WHY NOVELS SUCCEED

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 285, 28 August 1919, Page 5

WHY NOVELS SUCCEED

A TRIBUTE TO THE ART OF THEIR. CREATORS. "Novelists often complain that people speak with contempt of novel-reading," says "The Times Literary Supplement." "If they mean that their art is despised," they could not possibly be more wrong than they are. Tho lyric and the novel have for the last lifty years or more superseded ■ all other literary forms. Novels- long ago attained such a position that a man like Landor, who lived habitually with the literature to which they are unknown, and know tho world's great epics, especially Homer and Milton, almost by heart, rejoiccd in them as 'the loast tiresome kind of ejiics/ Sixty or seventy years ago It might still bo possible to think that the writer of Grotc's History of Greece was a higher kind of man of letters than the authors of 'Vanity Fair' and 'Dombey and Son,' which were written about the same' time. But that is quito impossililo now. Everyone saw that Stevenson belonged to a higher order of tho literary hierarchy than) say, Bage'hot or Lecky; as everyone sees that Mr. Hardy and Mr. Conrad belong to a higher order than oven such highly-hon-oured veterans of history, philosophy, or critioism as Lord Morley, Sir George Trevelyan, and Mr. Saintsbury. "AVlvy? For the very simple reason that tho first two have not .only claimed tho right of creation, but have shown themselves possessed of tlio powers.which justify tho claim; whilst the last three have never so much as claimed tho right or pretondod to the powers. The novelist is now seen to rank with the poet. Scott did for his age just what Homer did for the early-Greeks.' Anatole Franco does for the French tho .work of Aristophanes, and Mr. Hardy for us somethiiTg like tho work of Euripides. Tiie recreation of tho world by means of the imagination, that .giving of form to the chaos of life, which is tho task of the finest art and of tho rarest qualities in tho mind of man, is now divided between tho poet and tho novelist, and is in fact more frequently, though never so perfectly, accomplished by the latter. "Tho novelist is exposed to c'ontempt by tho ease of his art, if he bo content to take it at its lowest. But he also suffers by a difficulty inherent in it, at least for those who take their imagination at all seriously. v The historian, the biographer, tho writer of memoirs, tho critic, has so much given to him. Tho novelist has nothing. When he begins to talk of Becky or Bathsheba wo care nothing for either. Wo do not believe in them unless he can make us believe; wo do not mind whether they arc- liapny or miserable, live or die, unless he can compel us to do so. That is why indifferent novels are to some of us exactly the most tedious 'reading in tho world."