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 COHfRlGHT DEPOSflV 
 
THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 BY 
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 Author of "Literary Taste," "How to Live on 
 
 24 Hours a Day," "The Human Machine," 
 
 "Mental Efficiency," Etc., Etc. 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 
 
 Co 
 
 r/ 
 
?Ni45 
 .B4-3. 
 
 Copyright, 1 91 4 
 By George H. Doran Company 
 
 AUGI9I9!4 @C|A379168 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I Page 
 
 Seeing Life 9 
 
 « 
 
 PART II 
 Writing Novels 39 
 
 PART III 
 Writing Plays .69 
 
 PART IV 
 The Artist an( * the Public ..... 99 
 
PART I 
 SEEING LIFE 
 
PART I 
 
 SEEING LIFE 
 
 I 
 
 A YOUNG dog, inexperienced, sadly 
 lacking in even primary education, 
 ambles and frisks along the foot- 
 path 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 
 9 
 
io THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 im- 
 portant 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 footbrake, has ar- 
 rested 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 
 
SEEING LIFE n 
 
 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, pas- 
 sive 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. Relin- 
 quished 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 per- 
 fect accident! 
 
 The increasing crowd stares with beatific 
 placidity. People emerge impatiently from 
 
12 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 move- 
 ments 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 abso- 
 lute dominion of the elephantine policemen; 
 they admit that before the simple will of the 
 policemen inconvenience, lost minutes, short- 
 ened leisure, docked wages, count as less than 
 naught. And the policemen are carelessly sub- 
 lime, 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: 
 
SEEING LIFE 13 
 
 " 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 dis- 
 honest public. We, too, have wives and chil- 
 dren and privations and frightful apprehen- 
 sions. 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 conduc- 
 tor 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 
 
i 4 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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, float- 
 ing 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 conduc- 
 tor race towards the motor-bus. The bell 
 rings, the motor-bus, quite empty, disappears 
 snorting round the corner into Walham Green. 
 
SEEING LIFE 15 
 
 The crowd is now lessening. But it separates 
 with reluctance, many of its members continu- 
 ing 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 en- 
 tirely 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 partic- 
 ulars 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 ob- 
 served — that is to say, they have really seen 
 — nothing. 
 
16 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 II 
 
 It will be well for us not to assume an atti- 
 tude of condescension towards the crowd. Be- 
 cause 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 con- 
 tent 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 is that for many mornings he will 
 see naught that is not trivial, and that his sys- 
 tem of perspective will be absurdly distorted. 
 The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly 
 
SEEING LIFE 17 
 
 attract him, to the exclusion of what is funda- 
 mental 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 sub- 
 urban trains had seats on the roof like a tram- 
 car. 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 sys- 
 tem is unfavourable to the enlargement of cats. 
 I remember once, in the days when observation 
 
18 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 observa- 
 tion 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 ob- 
 serve even a large number of facts, and still re- 
 main 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 
 
SEEING LIFE 19 
 
 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 v^ 
 not in multiplicity of detail, but in co-ordina- 
 tion of detail according to a true perspective of 
 relative importance, so that a finally just gen- 
 eral 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 impres- 
 sion of an intimate friend with one's first im- 
 pression 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 draw- 
 ing-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 
 
20 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 mystic gift with which rumour credits them, 
 they are never mistaken. It is merely not true. 
 Women are constantly quite wrong in the esti- 
 mates based on their " feminine instinct " ; 
 they sometimes even admit it; and the matri- 
 monial courts prove it passim. Children are 
 more often wrong than women. And as for 
 dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever be- 
 ing taken in by plausible scoundrels; the per- 
 spective of dogs is grotesque. Not seldom 
 have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion 
 of deceived dogs. Nevertheless, the sentimen- 
 tal legend of the infallibility of women, chil- 
 dren, and dogs, will persist in Anglo-Saxon 
 countries. 
 
 Ill 
 
 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 ob- 
 
. SEEING LIFE 21 
 
 servation 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 aes- 
 thetic pleasure from the tranquil scrutiny of 
 all kinds of conduct ■ — as well, for example, of 
 a Renaissance Pope as of a Savonarola. Ob- 
 servation 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 
 
22 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 to the trouble of understanding. The one con- 
 dition 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 ap- 
 preciate all this is the first inspiring prelimin- 
 ary 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 spectac- 
 ular 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 em- 
 brace all phenomena in his curiosity. Being 
 finite, he cannot. Of course he cannot! But 
 he can, by obtaining a broad notion of the 
 
• SEEING LIFE 23 
 
 whole, determine with some accuracy the posi- 
 tion 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 pro- 
 portion 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 geo- 
 graphical and climatic phenomena. This is 
 surely obvious. If you say that you are not in- 
 terested 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. Be- 
 yond question the most important fact about, 
 for example, Great Britain is that it is an is- 
 land. 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 
 
24 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 su- 
 preme phenomenon that Great Britain is sur- 
 rounded 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 be- 
 fore 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 Eng- 
 land 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- 
 
SEEING LIFE 25 
 
 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 thou- 
 sands of squat little homes, neat, tended, re- 
 spectable, comfortable, prim, at once unosten- 
 tatious 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 fero- 
 cious jealousy bent on guarding its own indi- 
 viduality! Each a stronghold — an island! 
 And all careless of the general effect, but mak- 
 ing 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 splen- 
 did fagades of a French town, and work out 
 the implications. If you really intend to see 
 life you cannot afford to be blind to such thrill- 
 ing phenomena. 
 
 Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity 
 would be capable of walking through 
 
26 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 not- 
 ing. It is — in its place. French lamp-posts 
 are part of what we call the " interesting char- 
 acter " 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 charac- 
 teristic 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 idio- 
 syncrasy 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 
 
SEEING LIFE 27 
 
 in it. Nothing in it is to be neglected. Every- 
 thing in it is valuable, if the perspective is 
 maintained. Nevertheless, in the narrow indi- 
 vidualistic 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 exist- 
 ence of a community is shown in the gen- 
 eral 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 per- 
 
28 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 sons fail to see it. We hear of inquirers stand- 
 ing on London Bridge and counting the num- 
 ber of motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, 
 and white horses that pass over the bridge in 
 an hour. But we never hear of anybody count- 
 ing 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 in- 
 dividual — to which all human observing does 
 
SEEING LIFE 29 
 
 finally come if there is any right reason in it ■ — 
 the aforesaid general considerations ought to be 
 ever present in the hinterland of the conscious- 
 ness, 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 hap- 
 hazard particularity is the chief vitiating ele- 
 ment 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 vis- 
 ible in the individual himself. The inexperi- 
 enced and ardent observer, will, for example, be 
 astonishingly blind to everything in an indi- 
 vidual except his face. Telling himself that 
 the face must be the reflection of the soul, and 
 that every thought and emotion leaves inevi- 
 tably 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 
 
3 o THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 phys- 
 ical 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 re- 
 fined face may be refuted by clumsy finger- 
 ends; the eyes may contradict the voice; the 
 gait may nullify the smile. None of the phe- 
 nomena which every individual carelessly and 
 brazenly displays in every motor-bus terroris- 
 ing the streets of London is meaningless or 
 negligible. 
 
 Again, in observing we are generally guilty 
 of that particularity which results from slug- 
 
SEEING LIFE 31 
 
 gishness 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 pre- 
 paring 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 chil- 
 dren. Having laid down the law, or accepted 
 it, he sets forth to his daily duties, just a frac- 
 tion 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. 
 
32 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 police- 
 man- — 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 satis- 
 fied with the description of a disease. A friend 
 tells you his eyesight is failing. You sympa- 
 thise. " 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 police- 
 man contents you, seems to absolve you from 
 
SEEING LIFE 33 
 
 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 al- 
 ways a thick veil. But you — I mean you, I, 
 any of us — are oddly dim-sighted also in re- 
 gard 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. Prob- 
 ably 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 atti- 
 tude we are observing not the human individ- 
 uals, 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 
 
34 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 inter- 
 ests 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 organisa- 
 tion, and will insist on the variations from type 
 due to that grouping. If he is convinced — 
 as numbers of people appear to be — that so- 
 
SEEING LIFE 35 
 
 ciety is just now in an extremely critical pass, 
 and that if something mysterious is not forth- 
 with 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 re- 
 sisted too much, since they give character to 
 observation and redeem it from the frigidity of 
 mechanics, should be resisted to a certain ex- 
 tent. For, whatever they may be, they favour 
 the growth of sentimentality, the protean and 
 indescribably subtle enemy of common sense. 
 
PART II 
 WRITING NOVELS 
 
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 can- 
 not 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 
 39 
 
40 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 en- 
 tertaining steps from them you may ascend to 
 the major artist whose vision of life, inclusive, 
 intricate and intense, requires for its due trans- 
 mission 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 Shakespeare 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 compre- 
 
WRITING NOVELS 41 
 
 hensive 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, dur- 
 ing 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 play- 
 wright, 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 as- 
 pect of the interestingness of life which is not 
 now rendered in prose fiction — from land- 
 scape-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 
 
42 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 enormous territories even since Germinal. 
 Within the last fifteen years it has gained. 
 Were it to adopt the hue of the British Em- 
 pire, 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 trans- 
 mitting 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 in- 
 clusive 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 novel- 
 ist there are two attributes which may al- 
 ways be taken for granted. The first is 
 the sense of beauty — indispensable to the cre- 
 ative artist. Every creative artist has it, in 
 
WRITING NOVELS 43 
 
 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 ma- 
 terial which repels him — the fact is obvious. 
 Obviously, whatever kind of life the novelist 
 writes about, he has been charmed and se- 
 duced 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 criti- 
 cism — a criticism, indeed, which is not more 
 sagacious than that of the reviewer who re- 
 marks : " 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 
 
44 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 medi- 
 ocre novelist. Even in the extreme cases it 
 is untrue ; perhaps it is most untrue in the ex- 
 treme 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 gen- 
 erally regarded as the sordid ugliness of com- 
 monplace daily life. Yet both exercise a 
 unique charm (and will surely be read when 
 La Cathedrale is forgotten). And it is incon- 
 ceivable that Huysmans — whatever he may 
 
WRITING NOVELS 45 
 
 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 incon- 
 venienced by it; and the motive to pass it on 
 will thus not exist. Every fine emotion pro- 
 duced in the reader has been, and must have 
 been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far 
 greater degree. It is not altogether uncom- 
 mon to hear a reader whose heart has been 
 desolated by the poignancy of a narrative com- 
 plain that the writer is unemotional. Such 
 people have no notion at all of the processes 
 of artistic creation. 
 
 Ill 
 
 A sense of beauty and a passionate in- 
 tensity of vision being taken for granted, 
 the one other important attribute in the 
 equipment of the novelist in the attribute 
 
46 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 reck- 
 oned 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 no- 
 bility 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 
 
WRITING NOVELS 47 
 
 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 in- 
 complete for so grandiose a figure, and not free 
 from defects which are inimical to immor- 
 tality. 
 
 It is a hard saying for me, and full of danger 
 in any country whose artists have shown con- 
 tempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, 
 as the years pass, I attach less and less impor- 
 tance 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, ac- 
 cording to my own standards, have either ig- 
 
48 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 nored 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 man- 
 age 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 writ- 
 ing, 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 Kara- 
 mazovl 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 amateur- 
 ish technique of the late " Mark Rutherford " 
 
WRITING NOVELS 49 
 
 — 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 al- 
 ready 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 out- 
 standing phenomena of modern French criti- 
 cism. It is being discovered that Flaubert's 
 mind was not quite noble enough — that, in- 
 deed, 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 
 
50 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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, cur- 
 rently, was largely occupied with the question 
 of literary technique, and his correspondence 
 stands forth to-day as his best work — a mar- 
 vellous fount of inspiration to his fellow artists. 
 So I return to the point that the novelist's one 
 important attribute (beyond the two postu- 
 lated) 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 re- 
 peat that it is a hard saying. 
 
 I begin to think that great writers of fiction 
 are by the mysterious nature of their art or- 
 dained to be "amateurs.'' There may be 
 something of the amateur in all great artists. 
 I do not know why it should be so, unless be- 
 cause, in the exuberance of their sense of 
 power, they are impatient of the exactitudes of 
 
WRITING NOVELS 51 
 
 systematic study and the mere bother of re- 
 peated attempts to arrive at a minor perfec- 
 tion. Assuredly no great artist was ever a pro- 
 found 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 ex- 
 cusable 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 Shakespeare, who 
 was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose 
 methods would shock Flaubert. Indeed, the 
 amateurishness of Shakespeare 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 ama- 
 teur. 
 
 IV 
 
 Of this poor neglected matter of technique 
 the more important branch is design ■ — or con- 
 struction. It is the branch of the art — of all 
 
52 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 tech- 
 nique — 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-de- 
 signed picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one 
 particular spot. If the eye is drawn with equal 
 force to several different spots, then we re- 
 proach 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 fig- 
 
WRITING NOVELS 53 
 
 ures 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 pre- 
 sented 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 mo- 
 tive 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, natu- 
 rally, 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 
 
54 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 * / 
 
 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, over- 
 flowing with creative force, is to scatter the in- 
 terest. In both his major works Tolstoi found 
 the temptation too strong for him. Anna 
 Karenina is not one novel, but two, and suf- 
 fers 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 sis- 
 ters 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 
 
WRITING NOVELS 55 
 
 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 con- 
 struction, or plot. By interest I mean the in- 
 terest 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 anx- 
 iously guessing what will happen next. 
 
 When the reader is misled — not intention- 
 ally in order to get an effect, but clumsily 
 through amateurishness — then the construe- 
 
56 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 tion 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, wan- 
 ton, 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 capri- 
 cious and monstrous fancy for Algernon, de- 
 votes some sixteen pages to the young knave's 
 vagaries with an illicit thousand pounds. 
 That the sixteen pages are excessively bril- 
 liant does not a bit excuse the wilful unshape- 
 liness 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 
 
WRITING NOVELS 57 
 
 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 mysteri- 
 ous thing is superior in form to its coarse 
 fellow, the event-plot (which I positively do 
 not believe), — even then I still hold that slop- 
 piness in the fabrication of the event-plot 
 amounts to a grave iniquity. In this connec- 
 tion I have in mind, among English novels, 
 chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," 
 George Eliot, the Brontes, and Anthony Trol- 
 lope. 
 
 The one other important rule in construc- 
 tion is that the plot should be kept throughout 
 within the same convention. All plots — even 
 those of our most sacred naturalistic contem- 
 poraries — are and must be a conventionalisa- 
 tion 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 mid- 
 
58 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 day may be nearer the sun than the motorist, 
 but regarded as a portion of the entire jour- 
 ney 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. " Natural- 
 ist " is merely an epithet expressing self-satis- 
 faction. 
 
 Similarly, the habit of deriding as " conven- 
 tional " plots constructed in an earlier conven- 
 tion, is ridiculous. Under this head Dickens 
 in particular has been assaulted; I have as- 
 saulted him myself. But within their con- 
 vention, 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 undenia- 
 bly do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been ar- 
 
WRITING NOVELS 59 
 
 raigned 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 idosyn- 
 crasy 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 sym- 
 bolic illustration of an idea that a writer of fic- 
 tion 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 con- 
 vention, 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. 
 
60 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 V 
 
 Leaving the seductive minor question of 
 ornamentation, I come lastly to the question of 
 getting the semblance of life on to the page be- 
 fore 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 feat- 
 ures 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 ma- 
 terial? 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 hu- 
 man being may entrust him with confidences 
 extremely precious for his craft. But such 
 windfalls are so rare as to be negligible. 
 
WRITING NOVELS 61 
 
 From outward symptoms he can guess some- 
 thing of the psychology of others. He can use 
 a real person as the unrecognisable but help- 
 ful 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 ar- 
 ranging 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 de- 
 tected 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 thou- 
 sand convincing details interrogate that part of 
 
62 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 his own individuality which corresponds to the 
 particular character. The foundation of his 
 equipment is universal sympathy. And the re- 
 sult 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 novel- 
 ist 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 predilec- 
 tions of their own individuality. Again and 
 again they think they are creating, by observa- 
 tion, 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, 
 
WRITING NOVELS 63 
 
 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 Christopher biographical dic- 
 tionary of the characters of Balzac, a tall vol- 
 ume of six hundred pages, there are some two 
 thousand entries of different individuals, but 
 probably fewer than a dozen genuine distinc- 
 tive types. No creative artist ever repeated 
 himself more brazenly or more successfully 
 than Balzac. His miser, his vicious delight- 
 ful 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 Shake- 
 speare. Hamlet of Denmark was only the last 
 and greatest of a series of Shakespearean 
 Hamlets. 
 
 It may be asked, finally : What of the actual 
 process of handling the raw material dug out 
 
64 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 of existence and of the artist's self — the proc- 
 ess 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 uncompro- 
 mising struggle for the truth. They positively 
 like the artist to fall to temptation. If he 
 falls, they exclaim, "How sweet!" The lat- 
 ter are capable of savouring the fine unpleas- 
 antness of the struggle for truth. And when 
 
WRITING NOVELS 65 
 
 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 
 
PART III 
 
 WRITING PLAYS 
 
 I 
 
 THERE is an idea abroad, assiduously 
 fostered as a rule by critics who hap- 
 pen 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 weari- 
 ness between the first conception and the first 
 performance of a play is compared with the 
 whole weariness between the first conception 
 69 
 
70 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 writ- 
 ting with writing.) It seems to me that the 
 sole persons entitled to judge of the compara- 
 tive 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 dif- 
 ferences 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 dram- 
 atist 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-preserva- 
 tion. 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 
 
WRITING PLAYS 71 
 
 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 be- 
 hind the scenes. A famous actor-manager 
 once kindly gave me the benefit of his experi- 
 ence, and what he said was that a dramatist 
 who wished to learn his business must live be- 
 hind the scenes — and study the works of 
 Dion Boucicault! The truth is that no tech- 
 nique is so crude and so simple as the tech- 
 nique 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 hon- 
 estly try to convince the naive dramatist that 
 effects can only be obtained in the precise way 
 
72 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 man- 
 darins have ever said and will ever say that a 
 technique which does not correspond with 
 their own is no technique, but simple clumsi- 
 ness. 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 in- 
 
WRITING PLAYS 73 
 
 dieted 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 amateur- 
 ish 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 con- 
 sider the ways of Sardou, Henri Bernstein, and 
 Sir Herbert Tree, and be wise. Most posi- 
 
74 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 tively they would assert that Hamlet was not 
 a play. And their pupils of the daily press 
 would point out — what surely Mr. Shaks- 
 pere 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 ex- 
 pect 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 drama- 
 tist who sends a pretty woman off in street at- 
 tire and seeks to bring her on again in thirty 
 seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail 
 
WRITING PLAYS 75, 
 
 in stage technique, but he has not proved that 
 stage technique is tremendously difficult; he 
 has proved something quite else. 
 
 Ill 
 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 
 
76 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 ago we had an enormous palaver about the 
 " art of the short story," which numerous per- 
 sons who had omitted to write novels pro- 
 nounced 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 con- 
 struction is less complicated, because the bal- 
 ance of its proportions can be more easily cor- 
 rected by means of a rapid survey, because it 
 is lawful and even necessary in it to leave un- 
 done many things which are very hard to do, 
 and because the emotional strain is less pro- 
 longed. The most difficult thing in all art is 
 to maintain the imaginative tension unslack- 
 ened throughout a considerable period. 
 
 Then, not only does a play contain less mat- 
 ter than a novel — it is further simplified by 
 the fact that it contains fewer kinds of mat- 
 ter, and less subtle kinds of matter. There are 
 numerous delicate and difficult affairs of craft 
 that the dramatist need not think about at 
 
WRITING PLAYS 77 
 
 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 dis- 
 covered. 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 dis- 
 cretion. 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 sub- 
 urban train will have departed before he has 
 reached the crisis of the play. The last sub- 
 urban 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 
 
78 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 crea- 
 ture say things and do things. But if they set 
 out to portray a charming woman, the drama- 
 tist 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 unapproacha- 
 bility. The electric light burns in the novel- 
 ist'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 drama- 
 tist writes curtly, " Enter Millicent." All are 
 anxious to do the dramatist's job for him. Is 
 the play being read at home — the reader ea- 
 gerly and with brilliant success puts his ima- 
 gination to work and completes a charming 
 Millicent after his own secret desires. 
 
WRITING PLAYS 79 
 
 (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 super- 
 lative difficulty which is narrowly circum- 
 scribed 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 improbabili- 
 ties and artifice ; and the greater portion of the 
 artifice is employed in just this trickery of per- 
 suasion. 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 de- 
 clines to credit the statement and condemns 
 
80 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 re- 
 warded 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 neces- 
 sity for leaving out is more acute in the one 
 than in the other. The adjective "photo- 
 graphic" 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 
 
WRITING PLAYS 81 
 
 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 diffi- 
 cult, 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 sub- 
 ject, 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 considera- 
 tions 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 
 
82 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 curi- 
 osity, 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. 
 
WRITING PLAYS 83 
 
 In particular, I would urge that a play, any 
 more than a novel, need not be dramatic, em- 
 ploying 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 in- 
 terest 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 con- 
 tinue for about a century yet to excommuni- 
 cate 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 
 
84 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 launch at me one of those mandarinic epigram- 
 matic questions which are supposed to over- 
 throw 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 psychologi- 
 cal 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 ad- 
 jective " 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 uni- 
 versally accepted as such — even by man- 
 darins. For be it noted that the mandarin is 
 never consistent. 
 
 My definition brings me to the sole tech- 
 nical 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 
 
WRITING PLAYS 85 
 
 than it seems, and not invariably even a sure 
 point of distinction between the two kinds of 
 narrative. For a novel may consist exclu- 
 sively 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 gener- 
 ally 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 
 
86 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 al- 
 leged 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 funda- 
 mental 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 
 
WRITING PLAYS 87 
 
 belong exclusively to literature, because its ef- 
 fect depends on something more than the com- 
 position 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 re- 
 sents this uncomfortable fact, but the fact ex- 
 ists. 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 collabora- 
 tion. 
 
 Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the 
 
88 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 whole work of creation before the acting be- 
 gins 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 visu- 
 alise 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 ulti- 
 mate interpretation will perforce falsify his 
 
WRITING PLAYS 89 
 
 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 seri- 
 ous 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 inevi- 
 tably — 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 
 
go THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 power- 
 ful 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 adven- 
 ture. Some of the most glittering successes 
 have been rehearsed in an atmosphere of set- 
 tled 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 
 
WRITING PLAYS 91 
 
 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 ex- 
 perience could not happen to a novel, because 
 when a novel is written it is finished. 
 
 And when the director of rehearsals, or pro- 
 ducer, has been chosen, and this priceless and 
 mysterious person has his first serious con- 
 fabulation 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 te- 
 merity 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 cast- 
 ing. " What do you think of X. for the old 
 
92 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 man? " asks the producer. The author is stag- 
 gered. Is it conceivable that so renowned a 
 producer can have so misread and misunder- 
 stood the play? X. would be preposterous as 
 the old man. But the producer goes on talk- 
 ing. And suddenly the author sees possibili- 
 ties in X. But at the same time he sees a dif- 
 ferent 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 trans- 
 mutations; the author recognises in it some 
 likeness to his beloved child, but it is the like- 
 ness of a first cousin. 
 
 At the first rehearsal, and for many rehears- 
 als, 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 
 
WRITING PLAYS 93 
 
 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 col- 
 laboration. The first preoccupation of the in- 
 terpreters 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 ve- 
 hicle 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 atti- 
 tude 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 bril- 
 liant 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 
 
94 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 pro- 
 ducer, 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 pro- 
 ducer, 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 sur- 
 prising, 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 
 
WRITING PLAYS 95 
 
 suggest possibilities, they execute them. And 
 the author is confronted by artistic phenom- 
 ena for which lawfully he may not claim 
 credit. On the other hand, he may be con- 
 fronted 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-re- 
 hearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. 
 And the dramatist lying awake in the night re- 
 flects, 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 can- 
 not 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 
 
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 con- 
 tempt for popularity. The latter, however, al- 
 ways failed to conceal their envy of popu- 
 lar authors, and this envy was a phenom- 
 enon 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 or- 
 der to keep his emotions as much as possible 
 to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest 
 nonsense has been and will be written by un- 
 99 
 
ioo THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 creative critics, of course in the higher inter- 
 ests of creative authors, about popularity and 
 the proper attitude of the artist thereto. But 
 possibly the attitude of a first-class artist him- 
 self 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 refer- 
 ences to popularity, references overt and 
 covert. Meredith could never — and quite 
 naturally — get away from the idea of popu- 
 larity. He was a student of the English pub- 
 lic, and could occasionally be unjust to it. 
 Writing to M. Andre Raffalovich (who had 
 sent him a letter of appreciation) in Novem- 
 ber, 1881, he said: "I venture to judge by 
 your name that you are at most but half Eng- 
 lish. I can consequently believe in the feel- 
 ing you express for the work of an unpopular 
 writer. Otherwise one would incline to be 
 sceptical, for the English are given to prac- 
 tical jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors 
 who are supposed to languish in the shade 
 amuses them." A remark curiously unfair to 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 101 
 
 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 con- 
 stant 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 peo- 
 ple 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 there- 
 fore bound to work double ties, 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 Mere- 
 dith about the same time he sums up his career 
 
102 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 master- 
 pieces. 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 immor- 
 tality. 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-re- 
 spect and the respect of his friends. He had 
 failed only in one thing — immediate popu- 
 larity. 
 
 II 
 
 Assuming then that an author is justified 
 in desiring immediate popularity, instead of be- 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 103 
 
 ing content with poverty and the unheard 
 plaudits of posterity, another point presents it- 
 self. Ought he to limit himself to a mere de- 
 sire for popularity, or ought he actually to do 
 something, or to refrain from doing some- 
 thing, to the special end of obtaining popular- 
 ity? 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 neces- 
 sity of facing the alternative. Occasionally, 
 by chance, a genius may be so fortunately con- 
 stituted and so brilliantly endowed that he cap- 
 tures the public at once, prestige being estab- 
 lished, 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 
 
io 4 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 appreciation in the vast mediocrity of the pub- 
 lic, 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 ex- 
 ists. 
 
 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 be- 
 come 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-com- 
 promise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 105 
 
 " 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 di- 
 vided. . . . And in truth, being a servant of 
 the public, / must wait till my master com- 
 mands 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 appreci- 
 ates it — otherwise the pot-boiler. In 1861 
 Meredith wrote to Mrs. Ross : " I am en- 
 gaged in extra potboiling work which enables 
 
106 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 me to do this," i.e., to write an occasional long 
 poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh, base compro- 
 mise 1 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 Mere- 
 dith 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 occasion- 
 ally 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 com- 
 mon 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. 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 107 
 
 The truth is that an artist who demands ap- 
 preciation 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 or- 
 der, 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 im- 
 portant point — hypocritical, illogical and ab- 
 surd. But what would you? You cannot 
 
108 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 defy it ; you literally cannot. If you tried, you 
 would not even get as far as print, to say noth- 
 ing 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 edu- 
 cation 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 ap- 
 plied to the public. The public is a great actu- 
 ality, 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 clever- 
 ness — 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 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 109 
 
 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 some- 
 thing that he would prefer to refuse. You can 
 use a thousand devices on the excellent simple- 
 ton. . . . And in the process you may degrade 
 yourself to a mere popularity-hunter! Of 
 course you may; as you may become a drunk- 
 ard 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 usu- 
 ally 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 ines- 
 sentials 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 re- 
 sult 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 in- 
 ferior of a plain, honest merchant in stamina, 
 
no THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 and ought to retire to the upper branches of 
 the Civil Service. 
 
 Ill 
 
 When the author has finished the compo- 
 sition 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 apprecia- 
 tion of the essential in him — there still re- 
 mains to be accomplished something which is 
 not unimportant in the entire affair of ob- 
 taining 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 ad- 
 vantageously as possible. In other words, 
 when he lays down the pen he ought to be- 
 come 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 mes- 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC in 
 
 sage, 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 infuri- 
 ates the dilettanti of the literary world, to 
 whom the very word " royalties " is anathema. 
 They apparently would prefer to treat litera- 
 ture 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 success- 
 ful — and not a few of the successful also — 
 failed to obtain the fair reward of their work. 
 The dilettanti's snobbishness and sentimental- 
 ity 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 
 
ii2 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 have nothing to do with literature. But agree- 
 ments and royalties have a very great deal to 
 do with literature. Full contact between ar- 
 tist 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 as- 
 sisted in his career by the yoke, by servitude, 
 by enforced monotony, by overwork, by eco- 
 nomic inferiority. See Meredith's correspond- 
 ence 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 dear- 
 est 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 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 113 
 
 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 cer- 
 tain supreme artists one might be excused for 
 thinking, indeed, that they were more inter- 
 ested 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 re- 
 ality — 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 Mere- 
 dith and had a tonic effect on his whole sys- 
 tem. It is often hinted, even if it is not often 
 said, that great popularity ought to disturb the 
 
ii 4 TH E AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 apti- 
 tude 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 pat- 
 ently 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 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 115 
 
 a free mind if I am to be bothered all the time 
 by details of business." 
 
 Apart from the fact that no artist who pre- 
 tends also to be a man can in this world hope 
 for a free mind, and that if he seeks it by neg- 
 lecting his debtors he will be deprived of it 
 by his creditors — apart from that, the artist's 
 demand for a free mind is reasonable. More- 
 over, 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 major- 
 ity — 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 theatri- 
 cal manager have been subjected for centuries 
 to a special and grave temptation. The ordi- 
 nary merchant deals with other merchants — 
 his equals in business skill. The publisher 
 and the theatrical manager deal with what 
 
n6 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 amounts to a race of children, of whom even 
 arch-angels could not refrain from taking ad- 
 vantage. 
 
 When the democratisation of literature se- 
 riously 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 conse- 
 quence 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 im- 
 provement of letters. The literary agent, 
 against obstacles still more immense, has car- 
 ried out the details of the revolution. The 
 outcry — partly sentimental, partly snobbish, 
 but mainly interested — was at first tremen- 
 dous against these meddlers who would de- 
 stroy the charming personal relations that 
 used to exist between, for example, the author 
 and the publisher. (The less said about those 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 117 
 
 charming personal relations the better. Doc- 
 uments exist.) But the main battle is now 
 over, and every one concerned is beautifully 
 aware who holds the field. Though much re- 
 mains to be done, much has been done; and 
 to-day 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 pro- 
 fession 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 k likely to be entirely admirable who 
 is not a man before he is an artist. The no- 
 tion that art is first and the rest of the uni- 
 
n8 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 verse nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity 
 and futility in art. The artist who is too sen- 
 sitive 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 Flau- 
 bert. At an early age Flaubert convinced him- 
 self that he had no use for the world of men. 
 He demanded to be left in solitude and tran- 
 quillity. The morbid streak in his constitu- 
 tion grew rapidly under the fostering influ- 
 ences of peace and tranquillity. He was bril- 
 liantly peculiar as a schoolboy. As an old 
 man of twenty-two, mourning over the van- 
 ished 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 ego- 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 119 
 
 tism, but as the recipient of Flaubert's love- 
 letters she must win universal sympathy. 
 
 Full of a grievance against the whole mod- 
 ern planet, Flaubert turned passionately to an- 
 cient 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 pres- 
 ent age is now deciding. His fictions of mod- 
 ern life undoubtedly suffer from his detesta- 
 tion of the material; but considering his man- 
 ner of existence it is marvellous that he should 
 have been able to accomplish any of them, 
 except Un Coeur Simple. The final one, 
 Douvard 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 re- 
 sultant impression is that the author has 
 ruined a central idea which was well suited 
 for a grand larkish extravaganza in the hands 
 
120 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 of a French Swift. But the spectacle of Flau- 
 bert writing in mots justes a grand larkish ex- 
 travaganza cannot be conjured up by fancy. 
 
 There are many sub-Flauberts rife in Lon- 
 don. 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 forever being surprised 
 and hurt by the crudity and coarseness of hu- 
 man nature, and forever bracing themselves 
 to be not as others are. They would have in- 
 curred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just 
 discipline for them would be that they should 
 be cross-examined by the great bully in pres- 
 ence of a jury of butchers and sentenced ac- 
 cordingly. The morbid Flaubertian shrink- 
 ing 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 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 121 
 
 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 Johnson- 
 ially 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 evolu- 
 tion? 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 be- 
 come incapable of real existence. Each is a 
 Stylites on a pillar. Their opinion on Leon 
 Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John, 
 
122 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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 inter- 
 est 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 ad- 
 vertisements and announcements relating to 
 the arts. The occasional frequenting of this 
 circle may not be disadvantageous to the crea- 
 tive artist. But let him keep himself inoc- 
 ulated against its disease by constant steady 
 plunges into the cold sea of the general na- 
 tional 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 
 
ARTIST AND PUBLIC 123 
 
 is often astounding, must forever constitute 
 the main part of the material in which he 
 works. 
 
 Above all, let not the creative artist sup- 
 pose that the antidote to the circle of dilettan- 
 tism 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 im- 
 mediately done disaster will soon be upon us. 
 This is the illusion to which the circle of so- 
 cial 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 func- 
 tion of the artist is certainly concerned more 
 with what is than with what ought to be. 
 When all necessary reform has been accom- 
 plished 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? 
 
124 THE AUTHOR'S CRAFT 
 
 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.