Much of the charm of the old furniture and needle-work again, upon which the present time sets so much store, lies in acquired and unpremeditated qualities. And no doubt the novel grew up out of simple story-telling, and the universal desire of children, old and young alike, for a story.
It is only slowly that we have developed the distinction of the novel from the romance, as being a story of human beings, absolutely credible and conceivable, as distinguished from human beings frankly endowed with the glamour, the wonder, the brightness, of a less exacting and more vividly eventful world. The novel is a story that demands, or professes to demand, no make-believe. The novelist undertakes to present you people and things as real as any that you can meet in an omnibus. And I suppose it is conceivable that a novel might exist which was just purely a story of that kind, and nothing more. It might amuse you as one is amused by looking out of a window into a street, or listening to a piece of agreeable music; and that might be the limit of its effect.
But almost always the novel is something more than that, and produces more effect than that. The novel has almost inseparable moral consequences. It leaves impressions, not simply of things seen, but of acts judged and made attractive or unattractive. They may prove very slight moral consequences, and very shallow moral impressions, in the long run; but there they are, none the less, its almost inevitable accompaniments. It is almost unavoidable that this should be so. Even if the novelist attempts or affects to be impartial, he still cannot prevent his characters setting examples, he still cannot avoid, as people say, putting ideas into his readers’ heads. The greater his skill, the more convincing his treatment, the more vivid his power of suggestion. And it is almost equally impossible for him not to betray his sense that the proceedings of this person are rather jolly and admirable, and of that, rather ugly and detestable. I suppose Mr. Bennett, for example, would say that he should not do so; but it is as manifest to any disinterested observer that he greatly loves and admires his Card, as that Richardson admired his Sir Charles Grandison, or that Mrs. Humphry Ward considers her Marcella a very fine and estimable young woman. And I think it is just in this, that the novel is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a study and judgment of conduct, and through that of the ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and increasing value or, perhaps, to avoid controversy, I had better say the real and increasing importance of the novel and of the novelist in modern life, comes in.
It is no new discovery that the novel, like the drama, is a powerful instrument of moral suggestion. This has been understood in England ever since there has been such a thing as a novel in England. This has been recognized equally by novelists, novel-readers, and the people who would n’t read novels under any conditions whatever. Richardson wrote deliberately for edification, and Tom Jones is a powerful and effective appeal for a charitable and even indulgent attitude toward loose-living men. But, excepting Fielding and one or two others of those partial exceptions that always occur in the case of critical generalizations, there is a definable difference between the novel of the past and what I may call the modern novel. It is a difference that is reflected upon the novel from a difference in the general way of thinking. It lies in the fact that formerly there was a feeling of certitude about moral values and standards of conduct that is