On Newness in the Novel

Extract

No doubt you have noticed that the forms of literary production which show the most life today are lyric poetry, drama, and the novel;—and of these three, the greatest by far is the novel. Truly, the production in this field is now prodigious. A recent estimate was that the present winter season would see the publication in English of some three thousand works of fiction. The French critic, Georges Duhamel, acting recently as reviewer for the Mercure de France, says that for several years he was compelled to read between six and seven hundred novels annually; and this, he adds, required not only a stout heart and a good deal of patience, but even a good constitution, a certain physical resistance. A French publisher, announcing a new collection of novels, states that in France the novel is now the most “acute” (aigu) and the most “taking” (prenant) form of literary activity; that it dominates, at the present hour, the whole of modern literature.