Lionel Trilling
ART AND FORTUNE*
It is impossible to talk about the novel nowadays without
having in our minds the question of whether or not the novel is still
a living form. Twenty-five years ago Mr. Eliot said that the novel
came to an end with Flaubert and James, and at about the same
time Senor Ortega said much the same thing. This opinion is now
heard on all sides. It is heard in conversation rather than read in for–
mal discourse, for to insist on the death or moribundity of a great
genre is an unhappy task which the critic will naturally avoid if he
can, yet the opinion is now an established one and has a very con–
siderable authority. Do we not see its influence in, for example, Mr.
V. S. Pritchett's recent book,
The Living Novel?-for
although Mr.
Pritchett is himself a novelist and writes about the novel with the
perception that comes of love, and even, by the name he gives his
book, disputes the fact of the novel's death, yet still, despite these
tokens of his faith, he deals with the subject under a kind of con–
straint, as if he had won the right to claim life for the novel only
upon conditions of not claiming for it much power.
I do not believe that the novel is dead. And yet particular forms
of the creative imagination may indeed die-English poetic drama
stands as the great witness of the possibility-and there might at this
time
be
an advantage in accepting the proposition as an hypothesis
which will lead us to understand under what conditions the novel
may live.
If
we consent to speak of the novel as dead, three
po~ible
ex-
*
This essay, in a longer version, was one of a group of papers on the novel
which were read at sessions of the English Institute at Columbia University in
September of this year. In its extended form it will appear with the other papers
in a volume. to be edited by David Daiches and published by the Institute.
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