He wants to forget the troublesome realities of life. Perhaps he is vexed: he may have been bunkered, his line may have been entangled in the trees, his favorite investment may have slumped, or the judge may have had indigestion and been extremely rude to him.
Now at last comes the little precious interval of leisure, and the Weary Giant takes up a book. He has been in his office from ten to four, with perhaps only two hours interval at his club for lunch or he has been playing golf or he has been waiting about and voting in the House or he has been fishing or he has been disputing a point of law, or writing a sermon, or doing one of a thousand other of the grave important things which constitute the substance of a prosperous man’s life. The Reader is represented as a man, burthened, toiling, worn. It is the man’s theory of the novel rather than the woman’s.
In spite of manifest facts, that was the dominant view of the great period that we now in our retrospective way speak of as the Victorian, and it still survives to this day. There is, I am aware, the theory that the novel is wholly and solely a means of relaxation. Now this, I know, is not the usually received opinion. In many directions I think that we cannot get along without it. I make very high and very wide claims for it. I consider the novel a very important and necessary thing indeed in that complicated system of uneasy adjustments and readjustments which is modern civilization. When a man has focused so much of his life upon the novel, it is not reasonable to expect him to take a too modest or apologetic view of it. One of my chief claims to distinction in the world is that I wrote the first long appreciative review of Joseph Conrad’s work in the Saturday Review. And I was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them. This book contains 350 short stories from 50 classic, prize-winning and noteworthy authors.CIRCUMSTANCES have made me think a good deal at different times about the business of writing novels, and what it means and is and may be.
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