448 Mr. Anthony Hope Hawkins [May 7, 



Perceiving this radical fact, we find all contradiction between 

 romance and the life we call real to vanish, and we must confess that 

 the fault has been in our own ideas and not in the subject with which 

 we are concerned. Romance becomes an expression of what are 

 perhaps the most important, the most far-reaching, the most deeply 

 •seated instincts and impulses of humanity. It has no monopoly of 

 this expression, but it is its privilege to render it in a singularly 

 clear, distiuct, and pure form ; it can give to Lwe an ideal object, to 

 anibition a boundless field, to courage a high occasion; and these 

 great emotions, revelling in their freedom, exhibit themselves in their 

 glory. Thus in its most worthy forms, in the hands of its masters, 

 it can not only delight men, but can touch them t ) the very heart. 

 It shows them wl.at they would be if they could, if time and fate and 

 circumstances did not bind, what in a sense they all are, and what 

 their acts would show them to be if an opportunity ofi'ered. So they 

 dream and are the happier, and at least none the worse, for their 

 dreams. It is the ^i^ of the Romancer, in the measure of his ability, 

 to see and reveal truths of the heart, and for a time to loose the 

 fetters that a man's own lot rivets on him, to bid men forget what is 

 round them, but not of them, about them, but not themselves. We 

 say that a man "forgets himself" in an exciting romance. We mean, 

 as we sometimes do in speaking, just the opposite of what we say. A 

 man does not read a good romance to forget himself, but to forget 

 what is not himself; and because he finds there something that 

 recalls the self which the changes and chances and troubles of the 

 world have almost made him forget, he is well pleased. 



There are two points on which I wish to guard myself before I 

 sit down, if your patience will kindly allow me. The first has refer- 

 ence to what I have said about the relative position of incidents and 

 emotions. I must not be understood to mean anything in the least 

 like what is sometimes said, half-seriously, half-jokingly— that " the 

 plot doesn't matter." In my judgment the plot matters so much as 

 to be the surest mark of the writer's ability, and incomparably the 

 chief criterion of the merit of the book. But the word " plot " must 

 be understood in its proper sense, in the sense that makes it the very 

 core and kernel of the book, the story, the thing the writer tells the 

 reader. Every novel consists of emotions and incidents ; this is the 

 rudimentary analysis of it in respect of matter, just as the division 

 into theme and auxiliaries is the rudimentary analysis of it in respect 

 of form (I am not, of course, insisting on my own precise terms, but on 

 the obvious distinctions which I use them to express). The plot is 

 not emotions, for emotions idle, in a vacuum, so to speak, will yield no 

 story ; neither is it incidents, for as we saw at the beginning, naked 

 incidents, incidents without people and without emotions, will yield 

 no story. The j)lot of a romance is emotions and incidents — emotions 

 in action — and the merit of the plot lies first in choosing emotions of 

 true romantic quality, and secondly in fitting those emotions with 

 the most appropriate actions — those which will best exhibit the 



