12-04-2012, 03:45 PM
MODERN FICTION
The Common Reader, by Virginia Woolf.pdf (Size: 43.89 KB / Downloads: 45)
In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is
difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is
somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and
primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen
even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their masterpieces
certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And yet the analogy between
literature and the process, to choose an example, of making motor cars
scarcely holds good beyond the first glance.
Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of quarrelling with Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy, it is partly
that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a living,
breathing, everyday imperfection which bids us take what liberties with it
we choose. But it is also true that, while we thank them for a thousand
gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr. Hardy, for Mr.
Conrad, and in a much lesser degree for the Mr. Hudson of The Purple
Land, Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago. Mr. Wells, Mr.
Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and
disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes the form
of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have
not done; what we certainly could not do, but as certainly, perhaps, do not
wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the charge or grievance which we
have to bring against a mass of work so large in its volume and embodying
so many qualities, both admirable and the reverse.