Morning journal and courier., 1885-01-24
The French NOVelist,s Method.

The French gre we'll ahead, both in iitera- l ture and painting, in @ line of thought and work toward which the great scientific eur I rent of the century seems to be irresistibly | sweeping us all. 'tPut away from you," they ! cry to us, ''this party pris which leads you to ! make your novels the expression of certain limited number of threadbare ideas, and to give to your characters and their stories an artificial rountiness and gIloleness unknown to life itself. Give up the absurd attempt to construct pictures of life under the ham pering condition of excluding some of the most powerful of the motives which affect life. Describe what you see and know. It is not your business to make it beautiful, nor against vice. Leave idealisIn to the poet: the novel of the present day is document of human history; it should be as faithful and full possible. And, to it's influence
 upon morals, you are not more concerned
 with it than you with the influence of human life, modern civilization has devei- oped it, upon the morals of the indi-
 vidual Simply it is not your affair If human contained more beauty than ugliness,
 and were enthusiastically shaped to ideal ends,
 your sense of beauty and idealism would be
 ill their right place; but as it is, ugliness is
 the rule and beauty the exception, nor can
 any plain man perceive the evidence for your
 idealist optimistic conceptions of things.
 Your careful canoEs of selection are an i'm
 pertinence to the humanity you profess to
 draw. Show her to us as she is. |.
 Nothing can exceed the contempt of the
 successful French novelist for the slovenly
 ways of his English brethren, for the con
 ventionality of their plots, the commences
 of the motives employed by them, the mar
 rowness of their range Of characters, the care
 lessness of their literary method. To the
 critical Frenchman almost ail English novels
 are afflicted with incurable amateurishness.
 He will tell you that he himself writes
 novel year; that every scene in it is studied beforehand; that he invents nothing but his framework and connections, and that every scene dialogue, Or character is laboriously drawn or worked up from the life with the same orderly regularity as any other profes 1 sional man is bound to give to his business. ! ''As for you,' he winds up ssrcastically, l "you are still in the days of inspiration | take care to accumulate, as any novelist's l stock trade, store of notes and records of l scenes and characters, taken day by day from | the life. When l am planning novel, my l or the most important part of it, is l there before me. The intrigue which is to | bind the story together matters very little | compared to the pictures already have. To | them is my metier, and 1 have | no more excuse for neglecting my daily task than a lawyer doctor or bureaucrat. My business when it comes to the formation of novel is to choose, combine, ,and develop, | from what I already possess; to find gen eral situation or striking incident which will give unity to a certain mass of material, | and then set myself to the artists labor of which, supposing I have the novelist's qualities to begin with, is nothing but matter of training and patience. But you are still accustomed to regard the oper- ation of novel writing as a kind of magical process an affair of incantations''