THE NOVEL OF THE FUTURE.?

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 15175, 14 December 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE NOVEL OF THE FUTURE.?

BY W.O.A. '

Nono could read the comment but himself, And none could read the bpok; not even he

Is, to say the least of it, a daring close for an article which, among other things, suggests a formula for the novel, of tho future. But Mr. A. C. Benson is not a man to be deterred from the use of an effective quotation by any such frivolous consideration, and gallantly uses the lines in a recently published essay to round off a singularly able" and penetrating analysis of. realism

in fiction. Mr. Benson, who is nothing if not positive in his convictions, holds that the day of the writer of romance is gone as irrevocably as the snows of Villon's yester-year, and that the future is with the uncompromising realist. : But the realist of his conception is not tho haunter of slums and purlieus, and the purveyor of literary garbage, but the man of vision and insight, " who sees life steadily and sees

it whole," and sets steadily before him the difficult aim of communicating what he

sees, without excess and without defect, to his readers. Romance will find a place in his writings because there always have been, and there always will be. elements of romance in life —the inspired heroism of critical moments, the "lofty equanimity, the high and silent patience" which enables men and women to face monotony and endure obloquy. Only, the realist will observe proportion, and present his characters .in their moments of weakness no less than in their moments of strength. He will abstain from bias and take no sides. His business is with life, as a whole, and lie must school himself to view it with the godlike impartiality common; alike to the Lucretian divinity and the sublimated prig. Sentiment he will use with careful economy. " Work, health, social intercourse, religion, politics, education, and many other things" bulk far moro largely in many normal lives than love-making or combat. And he is faced with . the wellnigh insuperable difficulty that life is lived in moments, and a situation has often faded or lost poignancy before the swiftest imagination can clothe it in words. For emotion is a larger thing than words, a thing of glances, gestures, intuitions, interchanged perceptions. And there are also the wearisome iterations. the drab and dreary longueurs, of life, which have somehow or other to be expressed. All this and much more forms the matevial 'a'om which Mr. Benson's ideal writer will produce the novel of the future.

It sounds portentous enough, especially when stripped of tho happy phrase and illuminative comment of which Mr. Benson is so skilled a master. Yet, when we come to think it quietly over, is it so very new, after all? For what have the great writers of the past dealt with except the stuff that goes to make up life? The great essential facts of life, love, death, time, success, failure, remain unaffected by the changes which ruffle its surface, and are of the same supreme importance to the man of to-day as they were to the forgotten worthies who lived before Agamemnon. From time to time literature will shift its emphasis and vary its point of view, will try fresh combinations and evolve new formulas, but at long last, if it is to .be in any sense vital, its main interest will lie in the treatment of the essential and permanent, rather than in that of the transient and accidental. For

life is a greater thing than art, and in the very greatest creative work there is an element of freshness and spontaneity, a certain glad incvitableness, which comes from direct contact with life rather than from the rules of the literary craftsman. " To miss the joy," as Stevenson tells us, "is to miss all." >We are sometimes tempted to think that the professor is too much with us, and men under the bitter bondage of an obligation to seem original are a poor substitute for those happier souls "contented, if they may enjoy the things that others understand." The best interpreter of life is often the man who is least concerned with its interpretation. In these modern days we fall easy victims to the vice of style, of that feeling for phrase, and striving- after form, which too often but imperfectly disguises poverty of thought. The modern writer is apt to apply business methods to his work. ' Ho reads up his authorities, visits his neighbourhoods, conscientiously combines his materials under the influence of a definite art theory, and produces work excellent rather than great. More concerned with the, criticism and interpretation of life than with life itself, his very realism is inevitably selective and partial. The men of the earlier world, the Defoes, the Fieldings, the Gaits, the Scotts, the Thackerays, the lopes, had in tho larger leisure of their more limited lives a, greater chance of absorbing their environment unconsciously, and their material did not precipitate itself in" literary form, till their minds had reached saturation point. And that, perhaps, is possibly why some of us feel such a s.ense of freedom and relief when we turn from the admirable craftsmanship and scientific psychology of the hour to the books of those psychologists of the school of M. .Jourdaiu — great writers we have lived with all our lives.