Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Maurice Guest
Reasons for its life are mainly two. In the first place, it is one of the most truthful novels that have ever been written, and, in the second place, it creates men and women who are so alive that once you have met them they never leave you again.
This question of truth and the novel has been very much confused during the last ten years. An insistence on petty detail has often been thought to be all that is required, and the more you fill your bathroom with accurately described sponges, tooth-powder, and cakes of soap, the more you give your dentists' parlours the last word in the latest instruments of torture, the more truthful your vision of life. And, further than that, in order that you shall trust your imagination in nothing whatever, it has lately been a gospel that you shall never leave the inside of the cranium of your leading characters, shall tell only what they themselves are exactly thinking, and if by that you end by being nothing but autobiographical, what matter it, since you yourself are the most interesting person in the universe?
This sort of truth was not Mr. Richardson's. His book appeared before these later fashions, and considering its immense influence among other writers, it is remarkable that the path down which it points has not been more generally followed. The reason why it has not is, I think, because it is an extremely difficult path. "Maurice Guest" is founded, one cannot doubt, on actual experience - that is, its author has known at first hand Leipzig, its musical life, and persons living there who could at any rate quite legitimately exist in the same world as Louise, Schilsky, Krafft, Madeleine, Ephie Cayhill, and the rest, but that is not to say that Mr. Richardson has for one moment photographed his acquaintances. No true artist photographs anybody; the act of creation is something much more composite and mysterious. Some passer-by suggests a mood, some sun-setting or sun-rising a situation, some conversation a motive, and the creative work has had its beginning, but the end is far away.
Louise is a creation of such undoubted truth that it is easy to say that Mr. Richardson must have known her, but we all have also known her, and when the book is finished she remains with us as Marie Louise Dufrayer, known to us long before Mr. Richardson met her, to remain with us as part of our life experience until we die.
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