THE MASTER NOVEL.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 598, 28 August 1909, Page 9

THE MASTER NOVEL.

P Willoocks writes upon ..- The Novel-of the Futiire"-'-with a raith and indiscriminate eloquence that ought to Manure, those who believe that the cheap novelist and the cheap publisher; between them are spoiling: their chances.' -In an she, says, "when-literature has left the studj> for, the street, it can no longer move in-the strict -bonds of academic rule, , but will adopt as its mode of .expression the widest form: of art that is cofisonarit wjth definite expression at all. This-form of art is the story. ■ - 1 - . -■ There have been, she goes on-to say, four great cycles of story m • history, ■ and each incarnated ill a single typical ;figure the ideals of its ago or ages. But where is tho central- figure ; who' emerges.'from tho fourth cycle, which is only moving on now ■ to its lulhlmcnti'. . tlo is tho complex modern man who . tgsuibcs all t-h© old typ©s and begins' a new one; and liis history is to be written by: the - master-novelist,; who, to realise' him, 1 ' must dive into "the most secret-.places of tho hoart of man. • In that lies the key to tho whole future of .the novel,as a work of art./ The school that - began with 'a 'life-like-ohr.oniole of the most commonplace happenmgs, that was . a> matter, of tool-boxes, um--brellas,..;and wheat-grains in- Defoe, that became with Richardson an analysis of sentiment and a bluff picture of lusty happenings in Fielding,/is destined''to follow in the paths of science and deal with the very atom of . the soul< of, man. But in saying that what'may be called; 'the master, noverwill become moro.-and more psychological : we by no means exclude the . social novels of manners; these abstract and brief ohronicles :will'.still, continue' to perform the. servico they have always performed—the widening of the bonds of sympathy and comprehension between' class and . class, between type and type—but. they will take the psychological conclusions, the' laws of charhcter, given them bv the deeper novels, much as the compiler , of a text-book uses tho conclusions of a great, scientist; The: social and political novels will be the manuals of human biology, but the masters will devote theirenergies, to other work —to the great spiritual -pictures that stand out in the sphere of human ■ investigation, . like 'The Origin of Species' or -The Data of Ethics' in other fields." -This vision of tho "ma-ster novel"'-as the instrument of psychology and the new philosophy',- although it is presented in colours that are a trifle high, is not altogether impossible (comments, an English critic). But how are we to arrange for , tie' master-novelist to live while those who

triturate his ideas or servo them up in patent tabloids and chocolato-iovered alkaloids are supplying, tho market? The Jato George Meredith was a master-novelist, but he was an exception; ho was-blessed with a rarely resistant, constitution! Ho lived on loss than a groat a day at liis time of greatest need. Others might,not have his physical endurance,, and might go under just as they were about intellectually to find themselves. Wo see no way of protecting the master-novelist while liis prrasites and the other eph'emerides distil liis ideas on overy twig. For tho' flagrantly popular novelist is all Tight. But how would it .have been, to take Mis 3 Willcocks's parellel, if tho Darwins and Herbert Spencers of fiction had had to retail their philohophy at such a rato? How, if Meredith, while he was before his time and twenty years away from his popular interpreters' anil up-criers, had had to depend on. one-and-sixpenny editions? The debate, to leave it there, stands adjourned at a decidedly ticklish point in its history. ' -