80 Mr. Walter Besant [April 25, 



To sum up these few preliminary and general laws. The Art of 

 Fiction requires first of all the power of description, truth, and fidelity, 

 observation, selection, clearness of conception and of outline, dramatic 

 grouping, directness of purpose, a profound belief on the part of the 

 story-teller in the reality of his story, and beauty of workmanship. 

 It is, moreover, an Art which requires of those who follow it seriously 

 that they must be unceasingly occupied in studying the ways of man- 

 kind, the social laws, the religions, philosophies, tendencies, thoughts, 

 prejudices, superstitions of men and women. They must consider as 

 many of the forces which act upon classes and upon individuals as 

 they can discover ; they should be always trying to put themselves 

 into the place of another ; they must be as inquisitive and as watchful 

 as a detective, as suspicious as a criminal lawyer, as eager for knowledge 

 as a physicist, and withal fully possessed of that spirit to which 

 nothing appears mean, nothing contemptible, nothing unworthy of 

 study, which belongs to human nature. 



I repeat that I submit some of these laws as perhaps self-evident. 

 If that is so, many novels which are daily submitted to the reviewer 

 are written in wilful neglect and disobedience of them. But they 

 are not really self-evident ; those who aspire to be artists in Fiction 

 almost invariably begin without any understanding at all of these 

 laws. Hence the lamentable early failures, the waste of good 

 material, and the low level of Art with which both the novel-writer 

 and the novel-reader are too often contented. I am certain that if 

 these laws were better known and more generally studied, a very 

 large proportion of the bad works of which our critics complain 

 would not be produced at all. And I am in great hopes that one 

 effect of the establishment of the newly founded Society of Authors 

 will be to keep young writers of fiction from rushing too hastily into 

 print, to help them to the right understanding of their Art and its 

 principles, and to guide them into true practice of their principles 

 while they are still young, their imaginations strong, and their 

 personal experiences as yet not wasted in foolish failures. 



After all these preliminary studies there comes the most im- 

 portant point of all — the story. There is a school which pretends 

 that there is no need for a story : all the stories, they say, have been told 

 already ; there is no more room for invention : nobody wants any longer 

 to listen to a story. One hears this kind of talk with the same wonder 

 which one feels when a new monstrous fashion changes the beautiful 

 figure of woman into something grotesque and unnatural. Men say 

 these things gravely to each other, especially men who have no 

 story to tell : other men listen gravely ; in the same way women put 

 on the newest and most preposterous fiishions gravely, and look upon 

 each other without either laughing or hiding their faces for shame. 

 It is indeed, if we think of it, a most strange and wonderful theory, 

 that we should continue to care for Fiction and cease to care for the 

 story. We have all along been training ourselves how to tell the 

 story, and here is this new school which stops in like the needy 



