The Modern Novel [antikvár]

PrefaceAs Sir Desmond McCarthy remarked, the novel is usually thought of as satisfying our curiosity rather than our craving for beauty, meaning or significance. And curiosity, as we know, demands information. The great novelists of the past had therefore to supply a convincingly selective kind of information simply to show that they knew what they were talking about. Not surprisingly, they resented falling short of, or having to go beyond, immediate social actualities. But the novel of social manners satisfies us only so long as our curiosity remains social; once we begin to look at society with other kinds of curiosity, we need a completer type of novel. I do not say: 'We need the poem or the philosophical system', although of course it is true that the poem specializes in inwardness and the philosophical system in man's cosmic place. No: when we need inwardness and cosmic place related to man-in-society we still have to go to the novel or to what 'the novel' has now become; for the novelist has been quicker than the poet or the philosopher to borrow their specialities than they have to borrow his.The novel of manners gave us social man; and when some experimental writers introduced the stream of consciousness into the novel of manners they began to satisfy a second curiosity and, indeed, to create a new type of hero: self-absorbed and rather ineffectual. A third curiosity remainednot social, not subjective, but in the widest sense religious: 'What is man's place in Nature?'This study sketches the fortunes of these three types of curiosity. I am primarily concerned with the novelist's effort to bring psychology back into proportion with manners, and to augment these two with a view of man in the abstract. The effort hasxi