What the Novelists Have Done.

Evening Star, Issue 6819, 5 February 1886, Page 4

What the Novelists Have Done.

In real life there would be mere dumb, inarticulate, unconscious feeling —at least, for the immense majority of humanity—if certain specially-gifted individuals did not pick out, isolate, those feelings of real life, show them to us in an ideal condition where they have a merely intellectual value, where w r e could assimilate them into our conscious ideas. This is done by the moralist, by the preacher, by the poet, by the dramatist—people who have taught mankind to see the broad channels along which its feelings move, who have dug those channels. But in all those things, those finer details of feeling which separate us from the people of the time of Elizabeth—nay, from the people of the time of Fielding—who have been those that have discovered, made familiar, placed within the reach of the immense majority, subtleties of feeling barely known to the minority some hundred years before 1 The novelists, I think. They have, by playing upon our emotions, immensely increased the sensitiveness, the richness of this living key-board; even as a singing-master, by playing on his pupil’s throat, increases the number of the musical intervals which he can intone.—Vernon Lee, in the ‘ Contemporary Review.’