TRAINING FOR NOVELISTS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1390, 16 March 1912, Page 9

TRAINING FOR NOVELISTS.

Someone has been comparing the style of George Eliot as a novelist with that of Dickens to the disadvantage of the latter, but there is an unflagging vivacity about Dickens's style which makes it a superior instrument of fiction to that of George Eliot, and probably some seven years hence, when the centenary ot tho woman novelist's birth falls to bo commemorated, the opinion will be frequently expressed that if, for the first forty years of her life, she had been less assiduous in her study of such thinkers as Strauss and Feuerbach, her writing would have been more fluid and the artist in her would have less soon given place to the-theorist and didacticist. Oils would not have a novelist without a knowledge of the various systems of thought. They not only furnish him with an excellent mental gymnastic, but are to him what a knowledge of animal physiology and morphology is to the field naturalist. Nevertheless genius can do very well without such studies, and there can be little doubt that when pursued too exclusively and protracted too long they tend to stiffen the style, and even, perhaps, do something to weaken creative nower. M. Bourp t is another case in point. In his early ,'. vuth ho cultivated the virtues of the v *iaple dish, living on a minimum wage Earned by a minimum of private tuition, in order to have abundant time for private study. But the writings which he studied were those of such thinkers as Herbert Spencer, Spinoza, and Taine, and that may be the reason why, in his later books, the S readier and thinker are present to tho etriment of the artist. Ono must not be suspected of suggesting a comparison between the novels of Georgo Eliot and M. Bourget, even as they are, with those of Mr. Hall Caine—Mr. Caine is perhaps an instance of one who has too littlo of something of which the other two have too much—but there is a great deal in his suggestion that the best school of novel writing is journalism. There could not at any rate be a better corrigeut.to the mental habit of one who has been frequenting too much the region of abstract thought than journalism. It brings a writer face to faco with tho hard fact and the concrete case, and it requires him to keen superfluous knowledge severely ;u the background. Under the conditions in which Mr. Caine practised it, journalism was an excellent training. t His paper allowed him a "honorarium," asking him in- return for just as- much or as little copy as he cared to send. Ho accordingly went to London, lodged in a mean street, and knocked un against many strange characters. "The 'Old Frenchman,' with his Jovian bare head, who so < evening papers in the Strand; the old hatter and the old second-hand bookseller in 'Clement's Passage; the poor chorus £irls from the neighbouring theatres, who were treated worse than dogs by creatures worse than men; the poor little Italian orsan boys, who were boujrht nml sold like slaves: and then the frequenters of the bogus clubs, of the dancin;; academies, of the gambling hells-all these wore my neighbours, a few of them were my friends." Whether Mr. Caine has made tho most of his opportunities those who have rend his novels must decide, but we may agree with his general statement that for a novelist with n, bent towards realism "it was not a bad apprenticeship to live amid associates and roenes l'ke these."—"Manchester Guardian."