Part 12 (2/2)

One cannot but feel grateful for all this spontaneous beneficence The mischief is that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred (the fraction is really estions are of no possible use

Why should this be? Put briefly, the reason is that a story differs from an anecdote I take the first two instances that co ones, and, as they occur in a book of Mr Kipling's, are safe to be well known to allbook, _Life's Handicap, On Greenhow Hill_ is a story; _The Lang Men o' Larut_ is an anecdote

_On Greenhow Hill_ is founded on a study of the human heart, and it is upon the hu Men o' Larut_ is just a yarn spun for the yarn's sake: it infor, and is closely related (if I e for the occasion) to ”the lies swapped between men after the ladies have left the table” And the reason why the story-teller, when (as will happen at tienerous outpourings of his unknown friends, is just this--that the plots are merely plots, and the anecdotes merely anecdotes, and the difference between these and a story that shall reveal so ood art

Let us go a step further At first sight it seems a superfluous contention that a novelist's rank depends upon what he can see and what he can tell us of the human heart But, as a matter of fact, you will find that four-fifths at least of contemporary criticism is devoted to matters quite different--to what I will call Externals, or the Accidents of Story-telling: and that, as a consequence, our novelists are spending a quite unreasonable proportion of their labor upon Externals I wrote ”as a consequence” hastily, because it is always easier to blame the critics If the truth were known, I dare say the novelists began it with their talk about ”documents,” ”the scientific method,” ”observation and experiment,” and the like

The Fallacy of ”Documents”

Now you in and observe his: youwhat he eats and drinks: you may search out what his uncles died of, and the price he pays for his hats, and--know nothing at all about hih to insure his life or assess him for Inco a novel about hi externals His unspoken aht, in his bed; the pain he s in secret--these are the Essentials, and you cannot get them by Observation If you can discover these, you are a Novelist born: if not, you may as well shut up your note-book and turn to some more remunerative trade You will never surprise the secret of a soul by accu notes upon Externals

Local Color

Then, again, we have Local Color, an article inordinately bepraised just now; and yet an External For hueographical conditions, undergoes surprisingly little change as we pass froitude to another The Story of Ruth is as intelligible to an Englishleaned in the stubble behind Tess Durbeyfield Levine toiling with the eneia at the altar, Gil Blas before the Archbishop of Granada have as close a claim on our sympathy as if they lived but a few doors from us Let me be understood I hold it best that a novelist should be intimately acquainted with the country in which he lays his scene But, none the less, the study of local color is not of the first importance And the critic who lavishes praise upon a writer for ”introducing us to an entirely new at us to scenes hich the jaded novel-reader is scarcely acquainted,” and for ”giving us hich bears every trace ofthat which is of secondary importance The works of Richard Jefferies form a considerable museum of externals of one particular kind; and this is possibly the reason why the cockney novelist waxes eloquent over Richard Jefferies He can now ireater expense of ti down the _Ga a chapter or so before settling down to work There is not the slightest har local color (however acquired) of the first i fiction there is probably no safer rule than to ask one's self, How far does the pleasure excited in me by this book depend upon the transitory and trivial accidents that distinguish this time, this place, this character, from another time, another place, another character? And how far upon the abiding elements of human life, the constant temptations, the constant ambitions, and the constant nobility and weakness of the human heart? These are the essentials, and no amount of documents or local color can fill their room

Sept 30, 1893 The Country as ”Copy”

The case of a certain small volume of verse in which I take some interest, and its treatment at the hands of the reviewers, seeup of late In a short account of Mr

Hosken, the postman poet, written by way of preface to his _Verses by the Way_ (Methuen & Co), I took occasion to point out that he is not what is called in the jargon of these days a ”nature-poet”; that his poetic bent inclines rather to h his early struggles in London and elsewhere have e people in abnormal conditions of life, his interest has always lain, not in these striking anomalies, but in the destiny of hureat sches

These are sih, in Mr Hosken's verse--where anybody else may find them They also seem to me to be, for a critic's purpose, ultiilius Maro wore his buskins soher in the heel than did Quintus Horatius Flaccus: and no critic, to h to point out that, since Horace had soil was a stay-at-home courtier, therefore Horace should have essayed to tell the il contented hiossip of the Via Sacra Yet--to coreat--this is the mistake into which our critics have fallen in Mr

Hosken's case; and I et behind the ultimate facts and busy themselves with questions they have no proper concern with Some ask petulantly why Mr Hosken is not a ”nature-poet” Soravely concerned that ”local talent”

(_ie_ the talent of a man who happens to dwell in some locality other than the critic's) should not concern itself with local affairs; and re All the brass and plu”

As if a man may not concern himself with the broader problems of life and attack them with all the apparatus of recorded experience, unless he happen to live on one bank or other of the Fleet Ditch! If a ift, he can find all the ”brass and plue If he have not, he may (provided he be a _bona fide_ traveller) find it elsewhere What, for instance, were the use of telling Keats: ”To thy surgery belong all the brass and plu”? He couldn't find it there, so he betook hiht has a country post questions that vexed the brain of Plato?”--I ask in return, ”What right had John Keats, who knew no Greek, to busy hiy?” And the answer is that each has a perfect right to follow his own bent

The assumption of many critics that only within the metropolitan cab radius can a comprehensive systeh the plate-glass s of two or three clubs is it possible to see life steadily, and see it whole, is one that I have before now had occasion to dispute It is joined in this case to another yet more preposterous--that from a brief survey of an author's circuht to write about, and how he ought to write it And I have observed particularly that if a writer be a countryman, or at all well acquainted with country life, all kinds of odd entertainment is expected of him in the way of notes on the habits of birds, beasts, and fishes, on the growth of all kinds of common plants, on the proper way to make hay, to milk a cow, and so forth

Richard Jefferies

Now it is just the true countrys down in a book than a Londoner would think of stating in a novel that Bond Street joins Oxford Street and Piccadilly: simply because they have been familiar to hinificant sign of a rather lamentable movement--of none other, indeed, than the ”Rural Exodus,” as Political Economists call it--that each and every novelist ofas a matter of course that his readers are tolerably familiar with the London Directory, should, equally as a norant of the commonest features of open-air life

I protest there are few things more pitiable than the transports of your cockney critic over Richard Jefferies Listen, for instance, to this kind of thing:--

”Here and there upon the bank wild gooseberry and currant bushesoff ripe fruit fro out of the decayed 'touchwood' on the top of a holloithy-pollard

Wild apple trees, too, are not uncoes

”The beautiful rich colour of the horse-chestnut, when quite ripe and fresh froreen shell, can hardly be surpassed; underneath the tree the grass is streith shells where they have fallen and burst Close to the trunk the grass is worn away by the restless traives in suenerally near the trunk--fall off in suround, not unlike rotten cork, or black as if burned But the oak-galls show thick on soreen, and round as a ball; they will re brown and hard, and hanging there till the spring coain”--_Wild Life in a Southern County_, pp 224-5