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Updated: June 12, 2025
Hunt was minutely questioned upon all these points and he replied, conformably, he declared, to what the half-breed had told him many times. According to this statement, Dirk Peters had Arthur Pym’s note-book in his pocket at the moment when the ice-block struck them, and thus the journal which the half-breed placed at the disposal of the American romance-writer was saved.
And though I, no less cheerfully, grant that we have now living among us a creator of poetic romance immeasurably more inventive than they, appealing to our credulity in portents the most monstrous, with a charm of style the most conversationally familiar, still I cannot conceive that even that unrivalled romance-writer can so bewitch our understandings as to make us believe that, if Miss Mordaunt's cat dislikes to wet her feet, it is probably because in the prehistoric age her ancestors lived in the dry country of Egypt; or that when some lofty orator, a Pitt or a Gladstone, rebuts with a polished smile which reveals his canine teeth the rude assault of an opponent, he betrays his descent from a 'semi-human progenitor' who was accustomed to snap at his enemy.
A successful dramatist, as well as a popular romance-writer, his dialogues have the point and brilliancy, his narrative the vivid terseness, generally observable in novels written by persons accustomed to dramatic composition.
The servant told me that I might sit down in this chair, for that Sir Walter sat there while writing his romances, "and perhaps," quoth the man, smiling, "you may catch some inspiration." What a bitter word this would have been if he had known me to be a romance-writer! "No, I never shall be inspired to write romances!" I answered, as if such an idea had never occurred to me. I sat down, however.
Robert Wace, the Norman poet, who presented his Roman de Rou to Henry II, is the most picturesque and animated of the old writers, and from him we can obtain a more vivid and full description of the conflict than even the most brilliant romance-writer of the present time can supply.
For, if you tell me that this illustrious romance-writer is but a cautious man of science, and that we must accept his inventions according to the sober laws of evidence and fact, there is not the most incredible ghost story which does not better satisfy the common sense of a sceptic.
While parents and moralists are for ever saying, 'Don't marry for beauty; don't marry for inclination; don't marry for love: marry for money, marry for social position, marry for advancement, marry for our convenience, not for your own, the romance-writer is for ever urging, on the other hand, 'Marry for love, and for love only. His great theme in all ages has been the opposition between parental or other external wishes and the true promptings of the young and unsophisticated human heart.
If this applies to literature of every kind, it applies to history in a peculiar degree. "History deals with situations and figures not imaginary but real. It demands therefore a combination of qualities unnecessary to the poet or writer of romance glacial judgment coupled with fervent sympathy. The poet may be an inspired illiterate, the romance-writer an uninspired hack.
He is putting his readers, among whom his future jury is to be found, into a proper state of mind; he works on them with pathetic description, just as a romance-writer would: the rain pours in torrents; it is a dreary evening in November; the young creature's situation is neatly described; the distrust which entered into the breast of the keen old officer of gendarmes strongly painted, the suspicions which might, or might not, have been entertained by the inhabitants, eloquently argued.
This reminded me of a remark made to me by Moncure Conway, I think, that Froude had begun with the career of a novelist, for which he had decided gifts; that Carlyle had then made him think this sort of work unworthy, urging him to write history; and that Froude had carried into historical writing the characteristics of a romance-writer.
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