Read it through once

I HAVE been trying recently to make out what it is that happens in people’s minds, in the heads of persons who write novels. Novelists I have read — they are mostly English — seemed to me divided into two groups: the 'materialists' and the 'spiritualists.' By materialists I mean those who take their characters from life and then proceed to tell us everything about them — their appearance, their clothes, the house they live in, the number of their servants, their bank balance, their successive illnesses, the date of their death. By spiritualists I mean those who try to present life from within — who try to give us the feeling of being in a mind, what it is like to have emotions, to see things, to remember. The distinction, of course, is not absolute. Many writers combine both methods; but my complaint is against that absolute supremacy which the materialistic method has obtained in England.