II

I realised a little while ago that I was getting sadly belated in the matter of novel-reading.  I had come to decline on a few old favourites and was breaking no new ground.  That is a provincial frame of mind, just as when a man begins to discard dressing for dinner, and can endure nothing but an old coat and slippers.  It is easy to think of it as unworldly, peaceable, philosophical; but it is mere laziness.  The really unworldly philosopher is the man who is at ease in all costumes and at home in all companies.

I did not take up my novel-reading in a light spirit or for mere diversion.  To begin a new novel is for me like staying at a strange house; I am bewildered and discomposed by the new faces, by the hard necessity of making the acquaintance of all the new people, and in determining their merits and their demerits.  But I was bent on more serious things still.  I knew that it is the writers of romances, and not the historians or the moralists, who are the real critics and the earnest investigators of life and living.  There may be at the present day few subtle psychologists or surpassing idealists at work writing novels, and still fewer great artists; but for a man to get out of the way of reading contemporary fiction is not only a disease, it is almost a piece of moral turpitude—­or at best a sign of lassitude, stupidity, and Toryism; because it means that one’s mind is made up and that one has some dull theory which life and the thoughts of others may confirm if they will, but must not modify:  from which deadly kind of incrustation may common-sense and human interest deliver us.

It is a matter of endless debate whether a novel should have an ethical purpose, or whether it should merely be an attempt to present beautifully any portion of truth clearly perceived, faithfully observed, delicately grouped, and artistically isolated.  In the latter case, say the realists, whatever the subject, the incident, the details may be, the novel will possess exactly the same purpose that underlies things, no more and no less; and the purpose may be trusted to look after itself.

The other theory is that the novelist should have a definite motive; that he should have a case which he is trying to prove, a warning he wishes to enforce, an end which he desires to realise.  The fact that Dickens and Charles Reade had philanthropic motives of social reform, and wished to improve the condition of schools, workhouses, lunatic asylums, and gaols, is held to justify from the moral point of view such novels as Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Hard Cash, and It is Never too Late to Mend.  And from the moral point of view these books are entirely justified, because they did undoubtedly interest a large number of people in such subjects who would not have been interested by sermons or blue-books.  These books quickened the emotions of ordinary people on the subject; and public sentiment is of course the pulse of legislation.