446 Mr. Anthony Hope Hawkins [May 7, 



phrase, to take them in the spirit in which they are meant. Their 

 remoteness from his everyday experience clears from his mind the 

 everyday atmosphere in which he lives, and persuades him into an 

 acquiescence in the justice of the picture ; he knows that, as a 

 general rule, he does not feel his emotions in just this form, but the 

 novelty and stirring nature of the incidents easily convince him that, 

 placed as the hero was, he would feel as the hero felt. In this way, 

 then, what are generally called romantic incidents and romantic sur- 

 roundings are of real assistance to romance in the proper sense ; they 

 both aid in the exhibition of the matter of the theme, and dispose the 

 reader to accept, approve and endorse it ; they harmonise with the 

 high pitch of the emotions shown in action, and afford a fit setting 

 for them. But it must be repeated that they are only one of many 

 settings, not better than others, but only more obvious, more ready, 

 and in fact more easy to handle. The writer propo-es to himself a less 

 difficult task than that which he would attempt if he dispensed with 

 these auxiliaries. Very much the same considerations are applicable 

 to what are called historical romances. Here again the strangeness 

 of scene, the remoteness from common experience, and the sense that 

 everyday criteria cannot be applied, help the reader to put himself at 

 the standpoint of the characters, and thus materially assist the writer 

 in his task. There is, in a word, less chance of the reader saying, 

 " I shouldn't feel like that, or act like that, and no more would he." 



I have approached the borders of a question which I must not 

 wholly avoid. The romancer is often accused of dwelling in and of 

 inviting his readers to join him in an entirely artificial world, corre- 

 sponding to nothing in rerum natura, and of shirking that grappling 

 with the facts of life in which novelists of another school find their 

 hardest task and their highest glory. This charge of unreality is one 

 which romance must not shirk, but must face and analyse. I believe 

 myself that the accusation owes its origin in a great degree to the 

 same confusion of thought which has been already noted — to the idea 

 that the essence of romance is to be found in the incidents, rather 

 than in the emotions. For the emotions surely are not unreal ; they 

 are deep, fundamental, universal in human nature. But although 

 we must sturdily assert their reality, we may, without shame 

 and without hesitation, admit their rarity in the precise form 

 in which romance presents them. The " simple case " is, I take 

 it, always rare in nature; it has to be extracted; it is attained 

 as the result of a very high degree of abstraction. So it is in 

 literature ; and if all that is charged against the characteristic 

 themes of romance is that they are not often to be seen in undis- 

 turbed operation in life as we live it, the charge may be confessed. 

 But rarity is not falsity ; and not to happen very often, if it be a 

 fault, is a fault which affects many of the most important events in 

 the world's history. Abstraction is not the falsification of facts 

 ordinarily apparent, but rather the means of exhibiting truths ordi- 

 narily hidden — overlaid, as it were — by the multitude of circumstances 



