aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at
all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did
these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which
determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power
should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less
heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and
womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and
talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly
conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the
novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for
something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or
flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else.
The very central cause and essence of it--most definitely and most
keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also
dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people--is the human
delight in humanity--the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long
past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of
the present living, acting, speaking as they do--but in each case with
the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced with
that spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art.
It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided this
pleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except the
productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher position
which has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, before
or since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lower
place--it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positive
neglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy
to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as with
other kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powers
of working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existing
examples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that
great secondary (if secondary) office of all Art--to redress the
apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, of
Nature--to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of life
which, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal
among all the kinds of Art itself.