THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
JANUARY, 1912
The Contemporary Novel
By H. G. Wells
Circumstances have made me think a good deal at different times about the business of writing novels, and what it means and is and may be. And I was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them. One of my chief claims to distinction in the world is that I wrote the first long appreciative review of Joseph Conrad’s work in the Saturday Review. That was sixteen years ago. When a man has focused so much of his life upon the novel, it is not reasonable to expect him to take a too modest or apologetic view of it. I consider the novel a very important and necessary thing indeed in that complicated system of uneasy adjustments and readjustments which is modern civilization. I make very high and very wide claims for it. In many directions I think that we cannot get along without it.
Now this, I know, is not the usually received opinion. 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, and 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 ten to four, 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 been fishing; or he has been disputing a point of law, or 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. 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 favorite investment may have slumped, or the judge may 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 does n’t want ideas, he does n’t want facts, above all he does n’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 laces worn and princesses rescued and won. He wants pictures of funny slums and entertaining paupers and laughable longshoremen and kindlyVOL. 100 - NO. 1
