Poet's Feelings.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume IX, Issue 2929, 20 June 1888, Page 2

Poet's Feelings.

Do novelists weep when, composing passages which they hope will reduce to] tears ? On tho priAple, apparently, that, " who drivSs fat oxen, should himself be fat," Mr Walter Besant has been laying down this law for writers of fiction, and tho New York Critic has had the goodness to elicit and publish the opinions of a number of American novelists on the subject. But there is 110 light—at any rate 110 leading—to be had from this multitude of counsellors. Their opinions vary in the most bewildered manner. While one American author I tricfly writes down Mr Beasant's theory as "bosh" Mark Twain endorses it with the single word 1 Yes.' Indeed, these diversities of judgment extend even to the fact as to whether Thackeray was himself moved when he wrote that most pathetic of passages • -the account of Colonel Newcome's death. Mr Latlirop contends, oil - the authority of Nathaniel Hawthorn, that he was not, jjAjtreas Miss Baylor is as certain lie was as though she had "been behind the door," and seen "the teai«,that 1 dimmed his honest eyes."feith, however, no matter how strops but an indifferent substitute for ocular j demonstration in such matters, and an anecdote told by Mr F, H. Under' ! wood, in Harper's Magazine, settle# ■ the question as regards Tliaqk'ay,

II is related that Lowell met the great novelist in London one day during tlio publication of" The Newcomes," and that his inquiries as to the cause of •Shackeray's evident distress of mind "vero answered by the novelist drawing from his pocket the freshly written manuscript of the account of the Colonel's death, and reading it with the tears streaming down his face. But, after all, doos it so much matter what a writer is doing when writing—besides driving his pen—so long as he manages to produce his intended effect on the reader'? The result is the important point, not the means by which it has been brought about.