arose about this group scenery, the setting of the fable; how the atmosphere became presently charged with the presence of mankind, other characters attaching themselves to the group; how situations, scenes, conversations, led up little by little to the full development of this central idea. I can also conceive of a School of Fiction in which the students should be made to practise observation, description, dialogue, and dramatic effects. The student, in fact, would be taught how to use his tools. In this way the young writer might at least be saved a great many disgusts and disappointments, and a great deal of valuable time. He would learn at the outset something of what is absolutely necessary. He would especially learn, unless his teachers were pedants, that mere knowledge of the technique is useless without a natural aptitude for the Art is present to begin with.

But what if the natural aptitude is not present? We shall then, it will be objected, be training a horde of mediocre and incompetent novelists. Why? In every little town there are now Schools of Art and Schools of Music. Do they train a crowd of incompetent painters and musicians? Not at all. The outcome of their labours is that there are now thousands who can paint and draw, play and compose, after a fashion, in mediocre fashion; that the standard necessary for success has been enormously raised; that those who do succeed are much better than their predecessors, and that they are not in larger numbers. In other words, mediocrity finds it very much harder to get on; the critical faculty has been, in these two Arts, enormously cultivated and developed; and the work produced is enormously better. Exactly this, and nothing more, would be the case if the Science-the workmanship-of Fiction were understood and taught. It would become more and more impossible for the bad novelist to get his work published, even on the base and ignominious terms of paying for it-the method now responsible for three-fourths of the novels produced: the critic would learn to base his opinions upon a knowledge of the tools and how to use them; the work accepted by the public would be more artistic, more careful, more faithful.

Of course, we shall not get this School of Fiction-yet. The popular and the paragrapher's-belief that Fiction comes by

nature and is not an Art, is too strong. But the Americans, who first proposed the School, are a practical people. They have grasped the fact that they have to do with an Art, while our critics are struggling with the aforesaid elementary idea that novel writing comes by nature. Most of our people also believe that it is rather a contemptible pursuit at best. Meantime there is one thing which authors, who really do seem as if they were beginning to act together at last, might do in their own interests. They might, and they should, prohibit altogether the presentation of their books for review to papers whose criticisms are inadequate, ignorant, or unjust. And this simple measure of self-defence is one which some of us mean to bear in mind and to practise.

WALTER BESANT.

III.

INCE Art is science with an addition, since some science

SIN

underlies all Art, there is seemingly no paradox in the use of such a phrase as "the Science of Fiction." One concludes it to mean that comprehensive and accurate knowledge of realities which must be sought for, or intuitively possessed, to some extent, before anything deserving the name of an artistic performance in narrative can be produced.

The particulars of this science are the generals of almost all others. The materials of Fiction being human nature and circumstances, the science thereof may be dignified by calling it the codified law of things as they really are. No single pen can treat exhaustively of this. The Science of Fiction is contained in that large work, the cyclopædia of life.

In no proper sense can the term "science" be applied to other than this fundamental matter. It can have no part or share in the construction of a story, however recent speculations may have favoured such an application. We may assume with certainty that

directly the constructive stage is entered upon, Art-high or low -begins to exist.

The most devoted apostle of realism, the sheerest naturalist, cannot escape, any more than the withered old gossip over her fire, the exercise of Art in his labour or pleasure of telling a tale. Not until he becomes an automatic reproducer of all impressions whatsoever can he be called purely scientific, or even a manufacturer on scientific principles. If in the exercise of his reason he select or omit, with an eye to being more truthful than truth (the just aim of Art), he transforms himself into a technicist at a

move.

As this theory of the need for the exercise of the Dædalian faculty for selection and cunning manipulation has been disputed, it may be worth while to examine the contrary proposition. That it should ever have been maintained by such a romancer as M. Zola, in his work on the Roman Expérimental, seems to reveal an obtuseness to the disproof conveyed in his own novels which, in a French writer, is singular indeed. To be sure that author-whose powers in story-telling, rightfully and wrongfully exercised, may be partly owing to the fact that he is not a critic―does in a measure concede something in the qualified counsel that the novel should keep as close to reality as it can; a remark which may be interpreted with infinite latitude, and would no doubt have been cheerfully accepted by Dumas père or Mrs. Radcliffe. It implies discriminative choice; and if we grant that we grant all. But to maintain in theory what he abandons in practice, to subscribe to rules and to work by instinct, is a proceeding not confined to the author of Germinal and La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret.

The reasons that make against such conformation of storywriting to scientific processes have been set forth so many times in examining the theories of the realist, that it is not necessary to recapitulate them here. Admitting the desirability, the impossibility of reproducing in its entirety the phantasmagoria of experience with infinite and atomic truth, without shadow, relevancy, or subordination, is not the least of them. The fallacy appears to owe its origin to the just perception that with our widened knowledge of the universe and its forces, and man's position therein, narrative,

to be artistically convincing, must adjust itself to the new alignment, as would also artistic works in form and colour, if further spectacles in their sphere could be presented. Nothing but the illusion of truth can permanently please, and when the old illusions begin to be penetrated, a more natural magic has to be supplied.

Creativeness in its full and ancient sense-the making a thing or situation out of nothing that ever was before-is apparently ceasing to satisfy a world which no longer believes in the abnormal -ceasing at least to satisfy the van-couriers of taste; and creative fancy has accordingly to give more and more place to realism, that is, to an artificiality distilled from the fruits of closest observation.

This is the meaning deducible from the work of the realists, however stringently they themselves may define realism in terms. Realism is an unfortunate, an ambiguous word, which has been taken up by literary society like a view-halloo, and has been assumed in some places to mean copyism, and in others pruriency, and has led to two classes of delineators being included in one condemnation.

Just as bad a word is one used to express a consequence of this development, namely "brutality," a term which, first applied by French critics, has since spread over the English school like the other. It aptly hits off the immediate impression of the thing meant; but it has the disadvantage of defining impartiality as a passion, and a plan as a caprice. It certainly is very far from truly expressing the aims and methods of conscientious and wellintentioned authors who, notwithstanding their excesses, errors, and rickety theories, attempt to narrate the vérité vraie.

To return for a moment to the theories of the scientific realists. Every friend to the novel should and must be in sympathy with their error, even while distinctly perceiving it. Though not true, it is well found. To advance realism as complete copyism, to call the idle trade of story-telling a science, is the hyperbolic flight of an admirable enthusiasm, the exaggerated cry of an honest reaction from the false, in which the truth has been impetuously approached and overleapt in fault of lighted on.

Possibly, if we only wait, the third something, akin to perfection, will exhibit itself on its due pedestal. How that third some

thing may be induced to hasten its presence, who shall say? Hardly the English critic.

But this appertains to the Art of novel-writing, and is outside the immediate subject. To return to the "science." . . Yet what is the use? Its very comprehensiveness renders the attempt to dwell upon it a futility. Being an observative responsiveness to everything within the cycle of the suns that has to do with actual life, it is easier to say what it is not than to categorise its summa gencra. It is not, for example, the paying of a great regard to adventitious externals to the neglect of vital qualities, not a precision about the outside of the platter and an obtuseness to the contents. An accomplished lady once confessed to the writer that she could never be in a room two minutes without knowing every article of furniture it contained and every detail in the attire of the inmates, and, when she left, remembering every remark. Here was a person, one might feel for the moment, who could prime herself to an unlimited extent and at the briefest notice in the scientific data of fiction; one who, assuming her to have some slight artistic power, was a born novelist. To explain why such a keen eye to the superficial does not imply a sensitiveness to the intrinsic is a psychological matter beyond the scope of these notes; but that a blindness to material particulars often accompanies a quick perception of the more ethereal characteristics of humanity, experience continually shows.

A sight for the finer qualities of existence, an ear for the "still sad music of humanity," are not to be acquired by the outer senses alone, close as their powers in photography may be. What cannot be discerned by eye and ear, what may be apprehended only by the mental tactility that comes from a sympathetic appreciativeness of life in all its manifestations, this is the gift which renders its possessor a more accurate delineator of human nature than many another with twice his powers and means of external observation, but without that sympathy. To see in half and quarter views the whole picture, to catch from a few bars the whole tune, is the intuitive power that supplies the would-be storywriter with the scientific bases for his pursuit. He may not count the dishes at a feast, or accurately estimate the value of the jewels