"So you may take it from me that the writer who declares that he is going to do something really worth while, just as soon as he gets through doing the thing that the public expects him to do, is deceiving himself and no one else. An author cannot stand still in his work. He either progresses or retrogrades, and no man progresses except by means of steady improvement. He cannot say, 'I will write a poor book this year and a great book next year.'"
Mr. McCutcheon is so unashamedly a romanticist that I expected to find him an enthusiastic partisan of the first and greatest master of the romantic novel in English. But, to my surprise, he said:
"I suppose the world has outgrown Sir Walter Scott's novels. It is quite natural that it should. The world is older and conditions have changed. The fairest simile I can offer in explanation is that as man himself grows older he loses, except in a too frequently elastic memory, his interest in the things that moved him when he was a boy."
But while Mr. McCutcheon believes (in defiance of the opinion of the publishers who continue to bring out, year by year, their countless new editions of the Waverley Novels in all the languages of the civilized world) that the spell of the Wizard of the North has waned, he nevertheless believes that the romantic novel has lost none of its ancient appeal.
"I do not believe," he said, "that the vogue of the romantic novel, or tale (which is a better word for describing the sort of fiction covered by this generic term), will ever die. The present war undoubtedly will alter the trend of the modern romantic fiction, but it will not in effect destroy it."
"How will it alter it?" I asked.
"Years most certainly will go by," he replied, "before the novelist may even hope to contend with the realities of this great and most unromantic conflict. Kings and courtiers are very ordinary, and, in some cases, ignoble creatures in these days, and none of them appears to be romantic.
"We find a good many villains among our erstwhile heroes, and a good many heroes among our principal villains. People will not care to read war novels for a good many years to come, but it is inevitable that future generations will read even the lightest kind of fiction dealing with this war, horrible though it is. Just so long as the world exists there will be people who read nothing else but the red-blood, stirring romantic stories.
"There exists, of course, a class of readers who will not be tempted by the romantic, who will not even tolerate it, because they cannot understand it. That class may increase, but so will its antithesis.
"I know a man who has read the Bible through five or six times, not because he is of a religious turn of mind or even mildly devout, but because there is a lot of good, sound, exciting romance in it! A man who is without romance in his soul has no right to beget children, for he cannot love them as they ought to be loved. They represent romance at its best. He is, therefore, purely selfish in his possession of them."