Intentions | Page 3

that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be
overestimated. People have a careless way of talking about a "born liar," just as they talk
about a "born poet." But in both cases they are wrong. Lying and poetry are arts--arts, as
Pinto saw, not unconnected with each other--and they require the most careful study, the
most disinterested devotion. Indeed, they have their technique, just as the more material
arts of painting and sculpture have, their subtle secrets of form and colour, their
craft-mysteries, their deliberate artistic methods. As one knows the poet by his fine music,
so one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the
casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must, precede
perfection. But in modern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too
common, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen
into disrepute. Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which,
if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best

models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes
to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy--'
CYRIL. My dear fellow!
VIVIAN. Please don't interrupt in the middle of a sentence. 'He either falls into careless
habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed.
Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the
imagination of anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty
of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in
contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing
novels which are so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability. This is
no isolated instance that we are giving. It is simply one example out of many; and if
something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts,
Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.
'Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose, is
tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively no other name for it. There is such
a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow
is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation
of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet. As for Mr. Rider
Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is
now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous,
he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of
cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes
fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible
"points of view" his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.
Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice.
He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of
concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of
a short-sighted detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes
almost unbearable. The horses of Mr. William Black's phaeton do not soar towards the
sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects. On
seeing them approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattles
pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things.
Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is like the
lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about "le beau ciel d'Italie." Besides, he has
fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. He is always telling us that to be
good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying.
Robert Elsmere is of course a masterpiece--a masterpiece of the "genre ennuyeux," the
one form of literature that the English people seems thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful
young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that
goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite
believe it.