In January of the year 1875,
while Fleeming's sky was still unclouded, he was reading Smiles.
'I read my engineers' lives steadily,' he writes, 'but find
biographies depressing. I suspect one reason to be that
misfortunes and trials can be graphically described, but happiness
and the causes of happiness either cannot be or are not. A grand
new branch of literature opens to my view: a drama in which people
begin in a poor way and end, after getting gradually happier, in an
ecstasy of enjoyment. The common novel is not the thing at all.
It gives struggle followed by relief. I want each act to close on
a new and triumphant happiness, which has been steadily growing all
the while. This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where things
get blacker and blacker and end in hopeless woe. Smiles has not
grasped my grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle followed by
a little respite before death. Some feeble critic might say my new
idea was not true to nature. I'm sick of this old-fashioned notion
of art.
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