Novelty

“ The sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation. ”

“ That is novel which is new to us merely, which appears to us for the first time. It may be new to the intellect, a new idea, or to the sensibility, a new feeling, or to the will, a new act. As a new idea it satisfies our curiosity, as a new feeling it developes our nature, as a new volition it enlarges the sphere of our activity. In these respects, and for these reasons, novelty pleases, but in all this we discover no resemblance to the beautiful.
Novelty heightens Beauty.—It is not to be denied that novelty, in many cases, heightens the beauty of an object. ”

“ So, you see, the effect of novelty is never more powerfully displayed than by unusual impressions on the finer senses; that appearances which the eye perceives, and which the mind cannot explain, become phantoms, involving some special motive of wonder or dismay. ”

“ Hence, the Greeks called the beautiful ΚΑΛΟΣ.
The influence of novelty has been so well illustrated in an Essay by the author of a Treatise on Happiness, that we trust no apology will be required for transferring a portion of it to our pages:—
“The term novelty applies to everything new—either newly invented, or newly exhibited to us; in the former case the thing is novel to the world, in the latter it is novel to ourselves. Novelty powerfully influences the senses, the passions, and the manners of human beings; it furnishes amusement, employment, and maintenance for man ”

“ Their charm has been worn away by plodding feet, and they have lost that element of novelty or surprise which is so essential for romance. He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost workings. ”

“ Anon, the variable little beings would be searching for some new source of bliss; as if Nature had already taught them that novelty was the charm of earthly pleasure, but withheld the bitter certainty that "all is vanity." ”

“ The mixture of vanity and meanness, the internal worthlessness and external pretence, the rustic ignorance and fine lady-like airs, the intoxication of novelty and infatuation of pride, appear like a dream or romance, rather than anything in real life. ”

“ He paused, first, because it must be owned that his practice was restricted, and a fee gratified the vanity natural to unappreciated talent, and had the charm of novelty, which is sweet to human nature itself. ”

“ There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. ”

“ Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself more or less with all our passions. ”

“ In a few years that novelty will wear off, and that Curiosity will be equally gratified by other Compositions, it may be, as trifling, but who will then have the additional charm of novelty, to recommend them. ”

“ Or perhaps, to put it more simply—vanity, like all social vices, craves for novelty; ”

“ Novelty may be either pleasing or unpleasing. When it affects the senses by grateful influences, it occasions admiration and delight. How powerfully must the vision of Adam have been affected, when he was introduced to being! ”

“ As the novelty of our ideas is generally attended with pleasurable sensation, from this arises Curiosity, or a desire of examining a variety of objects, hoping to find novelty, and the pleasure consequent to this degree of surprise ”

“ the charms of novelty have the same power. ”

“ Such is the nature of novelty, that, where any thing pleases, it becomes doubly agreeable, if new: but if it displeases, it is doubly displeasing upon that very account. ”

“ In what is small, the parts must be finished, or they will offend. Lastly, in what is momentary and evanescent, as in dress, fashions, &c. there must be a glossy and sparkling effect, for brilliancy is the only virtue of novelty. ”

“ art may persuade, and novelty spread out its charm. The first fault is the child of simplicity; but every other the offspring of guilt. ”

“ The freshness of the new field which was opened up to the imagination—so full of vivid lights and shadows, light-hearted fun, grinding hardship, stirring adventure, heroic action, warm friendships, bitter hatreds—was in exhilarating contrast to the world of the historical romancer and the fashionable novelist, to which the mind of the general reader was at that date given over. ”

“ If you possess any shred of humor, charm, insight, sympathy, idealism, so-called,—above all, idealism,—and if you are cursed with any sense of form and unity, and feel that a story ought to have a beginning and an end, and be about something in the mean time,—why, trample on all this as you would on so many snakes,' I should say to him. 'Get it fixed firmly in your dull mind that life is dreary and meaningless, or has but a material meaning, if you like, and that sound fiction must behave accordingly. ”

“ How rash and presumptuous is it, besides, to set down any fixed limits to man's knowledge! Is not every age an advance upon its predecessors, and are not the commonest acts of our present civilization perfect miracles as compared with the usages of our ancestors? But why do I linger on this theme, which I only introduced to illustrate the temper of my boyish days? As I grew older, books of chivalry and romance took possession of my mind, and my passion grew for lives of adventure. ”

“ Extricating themselves from the tasks of the world, the world revenges itself by exposing, at every turn, the folly of these incomplete, pedantic, useless, ghostly creatures. The scholar will feel, that the richest romance, — the noblest fiction that was ever woven, — the heart and soul of beauty, — lies enclosed in human life. ”

“ How different the path I travelled from that in which ambition hurries forward—too narrow for friendship, too crooked for love, too rugged for honesty, and too dark for science! Thus, if we choose, we may sandwich in the poetry with the prose of life. Thus, many a dainty happiness and relishing enjoyment may come between the slices of every-day work, if we only so determine. ”

“ But what, the reader may ask, of the pleasure from novels? naturally, since the giving of pleasure is usually assumed as the main end of fiction. Well, pleasure largely depends on who is to be pleased: there are readers who could demand no greater pleasure than that sense of enlargement of personality, of the scope of experience and sympathy, which has been put down as the chief value of the novel. It may be claimed, also, that in the demand that fiction should impress vividly and hold the interest powerfully we have provided for the seekers after pleasure. ”

“ But time and familiarity gradually wore off all the imagined things, and, as with all heroes when seen within touching distance and without the glass of romance, he was found to be about as full of human nature as the rest of us. ”

“ Some day they are overcome by that all-absorbing, dreamy sensation which forms the contrast to their whole secret and public life: like unto delightful mystery and miracle, full of golden splendour and baffling description and illustration. ”

“ A vivid fancy, too, threw its glittering light over all these faculties, so that even the commonplace incidents of daily life grouped themselves dramatically in her mind, and events the least striking were made the origin of situation and sentiment, brilliant with wit and poetry. ”

“ The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind. ”

“ This means that our literature is almost entirely addressed to the appetite for romance and adventure, probable or improbable, to sentimentalism, to theoretical interest in crime, marital infelicity, and personal misfortune, and to the pleasure of light emotional excitement, while a large part of it turns on ethical emotion and ignorant zeal in social matters. ”

“ But they whom heaven has either cursed or blessed with minds, over which external circumstances exercise a deeper sway, whose fancies are more vivid, and whose impressions are more acute, require the aid of time to clip the wings of imagination,—to cast a soberer shade over the glowing pictures of hope,—and to teach the art of reducing an ideal standard of felicity and virtue, to one less romantic, but more practical. ”

“ From the society of such characters, who seem to consider the noble productions of superior intellect, the fine and vigorous flights of fancy, the brilliant effusions of a sublime imagination, and the refined feelings of the heart, as fancied conceits or wild deliriums, those who examine them by a better standard than that of fashion or common taste, fly with delight. ”

“ Graces free and uncultivated were there likewise, and the honest outpourings of the heart, subjected to no dull sneer from the lips of false refinement, burst forth with the touching force of simplicity and truth. The universal weaknesses of our nature mingled with all the rest, and varied the drama through a thousand parts. ”

“ Like the experience of life itself, some of these tales are very short, some longer, some gentle and wistful, and some intense and arousing. All tear away the veil of hypocrisy and prudishness—and reveal life and love with stark realism. ”

“ But the pleasure he derives from the sense of completeness, the sense that a walk or a story has a beginning and a middle and an end, the real plot pleasure, is negligible compared with the pleasure he gets in the action itself. ”

“ Hence beautiful allusions, surprising metaphors, and admirable sentiments, are always ready at hand; and while the fancy is full of images, collected from innumerable objects, and their different qualities, relations, and habitudes, it can at pleasure dress a common notion in a strange but becoming garb, by which, as before observed, the same thought will appear a new one, to the great delight and wonder of the hearer. ”

“ Fancy, awakened by the view of the former, instantly gives shape and features to men we have never seen.—We hear them speak, and see them act; the passions are excited, the mind amused; the houses, the rivers, the fields around supplying the absence of the poet and historian, and restoring with new energy the whole scene to the mind. ”

“ For all these fine airy Sentiments, these generous Passions, these strange Adventures, which the Author of the Romance, or Play, hath invented merely for Pleasure, bear no sort of proportion, either to the True Motives, which are generally the Springs of our Actions in the World, and upon which all our Affairs do turn ”

“ That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. The life of man is the true romance, which, when it is valiantly conducted, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. ”

“ She had brought a glimpse of the unexpected, the delightful irrelevance of pleasant trivial things, into the prosaic setting of everyday life which had caught him away insensibly from the dulness and the worries of his stupendous business undertakings, and brightened his home, very much, he often thought, as the swift appearance of the sun would brighten the prospect on a grey day. ”

“ Fiction—if it at all aspires to be art—appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. ”

“ Any charm of the story-tellers of the ages has entered into the body of the tale, which has become an objective presentment of a reality that concentrates on itself and keeps personality out of sight. ”

“ So strange a story could hardly be paralelled from the wildest pages of romance. Through an infinite variety of endeavours, success never once shone upon her path, and old age found her in a state of the most abject penury. ”

“ This charm is it which gives the whole vitality to home,—this mingling of the temperaments of youth and manhood and deep age, blending hopes of the future with memories of the past, and making of every heart a portion of one human biography, in which many are sharers. ”

“ They will find pleasures in books—boundless, unimagined, inexhaustible, inexpressible pleasures;—pleasures in their wives and children, pleasures in their firesides, and in the glorious face of nature, which have hitherto been unknown to their eyes and hearts, sealed up in the frost of ignorance and the contempt of the proud. ”