Thus to Revisit; Some Reminiscences (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE LORDLY TREASURE-HOUSE We set out, then, to search for a New Form for the Novel, and, possibly, a formula for the Mot Juste. A modest quest; but we demanded nothing less. Since I have said that Mr. Conrad was, of the two, the more preoccupied with the question of form, modesty demands that I should treat of that first though whether of right contour comes before texture I leave to other pens to decide. Let us ascertain what the author of the Nigger of the Narcissm meant when he spoke of a New Form for the English Novel: Looking around us, then, at our predecessors and contemporaries, and the models they presented to our view, we saw only one thing: the sacrificingthe ignoring indeedof every other attribute of Art in order to produce the Strong Situation. All characters had to be outlined d coups de hacfie, to be seven feet high and to walk from two to four feet above the ground in order that, towards the end of a book one of them might exclaim: " And my poor fool is dead !" or another, " Curse you, Copperfield !" And, indeed, conversing yesterday with one of our most distinguished critics as to the relative values of James and Meredith, I was astonished to hear him say: " Yes: the Real Thing is all very well; but consider thematchless situation in chapter xvi (or it may have been xvii) of Emilia. That scene alone is worth all that Henry James ever wrote." He went on to say that all the rest of Emilia bored himbut he repeated 'that that one Strong Situation washed out all claims of the author of the Princess Casamassima to be considered alongside the author of Evan Harrington. I bring in those two books on purpose, for in each the influence of Dickens is enormously evident. It was, in fact, as difficult for any one born shortly before 1850 to escape the ...