_Thomas Hill Green_

_An Estimate of The Value and Influence

Of

Works of Fiction In Modern Times_

_Edited With Introduction and Notes

By

Fred Newton Scott

Professor of Rhetoric in the University of Michigan_

_George Wahr Ann Arbor Michigan 1911_

COPYRIGHT

FRED NEWTON SCOTT

1911

THE ANN ARBOR PRESS ANN ARBOR, MICH.

PREFACE

_For a good many years I have used this essay of Green's with an advanced class in the theory of prose fiction. It has worked well. It always arouses discussion, and in doing so it has the great virtue that it imperiously leads the argument away from superficialities and centers it upon fundamentals. Its service as a stimulus to high thinking cannot easily be overestimated. For any student, and especially for one who has known only the unidea'd criticism of fiction so popular today, it is a fine thing to come in contact with a high-minded, sturdy, and uncompromising thinker such as Green is. As Green says of the hearer of tragedy,_ "He bears about him, for a time at least, among the rank vapors of the earth, something of the freshness and fragrance of the higher air." _I trust that this reprint, by making the essay more easily accessible than it has been heretofore, will help to raise the grade of student thought and taste and criticism._

F. N. S. _University of Michigan December 1, 1910._

CONTENTS.

PAGE Introduction 9 I. PRINCIPLES OF ART 19 a. Epic, Drama, and Novel 19 b. Imitation vs. Art 21 c. Nature the Creation of Thought 22 d. The 'Outward' aspect of Nature 23 e. Conquest of Nature by Art 24 f. The Artist as Idealizer 26 g. The Epic 27 h. Tragedy as Purifier of the Passions 29 i. Tragedy the Elevation of Life 33 j. Conditions Favorable to Tragedy 34 II. THE NOVEL AN INFERIOR FORM OF ART 35 a. Beginnings of the Novel 35 b. Characteristics of the _Spectator_ 36 c. The Modern Novel a Reflection of Ordinary Life 38 d. Naturalism vs. Idealism 43 e. Tragedy and the Novel 44 f. The Epic and the Novel 47 g. Poetry and Prose 49 h. The Novel an Incomplete Presentation of Life 52 i. Prudence the Novelist's Highest Morality 54 j. Evil Effects of Novel-reading 56 III. TRUE FUNCTION OF THE NOVEL 60 a. A Widener of Experience 60 b. An Expander of Sympathies 63 c. A Creator of Public Sentiment 69 d. A Leveller of Intellects 69

Table of contents (by pages)

• 1: An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of
• 2: When Jowett was made Master of Balliol
• 3: He was a neo Kantian as well as a neo Hegelian
• 4: Four lectures on 'The English Commonwealth'
• 5: Is modified in becoming communicable
• 6: The outward aspect of nature 4
• 7: Is more than an imitator of imitations
• 8: In collision with an overruling power
• 9: For the tragedian creates not passions but men
• 10: Tragedy the elevation of life 9
• 11: Let the adventures of the fictitious biography
• 12: If Addison had written a novel
• 13: An artist indeed the novelist is
• 14: We may observe man's actions like other phenomena
• 15: The only consistent moral of the consistent novel
• 16: To which the epic poet raises us
• 17: Purified from personal desires
• 18: The representation itself is incomplete
• 19: Amid the fretful stir Unprofitable
• 20: But the vulgar reader of our comic novelists
• 21: The fictitious expansion to the personal
• 22: It gathers up manifold experiences
• 23: The moral of Fielding's novels
• 24: He helps to level intellects as well as situations
• 25: The higher seem proportionately to sink
• 26: He idealises enough to make us feel pleasure or pain
• 27: And Duerer than by the Italians
• 28: Presupposes a prosaically ordered reality