>The Feast of St Friend</li>
+
+          <li>Those United States</li>
+
+          <li>The Plain Man and His Wife</li>
+
+          <li>Paris Nights</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        DRAMA</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>Polite Farces</li>
+
+          <li>Cupid and Common Sense</li>
+
+          <li>What the Public Wants</li>
+
+          <li>The Honeymoon</li>
+
+          <li>The Great Adventure</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+      <br />
+
+      (
+      <i>In Collaboration with EDEN PHILLPOTTS</i>
+
+      )</dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>The Sinews of War: A Romance</li>
+
+          <li>The Statue: A Romance</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+      <br />
+
+      (
+      <i>In Collaboration with EDWARD KNOBLAUCH</i>
+
+      )</dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>Milestones: A Play</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+    </dl>
+
+    <hr />
+
+    <a name='THE_AUTHORS_CRAFT'>
+    </a>
+
+    <h1>THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT</h1>
+
+<!-- Page 2 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page_ii" name="page_ii">[pg ii]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>By</h3>
+
+    <h2>ARNOLD BENNETT</h2>
+
+
+      <center>HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+      <br />
+
+      LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO</center>
+
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 3 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="pageiii" name="pageiii">[pg iii]</a>
+    </span>
+
+          <center>Printed in 1914</center>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 4 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page_iv" name="page_iv">[pg iv]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+    <table border="0" width="50%" align="center"
+    summary="Table of Contents">
+      <tr>
+        <td align="center">
+          <a href="#page001">PART I.
+          <br />
+
+          SEEING LIFE</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+
+      <tr>
+        <td align="center">
+          <a href="#page035">PART II.
+          <br />
+
+          WRITING NOVELS</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+
+      <tr>
+        <td align="center">
+          <a href="#page067">PART III.
+          <br />
+
+          WRITING PLAYS</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+
+      <tr>
+        <td align="center">
+          <a href="#page101">PART IV.
+          <br />
+
+          THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 5 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page001" name="page001">[pg 1]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>PART I</h2>
+
+    <h3>SEEING LIFE</h3>
+
+<!-- Page 6 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page002" name="page002">[pg 2]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <br />
+
+<!-- Page 7 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page003" name="page003">[pg 3]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>I</h3>
+
+    <p>A young dog, inexperienced, sadly lacking in even primary
+    education, ambles and frisks along the footpath of Fulham Road,
+    near the mysterious gates of a Marist convent. He is a large
+    puppy, on the way to be a dog of much dignity, but at present
+    he has little to recommend him but that gawky elegance, and
+    that bounding gratitude for the gift of life, which distinguish
+    the normal puppy. He is an ignorant fool. He might have entered
+    the convent of nuns and had a fine time, but instead he steps
+    off the pavement into the road, the road being a vast and
+    interesting continent imperfectly explored. His confidence in
+    his nose, in his agility, and in the goodness of God is
+    touching, absolutely painful to witness. He glances casually at
+    a huge, towering vermilion construction that is
+<!-- Page 8 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page004" name="page004">[pg 4]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded by a glint of
+    brass and a wisp of steam; and then with disdain he ignores it
+    as less important than a mere speck of odorous matter in the
+    mud. The next instant he is lying inert in the mud. His
+    confidence in the goodness of God had been misplaced. Since the
+    beginning of time God had ordained him a victim.</p>
+
+    <p>An impressive thing happens. The motor-bus reluctantly
+    slackens and stops. Not the differential brake, nor the
+    foot-brake, has arrested the motor-bus, but the invisible brake
+    of public opinion, acting by administrative transmission. There
+    is not a policeman in sight. Theoretically, the motor-'bus is
+    free to whiz onward in its flight to the paradise of
+    Shoreditch, but in practice it is paralysed by dread. A man in
+    brass buttons and a stylish cap leaps down from it, and the
+    blackened demon who sits on its neck also leaps down from it,
+    and they move gingerly towards the puppy. A little while ago
+<!-- Page 9 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page005" name="page005">[pg 5]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    the motor-bus might have overturned a human cyclist or so, and
+    proceeded nonchalant on its way. But now even a puppy requires
+    a post-mortem: such is the force of public opinion aroused. Two
+    policemen appear in the distance.</p>
+
+    <p>"A street accident" is now in being, and a crowd gathers
+    with calm joy and stares, passive and determined. The puppy
+    offers no sign whatever; just lies in the road. Then a boy,
+    destined probably to a great future by reason of his singular
+    faculty of initiative, goes to the puppy and carries him by the
+    scruff of the neck, to the shelter of the gutter. Relinquished
+    by the boy, the lithe puppy falls into an easy horizontal
+    attitude, and seems bent upon repose. The boy lifts the puppy's
+    head to examine it, and the head drops back wearily. The puppy
+    is dead. No cry, no blood, no disfigurement! Even no
+    perceptible jolt of the wheel as it climbed over the obstacle
+    of the puppy's body! A wonderfully clean and perfect
+    accident!</p>
+
+    <p>
+<!-- Page 10 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page006" name="page006">[pg 6]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    The increasing crowd stares with beatific placidity. People
+    emerge impatiently from the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus
+    and slip down from its back, and either join the crowd or
+    vanish. The two policemen and the crew of the motor-bus have
+    now met in parley. The conductor and the driver have an air at
+    once nervous and resigned; their gestures are quick and
+    vivacious. The policemen, on the other hand, indicate by their
+    slow and huge movements that eternity is theirs. And they could
+    not be more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had
+    them manacled and leashed. The conductor and the driver admit
+    the absolute dominion of the elephantine policemen; they admit
+    that before the simple will of the policemen inconvenience,
+    lost minutes, shortened leisure, docked wages, count as less
+    than naught. And the policemen are carelessly sublime, well
+    knowing that magistrates, jails, and the very Home Secretary on
+    his throne&#8212;yes, and a whole system of conspiracy
+<!-- Page 11 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page007" name="page007">[pg 7]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    and perjury and brutality&#8212;are at their beck in case of
+    need. And yet occasionally in the demeanour of the policemen
+    towards the conductor and the driver there is a silent message
+    that says: "After all, we, too, are working men like you,
+    over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in the
+    service of the pitiless and dishonest public. We, too, have
+    wives and children and privations and frightful apprehensions.
+    We, too, have to struggle desperately. Only the awful magic of
+    these garments and of the garter which we wear on our wrists
+    sets an abyss between us and you." And the conductor writes and
+    one of the policemen writes, and they keep on writing, while
+    the traffic makes beautiful curves to avoid them.</p>
+
+    <p>The still increasing crowd continues to stare in the pure
+    blankness of pleasure. A close-shaved, well-dressed,
+    middle-aged man, with a copy of
+    <i>The Sportsman</i>
+
+    in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus, starts
+    stamping his feet. "I was knocked down by a taxi last year," he
+
+<!-- Page 12 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page008" name="page008">[pg 8]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    says fiercely. "But nobody took no notice of
+    <i>that</i>
+
+    ! Are they going to stop here all the blank morning for a blank
+    tyke?" And for all his respectable appearance, his features
+    become debased, and he emits a jet of disgusting profanity and
+    brings most of the Trinity into the thunderous assertion that
+    he has paid his fare. Then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart.
+    And he stops and talks a long time with the other uniforms,
+    because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd
+    never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops
+    and picks up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it,
+    all soft and yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and
+    passes on. And only that which is immortal and divine of the
+    puppy remains behind, floating perhaps like an invisible vapour
+    over the scene of the tragedy.</p>
+
+    <p>The crowd is tireless, all eyes. The four principals still
+    converse and write. Nobody in the crowd comprehends what they
+    are about. At length the driver
+<!-- Page 13 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page009" name="page009">[pg 9]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    separates himself, but is drawn back, and a new parley is
+    commenced. But everything ends. The policemen turn on their
+    immense heels. The driver and conductor race towards the
+    motor-bus. The bell rings, the motor-bus, quite empty,
+    disappears snorting round the corner into Walham Green. The
+    crowd is now lessening. But it separates with reluctance, many
+    of its members continuing to stare with intense absorption at
+    the place where the puppy lay or the place where the policemen
+    stood. An appreciable interval elapses before the "street
+    accident" has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon.</p>
+
+    <p>The members of the crowd follow their noses, and during the
+    course of the day remark to acquaintances:</p>
+
+    <p>"Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the Fulham Road this
+    morning! Killed dead!"</p>
+
+    <p>And that is all they do remark. That is all they have
+    witnessed. They will not, and could not, give intelligible and
+    in
+<!-- Page 14 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page010" name="page010">[pg 10]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    teresting particulars of the affair (unless it were as to the
+    breed of the dog or the number of the bus-service). They have
+    watched a dog run over. They analyse neither their sensations
+    nor the phenomenon. They have witnessed it whole, as a bad
+    writer uses a
+    <i>clich&#233;</i>
+
+    . They have observed&#8212;that is to say, they have really
+    seen&#8212;nothing.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 15 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page011" name="page011">[pg 11]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>II</h3>
+
+    <p>It will be well for us not to assume an attitude of
+    condescension towards the crowd. Because in the matter of
+    looking without seeing we are all about equal. We all go to and
+    fro in a state of the observing faculties which somewhat
+    resembles coma. We are all content to look and not see.</p>
+
+    <p>And if and when, having comprehended that the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of observer is not passive but active, we determine by an
+    effort to rouse ourselves from the coma and really to see the
+    spectacle of the world (a spectacle surpassing circuses and
+    even street accidents in sustained dramatic interest), we shall
+    discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act of seeing,
+    which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. Let a man
+    resolve: "I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of
+    a morning,"
+<!-- Page 16 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page012" name="page012">[pg 12]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    and the probability if that for many mornings he will see
+    naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective
+    will be absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will
+    infallibly attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental
+    and universal. Travel makes observers of us all, but the things
+    which as travellers we observe generally show how unskilled we
+    are in the new activity.</p>
+
+    <p>A man went to Paris for the first time, and observed right
+    off that the carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof
+    like a tramcar. He was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery
+    that he observed almost nothing else. This enormous fact
+    occupied the whole foreground of his perspective. He returned
+    home and announced that Paris was a place where people rode on
+    the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the first
+    time&#8212;and no English person would ever guess the
+    phenomenon which vanquished all others in her mind on the
+<!-- Page 17 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page013" name="page013">[pg 13]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    opening day. She saw a cat walking across a street. The vision
+    excited her. For in Paris cats do not roam in thoroughfares,
+    because there are practically no houses with gardens or
+    "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement of
+    cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first
+    presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very
+    early and making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn
+    in quest of interesting material. And the one note I gathered
+    was that the ground in front of the all-night coffee-stalls was
+    white with egg-shells! What I needed then was an operation for
+    cataract. I also remember taking a man to the opera who had
+    never seen an opera. The work was
+    <i>Lohengrin</i>
+
+    . When we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather
+    stiff." And it was all he did say. We went and had a drink. He
+    was not mistaken. His observation was most just; but his
+    perspective was that of those literary critics who give ten
+    lines to point
+<!-- Page 18 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page014" name="page014">[pg 14]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    ing out three slips of syntax, and three lines to an
+    ungrammatical admission that the novel under survey is not
+    wholly tedious.</p>
+
+    <p>But a man may acquire the ability to observe even a large
+    number of facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of
+    observation. I have read, in some work of literary criticism,
+    that Dickens could walk up one side of a long, busy street and
+    down the other, and then tell you in their order the names on
+    all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an illustration of
+    his great powers of observation. Dickens was a great observer,
+    but he would assuredly have been a still greater observer had
+    he been a little less pre-occupied with trivial and
+    unco-ordinated details. Good observation consists not in
+    multiplicity of detail, but in co-ordination of detail
+    according to a true perspective of relative importance, so that
+    a finally just general impression may be reached in the
+    shortest possible time. The skilled observer is he who does not
+    have to change
+<!-- Page 19 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page015" name="page015">[pg 15]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    his mind. One has only to compare one's present adjusted
+    impression of an intimate friend with one's first impression of
+    him to perceive the astounding inadequacy of one's powers of
+    observation. The man as one has learnt to see him is simply not
+    the same man who walked into one's drawing-room on the day of
+    introduction.</p>
+
+    <p>There are, by the way, three sorts of created beings who are
+    sentimentally supposed to be able to judge individuals at the
+    first glance: women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a mystic
+    gift with which rumour credits them, they are never mistaken.
+    It is merely not true. Women are constantly quite wrong in the
+    estimates based on their "feminine instinct"; they sometimes
+    even admit it; and the matrimonial courts prove it
+    <i>passim</i>
+
+    . Children are more often wrong than women. And as for dogs, it
+    is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by plausible
+    scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. Not
+<!-- Page 20 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page016" name="page016">[pg 16]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    seldom have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion of
+    deceived dogs. Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the
+    infallibility of women, children, and dogs, will persist in
+    Anglo-Saxon countries.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 21 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page017" name="page017">[pg 17]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>III</h3>
+
+    <p>One is curious about one's fellow-creatures: therefore one
+    watches them. And generally the more intelligent one is, the
+    more curious one is, and the more one observes. The mere
+    satisfaction of this curiosity is in itself a worthy end, and
+    would alone justify the business of systematised observation.
+    But the aim of observation may, and should, be expressed in
+    terms more grandiose. Human curiosity counts among the highest
+    social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest
+    defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of
+    character and temperament and thereby to a better understanding
+    of the springs of human conduct. Observation is not practised
+    directly with this high end in view (save by prigs and other
+    futile souls); nevertheless it is a moral act and must
+    inevitably
+<!-- Page 22 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page018" name="page018">[pg 18]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    promote kindliness&#8212;whether we like it or not. It also
+    sharpens the sense of beauty. An ugly deed&#8212;such as a deed
+    of cruelty&#8212;takes on artistic beauty when its origin and
+    hence its fitness in the general scheme begin to be
+    comprehended. In the perspective of history we can derive an
+    &#230;sthetic pleasure from the tranquil scrutiny of all kinds
+    of conduct&#8212;as well, for example, of a Renaissance Pope as
+    of a Savonarola. Observation endows our day and our street with
+    the romantic charm of history, and stimulates charity&#8212;not
+    the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious charity
+    which puts itself to the trouble of understanding. The one
+    condition is that the observer must never lose sight of the
+    fact that what he is trying to see is life, is the woman next
+    door, is the man in the train&#8212;and not a concourse of
+    abstractions. To appreciate all this is the first inspiring
+    preliminary to sound observation.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 23 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page019" name="page019">[pg 19]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>IV</h3>
+
+    <p>The second preliminary is to realise that all physical
+    phenomena are interrelated, that there is nothing which does
+    not bear on everything else. The whole spectacular and sensual
+    show&#8212;what the eye sees, the ear hears, the nose scents,
+    the tongue tastes and the skin touches&#8212;is a cause or an
+    effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as negligible,
+    as not forming part of the equation. Hence he who would beyond
+    all others see life for himself&#8212;I naturally mean the
+    novelist and playwright&#8212;ought to embrace all phenomena in
+    his curiosity. Being finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot!
+    But he can, by obtaining a broad notion of the whole, determine
+    with some accuracy the position and relative importance of the
+    particular series of phenomena to which his instinct draws him.
+    If he
+<!-- Page 24 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page020" name="page020">[pg 20]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    does not thus envisage the immense background of his special
+    interests, he will lose the most precious feeling for interplay
+    and proportion without which all specialism becomes distorted
+    and positively darkened.</p>
+
+    <p>Now, the main factor in life on this planet is the planet
+    itself. Any logically conceived survey of existence must begin
+    with geographical and climatic phenomena. This is surely
+    obvious. If you say that you are not interested in meteorology
+    or the configurations of the earth, I say that you deceive
+    yourself. You are. For an east wind may upset your liver and
+    cause you to insult your wife. Beyond question the most
+    important fact about, for example, Great Britain is that it is
+    an island. We sail amid the Hebrides, and then talk of the fine
+    qualities and the distressing limitations of those islanders;
+    it ought to occur to us English that we are talking of
+    ourselves in little. In moments of journalistic vainglory we
+    are apt to refer to the "sturdy island race," meaning us. But
+    that we are
+<!-- Page 25 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page021" name="page021">[pg 21]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    insular in the full significance of the horrid word is certain.
+    Why not? A genuine observation of the supreme phenomenon that
+    Great Britain is surrounded by water&#8212;an effort to keep it
+    always at the back of the consciousness&#8212;will help to
+    explain all the minor phenomena of British existence.
+    Geographical knowledge is the mother of discernment, for the
+    varying physical characteristics of the earth are the sole
+    direct terrestrial influence determining the evolution of
+    original vital energy.</p>
+
+    <p>All other influences are secondary, and have been effects of
+    character and temperament before becoming causes. Perhaps the
+    greatest of them are roads and architecture. Nothing could be
+    more English than English roads, or more French than French
+    roads. Enter England from France, let us say through the gate
+    of Folkestone, and the architectural illustration which greets
+    you (if you can look and see) is absolutely dramatic in its
+    spectacular force. You say that there is no architecture in
+    Folke
+<!-- Page 26 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page022" name="page022">[pg 22]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    stone. But Folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of
+    architecture as a wood is full of trees. As the train winds on
+    its causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you
+    thousands of squat little homes, neat, tended, respectable,
+    comfortable, prim, at once unostentatious and conceited. Each a
+    separate, clearly-defined entity! Each saying to the others:
+    "Don't look over my wall, and I won't look over yours!" Each
+    with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its own
+    individuality! Each a stronghold&#8212;an island! And all
+    careless of the general effect, but making a very impressive
+    general effect. The English race is below you. Your own son is
+    below you insisting on the inviolability of his own den of a
+    bedroom! ... And contrast all that with the immense communistic
+    and splendid fa&#231;ades of a French town, and work out the
+    implications. If you really intend to see life you cannot
+    afford to be blind to such thrilling phenomena.</p>
+
+    <p>
+<!-- Page 27 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page023" name="page023">[pg 23]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity would be capable of
+    walking through a French street and through an English street,
+    and noting chiefly that whereas English lamp-posts spring from
+    the kerb, French lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! Not
+    that that detail is not worth noting. It is&#8212;in its place.
+    French lamp-posts are part of what we call the "interesting
+    character" of a French street. We say of a French street that
+    it is "full of character." As if an English street was not!
+    Such is blindness&#8212;to be cured by travel and the exercise
+    of the logical faculty, most properly termed common sense. If
+    one is struck by the magnificence of the great towns of the
+    Continent, one should ratiocinate, and conclude that a major
+    characteristic of the great towns of England is their shabby
+    and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. It is so. But there are
+    people who have lived fifty years in Manchester, Leeds, Hull
+    and Hanley without noticing it. The English idiosyncrasy is in
+    that
+<!-- Page 28 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page024" name="page024">[pg 24]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    awful external slovenliness too, causing it, and being caused
+    by it. Every street is a mirror, an illustration, an
+    exposition, an explanation, of the human beings who live in it.
+    Nothing in it is to be neglected. Everything in it is valuable,
+    if the perspective is maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow
+    individualistic novels of English literature&#8212;and in some
+    of the best&#8212;you will find a domestic organism described
+    as though it existed in a vacuum, or in the Sahara, or between
+    Heaven and earth; as though it reacted on nothing and was
+    reacted on by nothing; and as though it could be adequately
+    rendered without reference to anything exterior to itself. How
+    can such novels satisfy a reader who has acquired or wants to
+    acquire the faculty of seeing life?</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 29 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page025" name="page025">[pg 25]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>V</h3>
+
+    <p>The net result of the interplay of instincts and influences
+    which determine the existence of a community is shown in the
+    general expression on the faces of the people. This is an index
+    which cannot lie and cannot be gainsaid. It is fairly easy, and
+    extremely interesting, to decipher. It is so open, shameless,
+    and universal, that not to look at it is impossible. Yet the
+    majority of persons fail to see it. We hear of inquirers
+    standing on London Bridge and counting the number of
+    motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, and white horses that
+    pass over the bridge in an hour. But we never hear of anybody
+    counting the number of faces happy or unhappy, honest or
+    rascally, shrewd or ingenuous, kind or cruel, that pass over
+    the bridge. Perhaps the public may be surprised to hear that
+    the general ex
+<!-- Page 30 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page026" name="page026">[pg 26]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    pression on the faces of Londoners of all ranks varies from the
+    sad to the morose; and that their general mien is one of haste
+    and gloomy preoccupation. Such a staring fact is paramount in
+    sociological evidence. And the observer of it would be
+    justified in summoning Heaven, the legislature, the county
+    council, the churches, and the ruling classes, and saying to
+    them: "Glance at these faces, and don't boast too much about
+    what you have accomplished. The climate and the industrial
+    system have so far triumphed over you all."</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 31 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page027" name="page027">[pg 27]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>VI</h3>
+
+    <p>When we come to the observing of the individual&#8212;to
+    which all human observing does finally come if there is any
+    right reason in it&#8212;the aforesaid general considerations
+    ought to be ever present in the hinterland of the
+    consciousness, aiding and influencing, perhaps vaguely, perhaps
+    almost imperceptibly, the formation of judgments. If they do
+    nothing else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to
+    the highly important idea of the correlation of all phenomena.
+    Especially in England a haphazard particularity is the chief
+    vitiating element in the operations of the mind.</p>
+
+    <p>In estimating the individual we are apt not only to forget
+    his environment, but&#8212;really strange!&#8212;to ignore much
+    of the evidence visible in the individual himself. The
+    inexperienced and ardent observer,
+<!-- Page 32 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page028" name="page028">[pg 28]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    will, for example, be astonishingly blind to everything in an
+    individual except his face. Telling himself that the face must
+    be the reflection of the soul, and that every thought and
+    emotion leaves inevitably its mark there, he will concentrate
+    on the face, singling it out as a phenomenon apart and
+    self-complete. Were he a god and infallible, he could no doubt
+    learn the whole truth from the face. But he is bound to fall
+    into errors, and by limiting the field of vision he minimises
+    the opportunity for correction. The face is, after all, quite a
+    small part of the individual's physical organism. An Englishman
+    will look at a woman's face and say she is a beautiful woman or
+    a plain woman. But a woman may have a plain face, and yet by
+    her form be entitled to be called beautiful, and (perhaps)
+    <i>vice vers&#226;</i>
+
+    . It is true that the face is the reflexion of the soul. It is
+    equally true that the carriage and gestures are the reflection
+    of the soul. Had one eyes, the tying of a bootlace is the
+    reflection of the
+<!-- Page 33 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page029" name="page029">[pg 29]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    soul. One piece of evidence can be used to correct every other
+    piece of evidence. A refined face may be refuted by clumsy
+    finger-ends; the eyes may contradict the voice; the gait may
+    nullify the smile. None of the phenomena which every individual
+    carelessly and brazenly displays in every motor-bus terrorising
+    the streets of London is meaningless or negligible.</p>
+
+    <p>Again, in observing we are generally guilty of that
+    particularity which results from sluggishness of the
+    imagination. We may see the phenomenon at the moment of looking
+    at it, but we particularise in that moment, making no effort to
+    conceive what the phenomenon is likely to be at other
+    moments.</p>
+
+    <p>For example, a male human creature wakes up in the morning
+    and rises with reluctance. Being a big man, and existing with
+    his wife and children in a very confined space, he has to adapt
+    himself to his environment as he goes through the various
+    functions incident to preparing for his day's work. He is just
+    like you
+<!-- Page 34 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page030" name="page030">[pg 30]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    or me. He wants his breakfast, he very much wants to know where
+    his boots are, and he has the usually sinister preoccupations
+    about health and finance. Whatever the force of his egoism, he
+    must more or less harmonise his individuality with those of his
+    wife and children. Having laid down the law, or accepted it, he
+    sets forth to his daily duties, just a fraction of a minute
+    late. He arrives at his office, resumes life with his
+    colleagues sympathetic and antipathetic, and then leaves the
+    office for an expedition extending over several hours. In the
+    course of his expedition he encounters the corpse of a young
+    dog run down by a motor-bus. Now you also have encountered that
+    corpse and are gazing at it; and what do you say to yourself
+    when he comes along? You say: "Oh! Here's a policeman." For he
+    happens to be a policeman. You stare at him, and you never see
+    anything but a policeman&#8212;an indivisible phenomenon of
+    blue cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face, and a
+    helmet; "
+<!-- Page 35 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page031" name="page031">[pg 31]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    a stalwart guardian of the law"; to you little more human than
+    an algebraic symbol: in a word&#8212;a policeman.</p>
+
+    <p>Only, that word actually conveys almost nothing to you of
+    the reality which it stands for. You are satisfied with it as
+    you are satisfied with the description of a disease. A friend
+    tells you his eyesight is failing. You sympathise. "What is
+    it?" you ask. "Glaucoma." "Ah! Glaucoma!" You don't know what
+    glaucoma is. You are no wiser than you were before. But you are
+    content. A name has contented you. Similarly the name of
+    policeman contents you, seems to absolve you from further
+    curiosity as to the phenomenon. You have looked at tens of
+    thousands of policemen, and perhaps never seen the hundredth
+    part of the reality of a single one. Your imagination has not
+    truly worked on the phenomenon.</p>
+
+    <p>There may be some excuse for not seeing the reality of a
+    policeman, because a uniform is always a thick veil. But you
+    &#8212;
+<!-- Page 36 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page032" name="page032">[pg 32]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    I mean you, I, any of us&#8212;are oddly dim-sighted also in
+    regard to the civil population. For instance, we get into the
+    empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the street accident,
+    and examine the men and women who gradually fill it. Probably
+    we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of
+    life. All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past
+    and are moving towards a future. But how often does our
+    imagination put itself to the trouble of realising this? We may
+    observe with some care, yet owing to a fundamental defect of
+    attitude we are observing not the human individuals, but a
+    peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in
+    motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the
+    present! No human phenomenon is adequately seen until the
+    imagination has placed it back into its past and forward into
+    its future. And this is the final process of observation of the
+    individual.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 37 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page033" name="page033">[pg 33]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>VII</h3>
+
+    <p>Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not begin with
+    seeing the individual. Neither does it end with seeing the
+    individual. Particular and unsystematised observation cannot go
+    on for ever, aimless, formless. Just as individuals are singled
+    out from systems, in the earlier process of observation, so in
+    the later processes individuals will be formed into new groups,
+    which formation will depend upon the personal bent of the
+    observer. The predominant interests of the observer will
+    ultimately direct his observing activities to their own
+    advantage. If he is excited by the phenomena of
+    organisation&#8212;as I happen to be&#8212;he will see
+    individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation,
+    and will insist on the variations from type due to that
+    grouping. If he is convinced&#8212;as numbers of people appear
+<!-- Page 38 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page034" name="page034">[pg 34]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    to be&#8212;that society is just now in an extremely critical
+    pass, and that if something mysterious is not forthwith done
+    the structure of it will crumble to atoms&#8212;he will see
+    mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to
+    him, the human dilemma demands. And so on! These tendencies,
+    while they should not be resisted too much, since they give
+    character to observation and redeem it from the frigidity of
+    mechanics, should be resisted to a certain extent. For,
+    whatever they may be, they favour the growth of sentimentality,
+    the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common sense.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 39 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page035" name="page035">[pg 35]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>PART II</h2>
+
+    <h3>WRITING NOVELS</h3>
+
+<!-- Page 40 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page036" name="page036">[pg 36]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <br />
+
+<!-- Page 41 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page037" name="page037">[pg 37]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>I</h3>
+
+    <p>The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so
+    excited by it that he absolutely must transmit the vision to
+    others, chooses narrative fiction as the liveliest vehicle for
+    the relief of his feelings. He is like other artists&#8212;he
+    cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to himself, he is
+    bursting with the news; he is bound to tell&#8212;the affair is
+    too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in
+    this&#8212;that what most chiefly strikes him is the
+    indefinable humanness of human nature, the large general manner
+    of existing. Of course, he is the result of evolution from the
+    primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to this day
+    transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude
+    visions of life in the caf&#233; or the club, or on the
+    kerbstone. They belong to the lowest circle of artists;
+<!-- Page 42 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page038" name="page038">[pg 38]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    but they are artists; and the form that they adopt is the very
+    basis of the novel. By innumerable entertaining steps from them
+    you may ascend to the major artist whose vision of life,
+    inclusive, intricate and intense, requires for its due
+    transmission the great traditional form of the novel as
+    perfected by the masters of a long age which has temporarily
+    set the novel higher than any other art-form.</p>
+
+    <p>I would not argue that the novel should be counted supreme
+    among the great traditional forms of art. Even if there is a
+    greatest form, I do not much care which it is. I have in turn
+    been convinced that Chartres Cathedral, certain Greek
+    sculpture, Mozart's
+    <i>Don Juan</i>
+
+    , and the juggling of Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest thing in
+    the world&#8212;not to mention the achievements of Shakspere or
+    Nijinsky. But there is something to be said for the real
+    pre-eminence of prose fiction as a literary form. (Even the
+    modern epic has learnt almost all it knows from prose-fiction.)
+    The novel has, and always will have, the
+<!-- Page 43 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page039" name="page039">[pg 39]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    advantage of its comprehensive bigness. St Peter's at Rome is a
+    trifle compared with Tolstoi's
+    <i>War and Peace</i>
+
+    ; and it is as certain as anything can be that, during the
+    present geological epoch at any rate, no epic half as long as
+    <i>War and Peace</i>
+
+    will ever be read, even if written.</p>
+
+    <p>Notoriously the novelist (including the playwright, who is a
+    sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of
+    other artists. In the matter of poaching, the painter has done
+    a lot, and the composer has done more, but what the painter and
+    the composer have done is as naught compared to the grasping
+    deeds of the novelist. And whereas the painter and the composer
+    have got into difficulties with their audacious schemes, the
+    novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with a success
+    that is not denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the
+    interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose
+    fiction&#8212;from landscape-painting to sociology&#8212;and
+    none which might not be. Unnecessary to go back to the
+    ante-Scott
+<!-- Page 44 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page040" name="page040">[pg 40]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    age in order to perceive how the novel has aggrandised itself!
+    It has conquered enormous territories even since
+    <i>Germinal</i>
+
+    . Within the last fifteen years it has gained. Were it to adopt
+    the hue of the British Empire, the entire map of the universe
+    would soon be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand in the
+    hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present
+    day as a means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life.
+    It is, and will be for some time to come, the form to which the
+    artist with the most inclusive vision instinctively turns,
+    because it is the most inclusive form, and the most adaptable.
+    Indeed, before we are much older, if its present rate of
+    progress continues, it will have reoccupied the dazzling
+    position to which the mighty Balzac lifted it, and in which he
+    left it in 1850. So much, by the way, for the rank of the
+    novel.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 45 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page041" name="page041">[pg 41]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>II</h3>
+
+    <p>In considering the equipment of the novelist there are two
+    attributes which may always be taken for granted. The first is
+    the sense of beauty&#8212;indispensable to the creative artist.
+    Every creative artist has it, in his degree. He is an artist
+    because he has it. An artist works under the stress of
+    instinct. No man's instinct can draw him towards material which
+    repels him&#8212;the fact is obvious. Obviously, whatever kind
+    of life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed and
+    seduced by it, he is under its spell&#8212;that is, he has seen
+    beauty in it. He could have no other reason for writing about
+    it. He may see a strange sort of beauty; he may&#8212;indeed he
+    does&#8212;see a sort of beauty that nobody has quite seen
+    before; he may see a sort of beauty that none save a few odd
+    spirits ever will or can be made
+<!-- Page 46 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page042" name="page042">[pg 42]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    to see. But he does see beauty. To say, after reading a novel
+    which has held you, that the author has no sense of beauty, is
+    inept. (The mere fact that you turned over his pages with
+    interest is an answer to the criticism&#8212;a criticism,
+    indeed, which is not more sagacious than that of the reviewer
+    who remarks: "Mr Blank has produced a thrilling novel, but
+    unfortunately he cannot write." Mr Blank has written; and he
+    could, anyhow, write enough to thrill the reviewer.) All that a
+    wise person will assert is that an artist's sense of beauty is
+    different for the time being from his own.</p>
+
+    <p>The reproach of the lack of a sense of beauty has been
+    brought against nearly all original novelists; it is seldom
+    brought against a mediocre novelist. Even in the extreme cases
+    it is untrue; perhaps it is most untrue in the extreme cases. I
+    do not mean such a case as that of Zola, who never went to
+    extremes. I mean, for example, Gissing, a real extremist, who,
+    it is now admitted, saw a
+<!-- Page 47 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page043" name="page043">[pg 43]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    clear and undiscovered beauty in forms of existence which
+    hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to examine. And I mean
+    Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no works have been
+    more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel
+    <i>En M&#233;nage</i>
+
+    and his book of descriptive essays
+    <i>De Tout</i>
+
+    . Both reproduce with exasperation what is generally regarded
+    as the sordid ugliness of commonplace daily life. Yet both
+    exercise a unique charm (and will surely be read when
+    <i>La Cath&#233;drale</i>
+
+    is forgotten). And it is inconceivable that
+    Huysmans&#8212;whatever he may have said&#8212;was not ravished
+    by the secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in
+    it.</p>
+
+    <p>The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the
+    novelist, as in every artist, is passionate intensity of
+    vision. Unless the vision is passionately intense the artist
+    will not be moved to transmit it. He will not be inconvenienced
+    by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus not exist. Every
+    fine emotion produced in
+<!-- Page 48 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page044" name="page044">[pg 44]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the
+    writer, but in a far greater degree. It is not altogether
+    uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the
+    poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is
+    unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes
+    of artistic creation.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 49 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page045" name="page045">[pg 45]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>III</h3>
+
+    <p>A sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being
+    taken for granted, the one other important attribute in the
+    equipment of the novelist&#8212;the attribute which indeed by
+    itself practically suffices, and whose absence renders futile
+    all the rest&#8212;is fineness of mind. A great novelist must
+    have great qualities of mind. His mind must be sympathetic,
+    quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender, just,
+    merciful. He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing
+    sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. Above
+    all, his mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense.
+    His mind, in a word, must have the quality of being noble.
+    Unless his mind is all this, he will never, at the ultimate
+    bar, be reckoned supreme. That which counts, on every page, and
+
+<!-- Page 50 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page046" name="page046">[pg 46]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    all the time, is the very texture of his mind&#8212;the glass
+    through which he sees things. Every other attribute is
+    secondary, and is dispensable. Fielding lives unequalled among
+    English novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is
+    unequalled. He is read with unreserved enthusiasm because the
+    reader feels himself at each paragraph to be in close contact
+    with a glorious personality. And no advance in technique among
+    later novelists can possibly imperil his position. He will take
+    second place when a more noble mind, a more superb common
+    sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before. What
+    undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that
+    the texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in
+    courageous facing of the truth, and in certain delicacies of
+    perception. As much may be said of Thackeray, whose mind was
+    somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a figure, and not free
+    from defects which are inimical to immortality.</p>
+
+    <p>It is a hard saying for me, and full of
+<!-- Page 51 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page047" name="page047">[pg 47]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    danger in any country whose artists have shown contempt for
+    form, yet I am obliged to say that, as the years pass, I attach
+    less and less importance to good technique in fiction. I love
+    it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its
+    importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern
+    history of fiction will not support me. With the single
+    exception of Turgenev, the great novelists of the world,
+    according to my own standards, have either ignored technique or
+    have failed to understand it. What an error to suppose that the
+    finest foreign novels show a better sense of form than the
+    finest English novels! Balzac was a prodigious blunderer. He
+    could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general
+    form of a book. And as for a greater than
+    Balzac&#8212;Stendhal&#8212;his scorn of technique was
+    notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece:
+    "By the way I ought to have told you earlier that the
+    Duchess&#8212;!" And as for a greater
+<!-- Page 52 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page048" name="page048">[pg 48]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    than either Balzac or Stendhal&#8212;Dostoievsky&#8212;what a
+    hasty, amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the
+    unapproachable
+    <i>Brothers Karamazov</i>
+
+    ! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction
+    by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was
+    clumsy and careless. What would have been Flaubert's detailed
+    criticism of that book? And what would it matter? And, to take
+    a minor example, witness the comically amateurish technique of
+    the late "Mark Rutherford"&#8212;nevertheless a novelist whom
+    one can deeply admire.</p>
+
+    <p>And when we come to consider the great technicians, Guy de
+    Maupassant and Flaubert, can we say that their technique will
+    save them, or atone in the slightest degree for the defects of
+    their minds? Exceptional artists both, they are both now
+    inevitably falling in esteem to the level of the second-rate.
+    Human nature being what it is, and de Maupassant being tinged
+    with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with interest by
+<!-- Page 53 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page049" name="page049">[pg 49]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite all
+    his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant
+    with the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is
+    one of the outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It
+    is being discovered that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble
+    enough&#8212;that, indeed, it was a cruel mind, and a little
+    an&#230;mic.
+    <i>Bouvard et P&#233;cuchet</i>
+
+    was the crowning proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the
+    humanness of the world, and suffered from the delusion that he
+    had been born on the wrong planet. The glitter of his technique
+    is dulled now, and fools even count it against him. In regard
+    to one section of human activity only did his mind seem
+    noble&#8212;namely, literary technique. His correspondence,
+    written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the
+    question of literary technique, and his correspondence stands
+    forth to-day as his best work&#8212;a marvellous fount of
+    inspiration to his fellow artists. So I
+<!-- Page 54 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page050" name="page050">[pg 50]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    return to the point that the novelist's one important attribute
+    (beyond the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind. It
+    and nothing else makes both the friends and the enemies which
+    he has; while the influence of technique is slight and
+    transitory. And I repeat that it is a hard saying.</p>
+
+    <p>I begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the
+    mysterious nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." There
+    may be something of the amateur in all great artists. I do not
+    know why it should be so, unless because, in the exuberance of
+    their sense of power, they are impatient of the exactitudes of
+    systematic study and the mere bother of repeated attempts to
+    arrive at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great artist was
+    ever a profound scholar. The great artist has other ends to
+    achieve. And every artist, major and minor, is aware in his
+    conscience that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to
+    proceed rapidly with the affair of creation, and an excus
+<!-- Page 55 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page051" name="page051">[pg 51]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    able dislike of re-creating anything twice, thrice, or ten
+    times over&#8212;unnatural task!&#8212;are responsible for much
+    of that artifice. We can all point in excuse to Shakspere, who
+    was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods would
+    shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has
+    been mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care.
+    If Flaubert had been a greater artist he might have been more
+    of an amateur.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 56 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page052" name="page052">[pg 52]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>IV</h3>
+
+    <p>Of this poor neglected matter of technique the more
+    important branch is design&#8212;or construction. It is the
+    branch of the art&#8212;of all arts&#8212;which comes next
+    after "inspiration"&#8212;a capacious word meant to include
+    everything that the artist must be born with and cannot
+    acquire. The less important branch of technique&#8212;far less
+    important&#8212;may be described as an ornamentation.</p>
+
+    <p>There are very few rules of design in the novel; but the few
+    are capital. Nevertheless, great novelists have often flouted
+    or ignored them&#8212;to the detriment of their work. In my
+    opinion the first rule is that the interest must be
+    centralised; it must not be diffused equally over various parts
+    of the canvas. To compare one art with another may be perilous,
+    but really the convenience of
+<!-- Page 57 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page053" name="page053">[pg 53]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    describing a novel as a canvas is extreme. In a well-designed
+    picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one particular spot. If the
+    eye is drawn with equal force to several different spots, then
+    we reproach the painter for having "scattered" the interest of
+    the picture. Similarly with the novel. A novel must have one,
+    two, or three figures that easily overtop the rest. These
+    figures must be in the foreground, and the rest in the
+    middle-distance or in the back-ground.</p>
+
+    <p>Moreover, these figures&#8212;whether they are saints or
+    sinners&#8212;must somehow be presented more sympathetically
+    than the others. If this cannot be done, then the inspiration
+    is at fault. The single motive that should govern the choice of
+    a principal figure is the motive of love for that figure. What
+    else could the motive be? The race of heroes is essential to
+    art. But what makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure
+    chosen than the understanding sympathy of the artist with the
+    figure. To say that the hero has disappeared from
+<!-- Page 58 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page054" name="page054">[pg 54]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    modern fiction is absurd. All that has happened is that the
+    characteristics of the hero have changed, naturally, with the
+    times. When Thackeray wrote "a novel without a hero," he wrote
+    a novel with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this better
+    than Thackeray. What he meant was that he was sick of the
+    conventional bundle of characteristics styled a hero in his
+    day, and that he had changed the type. Since then we have grown
+    sick of Dobbins, and the type has been changed again more than
+    once. The fateful hour will arrive when we shall be sick of
+    Ponderevos.</p>
+
+    <p>The temptation of the great novelist, overflowing with
+    creative force, is to scatter the interest. In both his major
+    works Tolstoi found the temptation too strong for him.
+    <i>Anna Karenina</i>
+
+    is not one novel, but two, and suffers accordingly. As for
+    <i>War and Peace</i>
+
+    , the reader wanders about in it as in a forest, for days,
+    lost, deprived of a sense of direction, and with no vestige of
+    a sign-post; at
+<!-- Page 59 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page055" name="page055">[pg 55]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    intervals encountering mysterious faces whose identity he in
+    vain tries to recall. On a much smaller scale Meredith
+    committed the same error. Who could assert positively which of
+    the sisters Fleming is the heroine of
+    <i>Rhoda Fleming</i>
+
+    ? For nearly two hundred pages at a stretch Rhoda scarcely
+    appears. And more than once the author seems quite to forget
+    that the little knave Algernon is not, after all, the hero of
+    the story.</p>
+
+    <p>The second rule of design&#8212;perhaps in the main merely a
+    different view of the first&#8212;is that the interest must be
+    maintained. It may increase, but it must never diminish. Here
+    is that special aspect of design which we call construction, or
+    plot. By interest I mean the interest of the story itself, and
+    not the interest of the continual play of the author's mind on
+    his material. In proportion as the interest of the story is
+    maintained, the plot is a good one. In so far as it lapses, the
+    plot is a bad one. There is no other criterion of good con
+<!-- Page 60 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page056" name="page056">[pg 56]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    struction. Readers of a certain class are apt to call good the
+    plot of that story in which "you can't tell what is going to
+    happen next." But in some of the most tedious novels ever
+    written you can't tell what is going to happen next&#8212;and
+    you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. It would be
+    nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to
+    make sure what will happen next"! Good plots set you anxiously
+    guessing what will happen next.</p>
+
+    <p>When the reader is misled&#8212;not intentionally in order
+    to get an effect, but clumsily through
+    amateurishness&#8212;then the construction is bad. This
+    calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really
+    good work another calamity does occur with far too much
+    frequency&#8212;namely, the tantalising of the reader at a
+    critical point by a purposeless, wanton, or negligent shifting
+    of the interest from the major to the minor theme. A sad
+    example of this infantile trick is to be found in the
+    thirty-first chapter of
+    <i>Rhoda</i>
+
+<!-- Page 61 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page057" name="page057">[pg 57]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <i>Fleming</i>
+
+    , wherein, well knowing that the reader is tingling for the
+    interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable to
+    control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for Algernon,
+    devotes some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with
+    an illicit thousand pounds. That the sixteen pages are
+    excessively brilliant does not a bit excuse the wilful
+    unshapeliness of the book's design.</p>
+
+    <p>The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out defenders of
+    Victorian fiction are wont to argue that though the event-plot
+    in sundry great novels may be loose and casual (that is to say,
+    simply careless), the "idea-plot" is usually close-knit,
+    coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able to comprehend
+    how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot (any
+    more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but
+    assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that
+    the mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow,
+    the event-plot (which I positively
+<!-- Page 62 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page058" name="page058">[pg 58]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    do not believe),&#8212;even then I still hold that sloppiness
+    in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave
+    iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English
+    novels, chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot,
+    the Bront&#235;s, and Anthony Trollope.</p>
+
+    <p>The one other important rule in construction is that the
+    plot should be kept throughout within the same convention. All
+    plots&#8212;even those of our most sacred naturalistic
+    contemporaries&#8212;are and must be a conventionalisation of
+    life. We imagine we have arrived at a convention which is
+    nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
+    Perhaps we have&#8212;but so little nearer that the difference
+    is scarcely appreciable! An aviator at midday may be nearer the
+    sun than the motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire
+    journey to the sun, the aviator's progress upward can safely be
+    ignored. No novelist has yet, or ever will, come within a
+    hundred million miles of life itself. It is impossible for us
+    to
+<!-- Page 63 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page059" name="page059">[pg 59]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    see how far we still are from life. The defects of a new
+    convention disclose themselves late in its career. The notion
+    that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula
+    which ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "Naturalist" is
+    merely an epithet expressing self-satisfaction.</p>
+
+    <p>Similarly, the habit of deriding as "conventional" plots
+    constructed in an earlier convention, is ridiculous. Under this
+    head Dickens in particular has been assaulted; I have assaulted
+    him myself. But within their convention, the plots of Dickens
+    are excellent, and show little trace of amateurishness, and
+    every sign of skilled accomplishment. And Dickens did not
+    blunder out of one convention into another, as certain of
+    ourselves undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned
+    for the conventionalism of his plots. And yet Hardy happens to
+    be one of the rare novelists who have evolved a new convention
+    to suit their idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idiosyncrasy is a
+<!-- Page 64 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page060" name="page060">[pg 60]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    deep conviction of the whimsicality of the divine power, and
+    again and again he has expressed this with a virtuosity of
+    skill which ought to have put humility into the hearts of
+    naturalists, but which has not done so. The plot of
+    <i>The Woodlanders</i>
+
+    is one of the most exquisite examples of subtle symbolic
+    illustration of an idea that a writer of fiction ever achieved;
+    it makes the symbolism of Ibsen seem crude. You may say that
+    <i>The Woodlanders</i>
+
+    could not have occurred in real life. No novel could have
+    occurred in real life. The balance of probabilities is
+    incalculably against any novel whatsoever; and rightly so. A
+    convention is essential, and the duty of a novelist is to be
+    true within his chosen convention, and not further. Most
+    novelists still fail in this duty. Is there any reason, indeed,
+    why we should be so vastly cleverer than our fathers? I do not
+    think we are.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 65 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page061" name="page061">[pg 61]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>V</h3>
+
+    <p>Leaving the seductive minor question of ornamentation, I
+    come lastly to the question of getting the semblance of life on
+    to the page before the eyes of the reader&#8212;the daily and
+    hourly texture of existence. The novelist has selected his
+    subject; he has drenched himself in his subject. He has laid
+    down the main features of the design. The living embryo is
+    there, and waits to be developed into full organic structure.
+    Whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital tissue which
+    must be his material? The answer is that he digs it out of
+    himself. First-class fiction is, and must be, in the final
+    resort autobiographical. What else should it be? The novelist
+    may take notes of phenomena likely to be of use to him. And he
+    may acquire the skill to invent very apposite illustrative inci
+<!-- Page 66 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page062" name="page062">[pg 62]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    dent. But he cannot invent psychology. Upon occasion some human
+    being may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for
+    his craft. But such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible.
+    From outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology
+    of others. He can use a real person as the unrecognisable but
+    helpful basis for each of his characters.... And all that is
+    nothing. And all special research is nothing. When the real
+    intimate work of creation has to be done&#8212;and it has to be
+    done on every page&#8212;the novelist can only look within for
+    effective aid. Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he
+    has felt and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he
+    accomplish his end. An inquiry into the career of any
+    first-class novelist invariably reveals that his novels are
+    full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every good novel
+    contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could reveal.
+    Episodes, moods, characters of autobiography can be detected
+    and traced
+<!-- Page 67 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page063" name="page063">[pg 63]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate
+    autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may
+    not be detected. In dealing with each character in each episode
+    the novelist must for a thousand convincing details interrogate
+    that part of his own individuality which corresponds to the
+    particular character. The foundation of his equipment is
+    universal sympathy. And the result of this (or the
+    cause&#8212;I don't know which) is that in his own
+    individuality there is something of everybody. If he is a born
+    novelist he is safe in asking himself, when in doubt as to the
+    behaviour of a given personage at a given point: "Now, what
+    should
+    <i>I</i>
+
+    have done?" And incorporating the answer! And this in practice
+    is what he does. Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the
+    colours of all mankind.</p>
+
+    <p>The necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction accounts
+    for the creative repetition to which all
+    novelists&#8212;including the most powerful&#8212;are reduced.
+    They
+<!-- Page 68 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page064" name="page064">[pg 64]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    monotonously yield again and again to the strongest
+    predilections of their own individuality. Again and again they
+    think they are creating, by observation, a quite new
+    character&#8212;and lo! when finished it is an old
+    one&#8212;autobiographical psychology has triumphed! A novelist
+    may achieve a reputation with only a single type, created and
+    re-created in varying forms. And the very greatest do not
+    contrive to create more than half a score genuine separate
+    types. In Cerfberr and Christophe's biographical dictionary of
+    the characters of Balzac, a tall volume of six hundred pages,
+    there are some two thousand entries of different individuals,
+    but probably fewer than a dozen genuine distinctive types. No
+    creative artist ever repeated himself more brazenly or more
+    successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious delightful
+    actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young
+    man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping
+    virgin, his angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his
+
+<!-- Page 69 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page065" name="page065">[pg 65]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    faithful stupid servant&#8212;each is continually popping up
+    with a new name in the Human Comedy. A similar phenomenon, as
+    Frank Harris has proved, is to be observed in Shakspere. Hamlet
+    of Denmark was only the last and greatest of a series of
+    Shaksperean Hamlets.</p>
+
+    <p>It may be asked, finally: What of the actual process of
+    handling the raw material dug out of existence and of the
+    artist's self&#8212;the process of transmuting life into art?
+    There is no process. That is to say, there is no conscious
+    process. The convention chosen by an artist is his illusion of
+    the truth. Consciously, the artist only omits, selects,
+    arranges. But let him beware of being false to his illusion,
+    for then the process becomes conscious, and bad. This is
+    sentimentality, which is the seed of death in his work. Every
+    artist is tempted to sentimentalise, or to be
+    cynical&#8212;practically the same thing. And when he falls to
+    the temptation, the reader whispers in his heart, be it only
+    for one instant: "That
+<!-- Page 70 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page066" name="page066">[pg 66]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    is not true to life." And in turn the reader's illusion of
+    reality is impaired. Readers are divided into two
+    classes&#8212;the enemies and the friends of the artist. The
+    former, a legion, admire for a fortnight or a year. They hate
+    an uncompromising struggle for the truth. They positively like
+    the artist to fall to temptation. If he falls, they exclaim,
+    "How sweet!" The latter are capable of savouring the fine
+    unpleasantness of the struggle for truth. And when they whisper
+    in their hearts: "That is not true to life," they are ashamed
+    for the artist. They are few, very few; but a vigorous clan. It
+    is they who confer immortality.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 71 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page067" name="page067">[pg 67]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>PART III</h2>
+
+    <h3>WRITING PLAYS</h3>
+
+<!-- Page 72 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page068" name="page068">[pg 68]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <br />
+
+<!-- Page 73 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page069" name="page069">[pg 69]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>I</h3>
+
+    <p>There is an idea abroad, assiduously fostered as a rule by
+    critics who happen to have written neither novels nor plays,
+    that it is more difficult to write a play than a novel. I do
+    not think so. I have written or collaborated in about twenty
+    novels and about twenty plays, and I am convinced that it is
+    easier to write a play than a novel. Personally, I would sooner
+
+    <i>write</i>
+
+    two plays than one novel; less expenditure of nervous force and
+    mere brains would be required for two plays than for one novel.
+    (I emphasise the word "write," because if the whole weariness
+    between the first conception and the first performance of a
+    play is compared with the whole weariness between the first
+    conception and the first publication of a novel, then the play
+    has it. I would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels produced
+    than one play. But my
+<!-- Page 74 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page070" name="page070">[pg 70]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    immediate object is to compare only writing with writing.) It
+    seems to me that the sole persons entitled to judge of the
+    comparative difficulty of writing plays and writing novels are
+    those authors who have succeeded or failed equally well in both
+    departments. And in this limited band I imagine that the
+    differences of opinion on the point could not be marked. I
+    would like to note in passing, for the support of my
+    proposition, that whereas established novelists not
+    infrequently venture into the theatre with audacity,
+    established dramatists are very cautious indeed about quitting
+    the theatre. An established dramatist usually takes good care
+    to write plays and naught else; he will not affront the risks
+    of coming out into the open; and therein his instinct is quite
+    properly that of self-preservation. Of many established
+    dramatists all over the world it may be affirmed that if they
+    were so indiscreet as to publish a novel, the result would be a
+    great shattering and a great awakening.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 75 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page071" name="page071">[pg 71]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>II</h3>
+
+    <p>An enormous amount of vague reverential nonsense is talked
+    about the technique of the stage, the assumption being that in
+    difficulty it far surpasses any other literary technique, and
+    that until it is acquired a respectable play cannot be written.
+    One hears also that it can only be acquired behind the scenes.
+    A famous actor-manager once kindly gave me the benefit of his
+    experience, and what he said was that a dramatist who wished to
+    learn his business must live behind the scenes&#8212;and study
+    the works of Dion Boucicault! The truth is that no technique is
+    so crude and so simple as the technique of the stage, and that
+    the proper place to learn it is not behind the scenes but in
+    the pit. Managers, being the most conservative people on earth,
+    except compositors, will honestly try to
+<!-- Page 76 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page072" name="page072">[pg 72]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    convince the na&#239;ve dramatist that effects can only be
+    obtained in the precise way in which effects have always been
+    obtained, and that this and that rule must not be broken on
+    pain of outraging the public.</p>
+
+    <p>And indeed it is natural that managers should talk thus,
+    seeing the low state of the drama, because in any art rules and
+    reaction always flourish when creative energy is sick. The
+    mandarins have ever said and will ever say that a technique
+    which does not correspond with their own is no technique, but
+    simple clumsiness. There are some seven situations in the
+    customary drama, and a play which does not contain at least one
+    of those situations in each act will be condemned as
+    "undramatic," or "thin," or as being "all talk." It may contain
+    half a hundred other situations, but for the mandarin a
+    situation which is not one of the seven is not a situation.
+    Similarly there are some dozen character types in the customary
+    drama, and all original
+<!-- Page 77 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page073" name="page073">[pg 73]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    that is, truthful&#8212;characterisation will be dismissed as a
+    total absence of characterisation because it does not reproduce
+    any of these dozen types. Thus every truly original play is
+    bound to be indicted for bad technique. The author is bound to
+    be told that what he has written may be marvellously clever,
+    but that it is not a play. I remember the day&#8212;and it is
+    not long ago&#8212;when even so experienced and sincere a
+    critic as William Archer used to argue that if the
+    "intellectual" drama did not succeed with the general public,
+    it was because its technique was not up to the level of the
+    technique of the commercial drama! Perhaps he has changed his
+    opinion since then. Heaven knows that the so-called
+    "intellectual" drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all
+    literary art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama
+    could hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the most
+    successful commercial plays of modern times. I tremble to think
+    what the mandarins and William Archer would
+<!-- Page 78 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page074" name="page074">[pg 74]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    say to the technique of
+    <i>Hamlet</i>
+
+    , could it by some miracle be brought forward as a new piece by
+    a Mr Shakspere. They would probably recommend Mr Shakspere to
+    consider the ways of Sardou, Henri Bernstein, and Sir Herbert
+    Tree, and be wise. Most positively they would assert that
+    <i>Hamlet</i>
+
+    was not a play. And their pupils of the daily press would point
+    out&#8212;what surely Mr Shakspere ought to have perceived for
+    himself&#8212;that the second, third, or fourth act might be
+    cut wholesale without the slightest loss to the piece.</p>
+
+    <p>In the sense in which mandarins understand the word
+    technique, there is no technique special to the stage except
+    that which concerns the moving of solid human bodies to and
+    fro, and the limitations of the human senses. The dramatist
+    must not expect his audience to be able to see or hear two
+    things at once, nor to be incapable of fatigue. And he must not
+    expect his interpreters to stroll round or come on or go off in
+    a satisfactory manner unless he provides
+<!-- Page 79 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page075" name="page075">[pg 75]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    them with satisfactory reasons for strolling round, coming on,
+    or going off. Lastly, he must not expect his interpreters to
+    achieve physical impossibilities. The dramatist who sends a
+    pretty woman off in street attire and seeks to bring her on
+    again in thirty seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail
+    in stage technique, but he has not proved that stage technique
+    is tremendously difficult; he has proved something quite
+    else.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 80 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page076" name="page076">[pg 76]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>III</h3>
+
+    <p>One reason why a play is easier to write than a novel is
+    that a play is shorter than a novel. On the average, one may
+    say that it takes six plays to make the matter of a novel.
+    Other things being equal, a short work of art presents fewer
+    difficulties than a longer one. The contrary is held true by
+    the majority, but then the majority, having never attempted to
+    produce a long work of art, are unqualified to offer an
+    opinion. It is said that the most difficult form of poetry is
+    the sonnet. But the most difficult form of poetry is the epic.
+    The proof that the sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged
+    to be in the fewness of perfect sonnets. There are, however,
+    far more perfect sonnets than perfect epics. A perfect sonnet
+    may be a heavenly accident. But such accidents can never happen
+    to writers of
+<!-- Page 81 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page077" name="page077">[pg 77]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    epics. Some years ago we had an enormous palaver about the "art
+    of the short story," which numerous persons who had omitted to
+    write novels pronounced to be more difficult than the novel.
+    But the fact remains that there are scores of perfect short
+    stories, whereas it is doubtful whether anybody but Turgenev
+    ever did write a perfect novel. A short form is easier to
+    manipulate than a long form, because its construction is less
+    complicated, because the balance of its proportions can be more
+    easily corrected by means of a rapid survey, because it is
+    lawful and even necessary in it to leave undone many things
+    which are very hard to do, and because the emotional strain is
+    less prolonged. The most difficult thing in all art is to
+    maintain the imaginative tension unslackened throughout a
+    considerable period.</p>
+
+    <p>Then, not only does a play contain less matter than a
+    novel&#8212;it is further simplified by the fact that it
+    contains fewer kinds of matter, and less subtle kinds of
+<!-- Page 82 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page078" name="page078">[pg 78]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    matter. There are numerous delicate and difficult affairs of
+    craft that the dramatist need not think about at all. If he
+    attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree of subtlety,
+    he is merely wasting his time. What passes for subtle on the
+    stage would have a very obvious air in a novel, as some
+    dramatists have unhappily discovered. Thus whole continents of
+    danger may be shunned by the dramatist, and instead of being
+    scorned for his cowardice he will be very rightly applauded for
+    his artistic discretion. Fortunate predicament! Again, he need
+    not&#8212;indeed, he must not&#8212;save in a primitive and
+    hinting manner, concern himself with "atmosphere." He may
+    roughly suggest one, but if he begins on the feat of "creating"
+    an atmosphere (as it is called), the last suburban train will
+    have departed before he has reached the crisis of the play. The
+    last suburban train is the best friend of the dramatist, though
+    the fellow seldom has the sense to see it. Further, he is saved
+    all de
+<!-- Page 83 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page079" name="page079">[pg 79]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    scriptive work. See a novelist harassing himself into his grave
+    over the description of a landscape, a room, a
+    gesture&#8212;while the dramatist grins. The dramatist may have
+    to imagine a landscape, a room, or a gesture; but he has not
+    got to write it&#8212;and it is the writing which hastens
+    death. If a dramatist and a novelist set out to portray a
+    clever woman, they are almost equally matched, because each has
+    to make the creature say things and do things. But if they set
+    out to portray a charming woman, the dramatist can recline in
+    an easy chair and smoke while the novelist is ruining temper,
+    digestion and eyesight, and spreading terror in his household
+    by his moodiness and unapproachability. The electric light
+    burns in the novelist's study at three a.m.,&#8212;the novelist
+    is still endeavouring to convey by means of words the
+    extraordinary fascination that his heroine could exercise over
+    mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and he never
+    has really succeeded and never will. The dramatist
+<!-- Page 84 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page080" name="page080">[pg 80]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    writes curtly, "Enter Millicent." All are anxious to do the
+    dramatist's job for him. Is the play being read at
+    home&#8212;the reader eagerly and with brilliant success puts
+    his imagination to work and completes a charming Millicent
+    after his own secret desires. (Whereas he would coldly decline
+    to add one touch to Millicent were she the heroine of a novel.)
+    Is the play being performed on the stage&#8212;an experienced,
+    conscientious, and perhaps lovely actress will strive her
+    hardest to prove that the dramatist was right about Millicent's
+    astounding fascination. And if she fails, nobody will blame the
+    dramatist; the dramatist will receive naught but sympathy.</p>
+
+    <p>And there is still another region of superlative difficulty
+    which is narrowly circumscribed for the spoilt dramatist: I
+    mean the whole business of persuading the public that the
+    improbable is probable. Every work of art is and must be
+    crammed with improbabilities and artifice; and the greater
+    portion of the artifice is employed
+<!-- Page 85 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page081" name="page081">[pg 81]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    in just this trickery of persuasion. Only, the public of the
+    dramatist needs far less persuading than the public of the
+    novelist. The novelist announces that Millicent accepted the
+    hand of the wrong man, and in spite of all the novelist's
+    corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader
+    declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident as
+    unconvincing. The dramatist decides that Millicent must accept
+    the hand of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage in
+    flesh and blood, veritably doing it! Not easy for even the
+    critical beholder to maintain that Millicent could not and did
+    not do such a silly thing when he has actually with his eyes
+    seen her in the very act! The dramatist, as usual, having done
+    less, is more richly rewarded by results.</p>
+
+    <p>Of course it will be argued, as it has always been argued,
+    by those who have not written novels, that it is precisely the
+    "doing less"&#8212;the leaving out&#8212;that constitutes the
+    unique and fearful difficulty of dramatic art. "The
+<!-- Page 86 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page082" name="page082">[pg 82]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    skill to leave out"&#8212;lo! the master faculty of the
+    dramatist! But, in the first place, I do not believe that,
+    having regard to the relative scope of the play and of the
+    novel, the necessity for leaving out is more acute in the one
+    than in the other. The adjective "photographic" is as absurd
+    applied to the novel as to the play. And, in the second place,
+    other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and it
+    requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. To know
+    when to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is
+    even harder. Sometimes, listening to partisans of the drama, I
+    have been moved to suggest that, if the art of omission is so
+    wondrously difficult, a dramatist who practised the habit of
+    omitting to write anything whatever ought to be hailed as the
+    supreme craftsman.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 87 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page083" name="page083">[pg 83]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>IV</h3>
+
+    <p>The more closely one examines the subject, the more clear
+    and certain becomes the fact that there is only one fundamental
+    artistic difference between the novel and the play, and that
+    difference (to which I shall come later) is not the difference
+    which would be generally named as distinguishing the play from
+    the novel. The apparent differences are superficial, and are
+    due chiefly to considerations of convenience.</p>
+
+    <p>Whether in a play or in a novel the creative artist has to
+    tell a story&#8212;using the word story in a very wide sense.
+    Just as a novel is divided into chapters, and for a similar
+    reason, a play is divided into acts. But neither chapters nor
+    acts are necessary. Some of Balzac's chief novels have no
+    chapter-divisions, and it has been proved that a theatre
+    audience
+<!-- Page 88 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page084" name="page084">[pg 84]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    can and will listen for two hours to "talk," and even
+    recitative singing, on the stage, without a pause. Indeed,
+    audiences, under the compulsion of an artist strong and
+    imperious enough, could, I am sure, be trained to marvellous
+    feats of prolonged receptivity. However, chapters and acts are
+    usual, and they involve the same constructional processes on
+    the part of the artist. The entire play or novel must tell a
+    complete story&#8212;that is, arouse a curiosity and reasonably
+    satisfy it, raise a main question and then settle it. And each
+    act or other chief division must tell a definite portion of the
+    story, satisfy part of the curiosity, settle part of the
+    question. And each scene or other minor division must do the
+    same according to its scale. Everything basic that applies to
+    the technique of the novel applies equally to the technique of
+    the play.</p>
+
+    <p>In particular, I would urge that a play, any more than a
+    novel, need not be dramatic, employing the term as it is
+<!-- Page 89 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page085" name="page085">[pg 85]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    usually employed. In so far as it suspends the listener's
+    interest, every tale, however told, may be said to be dramatic.
+    In this sense
+    <i>The Golden Bowl</i>
+
+    is dramatic; so are
+    <i>Dominique</i>
+
+    and
+    <i>Persuasion</i>
+
+    . A play need not be more dramatic than that. Very emphatically
+    a play need not be dramatic in the stage sense. It need never
+    induce interest to the degree of excitement. It need have
+    nothing that resembles what would be recognisable in the
+    theatre as a situation. It may amble on&#8212;and it will still
+    be a play, and it may succeed in pleasing either the fastidious
+    hundreds or the unfastidious hundreds of thousands, according
+    to the talent of the author. Without doubt mandarins will
+    continue for about a century yet to excommunicate certain plays
+    from the category of plays. But nobody will be any the worse.
+    And dramatists will go on proving that whatever else divides a
+    play from a book, "dramatic quality" does not. Some
+    arch-Mandarin may launch at me one of those mandarinic epigram
+<!-- Page 90 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page086" name="page086">[pg 86]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    matic questions which are supposed to overthrow the adversary
+    at one dart. "Do you seriously mean to argue, sir, that drama
+    need not be dramatic?" I do, if the word dramatic is to be used
+    in the mandarinic signification. I mean to state that some of
+    the finest plays of the modern age differ from a psychological
+    novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling. Example,
+    Henri Becque's
+    <i>La Parisienne</i>
+
+    , than which there is no better. If I am asked to give my own
+    definition of the adjective "dramatic," I would say that that
+    story is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined to be
+    spoken by actors and actresses on the stage, and that any
+    narrower definition is bound to exclude some genuine plays
+    universally accepted as such&#8212;even by mandarins. For be it
+    noted that the mandarin is never consistent.</p>
+
+    <p>My definition brings me to the sole technical difference
+    between a play and a novel&#8212;in the play the story is told
+    by means of a dialogue. It is a difference
+<!-- Page 91 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page087" name="page087">[pg 87]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    less important than it seems, and not invariably even a sure
+    point of distinction between the two kinds of narrative. For a
+    novel may consist exclusively of dialogue. And plays may
+    contain other matter than dialogue. The classic chorus is not
+    dialogue. But nowadays we should consider the device of the
+    chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays, it indeed would be. We have
+    grown very ingenious and clever at the trickery of making
+    characters talk to the audience and explain themselves and
+    their past history while seemingly innocent of any such
+    intention. And here, I admit, the dramatist has to face a
+    difficulty special to himself, which the novelist can avoid. I
+    believe it to be the sole difficulty which is peculiar to the
+    drama, and that it is not acute is proved by the ease with
+    which third-rate dramatists have generally vanquished it.
+    Mandarins are wont to assert that the dramatist is also
+    handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of
+    material. This is not so. Rigid economy
+<!-- Page 92 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page088" name="page088">[pg 88]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    in the use of material is equally advisable in every form of
+    art. If it is a necessity, it is a necessity which all artists
+    flout from time to time, and occasionally with gorgeous
+    results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been
+    less guilty of flouting it than the novelist or any other
+    artist.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 93 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page089" name="page089">[pg 89]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>V</h3>
+
+    <p>And now, having shown that some alleged differences between
+    the play and the novel are illusory, and that a certain
+    technical difference, though possibly real, is superficial and
+    slight, I come to the fundamental difference between
+    them&#8212;a difference which the laity does not suspect, which
+    is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which
+    nobody who is well versed in the making of both plays and
+    novels can fail to feel profoundly. The emotional strain of
+    writing a play is not merely less prolonged than that of
+    writing a novel, it is less severe even while it lasts, lower
+    in degree and of a less purely creative character. And herein
+    is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write
+    than a novel. The drama does not belong exclusively to
+    literature, because its effect
+<!-- Page 94 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page090" name="page090">[pg 90]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    depends on something more than the composition of words. The
+    dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the sole
+    creator of it. Without him nothing can be done, but, on the
+    other hand, he cannot do everything himself. He begins the work
+    of creation, which is finished either by creative interpreters
+    on the stage, or by the creative imagination of the reader in
+    the study. It is as if he carried an immense weight to the
+    landing at the turn of a flight of stairs, and that thence
+    upward the lifting had to be done by other people. Consider the
+    affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist is the
+    base&#8212;but he is not the apex. A play is a collaboration of
+    creative faculties. The egotism of the dramatist resents this
+    uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. And further, the
+    creative faculties are not only those of the author, the
+    stage-director ("producer") and the actors&#8212;the audience
+    itself is unconsciously part of the collaboration.</p>
+
+    <p>
+<!-- Page 95 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page091" name="page091">[pg 91]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation
+    before the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the
+    functions of others, and will fail of proper accomplishment at
+    the end. The dramatist must deliberately, in performing his
+    share of the work, leave scope for a multitude of alien
+    faculties whose operations he can neither precisely foresee nor
+    completely control. The point is not that in the writing of a
+    play there are various sorts of matters&#8212;as we have
+    already seen&#8212;-which the dramatist must ignore; the point
+    is that even in the region proper to him he must not push the
+    creative act to its final limit. He must ever remember those
+    who are to come after him. For instance, though he must
+    visualise a scene as he writes it, he should not visualise it
+    completely, as a novelist should. The novelist may perceive
+    vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright
+    insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real
+    actors and hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such
+<!-- Page 96 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page092" name="page092">[pg 92]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    real actors, or he will perceive imaginary faces, and the
+    ultimate interpretation will perforce falsify his work and
+    nullify his intentions. This aspect of the subject might well
+    be much amplified, but only for a public of practising
+    dramatists.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 97 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page093" name="page093">[pg 93]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>VI</h3>
+
+    <p>When the play is "finished," the processes of collaboration
+    have yet to begin. The serious work of the dramatist is over,
+    but the most desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do not
+    refer to the business of arranging with a theatrical manager
+    for the production of the play. For, though that generally
+    partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also partakes of the
+    nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that theatrical
+    managers are&#8212;no doubt inevitably&#8212;theatrical.
+    Nevertheless, even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming
+    the slightest interest in anything more vital to the stage than
+    the box-office, is himself in some degree a collaborator, and
+    is the first to show to the dramatist that a play is not a play
+    till it is performed. The manager reads the play, and, to the
+    dramatist's astonishment,
+<!-- Page 98 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page094" name="page094">[pg 94]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    reads quite a different play from that which the dramatist
+    imagines he wrote. In particular the manager reads a play which
+    can scarcely hope to succeed&#8212;indeed, a play against whose
+    chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be
+    adduced. It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees
+    failure in a manuscript, and very seldom success. The manager's
+    profoundest instinct&#8212;self-preservation again!&#8212;is to
+    refuse a play; if he accepts, it is against the grain, against
+    his judgment&#8212;and out of a mad spirit of adventure. Some
+    of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed in an
+    atmosphere of settled despair. The dramatist naturally feels an
+    immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the
+    manager, and he is therein justified. The manager's vocation is
+    not to write plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to
+    direct the rehearsals of them, and even his knowledge of the
+    vagaries of his own box-office has often proved to be pitiably
+    delusive. The
+<!-- Page 99 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page095" name="page095">[pg 95]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    manager's true and only vocation is to refrain from producing
+    plays. Despite all this, however, the manager has already
+    collaborated in the play. The dramatist sees it differently
+    now. All sorts of new considerations have been presented to
+    him. Not a word has been altered; but it is noticeably another
+    play. Which is merely to say that the creative work on it which
+    still remains to be done has been more accurately envisaged.
+    This strange experience could not happen to a novel, because
+    when a novel is written it is finished.</p>
+
+    <p>And when the director of rehearsals, or producer, has been
+    chosen, and this priceless and mysterious person has his first
+    serious confabulation with the author, then at once the play
+    begins to assume new shapes&#8212;contours undreamt of by the
+    author till that startling moment. And even if the author has
+    the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals, similar
+    disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a
+    producer is a different
+<!-- Page 100 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page096" name="page096">[pg 96]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    fellow from the author as author. The producer is up against
+    realities. He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually
+    condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... He
+    suggests the casting. "What do you think of X. for the old
+    man?" asks the producer. The author is staggered. Is it
+    conceivable that so renowned a producer can have so misread and
+    misunderstood the play? X. would be preposterous as the old
+    man. But the producer goes on talking. And suddenly the author
+    sees possibilities in X. But at the same time he sees a
+    different play from what he wrote. And quite probably he sees a
+    more glorious play. Quite probably he had not suspected how
+    great a dramatist he is.... Before the first rehearsal is
+    called, the play, still without a word altered, has gone
+    through astounding creative transmutations; the author
+    recognises in it some likeness to his beloved child, but it is
+    the likeness of a first cousin.</p>
+
+    <p>At the first rehearsal, and for many
+<!-- Page 101 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page097" name="page097">[pg 97]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    rehearsals, to an extent perhaps increasing, perhaps
+    decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an apologetic and
+    self-conscious mood; and his mien is something between that of
+    a criminal who has committed a horrid offence and that of a
+    father over the crude body of a new-born child. Now in truth he
+    deeply realises that the play is a collaboration. In extreme
+    cases he may be brought to see that he himself is one of the
+    less important factors in the collaboration. The first
+    preoccupation of the interpreters is not with his play at all,
+    but&#8212;quite rightly&#8212;with their own careers; if they
+    were not honestly convinced that their own careers were the
+    chief genuine excuse for the existence of the theatre and the
+    play they would not act very well. But, more than that, they do
+    not regard his play as a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance
+    of their careers. At the most favourable, what they secretly
+    think is that if they are permitted to exercise their talents
+    on his play there is a chance that they may be
+<!-- Page 102 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page098" name="page098">[pg 98]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    able to turn it into a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance
+    of their careers. The attitude of every actor towards his part
+    is: "My part is not much of a part as it stands, but if my
+    individuality is allowed to get into free contact with it, I
+    may make something brilliant out of it." Which attitude is a
+    proper attitude, and an attitude in my opinion justified by the
+    facts of the case. The actor's phrase is that he
+    <i>creates</i>
+
+    a part, and he is right. He completes the labour of creation
+    begun by the author and continued by the producer, and if
+    reasonable liberty is not accorded to him&#8212;if either the
+    author or the producer attempts to do too much of the creative
+    work&#8212;the result cannot be satisfactory.</p>
+
+    <p>As the rehearsals proceed the play changes from day to day.
+    However autocratic the producer, however obstinate the
+    dramatist, the play will vary at each rehearsal like a large
+    cloud in a gentle wind. It is never the same play for two days
+    together. Nor is this surprising,
+<!-- Page 103 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page099" name="page099">[pg 99]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    seeing that every day and night a dozen, or it may be two
+    dozen, human beings endowed with the creative gift are
+    creatively working on it. Every dramatist who is candid with
+    himself&#8212;I do not suggest that he should be candid to the
+    theatrical world&#8212;well knows that though his play is often
+    worsened by his collaborators it is also often
+    improved,&#8212;and improved in the most mysterious and
+    dazzling manner&#8212;without a word being altered. Producer
+    and actors do not merely suggest possibilities, they execute
+    them. And the author is confronted by artistic phenomena for
+    which lawfully he may not claim credit. On the other hand, he
+    may be confronted by inartistic phenomena in respect to which
+    lawfully he is blameless, but which he cannot prevent; a
+    rehearsal is like a battle,&#8212;certain persons are
+    theoretically in control, but in fact the thing principally
+    fights itself. And thus the creation goes on until the
+    dress-rehearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. And the
+<!-- Page 104 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page100" name="page100">[pg 100]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    dramatist lying awake in the night reflects, stoically,
+    fatalistically: "Well, that is the play that they have made of
+    <i>my</i>
+
+    play!" And he may be pleased or he may be disgusted. But if he
+    attends the first performance he cannot fail to notice, after
+    the first few minutes of it, that he was quite mistaken, and
+    that what the actors are performing is still another play. The
+    audience is collaborating.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 105 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page101" name="page101">[pg 101]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>PART IV</h2>
+
+    <h3>THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC</h3>
+
+<!-- Page 106 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page102" name="page102">[pg 102]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <br />
+
+<!-- Page 107 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page103" name="page103">[pg 103]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>I</h3>
+
+    <p>I can divide all the imaginative writers I have ever met
+    into two classes&#8212;those who admitted and sometimes
+    proclaimed loudly that they desired popularity; and those who
+    expressed a noble scorn or a gentle contempt for popularity.
+    The latter, however, always failed to conceal their envy of
+    popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose truculent
+    bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or
+    religious life. And indeed, since (as I have held in a previous
+    chapter) the object of the artist is to share his emotions with
+    others, it would be strange if the normal artist spurned
+    popularity in order to keep his emotions as much as possible to
+    himself. An enormous amount of dishonest nonsense has been and
+    will be written by uncreative critics, of course in the higher
+    interests of crea
+<!-- Page 108 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page104" name="page104">[pg 104]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    tive authors, about popularity and the proper attitude of the
+    artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a first-class
+    artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.</p>
+
+    <p>The
+    <i>Letters of George Meredith</i>
+
+    (of which the first volume is a magnificent unfolding of the
+    character of a great man) are full of references to popularity,
+    references overt and covert. Meredith could never&#8212;and
+    quite naturally&#8212;get away from the idea of popularity. He
+    was a student of the English public, and could occasionally be
+    unjust to it. Writing to M. Andr&#233; Raffalovich (who had
+    sent him a letter of appreciation) in November, 1881, he said:
+    "I venture to judge by your name that you are at most but half
+    English. I can consequently believe in the feeling you express
+    for the work of an unpopular writer. Otherwise one would
+    incline to be sceptical, for the English are given to practical
+    jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors who are supposed to
+    languish in the shade amuses
+<!-- Page 109 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page105" name="page105">[pg 105]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    them." A remark curiously unfair to the small, faithful band of
+    admirers which Meredith then had. The whole letter, while
+    warmly and touchingly grateful, is gloomy. Further on in it he
+    says: "Good work has a fair chance to be recognised in the end,
+    and if not, what does it matter?" But there is constant proof
+    that it did matter very much. In a letter to William Hardman,
+    written when he was well and hopeful, he says: "Never mind: if
+    we do but get the public ear, oh, my dear old boy!" To Captain
+    Maxse, in reference to a vast sum of &#163;8,000 paid by the
+    <i>Cornhill</i>
+
+    people to George Eliot (for an unreadable novel), he exclaims:
+    "Bon Dieu! Will aught like this ever happen to me?"</p>
+
+    <p>And to his son he was very explicit about the extent to
+    which unpopularity "mattered": "As I am unpopular I am
+    ill-paid, and therefore bound to work double tides, hardly ever
+    able to lay down the pen. This affects my
+<!-- Page 110 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page106" name="page106">[pg 106]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    weakened stomach, and so the round of the vicious circle is
+    looped." (Vol. I., p. 322.) And in another letter to Arthur
+    Meredith about the same time he sums up his career thus: "As
+    for me, I have failed, and I find little to make the end
+    undesirable." (Vol. I., p. 318.) This letter is dated June
+    23rd, 1881. Meredith was then fifty-three years of age. He had
+    written
+    <i>Modern Love</i>
+
+    ,
+    <i>The Shaving of Shagpat</i>
+
+    ,
+    <i>The Ordeal of Richard Feverel</i>
+
+    ,
+    <i>Rhoda Fleming</i>
+
+    ,
+    <i>The Egoist</i>
+
+    and other masterpieces. He knew that he had done his best and
+    that his best was very fine. It would be difficult to credit
+    that he did not privately deem himself one of the masters of
+    English literature and destined to what we call immortality. He
+    had the enthusiastic appreciation of some of the finest minds
+    of the epoch. And yet, "As for me, I have failed, and I find
+    little to make the end undesirable." But he had not failed in
+    his industry, nor in the quality
+<!-- Page 111 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page107" name="page107">[pg 107]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    of his work, nor in achieving self-respect and the respect of
+    his friends. He had failed only in one thing&#8212;immediate
+    popularity.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 112 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page108" name="page108">[pg 108]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>II</h3>
+
+    <p>Assuming then that an author is justified in desiring
+    immediate popularity, instead of being content with poverty and
+    the unheard plaudits of posterity, another point presents
+    itself. Ought he to limit himself to a mere desire for
+    popularity, or ought he actually to do something, or to refrain
+    from doing something, to the special end of obtaining
+    popularity? Ought he to say: "I shall write exactly what and
+    how I like, without any regard for the public; I shall consider
+    nothing but my own individuality and powers; I shall be guided
+    solely by my own personal conception of what the public ought
+    to like"? Or ought he to say: "Let me examine this public, and
+    let me see whether some compromise between us is not
+    possible"?</p>
+
+    <p>Certain authors are never under the
+<!-- Page 113 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page109" name="page109">[pg 109]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    necessity of facing the alternative. Occasionally, by chance, a
+    genius may be so fortunately constituted and so brilliantly
+    endowed that he captures the public at once, prestige being
+    established, and the question of compromise never arises. But
+    this is exceedingly rare. On the other hand, many mediocre
+    authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample
+    appreciation in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are
+    never troubled by any problem worse than the vagaries of their
+    fountain-pens. Such authors enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as
+    happiness. Of nearly all really original artists, however, it
+    may be said that they are at loggerheads with the
+    public&#8212;as an almost inevitable consequence of their
+    originality; and for them the problem of compromise or
+    no-compromise acutely exists.</p>
+
+    <p>George Meredith was such an artist. George Meredith before
+    anything else was a poet. He would have been a better poet than
+    a novelist, and I believe that
+<!-- Page 114 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page110" name="page110">[pg 110]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    he thought so. The public did not care for his poetry. If he
+    had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents
+    usually have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said:
+    "I shall keep on writing poetry, even if I have to become a
+    stockbroker in order to do it." But when he was only
+    thirty-three&#8212;a boy, as authors go&#8212;he had already
+    tired of no-compromise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: "It may
+    be that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained
+    Song.... The worst is that having taken to prose delineations
+    of character and life, one's affections are divided.... And in
+    truth, being a servant of the public,
+    <i>I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously
+    to singing</i>
+
+    ." (Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example as one is
+    likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the
+    futility of writing what will not be immediately read, when he
+    can write something else, less to his taste, that will be read.
+    The same sentiment has actuated an immense number
+<!-- Page 115 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page111" name="page111">[pg 111]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    of first-class creative artists, including Shakspere, who would
+    have been a rare client for a literary agent.... So much for
+    refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer
+    to do because it is not appreciated by the public.</p>
+
+    <p>There remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain
+    because the public appreciates it&#8212;otherwise the
+    pot-boiler. In 1861 Meredith wrote to Mrs Ross: "I am engaged
+    in extra potboiling work which enables me to do this," i.e., to
+    write an occasional long poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh, base
+    compromise! Seventeen years later he wrote to R.L. Stevenson:
+    "Of potboilers let none speak. Jove hangs them upon necks that
+    could soar above his heights but for the accursed weight."
+    (Vol. I., p. 291.) It may be said that Meredith was forced to
+    write potboilers. He was no more forced to write potboilers
+    than any other author. Sooner than wallow in that shame, he
+    might have earned money in more difficult ways. Or he might
+    have indulged in
+<!-- Page 116 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page112" name="page112">[pg 112]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    that starvation so heartily prescribed for authors by a
+    plutocratic noble who occasionally deigns to employ the English
+    tongue in prose. Meredith subdued his muse, and Meredith wrote
+    potboilers, because he was a first-class artist and a man of
+    profound common sense. Being extremely creative, he had to
+    arrive somehow, and he remembered that the earth is the earth,
+    and the world the world, and men men, and he arrived as best he
+    could. The great majority of his peers have acted
+    similarly.</p>
+
+    <p>The truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from
+    the public on his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is
+    either a god or a conceited and impractical fool. And he is
+    somewhat more likely to be the latter than the former. He wants
+    too much. There are two sides to every bargain, including the
+    artistic. The most fertile and the most powerful artists are
+    the readiest to recognise this, because their sense of
+    proportion, which is the sense of order, is well developed. The
+
+<!-- Page 117 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page113" name="page113">[pg 113]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    lack of the sense of proportion is the mark of the
+    <i>petit ma&#238;tre</i>
+
+    . The sagacious artist, while respecting himself, will respect
+    the idiosyncrasies of his public. To do both simultaneously is
+    quite possible. In particular, the sagacious artist will
+    respect basic national prejudices. For example, no first-class
+    English novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his
+    pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which Continental
+    writers enjoy as a matter of course. The British public is
+    admittedly wrong on this important point&#8212;hypocritical,
+    illogical and absurd. But what would you? You cannot defy it;
+    you literally cannot. If you tried, you would not even get as
+    far as print, to say nothing of library counters. You can only
+    get round it by ingenuity and guile. You can only go a very
+    little further than is quite safe. You can only do one man's
+    modest share in the education of the public.</p>
+
+    <p>In Valery Larbaud's latest novel,
+    <i>A.O. Barnabooth,</i>
+
+    occurs a phrase of deep
+<!-- Page 118 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page114" name="page114">[pg 114]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    wisdom about women: "
+    <i>La femme est une grande realite, comme la guerre</i>
+
+    ." It might be applied to the public. The public is a great
+    actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist,
+    you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. There it is!
+    You can do something with it, but not much. And what you do not
+    do with it, it must do with you, if there is to be the contact
+    which is essential to the artistic function. This contact may
+    be closened and completed by the artist's cleverness&#8212;the
+    mere cleverness of adaptability which most first-class artists
+    have exhibited. You can wear the fashions of the day. You can
+    tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to distract his
+    attention while you stab him in the chest. You can cajole money
+    out of him by one kind of work in order to gain leisure in
+    which to force him to accept later on something that he would
+    prefer to refuse. You can use a thousand devices on the
+    excellent simpleton.... And in the process you may degrade your
+<!-- Page 119 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page115" name="page115">[pg 115]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    self to a mere popularity-hunter! Of course you may; as you may
+    become a drunkard through drinking a glass of beer. Only, if
+    you have anything to say worth saying, you usually don't
+    succumb to this danger. If you have anything to say worth
+    saying, you usually manage somehow to get it said, and read.
+    The artist of genuine vocation is apt to be a wily person. He
+    knows how to sacrifice inessentials so that he may retain
+    essentials. And he can mysteriously put himself even into a
+    potboiler.
+    <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i>
+
+    , which influenced fiction throughout Europe, was the direct
+    result of potboiling. If the artist has not the wit and the
+    strength of mind to keep his own soul amid the collisions of
+    life, he is the inferior of a plain, honest merchant in
+    stamina, and ought to retire to the upper branches of the Civil
+    Service.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 120 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page116" name="page116">[pg 116]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>III</h3>
+
+    <p>When the author has finished the composition of a work, when
+    he has put into the trappings of the time as much of his
+    eternal self as they will safely hold, having regard to the
+    best welfare of his creative career as a whole, when, in short,
+    he has done all that he can to ensure the fullest public
+    appreciation of the essential in him&#8212;there still remains
+    to be accomplished something which is not unimportant in the
+    entire affair of obtaining contact with the public. He has to
+    see that the work is placed before the public as advantageously
+    as possible. In other words, he has to dispose of the work as
+    advantageously as possible. In other words, when he lays down
+    the pen he ought to become a merchant, for the mere reason that
+    he has an article to sell, and
+<!-- Page 121 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page117" name="page117">[pg 117]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    the more skilfully he sells it the better will be the result,
+    not only for the public appreciation of his message, but for
+    himself as a private individual and as an artist with further
+    activities in front of him.</p>
+
+    <p>Now this absolutely logical attitude of a merchant towards
+    one's finished work infuriates the dilettanti of the literary
+    world, to whom the very word "royalties" is anathema. They
+    apparently would prefer to treat literature as they imagine
+    Byron treated it, although as a fact no poet in a short life
+    ever contrived to make as many pounds sterling out of verse as
+    Byron made. Or perhaps they would like to return to the golden
+    days when the author had to be "patronised" in order to exist;
+    or even to the mid-nineteenth century, when practically all
+    authors save the most successful&#8212;and not a few of the
+    successful also&#8212;failed to obtain the fair reward of their
+    work. The dilettanti's snobbishness and sentimentality prevent
+    them from admitting
+<!-- Page 122 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page118" name="page118">[pg 118]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    that, in a democratic age, when an author is genuinely
+    appreciated, either he makes money or he is the foolish victim
+    of a scoundrel. They are fond of saying that agreements and
+    royalties have nothing to do with literature. But agreements
+    and royalties have a very great deal to do with literature.
+    Full contact between artist and public depends largely upon
+    publisher or manager being compelled to be efficient and just.
+    And upon the publisher's or manager's efficiency and justice
+    depend also the dignity, the leisure, the easy flow of coin,
+    the freedom, and the pride which are helpful to the full
+    fruition of any artist. No artist was ever assisted in his
+    career by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by
+    overwork, by economic inferiority. See Meredith's
+    correspondence everywhere.</p>
+
+    <p>Nor can there be any satisfaction in doing badly that which
+    might be done well. If an artist writes a fine poem, shows it
+    to his dearest friend, and
+<!-- Page 123 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page119" name="page119">[pg 119]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    burns it&#8212;I can respect him. But if an artist writes a
+    fine poem, and then by sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to
+    be inefficiently published, and fails to secure his own
+    interests in the transaction, on the plea that he is an artist
+    and not a merchant, then I refuse to respect him. A man cannot
+    fulfil, and has no right to fulfil, one function only in this
+    complex world. Some, indeed many, of the greatest creative
+    artists have managed to be very good merchants also, and have
+    not been ashamed of the double
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    . To read the correspondence and memoirs of certain supreme
+    artists one might be excused for thinking, indeed, that they
+    were more interested in the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of merchant than in the other
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    ; and yet their work in no wise suffered. In the distribution
+    of energy between the two
+    <i>r&#244;les</i>
+
+    common sense is naturally needed. But the artist who has enough
+    common sense&#8212;or, otherwise expressed, enough sense of
+    reality&#8212;not to disdain the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of
+<!-- Page 124 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page120" name="page120">[pg 120]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    merchant will probably have enough not to exaggerate it. He may
+    be reassured on one point&#8212;namely, that success in the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of merchant will never impair any self-satisfaction he may feel
+    in the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of artist. The late discovery of a large public in America
+    delighted Meredith and had a tonic effect on his whole system.
+    It is often hinted, even if it is not often said, that great
+    popularity ought to disturb the conscience of the artist. I do
+    not believe it. If the conscience of the artist is not
+    disturbed during the actual work itself, no subsequent
+    phenomenon will or should disturb it. Once the artist is
+    convinced of his artistic honesty, no public can be too large
+    for his peace of mind. On the other hand, failure in the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of merchant will emphatically impair his self-satisfaction in
+    the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of artist and his courage in the further pursuance of that
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    .</p>
+
+    <p>But many artists have admittedly no aptitude for merchantry.
+    Not only is their sense of the bindingness of a bargain
+<!-- Page 125 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page121" name="page121">[pg 121]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    imperfect, but they are apt in business to behave in a puerile
+    manner, to close an arrangement out of mere impatience, to be
+    grossly undiplomatic, to be victimised by their vanity, to
+    believe what they ought not to believe, to discredit what is
+    patently true, to worry over negligible trifles, and generally
+    to make a clumsy mess of their affairs. An artist may say: "I
+    cannot work unless I have a free mind, and I cannot have a free
+    mind if I am to be bothered all the time by details of
+    business."</p>
+
+    <p>Apart from the fact that no artist who pretends also to be a
+    man can in this world hope for a free mind, and that if he
+    seeks it by neglecting his debtors he will be deprived of it by
+    his creditors&#8212;apart from that, the artist's demand for a
+    free mind is reasonable. Moreover, it is always a distressing
+    sight to see a man trying to do what nature has not fitted him
+    to do, and so doing it ill. Such artists, however&#8212;and
+    they form possibly the majority&#8212;can always employ an
+<!-- Page 126 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page122" name="page122">[pg 122]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    expert to do their business for them, to cope on their behalf
+    with the necessary middleman. Not that I deem the publisher or
+    the theatrical manager to be by nature less upright than any
+    other class of merchant. But the publisher and the theatrical
+    manager have been subjected for centuries to a special and
+    grave temptation. The ordinary merchant deals with other
+    merchants&#8212;his equals in business skill. The publisher and
+    the theatrical manager deal with what amounts to a race of
+    children, of whom even arch-angels could not refrain from
+    taking advantage.</p>
+
+    <p>When the democratisation of literature seriously set in, it
+    inevitably grew plain that the publisher and the theatrical
+    manager had very humanly been giving way to the temptation with
+    which heaven in her infinite wisdom had pleased to afflict
+    them,&#8212;and the Society of Authors came into being. A
+    natural consequence of the general awakening was the
+    self-invention of the literary agent. The
+<!-- Page 127 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page123" name="page123">[pg 123]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Society of Authors, against immense obstacles, has performed
+    wonders in the economic education of the creative artist, and
+    therefore in the improvement of letters. The literary agent,
+    against obstacles still more immense, has carried out the
+    details of the revolution. The outcry&#8212;partly sentimental,
+    partly snobbish, but mainly interested&#8212;was at first
+    tremendous against these meddlers who would destroy the
+    charming personal relations that used to exist between, for
+    example, the author and the publisher. (The less said about
+    those charming personal relations the better. Documents exist.)
+    But the main battle is now over, and everyone concerned is
+    beautifully aware who holds the field. Though much remains to
+    be done, much has been done; and today the creative artist who,
+    conscious of inability to transact his own affairs efficiently,
+    does not obtain efficient advice and help therein, stands in
+    his own light both as an artist and as a man, and is a
+<!-- Page 128 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page124" name="page124">[pg 124]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    reactionary force. He owes the practice of elementary common
+    sense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at
+    large.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 129 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page125" name="page125">[pg 125]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>IV</h3>
+
+    <p>The same dilettante spirit which refuses to see the
+    connection between art and money has also a tendency to
+    repudiate the world of men at large, as being unfit for the
+    habitation of artists. This is a still more serious error of
+    attitude&#8212;especially in a storyteller. No artist is likely
+    to be entirely admirable who is not a man before he is an
+    artist. The notion that art is first and the rest of the
+    universe nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity and futility in
+    art. The artist who is too sensitive for contacts with the
+    non-artistic world is thereby too sensitive for his vocation,
+    and fit only to fall into gentle ecstasies over the work of
+    artists less sensitive than himself.</p>
+
+    <p>The classic modern example of the tragedy of the artist who
+    repudiates the world is Flaubert. At an early age
+<!-- Page 130 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page126" name="page126">[pg 126]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Flaubert convinced himself that he had no use for the world of
+    men. He demanded to be left in solitude and tranquillity. The
+    morbid streak in his constitution grew rapidly under the
+    fostering influences of peace and tranquillity. He was
+    brilliantly peculiar as a schoolboy. As an old man of
+    twenty-two, mourning over the vanished brio of youth, he
+    carried morbidity to perfection. Only when he was travelling
+    (as, for example, in Egypt) do his letters lose for a time
+    their distemper. His love-letters are often ignobly inept, and
+    nearly always spoilt by the crass provincialism of the refined
+    and cultivated hermit. His mistress was a woman difficult to
+    handle and indeed a Tartar in egotism, but as the recipient of
+    Flaubert's love-letters she must win universal sympathy.</p>
+
+    <p>Full of a grievance against the whole modern planet,
+    Flaubert turned passionately to ancient times (in which he
+    would have been equally unhappy had he lived in them), and
+    hoped to resurrect beauty
+<!-- Page 131 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page127" name="page127">[pg 127]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    when he had failed to see it round about him. Whether or not he
+    did resurrect beauty is a point which the present age is now
+    deciding. His fictions of modern life undoubtedly suffer from
+    his detestation of the material; but considering his manner of
+    existence it is marvellous that he should have been able to
+    accomplish any of them, except
+    <i>Un Coeur Simple</i>
+
+    . The final one,
+    <i>Bouvard et P&#233;cuchet</i>
+
+    , shows the lack of the sense of reality which must be the
+    inevitable sequel of divorce from mankind. It is realism
+    without conviction. No such characters as Bouvard and Pecuchet
+    could ever have existed outside Flaubert's brain, and the
+    reader's resultant impression is that the author has ruined a
+    central idea which was well suited for a grand larkish
+    extravaganza in the hands of a French Swift. But the spectacle
+    of Flaubert writing in
+    <i>mots justes</i>
+
+    a grand larkish extravaganza cannot be conjured up by
+    fancy.</p>
+
+    <p>There are many sub-Flauberts rife in London. They are
+    usually more critical
+<!-- Page 132 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page128" name="page128">[pg 128]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    than creative, but their influence upon creators, and
+    especially the younger creators, is not negligible. Their aim
+    in preciosity would seem to be to keep themselves unspotted
+    from the world. They are for ever being surprised and hurt by
+    the crudity and coarseness of human nature, and for ever
+    bracing themselves to be not as others are. They would have
+    incurred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just discipline for
+    them would be that they should be cross-examined by the great
+    bully in presence of a jury of butchers and sentenced
+    accordingly. The morbid Flaubertian shrinking from reality is
+    to be found to-day even in relatively robust minds. I was
+    recently at a provincial cinema, and witnessed on the screen
+    with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama entitled "Gold is
+    not All." My friend, who combines the callings of engineer and
+    general adventurer with that of serving his country, leaned
+    over to me in the darkness amid the violent applause, and said:
+    "You know, this
+<!-- Page 133 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page129" name="page129">[pg 129]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    kind of thing always makes me ashamed of human nature." I
+    answered him as Johnsonially as the circumstances would allow.
+    Had he lived to the age of fifty so blind that it needed a
+    cinema audience to show him what the general level of human
+    nature really is? Nobody has any right to be ashamed of human
+    nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother? Is one ashamed of the
+    cosmic process of evolution? Human nature
+    <i>is</i>
+
+    . And the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts,
+    absorbs that supreme fact into his brain, the better for his
+    work.</p>
+
+    <p>There is a numerous band of persons in London&#8212;and the
+    novelist and dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their
+    circle&#8212;who spend so much time and emotion in practising
+    the rites of the religion of art that they become incapable of
+    real existence. Each is a Stylites on a pillar. Their opinion
+    on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John, Cyril Scott,
+    Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James
+<!-- Page 134 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page130" name="page130">[pg 130]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Stephens, E.A. Rickards, Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc.,
+    may not be without value, and their genuine feverish morbid
+    interest in art has its usefulness; but they know no more about
+    reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They never approach
+    normal life. They scorn it. They have a horror of it. They
+    class politics with the differential calculus. They have heard
+    of Lloyd George, the rise in the price of commodities, and the
+    eternal enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must
+    open a newspaper to look at the advertisements and
+    announcements relating to the arts. The occasional frequenting
+    of this circle may not be disadvantageous to the creative
+    artist. But let him keep himself inoculated against its disease
+    by constant steady plunges into the cold sea of the general
+    national life. Let him mingle with the public, for God's sake!
+    No phenomenon on this wretched planet, which after all is ours,
+    is meet for the artist's shrinking scorn. And the average man,
+    as to
+<!-- Page 135 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page131" name="page131">[pg 131]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    whom the artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever
+    constitute the main part of the material in which he works.</p>
+
+    <p>Above all, let not the creative artist suppose that the
+    antidote to the circle of dilettantism is the circle of social
+    reform. It is not. I referred in the first chapter to the
+    prevalent illusion that the republic has just now arrived at a
+    crisis, and that if something is not immediately done disaster
+    will soon be upon us. This is the illusion to which the circle
+    of social reforms is naturally prone, and it is an illusion
+    against which the common sense of the creative artist must
+    mightily protest. The world is, without doubt, a very bad
+    world; but it is also a very good world. The function of the
+    artist is certainly concerned more with what is than with what
+    ought to be. When all necessary reform has been accomplished
+    our perfected planet will be stone-cold. Until then the
+    artist's affair is to keep his balance amid warring points of
+    view,
+<!-- Page 136 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page132" name="page132">[pg 132]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    and in the main to record and enjoy what is.... But is not the
+    Minimum Wage Bill urgent? But when the minimum wage is as trite
+    as the jury-system, the urgency of reform will still be
+    tempting the artist too far out of his true path. And the
+    artist who yields is lost.</p>
+
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12743 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #12743 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12743)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Author's Craft, by Arnold Bennett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Author's Craft
+
+Author: Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: June 25, 2004 [EBook #12743]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, David McLachlan and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
+
+By
+
+ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+NOVELS
+
+A Man from the North
+Anna of the Five Towns
+Leonora
+A Great Man
+Sacred and Profane Love
+Whom God hath Joined
+Buried Alive
+The Old Wives' Tale
+The Glimpse
+Helen with the High Hand
+Clayhanger
+The Card
+Hilda Lessways
+The Regent
+
+FANTASIAS
+
+The Grand Babylon Hotel
+The Gates of Wrath
+Teresa of Watling Street
+The Loot of Cities
+Hugo
+The Ghost
+The City of Pleasure
+
+SHORT STORIES
+
+Tales of the Five Towns
+The Grim Smile of the Five Towns
+The Matador of the Five Towns
+
+BELLES-LETTRES
+
+Journalism for Women
+Fame and Fiction
+How to become an Author
+The Reasonable Life
+How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
+The Human Machine
+Literary Taste
+The Feast of St Friend
+Those United States
+The Plain Man and His Wife
+Paris Nights
+
+DRAMA
+
+Polite Farces
+Cupid and Common Sense
+What the Public Wants
+The Honeymoon
+The Great Adventure
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+(_In Collaboration with EDEN PHILLPOTTS_)
+The Sinews of War: A Romance
+The Statue: A Romance
+
+(_In Collaboration with EDWARD KNOBLAUCH_)
+Milestones: A Play
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
+
+By
+
+ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
+
+
+Printed in 1914
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I.
+SEEING LIFE
+
+PART II.
+WRITING NOVELS
+
+PART III.
+WRITING PLAYS
+
+PART IV.
+THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+SEEING LIFE
+
+
+I
+
+
+A young dog, inexperienced, sadly lacking in even primary education,
+ambles and frisks along the footpath of Fulham Road, near the mysterious
+gates of a Marist convent. He is a large puppy, on the way to be a dog
+of much dignity, but at present he has little to recommend him but that
+gawky elegance, and that bounding gratitude for the gift of life, which
+distinguish the normal puppy. He is an ignorant fool. He might have
+entered the convent of nuns and had a fine time, but instead he steps
+off the pavement into the road, the road being a vast and interesting
+continent imperfectly explored. His confidence in his nose, in his
+agility, and in the goodness of God is touching, absolutely painful to
+witness. He glances casually at a huge, towering vermilion construction
+that is whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded by a glint of
+brass and a wisp of steam; and then with disdain he ignores it as less
+important than a mere speck of odorous matter in the mud. The next
+instant he is lying inert in the mud. His confidence in the goodness of
+God had been misplaced. Since the beginning of time God had ordained him
+a victim.
+
+An impressive thing happens. The motor-bus reluctantly slackens and
+stops. Not the differential brake, nor the foot-brake, has arrested the
+motor-bus, but the invisible brake of public opinion, acting by
+administrative transmission. There is not a policeman in sight.
+Theoretically, the motor-'bus is free to whiz onward in its flight to
+the paradise of Shoreditch, but in practice it is paralysed by dread. A
+man in brass buttons and a stylish cap leaps down from it, and the
+blackened demon who sits on its neck also leaps down from it, and they
+move gingerly towards the puppy. A little while ago the motor-bus might
+have overturned a human cyclist or so, and proceeded nonchalant on its
+way. But now even a puppy requires a post-mortem: such is the force of
+public opinion aroused. Two policemen appear in the distance.
+
+"A street accident" is now in being, and a crowd gathers with calm joy
+and stares, passive and determined. The puppy offers no sign whatever;
+just lies in the road. Then a boy, destined probably to a great future
+by reason of his singular faculty of initiative, goes to the puppy and
+carries him by the scruff of the neck, to the shelter of the gutter.
+Relinquished by the boy, the lithe puppy falls into an easy horizontal
+attitude, and seems bent upon repose. The boy lifts the puppy's head to
+examine it, and the head drops back wearily. The puppy is dead. No cry,
+no blood, no disfigurement! Even no perceptible jolt of the wheel as it
+climbed over the obstacle of the puppy's body! A wonderfully clean and
+perfect accident!
+
+The increasing crowd stares with beatific placidity. People emerge
+impatiently from the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus and slip down
+from its back, and either join the crowd or vanish. The two policemen
+and the crew of the motor-bus have now met in parley. The conductor and
+the driver have an air at once nervous and resigned; their gestures are
+quick and vivacious. The policemen, on the other hand, indicate by their
+slow and huge movements that eternity is theirs. And they could not be
+more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had them manacled and
+leashed. The conductor and the driver admit the absolute dominion of the
+elephantine policemen; they admit that before the simple will of the
+policemen inconvenience, lost minutes, shortened leisure, docked wages,
+count as less than naught. And the policemen are carelessly sublime,
+well knowing that magistrates, jails, and the very Home Secretary on his
+throne--yes, and a whole system of conspiracy and perjury and
+brutality--are at their beck in case of need. And yet occasionally in
+the demeanour of the policemen towards the conductor and the driver
+there is a silent message that says: "After all, we, too, are working
+men like you, over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in
+the service of the pitiless and dishonest public. We, too, have wives
+and children and privations and frightful apprehensions. We, too, have
+to struggle desperately. Only the awful magic of these garments and of
+the garter which we wear on our wrists sets an abyss between us and
+you." And the conductor writes and one of the policemen writes, and they
+keep on writing, while the traffic makes beautiful curves to avoid them.
+
+The still increasing crowd continues to stare in the pure blankness of
+pleasure. A close-shaved, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with a copy of
+_The Sportsman_ in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus,
+starts stamping his feet. "I was knocked down by a taxi last year," he
+says fiercely. "But nobody took no notice of _that_! Are they going to
+stop here all the blank morning for a blank tyke?" And for all his
+respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet
+of disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity into the
+thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare. Then a man passes
+wheeling a muck-cart. And he stops and talks a long time with the other
+uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd
+never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops and picks
+up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and
+yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and passes on. And only that
+which is immortal and divine of the puppy remains behind, floating
+perhaps like an invisible vapour over the scene of the tragedy.
+
+The crowd is tireless, all eyes. The four principals still converse and
+write. Nobody in the crowd comprehends what they are about. At length
+the driver separates himself, but is drawn back, and a new parley is
+commenced. But everything ends. The policemen turn on their immense
+heels. The driver and conductor race towards the motor-bus. The bell
+rings, the motor-bus, quite empty, disappears snorting round the corner
+into Walham Green. The crowd is now lessening. But it separates with
+reluctance, many of its members continuing to stare with intense
+absorption at the place where the puppy lay or the place where the
+policemen stood. An appreciable interval elapses before the "street
+accident" has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon.
+
+The members of the crowd follow their noses, and during the course of
+the day remark to acquaintances:
+
+"Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the Fulham Road this morning!
+Killed dead!"
+
+And that is all they do remark. That is all they have witnessed. They
+will not, and could not, give intelligible and interesting particulars
+of the affair (unless it were as to the breed of the dog or the number
+of the bus-service). They have watched a dog run over. They analyse
+neither their sensations nor the phenomenon. They have witnessed it
+whole, as a bad writer uses a _cliché_. They have observed--that is to
+say, they have really seen--nothing.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+It will be well for us not to assume an attitude of condescension
+towards the crowd. Because in the matter of looking without seeing we
+are all about equal. We all go to and fro in a state of the observing
+faculties which somewhat resembles coma. We are all content to look and
+not see.
+
+And if and when, having comprehended that the _rôle_ of observer is not
+passive but active, we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves from
+the coma and really to see the spectacle of the world (a spectacle
+surpassing circuses and even street accidents in sustained dramatic
+interest), we shall discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act
+of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. Let a man
+resolve: "I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of a
+morning," and the probability if that for many mornings he will see
+naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective will be
+absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly
+attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental and universal.
+Travel makes observers of us all, but the things which as travellers we
+observe generally show how unskilled we are in the new activity.
+
+A man went to Paris for the first time, and observed right off that the
+carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof like a tramcar. He
+was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that he observed almost
+nothing else. This enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his
+perspective. He returned home and announced that Paris was a place where
+people rode on the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the
+first time--and no English person would ever guess the phenomenon which
+vanquished all others in her mind on the opening day. She saw a cat
+walking across a street. The vision excited her. For in Paris cats do
+not roam in thoroughfares, because there are practically no houses with
+gardens or "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement
+of cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first
+presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very early and
+making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn in quest of
+interesting material. And the one note I gathered was that the ground in
+front of the all-night coffee-stalls was white with egg-shells! What I
+needed then was an operation for cataract. I also remember taking a man
+to the opera who had never seen an opera. The work was _Lohengrin_. When
+we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather stiff." And it was all
+he did say. We went and had a drink. He was not mistaken. His
+observation was most just; but his perspective was that of those
+literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out three slips of
+syntax, and three lines to an ungrammatical admission that the novel
+under survey is not wholly tedious.
+
+But a man may acquire the ability to observe even a large number of
+facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of observation. I have
+read, in some work of literary criticism, that Dickens could walk up one
+side of a long, busy street and down the other, and then tell you in
+their order the names on all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an
+illustration of his great powers of observation. Dickens was a great
+observer, but he would assuredly have been a still greater observer had
+he been a little less pre-occupied with trivial and unco-ordinated
+details. Good observation consists not in multiplicity of detail, but in
+co-ordination of detail according to a true perspective of relative
+importance, so that a finally just general impression may be reached in
+the shortest possible time. The skilled observer is he who does not have
+to change his mind. One has only to compare one's present adjusted
+impression of an intimate friend with one's first impression of him to
+perceive the astounding inadequacy of one's powers of observation. The
+man as one has learnt to see him is simply not the same man who walked
+into one's drawing-room on the day of introduction.
+
+There are, by the way, three sorts of created beings who are
+sentimentally supposed to be able to judge individuals at the first
+glance: women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a mystic gift with which
+rumour credits them, they are never mistaken. It is merely not true.
+Women are constantly quite wrong in the estimates based on their
+"feminine instinct"; they sometimes even admit it; and the matrimonial
+courts prove it _passim_. Children are more often wrong than women. And
+as for dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by
+plausible scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. Not seldom
+have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion of deceived dogs.
+Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the infallibility of women,
+children, and dogs, will persist in Anglo-Saxon countries.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+One is curious about one's fellow-creatures: therefore one watches them.
+And generally the more intelligent one is, the more curious one is, and
+the more one observes. The mere satisfaction of this curiosity is in
+itself a worthy end, and would alone justify the business of
+systematised observation. But the aim of observation may, and should, be
+expressed in terms more grandiose. Human curiosity counts among the
+highest social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest
+defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of character
+and temperament and thereby to a better understanding of the springs of
+human conduct. Observation is not practised directly with this high end
+in view (save by prigs and other futile souls); nevertheless it is a
+moral act and must inevitably promote kindliness--whether we like it or
+not. It also sharpens the sense of beauty. An ugly deed--such as a deed
+of cruelty--takes on artistic beauty when its origin and hence its
+fitness in the general scheme begin to be comprehended. In the
+perspective of history we can derive an æsthetic pleasure from the
+tranquil scrutiny of all kinds of conduct--as well, for example, of a
+Renaissance Pope as of a Savonarola. Observation endows our day and our
+street with the romantic charm of history, and stimulates charity--not
+the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious charity which
+puts itself to the trouble of understanding. The one condition is that
+the observer must never lose sight of the fact that what he is trying to
+see is life, is the woman next door, is the man in the train--and not a
+concourse of abstractions. To appreciate all this is the first inspiring
+preliminary to sound observation.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The second preliminary is to realise that all physical phenomena are
+interrelated, that there is nothing which does not bear on everything
+else. The whole spectacular and sensual show--what the eye sees, the ear
+hears, the nose scents, the tongue tastes and the skin touches--is a
+cause or an effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as
+negligible, as not forming part of the equation. Hence he who would
+beyond all others see life for himself--I naturally mean the novelist
+and playwright--ought to embrace all phenomena in his curiosity. Being
+finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot! But he can, by obtaining a broad
+notion of the whole, determine with some accuracy the position and
+relative importance of the particular series of phenomena to which his
+instinct draws him. If he does not thus envisage the immense background
+of his special interests, he will lose the most precious feeling for
+interplay and proportion without which all specialism becomes distorted
+and positively darkened.
+
+Now, the main factor in life on this planet is the planet itself. Any
+logically conceived survey of existence must begin with geographical and
+climatic phenomena. This is surely obvious. If you say that you are not
+interested in meteorology or the configurations of the earth, I say that
+you deceive yourself. You are. For an east wind may upset your liver and
+cause you to insult your wife. Beyond question the most important fact
+about, for example, Great Britain is that it is an island. We sail amid
+the Hebrides, and then talk of the fine qualities and the distressing
+limitations of those islanders; it ought to occur to us English that we
+are talking of ourselves in little. In moments of journalistic vainglory
+we are apt to refer to the "sturdy island race," meaning us. But that we
+are insular in the full significance of the horrid word is certain. Why
+not? A genuine observation of the supreme phenomenon that Great Britain
+is surrounded by water--an effort to keep it always at the back of the
+consciousness--will help to explain all the minor phenomena of British
+existence. Geographical knowledge is the mother of discernment, for the
+varying physical characteristics of the earth are the sole direct
+terrestrial influence determining the evolution of original vital
+energy.
+
+All other influences are secondary, and have been effects of character
+and temperament before becoming causes. Perhaps the greatest of them are
+roads and architecture. Nothing could be more English than English
+roads, or more French than French roads. Enter England from France, let
+us say through the gate of Folkestone, and the architectural
+illustration which greets you (if you can look and see) is absolutely
+dramatic in its spectacular force. You say that there is no architecture
+in Folkestone. But Folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of
+architecture as a wood is full of trees. As the train winds on its
+causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you thousands of squat
+little homes, neat, tended, respectable, comfortable, prim, at once
+unostentatious and conceited. Each a separate, clearly-defined entity!
+Each saying to the others: "Don't look over my wall, and I won't look
+over yours!" Each with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its own
+individuality! Each a stronghold--an island! And all careless of the
+general effect, but making a very impressive general effect. The English
+race is below you. Your own son is below you insisting on the
+inviolability of his own den of a bedroom! ... And contrast all that
+with the immense communistic and splendid façades of a French town, and
+work out the implications. If you really intend to see life you cannot
+afford to be blind to such thrilling phenomena.
+
+Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity would be capable of walking
+through a French street and through an English street, and noting
+chiefly that whereas English lamp-posts spring from the kerb, French
+lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! Not that that detail is not
+worth noting. It is--in its place. French lamp-posts are part of what we
+call the "interesting character" of a French street. We say of a French
+street that it is "full of character." As if an English street was not!
+Such is blindness--to be cured by travel and the exercise of the logical
+faculty, most properly termed common sense. If one is struck by the
+magnificence of the great towns of the Continent, one should
+ratiocinate, and conclude that a major characteristic of the great towns
+of England is their shabby and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. It is so.
+But there are people who have lived fifty years in Manchester, Leeds,
+Hull and Hanley without noticing it. The English idiosyncrasy is in that
+awful external slovenliness too, causing it, and being caused by it.
+Every street is a mirror, an illustration, an exposition, an
+explanation, of the human beings who live in it. Nothing in it is to be
+neglected. Everything in it is valuable, if the perspective is
+maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow individualistic novels of
+English literature--and in some of the best--you will find a domestic
+organism described as though it existed in a vacuum, or in the Sahara,
+or between Heaven and earth; as though it reacted on nothing and was
+reacted on by nothing; and as though it could be adequately rendered
+without reference to anything exterior to itself. How can such novels
+satisfy a reader who has acquired or wants to acquire the faculty of
+seeing life?
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The net result of the interplay of instincts and influences which
+determine the existence of a community is shown in the general
+expression on the faces of the people. This is an index which cannot lie
+and cannot be gainsaid. It is fairly easy, and extremely interesting, to
+decipher. It is so open, shameless, and universal, that not to look at
+it is impossible. Yet the majority of persons fail to see it. We hear of
+inquirers standing on London Bridge and counting the number of
+motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, and white horses that pass over
+the bridge in an hour. But we never hear of anybody counting the number
+of faces happy or unhappy, honest or rascally, shrewd or ingenuous, kind
+or cruel, that pass over the bridge. Perhaps the public may be surprised
+to hear that the general expression on the faces of Londoners of all
+ranks varies from the sad to the morose; and that their general mien is
+one of haste and gloomy preoccupation. Such a staring fact is paramount
+in sociological evidence. And the observer of it would be justified in
+summoning Heaven, the legislature, the county council, the churches, and
+the ruling classes, and saying to them: "Glance at these faces, and
+don't boast too much about what you have accomplished. The climate and
+the industrial system have so far triumphed over you all."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+When we come to the observing of the individual--to which all human
+observing does finally come if there is any right reason in it--the
+aforesaid general considerations ought to be ever present in the
+hinterland of the consciousness, aiding and influencing, perhaps
+vaguely, perhaps almost imperceptibly, the formation of judgments. If
+they do nothing else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to the
+highly important idea of the correlation of all phenomena. Especially in
+England a haphazard particularity is the chief vitiating element in the
+operations of the mind.
+
+In estimating the individual we are apt not only to forget his
+environment, but--really strange!--to ignore much of the evidence
+visible in the individual himself. The inexperienced and ardent
+observer, will, for example, be astonishingly blind to everything in an
+individual except his face. Telling himself that the face must be the
+reflection of the soul, and that every thought and emotion leaves
+inevitably its mark there, he will concentrate on the face, singling it
+out as a phenomenon apart and self-complete. Were he a god and
+infallible, he could no doubt learn the whole truth from the face. But
+he is bound to fall into errors, and by limiting the field of vision he
+minimises the opportunity for correction. The face is, after all, quite
+a small part of the individual's physical organism. An Englishman will
+look at a woman's face and say she is a beautiful woman or a plain
+woman. But a woman may have a plain face, and yet by her form be
+entitled to be called beautiful, and (perhaps) _vice versâ_. It is true
+that the face is the reflexion of the soul. It is equally true that the
+carriage and gestures are the reflection of the soul. Had one eyes, the
+tying of a bootlace is the reflection of the soul. One piece of
+evidence can be used to correct every other piece of evidence. A refined
+face may be refuted by clumsy finger-ends; the eyes may contradict the
+voice; the gait may nullify the smile. None of the phenomena which every
+individual carelessly and brazenly displays in every motor-bus
+terrorising the streets of London is meaningless or negligible.
+
+Again, in observing we are generally guilty of that particularity which
+results from sluggishness of the imagination. We may see the phenomenon
+at the moment of looking at it, but we particularise in that moment,
+making no effort to conceive what the phenomenon is likely to be at
+other moments.
+
+For example, a male human creature wakes up in the morning and rises
+with reluctance. Being a big man, and existing with his wife and
+children in a very confined space, he has to adapt himself to his
+environment as he goes through the various functions incident to
+preparing for his day's work. He is just like you or me. He wants his
+breakfast, he very much wants to know where his boots are, and he has
+the usually sinister preoccupations about health and finance. Whatever
+the force of his egoism, he must more or less harmonise his
+individuality with those of his wife and children. Having laid down the
+law, or accepted it, he sets forth to his daily duties, just a fraction
+of a minute late. He arrives at his office, resumes life with his
+colleagues sympathetic and antipathetic, and then leaves the office for
+an expedition extending over several hours. In the course of his
+expedition he encounters the corpse of a young dog run down by a
+motor-bus. Now you also have encountered that corpse and are gazing at
+it; and what do you say to yourself when he comes along? You say: "Oh!
+Here's a policeman." For he happens to be a policeman. You stare at him,
+and you never see anything but a policeman--an indivisible phenomenon of
+blue cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face, and a helmet; "a
+stalwart guardian of the law"; to you little more human than an
+algebraic symbol: in a word--a policeman.
+
+Only, that word actually conveys almost nothing to you of the reality
+which it stands for. You are satisfied with it as you are satisfied with
+the description of a disease. A friend tells you his eyesight is
+failing. You sympathise. "What is it?" you ask. "Glaucoma." "Ah!
+Glaucoma!" You don't know what glaucoma is. You are no wiser than you
+were before. But you are content. A name has contented you. Similarly
+the name of policeman contents you, seems to absolve you from further
+curiosity as to the phenomenon. You have looked at tens of thousands of
+policemen, and perhaps never seen the hundredth part of the reality of a
+single one. Your imagination has not truly worked on the phenomenon.
+
+There may be some excuse for not seeing the reality of a policeman,
+because a uniform is always a thick veil. But you--I mean you, I, any
+of us--are oddly dim-sighted also in regard to the civil population. For
+instance, we get into the empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the
+street accident, and examine the men and women who gradually fill it.
+Probably we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of
+life. All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past and are
+moving towards a future. But how often does our imagination put itself
+to the trouble of realising this? We may observe with some care, yet
+owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are observing not the human
+individuals, but a peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in
+motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present! No
+human phenomenon is adequately seen until the imagination has placed it
+back into its past and forward into its future. And this is the final
+process of observation of the individual.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not begin with seeing the
+individual. Neither does it end with seeing the individual. Particular
+and unsystematised observation cannot go on for ever, aimless, formless.
+Just as individuals are singled out from systems, in the earlier process
+of observation, so in the later processes individuals will be formed
+into new groups, which formation will depend upon the personal bent of
+the observer. The predominant interests of the observer will ultimately
+direct his observing activities to their own advantage. If he is excited
+by the phenomena of organisation--as I happen to be--he will see
+individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation, and will
+insist on the variations from type due to that grouping. If he is
+convinced--as numbers of people appear to be--that society is just now
+in an extremely critical pass, and that if something mysterious is not
+forthwith done the structure of it will crumble to atoms--he will see
+mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to him, the
+human dilemma demands. And so on! These tendencies, while they should
+not be resisted too much, since they give character to observation and
+redeem it from the frigidity of mechanics, should be resisted to a
+certain extent. For, whatever they may be, they favour the growth of
+sentimentality, the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common
+sense.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+WRITING NOVELS
+
+
+I
+
+
+The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so excited by it
+that he absolutely must transmit the vision to others, chooses narrative
+fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of his feelings. He is
+like other artists--he cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to
+himself, he is bursting with the news; he is bound to tell--the affair
+is too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in this--that what
+most chiefly strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature,
+the large general manner of existing. Of course, he is the result of
+evolution from the primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to
+this day transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude
+visions of life in the café or the club, or on the kerbstone. They
+belong to the lowest circle of artists; but they are artists; and the
+form that they adopt is the very basis of the novel. By innumerable
+entertaining steps from them you may ascend to the major artist whose
+vision of life, inclusive, intricate and intense, requires for its due
+transmission the great traditional form of the novel as perfected by the
+masters of a long age which has temporarily set the novel higher than
+any other art-form.
+
+I would not argue that the novel should be counted supreme among the
+great traditional forms of art. Even if there is a greatest form, I do
+not much care which it is. I have in turn been convinced that Chartres
+Cathedral, certain Greek sculpture, Mozart's _Don Juan_, and the
+juggling of Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest thing in the world--not to
+mention the achievements of Shakspere or Nijinsky. But there is
+something to be said for the real pre-eminence of prose fiction as a
+literary form. (Even the modern epic has learnt almost all it knows from
+prose-fiction.) The novel has, and always will have, the advantage of
+its comprehensive bigness. St Peter's at Rome is a trifle compared with
+Tolstoi's _War and Peace_; and it is as certain as anything can be that,
+during the present geological epoch at any rate, no epic half as long as
+_War and Peace_ will ever be read, even if written.
+
+Notoriously the novelist (including the playwright, who is a
+sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of other
+artists. In the matter of poaching, the painter has done a lot, and the
+composer has done more, but what the painter and the composer have done
+is as naught compared to the grasping deeds of the novelist. And whereas
+the painter and the composer have got into difficulties with their
+audacious schemes, the novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with
+a success that is not denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the
+interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose fiction--from
+landscape-painting to sociology--and none which might not be.
+Unnecessary to go back to the ante-Scott age in order to perceive how
+the novel has aggrandised itself! It has conquered enormous territories
+even since _Germinal_. Within the last fifteen years it has gained. Were
+it to adopt the hue of the British Empire, the entire map of the
+universe would soon be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand in the
+hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present day as a
+means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life. It is, and will
+be for some time to come, the form to which the artist with the most
+inclusive vision instinctively turns, because it is the most inclusive
+form, and the most adaptable. Indeed, before we are much older, if its
+present rate of progress continues, it will have reoccupied the dazzling
+position to which the mighty Balzac lifted it, and in which he left it
+in 1850. So much, by the way, for the rank of the novel.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+In considering the equipment of the novelist there are two attributes
+which may always be taken for granted. The first is the sense of
+beauty--indispensable to the creative artist. Every creative artist has
+it, in his degree. He is an artist because he has it. An artist works
+under the stress of instinct. No man's instinct can draw him towards
+material which repels him--the fact is obvious. Obviously, whatever kind
+of life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed and seduced by
+it, he is under its spell--that is, he has seen beauty in it. He could
+have no other reason for writing about it. He may see a strange sort of
+beauty; he may--indeed he does--see a sort of beauty that nobody has
+quite seen before; he may see a sort of beauty that none save a few odd
+spirits ever will or can be made to see. But he does see beauty. To
+say, after reading a novel which has held you, that the author has no
+sense of beauty, is inept. (The mere fact that you turned over his pages
+with interest is an answer to the criticism--a criticism, indeed, which
+is not more sagacious than that of the reviewer who remarks: "Mr Blank
+has produced a thrilling novel, but unfortunately he cannot write." Mr
+Blank has written; and he could, anyhow, write enough to thrill the
+reviewer.) All that a wise person will assert is that an artist's sense
+of beauty is different for the time being from his own.
+
+The reproach of the lack of a sense of beauty has been brought against
+nearly all original novelists; it is seldom brought against a mediocre
+novelist. Even in the extreme cases it is untrue; perhaps it is most
+untrue in the extreme cases. I do not mean such a case as that of Zola,
+who never went to extremes. I mean, for example, Gissing, a real
+extremist, who, it is now admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered beauty
+in forms of existence which hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to
+examine. And I mean Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no
+works have been more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel _En
+Ménage_ and his book of descriptive essays _De Tout_. Both reproduce
+with exasperation what is generally regarded as the sordid ugliness of
+commonplace daily life. Yet both exercise a unique charm (and will
+surely be read when _La Cathédrale_ is forgotten). And it is
+inconceivable that Huysmans--whatever he may have said--was not ravished
+by the secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in it.
+
+The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the novelist, as
+in every artist, is passionate intensity of vision. Unless the vision is
+passionately intense the artist will not be moved to transmit it. He
+will not be inconvenienced by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus
+not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must
+have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree.
+It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been
+desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is
+unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes of
+artistic creation.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+A sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being taken for
+granted, the one other important attribute in the equipment of the
+novelist--the attribute which indeed by itself practically suffices, and
+whose absence renders futile all the rest--is fineness of mind. A great
+novelist must have great qualities of mind. His mind must be
+sympathetic, quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender,
+just, merciful. He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing
+sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. Above all, his
+mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense. His mind, in a
+word, must have the quality of being noble. Unless his mind is all this,
+he will never, at the ultimate bar, be reckoned supreme. That which
+counts, on every page, and all the time, is the very texture of his
+mind--the glass through which he sees things. Every other attribute is
+secondary, and is dispensable. Fielding lives unequalled among English
+novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is unequalled. He is
+read with unreserved enthusiasm because the reader feels himself at each
+paragraph to be in close contact with a glorious personality. And no
+advance in technique among later novelists can possibly imperil his
+position. He will take second place when a more noble mind, a more
+superb common sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before.
+What undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that the
+texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in courageous facing
+of the truth, and in certain delicacies of perception. As much may be
+said of Thackeray, whose mind was somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a
+figure, and not free from defects which are inimical to immortality.
+
+It is a hard saying for me, and full of danger in any country whose
+artists have shown contempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, as
+the years pass, I attach less and less importance to good technique in
+fiction. I love it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its
+importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern history
+of fiction will not support me. With the single exception of Turgenev,
+the great novelists of the world, according to my own standards, have
+either ignored technique or have failed to understand it. What an error
+to suppose that the finest foreign novels show a better sense of form
+than the finest English novels! Balzac was a prodigious blunderer. He
+could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general form of a
+book. And as for a greater than Balzac--Stendhal--his scorn of technique
+was notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece: "By
+the way I ought to have told you earlier that the Duchess--!" And as for
+a greater than either Balzac or Stendhal--Dostoievsky--what a hasty,
+amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the unapproachable _Brothers
+Karamazov_! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction
+by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was clumsy and
+careless. What would have been Flaubert's detailed criticism of that
+book? And what would it matter? And, to take a minor example,
+witness the comically amateurish technique of the late "Mark
+Rutherford"--nevertheless a novelist whom one can deeply admire.
+
+And when we come to consider the great technicians, Guy de Maupassant
+and Flaubert, can we say that their technique will save them, or atone
+in the slightest degree for the defects of their minds? Exceptional
+artists both, they are both now inevitably falling in esteem to the
+level of the second-rate. Human nature being what it is, and de
+Maupassant being tinged with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with
+interest by mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite
+all his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant with
+the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is one of the
+outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It is being discovered
+that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble enough--that, indeed, it was a
+cruel mind, and a little anæmic. _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ was the crowning
+proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the humanness of the world, and
+suffered from the delusion that he had been born on the wrong planet.
+The glitter of his technique is dulled now, and fools even count it
+against him. In regard to one section of human activity only did his
+mind seem noble--namely, literary technique. His correspondence,
+written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the question of
+literary technique, and his correspondence stands forth to-day as his
+best work--a marvellous fount of inspiration to his fellow artists. So I
+return to the point that the novelist's one important attribute (beyond
+the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind. It and nothing else
+makes both the friends and the enemies which he has; while the influence
+of technique is slight and transitory. And I repeat that it is a hard
+saying.
+
+I begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the mysterious
+nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." There may be something of
+the amateur in all great artists. I do not know why it should be so,
+unless because, in the exuberance of their sense of power, they are
+impatient of the exactitudes of systematic study and the mere bother of
+repeated attempts to arrive at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great
+artist was ever a profound scholar. The great artist has other ends to
+achieve. And every artist, major and minor, is aware in his conscience
+that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to proceed rapidly
+with the affair of creation, and an excusable dislike of re-creating
+anything twice, thrice, or ten times over--unnatural task!--are
+responsible for much of that artifice. We can all point in excuse to
+Shakspere, who was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods
+would shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has been
+mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care. If Flaubert
+had been a greater artist he might have been more of an amateur.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Of this poor neglected matter of technique the more important branch is
+design--or construction. It is the branch of the art--of all arts--which
+comes next after "inspiration"--a capacious word meant to include
+everything that the artist must be born with and cannot acquire. The
+less important branch of technique--far less important--may be described
+as an ornamentation.
+
+There are very few rules of design in the novel; but the few are
+capital. Nevertheless, great novelists have often flouted or ignored
+them--to the detriment of their work. In my opinion the first rule is
+that the interest must be centralised; it must not be diffused equally
+over various parts of the canvas. To compare one art with another may be
+perilous, but really the convenience of describing a novel as a canvas
+is extreme. In a well-designed picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one
+particular spot. If the eye is drawn with equal force to several
+different spots, then we reproach the painter for having "scattered" the
+interest of the picture. Similarly with the novel. A novel must have
+one, two, or three figures that easily overtop the rest. These figures
+must be in the foreground, and the rest in the middle-distance or in the
+back-ground.
+
+Moreover, these figures--whether they are saints or sinners--must
+somehow be presented more sympathetically than the others. If this
+cannot be done, then the inspiration is at fault. The single motive that
+should govern the choice of a principal figure is the motive of love for
+that figure. What else could the motive be? The race of heroes is
+essential to art. But what makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure
+chosen than the understanding sympathy of the artist with the figure. To
+say that the hero has disappeared from modern fiction is absurd. All
+that has happened is that the characteristics of the hero have changed,
+naturally, with the times. When Thackeray wrote "a novel without a
+hero," he wrote a novel with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this
+better than Thackeray. What he meant was that he was sick of the
+conventional bundle of characteristics styled a hero in his day, and
+that he had changed the type. Since then we have grown sick of Dobbins,
+and the type has been changed again more than once. The fateful hour
+will arrive when we shall be sick of Ponderevos.
+
+The temptation of the great novelist, overflowing with creative force,
+is to scatter the interest. In both his major works Tolstoi found the
+temptation too strong for him. _Anna Karenina_ is not one novel, but
+two, and suffers accordingly. As for _War and Peace_, the reader wanders
+about in it as in a forest, for days, lost, deprived of a sense of
+direction, and with no vestige of a sign-post; at intervals
+encountering mysterious faces whose identity he in vain tries to recall.
+On a much smaller scale Meredith committed the same error. Who could
+assert positively which of the sisters Fleming is the heroine of _Rhoda
+Fleming_? For nearly two hundred pages at a stretch Rhoda scarcely
+appears. And more than once the author seems quite to forget that the
+little knave Algernon is not, after all, the hero of the story.
+
+The second rule of design--perhaps in the main merely a different view
+of the first--is that the interest must be maintained. It may increase,
+but it must never diminish. Here is that special aspect of design which
+we call construction, or plot. By interest I mean the interest of the
+story itself, and not the interest of the continual play of the author's
+mind on his material. In proportion as the interest of the story is
+maintained, the plot is a good one. In so far as it lapses, the plot is
+a bad one. There is no other criterion of good construction. Readers of
+a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which
+"you can't tell what is going to happen next." But in some of the most
+tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen
+next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. It would be
+nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to make sure
+what will happen next"! Good plots set you anxiously guessing what will
+happen next.
+
+When the reader is misled--not intentionally in order to get an effect,
+but clumsily through amateurishness--then the construction is bad. This
+calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work
+another calamity does occur with far too much frequency--namely, the
+tantalising of the reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wanton,
+or negligent shifting of the interest from the major to the minor theme.
+A sad example of this infantile trick is to be found in the thirty-first
+chapter of _Rhoda_ _Fleming_, wherein, well knowing that the reader is
+tingling for the interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable
+to control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for Algernon, devotes
+some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with an illicit
+thousand pounds. That the sixteen pages are excessively brilliant does
+not a bit excuse the wilful unshapeliness of the book's design.
+
+The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out defenders of Victorian fiction
+are wont to argue that though the event-plot in sundry great novels may
+be loose and casual (that is to say, simply careless), the "idea-plot"
+is usually close-knit, coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able
+to comprehend how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot
+(any more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but
+assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that the
+mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow, the
+event-plot (which I positively do not believe),--even then I still hold
+that sloppiness in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave
+iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English novels,
+chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot, the Brontës, and
+Anthony Trollope.
+
+The one other important rule in construction is that the plot should be
+kept throughout within the same convention. All plots--even those of our
+most sacred naturalistic contemporaries--are and must be a
+conventionalisation of life. We imagine we have arrived at a convention
+which is nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
+Perhaps we have--but so little nearer that the difference is scarcely
+appreciable! An aviator at midday may be nearer the sun than the
+motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire journey to the sun,
+the aviator's progress upward can safely be ignored. No novelist has
+yet, or ever will, come within a hundred million miles of life itself.
+It is impossible for us to see how far we still are from life. The
+defects of a new convention disclose themselves late in its career. The
+notion that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula which
+ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "Naturalist" is merely an epithet
+expressing self-satisfaction.
+
+Similarly, the habit of deriding as "conventional" plots constructed in
+an earlier convention, is ridiculous. Under this head Dickens in
+particular has been assaulted; I have assaulted him myself. But within
+their convention, the plots of Dickens are excellent, and show little
+trace of amateurishness, and every sign of skilled accomplishment. And
+Dickens did not blunder out of one convention into another, as certain
+of ourselves undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned for
+the conventionalism of his plots. And yet Hardy happens to be one of the
+rare novelists who have evolved a new convention to suit their
+idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idiosyncrasy is a deep conviction of the
+whimsicality of the divine power, and again and again he has expressed
+this with a virtuosity of skill which ought to have put humility into
+the hearts of naturalists, but which has not done so. The plot of _The
+Woodlanders_ is one of the most exquisite examples of subtle symbolic
+illustration of an idea that a writer of fiction ever achieved; it makes
+the symbolism of Ibsen seem crude. You may say that _The Woodlanders_
+could not have occurred in real life. No novel could have occurred in
+real life. The balance of probabilities is incalculably against any
+novel whatsoever; and rightly so. A convention is essential, and the
+duty of a novelist is to be true within his chosen convention, and not
+further. Most novelists still fail in this duty. Is there any reason,
+indeed, why we should be so vastly cleverer than our fathers? I do not
+think we are.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Leaving the seductive minor question of ornamentation, I come lastly to
+the question of getting the semblance of life on to the page before the
+eyes of the reader--the daily and hourly texture of existence. The
+novelist has selected his subject; he has drenched himself in his
+subject. He has laid down the main features of the design. The living
+embryo is there, and waits to be developed into full organic structure.
+Whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital tissue which must be
+his material? The answer is that he digs it out of himself. First-class
+fiction is, and must be, in the final resort autobiographical. What else
+should it be? The novelist may take notes of phenomena likely to be of
+use to him. And he may acquire the skill to invent very apposite
+illustrative incident. But he cannot invent psychology. Upon occasion
+some human being may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for
+his craft. But such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible. From
+outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology of others. He
+can use a real person as the unrecognisable but helpful basis for each
+of his characters.... And all that is nothing. And all special research
+is nothing. When the real intimate work of creation has to be done--and
+it has to be done on every page--the novelist can only look within for
+effective aid. Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he has felt
+and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he accomplish his end.
+An inquiry into the career of any first-class novelist invariably
+reveals that his novels are full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every
+good novel contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could
+reveal. Episodes, moods, characters of autobiography can be detected and
+traced to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate
+autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may not be
+detected. In dealing with each character in each episode the novelist
+must for a thousand convincing details interrogate that part of his own
+individuality which corresponds to the particular character. The
+foundation of his equipment is universal sympathy. And the result of
+this (or the cause--I don't know which) is that in his own individuality
+there is something of everybody. If he is a born novelist he is safe in
+asking himself, when in doubt as to the behaviour of a given personage
+at a given point: "Now, what should _I_ have done?" And incorporating
+the answer! And this in practice is what he does. Good fiction is
+autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.
+
+The necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction accounts for the
+creative repetition to which all novelists--including the most
+powerful--are reduced. They monotonously yield again and again to the
+strongest predilections of their own individuality. Again and again they
+think they are creating, by observation, a quite new character--and lo!
+when finished it is an old one--autobiographical psychology has
+triumphed! A novelist may achieve a reputation with only a single type,
+created and re-created in varying forms. And the very greatest do not
+contrive to create more than half a score genuine separate types. In
+Cerfberr and Christophe's biographical dictionary of the characters of
+Balzac, a tall volume of six hundred pages, there are some two thousand
+entries of different individuals, but probably fewer than a dozen
+genuine distinctive types. No creative artist ever repeated himself more
+brazenly or more successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious
+delightful actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young
+man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping virgin, his
+angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his faithful stupid
+servant--each is continually popping up with a new name in the Human
+Comedy. A similar phenomenon, as Frank Harris has proved, is to be
+observed in Shakspere. Hamlet of Denmark was only the last and greatest
+of a series of Shaksperean Hamlets.
+
+It may be asked, finally: What of the actual process of handling the raw
+material dug out of existence and of the artist's self--the process of
+transmuting life into art? There is no process. That is to say, there is
+no conscious process. The convention chosen by an artist is his illusion
+of the truth. Consciously, the artist only omits, selects, arranges. But
+let him beware of being false to his illusion, for then the process
+becomes conscious, and bad. This is sentimentality, which is the seed of
+death in his work. Every artist is tempted to sentimentalise, or to be
+cynical--practically the same thing. And when he falls to the
+temptation, the reader whispers in his heart, be it only for one
+instant: "That is not true to life." And in turn the reader's illusion
+of reality is impaired. Readers are divided into two classes--the
+enemies and the friends of the artist. The former, a legion, admire for
+a fortnight or a year. They hate an uncompromising struggle for the
+truth. They positively like the artist to fall to temptation. If he
+falls, they exclaim, "How sweet!" The latter are capable of savouring
+the fine unpleasantness of the struggle for truth. And when they whisper
+in their hearts: "That is not true to life," they are ashamed for the
+artist. They are few, very few; but a vigorous clan. It is they who
+confer immortality.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+WRITING PLAYS
+
+
+I
+
+
+There is an idea abroad, assiduously fostered as a rule by critics who
+happen to have written neither novels nor plays, that it is more
+difficult to write a play than a novel. I do not think so. I have
+written or collaborated in about twenty novels and about twenty plays,
+and I am convinced that it is easier to write a play than a novel.
+Personally, I would sooner _write_ two plays than one novel; less
+expenditure of nervous force and mere brains would be required for two
+plays than for one novel. (I emphasise the word "write," because if the
+whole weariness between the first conception and the first performance
+of a play is compared with the whole weariness between the first
+conception and the first publication of a novel, then the play has it. I
+would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels produced than one play. But my
+immediate object is to compare only writing with writing.) It seems to
+me that the sole persons entitled to judge of the comparative difficulty
+of writing plays and writing novels are those authors who have succeeded
+or failed equally well in both departments. And in this limited band I
+imagine that the differences of opinion on the point could not be
+marked. I would like to note in passing, for the support of my
+proposition, that whereas established novelists not infrequently venture
+into the theatre with audacity, established dramatists are very cautious
+indeed about quitting the theatre. An established dramatist usually
+takes good care to write plays and naught else; he will not affront the
+risks of coming out into the open; and therein his instinct is quite
+properly that of self-preservation. Of many established dramatists all
+over the world it may be affirmed that if they were so indiscreet as to
+publish a novel, the result would be a great shattering and a great
+awakening.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+An enormous amount of vague reverential nonsense is talked about the
+technique of the stage, the assumption being that in difficulty it far
+surpasses any other literary technique, and that until it is acquired a
+respectable play cannot be written. One hears also that it can only be
+acquired behind the scenes. A famous actor-manager once kindly gave me
+the benefit of his experience, and what he said was that a dramatist who
+wished to learn his business must live behind the scenes--and study the
+works of Dion Boucicault! The truth is that no technique is so crude and
+so simple as the technique of the stage, and that the proper place to
+learn it is not behind the scenes but in the pit. Managers, being the
+most conservative people on earth, except compositors, will honestly try
+to convince the naïve dramatist that effects can only be obtained in
+the precise way in which effects have always been obtained, and that
+this and that rule must not be broken on pain of outraging the public.
+
+And indeed it is natural that managers should talk thus, seeing the low
+state of the drama, because in any art rules and reaction always
+flourish when creative energy is sick. The mandarins have ever said and
+will ever say that a technique which does not correspond with their own
+is no technique, but simple clumsiness. There are some seven situations
+in the customary drama, and a play which does not contain at least one
+of those situations in each act will be condemned as "undramatic," or
+"thin," or as being "all talk." It may contain half a hundred other
+situations, but for the mandarin a situation which is not one of the
+seven is not a situation. Similarly there are some dozen character
+types in the customary drama, and all original--that is,
+truthful--characterisation will be dismissed as a total absence of
+characterisation because it does not reproduce any of these dozen types.
+Thus every truly original play is bound to be indicted for bad
+technique. The author is bound to be told that what he has written may
+be marvellously clever, but that it is not a play. I remember the
+day--and it is not long ago--when even so experienced and sincere a
+critic as William Archer used to argue that if the "intellectual" drama
+did not succeed with the general public, it was because its technique
+was not up to the level of the technique of the commercial drama!
+Perhaps he has changed his opinion since then. Heaven knows that the
+so-called "intellectual" drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all
+literary art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama could
+hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the most successful
+commercial plays of modern times. I tremble to think what the mandarins
+and William Archer would say to the technique of _Hamlet_, could it by
+some miracle be brought forward as a new piece by a Mr Shakspere. They
+would probably recommend Mr Shakspere to consider the ways of Sardou,
+Henri Bernstein, and Sir Herbert Tree, and be wise. Most positively they
+would assert that _Hamlet_ was not a play. And their pupils of the daily
+press would point out--what surely Mr Shakspere ought to have perceived
+for himself--that the second, third, or fourth act might be cut
+wholesale without the slightest loss to the piece.
+
+In the sense in which mandarins understand the word technique, there is
+no technique special to the stage except that which concerns the moving
+of solid human bodies to and fro, and the limitations of the human
+senses. The dramatist must not expect his audience to be able to see or
+hear two things at once, nor to be incapable of fatigue. And he must not
+expect his interpreters to stroll round or come on or go off in a
+satisfactory manner unless he provides them with satisfactory reasons
+for strolling round, coming on, or going off. Lastly, he must not expect
+his interpreters to achieve physical impossibilities. The dramatist who
+sends a pretty woman off in street attire and seeks to bring her on
+again in thirty seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail in stage
+technique, but he has not proved that stage technique is tremendously
+difficult; he has proved something quite else.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+One reason why a play is easier to write than a novel is that a play is
+shorter than a novel. On the average, one may say that it takes six
+plays to make the matter of a novel. Other things being equal, a short
+work of art presents fewer difficulties than a longer one. The contrary
+is held true by the majority, but then the majority, having never
+attempted to produce a long work of art, are unqualified to offer an
+opinion. It is said that the most difficult form of poetry is the
+sonnet. But the most difficult form of poetry is the epic. The proof
+that the sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged to be in the
+fewness of perfect sonnets. There are, however, far more perfect sonnets
+than perfect epics. A perfect sonnet may be a heavenly accident. But
+such accidents can never happen to writers of epics. Some years ago we
+had an enormous palaver about the "art of the short story," which
+numerous persons who had omitted to write novels pronounced to be more
+difficult than the novel. But the fact remains that there are scores of
+perfect short stories, whereas it is doubtful whether anybody but
+Turgenev ever did write a perfect novel. A short form is easier to
+manipulate than a long form, because its construction is less
+complicated, because the balance of its proportions can be more easily
+corrected by means of a rapid survey, because it is lawful and even
+necessary in it to leave undone many things which are very hard to do,
+and because the emotional strain is less prolonged. The most difficult
+thing in all art is to maintain the imaginative tension unslackened
+throughout a considerable period.
+
+Then, not only does a play contain less matter than a novel--it is
+further simplified by the fact that it contains fewer kinds of matter,
+and less subtle kinds of matter. There are numerous delicate and
+difficult affairs of craft that the dramatist need not think about at
+all. If he attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree of subtlety,
+he is merely wasting his time. What passes for subtle on the stage would
+have a very obvious air in a novel, as some dramatists have unhappily
+discovered. Thus whole continents of danger may be shunned by the
+dramatist, and instead of being scorned for his cowardice he will be
+very rightly applauded for his artistic discretion. Fortunate
+predicament! Again, he need not--indeed, he must not--save in a
+primitive and hinting manner, concern himself with "atmosphere." He may
+roughly suggest one, but if he begins on the feat of "creating" an
+atmosphere (as it is called), the last suburban train will have departed
+before he has reached the crisis of the play. The last suburban train is
+the best friend of the dramatist, though the fellow seldom has the sense
+to see it. Further, he is saved all descriptive work. See a novelist
+harassing himself into his grave over the description of a landscape, a
+room, a gesture--while the dramatist grins. The dramatist may have to
+imagine a landscape, a room, or a gesture; but he has not got to write
+it--and it is the writing which hastens death. If a dramatist and a
+novelist set out to portray a clever woman, they are almost equally
+matched, because each has to make the creature say things and do things.
+But if they set out to portray a charming woman, the dramatist can
+recline in an easy chair and smoke while the novelist is ruining temper,
+digestion and eyesight, and spreading terror in his household by his
+moodiness and unapproachability. The electric light burns in the
+novelist's study at three a.m.,--the novelist is still endeavouring to
+convey by means of words the extraordinary fascination that his heroine
+could exercise over mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and
+he never has really succeeded and never will. The dramatist writes
+curtly, "Enter Millicent." All are anxious to do the dramatist's job for
+him. Is the play being read at home--the reader eagerly and with
+brilliant success puts his imagination to work and completes a charming
+Millicent after his own secret desires. (Whereas he would coldly decline
+to add one touch to Millicent were she the heroine of a novel.) Is the
+play being performed on the stage--an experienced, conscientious, and
+perhaps lovely actress will strive her hardest to prove that the
+dramatist was right about Millicent's astounding fascination. And if she
+fails, nobody will blame the dramatist; the dramatist will receive
+naught but sympathy.
+
+And there is still another region of superlative difficulty which is
+narrowly circumscribed for the spoilt dramatist: I mean the whole
+business of persuading the public that the improbable is probable. Every
+work of art is and must be crammed with improbabilities and artifice;
+and the greater portion of the artifice is employed in just this
+trickery of persuasion. Only, the public of the dramatist needs far less
+persuading than the public of the novelist. The novelist announces that
+Millicent accepted the hand of the wrong man, and in spite of all the
+novelist's corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader
+declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident as
+unconvincing. The dramatist decides that Millicent must accept the hand
+of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage in flesh and blood,
+veritably doing it! Not easy for even the critical beholder to maintain
+that Millicent could not and did not do such a silly thing when he has
+actually with his eyes seen her in the very act! The dramatist, as
+usual, having done less, is more richly rewarded by results.
+
+Of course it will be argued, as it has always been argued, by those who
+have not written novels, that it is precisely the "doing less"--the
+leaving out--that constitutes the unique and fearful difficulty of
+dramatic art. "The skill to leave out"--lo! the master faculty of the
+dramatist! But, in the first place, I do not believe that, having regard
+to the relative scope of the play and of the novel, the necessity for
+leaving out is more acute in the one than in the other. The adjective
+"photographic" is as absurd applied to the novel as to the play. And, in
+the second place, other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and
+it requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. To know when
+to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is even harder.
+Sometimes, listening to partisans of the drama, I have been moved to
+suggest that, if the art of omission is so wondrously difficult, a
+dramatist who practised the habit of omitting to write anything whatever
+ought to be hailed as the supreme craftsman.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The more closely one examines the subject, the more clear and certain
+becomes the fact that there is only one fundamental artistic difference
+between the novel and the play, and that difference (to which I shall
+come later) is not the difference which would be generally named as
+distinguishing the play from the novel. The apparent differences are
+superficial, and are due chiefly to considerations of convenience.
+
+Whether in a play or in a novel the creative artist has to tell a
+story--using the word story in a very wide sense. Just as a novel is
+divided into chapters, and for a similar reason, a play is divided into
+acts. But neither chapters nor acts are necessary. Some of Balzac's
+chief novels have no chapter-divisions, and it has been proved that a
+theatre audience can and will listen for two hours to "talk," and even
+recitative singing, on the stage, without a pause. Indeed, audiences,
+under the compulsion of an artist strong and imperious enough, could, I
+am sure, be trained to marvellous feats of prolonged receptivity.
+However, chapters and acts are usual, and they involve the same
+constructional processes on the part of the artist. The entire play or
+novel must tell a complete story--that is, arouse a curiosity and
+reasonably satisfy it, raise a main question and then settle it. And
+each act or other chief division must tell a definite portion of the
+story, satisfy part of the curiosity, settle part of the question. And
+each scene or other minor division must do the same according to its
+scale. Everything basic that applies to the technique of the novel
+applies equally to the technique of the play.
+
+In particular, I would urge that a play, any more than a novel, need not
+be dramatic, employing the term as it is usually employed. In so far as
+it suspends the listener's interest, every tale, however told, may be
+said to be dramatic. In this sense _The Golden Bowl_ is dramatic; so are
+_Dominique_ and _Persuasion_. A play need not be more dramatic than
+that. Very emphatically a play need not be dramatic in the stage sense.
+It need never induce interest to the degree of excitement. It need have
+nothing that resembles what would be recognisable in the theatre as a
+situation. It may amble on--and it will still be a play, and it may
+succeed in pleasing either the fastidious hundreds or the unfastidious
+hundreds of thousands, according to the talent of the author. Without
+doubt mandarins will continue for about a century yet to excommunicate
+certain plays from the category of plays. But nobody will be any the
+worse. And dramatists will go on proving that whatever else divides a
+play from a book, "dramatic quality" does not. Some arch-Mandarin may
+launch at me one of those mandarinic epigrammatic questions which are
+supposed to overthrow the adversary at one dart. "Do you seriously mean
+to argue, sir, that drama need not be dramatic?" I do, if the word
+dramatic is to be used in the mandarinic signification. I mean to state
+that some of the finest plays of the modern age differ from a
+psychological novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling.
+Example, Henri Becque's _La Parisienne_, than which there is no better.
+If I am asked to give my own definition of the adjective "dramatic," I
+would say that that story is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined
+to be spoken by actors and actresses on the stage, and that any narrower
+definition is bound to exclude some genuine plays universally accepted
+as such--even by mandarins. For be it noted that the mandarin is never
+consistent.
+
+My definition brings me to the sole technical difference between a play
+and a novel--in the play the story is told by means of a dialogue. It is
+a difference less important than it seems, and not invariably even a
+sure point of distinction between the two kinds of narrative. For a
+novel may consist exclusively of dialogue. And plays may contain other
+matter than dialogue. The classic chorus is not dialogue. But nowadays
+we should consider the device of the chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays,
+it indeed would be. We have grown very ingenious and clever at the
+trickery of making characters talk to the audience and explain
+themselves and their past history while seemingly innocent of any such
+intention. And here, I admit, the dramatist has to face a difficulty
+special to himself, which the novelist can avoid. I believe it to be the
+sole difficulty which is peculiar to the drama, and that it is not acute
+is proved by the ease with which third-rate dramatists have generally
+vanquished it. Mandarins are wont to assert that the dramatist is also
+handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of material.
+This is not so. Rigid economy in the use of material is equally
+advisable in every form of art. If it is a necessity, it is a necessity
+which all artists flout from time to time, and occasionally with
+gorgeous results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been
+less guilty of flouting it than the novelist or any other artist.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+And now, having shown that some alleged differences between the play and
+the novel are illusory, and that a certain technical difference, though
+possibly real, is superficial and slight, I come to the fundamental
+difference between them--a difference which the laity does not suspect,
+which is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which nobody
+who is well versed in the making of both plays and novels can fail to
+feel profoundly. The emotional strain of writing a play is not merely
+less prolonged than that of writing a novel, it is less severe even
+while it lasts, lower in degree and of a less purely creative character.
+And herein is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write
+than a novel. The drama does not belong exclusively to literature,
+because its effect depends on something more than the composition of
+words. The dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the
+sole creator of it. Without him nothing can be done, but, on the other
+hand, he cannot do everything himself. He begins the work of creation,
+which is finished either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by
+the creative imagination of the reader in the study. It is as if he
+carried an immense weight to the landing at the turn of a flight of
+stairs, and that thence upward the lifting had to be done by other
+people. Consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist
+is the base--but he is not the apex. A play is a collaboration of
+creative faculties. The egotism of the dramatist resents this
+uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. And further, the creative
+faculties are not only those of the author, the stage-director
+("producer") and the actors--the audience itself is unconsciously part
+of the collaboration.
+
+Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation before
+the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the functions of others,
+and will fail of proper accomplishment at the end. The dramatist must
+deliberately, in performing his share of the work, leave scope for a
+multitude of alien faculties whose operations he can neither precisely
+foresee nor completely control. The point is not that in the writing of
+a play there are various sorts of matters--as we have already
+seen---which the dramatist must ignore; the point is that even in the
+region proper to him he must not push the creative act to its final
+limit. He must ever remember those who are to come after him. For
+instance, though he must visualise a scene as he writes it, he should
+not visualise it completely, as a novelist should. The novelist may
+perceive vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright
+insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real actors and
+hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such real actors, or he
+will perceive imaginary faces, and the ultimate interpretation will
+perforce falsify his work and nullify his intentions. This aspect of the
+subject might well be much amplified, but only for a public of
+practising dramatists.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+When the play is "finished," the processes of collaboration have yet to
+begin. The serious work of the dramatist is over, but the most
+desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do not refer to the business
+of arranging with a theatrical manager for the production of the play.
+For, though that generally partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also
+partakes of the nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that
+theatrical managers are--no doubt inevitably--theatrical. Nevertheless,
+even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming the slightest interest in
+anything more vital to the stage than the box-office, is himself in some
+degree a collaborator, and is the first to show to the dramatist that a
+play is not a play till it is performed. The manager reads the play,
+and, to the dramatist's astonishment, reads quite a different play from
+that which the dramatist imagines he wrote. In particular the manager
+reads a play which can scarcely hope to succeed--indeed, a play against
+whose chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be adduced.
+It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees failure in a
+manuscript, and very seldom success. The manager's profoundest
+instinct--self-preservation again!--is to refuse a play; if he accepts,
+it is against the grain, against his judgment--and out of a mad spirit
+of adventure. Some of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed
+in an atmosphere of settled despair. The dramatist naturally feels an
+immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the manager,
+and he is therein justified. The manager's vocation is not to write
+plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to direct the rehearsals of
+them, and even his knowledge of the vagaries of his own box-office has
+often proved to be pitiably delusive. The manager's true and only
+vocation is to refrain from producing plays. Despite all this, however,
+the manager has already collaborated in the play. The dramatist sees it
+differently now. All sorts of new considerations have been presented to
+him. Not a word has been altered; but it is noticeably another play.
+Which is merely to say that the creative work on it which still remains
+to be done has been more accurately envisaged. This strange experience
+could not happen to a novel, because when a novel is written it is
+finished.
+
+And when the director of rehearsals, or producer, has been chosen, and
+this priceless and mysterious person has his first serious confabulation
+with the author, then at once the play begins to assume new
+shapes--contours undreamt of by the author till that startling moment.
+And even if the author has the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals,
+similar disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a producer
+is a different fellow from the author as author. The producer is up
+against realities. He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually
+condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... He suggests the
+casting. "What do you think of X. for the old man?" asks the producer.
+The author is staggered. Is it conceivable that so renowned a producer
+can have so misread and misunderstood the play? X. would be preposterous
+as the old man. But the producer goes on talking. And suddenly the
+author sees possibilities in X. But at the same time he sees a different
+play from what he wrote. And quite probably he sees a more glorious
+play. Quite probably he had not suspected how great a dramatist he
+is.... Before the first rehearsal is called, the play, still without a
+word altered, has gone through astounding creative transmutations; the
+author recognises in it some likeness to his beloved child, but it is
+the likeness of a first cousin.
+
+At the first rehearsal, and for many rehearsals, to an extent perhaps
+increasing, perhaps decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an
+apologetic and self-conscious mood; and his mien is something between
+that of a criminal who has committed a horrid offence and that of a
+father over the crude body of a new-born child. Now in truth he deeply
+realises that the play is a collaboration. In extreme cases he may be
+brought to see that he himself is one of the less important factors in
+the collaboration. The first preoccupation of the interpreters is not
+with his play at all, but--quite rightly--with their own careers; if
+they were not honestly convinced that their own careers were the chief
+genuine excuse for the existence of the theatre and the play they would
+not act very well. But, more than that, they do not regard his play as a
+sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their careers. At the most
+favourable, what they secretly think is that if they are permitted to
+exercise their talents on his play there is a chance that they may be
+able to turn it into a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their
+careers. The attitude of every actor towards his part is: "My part is
+not much of a part as it stands, but if my individuality is allowed to
+get into free contact with it, I may make something brilliant out of
+it." Which attitude is a proper attitude, and an attitude in my opinion
+justified by the facts of the case. The actor's phrase is that he
+_creates_ a part, and he is right. He completes the labour of creation
+begun by the author and continued by the producer, and if reasonable
+liberty is not accorded to him--if either the author or the producer
+attempts to do too much of the creative work--the result cannot be
+satisfactory.
+
+As the rehearsals proceed the play changes from day to day. However
+autocratic the producer, however obstinate the dramatist, the play will
+vary at each rehearsal like a large cloud in a gentle wind. It is never
+the same play for two days together. Nor is this surprising, seeing
+that every day and night a dozen, or it may be two dozen, human beings
+endowed with the creative gift are creatively working on it. Every
+dramatist who is candid with himself--I do not suggest that he should be
+candid to the theatrical world--well knows that though his play is often
+worsened by his collaborators it is also often improved,--and improved
+in the most mysterious and dazzling manner--without a word being
+altered. Producer and actors do not merely suggest possibilities, they
+execute them. And the author is confronted by artistic phenomena for
+which lawfully he may not claim credit. On the other hand, he may be
+confronted by inartistic phenomena in respect to which lawfully he is
+blameless, but which he cannot prevent; a rehearsal is like a
+battle,--certain persons are theoretically in control, but in fact the
+thing principally fights itself. And thus the creation goes on until the
+dress-rehearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. And the
+dramatist lying awake in the night reflects, stoically, fatalistically:
+"Well, that is the play that they have made of _my_ play!" And he may be
+pleased or he may be disgusted. But if he attends the first performance
+he cannot fail to notice, after the first few minutes of it, that he was
+quite mistaken, and that what the actors are performing is still another
+play. The audience is collaborating.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+THE ARTIST AND THE
+PUBLIC
+
+
+I
+
+
+I can divide all the imaginative writers I have ever met into two
+classes--those who admitted and sometimes proclaimed loudly that they
+desired popularity; and those who expressed a noble scorn or a gentle
+contempt for popularity. The latter, however, always failed to conceal
+their envy of popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose
+truculent bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or
+religious life. And indeed, since (as I have held in a previous chapter)
+the object of the artist is to share his emotions with others, it would
+be strange if the normal artist spurned popularity in order to keep his
+emotions as much as possible to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest
+nonsense has been and will be written by uncreative critics, of course
+in the higher interests of creative authors, about popularity and the
+proper attitude of the artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a
+first-class artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.
+
+The _Letters of George Meredith_ (of which the first volume is a
+magnificent unfolding of the character of a great man) are full of
+references to popularity, references overt and covert. Meredith could
+never--and quite naturally--get away from the idea of popularity. He was
+a student of the English public, and could occasionally be unjust to it.
+Writing to M. André Raffalovich (who had sent him a letter of
+appreciation) in November, 1881, he said: "I venture to judge by your
+name that you are at most but half English. I can consequently believe
+in the feeling you express for the work of an unpopular writer.
+Otherwise one would incline to be sceptical, for the English are given
+to practical jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors who are
+supposed to languish in the shade amuses them." A remark curiously
+unfair to the small, faithful band of admirers which Meredith then had.
+The whole letter, while warmly and touchingly grateful, is gloomy.
+Further on in it he says: "Good work has a fair chance to be recognised
+in the end, and if not, what does it matter?" But there is constant
+proof that it did matter very much. In a letter to William Hardman,
+written when he was well and hopeful, he says: "Never mind: if we do but
+get the public ear, oh, my dear old boy!" To Captain Maxse, in reference
+to a vast sum of £8,000 paid by the _Cornhill_ people to George Eliot
+(for an unreadable novel), he exclaims: "Bon Dieu! Will aught like this
+ever happen to me?"
+
+And to his son he was very explicit about the extent to which
+unpopularity "mattered": "As I am unpopular I am ill-paid, and therefore
+bound to work double tides, hardly ever able to lay down the pen. This
+affects my weakened stomach, and so the round of the vicious circle is
+looped." (Vol. I., p. 322.) And in another letter to Arthur Meredith
+about the same time he sums up his career thus: "As for me, I have
+failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." (Vol. I., p.
+318.) This letter is dated June 23rd, 1881. Meredith was then
+fifty-three years of age. He had written _Modern Love_, _The Shaving of
+Shagpat_, _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, _Rhoda Fleming_, _The Egoist_
+and other masterpieces. He knew that he had done his best and that his
+best was very fine. It would be difficult to credit that he did not
+privately deem himself one of the masters of English literature and
+destined to what we call immortality. He had the enthusiastic
+appreciation of some of the finest minds of the epoch. And yet, "As for
+me, I have failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." But
+he had not failed in his industry, nor in the quality of his work, nor
+in achieving self-respect and the respect of his friends. He had failed
+only in one thing--immediate popularity.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Assuming then that an author is justified in desiring immediate
+popularity, instead of being content with poverty and the unheard
+plaudits of posterity, another point presents itself. Ought he to limit
+himself to a mere desire for popularity, or ought he actually to do
+something, or to refrain from doing something, to the special end of
+obtaining popularity? Ought he to say: "I shall write exactly what and
+how I like, without any regard for the public; I shall consider nothing
+but my own individuality and powers; I shall be guided solely by my own
+personal conception of what the public ought to like"? Or ought he to
+say: "Let me examine this public, and let me see whether some compromise
+between us is not possible"?
+
+Certain authors are never under the necessity of facing the
+alternative. Occasionally, by chance, a genius may be so fortunately
+constituted and so brilliantly endowed that he captures the public at
+once, prestige being established, and the question of compromise never
+arises. But this is exceedingly rare. On the other hand, many mediocre
+authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample appreciation
+in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are never troubled by any
+problem worse than the vagaries of their fountain-pens. Such authors
+enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as happiness. Of nearly all really
+original artists, however, it may be said that they are at loggerheads
+with the public--as an almost inevitable consequence of their
+originality; and for them the problem of compromise or no-compromise
+acutely exists.
+
+George Meredith was such an artist. George Meredith before anything else
+was a poet. He would have been a better poet than a novelist, and I
+believe that he thought so. The public did not care for his poetry. If
+he had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents usually
+have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said: "I shall keep on
+writing poetry, even if I have to become a stockbroker in order to do
+it." But when he was only thirty-three--a boy, as authors go--he had
+already tired of no-compromise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: "It may be
+that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained Song....
+The worst is that having taken to prose delineations of character and
+life, one's affections are divided.... And in truth, being a servant of
+the public, _I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously
+to singing_." (Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example as one is
+likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the futility of
+writing what will not be immediately read, when he can write something
+else, less to his taste, that will be read. The same sentiment has
+actuated an immense number of first-class creative artists, including
+Shakspere, who would have been a rare client for a literary agent.... So
+much for refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer
+to do because it is not appreciated by the public.
+
+There remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain because the
+public appreciates it--otherwise the pot-boiler. In 1861 Meredith wrote
+to Mrs Ross: "I am engaged in extra potboiling work which enables me to
+do this," i.e., to write an occasional long poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh,
+base compromise! Seventeen years later he wrote to R.L. Stevenson: "Of
+potboilers let none speak. Jove hangs them upon necks that could soar
+above his heights but for the accursed weight." (Vol. I., p. 291.) It
+may be said that Meredith was forced to write potboilers. He was no more
+forced to write potboilers than any other author. Sooner than wallow in
+that shame, he might have earned money in more difficult ways. Or he
+might have indulged in that starvation so heartily prescribed for
+authors by a plutocratic noble who occasionally deigns to employ the
+English tongue in prose. Meredith subdued his muse, and Meredith wrote
+potboilers, because he was a first-class artist and a man of profound
+common sense. Being extremely creative, he had to arrive somehow, and he
+remembered that the earth is the earth, and the world the world, and men
+men, and he arrived as best he could. The great majority of his peers
+have acted similarly.
+
+The truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from the public on
+his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is either a god or a
+conceited and impractical fool. And he is somewhat more likely to be the
+latter than the former. He wants too much. There are two sides to every
+bargain, including the artistic. The most fertile and the most powerful
+artists are the readiest to recognise this, because their sense of
+proportion, which is the sense of order, is well developed. The lack of
+the sense of proportion is the mark of the _petit maître_. The sagacious
+artist, while respecting himself, will respect the idiosyncrasies of his
+public. To do both simultaneously is quite possible. In particular, the
+sagacious artist will respect basic national prejudices. For example, no
+first-class English novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his
+pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which Continental writers
+enjoy as a matter of course. The British public is admittedly wrong on
+this important point--hypocritical, illogical and absurd. But what would
+you? You cannot defy it; you literally cannot. If you tried, you would
+not even get as far as print, to say nothing of library counters. You
+can only get round it by ingenuity and guile. You can only go a very
+little further than is quite safe. You can only do one man's modest
+share in the education of the public.
+
+In Valery Larbaud's latest novel, _A.O. Barnabooth,_ occurs a phrase of
+deep wisdom about women: "_La femme est une grande realite, comme la
+guerre_." It might be applied to the public. The public is a great
+actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you
+cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. There it is! You can do
+something with it, but not much. And what you do not do with it, it must
+do with you, if there is to be the contact which is essential to the
+artistic function. This contact may be closened and completed by the
+artist's cleverness--the mere cleverness of adaptability which most
+first-class artists have exhibited. You can wear the fashions of the
+day. You can tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to distract his
+attention while you stab him in the chest. You can cajole money out of
+him by one kind of work in order to gain leisure in which to force him
+to accept later on something that he would prefer to refuse. You can use
+a thousand devices on the excellent simpleton.... And in the process you
+may degrade yourself to a mere popularity-hunter! Of course you may; as
+you may become a drunkard through drinking a glass of beer. Only, if you
+have anything to say worth saying, you usually don't succumb to this
+danger. If you have anything to say worth saying, you usually manage
+somehow to get it said, and read. The artist of genuine vocation is apt
+to be a wily person. He knows how to sacrifice inessentials so that he
+may retain essentials. And he can mysteriously put himself even into a
+potboiler. _Clarissa Harlowe_, which influenced fiction throughout
+Europe, was the direct result of potboiling. If the artist has not the
+wit and the strength of mind to keep his own soul amid the collisions of
+life, he is the inferior of a plain, honest merchant in stamina, and
+ought to retire to the upper branches of the Civil Service.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+When the author has finished the composition of a work, when he has put
+into the trappings of the time as much of his eternal self as they will
+safely hold, having regard to the best welfare of his creative career as
+a whole, when, in short, he has done all that he can to ensure the
+fullest public appreciation of the essential in him--there still remains
+to be accomplished something which is not unimportant in the entire
+affair of obtaining contact with the public. He has to see that the work
+is placed before the public as advantageously as possible. In other
+words, he has to dispose of the work as advantageously as possible. In
+other words, when he lays down the pen he ought to become a merchant,
+for the mere reason that he has an article to sell, and the more
+skilfully he sells it the better will be the result, not only for the
+public appreciation of his message, but for himself as a private
+individual and as an artist with further activities in front of him.
+
+Now this absolutely logical attitude of a merchant towards one's
+finished work infuriates the dilettanti of the literary world, to whom
+the very word "royalties" is anathema. They apparently would prefer to
+treat literature as they imagine Byron treated it, although as a fact no
+poet in a short life ever contrived to make as many pounds sterling out
+of verse as Byron made. Or perhaps they would like to return to the
+golden days when the author had to be "patronised" in order to exist; or
+even to the mid-nineteenth century, when practically all authors save
+the most successful--and not a few of the successful also--failed to
+obtain the fair reward of their work. The dilettanti's snobbishness and
+sentimentality prevent them from admitting that, in a democratic age,
+when an author is genuinely appreciated, either he makes money or he is
+the foolish victim of a scoundrel. They are fond of saying that
+agreements and royalties have nothing to do with literature. But
+agreements and royalties have a very great deal to do with literature.
+Full contact between artist and public depends largely upon publisher or
+manager being compelled to be efficient and just. And upon the
+publisher's or manager's efficiency and justice depend also the dignity,
+the leisure, the easy flow of coin, the freedom, and the pride which are
+helpful to the full fruition of any artist. No artist was ever assisted
+in his career by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by
+overwork, by economic inferiority. See Meredith's correspondence
+everywhere.
+
+Nor can there be any satisfaction in doing badly that which might be
+done well. If an artist writes a fine poem, shows it to his dearest
+friend, and burns it--I can respect him. But if an artist writes a fine
+poem, and then by sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to be
+inefficiently published, and fails to secure his own interests in the
+transaction, on the plea that he is an artist and not a merchant, then I
+refuse to respect him. A man cannot fulfil, and has no right to fulfil,
+one function only in this complex world. Some, indeed many, of the
+greatest creative artists have managed to be very good merchants also,
+and have not been ashamed of the double _rôle_. To read the
+correspondence and memoirs of certain supreme artists one might be
+excused for thinking, indeed, that they were more interested in the
+_rôle_ of merchant than in the other _rôle_; and yet their work in no
+wise suffered. In the distribution of energy between the two _rôles_
+common sense is naturally needed. But the artist who has enough common
+sense--or, otherwise expressed, enough sense of reality--not to disdain
+the _rôle_ of merchant will probably have enough not to exaggerate it.
+He may be reassured on one point--namely, that success in the _rôle_ of
+merchant will never impair any self-satisfaction he may feel in the
+_rôle_ of artist. The late discovery of a large public in America
+delighted Meredith and had a tonic effect on his whole system. It is
+often hinted, even if it is not often said, that great popularity ought
+to disturb the conscience of the artist. I do not believe it. If the
+conscience of the artist is not disturbed during the actual work itself,
+no subsequent phenomenon will or should disturb it. Once the artist is
+convinced of his artistic honesty, no public can be too large for his
+peace of mind. On the other hand, failure in the _rôle_ of merchant will
+emphatically impair his self-satisfaction in the _rôle_ of artist and
+his courage in the further pursuance of that _rôle_.
+
+But many artists have admittedly no aptitude for merchantry. Not only is
+their sense of the bindingness of a bargain imperfect, but they are apt
+in business to behave in a puerile manner, to close an arrangement out
+of mere impatience, to be grossly undiplomatic, to be victimised by
+their vanity, to believe what they ought not to believe, to discredit
+what is patently true, to worry over negligible trifles, and generally
+to make a clumsy mess of their affairs. An artist may say: "I cannot
+work unless I have a free mind, and I cannot have a free mind if I am to
+be bothered all the time by details of business."
+
+Apart from the fact that no artist who pretends also to be a man can in
+this world hope for a free mind, and that if he seeks it by neglecting
+his debtors he will be deprived of it by his creditors--apart from that,
+the artist's demand for a free mind is reasonable. Moreover, it is
+always a distressing sight to see a man trying to do what nature has not
+fitted him to do, and so doing it ill. Such artists, however--and they
+form possibly the majority--can always employ an expert to do their
+business for them, to cope on their behalf with the necessary middleman.
+Not that I deem the publisher or the theatrical manager to be by nature
+less upright than any other class of merchant. But the publisher and the
+theatrical manager have been subjected for centuries to a special and
+grave temptation. The ordinary merchant deals with other merchants--his
+equals in business skill. The publisher and the theatrical manager deal
+with what amounts to a race of children, of whom even arch-angels could
+not refrain from taking advantage.
+
+When the democratisation of literature seriously set in, it inevitably
+grew plain that the publisher and the theatrical manager had very
+humanly been giving way to the temptation with which heaven in her
+infinite wisdom had pleased to afflict them,--and the Society of Authors
+came into being. A natural consequence of the general awakening was the
+self-invention of the literary agent. The Society of Authors, against
+immense obstacles, has performed wonders in the economic education of
+the creative artist, and therefore in the improvement of letters. The
+literary agent, against obstacles still more immense, has carried out
+the details of the revolution. The outcry--partly sentimental, partly
+snobbish, but mainly interested--was at first tremendous against these
+meddlers who would destroy the charming personal relations that used to
+exist between, for example, the author and the publisher. (The less said
+about those charming personal relations the better. Documents exist.)
+But the main battle is now over, and everyone concerned is beautifully
+aware who holds the field. Though much remains to be done, much has been
+done; and today the creative artist who, conscious of inability to
+transact his own affairs efficiently, does not obtain efficient advice
+and help therein, stands in his own light both as an artist and as a
+man, and is a reactionary force. He owes the practice of elementary
+common sense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at large.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The same dilettante spirit which refuses to see the connection between
+art and money has also a tendency to repudiate the world of men at
+large, as being unfit for the habitation of artists. This is a still
+more serious error of attitude--especially in a storyteller. No artist
+is likely to be entirely admirable who is not a man before he is an
+artist. The notion that art is first and the rest of the universe
+nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity and futility in art. The artist
+who is too sensitive for contacts with the non-artistic world is thereby
+too sensitive for his vocation, and fit only to fall into gentle
+ecstasies over the work of artists less sensitive than himself.
+
+The classic modern example of the tragedy of the artist who repudiates
+the world is Flaubert. At an early age Flaubert convinced himself that
+he had no use for the world of men. He demanded to be left in solitude
+and tranquillity. The morbid streak in his constitution grew rapidly
+under the fostering influences of peace and tranquillity. He was
+brilliantly peculiar as a schoolboy. As an old man of twenty-two,
+mourning over the vanished brio of youth, he carried morbidity to
+perfection. Only when he was travelling (as, for example, in Egypt) do
+his letters lose for a time their distemper. His love-letters are often
+ignobly inept, and nearly always spoilt by the crass provincialism of
+the refined and cultivated hermit. His mistress was a woman difficult to
+handle and indeed a Tartar in egotism, but as the recipient of
+Flaubert's love-letters she must win universal sympathy.
+
+Full of a grievance against the whole modern planet, Flaubert turned
+passionately to ancient times (in which he would have been equally
+unhappy had he lived in them), and hoped to resurrect beauty when he
+had failed to see it round about him. Whether or not he did resurrect
+beauty is a point which the present age is now deciding. His fictions of
+modern life undoubtedly suffer from his detestation of the material; but
+considering his manner of existence it is marvellous that he should have
+been able to accomplish any of them, except _Un Coeur Simple_. The final
+one, _Bouvard et Pécuchet_, shows the lack of the sense of reality which
+must be the inevitable sequel of divorce from mankind. It is realism
+without conviction. No such characters as Bouvard and Pecuchet could
+ever have existed outside Flaubert's brain, and the reader's resultant
+impression is that the author has ruined a central idea which was well
+suited for a grand larkish extravaganza in the hands of a French Swift.
+But the spectacle of Flaubert writing in _mots justes_ a grand larkish
+extravaganza cannot be conjured up by fancy.
+
+There are many sub-Flauberts rife in London. They are usually more
+critical than creative, but their influence upon creators, and
+especially the younger creators, is not negligible. Their aim in
+preciosity would seem to be to keep themselves unspotted from the world.
+They are for ever being surprised and hurt by the crudity and coarseness
+of human nature, and for ever bracing themselves to be not as others
+are. They would have incurred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just
+discipline for them would be that they should be cross-examined by the
+great bully in presence of a jury of butchers and sentenced accordingly.
+The morbid Flaubertian shrinking from reality is to be found to-day even
+in relatively robust minds. I was recently at a provincial cinema, and
+witnessed on the screen with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama
+entitled "Gold is not All." My friend, who combines the callings of
+engineer and general adventurer with that of serving his country, leaned
+over to me in the darkness amid the violent applause, and said: "You
+know, this kind of thing always makes me ashamed of human nature." I
+answered him as Johnsonially as the circumstances would allow. Had he
+lived to the age of fifty so blind that it needed a cinema audience to
+show him what the general level of human nature really is? Nobody has
+any right to be ashamed of human nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother?
+Is one ashamed of the cosmic process of evolution? Human nature _is_.
+And the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts, absorbs that
+supreme fact into his brain, the better for his work.
+
+There is a numerous band of persons in London--and the novelist and
+dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their circle--who spend so
+much time and emotion in practising the rites of the religion of art
+that they become incapable of real existence. Each is a Stylites on a
+pillar. Their opinion on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John,
+Cyril Scott, Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James Stephens, E.A. Rickards,
+Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc., may not be without value, and
+their genuine feverish morbid interest in art has its usefulness; but
+they know no more about reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They
+never approach normal life. They scorn it. They have a horror of it.
+They class politics with the differential calculus. They have heard of
+Lloyd George, the rise in the price of commodities, and the eternal
+enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must open a newspaper
+to look at the advertisements and announcements relating to the arts.
+The occasional frequenting of this circle may not be disadvantageous to
+the creative artist. But let him keep himself inoculated against its
+disease by constant steady plunges into the cold sea of the general
+national life. Let him mingle with the public, for God's sake! No
+phenomenon on this wretched planet, which after all is ours, is meet for
+the artist's shrinking scorn. And the average man, as to whom the
+artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever constitute the
+main part of the material in which he works.
+
+Above all, let not the creative artist suppose that the antidote to the
+circle of dilettantism is the circle of social reform. It is not. I
+referred in the first chapter to the prevalent illusion that the
+republic has just now arrived at a crisis, and that if something is not
+immediately done disaster will soon be upon us. This is the illusion to
+which the circle of social reforms is naturally prone, and it is an
+illusion against which the common sense of the creative artist must
+mightily protest. The world is, without doubt, a very bad world; but it
+is also a very good world. The function of the artist is certainly
+concerned more with what is than with what ought to be. When all
+necessary reform has been accomplished our perfected planet will be
+stone-cold. Until then the artist's affair is to keep his balance amid
+warring points of view, and in the main to record and enjoy what is....
+But is not the Minimum Wage Bill urgent? But when the minimum wage is as
+trite as the jury-system, the urgency of reform will still be tempting
+the artist too far out of his true path. And the artist who yields is
+lost.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Author's Craft, by Arnold Bennett
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+    <title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Author's Craft, by
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Author's Craft, by Arnold Bennett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Author's Craft
+
+Author: Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: June 25, 2004 [EBook #12743]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, David McLachlan and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+    <h1>THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT</h1>
+
+    <h3>By</h3>
+
+    <h2>ARNOLD BENNETT</h2>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 1 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page__i" name="page__i">[pg i]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>WORKS BY ARNOLD BENNETT</h2>
+
+    <dl>
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        NOVELS</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>A Man from the North</li>
+
+          <li>Anna of the Five Towns</li>
+
+          <li>Leonora</li>
+
+          <li>A Great Man</li>
+
+          <li>Sacred and Profane Love</li>
+
+          <li>Whom God hath Joined</li>
+
+          <li>Buried Alive</li>
+
+          <li>The Old Wives' Tale</li>
+
+          <li>The Glimpse</li>
+
+          <li>Helen with the High Hand</li>
+
+          <li>Clayhanger</li>
+
+          <li>The Card</li>
+
+          <li>Hilda Lessways</li>
+
+          <li>The Regent</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        FANTASIAS</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>The Grand Babylon Hotel</li>
+
+          <li>The Gates of Wrath</li>
+
+          <li>Teresa of Watling Street</li>
+
+          <li>The Loot of Cities</li>
+
+          <li>Hugo</li>
+
+          <li>The Ghost</li>
+
+          <li>The City of Pleasure</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        SHORT STORIES</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>Tales of the Five Towns</li>
+
+          <li>The Grim Smile of the Five Towns</li>
+
+          <li>The Matador of the Five Towns</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        BELLES-LETTRES</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>Journalism for Women</li>
+
+          <li>Fame and Fiction</li>
+
+          <li>How to become an Author</li>
+
+          <li>The Reasonable Life</li>
+
+          <li>How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day</li>
+
+          <li>The Human Machine</li>
+
+          <li>Literary Taste</li>
+
+          <li>The Feast of St Friend</li>
+
+          <li>Those United States</li>
+
+          <li>The Plain Man and His Wife</li>
+
+          <li>Paris Nights</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+        <b>
+        <br />
+
+        DRAMA</b>
+      </dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>Polite Farces</li>
+
+          <li>Cupid and Common Sense</li>
+
+          <li>What the Public Wants</li>
+
+          <li>The Honeymoon</li>
+
+          <li>The Great Adventure</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+      <br />
+
+      (
+      <i>In Collaboration with EDEN PHILLPOTTS</i>
+
+      )</dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>The Sinews of War: A Romance</li>
+
+          <li>The Statue: A Romance</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+
+      <dt>
+      <br />
+
+      (
+      <i>In Collaboration with EDWARD KNOBLAUCH</i>
+
+      )</dt>
+
+      <dd>
+        <ul>
+          <li>Milestones: A Play</li>
+        </ul>
+      </dd>
+    </dl>
+
+    <hr />
+
+    <a name='THE_AUTHORS_CRAFT'>
+    </a>
+
+    <h1>THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT</h1>
+
+<!-- Page 2 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page_ii" name="page_ii">[pg ii]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>By</h3>
+
+    <h2>ARNOLD BENNETT</h2>
+
+
+      <center>HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+      <br />
+
+      LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO</center>
+
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 3 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="pageiii" name="pageiii">[pg iii]</a>
+    </span>
+
+          <center>Printed in 1914</center>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 4 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page_iv" name="page_iv">[pg iv]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+    <table border="0" width="50%" align="center"
+    summary="Table of Contents">
+      <tr>
+        <td align="center">
+          <a href="#page001">PART I.
+          <br />
+
+          SEEING LIFE</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+
+      <tr>
+        <td align="center">
+          <a href="#page035">PART II.
+          <br />
+
+          WRITING NOVELS</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+
+      <tr>
+        <td align="center">
+          <a href="#page067">PART III.
+          <br />
+
+          WRITING PLAYS</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+
+      <tr>
+        <td align="center">
+          <a href="#page101">PART IV.
+          <br />
+
+          THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 5 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page001" name="page001">[pg 1]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>PART I</h2>
+
+    <h3>SEEING LIFE</h3>
+
+<!-- Page 6 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page002" name="page002">[pg 2]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <br />
+
+<!-- Page 7 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page003" name="page003">[pg 3]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>I</h3>
+
+    <p>A young dog, inexperienced, sadly lacking in even primary
+    education, ambles and frisks along the footpath of Fulham Road,
+    near the mysterious gates of a Marist convent. He is a large
+    puppy, on the way to be a dog of much dignity, but at present
+    he has little to recommend him but that gawky elegance, and
+    that bounding gratitude for the gift of life, which distinguish
+    the normal puppy. He is an ignorant fool. He might have entered
+    the convent of nuns and had a fine time, but instead he steps
+    off the pavement into the road, the road being a vast and
+    interesting continent imperfectly explored. His confidence in
+    his nose, in his agility, and in the goodness of God is
+    touching, absolutely painful to witness. He glances casually at
+    a huge, towering vermilion construction that is
+<!-- Page 8 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page004" name="page004">[pg 4]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded by a glint of
+    brass and a wisp of steam; and then with disdain he ignores it
+    as less important than a mere speck of odorous matter in the
+    mud. The next instant he is lying inert in the mud. His
+    confidence in the goodness of God had been misplaced. Since the
+    beginning of time God had ordained him a victim.</p>
+
+    <p>An impressive thing happens. The motor-bus reluctantly
+    slackens and stops. Not the differential brake, nor the
+    foot-brake, has arrested the motor-bus, but the invisible brake
+    of public opinion, acting by administrative transmission. There
+    is not a policeman in sight. Theoretically, the motor-'bus is
+    free to whiz onward in its flight to the paradise of
+    Shoreditch, but in practice it is paralysed by dread. A man in
+    brass buttons and a stylish cap leaps down from it, and the
+    blackened demon who sits on its neck also leaps down from it,
+    and they move gingerly towards the puppy. A little while ago
+<!-- Page 9 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page005" name="page005">[pg 5]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    the motor-bus might have overturned a human cyclist or so, and
+    proceeded nonchalant on its way. But now even a puppy requires
+    a post-mortem: such is the force of public opinion aroused. Two
+    policemen appear in the distance.</p>
+
+    <p>"A street accident" is now in being, and a crowd gathers
+    with calm joy and stares, passive and determined. The puppy
+    offers no sign whatever; just lies in the road. Then a boy,
+    destined probably to a great future by reason of his singular
+    faculty of initiative, goes to the puppy and carries him by the
+    scruff of the neck, to the shelter of the gutter. Relinquished
+    by the boy, the lithe puppy falls into an easy horizontal
+    attitude, and seems bent upon repose. The boy lifts the puppy's
+    head to examine it, and the head drops back wearily. The puppy
+    is dead. No cry, no blood, no disfigurement! Even no
+    perceptible jolt of the wheel as it climbed over the obstacle
+    of the puppy's body! A wonderfully clean and perfect
+    accident!</p>
+
+    <p>
+<!-- Page 10 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page006" name="page006">[pg 6]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    The increasing crowd stares with beatific placidity. People
+    emerge impatiently from the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus
+    and slip down from its back, and either join the crowd or
+    vanish. The two policemen and the crew of the motor-bus have
+    now met in parley. The conductor and the driver have an air at
+    once nervous and resigned; their gestures are quick and
+    vivacious. The policemen, on the other hand, indicate by their
+    slow and huge movements that eternity is theirs. And they could
+    not be more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had
+    them manacled and leashed. The conductor and the driver admit
+    the absolute dominion of the elephantine policemen; they admit
+    that before the simple will of the policemen inconvenience,
+    lost minutes, shortened leisure, docked wages, count as less
+    than naught. And the policemen are carelessly sublime, well
+    knowing that magistrates, jails, and the very Home Secretary on
+    his throne&#8212;yes, and a whole system of conspiracy
+<!-- Page 11 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page007" name="page007">[pg 7]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    and perjury and brutality&#8212;are at their beck in case of
+    need. And yet occasionally in the demeanour of the policemen
+    towards the conductor and the driver there is a silent message
+    that says: "After all, we, too, are working men like you,
+    over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in the
+    service of the pitiless and dishonest public. We, too, have
+    wives and children and privations and frightful apprehensions.
+    We, too, have to struggle desperately. Only the awful magic of
+    these garments and of the garter which we wear on our wrists
+    sets an abyss between us and you." And the conductor writes and
+    one of the policemen writes, and they keep on writing, while
+    the traffic makes beautiful curves to avoid them.</p>
+
+    <p>The still increasing crowd continues to stare in the pure
+    blankness of pleasure. A close-shaved, well-dressed,
+    middle-aged man, with a copy of
+    <i>The Sportsman</i>
+
+    in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus, starts
+    stamping his feet. "I was knocked down by a taxi last year," he
+
+<!-- Page 12 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page008" name="page008">[pg 8]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    says fiercely. "But nobody took no notice of
+    <i>that</i>
+
+    ! Are they going to stop here all the blank morning for a blank
+    tyke?" And for all his respectable appearance, his features
+    become debased, and he emits a jet of disgusting profanity and
+    brings most of the Trinity into the thunderous assertion that
+    he has paid his fare. Then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart.
+    And he stops and talks a long time with the other uniforms,
+    because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd
+    never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops
+    and picks up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it,
+    all soft and yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and
+    passes on. And only that which is immortal and divine of the
+    puppy remains behind, floating perhaps like an invisible vapour
+    over the scene of the tragedy.</p>
+
+    <p>The crowd is tireless, all eyes. The four principals still
+    converse and write. Nobody in the crowd comprehends what they
+    are about. At length the driver
+<!-- Page 13 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page009" name="page009">[pg 9]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    separates himself, but is drawn back, and a new parley is
+    commenced. But everything ends. The policemen turn on their
+    immense heels. The driver and conductor race towards the
+    motor-bus. The bell rings, the motor-bus, quite empty,
+    disappears snorting round the corner into Walham Green. The
+    crowd is now lessening. But it separates with reluctance, many
+    of its members continuing to stare with intense absorption at
+    the place where the puppy lay or the place where the policemen
+    stood. An appreciable interval elapses before the "street
+    accident" has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon.</p>
+
+    <p>The members of the crowd follow their noses, and during the
+    course of the day remark to acquaintances:</p>
+
+    <p>"Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the Fulham Road this
+    morning! Killed dead!"</p>
+
+    <p>And that is all they do remark. That is all they have
+    witnessed. They will not, and could not, give intelligible and
+    in
+<!-- Page 14 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page010" name="page010">[pg 10]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    teresting particulars of the affair (unless it were as to the
+    breed of the dog or the number of the bus-service). They have
+    watched a dog run over. They analyse neither their sensations
+    nor the phenomenon. They have witnessed it whole, as a bad
+    writer uses a
+    <i>clich&#233;</i>
+
+    . They have observed&#8212;that is to say, they have really
+    seen&#8212;nothing.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 15 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page011" name="page011">[pg 11]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>II</h3>
+
+    <p>It will be well for us not to assume an attitude of
+    condescension towards the crowd. Because in the matter of
+    looking without seeing we are all about equal. We all go to and
+    fro in a state of the observing faculties which somewhat
+    resembles coma. We are all content to look and not see.</p>
+
+    <p>And if and when, having comprehended that the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of observer is not passive but active, we determine by an
+    effort to rouse ourselves from the coma and really to see the
+    spectacle of the world (a spectacle surpassing circuses and
+    even street accidents in sustained dramatic interest), we shall
+    discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act of seeing,
+    which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. Let a man
+    resolve: "I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of
+    a morning,"
+<!-- Page 16 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page012" name="page012">[pg 12]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    and the probability if that for many mornings he will see
+    naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective
+    will be absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will
+    infallibly attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental
+    and universal. Travel makes observers of us all, but the things
+    which as travellers we observe generally show how unskilled we
+    are in the new activity.</p>
+
+    <p>A man went to Paris for the first time, and observed right
+    off that the carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof
+    like a tramcar. He was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery
+    that he observed almost nothing else. This enormous fact
+    occupied the whole foreground of his perspective. He returned
+    home and announced that Paris was a place where people rode on
+    the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the first
+    time&#8212;and no English person would ever guess the
+    phenomenon which vanquished all others in her mind on the
+<!-- Page 17 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page013" name="page013">[pg 13]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    opening day. She saw a cat walking across a street. The vision
+    excited her. For in Paris cats do not roam in thoroughfares,
+    because there are practically no houses with gardens or
+    "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement of
+    cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first
+    presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very
+    early and making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn
+    in quest of interesting material. And the one note I gathered
+    was that the ground in front of the all-night coffee-stalls was
+    white with egg-shells! What I needed then was an operation for
+    cataract. I also remember taking a man to the opera who had
+    never seen an opera. The work was
+    <i>Lohengrin</i>
+
+    . When we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather
+    stiff." And it was all he did say. We went and had a drink. He
+    was not mistaken. His observation was most just; but his
+    perspective was that of those literary critics who give ten
+    lines to point
+<!-- Page 18 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page014" name="page014">[pg 14]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    ing out three slips of syntax, and three lines to an
+    ungrammatical admission that the novel under survey is not
+    wholly tedious.</p>
+
+    <p>But a man may acquire the ability to observe even a large
+    number of facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of
+    observation. I have read, in some work of literary criticism,
+    that Dickens could walk up one side of a long, busy street and
+    down the other, and then tell you in their order the names on
+    all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an illustration of
+    his great powers of observation. Dickens was a great observer,
+    but he would assuredly have been a still greater observer had
+    he been a little less pre-occupied with trivial and
+    unco-ordinated details. Good observation consists not in
+    multiplicity of detail, but in co-ordination of detail
+    according to a true perspective of relative importance, so that
+    a finally just general impression may be reached in the
+    shortest possible time. The skilled observer is he who does not
+    have to change
+<!-- Page 19 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page015" name="page015">[pg 15]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    his mind. One has only to compare one's present adjusted
+    impression of an intimate friend with one's first impression of
+    him to perceive the astounding inadequacy of one's powers of
+    observation. The man as one has learnt to see him is simply not
+    the same man who walked into one's drawing-room on the day of
+    introduction.</p>
+
+    <p>There are, by the way, three sorts of created beings who are
+    sentimentally supposed to be able to judge individuals at the
+    first glance: women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a mystic
+    gift with which rumour credits them, they are never mistaken.
+    It is merely not true. Women are constantly quite wrong in the
+    estimates based on their "feminine instinct"; they sometimes
+    even admit it; and the matrimonial courts prove it
+    <i>passim</i>
+
+    . Children are more often wrong than women. And as for dogs, it
+    is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by plausible
+    scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. Not
+<!-- Page 20 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page016" name="page016">[pg 16]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    seldom have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion of
+    deceived dogs. Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the
+    infallibility of women, children, and dogs, will persist in
+    Anglo-Saxon countries.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 21 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page017" name="page017">[pg 17]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>III</h3>
+
+    <p>One is curious about one's fellow-creatures: therefore one
+    watches them. And generally the more intelligent one is, the
+    more curious one is, and the more one observes. The mere
+    satisfaction of this curiosity is in itself a worthy end, and
+    would alone justify the business of systematised observation.
+    But the aim of observation may, and should, be expressed in
+    terms more grandiose. Human curiosity counts among the highest
+    social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest
+    defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of
+    character and temperament and thereby to a better understanding
+    of the springs of human conduct. Observation is not practised
+    directly with this high end in view (save by prigs and other
+    futile souls); nevertheless it is a moral act and must
+    inevitably
+<!-- Page 22 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page018" name="page018">[pg 18]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    promote kindliness&#8212;whether we like it or not. It also
+    sharpens the sense of beauty. An ugly deed&#8212;such as a deed
+    of cruelty&#8212;takes on artistic beauty when its origin and
+    hence its fitness in the general scheme begin to be
+    comprehended. In the perspective of history we can derive an
+    &#230;sthetic pleasure from the tranquil scrutiny of all kinds
+    of conduct&#8212;as well, for example, of a Renaissance Pope as
+    of a Savonarola. Observation endows our day and our street with
+    the romantic charm of history, and stimulates charity&#8212;not
+    the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious charity
+    which puts itself to the trouble of understanding. The one
+    condition is that the observer must never lose sight of the
+    fact that what he is trying to see is life, is the woman next
+    door, is the man in the train&#8212;and not a concourse of
+    abstractions. To appreciate all this is the first inspiring
+    preliminary to sound observation.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 23 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page019" name="page019">[pg 19]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>IV</h3>
+
+    <p>The second preliminary is to realise that all physical
+    phenomena are interrelated, that there is nothing which does
+    not bear on everything else. The whole spectacular and sensual
+    show&#8212;what the eye sees, the ear hears, the nose scents,
+    the tongue tastes and the skin touches&#8212;is a cause or an
+    effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as negligible,
+    as not forming part of the equation. Hence he who would beyond
+    all others see life for himself&#8212;I naturally mean the
+    novelist and playwright&#8212;ought to embrace all phenomena in
+    his curiosity. Being finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot!
+    But he can, by obtaining a broad notion of the whole, determine
+    with some accuracy the position and relative importance of the
+    particular series of phenomena to which his instinct draws him.
+    If he
+<!-- Page 24 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page020" name="page020">[pg 20]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    does not thus envisage the immense background of his special
+    interests, he will lose the most precious feeling for interplay
+    and proportion without which all specialism becomes distorted
+    and positively darkened.</p>
+
+    <p>Now, the main factor in life on this planet is the planet
+    itself. Any logically conceived survey of existence must begin
+    with geographical and climatic phenomena. This is surely
+    obvious. If you say that you are not interested in meteorology
+    or the configurations of the earth, I say that you deceive
+    yourself. You are. For an east wind may upset your liver and
+    cause you to insult your wife. Beyond question the most
+    important fact about, for example, Great Britain is that it is
+    an island. We sail amid the Hebrides, and then talk of the fine
+    qualities and the distressing limitations of those islanders;
+    it ought to occur to us English that we are talking of
+    ourselves in little. In moments of journalistic vainglory we
+    are apt to refer to the "sturdy island race," meaning us. But
+    that we are
+<!-- Page 25 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page021" name="page021">[pg 21]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    insular in the full significance of the horrid word is certain.
+    Why not? A genuine observation of the supreme phenomenon that
+    Great Britain is surrounded by water&#8212;an effort to keep it
+    always at the back of the consciousness&#8212;will help to
+    explain all the minor phenomena of British existence.
+    Geographical knowledge is the mother of discernment, for the
+    varying physical characteristics of the earth are the sole
+    direct terrestrial influence determining the evolution of
+    original vital energy.</p>
+
+    <p>All other influences are secondary, and have been effects of
+    character and temperament before becoming causes. Perhaps the
+    greatest of them are roads and architecture. Nothing could be
+    more English than English roads, or more French than French
+    roads. Enter England from France, let us say through the gate
+    of Folkestone, and the architectural illustration which greets
+    you (if you can look and see) is absolutely dramatic in its
+    spectacular force. You say that there is no architecture in
+    Folke
+<!-- Page 26 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page022" name="page022">[pg 22]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    stone. But Folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of
+    architecture as a wood is full of trees. As the train winds on
+    its causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you
+    thousands of squat little homes, neat, tended, respectable,
+    comfortable, prim, at once unostentatious and conceited. Each a
+    separate, clearly-defined entity! Each saying to the others:
+    "Don't look over my wall, and I won't look over yours!" Each
+    with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its own
+    individuality! Each a stronghold&#8212;an island! And all
+    careless of the general effect, but making a very impressive
+    general effect. The English race is below you. Your own son is
+    below you insisting on the inviolability of his own den of a
+    bedroom! ... And contrast all that with the immense communistic
+    and splendid fa&#231;ades of a French town, and work out the
+    implications. If you really intend to see life you cannot
+    afford to be blind to such thrilling phenomena.</p>
+
+    <p>
+<!-- Page 27 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page023" name="page023">[pg 23]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity would be capable of
+    walking through a French street and through an English street,
+    and noting chiefly that whereas English lamp-posts spring from
+    the kerb, French lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! Not
+    that that detail is not worth noting. It is&#8212;in its place.
+    French lamp-posts are part of what we call the "interesting
+    character" of a French street. We say of a French street that
+    it is "full of character." As if an English street was not!
+    Such is blindness&#8212;to be cured by travel and the exercise
+    of the logical faculty, most properly termed common sense. If
+    one is struck by the magnificence of the great towns of the
+    Continent, one should ratiocinate, and conclude that a major
+    characteristic of the great towns of England is their shabby
+    and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. It is so. But there are
+    people who have lived fifty years in Manchester, Leeds, Hull
+    and Hanley without noticing it. The English idiosyncrasy is in
+    that
+<!-- Page 28 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page024" name="page024">[pg 24]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    awful external slovenliness too, causing it, and being caused
+    by it. Every street is a mirror, an illustration, an
+    exposition, an explanation, of the human beings who live in it.
+    Nothing in it is to be neglected. Everything in it is valuable,
+    if the perspective is maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow
+    individualistic novels of English literature&#8212;and in some
+    of the best&#8212;you will find a domestic organism described
+    as though it existed in a vacuum, or in the Sahara, or between
+    Heaven and earth; as though it reacted on nothing and was
+    reacted on by nothing; and as though it could be adequately
+    rendered without reference to anything exterior to itself. How
+    can such novels satisfy a reader who has acquired or wants to
+    acquire the faculty of seeing life?</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 29 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page025" name="page025">[pg 25]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>V</h3>
+
+    <p>The net result of the interplay of instincts and influences
+    which determine the existence of a community is shown in the
+    general expression on the faces of the people. This is an index
+    which cannot lie and cannot be gainsaid. It is fairly easy, and
+    extremely interesting, to decipher. It is so open, shameless,
+    and universal, that not to look at it is impossible. Yet the
+    majority of persons fail to see it. We hear of inquirers
+    standing on London Bridge and counting the number of
+    motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, and white horses that
+    pass over the bridge in an hour. But we never hear of anybody
+    counting the number of faces happy or unhappy, honest or
+    rascally, shrewd or ingenuous, kind or cruel, that pass over
+    the bridge. Perhaps the public may be surprised to hear that
+    the general ex
+<!-- Page 30 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page026" name="page026">[pg 26]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    pression on the faces of Londoners of all ranks varies from the
+    sad to the morose; and that their general mien is one of haste
+    and gloomy preoccupation. Such a staring fact is paramount in
+    sociological evidence. And the observer of it would be
+    justified in summoning Heaven, the legislature, the county
+    council, the churches, and the ruling classes, and saying to
+    them: "Glance at these faces, and don't boast too much about
+    what you have accomplished. The climate and the industrial
+    system have so far triumphed over you all."</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 31 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page027" name="page027">[pg 27]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>VI</h3>
+
+    <p>When we come to the observing of the individual&#8212;to
+    which all human observing does finally come if there is any
+    right reason in it&#8212;the aforesaid general considerations
+    ought to be ever present in the hinterland of the
+    consciousness, aiding and influencing, perhaps vaguely, perhaps
+    almost imperceptibly, the formation of judgments. If they do
+    nothing else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to
+    the highly important idea of the correlation of all phenomena.
+    Especially in England a haphazard particularity is the chief
+    vitiating element in the operations of the mind.</p>
+
+    <p>In estimating the individual we are apt not only to forget
+    his environment, but&#8212;really strange!&#8212;to ignore much
+    of the evidence visible in the individual himself. The
+    inexperienced and ardent observer,
+<!-- Page 32 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page028" name="page028">[pg 28]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    will, for example, be astonishingly blind to everything in an
+    individual except his face. Telling himself that the face must
+    be the reflection of the soul, and that every thought and
+    emotion leaves inevitably its mark there, he will concentrate
+    on the face, singling it out as a phenomenon apart and
+    self-complete. Were he a god and infallible, he could no doubt
+    learn the whole truth from the face. But he is bound to fall
+    into errors, and by limiting the field of vision he minimises
+    the opportunity for correction. The face is, after all, quite a
+    small part of the individual's physical organism. An Englishman
+    will look at a woman's face and say she is a beautiful woman or
+    a plain woman. But a woman may have a plain face, and yet by
+    her form be entitled to be called beautiful, and (perhaps)
+    <i>vice vers&#226;</i>
+
+    . It is true that the face is the reflexion of the soul. It is
+    equally true that the carriage and gestures are the reflection
+    of the soul. Had one eyes, the tying of a bootlace is the
+    reflection of the
+<!-- Page 33 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page029" name="page029">[pg 29]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    soul. One piece of evidence can be used to correct every other
+    piece of evidence. A refined face may be refuted by clumsy
+    finger-ends; the eyes may contradict the voice; the gait may
+    nullify the smile. None of the phenomena which every individual
+    carelessly and brazenly displays in every motor-bus terrorising
+    the streets of London is meaningless or negligible.</p>
+
+    <p>Again, in observing we are generally guilty of that
+    particularity which results from sluggishness of the
+    imagination. We may see the phenomenon at the moment of looking
+    at it, but we particularise in that moment, making no effort to
+    conceive what the phenomenon is likely to be at other
+    moments.</p>
+
+    <p>For example, a male human creature wakes up in the morning
+    and rises with reluctance. Being a big man, and existing with
+    his wife and children in a very confined space, he has to adapt
+    himself to his environment as he goes through the various
+    functions incident to preparing for his day's work. He is just
+    like you
+<!-- Page 34 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page030" name="page030">[pg 30]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    or me. He wants his breakfast, he very much wants to know where
+    his boots are, and he has the usually sinister preoccupations
+    about health and finance. Whatever the force of his egoism, he
+    must more or less harmonise his individuality with those of his
+    wife and children. Having laid down the law, or accepted it, he
+    sets forth to his daily duties, just a fraction of a minute
+    late. He arrives at his office, resumes life with his
+    colleagues sympathetic and antipathetic, and then leaves the
+    office for an expedition extending over several hours. In the
+    course of his expedition he encounters the corpse of a young
+    dog run down by a motor-bus. Now you also have encountered that
+    corpse and are gazing at it; and what do you say to yourself
+    when he comes along? You say: "Oh! Here's a policeman." For he
+    happens to be a policeman. You stare at him, and you never see
+    anything but a policeman&#8212;an indivisible phenomenon of
+    blue cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face, and a
+    helmet; "
+<!-- Page 35 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page031" name="page031">[pg 31]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    a stalwart guardian of the law"; to you little more human than
+    an algebraic symbol: in a word&#8212;a policeman.</p>
+
+    <p>Only, that word actually conveys almost nothing to you of
+    the reality which it stands for. You are satisfied with it as
+    you are satisfied with the description of a disease. A friend
+    tells you his eyesight is failing. You sympathise. "What is
+    it?" you ask. "Glaucoma." "Ah! Glaucoma!" You don't know what
+    glaucoma is. You are no wiser than you were before. But you are
+    content. A name has contented you. Similarly the name of
+    policeman contents you, seems to absolve you from further
+    curiosity as to the phenomenon. You have looked at tens of
+    thousands of policemen, and perhaps never seen the hundredth
+    part of the reality of a single one. Your imagination has not
+    truly worked on the phenomenon.</p>
+
+    <p>There may be some excuse for not seeing the reality of a
+    policeman, because a uniform is always a thick veil. But you
+    &#8212;
+<!-- Page 36 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page032" name="page032">[pg 32]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    I mean you, I, any of us&#8212;are oddly dim-sighted also in
+    regard to the civil population. For instance, we get into the
+    empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the street accident,
+    and examine the men and women who gradually fill it. Probably
+    we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of
+    life. All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past
+    and are moving towards a future. But how often does our
+    imagination put itself to the trouble of realising this? We may
+    observe with some care, yet owing to a fundamental defect of
+    attitude we are observing not the human individuals, but a
+    peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in
+    motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the
+    present! No human phenomenon is adequately seen until the
+    imagination has placed it back into its past and forward into
+    its future. And this is the final process of observation of the
+    individual.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 37 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page033" name="page033">[pg 33]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>VII</h3>
+
+    <p>Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not begin with
+    seeing the individual. Neither does it end with seeing the
+    individual. Particular and unsystematised observation cannot go
+    on for ever, aimless, formless. Just as individuals are singled
+    out from systems, in the earlier process of observation, so in
+    the later processes individuals will be formed into new groups,
+    which formation will depend upon the personal bent of the
+    observer. The predominant interests of the observer will
+    ultimately direct his observing activities to their own
+    advantage. If he is excited by the phenomena of
+    organisation&#8212;as I happen to be&#8212;he will see
+    individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation,
+    and will insist on the variations from type due to that
+    grouping. If he is convinced&#8212;as numbers of people appear
+<!-- Page 38 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page034" name="page034">[pg 34]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    to be&#8212;that society is just now in an extremely critical
+    pass, and that if something mysterious is not forthwith done
+    the structure of it will crumble to atoms&#8212;he will see
+    mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to
+    him, the human dilemma demands. And so on! These tendencies,
+    while they should not be resisted too much, since they give
+    character to observation and redeem it from the frigidity of
+    mechanics, should be resisted to a certain extent. For,
+    whatever they may be, they favour the growth of sentimentality,
+    the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common sense.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 39 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page035" name="page035">[pg 35]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>PART II</h2>
+
+    <h3>WRITING NOVELS</h3>
+
+<!-- Page 40 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page036" name="page036">[pg 36]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <br />
+
+<!-- Page 41 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page037" name="page037">[pg 37]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>I</h3>
+
+    <p>The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so
+    excited by it that he absolutely must transmit the vision to
+    others, chooses narrative fiction as the liveliest vehicle for
+    the relief of his feelings. He is like other artists&#8212;he
+    cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to himself, he is
+    bursting with the news; he is bound to tell&#8212;the affair is
+    too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in
+    this&#8212;that what most chiefly strikes him is the
+    indefinable humanness of human nature, the large general manner
+    of existing. Of course, he is the result of evolution from the
+    primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to this day
+    transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude
+    visions of life in the caf&#233; or the club, or on the
+    kerbstone. They belong to the lowest circle of artists;
+<!-- Page 42 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page038" name="page038">[pg 38]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    but they are artists; and the form that they adopt is the very
+    basis of the novel. By innumerable entertaining steps from them
+    you may ascend to the major artist whose vision of life,
+    inclusive, intricate and intense, requires for its due
+    transmission the great traditional form of the novel as
+    perfected by the masters of a long age which has temporarily
+    set the novel higher than any other art-form.</p>
+
+    <p>I would not argue that the novel should be counted supreme
+    among the great traditional forms of art. Even if there is a
+    greatest form, I do not much care which it is. I have in turn
+    been convinced that Chartres Cathedral, certain Greek
+    sculpture, Mozart's
+    <i>Don Juan</i>
+
+    , and the juggling of Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest thing in
+    the world&#8212;not to mention the achievements of Shakspere or
+    Nijinsky. But there is something to be said for the real
+    pre-eminence of prose fiction as a literary form. (Even the
+    modern epic has learnt almost all it knows from prose-fiction.)
+    The novel has, and always will have, the
+<!-- Page 43 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page039" name="page039">[pg 39]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    advantage of its comprehensive bigness. St Peter's at Rome is a
+    trifle compared with Tolstoi's
+    <i>War and Peace</i>
+
+    ; and it is as certain as anything can be that, during the
+    present geological epoch at any rate, no epic half as long as
+    <i>War and Peace</i>
+
+    will ever be read, even if written.</p>
+
+    <p>Notoriously the novelist (including the playwright, who is a
+    sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of
+    other artists. In the matter of poaching, the painter has done
+    a lot, and the composer has done more, but what the painter and
+    the composer have done is as naught compared to the grasping
+    deeds of the novelist. And whereas the painter and the composer
+    have got into difficulties with their audacious schemes, the
+    novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with a success
+    that is not denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the
+    interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose
+    fiction&#8212;from landscape-painting to sociology&#8212;and
+    none which might not be. Unnecessary to go back to the
+    ante-Scott
+<!-- Page 44 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page040" name="page040">[pg 40]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    age in order to perceive how the novel has aggrandised itself!
+    It has conquered enormous territories even since
+    <i>Germinal</i>
+
+    . Within the last fifteen years it has gained. Were it to adopt
+    the hue of the British Empire, the entire map of the universe
+    would soon be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand in the
+    hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present
+    day as a means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life.
+    It is, and will be for some time to come, the form to which the
+    artist with the most inclusive vision instinctively turns,
+    because it is the most inclusive form, and the most adaptable.
+    Indeed, before we are much older, if its present rate of
+    progress continues, it will have reoccupied the dazzling
+    position to which the mighty Balzac lifted it, and in which he
+    left it in 1850. So much, by the way, for the rank of the
+    novel.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 45 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page041" name="page041">[pg 41]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>II</h3>
+
+    <p>In considering the equipment of the novelist there are two
+    attributes which may always be taken for granted. The first is
+    the sense of beauty&#8212;indispensable to the creative artist.
+    Every creative artist has it, in his degree. He is an artist
+    because he has it. An artist works under the stress of
+    instinct. No man's instinct can draw him towards material which
+    repels him&#8212;the fact is obvious. Obviously, whatever kind
+    of life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed and
+    seduced by it, he is under its spell&#8212;that is, he has seen
+    beauty in it. He could have no other reason for writing about
+    it. He may see a strange sort of beauty; he may&#8212;indeed he
+    does&#8212;see a sort of beauty that nobody has quite seen
+    before; he may see a sort of beauty that none save a few odd
+    spirits ever will or can be made
+<!-- Page 46 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page042" name="page042">[pg 42]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    to see. But he does see beauty. To say, after reading a novel
+    which has held you, that the author has no sense of beauty, is
+    inept. (The mere fact that you turned over his pages with
+    interest is an answer to the criticism&#8212;a criticism,
+    indeed, which is not more sagacious than that of the reviewer
+    who remarks: "Mr Blank has produced a thrilling novel, but
+    unfortunately he cannot write." Mr Blank has written; and he
+    could, anyhow, write enough to thrill the reviewer.) All that a
+    wise person will assert is that an artist's sense of beauty is
+    different for the time being from his own.</p>
+
+    <p>The reproach of the lack of a sense of beauty has been
+    brought against nearly all original novelists; it is seldom
+    brought against a mediocre novelist. Even in the extreme cases
+    it is untrue; perhaps it is most untrue in the extreme cases. I
+    do not mean such a case as that of Zola, who never went to
+    extremes. I mean, for example, Gissing, a real extremist, who,
+    it is now admitted, saw a
+<!-- Page 47 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page043" name="page043">[pg 43]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    clear and undiscovered beauty in forms of existence which
+    hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to examine. And I mean
+    Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no works have been
+    more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel
+    <i>En M&#233;nage</i>
+
+    and his book of descriptive essays
+    <i>De Tout</i>
+
+    . Both reproduce with exasperation what is generally regarded
+    as the sordid ugliness of commonplace daily life. Yet both
+    exercise a unique charm (and will surely be read when
+    <i>La Cath&#233;drale</i>
+
+    is forgotten). And it is inconceivable that
+    Huysmans&#8212;whatever he may have said&#8212;was not ravished
+    by the secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in
+    it.</p>
+
+    <p>The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the
+    novelist, as in every artist, is passionate intensity of
+    vision. Unless the vision is passionately intense the artist
+    will not be moved to transmit it. He will not be inconvenienced
+    by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus not exist. Every
+    fine emotion produced in
+<!-- Page 48 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page044" name="page044">[pg 44]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the
+    writer, but in a far greater degree. It is not altogether
+    uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the
+    poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is
+    unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes
+    of artistic creation.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 49 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page045" name="page045">[pg 45]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>III</h3>
+
+    <p>A sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being
+    taken for granted, the one other important attribute in the
+    equipment of the novelist&#8212;the attribute which indeed by
+    itself practically suffices, and whose absence renders futile
+    all the rest&#8212;is fineness of mind. A great novelist must
+    have great qualities of mind. His mind must be sympathetic,
+    quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender, just,
+    merciful. He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing
+    sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. Above
+    all, his mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense.
+    His mind, in a word, must have the quality of being noble.
+    Unless his mind is all this, he will never, at the ultimate
+    bar, be reckoned supreme. That which counts, on every page, and
+
+<!-- Page 50 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page046" name="page046">[pg 46]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    all the time, is the very texture of his mind&#8212;the glass
+    through which he sees things. Every other attribute is
+    secondary, and is dispensable. Fielding lives unequalled among
+    English novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is
+    unequalled. He is read with unreserved enthusiasm because the
+    reader feels himself at each paragraph to be in close contact
+    with a glorious personality. And no advance in technique among
+    later novelists can possibly imperil his position. He will take
+    second place when a more noble mind, a more superb common
+    sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before. What
+    undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that
+    the texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in
+    courageous facing of the truth, and in certain delicacies of
+    perception. As much may be said of Thackeray, whose mind was
+    somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a figure, and not free
+    from defects which are inimical to immortality.</p>
+
+    <p>It is a hard saying for me, and full of
+<!-- Page 51 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page047" name="page047">[pg 47]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    danger in any country whose artists have shown contempt for
+    form, yet I am obliged to say that, as the years pass, I attach
+    less and less importance to good technique in fiction. I love
+    it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its
+    importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern
+    history of fiction will not support me. With the single
+    exception of Turgenev, the great novelists of the world,
+    according to my own standards, have either ignored technique or
+    have failed to understand it. What an error to suppose that the
+    finest foreign novels show a better sense of form than the
+    finest English novels! Balzac was a prodigious blunderer. He
+    could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general
+    form of a book. And as for a greater than
+    Balzac&#8212;Stendhal&#8212;his scorn of technique was
+    notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece:
+    "By the way I ought to have told you earlier that the
+    Duchess&#8212;!" And as for a greater
+<!-- Page 52 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page048" name="page048">[pg 48]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    than either Balzac or Stendhal&#8212;Dostoievsky&#8212;what a
+    hasty, amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the
+    unapproachable
+    <i>Brothers Karamazov</i>
+
+    ! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction
+    by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was
+    clumsy and careless. What would have been Flaubert's detailed
+    criticism of that book? And what would it matter? And, to take
+    a minor example, witness the comically amateurish technique of
+    the late "Mark Rutherford"&#8212;nevertheless a novelist whom
+    one can deeply admire.</p>
+
+    <p>And when we come to consider the great technicians, Guy de
+    Maupassant and Flaubert, can we say that their technique will
+    save them, or atone in the slightest degree for the defects of
+    their minds? Exceptional artists both, they are both now
+    inevitably falling in esteem to the level of the second-rate.
+    Human nature being what it is, and de Maupassant being tinged
+    with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with interest by
+<!-- Page 53 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page049" name="page049">[pg 49]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite all
+    his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant
+    with the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is
+    one of the outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It
+    is being discovered that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble
+    enough&#8212;that, indeed, it was a cruel mind, and a little
+    an&#230;mic.
+    <i>Bouvard et P&#233;cuchet</i>
+
+    was the crowning proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the
+    humanness of the world, and suffered from the delusion that he
+    had been born on the wrong planet. The glitter of his technique
+    is dulled now, and fools even count it against him. In regard
+    to one section of human activity only did his mind seem
+    noble&#8212;namely, literary technique. His correspondence,
+    written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the
+    question of literary technique, and his correspondence stands
+    forth to-day as his best work&#8212;a marvellous fount of
+    inspiration to his fellow artists. So I
+<!-- Page 54 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page050" name="page050">[pg 50]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    return to the point that the novelist's one important attribute
+    (beyond the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind. It
+    and nothing else makes both the friends and the enemies which
+    he has; while the influence of technique is slight and
+    transitory. And I repeat that it is a hard saying.</p>
+
+    <p>I begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the
+    mysterious nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." There
+    may be something of the amateur in all great artists. I do not
+    know why it should be so, unless because, in the exuberance of
+    their sense of power, they are impatient of the exactitudes of
+    systematic study and the mere bother of repeated attempts to
+    arrive at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great artist was
+    ever a profound scholar. The great artist has other ends to
+    achieve. And every artist, major and minor, is aware in his
+    conscience that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to
+    proceed rapidly with the affair of creation, and an excus
+<!-- Page 55 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page051" name="page051">[pg 51]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    able dislike of re-creating anything twice, thrice, or ten
+    times over&#8212;unnatural task!&#8212;are responsible for much
+    of that artifice. We can all point in excuse to Shakspere, who
+    was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods would
+    shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has
+    been mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care.
+    If Flaubert had been a greater artist he might have been more
+    of an amateur.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 56 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page052" name="page052">[pg 52]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>IV</h3>
+
+    <p>Of this poor neglected matter of technique the more
+    important branch is design&#8212;or construction. It is the
+    branch of the art&#8212;of all arts&#8212;which comes next
+    after "inspiration"&#8212;a capacious word meant to include
+    everything that the artist must be born with and cannot
+    acquire. The less important branch of technique&#8212;far less
+    important&#8212;may be described as an ornamentation.</p>
+
+    <p>There are very few rules of design in the novel; but the few
+    are capital. Nevertheless, great novelists have often flouted
+    or ignored them&#8212;to the detriment of their work. In my
+    opinion the first rule is that the interest must be
+    centralised; it must not be diffused equally over various parts
+    of the canvas. To compare one art with another may be perilous,
+    but really the convenience of
+<!-- Page 57 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page053" name="page053">[pg 53]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    describing a novel as a canvas is extreme. In a well-designed
+    picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one particular spot. If the
+    eye is drawn with equal force to several different spots, then
+    we reproach the painter for having "scattered" the interest of
+    the picture. Similarly with the novel. A novel must have one,
+    two, or three figures that easily overtop the rest. These
+    figures must be in the foreground, and the rest in the
+    middle-distance or in the back-ground.</p>
+
+    <p>Moreover, these figures&#8212;whether they are saints or
+    sinners&#8212;must somehow be presented more sympathetically
+    than the others. If this cannot be done, then the inspiration
+    is at fault. The single motive that should govern the choice of
+    a principal figure is the motive of love for that figure. What
+    else could the motive be? The race of heroes is essential to
+    art. But what makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure
+    chosen than the understanding sympathy of the artist with the
+    figure. To say that the hero has disappeared from
+<!-- Page 58 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page054" name="page054">[pg 54]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    modern fiction is absurd. All that has happened is that the
+    characteristics of the hero have changed, naturally, with the
+    times. When Thackeray wrote "a novel without a hero," he wrote
+    a novel with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this better
+    than Thackeray. What he meant was that he was sick of the
+    conventional bundle of characteristics styled a hero in his
+    day, and that he had changed the type. Since then we have grown
+    sick of Dobbins, and the type has been changed again more than
+    once. The fateful hour will arrive when we shall be sick of
+    Ponderevos.</p>
+
+    <p>The temptation of the great novelist, overflowing with
+    creative force, is to scatter the interest. In both his major
+    works Tolstoi found the temptation too strong for him.
+    <i>Anna Karenina</i>
+
+    is not one novel, but two, and suffers accordingly. As for
+    <i>War and Peace</i>
+
+    , the reader wanders about in it as in a forest, for days,
+    lost, deprived of a sense of direction, and with no vestige of
+    a sign-post; at
+<!-- Page 59 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page055" name="page055">[pg 55]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    intervals encountering mysterious faces whose identity he in
+    vain tries to recall. On a much smaller scale Meredith
+    committed the same error. Who could assert positively which of
+    the sisters Fleming is the heroine of
+    <i>Rhoda Fleming</i>
+
+    ? For nearly two hundred pages at a stretch Rhoda scarcely
+    appears. And more than once the author seems quite to forget
+    that the little knave Algernon is not, after all, the hero of
+    the story.</p>
+
+    <p>The second rule of design&#8212;perhaps in the main merely a
+    different view of the first&#8212;is that the interest must be
+    maintained. It may increase, but it must never diminish. Here
+    is that special aspect of design which we call construction, or
+    plot. By interest I mean the interest of the story itself, and
+    not the interest of the continual play of the author's mind on
+    his material. In proportion as the interest of the story is
+    maintained, the plot is a good one. In so far as it lapses, the
+    plot is a bad one. There is no other criterion of good con
+<!-- Page 60 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page056" name="page056">[pg 56]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    struction. Readers of a certain class are apt to call good the
+    plot of that story in which "you can't tell what is going to
+    happen next." But in some of the most tedious novels ever
+    written you can't tell what is going to happen next&#8212;and
+    you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. It would be
+    nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to
+    make sure what will happen next"! Good plots set you anxiously
+    guessing what will happen next.</p>
+
+    <p>When the reader is misled&#8212;not intentionally in order
+    to get an effect, but clumsily through
+    amateurishness&#8212;then the construction is bad. This
+    calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really
+    good work another calamity does occur with far too much
+    frequency&#8212;namely, the tantalising of the reader at a
+    critical point by a purposeless, wanton, or negligent shifting
+    of the interest from the major to the minor theme. A sad
+    example of this infantile trick is to be found in the
+    thirty-first chapter of
+    <i>Rhoda</i>
+
+<!-- Page 61 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page057" name="page057">[pg 57]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <i>Fleming</i>
+
+    , wherein, well knowing that the reader is tingling for the
+    interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable to
+    control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for Algernon,
+    devotes some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with
+    an illicit thousand pounds. That the sixteen pages are
+    excessively brilliant does not a bit excuse the wilful
+    unshapeliness of the book's design.</p>
+
+    <p>The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out defenders of
+    Victorian fiction are wont to argue that though the event-plot
+    in sundry great novels may be loose and casual (that is to say,
+    simply careless), the "idea-plot" is usually close-knit,
+    coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able to comprehend
+    how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot (any
+    more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but
+    assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that
+    the mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow,
+    the event-plot (which I positively
+<!-- Page 62 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page058" name="page058">[pg 58]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    do not believe),&#8212;even then I still hold that sloppiness
+    in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave
+    iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English
+    novels, chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot,
+    the Bront&#235;s, and Anthony Trollope.</p>
+
+    <p>The one other important rule in construction is that the
+    plot should be kept throughout within the same convention. All
+    plots&#8212;even those of our most sacred naturalistic
+    contemporaries&#8212;are and must be a conventionalisation of
+    life. We imagine we have arrived at a convention which is
+    nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
+    Perhaps we have&#8212;but so little nearer that the difference
+    is scarcely appreciable! An aviator at midday may be nearer the
+    sun than the motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire
+    journey to the sun, the aviator's progress upward can safely be
+    ignored. No novelist has yet, or ever will, come within a
+    hundred million miles of life itself. It is impossible for us
+    to
+<!-- Page 63 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page059" name="page059">[pg 59]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    see how far we still are from life. The defects of a new
+    convention disclose themselves late in its career. The notion
+    that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula
+    which ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "Naturalist" is
+    merely an epithet expressing self-satisfaction.</p>
+
+    <p>Similarly, the habit of deriding as "conventional" plots
+    constructed in an earlier convention, is ridiculous. Under this
+    head Dickens in particular has been assaulted; I have assaulted
+    him myself. But within their convention, the plots of Dickens
+    are excellent, and show little trace of amateurishness, and
+    every sign of skilled accomplishment. And Dickens did not
+    blunder out of one convention into another, as certain of
+    ourselves undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned
+    for the conventionalism of his plots. And yet Hardy happens to
+    be one of the rare novelists who have evolved a new convention
+    to suit their idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idiosyncrasy is a
+<!-- Page 64 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page060" name="page060">[pg 60]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    deep conviction of the whimsicality of the divine power, and
+    again and again he has expressed this with a virtuosity of
+    skill which ought to have put humility into the hearts of
+    naturalists, but which has not done so. The plot of
+    <i>The Woodlanders</i>
+
+    is one of the most exquisite examples of subtle symbolic
+    illustration of an idea that a writer of fiction ever achieved;
+    it makes the symbolism of Ibsen seem crude. You may say that
+    <i>The Woodlanders</i>
+
+    could not have occurred in real life. No novel could have
+    occurred in real life. The balance of probabilities is
+    incalculably against any novel whatsoever; and rightly so. A
+    convention is essential, and the duty of a novelist is to be
+    true within his chosen convention, and not further. Most
+    novelists still fail in this duty. Is there any reason, indeed,
+    why we should be so vastly cleverer than our fathers? I do not
+    think we are.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 65 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page061" name="page061">[pg 61]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>V</h3>
+
+    <p>Leaving the seductive minor question of ornamentation, I
+    come lastly to the question of getting the semblance of life on
+    to the page before the eyes of the reader&#8212;the daily and
+    hourly texture of existence. The novelist has selected his
+    subject; he has drenched himself in his subject. He has laid
+    down the main features of the design. The living embryo is
+    there, and waits to be developed into full organic structure.
+    Whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital tissue which
+    must be his material? The answer is that he digs it out of
+    himself. First-class fiction is, and must be, in the final
+    resort autobiographical. What else should it be? The novelist
+    may take notes of phenomena likely to be of use to him. And he
+    may acquire the skill to invent very apposite illustrative inci
+<!-- Page 66 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page062" name="page062">[pg 62]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    dent. But he cannot invent psychology. Upon occasion some human
+    being may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for
+    his craft. But such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible.
+    From outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology
+    of others. He can use a real person as the unrecognisable but
+    helpful basis for each of his characters.... And all that is
+    nothing. And all special research is nothing. When the real
+    intimate work of creation has to be done&#8212;and it has to be
+    done on every page&#8212;the novelist can only look within for
+    effective aid. Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he
+    has felt and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he
+    accomplish his end. An inquiry into the career of any
+    first-class novelist invariably reveals that his novels are
+    full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every good novel
+    contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could reveal.
+    Episodes, moods, characters of autobiography can be detected
+    and traced
+<!-- Page 67 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page063" name="page063">[pg 63]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate
+    autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may
+    not be detected. In dealing with each character in each episode
+    the novelist must for a thousand convincing details interrogate
+    that part of his own individuality which corresponds to the
+    particular character. The foundation of his equipment is
+    universal sympathy. And the result of this (or the
+    cause&#8212;I don't know which) is that in his own
+    individuality there is something of everybody. If he is a born
+    novelist he is safe in asking himself, when in doubt as to the
+    behaviour of a given personage at a given point: "Now, what
+    should
+    <i>I</i>
+
+    have done?" And incorporating the answer! And this in practice
+    is what he does. Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the
+    colours of all mankind.</p>
+
+    <p>The necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction accounts
+    for the creative repetition to which all
+    novelists&#8212;including the most powerful&#8212;are reduced.
+    They
+<!-- Page 68 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page064" name="page064">[pg 64]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    monotonously yield again and again to the strongest
+    predilections of their own individuality. Again and again they
+    think they are creating, by observation, a quite new
+    character&#8212;and lo! when finished it is an old
+    one&#8212;autobiographical psychology has triumphed! A novelist
+    may achieve a reputation with only a single type, created and
+    re-created in varying forms. And the very greatest do not
+    contrive to create more than half a score genuine separate
+    types. In Cerfberr and Christophe's biographical dictionary of
+    the characters of Balzac, a tall volume of six hundred pages,
+    there are some two thousand entries of different individuals,
+    but probably fewer than a dozen genuine distinctive types. No
+    creative artist ever repeated himself more brazenly or more
+    successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious delightful
+    actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young
+    man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping
+    virgin, his angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his
+
+<!-- Page 69 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page065" name="page065">[pg 65]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    faithful stupid servant&#8212;each is continually popping up
+    with a new name in the Human Comedy. A similar phenomenon, as
+    Frank Harris has proved, is to be observed in Shakspere. Hamlet
+    of Denmark was only the last and greatest of a series of
+    Shaksperean Hamlets.</p>
+
+    <p>It may be asked, finally: What of the actual process of
+    handling the raw material dug out of existence and of the
+    artist's self&#8212;the process of transmuting life into art?
+    There is no process. That is to say, there is no conscious
+    process. The convention chosen by an artist is his illusion of
+    the truth. Consciously, the artist only omits, selects,
+    arranges. But let him beware of being false to his illusion,
+    for then the process becomes conscious, and bad. This is
+    sentimentality, which is the seed of death in his work. Every
+    artist is tempted to sentimentalise, or to be
+    cynical&#8212;practically the same thing. And when he falls to
+    the temptation, the reader whispers in his heart, be it only
+    for one instant: "That
+<!-- Page 70 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page066" name="page066">[pg 66]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    is not true to life." And in turn the reader's illusion of
+    reality is impaired. Readers are divided into two
+    classes&#8212;the enemies and the friends of the artist. The
+    former, a legion, admire for a fortnight or a year. They hate
+    an uncompromising struggle for the truth. They positively like
+    the artist to fall to temptation. If he falls, they exclaim,
+    "How sweet!" The latter are capable of savouring the fine
+    unpleasantness of the struggle for truth. And when they whisper
+    in their hearts: "That is not true to life," they are ashamed
+    for the artist. They are few, very few; but a vigorous clan. It
+    is they who confer immortality.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 71 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page067" name="page067">[pg 67]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>PART III</h2>
+
+    <h3>WRITING PLAYS</h3>
+
+<!-- Page 72 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page068" name="page068">[pg 68]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <br />
+
+<!-- Page 73 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page069" name="page069">[pg 69]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>I</h3>
+
+    <p>There is an idea abroad, assiduously fostered as a rule by
+    critics who happen to have written neither novels nor plays,
+    that it is more difficult to write a play than a novel. I do
+    not think so. I have written or collaborated in about twenty
+    novels and about twenty plays, and I am convinced that it is
+    easier to write a play than a novel. Personally, I would sooner
+
+    <i>write</i>
+
+    two plays than one novel; less expenditure of nervous force and
+    mere brains would be required for two plays than for one novel.
+    (I emphasise the word "write," because if the whole weariness
+    between the first conception and the first performance of a
+    play is compared with the whole weariness between the first
+    conception and the first publication of a novel, then the play
+    has it. I would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels produced
+    than one play. But my
+<!-- Page 74 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page070" name="page070">[pg 70]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    immediate object is to compare only writing with writing.) It
+    seems to me that the sole persons entitled to judge of the
+    comparative difficulty of writing plays and writing novels are
+    those authors who have succeeded or failed equally well in both
+    departments. And in this limited band I imagine that the
+    differences of opinion on the point could not be marked. I
+    would like to note in passing, for the support of my
+    proposition, that whereas established novelists not
+    infrequently venture into the theatre with audacity,
+    established dramatists are very cautious indeed about quitting
+    the theatre. An established dramatist usually takes good care
+    to write plays and naught else; he will not affront the risks
+    of coming out into the open; and therein his instinct is quite
+    properly that of self-preservation. Of many established
+    dramatists all over the world it may be affirmed that if they
+    were so indiscreet as to publish a novel, the result would be a
+    great shattering and a great awakening.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 75 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page071" name="page071">[pg 71]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>II</h3>
+
+    <p>An enormous amount of vague reverential nonsense is talked
+    about the technique of the stage, the assumption being that in
+    difficulty it far surpasses any other literary technique, and
+    that until it is acquired a respectable play cannot be written.
+    One hears also that it can only be acquired behind the scenes.
+    A famous actor-manager once kindly gave me the benefit of his
+    experience, and what he said was that a dramatist who wished to
+    learn his business must live behind the scenes&#8212;and study
+    the works of Dion Boucicault! The truth is that no technique is
+    so crude and so simple as the technique of the stage, and that
+    the proper place to learn it is not behind the scenes but in
+    the pit. Managers, being the most conservative people on earth,
+    except compositors, will honestly try to
+<!-- Page 76 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page072" name="page072">[pg 72]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    convince the na&#239;ve dramatist that effects can only be
+    obtained in the precise way in which effects have always been
+    obtained, and that this and that rule must not be broken on
+    pain of outraging the public.</p>
+
+    <p>And indeed it is natural that managers should talk thus,
+    seeing the low state of the drama, because in any art rules and
+    reaction always flourish when creative energy is sick. The
+    mandarins have ever said and will ever say that a technique
+    which does not correspond with their own is no technique, but
+    simple clumsiness. There are some seven situations in the
+    customary drama, and a play which does not contain at least one
+    of those situations in each act will be condemned as
+    "undramatic," or "thin," or as being "all talk." It may contain
+    half a hundred other situations, but for the mandarin a
+    situation which is not one of the seven is not a situation.
+    Similarly there are some dozen character types in the customary
+    drama, and all original
+<!-- Page 77 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page073" name="page073">[pg 73]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    that is, truthful&#8212;characterisation will be dismissed as a
+    total absence of characterisation because it does not reproduce
+    any of these dozen types. Thus every truly original play is
+    bound to be indicted for bad technique. The author is bound to
+    be told that what he has written may be marvellously clever,
+    but that it is not a play. I remember the day&#8212;and it is
+    not long ago&#8212;when even so experienced and sincere a
+    critic as William Archer used to argue that if the
+    "intellectual" drama did not succeed with the general public,
+    it was because its technique was not up to the level of the
+    technique of the commercial drama! Perhaps he has changed his
+    opinion since then. Heaven knows that the so-called
+    "intellectual" drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all
+    literary art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama
+    could hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the most
+    successful commercial plays of modern times. I tremble to think
+    what the mandarins and William Archer would
+<!-- Page 78 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page074" name="page074">[pg 74]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    say to the technique of
+    <i>Hamlet</i>
+
+    , could it by some miracle be brought forward as a new piece by
+    a Mr Shakspere. They would probably recommend Mr Shakspere to
+    consider the ways of Sardou, Henri Bernstein, and Sir Herbert
+    Tree, and be wise. Most positively they would assert that
+    <i>Hamlet</i>
+
+    was not a play. And their pupils of the daily press would point
+    out&#8212;what surely Mr Shakspere ought to have perceived for
+    himself&#8212;that the second, third, or fourth act might be
+    cut wholesale without the slightest loss to the piece.</p>
+
+    <p>In the sense in which mandarins understand the word
+    technique, there is no technique special to the stage except
+    that which concerns the moving of solid human bodies to and
+    fro, and the limitations of the human senses. The dramatist
+    must not expect his audience to be able to see or hear two
+    things at once, nor to be incapable of fatigue. And he must not
+    expect his interpreters to stroll round or come on or go off in
+    a satisfactory manner unless he provides
+<!-- Page 79 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page075" name="page075">[pg 75]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    them with satisfactory reasons for strolling round, coming on,
+    or going off. Lastly, he must not expect his interpreters to
+    achieve physical impossibilities. The dramatist who sends a
+    pretty woman off in street attire and seeks to bring her on
+    again in thirty seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail
+    in stage technique, but he has not proved that stage technique
+    is tremendously difficult; he has proved something quite
+    else.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 80 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page076" name="page076">[pg 76]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>III</h3>
+
+    <p>One reason why a play is easier to write than a novel is
+    that a play is shorter than a novel. On the average, one may
+    say that it takes six plays to make the matter of a novel.
+    Other things being equal, a short work of art presents fewer
+    difficulties than a longer one. The contrary is held true by
+    the majority, but then the majority, having never attempted to
+    produce a long work of art, are unqualified to offer an
+    opinion. It is said that the most difficult form of poetry is
+    the sonnet. But the most difficult form of poetry is the epic.
+    The proof that the sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged
+    to be in the fewness of perfect sonnets. There are, however,
+    far more perfect sonnets than perfect epics. A perfect sonnet
+    may be a heavenly accident. But such accidents can never happen
+    to writers of
+<!-- Page 81 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page077" name="page077">[pg 77]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    epics. Some years ago we had an enormous palaver about the "art
+    of the short story," which numerous persons who had omitted to
+    write novels pronounced to be more difficult than the novel.
+    But the fact remains that there are scores of perfect short
+    stories, whereas it is doubtful whether anybody but Turgenev
+    ever did write a perfect novel. A short form is easier to
+    manipulate than a long form, because its construction is less
+    complicated, because the balance of its proportions can be more
+    easily corrected by means of a rapid survey, because it is
+    lawful and even necessary in it to leave undone many things
+    which are very hard to do, and because the emotional strain is
+    less prolonged. The most difficult thing in all art is to
+    maintain the imaginative tension unslackened throughout a
+    considerable period.</p>
+
+    <p>Then, not only does a play contain less matter than a
+    novel&#8212;it is further simplified by the fact that it
+    contains fewer kinds of matter, and less subtle kinds of
+<!-- Page 82 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page078" name="page078">[pg 78]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    matter. There are numerous delicate and difficult affairs of
+    craft that the dramatist need not think about at all. If he
+    attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree of subtlety,
+    he is merely wasting his time. What passes for subtle on the
+    stage would have a very obvious air in a novel, as some
+    dramatists have unhappily discovered. Thus whole continents of
+    danger may be shunned by the dramatist, and instead of being
+    scorned for his cowardice he will be very rightly applauded for
+    his artistic discretion. Fortunate predicament! Again, he need
+    not&#8212;indeed, he must not&#8212;save in a primitive and
+    hinting manner, concern himself with "atmosphere." He may
+    roughly suggest one, but if he begins on the feat of "creating"
+    an atmosphere (as it is called), the last suburban train will
+    have departed before he has reached the crisis of the play. The
+    last suburban train is the best friend of the dramatist, though
+    the fellow seldom has the sense to see it. Further, he is saved
+    all de
+<!-- Page 83 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page079" name="page079">[pg 79]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    scriptive work. See a novelist harassing himself into his grave
+    over the description of a landscape, a room, a
+    gesture&#8212;while the dramatist grins. The dramatist may have
+    to imagine a landscape, a room, or a gesture; but he has not
+    got to write it&#8212;and it is the writing which hastens
+    death. If a dramatist and a novelist set out to portray a
+    clever woman, they are almost equally matched, because each has
+    to make the creature say things and do things. But if they set
+    out to portray a charming woman, the dramatist can recline in
+    an easy chair and smoke while the novelist is ruining temper,
+    digestion and eyesight, and spreading terror in his household
+    by his moodiness and unapproachability. The electric light
+    burns in the novelist's study at three a.m.,&#8212;the novelist
+    is still endeavouring to convey by means of words the
+    extraordinary fascination that his heroine could exercise over
+    mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and he never
+    has really succeeded and never will. The dramatist
+<!-- Page 84 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page080" name="page080">[pg 80]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    writes curtly, "Enter Millicent." All are anxious to do the
+    dramatist's job for him. Is the play being read at
+    home&#8212;the reader eagerly and with brilliant success puts
+    his imagination to work and completes a charming Millicent
+    after his own secret desires. (Whereas he would coldly decline
+    to add one touch to Millicent were she the heroine of a novel.)
+    Is the play being performed on the stage&#8212;an experienced,
+    conscientious, and perhaps lovely actress will strive her
+    hardest to prove that the dramatist was right about Millicent's
+    astounding fascination. And if she fails, nobody will blame the
+    dramatist; the dramatist will receive naught but sympathy.</p>
+
+    <p>And there is still another region of superlative difficulty
+    which is narrowly circumscribed for the spoilt dramatist: I
+    mean the whole business of persuading the public that the
+    improbable is probable. Every work of art is and must be
+    crammed with improbabilities and artifice; and the greater
+    portion of the artifice is employed
+<!-- Page 85 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page081" name="page081">[pg 81]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    in just this trickery of persuasion. Only, the public of the
+    dramatist needs far less persuading than the public of the
+    novelist. The novelist announces that Millicent accepted the
+    hand of the wrong man, and in spite of all the novelist's
+    corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader
+    declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident as
+    unconvincing. The dramatist decides that Millicent must accept
+    the hand of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage in
+    flesh and blood, veritably doing it! Not easy for even the
+    critical beholder to maintain that Millicent could not and did
+    not do such a silly thing when he has actually with his eyes
+    seen her in the very act! The dramatist, as usual, having done
+    less, is more richly rewarded by results.</p>
+
+    <p>Of course it will be argued, as it has always been argued,
+    by those who have not written novels, that it is precisely the
+    "doing less"&#8212;the leaving out&#8212;that constitutes the
+    unique and fearful difficulty of dramatic art. "The
+<!-- Page 86 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page082" name="page082">[pg 82]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    skill to leave out"&#8212;lo! the master faculty of the
+    dramatist! But, in the first place, I do not believe that,
+    having regard to the relative scope of the play and of the
+    novel, the necessity for leaving out is more acute in the one
+    than in the other. The adjective "photographic" is as absurd
+    applied to the novel as to the play. And, in the second place,
+    other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and it
+    requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. To know
+    when to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is
+    even harder. Sometimes, listening to partisans of the drama, I
+    have been moved to suggest that, if the art of omission is so
+    wondrously difficult, a dramatist who practised the habit of
+    omitting to write anything whatever ought to be hailed as the
+    supreme craftsman.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 87 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page083" name="page083">[pg 83]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>IV</h3>
+
+    <p>The more closely one examines the subject, the more clear
+    and certain becomes the fact that there is only one fundamental
+    artistic difference between the novel and the play, and that
+    difference (to which I shall come later) is not the difference
+    which would be generally named as distinguishing the play from
+    the novel. The apparent differences are superficial, and are
+    due chiefly to considerations of convenience.</p>
+
+    <p>Whether in a play or in a novel the creative artist has to
+    tell a story&#8212;using the word story in a very wide sense.
+    Just as a novel is divided into chapters, and for a similar
+    reason, a play is divided into acts. But neither chapters nor
+    acts are necessary. Some of Balzac's chief novels have no
+    chapter-divisions, and it has been proved that a theatre
+    audience
+<!-- Page 88 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page084" name="page084">[pg 84]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    can and will listen for two hours to "talk," and even
+    recitative singing, on the stage, without a pause. Indeed,
+    audiences, under the compulsion of an artist strong and
+    imperious enough, could, I am sure, be trained to marvellous
+    feats of prolonged receptivity. However, chapters and acts are
+    usual, and they involve the same constructional processes on
+    the part of the artist. The entire play or novel must tell a
+    complete story&#8212;that is, arouse a curiosity and reasonably
+    satisfy it, raise a main question and then settle it. And each
+    act or other chief division must tell a definite portion of the
+    story, satisfy part of the curiosity, settle part of the
+    question. And each scene or other minor division must do the
+    same according to its scale. Everything basic that applies to
+    the technique of the novel applies equally to the technique of
+    the play.</p>
+
+    <p>In particular, I would urge that a play, any more than a
+    novel, need not be dramatic, employing the term as it is
+<!-- Page 89 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page085" name="page085">[pg 85]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    usually employed. In so far as it suspends the listener's
+    interest, every tale, however told, may be said to be dramatic.
+    In this sense
+    <i>The Golden Bowl</i>
+
+    is dramatic; so are
+    <i>Dominique</i>
+
+    and
+    <i>Persuasion</i>
+
+    . A play need not be more dramatic than that. Very emphatically
+    a play need not be dramatic in the stage sense. It need never
+    induce interest to the degree of excitement. It need have
+    nothing that resembles what would be recognisable in the
+    theatre as a situation. It may amble on&#8212;and it will still
+    be a play, and it may succeed in pleasing either the fastidious
+    hundreds or the unfastidious hundreds of thousands, according
+    to the talent of the author. Without doubt mandarins will
+    continue for about a century yet to excommunicate certain plays
+    from the category of plays. But nobody will be any the worse.
+    And dramatists will go on proving that whatever else divides a
+    play from a book, "dramatic quality" does not. Some
+    arch-Mandarin may launch at me one of those mandarinic epigram
+<!-- Page 90 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page086" name="page086">[pg 86]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    matic questions which are supposed to overthrow the adversary
+    at one dart. "Do you seriously mean to argue, sir, that drama
+    need not be dramatic?" I do, if the word dramatic is to be used
+    in the mandarinic signification. I mean to state that some of
+    the finest plays of the modern age differ from a psychological
+    novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling. Example,
+    Henri Becque's
+    <i>La Parisienne</i>
+
+    , than which there is no better. If I am asked to give my own
+    definition of the adjective "dramatic," I would say that that
+    story is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined to be
+    spoken by actors and actresses on the stage, and that any
+    narrower definition is bound to exclude some genuine plays
+    universally accepted as such&#8212;even by mandarins. For be it
+    noted that the mandarin is never consistent.</p>
+
+    <p>My definition brings me to the sole technical difference
+    between a play and a novel&#8212;in the play the story is told
+    by means of a dialogue. It is a difference
+<!-- Page 91 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page087" name="page087">[pg 87]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    less important than it seems, and not invariably even a sure
+    point of distinction between the two kinds of narrative. For a
+    novel may consist exclusively of dialogue. And plays may
+    contain other matter than dialogue. The classic chorus is not
+    dialogue. But nowadays we should consider the device of the
+    chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays, it indeed would be. We have
+    grown very ingenious and clever at the trickery of making
+    characters talk to the audience and explain themselves and
+    their past history while seemingly innocent of any such
+    intention. And here, I admit, the dramatist has to face a
+    difficulty special to himself, which the novelist can avoid. I
+    believe it to be the sole difficulty which is peculiar to the
+    drama, and that it is not acute is proved by the ease with
+    which third-rate dramatists have generally vanquished it.
+    Mandarins are wont to assert that the dramatist is also
+    handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of
+    material. This is not so. Rigid economy
+<!-- Page 92 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page088" name="page088">[pg 88]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    in the use of material is equally advisable in every form of
+    art. If it is a necessity, it is a necessity which all artists
+    flout from time to time, and occasionally with gorgeous
+    results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been
+    less guilty of flouting it than the novelist or any other
+    artist.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 93 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page089" name="page089">[pg 89]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>V</h3>
+
+    <p>And now, having shown that some alleged differences between
+    the play and the novel are illusory, and that a certain
+    technical difference, though possibly real, is superficial and
+    slight, I come to the fundamental difference between
+    them&#8212;a difference which the laity does not suspect, which
+    is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which
+    nobody who is well versed in the making of both plays and
+    novels can fail to feel profoundly. The emotional strain of
+    writing a play is not merely less prolonged than that of
+    writing a novel, it is less severe even while it lasts, lower
+    in degree and of a less purely creative character. And herein
+    is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write
+    than a novel. The drama does not belong exclusively to
+    literature, because its effect
+<!-- Page 94 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page090" name="page090">[pg 90]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    depends on something more than the composition of words. The
+    dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the sole
+    creator of it. Without him nothing can be done, but, on the
+    other hand, he cannot do everything himself. He begins the work
+    of creation, which is finished either by creative interpreters
+    on the stage, or by the creative imagination of the reader in
+    the study. It is as if he carried an immense weight to the
+    landing at the turn of a flight of stairs, and that thence
+    upward the lifting had to be done by other people. Consider the
+    affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist is the
+    base&#8212;but he is not the apex. A play is a collaboration of
+    creative faculties. The egotism of the dramatist resents this
+    uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. And further, the
+    creative faculties are not only those of the author, the
+    stage-director ("producer") and the actors&#8212;the audience
+    itself is unconsciously part of the collaboration.</p>
+
+    <p>
+<!-- Page 95 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page091" name="page091">[pg 91]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation
+    before the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the
+    functions of others, and will fail of proper accomplishment at
+    the end. The dramatist must deliberately, in performing his
+    share of the work, leave scope for a multitude of alien
+    faculties whose operations he can neither precisely foresee nor
+    completely control. The point is not that in the writing of a
+    play there are various sorts of matters&#8212;as we have
+    already seen&#8212;-which the dramatist must ignore; the point
+    is that even in the region proper to him he must not push the
+    creative act to its final limit. He must ever remember those
+    who are to come after him. For instance, though he must
+    visualise a scene as he writes it, he should not visualise it
+    completely, as a novelist should. The novelist may perceive
+    vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright
+    insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real
+    actors and hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such
+<!-- Page 96 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page092" name="page092">[pg 92]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    real actors, or he will perceive imaginary faces, and the
+    ultimate interpretation will perforce falsify his work and
+    nullify his intentions. This aspect of the subject might well
+    be much amplified, but only for a public of practising
+    dramatists.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 97 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page093" name="page093">[pg 93]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>VI</h3>
+
+    <p>When the play is "finished," the processes of collaboration
+    have yet to begin. The serious work of the dramatist is over,
+    but the most desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do not
+    refer to the business of arranging with a theatrical manager
+    for the production of the play. For, though that generally
+    partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also partakes of the
+    nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that theatrical
+    managers are&#8212;no doubt inevitably&#8212;theatrical.
+    Nevertheless, even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming
+    the slightest interest in anything more vital to the stage than
+    the box-office, is himself in some degree a collaborator, and
+    is the first to show to the dramatist that a play is not a play
+    till it is performed. The manager reads the play, and, to the
+    dramatist's astonishment,
+<!-- Page 98 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page094" name="page094">[pg 94]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    reads quite a different play from that which the dramatist
+    imagines he wrote. In particular the manager reads a play which
+    can scarcely hope to succeed&#8212;indeed, a play against whose
+    chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be
+    adduced. It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees
+    failure in a manuscript, and very seldom success. The manager's
+    profoundest instinct&#8212;self-preservation again!&#8212;is to
+    refuse a play; if he accepts, it is against the grain, against
+    his judgment&#8212;and out of a mad spirit of adventure. Some
+    of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed in an
+    atmosphere of settled despair. The dramatist naturally feels an
+    immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the
+    manager, and he is therein justified. The manager's vocation is
+    not to write plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to
+    direct the rehearsals of them, and even his knowledge of the
+    vagaries of his own box-office has often proved to be pitiably
+    delusive. The
+<!-- Page 99 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page095" name="page095">[pg 95]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    manager's true and only vocation is to refrain from producing
+    plays. Despite all this, however, the manager has already
+    collaborated in the play. The dramatist sees it differently
+    now. All sorts of new considerations have been presented to
+    him. Not a word has been altered; but it is noticeably another
+    play. Which is merely to say that the creative work on it which
+    still remains to be done has been more accurately envisaged.
+    This strange experience could not happen to a novel, because
+    when a novel is written it is finished.</p>
+
+    <p>And when the director of rehearsals, or producer, has been
+    chosen, and this priceless and mysterious person has his first
+    serious confabulation with the author, then at once the play
+    begins to assume new shapes&#8212;contours undreamt of by the
+    author till that startling moment. And even if the author has
+    the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals, similar
+    disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a
+    producer is a different
+<!-- Page 100 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page096" name="page096">[pg 96]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    fellow from the author as author. The producer is up against
+    realities. He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually
+    condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... He
+    suggests the casting. "What do you think of X. for the old
+    man?" asks the producer. The author is staggered. Is it
+    conceivable that so renowned a producer can have so misread and
+    misunderstood the play? X. would be preposterous as the old
+    man. But the producer goes on talking. And suddenly the author
+    sees possibilities in X. But at the same time he sees a
+    different play from what he wrote. And quite probably he sees a
+    more glorious play. Quite probably he had not suspected how
+    great a dramatist he is.... Before the first rehearsal is
+    called, the play, still without a word altered, has gone
+    through astounding creative transmutations; the author
+    recognises in it some likeness to his beloved child, but it is
+    the likeness of a first cousin.</p>
+
+    <p>At the first rehearsal, and for many
+<!-- Page 101 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page097" name="page097">[pg 97]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    rehearsals, to an extent perhaps increasing, perhaps
+    decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an apologetic and
+    self-conscious mood; and his mien is something between that of
+    a criminal who has committed a horrid offence and that of a
+    father over the crude body of a new-born child. Now in truth he
+    deeply realises that the play is a collaboration. In extreme
+    cases he may be brought to see that he himself is one of the
+    less important factors in the collaboration. The first
+    preoccupation of the interpreters is not with his play at all,
+    but&#8212;quite rightly&#8212;with their own careers; if they
+    were not honestly convinced that their own careers were the
+    chief genuine excuse for the existence of the theatre and the
+    play they would not act very well. But, more than that, they do
+    not regard his play as a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance
+    of their careers. At the most favourable, what they secretly
+    think is that if they are permitted to exercise their talents
+    on his play there is a chance that they may be
+<!-- Page 102 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page098" name="page098">[pg 98]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    able to turn it into a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance
+    of their careers. The attitude of every actor towards his part
+    is: "My part is not much of a part as it stands, but if my
+    individuality is allowed to get into free contact with it, I
+    may make something brilliant out of it." Which attitude is a
+    proper attitude, and an attitude in my opinion justified by the
+    facts of the case. The actor's phrase is that he
+    <i>creates</i>
+
+    a part, and he is right. He completes the labour of creation
+    begun by the author and continued by the producer, and if
+    reasonable liberty is not accorded to him&#8212;if either the
+    author or the producer attempts to do too much of the creative
+    work&#8212;the result cannot be satisfactory.</p>
+
+    <p>As the rehearsals proceed the play changes from day to day.
+    However autocratic the producer, however obstinate the
+    dramatist, the play will vary at each rehearsal like a large
+    cloud in a gentle wind. It is never the same play for two days
+    together. Nor is this surprising,
+<!-- Page 103 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page099" name="page099">[pg 99]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    seeing that every day and night a dozen, or it may be two
+    dozen, human beings endowed with the creative gift are
+    creatively working on it. Every dramatist who is candid with
+    himself&#8212;I do not suggest that he should be candid to the
+    theatrical world&#8212;well knows that though his play is often
+    worsened by his collaborators it is also often
+    improved,&#8212;and improved in the most mysterious and
+    dazzling manner&#8212;without a word being altered. Producer
+    and actors do not merely suggest possibilities, they execute
+    them. And the author is confronted by artistic phenomena for
+    which lawfully he may not claim credit. On the other hand, he
+    may be confronted by inartistic phenomena in respect to which
+    lawfully he is blameless, but which he cannot prevent; a
+    rehearsal is like a battle,&#8212;certain persons are
+    theoretically in control, but in fact the thing principally
+    fights itself. And thus the creation goes on until the
+    dress-rehearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. And the
+<!-- Page 104 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page100" name="page100">[pg 100]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    dramatist lying awake in the night reflects, stoically,
+    fatalistically: "Well, that is the play that they have made of
+    <i>my</i>
+
+    play!" And he may be pleased or he may be disgusted. But if he
+    attends the first performance he cannot fail to notice, after
+    the first few minutes of it, that he was quite mistaken, and
+    that what the actors are performing is still another play. The
+    audience is collaborating.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 105 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page101" name="page101">[pg 101]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h2>PART IV</h2>
+
+    <h3>THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC</h3>
+
+<!-- Page 106 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page102" name="page102">[pg 102]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <br />
+
+<!-- Page 107 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page103" name="page103">[pg 103]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>I</h3>
+
+    <p>I can divide all the imaginative writers I have ever met
+    into two classes&#8212;those who admitted and sometimes
+    proclaimed loudly that they desired popularity; and those who
+    expressed a noble scorn or a gentle contempt for popularity.
+    The latter, however, always failed to conceal their envy of
+    popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose truculent
+    bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or
+    religious life. And indeed, since (as I have held in a previous
+    chapter) the object of the artist is to share his emotions with
+    others, it would be strange if the normal artist spurned
+    popularity in order to keep his emotions as much as possible to
+    himself. An enormous amount of dishonest nonsense has been and
+    will be written by uncreative critics, of course in the higher
+    interests of crea
+<!-- Page 108 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page104" name="page104">[pg 104]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    tive authors, about popularity and the proper attitude of the
+    artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a first-class
+    artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.</p>
+
+    <p>The
+    <i>Letters of George Meredith</i>
+
+    (of which the first volume is a magnificent unfolding of the
+    character of a great man) are full of references to popularity,
+    references overt and covert. Meredith could never&#8212;and
+    quite naturally&#8212;get away from the idea of popularity. He
+    was a student of the English public, and could occasionally be
+    unjust to it. Writing to M. Andr&#233; Raffalovich (who had
+    sent him a letter of appreciation) in November, 1881, he said:
+    "I venture to judge by your name that you are at most but half
+    English. I can consequently believe in the feeling you express
+    for the work of an unpopular writer. Otherwise one would
+    incline to be sceptical, for the English are given to practical
+    jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors who are supposed to
+    languish in the shade amuses
+<!-- Page 109 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page105" name="page105">[pg 105]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    them." A remark curiously unfair to the small, faithful band of
+    admirers which Meredith then had. The whole letter, while
+    warmly and touchingly grateful, is gloomy. Further on in it he
+    says: "Good work has a fair chance to be recognised in the end,
+    and if not, what does it matter?" But there is constant proof
+    that it did matter very much. In a letter to William Hardman,
+    written when he was well and hopeful, he says: "Never mind: if
+    we do but get the public ear, oh, my dear old boy!" To Captain
+    Maxse, in reference to a vast sum of &#163;8,000 paid by the
+    <i>Cornhill</i>
+
+    people to George Eliot (for an unreadable novel), he exclaims:
+    "Bon Dieu! Will aught like this ever happen to me?"</p>
+
+    <p>And to his son he was very explicit about the extent to
+    which unpopularity "mattered": "As I am unpopular I am
+    ill-paid, and therefore bound to work double tides, hardly ever
+    able to lay down the pen. This affects my
+<!-- Page 110 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page106" name="page106">[pg 106]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    weakened stomach, and so the round of the vicious circle is
+    looped." (Vol. I., p. 322.) And in another letter to Arthur
+    Meredith about the same time he sums up his career thus: "As
+    for me, I have failed, and I find little to make the end
+    undesirable." (Vol. I., p. 318.) This letter is dated June
+    23rd, 1881. Meredith was then fifty-three years of age. He had
+    written
+    <i>Modern Love</i>
+
+    ,
+    <i>The Shaving of Shagpat</i>
+
+    ,
+    <i>The Ordeal of Richard Feverel</i>
+
+    ,
+    <i>Rhoda Fleming</i>
+
+    ,
+    <i>The Egoist</i>
+
+    and other masterpieces. He knew that he had done his best and
+    that his best was very fine. It would be difficult to credit
+    that he did not privately deem himself one of the masters of
+    English literature and destined to what we call immortality. He
+    had the enthusiastic appreciation of some of the finest minds
+    of the epoch. And yet, "As for me, I have failed, and I find
+    little to make the end undesirable." But he had not failed in
+    his industry, nor in the quality
+<!-- Page 111 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page107" name="page107">[pg 107]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    of his work, nor in achieving self-respect and the respect of
+    his friends. He had failed only in one thing&#8212;immediate
+    popularity.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 112 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page108" name="page108">[pg 108]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>II</h3>
+
+    <p>Assuming then that an author is justified in desiring
+    immediate popularity, instead of being content with poverty and
+    the unheard plaudits of posterity, another point presents
+    itself. Ought he to limit himself to a mere desire for
+    popularity, or ought he actually to do something, or to refrain
+    from doing something, to the special end of obtaining
+    popularity? Ought he to say: "I shall write exactly what and
+    how I like, without any regard for the public; I shall consider
+    nothing but my own individuality and powers; I shall be guided
+    solely by my own personal conception of what the public ought
+    to like"? Or ought he to say: "Let me examine this public, and
+    let me see whether some compromise between us is not
+    possible"?</p>
+
+    <p>Certain authors are never under the
+<!-- Page 113 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page109" name="page109">[pg 109]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    necessity of facing the alternative. Occasionally, by chance, a
+    genius may be so fortunately constituted and so brilliantly
+    endowed that he captures the public at once, prestige being
+    established, and the question of compromise never arises. But
+    this is exceedingly rare. On the other hand, many mediocre
+    authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample
+    appreciation in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are
+    never troubled by any problem worse than the vagaries of their
+    fountain-pens. Such authors enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as
+    happiness. Of nearly all really original artists, however, it
+    may be said that they are at loggerheads with the
+    public&#8212;as an almost inevitable consequence of their
+    originality; and for them the problem of compromise or
+    no-compromise acutely exists.</p>
+
+    <p>George Meredith was such an artist. George Meredith before
+    anything else was a poet. He would have been a better poet than
+    a novelist, and I believe that
+<!-- Page 114 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page110" name="page110">[pg 110]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    he thought so. The public did not care for his poetry. If he
+    had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents
+    usually have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said:
+    "I shall keep on writing poetry, even if I have to become a
+    stockbroker in order to do it." But when he was only
+    thirty-three&#8212;a boy, as authors go&#8212;he had already
+    tired of no-compromise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: "It may
+    be that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained
+    Song.... The worst is that having taken to prose delineations
+    of character and life, one's affections are divided.... And in
+    truth, being a servant of the public,
+    <i>I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously
+    to singing</i>
+
+    ." (Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example as one is
+    likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the
+    futility of writing what will not be immediately read, when he
+    can write something else, less to his taste, that will be read.
+    The same sentiment has actuated an immense number
+<!-- Page 115 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page111" name="page111">[pg 111]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    of first-class creative artists, including Shakspere, who would
+    have been a rare client for a literary agent.... So much for
+    refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer
+    to do because it is not appreciated by the public.</p>
+
+    <p>There remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain
+    because the public appreciates it&#8212;otherwise the
+    pot-boiler. In 1861 Meredith wrote to Mrs Ross: "I am engaged
+    in extra potboiling work which enables me to do this," i.e., to
+    write an occasional long poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh, base
+    compromise! Seventeen years later he wrote to R.L. Stevenson:
+    "Of potboilers let none speak. Jove hangs them upon necks that
+    could soar above his heights but for the accursed weight."
+    (Vol. I., p. 291.) It may be said that Meredith was forced to
+    write potboilers. He was no more forced to write potboilers
+    than any other author. Sooner than wallow in that shame, he
+    might have earned money in more difficult ways. Or he might
+    have indulged in
+<!-- Page 116 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page112" name="page112">[pg 112]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    that starvation so heartily prescribed for authors by a
+    plutocratic noble who occasionally deigns to employ the English
+    tongue in prose. Meredith subdued his muse, and Meredith wrote
+    potboilers, because he was a first-class artist and a man of
+    profound common sense. Being extremely creative, he had to
+    arrive somehow, and he remembered that the earth is the earth,
+    and the world the world, and men men, and he arrived as best he
+    could. The great majority of his peers have acted
+    similarly.</p>
+
+    <p>The truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from
+    the public on his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is
+    either a god or a conceited and impractical fool. And he is
+    somewhat more likely to be the latter than the former. He wants
+    too much. There are two sides to every bargain, including the
+    artistic. The most fertile and the most powerful artists are
+    the readiest to recognise this, because their sense of
+    proportion, which is the sense of order, is well developed. The
+
+<!-- Page 117 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page113" name="page113">[pg 113]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    lack of the sense of proportion is the mark of the
+    <i>petit ma&#238;tre</i>
+
+    . The sagacious artist, while respecting himself, will respect
+    the idiosyncrasies of his public. To do both simultaneously is
+    quite possible. In particular, the sagacious artist will
+    respect basic national prejudices. For example, no first-class
+    English novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his
+    pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which Continental
+    writers enjoy as a matter of course. The British public is
+    admittedly wrong on this important point&#8212;hypocritical,
+    illogical and absurd. But what would you? You cannot defy it;
+    you literally cannot. If you tried, you would not even get as
+    far as print, to say nothing of library counters. You can only
+    get round it by ingenuity and guile. You can only go a very
+    little further than is quite safe. You can only do one man's
+    modest share in the education of the public.</p>
+
+    <p>In Valery Larbaud's latest novel,
+    <i>A.O. Barnabooth,</i>
+
+    occurs a phrase of deep
+<!-- Page 118 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page114" name="page114">[pg 114]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    wisdom about women: "
+    <i>La femme est une grande realite, comme la guerre</i>
+
+    ." It might be applied to the public. The public is a great
+    actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist,
+    you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. There it is!
+    You can do something with it, but not much. And what you do not
+    do with it, it must do with you, if there is to be the contact
+    which is essential to the artistic function. This contact may
+    be closened and completed by the artist's cleverness&#8212;the
+    mere cleverness of adaptability which most first-class artists
+    have exhibited. You can wear the fashions of the day. You can
+    tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to distract his
+    attention while you stab him in the chest. You can cajole money
+    out of him by one kind of work in order to gain leisure in
+    which to force him to accept later on something that he would
+    prefer to refuse. You can use a thousand devices on the
+    excellent simpleton.... And in the process you may degrade your
+<!-- Page 119 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page115" name="page115">[pg 115]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    self to a mere popularity-hunter! Of course you may; as you may
+    become a drunkard through drinking a glass of beer. Only, if
+    you have anything to say worth saying, you usually don't
+    succumb to this danger. If you have anything to say worth
+    saying, you usually manage somehow to get it said, and read.
+    The artist of genuine vocation is apt to be a wily person. He
+    knows how to sacrifice inessentials so that he may retain
+    essentials. And he can mysteriously put himself even into a
+    potboiler.
+    <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i>
+
+    , which influenced fiction throughout Europe, was the direct
+    result of potboiling. If the artist has not the wit and the
+    strength of mind to keep his own soul amid the collisions of
+    life, he is the inferior of a plain, honest merchant in
+    stamina, and ought to retire to the upper branches of the Civil
+    Service.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 120 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page116" name="page116">[pg 116]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>III</h3>
+
+    <p>When the author has finished the composition of a work, when
+    he has put into the trappings of the time as much of his
+    eternal self as they will safely hold, having regard to the
+    best welfare of his creative career as a whole, when, in short,
+    he has done all that he can to ensure the fullest public
+    appreciation of the essential in him&#8212;there still remains
+    to be accomplished something which is not unimportant in the
+    entire affair of obtaining contact with the public. He has to
+    see that the work is placed before the public as advantageously
+    as possible. In other words, he has to dispose of the work as
+    advantageously as possible. In other words, when he lays down
+    the pen he ought to become a merchant, for the mere reason that
+    he has an article to sell, and
+<!-- Page 121 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page117" name="page117">[pg 117]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    the more skilfully he sells it the better will be the result,
+    not only for the public appreciation of his message, but for
+    himself as a private individual and as an artist with further
+    activities in front of him.</p>
+
+    <p>Now this absolutely logical attitude of a merchant towards
+    one's finished work infuriates the dilettanti of the literary
+    world, to whom the very word "royalties" is anathema. They
+    apparently would prefer to treat literature as they imagine
+    Byron treated it, although as a fact no poet in a short life
+    ever contrived to make as many pounds sterling out of verse as
+    Byron made. Or perhaps they would like to return to the golden
+    days when the author had to be "patronised" in order to exist;
+    or even to the mid-nineteenth century, when practically all
+    authors save the most successful&#8212;and not a few of the
+    successful also&#8212;failed to obtain the fair reward of their
+    work. The dilettanti's snobbishness and sentimentality prevent
+    them from admitting
+<!-- Page 122 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page118" name="page118">[pg 118]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    that, in a democratic age, when an author is genuinely
+    appreciated, either he makes money or he is the foolish victim
+    of a scoundrel. They are fond of saying that agreements and
+    royalties have nothing to do with literature. But agreements
+    and royalties have a very great deal to do with literature.
+    Full contact between artist and public depends largely upon
+    publisher or manager being compelled to be efficient and just.
+    And upon the publisher's or manager's efficiency and justice
+    depend also the dignity, the leisure, the easy flow of coin,
+    the freedom, and the pride which are helpful to the full
+    fruition of any artist. No artist was ever assisted in his
+    career by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by
+    overwork, by economic inferiority. See Meredith's
+    correspondence everywhere.</p>
+
+    <p>Nor can there be any satisfaction in doing badly that which
+    might be done well. If an artist writes a fine poem, shows it
+    to his dearest friend, and
+<!-- Page 123 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page119" name="page119">[pg 119]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    burns it&#8212;I can respect him. But if an artist writes a
+    fine poem, and then by sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to
+    be inefficiently published, and fails to secure his own
+    interests in the transaction, on the plea that he is an artist
+    and not a merchant, then I refuse to respect him. A man cannot
+    fulfil, and has no right to fulfil, one function only in this
+    complex world. Some, indeed many, of the greatest creative
+    artists have managed to be very good merchants also, and have
+    not been ashamed of the double
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    . To read the correspondence and memoirs of certain supreme
+    artists one might be excused for thinking, indeed, that they
+    were more interested in the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of merchant than in the other
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    ; and yet their work in no wise suffered. In the distribution
+    of energy between the two
+    <i>r&#244;les</i>
+
+    common sense is naturally needed. But the artist who has enough
+    common sense&#8212;or, otherwise expressed, enough sense of
+    reality&#8212;not to disdain the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of
+<!-- Page 124 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page120" name="page120">[pg 120]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    merchant will probably have enough not to exaggerate it. He may
+    be reassured on one point&#8212;namely, that success in the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of merchant will never impair any self-satisfaction he may feel
+    in the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of artist. The late discovery of a large public in America
+    delighted Meredith and had a tonic effect on his whole system.
+    It is often hinted, even if it is not often said, that great
+    popularity ought to disturb the conscience of the artist. I do
+    not believe it. If the conscience of the artist is not
+    disturbed during the actual work itself, no subsequent
+    phenomenon will or should disturb it. Once the artist is
+    convinced of his artistic honesty, no public can be too large
+    for his peace of mind. On the other hand, failure in the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of merchant will emphatically impair his self-satisfaction in
+    the
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    of artist and his courage in the further pursuance of that
+    <i>r&#244;le</i>
+
+    .</p>
+
+    <p>But many artists have admittedly no aptitude for merchantry.
+    Not only is their sense of the bindingness of a bargain
+<!-- Page 125 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page121" name="page121">[pg 121]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    imperfect, but they are apt in business to behave in a puerile
+    manner, to close an arrangement out of mere impatience, to be
+    grossly undiplomatic, to be victimised by their vanity, to
+    believe what they ought not to believe, to discredit what is
+    patently true, to worry over negligible trifles, and generally
+    to make a clumsy mess of their affairs. An artist may say: "I
+    cannot work unless I have a free mind, and I cannot have a free
+    mind if I am to be bothered all the time by details of
+    business."</p>
+
+    <p>Apart from the fact that no artist who pretends also to be a
+    man can in this world hope for a free mind, and that if he
+    seeks it by neglecting his debtors he will be deprived of it by
+    his creditors&#8212;apart from that, the artist's demand for a
+    free mind is reasonable. Moreover, it is always a distressing
+    sight to see a man trying to do what nature has not fitted him
+    to do, and so doing it ill. Such artists, however&#8212;and
+    they form possibly the majority&#8212;can always employ an
+<!-- Page 126 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page122" name="page122">[pg 122]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    expert to do their business for them, to cope on their behalf
+    with the necessary middleman. Not that I deem the publisher or
+    the theatrical manager to be by nature less upright than any
+    other class of merchant. But the publisher and the theatrical
+    manager have been subjected for centuries to a special and
+    grave temptation. The ordinary merchant deals with other
+    merchants&#8212;his equals in business skill. The publisher and
+    the theatrical manager deal with what amounts to a race of
+    children, of whom even arch-angels could not refrain from
+    taking advantage.</p>
+
+    <p>When the democratisation of literature seriously set in, it
+    inevitably grew plain that the publisher and the theatrical
+    manager had very humanly been giving way to the temptation with
+    which heaven in her infinite wisdom had pleased to afflict
+    them,&#8212;and the Society of Authors came into being. A
+    natural consequence of the general awakening was the
+    self-invention of the literary agent. The
+<!-- Page 127 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page123" name="page123">[pg 123]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Society of Authors, against immense obstacles, has performed
+    wonders in the economic education of the creative artist, and
+    therefore in the improvement of letters. The literary agent,
+    against obstacles still more immense, has carried out the
+    details of the revolution. The outcry&#8212;partly sentimental,
+    partly snobbish, but mainly interested&#8212;was at first
+    tremendous against these meddlers who would destroy the
+    charming personal relations that used to exist between, for
+    example, the author and the publisher. (The less said about
+    those charming personal relations the better. Documents exist.)
+    But the main battle is now over, and everyone concerned is
+    beautifully aware who holds the field. Though much remains to
+    be done, much has been done; and today the creative artist who,
+    conscious of inability to transact his own affairs efficiently,
+    does not obtain efficient advice and help therein, stands in
+    his own light both as an artist and as a man, and is a
+<!-- Page 128 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page124" name="page124">[pg 124]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    reactionary force. He owes the practice of elementary common
+    sense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at
+    large.</p>
+
+    <hr />
+
+<!-- Page 129 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page125" name="page125">[pg 125]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    <h3>IV</h3>
+
+    <p>The same dilettante spirit which refuses to see the
+    connection between art and money has also a tendency to
+    repudiate the world of men at large, as being unfit for the
+    habitation of artists. This is a still more serious error of
+    attitude&#8212;especially in a storyteller. No artist is likely
+    to be entirely admirable who is not a man before he is an
+    artist. The notion that art is first and the rest of the
+    universe nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity and futility in
+    art. The artist who is too sensitive for contacts with the
+    non-artistic world is thereby too sensitive for his vocation,
+    and fit only to fall into gentle ecstasies over the work of
+    artists less sensitive than himself.</p>
+
+    <p>The classic modern example of the tragedy of the artist who
+    repudiates the world is Flaubert. At an early age
+<!-- Page 130 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page126" name="page126">[pg 126]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Flaubert convinced himself that he had no use for the world of
+    men. He demanded to be left in solitude and tranquillity. The
+    morbid streak in his constitution grew rapidly under the
+    fostering influences of peace and tranquillity. He was
+    brilliantly peculiar as a schoolboy. As an old man of
+    twenty-two, mourning over the vanished brio of youth, he
+    carried morbidity to perfection. Only when he was travelling
+    (as, for example, in Egypt) do his letters lose for a time
+    their distemper. His love-letters are often ignobly inept, and
+    nearly always spoilt by the crass provincialism of the refined
+    and cultivated hermit. His mistress was a woman difficult to
+    handle and indeed a Tartar in egotism, but as the recipient of
+    Flaubert's love-letters she must win universal sympathy.</p>
+
+    <p>Full of a grievance against the whole modern planet,
+    Flaubert turned passionately to ancient times (in which he
+    would have been equally unhappy had he lived in them), and
+    hoped to resurrect beauty
+<!-- Page 131 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page127" name="page127">[pg 127]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    when he had failed to see it round about him. Whether or not he
+    did resurrect beauty is a point which the present age is now
+    deciding. His fictions of modern life undoubtedly suffer from
+    his detestation of the material; but considering his manner of
+    existence it is marvellous that he should have been able to
+    accomplish any of them, except
+    <i>Un Coeur Simple</i>
+
+    . The final one,
+    <i>Bouvard et P&#233;cuchet</i>
+
+    , shows the lack of the sense of reality which must be the
+    inevitable sequel of divorce from mankind. It is realism
+    without conviction. No such characters as Bouvard and Pecuchet
+    could ever have existed outside Flaubert's brain, and the
+    reader's resultant impression is that the author has ruined a
+    central idea which was well suited for a grand larkish
+    extravaganza in the hands of a French Swift. But the spectacle
+    of Flaubert writing in
+    <i>mots justes</i>
+
+    a grand larkish extravaganza cannot be conjured up by
+    fancy.</p>
+
+    <p>There are many sub-Flauberts rife in London. They are
+    usually more critical
+<!-- Page 132 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page128" name="page128">[pg 128]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    than creative, but their influence upon creators, and
+    especially the younger creators, is not negligible. Their aim
+    in preciosity would seem to be to keep themselves unspotted
+    from the world. They are for ever being surprised and hurt by
+    the crudity and coarseness of human nature, and for ever
+    bracing themselves to be not as others are. They would have
+    incurred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just discipline for
+    them would be that they should be cross-examined by the great
+    bully in presence of a jury of butchers and sentenced
+    accordingly. The morbid Flaubertian shrinking from reality is
+    to be found to-day even in relatively robust minds. I was
+    recently at a provincial cinema, and witnessed on the screen
+    with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama entitled "Gold is
+    not All." My friend, who combines the callings of engineer and
+    general adventurer with that of serving his country, leaned
+    over to me in the darkness amid the violent applause, and said:
+    "You know, this
+<!-- Page 133 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page129" name="page129">[pg 129]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    kind of thing always makes me ashamed of human nature." I
+    answered him as Johnsonially as the circumstances would allow.
+    Had he lived to the age of fifty so blind that it needed a
+    cinema audience to show him what the general level of human
+    nature really is? Nobody has any right to be ashamed of human
+    nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother? Is one ashamed of the
+    cosmic process of evolution? Human nature
+    <i>is</i>
+
+    . And the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts,
+    absorbs that supreme fact into his brain, the better for his
+    work.</p>
+
+    <p>There is a numerous band of persons in London&#8212;and the
+    novelist and dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their
+    circle&#8212;who spend so much time and emotion in practising
+    the rites of the religion of art that they become incapable of
+    real existence. Each is a Stylites on a pillar. Their opinion
+    on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John, Cyril Scott,
+    Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James
+<!-- Page 134 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page130" name="page130">[pg 130]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    Stephens, E.A. Rickards, Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc.,
+    may not be without value, and their genuine feverish morbid
+    interest in art has its usefulness; but they know no more about
+    reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They never approach
+    normal life. They scorn it. They have a horror of it. They
+    class politics with the differential calculus. They have heard
+    of Lloyd George, the rise in the price of commodities, and the
+    eternal enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must
+    open a newspaper to look at the advertisements and
+    announcements relating to the arts. The occasional frequenting
+    of this circle may not be disadvantageous to the creative
+    artist. But let him keep himself inoculated against its disease
+    by constant steady plunges into the cold sea of the general
+    national life. Let him mingle with the public, for God's sake!
+    No phenomenon on this wretched planet, which after all is ours,
+    is meet for the artist's shrinking scorn. And the average man,
+    as to
+<!-- Page 135 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page131" name="page131">[pg 131]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    whom the artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever
+    constitute the main part of the material in which he works.</p>
+
+    <p>Above all, let not the creative artist suppose that the
+    antidote to the circle of dilettantism is the circle of social
+    reform. It is not. I referred in the first chapter to the
+    prevalent illusion that the republic has just now arrived at a
+    crisis, and that if something is not immediately done disaster
+    will soon be upon us. This is the illusion to which the circle
+    of social reforms is naturally prone, and it is an illusion
+    against which the common sense of the creative artist must
+    mightily protest. The world is, without doubt, a very bad
+    world; but it is also a very good world. The function of the
+    artist is certainly concerned more with what is than with what
+    ought to be. When all necessary reform has been accomplished
+    our perfected planet will be stone-cold. Until then the
+    artist's affair is to keep his balance amid warring points of
+    view,
+<!-- Page 136 -->
+    <span class="pagenum">
+      <a id="page132" name="page132">[pg 132]</a>
+    </span>
+
+    and in the main to record and enjoy what is.... But is not the
+    Minimum Wage Bill urgent? But when the minimum wage is as trite
+    as the jury-system, the urgency of reform will still be
+    tempting the artist too far out of his true path. And the
+    artist who yields is lost.</p>
+
+    <hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Author's Craft, by Arnold Bennett
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT ***
+
+***** This file should be named 12743-h.htm or 12743-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/7/4/12743/
+
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+</pre>
+
+  </body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/old/12743.txt b/old/12743.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..599973b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/12743.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2318 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Author's Craft, by Arnold Bennett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Author's Craft
+
+Author: Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: June 25, 2004 [EBook #12743]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, David McLachlan and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
+
+By
+
+ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+NOVELS
+
+A Man from the North
+Anna of the Five Towns
+Leonora
+A Great Man
+Sacred and Profane Love
+Whom God hath Joined
+Buried Alive
+The Old Wives' Tale
+The Glimpse
+Helen with the High Hand
+Clayhanger
+The Card
+Hilda Lessways
+The Regent
+
+FANTASIAS
+
+The Grand Babylon Hotel
+The Gates of Wrath
+Teresa of Watling Street
+The Loot of Cities
+Hugo
+The Ghost
+The City of Pleasure
+
+SHORT STORIES
+
+Tales of the Five Towns
+The Grim Smile of the Five Towns
+The Matador of the Five Towns
+
+BELLES-LETTRES
+
+Journalism for Women
+Fame and Fiction
+How to become an Author
+The Reasonable Life
+How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
+The Human Machine
+Literary Taste
+The Feast of St Friend
+Those United States
+The Plain Man and His Wife
+Paris Nights
+
+DRAMA
+
+Polite Farces
+Cupid and Common Sense
+What the Public Wants
+The Honeymoon
+The Great Adventure
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+(_In Collaboration with EDEN PHILLPOTTS_)
+The Sinews of War: A Romance
+The Statue: A Romance
+
+(_In Collaboration with EDWARD KNOBLAUCH_)
+Milestones: A Play
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT
+
+By
+
+ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
+
+
+Printed in 1914
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I.
+SEEING LIFE
+
+PART II.
+WRITING NOVELS
+
+PART III.
+WRITING PLAYS
+
+PART IV.
+THE ARTIST AND THE PUBLIC
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+SEEING LIFE
+
+
+I
+
+
+A young dog, inexperienced, sadly lacking in even primary education,
+ambles and frisks along the footpath of Fulham Road, near the mysterious
+gates of a Marist convent. He is a large puppy, on the way to be a dog
+of much dignity, but at present he has little to recommend him but that
+gawky elegance, and that bounding gratitude for the gift of life, which
+distinguish the normal puppy. He is an ignorant fool. He might have
+entered the convent of nuns and had a fine time, but instead he steps
+off the pavement into the road, the road being a vast and interesting
+continent imperfectly explored. His confidence in his nose, in his
+agility, and in the goodness of God is touching, absolutely painful to
+witness. He glances casually at a huge, towering vermilion construction
+that is whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded by a glint of
+brass and a wisp of steam; and then with disdain he ignores it as less
+important than a mere speck of odorous matter in the mud. The next
+instant he is lying inert in the mud. His confidence in the goodness of
+God had been misplaced. Since the beginning of time God had ordained him
+a victim.
+
+An impressive thing happens. The motor-bus reluctantly slackens and
+stops. Not the differential brake, nor the foot-brake, has arrested the
+motor-bus, but the invisible brake of public opinion, acting by
+administrative transmission. There is not a policeman in sight.
+Theoretically, the motor-'bus is free to whiz onward in its flight to
+the paradise of Shoreditch, but in practice it is paralysed by dread. A
+man in brass buttons and a stylish cap leaps down from it, and the
+blackened demon who sits on its neck also leaps down from it, and they
+move gingerly towards the puppy. A little while ago the motor-bus might
+have overturned a human cyclist or so, and proceeded nonchalant on its
+way. But now even a puppy requires a post-mortem: such is the force of
+public opinion aroused. Two policemen appear in the distance.
+
+"A street accident" is now in being, and a crowd gathers with calm joy
+and stares, passive and determined. The puppy offers no sign whatever;
+just lies in the road. Then a boy, destined probably to a great future
+by reason of his singular faculty of initiative, goes to the puppy and
+carries him by the scruff of the neck, to the shelter of the gutter.
+Relinquished by the boy, the lithe puppy falls into an easy horizontal
+attitude, and seems bent upon repose. The boy lifts the puppy's head to
+examine it, and the head drops back wearily. The puppy is dead. No cry,
+no blood, no disfigurement! Even no perceptible jolt of the wheel as it
+climbed over the obstacle of the puppy's body! A wonderfully clean and
+perfect accident!
+
+The increasing crowd stares with beatific placidity. People emerge
+impatiently from the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus and slip down
+from its back, and either join the crowd or vanish. The two policemen
+and the crew of the motor-bus have now met in parley. The conductor and
+the driver have an air at once nervous and resigned; their gestures are
+quick and vivacious. The policemen, on the other hand, indicate by their
+slow and huge movements that eternity is theirs. And they could not be
+more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had them manacled and
+leashed. The conductor and the driver admit the absolute dominion of the
+elephantine policemen; they admit that before the simple will of the
+policemen inconvenience, lost minutes, shortened leisure, docked wages,
+count as less than naught. And the policemen are carelessly sublime,
+well knowing that magistrates, jails, and the very Home Secretary on his
+throne--yes, and a whole system of conspiracy and perjury and
+brutality--are at their beck in case of need. And yet occasionally in
+the demeanour of the policemen towards the conductor and the driver
+there is a silent message that says: "After all, we, too, are working
+men like you, over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in
+the service of the pitiless and dishonest public. We, too, have wives
+and children and privations and frightful apprehensions. We, too, have
+to struggle desperately. Only the awful magic of these garments and of
+the garter which we wear on our wrists sets an abyss between us and
+you." And the conductor writes and one of the policemen writes, and they
+keep on writing, while the traffic makes beautiful curves to avoid them.
+
+The still increasing crowd continues to stare in the pure blankness of
+pleasure. A close-shaved, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with a copy of
+_The Sportsman_ in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus,
+starts stamping his feet. "I was knocked down by a taxi last year," he
+says fiercely. "But nobody took no notice of _that_! Are they going to
+stop here all the blank morning for a blank tyke?" And for all his
+respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet
+of disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity into the
+thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare. Then a man passes
+wheeling a muck-cart. And he stops and talks a long time with the other
+uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd
+never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops and picks
+up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and
+yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and passes on. And only that
+which is immortal and divine of the puppy remains behind, floating
+perhaps like an invisible vapour over the scene of the tragedy.
+
+The crowd is tireless, all eyes. The four principals still converse and
+write. Nobody in the crowd comprehends what they are about. At length
+the driver separates himself, but is drawn back, and a new parley is
+commenced. But everything ends. The policemen turn on their immense
+heels. The driver and conductor race towards the motor-bus. The bell
+rings, the motor-bus, quite empty, disappears snorting round the corner
+into Walham Green. The crowd is now lessening. But it separates with
+reluctance, many of its members continuing to stare with intense
+absorption at the place where the puppy lay or the place where the
+policemen stood. An appreciable interval elapses before the "street
+accident" has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon.
+
+The members of the crowd follow their noses, and during the course of
+the day remark to acquaintances:
+
+"Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the Fulham Road this morning!
+Killed dead!"
+
+And that is all they do remark. That is all they have witnessed. They
+will not, and could not, give intelligible and interesting particulars
+of the affair (unless it were as to the breed of the dog or the number
+of the bus-service). They have watched a dog run over. They analyse
+neither their sensations nor the phenomenon. They have witnessed it
+whole, as a bad writer uses a _cliche_. They have observed--that is to
+say, they have really seen--nothing.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+It will be well for us not to assume an attitude of condescension
+towards the crowd. Because in the matter of looking without seeing we
+are all about equal. We all go to and fro in a state of the observing
+faculties which somewhat resembles coma. We are all content to look and
+not see.
+
+And if and when, having comprehended that the _role_ of observer is not
+passive but active, we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves from
+the coma and really to see the spectacle of the world (a spectacle
+surpassing circuses and even street accidents in sustained dramatic
+interest), we shall discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act
+of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. Let a man
+resolve: "I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of a
+morning," and the probability if that for many mornings he will see
+naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective will be
+absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly
+attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental and universal.
+Travel makes observers of us all, but the things which as travellers we
+observe generally show how unskilled we are in the new activity.
+
+A man went to Paris for the first time, and observed right off that the
+carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof like a tramcar. He
+was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that he observed almost
+nothing else. This enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his
+perspective. He returned home and announced that Paris was a place where
+people rode on the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the
+first time--and no English person would ever guess the phenomenon which
+vanquished all others in her mind on the opening day. She saw a cat
+walking across a street. The vision excited her. For in Paris cats do
+not roam in thoroughfares, because there are practically no houses with
+gardens or "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement
+of cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first
+presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very early and
+making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn in quest of
+interesting material. And the one note I gathered was that the ground in
+front of the all-night coffee-stalls was white with egg-shells! What I
+needed then was an operation for cataract. I also remember taking a man
+to the opera who had never seen an opera. The work was _Lohengrin_. When
+we came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather stiff." And it was all
+he did say. We went and had a drink. He was not mistaken. His
+observation was most just; but his perspective was that of those
+literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out three slips of
+syntax, and three lines to an ungrammatical admission that the novel
+under survey is not wholly tedious.
+
+But a man may acquire the ability to observe even a large number of
+facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of observation. I have
+read, in some work of literary criticism, that Dickens could walk up one
+side of a long, busy street and down the other, and then tell you in
+their order the names on all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an
+illustration of his great powers of observation. Dickens was a great
+observer, but he would assuredly have been a still greater observer had
+he been a little less pre-occupied with trivial and unco-ordinated
+details. Good observation consists not in multiplicity of detail, but in
+co-ordination of detail according to a true perspective of relative
+importance, so that a finally just general impression may be reached in
+the shortest possible time. The skilled observer is he who does not have
+to change his mind. One has only to compare one's present adjusted
+impression of an intimate friend with one's first impression of him to
+perceive the astounding inadequacy of one's powers of observation. The
+man as one has learnt to see him is simply not the same man who walked
+into one's drawing-room on the day of introduction.
+
+There are, by the way, three sorts of created beings who are
+sentimentally supposed to be able to judge individuals at the first
+glance: women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a mystic gift with which
+rumour credits them, they are never mistaken. It is merely not true.
+Women are constantly quite wrong in the estimates based on their
+"feminine instinct"; they sometimes even admit it; and the matrimonial
+courts prove it _passim_. Children are more often wrong than women. And
+as for dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by
+plausible scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. Not seldom
+have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion of deceived dogs.
+Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the infallibility of women,
+children, and dogs, will persist in Anglo-Saxon countries.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+One is curious about one's fellow-creatures: therefore one watches them.
+And generally the more intelligent one is, the more curious one is, and
+the more one observes. The mere satisfaction of this curiosity is in
+itself a worthy end, and would alone justify the business of
+systematised observation. But the aim of observation may, and should, be
+expressed in terms more grandiose. Human curiosity counts among the
+highest social virtues (as indifference counts among the basest
+defects), because it leads to the disclosure of the causes of character
+and temperament and thereby to a better understanding of the springs of
+human conduct. Observation is not practised directly with this high end
+in view (save by prigs and other futile souls); nevertheless it is a
+moral act and must inevitably promote kindliness--whether we like it or
+not. It also sharpens the sense of beauty. An ugly deed--such as a deed
+of cruelty--takes on artistic beauty when its origin and hence its
+fitness in the general scheme begin to be comprehended. In the
+perspective of history we can derive an aesthetic pleasure from the
+tranquil scrutiny of all kinds of conduct--as well, for example, of a
+Renaissance Pope as of a Savonarola. Observation endows our day and our
+street with the romantic charm of history, and stimulates charity--not
+the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious charity which
+puts itself to the trouble of understanding. The one condition is that
+the observer must never lose sight of the fact that what he is trying to
+see is life, is the woman next door, is the man in the train--and not a
+concourse of abstractions. To appreciate all this is the first inspiring
+preliminary to sound observation.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The second preliminary is to realise that all physical phenomena are
+interrelated, that there is nothing which does not bear on everything
+else. The whole spectacular and sensual show--what the eye sees, the ear
+hears, the nose scents, the tongue tastes and the skin touches--is a
+cause or an effect of human conduct. Naught can be ruled out as
+negligible, as not forming part of the equation. Hence he who would
+beyond all others see life for himself--I naturally mean the novelist
+and playwright--ought to embrace all phenomena in his curiosity. Being
+finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot! But he can, by obtaining a broad
+notion of the whole, determine with some accuracy the position and
+relative importance of the particular series of phenomena to which his
+instinct draws him. If he does not thus envisage the immense background
+of his special interests, he will lose the most precious feeling for
+interplay and proportion without which all specialism becomes distorted
+and positively darkened.
+
+Now, the main factor in life on this planet is the planet itself. Any
+logically conceived survey of existence must begin with geographical and
+climatic phenomena. This is surely obvious. If you say that you are not
+interested in meteorology or the configurations of the earth, I say that
+you deceive yourself. You are. For an east wind may upset your liver and
+cause you to insult your wife. Beyond question the most important fact
+about, for example, Great Britain is that it is an island. We sail amid
+the Hebrides, and then talk of the fine qualities and the distressing
+limitations of those islanders; it ought to occur to us English that we
+are talking of ourselves in little. In moments of journalistic vainglory
+we are apt to refer to the "sturdy island race," meaning us. But that we
+are insular in the full significance of the horrid word is certain. Why
+not? A genuine observation of the supreme phenomenon that Great Britain
+is surrounded by water--an effort to keep it always at the back of the
+consciousness--will help to explain all the minor phenomena of British
+existence. Geographical knowledge is the mother of discernment, for the
+varying physical characteristics of the earth are the sole direct
+terrestrial influence determining the evolution of original vital
+energy.
+
+All other influences are secondary, and have been effects of character
+and temperament before becoming causes. Perhaps the greatest of them are
+roads and architecture. Nothing could be more English than English
+roads, or more French than French roads. Enter England from France, let
+us say through the gate of Folkestone, and the architectural
+illustration which greets you (if you can look and see) is absolutely
+dramatic in its spectacular force. You say that there is no architecture
+in Folkestone. But Folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of
+architecture as a wood is full of trees. As the train winds on its
+causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you thousands of squat
+little homes, neat, tended, respectable, comfortable, prim, at once
+unostentatious and conceited. Each a separate, clearly-defined entity!
+Each saying to the others: "Don't look over my wall, and I won't look
+over yours!" Each with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its own
+individuality! Each a stronghold--an island! And all careless of the
+general effect, but making a very impressive general effect. The English
+race is below you. Your own son is below you insisting on the
+inviolability of his own den of a bedroom! ... And contrast all that
+with the immense communistic and splendid facades of a French town, and
+work out the implications. If you really intend to see life you cannot
+afford to be blind to such thrilling phenomena.
+
+Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity would be capable of walking
+through a French street and through an English street, and noting
+chiefly that whereas English lamp-posts spring from the kerb, French
+lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! Not that that detail is not
+worth noting. It is--in its place. French lamp-posts are part of what we
+call the "interesting character" of a French street. We say of a French
+street that it is "full of character." As if an English street was not!
+Such is blindness--to be cured by travel and the exercise of the logical
+faculty, most properly termed common sense. If one is struck by the
+magnificence of the great towns of the Continent, one should
+ratiocinate, and conclude that a major characteristic of the great towns
+of England is their shabby and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. It is so.
+But there are people who have lived fifty years in Manchester, Leeds,
+Hull and Hanley without noticing it. The English idiosyncrasy is in that
+awful external slovenliness too, causing it, and being caused by it.
+Every street is a mirror, an illustration, an exposition, an
+explanation, of the human beings who live in it. Nothing in it is to be
+neglected. Everything in it is valuable, if the perspective is
+maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow individualistic novels of
+English literature--and in some of the best--you will find a domestic
+organism described as though it existed in a vacuum, or in the Sahara,
+or between Heaven and earth; as though it reacted on nothing and was
+reacted on by nothing; and as though it could be adequately rendered
+without reference to anything exterior to itself. How can such novels
+satisfy a reader who has acquired or wants to acquire the faculty of
+seeing life?
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The net result of the interplay of instincts and influences which
+determine the existence of a community is shown in the general
+expression on the faces of the people. This is an index which cannot lie
+and cannot be gainsaid. It is fairly easy, and extremely interesting, to
+decipher. It is so open, shameless, and universal, that not to look at
+it is impossible. Yet the majority of persons fail to see it. We hear of
+inquirers standing on London Bridge and counting the number of
+motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, and white horses that pass over
+the bridge in an hour. But we never hear of anybody counting the number
+of faces happy or unhappy, honest or rascally, shrewd or ingenuous, kind
+or cruel, that pass over the bridge. Perhaps the public may be surprised
+to hear that the general expression on the faces of Londoners of all
+ranks varies from the sad to the morose; and that their general mien is
+one of haste and gloomy preoccupation. Such a staring fact is paramount
+in sociological evidence. And the observer of it would be justified in
+summoning Heaven, the legislature, the county council, the churches, and
+the ruling classes, and saying to them: "Glance at these faces, and
+don't boast too much about what you have accomplished. The climate and
+the industrial system have so far triumphed over you all."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+When we come to the observing of the individual--to which all human
+observing does finally come if there is any right reason in it--the
+aforesaid general considerations ought to be ever present in the
+hinterland of the consciousness, aiding and influencing, perhaps
+vaguely, perhaps almost imperceptibly, the formation of judgments. If
+they do nothing else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to the
+highly important idea of the correlation of all phenomena. Especially in
+England a haphazard particularity is the chief vitiating element in the
+operations of the mind.
+
+In estimating the individual we are apt not only to forget his
+environment, but--really strange!--to ignore much of the evidence
+visible in the individual himself. The inexperienced and ardent
+observer, will, for example, be astonishingly blind to everything in an
+individual except his face. Telling himself that the face must be the
+reflection of the soul, and that every thought and emotion leaves
+inevitably its mark there, he will concentrate on the face, singling it
+out as a phenomenon apart and self-complete. Were he a god and
+infallible, he could no doubt learn the whole truth from the face. But
+he is bound to fall into errors, and by limiting the field of vision he
+minimises the opportunity for correction. The face is, after all, quite
+a small part of the individual's physical organism. An Englishman will
+look at a woman's face and say she is a beautiful woman or a plain
+woman. But a woman may have a plain face, and yet by her form be
+entitled to be called beautiful, and (perhaps) _vice versa_. It is true
+that the face is the reflexion of the soul. It is equally true that the
+carriage and gestures are the reflection of the soul. Had one eyes, the
+tying of a bootlace is the reflection of the soul. One piece of
+evidence can be used to correct every other piece of evidence. A refined
+face may be refuted by clumsy finger-ends; the eyes may contradict the
+voice; the gait may nullify the smile. None of the phenomena which every
+individual carelessly and brazenly displays in every motor-bus
+terrorising the streets of London is meaningless or negligible.
+
+Again, in observing we are generally guilty of that particularity which
+results from sluggishness of the imagination. We may see the phenomenon
+at the moment of looking at it, but we particularise in that moment,
+making no effort to conceive what the phenomenon is likely to be at
+other moments.
+
+For example, a male human creature wakes up in the morning and rises
+with reluctance. Being a big man, and existing with his wife and
+children in a very confined space, he has to adapt himself to his
+environment as he goes through the various functions incident to
+preparing for his day's work. He is just like you or me. He wants his
+breakfast, he very much wants to know where his boots are, and he has
+the usually sinister preoccupations about health and finance. Whatever
+the force of his egoism, he must more or less harmonise his
+individuality with those of his wife and children. Having laid down the
+law, or accepted it, he sets forth to his daily duties, just a fraction
+of a minute late. He arrives at his office, resumes life with his
+colleagues sympathetic and antipathetic, and then leaves the office for
+an expedition extending over several hours. In the course of his
+expedition he encounters the corpse of a young dog run down by a
+motor-bus. Now you also have encountered that corpse and are gazing at
+it; and what do you say to yourself when he comes along? You say: "Oh!
+Here's a policeman." For he happens to be a policeman. You stare at him,
+and you never see anything but a policeman--an indivisible phenomenon of
+blue cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face, and a helmet; "a
+stalwart guardian of the law"; to you little more human than an
+algebraic symbol: in a word--a policeman.
+
+Only, that word actually conveys almost nothing to you of the reality
+which it stands for. You are satisfied with it as you are satisfied with
+the description of a disease. A friend tells you his eyesight is
+failing. You sympathise. "What is it?" you ask. "Glaucoma." "Ah!
+Glaucoma!" You don't know what glaucoma is. You are no wiser than you
+were before. But you are content. A name has contented you. Similarly
+the name of policeman contents you, seems to absolve you from further
+curiosity as to the phenomenon. You have looked at tens of thousands of
+policemen, and perhaps never seen the hundredth part of the reality of a
+single one. Your imagination has not truly worked on the phenomenon.
+
+There may be some excuse for not seeing the reality of a policeman,
+because a uniform is always a thick veil. But you--I mean you, I, any
+of us--are oddly dim-sighted also in regard to the civil population. For
+instance, we get into the empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the
+street accident, and examine the men and women who gradually fill it.
+Probably we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of
+life. All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past and are
+moving towards a future. But how often does our imagination put itself
+to the trouble of realising this? We may observe with some care, yet
+owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are observing not the human
+individuals, but a peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in
+motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present! No
+human phenomenon is adequately seen until the imagination has placed it
+back into its past and forward into its future. And this is the final
+process of observation of the individual.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not begin with seeing the
+individual. Neither does it end with seeing the individual. Particular
+and unsystematised observation cannot go on for ever, aimless, formless.
+Just as individuals are singled out from systems, in the earlier process
+of observation, so in the later processes individuals will be formed
+into new groups, which formation will depend upon the personal bent of
+the observer. The predominant interests of the observer will ultimately
+direct his observing activities to their own advantage. If he is excited
+by the phenomena of organisation--as I happen to be--he will see
+individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation, and will
+insist on the variations from type due to that grouping. If he is
+convinced--as numbers of people appear to be--that society is just now
+in an extremely critical pass, and that if something mysterious is not
+forthwith done the structure of it will crumble to atoms--he will see
+mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to him, the
+human dilemma demands. And so on! These tendencies, while they should
+not be resisted too much, since they give character to observation and
+redeem it from the frigidity of mechanics, should be resisted to a
+certain extent. For, whatever they may be, they favour the growth of
+sentimentality, the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common
+sense.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+WRITING NOVELS
+
+
+I
+
+
+The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so excited by it
+that he absolutely must transmit the vision to others, chooses narrative
+fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of his feelings. He is
+like other artists--he cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to
+himself, he is bursting with the news; he is bound to tell--the affair
+is too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in this--that what
+most chiefly strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature,
+the large general manner of existing. Of course, he is the result of
+evolution from the primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to
+this day transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude
+visions of life in the cafe or the club, or on the kerbstone. They
+belong to the lowest circle of artists; but they are artists; and the
+form that they adopt is the very basis of the novel. By innumerable
+entertaining steps from them you may ascend to the major artist whose
+vision of life, inclusive, intricate and intense, requires for its due
+transmission the great traditional form of the novel as perfected by the
+masters of a long age which has temporarily set the novel higher than
+any other art-form.
+
+I would not argue that the novel should be counted supreme among the
+great traditional forms of art. Even if there is a greatest form, I do
+not much care which it is. I have in turn been convinced that Chartres
+Cathedral, certain Greek sculpture, Mozart's _Don Juan_, and the
+juggling of Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest thing in the world--not to
+mention the achievements of Shakspere or Nijinsky. But there is
+something to be said for the real pre-eminence of prose fiction as a
+literary form. (Even the modern epic has learnt almost all it knows from
+prose-fiction.) The novel has, and always will have, the advantage of
+its comprehensive bigness. St Peter's at Rome is a trifle compared with
+Tolstoi's _War and Peace_; and it is as certain as anything can be that,
+during the present geological epoch at any rate, no epic half as long as
+_War and Peace_ will ever be read, even if written.
+
+Notoriously the novelist (including the playwright, who is a
+sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of other
+artists. In the matter of poaching, the painter has done a lot, and the
+composer has done more, but what the painter and the composer have done
+is as naught compared to the grasping deeds of the novelist. And whereas
+the painter and the composer have got into difficulties with their
+audacious schemes, the novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with
+a success that is not denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the
+interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose fiction--from
+landscape-painting to sociology--and none which might not be.
+Unnecessary to go back to the ante-Scott age in order to perceive how
+the novel has aggrandised itself! It has conquered enormous territories
+even since _Germinal_. Within the last fifteen years it has gained. Were
+it to adopt the hue of the British Empire, the entire map of the
+universe would soon be coloured red. Wherever it ought to stand in the
+hierarchy of forms, it has, actually, no rival at the present day as a
+means for transmitting the impassioned vision of life. It is, and will
+be for some time to come, the form to which the artist with the most
+inclusive vision instinctively turns, because it is the most inclusive
+form, and the most adaptable. Indeed, before we are much older, if its
+present rate of progress continues, it will have reoccupied the dazzling
+position to which the mighty Balzac lifted it, and in which he left it
+in 1850. So much, by the way, for the rank of the novel.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+In considering the equipment of the novelist there are two attributes
+which may always be taken for granted. The first is the sense of
+beauty--indispensable to the creative artist. Every creative artist has
+it, in his degree. He is an artist because he has it. An artist works
+under the stress of instinct. No man's instinct can draw him towards
+material which repels him--the fact is obvious. Obviously, whatever kind
+of life the novelist writes about, he has been charmed and seduced by
+it, he is under its spell--that is, he has seen beauty in it. He could
+have no other reason for writing about it. He may see a strange sort of
+beauty; he may--indeed he does--see a sort of beauty that nobody has
+quite seen before; he may see a sort of beauty that none save a few odd
+spirits ever will or can be made to see. But he does see beauty. To
+say, after reading a novel which has held you, that the author has no
+sense of beauty, is inept. (The mere fact that you turned over his pages
+with interest is an answer to the criticism--a criticism, indeed, which
+is not more sagacious than that of the reviewer who remarks: "Mr Blank
+has produced a thrilling novel, but unfortunately he cannot write." Mr
+Blank has written; and he could, anyhow, write enough to thrill the
+reviewer.) All that a wise person will assert is that an artist's sense
+of beauty is different for the time being from his own.
+
+The reproach of the lack of a sense of beauty has been brought against
+nearly all original novelists; it is seldom brought against a mediocre
+novelist. Even in the extreme cases it is untrue; perhaps it is most
+untrue in the extreme cases. I do not mean such a case as that of Zola,
+who never went to extremes. I mean, for example, Gissing, a real
+extremist, who, it is now admitted, saw a clear and undiscovered beauty
+in forms of existence which hitherto no artist had deigned seriously to
+examine. And I mean Huysmans, a case even more extreme. Possibly no
+works have been more abused for ugliness than Huysman's novel _En
+Menage_ and his book of descriptive essays _De Tout_. Both reproduce
+with exasperation what is generally regarded as the sordid ugliness of
+commonplace daily life. Yet both exercise a unique charm (and will
+surely be read when _La Cathedrale_ is forgotten). And it is
+inconceivable that Huysmans--whatever he may have said--was not ravished
+by the secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in it.
+
+The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the novelist, as
+in every artist, is passionate intensity of vision. Unless the vision is
+passionately intense the artist will not be moved to transmit it. He
+will not be inconvenienced by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus
+not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must
+have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree.
+It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been
+desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is
+unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes of
+artistic creation.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+A sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being taken for
+granted, the one other important attribute in the equipment of the
+novelist--the attribute which indeed by itself practically suffices, and
+whose absence renders futile all the rest--is fineness of mind. A great
+novelist must have great qualities of mind. His mind must be
+sympathetic, quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender,
+just, merciful. He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing
+sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. Above all, his
+mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense. His mind, in a
+word, must have the quality of being noble. Unless his mind is all this,
+he will never, at the ultimate bar, be reckoned supreme. That which
+counts, on every page, and all the time, is the very texture of his
+mind--the glass through which he sees things. Every other attribute is
+secondary, and is dispensable. Fielding lives unequalled among English
+novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is unequalled. He is
+read with unreserved enthusiasm because the reader feels himself at each
+paragraph to be in close contact with a glorious personality. And no
+advance in technique among later novelists can possibly imperil his
+position. He will take second place when a more noble mind, a more
+superb common sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before.
+What undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that the
+texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in courageous facing
+of the truth, and in certain delicacies of perception. As much may be
+said of Thackeray, whose mind was somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a
+figure, and not free from defects which are inimical to immortality.
+
+It is a hard saying for me, and full of danger in any country whose
+artists have shown contempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, as
+the years pass, I attach less and less importance to good technique in
+fiction. I love it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its
+importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern history
+of fiction will not support me. With the single exception of Turgenev,
+the great novelists of the world, according to my own standards, have
+either ignored technique or have failed to understand it. What an error
+to suppose that the finest foreign novels show a better sense of form
+than the finest English novels! Balzac was a prodigious blunderer. He
+could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general form of a
+book. And as for a greater than Balzac--Stendhal--his scorn of technique
+was notorious. Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece: "By
+the way I ought to have told you earlier that the Duchess--!" And as for
+a greater than either Balzac or Stendhal--Dostoievsky--what a hasty,
+amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the unapproachable _Brothers
+Karamazov_! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction
+by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was clumsy and
+careless. What would have been Flaubert's detailed criticism of that
+book? And what would it matter? And, to take a minor example,
+witness the comically amateurish technique of the late "Mark
+Rutherford"--nevertheless a novelist whom one can deeply admire.
+
+And when we come to consider the great technicians, Guy de Maupassant
+and Flaubert, can we say that their technique will save them, or atone
+in the slightest degree for the defects of their minds? Exceptional
+artists both, they are both now inevitably falling in esteem to the
+level of the second-rate. Human nature being what it is, and de
+Maupassant being tinged with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with
+interest by mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite
+all his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant with
+the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is one of the
+outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It is being discovered
+that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble enough--that, indeed, it was a
+cruel mind, and a little anaemic. _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ was the crowning
+proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the humanness of the world, and
+suffered from the delusion that he had been born on the wrong planet.
+The glitter of his technique is dulled now, and fools even count it
+against him. In regard to one section of human activity only did his
+mind seem noble--namely, literary technique. His correspondence,
+written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the question of
+literary technique, and his correspondence stands forth to-day as his
+best work--a marvellous fount of inspiration to his fellow artists. So I
+return to the point that the novelist's one important attribute (beyond
+the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind. It and nothing else
+makes both the friends and the enemies which he has; while the influence
+of technique is slight and transitory. And I repeat that it is a hard
+saying.
+
+I begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the mysterious
+nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." There may be something of
+the amateur in all great artists. I do not know why it should be so,
+unless because, in the exuberance of their sense of power, they are
+impatient of the exactitudes of systematic study and the mere bother of
+repeated attempts to arrive at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great
+artist was ever a profound scholar. The great artist has other ends to
+achieve. And every artist, major and minor, is aware in his conscience
+that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to proceed rapidly
+with the affair of creation, and an excusable dislike of re-creating
+anything twice, thrice, or ten times over--unnatural task!--are
+responsible for much of that artifice. We can all point in excuse to
+Shakspere, who was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods
+would shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has been
+mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care. If Flaubert
+had been a greater artist he might have been more of an amateur.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Of this poor neglected matter of technique the more important branch is
+design--or construction. It is the branch of the art--of all arts--which
+comes next after "inspiration"--a capacious word meant to include
+everything that the artist must be born with and cannot acquire. The
+less important branch of technique--far less important--may be described
+as an ornamentation.
+
+There are very few rules of design in the novel; but the few are
+capital. Nevertheless, great novelists have often flouted or ignored
+them--to the detriment of their work. In my opinion the first rule is
+that the interest must be centralised; it must not be diffused equally
+over various parts of the canvas. To compare one art with another may be
+perilous, but really the convenience of describing a novel as a canvas
+is extreme. In a well-designed picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one
+particular spot. If the eye is drawn with equal force to several
+different spots, then we reproach the painter for having "scattered" the
+interest of the picture. Similarly with the novel. A novel must have
+one, two, or three figures that easily overtop the rest. These figures
+must be in the foreground, and the rest in the middle-distance or in the
+back-ground.
+
+Moreover, these figures--whether they are saints or sinners--must
+somehow be presented more sympathetically than the others. If this
+cannot be done, then the inspiration is at fault. The single motive that
+should govern the choice of a principal figure is the motive of love for
+that figure. What else could the motive be? The race of heroes is
+essential to art. But what makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure
+chosen than the understanding sympathy of the artist with the figure. To
+say that the hero has disappeared from modern fiction is absurd. All
+that has happened is that the characteristics of the hero have changed,
+naturally, with the times. When Thackeray wrote "a novel without a
+hero," he wrote a novel with a first-class hero, and nobody knew this
+better than Thackeray. What he meant was that he was sick of the
+conventional bundle of characteristics styled a hero in his day, and
+that he had changed the type. Since then we have grown sick of Dobbins,
+and the type has been changed again more than once. The fateful hour
+will arrive when we shall be sick of Ponderevos.
+
+The temptation of the great novelist, overflowing with creative force,
+is to scatter the interest. In both his major works Tolstoi found the
+temptation too strong for him. _Anna Karenina_ is not one novel, but
+two, and suffers accordingly. As for _War and Peace_, the reader wanders
+about in it as in a forest, for days, lost, deprived of a sense of
+direction, and with no vestige of a sign-post; at intervals
+encountering mysterious faces whose identity he in vain tries to recall.
+On a much smaller scale Meredith committed the same error. Who could
+assert positively which of the sisters Fleming is the heroine of _Rhoda
+Fleming_? For nearly two hundred pages at a stretch Rhoda scarcely
+appears. And more than once the author seems quite to forget that the
+little knave Algernon is not, after all, the hero of the story.
+
+The second rule of design--perhaps in the main merely a different view
+of the first--is that the interest must be maintained. It may increase,
+but it must never diminish. Here is that special aspect of design which
+we call construction, or plot. By interest I mean the interest of the
+story itself, and not the interest of the continual play of the author's
+mind on his material. In proportion as the interest of the story is
+maintained, the plot is a good one. In so far as it lapses, the plot is
+a bad one. There is no other criterion of good construction. Readers of
+a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which
+"you can't tell what is going to happen next." But in some of the most
+tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen
+next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. It would be
+nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to make sure
+what will happen next"! Good plots set you anxiously guessing what will
+happen next.
+
+When the reader is misled--not intentionally in order to get an effect,
+but clumsily through amateurishness--then the construction is bad. This
+calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work
+another calamity does occur with far too much frequency--namely, the
+tantalising of the reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wanton,
+or negligent shifting of the interest from the major to the minor theme.
+A sad example of this infantile trick is to be found in the thirty-first
+chapter of _Rhoda_ _Fleming_, wherein, well knowing that the reader is
+tingling for the interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable
+to control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for Algernon, devotes
+some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with an illicit
+thousand pounds. That the sixteen pages are excessively brilliant does
+not a bit excuse the wilful unshapeliness of the book's design.
+
+The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out defenders of Victorian fiction
+are wont to argue that though the event-plot in sundry great novels may
+be loose and casual (that is to say, simply careless), the "idea-plot"
+is usually close-knit, coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able
+to comprehend how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot
+(any more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but
+assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that the
+mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow, the
+event-plot (which I positively do not believe),--even then I still hold
+that sloppiness in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave
+iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English novels,
+chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot, the Brontes, and
+Anthony Trollope.
+
+The one other important rule in construction is that the plot should be
+kept throughout within the same convention. All plots--even those of our
+most sacred naturalistic contemporaries--are and must be a
+conventionalisation of life. We imagine we have arrived at a convention
+which is nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
+Perhaps we have--but so little nearer that the difference is scarcely
+appreciable! An aviator at midday may be nearer the sun than the
+motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire journey to the sun,
+the aviator's progress upward can safely be ignored. No novelist has
+yet, or ever will, come within a hundred million miles of life itself.
+It is impossible for us to see how far we still are from life. The
+defects of a new convention disclose themselves late in its career. The
+notion that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula which
+ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "Naturalist" is merely an epithet
+expressing self-satisfaction.
+
+Similarly, the habit of deriding as "conventional" plots constructed in
+an earlier convention, is ridiculous. Under this head Dickens in
+particular has been assaulted; I have assaulted him myself. But within
+their convention, the plots of Dickens are excellent, and show little
+trace of amateurishness, and every sign of skilled accomplishment. And
+Dickens did not blunder out of one convention into another, as certain
+of ourselves undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned for
+the conventionalism of his plots. And yet Hardy happens to be one of the
+rare novelists who have evolved a new convention to suit their
+idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idiosyncrasy is a deep conviction of the
+whimsicality of the divine power, and again and again he has expressed
+this with a virtuosity of skill which ought to have put humility into
+the hearts of naturalists, but which has not done so. The plot of _The
+Woodlanders_ is one of the most exquisite examples of subtle symbolic
+illustration of an idea that a writer of fiction ever achieved; it makes
+the symbolism of Ibsen seem crude. You may say that _The Woodlanders_
+could not have occurred in real life. No novel could have occurred in
+real life. The balance of probabilities is incalculably against any
+novel whatsoever; and rightly so. A convention is essential, and the
+duty of a novelist is to be true within his chosen convention, and not
+further. Most novelists still fail in this duty. Is there any reason,
+indeed, why we should be so vastly cleverer than our fathers? I do not
+think we are.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+Leaving the seductive minor question of ornamentation, I come lastly to
+the question of getting the semblance of life on to the page before the
+eyes of the reader--the daily and hourly texture of existence. The
+novelist has selected his subject; he has drenched himself in his
+subject. He has laid down the main features of the design. The living
+embryo is there, and waits to be developed into full organic structure.
+Whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital tissue which must be
+his material? The answer is that he digs it out of himself. First-class
+fiction is, and must be, in the final resort autobiographical. What else
+should it be? The novelist may take notes of phenomena likely to be of
+use to him. And he may acquire the skill to invent very apposite
+illustrative incident. But he cannot invent psychology. Upon occasion
+some human being may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for
+his craft. But such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible. From
+outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology of others. He
+can use a real person as the unrecognisable but helpful basis for each
+of his characters.... And all that is nothing. And all special research
+is nothing. When the real intimate work of creation has to be done--and
+it has to be done on every page--the novelist can only look within for
+effective aid. Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he has felt
+and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he accomplish his end.
+An inquiry into the career of any first-class novelist invariably
+reveals that his novels are full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every
+good novel contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could
+reveal. Episodes, moods, characters of autobiography can be detected and
+traced to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate
+autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may not be
+detected. In dealing with each character in each episode the novelist
+must for a thousand convincing details interrogate that part of his own
+individuality which corresponds to the particular character. The
+foundation of his equipment is universal sympathy. And the result of
+this (or the cause--I don't know which) is that in his own individuality
+there is something of everybody. If he is a born novelist he is safe in
+asking himself, when in doubt as to the behaviour of a given personage
+at a given point: "Now, what should _I_ have done?" And incorporating
+the answer! And this in practice is what he does. Good fiction is
+autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.
+
+The necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction accounts for the
+creative repetition to which all novelists--including the most
+powerful--are reduced. They monotonously yield again and again to the
+strongest predilections of their own individuality. Again and again they
+think they are creating, by observation, a quite new character--and lo!
+when finished it is an old one--autobiographical psychology has
+triumphed! A novelist may achieve a reputation with only a single type,
+created and re-created in varying forms. And the very greatest do not
+contrive to create more than half a score genuine separate types. In
+Cerfberr and Christophe's biographical dictionary of the characters of
+Balzac, a tall volume of six hundred pages, there are some two thousand
+entries of different individuals, but probably fewer than a dozen
+genuine distinctive types. No creative artist ever repeated himself more
+brazenly or more successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious
+delightful actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young
+man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping virgin, his
+angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his faithful stupid
+servant--each is continually popping up with a new name in the Human
+Comedy. A similar phenomenon, as Frank Harris has proved, is to be
+observed in Shakspere. Hamlet of Denmark was only the last and greatest
+of a series of Shaksperean Hamlets.
+
+It may be asked, finally: What of the actual process of handling the raw
+material dug out of existence and of the artist's self--the process of
+transmuting life into art? There is no process. That is to say, there is
+no conscious process. The convention chosen by an artist is his illusion
+of the truth. Consciously, the artist only omits, selects, arranges. But
+let him beware of being false to his illusion, for then the process
+becomes conscious, and bad. This is sentimentality, which is the seed of
+death in his work. Every artist is tempted to sentimentalise, or to be
+cynical--practically the same thing. And when he falls to the
+temptation, the reader whispers in his heart, be it only for one
+instant: "That is not true to life." And in turn the reader's illusion
+of reality is impaired. Readers are divided into two classes--the
+enemies and the friends of the artist. The former, a legion, admire for
+a fortnight or a year. They hate an uncompromising struggle for the
+truth. They positively like the artist to fall to temptation. If he
+falls, they exclaim, "How sweet!" The latter are capable of savouring
+the fine unpleasantness of the struggle for truth. And when they whisper
+in their hearts: "That is not true to life," they are ashamed for the
+artist. They are few, very few; but a vigorous clan. It is they who
+confer immortality.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+WRITING PLAYS
+
+
+I
+
+
+There is an idea abroad, assiduously fostered as a rule by critics who
+happen to have written neither novels nor plays, that it is more
+difficult to write a play than a novel. I do not think so. I have
+written or collaborated in about twenty novels and about twenty plays,
+and I am convinced that it is easier to write a play than a novel.
+Personally, I would sooner _write_ two plays than one novel; less
+expenditure of nervous force and mere brains would be required for two
+plays than for one novel. (I emphasise the word "write," because if the
+whole weariness between the first conception and the first performance
+of a play is compared with the whole weariness between the first
+conception and the first publication of a novel, then the play has it. I
+would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels produced than one play. But my
+immediate object is to compare only writing with writing.) It seems to
+me that the sole persons entitled to judge of the comparative difficulty
+of writing plays and writing novels are those authors who have succeeded
+or failed equally well in both departments. And in this limited band I
+imagine that the differences of opinion on the point could not be
+marked. I would like to note in passing, for the support of my
+proposition, that whereas established novelists not infrequently venture
+into the theatre with audacity, established dramatists are very cautious
+indeed about quitting the theatre. An established dramatist usually
+takes good care to write plays and naught else; he will not affront the
+risks of coming out into the open; and therein his instinct is quite
+properly that of self-preservation. Of many established dramatists all
+over the world it may be affirmed that if they were so indiscreet as to
+publish a novel, the result would be a great shattering and a great
+awakening.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+An enormous amount of vague reverential nonsense is talked about the
+technique of the stage, the assumption being that in difficulty it far
+surpasses any other literary technique, and that until it is acquired a
+respectable play cannot be written. One hears also that it can only be
+acquired behind the scenes. A famous actor-manager once kindly gave me
+the benefit of his experience, and what he said was that a dramatist who
+wished to learn his business must live behind the scenes--and study the
+works of Dion Boucicault! The truth is that no technique is so crude and
+so simple as the technique of the stage, and that the proper place to
+learn it is not behind the scenes but in the pit. Managers, being the
+most conservative people on earth, except compositors, will honestly try
+to convince the naive dramatist that effects can only be obtained in
+the precise way in which effects have always been obtained, and that
+this and that rule must not be broken on pain of outraging the public.
+
+And indeed it is natural that managers should talk thus, seeing the low
+state of the drama, because in any art rules and reaction always
+flourish when creative energy is sick. The mandarins have ever said and
+will ever say that a technique which does not correspond with their own
+is no technique, but simple clumsiness. There are some seven situations
+in the customary drama, and a play which does not contain at least one
+of those situations in each act will be condemned as "undramatic," or
+"thin," or as being "all talk." It may contain half a hundred other
+situations, but for the mandarin a situation which is not one of the
+seven is not a situation. Similarly there are some dozen character
+types in the customary drama, and all original--that is,
+truthful--characterisation will be dismissed as a total absence of
+characterisation because it does not reproduce any of these dozen types.
+Thus every truly original play is bound to be indicted for bad
+technique. The author is bound to be told that what he has written may
+be marvellously clever, but that it is not a play. I remember the
+day--and it is not long ago--when even so experienced and sincere a
+critic as William Archer used to argue that if the "intellectual" drama
+did not succeed with the general public, it was because its technique
+was not up to the level of the technique of the commercial drama!
+Perhaps he has changed his opinion since then. Heaven knows that the
+so-called "intellectual" drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all
+literary art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama could
+hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the most successful
+commercial plays of modern times. I tremble to think what the mandarins
+and William Archer would say to the technique of _Hamlet_, could it by
+some miracle be brought forward as a new piece by a Mr Shakspere. They
+would probably recommend Mr Shakspere to consider the ways of Sardou,
+Henri Bernstein, and Sir Herbert Tree, and be wise. Most positively they
+would assert that _Hamlet_ was not a play. And their pupils of the daily
+press would point out--what surely Mr Shakspere ought to have perceived
+for himself--that the second, third, or fourth act might be cut
+wholesale without the slightest loss to the piece.
+
+In the sense in which mandarins understand the word technique, there is
+no technique special to the stage except that which concerns the moving
+of solid human bodies to and fro, and the limitations of the human
+senses. The dramatist must not expect his audience to be able to see or
+hear two things at once, nor to be incapable of fatigue. And he must not
+expect his interpreters to stroll round or come on or go off in a
+satisfactory manner unless he provides them with satisfactory reasons
+for strolling round, coming on, or going off. Lastly, he must not expect
+his interpreters to achieve physical impossibilities. The dramatist who
+sends a pretty woman off in street attire and seeks to bring her on
+again in thirty seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail in stage
+technique, but he has not proved that stage technique is tremendously
+difficult; he has proved something quite else.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+One reason why a play is easier to write than a novel is that a play is
+shorter than a novel. On the average, one may say that it takes six
+plays to make the matter of a novel. Other things being equal, a short
+work of art presents fewer difficulties than a longer one. The contrary
+is held true by the majority, but then the majority, having never
+attempted to produce a long work of art, are unqualified to offer an
+opinion. It is said that the most difficult form of poetry is the
+sonnet. But the most difficult form of poetry is the epic. The proof
+that the sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged to be in the
+fewness of perfect sonnets. There are, however, far more perfect sonnets
+than perfect epics. A perfect sonnet may be a heavenly accident. But
+such accidents can never happen to writers of epics. Some years ago we
+had an enormous palaver about the "art of the short story," which
+numerous persons who had omitted to write novels pronounced to be more
+difficult than the novel. But the fact remains that there are scores of
+perfect short stories, whereas it is doubtful whether anybody but
+Turgenev ever did write a perfect novel. A short form is easier to
+manipulate than a long form, because its construction is less
+complicated, because the balance of its proportions can be more easily
+corrected by means of a rapid survey, because it is lawful and even
+necessary in it to leave undone many things which are very hard to do,
+and because the emotional strain is less prolonged. The most difficult
+thing in all art is to maintain the imaginative tension unslackened
+throughout a considerable period.
+
+Then, not only does a play contain less matter than a novel--it is
+further simplified by the fact that it contains fewer kinds of matter,
+and less subtle kinds of matter. There are numerous delicate and
+difficult affairs of craft that the dramatist need not think about at
+all. If he attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree of subtlety,
+he is merely wasting his time. What passes for subtle on the stage would
+have a very obvious air in a novel, as some dramatists have unhappily
+discovered. Thus whole continents of danger may be shunned by the
+dramatist, and instead of being scorned for his cowardice he will be
+very rightly applauded for his artistic discretion. Fortunate
+predicament! Again, he need not--indeed, he must not--save in a
+primitive and hinting manner, concern himself with "atmosphere." He may
+roughly suggest one, but if he begins on the feat of "creating" an
+atmosphere (as it is called), the last suburban train will have departed
+before he has reached the crisis of the play. The last suburban train is
+the best friend of the dramatist, though the fellow seldom has the sense
+to see it. Further, he is saved all descriptive work. See a novelist
+harassing himself into his grave over the description of a landscape, a
+room, a gesture--while the dramatist grins. The dramatist may have to
+imagine a landscape, a room, or a gesture; but he has not got to write
+it--and it is the writing which hastens death. If a dramatist and a
+novelist set out to portray a clever woman, they are almost equally
+matched, because each has to make the creature say things and do things.
+But if they set out to portray a charming woman, the dramatist can
+recline in an easy chair and smoke while the novelist is ruining temper,
+digestion and eyesight, and spreading terror in his household by his
+moodiness and unapproachability. The electric light burns in the
+novelist's study at three a.m.,--the novelist is still endeavouring to
+convey by means of words the extraordinary fascination that his heroine
+could exercise over mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and
+he never has really succeeded and never will. The dramatist writes
+curtly, "Enter Millicent." All are anxious to do the dramatist's job for
+him. Is the play being read at home--the reader eagerly and with
+brilliant success puts his imagination to work and completes a charming
+Millicent after his own secret desires. (Whereas he would coldly decline
+to add one touch to Millicent were she the heroine of a novel.) Is the
+play being performed on the stage--an experienced, conscientious, and
+perhaps lovely actress will strive her hardest to prove that the
+dramatist was right about Millicent's astounding fascination. And if she
+fails, nobody will blame the dramatist; the dramatist will receive
+naught but sympathy.
+
+And there is still another region of superlative difficulty which is
+narrowly circumscribed for the spoilt dramatist: I mean the whole
+business of persuading the public that the improbable is probable. Every
+work of art is and must be crammed with improbabilities and artifice;
+and the greater portion of the artifice is employed in just this
+trickery of persuasion. Only, the public of the dramatist needs far less
+persuading than the public of the novelist. The novelist announces that
+Millicent accepted the hand of the wrong man, and in spite of all the
+novelist's corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader
+declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident as
+unconvincing. The dramatist decides that Millicent must accept the hand
+of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage in flesh and blood,
+veritably doing it! Not easy for even the critical beholder to maintain
+that Millicent could not and did not do such a silly thing when he has
+actually with his eyes seen her in the very act! The dramatist, as
+usual, having done less, is more richly rewarded by results.
+
+Of course it will be argued, as it has always been argued, by those who
+have not written novels, that it is precisely the "doing less"--the
+leaving out--that constitutes the unique and fearful difficulty of
+dramatic art. "The skill to leave out"--lo! the master faculty of the
+dramatist! But, in the first place, I do not believe that, having regard
+to the relative scope of the play and of the novel, the necessity for
+leaving out is more acute in the one than in the other. The adjective
+"photographic" is as absurd applied to the novel as to the play. And, in
+the second place, other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and
+it requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. To know when
+to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is even harder.
+Sometimes, listening to partisans of the drama, I have been moved to
+suggest that, if the art of omission is so wondrously difficult, a
+dramatist who practised the habit of omitting to write anything whatever
+ought to be hailed as the supreme craftsman.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The more closely one examines the subject, the more clear and certain
+becomes the fact that there is only one fundamental artistic difference
+between the novel and the play, and that difference (to which I shall
+come later) is not the difference which would be generally named as
+distinguishing the play from the novel. The apparent differences are
+superficial, and are due chiefly to considerations of convenience.
+
+Whether in a play or in a novel the creative artist has to tell a
+story--using the word story in a very wide sense. Just as a novel is
+divided into chapters, and for a similar reason, a play is divided into
+acts. But neither chapters nor acts are necessary. Some of Balzac's
+chief novels have no chapter-divisions, and it has been proved that a
+theatre audience can and will listen for two hours to "talk," and even
+recitative singing, on the stage, without a pause. Indeed, audiences,
+under the compulsion of an artist strong and imperious enough, could, I
+am sure, be trained to marvellous feats of prolonged receptivity.
+However, chapters and acts are usual, and they involve the same
+constructional processes on the part of the artist. The entire play or
+novel must tell a complete story--that is, arouse a curiosity and
+reasonably satisfy it, raise a main question and then settle it. And
+each act or other chief division must tell a definite portion of the
+story, satisfy part of the curiosity, settle part of the question. And
+each scene or other minor division must do the same according to its
+scale. Everything basic that applies to the technique of the novel
+applies equally to the technique of the play.
+
+In particular, I would urge that a play, any more than a novel, need not
+be dramatic, employing the term as it is usually employed. In so far as
+it suspends the listener's interest, every tale, however told, may be
+said to be dramatic. In this sense _The Golden Bowl_ is dramatic; so are
+_Dominique_ and _Persuasion_. A play need not be more dramatic than
+that. Very emphatically a play need not be dramatic in the stage sense.
+It need never induce interest to the degree of excitement. It need have
+nothing that resembles what would be recognisable in the theatre as a
+situation. It may amble on--and it will still be a play, and it may
+succeed in pleasing either the fastidious hundreds or the unfastidious
+hundreds of thousands, according to the talent of the author. Without
+doubt mandarins will continue for about a century yet to excommunicate
+certain plays from the category of plays. But nobody will be any the
+worse. And dramatists will go on proving that whatever else divides a
+play from a book, "dramatic quality" does not. Some arch-Mandarin may
+launch at me one of those mandarinic epigrammatic questions which are
+supposed to overthrow the adversary at one dart. "Do you seriously mean
+to argue, sir, that drama need not be dramatic?" I do, if the word
+dramatic is to be used in the mandarinic signification. I mean to state
+that some of the finest plays of the modern age differ from a
+psychological novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling.
+Example, Henri Becque's _La Parisienne_, than which there is no better.
+If I am asked to give my own definition of the adjective "dramatic," I
+would say that that story is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined
+to be spoken by actors and actresses on the stage, and that any narrower
+definition is bound to exclude some genuine plays universally accepted
+as such--even by mandarins. For be it noted that the mandarin is never
+consistent.
+
+My definition brings me to the sole technical difference between a play
+and a novel--in the play the story is told by means of a dialogue. It is
+a difference less important than it seems, and not invariably even a
+sure point of distinction between the two kinds of narrative. For a
+novel may consist exclusively of dialogue. And plays may contain other
+matter than dialogue. The classic chorus is not dialogue. But nowadays
+we should consider the device of the chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays,
+it indeed would be. We have grown very ingenious and clever at the
+trickery of making characters talk to the audience and explain
+themselves and their past history while seemingly innocent of any such
+intention. And here, I admit, the dramatist has to face a difficulty
+special to himself, which the novelist can avoid. I believe it to be the
+sole difficulty which is peculiar to the drama, and that it is not acute
+is proved by the ease with which third-rate dramatists have generally
+vanquished it. Mandarins are wont to assert that the dramatist is also
+handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of material.
+This is not so. Rigid economy in the use of material is equally
+advisable in every form of art. If it is a necessity, it is a necessity
+which all artists flout from time to time, and occasionally with
+gorgeous results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been
+less guilty of flouting it than the novelist or any other artist.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+And now, having shown that some alleged differences between the play and
+the novel are illusory, and that a certain technical difference, though
+possibly real, is superficial and slight, I come to the fundamental
+difference between them--a difference which the laity does not suspect,
+which is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which nobody
+who is well versed in the making of both plays and novels can fail to
+feel profoundly. The emotional strain of writing a play is not merely
+less prolonged than that of writing a novel, it is less severe even
+while it lasts, lower in degree and of a less purely creative character.
+And herein is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write
+than a novel. The drama does not belong exclusively to literature,
+because its effect depends on something more than the composition of
+words. The dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the
+sole creator of it. Without him nothing can be done, but, on the other
+hand, he cannot do everything himself. He begins the work of creation,
+which is finished either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by
+the creative imagination of the reader in the study. It is as if he
+carried an immense weight to the landing at the turn of a flight of
+stairs, and that thence upward the lifting had to be done by other
+people. Consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist
+is the base--but he is not the apex. A play is a collaboration of
+creative faculties. The egotism of the dramatist resents this
+uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. And further, the creative
+faculties are not only those of the author, the stage-director
+("producer") and the actors--the audience itself is unconsciously part
+of the collaboration.
+
+Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation before
+the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the functions of others,
+and will fail of proper accomplishment at the end. The dramatist must
+deliberately, in performing his share of the work, leave scope for a
+multitude of alien faculties whose operations he can neither precisely
+foresee nor completely control. The point is not that in the writing of
+a play there are various sorts of matters--as we have already
+seen---which the dramatist must ignore; the point is that even in the
+region proper to him he must not push the creative act to its final
+limit. He must ever remember those who are to come after him. For
+instance, though he must visualise a scene as he writes it, he should
+not visualise it completely, as a novelist should. The novelist may
+perceive vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright
+insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real actors and
+hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such real actors, or he
+will perceive imaginary faces, and the ultimate interpretation will
+perforce falsify his work and nullify his intentions. This aspect of the
+subject might well be much amplified, but only for a public of
+practising dramatists.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+When the play is "finished," the processes of collaboration have yet to
+begin. The serious work of the dramatist is over, but the most
+desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do not refer to the business
+of arranging with a theatrical manager for the production of the play.
+For, though that generally partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also
+partakes of the nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that
+theatrical managers are--no doubt inevitably--theatrical. Nevertheless,
+even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming the slightest interest in
+anything more vital to the stage than the box-office, is himself in some
+degree a collaborator, and is the first to show to the dramatist that a
+play is not a play till it is performed. The manager reads the play,
+and, to the dramatist's astonishment, reads quite a different play from
+that which the dramatist imagines he wrote. In particular the manager
+reads a play which can scarcely hope to succeed--indeed, a play against
+whose chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be adduced.
+It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees failure in a
+manuscript, and very seldom success. The manager's profoundest
+instinct--self-preservation again!--is to refuse a play; if he accepts,
+it is against the grain, against his judgment--and out of a mad spirit
+of adventure. Some of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed
+in an atmosphere of settled despair. The dramatist naturally feels an
+immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the manager,
+and he is therein justified. The manager's vocation is not to write
+plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to direct the rehearsals of
+them, and even his knowledge of the vagaries of his own box-office has
+often proved to be pitiably delusive. The manager's true and only
+vocation is to refrain from producing plays. Despite all this, however,
+the manager has already collaborated in the play. The dramatist sees it
+differently now. All sorts of new considerations have been presented to
+him. Not a word has been altered; but it is noticeably another play.
+Which is merely to say that the creative work on it which still remains
+to be done has been more accurately envisaged. This strange experience
+could not happen to a novel, because when a novel is written it is
+finished.
+
+And when the director of rehearsals, or producer, has been chosen, and
+this priceless and mysterious person has his first serious confabulation
+with the author, then at once the play begins to assume new
+shapes--contours undreamt of by the author till that startling moment.
+And even if the author has the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals,
+similar disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a producer
+is a different fellow from the author as author. The producer is up
+against realities. He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually
+condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... He suggests the
+casting. "What do you think of X. for the old man?" asks the producer.
+The author is staggered. Is it conceivable that so renowned a producer
+can have so misread and misunderstood the play? X. would be preposterous
+as the old man. But the producer goes on talking. And suddenly the
+author sees possibilities in X. But at the same time he sees a different
+play from what he wrote. And quite probably he sees a more glorious
+play. Quite probably he had not suspected how great a dramatist he
+is.... Before the first rehearsal is called, the play, still without a
+word altered, has gone through astounding creative transmutations; the
+author recognises in it some likeness to his beloved child, but it is
+the likeness of a first cousin.
+
+At the first rehearsal, and for many rehearsals, to an extent perhaps
+increasing, perhaps decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an
+apologetic and self-conscious mood; and his mien is something between
+that of a criminal who has committed a horrid offence and that of a
+father over the crude body of a new-born child. Now in truth he deeply
+realises that the play is a collaboration. In extreme cases he may be
+brought to see that he himself is one of the less important factors in
+the collaboration. The first preoccupation of the interpreters is not
+with his play at all, but--quite rightly--with their own careers; if
+they were not honestly convinced that their own careers were the chief
+genuine excuse for the existence of the theatre and the play they would
+not act very well. But, more than that, they do not regard his play as a
+sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their careers. At the most
+favourable, what they secretly think is that if they are permitted to
+exercise their talents on his play there is a chance that they may be
+able to turn it into a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their
+careers. The attitude of every actor towards his part is: "My part is
+not much of a part as it stands, but if my individuality is allowed to
+get into free contact with it, I may make something brilliant out of
+it." Which attitude is a proper attitude, and an attitude in my opinion
+justified by the facts of the case. The actor's phrase is that he
+_creates_ a part, and he is right. He completes the labour of creation
+begun by the author and continued by the producer, and if reasonable
+liberty is not accorded to him--if either the author or the producer
+attempts to do too much of the creative work--the result cannot be
+satisfactory.
+
+As the rehearsals proceed the play changes from day to day. However
+autocratic the producer, however obstinate the dramatist, the play will
+vary at each rehearsal like a large cloud in a gentle wind. It is never
+the same play for two days together. Nor is this surprising, seeing
+that every day and night a dozen, or it may be two dozen, human beings
+endowed with the creative gift are creatively working on it. Every
+dramatist who is candid with himself--I do not suggest that he should be
+candid to the theatrical world--well knows that though his play is often
+worsened by his collaborators it is also often improved,--and improved
+in the most mysterious and dazzling manner--without a word being
+altered. Producer and actors do not merely suggest possibilities, they
+execute them. And the author is confronted by artistic phenomena for
+which lawfully he may not claim credit. On the other hand, he may be
+confronted by inartistic phenomena in respect to which lawfully he is
+blameless, but which he cannot prevent; a rehearsal is like a
+battle,--certain persons are theoretically in control, but in fact the
+thing principally fights itself. And thus the creation goes on until the
+dress-rehearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. And the
+dramatist lying awake in the night reflects, stoically, fatalistically:
+"Well, that is the play that they have made of _my_ play!" And he may be
+pleased or he may be disgusted. But if he attends the first performance
+he cannot fail to notice, after the first few minutes of it, that he was
+quite mistaken, and that what the actors are performing is still another
+play. The audience is collaborating.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+THE ARTIST AND THE
+PUBLIC
+
+
+I
+
+
+I can divide all the imaginative writers I have ever met into two
+classes--those who admitted and sometimes proclaimed loudly that they
+desired popularity; and those who expressed a noble scorn or a gentle
+contempt for popularity. The latter, however, always failed to conceal
+their envy of popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose
+truculent bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or
+religious life. And indeed, since (as I have held in a previous chapter)
+the object of the artist is to share his emotions with others, it would
+be strange if the normal artist spurned popularity in order to keep his
+emotions as much as possible to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest
+nonsense has been and will be written by uncreative critics, of course
+in the higher interests of creative authors, about popularity and the
+proper attitude of the artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a
+first-class artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.
+
+The _Letters of George Meredith_ (of which the first volume is a
+magnificent unfolding of the character of a great man) are full of
+references to popularity, references overt and covert. Meredith could
+never--and quite naturally--get away from the idea of popularity. He was
+a student of the English public, and could occasionally be unjust to it.
+Writing to M. Andre Raffalovich (who had sent him a letter of
+appreciation) in November, 1881, he said: "I venture to judge by your
+name that you are at most but half English. I can consequently believe
+in the feeling you express for the work of an unpopular writer.
+Otherwise one would incline to be sceptical, for the English are given
+to practical jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors who are
+supposed to languish in the shade amuses them." A remark curiously
+unfair to the small, faithful band of admirers which Meredith then had.
+The whole letter, while warmly and touchingly grateful, is gloomy.
+Further on in it he says: "Good work has a fair chance to be recognised
+in the end, and if not, what does it matter?" But there is constant
+proof that it did matter very much. In a letter to William Hardman,
+written when he was well and hopeful, he says: "Never mind: if we do but
+get the public ear, oh, my dear old boy!" To Captain Maxse, in reference
+to a vast sum of L8,000 paid by the _Cornhill_ people to George Eliot
+(for an unreadable novel), he exclaims: "Bon Dieu! Will aught like this
+ever happen to me?"
+
+And to his son he was very explicit about the extent to which
+unpopularity "mattered": "As I am unpopular I am ill-paid, and therefore
+bound to work double tides, hardly ever able to lay down the pen. This
+affects my weakened stomach, and so the round of the vicious circle is
+looped." (Vol. I., p. 322.) And in another letter to Arthur Meredith
+about the same time he sums up his career thus: "As for me, I have
+failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." (Vol. I., p.
+318.) This letter is dated June 23rd, 1881. Meredith was then
+fifty-three years of age. He had written _Modern Love_, _The Shaving of
+Shagpat_, _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, _Rhoda Fleming_, _The Egoist_
+and other masterpieces. He knew that he had done his best and that his
+best was very fine. It would be difficult to credit that he did not
+privately deem himself one of the masters of English literature and
+destined to what we call immortality. He had the enthusiastic
+appreciation of some of the finest minds of the epoch. And yet, "As for
+me, I have failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." But
+he had not failed in his industry, nor in the quality of his work, nor
+in achieving self-respect and the respect of his friends. He had failed
+only in one thing--immediate popularity.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Assuming then that an author is justified in desiring immediate
+popularity, instead of being content with poverty and the unheard
+plaudits of posterity, another point presents itself. Ought he to limit
+himself to a mere desire for popularity, or ought he actually to do
+something, or to refrain from doing something, to the special end of
+obtaining popularity? Ought he to say: "I shall write exactly what and
+how I like, without any regard for the public; I shall consider nothing
+but my own individuality and powers; I shall be guided solely by my own
+personal conception of what the public ought to like"? Or ought he to
+say: "Let me examine this public, and let me see whether some compromise
+between us is not possible"?
+
+Certain authors are never under the necessity of facing the
+alternative. Occasionally, by chance, a genius may be so fortunately
+constituted and so brilliantly endowed that he captures the public at
+once, prestige being established, and the question of compromise never
+arises. But this is exceedingly rare. On the other hand, many mediocre
+authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample appreciation
+in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are never troubled by any
+problem worse than the vagaries of their fountain-pens. Such authors
+enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as happiness. Of nearly all really
+original artists, however, it may be said that they are at loggerheads
+with the public--as an almost inevitable consequence of their
+originality; and for them the problem of compromise or no-compromise
+acutely exists.
+
+George Meredith was such an artist. George Meredith before anything else
+was a poet. He would have been a better poet than a novelist, and I
+believe that he thought so. The public did not care for his poetry. If
+he had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents usually
+have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said: "I shall keep on
+writing poetry, even if I have to become a stockbroker in order to do
+it." But when he was only thirty-three--a boy, as authors go--he had
+already tired of no-compromise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: "It may be
+that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained Song....
+The worst is that having taken to prose delineations of character and
+life, one's affections are divided.... And in truth, being a servant of
+the public, _I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously
+to singing_." (Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example as one is
+likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the futility of
+writing what will not be immediately read, when he can write something
+else, less to his taste, that will be read. The same sentiment has
+actuated an immense number of first-class creative artists, including
+Shakspere, who would have been a rare client for a literary agent.... So
+much for refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer
+to do because it is not appreciated by the public.
+
+There remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain because the
+public appreciates it--otherwise the pot-boiler. In 1861 Meredith wrote
+to Mrs Ross: "I am engaged in extra potboiling work which enables me to
+do this," i.e., to write an occasional long poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh,
+base compromise! Seventeen years later he wrote to R.L. Stevenson: "Of
+potboilers let none speak. Jove hangs them upon necks that could soar
+above his heights but for the accursed weight." (Vol. I., p. 291.) It
+may be said that Meredith was forced to write potboilers. He was no more
+forced to write potboilers than any other author. Sooner than wallow in
+that shame, he might have earned money in more difficult ways. Or he
+might have indulged in that starvation so heartily prescribed for
+authors by a plutocratic noble who occasionally deigns to employ the
+English tongue in prose. Meredith subdued his muse, and Meredith wrote
+potboilers, because he was a first-class artist and a man of profound
+common sense. Being extremely creative, he had to arrive somehow, and he
+remembered that the earth is the earth, and the world the world, and men
+men, and he arrived as best he could. The great majority of his peers
+have acted similarly.
+
+The truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from the public on
+his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is either a god or a
+conceited and impractical fool. And he is somewhat more likely to be the
+latter than the former. He wants too much. There are two sides to every
+bargain, including the artistic. The most fertile and the most powerful
+artists are the readiest to recognise this, because their sense of
+proportion, which is the sense of order, is well developed. The lack of
+the sense of proportion is the mark of the _petit maitre_. The sagacious
+artist, while respecting himself, will respect the idiosyncrasies of his
+public. To do both simultaneously is quite possible. In particular, the
+sagacious artist will respect basic national prejudices. For example, no
+first-class English novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his
+pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which Continental writers
+enjoy as a matter of course. The British public is admittedly wrong on
+this important point--hypocritical, illogical and absurd. But what would
+you? You cannot defy it; you literally cannot. If you tried, you would
+not even get as far as print, to say nothing of library counters. You
+can only get round it by ingenuity and guile. You can only go a very
+little further than is quite safe. You can only do one man's modest
+share in the education of the public.
+
+In Valery Larbaud's latest novel, _A.O. Barnabooth,_ occurs a phrase of
+deep wisdom about women: "_La femme est une grande realite, comme la
+guerre_." It might be applied to the public. The public is a great
+actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you
+cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. There it is! You can do
+something with it, but not much. And what you do not do with it, it must
+do with you, if there is to be the contact which is essential to the
+artistic function. This contact may be closened and completed by the
+artist's cleverness--the mere cleverness of adaptability which most
+first-class artists have exhibited. You can wear the fashions of the
+day. You can tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to distract his
+attention while you stab him in the chest. You can cajole money out of
+him by one kind of work in order to gain leisure in which to force him
+to accept later on something that he would prefer to refuse. You can use
+a thousand devices on the excellent simpleton.... And in the process you
+may degrade yourself to a mere popularity-hunter! Of course you may; as
+you may become a drunkard through drinking a glass of beer. Only, if you
+have anything to say worth saying, you usually don't succumb to this
+danger. If you have anything to say worth saying, you usually manage
+somehow to get it said, and read. The artist of genuine vocation is apt
+to be a wily person. He knows how to sacrifice inessentials so that he
+may retain essentials. And he can mysteriously put himself even into a
+potboiler. _Clarissa Harlowe_, which influenced fiction throughout
+Europe, was the direct result of potboiling. If the artist has not the
+wit and the strength of mind to keep his own soul amid the collisions of
+life, he is the inferior of a plain, honest merchant in stamina, and
+ought to retire to the upper branches of the Civil Service.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+When the author has finished the composition of a work, when he has put
+into the trappings of the time as much of his eternal self as they will
+safely hold, having regard to the best welfare of his creative career as
+a whole, when, in short, he has done all that he can to ensure the
+fullest public appreciation of the essential in him--there still remains
+to be accomplished something which is not unimportant in the entire
+affair of obtaining contact with the public. He has to see that the work
+is placed before the public as advantageously as possible. In other
+words, he has to dispose of the work as advantageously as possible. In
+other words, when he lays down the pen he ought to become a merchant,
+for the mere reason that he has an article to sell, and the more
+skilfully he sells it the better will be the result, not only for the
+public appreciation of his message, but for himself as a private
+individual and as an artist with further activities in front of him.
+
+Now this absolutely logical attitude of a merchant towards one's
+finished work infuriates the dilettanti of the literary world, to whom
+the very word "royalties" is anathema. They apparently would prefer to
+treat literature as they imagine Byron treated it, although as a fact no
+poet in a short life ever contrived to make as many pounds sterling out
+of verse as Byron made. Or perhaps they would like to return to the
+golden days when the author had to be "patronised" in order to exist; or
+even to the mid-nineteenth century, when practically all authors save
+the most successful--and not a few of the successful also--failed to
+obtain the fair reward of their work. The dilettanti's snobbishness and
+sentimentality prevent them from admitting that, in a democratic age,
+when an author is genuinely appreciated, either he makes money or he is
+the foolish victim of a scoundrel. They are fond of saying that
+agreements and royalties have nothing to do with literature. But
+agreements and royalties have a very great deal to do with literature.
+Full contact between artist and public depends largely upon publisher or
+manager being compelled to be efficient and just. And upon the
+publisher's or manager's efficiency and justice depend also the dignity,
+the leisure, the easy flow of coin, the freedom, and the pride which are
+helpful to the full fruition of any artist. No artist was ever assisted
+in his career by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by
+overwork, by economic inferiority. See Meredith's correspondence
+everywhere.
+
+Nor can there be any satisfaction in doing badly that which might be
+done well. If an artist writes a fine poem, shows it to his dearest
+friend, and burns it--I can respect him. But if an artist writes a fine
+poem, and then by sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to be
+inefficiently published, and fails to secure his own interests in the
+transaction, on the plea that he is an artist and not a merchant, then I
+refuse to respect him. A man cannot fulfil, and has no right to fulfil,
+one function only in this complex world. Some, indeed many, of the
+greatest creative artists have managed to be very good merchants also,
+and have not been ashamed of the double _role_. To read the
+correspondence and memoirs of certain supreme artists one might be
+excused for thinking, indeed, that they were more interested in the
+_role_ of merchant than in the other _role_; and yet their work in no
+wise suffered. In the distribution of energy between the two _roles_
+common sense is naturally needed. But the artist who has enough common
+sense--or, otherwise expressed, enough sense of reality--not to disdain
+the _role_ of merchant will probably have enough not to exaggerate it.
+He may be reassured on one point--namely, that success in the _role_ of
+merchant will never impair any self-satisfaction he may feel in the
+_role_ of artist. The late discovery of a large public in America
+delighted Meredith and had a tonic effect on his whole system. It is
+often hinted, even if it is not often said, that great popularity ought
+to disturb the conscience of the artist. I do not believe it. If the
+conscience of the artist is not disturbed during the actual work itself,
+no subsequent phenomenon will or should disturb it. Once the artist is
+convinced of his artistic honesty, no public can be too large for his
+peace of mind. On the other hand, failure in the _role_ of merchant will
+emphatically impair his self-satisfaction in the _role_ of artist and
+his courage in the further pursuance of that _role_.
+
+But many artists have admittedly no aptitude for merchantry. Not only is
+their sense of the bindingness of a bargain imperfect, but they are apt
+in business to behave in a puerile manner, to close an arrangement out
+of mere impatience, to be grossly undiplomatic, to be victimised by
+their vanity, to believe what they ought not to believe, to discredit
+what is patently true, to worry over negligible trifles, and generally
+to make a clumsy mess of their affairs. An artist may say: "I cannot
+work unless I have a free mind, and I cannot have a free mind if I am to
+be bothered all the time by details of business."
+
+Apart from the fact that no artist who pretends also to be a man can in
+this world hope for a free mind, and that if he seeks it by neglecting
+his debtors he will be deprived of it by his creditors--apart from that,
+the artist's demand for a free mind is reasonable. Moreover, it is
+always a distressing sight to see a man trying to do what nature has not
+fitted him to do, and so doing it ill. Such artists, however--and they
+form possibly the majority--can always employ an expert to do their
+business for them, to cope on their behalf with the necessary middleman.
+Not that I deem the publisher or the theatrical manager to be by nature
+less upright than any other class of merchant. But the publisher and the
+theatrical manager have been subjected for centuries to a special and
+grave temptation. The ordinary merchant deals with other merchants--his
+equals in business skill. The publisher and the theatrical manager deal
+with what amounts to a race of children, of whom even arch-angels could
+not refrain from taking advantage.
+
+When the democratisation of literature seriously set in, it inevitably
+grew plain that the publisher and the theatrical manager had very
+humanly been giving way to the temptation with which heaven in her
+infinite wisdom had pleased to afflict them,--and the Society of Authors
+came into being. A natural consequence of the general awakening was the
+self-invention of the literary agent. The Society of Authors, against
+immense obstacles, has performed wonders in the economic education of
+the creative artist, and therefore in the improvement of letters. The
+literary agent, against obstacles still more immense, has carried out
+the details of the revolution. The outcry--partly sentimental, partly
+snobbish, but mainly interested--was at first tremendous against these
+meddlers who would destroy the charming personal relations that used to
+exist between, for example, the author and the publisher. (The less said
+about those charming personal relations the better. Documents exist.)
+But the main battle is now over, and everyone concerned is beautifully
+aware who holds the field. Though much remains to be done, much has been
+done; and today the creative artist who, conscious of inability to
+transact his own affairs efficiently, does not obtain efficient advice
+and help therein, stands in his own light both as an artist and as a
+man, and is a reactionary force. He owes the practice of elementary
+common sense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at large.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The same dilettante spirit which refuses to see the connection between
+art and money has also a tendency to repudiate the world of men at
+large, as being unfit for the habitation of artists. This is a still
+more serious error of attitude--especially in a storyteller. No artist
+is likely to be entirely admirable who is not a man before he is an
+artist. The notion that art is first and the rest of the universe
+nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity and futility in art. The artist
+who is too sensitive for contacts with the non-artistic world is thereby
+too sensitive for his vocation, and fit only to fall into gentle
+ecstasies over the work of artists less sensitive than himself.
+
+The classic modern example of the tragedy of the artist who repudiates
+the world is Flaubert. At an early age Flaubert convinced himself that
+he had no use for the world of men. He demanded to be left in solitude
+and tranquillity. The morbid streak in his constitution grew rapidly
+under the fostering influences of peace and tranquillity. He was
+brilliantly peculiar as a schoolboy. As an old man of twenty-two,
+mourning over the vanished brio of youth, he carried morbidity to
+perfection. Only when he was travelling (as, for example, in Egypt) do
+his letters lose for a time their distemper. His love-letters are often
+ignobly inept, and nearly always spoilt by the crass provincialism of
+the refined and cultivated hermit. His mistress was a woman difficult to
+handle and indeed a Tartar in egotism, but as the recipient of
+Flaubert's love-letters she must win universal sympathy.
+
+Full of a grievance against the whole modern planet, Flaubert turned
+passionately to ancient times (in which he would have been equally
+unhappy had he lived in them), and hoped to resurrect beauty when he
+had failed to see it round about him. Whether or not he did resurrect
+beauty is a point which the present age is now deciding. His fictions of
+modern life undoubtedly suffer from his detestation of the material; but
+considering his manner of existence it is marvellous that he should have
+been able to accomplish any of them, except _Un Coeur Simple_. The final
+one, _Bouvard et Pecuchet_, shows the lack of the sense of reality which
+must be the inevitable sequel of divorce from mankind. It is realism
+without conviction. No such characters as Bouvard and Pecuchet could
+ever have existed outside Flaubert's brain, and the reader's resultant
+impression is that the author has ruined a central idea which was well
+suited for a grand larkish extravaganza in the hands of a French Swift.
+But the spectacle of Flaubert writing in _mots justes_ a grand larkish
+extravaganza cannot be conjured up by fancy.
+
+There are many sub-Flauberts rife in London. They are usually more
+critical than creative, but their influence upon creators, and
+especially the younger creators, is not negligible. Their aim in
+preciosity would seem to be to keep themselves unspotted from the world.
+They are for ever being surprised and hurt by the crudity and coarseness
+of human nature, and for ever bracing themselves to be not as others
+are. They would have incurred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just
+discipline for them would be that they should be cross-examined by the
+great bully in presence of a jury of butchers and sentenced accordingly.
+The morbid Flaubertian shrinking from reality is to be found to-day even
+in relatively robust minds. I was recently at a provincial cinema, and
+witnessed on the screen with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama
+entitled "Gold is not All." My friend, who combines the callings of
+engineer and general adventurer with that of serving his country, leaned
+over to me in the darkness amid the violent applause, and said: "You
+know, this kind of thing always makes me ashamed of human nature." I
+answered him as Johnsonially as the circumstances would allow. Had he
+lived to the age of fifty so blind that it needed a cinema audience to
+show him what the general level of human nature really is? Nobody has
+any right to be ashamed of human nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother?
+Is one ashamed of the cosmic process of evolution? Human nature _is_.
+And the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts, absorbs that
+supreme fact into his brain, the better for his work.
+
+There is a numerous band of persons in London--and the novelist and
+dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their circle--who spend so
+much time and emotion in practising the rites of the religion of art
+that they become incapable of real existence. Each is a Stylites on a
+pillar. Their opinion on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John,
+Cyril Scott, Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James Stephens, E.A. Rickards,
+Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc., may not be without value, and
+their genuine feverish morbid interest in art has its usefulness; but
+they know no more about reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They
+never approach normal life. They scorn it. They have a horror of it.
+They class politics with the differential calculus. They have heard of
+Lloyd George, the rise in the price of commodities, and the eternal
+enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must open a newspaper
+to look at the advertisements and announcements relating to the arts.
+The occasional frequenting of this circle may not be disadvantageous to
+the creative artist. But let him keep himself inoculated against its
+disease by constant steady plunges into the cold sea of the general
+national life. Let him mingle with the public, for God's sake! No
+phenomenon on this wretched planet, which after all is ours, is meet for
+the artist's shrinking scorn. And the average man, as to whom the
+artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever constitute the
+main part of the material in which he works.
+
+Above all, let not the creative artist suppose that the antidote to the
+circle of dilettantism is the circle of social reform. It is not. I
+referred in the first chapter to the prevalent illusion that the
+republic has just now arrived at a crisis, and that if something is not
+immediately done disaster will soon be upon us. This is the illusion to
+which the circle of social reforms is naturally prone, and it is an
+illusion against which the common sense of the creative artist must
+mightily protest. The world is, without doubt, a very bad world; but it
+is also a very good world. The function of the artist is certainly
+concerned more with what is than with what ought to be. When all
+necessary reform has been accomplished our perfected planet will be
+stone-cold. Until then the artist's affair is to keep his balance amid
+warring points of view, and in the main to record and enjoy what is....
+But is not the Minimum Wage Bill urgent? But when the minimum wage is as
+trite as the jury-system, the urgency of reform will still be tempting
+the artist too far out of his true path. And the artist who yields is
+lost.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Author's Craft, by Arnold Bennett
+
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