Confessions and Criticisms

by Julian Hawthorne

In two or three cases I have tried to make portraits of real persons whom I have known; but these persons have always been more lifeless than the others, and most lifeless in precisely those features that most nearly reproduced life. The best results in this direction are realized by those characters that come to their birth simultaneously with the general scheme of the proposed events; though I remember that one of the most lifelike of my personages (Madge, in the novel "Garth") was not even thought of until the story of which she is the heroine had been for some time under consideration.

Speaking generally, I should suppose that the best novels are apt to be those that have been longest in the novelist's mind before being committed to paper; and the best materials to use, in the way of character and scenery, are those that were studied not less than seven or eight years previous to their reproduction. Thereby is attained that quality in a story known as atmosphere or tone, perhaps the most valuable and telling quality of all. Occasionally, however, in the rare case of a story that suddenly seizes upon the writer's imagination and despotically "possesses" him, the atmosphere is created by the very strength of the "possession." In the former instance, the writer is thoroughly master of his subject; in the latter, the subject thoroughly masters him; and both amount essentially to the same thing, harmony between subject and writer.

With respect to style, there is little to be said. Without a good style, no writer can do much; but it is impossible really to create a good style. A writer's style was born at the same time and under the same conditions that he himself was. The only rule that can be given him is, to say what he has to say in the clearest and most direct way, using the most fitting and expressive words. But often, of course, this advice is like that of the doctor who counsels his patient to free his mind from all care and worry, to live luxuriously on the fat of the land, and to make a voyage round the world in a private yacht. The patient has not the means of following the prescription. A writer may improve a native talent for style; but the talent itself he must either have by nature, or forever go without. And the style that rises to the height of genius is like the Phoenix; there is hardly ever more than one example of it in an age.

Upon the whole, I conceive that the best way of telling how a novel may be written will be to trace the steps by which some one novel of mine came into existence, and let the reader draw his own conclusions from the record. For this purpose I will select one of the longest of my productions, "Fortune's Fool."

It is so long that, rather than be compelled to read it over again, I would write another of equal length; though I hasten to add that neither contingency is in the least probable. In very few men is found the power of sustained conception necessary to the successful composition of so prolix a tale; and certainly I have never betrayed the ownership of such a qualification. The tale, nevertheless, is an irrevocable fact; and my present business it is to be its biographer.

When, in the winter of 1879, the opportunity came to write it, the central idea of it had been for over a year cooking in my mind. It was originally derived from a dream. I saw a man who, upon some occasion, caught a glimpse of a woman's face. This face was, in his memory, the ideal of beauty, purity, and goodness. Through many years and vicissitudes he sought it; it was his religion, a human incarnation of divine qualities.

At certain momentous epochs of his career, he had glimpses of it again; and the effect was always to turn him away from the wrong path and into the right. At last, near the end of his life, he has, for the first time, an opportunity of speaking to this mortal angel and knowing her; and then he discovers that she is mortal indeed, and chargeable with the worst frailties of mortality. The moral was that any substitute for a purely spiritual religion is fatal, and, sooner or later, reveals its rottenness.

This seemed good enough for a beginning; but, when I woke up, I was not long in perceiving that it would require various modifications before being suitable for a novel; and the first modifications must be in the way of rendering the plot plausible. What sort of a man, for example, must the hero be to fall into and remain in such an error regarding the character of the heroine? He must, I concluded, be a person of great simplicity and honesty of character, with a strong tinge of ideality and imagination, and with little or no education.

These considerations indicated a person destitute of known parentage, and growing up more or less apart from civilization, but possessing by nature an artistic or poetic temperament. Fore-glimpses of the further development of the story led me to make him the child of a wealthy English nobleman, but born in a remote New England village. His artistic proclivities must be inherited from his father, who was, therefore, endowed with a talent for amateur sketching in oils; which talent, again, led him, during his minority, to travel on the continent for purposes of artistic study. While in Paris, this man, Floyd Vivian, meets a young Frenchwoman, whom he secretly marries, and with whom he elopes to America. Then Vivian receives news of his father's death, compelling him to return to England; and he leaves his wife behind him.

A child (Jack, the hero of the story) is born during his absence, and the mother dies. Vivian, now Lord Castleman, finds reason to believe that his wife is dead, but knows nothing of the boy; and he marries again. The boy, therefore, is left to grow up in the Maine woods, ignorant of his parentage, but with one or two chances of finding it out hereafter. So far, so good.