THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH FICTION
conceivably heal the split in our culture. But he finds that the cinema
and the radio sweep away his advantage the moment he attains it.
This is an age of the senses, not of the mind; an age made for the
reporter, not for the imagination.
The novelist is also bound to reflect in dismay that the modern
novel is only two hundred years old. It is the youngest literary form,
f<l! younger, for example, than the drama. The novel was born with
modern capitalism, it is saturated with individualism and liberal cul–
ture; it is characteristically middle class. Is the novel tied to the fate
of capitalism and the liberal view of life? Is the novel condemned
quietly to become an anomaly in the socialist climate where freedom,
individualism, liberal thought and the preoccupation with individual
fate are despised, discouraged or, worse still, are painlessly forgotten?
When we think of the future of the novel, we .are inquiring whether
it is the form which will continue to attract the best creative minds;
and it may be that the intellectual atmosphere of the collective state
will be kinder to other forms of writing. Under socialism, the sociable
art may wane; just as, since the flowering of sociability, epics like
Paradise Lost,
compendious narratives like
The Canterbury Tales
and sagas like
Beowulf,
are no longer written. Official myths may
come to mean more to us than private histories, and this condition–
as Greek literature shows us- is above all congenial to the drama.
It may very well be that 'official' art-in this sense-will be superior
to the private or unofficial art of the novelist, and already the cinema
has shown the capacity-crude though it is-to create myths .and
'heroes of our time'- a capacity which the novel has lost. When we
say there are too many novels we mean that so many different views
of life become in the end gratuitous and self-destructive; and we
would like to return to a form of art which, working under more
stimulating restrictions, would speak with the single voice of .a classical
authority.
Still, though we allow our pessimism to make this kind of bed,
we novelists are not obliged to lie on it. After all the novel
is
a young
form and its strength lies in its adaptability. Private life dwindles:
for long, ever since D. H. Lawrence, indeed ever since Wells's
The
New Machiavelli,
the interest in character for its own sake has gone.
Lives, states of mind, states of soul, collective feeling have replaced
the concern with the friction of character in its own circle. Sensibility
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