Read Online Ten Novels And Their Authors by W. Somerset Maugham - Free Book Online Page A

that there is a lot of crime and immorality in the world, poverty and unhappiness, but we don’t want to read about it. Why should we make ourselves uncomfortable? It is not as though we could do anything about it. After all, there always have been richand poor in the world.’ Another sort of people have other reasons for condemning the realist. They admit that there are vice and wickedness in the world, cruelty and oppression; but, they ask, is this proper matter for fiction? Is it well that the young should read about things which their elders know, but deplore, and may they not be corrupted by reading stories which are suggestive if not actually obscene? Surely fiction is better employed in showing how much beauty, kindness, self-sacrifice, generosity and heroism there is in the world. The answer the realist makes is that he is interested in telling the truth, as he sees it, about the world he has come in contact with. He does not believe in the unalloyed goodness of human beings; he thinks them a mixture of good and bad; and he is tolerant to idiosyncrasies of human nature which conventional morality reprobates, but which he accepts as human, natural, and therefore to be palliated. He hopes that he depicts the good in his characters as faithfully as the bad in them, and it is not his fault if his readers are more interested in their vices than in their virtues. That is a curious trait in the human animal for which he cannot be held responsible. If, however, he is honest with himself, he will admit that vice can be painted in colours that glow, whereas virtue seems to bear a hue that is somewhat dun. If you asked him how he could defend himself against the charge of corrupting the young, he would answer that it is very well for the young to learn what sort of a world it is that they will have to cope with. The result may be disastrous if they expect too much. If the realist can teach them to expect little from others; to realise from the beginning that each one’s main interest is in himself; if he can teach them that, in some way or other, they will have to pay for everything they get, be it place, fortune, honour, love, reputation; and that a great part of wisdom is not to pay for anything more than it is worth, he will have done more than all the pedagogues and preachers to enable them to make the best of thisdifficult business of living. He will add, however, that he is not a pedagogue or a preacher, but, he hopes, an artist.

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Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice
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    The events of Jane Austen’s life can be told very briefly. The Austens were an old family whose fortunes, like those of many of the greatest families in England, had been founded on the wool trade, which was at one time the country’s staple industry; and having made money, again like others of greater importance, they had bought land and so, in course of time, joined the ranks of the landed gentry. But the branch of the family to which Jane Austen belonged seems to have inherited very little of such wealth as its other members possessed. It had come down in the world. Jane’s father, George Austen, was the son of William Austen, a surgeon of Tonbridge, a profession which at the beginning of the eighteenth century was regarded no more highly than the attorney’s; and, as we know from Persuasion , even in Jane Austen’s day an attorney was a person of no social consequence. It shocks Lady Russell, ‘the widow only of a knight’, that Miss Elliot, the daughter of a baronet, should have social relations with Mrs. Clay, daughter of an attorney, ‘who ought to have been nothing to her but the object of distant civility.’ William Austen, the surgeon, died early, and his brother, Francis Austen, sent the orphaned boy to Tonbridge School and afterwards to St. John’s College,Oxford. These facts I learn from Dr. R. W. Chapman’s Clark Lectures, which he has published under the title Jane Austen Facts and Problems . For all that follows I am