PARTISAN REVIEW
and simple respect to its chosen material. This predominance of for–
tuitousness in the novel accounts for the roughness of grain, even
the coarseness of grain as compared with other arts, that runs through
it. The novel is, as many have said of it, the least "artistic" of genres.
For this it pays its penalty and it has become in part the grave as well
as the monument of many great spirits who too carelessly have en–
trusted their talents to it. Yet the headlong, profuse, often careless
quality of the novel, though no doubt wasteful, is an aspect of its
bold and immediate grasp on life.
But from this very sense of its immediacy to life we have come to
over-value the novel. We have, for example, out of awareness of its
power, demanded that it change the world-no genre has ever had
so great a burden of social requirement put upon it (which, inci–
dentally it has very effectively discharged), or has been so strictly
ordered to give wp, in the fulfillment of its assigned function, all that
was unconscious and ambivalent and playful in itself. Our sense of
its comprehensiveness and effectiveness have led us to make a legend
of it: one of the dreams of a younger America, continuing up to
recently, was of
The
Great American Novel, which was always
imagined to be as solitary and omniseminous as the Great White
Whale. Then we have subjected it to criteria which are irrelevant
to its nature-how many of us happily share the horror which John
Gould Fletcher expressed at the discovery that Trollope thought of
novel-writing as a trade. The over-valuation of love is the beginning of
the end of love; the over-valuation of art is the beginning of the end
of
art.
What I have called the roughness of grain of the novel and
praised as such corresponds with something in the nature of the
novelists themselves. Of
all
practitioners of literature, novelists as a
class have made the most aggressive assault upon the world, the most
personal demand upon it, and no matter how obediently they have
listened to their daemons they have kept an ear cocked at the crowd
and have denounced its dulness in not responding with gifts of power
and fame. This personal demand the haughtiest reserve of Flaubert
and James did not try to hide. The novelists have wanted much .and
very openly; and with great simplicity and naivety they have mixed
what they personally desired with what they desired for the world,
and have mingled their mundane needs with their largest judgments.
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