m, popular education, religious unrest, pictorial
rebellion, must adapt ourselves and our books to the new spirit. I do
not pretend that the movement has been sudden. Many years before
_L'Education Sentimentale_ was written, Stendhal had imported chaos
(with genius) into the spacious 'thirties. But Stendhal was a meteor:
Dostoievsky and Mr Romain Rolland had to come to break up the old
narrative form, to make the road for Mr Wells and for the younger men
who attempt, not always successfully, to crush within the covers of an
octavo volume the whole of the globe spinning round its axis, to express
with an attitude the philosophy of life, to preach by gospel rather than
by statement.

Such movements as these naturally breed a reaction, and I confess that,
when faced with the novels of the 'young men,' so turgid, so bombastic,
I turn longing eyes towards the still waters of Turgenev, sometimes even
towards my first influence, now long discarded--the novels of Zola.
Though the Zeitgeist hold my hand and bid me abandon my characters,
forget that they should be people like ourselves, living, loving, dying,
and this enough; though it suggest to me that I should analyse the
economic state, consider what new world we are making, enlist under the
banner of the 'free spirits' or of the 'simple life,' I think I should
turn again towards the old narrative simplicities, towards the schedules
of what the hero said, and of what the vicar had in his drawing-room, if
I were not conscious that form evolves.

If literature be at all a living force it must evolve as much as man,
and more if it is to lead him; it must establish a correspondence
between itself and the uneasy souls for which it exists. So it is no
longer possible to content ourselves with such as Jane Austen; we must
exploit ourselves. Ashamed as we are of the novel with a purpose, we can
no longer write novels without a purpose. We need to express the motion
of the world rather than its contents. While the older novelists were
static, we have to be kinetic: is not the picture-palace here to give
us a lesson and to remind us that the waxworks which delighted our
grandfathers have gone?

But evolution is not quite the same thing as revolution. I do believe
that revolution is only evolution in a hurry; but revolution can be in
too great a hurry, and cover itself with ridicule. When the Futurists
propose to suppress the adjective, the adverb, the conjunction, and to
make of lit