Modern Developments in the Novel

NOVEL, MODERN DEVELOPMENTS IN THE.

Towards the close of the last century, there arose as a reaction from the naturalistic novel, a school of neo-romantic psycholo gists, sceptically sentimental, and fond of lyrical "nuances." Types such as Oscar Wilde's Dorian Grey were popular, also the gentle, pallid, aristocratic, weary heroes of the Danish author, Hermann Bang. The erotic was the favourite theme, either sub limated, delicately portrayed in many beautiful shades, or else traced in glowingly pathetic frescoes. Atmosphere, tact, a great knowledge of women, good form, scepticism, and up-to-date-ness were the qualities valued in a novelist. Leading literary criticism asserted that Art has little to do with character and all that was written was appraised in accordance with a strongly underlined "Art for Art" principle.

The New Novelists.

Strange to say, only a few of the novel ists who in the long run proved themselves great and lasting belonged to this tendency favoured by official literature. Inde pendently of it, it may be mentioned, Romain Rolland wrote his vast life history of the musician Jean Christophe, and Anatole France his gentle, sceptical, wise novels. Rudyard Kipling com posed his ballads and his great ballad-like Indian tales, and, fol lowing on Dostoievski and Tolstoi, Maxim Gorki appeared, melan choly and powerful upon the European horizon. Independently also of this officially favoured tendency August Strindberg cried aloud his maniacal, embarrassing confessions; Hamsun, with biting lyrics, placed his quiet, queer characters in a grand landscape ; Selma Lagerlof wrote her wild, sweet novels; and Johannes V. Jensen transformed the doctrines of Darwin and his own views on America into literature.

Of American novelists after E. A. Poe and Mark Twain no more were sighted in the continent of Europe. A master of story writing of the rank of Stevenson was at best only known there through little read translations of The Master of Ballantrae and Treasure Island. Strindberg's novels, hardly accepted by a wider public, aroused in the connoisseurs admiration and displeasure.

Dostoievski and Tolstoi were looked upon by the Europe of their day as gifted lunatics in much the same way as was Shakespeare by the French of the i8th century. It was Paris that dominated. France—at least in fiction—played the part which Greece had played in the ancient world. French novels even of mediocre im portance were everywhere translated and imitated. They ruled the entire East, Russia, the Balkans. Practically the whole of European society modelled itself, in all aesthetic questions, on the pattern portrayed in this novel. Only that which had with stood the criticisms of the Paris salons was considered as of real artistic merit. Each country sought to adapt the French mode to its own atmosphere. In Italy, D'Annunzio exaggerated the main feature of the French style, pathetically overcolouring it. In Hungary, the French style was highly seasoned, banalized and provincialized. Among German-speaking authors the Viennese especially showed great zeal in emulating the French example. They decreed, nearly without any contradiction, that love, comedy and death should be the themes of literature.

Novels After the World War.

With the war the position of the novel changed swiftly and fundamentally. At the front the boredom of the trenches, at home the want of other distractions, won for the novel new readers, who, accustomed to a hard existence, compelled to struggle with stark reality, found that literature was dealing with affairs of secondary importance and did not touch the real centre of life, at any rate, not of their lives. They had no use for the erotic futilities, for the artistic "drawing room" philosophy of life, for the psychology—subtle as it was superficial—so popular in literature. They demanded reality. If, up till now, the reader had been drawn to the novel by a longing for entertainment and suspense, now it was the films which responded to this longing in a more agreeable and intensive way.