Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/12

 impulses making life sweet. He wants Romance without its defiance, and humor without its sting; and the business of the novelist, he holds, is to supply this cooling refreshment.

That is the Weary Giant theory of the novel. It ruled British criticism up to the period of the Boer War and then something happened to quite a lot of us, and it has never completely recovered its old predominance. Perhaps it will. Perhaps something else may happen to prevent its ever doing so.

Both fiction and criticism to-day are in revolt against that Weary Giant, the prosperous Englishman. I cannot think of a single writer of any distinction to-day, unless it be Mr. W. W. Jacobs, who is content merely to serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far from the Weary Reader being a decently tired Giant, we realize that he is only an inexpressibly lax, slovenly, and undertrained Giant; and we are all out with one accord resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in every possible way. And so I will say no more of the idea that the novel is merely a harmless opiate for the vacant hours of prosperous men. As a matter of fact it never has been, and by its nature I doubt if it ever can be.

I do not think that women have ever quite succumbed to the Weary Giant attitude in their reading. Women are more serious, not only about life, but about books. No type or kind of woman is capable of that lounging defensive stupidity which is the basis of the Weary Giant attitude; and all through the early nineties, during which the respectable frivolity of Great Britain left its most enduring marks upon our literature, there was a rebel undertow of earnest and aggressive writing and reading, supported chiefly by women, and supplied very largely by women, which gave the lie to the prevailing trivial estimate of fiction. Among readers, women and girls and young men at least will insist upon having their novels significant and real, and it is to these perpetually renewed elements in the public that the novelist must look for his continuing emancipation from the wearier and more massive influences at work in contemporary British life.

And if the novel is to be recognized as something more than a relaxation, it has also, I think, to be kept free from the restrictions imposed upon it by the fierce pedantries of those who would define a general form for it. Every art nowadays must steer its way between the rocks of trivial and degrading standards and the whirlpool of arbitrary and irrational criticism. Whenever criticism of any art becomes specialized and professional, whenever a class of adjudicators is brought into existence, those adjudicators are apt to become, as a class, distrustful of their immediate impressions, and anxious for methods of comparison between work and work; they begin to emulate the classifications and exact measurements of a science, and to set up ideals and rules as data for such classification and measurements. They develop an alleged sense of technique, which is too often no more than the attempt to exact a laboriousness of method or to insist upon peculiarities of method which impress the professional critic, not so much as being merits as being meritorious.

This sort of thing has gone very far with the critical discussion of both the novel and the play. You have all heard that impressive dictum that some particular theatrical display, although moving, interesting, and continually entertaining from start to finish, was for occult technical reasons ’not a play.’ And in the same way you are continually having your appreciation of fiction