440 Mr. Anthony Hope Hawlcins [May 7, 



Or perhaps ho has in his mind murders and dark intrigues. None 

 the less he does not mean the same thing when he says " A 

 Romance " as he does when he says " A Detective Story." Nor 

 does he really mean to assert the necessary introduction of im- 

 probability of incident, '-r of " sensati- )ns," or of strange scenes 

 or strange places — though he would say that all these things 

 were certainly often present in romances, and we should be 

 obliged to admit the justice of his remark Or perhaps he would 

 maintain that a plentiful supply of love making is the hall-mark of 

 the romance ; and again we sliould agree that love-making is very 

 common and is apt to be a predominant subject in romance. But he 

 would admit on reflection that there might be a romance of ambition, 

 or of religious emotion, or of devotion to truth, or of the love of 

 humanity. His mistake, in fact, would seem to be the very ordinary 

 one of taking separable, though frequent, accidents for the essence. 

 And it is worth noticing that the common speech is sometimes more 

 nearly right. If I say of a man, " He hasn't a bit of romance in 

 him," I do not mean that nothing happens to him — the Tower of 

 Siloam would fall on romantic and unromantic alike. Nor do I mean 

 that he never makes love. He may make it very often. I am 

 characterising the quality of the man's mind, not his fortunes or his 

 doings. We shall see later on, perhaps, how the venial error of every- 

 day speech finds its excuse. 



The theme in which we are to discover the romance is concerned, 

 then, not with things or with incidents but with people. But it is 

 concerned only with parts of people. Sometimes we read of a book, 

 " It shows us the whole man," and the remark is meant as praise. 

 But it is not to be read literally, or it is not praise. You must add 

 to it, " so far as relevant to the theme." No book should, or perhaps 

 could, show the whole man any more than it should show his whole 

 life. This is familiar ground, and I need not labour it. A book 

 shows more or less of a man, first, in relation to a similar more or less 

 of other people, and secondly, as acted on by the chosen incidents, 

 not by all that happens to him, for the greater part of that either 

 has no material influence at all, or such a common and obvious one 

 that the exj^erience of the reader may safely be left to presuppose it. 

 Certain feelings of a man or several men are the theme of a novel, 

 and are therefore the place in which romance is to be found or the 

 absence of it to be noted. 



But does romance lie in the choice of these feelings or in the 

 treatment of them ? The question cannot be answered quite simply. 

 Not in the choice in one sense, for probably any sort of emotion might 

 be selected, nor merely in the treatment, for there must be a material 

 of the appropriate nature. Miserliness does not sound like a good 

 subject for romance, yet there might be a romance of miserliness ; 

 but it would have to be miserliness in excelsis, and unless it were, no 

 skill of treatment would make a romance out of the theme. We must 

 answer, I think, that the basis of romance is to be found in the choice 



