ransmit the vision to others, chooses narrative
fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of his feelings. He is
like other artists--he cannot remain silent; he cannot keep himself to
himself, he is bursting with the news; he is bound to tell--the affair
is too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in this--that what
most chiefly strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature,
the large general manner of existing. Of course, he is the result of
evolution from the primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to
this day transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude
visions of life in the cafe or the club, or on the kerbstone. They
belong to the lowest circle of artists; but they are artists; and the
form that they adopt is the very basis of the novel. By innumerable
entertaining steps from them you may ascend to the major artist whose
vision of life, inclusive, intricate and intense, requires for its due
transmission the great traditional form of the novel as perfected by the
masters of a long age which has temporarily set the novel higher than
any other art-form.

I would not argue that the novel should be counted supreme among the
great traditional forms of art. Even if there is a greatest form, I do
not much care which it is. I have in turn been convinced that Chartres
Cathedral, certain Greek sculpture, Mozart's _Don Juan_, and the
juggling of Paul Cinquevalli, was the finest thing in the world--not to
mention the achievements of Shakspere or Nijinsky. But there is
something to be said for the real pre-eminence of prose fiction as a
literary form. (Even the modern epic has learnt almost all it knows from
prose-fiction.) The novel has, and always will have, the advantage of
its comprehensive bigness. St Peter's at Rome is a trifle compared with
Tolstoi's _War and Peace_; and it is as certain as anything can be that,
during the present geological epoch at any rate, no epic half as long as
_War and Peace_ will ever be read, even if written.

Notoriously the novelist (including the playwright, who is a
sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of other
artists. In the matter of poaching, the painter has done a lot, and the
composer has done more, but what the painter and the composer have done
is as naught compared to the grasping deeds of the novelist. And whereas
the painter and the composer have got into difficulties with their
audacious schemes, the novelist has p