THE DIFFICULTY OF ROMANCE-WRITERS.
THE reign of the new romance-writer, the novelist who refuses to obey conditions, and uses the supernatural, or the half-supernatural, or the impossible, or the wildly im- probable at his own discretion, will probably be short ; but for another reason than those usually assigned. The public will not weary of those stories, as some believe, if only they are adequately done ; and the materials are far more extensive than some reviewers imagine. The thirst for stories not limited by general experience is as inherent in human nature as is the belief in magic, or the desire for tales of true adventure, and is a thirst as strongly felt by cultivated Europeans as by Asiatics. Of all the works of Dumas, the one best known in all countries is "Monte Christo," that modern story from the "Arabian Nights," in which the power of drawing a cheque plays the part of the magic ring; and we took up yesterday the forty-six thousandth copy of Mr. Haggard's " She," which has not yet been printed in a" popular edition." Haronn al-Raschid will outlive any creation of Mr. Henry James's, and Gulliver will be a house- hold word when "Middlemarch" is forgotten. As for materials, no one has yet so much as attempted to use freely the true super- natural, or described to us at full length a being who is avowedly not of our world or limited by its immovable conditions. Mr. Howitt made the attempt in the collection of stories be called " Pantika ;" but it was a failure, and of this generation hardly any one would even understand us if we spoke of Nichar, "the mighty angel," who was so very like a muscular Christian clergy- man. The effort to paint such a being will probably not be made except by a new Milton, novelists, like the rest of mankind, having their own laws of modesty ; but the whole of that domain lies still open to the audacious and the strong, and we doubt, though we write it with a tremor, whether, if the audacity and the strength were sufficient, men have become too civilised to take interest in the action of their superiors. " Angels " cannot be for ever lost in an eternal calm. The realm of the half-supernatural has been much more worked, but it is by no means exhausted yet. Is there nowhere a family merged in our complex civilisation which descends, and knows that it descends, from the race believed by old commentators to be mentioned in Genesis, the half-breeds of heaven, the children of angels and men, and which retains from that descent powers and capacities and longings, and above all certainties as to another life, and with them religions obligations unknown to its fellows all around, always operative, yet always of necessity concealed ? That family, if its members knew each other, would be a Secret Society worth all the Jesuits in the world. Is there no one who is undying, yet must obey all other conditions of humanity ; no one, except St. Leon, for whom wealth is pro- ducible at will, yet who dreads to use his power; no one possessed of the faculty Bulwer used to hint at but never utilised in his half-supernatural stories, of generating in another mind any idea he would ? The novelists who have used mesmerism as a
machine have thought of that power, but have always limited it to its subject's periods of unconsciousness, and employed it for some comparatively trifling end. It would give its owner the secure mastery of the world. Fancy compelling the Par- nellites by mere mental mastery to struggle for English sway !
Is there no one who can read the thoughts around him, and so live utterly apart, strong on some sides almost as a god, on others the weakest because the most jealous, and therefore miserable, of mankind? Except in the departments of mesmerism and sleep-walking, the romance-writers have hardly utilised the facts of physiology now creeping slowly into common knowledge, while they have left the machinery of science to Jules Verne, who uses it with the intellectual subtlety of a peep-show pro- prietor who has hired an electric light. Suppose a man who in sleep learned all that waking he desired to know. It would be but a grand exaggeration of some well-known mental processes in sleep. If absolute freedom from terrestrial conditions is desired, the list of worlds in which all may be that the thinker can devise or the poet imagine is not ended with the account of Mars in "Across the Zodiac," that singularly effective romance which so few seem to have read ; and there may be, even in this world, races of stranger yet more human type than Mr. Haggard's cruel friends who burned corpses to light their revels. Why, we read a letter only last week describing an actual people of warriors, warriors as terrible as Umslopogaas, who fight only by night; and we know of sects, with thousands of followers, whose distinctive doctrine is that humanity is accursed, and should and shall end. Was it not a well-known and most thoughtful correspondent of our own who, after a careful study of the Cambodian sculptures accumulated in Paris, declared that that extinct and powerful race had in them something absolutely separate from ordinary humanity, a con- scienceless force, a wicked satisfaction in themselves, such as in all his studies he had never dreamed of before ? As to places, who knows anything of the natural forces at work in the Indian Archipelago, where a volcano the other day flung out a shower 'which for months coloured the sunsets ; or in Formosa, where the perpendicular cliffs ares7,000 ft. high ; or has yet discovered that perished or perishing city in Central Australia whose painted ruins show not only that a forgotten and great race has passed away in the continent we think unpopulated, but that this race was dumb ? Is speech a condition of thought, or of swift com- munication, or of combined action either ?—watch, before you answer, the making of a beavers' dam.
The difficulty of the romance-writers is not any satiety in the public, or any lack of materials, but the necessity which arises in using them for something of true genius. The faculty of writing social novels is given to very many who have no genius at all, but who are struck with the incidents of life, and can make stories out of them almost as well as old nurses. They are sometimes very good stories, or when the narrator has, like " Sarah Tytler " for example, an exceptionally keen habit of observation, admirable stories ; but their authors are by no means necessarily extraordinary people. They must be able to write fairly interesting conversation, to dramatise with some sense of scenic effect, and to make remarks of some merit either for piquancy, or pathos, or shrewd observation ; but they need not have much imagination, originality is rarely in them, and poetic power is often a positive drawback. They are almost sure so to use it as to create the impression of unreality and strain, which, for example, deforms and spoils all the best passages in Lord Lytton's tales. The powers of a good talker are those which help them most ; and if to them they add the gift of the narrator, so often found in the least cultivated, they will find acceptance at Mudie's, and receive from their publishers satis- factory cheques. The true romance-writer, to succeed, requires a great deal more original invention, a sense of situation stronger than the playwright's, a power of conceiving characters about whom experience can tell him nothing, and making them real figures, and, above all, a poetic imagination. That last is Mr. Rider Haggard's secret. He has the gift of the narrator in the highest degree, and strong though limited power of invention; but the quality which really " fetches " his readers, and makes them draw their breath, is always described by all critics in the one word, " Homeric." He is on occasion a poet, and a considerable one, though he uses prose to produce his loftiest as well as his ordinary effects ; and poetic power of that class is given to very few. Reading recently quite a number of the romances obviously suggested by his success, we have been struck by the absence of this quality, and the consequent absence of
any thing like strong attractiveness. We are not worshippers of Mr. James Payn, for instance, but we should not have thought it possible that he should be actually tedious ; and yet "A Prince of the Blood," which but for the change in the public taste would never have been written, has for its fault, amidst some merits, tediousness. To make the story possible required a poet, —that is to say, precisely what Mr. Payn is not. He is hamourist, tale-teller, dramatist, even occasionally, as in "By Proxy," a considerable painter of character—if he hates it—but poet he is not. Nor is the marine novelist, Mr. Clark Russell. Of all the recent romances not of the first class which we have recently read, his is perhaps the best. He can always paint sea-pictures, he has hit on an original form of horror, he has shown in his method of extrication some originality ; but his "Frozen Pirate" is nevertheless, even for us —and we are of those who appreciate his work—distinctly dull. We care nothing about the Pirate, and quite agree with his reviver as to the expediency of wringing his neck ; and but little more for the awful scene amidst which his short life is passed. The book is spoiled by a want of adequate poetic power, the more remarkable because Mr. Russell has in less romantic work, and even in this book, displayed poetic appreciation of the moods of the sea. The unconditioned romance, in fact, requires, to make it quite acceptable, a rarer artist than the novel,—an author of unusual, though it may not be necessarily the highest, force. Such writers are infrequent ; and when Mr. Haggard and Mr. Stevenson have spent themselves, we look to hear it said, and said truly, from the publisher's point of view, that "the public taste for romance has once more died away." It never dies away, but the combination of qualities which enables a man to gratify it is so infrequent, that a series of romances feeding the taste fully, say, for a generation, can hardly be. We shall have a series of poets as soon, and that, though it has occurred in the last happy generation and in the generation before, it is usually an incident to be noted only once within two centuries.
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