Sovnsts ox Noveis."—By R. Brimley ron. London: Noel Douglas, Price, Ts. 6a. a time when we hear that the end of the novel is at hand, that its succession is to be disputed by the short story and the film, such a title as "Novelists on Novels" is attractive, though it is attached to nothing but an anthology. Mr. Brimley Johnson has not ventured on unconsolidated modern ground; hho prefers to consider the youth of the novel instead of studying its age and achievement. His collection of novelists' apd prefaces, protests, defences and dissertation on their trade, takes the journey from the romances of the Duchess Neweastle and the traveller's tales of Defoe and Swift to the inauguration of the modern novel by Richard-gon and Fielding. and so vid Jan: Austen, Scott and Maria Edgeworth to George Eliot. So much of this material is buried deep in the work of these authors—the invaluable. prefaces in "Tom Jones" for instance—that such a handy collection as this has a value and an agreeable unity.
As much controversy was aroused by the public taste for romantic entertainment when the first novels ap peared, won public esteem, fought their way into the libraries of the learned, or the bookless houses of the severer moralists, as is roused nowadays when people assure us that they do not know what the modern novel is coming to. It is amusing to see that the new charges. fare the old charges; the new defences, the old defences; facts which require a deeper explanation than that provided by our present taste for eighteenth century letters.
The smaller moralists, faced by the problems of this world, were harassed into a rash condemnation when the novelists invented a thow-sand worlds which fad the adv tage of being fictitious. Over and over again ax one reads the defences of writers like Fielding and Jane Austen, one hears the same undertone of complaint; the superficial moralist hae not understood that, consciously or unconsciously, will or nilly, the novelist is not only a serious artist, but as serious a moralist, too.
No writer could have been more serious and more concerned with moral purpose than George Eliot, and yet she resisted that mammon which wovid tempt an author to to be read in the same spirit as it is writ." And Jame Aus-}ten wrote cuttingly in "Northanger Abbey": "While the abilities of the nine hundredth abridger of the history of England or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen Lines of Milton, Pope and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator' and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, there seems an almost general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novel. ist and of slighting the performancos which have orly genius, wit and taste to recommend them."
AM. Johnson's book concludes too soon for the novelist to bring his apologia up to date. Herein lies the da feet of an outlook which does not reach beyond its period—cs.at.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.