Fiction Of Today

For Borne time past the fashionable tendency has been largely in the direction of a conscious, not to say willful, thinness of narrative material. The old merits of fullness and "body" - virtues apparently hereditary in that'lineage of robust minds which can be traced backward without a break from George Eliot to Fielding - have been growing rarer and rarer. In their place the art of making a very little go a very long way has been carefuily cultivated by undoubtedly dexterous hands. Fiction has alrnost reached the point of sheer bravado in some developrnents of the "society" novel, notably a species grown in American soil, or rather in New York I ries and forcing beds, and distinguished by an elabórate triviality which no amount of cleverness can render other than vapid. Such a fashioncan never in the nature of things be long lived. Those miracles of inexhaustible nothingness, in which the tiniest rivulet of incident just trickles across a cont' nf dialogue, cannot long be in Ag, even as miracles, in an age to which the miraculous does not make a permanently successíul