rattle at the shutters.

[18] 1882.

XVI

A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE[19]

I

We have recently[20] enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing, in some
detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, of Mr. Walter Besant
and Mr. Henry James; two men certainly of very different calibre; Mr.
James so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupulous of
finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, with so persuasive and
humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James the very type of the deliberate
artist, Mr. Besant the impersonation of good-nature. That such doctors
should differ will excite no great surprise; but one point in which they
seem to agree fills me, I confess, with wonder. For they are both
content to talk about the "art of fiction"; and Mr. Besant, waxing
exceedingly bold, goes on to oppose this so-called "art of fiction" to
the "art of poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean nothing but the
art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of
prose. For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to call
by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; present,
at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom
present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic.
Fiction is in the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element
which enters largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer,
Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet
I do not suppose that either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these
two, entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting
lecture or Mr. James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then,
regarded as a definition, is both too ample and too scanty. Let me
suggest another; let me suggest that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant
had in view was neither more nor less than the art of narrative.

But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the modern English novel,"
the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author of the most
pleasing novel on that roll, "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," the
desire is natural enough. I can conceive then, that he would hasten to
propose two additions, and read thus: the art of _fictitious_ narrative
_in prose_.

Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be
denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded
lettering, it is easily distinguishable from othe