Shakespeare.
Stories read by the Young.
The Suicide Club.
Jane Eyre.
Adam Bede.
Paul Ferroll.
Daniel Deronda.
With regard to the first of these propositions, I should say that crimes of all kinds occur more frequently in all imaginative literature than they do in the dull routine of everyday existence. Murder, for example, is much more frequent in Shakespeare than it is in ordinary English life. Even stories that are considered innocent enough to be read by the young, such as The Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and, in recent times, Mr. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, are full of villainy and homicide, introduced for no purpose in the world but to excite the interest of the reader. What would English critics say to a Frenchman who should affirm that there are suicide clubs in England like the mutual murder society described with such circumstantial detail in the New Arabian Nights? If we think of a few famous English novels we shall find that they often describe situations which are certainly not common in the ordinary lives of respectable people like ourselves. We are not generally either bigamists, or seducers, or wife-slayers, yet Jane Eyre turned upon an intended bigamy, Adam Bede turned upon a case of seduction and infanticide, and Paul Ferroll fascinated us by the wonderfully self-possessed behaviour of a gentleman who had quietly murdered his wife, as she lay in bed, early one summer morning. In Daniel Deronda the most polished gentleman in the book has a family of illegitimate children, and the most brilliant young lady becomes, in intention, a murderess, whilst the sweetest girl is rescued from attempted suicide. These things may happen, which is enough for the purposes of the novelist. In France the great difficulty of that artist is the uninteresting nature of the usual preliminaries of marriage, so that he is thrown back upon adulterous love as the only kind that is adventurous and romantic.
That Fiction only represents Collected Cases.
Situations often Invented.