Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading:

An Impersonal Explanation1
It was Thackeray2 who noted how actors, when they had a holiday, always went and saw a play.
I fancy that they form the kindest and best part of the house at such times. They know how hard
it is to do what the people on the stage are doing; if they are quick to what is ill-done, they are
quick to what is well done, too; and from what I have seen of their behavior at actors matines,3
as they are called, when the profession pretty much fills the house, I am ready to say, that they
are the most lenient, the most generous of all the spectators.
It is much the same, I believe, with novelists, whom I will assume for the purposes of
illustration, to be so largely of my own mind and make, that I need not consider those who are
otherwise. In fact, I will assume, as a working hypothesis that I am exactly like every other
novelist, and I will speak for the whole body of fiction-mongers in saying that when I get a day
off from a novel of my own, there is nothing I like so much as to lose myself in the novel of
some one else. When I have not a whole day, I am very glad of a half day, or even such hours
and halfhours as I can steal from sleep after going to bed at night, and before getting up in the
morning. I do not despise other kinds of reading. I like history, I like biography, I like travels, I
like poetry, I like drama, I like metaphysics; but I suspect that if I could once be got to tell the
whole truth, it would appear that I liked all these in the measure they reminded me of the
supreme literary form, the fine flower of the human story, the novel; and if I have anywhere said
anything else to the contrary, I take it back, at least for the time being.
You would have thought perhaps that having written so many novels myself,the procession
has now been some twenty-five years in passing a given point,I would not care to read any;
but we novelists, like the actors, are so in love with our art that we cannot get enough of it; and
rather than read no novels at all, I would read my own, over and over again. In fact I often do
this, and I have probably read them more times than any person present, not because I admire
them so very much, but because when I find myself in a difficult place in some new one, I can
learn from the old ones how I once behaved in another difficult place. If I go to some other
novelist's book to take a leaf from it, I am apt to become so interested in the story, that I forget
what I went to it for, and rise from it as honest as I sat down. But I know the story in my own
books so thoroughly that I can give myself without hindrance to the study of the method, which
is what I want.
That is what we go to one another's novels for. We read them for pleasure, of course, but for a
pleasure quite different from that which other readers find in them. The pleasure they yield is
probably greater for us than for any other kind of reader; but again we are like the actors at the
play: we are all the time, consciously or unconsciously, taking note how the thing is done. We
may forget the shop, as I have just now pretended, but the shop does not forget us; sooner or later
we find that we have had it with us; and here appears that chasmal difference between the author
and the reader, which Goethe4 says can never be bridged. The reader who is not an author
considers what the book is; the author who is a reader, considers, will he, nill he, how the book
has been done. It is so in every art. The painter, sculptor, architect, musician feels to his inmost
soul the beauty of the picture, statue, edifice, symphony, but he feels still more thoroughly the

skill which manifests that beauty. This difference is from everlasting to everlasting, and it
disposes instantly of the grotesque pretension that the artist is not the best critic of his art. He is
the best of all possible critics. Others may learn to enjoy, to reason and to infer in the presence of
a work of art; but he alone who has wrought in the same kind can feel and know concerning it
from instinct and from experience. Construction and criticism go hand in hand. No man ever yet
imagined beauty without imagining more beauty and less; he senses, as the good common phrase
has it, the limitations to the expression of beauty; and if he is an artist he puts himself in the
place of the man who made the thing of beauty before him, clothes himself in his possibilities,
and lives the failure and the success which it records. His word, if honest, is the supreme
criticism.
By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is
ugly, and it is only the false which is immoral. The truth may be indecent, but it cannot be
vicious, it can never corrupt or deprave; and I should say this in defence of the grossest material
honestly treated in modern novels as against the painted and perfumed meretriciousness of the
novels that went before them. I conceive that apart from all the clamor about schools of fiction is
the question of truth, how to get it in, so that it may get itself out again as beauty, the divinely
living thing, which all men love and worship. So I make truth the prime test of a novel. If I do
not find that it is like life, then it does not exist for me as art; it is ugly, it is ludicrous, it is
impossible. I do not expect a novel to be wholly true; I have never read one that seemed to me so
except Tolstoy's5 novels; but I expect it to be a constant endeavor for the truth, and I perceive
beauty in it so far as it fulfills this endeavor. I am quite willing to recognize and enjoy whatever
measure of truth I find in a novel that is partly or mainly false; only, if I come upon the falsehood
at the outset I am apt not to read that novel. But I do not bear such a grudge against it as I do
against the novel which lures me on with a fair face of truth, and drops the mask midway. If you
ask me for illustrations, I am somewhat at a loss, but if you ask me for examples, they are
manifold. In English I should say the truthful novelists or those working with an ideal of truth
were Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Mrs. Humphrey Ward,
George Moore; in French, Flaubert, Maupassant, the Goncourts, Daudet and Zola; in Russian,
Tourguenief and Tolstoy; in Spanish, Valds, Galds and Pardo-Bazan; in Norwegian, Bjrnson,
Lie, and Kielland. In English, some untruthful novelists, or those working from an ideal of effect,
are Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Reade, and all their living followers; in French, Dumas,
Feuillet, Ohnet; in Spanish Valera; in Russian, measurably Dostoyevsky;6 in Norwegian, none
that I know of. It is right to say, however that of some of the untruthful novelists, and notably of
Thackeray, that they were the victims of their period. If Thackeray had been writing in our time,
I have no question but he would have been one of its most truthful artists.
The truth which I mean, the truth which is the only beauty, is truth to human experience, and
human experience is so manifold and so recondite, that no scheme can be too remote, too airy for
the test. It is a well ascertained fact concerning the imagination that it can work only with the
stuff of experience. It can absolutely create nothing; it can only compose. The most fantastic
extravagance comes under the same law that exacts likeness to the known as well as the closest
and severest study of life. Once for all, then, obedience to this law is the creed of the realist, and
rebellion is the creed of the romanticist. Both necessarily work under it, but one willingly, to
beautiful effect, and the other unwillingly to ugly effect.
For the reader, whether he is an author too, or not, the only test of a novel's truth is his own

knowledge of life. Is it like what he has seen or felt? Then it is true, and for him it cannot
otherwise be true, that is to say beautiful. It will not avail that it has style, learning, thinking,
feeling; it is no more beautiful without truth than the pretty statue which cannot stand on its feet.
It is very astonishing to me that any sort of people can find pleasure in such a thing; but I know
that there are many who do; and I should not think of consigning them to the police for their bad
taste so long as their taste alone is bad. At the same time I confess that I should suspect an
unreality, an insincerity in a mature and educated person whom I found liking an unreal, an
insincere novel. You see, I take novels rather seriously, and I would hold them to a much stricter
account than they are commonly held to. If I could, I would have them all subject to the
principles that govern an honest man, and do not suffer him to tell lies of any sort. I think the
novelist is rarely the victim of such a possession, or obsession, that he does not know when he is
representing and when he is misrepresenting life. If he does not know it fully at the time, he
cannot fail to be aware of it upon review of his work. In the frenzy of inspiration, he may not
know that he has been lying; but a time will quickly come to him, if he is at all an artist, when he
will know it, and will see that the work he has done is ugly because of it. That is the time for him
to tear up his work, and to begin anew.
Of course, there are several ways of regarding life in fiction, and in order to do justice to the
different kinds we ought to distinguish very clearly between them. There are three forms, which I
think of, and which I will name in the order of their greatness: the novel, the romance, and the
romanticistic novel.
The novel I take to be the sincere and conscientious endeavor to picture life just as it is, to deal
with character as we witness it in living people, and to record the incidents that grow out of
character. This is the supreme form of fiction, and I offer as supreme examples of it, Pride and
Prejudice, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Fathers and Sons, Doa Perfecta & Marta y Mara,7
sufficiently varied in their origin and material and method, but all of the same absolute honesty
in their intention. They all rely for their moral effect simply and solely upon their truth to nature.
The romance is of as great purity of intention as the novel, but it deals with life allegorically and
not representatively; it employs types rather than characters, and studies them in the ideal rather
than the real; it handles the passions broadly. Altogether the greatest in this kind are The Scarlet
Letter and The Marble Faun of Hawthorne, which partake of the nature of poems, and which, as
they frankly place themselves outside of familiar experience and circumstance, are not to be
judged by the rules of criticism that apply to the novel. In this sort, Judd's Margaret is another
eminent example that occurs to me; and some of you will think of Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, &
of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde. I suggest also Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl.8
The romanticistic novel professes like the real novel to portray actual life, but it does this with an
excess of drawing and coloring which are false to nature. It attributes motives to people which do
not govern real people, and its characters are of the quality of types; they are heroic, for good or
for bad. It seeks effect rather than truth; and endeavors to hide in a cloud of incident the
deformity and artificiality of its creations. It revels in the extravagant, the unusual and the
bizarre. The worst examples of it are to be found in the fictions of two very great men: Charles
Dickens and Victor Hugo; but it prevailed in all languages, except the Russian, from the rise of
Bulwer and Balzac9 to the death of Dickens, in spite of the influence of George Eliot and
Thackeray. Both these writers contemned it, but not effectively; the one was too much a moralist,
the other too much a sentimentalist and caricaturist; I am speaking broadly. In all that time the

most artistic, that is to say the most truthful, English novelist was Anthony Trollope, and he was
so unconscious of his excellence, that at times he strove hard for the most inartistic, the most
untruthful attitudes of Thackeray. Now, all is changed: not one great novelist, not a single one in
any European language, in any country, has for the last twenty five years been a romanticistic
novelist; while literature swarms with second-rate, third-rate romanticistic novelists. The great
novelists of China, of Abyssinia, of Polynesia, may still be romanticists, but they are not so in
any Western civilization. If you wish to darken council by asking how it is that these inferior
romanticists are still incomparably the most popular novelists, I can only whisper, in strict
confidence, that by far the greatest number of people in the world, even the civilized world, are
people of weak and childish imagination, pleased with gross fables, fond of prodigies, heroes,
heroines, portents and improbabilities, without self-knowledge, and without the wish for it. Only
in some such exceptional assemblage as the present, do they even prefer truth to lies in art, and it
is a great advance for them to prefer the half-lies which they get in romanticistic novels.
I believe, nevertheless, that the novelist has a grave duty to his reader; and I wish his reader
realized that he has a grave duty to the novelist, and ought to exact the truth of him. But most
readers think that they ought only to exact amusement of him. They are satisfied if they can get
that, and often they have to be satisfied without it. In spite of the fact that the novelist is usually
so great a novel-reader himself, I doubt if he is fully conscious of the mind the novel reader
commonly brings to the work he has taken so much pains with. Once, a great while ago, when a
story of mine was appearing from month to month, a young lady wrote me that she was reading
it, with nine other serials, besides novels out of the circulating library,1 and she liked mine the
best of all. I thought it was very kind of her, and I could not help wondering what the inside of
her mind could be like. But the mind of youth, before the world has yet filled it, is hospitable to
many guests, and perhaps with all the people of all those stories in it, the mind of this young lady
was still tolerably empty. I dare say there is not a person here present but has at some time or
other read a novel; it is possible that several may have read two or three serials at the same time;
and I would like these to understand that I do not at all object to that way of reading novels. It is
much better than not to read novels at all, and I do not know that I felt any reproach for another
young lady whose teacher evolved from her the fact that she knew all of what she called the
love-parts of my novels, but supposed that I was an Englishman, and that I was dead. It would be
no bad thing, I suppose, to be an Englishman if one were dead; and perhaps this may be my
paligenesis;2 but If I were to rise an English novelist I should like to be allowed a choice which.
It is not of novel writers however, that I now wish to speak, but a little more of novel readers, as
I have known them. When another story of mine was appearing I had a bill for $30 sent me from
a tailor in Chicago for a spring overcoat, against a certain Mr. Ferris. The hero of my novelhe
was, as usual, very unheroicwas Henry Ferris,3 and the tailor naturally thought that from my
intimacy with one member of the family, I would very likely know the address of another.
Only last summer a lady said to me that she wondered I could remember so exactly all that was
said and done in a current story of mine; and it appeared that she thought it had all really
happened as I had set it down. This was very gratifying in a way, but it was a little dismaying,
too; and I fancy it would not be well to peer too earnestly into that chasm which parts authors
and readers. Many people read your book without ever looking at the title page, or knowing who
wrote it, or caring. This is the wholly unliterary sort, who do not know apparently how books
come to be, or how they differ in origin from products of the loom or plough. There is another

sort who amiably confuse you with some brother author, and praise you for novels that you have
never written. I remember that one night at the White House one of the ladies who was receiving
had the goodness to say that she was reading my story of The Bostonians4 with so much interest.
I was forced to disclaim the honor done me; I could only thank her and add that I liked The
Bostonians too, as I did everything that Henry James wrote. Upon this we both fell into some
embarrassment, I do not know why; she excused herself for her blunder; of course, the story was
Mr. James's; she knew that; and she asked me if I would be introduced to the Secretary of the
Periphery (that was not really the office) who liked my books, and greatly wished to see me. The
secretary was very cordial, and told me that he always kept my Stillwater Tragedy lying on his
desk, he liked so much to take it up and read it at leisure moments. What could I do? I answered
that I should be glad to tell Mr. Aldrich5 when I went back to Boston, what a favorite his book
was with the Secretary of the Periphery; and I really forget how we got rid of each other.
But anything so disastrous as this does not often happen to a novelist, I fancy. Those crushing
blows, which fell within ten minutes of each other, were probably meant to cure me of vanity,
and I can confidently say that they did so. I have not felt since the slightest notion of pride or
conceit when the reader has failed to confound me with some one else, or even when he knows
distinctly who I am and what I have written, and seizes with exquisite intelligence my lightest
and slightest intention in a book. There are such readers; and I feel sure that nothing good that
the author puts into a novel is ever lost. Some one sees it, feels, loves it, and loves him for it.
This is the sweet compensation for much negligence, much coldness, much dullness. Readers are
not so bad, I should like to say to my brother novelists; they are really very good, and at any rate
we could not get on without them. I myself think they are better in the small towns, where the
excitements and the distractions are few, than in the cities where there are many. I have said
before, somewhere, that in the cities people do not read books, they read about them; and I
believe that it is far from these nervous centres, that the author finds his closest, truest, loveliest
appreciation. For my part I like best to think of my stories, if they are so blest, as befriending the
loneliness of outlying farms, dull villages, distant exile. I cannot express the joy it gave me to
have General Greely6 say that he had read me amidst the frozen blackness of the arctic night; and
the other day I had a letter from a man who had followed the fortunes of some imaginary people
of mine through a long cruise in the South Seas. I answered him that it was the knowledge of
such things which made it sweet to be a novelist; and I may add, to you, that to have a letter like
that I would willingly disown all the books that Mr. James ever wrote, or Mr. Aldrich either.
While I am about these confidences, which I make very frank because they are typical rather
than personal, and deal with things that happen to all authors more or less, I will confess that I
have never yet seen one novel of mine sold. Once, in a book store, I saw a lady take up my latest,
and look into it; I waited breathless; but she laid it down again, and went out directly, as if it had
perhaps been too much for her. Yet, unless the publishers have abused my fondness,7 some of
my novels have had a pretty sale enough; and I have at least overheard them talked about. In a
railway train once, I listened to a gentleman in the seat before me commending them to a young
lady for their blameless morality; another day, at the table next mine, in a restaurant, a young
man went critically through most of them to his commensal.8
I believe he was rather lenient to them; but you cannot always depend upon the flattering quality
of such eavesdroppings, and I think it is best to get away from them. At a table dhte9 in
Florence a charming young English lady, who knew me for an American by my speech began

the talk by saying that she was just from Venice, where she had read a book which a countryman
of mine had written about that city, and named a book of my own. I did not think it would be fair
to let her go on if she had any censure to pronounce, and I knew it would not be pleasant; so I
made haste to say that I was myself the countryman of mine whom she meant; after that she had
nothing but praise for my book. The trouble is you cannot be sure what people will say, and it is
best to forego anything surreptitious in the collection of opinion. I once wrote a novel in which I
thought I had been very deeply, and was perhaps only too subtly, serious; but a young gentleman
in a waltz, when his partner asked him if he were reading it, said, No; too trivial. I did not
overhear this, and so I do not feel justly punished by it. Neither do I consider that I quite merit
the blame bestowed upon another novel of mine,1 but I will report the fact because it shows that
there may be two views of my morality. This story was of a young girl who, by a series of
misunderstandings, finds herself the only woman on board a vessel going to Italy, with three
young men for her fellow passengers. They do everything they can to keep her from
embarrassment or even consciousness, and one of them marries her when they get to Venice. I
thought this a very harmless scheme, and so did a friend of mine,2 who was in France when the
book came out, and who recommended it, perhaps too confidently, to a French mother of
daughters anxious for some novel in English proper for a young girl to read. He lent it her, but
when she had read it herself, she brought it back, and said the situation imagined in it was
immoral and altogether unfit to be presented to the mind of a jeune fille.3
To tell the truth, I do not think it would be well for the author to aim at the good opinion of the
reader in this or anything else.That cannot be trusted to keep the author's literary or moral
conscience clean and that is the main thing with him. His affair is to do the best he can with the
material he has chosen, to make the truest possible picture of life, and this is what I believe he
always does, if he is worthy of the name of artist. He had better not aim to please, and he had still
better not aim to instruct; the pleasure and the instruction will follow from such measure of truth
as the author has in him to such measure of truth as the reader has in him. You will sometimes
find it said by the critics that such and such a novel has evidently been written with such and
such an object; but unless it is the work of a mere artizan, and no artist at all, I believe this is
never the fact. If it is a work of art, it promptly takes itself out of the order of polemics or of
ethics, and primarily consents to be nothing if not aesthetical. Its story is the thing that tells, first
of all, and if that does not tell, nothing in it tells. It is said that one reason why Tolstoy, when he
felt the sorrow of the world laid upon him, decided to write no more novels, because no matter
how full he filled these with the desire of his soul to help them that have no helper, he found that
what went into the minds of most readers was merely the story.
Then shall the novel have no purpose? Shall it not try to do good? Shall this unrivalled, this
inapproachable form, beside which epic and drama dwindle to puny dwarfishness, and are so
little that they can both be lost in its vast room, shall this do nothing to better men and uplift
them? Shall it only amuse them? No, and a thousand times, no! But it shall be a mission to their
higher selves only so far as it shall charm their minds and win their hearts. It shall do no good
directly. It shall not be the bread, but the grain of wheat which must sprout and grow in the
reader's soul, and be harvested in his experience, and in the mills of the gods ground slowly
perhaps many years before it shall duly nourish him. I do not mean that there can never be any
immediate good from novels. I do not see how any one can read The Scarlet Letter, or
Middlemarch, or Romola,4 without being instantly seized with the dread of falsehood. This is in
the way to the love of truth. It is the first step, the indispensable first step towards that love, but it

is by no means arrival at it. The novel can teach, and for shame's sake, it must teach, but only by
painting life truly. This is what it must above all things strive to do. If it succeeds, every good
effect shall come from it: delight, use, wisdom. If it does not succeed in this, no good can come
of it. Let no reader, and let no intending novelist suppose that this fidelity to life can be carried
too far. After all, and when the artist has given his whole might to the realization of his ideal, he
will have only an effect of life. I think the effect is like that in those cycloramas where up to a
certain point there is real ground and real grass, and then carried indivisibly on to the canvas the
best that the painter can do to imitate real ground and real grass. We start in our novels with
something we have known of life, that is, with life itself; and then we go on and imitate what we
have known of life. If we are very skilful and very patient we can hide the joint. But the joint is
always there, and on one side of it are real ground and real grass, and on the other are the painted
images of ground and grass. I do not believe that there was ever any one who longed more
strenuously or endeavored more constantly to make the painted ground and grass exactly like the
real, than I have done in my cycloramas. But I have to own that I have never yet succeeded to my
own satisfaction. Some touch of color, some tone of texture is always wanting; the light is
different; it is all in another region. At the same time I have the immense, the sufficient
consolation, of knowing that I have not denied such truth as was in me by imitating unreal
ground and grass, or even copying the effect of some other's effort to represent real ground and
real grass.
Early in the practice of my art I perceived that what I must do in fiction, if I were to do anything
worth while, was to get into it from life the things that had not been got into fiction before. At the
very first, of course I tried to do the things that I found done already, or the kind of things,
especially as I found them in English novels. These had been approved as fit for literature, and
they alone were imaginably fit for it. But I tried some other things, and found them fit too. Then I
said to myself that I would throw away my English glasses, and look at American life with my
own American eyes, and report the things I saw there, whether they were like the things in
English fiction or not. In a modest measure this plan succeeded, and I could not commend any
other to the American novelist.
I do not mean to say, however, that one's work is always of this intentional, this voluntary sort.
On the contrary, there is so much which is unintentional and involuntary, that one might very
well believe one's self inspired if one did not know better. For instance, each novel has a law of
its own, which it seems to create for itself. Almost from the beginning it has its peculiar
temperament and quality, and if you happen to be writing that novel you feel that you must
respect its law. You, who are master of the whole affair, cannot violate its law without taking its
life. It may grow again, but it will be of another generation and another allegiance. No more can
you change the nature of any character in it without spoiling it. You cannot even change the
name of a character without running great risk of affecting its vital principle; and by the way
where do one's characters get their names? They mostly appear with their names on, an integral
part of themselves. This is very curious; but it does not evince inspiration. It merely suggests that
the materials which the imagination deals with are not fluid, not flexible, not ductile; but when
they have once taken form have a plaster of paris fixity, which is scarcely more subject to the
author's will than the reader's. Either one of these may shatter the form, but one is almost as able
to reconstitute it as the other. I hope this is not very mystical for I hate anything of that sort, and
would have all in plain day if I could. The most that I will allow is that the mind fathers creatures
which are apparently as self-regulated as any other offspring. They are the children of a given

mind; they bear a likeness to it; they are qualified by it; but they seem to have their own life and
their own being apart from it. Perhaps this is allowing a good deal.
Another, and much simpler, fact of my experience has been that you never master your art as a
whole. I used vainly to suppose, when I began to write fiction, that after I had struck my gait I
had merely to keep on at that pace forever. But I discovered to my vast surprise that I had struck
my gait for this or that book only, and that the pace would not serve for another novel. I must
strike a new gait, I must get a new pace for every new story. I could issue master from the last,
but I must begin prentice with the next; and I suppose this is the great difference between an art
and a trade, or even a science. The art is always both a teaching and a learning. In virtue of never
being twice the same, it is a perpetual delight, a perpetual ordeal to the artist. He enjoys and he
suffers in it, as no other man enjoys or suffers in his work.
In fiction you cannot, if you would, strike twice in the same place, and you certainly had better
not, if you could. It is interesting to note how, if you carry a character from one story to another,
it can scarcely be important in both. If you have first given it a leading part, you have exhausted
its possibilities, but if it has been at first subordinate, then you may develop it into something
important in the second handling. Still less can you treat the same theme twice. For the novelist
there is no replica; and I would ask those readers who sometimes complain of sameness in an
author's books to consider whether it is anything more than that family likeness which they must
inevitably have. All Mr. James's book are like Mr. James; all Tourguenieff's books are like
Tourguenieff; all Hawthorne's books are like Hawthorne. You cannot read a page in any of them
without knowing them for this author or that; but the books of no author resemble one another
than through this sort of blood-relationship.
Indefinite patience is requisite to a fine or true effect in this art which I am speaking of. In my
beginning, I sometimes imagined that a novel might be blocked out by writing all the vital scenes
first from the earliest to the latest, and then going back, and supplying the spaces of dead color
between them. But this is so obviously impossible that I never even tried it. The events of a real
novel grow slowly and necessarily out of the development of its characters, and the author
cannot fully forecast these. He creates them, but he has to get acquainted with them in great
measure afterwards. He knows the nature of each, but he does not know how they will affect one
another till he tries. Sometimes, I have hurried forward to an effect, impatient of intervening
detail, but when I have got the effect by this haste I find that it is weak and false because the
detail was wanting. That is the soil which it must grow out of; without that, and the slow, careful
thinking which supplies it, the effect is a sickly and spindling growth.
The novel reader, who is on the outside of all these processes, cannot consider them in liking or
disliking a novel. Yet it is the readers and not the writers of novels who decide their fate, and
whom novels must first appeal to upon some broad principle common to all men, and especially
to that kind of men who are called women. The favor of all the novel writers in the world could
not solely make a novel successful; and yet if the novelists liked it I should say it was surely a
good novel. I do not say, on the other hand, that readers choose falsely, although they often
choose foolishly. One could bring up a terrible array of foolish choices against them: novels that
sold by the hundred thousand, and yet were disgracefully bad, and are now wholly forgotten.
They met a momentary want, they caught a passing fancy; perhaps they touched with artless
fortune a chord of real feeling. They pleased vastly, if not mightily, and till they blew over, as
Douglass Jerrold5 used to say of such books, the few who knew better had to hang their heads in

shame for the rest.

But there are also novels that please mightily as well as vastly, and then cease to please at all and
are as if they had never been. Who is it that now speaks ofI was going to speak of it, but I
will not; everyone knows what I mean and is sick of it. Yet it was a charming book, full of fun
and airy fancy, and of a certain truth, generous, spirited, gay and heartbreaking. Why should not
it please forever? It must simply be that the principles which in their peculiar combination it
appealed to were worn out, as the capacity for being amused by a certain joke is exhausted by
familiarity. The joke is as droll as ever: why do not you laugh still? That air, that song, which
ravished your sense ninety times was torture the hundredth. Your beloved who died ten years
ago, is more lost to you now than then: where are your tears?
All things are taken from us and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.6All things
are taken from us and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.6
Laughter passes; grief gluts itself and can no more; laughter dies, spent with its own joy.
The book was charming; I say it again; but nothing could make me read it again. Yet there are
stories that I can read again and again, and not tire of. They are not such as appeal so much to the
passions, or else they appeal to them in a different way. In them, the elements are more
fortunately mixed, and more skilfully; but it would be hard to say what makes a work of art
lastingly please, and what makes a work of art please transiently. If you ask me, I will own
frankly I do not know. I can only offer some such makeshift of an explanation as that it is repose
which causes the enduring charm; but who can say just what repose is?
It is taken for granted that one thing which always pleases in a novel is the love-making; but I
doubt it. A good deal of the lovemaking in novels is vulgar and offensive. Love is a passion
which must be delicately handled by a novelist, or else his lovers will be as disgusting as those
who betray their fondness in society, and make the spectator sick; they will be as bad as those
poor things who sit with their arms round each other on the benches in the park. Really some of
the lovescenes even in so great a novelist as George Eliot, stomach one. But there is nothing
better than a love scene when it is well done, though there can be other things quite as good. I
think that to make it very acceptable, there should be a little humorous consciousness, a little
self-irony in the lovers; though when I think of such noble tragedy as the love-passages in
Tourguenieff, I am not sure of my position. Still, still, I think I prefer the love-making of Jane
Austen's people; but what do not I prefer of Jane Austen's?
As for my own modest attempts in that direction, I should be far too shame-faced to allege them,
if I had not once received a singular proof of their success. I do not mean in the favor of that
young lady who had read all the love parts in books, and supposed I was a dead Englishman, or
that other young lady who liked my story best of all out of the nine serials and novels from the
library which she was reading. It was such testimony as the boys and the blackbirds bear to the
flavor of fruit, and it came about through the printers leaving the copy of one of my loves scenes
out overnight where the mice could get at it. The mice ate the delicious morsel all up but a few
tattered fragments. It was excessively gratifying to my vanity as author; more, for me, mice
could not do; but I did not find it so agreeable when the printers sent me these remnants, and

asked me to supply the paragraphs which had been devoured with such eager interest. If you
have never had a like experience you can not have any notion how difficult it is to reproduce a
love-passage which the mice have eaten.
When I began to write fiction we were under the romantic superstition that the hero must do
something to win the heroine; perform some valorous or generous act; save her from danger, as a
burning building or a breaking bridge, or the like, or at least be nursed by her through a long and
dangerous sickness. In compliance with this burdensome tradition, I had my hero rescue my
heroine from a ferocious bulldog, which I remember was thought rather infra dig.7 by some of
the critics; but I had no other mortal peril handy, and a bulldog is really a very dangerous animal.
This was in my first novel; but after that I began to look about me and consider. I observed that
none of the loved husbands of the happy wives I knew had done anything to win them except
pay a certain number of visits, send them flowers, dance or sit out dances with them at parties,
and then muster courage to ask if they would have them. Amongst the young people of my
acquaintance, I noticed that this simple and convenient sort of conquest was still going on; and I
asked myself why it should be different in books. It was certainly very delightful as I saw it in
nature, and why try to paint the lily or tint the rose? After that I let my heroes win my heroines
by being as nice fellows as I could make them. But even then I felt that they both expected too
much of me; and it was about this time that I had many long and serious talks with my friend,
Mr. Henry James, as to how we might eliminate the everlasting young man and young woman,
as we called them. We imagined a great many intrigues in which they should not be the principal
personages; I remember he had one very notable scheme for a novel whose interest should center
about a mother and a son. Still, however, he is writing stories, as I still am about the everlasting
man and young woman; though I do think we have managed somewhat to moderate them a little
as to their importance in fiction. I suppose we must always have them there, as we must always
have them in life, if the race is to go on; but I think the modern novel is more clearly ascertaining
their place. Their dominance of course was owing to the belief that young people were the chief
readers of fiction. I dare say this is true yet; but I doubt if it is the young people who make the
fortune of a novel. Rather, I fancy, its prosperity lies in the favor of women of all agesand (I
was going to say) sexes. These are the most devoted novel-readers, the most intelligent (after the
novelists themselves) and the most influential, by far. It is the man of feminine refinement and of
feminine culture, with us so much greater than masculine culture, who loves fiction, but amongst
other sorts of men I have observed that lawyers are the greatest novel-readers. They read,
however, for the story, the distraction, the relief; and after them come physicians, who read
novels for much the same reasons, but more for the psychological interest than lawyers. The
more liberal sorts of ministers read novels, with an eye to the ethical problems treated; but none
of these read so nearly from the novelists own standpoint as the women. Like the novelists,
these read with sympathy for the way the thing is done, with an eye for the shades of character,
the distribution of motive, the management of the intrigue, and not merely for the story, or so
much for the psychological and ethical aspects of it. Business men, I fancy, seldom read novels
at all; they read newspapers.
Fiction is the chief intellectual stimulus of our time, whether we like the fact or not, and taking it
in the broad sense if not the deep sense, it is the chief intellectual influence. I should say moral
influence, too; but it is often a moral stimulus without being a moral influence; it reaches the
mind, and stops short of the conduct. As to the prime fact involved, I think we have but to recall
the books of any last year of modern times, and we cannot question it. It is ninety-nine chances

out of a hundred that the book which at any given moment is making the world talk, and making
the world think is a novel. Within the last generation, I can remember only one book making the
impression that a dozen of novels have each made, and against Renan's Life of Jesus,8 I will set
Les Miserables, Romola and Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, LAssommoir and Nana, Tess of
the DUrbervilles, Anna Karnina and the Kreuzer Sonata, Robert Elsmere, Trilby, Ben Hur, not
all, or at all, of the same artistic value, but all somehow, of a mighty human interest. We must
leave Uncle Tom's Cabin out of the count because it was of an earlier period; if we counted it,
the proof of my assertion would be overwhelming.
The novel is easily first among books that people read willingly, and it is rightfully first. It has
known how to keep the charm of the story, and to add to it the attraction of almost every interest.
It still beguiles, as in the hands of the Byzantine romancers,9 not to go unnumbered centuries
back to the Greek novel of Homer, the Odyssey; and it has learnt how to warn, to question, to
teach in every concern of life. Scarcely any predicament, moral or psychological has escaped its
study, and it has so refined and perfected its methods that antiseptic surgery itself has hardly
made a more beneficent advance. It began with the merest fable, excluding from the reader's
interest all but the fortunes of princes and the other dignified personages, for whose
entertainment it existed until now it includes all sorts and conditions of men, who turn to it for
instruction, inspiration, consolation. It has broadened and deepened down and out till it
compasses the whole of human nature; and no cause important to the race has been unfriended of
it. Sometimes I have been vexed at its vicious pandering to passion, but I cannot think, after all,
of any great modern novel which has not been distinctly moral in effect. I am not sorry to have
had it go into the dark places of the soul, the filthy and squalid places of society, high and low,
and shed there its great light. Let us know with its help what we are, and where we are. Let all
the hidden things be brought into the sun, and let every day be the day of judgment. If the
sermon cannot any longer serve this end, let the novel do it.
But in doing this it will have to render a stricter account than it has yet been held to. The old
superstition of a dramatic situation as the supreme representation of life must be discarded, and
the novelist must endeavor to give exactly the effect of life. I believe he will yet come to do this.
I can never do it, for I was bred in a false school whose trammels I have never been quite able to
burst; but the novelist who begins where I leave off, will yet write the novel which has been my
ideal. He will not reject anything because he cannot make it picturesque or dramatic; but he will
feel the beauty of truth so intimately, and will value it so supremely that he will seek the effect of
that solely. He cannot transport life really into his story, any more than the cycloramist could
carry the real ground and the real grass into his picture. But he will not rest till he has made his
story as like life as he can, with the same mixed motives, the same voluntary and involuntary
actions, the same unaccountable advances and perplexing pauses, the same moments of rapture,
the same days and weeks of horrible dullness, the same conflict of the higher and lower
purposes, the same vices and virtues, inspirations and propensities. He will not shun any aspect
of life because its image will be stupid and gross, still less because its image will be incredibly
noble and glorious. He will try to give that general resemblance which can come only from the
most devoted fidelity to particulars. As it is now the representation of life in novels, even the
most conscientious in its details, is warped and distorted by the novelist's anxiety to produce an
image that is startling and impressive, as well as true. But if he can once conceive the notion of
letting the reader's imagination care for these things; if he can convince himself that his own
affair is to arrange a correct perspective, in which all things shall appear in their very proportion

and relation, he will have mastered the secret of repose, which is the soul of beauty in all its
forms.
The hope of this may be the vainest of dreams, but I do not think so. Already I see the promise,
the prophesy of such a novel in the work of some of the younger men. That work often seems to
me crude and faulty, but I feel that it is in the right direction, and I value it for that reason with a
faith which only work in the right direction can inspire. Good work in the wrong direction fills
me with despair, and my heart sinks lower the better the work is. In a picture of life which is
fundamentally or structurally false, I cannot value coloring or drawing, composition or
sentiment; the lie at the thing's heart taints and blights every part of it. This happens to me from
my own work when I have made a false start, and then I keep trying to hark back to the truth as I
know it, and start afresh. A hundred times in the course of a story I have to retrace my steps, and
efface them. Often the whole process is a series of arduous experiments, trying it this way, trying
it that; testing it by my knowledge of myself and my acquaintance with others; asking if it would
be true of me, or true of my friend or my enemy; and not possibly resting content with anything I
thought gracious or pleasing in my performance till I have got the setting of truth for it. This sort
of scrutiny goes on perpetually in the novelist's mind. His story is never out of it. He lies down
with it in his last waking thought and rises up with it in his first. Throughout the day, in crowds
or in solitude, it is dimly or distinctly in his thought, a joy, a torment. He shakes hands with a
friend and asks after his sick wife, but he is really wondering whether his hero would probably
marry his heroine. In his talk at dinner he brings covertly to the test of his neighbor's experience
the question of the situation he is developing. He escapes with his life from a cable-car, and at
the same instant the solution of a difficult problem flashes upon him. Till he has written finis at
the end of his book, it literally obsesses him. He cannot dismiss it; consciously or unconsciously
it pervades his being.
Is this a normal, a healthful state for a man to be in? I suppose it is measurably the state of every
manner of artist, and I am not describing a condition that will seem strange to any artist. I am not
at all sure that it is morbid or unwholesome. The best thing that can fill a man's mind is his work,
for if his work does not fill it, his self will fill it, and it can have no worse tenant. Of one thing I
am certain, and that is that the preoccupation with work that constantly exacts reference to life,
makes life incessantly interesting. In my quality of novelist I defy the deadliest bore to afflict me.
I have but to test some bore in my story by him, and be becomes a boon, a favor of heaven, an
invaluable and exquisitely interesting opportunity.
As to the outward shape of the inward life of the novel, which must invariably be truth, there is
some choice, but mainly between three sorts; the autobiographical, the biographical and the
historical. The first of these I have always considered the most perfect literary form after the
drama. If you tell the story as apparently your own, you are completely master of the situation,
and you can report everything as if it were a real incident. What goes on in your own mind
concerning persons and events you can give with absolute authority, and you are not tempted to
say what goes on in the minds of others, except in the way of conjecture, as one does in life. But
the conditions are that you must not go outside of your own observation and experience; you
cannot tell what you have not yourself seen and known to happen. If you do, you at once break
the illusion; and you cannot even repeat things that you have at second hand, without some
danger of this. Within its narrow range the autobiographical story1 operates itself as much as the
play does. Perhaps because of its limitations none of the greatest novels have been written in that

form, perfect as it is, and delightful as it is to the reader, except Gil Blas only. But Thackeray
was always fond of it, and he wrote his best book, The Luck of Barry Lyndon in it, and his next
best, Henry Esmond. In many other novels of his, it is employed; in the very last, The
Adventures of Philip, Pendennis tells the story of Firman as if he were knowing to it. Hawthorne
chose the autobiographic form for what I think his greatest novel, The Blithedale Romance, and
many others have used it. The old fashioned novels in letters, like Pamela and Evelina, were
modifications of it; and some next-to-modern novelists, like Wilkie Collins have used the
narratives, or statements, of several persons concerning the same fact to much the effect of the
autobiographic novel. Gil Blas is possibly the most famous story in this form, and David
Copperfield2 next.
The biographical novel is that in which the author chooses a central figure and refers to it and
reports from it all the facts and feelings involved. The central figure must be of very paramount
importance to justify this form, which is nearly as cramping as the autobiographical, and has not
its intimate charm. Mr. James used it in his Roderick Hudson,3 but to immeasurably less
beautiful effect than he has used the autobiographical, in some of his incomparable short stories.
He seems of late to prefer it to any other, and he has cast in it work of really unimpeachable
perfection.
After all, however, the historical is the great form, impure and imperfect as it is. But here I wish
you to note that I am talking of the historical form in novel writing, and not at all of the historical
novel. The historical novel may be written in either the autobiographical, the biographical, or the
historical form; but it is not now specifically under discussion. What is under discussion is any
sort of novel whose material is treated as if it were real history. In this the novelist supposes
himself to be narrating a series of events, indefinite in compass, and known to him from the
original documents, as a certain passage in the real life of the race is known to the historian. If,
then, he could work entirely in the historian's spirit, and content himself and his reader with
conjecture as to his people's motives and with report of them from hearsay, I should not call this
form impure or imperfect. But he cannot do this, apparently, or at least he never has done it. He
enters into the minds and hearts of his characters; he gives long passages of dialogue among
them, and invents speeches for them, as the real historians used to do for their real personages;
and he not only does this, but he makes his reader privy to their most secret thoughts, feelings
and desires. At times his work is dramatic, and at times narrative; he makes it either at will. He
dwells in a world of his own creating, where he is a universal intelligence, comprehending and
interpreting everything, not indirectly or with any artistic conditions, but frankly and
straightforwardly, without accounting in any way for his knowledge of the facts. The form
involves a thousand contradictions, impossibilities. There is no point where it cannot be
convicted of the most grotesque absurdity. The historian has got the facts from some one who
witnessed them; but the novelist employing the historic form has no proof of them; he gives his
word alone for them. He visits this situation and that and reports what no one but himself could
have seen. He has the intimate confidence of his character in the hour of passion, the hour of
remorse, the hour of death itself. Tourguenief and Tolstoy came back from following theirs to
the verge of the other world. They tell what they thought and felt as this world faded from them,
and nothing in fiction is more impressive, more convincing of its truth.
The historical form, though it involves every contradiction, every impossibility, is the only form
which can fully represent any passage of life in its inner and outer entirety. It alone leaves

nothing untouched, nothing unsearched. It is the primal form of fiction; it is epic. The first great
novels, the Iliad and the Odyssey were cast in it; and the last, if there is ever any last novel while
the human race endures, will probably wear it. The subtlest, the greatest achievements of fiction
in other forms are nothing beside it. Think of Don Quixote, of Wilhelm Meister, of the Bride of
Lammermoor, of I Promessi Sposi, of War and Peace, of Fathers and Sons, of Middlemarch, of
Pendennis, of Bleak House, of Uncle Tom's Cabin, of The Scarlet Letter, of LAssommoir, of
The Grandissimes, of Princess Casamassima, of Far from the Madding Crowd:4 the list of
masterpieces in this form is interminable.
When Homer wrote his novels, he feigned that he had his facts from the Muse, and that saved
appearances; but hardly any novelist since has seriously done so. The later novelist boldly asks
you to believe, as a premise, that he knows all about things that no one man can imaginably
know all about, and you are forced to grant it because he has the power of convincing you
against your reason. The form which is the least artistic, is the least artificial; the novel of
historic form is the novel par excellence; all other forms are clever feats in fiction, literary,
conscious. This supreme form is almost shapeless, as it is with the greatest difficulty, with
serious limitations of its effects, that you can give it symmetry. Left to itself, it is sprawling,
splay-footed, gangling, proportionless and inchoate; but if it is true to the life which it can give
no authority for seeming to know, it is full of beauty and symmetry.
In fine, at the end of the ends, as the Italians say, truth to life is the supreme office of the novel,
in whatever form. I am always saying this, and I can say no other. If you like to have it in
different words, the business of the novelist is to make you understand the real world through his
faithful effigy of it; or, as I have said before, to arrange a perspective for you with everything in
its proper relation and proportion to everything else, and this so manifest that you cannot err in it
however myopic or astigmatic you may be. It is his function to help you be kinder to your
fellows, juster to yourself, truer to all.
Mostly, I should say, he has failed. I can think of no one, except Tolstoy alone, who has met the
high requirements of his gift, though I am tempted to add Bjrnson in some of his later books.
But in spite of his long and almost invariable failure, I have great hopes of the novelist. His art,
which is as old as the world, is yet the newest in it, and still very imperfect. But no novelist can
think of it without feeling its immeasurable possibilities, without owning that in every instance
the weakness, the wrong is in himself, and not in his art.
1899 1958, 1979