Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/228

218 human life supplies an equally endless variety of themes; and the nature of the theme will properly lead to emphasis now on the external, now on the internal, now on the ordinary, now on the extraordinary, with appropriate variation of the technical methods employed. But with all this variation the demand holds for truth to the permanent and essential traits of human nature and human life, and for vitality and interest in the presentation of this truth.

But what, the reader may ask, of the pleasure from novels? naturally, since the giving of pleasure is usually assumed as the main end of fiction. Well, pleasure largely depends on who is to be pleased: there are readers who could demand no greater pleasure than that sense of enlargement of personality, of the scope of experience and sympathy, which has been put down as the chief value of the novel. It may be claimed, also, that in the demand that fiction should impress vividly and hold the interest powerfully we have provided for the seekers after pleasure. The greatest pleasure is to live broadly and intensely, to feel oneself in a world significant at every point and palpitating in response to our activities, and this the greatest fiction surely tends to give. One of the finest of modern masters of the art, Mr. Henry James, has summed up the matter in an epigram as true as it is brilliant, that we are entertained by the novelist because we live at his expense.