# The Atlantic Monthly/Volume 109/Number 1/Contemporary Novel

LLC:PN 80-99
The Contemporary Novel
By H. G. Wells
Circumstances have made me think a good deal at different times about the business of writing novels, and what it means and is and may be. And I was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them. One of my chief claims to distinction in the world is that I wrote the first long appreciative review of Joseph Conrad’s work in the Saturday Review. That was sixteen years ago. When a man has focused so much of his life upon the novel, it is not reasonable to expect him to take a too modest or apologetic view of it. I consider the novel a very important and necessary thing indeed in that complicated system of uneasy adjustments and readjustments which is modern civilization. I make very high and very wide claims for it. In many directions I think that we cannot get along without it.
Now this, I know, is not the usually received opinion. There is, I am aware, the theory that the novel is wholly and solely a means of relaxation. In spite of manifest facts, that was the dominant view of the great period that we now in our retrospective way speak of as the Victorian, and it still survives to this day. It is the man’s theory of the novel rather than the woman’s. One may call it the Weary Giant theory.
The Reader is represented as a man, burthened, toiling, worn. He has been in his office from ten to four, with perhaps only two hours interval at his club for lunch; or he has been playing golf; or he has been waiting about and voting in the House; or he has been fishing; or he has been disputing a point of law, or writing a sermon, or doing one of a thousand other of the grave important things which constitute the substance of a prosperous man’s life. Now at last comes the little precious interval of leisure, and the Weary Giant takes up a book. Perhaps he is vexed: he may have been bunkered, his line may have been entangled in the trees, his favorite investment may have slumped, or the judge may have had indigestion and been extremely rude to him. He wants to forget the troublesome realities of life. He wants to be taken out of himself, to be cheered, consoled, amused above all, amused. He does n’t want ideas, he does n’t want facts, above all he does n’t want Problems. He wants to dream of the bright, thin, gay excitements of a phantom world, in which he can be hero, of horses ridden and laces worn and princesses rescued and won. He wants pictures of funny slums and entertaining paupers and laughable longshoremen and kindly ​impulses making life sweet. He wants Romance without its defiance, and humor without its sting; and the business of the novelist, he holds, is to supply this cooling refreshment.
That is the Weary Giant theory of the novel. It ruled British criticism up to the period of the Boer War and then something happened to quite a lot of us, and it has never completely recovered its old predominance. Perhaps it will. Perhaps something else may happen to prevent its ever doing so.
Both fiction and criticism to-day are in revolt against that Weary Giant, the prosperous Englishman. I cannot think of a single writer of any distinction to-day, unless it be Mr. W. W. Jacobs, who is content merely to serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far from the Weary Reader being a decently tired Giant, we realize that he is only an inexpressibly lax, slovenly, and undertrained Giant; and we are all out with one accord resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in every possible way. And so I will say no more of the idea that the novel is merely a harmless opiate for the vacant hours of prosperous men. As a matter of fact it never has been, and by its nature I doubt if it ever can be.
I do not think that women have ever quite succumbed to the Weary Giant attitude in their reading. Women are more serious, not only about life, but about books. No type or kind of woman is capable of that lounging defensive stupidity which is the basis of the Weary Giant attitude; and all through the early nineties, during which the respectable frivolity of Great Britain left its most enduring marks upon our literature, there was a rebel undertow of earnest and aggressive writing and reading, supported chiefly by women, and supplied very largely by women, which gave the lie to the prevailing trivial estimate of fiction. Among readers, women and girls and young men at least will insist upon having their novels significant and real, and it is to these perpetually renewed elements in the public that the novelist must look for his continuing emancipation from the wearier and more massive influences at work in contemporary British life.
And if the novel is to be recognized as something more than a relaxation, it has also, I think, to be kept free from the restrictions imposed upon it by the fierce pedantries of those who would define a general form for it. Every art nowadays must steer its way between the rocks of trivial and degrading standards and the whirlpool of arbitrary and irrational criticism. Whenever criticism of any art becomes specialized and professional, whenever a class of adjudicators is brought into existence, those adjudicators are apt to become, as a class, distrustful of their immediate impressions, and anxious for methods of comparison between work and work; they begin to emulate the classifications and exact measurements of a science, and to set up ideals and rules as data for such classification and measurements. They develop an alleged sense of technique, which is too often no more than the attempt to exact a laboriousness of method or to insist upon peculiarities of method which impress the professional critic, not so much as being merits as being meritorious.
This sort of thing has gone very far with the critical discussion of both the novel and the play. You have all heard that impressive dictum that some particular theatrical display, although moving, interesting, and continually entertaining from start to finish, was for occult technical reasons ’not a play.’ And in the same way you are continually having your appreciation of fiction ​dashed by the mysterious parallel condemnation, that the story that you like ‘isn’t a novel.’ The novel has been treated as if its form were as well defined as the sonnet. A year or so ago, for example, there was a quite serious discussion, which began I believe in a weekly paper devoted to the interests of various nonconformist religious organizations, about the proper length for a novel. The critic was to begin his painful duties with a yard-measure. The matter was taken up with profound gravity by the Westminster Gazette, and a considerable number of literary men and women were circularized and asked to state, in the face of Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Shabby Genteel Story, and Bleak House, just exactly how long the novel ought to be. Our replies, according to the civility of our natures, were for the most part either uncivil or evasive; but the mere attempt to raise the question shows, I think, how widespread among the editorial, paragraph-writing, opinion-making sort of people is this notion of prescribing a definite length and a definite form for the novel. In the newspaper correspondence that followed, our friend the Weary Giant made a transitory appearance again. We were told the novel ought to be long enough for him to take up after dinner and finish before his whiskey at eleven.
That was obviously a half-forgotten echo of Edgar Allan Poe’s discussion of the short story. Edgar Allan Poe was very definite upon the point that the short story should be finished at a sitting. But the novel and the short story are two entirely different things, and the train of reasoning that made the American master limit the short story to about an hour of reading as a maximum, does not apply to the longer work. A short story is, or should be, a simple thing; it aims at producing one single, vivid effect; it has to seize the attention at the outset, and never relaxing, gather it together more and more until the climax is reached. The limits of the human capacity to attend closely therefore set a limit to it: it must explode and finish before interruption occurs or fatigue sets in. But the novel I hold to be a discursive thing; it is not a single interest, but a woven tapestry of interests; one is drawn, first by this affection and curiosity and then by that; it is something to return to, and I do not see that we can possibly set any limit to its extent.
The distinctive value of the novel among written works of art is in characterization, and the charm of a well-conceived character lies not in knowing its destiny but in watching its proceedings. For my own part I will confess that I find all the novels of Dickens, long as they are, too short for me. I am sorry they do not flow into one another more than they do. I wish that Micawber and Dick Swiveller and Sairey Gamp turned up again in other novels than their own, just as Shakespeare ran the glorious glow of Falstaff through a group of plays. But Dickens tried this once when he carried on the Pickwick Club into Master Humphrey’s Clock. That experiment was unsatisfactory, and he did not attempt anything of the sort again.
Following on the days of Dickens, the novel began to contract, to subordinate characterization to story and description to drama; considerations of a sordid nature, I am told, had to do with that something about a guinea-and-a-half and six shillings, with which we will not concern ourselves here and now; but I rejoice to see many signs to-day that that phase of narrowing and restriction is over, and that there is every encouragement for a return toward a laxer, more spacious form of novel-writing. ​The movement is partly of English origin, a revolt against those more exacting and cramping conceptions of artistic perfection to which I will recur in a moment, and a return to the lax freedom of form, the rambling discursiveness, the right to roam, of the earlier English novel, of Tristram Shandy and of Tom Jones; and partly it comes from abroad, and derives a stimulus from such bold and original enterprises as that of Monsieur Rolland in his Jean Christophe.
Its double origin involves a double nature for while the English spirit is toward discursiveness and variety, the new French movement is rather toward exhaustiveness. One who is, I think, quite the greatest of our contemporary English novelists, Mr. Bennett, has experimented in both forms of amplitude. His superb Old Wives’ Tale, wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the finest ‘long novel’ that has been written in English in the English fashion, in this generation; and now in Clayhanger and its promised collaterals he undertakes that complete, minute, abundant presentation of the growth and modification of one or two individual minds, which is the essential characteristic of the continental movement toward the novel of amplitude. While the Old Wives’ Tale is discursive, Clayhanger is exhaustive; he gives us both types of the new movement in perfection.
I name Jean Christophe as a sort of archetype in this connection, because it is just at present very much in our thoughts by reason of the admirable translation Mr. Cannan is giving us; but there is a greater predecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular treatment of a single mind and its impressions and ideas, or of one or two associated minds. The great original of all this work is that colossal last unfinished book of Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet. Flaubert, the bulk of whose life was spent upon the most austere and restrained fiction, Turgenev was not more austere and restrained, broke out at last into this gay, sad miracle of intellectual abundance. It is not extensively read in this country; it is not yet, I believe, translated into English; but there it is and if it is new to the reader I make him this present of the secret of a book that is a precious wilderness of wonderful reading. But if Flaubert is really the continental emancipator of the novel from the restrictions of form, the master to whom we of the English persuasion, we of the discursive school, must forever recur is he whom I will maintain against all comers to be the subtlest and greatest artist—I lay stress upon that word artist—that Great Britain has ever produced in all that is essentially the novel—Laurence Sterne.
The confusion between the standard of a short story and the standards of the novel, which leads at last to these what shall I call them? ‘Westminster Gazetteisms’ about the correct length to which the novelist should aspire, leads also to all kinds of absurd condemnations and exactions upon matters of method and style. The underlying fallacy is always this: the assumption that the novel, like the story, aims at a single, concentrated impression. From that comes a fertile growth of error.
Constantly one finds in the reviews of works of fiction the complaint that this, that, or the other thing in a novel is irrelevant. Now, it is the easiest thing and the most fatal thing to become irrelevant in a short story. A short story should go to its point as a man flies from a pursuing tiger: he pauses not for the daisies in his path or to note the pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety. But the novel by com-​parison is like breakfasting in the open air on a summer morning. Nothing is irrelevant if the writer’s mood be happy; and the tapping of the thrush on the garden-path or the petal of apple-blossom that floats down into my coffee, is as irrelevant as the egg I open or the bread and butter I bite. And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which is the aim of the short story, the introduction, for example, of the author’s personality, any comment that seems to admit that after all fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such things are not necessarily wrong in the novel. Of course all these things may fail in their effect, they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to do well; but there is no artistic merit in evading a difficulty any more than it is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the lowest of fences.
Nearly all the novels that have, by the lapse of time, reached an assured position of recognized greatness, are not only saturated in the personality of the author, but have in addition quite unaffected personal outbreaks. The least successful instance, the one that is made the text against all such first-personal interventions, is of course Thackeray. But I think the trouble with Thackeray is, not that he makes first-personal interventions, but that he does so with a curious touch of dishonesty. I quite agree with the late Mrs. Craigie that there was something profoundly vulgar about Thackeray. It is a sham-thoughtful, sham-gentleman, sham man-of-the-world pose that he assumes; it is an aggressive, conscious, challenging person astride before a fire, and a little distended by dinner and a sense of social and literary precedences, who uses the first person in Thackeray’s novels. It is n’t the real Thackeray; it is n’t a frank man who looks you in the eyes and bares his soul and demands your sympathy. That is a criticism of Thackeray, but it is n’t a condemnation of intervention.
I admit that for a novelist to come in person in this way before his readers involves grave risks; but when it is done without affectations, starkly as a man comes in out of the darkness to tell of perplexing things without, as, for instance, Mr. Joseph Conrad does for all practical purposes in his Lord Jim, then it gives a sort of depth, a sort of subjective reality, that no such cold, almost affectedly ironical detachment as that which distinguishes the work of Mr. John Galsworthy, for example, can ever attain. And in some cases the whole art and delight of a novel may lie in the author’s personal interventions: let such novels as Elizabeth and her German Garden, and the same writer’s Elizabeth in Rugen, bear witness.
Now all this time I have been hacking away at certain hampering and limiting beliefs about the novel, letting it loose as it were in form and purpose. I have still to say just what I think the novel is; and where, if anywhere, its boundary line ought to be drawn. It is by no means an easy task to define the novel. It is not a thing premeditated. It is a thing that has grown up into modern life, and taken upon itself uses and produced results that could not have been foreseen by its originators.
Few of the important things in the collective life of man started out to be what they are. Consider, for example, all the unexpected aesthetic values, the inspiration and variety of emotional result which arise out of the cross-shaped plan of the Gothic cathedral, and the undesigned delight and wonder of white marble that has ensued, as I have been told, through the aging and whitening of the realistically colored statuary of the Greeks and Romans. ​Much of the charm of the old furniture and needle-work again, upon which the present time sets so much store, lies in acquired and unpremeditated qualities. And no doubt the novel grew up out of simple story-telling, and the universal desire of children, old and young alike, for a story.
It is only slowly that we have developed the distinction of the novel from the romance, as being a story of human beings, absolutely credible and conceivable, as distinguished from human beings frankly endowed with the glamour, the wonder, the brightness, of a less exacting and more vividly eventful world. The novel is a story that demands, or professes to demand, no make-believe. The novelist undertakes to present you people and things as real as any that you can meet in an omnibus. And I suppose it is conceivable that a novel might exist which was just purely a story of that kind, and nothing more. It might amuse you as one is amused by looking out of a window into a street, or listening to a piece of agreeable music; and that might be the limit of its effect.
But almost always the novel is something more than that, and produces more effect than that. The novel has almost inseparable moral consequences. It leaves impressions, not simply of things seen, but of acts judged and made attractive or unattractive. They may prove very slight moral consequences, and very shallow moral impressions, in the long run; but there they are, none the less, its almost inevitable accompaniments. It is almost unavoidable that this should be so. Even if the novelist attempts or affects to be impartial, he still cannot prevent his characters setting examples, he still cannot avoid, as people say, putting ideas into his readers’ heads. The greater his skill, the more convincing his treatment, the more vivid his power of suggestion. And it is almost equally impossible for him not to betray his sense that the proceedings of this person are rather jolly and admirable, and of that, rather ugly and detestable. I suppose Mr. Bennett, for example, would say that he should not do so; but it is as manifest to any disinterested observer that he greatly loves and admires his Card, as that Richardson admired his Sir Charles Grandison, or that Mrs. Humphry Ward considers her Marcella a very fine and estimable young woman. And I think it is just in this, that the novel is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a study and judgment of conduct, and through that of the ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and increasing value or, perhaps, to avoid controversy, I had better say the real and increasing importance of the novel and of the novelist in modern life, comes in.
It is no new discovery that the novel, like the drama, is a powerful instrument of moral suggestion. This has been understood in England ever since there has been such a thing as a novel in England. This has been recognized equally by novelists, novel-readers, and the people who would n’t read novels under any conditions whatever. Richardson wrote deliberately for edification, and Tom Jones is a powerful and effective appeal for a charitable and even indulgent attitude toward loose-living men. But, excepting Fielding and one or two others of those partial exceptions that always occur in the case of critical generalizations, there is a definable difference between the novel of the past and what I may call the modern novel. It is a difference that is reflected upon the novel from a difference in the general way of thinking. It lies in the fact that formerly there was a feeling of certitude about moral values and standards of conduct that is ​altogether absent to-day. It was n’t so much that men were agreed upon these things, about these things there have always been enormous divergences of opinion, as that men were emphatic, cock-sure, and unteachable, about whatever they did happen to believe, to a degree that no longer obtains. This is the Balfourian age and even religion now seeks to establish itself on Doubt.
There were perhaps just as many differences in the past as there are now, but the outlines were harder they were indeed so hard as to be almost, to our sense, savage. You might be a Roman Catholic, and in that case you did not want to hear about Protestants, Turks, Infidels, except in tones of horror and hatred. You knew exactly what was good, and what was evil. Your priest informed you upon these points, and all you needed in any novel you read was a confirmation, implicit or explicit, of these vivid rather than charming prejudices. If you were a Protestant you were equally clear and unshakable. Your sect, whichever sect you belonged to, knew the whole of truth and included all the nice people. It had nothing to learn in the world, and it wanted to learn nothing outside its sectarian convictions. And the unbelievers, you know, were just as bad, and said their Creeds with an equal fury merely interpolating note. And people of every sort, Catholic, Protestant, Infidel, or what not, were equally clear that good was good and bad was bad, that the world was made up of good characters whom you had to love, help, and admire, and of bad characters to whom one might in the interests of goodness even lie, and whom one had to foil, defeat, and triumph over shamelessly at every opportunity. That was the quality of the times. The novel reflected this quality of assurance, and its utmost charity was to unmask an apparent villain and show that he or she was really profoundly and correctly good, or to unmask an apparent saint and show the hypocrite. There was no such penetrating and pervading element of doubt and curiosity and charity about the rightfulness and beauty of conduct as one meets on every hand to-day.
The novel-reader of the past, therefore, like the novel-reader of the more provincial party of England to-day, judged a novel by the convictions that had been built up in him by his training and his priest or his pastor. If it agreed with these convictions he approved, if it did not agree, he disapproved often with great energy. The novel, where it was not unconditionally banned altogether as a thing disturbing and unnecessary, was regarded as a thing subordinated to the teaching of the priest or pastor, or whatever director and dogma were followed. Its modest moral confirmations began when authority had completed its direction. The novel was good, if it seemed to harmonize with the graver exercises conducted by Mr. Chadband, and it was bad and outcast if Mr. Chadband said so. And it is over the bodies of discredited and disgruntled Chadbands that the novel escapes from its servitude and inferiority.
Now the conflict of authority against criticism is one of the eternal conflicts of humanity. It is the conflict of organization against initiative, of discipline against freedom. It was the conflict of the priest against the prophet in ancient Judea, of the Pharisee against the Nazarene, of the Realist against the Nominalist, of the Church against the Franciscan and the Lollard, of the Respectable Person against the Artist, of the hedge-clippers of mankind against the shooting buds. And to-day, while we live in a period of tightening and extending social organization, we live ​also in a period of adventurous and insurgent thought, in an intellectual spring unprecedented in the world’s history. There is an enormous criticism going on of the faiths upon which men’s lives and associations are based, and of every standard and rule of conduct. And it is inevitable that the novel, just in the measure of its sincerity and ability, should cooperate in and reflect the atmosphere and uncertainties and changing variety of this seething and creative time.
And I do not mean merely that the novel is unavoidably charged with the representation of this wide and wonderful conflict. It is a necessary part of the conflict. The essential characteristic of this great intellectual revolution amidst which we are living to-day, this revolution of which the revival and restatement of nominalism under the name of pragmatism is the philosophical aspect, consists in the reassertion of the importance of the individual instance as against the generalization. All our social, political, moral problems are being approached in a new spirit, in an inquiring and experimental spirit, which has small respect for abstract principles and deductive rules. We perceive more and more clearly, for example, that the study of social organization is an empty and unprofitable study until we approach it as a study of the association and inter-reaction of individualized human beings inspired by diversified motives, ruled by traditions, and swayed by the suggestions of a complex intellectual atmosphere. And all our conceptions of the relationships between man and man, and of justice and rightfulness and social desirableness, remain something misfitting and inappropriate, something uncomfortable and potentially injurious, as if we were trying to wear sharp-edged clothes made for a giant out of tin, until we bring them to the test and measure of realized individualities.
And this is where the value and opportunity of the modern novel come in. So far as I can see, it is the only medium through which we can discuss the great majority of the problems which are being raised in such bristling multitude by our contemporary social development. Nearly every one of them has at its core a psychological problem; and not merely a psychological problem, but one in which the idea of individuality is an essential factor. Dealing with most of these questions by a rule or a generalization is like putting a cordon round a jungle full of the most diversified sort of game. The hunting only begins when you leave the cordon behind you, and push into the thickets.
Take, for example, the immense cluster of difficulties that arise out of the increasing complexity of our state. On every hand we are creating officials; and compared with only a few years ago, private life in a dozen fresh directions comes into contact with officialdom. But we still do practically nothing to work out the interesting changes that occur in this sort of man or that, when you withdraw him as it were from the common crowd of humanity, put his mind if not his body into uniform, and endow him with powers and functions and rules. It is manifestly a study of the profoundest public and personal importance. It is manifestly a study of increasing importance.
The process of social and political organization that has been going on for the last quarter of a century, is pretty clearly going on now if anything, with increasing vigor; and for the most part the entire dependence of the consequences of the whole problem upon the reaction between the office on the one hand and the weak, uncertain, various human beings who take office on ​the other, does not seem even to be suspected by the energetic, virtuous, and more or less amiable people whose activities in politics, and upon the backstairs of politics, bring about these developments. They assume that the sort of official they need, a combination of god-like virtue and intelligence with unfailing mechanical obedience, can be made out of just any young nephew. And I know of no means of persuading people that this is a rather unjustifiable assumption, and of creating an intelligent controlling criticism of officials, and of assisting conscientious officials to an effective self-examination, and generally of keeping the atmosphere of official life sweet and healthy, except the novel. Yet so far the novel has scarcely begun its attack upon this particular field of human life, and all the attractive varied play of motive it contains.
Of course, we have one supreme and devastating study of the illiterate minor official in Bumble. That one figure lit up, and still lights, the whole problem of Poor-Law administration for the English reading community. It was a translation of well-meant regulations and pseudo-scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, arrogant, ill-bred flesh and blood. It was worth a hundred royal commissions. You may make your regulations as you please, said Dickens in effect; this is one sample of the stuff that will carry them out. But Bumble stands almost alone. Instead of realizing that he is only one aspect of officialdom, we are all too apt to make him the type of all officials; and not an urban district council can get into a dispute about its electric light without being denounced as a Bumbledom by some whirling enemy or other.
The burthen upon Bumble’s shoulders is too heavy to be borne, and we want the contemporary novel to give us a score of other figures to put beside him: other aspects of and reflections upon this great problem of officialism made flesh. Bumble is a magnificent figure of the follies and cruelties of ignorance in office; I would have every candidate for the post of Workhouse Master pass a severe examination on Oliver Twist; but it is not only caricature and satire that I demand. We must have the fullest treatment, not only of the temptations, vanities, abuses and absurdities of office, but of all its dreams, its sense of constructive order, its consolations, its sense of service, and its nobler satisfactions. You may say that is demanding more insight and power in our novels and novelists than we can possibly hope to find in them. So much the worse for us. I stick to my thesis that the complicated social organization of to-day cannot get along without the amount of mutual understanding and mutual explanation which such a range of characterization in our novels implies.
The success of civilization amounts ultimately to a success of sympathy and understanding. If people cannot be brought to an interest in one another greater than they feel to-day, to curiosities and criticisms far keener, and coöperations far subtler, than we have now; if class cannot be brought to measure itself against and to interchange experience and sympathy with class, and temperament with temperament, then we shall never struggle very far beyond the confused discomforts and uneasiness of to-day, and the changes and complications of human life will remain as they are now, very like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immense avalanche that is sliding down a hill. And in this tremendous work of human reconciliation and elucidation, it seems to me it is the novel that must attempt most, and achieve most.
​You may feel disposed to say to all this: We grant the major premises, but why look to the work of prose fiction as the main instrument in this- necessary process of so to speak sympathizing humanity together. Cannot this be done far more effectively through biography and autobiography, for example? Is n’t there the lyric, and above all, is n’t there the play?
Well, so far as the stage goes, I think it is a very charming and exciting form of human activity, a display of actions and surprises of the most moving and impressive sort; but beyond the opportunities it affords for saying startling and thought-provoking things, opportunities Mr. Shaw, for example, has worked to the utmost limit, I do not see that the drama does much to enlarge our sympathies and add to our stock of motive ideas. And regarded as a medium for startling and thought-provoking things, the stage seems to me an extremely clumsy and costly affair. One might just as well go about with a pencil writing up the thought-provoking phrase, whatever it is, on walls. The drama excites our sympathies, I admit, intensely, but it seems to me it is far too objective a medium to widen them appreciably; and it is that widening, that increase in the range of understanding, at which I think civilization is aiming.
The case for biography, and more particularly autobiography, as against the novel, is I admit, at the first blush, stronger. You may say, why give us the creatures of a novelist’s imagination, these phantom and fantastic thinkings and doings, when we may have the stories of real lives, really lived, the intimate record of actual men and women? To which one answers: Ah! if one could! But it is just because biography does deal with actual lives, actual facts, because it radiates out to touch continuing interests and sensitive survivors, that it is so unsatisfactory, so untruthful. Its inseparable falsehood is the worst of all kinds of falsehood the falsehood of omission. Think what an abounding, astonishing, perplexing person Gladstone must have been in life; and consider Lord Morley’s Life of Gladstone, cold, dignified, not a life at all indeed, so much as embalmed remains; the fire gone, the passions gone, the bowels carefully removed. All biography has something of that post mortem coldness and respect; and as for autobiography a man may show his soul in a thousand half-unconscious ways, but to turn upon one’s self and explain one’s self is given to no one. It is the natural liars and braggarts, your Cellinis and Casanovas, men with a habit of regarding themselves with a kind of objective admiration, who do best in autobiography. And, on the other hand, the novel has neither the intense self-consciousness of autobiography, nor the paralyzing responsibilities of the biographer. It is by comparison irresponsible and free. Because its characters are figments and phantoms they can be made entirely transparent. Because they are fictions and you know they are fictions, so that they cannot hold you for an instant so soon as they cease to be true, they have a power of veracity quite beyond that of actual records. Every novel carries its own justification and its own condemnation, in its success or failure to convince you that the thing was so. Now history, biography, blue-book, and so forth, can hardly ever get beyond the statement that the superficial fact was so.
You see now the scope of the claim I am making for the novel : it is to be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of self-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the factory of customs, the criticism of laws and in-​stitutions and of social dogmas and ideas. It is to be the home confessional, the initiator of knowledge, the seed of fruitful self-questioning. Let me be very clear here. I do not mean for a moment that the novelist is going to set up as a teacher, as a sort of priest with a pen, who will make men and women believe and do this and that. The novel is not a new sort of pulpit; humanity is passing out of the phase when men sit under preachers and dogmatic influences. But the novelist is going to be the most potent of artists, because he is going to present conduct, devise beautiful conduct, discuss conduct, analyze conduct, suggest conduct, illuminate it through and through. He will not teach, but discuss, point out, plead, and display.
And this being my view, you will be prepared for the demand I am now about to make for an absolutely free hand for the novelist in his choice of topic and incident, and in his method of treatment. Or rather, if I may presume to speak for other novelists, I would say it is not so much a demand we make as an intention we proclaim. We are going to write, subject only to our own limitations, about the whole of human life. We are going to deal with political questions and religious questions and social questions. We cannot present people unless we have this free hand, this unrestricted field. What is the good of telling stories about people’s lives if one may not deal freely with the religious beliefs and organizations that have controlled or failed to control them? What is the good of pretending to write about love, and the loyalties and treacheries and quarrels of men and women, if one must not glance at those varieties of physical temperament and organic quality, those deeply passionate needs and distresses from which half the storms of human life are brewed?
We propose to deal with all these things, and it will need very much more than the disapproval of provincial librarians, the hostility of a few influential people in London, the scurrility of the Spectator, and the deep and obstinate silences of the Westminster Gazette, to stop the incoming tide of aggressive novel-writing.
We are going to write about it all. We are going to write about business and finance and politics, and precedence and pretentiousness and decorum and indecorum, until a thousand pretences and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold clear air of our elucidations. We are going to write of wasted opportunities and latent beauties, until a thousand new ways of living open to men and women. We are going to appeal to the young and the hopeful and the curious, against the established, the dignified, and defensive. Before we have done, we shall have all life within the scope of the novel.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in 1912, before the cutoff of January 1, 1930.
This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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