young men become boring and pompous state councillors, the distinguished ladies become talkative old crones. With the figures in the novel she really cares for, however, she is more merciful, killing them off before they reach an unattractive state. In contrast to Proust, who turns the glorious world he at first pictures into a miserable company of parvenus and hideously aged aristocrats, Murasaki gradually dissolves her society into the empty spaces of her painting, leaving only a reduced figure here and there to show how great a falling-off there has been.
Murasaki gave her views on the art of the novel in a famous passage in The Tale of Genji. Genji, discovering one of the court-ladies deeply engrossed in reading a romance, at first teases her, then continues:
“ A‘s a matter of fact I think far better of this art than I have led you to suppose. Even its practical value is immense. Without it what should we know of how people lived in the past, from the Age of the Gods down to the present day? For history-books, such as the Chronicles of Japan, show us only one small corner of life; whereas these diaries and romances which I see piled around you contain, I am sure, the most minute information about all sorts of people’s private affairs. …’ He smiled, and went on: ‘But I have a theory of my own about what this art of the novel is, and how it came into being. To begin with, it does not simply consist in the author’s telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate
