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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Criticism And Fiction, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Criticism And Fiction
+       From "Literature and Life"
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August 22, 2006 [EBook #3377]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICISM AND FICTION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICISM AND FICTION
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+I would have my fellow-critics consider what they are really in the world
+for. The critic must perceive, if he will question himself more
+carefully, that his office is mainly to ascertain facts and traits of
+literature, not to invent or denounce them; to discover 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
+something besides his own mind. 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 author 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 criticism neither
+cured nor killed Keats, as we all now very well know. It wounded, 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 opposed 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 aesthetically or
+specifically we are of no use, and that we are only useful historically;
+that we may register laws, but not enact them. I am not quite prepared
+to admit that aesthetic criticism is useless, though in view of its
+futility in any given instance it is hard to deny that it is so.
+It certainly seems as useless against a book that strikes the popular
+fancy, and prospers 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 wonder it has never hitherto suggested to criticism that its point of
+view was altogether 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
+expressions of actuality in thought and feeling. 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 thoroughly 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.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+Sometimes it has seemed to me that the crudest expression 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
+creation of a poor novel than to the production 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 criticism became an art than
+there were before; that in fact the greatest books seem to have come much
+earlier.
+
+That which criticism seems most certainly to have done is to have put a
+literary 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 fashion 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,
+almost 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 except 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 nothing of the general about him but the
+shoulder-straps, which he sometimes forgets.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+Canon Fairfax,'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 legislators of literature, barely even its judges and police";
+and he reminds them of Mr. Ruskin's saying that "a bad critic is probably
+the most mischievous person in the world," though a sense of their
+relative proportion to the whole of life would perhaps 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.
+Otherwise it would be mainly the conventional books and not the original
+books which would survive; for the censor who imagines himself a
+law-giver can give law 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 fostered 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 implication of
+the words, it must have been the tame, the trite, the negative, that
+survived.
+
+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 conditioned 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 conclusions from certain easily verifiable
+principles, but are effects from the worship 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 explicitly
+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 departure. 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 reconceive 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 impressions. 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 ceases 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
+mischief; 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 brutality permitted by civilized society as in the criticism of
+literature and the arts. Canon Farrar is quite right in reproaching
+literary criticism with the uncandor of judging an author without
+reference to his aims; with pursuing certain writers 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 motives.
+
+Every writer of experience knows that certain critical journals will
+condemn his work without regard to its quality, even if it has never been
+his fortune to learn, as one author did from a repentent reviewer, that
+in a journal pretending to literary taste his books were given out for
+review with the caution, "Remember that the Clarion is opposed to Mr.
+Blank's books."
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+As I have already intimated, I doubt the more lasting effects of unjust
+criticism. It is no part of my belief that Keats's fame was long delayed
+by it, or Wordsworth's, or Browning's. Something unwonted, unexpected,
+in the quality of each delayed his recognition; each was not only a poet,
+he was a revolution, a new order of things, to which the critical
+perceptions and habitudes had painfully to adjust themselves: But I have
+no question of the gross and stupid injustice with which these great men
+were used, and of the barbarization of the public mind by the sight of
+the wrong inflicted on them with impunity. This savage condition still
+persists in the toleration of anonymous criticism, an abuse that ought to
+be as extinct as the torture 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 critics. We ought not to destroy critics, we ought to reform
+them, or rather transform them, or turn them from the assumption 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
+probably good husbands and tender fathers, loving daughters and careful
+mothers, among them.
+
+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 journal. 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 literature 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
+talent to try to right itself if wronged, but here we are without the
+requisite statistics. 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, painter, 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. Every body
+understands that it is not funny 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 feeling that the author,
+dramatist, painter, sculptor, has already said the best he can for his
+side in his book, play, picture, statue. This is partly true, and yet if
+he wishes to add something more to prove the critic wrong, I 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 himself, with petulance or with
+principle. If he betrayed a wounded vanity, if he impugned the motives
+and accused the lives of his critics, I should certainly feel that he was
+losing dignity; but if he temperately 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.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+I would beseech the literary critics of our country to disabuse
+themselves of the mischievous notion that they are essential to the
+progress of literature in the way critics have imagined. Canon Farrar
+confesses that with the best will in the world to profit 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
+accurately 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 perfection of
+Miss Austere, 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 theatricality in the very presence of his beautiful
+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 anyone going," said
+Scott, but he owned that the exquisite touch of Miss Austere was denied
+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 cultivated, or
+once cultivated, it may be preserved; 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 delightful 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 'The Sister of San Sulpizio,' 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.
+
+Senor Valdes is a realist, but a realist according to his own conception
+of realism; and he has some words of just censure for the French
+naturalists, whom he finds unnecessarily, and suspects of being sometimes
+even mercenarily, nasty. He sees the wide difference that passes between
+this naturalism and the realism of the English and Spanish; and he goes
+somewhat further than I should go in condemning it. "The French
+naturalism represents only a moment, and an insignificant part of life."
+. . . It is characterized by sadness and narrowness. The prototype of
+this literature is the 'Madame Bovary' of Flaubert. I am an admirer of
+this novelist, and especially of this novel; but often in thinking of it
+I have said, How dreary would literature be if it were no more than this!
+There is something antipathetic and gloomy and limited in it, as there is
+in modern French life; but this seems to me exactly the best possible
+reason for its being. I believe with Senor Valdes that "no literature
+can live long without joy," not because of its mistaken aesthetics,
+however, but because no civilization can live long without 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 naturalistic book . . . without a vivid desire to escape" from
+the wretched world depicted 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 morality, still I think that, resting on a divine 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 Octave
+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 Senor Valdes, "wishes to know
+everything and enjoy everything: he turns the objective of a powerful
+equatorial towards the heavenly spaces where gravitates the infinitude of
+the stars, just as he applies the microscope to the infinitude of the
+smallest insects; for their laws are identical. His experience, united
+with intuition, 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
+Valdes explains, exists in the human spirit, and is the beautiful effect
+which it receives 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 symphony, a novel,
+a statue, a picture, an edifice, you have fulfilled the purpose for which
+you were born an artist.
+
+The reflection of exterior nature in the individual spirit, Senor 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 others
+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, ordinarily 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 succeeded, and they make statues of
+statues, poems of poems, novels of novels. It is entirely false that the
+great romantic, symbolic, 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 romantic 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 themselves to
+be realists merely to follow the fashion."
+
+The pseudo-realists, in fact, are the worse offenders, to my thinking,
+for they sin against the living; whereas those who continue to celebrate
+the heroic adventures 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.
+
+"The principal cause," our Spaniard says, "of the decadence of
+contemporary literature is found, to my thinking, in the vice which has
+been very graphically called effectism, 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 some thing feminine in him, which tempts him to coquet with the
+reader, and display qualities that he thinks will astonish him, as women
+laugh for no reason, to show their teeth when they have them white and
+small and even, or lift their dresses to show their feet when there is no
+mud in the street . . . . What many writers nowadays wish, is to
+produce an effect, grand and immediate, to play the part of geniuses.
+For this they have learned that it is only necessary to write exaggerated
+works in any sort, since the vulgar do not ask that they shall be quietly
+made to think and feel, but that they shall be startled; and among the
+vulgar, of course, I include the great part of those who write literary
+criticism, and who constitute the worst vulgar, since they teach what
+they do not know .. . . There are many persons who suppose that the
+highest proof an artist can give of his fantasy is the invention of a
+complicated plot, spiced with perils, surprises, and suspenses; and that
+anything 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 hoodwinked by the dramatic mystery and
+the surprising and fantastic scenes of a novel. 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 entertain with complicated plots and impossible
+characters, now belongs to some hundreds of writers in Europe; while
+there are not much above a dozen who know how to interest with the
+ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human.
+If the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than
+the latter . . . . If we are to rate novelists according to their
+fecundity, 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 Cervantes, mischievously influenced
+afterwards 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 inventive talent, and wrote the 'Persiles and Sigismunda,'
+where the strange incidents, the vivid complications, the surprises, the
+pathetic scenes, succeed one another so rapidly and constantly that it
+really fatigues you . . . . But in spite of this flood of invention,
+imagine," says Seflor Valdes, "the place that Cervantes would now occupy
+in the heaven of art, if he had never written 'Don Quixote,'" but only
+'Persiles and Sigismund!'
+
+From the point of view of modern English criticism, which likes to be
+melted, 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
+invention in plot . . . they seek it in character. For this end they
+begin by deliberately falsifying human feelings, giving them a
+paradoxical appearance completely inadmissible . . . . Love that
+disguises itself as hate, incomparable energy under the cloak of
+weakness, virginal innocence under 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 Feuillet 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 most drama is witness of the result of this
+effectism 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 little. Give him simple, lifelike
+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 humanity."
+
+But, Senor Valdes, Senor Valdes! Do not you know that this small
+condition of yours implies in its fulfilment hardly less than the gift of
+the whole earth? You merely ask that the character portrayed in fiction
+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 character in fiction be superhuman, or subterhuman, 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 conjuring, or from a
+puppet-show, 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.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+This is what I say in my severer 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 performance of this office. Or, if people find
+pleasure 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 desire it.
+
+There is a certain demand in primitive 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 reader would probably call his mind, off
+himself; 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 helpfuller and wholesomer creature than
+you are. No sordid details of verity 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 mortification
+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 emotional 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 kissing their right
+hands to the audience, in the 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 a condition of his doing well
+the kind of work he does that he should think it important, that he
+should believe in himself; 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
+forget 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 perhaps 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 errors 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 respected as well as
+tolerated. He seems to believe 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 carefuller reasoning from a little closer
+inspection of the facts would not have brought him to these conclusions.
+In the first place, I doubt very much whether the "literary elect" have
+been fascinated in great numbers by the fiction in question; but if I
+supposed them to have really fallen under that spell, I should still be
+able to account for their fondness and that of the "unthinking multitude"
+upon the same grounds, without honoring either very much. It is the
+habit of hasty casuists to regard civilization as inclusive of all the
+members of a civilized community; but this is a palpable error. Many
+persons 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 civilized or always civilized; the most refined,
+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 primitive and their
+gratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person
+may then like melodrama, impossible 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
+interesting in them; but if they lastingly established themselves in him,
+I could not help deploring the state of that person. No one can really
+think that the "literary elect," who are said to have joined the
+"unthinking multitude" in clamoring 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 Tolstoy, Tourguenief, George Eliot, Thackeray, Balzac,
+Manzoni, Hawthorne, Mr. Henry James, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Senor Palacio
+Valdes, or even Walter Scott. They have joined the "unthinking
+multitude," perhaps because they are tired of thinking, and expect to
+find relaxation in feeling--feeling crudely, grossly, merely. For once
+in a way there is no great harm in this; perhaps no harm at all. It is
+perfectly natural; let them have their innocent 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; between
+the pleasures that edify them and those that amuse them. Otherwise we
+shall be in danger of becoming permanently part of the "unthinking
+multitude," 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 forward more
+vigorously; but even this is not certain.
+
+My own philosophy of the matter, however, would not bring me to
+prohibition of such literary amusements as the writer quoted seems to
+find significant of a growing indifference to truth and sanity in
+fiction. Once more, I say, these amusements have their place, as the
+circus has, and the burlesque and negro minstrelsy, and the ballet, and
+prestidigitation. No one of these is to be despised in its place; but we
+had better understand that it is not the highest place, and that it is
+hardly an intellectual delight. The lapse of all the "literary elect"
+in the world could not dignify unreality; and their present mood, if it
+exists, is of no more weight against that beauty in literature which
+comes from truth alone, and never can come from anything else, than the
+permanent state of the "unthinking multitude."
+
+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
+laborious, honest lives; for their kindness, their good-will; for that
+aspiration towards something better than themselves which seems to stir,
+however dumbly, in every human breast not abandoned to literary pride or
+other forms of self-righteousness. 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 precedes it, that one winces under it; and if one is still young,
+with the world gay before 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 fulfilled. This, perhaps, was what
+Emerson had in mind; and if he had it in mind of Shakespeare, who gave
+us, with his histories and comedies and problems, such a searching homily
+as "Macbeth," one feels that he scarcely recognized the limitations of
+the dramatist's art. Few consciences, 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 Elizabethan in his coarseness, his courtliness, his imperfect
+sympathy.
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+One of the great newspapers the other day invited the prominent American
+authors 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 before 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 freedom in the matter.
+But it certainly inclined 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 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 censure the Anglo-Saxon novel for its prudishness, that it is really
+not such a prude after all; and that if it is sometimes apparently
+anxious to avoid those experiences of life not spoken of before young
+people, this may be an appearance only. Sometimes a novel which has this
+shuffling air, this effect of truckling to propriety, might defend
+itself, if it could speak for itself, by saying that such experiences
+happened not to come within its scheme, and that, so far from maiming or
+mutilating itself in ignoring them, it was all the more faithfully
+representative of the tone of modern life in dealing with love that was
+chaste, and with passion 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 company. It could say very justly that
+the novel in our civilization now always addresses 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 acceptance, things for young girls to read which you would be
+put out-of-doors for saying to them, or of frankly giving notice 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 admirable 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
+indecency?" 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 tolerable, 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 material of
+tragedy, the stuff from which intense effects are wrought. The question,
+after owning this fact, is whether these intense effects are not rather
+cheap effects. 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 anything to be hinted. This is
+what makes a love intrigue of some sort all but essential 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 "passionate"; 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.
+
+But I do not mean to imply that his case covers the whole ground. So far
+as it goes, though, it ought to stop the mouths of those who complain
+that fiction is enslaved to propriety among us. It appears that of a
+certain kind of impropriety 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 portrayal 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 Bovary.' They wish to touch one of the most serious
+and sorrowful problems of life in the spirit of Tolstoy 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, Richardson 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
+saying that the Young Girl has 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. Generally, people now call a spade an agricultural implement; they
+have not grown decent without having also grown a little squeamish, but
+they have grown comparatively 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 physician 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 conditions, 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 Dickens
+treats in 'David Copperfield;' such as Thackeray treats in 'Pendennis,'
+and glances at in every one of his fictions; such as most of the masters
+of English fiction have at same time treated more or less openly. It is
+quite false or quite mistaken to suppose that our novels have left
+untouched these most important realities of life. They have only not
+made them their stock in trade; they have kept a true perspective in
+regard to them; they have relegated them in their pictures of life to the
+space and place they occupy in life itself, as we know it in England and
+America. They have kept a correct proportion, knowing perfectly well
+that unless the novel is to be a map, with everything scrupulously laid
+down in it, a faithful record of life in far the greater extent could be
+made to the exclusion of guilty love and all its circumstances and
+consequences.
+
+I justify them in this view not only because I hate what is cheap and
+meretricious, and hold in peculiar loathing the cant of the critics who
+require "passion" as something in itself admirable and desirable in a
+novel, but because I prize fidelity in the historian of feeling and
+character. Most of these critics who demand "passion" would seem to have
+no conception of any passion but one. Yet there are several other
+passions: the passion 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
+unwittingly, 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+Who 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 passion, 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 serious criticism recognizes as
+master-works (I will not push the question of supremacy) 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
+American 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 magazine 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 penetrate 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 reputable English or American
+magazine and the families which receive it there is a tacit agreement
+that he will print nothing which a father may not read to his daughter,
+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, therefore,
+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 imagine. 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 novelist's
+skill to fix impressions in a young girl's mind or to suggest conjecture.
+The magazine is a little despotic, a little arbitrary; but unquestionably
+its favor is essential to success, and its conditions are not such narrow
+ones. You cannot deal with Tolstoy's and Flaubert's subjects in the
+absolute artistic freedom of Tolstoy and Flaubert; since De Foe, that is
+unknown 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 material from you. But probably he will require 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.
+
+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
+unexplored, and whole regions in it are unknown 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+While the Americans have greatly excelled in the short story generally,
+they have almost created a species of it in the Thanksgiving story.
+We have transplanted the Christmas story 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 generalize a distinction between them, I should say that the one dealt
+more with marvels and the other more with morals; and yet the critic
+should beware of speaking too confidently on this point. It is certain,
+however, that the Christmas season is meteorologically more favorable to
+the effective return of persons long supposed lost at sea, or from a
+prodigal life, or from a darkened mind. The longer, darker, and colder
+nights are better adapted to the apparition of ghosts, and to all manner
+of signs and portents; while they seem to present a wider field for the
+intervention 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 lifetime, and reconciling them to their sons,
+daughters, and nephews, who have thwarted 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 hampers among the sick and poor, and to a friendly
+reception of gentlemen with charity subscription papers.
+
+Ships readily drive upon rocks in the early twilight, and offer exciting
+difficulties of salvage; and the heavy snows gather quickly round the
+steps of wanderers who lie down to die in them, preparatory to their
+discovery and rescue by immediate relatives. The midnight weather is
+also very suitable for 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
+available 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 suspicious looking
+entertainers, and then suddenly 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 peasants whom they had
+so unjustly doubted, waiting breakfast for them.
+
+We need not point out the superior advantages of the Christmas season for
+anything one has a mind to do with the French Revolution, of the Arctic
+explorations, or the Indian Mutiny, or the horrors of Siberian 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 appealing voice, and is
+moved to good resolutions as at no other period of the year; and in the
+mining regions, first in California and later in Colorado, the hardened
+reprobate, dying in his boots, smells his mother's doughnuts, 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 butts of their revolvers.
+
+It has to be very grim, all that, to be 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 entertainment 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 nature, by good
+resolutions. He would be very likely, indeed, to break his resolutions
+in either case, but not so likely in the one as in the other.
+
+Generically, the Thanksgiving story is cheerfuller in its drama and
+simpler in its persons than the Christmas story. Rarely has it dealt
+with the supernatural, either the apparition of ghosts or the
+intervention 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 northeasterly 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 husbands 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 kindlier thoughts and
+better moods. The art is at its highest in some strong sketch of Rose
+Terry Cooke's, or some perfectly satisfying study of Miss Jewett's, or
+some graphic situation of Miss Wilkins's; and then it is a very fine art.
+But mostly it is poor and rude enough, and makes openly, shamelessly, for
+the reader's emotions, as well as his morals. It is inclined to be
+rather descriptive. The turkey, the pumpkin, the corn-field, figure
+throughout; and the leafless 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 Western modifications.
+
+The Thanksgiving story is mostly confined 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,' fiction
+appropriate to both could be produced, and both could be employed
+naturally 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 spiritual regeneration over a bowl of
+punch at Christmas.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+It would be interesting to know the far beginnings of holiday literature,
+and I commend the quest to the scientific spirit which now specializes
+research in every branch of history. In the mean time, without being too
+confident of the facts, I venture to suggest that it came in with the
+romantic 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 blossom on the Christmas Tree which has since borne so much
+tinsel foliage and painted fruit. But the Annual was extremely Oriental;
+it was much preoccupied 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 daughters of Albion, though inscribed
+with the names of real countesses and duchesses, betrayed their descent
+from the well-known Eastern odalisques. It was possibly 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 English."
+
+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 aesthetic 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
+mistletoe, if not the decorative holly, may have been accompanied by the
+recitations of holiday triads. But it is certain that several 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 Christmas with the
+festival itself. It came in again, by a natural reaction, with the
+returning Stuarts, and throughout the period of the Restoration it
+enjoyed a perfunctory 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 middle of the last century laments the neglect
+into which it had fallen. Irving seems to have been the first to observe
+its surviving rites lovingly, and Dickens divined its immense advantage
+as a literary occasion. He made it in some sort entirely his for a time,
+and there can be no question but it was he who again endeared 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 grotesque as his theories of political economy. In no one
+direction was his erring force more felt than in the creation of holiday
+literature as we have known it for the last half-century. Creation, of
+course, is the wrong word; it says too much; but in default of a better
+word, it may stand. He did not make something out of nothing; 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 development of holiday literature as we have known
+it, as he was the chief agency in universalizing the great Christian
+holiday as we now have it. Other agencies wrought with him and after
+him; but it was he who rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust, and
+humanized it and consecrated 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 Haunted Man, The Cricket
+on the Hearth,' and all the rest--and with "a heart high-sorrowful and
+cloyed," asks himself for the preternatural virtue that they once had.
+The pathos appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; the
+character theatrical; the joviality pumped; the psychology commonplace;
+the sociology 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 disproportioned 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 imagination, 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 preposterous
+inventions of its activity have been regarded in their time as the
+greatest feats of the human mind, and in its receptive form it has been
+nursed into an imbecility to which the truth is repugnant, and the fact
+that the beautiful resides nowhere else is inconceivable. It has been
+flattered out of all sufferance in its toyings with the mere elements of
+character, and its attempts to present these in combinations foreign to
+experience are still praised by the poorer sort of critics as
+masterpieces 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 begin 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, therefore, it must perish. It did
+not perish, however, before it had propagated itself in a whole school of
+unrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder those
+sentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandoned
+long after the original conjurer 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 whether it was Dickens or Sala or Collins who was
+writing. The Christmas book had by that time lost its direct application
+to Christmas. It dealt with shipwrecks a good deal, and with perilous
+adventures of all kinds, and with unmerited 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
+repetition of them. The wizards who wrought their spells with them
+contented themselves with the lasting efficacy of these simple means;
+and the apprentice-wizards and journeyman-wizards who have succeeded them
+practise the same arts at the old stand; but the ethical intention which
+gave dignity to Dickens's Christmas 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 reforming 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 fruitless, 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 together and gets forward.
+It was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in 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 altogether 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 often saintly, although he put no peevishness into
+their patience with their ills. His ethical intention told for manhood
+and fraternity and tolerance, and when this intention disappeared from
+the better holiday literature, that literature was sensibly the poorer
+for the loss.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+But if the humanitarian impulse has mostly disappeared from Christmas
+fiction, I think it has never so generally characterized all fiction.
+One may refuse to recognize this impulse; one may deny that it is in any
+greater degree shaping life than ever before, but no one who has the
+current of literature under his eye can fail to note it there. People
+are thinking and feeling 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 reached
+before, the eminence enables more men than ever before to see how even
+here 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. The men
+and women who do the hard work of the world have learned that they have a
+right to pleasure in their toil, and that when justice is done them they
+will have it. In all ages poetry has affirmed something of this sort,
+but it remained for ours to perceive 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
+passion and power, to the deification of self, appears monstrous and
+hideous. The romantic spirit worshipped genius, worshipped heroism, but
+at its best, in such a man as Victor Hugo, this spirit recognized the
+supreme claim of the lowest humanity. Its error was to idealize the
+victims of society, to paint them impossibly virtuous and beautiful; but
+truth, which has succeeded to the highest mission 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 altogether 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 aimlessness, 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.
+
+I do not think the fiction of our own time even always equal to this
+work, or perhaps more than seldom so. But as I once expressed, to the
+long-reverberating discontent of two continents, fiction is now a finer
+art than it, has 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 foundation; 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 interest 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 confine myself, as usual, to the hither side of the
+regions of conjecture.
+
+The art which in the mean time disdains 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 identified. Democracy in
+literature is the reverse of all this. It wishes to know and to tell the
+truth, confident that consolation and delight are there; it does not care
+to paint the marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to
+sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few. Men are more
+like than unlike 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 letters, nor sciences, except as they
+somehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to make the race better and kinder,
+are to be regarded 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.
+
+
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    A Thanksgiving-Christmas Story
+    Anthony Trollope
+    Authorities
+    Browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust
+    Canon Fairfax,'s opinions of literary criticism
+    Comfort from the thought that most things cannot be helped
+    Concerning popularity as a test of merit in a book
+    Critical vanity and self-righteousness
+    Critics are in no sense the legislators of literature
+    Dickens rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust
+    Effectism
+    Fact that it is hash many times warmed over reassures them
+    Forbear the excesses of analysis
+    Glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light
+    Greatest classics are sometimes not at all great
+    Holiday literature
+    Imitators of one another than of nature
+    Jane Austen
+    Languages, while they live, are perpetually changing
+    Let fiction cease to lie about life
+    Long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless repetition
+    Made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked
+    Michelangelo's "light of the piazza,"
+    No greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth
+    Novels hurt because they are not true
+    Plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised
+    Pseudo-realists
+    Public wish to be amused rather than edified
+    Teach what they do not know
+    Tediously analytical
+    To break new ground
+    Unless we prefer a luxury of grief
+    Vulgarity: bad art to lug it in
+    What makes a better fashion change for a worse
+    Whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Criticism And Fiction, by William Dean Howells
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