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Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism by Henry Seidel Canby
page 37 of 253 (14%)
equally respectable, to be noticed, when noticed at all, with some
of the reverence due to an ancient and dignified art. The sermon
family, still numerous to a degree incredible to those who do not
study the lists of new books, is so eminently respectable that few
dare to abuse even its most futile members. 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. Today we pay
the price.
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