a selection from the chapter:THE NOVEL

THE question which I propose to treat of in what follows may seem to be in no need of an answer. Nearly everybody believes that he knows that answer. Yet, how many have ever given any real thought to just what the novel is?

Now, first of all, it is one of the forms of literary art. The aim of art-to define man's emotional reaction to life or to the outer world, to all that is not I-is one and indivisible; the methods which artists employ to achieve that aim are as manifold as human temperaments. According to the method employed, there are many forms of art.

One of them uses words or language for its tool; it we call literature.

True literature is that in the given utterances of a given age and country which, by virtue of its excellence and general validity, will endure; which will remain as the document of its time and origin throughout the ages.

Within the realm of literature we have the province of narrative art.

This branch of literature has, during the last two or three centuries, assumed an importance which is phenomenal and unheard-of in the history of the last two or three thousand years. The reason is, of course, that, with the development of printing, the circle of readers has enormously widened; the circle of listeners and spectators has almost proportionately contracted. Even true plays are more commonly read these days than seen. Naturally, then, prose narration, conceived and written to be read, not memorized and recited to an audience, is the form most commonly chosen by the artist of to-day as the one most directly adapted to his purpose which is, of course, to waken an emotional reaction and response, in the largest possible number, to a given set of conditions, data, circumstances, events, and characters.

If, then, we take the vast mass of works of more or less permanent value which have accumulated under this heading of narrative prose, we find that we can roughly classify them in three groups which, for our present purpose, have a special significance. In ascending order of importance (without prejudice to their artistic value), we might call them The Tale, The Short Story, and The Novel. All three try to achieve the aim common to all art by depicting a section of human life.

In order to define the novel, I cannot do better than briefly delineate the border lines between the three groups.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote Tales. He took his subject matter, as it has been well said, from the border-provinces of human life-in contradistinction to its main stream. Poe presents things which happen "on the margin of life".

From this follows one important deduction: the tale is not socially significant.

Its incidents may have the interest of anecdotes, the charm of dreams, the novelty of a surprise; its characters may be interesting as pathological cases or as physiological accidents, like a man with either a diseased liver or with a hump-back on his shoulders or six fingers on his hands. But no conclusion can be drawn from either incidents or characters as to the state of society in which they are set.

The tale is not necessarily a short narrative: the Russian Dostoievski, the Pole Joseph Conrad have written tales of five hundred pages each.

But the secret of its appeal and at the same time its limitation lies in this that it consists of accidental or incidental things. It deals with the unusual, in character as well as in event. It satisfies our occasional appetite for the adventurous, the mysterious, or the horrible.