There is a curious atmosphere of logical conclusiveness about these arguments. They carry with them, apparently, an air of certainty which it is useless to question. We know that the novelist has already exploited Politics, Socialism, History, Theology, Marriage, Education, and a host of other subjects; indeed, a perusal of Dixon's "Index to Fiction" is calculated to provoke the inquiry: "Is there anything left to write about?" We know that everywhere is springing up the "literature of locality," and it would seem as if the resources of this world's experience had been exhausted when writers like Mr H. G. Wells and the late George Du Maurier invade the planet Mars for fresh material. The heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth have all been "written up." Is there anything new?
"Change" not "Exhaustion"
There can be no doubt that fiction has undergone great changes during recent years. These changes are the result of deeper changes in our common life. Consider for a moment the position of the drama. What is the significance of the problem play on the one hand, and the cry for a "Static Theatre" on the other hand? It means that life has changed, and is still changing; that the national character is not so emphatically external or spontaneous as in those days when Ben Jonson killed two men, and Marlowe himself was killed in a brawl. We have lost the passion, the force, and the brutality of those times, and have become more contemplative and analytical. The simple law is this: that literature and the drama are a reflex of life; hence, when character has a tendency to be driven inwards, as is the case to-day, Maeterlinck pleads on behalf of a drama without action; and Paul Bourget in France and Henry James in England embody the spirit of the age in the fiction of psychological minutiæ. Now there may be symptoms of decay in these manifestations of literary impulse, but the impulse is part of that new experience which the facts of an increasingly complex civilisation foist upon us. And, further, change is not necessarily exhaustion; in fact, it is more than surprising that anyone can believe all the stories possible have been told already, or have been told in the most interesting way. It is a very ancient cry—this cry about exhaustion. The old Hebrew writer wailed something about wanting to meet with a man who could show him a new thing. A new thing? "There is no new thing under the Sun." But we have found a few since those days, and the future will give birth to as many more.
Men and women have written about love from time immemorial, but have we finished with the theme? Is it exhausted? Did Homer satisfy our love of recorded adventure once and for all? There is only one answer—namely, that human experience is infinite in its possibilities and its capacity for renewal. If human experience—these vague and subtle emotions, these violently real but inscrutable feelings, these tremulous questionings of existence encompassed with mystery—if human experience were no more than a hard and dry scientific fact, well, our novelists would have a poor time of it. But life knows no finality; its stream flows on in perennial flood. Human nature is said to be much the same the world over, and yet every personality is absolutely a new thing. Goethe might attempt a rough classification by saying we are either Platonists or Aristotelians, but actually a great many of us are neither one nor the other, and there are infinities of degrees amongst us even then. New character is a necessary outcome of the advancing centuries, and new personalities are being born every day.
No; the world still loves a story, and there are stories which have never been told. It is, perhaps, true, that the story-tellers have not found them yet. Why?
Why we talk about Exhaustion
The answer is: We are becoming too artificial; we are losing spontaneity, and are getting too far away from the soil. Have we not noticed over and over again that the first book of a novelist is his best? Those which followed are called "good," but they sell because the author is the author of the first book which created a sensation.
Speaking of the first work of a young writer, Anthony Trollope says: "He sits down and tells his story because he has a story to tell; as you, my friend, when you have heard something which has at once tickled your fancy or moved your pathos, will hurry to tell it to the first person you meet. But when that first novel has been received graciously by the public, and has made for itself a success, then the writer, naturally feeling that the writing of novels is within his grasp, looks about for something to tell in another. He cudgels his brains, not always successfully, and sits down to write, not because he has something which he burns to tell, but because he feels it to be incumbent on him to be telling something. . . . So it has been with many novelists, who, after some good work, perhaps after much good work, have distressed their audience because they have gone on with their work till their work has become simply a trade with them."[146:A] There is often a good reason for such a change. The first book was written in a place near to Nature's heart; the writer was free from the obligations of society as found in city life; he was thrown back on his own resources, and fortunately could not spoil his individual view of things by multitudinous references to books and authorities. Do we not selfishly wish that Miss Olive Schreiner had never left the veldt, in the loneliness of which she produced "The Story of an African Farm"? Nearer contact with civilisation has failed to induce an impulse the result of which is at all comparable with this genuine story. It may or may not be of significance that Mr Wells, the creator of a distinct type of romance, dislikes what is called "Society," but I fancy that a few of those who lament too frequently that "everything has been said" spend more time in "Society" and clubs than is possible for good work. Mr C. H. Pearson, in a notable chapter on "Dangers of Political Development," says: "The world at large is just as reverent of greatness, as observant of a Browning, a Newman, or a Mill, as it ever was; but the world of Society prefers the small change of available and ephemeral talent to the wealth of great thoughts, which must always be kept more or less in reserve. The result seems to be that men, anxious to do great work, find city life less congenial than they did, and either live away from the Metropolis, as Darwin and Newman did, or restrict their intercourse, as Carlyle and George Eliot practically did, to a circle of chosen friends."