CRITICISM AND FICTION (1891) By William Dean Howells ON REALISM, CRITICISM AND THE SOCIAL EFFECT OF LITERATURE (title in Jane Bernadettes selection)

CRITICISM AND FICTION (1891)

By William Dean Howells

ON REALISM, CRITICISM AND THE SOCIAL EFFECT OF LITERATURE (title in Jane Bernadettes selection)

The question of a final criterion for the appreciation of art is one that

perpetually recurs to those interested in any sort of aesthetic endeavor.

Mr. John Addington Symonds, in a chapter of 'The Renaissance in Italy'

treating 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 emptiness and

soullessness, seeks to determine whether there can be an enduring

criterion or not; and his conclusion is applicable 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 sentimental or academical seekings after

the ideal having been abandoned, momentary theories founded upon

idiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, and nothing accepted

but what is solid and positive, the scientific spirit shall make men

progressively more and more conscious of these 'bleibende Verhaltnisse,'

more and more capable of living in the whole; also, that in proportion as

we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come to

comprehend with more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, and

honest, welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit these

qualities. 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

That is to say, as I understand, 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 fashion plates, he must own that most

fashions have been ugly. A few, which could be readily instanced, have

been very pretty, and even beautiful, but it is doubtful if these have

pleased the greatest number 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 instinctive 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. Possibly there is no absolutely ugly, no absolutely

beautiful; or possibly the ugly contains always an element of the

beautiful better adapted to the general appreciation than the more

perfectly beautiful. This is a somewhat discouraging conjecture, 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

I should, indeed, prefer another line of Keats's, if I were to profess

any formulated creed, and should feel much safer with his 'Beauty is

Truth, Truth Beauty,' than even with my friend's reformation of the more

quoted 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 eighteenth-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, statues, and buildings; but art can never give the

rules that make an art. This is, I believe, 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 therefore 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

industry 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

useful 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 overawed

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 fidelity 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 professed 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 critical 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 direction they are taught to form themselves, not upon

life, but upon the masters who became masters only by forming themselves

upon life. The seeds of death are planted in them, and they can produce

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 unworthy by people who would like to have him show how

Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or Thackeray'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 pedantry

into which learning, much or little, always decays 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

scientist: '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

expense 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 indestructible. 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

common, 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,

because it is not 'simple, natural, and honest,' because it is not like a

real grasshopper. 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-devoted,

adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out

before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper 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 gentleman

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 commonly read little

or nothing since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a standard

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 resentment, with which they receive any

question of their literary saints is genuine; you descend at once very

far in the moral 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 authors were considered authorities in certain kinds,

when they must be accepted entire and not questioned in any particular.

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 continuous with any

authors in the past, and they are rare with all. Therefore I am not

afraid to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not at all

great, and that we can profit by them only when we hold them, like our

meanest contemporaries, to a strict accounting, and verify their work by

the standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the simple, the

natural, and the honest.

Those good people 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 literature: whatever is

established is sacred with those who do not think. At the beginning 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.

Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of

sympathy, to level 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 fidelity to experience and

probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative

literature. It is not a new theory, but it has never before universally

characterized literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself,

when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it,

realism will perish 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

overmoralizing. In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for

destiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. He

cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy

of notice, any more than the scientist 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 business 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

Montrivaut, or the Sworn Thirteen Noblemen. He must say to himself that

Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Balzac, he was Dumas; he

was not realistic, he was romanticistic.

III

Such 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 interesting likeness

between his work in this and Nicolas Gogol's in 'Dead Souls,' which

serves to illustrate the simultaneity of the literary movement in men of

such widely separated civilizations and conditions. Both represent their

characters 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

triumphantly, spectacularly, of an opportune hemorrhage, in the midst of

the festivities 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 towards 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 Balzac 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 recurring descriptive and caressing

epithets, to let the characters suffice for themselves. All this does

not mean that 'Cesar Birotteau' is not a beautiful and pathetic story,

full of shrewdly considered knowledge of men, and of a good art

struggling to free itself from self-consciousness. But it does mean that

Balzac, when he wrote it, was under the burden 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 people,

and to point out others for the abhorrence 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 inevitable, and he is not to be judged by it.

IV

In the beginning of any art even the most gifted worker must be crude in

his methods, 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 cumbrous 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 descriptive;

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 readers' intuitions so little that he was apt to rub in his

appeals to them. He was probably right: the generation which he wrote

for was duller than this; slower-witted, aesthetically 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 aristocracy and

royalty; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble,

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 contemporaries. 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

otherwise 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 benefaction to

readers; but there is very little else in the conduct of the Goethean

novels which is in advance of their time; this remains almost their sole

contribution 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

indulged in the following reflections,' is a mode of analysis which would

not be practised nowadays; and all that fancifulness of nomenclature in

Wilhelm Meister 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 homelessly

about among them, without definite direction; and the mists are full of a

luminosity 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 cannot 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.

V.

In 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--'Le Pere Goriot,' which is full of a

malarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art. After that

exquisitely careful and truthful 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 organization 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 children, and

leading a life of self-denial for their sake, as may probably and

pathetically be, is not enough; there must be an imbecile, trembling

dotard, willing to promote even the liaisons of his daughters 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 superfluously intend a career

of iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by nothing but the most

cataclysmal interpositions. It can be said that without such personages

the plot could not be transacted; but so much the worse for the plot.

Such a plot had no business to be; and while actions so unnatural are

imagined, 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 Grandet,' 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 appear 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

conservative in their tastes and theories. They have the tastes and

theories of their instructors, 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 Tourguenief and Tolstoy in Russia,

of Bjornson and Ibsen in Norway, of Valdes and Galdos in Spain, of Verga

in Italy. Till these younger critics have learned to think as well as to

write for themselves they will persist in heaving a sigh, more and more

perfunctory, for the truth as it was in Sir Walter, and as it was in

Dickens and in Hawthorne. 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.

In 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 continent; 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

those who differ with him in matters of taste or opinion; that he must be

rude with those he does not like. 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 enters very little. Commonly he has no principles, but only

an assortment of prepossessions for and against; and this otherwise 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; he thinks this is droll, and appears not to suspect that it is

immoral. He is not tolerant; he thinks it a virtue to be intolerant; 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 grinding 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

irregular. 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 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 ordinary critic of

commerce, so to speak--is even now very, well indeed. Collectively he is

more than this; for the joint effect of our criticism is the pretty

thorough appreciation of any book submitted to it.

VII.

The misfortune rather than the fault of our individual critic is that he

is the heir of the false theory and bad manners 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 American, whom it

has largely formed, is by nature very glib and very lively, and commonly

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 ambition of the American critic to

write like the English critic, to show his wit if not his learning, to

strive to eclipse the author under review rather than illustrate him.

He has not yet caught on to the fact that it is really no part of his

business 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 offensive

without knowing that he is so. 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, 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, perhaps because it is so easy and so

natural to be personal, and so instantly attractive. In this respect our

criticism has not improved from the accession of numbers of ladies to its

ranks, though we still hope so much from women in our politics 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

literary 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 censuring an author's performance to censuring him. They

bring a stock of lively 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.

Our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the critic 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 doing it than any one else, the critic might

learn something, and might help the reader to learn; but by putting

himself in a false position, a position of superiority, he is of no use.

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.

 

XV.

Which brings us again, after this long way about, to Jane Austen and her

novels, and that troublesome question about them. She was great and they

were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature

nearly a hundred 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 distinguish what

is good before he likes it. The art of fiction, as Jane Austen knew it,

declined from her through Scott, and Bulwer, 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 Continental

masterpieces, has continued provincial 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 Valdes says,

'the barbarous customs of the Middle Ages, softening and distorting them,

as Walter Scott and his kind did;' that they should 'devote themselves to

falsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifying

psychology after their own fancy,' like Bulwer and Dickens, as well as

like Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention Balzac, the worst of

all that sort at his worst. This was the natural course of the disease;

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 English 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 hopelessly below her.

It was Anthony Trollope who was most like her in simple honesty and

instinctive truth, as unphilosophized as the light of common day; but he

was so warped from a wholesome ideal as to wish at times to be like

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 criticism even at this late day,

when all Continental Europe has the light of aesthetic truth, could be

taken, the majority against these artists would be overwhelmingly 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 amazing properties.

'How few materials,' says Emerson, 'are yet used by our arts! The mass of

creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant,' and to break new

ground is still one of the uncommonest and most heroic 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 understand' are the conventional things. This is why the

ordinary English novel, with its hackneyed plot, scenes, and figures, is

more comfortable to the ordinary American than an American novel, which

deals, at its worst, with comparatively new interests and motives. To

adjust one's self to the enjoyment of these costs an intellectual effort,

and an intellectual effort is what no ordinary person likes to make. It

is only the extraordinary person who can say, with Emerson: 'I ask not

for the great, the remote, the romantic . . . . I embrace the common;

I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low . . . . Man is

surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous

than things remote . . . . The perception of the worth of the vulgar

is fruitful in discoveries . . . . The foolish man wonders at the

unusual, but the wise man at the usual . . . . To-day always looks

mean to the thoughtless; but to-day is a king in disguise . . . .

Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism,

are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of

wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphos.'

Perhaps we ought not to deny their town of Troy and their temple of

Delphos to the dull people; but if we ought, and if we did, they would

still insist upon having them. An English novel, full of 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, troubles them with varied misgiving. They

are not sure that it is literature; they do not feel that it is good

society; its characters, 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 classes like the fine

people we have read about. We are really a mixture of the plebeian

ingredients of the whole world; but that is not bad; our vulgarity

consists in trying to ignore 'the worth of the vulgar,' in believing that

the superfine is better.

XVII.

Another Spanish novelist of our day, whose books have given me great

pleasure, is so far from being of the same mind of Senor Valdes about

fiction that he boldly declares 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

attempt to prove theses by writing stories,' and yet if it is true that

'the object of a novel should be to charm through a faithful

representation of human actions and human passions, and to create by this

fidelity to nature a beautiful work,' and if 'the creation of the

beautiful' is solely 'the object 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, perhaps this may happen;

but till then the finest effect of the 'beautiful' will be ethical and

not aesthetic merely. Morality 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 corrupt, 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. For the

moment, it is charming to have a story end happily, but after one has

lived a certain number of years, and read a certain number of novels, it

is not the prosperous or adverse fortune of the characters that affects

one, but the good or bad faith of the novelist in dealing with them.

Will he play us false or will he be true in the operation of this or that

principle involved? I cannot hold him to less account than this: he must

be true to what life has taught me is the truth, and after that he may

let any fate betide his people; the novel ends well that ends faithfully.

The greater his power, the greater his responsibility before 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 Wordsworth felt in Goethe, that must long sur vive him. There is a

kind of thing--a kind of metaphysical lie against righteousness 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 'unmorality,' and is

therefore inferably harmless. But no study of Goethe is complete without

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

literature many others must suffer. I do not despair, however, of the

day when the poor honest herd of man kind shall give universal 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 weakness, and have

abused it to their own glory. In that day we shall shudder at many

monsters of passion, of self-indulgence, of heartlessness, whom we still

more or less openly adore for their 'genius,' and shall account no man

worshipful whom we do not feel and know to be good. The spectacle of

strenuous achievement will then not dazzle or mislead; it will not

sanctify or palliate iniquity; it will only render it the more hideous

and pitiable.

In fact, the whole belief in 'genius' seems to me rather a mischievous

superstition, and if not mischievous always, still always a superstition.

From the account 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 common 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 superstition which has caused our race to go on so long

writing and reading of the difference 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 'genius' which keeps

so many poor little authorlings trembling in question whether they have

it, or have only 'talent'?

One of the greatest captains who ever lived [General U. S. Grant D.W.]

--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 calling. But he went to West Point

because, 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 peaceful 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 Memoirs of U. S. Grant, written

as simply and straightforwardly as his battles were fought, couched in

the most unpretentious phrase, with never a touch of grandiosity 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 some thing great in them, whether

religion, or beauty, or deep experience. Probably Grant would have said

that he had no more vocation to literature 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 impeachment of literary power.

Nevertheless, he shows it, as he showed military power, unexpectedly,

almost miraculously. 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

together? Who calls Washington a genius? or Franklin, or Bismarck, or

Cavour, or Columbus, or Luther, or Darwin, or Lincoln? Were these men

second-rate in their way? Or is 'genius' that indefinable, 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 inarticulate classes that

they are on peculiar terms of confidence with the deity?

XVIII.

In 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 novelist in me imagines such an inference. But however this may be,

there is certainly no question concerning the intention of a

correspondent who once wrote to me after reading some rather bragging

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, whatever is

injurious, I can trace to the perusal 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

impossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine.'

I am not sure that I had the controversy 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 immense numbers of people, without question of

their influence, good or bad, upon the mind that it is refreshing to have

them frankly denounced, and to be invited 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 believe the stage-play to be still almost wholly

injurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and its

aimlessness. It may be safely assumed that most of the novel-reading

which people fancy an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation,

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

novels 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 one another.

One need not go so far as our correspondent, and trace to the fiction

habit 'whatever is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is

injurious,' 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 poisonous 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

examples 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 following, 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 judgment, or that coddle our sensibilities or

pamper our gross appetite for the marvellous, are not so fatal, but they

are innutritious, and clog the soul with unwholesome vapors of all kinds.

No doubt they too help to weaken the moral fibre, and make their readers

indifferent to 'plodding perseverance and plain industry,' and to

'matter-of-fact poverty and commonplace 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 worthy 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 deplorable

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 achievement 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-sacrifice, as idle and useless as the moral experiences 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 literature 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 commonly 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 civilization has already broken even upon the novel, and no

conscientious man can now set about painting an image of life without

perpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling bound

to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between

what is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what is

health and what is perdition, in the actions and the characters he

portrays.

The fiction that aims merely to entertain--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 should hold it to account if it passes from painting to

teaching folly.

I confess that I do not care to judge any work of the imagination 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 women? This truth,

which necessarily includes the highest morality and the highest 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 without solicitation; they are added unto it. In the

whole range of fiction I 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

ascertained; 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 mankind, 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 contemptible 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 correspondent 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

frequenter of an opium-joint perhaps knows for the attendant who fills

his pipe with the drug.

Or, as in the case of another correspondent 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 brotherhood

and sisterhood of novelists as full of wholesome if bitter suggestion;

and I 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 majority of people for whom life is

earnest, and who find only a distorted and misleading likeness of it in

our books. We may fold ourselves in our scholars' gowns, and close the

doors of our studies, and affect to despise this rude voice; but we

cannot shut it out. It comes to us from wherever men are at work, from

wherever they are truly living, and accuses us of unfaithfulness, 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 celebrity, and by despair, wrote

in his study of Diderot: 'Were it not reasonable to prophesy that this

exceeding great multitude of novel-writers and such like must, in a new

generation, gradually do one of two things: either retire into the

nurseries, 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 infinite 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 exactly 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 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, actuated 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 different 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.

..

XX.

Of the finer kinds of romance, as distinguished from the novel, I would

even encourage 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 romance, 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

superstition 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 romance 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 imagination--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

advantage to readers and writers who cannot bear to be brought face to

face with human 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 harmless people should not be amused, or

their little preferences indulged.

But here, again, I have my modest doubts, some recent instances are so

fatuous, as far as the portrayal of character goes, though I find them

admirably contrived 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 affect me like persons of our generation

made up for the parts; well trained, well costumed, but actors, and

almost amateurs. 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 gentleman 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 romancer because I find my pleasure

chiefly in Tolstoy and Valdes and Thomas Hardy and Tourguenief, and

Balzac at his best.

XXI.

It used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance in

America, which Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there

were so few shadows and inequalities 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 dealing in American fiction with certain

nudities 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 novelists, 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 commonplace, to be true to

our well-to-do actualities; 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 always be in the world, I suppose,

but I believe 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 medicines 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 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.

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 probability; 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 attempts to

assemble it in our pictures are failures, possibly because it is too

transitory, too intangible in its nature with us, to be truthfully

represented as really existent.

I am not sure that the Americans have not brought the short story nearer

perfection in the all-round sense that almost any other people, and for

reasons very simple and near at hand. It might be argued from the

national hurry and impatience that it was a literary form peculiarly

adapted to the American temperament, 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 commensurate with their excellence. Their sort of success is not

only from the courage to decide which 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 serial 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 demand follows the supply, and short stories are

sought for because there is a proven ability to furnish them, and people

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 'syndicates' which

deal in them almost to the exclusion of the serials.

An interesting fact in regard to the different varieties of the short

story among us is that the sketches and studies by the women seem

faithfuller 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,

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 native sources which our

literary decentralization will help to keep open, and I will own that as

I turn over novels coming 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. Alphonse Daudet,

in a conversation with H. H. Boyesen said, speaking of Tourguenief,

'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

civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to

find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing. 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 whimsical, yet it has a certain

measure of reason in it, and the same regret has been more 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. Lowell, almost the greatest

and finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us that Elizabeth

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 sometimes 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 then use '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, Philadelphian,

Bostonian, and New York accents. If we bother ourselves to write what

the critics imagine to be 'English,' we shall be priggish and artificial,

and still more so if we make our Americans talk 'English.' There is also

this serious disadvantage 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 language can be kept as they

find it; but languages, while they live, are perpetually changing. God

apparently meant them for the common people; and the common people 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

unconsciously can. Matthew Arnold complained 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

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 equality 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' perceptible to the eye that loves and

values it. Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty,

common grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality of

solidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to the

disadvantage 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 encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in

the superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the

distinguished, 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 Arnold was half

right in making us shall have no justice in it any longer; we shall be

'distinguished.'

XXII.

In the mean time it has been said with a superficial justice that our

fiction is narrow; though in the same sense I suppose the present English

fiction is as narrow as our own; and most modern fiction is narrow in a

certain sense. In Italy the best men are writing novels as brief and

restricted in range as ours; in Spain the novels are intense and deep,

and not spacious; the French school, with the exception of Zola, is

narrow; the Norwegians are narrow; the Russians, except Tolstoy, are

narrow, and the next greatest after him, Tourguenief, 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 narrowness is a defect, while denying that it is a

universal characteristic of our fiction; it is rather, for the present,

a virtue. Indeed, I should call the present American work, North and

South, thorough 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 neighborhood

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 differences are not of classes, but of types, and not of

types either so much as of characters. A new method was necessary in

dealing with the new conditions, and the new method is worldwide, because

the whole world is more or less Americanized. Tolstoy is exceptionally

voluminous among modern writers, even Russian writers; and it might be

said that the forte of Tolstoy himself is not in his breadth sidewise,

but in his breadth upward and downward. 'The Death of Ivan Ilyitch'

leaves as vast an impression 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

superficies 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 as never so nearly covered by

imaginative literature in any age as in this; and American life

especially is getting represented 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 forbids this, and may forever

forbid it. But a great number of very good writers are instinctively

striving to make each part of the country and each phase of our

civilization 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. Formerly, all science could be grasped by a single

mind; but now the man who hopes to become great or useful in science must

devote himself to a single department. 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 inspiring

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 regards 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 surviving literature upon it. The question is merely

one of time. He consoles himself, therefore, if he is wise, and works

on; and we may all take some comfort from the thought that most things

cannot 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 standards or ideals; but try

to be faithful and natural: remember that there is no greatness, 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.

At least three-fifths of the literature called classic, in all languages,

no more lives than the poems and stories that perish 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.