Mrs. Hodgson Burnett may indeed be proud of her success, although she writes of it in such a simple, unaffected manner. ’Twas well for her she faced the lawsuit, for ruin scowled on one side while fortune smiled on the other.
No novelist’s works have sold more freely than those of Hall Caine and Miss Marie Corelli. Both are highly dramatic in style, but Miss Corelli has not taken to play-writing, preferring the novel as a means of expression.
Hall Caine, on the other hand, has been tempted by the allurements of the stage. When I asked him why he took up literature as a profession, he replied:
“I write a novel because I love the motive, or the story, or the characters, or the scene, or all four, and I dramatise it because I like to see my subject on the stage. If more material considerations sometimes influence me, more spiritual ones are, I trust, not always absent. I don’t think the time occupied in writing a book or a play has ever entered into my calculations, nor do I quite know which gives me most trouble.”
Continuing the subject, I ventured to ask him whether he thought drama or fiction the higher art.
“I like both the narrative and the dramatic forms of art, but perhaps I think the art of fiction is a higher and better art than the art of a drama, inasmuch as it is more natural, more free, and more various, and yet capable of equal unity. On the other hand, I think the art of the drama is in some respects more difficult, because it is more artificial and more limited, and always hampered by material conditions which concern the stage, the scenery, the actors, and even the audience. I think,” he continued, “the novel and the drama have their separate joys for the novelist and dramatist, and also their separate pains and penalties.
“On the whole, I find it difficult to compare things so different, and all I can say for myself is that, notwithstanding my great love of the theatre, I find it so trying in various ways—owing, perhaps, to my limitations—that I do not grudge any one the success he achieves as a dramatist, and I deeply sympathise with the man who fails in that character.”
How true that is! By far the most lenient critics are the workers. It is the man who never wrote a book who criticises most severely, the man who never painted a picture who is the hardest to please.
Speaking about the dramatic element of the modern novel, Mr. Caine continued: