X
About 1868 there was a somewhat foolish custom of publishing collections of short stories in Christmas numbers of the magazines. These stories were very poor as a rule, and they were strung together by a quite needless thread. Dickens, for instance, had his Mugby Function, the introduction to which he wrote himself. Once a Week, of course, must fall in with the fashion. To the Christmas number of 1868 I contributed a short story; to that of 1869 I contributed the larger part. It was called “Titania’s Farewell,” and described the last night of the fairies in this island. The motif was not, it is true, original. Corbett’s “Farewell to the Fairies” belonged to the seventeenth century, Wood’s “Plea for the Midsummer Fairies” to the nineteenth; but one cannot hope to be always original. The subject was fresh enough for the general reader, and the treatment was light, and I think pleasing, with a slight tinge of sadness. All kinds of bogies, wraiths, and goblins were introduced, and there were dances and songs. In a word, I believe it was a pretty little thing—at all events, it found many friends. It was published anonymously. To me this flimsy trifle became of the utmost importance, because it changed the whole current of my life. In place of a writer of “studies,” “appreciations,” and the lighter kind of criticism, I became a novelist. Nothing could have been more fortunate. I now understand that there is no branch of the literary life more barren and dreary than that of writing notes upon poets and other writers dead and gone. I have seen the effect of this left upon so many. First, everybody can do it, well or ill; therefore there is a striving for something distinctive, resulting in extravagance, exaggerations, studied obscurity, the pretence of seeing more than other people can see in an author, the parade of an inferior writer as a great genius; so we have the revival of a poet deservedly forgotten—all pour l’effet, and all leading directly to habitual dishonesty, sham, and the estimation of form above matter. Indeed, many of these writers of “studies,” after a few years, fail to understand matter or to look for anything but form. It is this that they look for and this alone that they talk about. I was rescued from their unfortunate fate while I still clung to the subject-matter as the principal and most important consideration. In an essay the thought is the first thing—the message which the writer has to communicate, the views and conclusions of his mind; the style comes afterwards. A good essay is not an affair of adjectives with new applications, nor of strange phrases, nor of new arrangements of words. At the same time, when a man has a thing to say, he must study how to present it in the most attractive form possible for him.
Consider, for instance, the way of the world in a picture gallery. The crowd go round the rooms from picture to picture; they stop before any canvas that tells a story; they study the story; they do not greatly care for, nor do they inquire too closely into, the method of telling the story—most of them never ask at all how the story is told; they are entirely ignorant about grouping and drawing, about light, shadow, colour, and harmony. Presently the professed critic comes along. Then we hear the art jargon; there is talk of “values,” of “middle distance,” and all the rest of it; but not a word of instruction. This kind of critic is like the man who writes “studies” and “appreciations”: he has developed a jargon. If we are lucky, we may meet the true critic who knows the construction of a picture, and can divine first the thought and attempt of the artist, and next his method, and its success or failure. It is the same with books and their critics. The difference between the sham critic and the real critic is that the latter shows the reader how to look first for the intention of the book and next how to examine into the method employed in carrying out that intention. I do not think that I was born to be a true critic, and by the blessing of the Lord I have been prevented from becoming a sham critic. In the world of letters, I find many who write about books generously and with enthusiasm—these are the young writers; I find many who write jargon—they are mostly the older writers, for the young and generous spirits degenerate; and I find a few, a very few, whose judgments are lessons both to the author and the reader. These true critics are never spiteful; they are never “smart”; they are never derisive; they never pretend to be indignant; they observe courtesy even in condemnation; the writing is always well-bred; and their words are always conclusive.
For my own part I have always belonged to the crowd who read the story in the canvas; and this whether I am studying a picture, a poem, a drama, or a novel. It is the story that I look for first. When I have read, or made out, the story, I may perhaps go on to consider how it is told; perhaps I am quite satisfied with having read the story—indeed, most stories are not worth discussing or considering. In many cases I put the matter first and the form afterwards. The true critic considers the story which the author has attempted to tell, as the first point; the sham critic considers the language and the style (which is, with him, a fashion of the day), and goes no farther. I used to think myself a critic when I was only a sympathetic listener easily absorbed in the story, carried out of myself by the art of the novelist or the poet, whether apparent or concealed. I now understand my limitations in the field of criticism, and I am continually grateful for the accident which took me out of the ranks of reviewers and criticasters and placed me in the company of the story-tellers.
It ought to be understood that a true critic—one who is jealous for both the form and the matter, one who is above all personal considerations, one who is not a “slasher” and a “slater,” but a cold and calm judge—is as rare as a true poet, and as valuable. Editors do not understand this. They seem to make no effort to secure the true critics; they allow the disappointed failure, the “slasher,” and the “slater” to defile their columns unchecked. There are not, in fact, enough true critics to go round, but an effort should be made by the younger men to imitate their methods. I believe that one can count on ten fingers the few critics whose judgments are lessons of instruction to writers as well as readers, who take broad views of literary work and do not judge a writer by a fault of taste here, or a wrong date there, or an error of opinion, or a mistake in fact.
I was not, I say, by gift of nature one of this small company. Had I continued in the line which I had at first designed, I should certainly have belonged before long to that large company of writers who are always ready with a paper on any literary subject which you like to name; who do odd jobs for publishers; who are made men when they can get a “study” of a writer into a series; and who drag down—down—down—every magazine which gives them free access. In a word, there were two lines open to me: I might continue as secretary of a society and so obtain a livelihood, doing literary work outside the daily hours of routine—always in bachelor chambers, and becoming every year more of a hermit; or I might give up secretarial work and live upon literature—somehow, earning a precarious income, a hack and a dependent, soured, poor, disappointed, and bitter. There are many such unfortunates about. They pretend to be leaders; they give themselves airs of superiority; they are bitter and ungenerous reviewers; their lot is still the lot of Grub Street; they are, as always, the children of Gibeon who hew wood and draw water and do hack work for their employers, for the pay of a solicitor’s clerk. That I was spared from taking either of these two obvious lines was greatly due to the writing and publishing of “Titania’s Farewell.”
For after the appearance of “Titania’s Farewell,” Rice came to me with a proposal. It was that I would collaborate with him in writing a novel, the plot of which had already been drawn out in the rough by himself. His plot was simply the story of the Prodigal Son with variations. The wanderer was to return apparently repentant, in reality resolved upon getting out of the old man all that he could secure. The father was to be a rich miser, a banker in a country town. The idea seemed to offer great possibilities in the way of incident and character. In fact, the more one looked at it, the more these possibilities extended. Of course the Prodigal would have a past to hamper him; one past belonging to the time before he left the paternal home, and another belonging to his adventurous career about the world. I accepted the proposal. I set to work with a will, and before long our Prodigal was working out his later developments in the columns of Once a Week. The plot, naturally, was modified. The Prodigal grew more human; he became softened; but the past remained with him to hamper him and to drag him down.
When it came to reproducing the story as a volume, Rice proposed that we should print it and give it to a publisher as a commission book. There was no doubt about its success from the first. As a pecuniary speculation it was as successful as could be expected in those days, when half-a-dozen novelists commanded a circulation in three-volume forms of twelve hundred or so; and the next dozen or so were lucky if they got rid of six hundred copies of their works. I do not think that my own share of the proceeds, from the beginning to the end, of Ready Money Mortiboy reached more than £200 or £250.
I have often been asked to explain the method of collaboration adopted by Rice and myself. The results were certainly satisfactory so far as popularity was concerned, a fact which goes a long way to explaining this curiosity, no other literary collaboration having been comparable, in this country, with ours for success. My answer to the question was always the same. It is impossible that I should offer any explanation or give any account of this method, seeing that my collaborateur has been dead since the year 1882. It is enough to state that we worked without disagreement; that there was never any partnership between us in the ordinary sense of the word; but that the collaboration went on from one story to another always without any binding conditions, always liable to be discontinued; while each man carried on his own independent literary work, and was free to write fiction, if he pleased, by himself.
The collaboration had its advantages; among others, that of freeing me, for my part, from the worry of business arrangements. I am, and always have been, extremely averse from making terms and arrangements for myself. At the same time, if I were asked for my opinion as to collaboration in fiction, it would be decidedly against it. I say this without the least desire to depreciate the literary ability of my friend and collaborateur. The arrangement lasted for ten years and resulted in as many successful novels. I only mean that, after all, an artist must necessarily stand alone. If two men work together, the result must inevitably bear the appearance of one man’s work; the style must be the same throughout; the two men must be rolled into one; each must be loyal to the other; neither can be held responsible for plot, incident, character, or dialogue. There will come a time when both men fret under the condition; when each desires, but is not able, to enjoy the reputation of his own good work; and feels, with the jealousy natural to an artist, irritated by the loss of half of himself and ready to accept the responsibility of failure in order to make sure of the meed of success. Now that Rice is dead it is impossible for me to lay hands upon any passage or page and to say “This belongs to Rice—this is mine.” The collaboration would have broken down, I believe, amicably. It would have been far better if it had broken down five years before the death of Rice, so that he might have achieved what has been granted to myself—an independent literary position.
There are, however, some parts in our joint work which, without injustice to him or to myself, I may fairly assign to one or the other. In Ready Money Mortiboy, as I have stated, the plot and the origin and the conception were his; the whole of the part concerned with the country town and the bank is his. On the other hand, in the story called By Celia’s Arbour the whole of the local part, that which belongs to Portsmouth, is my own. I was born in the place, which Rice never, to my knowledge, even saw. On the other hand, there are many parts of all the stories, in which our rambles about London, and conversations over these rambles, suggested situations, plots, and characters, which it would be impossible to assign to either. Of The Golden Butterfly, the origin which has already been plainly stated in certain introductions may be repeated. The thing itself—the Golden Butterfly—was seen by my brother, Mr. Edgar Besant, in Sacramento, California. He told me about it, and it suggested possibilities. Rice at the same time had thought of a story of a Canadian who “struck ile,” became a millionaire, created a town, and was there ruined, town and all, by the drying up of the supply. He also found the “fighting editor.” The twins were a reminiscence, not an invention, of my own. The rest, as any novelist will understand, was simply the construction of a novel with these materials as its basis. This story appeared in the year 1876, a quarter of a century ago. Like Ready Money Mortiboy, it has never ceased to sell: last year the publishers—now the proprietors—brought out an edition at sixpence. They sold the whole—150,000 copies—in three weeks. I repeat that I desire to suggest nothing that might seem to lessen the work of Rice in the collaboration, while, both for his sake and my own, I regret that it ever went beyond The Golden Butterfly, which was quite the most successful of the joint novels. The continued popularity of this and one or two others of my novels has always been the most gratifying circumstance in my literary career.
In 1876 Rice and I began to write the Christmas number for All the Year Round, which was continued until Rice’s death in 1882, and after that by myself till 1887. The stories which formed these Christmas numbers were in length very nearly as long as many stories now produced at six shillings. Some of them were very popular; all of them gave me the greatest pleasure possible in writing, partly because they were short enough to turn on a single motif with a small number of characters. The three-volume novel, on the other hand, was three times the length of the Christmas number and presented much greater constructive difficulties. The ignorant reviewer used to talk of the “Procrustean” length of the three-volume novel. Of course there was no more uniformity of length about the three-volume novel than exists now with the one-volume. The three-volume novel, in fact, varied in length, say, from 100,000 words to 300,000 words. It was thought to be giving short measure to present the former length, but the longer might tax the energies of the reader too much.
The ignorant reviewer has also, on many occasions, waxed eloquent over the estimate of length by so many words. He imagines that the words are carefully counted and that the writer is bound not to exceed a certain fixed number and not to offer a story less than that number. Now, since most novels of repute appear first as serials, one is bound to consider the length of each instalment, and there is no more ready way of estimating the length than by the number of words. I have written serials for a great many publications. Let me take one, the Illustrated London News. Here the only condition imposed on the author was that the story was to run for twenty-six weeks. This meant an average length of so many columns. Translated into numbers, it meant about 6,000 words for each instalment. But I am quite certain that the editor of the Illustrated London News never counted the words; if the chapter was a few hundred words over or under the average length, it mattered nothing. As I always write on paper of the same size and know very approximately the number of words that fill one page, I have never had any difficulty in dividing the chapters into tolerably equal instalments.
Formerly, the writer reckoned by sheets; still he must have learned how many words go to a sheet; or by pages, but still he must have learned how many words go to a page; or by columns, but with the same necessity. It is surely better to begin at once with the number of words, always understanding that there is not, as the ignorant reviewer would insist, a yard measure or a two-foot rule introduced or any rigid condition about the number of words.
Let me note one or two other points on which the reviewer often betrays his ignorance. The Spectator is in most respects a well-conducted and well-informed journal. I saw in the Spectator sometime ago a notice of a certain recently deceased writer who, the reviewer pointed out, had most unfortunately brought out his novels in serial form, so that he was compelled to end each instalment with a sensational incident, a circumstance which spoiled his work. One would really think that a person allowed to write for the Spectator would have known better than to talk such rubbish; he or she would at least, one would think, have sufficient knowledge of the history of fiction to know that Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, George Meredith, William Black, Blackmore, Hardy—everybody of note among modern novelists—brought out their novels in serial form. Yet this fact has not spoiled their work. I have, if that affects the question, brought out nearly all my novels in serial form first. And I may safely aver that I have never felt, recognised, or understood that there was the least necessity for ending an instalment with an incident. There is, however, no end to the rubbish—mostly ignorant, partly malevolent—that is written and published about novels. In the same paper, for instance, I found the other day an objection to one of my characters on the ground that it was not a “transcript from nature!” Therefore, if you please, no novelist has a right to present a character which is not a portrait! Why, the characters of the first and best novelists are never “transcripts” from nature. They are suggested by certain points, often unsuspected points, in real characters. That to which my reviewer objected was a character suited to the actual times, insomuch as he might very well exist, and perhaps does exist. No impossibility was presented. But he was certainly not a “transcript from nature.”
The ignorant and prejudiced reviewer of novels is not perhaps so much to blame as the editor of the paper where the review appears, for so long as the editor expects his reviewer to pronounce a judgment upon a dozen novels every week, so long will those judgments be either miserably inadequate or dishonest. I cannot conceive any kind of work more demoralising to a writer than that of reviewing a dozen novels every week in, say, two columns. The inevitable result is that he loses all sense of proportion; one novel becomes as much worth mentioning as another; George Meredith—as actually happened once in a “literary” journal—may be dismissed in a paragraph between the works of two schoolgirls. The reviewer, after a short course of this kind of work, loses the power of judgment; he scamps the reading so persistently that he becomes unable to read; he makes an effort to get at something like the story, which he proceeds to tell baldly and badly; appreciation is impossible where there has been no real reading: he cannot praise because praise is a definite thing which, unless it is general and meaningless, must be based on actual reading; but he can depreciate. Sometimes, of course, in his haste, he makes dire blunders. I have known many such cases. Thus, a novel praised to the skies one week was slated pitilessly, a few weeks later, in the same weekly! I remember once in the Athenæum a notice of a novel of my own. The book was dismissed in eight or ten lines, everyone of which contained a separate misstatement concerning the story. It was, I remember, stated that the whole action of the book took place in a banker’s office. There was no mention of such a thing as a bank or a banker in the whole book.
It is to me, I confess, a continual subject of wonder that an editor who allows books to be noticed in batches—ten or a dozen every week—does not understand that by doing so he actually throws away the whole weight of his paper as a critical organ—the whole weight of his authority. Surely it would be better, in the long run, to preserve the character of a paper for fair, dispassionate, and competent criticism, than, for the sake of pleasing publishers (who are wholly indifferent to criticism and care for nothing at all but a line of praise that they can quote, to issue miserable little paragraphs, whose praise carries no conviction—because it is and must be, so long as the present plan of reviewing by batches continues, couched in general terms—and whose condemnation can produce no effect upon the mind of the reader. Yet, in one paper after another, the suicidal policy is preserved. It must be remembered that these paragraphs are simply passed over by the majority of readers. It is impossible, week after week, to persuade them that the batch of books so noticed can have been read.
Another point in which the ordinary editor is blameworthy is that he takes no care to keep out of his paper the personal element. He allows the log-roller to praise his own friends and the spiteful and envious failure to abuse his enemies. This carelessness is so common in English journalism that one knows beforehand, when certain books appear, the organs in which they will be praised or assailed. Surely, for the credit of his paper, an editor might at least ascertain, beforehand, that a critic is neither the friend nor the enemy of the author. In the New York Critic, I have been told, every reviewer is on his honour not to undertake a criticism of the work of a personal friend or a personal enemy. We have many things to learn from America. The maintenance of the honour and the reputation and the authority of the critical columns of our journals is one of these things.
It is, of course, quite impossible for any journal to deal with all the books that appear—the trashy novels especially. Surely a review should be a distinction for the author and an opportunity for the critic. Why should not a responsible paper select one or two novels a week, as worthy, not of a paragraph among a batch of other paragraphs, but of a serious review by someone who is competent to speak of a work of art? There are certainly not a hundred novels in the year which are really so worthy; and the judgment, calmly considered, by a serious and educated critic should not only be of service to the author and to the book, but it would be instructive to the reader, who has for the most part studied no canons of criticism and formed consciously no literary standards. But the reviewer must be serious and educated. He must know what the canons of criticism mean; he must be trustworthy; he must not be the hack who rolls the log for his friend and “slates” his enemies; he must be in a word, a man of honour. Should there, then, be no criticism of bad books? Assuredly. It is a foolish waste of time and space to “slate” a poor little weakling which will never be presented to the public except in a seaside circulating library, made up of “remainders.” But in the case of a bad book, or a mischievous book, or a book which has succeeded and yet ought not to have succeeded, it is the duty of the critic to inform and instruct the reader as to the true character and tendencies of this book. This he can very well do, if he is himself a gentleman as well as a scholar, in the language and the manner of courtesy and politeness.
Let me return to my subject. The collaboration between Rice and myself lasted for one book after another—there was never any binding agreement, contract, or partnership—for about ten years. During this time we produced three highly successful novels, viz., Ready Money Mortiboy, The Golden Butterfly, and The Chaplain of the Fleet, and others—My Little Girl, By Celia’s Arbour, This Son of Vulcan, With Harp and Crown, The Monks of Thelema, The Seamy Side, and two or three volumes of short stories, including The Case of Mr. Lucraft, all of which did very well and made friends for the writers. The method of publication pursued was simple. The novel or the story first appeared in a magazine or journal; it was then published in three-volume form; after a year or so it came out in a single volume at 3s. 6d.; and finally as a “yellow-back” at 2s.
I think, trying to put myself outside these novels, that they are really a collection with which one may reasonably be satisfied. The book that I like best of them all is The Chaplain of the Fleet. It was the first of my eighteenth-century novels, and perhaps the best. The situations, the plot, the characters, all seem to me, if I may speak in praise of myself, original and striking. It was a subject which lent itself to firm and vigorous drawing. I am, in fact, more and more convinced that the first and most important thing is to have a clear story with strong characters. It was impossible that reviewers could be more appreciative than those who reviewed this series of novels. The collaboration lasted off and on for ten years. Then it came to an end.
Early in 1881 Rice was attacked by an illness, for which he came to town, thinking that a week or two of rest and treatment would set him right. He stayed in town for six weeks; he then went home and reported himself in a fair way of recovery. But then followed symptoms which were persistent and unaccountable; he could not eat anything without suffering dire pains; he tried oysters, chopped up raw beef, all kinds of things. Then the pains vanished; he even thought himself quite recovered; he went for a week or two to Dunquerque in August. On his return the symptoms reappeared. After lingering for six months in great suffering, he died in April 1882 at the age of thirty-nine; the cause was a cancer in the throat.