78 Mr, Walter Besant [April 25, 



speech or of carriage. This is the worst, as may generally be said of 

 the easiest way. Another easy method is to describe your character at 

 length. This also is a bad, because a tedious, method. If, however, 

 you read a page or two of any good writer, you will discover that he 

 first makes a character intelligible by a few words, and then allows 

 him to reveal himself in action and dialogue. On the other hand, 

 nothing is more inartistic than to be constantly calling attention in a 

 dialogue to a gesture or a look, to laughter or to tears. The situation 

 generally requires no such explanation : in some well-known scenes 

 which I could quote, there is not a single word to emphasize or 

 explain the attitude, manner, and look of the speakers, yet they are as 

 intelligible as if they were written down and described. That is the 

 highest art which carries the reader along and makes him see, with- 

 out being told, the changing exj)ressions, the gestures of the speakers, 

 and hear the varying tones of their voices. It is as if one should 

 close one's eyes at the theatre, and yet continue to see the actors on 

 the stage as well as hear their voices. The only writer who can do 

 this is he who makes his characters intelligible from the very outset, 

 causes them first to stand before the reader in clear outline, and then 

 with every additional line brings out the figure, fills up the face, and 

 makes his creatures grow from simple outline more and more to the 

 perfect and rounded figure. 



Clearness of drawing, which includes clearness of vision, also 

 assists in producing directness of purpose. As soon as the actors in 

 the story become real in the mind of the narrator, and not before, the 

 story itself becomes real to him. More than this, he becomes straight- 

 way vehemently impelled to tell it, and he is moved to tell it in the 

 best and most direct way, the most dramatic way, the most truthful 

 way possible to him. It is, in fact, only when the writer believes 

 his own story, and knows it to be every word true, and feels that he 

 has somehow learned from everyone concerned the secret history of 

 his own part in it, that he can really begin to write it.* We know 

 how sometimes, even from a practised hand, there comes a work 

 marred with the fatal defect that the writer does not believe in his 

 own story. When this is the case, one may generally find on investi- 

 gation that one cause at least of the failure is that the characters, or 

 some of them, are blurred and uncertain. 



Again, the modern English novel, whatever form it takes, almost 

 always starts with a conscious moral purpose. When it does not, so 



* Hardly anytliing is more important than this — to believe in your own story. 

 Wherefore let the student remember that unless the cluiraeters exist and move 

 about in his brain, all separate, distinct, living, and perpetually engaged in the 

 action of the story, sometimes at one part of it, sometimes at another, and that in 

 scenes and places which must be omitted in the writing, he lias got no story to tell 

 and had better give it up. I do not think it is generally understood that there are 

 th«MiSiinds of scenes which belong to the story and never get outside the writer's 

 brain at all. Some of these may be beautiful and touching ; but there is not 

 room for all, and the writer has to select. 



