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Besides the instinct of paternity—or perhaps in place of it—the novelist may feel an instinct to build something, or to paint a beautiful picture, or mold a lovely figure. This yearning of the artist, so-called, is sometimes denoted by the word “self-expression,” a misnomer, if it be not a euphemism, for the longing to fatherhood. There is just as much “self-expression” in the paternity of a boy or a girl as in the creation of a book, a picture or a building. The child, in any case, has innumerable other ancestors; you are not the first to have written such a book or painted such a picture.
How about the second motive in novel-writing, the desire to please or instruct others? The only safe generalization about it seems to be this: A novel written exclusively from this motive will be a bad novel. A novel is not, above everything, a didactic enterprise. Yet even those enterprises of the human race which are in their essence purely didactic, designed “to warn, to comfort, to command,” such as sermons and lessons in school, seldom achieve their greatest possible effect if instruction or improvement be the preacher’s or teacher’s unadorned and unconcealed and only purpose.
Take a school lesson. Teachers who get the best results are invariably found to have added some element besides bare instruction to their work. Sometimes they have made the lesson entertaining; sometimes they have exercised that imponderable thing we call “personal magnetism”; sometimes they have supplied an incentive to learn that didn’t exist in the lesson itself.
Take a sermon. If the auditor does not feel the presence in it of something besides the mere intelligence the words convey the sermon leaves the auditor cold.
Pure intellect is not a force in human affairs. Bach wrote music with a very high intellectual content but the small leaven of sublime melody is present in his work that lasts through the centuries. Shakespeare and Beethoven employed intellect and emotionalism in the proportion of fifty-fifty. Sir Joshua Reynolds mixed his paint “with brains, sir”; but the significant thing is that Sir Joshua did not use only gray matter on his palette. Those who economize on emotionalism in one direction usually make up for it, not always consciously, in another. Joseph Hergesheimer, writing Java Head, is very sparing in the emotionalism bound up with action and decidedly lavish in the emotionalism inseparable from sensuous coloring and “atmosphere.”
No, a novel written wholly to instruct will never do; but neither will a novel written entirely to please, to give æsthetic or sensuous enjoyment to the reader. Such a novel is like a portion of a fine French sauce—with nothing to spread it on. It is honey without a crust to dip.