ENGLISH FICTION.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 12978, 18 May 1906, Page 3

ENGLISH FICTION.

CHARACTER AND MANNERS.

For a long tinM thfe Fielding tradition wa* the dominant one in the world of English fiction. It gave a cne to Sir Walter Scott, to Sickens, to George Eliot, to Thackeray, to everyone who aimed at writing in the grand style. But when the last of these great writers had passed away, a new spirit seemed to take possession of their successors. Perhaps the most influential of modern writers was George Eliot, each of whc»?e works came to be a kind of treatise on a question of the day. Charles Reado earned the practice a good deal farther and made of each of his novels anavowed sermon. Anthony Trollope, on the other hand, followed much more closely in the footsteps of him who has been rightly called the father of the English novel, but he scarcely had power enough to gain the position in .which he would have wielded a great influence. Just after he had passed his meridan the cloak and rapier school took possession of the field, and for a long time we were deluged with romances, formed more or less on the model of "The Three Musketeers." Attention to character was altogether neglected. It was sufficient to have an amiable Quentin of a hero and a heroine sufficiently attractive to interest the reader. And a duel or two, plenty of desperate adventures and a few! delicate situations, and there was the novel or romance. Many thousands of them were printed between the years 1880 and 1900. Of course, they formed as well as fed the public taste, with the result that scarcely any recent writer has evolved a character that>lives on its own account. We have had, in galore sex problems set before ns, problems of wealth and poverty, problems of town and country, problems of simple and complicated life, and problems of morality. But the intentness of writers on bringing about the crucial situation that is meant to illustrate the doctrine they advance seems to prevent them from giving that tranquil aod urbane presentation of character that the elder novelists delighted in. It seems to me, too, to militate against the quality of their work. It is a commonplace to say that the novel of to-day will not. stand a "second reading. It generally has a fairlv interesting fable, as the critics called the plot, and -one or two telling situations, but at a single glance one gets out of it everything that can be got. Librarians say that even a popular work of fiction has a life that can be measured by months. It is quite otherwise with those novels in which characters and manners «re really studied. One may pant through them hurriedly the first time for the sake of the story them contain (and there -is no reason whatever why the novel of manners 'should not also Job an enthralling narrative), but just as in real life it requires continual contact to become really familiar with anyone and a character seems to disclose itself very gradually so in reading again a novel in which a character is presented with inRight and subtlety we* discover new charms at each perusal One of the most eminent men of mv actenTZ g + w T 6 ever T - vear > **<* he wmfln V 3 ™- *r from nailing grows on lum:_ "p.," in the "Academy."