Notes on Life and Letters | Page 5

believe the long and
helpless indignations of their daily and weekly Press, the majority of
municipal rulers appear to be thieves of a particularly irrepressible sort.
But this by the way. My concern is with a statement issuing from the
average temperament and the average wisdom of a great and wealthy
community, and uttered by a civic magistrate obviously without fear
and without reproach.
I confess I am pleased with his temper, which is that of prudence. "I
have not read the books," he says, and immediately he adds, "and if I
have read them I have forgotten." This is excellent caution. And I like
his style: it is unartificial and bears the stamp of manly sincerity. As a
reported piece of prose this declaration is easy to read and not difficult
to believe. Many books have not been read; still more have been
forgotten. As a piece of civic oratory this declaration is strikingly
effective. Calculated to fall in with the bent of the popular mind, so
familiar with all forms of forgetfulness, it has also the power to stir up
a subtle emotion while it starts a train of thought--and what greater
force can be expected from human speech? But it is in naturalness that
this declaration is perfectly delightful, for there is nothing more natural
than for a grave City Father to forget what the books he has read
once--long ago--in his giddy youth maybe--were about.
And the books in question are novels, or, at any rate, were written as
novels. I proceed thus cautiously (following my illustrious example)
because being without fear and desiring to remain as far as possible
without reproach, I confess at once that I have not read them.
I have not; and of the million persons or more who are said to have read

them, I never met one yet with the talent of lucid exposition sufficiently
developed to give me a connected account of what they are about. But
they are books, part and parcel of humanity, and as such, in their ever
increasing, jostling multitude, they are worthy of regard, admiration,
and compassion.
Especially of compassion. It has been said a long time ago that books
have their fate. They have, and it is very much like the destiny of man.
They share with us the great incertitude of ignominy or glory--of severe
justice and senseless persecution--of calumny and
misunderstanding--the shame of undeserved success. Of all the
inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us, for
they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our
illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error.
But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life. A
bridge constructed according to the rules of the art of bridge-building is
certain of a long, honourable and useful career. But a book as good in
its way as the bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth.
The art of their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a
moment of life. Of the books born from the restlessness, the inspiration,
and the vanity of human minds, those that the Muses would love best
lie more than all others under the menace of an early death. Sometimes
their defects will save them. Sometimes a book fair to see may--to use a
lofty expression--have no individual soul. Obviously a book of that sort
cannot die. It can only crumble into dust. But the best of books drawing
sustenance from the sympathy and memory of men have lived on the
brink of destruction, for men's memories are short, and their sympathy
is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, unprincipled emotion.
No secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the
formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed
combination of drugs. This is not because some books are not worthy
of enduring life, but because the formulas of art are dependent on
things variable, unstable and untrustworthy; on human sympathies, on
prejudices, on likes and dislikes, on the sense of virtue and the sense of
propriety, on beliefs and theories that, indestructible in themselves,
always change their form--often in the lifetime of one fleeting

generation.
II.
Of all books, novels, which the Muses should love, make a serious
claim on our compassion. The art of the novelist is simple. At the same
time it is the most elusive of all creative arts, the most liable to be
obscured by the scruples of its servants and votaries, the one
pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind and the heart of the
artist. After all, the creation of a world is not a small undertaking
except perhaps to the divinely gifted. In truth every novelist must begin