Novel reading

“ Ever since the Novel reached the stage of development where it was demonstrated to be the most ingenious vehicle yet designed for conveying the protean thought and fancy of man, there has stood in the judgment book of Public Opinion the decree that novel-reading was a vice. ”

“ I scarcely think we could any of us claim that in reading a novel we deliberately watch the book itself, rather than the scenes and figures it suggests, or that we seek to construct an image of the book, page by page, while its form is gradually exposed to us. ”

“ I seldom look into novels; it is really very well for a novel.’ Such is the common cant. ‘And what are you reading, Miss ——?’ ‘Oh, it’s only a novel!’ replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference or momentary shame. ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda,’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. ”

“ They are so habituated to the idea that novels, to them, are valueless—mere sentimental unrealities or spiced narratives of heated invention—so that they go through the treasure houses of genius without ever hearing the soft-voiced persuasion of knowledge or seeing the marvelous, vivid panorama of human life, illustrating its aspirations, sorrows, struggles, triumphs and failures. ”

“ What a different result is achieved by the reader who knows the secret that imagination is the soul of thought, that taste is the power of truth and that the abstractions produced by imagination and taste dealing with fact to convert it to fiction, or carefully assembling fiction to convert it to fact, have been the stars that have lighted up the night of human history. By the light of these in their varying forms man discovered Religion, Philosophy, Science, Government and the possibility of orderly Liberty. To such a reader the novel comprehends all human society, its customs and secrets. ”

“ So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading public—a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two centuries ago. ”

“ The dull people decided years and years ago, as every one knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel-reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time. ”

“ In the Novel you may find the measure, the accent and the figures of the whole range of poetry, and a capacity for inspiring enthusiasm and emulation quite as great as poetry unjoined to the divine enchantress, Music. ”

“ But the reading need not be confined to the classics nor to the master-pieces of literature. Natural history—generally the most fascinating of subjects—can be taught; interest in flowers and trees and birds and the habits of animals can be awakened by reading the essays of literary men on these topics as they never can be by the dry text-books. ”

“ I am indeed inclined to lay much stress on the quality of re-readableness in a novel. Perhaps, as indeed is pretty generally the fact in such cases, a capacity of reading again is required in the person as well as one of being read again in the book. ”

“ Such readers, convinced in advance that everything in a novel is fictitious, because the personages discussed are fictitious in name, never dream that study of the conduct of these personages may be useful to influence their own manners, conduct, morals or sympathies. ”

“ A novelist conceives certain characters and assembles them in action and reaction, but it is we who in effect create the story as we read. We take up a novel, perhaps, which we read five years ago; we find in it now new significances and appeals. The book is the same; it is we who have changed. We bring to it the added power of feeling of those five years of living. ”

“ Say that the new methods in literature concentrate all styles, comedy and tragedy, description, character-drawing and dialogues, in a series of pictures set in the brilliant frame of a plot which holds the reader's interest. The Novel, which demands sentiment, style, and imagery, is the greatest creation of modern days ”

“ But some of you have so little time that you cannot read any histories but must find relaxation in the good novel alone. By the good novel I mean the one that, written in good English, tells an interesting story, has a distinct plot, and ends happily. ”

“ So we drop the adventure story and turn to the novel. For the novel is a work of fiction in which the imagination and the intellect combine to express life in the form of a story and the imagination is always directed and controlled by the intellect. It is interested chiefly, not in romance or adventure, but in men and women as they are; it aims to show the motives and influences which govern human life, and the effects of personal choice upon character and destiny. Such is the true novel, [213] and as such it opens a wider and more interesting field than any other type of literature. ”

“ It is only slowly that we have developed the distinction of the novel from the romance, as being a story of human beings, absolutely credible and conceivable, as distinguished from human beings frankly endowed with the glamour, the wonder, the brightness, of a less exacting and more vividly eventful world. The novel is a story that demands, or professes to demand, no make-believe. The novelist undertakes to present you people and things as real as any that you can meet in an omnibus. ”

“ Turning our attention from the epic and the drama, and confining it to the general type of fiction which in the last chapter was loosely named novelistic, we shall find it possible to distinguish somewhat sharply, on the basis of both material and method, between three several forms,—the novel, the novelette, and the short-story. The French, who are more precise than we in their use of denotative terms, are accustomed to divide their novelistic fiction into what they call the roman, the nouvelle, and the conte. ”

“ And I think it is just in this, that the novel is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a study and judgment of conduct, and through that of the ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and increasing value—or perhaps to avoid controversy I had better say the real and increasing importance—of the novel and of the novelist in modern life comes in. ”

“ The novel of life and manners which is largely descriptive and in which the exigencies of the plot give way to the study of customs. (3) The novel of incident in which the plot is everything and description and character study are avoided or subordinated to action. (4) The romance which usually deals with things as they were in days long past and with actions that little concern the present. Marvelous and even supernatural incidents crowd its pages. (5) The idealistic novel which paints the world as it should be and makes its actors more nearly perfect than the world accepts as typical. ”

“ Such, I should think, is very nearly the theory of our criticism in the matter of the art of fiction. A novel is a picture of life, and life is well known to us; let us first of all "realize" it, and then, using our taste, let us judge whether it is true, vivid, convincing—like life, in fact. ”

“ The book has this merit—the first merit of a novel—that the reader is interested in the people rather than the plot, and that he watches the development of character rather than that of event."—Literary World. ”

“ This convenient division of prose fiction into romances and novels is open to challenge. Some critics use the name "novel" for any work of prose fiction. They divide novels into two classes, stories (or short stories) and romances. The story relates simple or detached incidents; the romance deals with life in complex relations, dominated by strong emotions, especially by the emotion of love. ”

“ And, as in every other art, that which is base and false in fiction soon dies of its own inherent weakness and is forgotten. But decade by decade the Novel grows more powerful, more noble, and more adaptable to the spiritual uses of man. The time will come when the Novel will stand on the book-shelves with history, the philosophies and the sciences, as of equal honor and use—necessary to complete the education of every scholar; yet even then there will probably be a tribunal to pronounce it to be, if not a vice, at least of doubtful utility. ”

“ But the novel adapts itself to so large a range of readers, and covers so vast a ground in the imitation of life, that it is the unique branch of literature which may be cultivated without any real distinction or skill, and yet for the moment may exercise a powerful purpose. ”

“ The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation; the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the variety of scene and incident—all most properly connected with the plot, but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue; the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all—these things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the born lover of the special novel-pleasure. ”

“ You see I have novel on the brain. Well, just suppose you were writing that novel, with me for a heroine, what would you advise me? One has got accustomed to having certain things—a certain amount of clothes, and bric-à-brac and horses, and so forth, and to consider them necessary. ”

“ The term novel has been made to cover books of such diverse character, now-a-days, that the reader is almost entitled to demand of a novelist that he shall affix some distinct label to the book he is putting forth, and make it clear beforehand whether his work is a dialogue on religion, a satire on morals, a political tract, a study in slum life, or a mere romance. ”

“ The order in which the drama simply says things gives it all its form, while the story told and the picture painted, as the novel at the pass we have brought it to embraces them, reports of an infinite diversity of matters, gathers together and gives out again a hundred sorts, and finds its order and its structure, its unity and its beauty, in the alternation of parts and the adjustment of differences. ”

“ Certain materials of fiction are inherently epic, or dramatic, or novelistic, as the case may be. Also, an author, according to his mental attitude toward life and toward the subject-matter of his fictions, may cast his stories either in the epic, the dramatic, or the novelistic mood. In order to understand this distinction, we must examine the nature of the epic and the drama, and then study the novel in comparison with these two elder types of fiction. ”

“ Now literature (to repeat what has been than more once stated earlier in this book) is a way of escape from life as well as an echo or mirror of it, and the novel as the form of literature which more than any other men read for pleasure, is the main avenue for this escape. So that alongside this invasion of realism it is not strange that there grew a revival in romance. ”

“ Questions of all kinds are presenting themselves for discussion. Has the rise of realism made romance impossible? Is there a valid distinction between romance and romanticism? Is the short-story a definite form, differing from the novel in purpose as well as in length? What is the best way to tell a story,—in the third person, as in the epic,—in the first person, as in an autobiography,—or in letters? Which is of most importance, character or incident or atmosphere? Is the novel-with-a-purpose legitimate? Why is it that dramatized novels often fail in the theater? ”

“ Doubtless there are classes of literature in which form or expression predominates, and we cannot read poetry, for example, or the drama, or even the higher class of fiction, without lingering upon the finer passages, to get the full impression of their beauty. In reading works of the imagination, we read not for ideas alone, but for expression also, and to enjoy the rhythm and melody of the verse, if it be poetry, or, if prose, the finished rhetoric, and the pleasing cadence of the style. ”

“ V A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thence-forward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. ”

“ First each novel, and then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I will take, for instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the novel of adventure, which appeals to certain almost sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man; second, the novel of character, which appeals to our intellectual appreciation of man’s foibles and mingled and inconstant motives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature and moral judgment. ”

“ The faculty which by a daring leap fixes on the evolutionary hypothesis, or with imaginative subtlety suggests the plot of a novel, is the self-same one which enables us to say, “Our Father, which art in heaven.” ”