Why is the author not bound by the same canon of art? Artistically, he certainly is so bound. Intellectually, he certainly is so bound. That this obligation is continually defied and broken through by many English writers, proves only that the great majority of these writers are not artists in any sense of the word.
The brevity or length of a literary work can have nothing to do with its beauty or excellence. If it be beautiful, if it be excellent, its proportions will be those which naturally grew out of its subject; and the writer who is an artist will know, as the painter knows, that he cannot alter the unwritten law which prescribes to him those proportions. What has either length or brevity to do with either excellence or beauty? What give both excellence and beauty are qualities not to be measured by a publisher's counting up of words, or a printer's enumeration of pages.
A sketch of a few pages of Maupassant's is worth all the volumes put together of Georges Ohnet; one of the _Sonnets of Proteus_ is worth the whole swagger of the _Seven Seas_.
There seems to be, unhappily, an unwritten law in English literature that cheapness must of necessity be allied to ugliness. A cheap book is in England an inferior and unlovely thing. But it need not be so. It is not so everywhere. I have now before me a book of Pompeo Molmenti's, issued by Bemporad, of Florence; its cost is two francs twenty-five centièmes; less than one-and-sixpence in your money. It is bound in thick cream-coloured paper; it is called _Il Moretto di Brescia_, being a brief study of the life and works of the great artist of whose pure and noble work the city of Brescia is full. That the text is of rare scholarly excellence, and of the finest critical and appreciative qualities, there can be no question, since it is written by the President of the Accademia delle Arte of Venice. The type is large, the paper fine, the illustrations (phototyped) are of extreme delicacy and beauty, rendering worthily the works of the Moretto; the size of the book is Imperial 8vo.
Will you tell me where I should find anything equal to it at its price in London?
Your books are all ill-stitched, and fall to pieces as soon as one handles them. Your type is usually ugly, even at its best; all foreign readers complain of its clumsiness and confusing effect on the eyes. Compare a page of a Parisian book at three francs and a half with a page of a six-shilling English novel. The former is incomparably the superior. Your cheap illustrated books are still more scandalously treated. I have before me a book priced four-and-sixpence, more than double the price of _Il Moretto_. It is a book for children; its illustrations have been reproduced from earlier works, and they are not even all of the same method or the same size; some are printed from old wood-blocks, some are photographed; in one a child is represented the size of a fly, in another a dog is drawn bigger than a man; anything is thought good enough, it seems, for children. Artistic beauty is entirely lacking in the illustrations of English juvenile books; and there is nothing so irritating as the sight of illustrations of various qualities bound up in the same volume.