ON a newspaper placard, the other day, I saw announced a new novel by a
celebrated author. I bought a copy of the paper, and turned eagerly to
the last page. I was disappointed to find that I had missed the first
six chapters. The story had commenced the previous Saturday; this was
Friday. I say I was disappointed and so I was, at first. But my
disappointment did not last long. The bright and intelligent sub-editor,
according to the custom now in vogue, had provided me with a short
synopsis of those first six chapters, so that without the trouble of
reading them I knew what they were all about.
“The first instalment,” I learned, “introduces the reader to a brilliant
and distinguished company, assembled in the drawing-room of Lady Mary’s
maisonette in Park Street. Much smart talk is indulged in.”
I know that “smart talk” so well. Had I not been lucky enough to miss
that first chapter I should have had to listen to it once again.
Possibly, here and there, it might have been new to me, but it would have
read, I know, so very like the old. A dear, sweet white-haired lady of
my acquaintance is never surprised at anything that happens.
“Something very much of the same kind occurred,” she will remember, “one
winter when we were staying in Brighton. Only on that occasion the man’s
name, I think, was Robinson.”
We do not live new stories—nor write them either. The man’s name in the
old story was Robinson, we alter it to Jones. It happened, in the old
forgotten tale, at Brighton, in the winter time; we change it to
Eastbourne, in the spring. It is new and original—to those who have not
heard “something very like it” once before.
“Much smart talk is indulged in,” so the sub-editor has explained. There
is absolutely no need to ask for more than that. There is a Duchess who
says improper things. Once she used to shock me. But I know her now.
She is really a nice woman; she doesn’t mean them. And when the heroine
is in trouble, towards the middle of the book, she is just as amusing on
the side of virtue. Then there is a younger lady whose speciality is
proverbs. Apparently whenever she hears a proverb she writes it down and
studies it with the idea of seeing into how many different forms it can
be twisted. It looks clever; as a matter of fact, it is extremely easy.
_Be virtuous and you will be happy_.
She jots down all the possible variations: _Be virtuous and you will be
unhappy_.
“Too simple that one,” she tells herself. _Be virtuous and your friends
will be happy if you are not_.
“Better, but not wicked enough. Let us think again. _Be happy and
people will jump to the conclusion that you are virtuous_.
“That’s good, I’ll try that one at to-morrow’s party.”
She is a painstaking lady. One feels that, better advised, she might
have been of use in the world.
There is likewise a disgraceful old Peer who tells naughty stories, but
who is good at heart; and one person so very rude that the wonder is who
invited him.
Occasionally a slangy girl is included, and a clergyman, who takes the
heroine aside and talks sense to her, flavoured with epigram. All these
people chatter a mixture of Lord Chesterfield and Oliver Wendell Holmes,
of Heine, Voltaire, Madame de Stael, and the late lamented H. J. Byron.
“How they do it beats me,” as I once overheard at a music hall a stout
lady confess to her friend while witnessing the performance of a clever
troup, styling themselves “The Boneless Wonders of the Universe.”
The synopsis added that: “Ursula Bart, a charming and unsophisticated
young American girl possessed of an elusive expression makes her first
acquaintance with London society.”
Here you have a week’s unnecessary work on the part of the author boiled
down to its essentials. She was young. One hardly expects an elderly
heroine. The “young” might have been dispensed with, especially seeing
it is told us that she was a girl. But maybe this is carping. There are
young girls and old girls. Perhaps it is as well to have it in black and
white; she was young. She was an American young girl. There is but one
American young girl in English fiction. We know by heart the
unconventional things that she will do, the startlingly original things
that she will say, the fresh illuminating thoughts that will come to her
as, clad in a loose robe of some soft clinging stuff, she sits before the
fire, in the solitude of her own room.
To complete her she had an “elusive expression.” The days when we used
to catalogue the heroine’s “points” are past. Formerly it was possible.
A man wrote perhaps some half-a-dozen novels during the whole course of
his career. He could have a dark girl for the first, a light girl for
the second, sketch a merry little wench for the third, and draw you
something stately for the fourth. For the remaining two he could go
abroad. Nowadays, when a man turns out a novel and six short stories
once a year, description has to be dispensed with. It is not the
writer’s fault. There is not sufficient variety in the sex. We used to
introduce her thus:
“Imagine to yourself, dear reader, an exquisite and gracious creature of
five feet three. Her golden hair of that peculiar shade”—here would
follow directions enabling the reader to work it out for himself. He was
to pour some particular wine into some particular sort of glass, and wave
it about before some particular sort of a light. Or he was to get up at
five o’clock on a March morning and go into a wood. In this way he could
satisfy himself as to the particular shade of gold the heroine’s hair
might happen to be. If he were a careless or lazy reader he could save
himself time and trouble by taking the author’s word for it. Many of
them did.
“Her eyes!” They were invariably deep and liquid. They had to be pretty
deep to hold all the odds and ends that were hidden in them; sunlight and
shadow, mischief, unsuspected possibilities, assorted emotions, strange
wild yearnings. Anything we didn’t know where else to put we said was
hidden in her eyes.
“Her nose!” You could have made it for yourself out of a pen’orth of
putty after reading our description of it.
“Her forehead!” It was always “low and broad.” I don’t know why it was
always low. Maybe because the intellectual heroine was not then popular.
For the matter of that I doubt if she be really popular now. The
brainless doll, one fears, will continue for many years to come to be
man’s ideal woman—and woman’s ideal of herself for precisely the same
period, one may be sure.
“Her chin!” A less degree of variety was permissible in her chin. It
had to be at an angle suggestive of piquancy, and it had to contain at
least the suspicion of a dimple.
To properly understand her complexion you were expected to provide
yourself with a collection of assorted fruits and flowers. There are
seasons in the year when it must have been difficult for the
conscientious reader to have made sure of her complexion. Possibly it
was for this purpose that wax flowers and fruit, carefully kept from the
dust under glass cases, were common objects in former times upon the
tables of the cultured.
Nowadays we content ourselves—and our readers also, I am inclined to
think—with dashing her off in a few bold strokes. We say that whenever
she entered a room there came to one dreams of an old world garden, the
sound of far-off bells. Or that her presence brought with it the scent
of hollyhocks and thyme. As a matter of fact I don’t think hollyhocks do
smell. It is a small point; about such we do not trouble ourselves. In
the case of the homely type of girl I don’t see why we should not borrow
Mr. Pickwick’s expression, and define her by saying that in some subtle
way she always contrived to suggest an odour of chops and tomato sauce.
If we desire to be exact we mention, as this particular author seems to
have done, that she had an “elusive expression,” or a penetrating
fragrance. Or we say that she moved, the centre of an indefinable
nuance.
But it is not policy to bind oneself too closely to detail. A wise
friend of mine, who knows his business, describes his hero invariably in
the vaguest terms. He will not even tell you whether the man is tall or
short, clean shaven or bearded.
“Make the fellow nice,” is his advice. “Let every woman reader picture
him to herself as her particular man. Then everything he says and does
becomes of importance to her. She is careful not to miss a word.”
For the same reason he sees to it that his heroine has a bit of every
girl in her. Generally speaking, she is a cross between Romola and Dora
Copperfield. His novels command enormous sales. The women say he draws
a man to the life, but does not seem to know much about women. The men
like his women, but think his men stupid.
Of another famous author no woman of my acquaintance is able to speak too
highly. They tell me his knowledge of their sex is simply marvellous,
his insight, his understanding of them almost uncanny. Thinking it might
prove useful, I made an exhaustive study of his books. I noticed that
his women were without exception brilliant charming creatures possessed
of the wit of a Lady Wortlay Montagu, combined with the wisdom of a
George Eliot. They were not all of them good women, but all of them were
clever and all of them were fascinating. I came to the conclusion that
his lady critics were correct: he did understand women. But to return to
our synopsis.
The second chapter, it appeared, transported us to Yorkshire where:
“Basil Longleat, a typical young Englishman, lately home from college,
resides with his widowed mother and two sisters. They are a delightful
family.”
What a world of trouble to both writer and to reader is here saved. “A
typical young Englishman!” The author probably wrote five pages,
elaborating. The five words of the sub-editor present him to me more
vividly. I see him positively glistening from the effects of soap and
water. I see his clear blue eye; his fair crisp locks, the natural
curliness of which annoys him personally, though alluring to everybody
else; his frank winning smile. He is “lately home from college.” That
tells me that he is a first-class cricketer; a first-class oar; that as a
half-back he is incomparable; that he swims like Captain Webb; is in the
first rank of tennis players; that his half-volley at ping-pong has never
been stopped. It doesn’t tell me much about his brain power. The
description of him as a “typical young Englishman” suggests more
information on this particular point. One assumes that the American girl
with the elusive expression is going to have sufficient for both.
“They are a delightful family.” The sub-editor does not say so, but I
imagine the two sisters are likewise typical young Englishwomen. They
ride and shoot and cook and make their own dresses, have common sense and
love a joke.
The third chapter is “taken up with the humours of a local cricket
match.”
Thank you, Mr. Sub-editor. I feel I owe you gratitude.
In the fourth, Ursula Bart (I was beginning to get anxious about her)
turns up again. She is staying at the useful Lady Mary’s place in
Yorkshire. She meets Basil by accident one morning while riding alone.
That is the advantage of having an American girl for your heroine. Like
the British army: it goes anywhere and does anything.
In chapter five Basil and Ursula meet again; this time at a picnic. The
sub-editor does not wish to repeat himself, otherwise he possibly would
have summed up chapter five by saying it was “taken up with the humours
of the usual picnic.”
In chapter six something happens:
“Basil, returning home in the twilight, comes across Ursula Bart, in a
lonely point of the moor, talking earnestly to a rough-looking stranger.
His approach over the soft turf being unnoticed, he cannot help
overhearing Ursula’s parting words to the forbidding-looking stranger: ‘I
must see you again! To-morrow night at half-past nine! In the gateway
of the ruined abbey!’ Who is he? And why must Ursula see him again at
such an hour, in such a spot?”
So here, at cost of reading twenty lines, I am landed, so to speak, at
the beginning of the seventh chapter. Why don’t I set to work to read
it? The sub-editor has spoiled me.
“You read it,” I want to say to him. “Tell me to-morrow morning what it
is all about. Who was this bounder? Why should Ursula want to see him
again? Why choose a draughty place? Why half-past nine o’clock at
night, which must have been an awkward time for both of them—likely to
lead to talk? Why should I wade though this seventh chapter of three
columns and a half? It’s your work. What are you paid for?”
My fear is lest this sort of thing shall lead to a demand on the part of
the public for condensed novels. What busy man is going to spend a week
of evenings reading a book when a nice kind sub-editor is prepared in
five minutes to tell him what it is all about!
Then there will come a day—I feel it—when the business-like Editor will
say to himself: “What in thunder is the sense of my paying one man to
write a story of sixty thousand words and another man to read it and tell
it again in sixteen hundred!”
We shall be expected to write our novels in chapters not exceeding twenty
words. Our short stories will be reduced to the formula: “Little boy.
Pair of skates. Broken ice, Heaven’s gates.” Formerly an author,
commissioned to supply a child’s tragedy of this genre for a Christmas
number, would have spun it out into five thousand words. Personally, I
should have commenced the previous spring—given the reader the summer and
autumn to get accustomed to the boy. He would have been a good boy; the
sort of boy that makes a bee-line for the thinnest ice. He would have
lived in a cottage. I could have spread that cottage over two pages; the
things that grew in the garden, the view from the front door. You would
have known that boy before I had done with him—felt you had known him all
your life. His quaint sayings, his childish thoughts, his great longings
would have been impressed upon you. The father might have had a dash of
humour in him, the mother’s early girlhood would have lent itself to
pretty writing. For the ice we would have had a mysterious lake in the
wood, said to be haunted. The boy would have loved o’ twilights to stand
upon its margin. He would have heard strange voices calling to him. You
would have felt the thing was coming.
So much might have been done. When I think of that plot wasted in nine
words it makes me positively angry.
And what is to become of us writers if this is to be the new fashion in
literature? We are paid by the length of our manuscript at rates from
half-a-crown a thousand words, and upwards. In the case of fellows like
Doyle and Kipling I am told it runs into pounds. How are we to live on
novels the serial rights of which to most of us will work out at four and
nine-pence.
It can’t be done. It is no good telling me you can see no reason why we
should live. That is no answer. I’m talking plain business.
And what about book-rights? Who is going to buy novels of three pages?
They will have to be printed as leaflets and sold at a penny a dozen.
Marie Corelli and Hall Caine—if all I hear about them is true—will
possibly make their ten or twelve shillings a week. But what about the
rest of us? This thing is worrying me.