But the novel was
given a bad name in its youth that has overshadowed its successful
maturity.
Our ancestors are much to blame. For centuries they held the novel
suspect as a kind of bastard literature, probably immoral, and
certainly dangerous to intellectual health. But they are no more
deeply responsible for our suppressed contempt of fiction than
weak-kneed novelists who for many generations have striven to
persuade the English reader that a good story was really a sermon,
or a lecture on ethics, or a tract on economics or moral
psychology, in disguise. Bernard Shaw, in his prefaces to the
fiction that he succeeds in making dramatic, is carrying on a
tradition that Chaucer practised before him:
And ye that holden this tale a folye,--
As of a fox, or of a cok and hen,--
Taketh the moralite, good men.
And that was the way they went at it for centuries, always
pretending, always driven to pretend, that a good story was not
good enough to be worth telling for itself alone, but must convey
a moral or a satire or an awful lesson, or anything that might
separate it from the "just fiction" that only the immoral and the
frivolous among their contemporaries read or wrote.
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