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And it is quite obvious that they have very few of the qualities that make good fiction in the eyes of the ordinary novel-reader. There are marked inequalities of talent between them, as well as considerable differences of style. Pilniak is the most ambitious, he aims highest and at his worst falls lowest.
"Well, little maid, I can read, and I would be thy true friend. What is it thou wouldst fain know?" "Why," said Maude, in an interested tone, "whether the great knight, of whose mighty deeds this book doth tell, should win his 'trothed love at the last, or no." For the novel-reader of the fourteenth century was not very different from the novel-reader of the nineteenth.
Trust me, there is better praise in this, than in dazzling the distracted glance with a perpetual succession of luminous fire-flies, and dragging your fair novel-reader, harried and excited, through the mazes of a thousand incidents. Thirdly, and lastly, in this prefatorial say, there is to be considered that inevitable defeator of all printed secrets impatience.
My dear Father, Nothing that gives you disquietude can give me amusement. Otherwise I should have been excessively diverted by the dialogue which you have reported with so much vivacity; the accusation; the predictions; and the elegant agnomen of "the novel-reader" for which I am indebted to this incognito. I went in some amazement to Malden, Romilly, and Barlow.
The novel-reader who becomes furious with someone for letting him into the secret of the end of the story is of the same mind as Democritus. "Go thy way," he says in effect, "thou hast done me wrong." The child protests in the same way to a too-informative elder: "You weren't to tell me!" He would like to wander in the garden paths of curiosity.
By one of those singular coincidences which, if this work be judged by the ordinary rules presented to the ordinary novel-reader, a critic would not unjustly impute to defective invention in the author, the provision for this child, deprived of its natural parents during their lives, is left to the discretion and honour of trustees, accompanied on the part of the consecrated Louise and "the blameless King," with the injunction of respect to their worldly reputations two parents so opposite in condition, in creed, in disposition, yet assimilating in that point of individual character in which it touches the wide vague circle of human opinion.
She was a great novel-reader, and I think a good many of the things she told us of, as having happened to herself, had their real origin in the Riflebury circulating library. For she was one of those strange characters who indulge in egotism and exaggeration, till they seem positively to lose the sense of what is fact and what is fiction.
It may be confidently said that three- quarters of what the ordinary Russian novel-reader read in the years preceding the Revolution were translated novels. The book-market was swamped with translations, Polish, German, Scandinavian, English, French and Spanish.
"Thou art the cause of my downfall from Heaven!" I muttered, when I looked upon Isora's calm face: "thou feelest it not, and I could destroy thee and myself, myself the criminal, thee the cause of the crime!" * I need not point out to the novel-reader how completely the character of Aubrey has been stolen in a certain celebrated French romance.
Trust me, there is better praise in this, than in dazzling the distracted glance with a perpetual succession of luminous fire-flies, and dragging your fair novel-reader, harried and excited, through the mazes of a thousand incidents. Thirdly, and lastly, in this prefatorial say, there is to be considered that inevitable defeator of all printed secrets impatience.