On books and arts

ON BOOKS AND ARTS
BY FREDERICK WEDMORE
LONDON HODDER AND STOUGHTON 27 PATERNOSTER ROW 1899
Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
In the pages that here follow I have gathered up such of my more or less critical contributions to various Reviews, and to one great daily paper, as I am least unwilling to preserve within the covers of a book.
As the proportion borne by things reprinted from the ‘Standard’ will seem small to those who know during how many years I have been permitted to contribute to its columns the expression of opinion on many of those arts which have been both my delight and my laborious study, let me just simply say that every line that I have written in that paper has been written with a single eye to the needs of the occasion and the moment, and the more expressly any writing is designed for a particular need and place, the less, I think, is it adapted for transplanting.
There has been no attempt to bring these essays, or these fragments, ‘up-to-date’—to bring them to the point of view, I mean, of the time at which they chance to be republished. A suppression here, and there the alteration of a phrase—little else is attempted. They remain, frankly, ‘contributions.’
F. W.
Westminster, October 1899.
One of the most engaging of the wits of our day wrote lately in a weekly newspaper that it is, for the most part, only those who are not good enough actors to act successfully in Life, who are compelled to act at the Theatre. Under the influence of such an amiable paradox it is possible that we may ask ourselves, in regard to story-writing, whether the people singled out to practise it are those, chiefly, to whose personal history Romance has been denied: so that the greatest qualification even for the production of a lady’s love-tale, is—that the lady shall never have experienced a love-affair. Eminent precedents might be cited in support of the contention. A great editor once comfortably declared that the ideal journalist was a writer who did not know too much about his subject. The public did not want much knowledge, he said. The literary criticism in your paper would be perfect if you handed it over to the critic of Music; and the musical criticism would want for nothing if you assigned it to an expert in Art. And Mr. Thackeray, speaking of love-tales, said something that pointed the same way. He protested, no one should write a love-story after he was fifty. And why? Because he knew too much about it.