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Page 47
There are ninety millions of people in this country, all with characters
which might be carefully studied, if we had time. But we haven't the
time. So we have to choose our intimates. We prefer to know those who
seem to us most worth knowing. You should remember that the novelist has
no monopoly on realism. The newspapers are full of all sorts of
realities. The historian is a keen competitor.
Do you know that when I went to the bookstore to get your works I fell
in with a book on Garibaldi by a man named Trevelyan. When I got home I
sat down with it and couldn't let it go. Garibaldi was all the time
doing things, which you never allow your characters to do because you
think they would not be real. He was acting in the most romantic and
heroic manner possible. And his Thousand trooped after him as gayly as
if they were in a melodrama. And yet I understand that Garibaldi was a
real person, and that his exploits can be authenticated.
The competition in your line of business is fierce. You try to hold the
reader's attention to the states of mind of a few futile persons who
never did anything in particular that would make people want to know
them exhaustively. And then along comes the historian who tells all
about some one who does things they are interested in.
You can't wonder at the result. People who ought to be interested in
fiction are carried away by biography, and the chances are that some of
them will never come back. When they once get a taste for highly spiced
intellectual victuals, you can't get them to relish the breakfast food
you set before them. It seems to them insipid.
I know what you will say about Garibaldi. He was not your kind. You
wouldn't touch such a character if it was offered to you at a bargain.
After looking over that expedition to Sicily you would say that there
was nothing in it for you. The motives weren't complicated enough. It
was just plain heroics. You don't care so much for passions as for
problems. You want something to analyze.
Well, what do you say to Cavour? When I was deep in Garibaldi I found I
couldn't understand what he was driving at without knowing something
about Cavour who was always mixed up with what was going on in that
section of the world.
So I took up a Life of Cavour by a man named Thayer. It's the way I
have; one thing suggests another. Once I went up to Duluth and invested
in some corner lots on Superior Street. That suggested Superior City,
just across the river. The two towns were running each other down at a
great rate just then, so I stopped at West Superior to see what it had
to say for itself. The upshot of the matter was that I sized up the
situation about like this. A big city has _got_ to grow up at the head
of Lake Superior. If Duluth grows as much as it thinks it will, it's
bound to take in Superior. And if Superior grows as much as it thinks it
will, it can't help taking in Duluth. So I concluded that the best thing
for me was to take a flier in both.
When I saw what a big proposition the Unification of Italy was, I knew
that there was room for the development of some mighty interesting
characters before they got through with the business. So I plunged into
the Life of Cavour, and I've never regretted it.
Talk about problems! That hero of yours in your last book--I know you
don't believe in heroes,--at any rate, the leading man--was an innocent
child walking with his nurse along Easy Street, when compared with
Cavour. Cavour had fifty problems at the same time, and all of them were
insoluble to every one except himself.
His project, as I have just told you, was the unification of Italy. But
he hadn't any regulated monopoly in the business. A whole bunch of
unifiers were ahead of him; each one of them was trying to unify Italy
in his own way. They were all working at cross-purposes.
Now Cavour didn't try, as you might have expected, to reconcile these
people. He saw that it couldn't be done. He didn't mind their hating one
another; when they got too peaceable he would make an occasion for them
to hate him. He kept them all irreconcilably at work, till, in spite of
themselves, they got to working together. And when they began to do
that, Cavour would encourage them in it. As long as they were all
working for Italy he didn't care what they thought of each other or of
him. He had his eye on the main chance--for Italy.
I notice that in your novel, when your man got into trouble he threw up
the sponge. That rather turned me against him and I wished I hadn't
wasted so much time on his affairs. That wasn't the way with Thayer's
hero. One of the largest deals Cavour ever made was with Napoleon III,
who at that time had the reputation of being the biggest promoter of
free institutions in Europe. He was a regular wizard in diplomacy.
Whatever he said went. You see they hadn't realized then that he was
doing business on borrowed capital.
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