第32章

A FAIRY TALE AND ITS FAIRY TAILORS

As this is not a realistic novel, I do not hold myself bound, as I have said before, to account reasonably for everything that is done--least of all, said--within its pages.I simply say, So it happened, or So it is, and expect the reader to take my word.If he be uncivil enough to doubt it, we may as well stop playing this game of fancy.It is one of the first conditions of enjoying a book, as it is of all successful hypnotism, that the reader surrenders up his will to the writer, who, of course, guarantees to return it to him at the close of the volume.If you say that no young lady would have behaved as I have presently to relate of Nicolete, that no parents were ever so accommodating in the world of reality, I reply,--No doubt you are right, but none the less what I have to tell is true and really did happen, for all that.And not only did it happen, but to the whimsically minded, to the true children of fancy, it will seem the most natural thing in the world.No doubt they will wonder why I have made such a preamble about it, as indeed, now I think of it, so do I.

Again I claim exemption in this wandering history from all such descriptive drudgery upon second, third, and fourth dramatis personsonae as your thorough-going novelist must undertake with a good grace.Like a host and hostess at a reception, the poor novelist has to pretend to be interested in everybody,--in the dull as in the brilliant, in the bore as in the beauty.I'm afraid I should never do as a novelist, for I should waste all my time with the heroine; whereas the true novelist is expected to pay as much attention to the heroine's parents as though he were a suitor for her hand.Indeed, there is no relative of hero or heroine too humble or stupid for such a novelist as the great Balzac.He will invite the dullest of them to stay with him for quite prolonged visits, and without a murmur set apart a suite of chapters for their accommodation.I'm not sure that the humanity of the reader in these cases is of such comprehensive sympathy as the novelist's, and it may well be that the novelist undertakes all such hard labour under a misapprehension of the desires of the reader, who, as a rule, I fancy, is as anxious to join the ladies as the novelist himself.Indeed, I believe that there is an opportunity for a new form of novel, in which the novelist, as well as the reader, will skip all the dull people, and merely indicate such of them as are necessary to the action by an outline or a symbol, compressing their familiar psychology, and necessary plot-interferences with the main characters, into recognised formulae.For the benefit of readers voracious for everything about everybody, schedule chapters might be provided by inferior novelists, good at painting say tiresome bourgeois fathers, gouty uncles and brothers in the army, as sometimes in great pictures we read that the sheep in the foreground have been painted by Mr.So-and-so, R.A.

The Major-General and his Lady were taking the waters at Wiesbaden.That was all I knew of Nicolete's parents, and all Ineeded to know; with the exception of one good action,--at her urgent entreaty they had left Nicolete behind them, with no other safeguard than a charming young lady companion, whose fitness for her sacred duties consisted in a temperament hardly less romantic and whimsical than Nicolete's own.She was too charming to deserve the name of obstacle; and as there was no other--But I admit that the cart has got a little in front of the horse, and I grow suddenly alarmed lest the reader should be suspecting me of an elopement, or some such romantic vulgarity.If he will only put any such thoughts from his mind, I promise to proceed with the story in a brief and business- like manner forthwith.

We are back once more at the close of the last chapter, in Nicolete's book-bower in the wildwood.It is an hour or two later, and the afternoon sun is flooding with a searching glory all the secret places of the woodland.Hidden nooks and corners, unused to observation, suddenly gleam and blush in effulgent exposure,--like lovers whom the unexpected turning on of a light has revealed kissing in the dark,--and are as suddenly, unlike the lovers, left in their native shade again.It was that rich afternoon sunlight that loves to flash into teacups as though they were crocuses, that loves to run a golden finger along the beautiful wrinkles of old faces and light up the noble hollows of age-worn eyes; the sunlight that loves to fall with transfiguring beam on the once dear book we never read, or, with malicious inquisitiveness, expose to undreamed- of detection the undusted picture, or the gold- dusted legs of remote chairs, which the poor housemaid has forgotten.