Page:The House of Souls.djvu/12

 ''; it has tacitly, if not openly, ordered that the English Novel is only great when it is a sermon, a tract, or a pamphlet in disguise. The hard-headed men of business, whose judgment is, very properly, supreme in all questions of art and letters, have never disguised their intolerance of imagination qua imagination, since they have rightly felt that in the imaginative world, pure and simple, they have no part. He whose mind is occupied throughout the hours of business with, say, the complicated and scientific operation of brewing, who knows the strange rich alchemy by which a beverage still called (out of respect for antiquity) by the name of beer is extracted from glucose, sulphuric acid, arsenic, and many other chemicals, such a man will be little inclined to waste his leisure in perusing idle fantasies. Rather he will desire to keep abreast with serious contemporary thought, with the movements of the day, with the trend of politics; or at all events, if he desire fiction pure and simple, he will be more pleased with a plain unvarnished transcript of plain English Life as he knows it than with matter that is dream and fantasy. In a word, English fiction must justify itself either as containing useful doctrine and information, or as a manifest transcript of life as it is known to the average reader; due regard being had,''