Especially of compassion.  It has been said a long time ago that books have their fate.  They have, and it is very much like the destiny of man.  They share with us the great incertitude of ignominy or glory—­of severe justice and senseless persecution—­of calumny and misunderstanding—­the shame of undeserved success.  Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error.  But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life.  A bridge constructed according to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a long, honourable and useful career.  But a book as good in its way as the bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth.  The art of their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life.  Of the books born from the restlessness, the inspiration, and the vanity of human minds, those that the Muses would love best lie more than all others under the menace of an early death.  Sometimes their defects will save them.  Sometimes a book fair to see may—­to use a lofty expression—­have no individual soul.  Obviously a book of that sort cannot die.  It can only crumble into dust.  But the best of books drawing sustenance from the sympathy and memory of men have lived on the brink of destruction, for men’s memories are short, and their sympathy is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, unprincipled emotion.

No secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs.  This is not because some books are not worthy of enduring life, but because the formulas of art are dependent on things variable, unstable and untrustworthy; on human sympathies, on prejudices, on likes and dislikes, on the sense of virtue and the sense of propriety, on beliefs and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always change their form—­often in the lifetime of one fleeting generation.

II.

Of all books, novels, which the Muses should love, make a serious claim on our compassion.  The art of the novelist is simple.  At the same time it is the most elusive of all creative arts, the most liable to be obscured by the scruples of its servants and votaries, the one pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind and the heart of the artist.  After all, the creation of a world is not a small undertaking except perhaps to the divinely gifted.  In truth every novelist must begin by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which he can honestly believe.  This world cannot be made otherwise than in his own image:  it is fated to remain individual and a little mysterious, and yet it must resemble something already familiar to the experience, the thoughts and the sensations of his readers.