Critical Studies

by Ouida

There was a comical lamentation in the London Press the other day for what was called 'the death of the novel'; not the approaching death which I expect for it by suffocation under the dust-storms of verbosity and imbecility, but of death by its own suicide, through its own curtailed proportions. It was indignantly asked why it was not as long as it used to be in the 'Fifties and 'Sixties, and why novelists now wrote short stories which in that period would have found no sale, would not, indeed, have even found the preliminary necessary to a sale-publication.

Surely we remember some short stories called The Cricket on the Hearth and The Chimes, and others telling the adventures of the Great Hoggarty Diamond and of one Barry Lyndon? As for the length of novels nowadays, my own Massarenes, published in 1897, contains precisely the same number of words as Esmond, and, I think, Mr Mallock's novels, and those of Mrs Humphry Ward, must surely be quite as long, whilst Mr Hall Caine's marvellous narratives appear as endless as 'the thread of Time reel'd off the wheel of Fate.' The critic who grieves over the brevity of present-day volumes, thinks that Thackeray and Dickens wrote at such length because they were obliged to fill their monthly numbers! It seems to me far more likely that they were in love with their characters, as every writer of true talent is, and lingered tenderly over many needless details and dialogues out of sheer pleasure in their creations; and it must be admitted that both of them had naturally a discursive style, which would have been the better for some excision. But were it true that there is an unwritten law which limits or expands the length of romances according to the public caprice or taste, surely nothing could be more harmful to fiction than such limitation? Every story, if it be worth the telling, has its own natural length, which cannot be stretched or shortened arbitrarily without hurt. The sculptor knows that the form which he creates has its own natural proportions, its own inherent symmetry according to natural rules, which he must obey. The painter knows that, according to the nature of his subject, and of his intended treatment, he must take for his picture, either a small panel, a kit-kat, or a large canvas; and that if he force its dimensions, either by over-compression or over-extension, his work will be a failure.

Why is the author not bound by the same canon of art? Artistically, he certainly is so bound. Intellectually, he certainly is so bound. That this obligation is continually defied and broken through by many English writers, proves only that the great majority of these writers are not artists in any sense of the word.

The brevity or length of a literary work can have nothing to do with its beauty or excellence. If it be beautiful, if it be excellent, its proportions will be those which naturally grew out of its subject; and the writer who is an artist will know, as the painter knows, that he cannot alter the unwritten law which prescribes to him those proportions. What has either length or brevity to do with either excellence or beauty? What give both excellence and beauty are qualities not to be measured by a publisher's counting up of words, or a printer's enumeration of pages.

A sketch of a few pages of Maupassant's is worth all the volumes put together of Georges Ohnet; one of the Sonnets of Proteus is worth the whole swagger of the Seven Seas.

There seems to be, unhappily, an unwritten law in English literature that cheapness must of necessity be allied to ugliness. A cheap book is in England an inferior and unlovely thing. But it need not be so. It is not so everywhere. I have now before me a book of Pompeo Molmenti's, issued by Bemporad, of Florence; its cost is two francs twenty-five centièmes; less than one-and-sixpence in your money. It is bound in thick cream-coloured paper; it is called Il Moretto di Brescia, being a brief study of the life and works of the great artist of whose pure and noble work the city of Brescia is full. That the text is of rare scholarly excellence, and of the finest critical and appreciative qualities, there can be no question, since it is written by the President of the Accademia delle Arte of Venice. The type is large, the paper fine, the illustrations (phototyped) are of extreme delicacy and beauty, rendering worthily the works of the Moretto; the size of the book is Imperial 8vo.

Will you tell me where I should find anything equal to it at its price in London?

Your books are all ill-stitched, and fall to pieces as soon as one handles them. Your type is usually ugly, even at its best; all foreign readers complain of its clumsiness and confusing effect on the eyes. Compare a page of a Parisian book at three francs and a half with a page of a six-shilling English novel. The former is incomparably the superior. Your cheap illustrated books are still more scandalously treated. I have before me a book priced four-and-sixpence, more than double the price of Il Moretto. It is a book for children; its illustrations have been reproduced from earlier works, and they are not even all of the same method or the same size; some are printed from old wood-blocks, some are photographed; in one a child is represented the size of a fly, in another a dog is drawn bigger than a man; anything is thought good enough, it seems, for children. Artistic beauty is entirely lacking in the illustrations of English juvenile books; and there is nothing so irritating as the sight of illustrations of various qualities bound up in the same volume.

Even certain illustrated periodicals and journals are not above using up their old wood-blocks in their new numbers. It is a very disgraceful and unworthy practice. When the illustrations are fresh, the designer frequently does not attempt to adapt them to the text; a gentlemen is drawn like a cad, and a Newfoundland dog is drawn like a poodle; a peasant of the Romagna is drawn like a loafer in Shoreditch, and so on continually, without the slightest attention to accuracy.

There is also, beyond all doubt, an unwritten law which has been so universally observed that it has become, properly, as binding as a written law. I mean the law that when once a romance, or a story, or a poem have been published they cannot be altered.