An Unworked Field of Romance

— The striking revival of “romantic ” or “ ideal fiction in English, at a time when the “ realists ” were supposed to be having it all their own way, has of course been the subject of abundant comment; but one singular trait in the new romances appears to have been overlooked : they are almost all autobiographies. The stories of Stevenson, Weyman, Rider Haggard, and Gilbert Parker,all dealing with remote times or remote countries, are personal narratives, supposed to be told by the heroes themselves ; so is The Prisoner of Zenda. On the other hand, the “realistic ” novels or stories of “ modern life” which so lately held the field are told in the historic form ; so were the romances of Dumas and Scott. The latter tried the personal form once, in Redgauntlet, as a series of letters ; but halfway through he returned to the historic style, to the immense advantage of his novel. Defoe’s early realistic fictions are throughout autobiographies.

But the method adopted by Stevenson and others seems to be a concession, unconscious, perhaps, to the realists of what is true in their contention, that ancient days and lands of adventure are separated by an impassable gulf from the average citizen of London or New York. Yet there were men and women living in those remote days, and what is dead forever to us was a living reality to them. Let them tell their story as they may be supposed to have felt it, and it brings the time one stage nearer to us. Just so with the returned traveler, who has lived for a time in lands and among races which to us are impossibilities. The one reality is human nature, to which no circumstances can be strange when it is actually among them.

Leaving this thought to be masticated, I pass to a kindred one: why has it proved impossible to write a story of classical life — Greek or Roman — which is not a mere handbook of antiquities? Yet Shakespeare found in Plutarch as good material as in Holinshed ; Coriolanus and Cleopatra are as vivid as Faulconbridge and Cordelia. The romance of Panthea as told by Xenophon lacks no element of a true love-story. Yet no one who has attempted a classical novel, from Bulwer down, has made anything more lifelike than a sculptured slab. Could not Mr. Anthony Hope try his hand on Alcibiades or Germanicus ?