The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Craft of Fiction, by Percy Lubbock

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Title: The Craft of Fiction

Author: Percy Lubbock

Release Date: August 1, 2006 [eBook #18961]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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THE CRAFT OF FICTION

by

PERCY LUBBOCK

Jonathan Cape
Eleven Gower Street, London
First Published 1921.

THE CRAFT OF FICTION

I

To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, to
turn it over and survey it at leisure--that is the effort of a critic
of books, and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keep
a book steady and motionless before us, so that we may have time to
examine its shape and design. As quickly as we read, it melts and
shifts in the memory; even at the moment when the last page is turned,
a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and
doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is
really left of it? A cluster of impressions, some clear points
emerging from a mist of uncertainty, this is all we can hope to
possess, generally speaking, in the name of a book. The experience of
reading it has left something behind, and these relics we call by the
book's name; but how can they be considered to give us the material
for judging and appraising the book? Nobody would venture to criticize
a building, a statue, a picture, with nothing before him but the
memory of a single glimpse caught in passing; yet the critic of
literature, on the whole, has to found his opinion upon little more.
Sometimes it is possible to return to the book and renew the
impression; to a few books we may come back again and again, till they
do in the end become familiar sights. But of the hundreds and hundreds
of books that a critic would wish to range in his memory, in order to
scrutinize and compare them reflectively, how many can he expect to
bring into a state of reasonable stability? Few indeed, at the best;
as for the oth