The movement is partly of English origin, a revolt against those more exacting and cramping conceptions of artistic perfection to which I will recur in a moment, and a return to the lax freedom of form, the rambling discursiveness, the right to roam, of the earlier English novel, of Tristram Shandy and of Tom Jones; and partly it comes from abroad, and derives a stimulus from such bold and original enterprises as that of Monsieur Rolland in his Jean Christophe.
Its double origin involves a double nature for while the English spirit is toward discursiveness and variety, the new French movement is rather toward exhaustiveness. One who is, I think, quite the greatest of our contemporary English novelists, Mr. Bennett, has experimented in both forms of amplitude. His superb Old Wives’ Tale, wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the finest ‘long novel’ that has been written in English in the English fashion, in this generation; and now in Clayhanger and its promised collaterals he undertakes that complete, minute, abundant presentation of the growth and modification of one or two individual minds, which is the essential characteristic of the continental movement toward the novel of amplitude. While the Old Wives’ Tale is discursive, Clayhanger is exhaustive; he gives us both types of the new movement in perfection.
I name Jean Christophe as a sort of archetype in this connection, because it is just at present very much in our thoughts by reason of the admirable translation Mr. Cannan is giving us; but there is a greater predecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular treatment of a single mind and its impressions and ideas, or of one or two associated minds. The great original of all this work is that colossal last unfinished book of Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet. Flaubert, the bulk of whose life was spent upon the most austere and restrained fiction, Turgenev was not more austere and restrained, broke out at last into this gay, sad miracle of intellectual abundance. It is not extensively read in this country; it is not yet, I believe, translated into English; but there it is and if it is new to the reader I make him this present of the secret of a book that is a precious wilderness of wonderful reading. But if Flaubert is really the continental emancipator of the novel from the restrictions of form, the master to whom we of the English persuasion, we of the discursive school, must forever recur is he whom I will maintain against all comers to be the subtlest and greatest artist—I lay stress upon that word artist—that Great Britain has ever produced in all that is essentially the novel—Laurence Sterne.
The confusion between the standard of a short story and the standards of the novel, which leads at last to these what shall I call them? ‘Westminster Gazetteisms’ about the correct length to which the novelist should aspire, leads also to all kinds of absurd condemnations and exactions upon matters of method and style. The underlying fallacy is always this: the assumption that the novel, like the story, aims at a single, concentrated impression. From that comes a fertile growth of error.
Constantly one finds in the reviews of works of fiction the complaint that this, that, or the other thing in a novel is irrelevant. Now, it is the easiest thing and the most fatal thing to become irrelevant in a short story. A short story should go to its point as a man flies from a pursuing tiger: he pauses not for the daisies in his path or to note the pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety. But the novel by com-
