Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... VI A SHORT while ago I saw that someone had been writing on "The Decadence of the Novel,"--I think it was that brilliant young novelist, Benjamin Swift. Well, I don't know! Is the novel, when you come to think of it, in quite such a bad way? At the first flush, all contemporary pessimism is apt to find a ready acquiescence. It has the permanent discontent of human nature back of it. The sound of the great old men departing deadens our ears to the sound of the great young men arriving. No contemporary ever plays Hamlet like Kean. "And yet--, and yet--," says Stephen Phillips, himself a poet whose shoulders are rapidly broadening for one of the old mantles. Yes! Dickens and Thackeray are dead, it is true; and Balzac and Dumas no longer throw their vast shadows across the world; and yet, --well, let us for a little count our mercies in the shape of living novelists, and see if our day of small things is so diminutive, after all. Have we any great novelists, properly so called? I do not mean merely able, brilliant novelists, --but novelists really great; the quality of greatness, perhaps we may premise, being an indefinable quality of the man himself bulking large behind the novelist. Yes; we have Tolstoi, and Meredith, and Bjornson. One has only to realize what these three men stand for to realize what a serious, spiritual force the novel has become in the modern world, and of what profound and delicate human interest it has become the vehicle. Tolstoi is the Christian; Meredith, the philosopher; Bjornson, the patriot. All three are masterly story-tellers and creators of character. We read what they write for "the story," like the work of any other story-teller, but their stories move in an atmosphere so charged with the deepest meanings of...