From the PREFACE. Of the dozen appreciations and estimates gathered here, several have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and one in The Yale Review , to the editors of which magazines we make grateful acknowledgment for permission to revise and reprint about half of the material in this book. We hope that, in and underlying the group of essays, the reader may find a unity of intention expressed in neither the title nor the form of the volume. Each of these seemingly detached papers is conceived as a footnote to a ...
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From the PREFACE. Of the dozen appreciations and estimates gathered here, several have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and one in The Yale Review , to the editors of which magazines we make grateful acknowledgment for permission to revise and reprint about half of the material in this book. We hope that, in and underlying the group of essays, the reader may find a unity of intention expressed in neither the title nor the form of the volume. Each of these seemingly detached papers is conceived as a footnote to a tendency: the modern tendency of fiction-and, for that matter, of all humane thinking and living-toward a fuller sense of the continuity in things, in the world and in man's collective life. This sense of continuity-call it "living in the whole," the social conscience, or simply the will to brotherhood-is of course no new thing, either in the world or in literature. The discovery by Adam and Eve that there was a certain rewarding solidarity even in the sharing of sin and fear must have been a comparatively recent development of the social intuition. Yet that intuition has entered, it seems to us, upon a definably new phase, not dating indeed from any single event or even from any single decade, but growing without cessation ever since that memorable yesterday when our English-speaking world was suddenly made the richer by three great works of the imagination called Adam Bede, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel , and The Origin of Species . This new phase is characterized, as we understand it, by the union of the old and universal dream of brotherhood with the new scientific curiosity about the nature and the bases of society. The change is from emotional or philanthropic appreciation-that is, humanitarianism-to intellectual and impersonal appreciation. This new force has become, at its worst, sociologic muck-raking and, at its best, a new humanism. It was given scope and momentum, obviously, by the break-up of the old theology, the perception of organic unity in material creation, the rise of the social sciences, and the generally increased feeling of our joint responsibility to each other and to the whole.
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