A Novelist on Novels. George Walter Lionel

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СКАЧАТЬ a shadowy, gleaming figure, which, with hand high upraised over the characters' heads, describes the Sign of the Cross. Mr Ranger Gull introduces as a manservant one of the most celebrated burglars of the day, a peer poisoned with carbon disulphide, wireless apparatus, and the lost heir to a peerage. As for 'Richard Dehan,' it is enough to quote one of her character's remarks: 'I had drained my cup of shame to the dregs.'

      This sort of thing is produced in great abundance, and has helped to bring the novel down. Unreality, extravagance, stage tears, offensive piety, ridiculous abductions and machinery, because of those we have 'lost face,' like outraged Chinamen. No wonder that people of common intelligence, who find at their friend's house drivel such as this, should look upon the novel as unworthy. It is natural, though it is unjust. The novel is a commodity, and if it seeks a wide public it must make for a low one: the speed of a fleet is that of its slowest ship; the sale of a novel is the capacity of the basest mind. Only it might be remembered that all histories are not accurate, all biographies not truthful, all economic text-books not readable. Likewise, it should be remembered, and we need quote only Mr Conrad, that novels are not defined by the worst of their kind… It is men's business to find out the best books; they search for the best wives, why not for the best novels? There are novels that one can love all one's life, and this cannot be said of every woman.

      There are to-day in England about twenty men and women who write novels of a certain quality, and about as many who fail, but whose appeal is to the most intelligent. These people are trying to picture man, to describe their period, to pluck a feather from the wing of the fleeting time. They do not write about radium murders, or heroines clad in orchids and tiger skins. They strive to seize a little of the raw life in which they live. The claim is simple; even though we may produce two thousand novels a year which act upon the brain in the evening as cigarettes do after lunch, we do put forth a small number of novels which are the mirror of the day. Very few are good novels, and perhaps not one will live, but many a novel concerned with labour problems, money, freedom in love, will have danced its little dance to some purpose, will have created unrest, always better than stagnation, will have aroused controversy, anger, impelled some people, if not to change their life, at least to tolerate that others should do so. The New Machiavelli, Lord Jim, The White Peacock, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Ethan Frome, none of those are supreme books, but every one of them is a hand grenade flung at the bourgeoisie; we do not want to kill it, but we do want to wake it up.

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