If they soon disappear, the fault may be the writer's or the
reader's, Richardson's if he failed to describe them adequately, mine
if my manner of reading has not been sufficiently creative. In any
case the page that has been well read has the best chance of survival;
it was soundly fashioned, to start with, out of the material given me
by the writer, and at least it will resist the treachery of a poor
memory more resolutely than a page that I did not thoroughly 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.
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