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CRITICISM AND FICTION
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CRITICISM
AND FICTION
BY
W. D. HOWELLS
NEW YORK /
HARPER AND BROTHERS
MDCCCXCII
Copyright, 1891, by Hakpek & Bkothers.
A.II rights reaened.
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CRITICISM AND FICTION
;^:g^(Sgs.(^HE question of a final crite- rion for the appreciation of art is one that perpetually recurs to those interested in any sort of aesthetic endeav- or. Mr. John Addington Symonds, in a chapter of The Renaissance in Italy treat- •ng of the Bolognese school of painting, which once had so great cry, and was T'aunted the supreme exemplar of the j^rand style, but which he now believes iillen into lasting contempt for its empti- ress and soullessness, seeks to determine whether there can be an enduring crite- rion or not ; and his conclusion is applica- ble to literature as to the other arts. " Our liope," he says, " with regard to the unity of taste in the future then is, that all senti- mental or academical seekings after the
ideal having been abandoned, momentary theories founded upon idiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, and noth- ing accepted but what is solid and posi- tive, the scientific spirit shall make men progressively more and more conscious of these bleibende Verhaltnisse, more and more capable of living in the whole ; also, that in proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shalf come to comprehend with more instinct- ive certitude what is simple, natural, and honest, welcoming with gladness all ar-^r tistic products that exhibit these quali-I ties. The perception of the enlightenedl man will then be the task of a health)^ person who has made himself acquainted; with the laws of evolution in art and in) society, and is able to test the excellence! of work in any stage from immaturity tc). decadence by discerning what there is o| truth, sincerity, and natural vigor in it." .
I
[|HAT is to say, as I under- stand, that moods and tastes and fashions change ; people fancy now this and now that ; but what is unpretentious and what is true is always beautiful and good, and nothing else is so. This is not saying that fantastic and monstrous and artificial things do not please ; everybody knows that they do please immensely for a time, and then, after the lapse of a much longer time, they have the charm of the rococo. Nothing is more curious than the charm that fashion has. Fashion in women's dress, almost every fashion, is somehow delightful, else it would never have been the fashion ; but if any one will look through a collection of old fash- ion plates, he must own that most fash- ions have been ugly. A few, which could be readily instanced, have been very pret-
ty, and even beautiful, but it is doubtful if these have pleased the greatest num- ber of people. The ugly delights as well as the beautiful, and not merely because the ugly in fashion is associated with the young loveliness of the women who wear the ugly fashions, and wins a grace from them, not because the vast majority of mankind are tasteless, but for some cause that is not perhaps ascertainable. It is quite as likely to return in the fashions of our clothes and houses and furniture, and poetry and fiction and painting, as the beautiful, and it may be from an instinct- ive or a reasoned sense of this that some of the extreme naturalists have refused to make the old discrimination against it, or to regard the ugly as any less worthy of celebration in art than the beautiful; some of them, in fact, seem to regard it as rather more worthy, if anything. Pos- sibly there is no absolutely ugly, no abso- lutely beautiful ; or possibly the ugly con- tains always an element of the beautiful better adapted to the general apprecia- tion than the more perfectly beautiful. This is a somewhat discouraging conject-
ure, but I offer it for no more than it is worth ; and I do not pin my faith to the saying of one whom I heard denying, the other day, that a thing of beauty was a joy forever. He contended that Keats s Hne should have read, "Some things of beauty are sometimes joys forever," and that any assertion beyond this was too hazardous.
II
SHOULD, indeed, prefer an- other line of Keats's, if I were to profess any formu- lated creed, and should feel much safer with his " Beauty- is Truth, Truth Beauty," than even with my friend's reformation of the more quot- ed verse. It brings us back to the solid ground taken by Mr. Symonds, which is not essentially different from that taken in the great Mr. Burke's Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful — a singularly modern book, considering how long ago it was wrote (as the great Mr. Steele would have written the participle a little longer ago), and full of a certain well- mannered and agreeable instruction. In some things it is of that droll little eigh- teenth-century world, when philosophy had got the neat little universe into the hollow of its hand, and knew just what
it was, and what it was for; but it is quite without arrogance. " As for those called critics," the author says, "they have generally sought the rule of the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among poems, pictures, engravings, stat- ues, and buildings ; but art can never give the rules that make an art. This is, I be- lieve, the reason why artists in general, and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle; they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature. Critics follow them, and there- fore can do little as guides. I can judge but poorly of anything while I measure it by no other standard than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, in nature will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and in- dustry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights."
If this should happen to be true — and it certainly commends itself to acceptance — it might portend an immediate danger
to the vested interests of criticism, only that it was written a hundred years ago ; and we shall probably have the " sagacity and industry that slights the observation " of nature long enough yet to allow most critics the time to learn some more use- ful trade than criticism as they pursue it. Nevertheless, I am in hopes that the communistic era in taste foreshadowed by Burke is approaching, and that it will occur within the lives of men now over- awed by the foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but the expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test than that of their fidel- ity to it. The time is coming, I hope, when each new author, each new artist, will be considered, not in his proportion to any other author or artist, but in his relation to the human nature, known to us all, which it is his privilege, his high duty, to interpret. " The true standard of the artist is in every man's power" already, as Burke says ; Michelangelo's " light of the piazza," the glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light on a statue; Goethe's "boys and
blackbirds " have in all ages been the real connoisseurs of berries ; but hitherto the mass of common men have been afraid to apply their own simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the beautiful. They have always cast about for the instruction of some one who pro- fessed to know better, and who browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self- distrust that ends in sophistication. They have fallen generally to the worst of this bad species, and have been " amused and misled " (how pretty that quaint old use of amuse is !) " by the false lights " of crit- ical vanity and self-righteousness. They have been taught to compare what they see and what they read, not with the things that they have observed and known, but with the things that some other artist or writer has done. Especially if they have themselves the artistic impulse in any di- rection they are taught to form them- selves, not upon life, but upon the mas- ters who became masters only by forming themselves upon life. The seeds of death are planted in them, and they can pro- duce only the still-born, the academic
They are not told to take their work into the public square and see if it seems true to the chance passer, but to test it by the work of the very men who refused and decried any other test of their own work The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unwor- thy by the stupid people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or Thack- eray's, or Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's ; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life- likeness out of them, and put the book- likeness into them. He is approached in the spirit of the wretched pedantry into which learning, much or little, always de- cays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imagined superiority, and which would say with the same confidence to the sci- entist: "I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to
describe it. Now don't waste your time and sin against culture in that way. I've got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and ex- pense out of the grasshopper in general ; in fact, it's a type. It's made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it's perfectly in- destructible. It isn't very much like a real grasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, and it's served to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. You may say that it's artificial. Well, it is artificial; but then it s ideal too ; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You'il find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them. The thing that you are proposing to do IS commonplace ; but if you say that it isn't commonplace, for the very reason that it hasn't been done before, you'll have to admit that it's photographic."
As I said, I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the com- mon, average man, who always " has the standard of the arts in his power," will
have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, be- cause it is not " simple, natural, and hon- est," because it is not like a real grass- hopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self -devot- ed, adventureful, good old romantic card- board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshop- per can have a fair field. I am in no haste to compass the end of these good people, whom I find in the mean time very amusing. It is delightful to meet one of them, either in print or out of it — some sweet elderly lady or excellent gen- tleman whose youth was pastured on the literature of thirty or forty years ago — and to witness the confidence with which they preach their favorite authors as all the law and the prophets. They have common- ly read little or nothing since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a stand- ard taken from these authors, and never
dreamed of judging it by nature; they are destitute of the documents in the case of the later writers ; they suppose that Balzac was the beginning of realism, and that Zola is its wicked end ; they are quite ignorant, but they are ready to talk you down, if you differ from them, with an assumption of knowledge sufficient for any occasion. The horror, the resent- ment, with which they receive any ques- tion of their literary saints is genuine; you descend at once very far in the mor- al and social scale, and anything short of offensive personality is too good for you; it is expressed to you that you are one to be avoided, and put down even a little lower than you have naturally fallen.
These worthy persons are not to blame ; it is part of their intellectual mission to represent the petrifaction of taste, and to preserve an image of a smaller and cruder and emptier world than we now live in, a world which was feeling its way towards the simple, the natural, the honest, but was a good deal " amused and misled " by lights now no longer mistakablc for
heavenly luminaries. They belong to a time, just passing away, when certain au- thors were considered authorities in cer- tain kinds, when they must be accepted entire and not questioned in any particu- lar. Now we are beginning to see and to say that no author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature's lips and caught her very accent. These moments are not continu- ous with any authors in the past, and they are rare with all. Therefore I am not afraid to say now that the greatest clas- sics are sometimes not at all great, and that we can profit by them only when we hold them, like our meanest contempora- ries, to a strict accounting, and verify their work by the standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the sim- ple, the natural, and the honest.
Those good people, those curious and interesting if somewhat musty back-num- bers, must always have a hero, an idol of some sort, and it is droll to find Balzac, who suffered from their sort such bitter scorn and hate for his realism while he was alive, now become a fetich in his
turn, to be shaken in the faces of those who will not blindly worship him. But it is no new thing in the history of litera- ture: whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think. At the be- ginning of the century, when romance was making the same fight against effete classicism which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism.the Italian poet Monti declared that " the romantic was the cold grave of the Beautiful," just as the realistic is now supposed to be. The romantic of that day and the real of this are in certain degree the same. Roman- ticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to lev- el every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape ff^m the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse ; and it remained for realism to assert that fidel- ity to experience and probability of mo- tive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature. It is not a new theory, but it has never before universal- ly characterized literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life in-
i6
Stead of picturing it, realism will per= ish too. Every true realist instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of over -moraliz- ing. In life he finds nothing insignifi- cant ; all tells for destiny and character ; nothing that God has made is contempti- ble. He cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing un- worthy of notice, any more than the sci- entist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry. He feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men ; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth lives. In criticism it is his busi- ness to break the images of false gods and misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly toys that many grown people would still like to play with. He cannot keep terms with Jack the Giant-killer or Puss in Boots, under any name or in any place, even when they reappear as the convict Vautrcc, or the Marquis de Mon-
trivaut, or the Sworn Thirteen Noblemen. He must say to himself that Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Bal- zac, he was Dumas ; he was not realistic, he was romantic.
Ill
lUCH a critic will not respect Balzac's good work the less for contemning his bad work. He will easily account for the bad work historically, and when he has recognized it, will trouble himself no further with it. In his view no living man is a type, but a character ; now noble, now ignoble ; now grand, now little ; complex, full of vicissitude. He will not expect Balzac to be always Balzac, and will be perhaps even more attracted to the study of him when he was trying to be Balzac than when he had become so. In Cesar Birotteau, for instance, he will be interested to note how Balzac stood at the beginning of the great things that have followed since in fiction. There is an in- teresting likeness between his work in this and Nicolas Gogol's in Dead Souls, which serves to illustrate the simultane-
'9
ity of the literary movement in men of such widely separated civilizations and conditions. Both represent their char- acters with the touch of exaggeration which typifies ; but in bringing his story to a close, Balzac employs a beneficence unknown to the Russian, and almost as universal and as apt as that which smiles upon the fortunes of the good in the Vicar of Wakefield. It is not enough to have rehabilitated Birotteau pecuniarily and socially; he must make him die trium- phantly, spectacularly, of an opportune hemorrhage, in the midst of the festivi- ties which celebrate his restoration to his old home. Before this happens, human nature has been laid under contribution right and left for acts of generosity tow- ards the righteous bankrupt; even the king sends him six thousand francs. It is very pretty ; it is touching, and brings the lump into the reader's throat ; but it is too much, and one perceives that Bal- zac lived too soon to profit by Balzac, The later men, especially the Russians, have known how to forbear the excesses of analysis, to withhold the weakly recur-
ring descriptive and caressing epithets, to let the characters suffice for them- selves. All this does not mean that Ce- sar Birotteau is not a beautiful and pa- thetic story, full of shrewdly considered knowledge of men, and of a good art struggling to free itself from self -con- sciousness. But it does mean that Bal- zac, when he wrote it, was under the bur- den of the very traditions which he has helped fiction to throw off. He felt obliged to construct a mechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moralize openly and baldly ; he permitted himself to "sympathize " with certain of his peo- ple, and to point out others for the ab- horrence of his readers. This is not so bad in him as it would be in a novelist of our day. It is simply primitive and inev- itable, and he is not to be judged by it.
IV
'N the beginning of any art even the most gifted worker must be crude in his meth- ods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we turn, say, from the purblind worshippers of Scott to Scott himself, and recognize that he often wrote a style cum- brous and diffuse ; that he was tediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved his characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary ; that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked ; that he was tiresomely descrip- tive; that on the simplest occasions he went about half a mile to express a thought that could be uttered in ten paces across lots ; and that he trusted his read- ers' intuitions so little that he was apt to
rub in his appeals to them. He was prob- ably right : the generation which he wrote for was duller than this; slower-witted, aes- thetically untrained, and in maturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention as the children of to-day. All this is not saying Scott was not a great man ; he was a great man, and a very great novelist as compared with the novelists who went before him. He can still amuse young people, but they ought to be instructed how false and how mistaken he often is, with his mediaeval ideals, his blind Jacobitism, his intense devotion to aris- tocracy and royalty ; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ig- noble, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it were the law of God ; for all which, indeed, he is not to blame as he would be if he were one of our con- temporaries. Something of this is true of another master, greater than Scott in being less romantic, and inferior in being more German, namely, the great Goethe himself. He taught us, in novels other- wise now antiquated, and always full of German clumsiness, that it was false to
good art — which is never anything but the reflection of life — to pursue and round the career of the persons introduced, whom he often allowed to appear and disappear in our knowledge as people in the actual world do. This is a lesson which the writers able to profit by it can never be too grateful for ; and it is equally a ben- efaction to readers ; but there is very lit- tle else in the conduct of the Goethean novels which is in advance of their time ; this remains almost their sole contribu- tion to the science of fiction. They are very primitive in certain characteristics, and unite with their calm, deep insight, an amusing helplessness in dramatization. "Wilhelm retired to his room, and in- dulged in the following reflections," is a mode of analysis which would not be practised nowadays; and all that fanci- fulness of nomenclature in Wilhelm Meis- ter is very drolly sentimental and feeble. The adventures with robbers seem as if dreamed out of books of chivalry, and the tendency to allegorization affects one like an endeavor on the author's part to escape from the unrealities which he must
have felt harassingly, German as he was. Mixed up with the shadows and illusions are honest, wholesome, every-day people, who have the air of wandering homeless- ly about among them, without definite direction ; and the mists are full of a lu- minosity which, in spite of them, we know for common-sense and poetry. What is useful in any review of Goethe's methods is the recognition of the fact, which it must bring, that the greatest master can- not produce a masterpiece in a new kind. The novel was too recently invented in Goethe's day not to be, even in his hands, full of the faults of apprentice work.
>N fact, a great master may sin against the " modesty of nature " in many ways, and I have felt this painfully in reading Balzac's romance — it is not worthy the name of novel — lA Pere Goriot, which is full of a malarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art. After that exquisitely careful and truth- ful setting of his story in the shabby boarding-house, he fills the scene with figures jerked about by the exaggerated passions and motives of the stage. We cannot have a cynic reasonably wicked, disagreeable, egoistic ; we must have a lurid villain of melodrama, a disguised convict, with a vast criminal organiza- tion at his command, and
••So dyW double red"
in deed and purpose that he lights up the faces of the horrified spectators with his
glare. A father fond of unworthy chil- dren, and leading a life of self-denial for their sake, as may probably and pathet- ically be, is not enough ; there must be an imbecile, trembling dotard, willing to promote even the liaisons of his daugh- ters to give them happiness and to teach the sublimity of the paternal instinct. The hero cannot sufficiently be a selfish young fellow, with alternating impulses of greed and generosity ; he must su- perfluously intend a career of iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by noth- ing but the most cataclysmal interposi- tions. It can be said that without such personages the plot could not be trans- acted ; but so much the worse for the plot. Such a plot had no business to be ; and while actions so unnatural are imag- ined, no mastery can save fiction from contempt with those who really think about it. To Balzac it can be forgiven, not only because in his better mood he gave us such biographies as Eugenie Gran- det, but because he wrote at a time when fiction was just beginning to verify the externals of life, to portray faithfully the
outside of men and things. It was still held that in order to interest the reader the characters must be moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to be taught that "heroes" and "heroines" existed all around us, and that these abnormal beings needed only to be discovered in their several humble disguises, and then we should see every-day people actuated by the fine frenzy of the creatures of the poets. How false that notion was few but the critics, who are apt to be rather belated, need now be told. Some of these poor fellows, however, still contend that it ought to be done, and that human feelings and motives, as God made them and as men know them, are not good enough for novel-readers.
This is more explicable than would ap- pear at first glance. The critics — and in speaking of them one always modestly leaves one's self out of the count for some reason — when they are not elders ossified in tradition, are apt to be young people, and young people are necessarily conserv- ative in their tastes and theories. They have the tastes and theories of their in-
28
structors, who perhaps caught the truth of their day, but whose routine Hfe has been aHen to any other truth. There is probably no chair of Hterature in this country from which the principles now shaping the literary expression of every civilized people are not denounced and confounded with certain objectionable French novels, or which teaches young men anything of the universal impulse which has given us the work, not only of Zola, but of Tourgueneff and Tolstoi in Russia, of Bjornson and Ibsen in Nor- way, of Valdes and Galdos m Spain, of Verga in Italy. Till these younger crit- ics have learned to think as well as to write for themselves they will persist in heaving a sigh, more and more perfunc- tory, for the truth as it was in Sir Wal- ter, and as it was in Dickens and in Haw- thorne. Presently all will have been changed ; they will have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree ; and when it shall have become the old truth, they will perhaps see it all.
VI
'N the mean time the average of criticism is not wholly- bad with us. To be sure, the critic sometimes appears in the panoply of the savages whom we have supplanted on this conti- nent; and it is hard to believe that his use of the tomahawk and the scalping- knife is a form of conservative surgery. It is still his conception of his office that he should assail with obloquy those who differ with him in matters of taste or opinion ; that he must be rude with those he does not like, and that he ought to do them violence as a proof of his superior- ity. It is too largely his superstition that because he likes a thing it is good, and because he dislikes a thing it is bad ; the reverse is quite possibly the case, but he is yet indefinitely far from knowing that in affairs of taste his personal preference en-
ters very little. Commonly he has no principles, but only an assortment of pre- possessions for and against ; and this oth- erwise very perfect character is sometimes uncandid to the verge of dishonesty. He seems not to mind misstating the position of any one he supposes himself to disagree with, and then attacking him for what he never said, or even implied ; the critic thinks this is droll, and appears not to suspect that it is immoral. He is not tolerant ; he thinks it a virtue to be in- tolerant ; it is hard for him to understand that the same thing may be admirable at one time and deplorable at another ; and that it is really his business to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise^ or blame them ; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in his trampling on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as in the botanist's grind- ing a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty. He does not conceive that it is his business rather to identify the species and then explain how and
where the specimen is imperfect and ir- regular. If he could once acquire this simple idea of his duty he would be much more agreeable company than he now is, and a more useful member of society ; though I hope I am not yet saying that he is not extremely delightful as he is, and wholly indispensable. He is certain- ly more ignorant than malevolent ; and considering the hard conditions under which he works, his necessity of writing hurriedly from an imperfect examination of far more books, on a greater variety of subjects, than he can even hope to read, the average American critic — the ordi- nary critic of commerce, so to speak — is very well indeed. Collectively he is more than this ; for the joint effect of our crit- icism is the pretty thorough appreciation of any book submitted to it.
VII
HE misfortune rather than the fault of our individual critic is that he is the heir of the false theory and bad man- ners of the English school. The theory of that school has apparently been that almost any person of glib and lively expression is competent to write of almost any branch of polite literature ; its manners are what we know. The Ameri- can, whom it has largely formed, is by nat- ure very glib and very lively, and com- monly his criticism, viewed as imaginative work, is more agreeable than that of the Englishman ; but it is, like the art of both countries, apt to be amateurish. In some degree our authors have freed themselves from English models ; they have gained some notion of the more serious work of the Continent; but it is still the ambi-
33
tion of the American critic to write like the Enghsh critic, to show his wit if not his learning, to strive to eclipse the au- thor under review rather than illustrate him. He has not yet caught on to the fact that it is really no part of his busi- ness to display himself, but that it is altogether his duty to place a book in such a light that the reader shall know its class, its function, its character. The vast good-nature of our people preserves us from the worst effects of this criticism without principles. Our critic, at his lowest, is rarely malignant ; and when he is rude or untruthful, it is mostly without truculence ; I suspect that he is often of- fensive without knowing that he is so. If he loves a shining mark because a fair shot with mud shows best on that kind of target, it is for the most part from a boyish mischievousness quite innocent of malice. Now and then he acts simply under instruction from higher authority, and denounces because it is the tradition of his publication to do so. In other cases the critic is obliged to support his journal's repute for severity, or for wit,
34
or for morality, though he may himself be entirely amiable, dull, and wicked ; this necessity more or less warps his verdicts. The worst is that he is personal, per- haps because it is so easy and so natural to be personal, and so instantly attractive. In this respect our criticism has not im- proved from the accession of numbers of ladies to its ranks, though we still hope so much from women in our poli- tics when they shall come to vote. They have come to write, and with the effect to increase the amount of little-digging, which rather superabounded in our liter- ary criticism before. They " know what they like" — that pernicious maxim of those who do not know what they ought to like — and they pass readily from cen- suring an author's performance to cen- suring him. They bring a lively stock of misapprehensions and prejudices to their work; they would rather have heard about than known about a book; and they take kindly to the public wish to be amused rather than edified. But neither have they so much harm in them : they, too, are more ignorant than malevolent.
VIII
UR criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the crit- ic to learn from an author, and his readiness to mistrust him. A writer passes his whole life in fitting himself for a certain kind of performance; the critic does not ask why, or whether the performance is good or bad, but if he does not like the kind, he instructs the writer to go off and do some other sort of thing — usually the sort that has been done already, and done sufficiently. If he could once understand that a man who has written the book he dislikes, probably knows infinitely more about its kind and his ovm fitness for do- ing it than any one else, the critic might learn something, and might help the read- er to learn ; but by putting himself in a false position, a position of superiority, he is of no use. He ought, in the first place,
to cast prayerfully about for humility, and especially to beseech the powers to pre- serve him from the sterility of arrogance and the deadness of contempt, for out of these nothing can proceed. He is not to suppose that an author has committed an offence against him by writing the kind of book he does not like ; he will be far more profitably employed on behalf of the reader in finding out whether they had better not both like it. Let him conceive of an author as not in any wise on trial before him, but as a reflection of this or that aspect of life, and he will not be tempted to browbeat him or bully him.
The critic need not.be impolite even to the youngest and weakest author. A little courtesy, or a good deal, a constant perception of the fact that a book is not a misdemeanor, a decent self-respect that must forbid the civilized man the savage pleasure of wounding, are what I would ask for our criticism, as something which will add sensibly to its present lustre.
IX
WOULD have my fellows- critics consider what they are really in the world for. It is not, apparently, for a great deal, because their only excuse for being is that somebody else has been. The critic exists because the author first existed. If books failed to appear, the critic must disappear, like the poor aphis or the lowly caterpillar in the absence of vegetation. These in- sects may both suppose that they have something to do with the creation of vegetation ; and the critic may suppose that he has something to do with the creation of literature; but a very little reasoning ought to convince alike aphis, caterpillar, and critic that they are mis- taken. The critic — to drop the others — must perceive, if he will question himself more carefully, that his office is mainly
j( to ascertain facts and traits of literature, not to invent or denounce them ; to dis- cover principles, not to establish them; to report, not to create.
It is so much easier to say that you like this or dislike that, than to tell why one thing is, or where another thing comes from, that many flourishing critics will have to go out of business altogether if the scientific method comes in, for then the critic will have to know some- thing beside his own mind, which is often but a narrow field. He will have to know something of the laws of that mind, and of its generic history.
The history of all literature shows that even with the youngest and weakest au- thor criticism is quite powerless against his will to do his own work in his own way ; and if this is the case in the green wood, how much more in the dry! It has been thought by the sentimentalist that criticism, if it cannot cure, can at least kill, and Keats was long alleged in proof of its efficacy in this sort. But crit- icism neither cured nor killed Keats, as we all now very well know. It wound-
ed, it cruelly hurt him, no doubt ; and it is always in the power of the critic to give pain to the author — the meanest critic to the greatest author — for no one can help feeling a rudeness. But every literary movement has been violently op- posed at the start, and yet never stayed in the least, or arrested, by criticism; every author has been condemned for his virtues, but in no wise changed by it. In the beginning he reads the critics ; but presently perceiving that he alone makes or mars himself, and that they have no instruction for him, he mostly leaves off reading them, though he is always glad of their kindness or grieved by their harshness when he chances upon it. This, I believe, is the general experience, modified, of course, by exceptions.
Then, are we critics of no use in the world ? I should not like to think that, though I am not quite ready to define our use. More than one sober thmker is inclining at present to suspect that aes- thetically or specifically we are of no use, and that we are only useful historically ; that we may register laws, but not enact
40
them. I am not quite prepared to admit that aesthetic criticism is useless, though in view of its futihty in any given in- stance it is hard to deny that it is so. It certainly seems as useless against a book that strikes the popular fancy, and pros- pers on in spite of condemnation by the best critics, as it is against a book which does not generally please, and which no critical favor can make acceptable. This is so common a phenomenon that I won- der it has never hitherto suggested to criticism that its point of view was al- together mistaken, and that it was really necessary to judge books not as dead things, but as living things — things which have an influence and a power irrespective of beauty and wisdom, and merely as ex- pressions of actuality in thought and feel- ing. Perhaps criticism has a cumulative and final effect; perhaps it does some good we do not know of. It apparently does not affect the author directly, but it may reach him through the reader. It may in some cases enlarge or diminish his audience for a while, until he has thor- oughly measured and tested his own
powers. If criticism is to affect literature at all, it must be through the writers who have newly left the starting-point, and are reasonably uncertain of the race, not with those who have won it again and again in their own way. I doubt if it can do more than that ; but if it can do that I will admit that it may be the toad of adversity, ugly and venomous, from whose unpleasant brow he is to snatch the precious jewel of lasting fame.
I employ this figure in all humility, and I conjure our fraternity to ask them- selves, without rancor or offence, whether I am right or not. In this quest let us get together all the modesty and candor and impartiality we can ; for if we should happen to discover a good reason for continuing to exist, these qualities will be of more use to us than any others in examining the work of people who really produce something.
OMETIMES it has seemed to me that the crudest ex- pression of any creative art is better than the finest comment upon it. I have sometimes suspected that more thinking, more feeling certainly, goes to the crea- tion of a poor novel than to the produc- tion of a brilliant criticism ; and if any novel of our time fails to live a hundred years, will any censure of it live ? Who can endure to read old reviews? One can hardly read them if they are in praise of one's own books.
The author neglected or overlooked need not despair for that reason, if he will reflect that criticism can neither make nor unmake authors; that there have not been greater books since criti- cism became an art than there were be-
fore; that in fact the greatest books seem to have come much earlier.
That which criticism seems most cer- tainly to have done is to have put a liter- ary consciousness into books unfelt in the early masterpieces, but unfelt now only in the books of men whose lives have been passed in activities, who have been used to employing language as they would have employed any implement, to effect an object, who have regarded a thing to be said as in no wise different from a thing to be done. In this sort I have seen no modern book so unconscious as General Grant's Personal Memoirs. The author's one end and aim is to get the facts out in words. He does not cast about for phrases, but takes the word, whatever it is, that will best give his meaning, as if it were a man or a force of men for the accomplishment of a feat of arms. There is not a moment wasted in preening and prettifying, after the fash- ion of literary men ; there is no thought of style, and so the style is good as it is in the Book of Chronicles, as it is in the Pilgrim's Progress, with a peculiar, al-
most plebeian, plainness at times. There is no more attempt at dramatic effect than there is at ceremonious pose ; things happen in that tale of a mighty war as they happened in the mighty war itself, without setting, without artificial reliefs one after another, as if they were all of one quality and degree. Judgments are delivered with the same unimposing quiet ; no awe surrounds the tribunal ex- cept that which comes from the weight and justice of the opinions ; it is always an unaffected, unpretentious man who is talking; and throughout he prefers to wear the uniform of a private, with noth- ing of the general about him but the shoulder-straps, which he sometimes for- gets.
XI
lANON FARRAR'S opinions of literary criticism are very much to my liking, perhaps because when I read them I found them so like my own, already delivered in print. He tells the critics that " they are in no sense the legis- lators of literature, barely even its judges and police ; " and he reminds them of Mr. Ruskin's saying that " a bad critic is prob- ably the most mischievous person in the world," though a sense of their relative proportion to the whole of life would per- haps acquit the worst among them of this extreme of culpability. A bad critic is as bad a thing as can be, but, after all, his mischief does not carry very far. Other- wise it would be mainly the conventional books and not the original books which would survive ; for the censor who imag- ines himself a law-giver can give law
46
( only to the imitative and never to the I creative mind. Criticism has condemned whatever was, from time to time, fresh and vital in literature ; it has always fought the new good thing in behalf of the old good thing; it has invariably fos- tered and encouraged the tame, the trite, the negative. Yet upon the whole it is the native, the novel, the positive that has survived in literature. Whereas, if bad criticism were the most mischievous thing in the world, in the full implica- tion of the words, it must have been the tame, the trite, the negative, that sur- vived.
Bad criticism is mischievous enough, however; and I think that much if not most current criticism as practised among the English and Americans is bad, is falsely principled, and is condi- tioned in evil. It is falsely principled because it is unprincipled, or without principles ; and it is conditioned in evil because it is almost wholly anonymous. At the best its opinions are not con- clusions from certain easily verifiable principles, but are effects from the wor-
ship of certain models. They are in so far quite worthless, for it is the very nature of things that the original mind cannot conform to models ; it has its norm within itself; it can work only in its own way, and by its self-given laws. Criticism does not inquire whether a work is true to life, but tacitly or explic- itly compares it with models, and tests it by them. If literary art travelled by any such road as criticism would have it go, it would travel in a vicious circle, and would arrive only at the point of depart- ure. Yet this is the course that criticism must always prescribe when it attempts to give laws. Being itself artificial it cannot conceive of the original except as the abnormal. It must altogether recon- ceive its office before it can be of use to literature. It must reduce this to the business of observing, recording, and comparing; to analyzing the material before it, and then synthetizing its im- pressions. Even then, it is not too much to say that literature as an art could get on perfectly well without it. Just as many good novels, poems, plays, essays,
48
sketches, would be written if there were no such thing as criticism in the literary world, and no more bad ones.
But it will be long before criticism ceas- es to imagine itself a controlling force, to give itself airs of sovereignty, and to issue decrees. As it exists it is mostly a mischief, though not the greatest mis- chief; but it may be greatly ameliorated in character and softened in manner by the total abolition of anonymity.
I think it would be safe to say that in no other relation of life is so much bru- tality permitted by civilized society as in the criticism of literature and the arts. Canon Farrar is quite right in reproach- ing literary criticism with the uncandor of judging an author without reference to his aims ; with pursuing certain writ- ers from spite and prejudice, and mere habit ; with misrepresenting a book by quoting a phrase or passage apart from the context ; with magnifying misprints and careless expressions into important faults; with abusing an author for his opinions; with base and personal mo- tives. Every writer of experience knows
49
that certain critical journals will con- demn his work without regard to its quality, even if it has never been his fort- une to learn, as one author did from a repentant reviewer, that in a journal pre- tending to literary taste his books were given out for review with the caution, " Remember that the Clarion is opposed to Soandso's books." Any author is in luck if he escapes without personal abuse; contempt and impertinence as an author no one will escape.
The final conclusion appears to be that the man, or even the young lady, who is given a gun, and told to shoot at some passer from behind a hedge, is placed in circumstances of temptation almost too strong for human nature.
4
XII
■S I have already intimated, I doubt the more lasting effects of unjust criticism. It is no part of my belief that Keats's fame was long delayed by it, or Wordsworth's, or Browning's. Some- thing unwonted, unexpected, in the qual- ity of each delayed his recognition ; each was not only a poet, he was a revolution, a new order of things, to which the crit- ical perceptions and habitudes had pain- fully to adjust themselves. But I have no question of the gross and stupid in- justice with which these great men were used, and of the barbarization of the pub- lic mind by the sight of the wrong in- flicted on them with impunity. This sav- age condition still persists in the toler- ation of anonymous criticism, an abuse that ought to be as extinct as the tort- ure of witnesses. It is hard enough to
treat a fellow-author with respect even when one has to address him, name to name, upon the same level, in plain day; swooping down upon him in the dark, panoplied in the authority of a great journal, it is impossible.
Every now and then some idealist comes forward and declares that you should say nothing in criticism of a man's book which you would not say of it to his face. But I am afraid this is asking too much. I am afraid it would put an end to all criticism ; and that if it were practised literature would be left to purify itself. I have no doubt literature would do this ; but in such a state of things there would be no provision for the crit- ics. We ought not to destroy critics, we ought to reform them, or rather trans- form them, or turn them from the as- sumption of authority to a realization of their true function in the civilized state. They are no worse at heart, probably, than many others, and there are prob- ably good husbands and tender fathers, loving daughters and careful mothers, among them. I venture to suppose this
because I have read that Monsieur de Paris is an excellent person in all the re- lations of private life, and is extremely anxious to conceal his dreadful occupa- tion from those dear to him.
It is evident to any student of human nature that the critic who is obliged to sign his review will be more careful of an author's feelings than he would if he could intangibly and invisibly deal with him as the representative of a great jour- nal. He will be loath to have his name connected with those perversions and misstatements of an author's meaning in which the critic now indulges without danger of being turned out of honest company. He will be in some degree forced to be fair and just with a book he dislikes ; he will not wish to misrepresent it when his sin can be traced directly to him in person ; he will not be willing to voice the prejudice of a journal which is " opposed to the books " of this or that author ; and the journal itself, when it is no longer responsible for the behavior of its critic, may find it interesting and profitable to give to an author his innings
when he feels wronged by a reviewer and desires to right himself; it may even be eager to offer him the opportunity. We shall then, perhaps, frequently witness the spectacle of authors turning upon their reviewers, and improving their manners and morals by confronting them in public with the errors they may now commit with impunity. Many an author smarts under injuries and indignities which he might resent to the advantage of litera- ture and civilization, if he were not afraid of being browbeaten by the journal whose nameless critic has outraged him.
The public is now of opinion that it involves loss of dignity to creative tal- ent to try to right itself if wronged, but here we are without the requisite sta- tistics. Creative talent may come off with all the dignity it went in with, and it may accomplish a very good work in demolishing criticism.
In any other relation of life the man who thinks himself wronged tries to right himself, violently, if he is a mistaken man, and lawfully if he is a wise man or a rich one, which is practically the same
thing. But the author, dramatist, paint- er, sculptor, whose book, play, picture, statue, has been unfairly dealt with, as he believes, must make no effort to right himself with the public; he must bear his wrong in silence ; he is even expected to grin and bear it, as if it were funny. Everybody understands that it is not fun- ny to him, not in the least funny, but everybody says that he cannot make an effort to get the public to take his point of view without loss of dignity. This is very odd, but it is the fact, and I suppose that it comes from the feel- ing that the author, dramatist, painter, sculptor, has already said the best he can for his side in his book, play, pict- ure, statue. This is partly true, and yet if he wishes to add something more to prove the critic wrong, we do not see how his attempt to do so should involve loss of dignity. The public, which is so jealous for his dignity, does not otherwise use him as if he were a very great and invaluable creature ; if he fails, it lets him starve like any one else. I should say that he lost dignity or not
55
as he behaved, in his effort to right him- self, with petulance or with principle. If he betrayed a wounded vanity, if he im- pugned the motives and accused the lives of his critics, I should certainly feel that he was losing dignity; but if he tem- perately examined their theories, and tried to show where they were mistaken, I think he would not only gain dignity, but would perform a very useful work.
The temptation for a critic to cut fan- tastic tricks before high heaven in the full light of day is great enough, and for his own sake he should be stripped of the shelter of the dark. Even then it will be long before the evolution is com- plete, and we have the gentle, dispassion- ate, scientific student of current literature who never imagines that he can direct lit- erature, but realizes that it is a plant which springs from the nature of a people, and draws its forces from their life, that its root is in their character, and that it takes form from their will and taste.
XIII
'N fine, I would beseech the literary critics of our coun- try to disabuse themselves of the mischievous notion that they are essential to the pro- gress of literature in the way critics have vainly imagined. Canon Farrar confesses that with the best will in the world to pro- fit by the many criticisms of his books, he has never profited in the least by any of them ; and this is almost the universal experience of authors. It is not always the fault of the critics. They sometimes deal honestly and fairly by a book, and not so often they deal adequately. But in making a book, if it is at all a good book, the author has learned all that is knowable about it, and every strong point and every weak point in it, far more accu- rately than any one else can possibly learn them. He has learned to do better
than well for the future; but if his book is bad, he cannot be taught anything about it from the outside. It will perish ; and if he has not the root of literature in him, he will perish as an author with it.
But what is it that gives tendency in art, then ? What is it makes people like this at one time, and that at another,? Above all, what makes a better fashion change for a worse; how can the ugly come to be preferred to the beautiful ; in other words, how can an art decay ?
This question came up in my mind lately with regard to English fiction and its form, or rather its formlessness. How, for instance, could people who had once known the simple verity, the refined per- fection of Miss Austen, enjoy anything less refined and less perfect ?
With her example before them, why should not English novelists have gone on writing simply, honestly, artistically, ever after.? One would think it must have been impossible for them to do otherwise, if one did not remember, say, the lamentable behavior of the actors who support Mr. Jefferson, and their the-
58
atricality in the very presence of his beau- tiful naturalness. It is very difficult, that simplicity, and nothing is so hard as to be honest, as the reader, if he has ever happened to try it, must know. " The big bow-wow I can do myself, like any one going," said Scott, but he owned that the exquisite touch of Miss Austen was de- nied him ; and it seems certainly to have been denied in greater or less measure to all her successors. But though reading and writing come by nature, as Dogberry justly said, a taste in them may be culti- vated, or once cultivated, it may be pre- served ; and why was it not so among those poor islanders ? One does not ask such things in order to be at the pains of answering them one's self, but with the hope that some one else will take the trouble to do so, and I propose to be rather a silent partner in the enterprise, which I shall leave mainly to Seiior Armando Palacio Valdes. This delight- ful author will, however, only be able to answer my question indirectly from the essay on fiction with which he prefaces one of his novels, the charming story of
59
The Sister of San Sulphizo, and I shall have some little labor in fitting his saws to my instances. It is an essay which I wish every one intending to read, or even to write, a novel, might acquaint himself with ; for it contains some of the best and clearest things which have been said of the art of fiction in a time when nearly all who practise it have turned to talk about it.
Seiior Valdes is a realist, but a realist according to his own conception of real- ism ; and he has some words of just cen- sure for the French naturalists, whom he finds unnecessarily, and suspects of being sometimes even mercenarily, nasty. He sees the wide diflference that passes be- tween this naturalism and the realism of the English and Spanish ; and he goes somewhat further than I should go in condemning it. "The French natural- ism represents only a moment, and an insignificant part of life. ... It is charac- terized by sadness and narrowness. The prototype of this literature is the Madame Bovary of Flaubert. I am an admirer of this novelist, and especially of this novel ;
but often in thinking of it I have said, How dreary would literature be if it were no more than this ! There is something antipathetic and gloomy and limited in it, as there is in modern French life;" but this seems to me exactly the best possible reason for its being. I believe with Seiior Valdes that " no literature can live long without joy," not because of its mistaken aesthetics, however, but be- cause no civilization can live long with- out joy. The expression of French life will change when French life changes ; and French naturalism is better at its worst than French unnaturalism at its best. "No one," as Sefior Valdes truly says, " can rise from the perusal of a nat- uralistic book . . . without a vivid desire to escape " from the wretched world de- picted in it, " and a purpose, more or less vague, of helping to better the lot and morally elevate the abject beings who figure in it. Naturalistic art, then, is not immoral in itself, for then it would not merit the name of art ; for though it is not the business of art to preach moral- ity, still I think that, resting on a divine
6i
and spiritual principle, like the idea of the beautiful, it is perforce moral. I hold much more immoral other books which, under a glamour of something spiritual and beautiful and sublime, portray the vices in which we are allied to the beasts. Such, for example, are the works of Oc- tave Feuillet, Arsene Houssaye, Georges Ohnet, and other contemporary novelists much in vogue among the higher classes of society."
But what is this idea of the beautiful which art rests upon, and so becomes moral? "The man of our time," says Sefior Valdes, " wishes to know every- thing and enjoy everything : he turns the objective of a powerful equatorial towards the heavenly spaces where gravitate the infinitude of the stars, just as he applies the microscope to the infinitude of the smallest insects ; for their laws are iden- tical. His experience, united with intui- tion, has convinced him that in nature there is neither great nor small; all is equal. All is equally grand, all is equally just, all is equally beautiful, because all is equally divine." But beauty, Sefior Val-
62
des explains, exists in the human spirit, and is the beautiful effect which it re- ceives from the true meaning of things ; it does not matter what the things are, and it is the function of the artist who feels this effect to impart it to others. I may add that there is no joy in art except this perception of the meaning of things and its communication; when you have felt it, and portrayed it in a poem, a sym- phony, a novel, a statue, a picture, an ed- ifice, you have fulfilled the purpose for which you were born an artist.
The reflection of exterior nature in the individual spirit, Seiior Valdes believes to be the fundamental of art. " To say, then, that the artist must not copy but create is nonsense, because he can in no wise copy, and in no wise create. He who sets deliberately about modifying nature, shows that he has not felt her beauty, and therefore cannot make oth- ers feel it. The puerile desire which some artists without genius manifest to go about selecting in nature, not what seems to them beautiful, but what they think will seem beautiful to others, and
63
rejecting what may displease them, ordi- narily produces cold and insipid works. For, instead of exploring the illimitable fields of reality, they cling to the forms invented by other artists who have suc- ceeded, and they make statues of statues, poems of poems, novels of novels. It is entirely false that the great romantic, sym- bolic, or classic poets modified nature ; such as they have expressed her they felt her; and in this view they are as much realists as ourselves. In like manner if in the realistic tide that now bears us on there are some spirits who feel nature in another way, in the romantic way, or the classic way, they would not falsify her in expressing her so. Only those falsify her who, without feeling classic wise or ro- mantic wise, set about being classic or romantic, wearisomely reproducing the models of former ages ; and equally those who, without sharing the sentiment of realism, which now prevails, force them- selves to be realists merely to follow the fashion."
The pseudo-realists, in fact, are the worse offenders, to my thinking, for they
64
sin against the living ; whereas those who continue to celebrate the heroic ad- ventures of Puss in Boots and the hair- breadth escapes of Tom Thumb, under various aliases, only cast disrespect upon the immortals who have passed beyond these noises.
XIV
HE principal cause," our Spaniard says, "of the de- cadence of contemporary- literature is found, to my thinking, in the vice which has been very graphically called ef- fectism, or the itch of awaking at all cost in the reader vivid and violent emotions, which shall do credit to the invention and originality of the writer. This vice has its roots in human nature itself, and more particularly in that of the artist ; he has always something fem- inine in him, which tempts him to coquet with the reader, and display qualities that he thinks will astonish him, as women laugh for no reason, to show their teeth when they have them white and small and even, or lift their dresses to show their feet when there is no mud in the street. . . . What many writers nowadays
wish, is to produce an effect, grand and immediate, to play the part of geniuses. For this they have learned that it is only necessary to write exaggerated works in any sort, since the vulgar do not ask that they shall be quietly made to think and feel, but that they shall be startled ; and among the vulgar, of course, I include the great part of those who write literary criticism, and who constitute the worst vulgar, since they teach what they do not know. . . . There are many persons who suppose that the highest proof an artist can give of his fantasy is the invention of a complicated plot, spiced with perils, surprises, and suspenses ; and that any- thing else is the sign of a poor and tepid imagination. And not only people who seem cultivated, but are not so, suppose this, but there are sensible persons, and even sagacious and intelligent critics, who sometimes allow themselves to be hood- winked by the dramatic mystery and the surprising and fantastic scenes of a nov- el. They own it is all false ; but they admire the imagination, what they call the ' power ' of the author. Very well ;
67
all I have to say is that the ' power ' to dazzle with strange incidents, to enter- tain with complicated plots and impossi- ble characters, now belongs to some hun- dreds of writers in Europe ; while there are not much above a dozen who know how to interest with the ordinary events of life, and with the portrayal of charac- ters truly human. If the former is a tal- ent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than the latter. ... If we are to rate novelists according to their fe- cundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put Alexander Dumas above Cervantes. Cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without belying much or little the natural and logical course of events. This novel, which was called Don Quixote, is perhaps the greatest work of human wit. Very well ; the same Cer- vantes, mischievously influenced after- wards by the ideas of the vulgar, who were then what they are now and always will be, attempted to please them by a work giving a lively proof of his invent- ive talent, and wrote the Persiles and Sigismunda, where the strange incidents.
68
the vivid complications, the surprises, the pathetic scenes, succeed one another so rapidly and constantly that it really fa- tigues you. . . . But in spite of this flood of invention, imagine," says Senor Valdes, " the place that Cervantes would now oc- cupy in the heaven of art, if he had never written Don Quixote," but only Persiles and Sigismunda !
From the point of view of modern English criticism, which likes to be melt- ed, and horrified, and astonished, and blood-curdled, and goose-fleshed, no less than to be " chippered up " in fiction, Seiior Valdes were indeed incorrigible. Not only does he despise the novel of complicated plot, and everywhere prefer Don Quixote to Persiles and Sigismunda, but he has a lively contempt for another class of novels much in favor with the gentilities of all countries. He calls their writers " novelists of the world," and he says that more than any others they have the rage of effectism. " They do not seek to produce effect by novelty and inven- tion in plot . . . they seek it in character. For this end they begin by deliberately
69
falsifying human feelings, giving them a paradoxical appearance completely inad- missible. . . . Love that disguises itself as hate, incomparable energy under the cloak of weakness, virginal innocence un- der the aspect of malice and impudence, wit masquerading as folly, etc., etc. By this means they hope to make an effect of which they are incapable through the direct, frank, and conscientious study of character." He mentions Octave Feuil- let as the greatest offender in this sort among the French, and Bulwer among the English ; but Dickens is full of it (Boffin in Our Mutual Friend will suffice for all example), and the present loath- some artistic squalor of the English dra- ma is witness of the result of this effect- ism when allowed full play.
But what, then, if he is not pleased with Dumas, or with the effectists who delight genteel people at all the theatres, and in most of the romances, what, I ask, v/ill satisfy this extremely difficult Spanish gentleman ? He would pretend, very lit- tle. Give him simple, life-like character ; that is all he wants. " For me, the only
70
condition of character is that it be human, and that is enough. If I wished to know what was human, I should study human- ity."
But, Senor Valdes, Senor Valdes ! Do not you know that this small condition of yours implies in its fulfilment hardly less than the gift of the whole earth, with a little gold fence round it ? You merely ask that the character portrayed in fic- tion be human ; and you suggest that the novelist should study humanity if he would know whether his personages are human. This appears to me the crudest irony, the most sarcastic affectation of humility. If you had asked that char- acter in fiction be superhuman, or subter- human, or preterhuman, or intrahuman, and had bidden the novelist go, not to humanity, but the humanities, for the proof of his excellence, it would have been all very easy. The books are full of those "creations," of every pattern, of all ages, of both sexes ; and it is so much handier to get at books than to get at men ; and when you have portrayed " passion " instead of feeling, and used
"power" instead of common -sense, and shown yourself a " genius " instead of an artist, the applause is so prompt and the glory so cheap, that really anything else seems wickedly wasteful of one's time. One may not make one's reader enjoy or suffer nobly, but one may give him the kind of pleasure that arises from conjur- ing, or from a puppetshow, or a modern stage play, and leave him, if he is an old fool, in the sort of stupor that comes from hitting the pipe ; or if he is a young fool, half crazed with the spectacle of qualities and impulses like his own in an apotheosis of achievement and fruition far beyond any earthly experience.
But apparently Senor Valdes would not think this any great artistic result. " Things that appear ugliest in reality to the spectator who is not an artist, are transformed into beauty and poetry when the spirit of the artist possesses itself of them. We all take part every day in a thousand domestic scenes, every day we see a thousand pictures in life, that do not make any impression upon us, or if they make any it is one of repugnance;
but let the novelist come, and without betraying the truth, but painting them as they appear to his vision, he produces a most interesting work, whose perusal enchants us. That which in life left us indifferent, or repelled us, in art delights us. Why? Simply because the artist has made us see the idea that resides in it. Let not the novelists, then, endeavor to add anything to reality, to turn it and twist it, to restrict it. Since nature has endowed them with this precious gift of discovering ideas in things, their work will be beautiful if they paint these as they appear. But if the reality does not impress them, in vain will they strive to make their work impress others.''
XV
HIGH brings us again, af- ter this long way about, to the divine Jane and her novels, and that trouble- some question about them. She was great and they were beauti- ful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hun- dred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and • nothing- less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelists, and alone worthy to be matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists. It is not a question of intellect, or not wholly that. The English have , mind enough; but they have not taste
enough ; or, rather, their taste has been perverted by their false criticism, which is based upon personal preference, and not upon principle; which instructs a man to think that what he likes is good, instead of teaching him first to distin- guish what is good before he likes it. The art of fiction, as Jane Austen knew it, declined from her through Scott, and Bul- wer, and Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte, and Thackeray, and even George Eliot, because the mania of romanticism had seized upon all Europe, and these great writers could not escape the taint of their time ; but it has shown few signs of recovery in England, because English criticism, in the presence of the Conti- nental masterpieces, has continued pro- vincial and special and personal, and has expressed a love and a hate which had to do with the quality of the artist rather than the character of his work. It was inevitable that in their time the English romanticists should treat, as Seiior Val- des says, " the barbarous customs of the Middle Ages, softening and disfiguring them, as Walter Scott and his kind did ;"
that they should " devote themselves to falsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifying psychology after their own fancy," like Bulwer and Dickens, as well as like Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention Balzac, the worst of all that sort at his worst. This was the natural course of the dis- ease; but it really seems as if it were their criticism that was to blame for the rest : not, indeed, for the performance of this writer or that, for criticism can never affect the actual doing of a thing; but for the esteem in which this writer or that is held through the perpetuation of false ideals. The only observer of Eng- lish middle-class life since Jane Austen worthy to be named with her was not George Eliot, who was first ethical and then artistic, who transcended her in everything but the form and method most essential to art, and there fell hope- lessly below her. It was Anthony Trol- lope who was most like her in simple honesty and instinctive truth, as unphi- losophized as the light of common day; but he was so warped from a wholesome
ideal as to wish at times to be like the caricaturist Thackeray, and to stand V about in his scene, talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art resides. Mainly, his instinct was too much for his ideal, and with a low view of life in its civic relations and a thoroughly bourgeois soul, he yet produced works whose beauty is surpassed only by the effect of a more poetic writer in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Yet if a vote of English criti- cism even at this late day, when all con- tinental Europe has the light of aesthet- ic truth, could be taken, the majority against these artists would be overwhelm- ingly in favor of a writer who had so little artistic sensibility, that he never hesitated on any occasion, great or small, to make a foray among his characters, and catch them up to show them to the reader and tell him how beautiful or ugly they were ; and cry out over their amaz- ing properties.
Doubtless the ideal of those poor isl- anders will be finally changed. If the
truth could become a fad it would be ac- cepted by all their " smart people," but truth is something rather too large for that ; and we must await the gradual ad- vance of civilization among them. Then they will see that their criticism has mis- led them ; and that it is to this false guide they owe, not precisely the decline of fiction among them, but its contin- ued debasement as an art.
XVI
OW few materials," says Emerson, " are yet used by our arts ! The mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expect- ant," and to break new ground is still one of the uncommonest and most he roic of the virtues. The artists are not alone to blame for the timidity that keeps them in the old furrows of the worn-out fields ; most of those whom they live to please, or live by pleasing, prefer to have them remain there ; it wants rare virtue to appreciate what is new, as well as to invent it ; and the " easy things to under- stand " are the conventional things. This is why the ordinary English novel, with its hackneyed plot, scenes, and figures, is more comfortable to the ordinary Ameri- can than an American novel, which deals, at its worst, with comparatively new in-
79
terests and motives. To adjust one's self to the enjoyment of these costs an intel- lectual effort, and an intellectual effort is what no ordinary person likes to make. It is only the extraordinary person who can say, with Emerson : " I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic. . . . I embrace the common ; I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low, . . . Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. . . . The perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. . . . The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual. . . . To-day always looks mean to the thoughtless ; but to-day is a king in disguise. . . . Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphos."
Perhaps we ought not to deny their town of Troy and their temple of Del- phos to the dull people ; but if we ought, and if we did, they would still insist upon having them. An English novel, full of
8o
titles and rank, is apparently essential to the happiness of such people ; their weak and childish imagination is at home in its familiar environment; they know what they are reading ; the fact that it is hash many times warmed over reassures them ; whereas a story of our own life, honestly studied and faithfully represented, trou- bles them with varied misgiving. They are not sure that it is literature ; they do not feel that it is good society ; its char- acters, so like their own, strike them as commonplace ; they say they do not wish to know such people.
Everything in England is appreciable to the literary sense, while the sense of the literary worth of things in America is still faint and weak with most people, with the vast majority who " ask for the great, the remote, the romantic," who cannot " embrace the common," cannot "sit at the feet of the familiar and the low,'' in the good company of Emerson. We are all, or nearly all, struggling to be distinguished from the mass, and to be set apart in select circles and upper class- es like the fine people we have read about.
We are really a mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world ; but that is not bad ; our vulgarity consists in try- ing to ignore " the worth of the vulgar," in believing that the superfine is better. 6
XVII
NOTHER Spanish novelist of our day, whose books have given me great pleas- ure, is so far from being of the same mind of Sefior Valdes about fiction that he boldly de- clares himself, in the preface to his Pepita Ximenez, "an advocate of art for art's sake." I heartily agree with him that it is " in very bad taste, always impertinent and often pedantic, to at- tempt to prove theses by writing stories," and yet I fancy that no reader whom Seiior Valera would care to please could read his Pepita Ximenez without finding himself in possession of a great deal of serious thinking on a very serious subject, which is none the less serious because it is couched in terms of delicate irony. If it is true that " the object of a novel should be to charm through a faithful represen-
83
tation of human actions and human pas- sions, and to create by this fidelity to nature a beautiful work," and if " the cre- ation of the beautiful " is solely " the ob- ject of art," it never was and never can be solely its effect as long as men are men and women are women. If ever the race is resolved into abstract qualities, per- haps this may happen ; but till then the finest effect of the "beautiful" will be ethical and not aesthetic merely. Moral- ity penetrates all things, it is the soul of all things. Beauty may clothe it on, whether it is false morality and an evil soul, or whether it is true and a good soul. In the one case the beauty will cor- rupt, and in the other it will edify, and in either case it will infallibly and inevitably have an ethical effect, now light, now grave, according as the thing is light or grave. We cannot escape from this ; we are shut up to it by the very conditions of our being. What is it that delights us in this very Pepita Ximenez, this exqui- site masterpiece of Sefior Valera's } Not merely that a certain Luis de Vargas, dedicated to the priesthood, finds a cer-
tain Pepita Ximenez lovelier than the priesthood, and abandons all his sacer- dotal hopes and ambitions, all his poetic dreams of renunciation and devotion, to marry her. , That is very pretty and very true, and it pleases ; but what chiefly ap- peals to the heart is the assertion, how- ever delicately and adroitly implied, that their right to each other through their love was far above his vocation. In spite of himself, without trying, and therefore without impertinence and without pedant- ry, Seilor Valera has proved a thesis in his story. They of the Church will acqui- esce with the reservation of Don Luis's uncle the Dean that his marriage was better than his vocation, because his vo- cation was a sentimental and fancied one ; we of the Church-in-error will accept the result without any reservation whatever ; and I think we shall have the greater enjoyment of the delicate irony, the fine humor, the amusing and unfailing subtle- ty, with which the argument is enforced. In recognizing these, however, in praising the story for the graphic skill with which Southern characters and passions are por-
8s
trayed in the gay light of an Andalusian sky, for the charm with which a fresh and unhaciineyed life is presented, and the fidelity with which novel conditions are sketched, I must not fail to add that the book is one for those who have come to the knowledge of good and evil, and to confess my regret that it fails of the remoter truth, "the eternal amenities" which only the avowed advocates of "art for art's sake " seem to forget. It leaves the reader to believe that Vargas can be happy with a woman who wins him in Pepita's way ; and that is where it is false both to life and to art. For the moment, it is charming to have the story end hap- pily, as it does, but after one has lived a certain number of years, and read a cer- tain number of novels, it is not the pros- perous or adverse fortune of the char- acters that affects one, but the good or bad faith of the novelist in dealing with them. Will he play us false or will he be true in the operation of this or that principle involved } I cannot hold him to less account than this : he must be true to what life has taught me is the
truth, and after that he may let any fate betide his people; the novel ends well that ends faithfully. The greater his power, the greater his responsibility be- fore the human conscience, which is God in us. But men come and go, and what they do in their limited physical lives is of comparatively little moment ; it is what they say that really survives to bless or to ban; and it is the evil which Words- worth felt in Goethe, that must long sur- vive him. There is a kind of thing — a kind of metaphysical lie against right- eousness and common-sense — which is called the Unmoral, and is supposed to be different from the Immoral ; and it is this which is supposed to cover many of the faults of Goethe. His Wilhelm Meister, for example, is so far removed within the region of the " ideal " that its unprincipled, its evil-principled, tenor in regard to women is pronounced " unmo- rality," and is therefore inferably harmless. But no study of Goethe is complete with- out some recognition of the qualities which caused Wordsworth to hurl the book across the room with an indignant
87
perception of its sensuality. For the sins of his Hfe Goethe was perhaps sufficiently- punished in his life by his final marriage with Christiane ; for the sins of his litera- ture many others must suffer. I do not despair, however, of the day when the poor honest herd of mankind shall give univer- sal utterance to the universal instinct, and shall hold selfish power in politics, in art, in religion, for the devil that it is; when neither its crazy pride nor its amusing vanity shall be flattered by the puissance of the " geniuses " who have forgotten their duty to the common weak- ness, and have abused it to their own glory. In that day we shall shudder at many monsters of passion, of self-indul- gence, of heartlessness, whom we still more or less openly adore for their " gen- ius," and shall account no man worship- ful whom we do not feel and know to be good. The spectacle of strenuous achievement will then not dazzle or mis- lead ; it will not sanctify or palliate in- iquity ; it will only render it tHe more hideous and pitiable.
In fact, the whole belief in "genius"
88
seems to me rather a mischievous super- stition, and if not mischievous always, still always a superstition. From the ac- count of those who talk about it, " genius " appears to be the attribute of a sort of very potent and admirable prodigy which God has created out of the com- mon for the astonishment and confusion of the rest of us poor human beings. But do they really believe it.^ Do they mean anything more or less than the Mastery which comes to any man according to his powers and diligence in any direction? If not, why not have an end of the super- stition which has caused our race to go on so long writing and reading of the dif- ference between talent and genius ? It is within the memory of middle-aged men that the Maelstrom existed in the belief of the geographers, but we now get on perfectly well without it ; and why should we still suffer under the notion of " gen- ius " which keeps so many poor little au- thorlings trembling in question whether they have it, or have only " talent ?"
One of the greatest captains who ever lived — a plain, taciturn, unaffected soul —
89
has told the story of his wonderful life as unconsciously as if it were all an every- day affair, not different from other lives, except as a great exigency of the human race gave it importance. So far as he knew, he had no natural aptitude for arms, and certainly no love for the call- ing. But he went to West Point be- cause, as he quaintly tells us, his father " rather thought he would go ;" and he fought through one war with credit, but without glory. The other war, which was to claim his powers and his science, found him engaged in the most prosaic of peace- ful occupations ; he obeyed its call because he loved his country, and not because he loved war. All the world knows the rest, and all the world knows that greater military mastery has not been shown than his campaigns illustrated. He does not say this in his book, or hint it in any way ; he gives you the facts, and leaves them with you. But the Personal Me- moirs of U. S. Grant, written as simply and straightforwardly as his battles were fought, couched in the most unpreten- tious phrase, with never a touch of gran-
QO
diosity or attitudinizing, familiar, homely in style, form a great piece of literature, because great literature is nothing more nor less than the clear expression of minds that have something great in them, whether religion, or beauty, or deep expe- rience. Probably Grant would have said that he had no more vocation to litera- ture than he had to war. He owns, with something like contrition, that he used to read a great many novels; but we think he would have denied the soft im- peachment of literary power. Neverthe- less, he shows it, as he showed military power, unexpectedly, almost miraculous- ly. All the conditions here, then, are favorable to supposing a case of " genius." Yet who would trifle with that great heir of fame, that plain, grand, manly soul, by speaking of "genius" and him togeth- er? Who calls Washington a genius.? or Franklin, or Bismarck, or Cavour, or Columbus, or Luther, or Darwin, or Lin- coln? Were these men second-rate in their way ? Or is " genius" that indefin- able, preternatural quality, sacred to the musicians, the painters, the sculptors, the
9»
actors, the poets, and above all, the poets ? Or is it that the poets, having most of the say in this world, abuse it to shameless self-flattery, and would persuade the in- articulate classes that they are on pecul- iar terms of confidence with the deity ?
XVIII
>N General Grant's confession of novel-reading there is a sort of inference that he had wasted his time, or else the guilty conscience of the nov- elist in me imagines such an inference. But however this may be, there is cer- tainly no question concerning the inten- tion of a correspondent who once wrote to me after reading some rather brag- ging claims I had made for fiction as a mental and moral means. "I have very grave doubts," he said, "as to the whole list of magnificent things that you seem to think novels have done for the race, and can witness in myself many evil things which they have done for me. Whatever in my mental make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, what- ever is injurious, I can trace to the pe- rusal of some work of fiction. Worse
than that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter-of-fact poverty, or every-day, commonplace distress, meets with no sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over the impos- sibly accumulated sufferings of some gau- dy hero or heroine."
I am not sure that I had the contro-. versy with this correspondent that he seemed to suppose ; but novels are now so fully accepted by every one pretending to cultivated taste — and they really form the whole intellectual life of such im- mense numbers of people, without ques- tion of their influence, good or bad, upon the mind — ^that it is refreshing to have them frankly denounced, and to be invit- ed to revise one's ideas and feelings in regard to them. A little honesty, or a great deal of honesty, in this quest will do the novel, as we hope yet to have it, and as we have already begun to have it, no harm ; and|^for my own part I will confess that I believe fiction in the past to have been largely injurious, as I be*
^
94
Jieve the stage play to be still almost wholly injurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and its aimless- ness. It may be safely assumed that most of the novel-reading which people fancy an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dis- sipation, hardly more related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the mental faculties than opium -eating; in either case the brain is drugged, and left weaker and crazier for the debauch. If this may be called the negative result of the fiction habit, the positive injury that most nov- els work is by no means so easily to be measured in the case of young men whose character they help so much to form or deform, and the women of all ages whom they keep so much in ignorance of the world they misrepresent. Grown men have little harm from them, but in the other cases, which are the vast majority, they hurt because they are not true — not because they are malevolent, but because they are idle lies about human nature and the social fabric, which it behooves us to know and to understand, that we may deal justly with ourselves and with
9S
one another. One need not go so far as our correspondent, and trace to the fic- tion habit " whatever is wild and vision- ary, whatever is untrue, whatever is inju- rious," in one's life ; bad as the fiction habit is it is probably not responsible for the whole sum of evil in its victims, and I believe that if the reader will use care in choosing from this fungus-growth with which the fields of literature teem every day, he may nourish himself as with the true mushroom, at no risk from the poi- sonous species.
The tests are very plain and simple, and they are perfectly infallible. If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous ; it may not kill, but it will certainly injure ; and this test will alone exclude an entire class of fiction, of which eminent exam- ples will occur to all. Then the whole spawn of so-called unmoral romances, which imagine a world where the sins of sense are unvisited by the penalties fol- lowing, swift or slow, but inexorably sure, in the real world, are deadly poison : these do kill. The novels that merely
tickle our prejudices and lull our judg- ment, or that coddle our sensibilities or pamper our gross appetite for the marvel- lous are not so fatal, but they are innutri- tious, and clog the soul with unwhole- some vapors of all kinds. No doubt they too help to weaken the moral fibre, and make their readers indifferent to " plod- ding perseverance and plain industry," and to " matter-of-fact poverty and com- monplace distress."
Without taking them too seriously, it still must be owned that the " gaudy hero and heroine " are to blame for a great deal of harm in the world. That heroine long taught by example, if not precept, that Love, or the passion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief interest of a life, which is really concerned with a great many other things; that it was lasting in the way she knew it ; that it was wor- thy of every sacrifice, and was altogether a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason ; that love alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly in comparison with it. More lately she has begun to idolize and illustrate Duty,
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and she is hardly less mischievous in this new role, opposing duty, as she did love, to prudence, obedience, and reason. The stock hero, whom, if we met him, we could not fail to see was a most deplo- rable person, has undoubtedly imposed himself upon the victims of the fiction habit as admirable. With him, too, love was and is the great affair, whether in its old romantic phase of chivalrous achieve- ment or manifold suffering for love's sake, or its more recent development of the " virile," the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more recent agonies of self-sacri- fice, as idle and useless as the moral ex- periences of the insane asylums. With his vain posturings and his ridiculous splendor he is really a painted barbarian, the prey of his passions and his delusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the motives and ethics of a savage, which the guilty author of his being does his best — or his worst — in spite of his own light and knowledge, to foist upon the reader as something generous and noble. I am not merely bringing this charge against that sort of fiction which is beneath lit-
7
erature and outside of it, " the shoreless lakes of ditch-water," whose miasms fill the air below the empyrean where the great ones sit; but I am accusing the work of some of the most famous, who have, in this instance or in that, sinned against the truth, which can alone exalt and purify men. I do not say that they have constantly done so, or even com- monly done so ; but that they have done so at all marks them as of the past, to be read with the due historical allowance for their epoch and their conditions. For I believe that, while inferior writers will and must continue to imitate them in their foibles and their errors, no one here- after will be able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties. The light of civil- ization has already broken even upon the novel, and no conscientious man can now set about painting an image of life with- out perpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling bound to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is right and what is wrong, what is noble and
what is base, what is heahh and what is perdition, in the actions and the char- acters he portrays.
The fiction that aims merely to enter- tain— the fiction that is to serious fiction as the opera-bouffe, the ballet, and the pantomime are to the true drama — need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply ; but even such fiction will not be gay or trivial to any reader's hurt, and criticism will hold it to account if it passes from painting to teaching folly.
More and more not only the criticism which prints its opinions, but the infinite- ly vaster and powerfuler criticism which thinks and feels them merely, will make this demand. I confess that I do not care to judge any work of the imagina- tion without first of all applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else. Is it true } — true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and wom- en? This truth, which necessarily in- cludes the highest morality and the high- est artistry — this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak:
and without it all graces of style and feats of invention and cunning of construction are so many superfluities of naughtiness. It is well for the truth to have all these, and shine in them, but for falsehood they are merely meretricious, the bedizenment of the wanton ; they atone for nothing, they count for nothing. But in fact they come naturally of truth, and grace it with- out solicitation ; they are added unto it. In the whole range of fiction we know of no true picture of life — that is, of human nature — which is not also a masterpiece of literature, full of divine and natural beauty. It may have no touch or tint of this special civilization or of that ; it had better have this local color well ascertain- ed ; but the truth is deeper and finer than aspects, and if the book is true to what men and women know of one another's souls it will be true enough, and it will be great and beautiful. It is the conception of literature as something apart from life, superfinely aloof, which makes it really unimportant to the great mass of man- kind, without a message or a meaning for them : and it is the notion that a novel
may be false in its portrayal of causes and effects that makes literary art contempt- ible even to those whom it amuses, that forbids them to regard the novelist as a serious or right-minded person. If they do not in some moment of indignation cry out against all novels, as my corre- spondent does, they remain besotted in the fume of the delusions purveyed to them, with no higher feeling for the author than such maudlin affection as the habitue of an opium-joint perhaps knows for the at- tendant who fills his pipe with the drug.
Or, as in the case of another corre- spondent who writes that in his youth he "read a great many novels, but always regarded it as an amusement, like horse- racing and card-playing," for which he had no time when he entered upon the serious business of life, it renders them merely contemptuous. His view of the matter may be commended to the broth- erhood and sisterhood of novelists as full of wholesome if bitter suggestion ; and we urge them not to dismiss it with high literary scorn as that of some Boeotian dull to the beauty of art. Refuse it as we
may, it is still the feeling of the vast ma- jority of people for whom life is earnest, and who find only a distorted and mis- leading likeness of it in our books. We may fold ourselves in our scholars' gowns, and close the doors of our studies, and af- fect to despise this rude voice ; but we can- not shut it out. It comes to us from wher- ever men are at work, from wherever they are truly living, and accuses us of unfaith- fulness, of triviality, of mere stage-play ; and none of us can escape conviction except he prove himself worthy of his time — a time in which the great masters have brought literature back to life, and filled its ebbing veins with the red tides of reality. We cannot all equal them ; we need not copy them ; but we can all go to the sources of their inspiration and their power ; and to draw from these no one need go far — no one need really go out of himself.
Fifty years ago, Carlyle, in whom the truth was always alive, but in whom it was then unperverted by suffering, by ce- lebrity, and by despair, wrote in his study of Diderot : " Were it not reasonable to
I03
prophesy that this exceeding great multi- tude of novel-writers and such like must, in a new generation, gradually do one of two things : either retire into the nurser- ies, and work for children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novel-fabric into the dust-cart, and betake themselves with such faculty as they have to understand and record what is true, of which surely there is, and will forever be, a whole infinitude unknown to us of in- finite importance to us? Poetry, it will more and more come to be understood, is nothing but higher knowledge; and the only genuine Romance (for grown persons). Reality."
If, after half a century, fiction still mainly works for " children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes," it is nevertheless one of the hopefulest signs of the world's progress that it has begun to work for "grown persons," and if not ex- actly in the way that Carlyle might have solely intended in urging its writers to compile memoirs instead of building the " novel-fabric," still it has, in the highest
I04
and widest sense, already made Reality its Romance. I cannot judge it, I do not even care for it, except as it has done this ; and I can hardly conceive of a literary self-respect in these days compatible with the old trade of make-believe, with the production of the kind of fiction which is too much honored by classification with card-playing and horse-racing. But let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, act- uated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know ; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires ; let it show the differ- ent interests in their true proportions; let it forbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and prejudice, but frankly own these for what they are, in whatever figures and occasions they appear; let it not put on fine literary airs ; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know — the language of unaffected people everywhere — and there can be no doubt of an unlimited future, not only of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it.
XIX
|HIS is what I say in my se- verer moods, but at other times I know that, of course, no one is going to hold all fiction to such strict account. There is a great deal of it which may be very well left to amuse us, if it can, when we are sick or when we are silly, and I am not inclined to despise it in the perform- ance of this office. Or, if people find pleas- ure in having their blood curdled for the sake of having it uncurdled again at the end of the book, I would not interfere with their amusement, though I do not de- sire it. There is a certain demand in prim- itive natures for the kind of fiction that does this, and the author of it is usually very proud of it. The kind of novels he likes, and likes to write, are intended to take his reader's mind, or what that read- er would probably call his mind, off him-
self ; they make one forget life and all its cares and duties ; they are not in the least like the novels which make you think of these, and shame you into at least wishing to be a helpfuler and wholesomer creature than you are. No sordid details of veri- ty here, if you please; no wretched being humbly and weakly struggling to do right and to be true, suffering for his follies and his sins, tasting joy only through the mor- tification of self, and in the help of others ; nothing of all this, but a great, whirling splendor of peril and achievement, a wild scene of heroic adventure and of emotion- al ground and lofty tumbling, with a stage " picture " at the fall of the curtain, and all the good characters in a row, their left hands pressed upon their hearts, and kiss- ing their right hands to the audience, in the good old way that has always charmed and always will charm. Heaven bless it !
In a world which loves the spectacular drama and the practically bloodless sports of the modern amphitheatre the author of this sort of fiction has his place, and we must not seek to destroy him because he fancies it the first place. In fact, it is
I07
a condition of his doing well the kind of work he does that he should think it im- portant, that he should believe in him- self; and I would not take away this faith of his, even if I could. As I say, he has his place. The world often likes to for- get itself, and he brings on his heroes, his goblins, his feats, his hair-breadth escapes, his imminent deadly breaches, and the poor, foolish, childish old world renews the excitements of its nonage. Perhaps this is a work of beneficence ; and per- haps our brave conjurer in his cabalistic robe is a philanthropist in disguise.
Within the last four or five years there has been throughout the whole English- speaking world what Mr. Grant Allen happily calls the " recrudescence " of taste in fiction. The effect is less noticeable in America than in England, where effete Philistinism, conscious of the dry-rot of its conventionality, is casting about for cure in anything that is wild and strange and unlike itself. But the recrudescence has been evident enough here, too ; and a writer in one of our periodicals has put into convenient shape some common er-
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rors concerning popularity as a test of merit in a book. He seems to think, for instance, that the love of the marvellous and impossible in fiction, which is shown not only by "the unthinking multitude clamoring about the book counters " for fiction of that sort, but by the " literary elect " also, is proof of some principle in human nature which ought to be respect- ed as well as tolerated. He seems to be- lieve that the ebullition of this passion forms a sufficient answer to those who say that art should represent life, and that the art which misrepresents life is feeble art and false art. But it appears to me that a little carefuler reasoning from a little closer inspection of the facts would not have brought him to these conclusions. In the first place, I doubt very much whether the " literary elect" have been fascinated in great numbers by the fiction in question ; but if I supposed them to have really fallen under that spell, I should still be able to account for their fondness and that of the " unthinking multitude " upon the same grounds, without honoring either very much. It is the habit of hasty casuists
to regard civilization as inclusive of all the members of a civilized community ; but this is a palpable error. Many per- sons in every civilized community live in a state of more or less evident savagery with respect to their habits, their morals, and their propensities ; and they are held in check only by the law. Many more yet are savage in their tastes, as they show by the decoration of their houses and persons, and by their choice of books and pictures; and these are left to the restraints of public opinion. In fact, no man can be said to be thoroughly civ- ilized or always civilized ; the most re- fined, the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, in which the best, or even the second best, shall not please him. At these times the lettered and the unlettered are alike prim- itive and their gratifications are of the same simple sort ; the highly cultivated person may then like melodrama, impos- sible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or a barbarian of any age.
I do not blame him for these moods ; I
find something instructive and interest- ing in them ; but if they lastingly es- tablished themselves in him, I could not help deploring the state of that person. No one can really think that the "lit- erary elect," who are said to have join- ed the "unthinking multitude" in clam- oring about the book counters for the romances of no-man's land, take the same kind of pleasure in them as they do in a novel of Tolstoi, Tourgueneff, George Eliot, Thackeray, Balzac, Manzoni, Haw- thorne, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Pa- lacio Valdes, or even Walter Scott. They have joined the " unthinking multitude," perhaps because they are tired of think- ing, and expect to find relaxation in feel- ing— feeling crudely, grossly, merely. For once in a way there is no great harm in this ; perhaps no harm at all. It is per- fectly natural ; let them have their in- nocent debauch. But let us distinguish, for our own sake and guidance, between the different kinds of things that please the same kind of people; between the things that please them habitually and those that please them occasionally ; be-
tween the pleasures that edify them and those that amuse them. Otherwise we shall be in danger of becoming perma- nently part of the " unthinking multi- tude," and of remaining puerile, primitive, savage. We shall be so in moods and at moments ; but let us not fancy that those are high moods or fortunate moments. If they are harmless, that is the most that can be said for them. They are lapses from which we can perhaps go for- ward more vigorously ; but even this is not certain.
My own philosophy of the matter, how- ever, would not bring me to prohibition of such literary amusements as the writ- er quoted seems to find significant of a growing indifference to truth and sanity in fiction. Once more, I say, these amuse- ments have their place, as the circus has, and the burlesque and negro minstrelsy, and the ballet, and prestidigitation. No one of these is to be despised in its place ; but we had better understand that it is not the highest place, and that it is hardly an intellectual delight. The lapse of all the ' ' literary elect " in the world
could not dignify unreality; and their present mood, if it exists, is of no more weight against that beauty in literature which comes from truth alone, and never can come from anything else, than the permanent state of the "unthinking mul- titude."
Yet even as regards the "unthinking multitude," I believe I am not able to take the attitude of the writer I have quoted. I am afraid that I respect them more than he would like to have me, though I cannot always respect their taste, any more than that of the " literary elect." I respect them for their good sense in most practical matters; for their labo- rious, honest lives ; for their kindness, their good-will ; for that aspiration tow- ards something better than themselves which seems to stir, however dumbly, in every human breast not abandoned to lit- erary pride or other forms of self-right- eousness. I find every man interesting, whether he thinks or unthinks, whether he is savage or civilized ; for this reason I cannot thank the novelist who teaches us not to know but to unknow our kind.
Yet I should by no means hold him to such strict account as Emerson, who felt the absence of the best motive, even in the greatest of the masters, when he said of Shakespeare that, after all, he was only- master of the revels. The judgnient is so severe, even with the praise which pre- cedes it, that one winces under it ; and if one is still young, with the world gay be- fore him, and life full of joyous promise, one is apt to ask, defiantly. Well, what is better than being such a master of the revels as Shakespeare was ? Let each judge for himself. To the heart again of serious youth uncontaminate and exigent of ideal good, it must always be a grief that the great masters seem so often to have been willing to amuse the leisure and vacancy of meaner men, and leave their mission to the soul but partially ful- filled. This, perhaps, was what Emerson had in mind ; and if he had it in mind of Shakespeare, who gave us, with his histo- ries and comedies and problems, such a searching homily as " Macbeth," one feels that he scarcely recognized the limita- tions of the dramatist's art. Few con-
sciences, at times, seem so enlightened as that of this personally unknown person, so withdrawn into his work, and so lost to the intensest curiosity of after-time ; at other times he seems merely Eliza- bethan in his coarseness, his courtliness, his imperfect sympathy.
XX
F the finer kinds of romance, as distinguished from the novel, I would even encour- age the writing, though it is one of the hard conditions of romance that its personages starting with a part^ pris can rarely be characters with a living growth, but are apt to be types, limited to the expression of one principle, simple, elemental, lacking the God -given complexity of motive which we find in all the human beings we know. Hawthorne, the great master of the ro- mance, had the insight and the power to create it anew as a kind in fiction ; though I am not sure that The Scarlet Letter and the Blithedale Romance are not, strictly speaking, novels rather than romances. They do not play with some old super- stition long outgrown, and they do not invent a new superstition to play with.
but deal with things vital in every one's pulse. I am not saying that what may be called the fantastic romance — the ro- mance that descends from Frankenstein rather than The Scarlet Letter — ought not to be. On the contrary, I should grieve to lose it, as I should grieve to lose the pantomime or the comic opera> or many other graceful things that amuse the passing hour, and help us to live agreeably in a world where men actually sin, suffer, and die. But it belongs to the decorative arts, and though it has a high place among them, it cannot be ranked with the works of the imagina- tion— the works that represent and body forth human experience. Its ingenuity can always afford a refined pleasure, and it can often, at some risk to itself, convey a valuable truth.
Perhaps the whole region of historical romance might be reopened with advan- tage to readers and writers who cannot bear to be brought face to face with hu- man nature, but require the haze of distance or a far perspective, in which all the disagreeable details shall be lost.
There is no good reason why these harm- less people should not be amused, or their little preferences indulged.
But here, again, I have my modest doubts, some recent instances are so fat- uous, as far as the portrayal of character goes, though I find them admirably con- trived in some respects. When I have owned the excellence of the staging in every respect, and the conscience with which the carpenter (as the theatrical folks say) has done his work, I am at the end of my praises. The people af- fect me like persons of our generation made up for the parts ; well trained, well costumed, but actors, and almost ama- teurs. They have the quality that makes the histrionics of amateurs endurable ; they are ladies and gentlemen ; the worst, the wickedest of them, is a lady or gen- tleman behind the scene.
Yet, no doubt it is well that there should be a reversion to the earlier types of thinking and feeling, to earlier ways of looking at human nature, and I will not altogether refuse the pleasure offered me by the poetic romancer or the historical
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romancer because I find my pleasure chiefly in Tolstoi and James and Glados and Valdes and Thomas Hardy and Tour- gueneff, and Balzac at his best.
The reversions or counter-currents in the general tendency of a time are very curious, and are worthy tolerant study. They are always to be found ; perhaps they form the exception that establishes the rule ; at least they distinguish it. They give us performances having an ar- chaic charm by which, by-and-by, things captivate for reasons unconnected with their inherent beauty. They become quaint, and this is reason enough for lik- ing them, for returning to them, and in art for trying to do them again. But I confess that I like better to go forward than to go backward, and it is saying very little to say that I value more such a nov- el as Mr. James's Tragic Muse than all the romantic attempts since Hawthorne.' I call Mr. James a novelist because there is yet no name for the literary kind he has invented, and so none for the in- ventor. The fatuity of the stoiy merely as a story is something that must early
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impress the story-teller who does not live in the stone age of fiction and criticism. To spin a yarn for the yarn's sake, that is an ideal worthy of a nineteenth -cen- tury Englishman, doting in forgetfulness of the English masters and grovelling in ignorance of the Continental masters; but wholly impossible to an American of Mr. Henry James's modernity. To him it must seem like the lies swapped between men after the ladies have left the table and they are sinking deeper and deeper into their cups and growing dimmer and dimmer behind their cigars. To such a mind as his the story could never have value except as a means ; it could not exist for him as an end ; it could be used only illustratively ; it could be the frame, not possibly the picture. But in the mean time the kind of thing he wished to do, and began to do, and has always done, amid a stupid clamor, which still lasts, that it was not a story, had to be called a novel ; and the wretched victim of the novel habit (only a little less intel- lectually degraded than the still more miserable slave of the theatre habit), who
wished neither to perceive nor to reflect, but only to be acted upon by plot and inci- dent, was lost in an endless trouble about it. Here was a thing called a novel', writ- ten with extraordinary charm; interest- ing by the vigor and vivacity with which phases and situations and persons were handled in it ; inviting him to the inti- macy of characters divined with creative insight ; making him witness of motives and emotions and experiences of the finest import ; and then suddenly requir- ing him to be man enough to cope with the question itself; not solving it for him by a marriage or a murder, and not spoon- victualling him with a moral minced small and then thinned with milk and water, and familiarly flavored with sen- timentality or religiosity. I can imagine the sort of shame with which such a writer as Mr. James, so original and so clear-sighted, may sometimes have been tempted by the outcry of the nurslings of fable, to give them of the diet on which they had been pampered to imbe- cility ; or to call together his characters for a sort of round-up in the last chapter.
XXI
►T is no doubt such work as Mr. James's that an English essayist (Mr. E. Hughes) has chiefly in mind, in a study of the differences of the Eng- Hsh and American novel. He defines the English novel as working from with- in outwardly, and the American novel as working from without inwardly. The definition is very surprisingly accurate; and the critic's discovery of this fun- damental difference is carried into par- ticulars with a distinctness which is as unfailing as the courtesy he has in recog- nizing the present superiority of Ameri- can work. He seems to think, however, that the English principle is the better, though why he should think so he does not make so clear. It appears a belated and rather voluntary effect of patriotism, disappointing in a philosopher of his de-
gree ; but it does not keep him from very explicit justice to the best characteristics of our fiction. " The American novelist is distinguished for the intellectual grip which he has of his characters. . . . He penetrates below the crust, and he recog- nizes no necessity of the crust to antici- pate what is beneath. . . . He utterly discards heroics ; he often even discards anything like a plot. . . . His story proper is often no more than a natural predica- ment. ... It is no stage view we have of his characters, but one behind the scenes. . . . We are brought into contact with no strained virtues, illumined by strained lights upon strained heights of situation. . . . Whenever he appeals to the emotions it would seem to be with an appeal to the intellect too. . . . because he weaves his story of the finer, less self- evident though common threads of hu- man nature, seldom calling into play the grosser and more powerful strain. . . . Everywhere in his pages we come across acquaintances undisguised. . . . The char- acters in an American novel are never unapproachable to the reader. . . . The
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naturalness, with the every-day atmos- phere which surrounds it, is one great charm of the American novel. ... It is throughout examinative, discursory, even more — quizzical. Its characters are un- dergoing, at the hands of the author, calm, interested observation. . . . He is never caught identifying himself with them ; he must preserve impartiality at all costs . . . but . . . the touch of nature is always felt, the feeling of ' kinship always follows. . . . The strength of the American novel is its optimistic faith. ... If out of this persistent hopefulness it can evolve for men a new order of trust- fulness, a tenet that between man and man there should be less suspicion, more confidence, since human nature sanctions it, its mission will have been more than an aesthetic, it will have been a moral one."
Not all of this will be found true of Mr. James, but all that relates to artistic methods and characteristics will, and the rest is true of American novels generally. For the most part in their range and ten- dency they are admirable. I will not say
they are all good, or that any of them is wholly good ; but I find in nearly every one of them a disposition to regard our life without the literary glasses so long thought desirable, and to see character, not as it is in other fiction, but as it abounds outside of all fiction. This disposition sometimes goes with poor enough performance, but in some of our novels it goes with performance that is excellent ; and at any rate it is for the present more valuable than evenness of performance. It is what relates Ameri- can fiction to the only living movement in imaginative literature, and distinguish- es by a superior freshness and authen- ticity any group of American novels from a similarly accidental group of English novels, giving them the same good right to be as the like number of recent Rus- sian novels, French novels, Spanish nov- els, Italian novels, Norwegian novels.
It is the difference of the American novelist's ideals from those of the Eng- lish novelist that gives him his advan- tage, and seems to promise him the future. The love of the passionate and the he-
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roic, as the Englishman has it, is such a crude and unwholesome thing, so deaf and blind to all the most delicate and important facts of art and life, so insensi- ble to the subtle values in either that its presence or absence makes the whole dif- ference, and enables one who is not ob- sessed by it to thank Heaven that he is not as that other man is.
There can be little question that many refinements of thought and spirit which every American is sensible of in the fiction of this continent, are necessarily lost upon our good kin beyond seas, whose thumb- fingered apprehension requires something gross and palpable for its assurance of reality. This is not their fault, and I am not sure that it is wholly their misfort- une : they are made so as not to miss what they do not find, and they are sim- ply content without those subtleties of life and character which it gives us so keen a pleasure to have noted in litera- ture. If they perceive them at all it is as something vague and diaphanous, something that filmily wavers before their sense and teases them, much as the
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beings of an invisible world might mock one of our material frame by intimations of their presence. It is with reason, therefore, on the part of an Englishman, that Mr. Henley complains of our fiction as a shadow-land, though we find more and more in it the faithful report of our life, its motives and emotions, and all the comparatively etherealized passions and ideals that influence it.
In fact, the American who chooses to enjoy his birthright to the full, lives in a world wholly different from the English- man's, and speaks (too often through his nose) another language : he breathes a rarefied and nimble air full of shining possibilities and radiant promises which the fog-and-soot-clogged lungs of those less-favored islanders struggle in vain to fill themselves with. But he ought to be modest in his advantage, and patient with the coughing and sputtering of his cousin who complains of finding himself in an exhausted receiver on plunging into one of our novels. To be quite just to the poor fellow, I have had some such expe- rience as that myself in the atmosphere
of some of our more attenuated ro- mances.
Yet every now and then I read a book with perfect comfort and much exhilara- tion, whose scenes the average Enghsh- man would gasp in. Nothing happens ; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody else ; there is no arson or pillage of any sort ; there is not a ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacri- fice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole course of the story ; " no prom- enade, no band of music, nossing !" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general conditions as they make them- selves known to American experience.
These conditions have been so favorable hitherto (though they are becoming al- ways less so) that they easily account for the optimistic faith of our novel which Mr. Hughes notices. It used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance in America, which Hawthorne
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more or less whimsically lamented, that there were so few shadows and inequali- ties in our broad level of prosperity ; and it is one of the reflections suggested by Dostoievsky's novel, The Crime and the Punishment, that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing — as false and as mistaken in its way as deal- ing in American fiction with certain nu- dities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying. Whatever their deserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth ; and in a land where journeymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the wrong from class to class has been almost inappreciable, though all this is changing for the worse. Our nov- elists, therefore, concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests. It is worth while, even at the risk of being called common-
place, to be true to our well-to-do act- ualities; the very passions themselves seem to be softened and modified by- conditions which formerly at least could not be said to wrong any one, to cramp endeavor, or to cross lawful desire. Sin and suffering and shame there must al- ways be in the world, I suppose, but I be- lieve that in this new world of ours it is still mainly from one to another one, and oftener still from one to one's self. We have death too in America, and a great deal of disagreeable and painful disease, which the multiplicity of our patent medi- cines does not seem to cure ; but this is tragedy that comes in the very nature of things, and is not peculiarly American, as the large, cheerful average of health and success and happy life is. It will not do to boast, but it is well to be true to the facts, and to see that, apart from these purely mortal troubles, the race here has enjoyed conditions in which most of the ills that have darkened its annals might be averted by honest work and unselfish behavior.
Fine artists we have among us, and
9
right-minded as far as they go ; and we must not forget this at evil moments when it seems as if all the women had taken to writing hysterical improprieties, and some of the men were trying to be at least as hysterical in despair of being as improper. If we kept to the complexion of a certain school — which sadly needs a school - master — we might very well be despondent ; but, after all, that school is not representative of our conditions or our intentions. Other traits are much more characteristic of our life and our fiction. In most American novels, vivid and graphic as the best of them are, the people are segregated if not sequestered, and the scene is sparsely populated. The effect may be in instinctive response to the vacancy of our social life, and I shall not make haste to blame it. There are few places, few occasions among us, in which a novelist can get a large number of polite people together, or at least keep them together. Unless he carries a snap- camera his picture of them has no prob- ability ; they affect one like the figures perfunctorily associated in such deadly
old engravings as that of " Washington Irving and his Friends." Perhaps it is for this reason that we excel in small pieces with three or four figures, or in studies of rustic communities, where there is propinquity if not society. Our grasp of more urbane life is feeble ; most at- tempts to assemble it in our pictures are failures, possibly because it is too transi- tory, too intangible in its nature with us, to be truthfully represented as really ex- istent.
I am not sure that the Americans have not brought the short story nearer per- fection in the all-round sense than almost any other people, and for reasons very simple and near at hand. It might be argued from the national hurry and im- patience that it was a literary form pecul- iarly adapted to the American tempera- ment, but I suspect that its extraordinary development among us is owing much more to more tangible facts. The success of American magazines, which is nothing less than prodigious, is only commensu- rate with their excellence. Their sort of success is not only from the courage to
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decide what ought to please, but from the knowledge of what does please ; and it is probable that, aside from the pictures, it is the short stories which please the readers of our best magazines. The se- rial novels they must have, of course ; but rather more of course they must have short stories, and by operation of the law of supply and demand, the short stories, abundant in quantity and excellent in quality, are forthcoming because they are wanted. By another operation of the same law, which political economists have more recently taken account of, the de- mand follows the supply, and short sto- ries are sought for because there is a proven ability to furnish them, and peo- ple read them willingly because they are usually very good. The art of writing them is now so disciplined and diffused with us that there is no lack either for the magazines or for the newspaper "syn- dicates " which deal in them almost to the exclusion of the serials. In other countries the feuilleton of the journals is a novel continued from day to day, but with us the papers, whether daily or
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weekly, now more rarely print novels, whether they get them at first hand from the writers, as a great many do, or through the syndicates, which purvey a vast variety of literary wares, chiefly for the Sunday editions of the city journals. In the country papers the short story takes the place of the chapters of a serial which used to be given.
XXII
N interesting fact in regard to the different varieties of the short story among us is that the sketches and stud- ies by the women seem faith- fuler and more realistic than those of the men, in proportion to their number. Their tendency is more distinctly in that direction, and there is a solidity, an honest observation, in the work of such women as Mrs. Cooke, Miss Murfree, Miss Wilkins and Miss Jewett, which often leaves little to be desired. I should, upon the whole, be disposed to rank American short stories only below those of such Russian writers as I have read, and I should praise rather than blame their free use of our different local parlances, or " dialects," as people call them. I like this because I hope that our inherited English may be constantly freshened and revived from the
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native sources which our literary decen- tralization will help to keep open, and I will own that as I turn over novels com- ing from Philadelphia, from New Mexico, from Boston, from Tennessee, from rural New England, from New York, every local flavor of diction gives me courage and pleasure. M. Alphonse Daudet, in a conversation which Mr. H. H. Boyesen has set down in a recently recorded in- terview with him, said, in speaking of Tourgueneff : " What a luxury it must be to have a great big untrodden barbaric language to wade into ! We poor fellows who work in the language of an old civil- ization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polish- ing. The crown jewels of our French tongue have passed through the hands of so many generations of monarchs that it seems like presumption on the part of any late-born pretender to attempt to wear them."
This grief is, of course, a little whimsi- cal, yet it has a certain measure of reason in it, and the same regret has been more
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seriously expressed by the Italian poet Aleardi :
*' Muse of an aged people, in the eve Of fading civilization, I was born.
Oh, fortunate,
My sisters, who in the heroic dawn Of races sung ! To them did destiny give The virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness Of their land's speech ; and, reverenced,
their hands Ran over potent strings."
It will never do to allow that we are at such a desperate pass in English, but something of this divine despair we may feel too in thinking of " the spacious times of great Elizabeth," when the poets were trying the stops of the young language, and thrilling with the surprises of their own music. We may comfort ourselves, however, unless we prefer a luxury of grief by remembering that no language, is ever old on the lips of those who speak it, no matter how decrepit it drops from the pen. We have only to leave our studies, editorial and other, and go into the shops and fields to find the " spacious
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times " again ; and from the beginning Realism, before she had put on her capital letter, had divined this near-at-hand truth along with the rest. Mr. Lowell, almost the greatest and finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us that Eliza- beth was still Queen where he heard Yankee farmers talk. One need not invite slang into the company of its betters, though perhaps slang has been dropping its " s " and becoming language ever since the world began, and is certainly some- times delightful and forcible beyond the reach of the dictionary. I would not have any one go about for new words, but if one of them came aptly, not to reject its help. For our novelists to try to write Americanly, from any motive, would be a dismal error, but being born Americans, I would have the muse " Americanisms " whenever these serve their turn ; and when their characters speak, I should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying Tennesseean, Philadel-I phian, Bostonian, and New York accents^ If we bother ourselves to write what the critics imagine to be " English," we
•38
Bhall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk " English." There is also this serious dis- advantage about " English," that if we wrote the best " English " in the world, probably the English themselves would not know it, or, if they did, certainly would not own it. It has always been supposed by grammarians and purists that a lan- guage can be kept as they find it ; but lan- guages, while they live, are perpetually changing. God apparently meant them for the common people — whom Lincoln believed God liked because he had made so many of them ; and the common peo- ple will use them freely as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and I believe that this is not deplorable, but desirable.
In fine, I would have our American novelists be as American as they un- consciously can. Matthew Arnold com- plained that he found no " distinction " in our life, and I would gladly persuade all artists intending greatness in any kind among us that the recognition of the fact
«39
pointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to be a source of inspiration to them, and not discouragement. We have been now some hundred years building up a state on the affirmation of the essential equali- ty of men in their rights and duties, and whether we have been right or been wrong the gods have taken us at our word, and have responded to us with a civilization in which there is no "distinction " per- ceptible to the eye that loves and values it. Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common gran- deur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality of solidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to the disad- vantage of anything else. It seems to me that these conditions invite the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever humanity, if he would thrive in our new order of things. The talent that is robust enough to front the every-day world and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, need not fear the en-
140
counter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the dis- tinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing. The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art ; and the reproach which Mr. Arnold was half right in making us shall have no justice in it any longer ; we shall be " dis- tinguished."
XXIII
N the mean time it has been said with a superficial jus- tice that our fiction is nar- row ; though in the same sense I suppose the pres- ent Enghsh fiction is as narrow as our own ; and most modern fiction is nar- row in a certain sense. In Italy the best men are writing novels as brief and re- stricted in range as ours ; in Spain the novels are intense and deep, and not spa- cious ; the French school, with the ex- ception of Zola, is narrow ; the Norwe- gians are narrow ; the Russians, except Tolstoi, are narrow, and the next greatest after him, Tourgueneff, is the narrowest great novelist, as to mere dimensions, that ever lived, dealing nearly always with small groups, isolated and analyzed in the most American fashion. In fact, the charge of narrowness accuses the
whole tendency of modern fiction as much as the American school. But I do not by any means allow that this nar- rowness is a defect, while denying that it is a universal characteristic of our fic- tion ; it is rather, for the present, a virt- ue. Indeed, I should call the present American work, North and South, thor- j^ ough rather than narrow. In one sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighbor- hood or a class, has done something which cannot in any bad sense be called narrow ; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all ; and this depth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization like ours, where the differ- ences are not of classes, but of types, and not of types either so much as of charac- ters. A new method was necessary in )(, dealing with the new conditions, and the new method is world-wide, because the whole world is more or less American- ized. Tolstoi is exceptionally volumi- nous among modern writers, even Rus-
J43
sian writers ; and it might be said that / the forte of Tolstoi himself is not in his breadth sidewise, but in his breadth up- ward and downward. The Death of Ivan Illitch leaves as vast an impres- sion on the reader's soul as any episode of War and Peace, which, indeed, can be recalled only in episodes, and not as a whole. I think that our writers may be safely counselled to continue their work in the modern way, because it is the best way yet known. If they make it true, it will be large, no matter what its super- ficies are ; and it would be the greatest mistake to try to make it big. A big book is necessarily a group of episodes more or less loosely connected by a thread of narrative, and there seems no reason why this thread must always be supplied. Each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one of a connected group ; the final effect will be from the truth of each episode, not from the size of the group.
The whole field of human experience was never so nearly covered by imagina- tive literature in any age as in this ; and American life especially is getting repre-
sented with unexampled fulness. It is true that no one writer, no one book, represents it, for that is not possible ; our social and political decentralization for- bids this, and may forever forbid it. But a great number of very good writers are in- stinctively striving to make each part of the country and each phase of our civili- zation known to all the other parts ; and their work is not narrow in any feeble or vicious sense. The world was once very little, and it is now very large. For- merly, all science could be grasped by a single mind ; but now the man who hopes to become great or useful in sci- ence must devote himself to a single de- partment. It is so in everything — all arts, all trades ; and the novelist is not superior to the universal rule against universality. He contributes his share to a thorough knowledge of groups of the human race under conditions which are full of inspir- ing novelty and interest. He works more fearlessly, frankly, and faithfully than the novelist ever worked before ; his work, or much of it, may be destined never to be reprinted from the monthly magazines ;
145
but if he turns to his book-shelf and re- gards the array of the British or other classics, he knows that they too are for the most part dead ; he knows that the planet itself is destined to freeze up and drop into the sun at last, with all its sur- viving literature upon it. The question is merely one of time. He consoles him- self, therefore, if he is wise, and works on ; and we may all take some comfort from the thought that most things can- not be helped. Especially a movement in literature like that which the world is now witnessing cannot be helped; and we could no more turn back and be of the literary fashions of any age before this than we could turn back and be of its social, economical, or political conditions.
If I were authorized to address any |, word directly to our novelists I should say, ' , Do not trouble yourselves about stand- j \ ards or ideals ; but try to be faithful and natural : remember that there is no great- ' ness, no beauty, which does not come from f truth to your own knowledge of things ; and keep on working, even if your work is not long remembered.
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At least three-fifths of the Hterature called classic, in all languages, no more lives than the poems and stories that per- ish monthly in our magazines. It is all printed and reprinted, generation after generation, century after century ; but it is not alive ; it is as dead as the people who wrote it and read it, and to whom it meant something, perhaps ; with whom it was a fashion, a caprice, a passing taste. A superstitious piety preserves it, and pretends that it has aesthetic qualities which can delight or edify ; but nobody really enjoys it, except as a reflection of the past moods and humors of the race, or a revelation of the author's character ; otherwise it is trash, and often very filthy trash, which the present trash generally is not.
XXIV
NE of the great newspapers the other day invited the prominent American au- thors to speak their minds upon a point in the theory and practice of fiction which had already vexed some of them. It was the question of how much or how little the American novel ought to deal with certain facts of life which are not usually talked of be- fore young people, and especially young ladies. Of course the question was not decided, and I forget just how far the balance inclined in favor of a larger free- dom in the matter. But it certainly in- clined that way ; one or two writers of the sex which is somehow supposed to have purity in its keeping (as if purity were a thing that did not practically concern the other sex, preoccupied with serious affairs) gave it a rather vigorous
148
tilt to that side. In view of this fact it would not be the part of prudence to make an effort to dress the balance ; and indeed I do not know that I was going to make any such effort. But there are some things to say, around and about the subject, which I should like to have some one else say, and which I may myself possibly be safe in suggesting.
One of the first of these is the fact, generally lost sight of by those who cen- sure the Anglo-Saxon novel for its prud- ishness, that it is really not such a prude after all ; and that if it is sometimes ap- parently anxious to avoid those experi- ences of life not spoken of before young people, this may be an appearance only. Sometimes a novel which has this shuf- fling air, this effect of truckling to pro- priety, might defend itself, if it could speak for itself, by saying that such ex- periences happened not to come within its scheme, and that, so far from maim- ing or mutilating itself in ignoring them, it was all the more faithfully representa- tive of the tone of modern life in dealing with love that was chaste, and with pas-
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sion so honest that it could be openly spoken of before the tenderest society bud at dinner. It might say that the guilty intrigue, the betrayal, the extreme flirtation even, was the exceptional thing in life, and unless the scheme of the story necessarily involved it, that it would be bad art to lug it in, and as bad taste as to introduce such topics in a mixed com- pany. It could say very justly that the novel in our civilization now always ad- dresses a mixed company, and that the vast majority of the company are ladies, and that very many, if not most, of these ladies are young girls. If the novel were written for men and for married women alone, as in continental Europe, it might be altogether different. But the simple fact is that it is not written for them alone among us, and it is a question of writing, under cover of our universal ac- ceptance, things for young girls to read which you would be put out-of-doors for saying to them, or of frankly giving no^ tice of your intention, and so cutting yourself off from the pleasure — and it is a very high and sweet one — of appealing
ISO
to these vivid, responsive intelligences, which are none the less brilliant and ad- mirable because they are innocent.
One day a novelist who liked, after the manner of other men, to repine at his hard fate, complained to his friend, a critic, that he was tired of the restriction he had put upon himself in this regard ; for it is a mistake, as can be readily shown, to suppose that others impose it. " See how free those French fellows are !" he rebelled. "Shall we always be shut up to our tradition of decency ?"
" Do you think it's much worse than being shut up to their tradition of inde- cency ?" said his friend.
Then that novelist began to reflect, and he remembered how sick the invariable motive of the French novel made him. He perceived finally that, convention for convention, ours was not only more tol- erable, but on the whole was truer to life, not only to its complexion, but also to its texture. No one will pretend that there js not vicious love beneath the surface of our society ; if he did, the fetid explosions of the divorce trials would refute him;
IS'
but if he pretended that it was in any just sense characteristic of our society, he could be still more easily refuted. Yet it exists, and it is unquestionably the mate- rial of tragedy, the stuff from which in- tense effects are wrought. The question, after owning this fact, is whether these intense effects are not rather cheap ef- fects. I incline to think they are, and I will try to say why I think so, if I may do so without offence. The material itself, the mere mention of it, has an instant fascination ; it arrests, it detains, till the last word is said, and while there is any- thing to be hinted. This is what makes a love intrigue of some sort all but es- sential to the popularity of any fiction. Without such an intrigue the intellectual equipment of the author must be of the highest, and then he will succeed only with the highest class of readers. But any author who will deal with a guilty love intrigue holds all readers in his hand, the highest with the lowest, as long as he hints the slightest hope of the smallest potential naughtiness. He need not at all be a great author ; he may be a very
shabby wretch, if he has but the courage or the trick of that sort of thing. The critics will call him " virile " and " pas- sionate ;" decent people will be ashamed to have been limed by him ; but the low average will only ask another chance of flocking into his net. If he happens to be an able writer, his really fine and costly work will be unheeded, and the lure to the appetite will be chiefly remembered. There may be other qualities which make reputations for other men, but in his case they will count for nothing. He pays this penalty for his success in that kind ; and every one pays some such penalty who deals with some such material. It attaches in like manner to the triumphs of the writers who now almost form a school among us, and who may be said to have established themselves in an easy popularity simply by the study of erotic shivers and fervors. They may find their account in the popularity, or they may not; there is no question of the popu- larity.
But I do not mean to imply that their case covers the whole ground. So far
as it goes, though, it ought to stop the mouths of those who complain that fic- tion is enslaved to propriety among us. It appears that of a certain kind of im- propriety it is free to give us all it will, and more. But this is not what serious men and women writing fiction mean when they rebel against the limitations of their art in our civilization. They have no desire to deal with nakedness, as painters and sculptors freely do in the worship of beauty ; or with certain facts of life, as the stage does, in the service of sensation. But they ask why, when the conventions of the plastic and histrionic arts liberate their followers to the por- trayal of almost any phase of the physical or of the emotional nature, an American novelist may not write a story on the lines of Anna Karenina or Madame Bo- vary. Sappho they put aside, and from Zola's work they avert their eyes. They do not condemn him or Daudet, neces- sarily, or accuse their motives ; they leave them out of the question ; they do not want to do that kind of thing. But they do sometimes wish to do another kind, to
touch one of the most serious and sorrow- ful problems of life in the spirit of Tolstoi and Flaubert, and they ask why they may not. At one time, they remind us, the Anglo-Saxon novelist did deal with such problems — De Foe in his spirit, Richard- son in his, Goldsmith in his. At what moment did our fiction lose this privilege ? In what fatal hour did the Young Girl arise and seal the lips of Fiction, with a touch of her finger, to some of the most vital interests of life ?
Whether I wished to oppose them in their aspiration for greater freedom, or whether I wished to encourage them, I should begin to answer them by say- ing that the Young Girl had never done anything of the kind. The manners of the novel have been improving with those of its readers; that is all. Gentlemen no longer swear or fall drunk under the table, or abduct young ladies and shut them up in lonely country-houses, or so habitually set about the ruin of their neighbors' wives, as they once did. Gen- erally, people now call a spade an agri- cultural implement ; they have not grown
'55
decent without having also grown a little squeamish, but they have grown compar- atively decent; there is no doubt about that. They require of a novelist whom they respect unquestionable proof of his seriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases of life ; they require a sort of scientific decorum. He can no longer expect to be received on the ground of entertainment only; he assumes a higher function, something like that of a phy- sician or a priest, and they expect him to be bound by laws as sacred as those of such professions ; they hold him solemnly pledged not to betray them or abuse their confidence. If he will accept the condi- tions, they give him their confidence, and he may then treat to his greater honor, and not at all to his disadvantage, of such experiences, such relations of men and women as George Eliot treats in Adam Bede, in Daniel Deronda, in Romola, in almost all her books ; such as Hawthorne treats in the Scarlet Letter ; such as Dick- ens treats in David Copperfield ; such as Thackeray treats in Pendennis, and glances at in every one of his fictions; such
as most of the masters of English fiction have at some time treated more or less openly. It is quite false or quite mistaken to suppose that our novels have left un- touched these most important realities of life. They have only not made them their stock in trade ; they have kept a true per- spective in regard to them ; they have relegated them in their pictures of life to the space and place they occupy in life it- self, as we know it in England and Amer- ica. They have kept a correct propor- tion, knowing perfectly well that unless the novel is to be a map, with every- thing scrupulously laid down in it, a faith- ful record of life in far the greater extent could be made to the exclusion of guilty love and all its circumstances and conse- quences.
I justify them in this view not only be- cause I hate what is cheap and meretri- cious, and hold in peculiar loathing the cant of the critics who require " passion " as something in itself admirable and de- sirable in a novel, but because I prize fidelity in the historian of feeling and character. Most of these critics who de-
»S7
mand " passion " would seem to have no conception of any passion but one. Yet there are several other passions : the pas- sion of grief, the passion of avarice, the passion of pity, the passion of ambition, the passion of hate, the passion of envy, the passion of devotion, the passion of friendship ; and all these have a greater part in the drama of life than the passion of love, and infinitely greater than the passion of guilty love. Wittingly or un- wittingly, English fiction and American fiction have recognized this truth, not fully, not in the measure it merits, but in greater degree than most other fiction.
XXV
HO can deny that fiction would be incomparably stronger, incomparably truer, if once it could tear off the habit which enslaves it to the celebration chiefly of a single pas- sion, in one phase or another, and could frankly dedicate itself to the service of all the passions, all the interests, all the facts ? Every novelist who has thought about his art knows that it would, and I think that upon reflection he must doubt whether his sphere would be greatly enlarged if he were allowed to treat freely the darker aspects of the favorite passion. But, as I have shown, the privilege, the right to do this, is already perfectly recognized. This is proved again by the fact that seri- ous criticism recognizes as master-works (I will not push the question of suprem- acy) the two great novels which above
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all others have moved the world by their study of guilty love. If by any chance, if by some prodigious miracle, any Amer- ican should now arise to treat it on the level of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, he would be absolutely sure of success, and of fame and gratitude as great as those books have won for their authors.
But what editor of what American mag- azine would print such a story ?
Certainly I do not think any one would ; and here our novelist must again submit to conditions. If he wishes to publish such a story (supposing him to have once written it), he must publish it as a book. A book is something by itself, responsible for its character, which becomes quickly known, and it does not necessarily pene- trate to every member of the household. The father or the mother may say to the child, " I would rather you wouldn't read that book;" if the child cannot be trusted, the book may be locked up. But with the magazine and its serial the affair is different. Between the editor of a repu- table English or American magazine and
the families which receive it there is a tacit agreement that he will print nothing which a father may not read to his daugh- ter, or safely leave her to read herself. After all, it is a matter of business ; and the insurgent novelist should consider the situation with coolness and common- sense. The editor did not create the situation ; but it exists, and he could not even attempt to change it without many sorts of disaster. He respects it, there- fore, with the good faith of an honest man. Even when he is himself a novelist, with ardor for his art and impatience of the limitations put upon it, he interposes his veto, as Thackeray did in the case of Trollope when a contributor approaches forbidden ground.
It does not avail to say that the daily papers teem with facts far fouler and deadlier than any which fiction could im- agine. That is true, but it is true also that the sex which reads the most novels reads the fewest newspapers ; and, besides, the reporter does not command the novel- ist's skill to fix impressions in a young girl's mind or to suggest conjecture. The
i6i
magazine is a little despotic, a little arbi- trary ; but unquestionably its favor is es- sential to success, and its conditions are not such narrow ones. You cannot deal with Tolstoi's and Flaubert's subjects in the absolute artistic freedom of Tolstoi and Flaubert ; since De Foe, that is un- known among us; but if you deal with them in the manner of George Eliot, of Thackeray, of Dickens, of society, you may deal with them even in the magazines. There is no other restriction upon you. All the horrors and miseries and tortures are open to you ; your pages may drop blood ; sometimes it may happen that the editor will even exact such strong mate- rial from you. But probably he will re- quire nothing but the observance of the convention in question ; and if you do not yourself prefer bloodshed he will leave you free to use all sweet and peaceable means of interesting his readers.
Believe me, it is no narrow field he throws open to you, with that little sign to keep off the grass up at one point only. Its vastness is still almost unex- plored, and whole regions in it are un-
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known to the fictionist. Dig anywhere, and do but dig deep enough, and you strike riches; or, if you are of the mind to range, the gentler cHmes, the softer temperatures, the serener skies, are all free to you, and are so little visited that the chance of novelty is greater among them.
XXVI
HILE the Americans have greatly excelled in the short story generally, they have almost created a species of it in the Thanskgiving story. We have transplanted the Christmas sto- ry from England, while the Thanksgiving story is native to our air ; but both are of Anglo-Saxon growth. Their difiference is from a difference of environment ; and the Christmas story when naturalized among us becomes almost identical in motive, incident, and treatment with the Thanksgiving story. If I were to gener- alize a distinction between them, I should say that the one dealt more with marvels and the other more with morals ; and yet the critic should beware of speaking too confidently on this point. It is certain, however, that the Christmas season is meteorologically more favorable to the
effective return of persons long supposed lost at sea, or from a prodigal life, or from a darkened mind. The longer, denser, and colder nights are better adapted to the apparition of ghosts, and to all man- ner of signs and portents ; while they seem to present a wider field for the active in tervention of angels in behalf of orphans and outcasts. The dreams of elderly sleepers at this time are apt to be such as will effect a lasting change in them when they awake, turning them from the hard, cruel, and grasping habits of a life- time, and reconciling them to their sons, daughters, and nephews, who have thwart- ed them in marriage ; or softening them to their meek, uncomplaining wives, whose hearts they have trampled upon in their reckless pursuit of wealth ; and generally disposing them to a distribution of ham- pers among the sick and poor, and to a friendly reception of chubby gentlemen with charity subscription papers. Ships readily drive upon rocks in the early twi- light, and offer exciting difficulties of sal- vage ; and the heavy snows gather thickly round the steps of wanderers who lie
down to die in them, preparatory to their discovery and rescue by immediate rela- tives. The midnight weather is also very suitable to encounter with murderers and burglars ; and the contrast of its freezing gloom with the light and cheer in-doors promotes the gayeties which merge, at all well-regulated country-houses, in love and marriage. In the region of pure character no moment could be so availa- ble for flinging off the mask of frivolity, or imbecility, or savagery, which one has worn for ten or twenty long years, say, for the purpose of foiling some villain, and surprising the reader, and helping the author out with his plot. Persons abroad in the Alps, or Apennines, or Pyrenees, or anywhere seeking shelter in the huts of shepherds or the dens of smugglers, find no time like it for lying in a feigned slumber, and listening to the whispered machinations of their suspi- cious-looking entertainers, and then sud- denly starting up and lighting their way out ; or else springing from the real sleep into which they have sunk exhausted, and finding it broad day and the good
i66
peasants whom they had so unjustly doubted, waiting breakfast for them. We need not point out the superior advan- tages of the Christmas season for anything one has a mind to do with the French Revolution, or the Arctic explorations, or the Indian Mutiny, or the horrors of Si- berian exile ; there is no time so good for the use of this material ; and ghosts on shipboard are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In our own logging camps the man who has gone into the woods for the winter, after quarrelling with his wife, then hears her sad appeal- ing voice, and is moved to good resolu- tions as at no other period of the year ; and in the mining regions, first in Cali- fornia and later in Colorado, the hardened reprobate, dying in his boots, smells his mother's dough-nuts, and breathes his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and the little brother, or sister, or the old father coming to meet him from heaven ; while his rude companions listen round him, and dry their eyes on the buts of their revolvers.
It has to be very grim, all that, to be
i67
truly effective ; and here, already, we have a touch in the Americanized Christmas story or the moralistic quality of the American Thanksgiving story. This was seldom written, at first, for the mere en- tertainment of the reader ; it was meant to entertain him, of course ; but it was meant to edify him, too, and to improve him ; and some such intention is still present in it. I rather think that it deals more probably with character to this end than its English cousin, the Christmas story, does. It is not so improbable that a man should leave off being a drunkard on Thanksgiving, as that he should leave off being a curmudgeon on Christmas; that he should conquer his appetite as that he should instantly change his nat- ure, by good resolutions. He would be very likely, indeed, to break his resolu- tions in either case, but not so likely in the one as in the other.
Generically, the Thanksgiving story is cheerfuler in its drama and simpler in its persons than the Christmas story. Rare- ly has it dealt with the supernatural, either the apparition of ghosts or the in-
tervention of angels. The weather being so much milder at the close of November than it is a month later, very little can be done with the elements; though on the coast a north-easterly storm has been, and can be, very usefully employed. The Thanksgiving story is more restricted in its range ; the scene is still mostly in New England, and the characters are of New England extraction, who come home from the West usually, or New York, for the event of the little drama, whatever ijt may be. It may be the reconciliation of kinsfolk who have quarrelled ; or the union of lovers long estranged ; or hus- bands and wives who have had hard words and parted ; or mothers who had thought their sons dead in California and find themselves agreeably disappointed in their return ; or fathers who for old time's sake receive back their erring and conveniently dying daughters. The notes are not many which this simple music sounds, but they have a Sabbath tone, mostly, and win the listener to kind- lier thoughts and better moods. The art is at its highest in some strong sketch of
i69
Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke's, or some per- fectly satisfying study of Miss Jewett's, or some graphic situation of Miss Wil- kins's ; and then it is a very fine art. But mostly it is poor and rude enough, and makes openly, shamelessly, sickeningly, for the reader's emotions, as well as his morals. It is inclined to be rather de- scriptive. The turkey, the pumpkin, the cornfield, figure throughout ; and the leaf- less woods are blue and cold against the evening sky behind the low hip- roofed, old-fashioned homestead. The parlance is usually the Yankee dialect and its west- ern modifications.
The Thanksgiving story is mostly con- fined in scene to the country ; it does not seem possible to do much with it in town ; and it is a serious question whether with its geographical and topical limitations it can hold its own against the Christmas story ; and whether it would not be well for authors to consider a combination with its elder rival.
The two feasts are so near together in point of time that they could be easily covered by the sentiment of even a brief
narrative. Under the agglutinated style of A Thanksgiving-Christmas Story, fic- tion appropriate to both could be pro- duced, and both could be employed natu- rally and probably in the transaction of its affairs and the development of its characters. The plot for such a story could easily be made to include a total- abstinence pledge and family reunion at Thanksgiving, and an apparition and spir- itual regeneration over a bowl of punch at Christmas.
Not all Thanksgiving-Christmas stories need be of this pattern precisely ; I wish to suggest merely one way of doing them. Perhaps when our writers really come to the work they will find sufficient inspira- tion in its novelty to turn to human life and observe how it is really affected on these holidays, and be tempted to present some of its actualities. This would be a great thing#to do, and would come home to readers with surprise.
XXVII
iT would be interesting to know the far beginnings of holiday, literature, and I commend the quest to the scientific spirit which now specializes research in every branch of history. In the mean time, without be- ing too confident of the facts, I venture to suggest that it came in with the ro- mantic movement about the beginning of this century, when mountains ceased to be horrid and became picturesque ; when ruins of all sorts, but particularly abbeys and castles, became habitable to the most delicate constitutions ; when the despised Gothick of Addison dropped its " k," and arose the chivalrous and religious Gothic of Scott ; when ghosts were redeemed from the contempt into which they had fallen, and resumed their place in polite society; in fact, the politer the society,
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the welcomer the ghosts, and whatever else was out of the common. In that day the Annual flourished, and this artificial flower was probably the first literary blos- som on the Christmas Tree which has since borne so much tinsel foliage and painted fruit. But the Annual was ex- tremely Oriental ; it was much preoccu- pied with Haidees and Gulnares and Zulcikas, with Hindas and Nourmahals, owing to the distinction which Byron and Moore had given such ladies; and when it began to concern itself with the actualities of British beauty, the daugh- ters of Albion, though inscribed with the names of real countesses and duchesses, betrayed their descent from the well- known Eastern odalisques. It was pos- sibly through an American that holiday literature became distinctively English in material, and Washington Irving, with his New World love of the past, may have given the impulse to the literary worship of Christmas which has since so widely established itself. A festival revived in popular interest by a New-Yorker to whom Dutch associations with New-
year's had endeared the German ideal of Christmas, and whom the robust gayeties of the season in old-fashioned country- houses had charmed, would be one of those roundabout results which destiny likes, and " would at least be Early Eng- lish." If we cannot claim with all the patriotic confidence we should like to feel that it was Irving who set Christmas in that light in which Dickens saw its aes- thetic capabilities, it is perhaps because all origins are obscure. For anything that we positively know to the contrary, the Druidic rites from which English Christmas borrowed the inviting mistle- toe, if not the decorative holly, may have been accompanied by the recitations of holiday triads. But it is certain that sev- eral plays of Shakespeare were produced, if not written, for the celebration of the holidays, and that then the black tide of Puritanism which swept over men's souls blotted out all such observance of Christ- mas with the festival itself. It came in again, by a natural reaction, with the re- turning Stuarts, and throughout the pe« riod of the Restoration it enjoyed a per-
functory favor. There is mention of it often enough in the eighteenth century essayists, in the Spectators and Idlers and Tatlers ; but the World about the mid- dle of the last century laments the neglect into which it had fallen. Irving seems to have been the first to observe its sur- viving rites lovingly, and Dickens divined its immense advantage as a literary oc- casion. He made it in some sort entire- ly his for a time, and there can be no question but it was he who again en- deared it to the whole English-speaking world, and gave it a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before upon the fancies and affections of our race.
The might of that great talent no one can gainsay, though in the light of the truer work which has since been done his literary principles seem almost as gro- tesque as his theories of political econ- omy. In no one direction was his erring force more felt than in the creation of holiday literature as we have known it for the last half-century. Creation, of course, is the wrong word ; it says too much ; but in default of a better word, it may stand.
He did not make something out of noth- ing ; the material was there before him ; the mood and even the need of his time contributed immensely to his success, as the volition of the subject helps on the mesmerist ; but it is within bounds to say- that he was the chief agency in the de- velopment of holiday literature as we have known it, as he was the chief agency in universalizing the great Christian holi- day as we now have it. Other agencies wrought with him and after him ; but it was he who rescued Christmas from Puri- tan distrust, and humanized it and con- secrated it to the hearts and homes of all. Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in working his miracle, but there is no doubt about his working it. One opens his Christmas stories in this later day — The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunt- ed Man, The Cricket on the Hearth, and all the rest — and with " a heart high-sor- rowful and cloyed," asks himself for the preternatural virtue that they once had. The pathos appears false and strained ; the humor largely horse -play; the char- acter theatrical; the joviality pumped;
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the psychology commonplace; the soci- ology alone funny. It is a world of real clothes, earth, air, water, and the rest ; the people often speak the language of life, but their motives are as dispropor- tioned and improbable, and their passions and purposes as overcharged, as those of the worst of Balzac's people. Yet all these monstrosities, as they now appear, seem to have once had symmetry and verity ; they moved the most cultivated intelligences of the time ; they touched true hearts ; they made everybody laugh and cry.
This was perhaps because the imagina- tion, from having been fed mostly upon gross unrealities, always responds readily to fantastic appeals. There has been an amusing sort of awe of it, as if it were the channel of inspired thought, and were somehow sacred. The most preposter- ous inventions of its activity have been regarded in their time as the greatest feats of the human mind, and in its receptive form it has been nursed into an imbecility to which the truth is repugnant, and the fact that the beautiful resides nowhere
else is inconceivable. It has been flat- tered out of all sufferance in its toyings with the mere elements of character, and its attempts to present these in combina- tions foreign to experience are still praised by the poorer sort of critics as master- pieces of creative work.
In the day of Dickens's early Christmas stories it was thought admirable for the author to take types of humanity which everybody knew, and to add to them from his imagination till they were as strange as beasts and birds talking. Now we be- gin to feel that human nature is quite enough, and that the best an author can do is to show it as it is. But in those stories of his Dickens said to his readers, Let us make believe so-and-so; and the result was a joint juggle, a child's-play, in which the wholesome allegiance to life was lost. Artistically, therefore, the scheme was false, and artistically, there- fore, it must perish. It did not perish, however, before it had propagated itself in a whole school of unrealities so ghast- ly that one can hardly recall without a shudder those sentimentalities at second-
hand to which holiday literature was abandoned long after the original con- jurer had wearied of his performance.
Under his own eye and of conscious purpose a circle of imitators grew up in the fabrication of Christmas stories. They obviously formed themselves upon his sobered ideals ; they collaborated with him, and it was often hard to know wheth- er it was Dickens or Mr. Sala or Mr. Col- lins who was writing. The Christmas book had by that time lost its direct ap- plication to Christmas. It dealt with shipwrecks a good deal, and with peril- ous adventures of all kinds, and with un- merited suffering, and with ghosts and mysteries, because human nature, secure from storm and danger in a well-lighted room before a cheerful fire, likes to have these things imaged for it, and its long- puerilized fancy will bear an endless repe- tition of them. The wizards who wrought their spells with them contented them- selves with the lasting efficacy of these simple means; and the apprentice - wiz- ards and journeyman-wizards who have succeeded them practise the same arts at
the old stand ; but the ethical intention which gave dignity to Dickens's Christ- mas stories of still earlier date has almost wholly disappeared. It was a quality which could not be worked so long as the phantoms and hair-breadth escapes. People always knew that character is not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux ; that a ghost cannot do much towards re- forming an inordinately selfish person; that a life cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, by the most allegorical apparition ; that want and sin and shame cannot be cured by kettles singing on the hob ; and gradually they ceased to make believe that there was virtue in these devices and appliances. Yet the ethical intention was not fruit- less, crude as it now appears. It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of the old, simple truths ; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and the endeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are the principles upon which alone the world holds togeth- er and gets forward. It was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in
i8o
mind of the savagery and suffering all round them, and to be taught, as Dickens was always teaching, that certain feelings which grace human nature, as tenderness for the sick and helpless, self-sacrifice and generosity, self-respect and manliness and womanliness, are the common heritage of the race, the direct gift of Heaven, shared equally by the rich and poor. It did not necessarily detract from the value of the lesson that, with the imperfect art of the time, he made his paupers and porters not only human, but superhuman, and too al- together virtuous ; and it remained true that home life may be lovely under the lowliest roof, although he liked to paint it without a shadow on its beauty there. . It is still a fact that the sick are very of- ten saintly, although he put no peevish- ness into their patience with their ills. His ethical intention told for manhood and fraternity and tolerance, and when this intention disappeared from the bet- ter holiday literature, that literature was sensibly the poorer for the loss.
It never did disappear wholly from the writings of Dickens, whom it once vitally
i8x
possessed, and if its action became more and more mechanical, still it always had its effect with the generation which hung charmed upon his lips, till the lips fell dumb and still forever. It imbued sub- ordinate effort, and inspired his myriad imitators throughout the English - scrib- bling world, especially upon its remot- er borders, so that all holiday fiction, which was once set to the tunes of The Carol and The Chimes, still grinds no other through the innumerable pipes of the humbler newspapers and magazines, though these airs are no longer heard in the politer literary centres.
This cannot go on forever, of course, but the Christmas whose use and beauty Dickens divined will remain, though Christmas literature is going the way of so much that was once admired, like the fine language, the beauties of style, and the ornate manners of the past, down through the ranks of the aesthetical poor, whom we have always with us, to the final rag-bag of oblivion.
It is still manufactured among us in the form of short stories : but the Christ-
l82
mas book, which now seems to be always a number of paste gems threaded upon a strand of tinsel, must be imported from England if we want it. With the con- stant and romantic public of the British islands it appears that spectres and im- minent dangers still have favor enough to inspire their fabrication, while if I may judge from an absence of native phantasms and perils, the industry has no more encouragement among us than ship-building, though no prohibitive tar- iff has enhanced the cost of the raw ma- terials, or interfered to paralyze the ef- forts of the American imagination.
XXVIII
UT if the humanitarian im- pulse has mostly disappear- ed from Christmas fiction, I think it has never so general- ly characterized all fiction. One may refuse to recognize this im- pulse; one may deny that it is in any greater degree shaping life than ever be- fore, but no one who has the current of literature under his eye can fail to note it there. People are thinking and feel- ing generously, if not living justly, in our time ; it is a day of anxiety to be saved from the curse that is on selfishness, of eager question how others shall be helped, of bold denial that the conditions in which we would fain have rested are sacred or immutable. Especially in America, where the race has gained a height never reach- ed before, the eminence enables more men than ever before to see how even here
i84
vast masses of men are sunk in misery that must grow every day more hopeless, or embroiled in a struggle for mere life that must end in enslaving and imbruting them.
Art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does not make friends with Need it must perish. It perceives that to take itself from the many and leave them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few whom it can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error that kills. This has long been the burden of Rus- kin's message : and if we can believe William Morris, the common people have heard him gladly, and have felt the truth of what he says. " They see the prophet in him rather than the fantastic rhetori- cian, as more superfine audiences do ;" and the men and women who do the hard work of the world have learned from him and from Morris that they have a right to pleasure in their toil, and that when jus- tice is done them they will have it. In all ages poetry has affirmed something of this sort, but it remained for ours to per- ceive it and express it somehow in every
185
form of literature. But this is only one phase of the devotion of the best literature of our time to the service of humanity. No book written with a low or cynical motive could succeed now, no matter how brilliantly written ; and the work done in the past to the glorification of mere pas- sion and power, to the deification of self, appears monstrous and hideous. The romantic spirit worshipped genius, wor- shipped heroism, but at its best, in such a man as Victor Hugo, this spirit recog- nized the supreme claim of the lowest humanity. Its error was to idealize the victims of society, to paint them impos- sibly virtuous and beautiful ; but truth, which has succeeded to the highest mis- sion of romance, paints these victims as they are, and bids the world consider them not because they are beautiful and virtuous, but because they are ugly and vicious, cruel, filthy, and only not alto- gether loathsome because the divine can never wholly die out of the human. The truth does not find these victims among the poor alone, among the hungry, the houseless, the ragged ; but it also finds
them among the rich, cursed with the aim- lessness, the satiety, the despair of wealth, wasting their lives in a fool's paradise of shows and semblances, with nothing real but the misery that comes of insincerity and selfishness.
It is needless for me to say, either to the many whom my opinions on this point in- cense or to the few who accept them, that I do not think the fiction of our own time even always equal to this work, or per- haps more than seldom so. But as I have before expressed, to the still-reverberating discontent of two continents, fiction is now a finer art than it has ever been hitherto, and more nearly meets the requirements of the infallible standard. I have hopes of real usefulness in it, because it is at last building on the only sure founda- tion ; but I am by no means certain that it will be the ultimate literary form, or will remain as important as we believe it is destined to become. On the contrary, it is quite imaginable that when the great mass of readers, now sunk in the foolish joys of mere fable, shall be lifted to an in- terest in the meaning of things through
i87
the faithful portrayal of life in fiction, then fiction the most faithful may be superseded by a still more faithful form of contemporaneous history. I willingly leave the precise character of this form to the more robust imagination of readers whose minds have been nurtured upon romantic novels, and who really have an imagination worth speaking of, and con- fine myself, as usual, to the hither side of the regions of conjecture.
The art which in the mean time dis- dains the office of teacher is one of the last refuges of the aristocratic spirit which is disappearing from politics and society, and is now seeking to shelter itself in aesthetics. The pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste ; but as before, it is averse to the mass of men ; it consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise. It seeks to withdraw itself, to stand aloof; to be distinguished, and not to be identi- fied. Democracy in literature is the re- verse of all this. It wishes to know and to tell the truth, confident that consola- tion and delight are there; it does not
iS8
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