On Books and Arts
9781465685094
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
One of the most engaging of the wits of our day wrote lately in a weekly newspaper that it is, for the most part, only those who are not good enough actors to act successfully in Life, who are compelled to act at the Theatre. Under the influence of such an amiable paradox it is possible that we may ask ourselves, in regard to story-writing, whether the people singled out to practise it are those, chiefly, to whose personal history Romance has been denied: so that the greatest qualification even for the production of a lady’s love-tale, is—that the lady shall never have experienced a love-affair. Eminent precedents might be cited in support of the contention. A great editor once comfortably declared that the ideal journalist was a writer who did not know too much about his subject. The public did not want much knowledge, he said. The literary criticism in your paper would be perfect if you handed it over to the critic of Music; and the musical criticism would want for nothing if you assigned it to an expert in Art. And Mr. Thackeray, speaking of love-tales, said something that pointed the same way. He protested, no one should write a love-story after he was fifty. And why? Because he knew too much about it. But it was a personal application I was going to have given to the statement with which this paper begins. If the actor we see upon the boards be only there because more capable comedians are busy on the stage of the world, I am presumably invited by the Editor of The Nineteenth Century to hold forth on the Short Story because I am not a popular writer. The Editor, in the gentle exercise of his humour, bids me to fill the place which should be filled by the man of countless editions. It is true that in the matter of short stories, such a writer is not easy to find; and this too at a time when, if one is correctly informed, full many a lady, not of necessity of any remarkable gifts, maintains an honourable independence by the annual production of an improper novel. Small as my personal claims might be, were they based only on my books—Renunciations, for example, or Pastorals of France—I may say my say as one who, with production obviously scanty, has for twenty years been profoundly interested in the artistic treatment of the Short Story; who believes in the short story, not as a ready means of hitting the big public, but as a medium for the exercise of the finer art—as a medium, moreover, adapted peculiarly to that alert intelligence, on the part of the reader, which rebels sometimes at the longueurs of the conventional novel: the old three volumes or the new fat book. Nothing is so mysterious, for nothing is so instinctive, as the method of a writer. I cannot communicate the incommunicable. But at all events I will not express opinions aimed at the approval of the moment: convictions based on the necessity for epigram.
