Now, after all, could anything be less harmful than my tales? The casual meeting of my hero and heroine in the first chapter has always been marked by the gravest circumspection. My melodrama has never been offensively gory,—in fact, I have been ridiculed for my bloodless combats. My villains have been the sort that anyone with any kind of decent bringing-up would hiss. A girl in white, walking beside a lake, with a blue parasol swinging back of her head, need offend no one. That the young man emerging from the neighboring wood should not recognize her at once as the young woman ordained in his grandfather’s will as the person he must marry to secure the estate, seems utterly banal, I confess; but it is the business of romance to maintain illusions. Realism, with the same agreed state of facts, recognizes the girl immediately—and spoils the story. Or I might put it thus: in realism, much or all is obvious in the first act; in romance, nothing is quite clear until the third. This is why romance is more popular than realism, for we are all children and want to be surprised. Why villains should always be so stupid, and why heroines should so perversely misunderstand the noble motives of heroes, are questions I cannot answer. Likewise before dear old Mistaken Identity—the most venerable impostor in the novelist’s cabinet—I stand dumbly grateful.
On the stage, where a plot is most severely tested, but where the audience must, we are told, always be in the secret, we see constantly how flimsy a mask the true prince need wear. And the reason for this lies in the primal and—let us hope—eternal childlikeness of the race. The Zeitgeist will not grind us underfoot so long as we are capable of joy in make-believe, and can renew our youth in the frolics of Peter Pan.
You, sir, who re-read “The Newcomes” every year, and you, madam, reverently dusting your Jane Austen,—I am sadder than you can be that my talent is so slender; but is it not a fact that you have watched me at my little tricks on the mimic stage, and been just a little astonished when the sparrow, and not the dove, emerged from the handkerchief? But you prefer the old writers; and so, dear friends, do I!
Having, as I have confessed, deliberately tried my hand at romance merely to see whether I could swim the moat under a cloud of the enemy’s arrows, and to gain experience in the mechanism of story-writing, I now declare (though with no illusion as to the importance of the statement) that I have hung my sword over the fireplace; that I shall not again thunder upon the tavern door at midnight; that not much fine gold could tempt me to seek, by means however praiseworthy, to bring that girl with the blue parasol to a proper appreciation of the young gentleman with the suit-case, who even now is pursuing her through the wood to restore her lost handkerchief. It has been pleasant to follow the bright guidon of romance; even now, from the window of the tall office-building in which I close these reflections, I can hear the bugles blowing and look upon
“Strangest skies and unbeholden seas.”
But I feel reasonably safe from temptation. Little that men do is, I hope, alien to me; and the life that surges round me, and whose sounds rise from the asphalt below, or the hurrying feet on the tiles in my own corridor of this steel-boned tower,—the faint tinkle of telephones, the click of elevator doors,—these things, and the things they stand for, speak with deep and thrilling eloquence; and he who would serve best the literature of his time and country will not ignore them.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
FOOTNOTE:
[1] “Heckling the Church,” The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1911.