And we still suffer from a kind of shyness in the presence of a novel.
From shyness of the author or of his sentiments or of his imagined
world, no indeed; but we are haunted by a sense that a novel is a
piece of life, and that to take it to pieces would be to destroy it.
We begin to analyse it, and we seem to be like Beckmesser, writing
down the mistakes of the spring-time upon his slate. It is an obscure
delicacy, not clearly formulated, not admitted, perhaps, in so many
words; but it has its share in restraining the hand of criticism. We
scarcely need to be thus considerate; the immense and necessary
difficulty of closing with a book at all, on any terms, might appear
to be enough, without adding another; the book is safe from rude
violation. And it is not a piece of life, it is a piece of art like
another; and the fact that it is an ideal shape, with no existence in
space, only to be spoken of in figures and metaphors, makes it all the
more important that in our thought it should be protected by no
romantic scruple. Or perhaps it is not really the book that we are
shy of, but a still more fugitive phantom--our pleasure in it. It
spoils the fun of a novel to know how it is made--is this a reflection
that lurks at the back of our minds? Sometimes, I think.
But the pleasure of illusion is small beside the pleasure of creation,
and the greater is open to every reader, volume in hand.
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