Criticism and fiction

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University of California • Berkeley

CRITICISM AND FICTION

CRITICISM

AND FICTION

W. D. H>

CRITICISM

AND FICTION

BY

W. D. HOWELLS

NEW YORK

HARPER AND BROTHERS

MDCCCXCI

Copyright, 1891, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

All rights reserotd.

CRITICISM AND FICTION

j>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-
ing of the Bolognese school of painting,
which once had so great cry, and was
vaunted the supreme exemplar of the
grand style, but which he now believes
fallen into lasting contempt for its empti-
ness 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
hope," 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
imore capable of living in the whole ; also,
that in proportion as we gain a firmer hold
upon our own place in the world, we shall
come to comprehend with more instinct-
ive certitude what is simple, natural, and
honest, welcoming with gladness all ar-
tistic products that exhibit these quali-
ties. The perception of the enlightened
man will then be the task of a healthy
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 to
decadence by discerning what there is of
truth, sincerity, and natural vigor in it."

I

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
line 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'll 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 mistakable 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 from 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 Vautrec, 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

IUCH 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-

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 — L£
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 dyed 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-

structors, who perhaps caught the truth
of their day, but whose routine life has
been alien to any other truth. There is
probably no chair of literature 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 in 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

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 English 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,

3

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 own 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 fellow-
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

38

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 thinker 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 futility 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.

SOMETIMES 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

JANON 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
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,

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

jj!S I have already intimated, I
doubt the more lasting effects
of unjust criticism. It is no
part of my belief that Keats '9
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

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-

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 Senor
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.

Sefior 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 difference 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 ;

6o

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 Senor 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 Senor 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

6 1-

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
Seiior 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, Senor 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, Sefior 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

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

j)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
s

66

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;

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,
Senor 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,
will 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

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, Seiior 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 cruelest
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

i 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 Senor Val-
des says, "the barbarous customs of the
Middle Ages, softening and disfiguring
them, as Walter Scott and his kind did ;"

75

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
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

I 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
jwhat 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.

8i

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

ANOTHER Spanish novelist
of our day, whose books
have given me great pleas-
ure, is so far from being
of the same mind of Seilor
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
Sen or 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-

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, Seiior 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-

trayed in the gay light of an Andalusian
sky, for the charm with which a fresh and
unhackneyed 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

86

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

perception of its sensuality. For the sins
of his life 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"

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 —

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-

9o

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

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

lieve 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

95

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,

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-

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

99

what is base, what is health 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

103

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

104

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

JHIS 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

io7

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-

io8

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

io9

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 conies 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 judgment 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-

8

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 parti 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

n8

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 story merely
as a story is something that must early

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-
lish 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

123

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-

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

J26

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

I27

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 English-
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

128

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

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 J:hem, 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

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

135

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

I36

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

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-
phian, Bostonian, and New York accents.
If we bother ourselves to write what
the critics imagine to be " English," we

138

ishall 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

139

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-

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

I 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 English 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-
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-

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 ;

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-
ards or ideals ; but try to be faithful and
natural : remember that there is no great-
ness, no beauty, which does not come from
truth to your own knowledge of things ;
and keep on working, even if your work
is not long remembered.

i46

At least three-fifths of the literature
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-

149

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

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
is not vicious love beneath the surface of
our society ; if he did, the fetid explosions
of the divorce trials would refute him ;

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

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

«56

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-

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

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

i6o

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

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-

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 climes, 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

I 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 difference
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

i64

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

i6S

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 fighting their way
out ; or else springing from the real sleep
into which they have sunk exhausted,
and finding it broad day and the good

1 66

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 of 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-

1 68

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 it
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

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

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,

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
Zuleikas, 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.

'75

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 ;

i76

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

i77

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

179

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

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-

182

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

JT 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

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

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

care to paint the marvellous and impos-
sible for the vulgar many, or to senti-
mentalize and falsify the actual for the
vulgar few. Men are more like than un-
like one another : let us make them know
one another better, that they may be all
humbled and strengthened with a sense
of their fraternity. Neither arts, nor let-
ters, nor sciences, except as they some-
how, clearly or obscurely, tend to make
the race better and kinder, are to be re-
garded as serious interests ; they are all
lower than the rudest crafts that feed and
house and clothe, for except they do this
office they are idle ; and they cannot do
this except from and through the truth.

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