These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent, and yet
have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better
depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. In this
age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract,
the great books of the past, the brave men that lived before
Shakespeare and before Balzac. And as the root of the whole
matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of
life, to be judged by its exactitude; but a simplification of some
side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant
simplicity. For although, in great men, working upon great
motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet
underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that
simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their
excellence.
II
Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly
the lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells;
and none ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. His own
work and those of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he
is the bondslave, the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance
in art like what there is in science; he thinks of past things as
radically dead; he thinks a form can be outlived: a strange
immersion in his own history; a strange forgetfulness of the
history of the race! Meanwhile, by a glance at his own works
(could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of this
illusion would be dispelled.
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