[81:A] Shuman, "Steps into Journalism," p. 201.
[83:A] "The Art of Writing Fiction," p. 40.
[88:A] "Autobiography," vol. ii. p. 58.
[93:A] See Bates' "Talks on Writing English." An excellent manual, to which I am indebted for ideas and suggestions.
CHAPTER VII
PITFALLS
Items of General Knowledge
I propose to show in this chapter that a literary artist can never afford to despise details. He may have genius enough to write a first-rate novel, and sell it rapidly in spite of real blemishes, but if a work of art is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well. No writer is any the better for slovenly inaccuracy. Take the details of everyday life. Do you suppose you are infallible in these commonplace things? If so, be undeceived at once. It is simply marvellous with what ease a mistake will creep into your narrative. Even Mr Zangwill once made a hansom cab door to open with a handle from the inside, and the mistake appeared in six editions, escaping the reviewers, and was quietly altered by the author in the seventh. There is nothing particularly serious about an error of this kind; but at the same time, where truth to fact is so simple a matter, why not give the fact as it is? Trivialities may not interfere with the power of the story, but they often attach an ugliness, or a smack of the ridiculous, which cannot but hinder, to some extent, the beauty of otherwise good work. Mistakes such as that just referred to, arise, in most instances, out of the passion and feeling in which the novelist advances his narrative. The detail connected with the opening of the hansom door (doors) was nothing to Mr Zangwill, compared to the person who opened it. I should advise you, therefore, to master all the necessary minutiae of travelling, if your hero and heroine are going abroad; of city life if you take them to the theatre for amusement—in fact, of every environment in which imagination may place them. Then, when all your work is done, read what has been written with the microscopic eyes of a Flaubert.