SOME MODERN NOVELISTS

Timaru Herald, Volume CVI, Issue 16227, 24 March 1917, Page 3

SOME MODERN NOVELISTS

The long novel and the discursive novel is very much with us to-day eays an American critic. The old three-decker dwindles to modest proportions boside Idle huge bulk of "Jean Christophe," of "Pelle the Oonquror," of the Olayhanger trilogy, or the sequels and trilogies which tne younger men in England nowadays require to trace the career of a sipgle hero from the cradle to the last passionate experience. The point can no doubt be made that whereas the MidVictorian novel was garrulous, the modern novel owes its length to fulness of and a rich detail of treatment. Jfc takes chapters to analyse adequately the subtle modern soul. But this will not altogther explain away "Jean Christophe," into which the author has frankly poured his personal views and dogmas on a world of modern problems. Remain Rolland editorialises on music, on politics, on international relations,, and on sex. Of Wells there is no need to speak. Ho has been called the most sensitive barometer of the age. But he is also very much the barometer of Mr Wells's own psychic fluctuations He is more garrulous than any of the Mid-Victorians. The difference is in -the theme of the monologue. And all monologues are rather hard to follow. It is the fashion to jay that Thackeray and Dickens make hard reading to-day. It would be Interesting to have a frank statement of how easy it is to get through a'' Wells novel with all Us diviations, or for that matter a Bennett novel with all its minute realism.

But the most important thing is not that these men, Rolland, and Bennett, and to a lesser extent Wells,«'have revived the leisurely method of the midVictorians. It is rather the fact that in order to carry the reader over the long stretch between oojer and cover they must, resort to the impetus of emotion or sentimentality, call it what you will, upon which the early novelists relied. That is all very 'fine inlay work, no. doubt, by which Bennett depicts the moods of the schoolboy Clayhanger, as he hangs over the parapet of the bridge pitching stones into the water; or young Olayhanger's emotions on coming into possession of a bedroom of his own; or that extraordinary Sunday school celebration in the public square which runs through several chapters. But let tho honest reader compare his own leisurely reactions to Mich examples of mosaic artistry with tho sudden emotional rush which clutches him when Mr _ Bennett drops his stitch work and begins to tell the story of Clayhanger's father as a factory boy in the unhappy days of unmitigated Manchestrianism. Those chapters sweep the reader forward on a tide of pity and indignaltion that is straight out of Dickens. It is Mid-Victorianism breaking loose from the confines of scientific restraint. Let the reader recall the tscene in the death chamber of Clayhanger's father, or that extraordinary scene of youth and romance and sentiment when Olayhanger meets Hilda in the garden at night. Mr Saintsbury insists that the prime mission of the novelist is to "enfist" you. Mr Bennett enlists you when he eschews filagree work and lets himself go on elemontals pity, young love, death. It is the same with "Jean Christophe in Paris." After chapters of very fine, very subtle analysis of French character and French music, we turn the page and come on the episode entitled "Antoinette," and once more we are carried away on a living current of suffering, pity, selfsacrifice, which is nothing but plain, blubbering Mid-Victorianism. And the onlv two living characters which Mr V.'ells has created are the Diekensian hero of "Tono-Bungay" and his wife.