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A Rebellious Heroine By: John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922) |
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A REBELLIOUS HEROINE by John Kendrick Bangs
CHAPTER I: STUART HARLEY: REALIST " if a word could save me, and that word were not the Truth, nay, if
it did but swerve a hair's breadth from the Truth, I would not say
it!" LONGFELLOW. Stuart Harley, despite his authorship of many novels, still
considered himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not
write his books; that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw
it, and he insisted always that he saw life as it was. "The mission of the novelist, my dear Professor," he had once been
heard to say at his club, "is not to amuse merely; his work is that
of an historian, and he should be quite as careful to write
truthfully as is the historian. How is the future to know what
manner of lives we nineteenth century people have lived unless our
novelists tell the truth?" "Possibly the historians will tell them," observed the Professor of
Mathematics. "Historians sometimes do tell us interesting things." "True," said Harley. "Very true; but then what historian ever let
you into the secret of the every day life of the people of whom he
writes? What historian ever so vitalized Louis the Fourteenth as
Dumas has vitalized him? Truly, in reading mere history I have
seemed to be reading of lay figures, not of men; but when the
novelist has taken hold properly ah, then we get the men." "Then," objected the Professor, "the novelist is never to create a
great character?" "The humorist or the mere romancer may, but as for the novelist with
a true ideal of his mission in life he would better leave creation to
nature. It is blasphemy for a purely mortal being to pretend that he
can create a more interesting character or set of characters than the
Almighty has already provided for the use of himself and his brothers
in literature; that he can involve these creations in a more dramatic
series of events than it has occurred to an all wise Providence to
put into the lives of His creatures; that, by the exercise of that
misleading faculty which the writer styles his imagination, he can
portray phases of life which shall prove of more absorbing interest
or of greater moral value to his readers than those to be met with in
the every day life of man as he is." "Then," said the Professor, with a dexterous jab of his cue at the
pool balls "then, in your estimation, an author is a thing to be led
about by the nose by the beings he selects for use in his books?" "You put it in a rather homely fashion," returned Harley; "but, on
the whole, that is about the size of it." "And all a man needs, then, to be an author is an eye and a type
writing machine?" asked the Professor. "And a regiment of detectives," drawled Dr. Kelly, the young surgeon,
"to follow his characters about." Harley sighed. Surely these men were unsympathetic. "I can't expect you to grasp the idea exactly," he said, "and I can't
explain it to you, because you'd become irreverent if I tried." "No, we won't," said Kelly. "Go on and explain it to us I'm bored,
and want to be amused." So Harley went on and tried to explain how the true realist must be
an inspired sort of person, who can rise above purely physical
limitations; whose eye shall be able to pierce the most impenetrable
of veils; to whom nothing in the way of obtaining information as to
the doings of such specimens of mankind as he has selected for his
pages is an insurmountable obstacle. "Your author, then, is to be a mixture of a New York newspaper
reporter and the Recording Angel?" suggested Kelly. "I told you you'd become irreverent," said Harley; "nevertheless,
even in your irreverence, you have expressed the idea. The writer
must be omniscient as far as the characters of his stories are
concerned he must have an eye which shall see all that they do, a
mind sufficiently analytical to discern what their motives are, and
the courage to put it all down truthfully, neither adding nor
subtracting, coloring only where color is needed to make the moral
lesson he is trying to teach stand out the more vividly... Continue reading book >>
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Fiction |
Literature |
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