THE DECAY OF THE NOVEL
Sitt,—The modern novel may be ill; it may be suffering from an overdose of Freud and the last week's diagnosis by Frank Swinnerton may be correct. But there is more to it than that.
Admittedly the primary object of a novelist is to tell a story; that is the rub. The Victorians did and they did it supremely well—yet there is another quality to be consideled : it is that greatly misused quality of sensibility (in the philosophical sense). A novel should be more than an outward display: it is more interesting to watch Hugo at work on his characters in his prose epic Les Miserables than to rattle through Paris with Balzac in a taxi-cab; it is more interesting to observe mediaeval England with Chaucerian eyes than to walk in the smock of Langland; it is more interesting to feel as Robert Jordan felt in Spain before the bridge was dynamited than to listen to the intellectual Ambrose Silk dis- cussing Parsnip and Pimpernel. In each of these cases the stories told are good and in this sense they have those primary qualities which enable them to be labelled as novels. But even before Freud—and that is why I have quoted Chaucer and Langland—men read not only to enjoy themselves, but to feel and experience that sensation of Kartharsis that only comes from a great work of art.
Finally, it may be said that the world is divided between those who read Dickens and Scott, but those who have read neither Lawrence nor Virginia Woolf have missed something that solely comes from a "contemplative study of the whole of life." Sons and Lovers is not the masterpiece that David Copperfield is, and Between the Acts is not the masterpiece that Ivanhoe may be; yet whereas Dickens ana Scott represent the culmination of the story-told novel, we have yet to await the culmination of the psychological novel. Mr. Frank Swinnerton no doubt thinks we are still waiting—probably we are—but the plunge has been made and that is something; it is too early to condemn it as degenerate, for it is still in swaddling clothes.—Your obedient servant,
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