592 Professor Walter Baleigh [May 17, 



Scott — Hugo, Dumas, Hawthorne, to name only those in Stevenson's 

 direct line of ancestry — have added new realms to the domain of 

 romance. 



"What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyond 

 problems of character and conduct, seeks to realise? What is the 

 nature of the great informing, underlying idea that animates a truly 

 great romance — ' The Bride of Lammermoor,' ' Monte Ohristo,' 

 1 Les Miserables,' « The Scarlet Letter,' < The Master of Ballantrae ' ? 

 These questions can only be answered by deforming the impression 

 given by each of these works to present it in the chop-logic language 

 of philosophy. But an approach to an answer may be made by 

 illustration. 



In his ' American Notebooks ' Nathaniel Hawthorne used to jot 

 down subjects for stories as they struck him. His successive entries 

 are like the souls of stories awaiting embodiment, which many of 

 them never received ; they bring us very near to the workings of the 

 mind of a great master. Here are some of them : — 



" A sketch to be given of a modern reformer, a type of the extreme 

 doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and the like. He goes 

 about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of 

 making many converts, when his labours are suddenly interrupted by 

 the appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he has escaped. 

 Much may be made of this idea." 



" The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a 

 street lantern ; the time, when the lamp is near going out ; and the 

 catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last nickering gleam." 



" A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against 

 his intentions ; that the characters act otherwise than he thought, 

 and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might 

 shadow forth his own fate — he having made himself one of the 

 personages." 



" Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for 

 the two principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even 

 then passing, and that they themselves are the two actors." 



" A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow." 



Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches. 



" A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession 

 of a human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by 

 trying the operation of a certain vice on him." 



M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in 

 his novel called ' Le Disciple.' Only it is not a slave, but a young 

 girl whom he pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral 

 philosopher's experiment ; and a noisy war has been waged round the 

 book in France. Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic 

 essence of the idea and would have avoided the boneyard of " problem 

 morality." 



" A story the principal personage of which shall seem always on 

 the point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear." 



