It is curious how rare (if it is not non-existent) is the novel rooted in trade and commerce and finance. Good fiction, like good poetry, is surely a criticism of life, yet the business world hardly ever supplies our novelists with material. It is not so in America. There business and the qualities it develops in human character are stuff for the novelist and "the short-story writer. Why—this difference?
I am told (says a writer in "John 0' London's Weekly"), that the explanation lies in national habit and temperament. The American is permanently and intensely interested in business, whereas the Englishman, his equal in efficiency, is interested in it only while at work. I am assured that he would not read novels based largely on the human side of commercial success, manufacturing enterprise, mechanical inventions, or overseas trade. All this has been true enough in the past, but I suspect that publishers and authors deceive themselves thinking that it is a law. Why does not some publisher offer a substantial prize for the best business novel? The large prizes which have already been given for new novels have doubtless been justified; they have brought to light new talent. But they have not enlarged the scope of fiction; they have not, I think, advanced the novel as an instrument of social survey and criticism. Such a prize might do so.
Tur Farner or me Britien Novew.
This elimination of the business world from fiction is the more curious because the man who must be regarded as the father of the British novel—Daniel Defoe—found in it his chief inspiration. Defoe's novels were such as only a merchant could have written. They are full of trade. When his characters move about the world, they carry cargoes of rum and tobacco instead of money and drafts on banks. Moll Flanders brings such goods to Bristol when she leaves her appalling surroundings in Virginia. Roxana's hopes of respectability are centred im her merchant-lover; and we have a} characteristic scene in which, after their marriage, the pair bring into one room the boxes containing their wealth and. compare their estates. Defoe revels im the enumeration of their bills and securities; assignments upon the Bank of Lyons, 30,000 ris-dollars
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.