Blessings of Fiction.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVII, Issue 7739, 15 February 1905, Page 4

Blessings of Fiction.

MR HALL CAINE ON THE", USES OF THE NOVEL. " I rebel with all my might, •with nil Ihe strength of my soul* against that domineering phrase, • Light Literature,' said Mr Hall Caine at the Christmas dinner of till! New Vagabonds' Club, when he was the juest of the evening. " We novelists are always having the phrase thrown at us by the Jobs mid .Jeremiahs of journalism and public life. It comes, of'course, in the acidulated drops of criticism and the platitudinous patronage of our dear friend the pulpit, but we also get it by way of a sort of patent food in the dry nursing of the public itself. " It is astonishing how hypercritical the good public can be about its novel-reading. It reads novels from one end of the earth to the other, but it is always apologising to itself for __ reading them and pretending to read something more solid. " If we could wipe out English fiction for the past hundred years we should wipe out half of all we knowabout our own country. And in the time to come, when people want to arrive at a picture of our own generation, to know how we lived and amused ourselves, and what sort of folks we were, I daresay they will go to whatever is left of the poor despised light literature of the present moment—the Wessex novels of Mr Hardy, the Scotch stories of Mr liarrie and lan Maclaren, and the Cockney sketches of Mr Jerome and Mr l'ctt Ridge. . THE BEST COMFORTER. "It is the spirit of brotherhood that will bring in the reign of universal peace, if it ever comes, and surely there is no better ayency in creating the spirit of brollicrbaod among the races than the simple stories interchanged in translations. Russia was merely a hell-born empire to some of the people of Great Hritain until Tolstoy and Turgenev began to light up the dark heart of it with human beings like ourselves, and, once having seen this, the Russian moujik became own brother to the English peasant. "We hear a good deal about the impurity of certain books and plays, but this complaint comes usually from the dear old Partridges of journalism, who go to the theatre for the first time at fifty-five years of age, and do not know enough to realise that, in the long run, impurity ' does not even pay." | Explaining his final point, that fiction is the best comforter of all forms of literature, the speaker said .that, in life, wrong-doing often scem'ed victorious and right-doing was often seen in the dust, because men's days were few and they could not watch long enough. Was not that what fiction was for—to watch long enough, to answer the craving of the soul for compensation, and to showthat success may be the worst failure and failure the best success ? I In an article in the Januarv number of " The World's Work," Mr Hall Caine expresses the opinion that " The novel of the future will be more and more the religious novel and it will only be, accepted, wlie- ~ , thcr by the ploughman or the jihiiosopher, in the degree in which it un'ites with the simplest pictures of human life the deepest problems of hu- , inanity. I think the, people writing H I novels will bo the best minds, the j richest natures, and the strongest • souls. There is no pulpit with a sounding-board that will send the ' human voice so far as the novel."—. Daily Mail. .. v 1 j __