hly recreate.

But still, as I say, the aspects of a book that for the most part we
detach and solidify are simply those which cost us no deliberate
pains. We bring to the reading of a book certain imaginative faculties
which are in use all the day long, faculties that enable us to
complete, in our minds, the people and the scenes which the novelist
describes--to give them dimensions, to see round them, to make them
"real." And these faculties, no doubt, when they are combined with a
trained taste, a sense of quality, seem to represent all that is
needed for the criticism of fiction. The novel (and in these pages I
speak only of the modern novel, the picture of life that we are in a
position to understand without the knowledge of a student or a
scholar)--the modern novel asks for no other equipment in its readers
than this common gift, used as instinctively as the power of
breathing, by which we turn the flat impressions of our senses into
solid shapes: this gift, and nothing else except that other, certainly
much less common, by which we discriminate between the thing that is
good of its kind and the thing that is bad. Such, I should think, is
very nearly the theory of our criticism in the matter of the art of
fiction. A novel is a picture of life, and life is well known to us;
let us first of all "realize" it, and then, using our taste, let us
judge whether it is true, vivid, convincing--like life, in fact.

The theory does indeed go a little further, we know. A novel is a
picture, a portrait, and we do not forget that there is more in a
portrait than the "likeness." Form, design, composition, are to be
sought in a novel, as in any other work of art; a novel is the better
for possessing them. That we must own, if fiction is an art at all;
and an art it must be, since a literal transcript of life is plainly
impossible. The laws of art, therefore, apply to this object of our
scrutiny, this novel, and it is the better, other things being equal,
for obeying them. And yet, is it so very much the better? Is it not
somehow true that fiction, among the arts, is a peculiar case,
unusually exempt from the rules that bind the rest? Does the fact that
a novel is well designed, well proportioned, really make a very great
difference in its power to please?--and let us answer honestly, for if
it does not, then it is pedantry to force these rules upon a novel. In
other arts it may be otherwise, and no doubt a lop-sided statue or an