The purely fantastical, purely Utopian novel provides documen tary evidence of the rationalizing tendency of the times. At the beginning of the century Hanns Heinz Ewers strives after effect in his ghastly stories; Gustav Meyrink writes his mystically magical novels. In France, Renard applies his extraordinary art of story telling to fantastic themes. But since the World War the lawless roaming of imagination has been rendered more and more difficult; its direction is more and more decided by a biological and sociological point of view. The dream landscapes of the great vision of the Bohemian poet, Franz Kafka, are psycho analytically traced out, and the Utopian novels of H. G. Wells are carefully founded upon the results of modern research.
The films, with their manifold oppor tunities for creating suspense, with their immediate appeal to the senses, are becoming a dangerous competitor to the purely fic tional novel, written merely for the sake of telling a story. Some authors of the anecdotal novel take refuge in an artistically re fined, at times pseudo-classical technique, as for instance Paul Ernst, or Bruno Frank, also Thomas Mann (in Death in Venice, in his short stories), and in England such writers as D. H. Law rence. As this epoch has a whole series of authors of vigorous imagination and original delight in story telling an astonishingly high level is reached in this field. Writers such as M. Renard, Blasco Ibanez, Margaret Kennedy, Leo Perutz and Wilhelm Speyer and Franz Molnar write entertaining novels of a con siderably higher quality than is to be found in the entertaining novels of a former period. Some of these stories are very pointed and not without ingenious jests; most of them penetrate into other fields, attaching themselves carefully to the historical or to the sociological. Or with worldly wise, cleverly interpreted imagination they paraphrase on actual life (Maurois, the life of Shelley in Ariel, and Maugham, the life of Gauguin in The Moon and Sixpence). A very fortunate combination of circumstances has made The Adventures of the Brave Soldier, Schwejk, by Jaro slav Hesek, a sort of national epic of international reputation.
At the beginning of the century the society novel possessed im portant exponents, who found numerous imitators. Fritz Mauth ner, Guy de Maupassant and young Bernard Shaw wrote their criticisms of society. These were justified at the time, as the conventions of society were still a problem. To-day, when they are so no longer, criticism of society is at most a pretext for authors who wish to preserve the society novel as a portraiture of the fashionable world—Arlen, Dekobra, Morand, Colette and Pitigrilli. Even in Germany, where society in this special sense of the word has never existed, the society novel is now being at tempted ; Edschmidt and Speyer.
At the close of the last cen tury the psychological novel was at its height. Taught by Dos toievski, leading authors in every literature sought more and more to shade the characters of their novels, to differentiate them more and more finely (Meredith, Wassermann, Henrik Pontoppi dan, and Theodore Dreiser). But whilst at the beginning of this century it was the individual case, the glaring, sensational case that was the chief interest, the novelist now lays the chief stress on portraying the individual going to mingle with the masses. The Russians of the school of Dostoievski; the followers of Chekhov, writers such as T. Shmeliov and their fellow-aspirants, are overshadowed by the sociologically inclined pupils of Tol stoi and Gorki. The books of the Viennese authors, such as Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, and their languid knowledge of the human heart, with their esprit and their idle cautious psychology, are being dislodged by the books of the Anglo-Saxons, Gals worthy, Bennett and Sinclair Lewis, in which the hero interests, not as an individual, but as a type. If psychology be admitted at
all, then much colder and more unsentimental artistic shading is demanded by the younger school (somewhat after the style of Joseph Hergesheimer), or scientifically founded psycho-analysis, as, for instance, is attempted by James Joyce.
The novel with a purpose, the novel with a thesis, triumphs. Already, their titles openly pro claim such themes as : "Not the Murderer, but the Murdered is Guilty," "All Roads Lead to Golgotha," "Thou Mayest Commit Adultery," "Man is Good." In Germany, Heinrich Mann em phasizes with force the democratic, humanistic tendency in his great biting novels dealing with the Kaiser's period. (The de velopment of the times shows itself typically in this author. He begins with criticisms of society, then writes highly-coloured, romantically artistic books with a psychological strain, whose subject-matter consists of tempestuous emotions, fierce land scapes, and an intensely demoniacal heroine. To-day, he is writing great sociological novels with a purpose.) Everywhere there appear violent anti-war novels. Already, long before the war, Bertha von Suttner had the greatest success with her weak, well meant, pacifist novel, Down with Arms. Some of the anti-war novels, Fire, by Barbusse; Three Soldiers, by Dos Passos; Sergeant Grischa, by Arnold Zweig, although undisguised po lemics, created a directly artistic effect. The didactic political tendency becomes strongly accentuated. Originating in Russia, there arises a mixture of fiction-writing and a reporting of facts. Moreover, the moment favours bellicose emotions, and clear, undisguised attitudes. The gentle scepticism of Anatole France is too quietistic for these times. Strongly polemic themes pre dominate throughout the Utopian, society-criticizing novels of Wells. Broadly didactic passages may already be found in Tolstoi's War and Peace. Upton Sinclair's novels, however, are solely and purely propaganda fiction, in which the rhetoric greatly outweighs the creative tendency. The novels of the Soviet writers (Gladkov's Cement and Kollontai's Ways of Love) are also unscrupulous propaganda. On the other hand, in the novels of the Americans, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos, and Theodore Dreiser, propaganda is subordinate to creative desire. The Historical Novel.—The historical novel, as it was pre sented at the close of the last century, springs from a delight in gaily-coloured story telling and in the decorative. Ben by Wallace, and Quo Vadis, by Sinkiewicz, creates enthusiasm in millions of readers. In Germany, Alfred Doeblin, in his books The Three Leaps of Wan Lung and Wallenstein, brings to per fection the artistically-coloured novel as based upon the works of Flaubert and of the Swiss author, C. F. Meyer. But it is just in the historical novel and its metamorphoses that the tendency of the times is most clearly to be traced. Whilst, before the World War, the historical novel was popular due to its colour and its background, after the war it was the pragmatical that was sought for in it. It was popular because it strengthened in the reader the illusion of reality and imparted to him a convic tion of documentary evidence and reliability. The Russian novels of D. Merejkovski form a connecting link between the earlier kind of historical novel and the modern one.