Fielding began Joseph Andrews as a parody on Pamela. Serious or satirical imitation of other fictions is a typical origin for the novel. — Pepita Jiménez was suggested by a reading of the Spanish mystics of the seventeenth century. — The Castle of Otranto originated in a dream. · Frankenstein was a deliberately planned ghost story, due to a social "group-impulse."- Werther may be considered as originally a kind of lyrical confession.-D'Azeglio's Ettorre Fieramosca was suggested from a painting by the author. Compare some of the poems of D. G. Rossetti. The practical impulse which produced Rasselas was Johnson's purpose to pay his mother's debts and funeral expenses.

140. The Plan.-The completed plan of a novel includes all the relations of dramatis personæ, plot, settings, and subject-matter, the shaping of the language, and the method of external division. For a lyric, the entire plan may spring into being almost instantaneously. After some practise in sonnet-writing, the outline of a whole sonnet, and a distinct thought, image, or shade of feeling for each structural division, may appear together. In the novel, this is practically impossible. While a general plan for the whole work may often be coincident with the germinal idea, many of the details must wait until the actual process of execution has determined them. Nor is it probable that many novelists have made out even a complete general plan before beginning to write, as Rossetti is said to have done, in prose, for the House of Life.1 Often the first general design undergoes great changes after the novel is partly written.

Scott's introductory matter furnishes many examples of general design. He seems to have had a fairly definite plan for most of the single novels, and for small groups, but never a completely unifying plan for the Waverley Novels as a series. The general design of The Monastery was "to conjoin two characters in that bustling and contentious age, who, thrown into situations which gave them different

1 Spielhagen notices this matter; Technik des Romans, p. 30.

views on the subject of the Reformation, should, with the same sincerity and purity of intention, dedicate themselves, the one to the support of the sinking fabric of the Catholic Church, the other to the establishment of the Reformed doctrines." (Introduction of 1830.) This element of conscious contrast is conspicuous in Scott's original plans. (For alteration of first designs, see Introductions to Guy Mannering, 1829, and Redgauntlet, 1832.)

George Eliot first thought of making Adam Bede one of the Scenes of Clerical Life. She afterwards "began to think of blending this [story of the executed woman] and some other recollections of my aunt in one story, with some points in my father's early life and character. The problem of construction that remained was to make the unhappy girl one of the chief dramatis personæ, and connect her with the hero . . . the scene in the prison being, of course, the climax towards which I worked." Dorothy Brooke was the original heroine of Middlemarch, which was first called "Miss Brooke." The Mill on the Floss began publication as "Sister Maggie."

One of the largest designs in the history of fiction is found in the Comédie Humaine. An extended exposition of it is given in the preface to the Peau de Chagrin, 1842.

The general plan of Pepita Jiménez was a "representation of this divine ardor [religious mysticism] brought face to face with an earthly love and worsted by it." (See Gosse's introduction to English translation.) So stated, the design is not an uncommon one. The original plan which resulted in Taras Bulba was to write histories of Little Russia and the Middle Ages. (Waliszewski.)—Silas Marner was begun without definite plan for its length, and Ettorre Fieramosca, without idea how it would end.

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141. The Sources. The materials for a novel may be mainly in the mind of the novelist when the original plan is made, or they may be sought for afterwards. The immediate sources are always closely related to the personality of the author; the ultimate sources are social, and may be very difficult to trace.

In most novels there is an intricate mingling of the more subjective and the more objective materials. Romance may be largely subjective, but for the novel proper, the

canon of objectivity (see Section 129) demands extended observation of the outer world. Subjective material may belong to recent experience, or to remote memory; but memory allowed to dominate could not produce a representative novel. Few great novels could be adequately described as "emotion recollected in tranquillity." The creative element is always essential, and may be considered as belonging to the subjective material.

Observation takes many forms. The source of much material for the novel is in literature itself— in biography, history, essay, novel, and drama.

George Eliot gained a part of the Jewish material for Daniel Deronda, and some of her knowledge of inundations for The Mill on the Floss, by vigorous search of libraries. While Scott's theory of historical composition was that a period already familiar to the novelist should be chosen, he apologizes for the errors in Anne of Geierstein on the ground that he was away from his library. (Introduction of 1831.) The source of the main theme of Ivanhoe the contrast of Celt and Saxon was in an obscure drama, Logan's Runnimede. The novelization of dramas has been much less common than the opposite process.1

Consultation with other persons has been a source of material in many novels.

Scott observed and questioned many representatives of an earlier generation, for legendary matter and local manners. Gogol consulted his mother for peasant material, and Pushkin was indebted to his old serf nurse for national songs and traditions. George Eliot sought professional advice regarding the legal element in Felix Holt.

Travel, whether for general purposes or for the sake of an individual novel, has long been a common method of obtaining materials.

1 Professor C. F. McClumpha gives an extended comparison of Greene's Alcida and Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis, on which it was founded, in The Minnesota Magazine for October, 1899.

Browning's life of George Eliot mentions her visits to Cambridge, Oxford, and Florence as yielding new fabric for novelistic weaving. Scott records that his trip around the coast of Scotland, in 1814, was for the purpose of gathering data for the Lord of the Isles, with a view to prose fiction also. (Introduction to The Pirate, 1832.)

That method of observation which takes the form of very exact intellectual attention to details-reportage — is condemned by more than one critic.

Brunetière writes: 1 "L'observation devient moins large à mesure qu'elle devient plus exacte, plus précise, plus microscopique et, par conséquent, à mesure, s'éloigne davantage de la nature même et de la vérité.” Lanson comments on the note-taking habits of the Goncourt brothers and Daudet. Scott in general followed an older method — the method which produced the Duddon River sonnets of Wordsworth—"It was not the purpose of the author to present a landscape copied from nature, but a piece of composition, in which a real scene, with which he is already familiar, had afforded him some leading outlines." (Introduction to The Monastery, 1830. Compare Section 84.)

Many writers agree that the principal characters of a novel are often modeled after real persons, but many also insist that the ultimate portrait should bear slight resemblance to the original. Novelists have frequently complained of the too curious attempt of readers to trace back the artistic result to the real source.

As early as 1754, Sarah Fielding vigorously objected to this habit, and, a century later, Spielhagen criticized the same false tendency. Scott and Hawthorne received rebukes from persons connected with the real models for certain idealized characters or places. Probably the novelist is sometimes at fault, especially in the eighteenth century, when "secret histories" and caricature of contemporaries were so common.

Among famous characters based to some degree on real models, outside of historical fiction, are Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Amelia, The Vicar of Wakefield, Meg Merrilies, Jeanie Deans, and Dinah Morris.

1 Roman Naturaliste, p. 129.

142. The Time Perspective. - Poe's theory for the ideal short story, based on his general lyrical conception of art, was that it should be written at a single sitting. The novel more often has the contrasted interest of a prolonged process. Probably few of the world's greatest novels have occupied less than a year, from original plan to publication. Literature does not demand a difficult physical execution, and it cannot rival the dignity of dramaturgy, painting, or sculpture in this respect. Even the time given to the Comédie Humaine sinks into insignificance, compared with that required for the construction of great cathedrals.

The rate of composition varies not only for individual novelists, but for individual novels and passages. George Eliot wrote the eighth chapter of Amos Barton at a sitting, but at Dresden she produced little more than eight hundred words a day on Adam Bede. There may possibly be danger that too much time spent on a single work may destroy the subtle unity of emotional tone; but on the other hand, a long process of thought may strengthen the intellectual unity of structure. Scott defends rapid composition:

"The best authors in all countries have been the most voluminous. The works and passages in which I have succeeded, have uniformly been written with the greatest rapidity; . . . the parts in which I have come feebly off, were by much the more labored." (Introductory Epistle, Fortunes of Nigel.)

The testimony of the author himself is not always final authority. Beckford records of Vathek : "It took me three days and two nights of hard labor. I never took my clothes off the whole time." But Garnett, in the introduction to his edition of Vathek, shows that the actual time, including the revisions, was a matter of years instead of days.