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Balzac used to look long among the shop-signs of Paris for the precise name needed by a preconceived character, and the absolute invention of such titles is doubtless very rare; few fictionists are gifted with Dickens's fertility in the discovering of names bearing the most forcible and occult relations to the fleshless owners of them.
There are now several writers on animals who are not exactly naturalists, nor yet mere fictionists, but who, to a considerable knowledge of animal psychology and extraordinary sympathy with all wildness, unite an imaginative insight which reveals to them much of the inner, the mind life of brutes.
What struck me principally in Montreux was its extreme suitability to the purposes of the international novelist. It was full of sites for mild incidents, for tacit tragedies, for subdued flirtations, and arrested improprieties. I can especially recommend the Kursaal at Montreux to my brother and sister fictionists looking about for a pretty entourage.
Alexander's girl, who is done so strikingly to the life, with courage to grapple a character and a temperament as uncommon as it is true, which we have rarely found among our fictionists.
These forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no matter how consummate we become as artists.
"They are the books and magazine stories of nature fakirs, the 'works' of naturalists who have never heard the howl of a wolf or the cry of a loon; the wild dreams of fictionists, the rot of writers who spend two weeks or a month each year on some blazed trail and return to the cities to call themselves students of nature. When I feel in bad humour I read some of that stuff and laugh."
These things which might have happened anywhere did, in fact, happen in Ireland. Out of the footprints of the invaders there sprang up a legion of fictionists, professional cooks of history. Beginning with Giraldus Cambrensis they ought to have ended, but, as we shall see, did not end with Froude.
If one reads the French fictionists before Richardson Madame de La Fayette, Le Sage, Prevost and Rousseau one speedily discovers that they did not write novels in the modern sense; the last named took a cue from Richardson, to be sure, in his handling of sentiment, but remained an essayist, nevertheless. And the greater Goethe also felt and acknowledged the Englishman's example.
At Locks Mills, we met his old playmates, Dennis and Abner Herrick, men bent of form and dim of eye, gnarled and knotted by their battle with the rocks and barren hillsides, and to them we, confident lads, with our tales of smooth and level plow-lands, must have seemed like denizens from some farmers' paradise, or perhaps they thought us fictionists.
Fictionists who take the South Seas for their scenery too often paint their characters in one tone black, brown, or yellow, or even white. Their bad men are super-villains, and yet there are no men all bad. I know there are no supermen at all, bad or good, but only that some men do super acts now and then; none has the grand gesture at all times.
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