KILLING THEM OFF.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VI, Issue 1789, 7 November 1919, Page 2

KILLING THEM OFF.

NOVELISTS WEEP WHEN HEROES DIE. How do novelists feel when they kill their characters? It depends a good deal, I suppose, writes "Penguin" in the Sunday "Observer, upon the novelist and upon the character. To put an end to the career of a particularly blackguardly villain must, I fancy, not be wholly unpleasant, but remember that he is a villain of vour own creation. Some novelists are unrelenting to their characters, while some are tolerant and forgiving. Scott is an example of the latter class, and an article on The Bride of Lammermoor" which I read the other day reminded me of his sorrow at having to kill Lucy. Sir William Gell supplied Lockhart -with an account of Scott's visit to Borne in 1832 when the novelist met Don Luigi Santa Goce, one of his most ardent admirers: — Don Luigi talked of the plots of some of the novels, and earnestly remonstrated against the fate of Clara Mowbrav, in "St. Ron an s Well." "I am much obliged to the gentleman for the interest he takes in her," said Sir Walter, "but I could not save her, poor thing—it is against the rules —she had the bee in her bonnet." Don Luigi still insisting, Sir Walter replied: "No; but of all the murders that I have committed in that •wav—and few men have been guilty of more—there is none that went so much to my heart as the poor Bride of Lammermoor; but H could not be helped—it is all true."

Perhaps the classical account of how an author felt when he killed one of his characters is Anthony Trollope's description of his misgivings and hesitation in putting an end to Mrs Proudie. He tells us in his "Autobiography" that he "could not have done it but for a resolution taken and declared under circumstances of great momentary pressure." He was sitting one morning at work upon "The Last Chronicle of Barset" in the Athenaeum Club, when he heard two other members complaining that he reintroduced the same characters too often into his books:— Then one of them fell foul of Mrs Proudie. It was impossible not for me to hear their words, and almost impossible to hear them and be quiet. I got up, and, standing between them, I acknowledged myself to be the culprit. "As to Mrs Proudie," I said, "I will go . home and kill her before the week is over." And so I did. • Trollope adds that he some.times regretted the deed, and, notwithstanding his affection for some of his other characters, he said later in life: "I have never dissevered myself from Mrs Proudie, and still live much in company with her ghost." It is amusing to compare this regret with the reception of the news of Mrs Proudie's death by some of the characters in the novels. Archdeacon Grantley's exclamation is "What a relief!" thinking of the poor bishop as well as himself, and Bishop Proudie prays "that God might save him from being glad that his wife was dead." Dumas Weeps. Alexandre Dumas was filled with grief when Porthos had to die:— One afternoon his son, seeing him looking careworn, wretched, overwhelmed, asked him: "What has happened to you? Are you ill?" "No." Well, what is it, then?" "I am miserable." "Why?" "This morning, I killed Porthos «—poor Porthos! Oh, what trouble I have had, to make up my mind to do it. But there must be an end of all things. Yet when I saw him sink beneath the ruins, crving, 'lt is too heavy, too heavy for me,' I swear to you that I cried." And he wiped away a tear with the sleeve of his dressing-sown. "Finished Part XIII. Killed Tito In great excitement," is an entry in George Eliot's Journal for May 16, recording the progress of Roinola, and on March 21, 1860, she writes: "Finished this morning 'The Mill on the Floss,' writing from the moment ■when Maggie, carried out of the ■water, things of her mother and brother," but T have not been able to find any fuller account of her emotions when ending the careers of these characters. "I am going to kill Mrs Pendennis presently," Thackeray wrote to Mrs Brookfield in 1849, "and have her ill in this number. Minnie says, 'Oh! papa, do make her well again; sbc can have a regular doctor and be almost dead, and then will come a homoeopathic physician who will make her well, you know.'" Judging from this alone, one would he inclined to believe that Thackeray went about the business in a cold-blooded way. We learn, however, from Lady Ritchie that this was not the case:—

T can remember the morning Helen died. My father was in his study in Young Street, sitting at the table at which he wrote. It stood in the middle of the room, and he used to sit facing the door. I was going into the room, but he motioned me away. An hour afterwards he came into our schoolroom, half-laughing, halfashamed, and said to us: "I do not know" what James can have thought of me when he came in with the tax-gatherer just after you left, and found me blubbering over Helen Pendennis's death." From the same authority we have a description of the way in which Colonel Newcome's death was written. It was Thackeray's habit to dictate very constantly to his daughter, but when he came to a critical point he would send his Secretary away and write for himself:—

I remember writing the last chapters of "The Newcomes," t.> my father's dictation. I wrote on as he dictated, more and more slowly until he stopped altogether in the account of Colonel Newcome's last illness, when he said that he must now take the pen into his own hand, and he sent me away.

Dickens Prostrated. J>ickens had uol thought of kill-

ing Little Nell until after he had made a good deal of progress with "The Old Curiosity Shop?' and the suggestion that she should die came from Forster. Dickens admitted that Forster was right, but wrote the description of the death with reluctance. "I am breaking my heart over this story, and cannot bear to finish it," he told a friend, and he wrote to Lord Houghton "That Nellicide was the act of Heaven, as you may see any of these fine mornings when ypu look about you. If you knew the pain it gave me—but what am I talking of? If you don't know, nobody knows." The death of Paul Dombey was another episode that caused Dickens much grief. In the preface to a later edition of "Dombey and Son," he mentions how intimate he was with its characters. "When I am reminded by any chance of what it was that the waves were always saying, I wander in my fancy for a whole winter night about the streets of Paris—as I really did, with a heavy heart, on the night when my little friend and I parted company for ever. There is one literary murder which I hold to be a clear case of unjustifiable homicide. Why did George Meredith kill Lucy in "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel"? It may have been because her author felt that she must be made a victim to Sir Austin Feverel's magnificent system, and most critics have defended his artistic courage in decreeing her death. But every consideration of mercy to himself, and his readers urged the contrary, and I am weak enough to wish that he had stayed his hand.

SOME REVIEWS. AN EPISTOLARY ENTENTE. It is one thing to maintain a child in France, and another altogether to tell how it was done. To tell it, anyhow, as it is told by Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell in "Deer Godchild" is given only to born humorists. The "Kid in France" business is just about extinct: the sentiment that gave birth to mothering and being mothered; and all those other rapturous adaptations of filial relationships across thousands of miles of sea died suddenly With the Armistice. But humour is the great preservative. Whether this little book is or is not the echo of anything more substantial than a bright idea in the minds of two bright young women doesn't matter. We don't believe really that it is. But there are two or three happy half-hours in it for kids of various sizes over here. Take this: "When all the men had come home I thot I wood take the papers to the folks that wernt on the street, like the schoolmnams and the sisters. Well most of them bot fine except miss Leigh the Sunday school teacher and she sed the Mirror was a low down politishuns sheet and what- are you so ankshus to sell papers fer? And I sed how do you expect me to support a kid in France and she sed the Lord will provide, but T told her I wood rather do it mvself." And the answer weeks after from Andre Leblanc in Paris: "Tell me dear god-father, what is it the Sunday school? In Paris Ave go not to school the Sunday. We rise more lately and we dress more pretty and for breakfast we eat the cacao in lieu of soup of Dotato left last night. . . . Little brother Jean, he say, 'I want not to be the angel and have wings like one hen!'""

And when Andre turns out to be the epistolary* complications arc more alarming still. (T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., through L. M. Isitt.) An Entrancing Romance. A briskly-moving romance is Warwick Deeping's "The King Behind the King. Warwick Deeping is a novelist of some little versatility; a story of modern society comes from his pen as readily as one set amid mediaeval scenes. But it is in the latter that his best work is done. He has a pretty knack for weaving a story into the surroundings of mediaeval times, skill in giving a picture of those full-blooded days, and a style which conveys the "atmosphere" without being archaic, and which in no wise apes the style of other novelists who have a liking for the days of Romance. One must confess that his types are not particularly diversified; the hero is always a valiant, but lonely young man, skilled in the use of weapons, who has to carve his way with a trusty sword, and the heroine is bound to be a beautiful and persecuted damsel, equally lonely, who is either rescued by the hero from peril, or is captured, as a poacher or something of that sort, by him very early in the book. But Warwick Deeping does manage to make each story a fresh one; except that there is no lack of lighting, he gives new twists and turns to his plots. In "The King Behind the King," he plays a little with history, and tears away from Richard 11. the character for courage and spirit in the face of Wat Tyler's mob of incensed peasants, with which historians have credited the boy-king. That he has done to permit his bold forest-bred hero to play a king's part in the moment of the* kingdom's peril—and, needless to say, the hero plays the part well. It is an entrancing romance. "The King Behind the King" is not a new novel, but this handy reprint comes very opportunely. (('.asset I and Co., through Simpson and Williams, Ltd.)

GLEANINGS. A new thing in journalism is an illustrated "Times, Weekly." So also is a glaring "Times" mistake. In the first issue, now to hand from London, there is a series of eight photographs of recent "distinguished recipients of birthday honours." For the portrait of Sir George Fenwick, .1.1'., founder and director of the New Zealand Press Association, there appears the face of a man possibly 40 .years old, and resembling no public figure in the Dominion so much as Mr Robert Semple. We should not like to have to decide who will feel most aggrieved.

According to the current number of "M. A. B.", there are two editions of Joseph Conrad's latest novel, "The Arrow of Gold," the American and the English. The "copy" supplied the English printers was a set of sheets printed in volume form on the western side of the Atlantic. Mr

Conrad informs his English publisher that he devotes "particular care to the text of the English edition always, aad it is to be considered the standard one." The N.Z. "National Review" for October is the first number of the fifth volume of a venture that most people expected to meet with speedy | disaster. That is not yet a record in New Zealand, but it is sufficiently remarkable to be worthy of comment. Into the bargain, the production of the review—paper, print, illustrations—has been of a particularly high standard from the outset. Of the reading-matter, too, though we should not like to say that if is first-class journalism, we can say that it is better than the circumstances would have led us to expect. You can't get something for nothing,. and it is clear from its own announcements that the review doesn't! want to pay for articles if it canl possibly find literary philanthropists. | The result is more or less perfunctory stuff by professors or teachers, plus a thin, a very thin, sprinkling of promising amateurism. By the way, an advertisement on the back cover convevs the interesting information that 10,000 free copies will be distributed during the next two months. All that is necessary is to send a name and an address.

After much wit and a deal of harmless self-praise, G. Bernard Shaw, in his article "On Cutting Shakespeare" in the "Fortnightly Review," says:—The sane conclusion is therefore that cutting must be dogmatically ruled out, because, as Lao-Tsc'said, "Of the making of reforms there is no end." The simple thing to do with a Shakespeare play is to perform it. The alternative is to let it alone. If Shakespeare made a mess of it, it is not likely that Smith or Robinson will succeed where he failed.

Extract from an American library publication dated October:—With the death of Andrew Carnegie the library world has lost its greatest benefactor. Mr Carnegie once said, "I choose free libraries-as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. They never pauperise. They reach the aspiring, and open to these the chief treasures of the world—those stored up in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes. Besides this, I believe good fiction one of the most beneficial reliefs to the monotonous lives of the people. For these and others reasons, I prefer the free public library to most if not any other agencies for the happiness and improvement of a. community."

Berta Buck has been here, writes Miss Fanny Butcher in the Chicago "Tribune," and those of us who met her will never forget the three days which were a succession of glorious hours to her and to us. There has never come to Chicago any one more joyously eager about our town, more sincerely happy in our smoke and our dreams. Berta Ruck is the sort of woman who makes one proud one is a woman—straightforward, keen minded, with an antenna-like sense of humour, a joy in life and a passionately devoted love for her two children and her husband, who is, by the way, Oliver Onions, who wrote "Mushroom Town," that most remarkable of all life histories of a village springing into a city. The last chapter of her first novel wa.s written on the day that her youngest son was born, a little over five years ago. She had done journalism before that, but she had never attempted a novel. She is frankly a popular writer, and she insists that her husband is anything but a "writing man."

Canon Scott Holland, who died a few months ago, was no mean critic either of men or of books. Of W. D. Howells's "A Modern Instance," he said: Nothing in it is worth all the nasty unpleasantness. It. is a fiendish ending. That roll of fat red neck just seen above the collar in court, and the complacency of the brute. It is very cleverly worked' out. A very striking study of the real villainy that lies in a cheery, slap-you-on-the-back, jolly selfishness as it ceases to be young, and grows fat, and drinks Tivoli beer. But it is too brutal. I read on and on, but I was rather glad .when it was done witb. How vulgar some American life is! How bare socially!

Readers of books on spiritualism will be interested to learn that a Federation of Spiritualists came into being in London on July 1 in the commonplace precincts of the Food Reform Restaurant. There were over 100 present in the ffesh, and journalists attending could not count the others. Officers were elected for not only the mundane federation but for a duplicate organisation on the other side, the late Mr Stead being called upon to assume the presidency of the spiritual branch. He was averred by a medium there to have accepted, and he has power to appoint his own spiritual executive committee, which will decide on a variety of matters, including, doubtless, the size of the spiritual dues. The dues of this world's federation are an important item, a writer upon it in "Truth" even suggesting that the organisers haye a most worldly eye for them. Much indignation was expressed at the meeting over the small fees that psychics often j get-

Word—belated word—comes from London of the death of Mrs William de Morgan, widow of the famous novelist who died about a year ago. For a year "The Old Madhouse," one of the novels which Mrs de Morgan completed after her husband's death has been advertised in America and Britain. But a time of paper drought is no time to publish such lengthy novels. Mrs de Morgan also tinishe'd "The Old Man's Youth and the Young Man's Old Age." Neither of the two last has yet been printed in England on account of economic conditions.

"Then and Now," by Eden Phillpotts, in the "Westminster Gazette." A "grey-haired, dim-eyed, still inquiring thing" makes up for the cloudiness of the rest:— *' When I was young and leapt into tlio Spring— An eager, quick-eyed, all-inquiring tiling— I hunted wood and valley, sea and shore. Yet knew not how to feel the wonders that 1 saw. Now am I old and creep into the Spring— A grey-haired, dim-eyed, still inquiring thing. By ancient ways, a shadow, still I steal, Yet know not how to sec the wonders that I feel. Come Youth again, while to another Spring My memories the old adventure bring. Wonder and wander yet once more with me; I'll teach you how to feel, and you my eyes shall be.