He nodded his head approvingly. "From such seed a good crop should come," he said. "But what line shall you take?"
"I don't know."
"Not novels then, for certain?"
"Nothing for certain—whatever comes and calls for expression."
They were pacing up and down together, and there was a pause.
"Did you expect I should try to write novels, and do you think I ought?" Beth asked at last.
"I think I did expect it," he answered; "but as to whether you ought or ought not, that is for you to decide. There is much to be said against novel reading and writing. I think it was De Quincey who said that novels are the opium of the West; and I have myself observed that novel-reading is one of those bad habits that grow upon people until they are enslaved by it, demoralised by it; and if that is the case with the reader, what must the writer suffer?"
Beth bent her brows upon this. "But that is only one side of it, is it not?" she asked after a moment's reflection. "I notice in all things a curious duality, a right side and a wrong side. Confusion is the wrong side of order, misery of happiness, falsehood of truth, evil of good; and it seems to me that novel-reading, which can be a vice, I know, may also be made a virtue. It depends on the writer."
"And on the taste of the reader," he suggested. "But I believe the taste of the intelligent 'general reader' is much better than one supposes. The mind craves for nourishment; and the extraordinary success of books in which any attempt, however imperfect, is made to provide food for thought, as distinguished from those which merely offer matter to distract the attention, bears witness, it seems to me, to the involuntary effort which is always in progress to procure it. I believe myself that good fiction may do more to improve the mind, enlarge the sympathies, and develop the judgment than any other form of literature—partly because it looks into the hidden springs of action, and makes all that is obscure in the way of impulse and motive clear to us. Biography, for instance, merely skims the surface of life, as a rule; and in history, where man is a puppet moved by events, there can be very little human nature."
"I wonder if you read many novels," said Beth. "I have to read them aloud to my husband until I am satiated. And I am determined, if I ever do try to write one, to avoid all that is conventional. I never will have a faultlessly beautiful heroine, for instance. I am sick of that creature. When I come to her, especially if she has golden hair yards long, a faultless complexion, and eyes of extraordinary dimensions, I feel inclined to groan and shut the book. I have met her so often in the weary ways of fiction! I know every variety of her so well! She consists of nothing but superlatives, and is as conventional as the torso of an Egyptian statue, with her everlasting physical perfection. I think her as repulsive as a barber's block. I confess that a woman who has golden hair and manages to look like a lady, or to be like one even in a book, is a wonder, considering all that is associated with golden hair in our day; but I should avoid the abnormal as much as the conventional. I would not write plotty-plotty books either, nor make a pivot of the everlasting love-story, which seems to me to show such a want of balance in an author, such an absence of any true sense of proportion, as if there was nothing else of interest in life but our sexual relations. But, oh!" she broke off, "how I do appreciate what the difficulty of selection must be! In writing a life, if one could present all sides of it, and not merely one phase—the good and the bad of it, the joys and the sorrows, the moments of strength and of weakness, of wisdom and of folly, of misery and of pure delight—what a picture!"