VOL. IV.

MY BOOKS.

I love my books as drinkers love their wine;
The more I drink the more they seem divine;
With joy elate my soul in love runs o'er,
And each fresh draught is sweeter than before.
Books bring me friends where'er on earth I be,-
Solace of Solitude,-bonds of Society!

I love my books! they are companions dear,
Sterling in worth, in friendship most sincere;
Here talk I with the wise in ages gone,
And with the nobly gifted of our own.
If love, joy, laughter, sorrow please my mind,
Love, joy, grief, laughter in my books I find.
FRANCIS BENNOCH.

WRITING NOVELS.

(A lecture delivered at Vassar College.) I wrote this paper first in English: but when 1 was asked to read it at Vassar, I supposed it would be necessary to rewrite in some classic tongue,Greek, for example: in order to make sure that my audience should understand me. I learned later, however, that there were to be older persons present, to whom the lang iage of Ancient Athens might be unfamiliar; so I finally decided to let it stand as it was.

Yet, it is not without some conscientious misgivings, that I stand before you. Very few of you, I presume, have heard of novels before this evening; fewer still can actually have seen or read any. And I am not only to make you acquainted with the existence of such things, but I may be tempted to go on and tell you how they are produced. This is a dangerous knowledge. There is no saying what it might lead to. Suppose, for example, that some of you should take to writing novels, yourselves! This is an extravagant hypothesis, of course: yet things as strange have happened. And then suppose that I, in my capacity as literary critic, should find myself reviewing a volume written by one of the ladies who now sit before me! The sins of the

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lecturer would be visited upon the critic. I should be hoist with my own petard.

Let us hope that it will not come to that. Let us hope that, so far from being attracted by any picture I may draw, you will rather regard me and my works as a frightful example, and steer your course henceforth in the opposite direction. Should this be the result, I shall feel that, for once, I have not spoken in vain. As Shakspere says of somebody, that nothing in his life became him like the leaving it; so may you say of me, that nothing in my literary career was so creditable, as its discouraging effect upon others.

1 may as well confess, too, that novel-writing was a mystery to me at the start, and that, after reading hundreds, and writing--I don't know how many, I still understand very little about how it is done. I have sometimes even gone so far as to doubt whether anybody else understands it: I have suspected that the good novels were written while their authors were in a sort of trance state, on awakening from which, they were as much surprised at what had happened as anybody else could be; only, they disguised it better. Genius, upon this theory, would be a not less passive state than that of the Roman peasant, who lies on the steps of the Piazza di Spagna, and just lets the sun broil him. He doesn't have to run to keep warm.

were.

But we are going too fast. We are already talking about "good novels," and "genius." It may be necessary to inform you that all novelists are not geniuses, and that all novels are not good. If they it is certain that I should not be here to-night. I should be paving streets, or doing business in a corner-grocery. But anybody can write inferior novels, and most people fancy they possess some literary ability. And what is a novel, after all? Only a scaffolding of plot, draped with a certain amount of description, and ligh'ed up with dialogue. So they go to work, and the shelves of the libraries groan. Three new novels are published every day in the year; and yet, for one that is published, ten are rejected by the publishers. A thousand novels a year; thirty thousand in a gener ation: and of them all, oue perhaps, is a really good novel, a work of genius. In view of these facts, it is really hard to say whether everybody understands

novel-writing, or whether nobody does. You shall, at least, be allowed to decide that question for yourselves.

Meanwhile, I will say one thing. It is not the best workman who best knows how he works. Ask Shakspere how he wrote Macbeth, and all he can answer is, that he did write it, somehow,-unless, of course, it was written by Bacon, or somebody else. But if, on the other hand, you enquire of John Smith, the popular writer on the weekly Ledger, how he wrote Alice Vivian's Feril; or, the Black Brigantine's Last Voyage,' he will sit down, and bring out his scrap books, and his memoranda of plots, and his volume of familiar quotations, and his two foot-rule and compasses, and his diary; and he will show you the date on which he began, and the number of words he wrote each day, and the mottoes of his chapters, and the marked passages in the encyclopædia, and his patent fountain pen that writes three days without refilling; and, what with one thing and another, in the course of half an hour you will understand clearly how he wrote his novel. There is nothing strange about that; but something else is rather strange. And that is, that a thorough comprehension of John Smith's methods will put you on the the way towards comprehending something of Shakspere's. I don't mean, of course, that they will reveal the mode of genesis of Shakspere's specific excellencies: still less, that they will enable you to write like Shakspere. I mean, only, that they will give you some insight into that great art, whose laws Shakspere and John Smith must both obey,-laws which are at the basis of all æsthetic endeavor and creation, whether in the line of sculpture, painting, architecture, poetry, music, or novel-writing. John Smith is an arrant literary hack, no doubt: his ways and means are wholly superficial and mechanical; yet he derives from Shakspere: had there been no Macbeth' and 'Hamlet,' there would have been no 'Alice Vivian's Peril.' And it is true, also, that John Smith's adherence to the rules of dramatic construction and artistic proportion will be much more literal and obvious than Shakspere's. It is easy to follow the operations of a house-builder, building and decorating a house; but who shall trace the blooming and fragrance of a flower? And these Shaksperian flowers are really of kin to the John-Smith shanties, though the latter are put together by rule of thumb, while the roots of the former are planted deep in the human heart and soul, and their lovely petals unfold by the connivance of the Universe. The rule of thumb and the laws of the Universe-they do not seem much alike: and yet the difference between them is not greater, nor other, than between one man and another man-between the sublime poet and the hack story writer. But the poet regards results, the hack, processes; which brings me back to what I was saying, that Shakspere could not give you so good an account of the methods of novel-writing, as my friend John Smith, or I.

A certain kind of statistics on this subject is,

indeed, readily obtained. Charles Dickens used to laugh and cry while writing; he would gesticulate, tramp about the room, chatter dialogue, and make faces in a looking glass. Thackeray apparently wrote with the greatest reluctance and pain; he sighed and groaned and forged about his study like a hunted animal striving to escape, and scribbled immortal literature between his spasms. Balzac had a white monkish gown, whose flowing drapery attired him in his inspired seasons; and he wrote at night, under the stimulus of black coffee. George Eliot composed under the pressure of an ethical conscience, and copied her manuscript, after completing it: and so on. But this is not the sort of information we want now. We want to know how the story itself was built up? what were the steps by which the results were obtained? we want to get such knowledge as may enable us-in case we were ourselves moved to become novelists-to proceed in the most intelligent and effective manner.

No

Aye, there's the rub! for the advice will generally be found to vary with the advizor. Broadly speaking, however, it may be said that the best writers have two distinct methods of procedure. The first is, to take men and women and circumstances as they find them—almost any complication or situation will do-and then to penetrate to the heart and soul of it -to discover and develop its permanent or spiritual meaning. Everything is significant — nothing is common or unclean-if you have the genius to see its essence and its relations. But that is an "if" so large, that no space less than that between Heaven and Earth is broad enough to write it on. Only the Shaksperian minds are capable of this feat. Shakspere was in the habit of taking old dead plays and stories, and--not galvanising them, but making living, immortal things out of them. In his own phrase he "put a soul beneath the ribs of death." We listen in vain for his voice-for the author's voice-in his Plays. We know it is his only be cause it never is his, but that of his creatures. one has equalled him in this respect; but others have followed him; others have sought the soul within the substance. That is by no means the same thing as pausing in the substance itself,-a mistake commonly made nowadays. We hear it asserted that any story, no matter how pointless, any people, no matter how commonplace, are worth treating, if only the treatment be true to life. That is a standard principle of what has been termed the New School of Fiction. The fallacy ought to be obvious. "Truth to life," in this connection, means faithful reproduction of the facts in the case. The events are to be described exactly as they happened; the people are to appear and talk precisely as they were seen and heard. Well, suppose the reproduction to be perfect, what then? Why, then you have but served the purpose of a looking-glass, set up in a public street, or a private drawing-room. You have echoed and imitated; but you have created nothing,-you have not earned the name of artist. Let the artist take the same complex of persons and events, and note

the difference. He turns the leaves of his volume of Human nature and philosophy, and finds there the spiritual truth, of which this subject may be used as a concrete illustration. Then he proceeds to select and discriminate; he passes over this; he dwells upon that. He fixes his eyes upon what is, and sees-not that alone, but-the potentiality of the future, and the fulfilment of the past. He throws behind it the undefined but profound background of the world, of which, however intrinsically trifling, it is an organic part; and thus expands its littleness into dignity. He draws above it the boundless arch of Heaven, with its sun and stars, its clouds and storms, and thus allies its finiteness with Infinity. This or that man, John or Thomas, is in himself-as a detached phenomenon-an insignificant thing enough; but if you regard him as a type of man, a partaker of our universal human nature, as descendant of his ancestors, and progenitor of his posterity, as the combined product of Fate and of Freewill, as the link between two eternities, as an incarnate immortal, as the image of God,-and every man that lives is all of these,-then you will find that his personal insignificance as John or Thomas is a very insignificant part of him. His John-hood or Tom-hood no doubt remains; but if it be not shown to be swallowed up-dazzled out of sight-in his manhood, it is but a falsehood after all your pains; and this is the characteristic falsehood of the realistic school. Their books are aggregations of minutely-finished isolations, instead of being sinewy organic wholes. They stand on nothing, appeal to nothing, aspire towards nothing. Shakspere unites John or Thomas with the whole world; the realistic novelist makes the whole world incidental to John or Thomas; and that is where the two writers differ. It seems to me that Shakspere has the best of the argument.

A novel conceived in the Shaksperean method has an innate faculty of growth, like a plant, or a human being; whereas the novel of mere facts must be constructed-it does not grow; and, if the constructive skill be wanting, it becomes pointless and unsymmetrical. The former needs only to be planted aright, and wisely watched and tended, and it will vindicate its own right to exist; the latter must depend abjectly on the builder; and, at best, it will be a lifeless imitation of life.-But, it may be asked, if we are not to imitate life, what are we to do ?-Well, certainly, the next step is a great one, and you may think it paradoxical: but, in truth, the only thing that lies beyond an imitation of life is neither more nor less than life itself! This is a hard saying, but we cannot escape it. The true creations of art must follow the order of the Divine creation. The spirit-the soul, must come first: it will assume its proper body, like other souls, and this body will be palpable and visible: but the body will have existence, only because the soul, beforehand, has being.-How this soul is to be born, is another question, to be answered only by those endowed with the mysterious gift that we call

genius. All we can know about it is, that he who gives life can have no life to give except his own. It is not a matter of note-books, of observation, of learning, of cleverness. The source of works that live is a very interior chamber indeed, whose secrets only those who have entered it can reveal,-and possibly, as I said just now, not even they.

But we were speaking of two methods of procedure open to the best writers; and so far we have attended only to one method-the greater of the two-the Shaksperian method. But there is a class of minds, lofty and ideal in their quality, wiser in abstract principles than in human experience and sympathy, who, instead of developing the permanent significance latent in commonplace matters, adopt the opposite course:-they take a group of abstract moral ideas, and endeavor to realise them in concrete symbols. Such minds, in their highest phase, are the Dantes, the Miltons and the Bunyans of the world; and their productions belong, more or less avowedly, to what is called the domain of allegory. Their writings have great power for those persons who agree with their views, or are on the way to do so; and they can inspire sublime and noble thoughts; but they are not the highest form of art -indeed, to speak strictly, they are not Art at all. And the reason is, that although the laws of Art are strict, the first of those laws is, that Art shall be spontaneous and free. The perfect tree must erect its shaft and expand its branches without warping or impediment; the perfect crystal must have liberty to develop symmetrically; the perfect human being must be unmarred by any taint of heredity or bias of training. And when you wish to create a perfect work of art, you must not bend or accomodate its proportions to make them suit any preconceived moral or philosophical theory to which you are committed. For your theories, be they never so advanced and enlightened, are fiuite, like yourself; but Art is infinite, as life is: and in proportion as your theories become antiquated-as in time they must-will your allegory become worthless. You can never comprehend the whole scheme of creation; you can never criticise the Creator. But you can, if you will, comprehend some part (large or small) of the creative plan, and interpret that; and such a work will survive and never be antiquated, because it obeys nature, instead of attempting to command her. The allegorist is dogmatic, and argues from above downwards; the artist is a disciple, and argues from below upwards. The intellect of the artist is humanized by his heart; the heart of the allegorist is abstracted by his intellect. The latter cares to vindicate his theory; the former seeks to vindicate the nature of man. It is grander aim, as well as humbler one.

Of course you understand, without my telling you, that when I talk in this way about the artist and the allegorist, I am discussing imaginary persons, who never existed, or could exist, in the unadulterated state. Shakspere is not a pure artist; he has his allegorical lapses. Dante and

Milton live, not by their allegories, sublime though these are, but by dint of their superb poetry, and their hunian sympathies, which blossom forth irrepressibly, like columbines from a rock. And John Bunyan, the most uncompromising of allegorists, is constantly importing so much wholesome homely human nature into his great religious symbol, that the difficulty is, to remember there is any symbol there. All the great literary works of the world, in short, show a blending of the two controlling methods: and this is as it should be, for both methods are characteristic of the human mind, when working in happiness and freedom. They combine like warp and woof in the web, giving strength and texture: or like light and shadow in natural objects. But art is always the light; and the best use of the shadowy allegory, is to afford the light form and contrast.

And if this be true of the leaders, it is still more so of the rank and file. But of late years, things have come to such a pass, that we may be thankful to get either allegory or art. The great writers at least aimed to spiritualise facts, from one side or the other; but the realistic school feed upon facts only, as pigs feed on acorns, with never a thought for the boundless forests of spiritual oak latent within their minds. They think, if they can only get the outside of things right, the inside may take care of itself. But the difficulty is, you can never see the outside aright, unless you look at it from within, and thus, in a measure, re-create it. This is so true that we need not go out of this room for illustrations of it. Ever since I can remember, I have seen women going about in wonderful dresses: and, as a novelist, I have often been called upon to describe a woman's dress. But I have been wise enough to do so only in the most general terms, because I knew very well that the moment I attempted to enter into detail, I was lost. I have said that they were red, or black, or blue or white; that they were close-fitting, or hung in graceful folds, or had a feathery effect, or rustled softly when the wearer moved. But the youngest girl in this room knows more about dresses than I should if I were to live to a hundred-because they have seen them on the creative side,-they know how they were made. And with dresses, so with everything else: you must know how they are made, before you can either see them or describe them properly. The eye tells us very little: it tells us nothing truly of itself; it can only confirm what we have already discovered by other means, by the mind, the heart and the sympathies. If there be anything more deceptive than a material fact, it has not yet been catalogued; and they have as little interconnection as so many pebbles. Whereas the truth, that lies behind every fact, as the soul lies behind its body, is related in immortal bonds with every other truth in the universe; and art is art only in so far as it reveals and avouches this unity.

But we are getting somewhat too much of abstract principles, which never can be made very clear, and

which serve better to confirm experience than to instruct ignorance. Perhaps a little practical illustration would be agreeable for a change. And to this end, I would like to tell you how any one of the great novelists, from Cervantes down to Victor Hugo, composed their novels; how the idea first presented itself to their minds, and through what changes and difficulties they worked it out to its final form. I would like to do this, and only one thing restrains me from doing it-that I know nothing whatever about the matter. They never told me, and it is now too late to find out. There is only one person, concerning whose methods I can speak with security; and that person, I regret to say, happens to be myself. With your permission, therefore, I will try to give you some account of how I wrote a story called 'Archibald Malmaison.' A good many people have asked me whether the story was true, to which I have uniformly replied that I saw no reason why it should not be. But now you will be able to judge about that for yourselves.

I took up the morning newspaper, one day, and came upon a short paragraph, telling of a curious case of a man who had lost his memory in consequence of a blow on the head. He was married at the time, and had several children; but, on recovering from his swoon, he had lost all recollection of any of them, and indeed, of everything else connected with his past life. His health was soon restored, but bis memory remained in abeyance; and finally (as the situation was rather awkward) his wife was granted a divorce from him. In the course of a few years, he married again, and had another family. This would have been all well enough, save that, as ill-luck would have it, he awoke one morning in complete oblivion of everything that occurred since the blow on his head six or seven years before. He regained a distinct recollection of his former married life, but not of his present domestic arrangements. Such was his strange predicament; and what the upshot of it was, I have forgotten, nor does it matter.

But I meditated a good deal upon this instance of a double life, and thought there ought to be the making of a story in it; though exactly what it should be, I could not decide: something seemed wanting to clinch the matter. Presently, the paragraph slipped out of my mind, and might have remained out until now, had 1 not chanced to come across a volume of Thackeray's Lectures on English Humorists. And in one of those Lectures 1 hit upon a chance allusion to the discovery, among the hardened ashes of the ruins of Pompeii, of the mould of a woman's form. The form itself had centuries before vanished into dust: but the mould remained, and, on being filled with plaster, and then broken apart, a perfect cast was discovered of the long dead and forgotten Pompeiian girl. It was impossible not to be struck by this somewhat ghastly episode; but it would have resulted in nothing, so far as I was concerned, had not some accidental jump of my inind happened to connect it with the story of the man with two, memories. I had an

instinctive feeling that, if these two things could be combined, a good dramatic situation would be the result. But how to combine them?

I twisted them about for a long time, as one twists about two pieces of a puzzle, trying to fit them together. "Suppose," I said at last, "that some person leaves another in some place, and goes away intending to come back,—but loses his memory means while, and only returns after twenty years."-Well from that moment I knew I was safe; all the rest would be mere arrangement of detail.

I was not long in deciding that the person who lost his memory should be the hero of the story, and that the person who got left should be the heroine, and that they should be in love with each other. And where should be the place of imprisonment ?—not in the ashes of Pompeii, certainly! At first I thought of a lonely hut in some wild country; but it would be difficult to shut up a woman in a hut, so that she could not escape. Then I thought she should be locked into a chamber of on ordinary house. But was it probable that a chamber could remain locked for twenty years, or even twenty hours, and nothing be suspected by a third person?-Very well, then, the chamber should be a secret chamber; and as these exist only in ancient houses, the house should be hundreds of years old, with walls four or five feet thick; and the existence of the chamber should be known only to the young man, who, consequently must be the master of the house. Thus you may see how one thing leads to another, and how the exigencies of the situation suggest the development of the plot.

But there was a great deal to be done yet, Some adequate cause for the concealmert must be provided. As the heroine and hero were young lovers, an elopement readily suggested itself. She must be kept in hiding while her lover went to make the final arrangements; and it was while upon this errand, and with his heart full of the immediate anticipation of seeing her again, that he should be smitten with oblivion, and she, consequently, be lost forever. But when I reflected upon the horror of this catastrophe, I felt that it ought not to be so wantonly inflicted; that it should be the fulfilment of some doom or just punishment. Now, an elopement is of course wrong; but hardly wrong enough to warrant being buried alive for it. But, if the heroine were a married woman, then the case would wear a very different complexion; and the calamity which overtook the guilty lovers would be deserved. Nevertheless, in order not wholly to alienate sympathy from them (without which, the reader would be indifferent to their fate, and the effect would fail), 1 arranged that they should know and love each other in early life, and be parted by circumstances,--that so their coming together again might seem less forced and unexpected.

But this opened the way to other developments, which suggested themselves both singly and in groups, and the aim of all of which was to add force to the culminating scene,-to foreshadow it, yet not

explicitly to foretell it, from the beginning, - to remove all crude improbabilities, and to maintain a constantly augmenting element of curiosity and suspense. 1 reduced the period of years from twenty, to seven; and then I made the abnormal affection of the brain periodical, instead of isolated. Next, 1 so ordered the minor events of the story, that these periodical seizures of the hero should be coincident with important stages of the plot, preparatory to the last stage of all; so that, at the end, all should be seen to be a pre-ordained and inevitable culmination; and, partly to give variety, and partly for reasons of construction, I made him stupid during one seven-year period, and clever during the next, and so on.

But at this stage it occurred to me that I had forgotten to provide myself with a villain,—an element which so terrible a tale imperatively demanded. I described this personage as a distant relative of the hero, a gambler and a profligate, and possessed of a supposed secret regarding the hero's ancestry, which should have the effect of casting doubts upon his legitimacy, though I also arranged that the documents disproving the charge should be found by the bero concealed in the secret chamber. This villain should, of course, be the successful rival for the heroine's hand; and, toward the last, the hero should fight with him and kill him. By degrees, I added other characters, as 1 foresaw that need would arise; and gave the whole brood such names, as might be more or less characteristic, and also in keeping with the singularity of the story.

It remained to settle the more technical details. The date of the narrative should not be so recent as to deprive it of atmosphere and perspective, nor yet so distant as to estrange sympathy; so I fixed it in England, at the beginning of this century. In view of the hideousness of the dénoument, I resolved to make the book not too long to be easily read at one sitting; but, in order that the full effect might be produced in that time, I took every means to impress its absolute truth upon the reader,-not that I intended him to believe it after he had finished it, but that he might not lose the pleasure of yielding to the illusion while it lasted. Yet, to put him on his guard against over-credulity, I inserted a manifest impossibility into the opening clause of the story,the statement, namely, that Archibald Malmaison was born on the 29th February 1800,-a date which (as of course you are aware) is not found in the calendars. Despite my precautions, however, I afterwards found that they were not sufficient; for several persons have not only insisted that the story is true, but have asserted that they know where I found the original.

The story once mapped out, was completed rapidly; but (as often happens) some of the best points did not suggest themselves until, in the course of writing, I came to them. You will notice that, in this instance, the elaboration of the plot began at the dénoument, and proceeded backwards upon constantly widening lines. That is probably a good