I

Constitution, or even the Women’s Movement? I say “even the Women’s Movement” because there happened to be a close association between fiction in England and that movement during the nineteenth century⁠—a connection so close that it has misled some critics into thinking it an organic connection. As women bettered their position the novel, they asserted, became better too. Quite wrong. A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver⁠—in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel’s success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter. Empires fall, votes are accorded, but to those people writing in the circular room it is the feel of the pen between their fingers that matters most. They may decide to write a novel upon the French or the Russian Revolution, but memories, associations, passions, rise up and cloud their objectivity, so that at the close, when they reread, someone else seems to have been holding their pen and to have relegated their theme to the background. That “someone else” is their self no doubt, but not the self that is so active in time and lives under George IV or V . All through history writers while writing have felt more or less the same. They have entered a common state which it is convenient to call inspiration, and having regard to that state, we may say that History develops, Art stands still.