Эдвард Морган Форстер «Aspects of the Novel»

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I do not know on the verge of which philosophy or what rival philosophies the above remarks are wavering, but as I look back at my own scraps of knowledge and into my own heart, I see these two movements of the human mind: the great tedious onrush known as history, and a shy crablike sideways movement. Both movements have been neglected in these lectures: history because it only carries people on, it is just a train full of passengers; and the crablike movement because it is too slow and cautious to be visible over our tiny period of two hundred years. So we laid it down as an axiom when we started that human nature is unchangeable, and that it produces in rapid succession prose fictions, which fictions, when they contain 50,000 words or more, are called novels. If we had the power or license to take a wider view, and survey all human and pre-human activity, we might not conclude like this; the crablike movement, the shiftings of the passengers, might be visible, and the phrase "the development of the novel" might cease to be a pseudo-scholarly tag or a technical triviality, and become important, because it implied the development of humanity.

Примечания

1

Abel Chevalley, Le Roman Anglais de Notre Temps, Oxford University Press, New York.

2

I have touched on this theory of inspiration in a short essay called "Anonymity", Hogarth Press, London.

3

Paraphrased from Système des Beaux Arts, pp. 314-315. I am indebted to M. André Maurois for introducing me to this stimulating essay.

4

Translated by Dorothy Bussy as The Counterfeiters, Knopf.

5

Paraphrased from Les Faux Monnayeurs, pp. 238-246. My version, needless to say, conveys neither the subtlety nor the balance of the original.

6

Ulysses, Shakespeare & Co. , Paris, is not at present obtainable in England. America, more enlightened, has produced a mutilated version without the author's permission and without paying him a cent.

7

Only to be found in a collected edition.

For knowledge of it, and for much else, I am indebted to Mr. John Freeman's admirable monograph on Melville.

8

See that sound and brilliant essay, The Structure of Wuthering Heights, by C. P. S. , Hogarth Press.

9

There is a masterly analysis of The Ambassadors from an other standpoint in The Craft of Fiction.

10

See the Letters of H. James, Vol. II.

11

The first three books of A la recherche du temps perdu have been excellently translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff under the title of Remembrance of Things Past, A. & C. Boni.