Regarding the metaphysical justification of the novel

Regarding the metaphysical justification of the novel.

Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery. In writing, for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human

vision.

William Stafford,

Writing the Australian Crawl

The metaphysical justification of anything—including both fiction, which is a "criticism of life, " and life itself— rests on premises dictated by the philosophy one happens to believe in. To the pessimist, nothing justifies its existence, not even his own despair; to the optimist, all things work together for good, even the things that seem, when taken by themselves and momentarily, worst. The cynic sage who wrote, in a burst of fretful impatience, "Of making books there is no end, " would have found nothing to solace him in this age when, it is said, everybody who is not writing novels is reading them, and when (it may be added) everyone is talking about them, even the persons who neither read nor write them. The optimist, on the other hand, is not only not put out of countenance by the making and selling of many very bad books, but he can even face without chagrin the sad modern industry of reviewing them.

Now it is not the function of the critic to dictate to his audience the philosophical opinions they should hold; they would not listen to him anyway, for we

choose our philosophies, as we do our occupations or our neckties, by temperamental bias. Theologies go as much by favor as kisses do. Any discussion has to begin therefore with immense assumptions, —that is, if it insist on getting somewhere, —and even what we call "first principles" take unspeakable things for granted. What we must take for granted here is a certain resigned and unflinching state of the conscience, an objective and impartially inquiring condition to which most humane intelligences come sooner or later, in which all the works of both nature and man seem worth an expenditure of interest or of curiosity—among them not least the fine art of telling stories.

It is far from my thought to say that whatever is right, —the philosophy of a shallow opportunist without responsibility, —or that a thing is good simply because it exists in great quantity, as anything must to be popularly accredited. But one can say that there is a very important sense in which whatever exists is worth considering, even if the consideration amount only to a casual passing glance. The universality of our interest in fiction does not prove that fiction has any inherent right to the space it occupies

n our libraries or in our lives; but it does prove that e have given fiction a sort of pragmatic claim on us by giving so much of ourselves to it. In short, books, and more especially novels, are worth writing and buying and reading and criticizing in just about the measure of our finding them so. Work of the hand, work of the brain—it is all subject to the same law;

this law which, where it touches the study of the classics, also a pursuit resting on vast assumptions, we tritely embody in an admonition to young men who are supposed not to enjoy their work: "You'll get out of it exactly what you put into it. " Things mean what we find in them or bring out of them for ourselves, by imagination, insight, the will to be interested; books are worth whatever we make them worth in terms of our own curiosity or wonder or inspiration—the impersonal virtues of the mind.

Such then is the initial postulate, and the only justification of the novel that need be attempted here. The study of fiction is a pleasurable task whose value is to be measured, not in abstractions, not in any remote philosophical or esthetic categories, but empirically and pragmatically, in terms of its effect on our own emotions and wills. The question is not, What must be our attitude toward the art of fiction? It is rather, What must fiction have done to us before it becomes deserving of consideration as an art? /Fiction is a creative art in that it creates something V in its audience. Therein it is like friendship. He who makes a friend, as Mr. Chesterton says, makes a man. The novelist and his reader create and perpetuate each other, by a uniquely impersonal reciprocity. The ideal responsibility of fiction is to make us dream nobly and disinterestedly, to give a beautiful and intelligible shape to the best of our desire. If it do that, it justifies itself in and through us. Meanwhile it is for criticism to say whether the dreaming is noble and disinterested, the shape of it a

beautiful and intelligible one; to make sure that our bread is not a stone—or, as Professor Saintsbui7 says in a slightly different connection, pie-crust.

And so we begin a stage farther along than the question whether the intrinsic claim of the novel is such that we ought to concede anything to it; farther along, where we meet these two other questions, What are the claims of the novels and What is or may be the nature of the concession we do make?