Forces in Fiction Author:Richard Burton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE LOVE MOTIVE IN MODEEN FICTION It may be said that of old a story in fiction of the English tongue meant a love story. This is a generalization that the m... more »emories of novel readers of an elder generation will justify. As love is the central fact and solar force in the life of man as lie emerges from the brute; so, naturally, it was given the role of protagonist in the human passion play. "Love," says Mr. Howells in a recent piece ./ of fiction, "has to be in every picture of life, as it has to be in every life." Peter Bayne, in 1860, defined the novel as a "domestic history" in which the incidents and evolution centered in the amatory passion. Even present day dictionaries emphasize the love theme, in describing fiction. In the fiction of the eighteenth century the love depicted was, take it by and large, stilted, narrow and unideal. But it played a very important role, nevertheless, whether it was handled in its coarser manifestations by a Fielding or treated with the comparatively prim propriety of a Jane Austen. The novel, then, of all present literary forms most reflective of modern society, has mirrored the S thoughts, feelings and acts connected with love to the exclusion, or, at least, to the comparative neglect, of other social motor forces. But in the remarkable development of fiction which has taken place during the past quarter-century—a movement beginning to crystallize into definite results with Zola at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, a change is to be chronicled in the handling and valuation of the love-motive and its successive stages. The result has suggestion and interest not only for its bearings on modern fiction but also on the life such literature portrays. In the treatment of love in the old-fashioned "goody-goody" story of English manufact...« less