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The PRIME MINISTER, it may not be generally known, recruits his energies by frequent perusal of the plays of SHAKSPEARE. At present he is conducting a correspondence with Sir SIDNEY LEE and Professor GOLLANCZ on the esoteric significance of Labour's Love's Lost. Mr. WINSTON CHURCHILL is a voracious novel-reader of catholic tastes.
He knew his mother would say it was only half-done. To be sure, Delia's mother was a great novel-reader and had neglected her household many a time for an interesting book. But she wrote neither stories nor verses. "Of course, you will do as you like. And you think you are the only one that will suffer. But a mother has many sorrowful hours over a son's unhappiness and discomfort."
But I am fully convinced that had the charge prevailed to any extent it must have reached the ears of one of those whom I interrogated. At all events I have the consolation of not being thought a novel-reader by three or four who are entitled to judge upon the subject, and whether their opinion be of equal value with that of this John-a-Nokes against whom I have to plead I leave you to decide.
But no connected argument, no definition of terms, no formulation of claims, not so much as any ground really cleared and prepared for discussion what is a novel-reader to make of such a condition and how is he to keep his critical interest alive and alert? The business of criticism in the matter of fiction seems clear, at any rate.
Was it possible that he had allowed himself to think less well of "Abundance" because it was not to the taste of the average novel-reader? Such false humility was less excusable than the crudest appetite for praise: it was ridiculous to try to do conscientious work if one's self-esteem were at the mercy of popular judgments.
The end indeed took me wholly unawares, since as a hardened novel-reader I had naturally been expecting but read it, and see if you also are not startled by a refreshing departure from the conventional.
Had I, for example, announced in my frontispiece, 'Waverley, a Tale of other Days, must not every novel-reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited, and the keys either lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts?
Life is not dull; life is full of the unforeseen, full of suspense. A novelist, however natural and logical, must contrive to have it in his novels if he is not to sacrifice the soul of art for the merest show of fidelity. The plot of Dmitri Rudin is so exceedingly simple that an English novel-reader would say that there is hardly any plot at all.
But ever since Byron's time, the author is always hearing the public say, "Don't be poetical," etc., etc.; and in these days both writer and reader seem to have discovered that life is too short for long descriptions, so that, when the pen of a G. P. R. James, waiting for the inspirations of its master, has amused itself with sketching a greater or less extent of natural scenery, the rule of the novel-reader is invariably, "Skip landscape, etc., to event on thirty-second page."
The object of the novelist, generally, is to produce the highest possible degree of excitement, both of the mind and the passions. The object is very similar to that of intoxicating liquors on the body: hence, the confirmed novel-reader becomes a kind of literary inebriate, to whom the things of entity have no attractions, and whose thirst cannot be slaked, even with the water of life.
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