ALL LIFE TO BE PUT IN A NOVEL.

Otago Witness, Issue 3014, 20 December 1911, Page 85

ALL LIFE TO BE PUT IN A NOVEL.

“THE WEARY GIANT” THEORY. Mr H. G. Wells the novelist, has a very attractive and arresting article on the future of the novel in the November ■Fortnightly Review. The gist of it is that the novel, like-John Wesley, has got to take the whole world for its parish, and that in so doing it is doing a public service of the first order. “Before we have done,” says Mr Wells, “we will have all life within the scope of the novel.” Mr Wells’s aim is high. He is not out to meet the wants of what he describes as “that tired giant the prosperous Englishman,” and he makes a vivacious attack on the weary giant who wants the novel “to be long enough to take up after dinner and finish before his whisky at 11.” —The Weary Giant Theory.— “I consider the novel a very important and necessary thing indeed in that complicated system of uneasy adjustments and re-adjustments which is modern civilisation,” writes Mr Wells. “I make very high and wide claims for it. In many directions I do not think we can get along without it _ “There is, I am aware, the theory that the novel -is wholly and solely a means of relaxation. In spite of manifest facts, that was the dominant view of the .great period that we now in our retrospective way speak of as the Victorian, arid it still survives to this day. It is the man’s theory of the novel rather than the woman’s. One may call it the Weary Giant Theory. “The reader is represented as a man, burthened, toiling, worn.' He has been in his office from 10 to 4, with perhaps only two hours’ interval at his club for lunch; or he has been playing golf; or he has been waiting about and voting in the House; or he has -een fishing; cr he has been disputing a point of law; cr writing a sermon; or doing one of a thousand other of the grave important things which constitute the' substance of a prosperous man’s life. —No Problems Wanted. — “Now at last comes the little precious interval of leisure, and the Weary Giant takes up a book. Perhaps he is vexed, he may have been bunkered, his line may have been entangled in the trees, his favourite investment may have slumped, or the judge have had indigestion and been extremely rude to him. He wants to forget the troublesome realities of life. He wants to be taken out of himself, to be cheered, consoled, amused —above all, amused. He doesn’t want ideas, he doesn’t want facts; above all, he doesn’t want—■ Problems. He wants to dream of the bright, thin, gay excitements of a phantom world —in which he can be hero —of horses ridden and lace worn and princesses rescued and won. ‘•‘That is the weary giant theory of the novel. It ruled British criticism up to the period of the Boer war—and then something happened to quite a lot of us, and it has 'never completely recovered its old predominance. Perhaps it will; perhaps something else may happen to prevent its ever doing so. —Fiction in Revolt. — “Both fiction and criticism to-day are in revolt against that tired giant, the prosperous Englishman. I cannot think of a single writer of any distinction today, unless it is Mr W. W. Jacobs, who is content merely to serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far from the weary reader being a decently tired giant, we realise that he is only an inexpressibly lax, slovenly, and undertrained giant, and we are all out with one accord resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in every possible way. And so I will say no more of the idea that the novel is merely a harmless opiate for the vacant hours of prosperous men. As' a matter of fact, it never has been, and by its nature I doubt if it ever can be. —Cold Biography.— “Think what an abounding, astonishing perplexing person Gladstone must hav£ been in life, and consider Lord Morley’.s ‘Life of Gladstone,’ cold, dignified—not a life at all, indeed so much as embalmed remains; the fire gone, the passions gone, the bowels carefully removed. All bioigraphy has something of that post-mortem coldness and respect, and as for autobiography —a man may show his soul in a thousand half-unconscious ways—but to turn upon oneself and explain oneself is given to no one. ‘ ‘ Every novel carries its own justification and its own condemnation in its success or failure to convince you that the thing was so. Now history, biography, blue-book, and so forth, cart hardly ever get beyond the statement that the sunerficial fact was so. “ You see now the scope of the claim

I am making for the novel j it is to be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the imstru;hent of self-examination, the parade of irtorals and the exchange of manners, the f actorv of customs, the criticisms o fk»frs and institutions and of 6ocial dogmas and ideas. It is to be the home confessional, the initiator of knowledge, the seed of fruitful self-questioning. "Let me be very clear here. I do not mean for a moment that the novelist is going to set up as a teacher, as a sort of priest with a pen, who will make men and women believe and do this and that. The novel is not a new sort of pulpit; humanity is passing out of the phase when men sit under preachers and dogmatic influences. But the novelist is going to be the most potent of artists, because he is going to present conduct, devise beautiful conduct, discuss conduct, analyse conduct, suggest conduct, illuminate it through and through. He will not teach, but discuss, point out, plead, and display. And this being my view you will be prepared for the demand I am now about to make for an absolutely free hand for the novelist in his choice of topic and incident and in his method of treatment; or rather, if I may presume to speak for other novelists, I would say it is not so much a demand Ave make as an intention we proclaim. —The Novel aafyl 1 man Life.— " We are going to write, subject only to our own limitations, about the whole of human life. We are going to deal with political questions and religious questions and social, questions. We cannot present people unless we have this free'hand, this unrestricted field. What is the good of telling stories about people's lives if one may not deal freely with the religious beliefs and organisations that have controlled or failed to control them ? What is the good of pretending to write about love, and the loyalties and treacheries and quarrels of men and women, if one -must not glance at those varieties of physical terperarnent and organic quality, those deeply passionate needs' and distresses from which half the storms of human life are brewed ? " We mean to deal with all these things, and it will need very much more than the disapproval of provincial librarians, the hostility of a few influential people in London, the scurrility of the Spectator, and the deep and obstinate silences of the Westminster Gazette, to stop the incoming tide of agtgressive novel-writing. We are going to write about it all. We are going to write about business and finance and politics and precedence and pretentiousness and decorum and indecorum, until a thousand pretences and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold, clear air of our elucidations " We are going to write of wasted opportunities and latent beauties until a thousand new ways of living open to men and women. We are going to appeal to the young and the hopeful and the curious, against the "established, the dignified, and defensive. Before we have done, we will have all life within the scope of the novel-''