Dr. Ravindra Kumar Singh
Humanities
Janurary 2022
Every important novelist has been deeply concerned with the relationship between novel and morality. Henry James, a great imaginative novelist and critic has discussed the nature of this relationship at the end of his classic essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884). He dwelt on it at great length in his critical essays on French and English writers. In his prefaces, too, he brilliantly examined the entire question critically. He pointed out how it was a moot question that bothered his artistic imagination. By coupling this question with the artistic sense, James introduced “modern moral consciousness into the Victorian arena” (Novel, 114). After James, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster also grappled with the question and observed that a novelist is not a didactic artist. His aim is not to deliver a discourse on ethical education. In fact, the question of morality is inseparably interlinked with the artist’s consciousness. That is why, Henry James observed in his characteristic way:
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© Airo Journals 2021
