Weekly Trinity journal., 1872-08-31
NUMBER 80.
NOVEL READING.

The noyel has become, for good or for
evil, the daily food Of the civilized world.
1t is given to the Youngest childhood in
Mother Goose and other extravagant and
grotesque inventions, it is placed in the
hands Of older childhood, and youth
through the distributing agencies of a
| hundred thousand publishing houses and
Sunday school libraries, and prepared
for the eyes of the adult world by every
magazine and weekly-newspap that
finds its way into Christian homes.
Among all peoples and all sorts of peo-
pie, of every age and of every religious
and social school, it is the only universally
accepted form of literature. History,
poetry, philosophy, science, social ethecs,
and religion are accepted respectively by
classes of readers, larger or smaller but
the novel is read by mutitudes am ong
all those classes, and by the great multi
tude outside Of them, who rarely look into
anything else. The serial novel is now
an invariable component of the magazine
in America and England the French
featteton has been so long established
as to be regarded as necessary element
in the newspaper; while in Germany,
the land Of scholars and philosophers,
and scientific explorers, the story-tellers
are among the most ingenious and pro-
life in the world.
1t all comes of the interest the human
mind takes in human life. If history and
biography are less read than the novel,
it is because the life found in them is less
interesting or in n less interesting form.
The details of individual experience and
of social life are far more engaging to or
dinary minds than the proceedings of
parliaments and the intercourse of ma
tions. From these latter the life of tho
great masses is far removed. Tho mon
and women whom one meets at social
gathering, and the dramatic by-play and
personal experience of such occasion will
absorb multitude of minds far beyond
the proceedings of Board of Arbitration
that holds in its hands the relations Of
two great nations and possibly the peace
Of the world. The daily life Of the pco-
pie is not in politics, or philosophy, or re-
ligous discussion. They eat and drink,
they buy and sell, they lose and gain,
they love and hate, they plot and coun-
terplot their lives are filed with doubts
and fears and hopes, and realizations or
disappointmcnts of hope and when they
read, they chose to read Of these. 1t is
in these experiences that all classes meet
on common ground, and this is the ground
of the novel. In truth, the novel is So
cial history, personal biography, religion,
morals and philosophy, realized and
ideaized, all in one. Nay, moro it is
the only social history we have. If tho
social history Of the last hundred years
in England and America has not been
written in the novels of the last fifty,
it has not been written Mt all. In tho
proportion that these novels have been
accepted, and successful have their plots,
characters, spirit, properties and belong
ings been taken from real life. There is
no form of literature in which the people
have been more inexorably determined
to have truthfulness than in that Of llc-
tion. History, under the foul influence
of partisanship, has often won success by
| lying, but fiction never. Under the in
spirations Of ideality, il has presented to
us some of the very purcst forms Of truth
which we possess. .-,SclT6aer's Monthly.