instance) like the
difference between _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _The Time Machine_. If we
class Richardson's book with Mr. Wells's book it is really only for
convenience; if we say that they are both novels we shall certainly be
puzzled in that case to say what on earth a novel is. But the note of
our age, both for good and evil, is a highly poetical and largely
illogical faith in liberty. Liberty is not a negation or a piece of
nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say; it is a belief in variety and
growth. But it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief. The
nineteenth century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle Ages
was an age of reason. Mediaevals liked to have everything defined and
defensible; the modern world prefers to run some risks for the sake of
spontaneity and diversity. Consequently the modern world is full of a
phenomenon peculiar to itself--I mean the spectacle of small or
originally small things swollen to enormous size and power. The modern
world is like a world in which toadstools should be as big as trees, and
insects should walk about in the sun as large as elephants. Thus, for
instance, the shopkeeper, almost an unimportant figure in carefully
ordered states, has in our time become the millionaire, and has more
power than ten kings. Thus again a practical knowledge of nature, of the
habits of animals or the properties of fire and water, was in the old
ordered state either an almost servile labour or a sort of joke; it was
left to old women and gamekeepers and boys who went birds'-nesting. In
our time this commonplace daily knowledge has swollen into the enormous
miracle of physical size, weighing the stars and talking under the sea.
In short, our age is a sort of splendid jungle in which some of the most
towering weeds and blossoms have come from the smallest seed.

And this is, generally speaking, the explanation of the novel. The novel
is not so much the filling up of an artistic plan, however new or
fantastic. It is a thing that has grown from some germ of suggestion,
and has often turned out much larger than the author intended. And this,
lastly, is the final result of these facts, that the critic can
generally trace in a novel what was the original artistic type or shape
of thought from which the whole matter started, and he will generally
find that this is different in every case. In one novel he will find
that the first impulse is a character. In another novel he will fi