Criticism and Fiction Read online

  My own philosophy of the matter, however, would not bring me toprohibition of such literary amusements as the writer quoted seems tofind significant of a growing indifference to truth and sanity infiction. Once more, I say, these amusements have their place, as thecircus has, and the burlesque and negro minstrelsy, and the ballet, andprestidigitation. No one of these is to be despised in its place; but wehad better understand that it is not the highest place, and that it ishardly an intellectual delight. The lapse of all the "literary elect"in the world could not dignify unreality; and their present mood, if itexists, is of no more weight against that beauty in literature whichcomes from truth alone, and never can come from anything else, than thepermanent state of the "unthinking multitude."

  Yet even as regards the "unthinking multitude," I believe I am not ableto take the attitude of the writer I have quoted. I am afraid that Irespect them more than he would like to have me, though I cannot alwaysrespect their taste, any more than that of the "literary elect."I respect them for their good sense in most practical matters; for theirlaborious, honest lives; for their kindness, their good-will; for thataspiration towards something better than themselves which seems to stir,however dumbly, in every human breast not abandoned to literary pride orother forms of self-righteousness. I find every man interesting, whetherhe thinks or unthinks, whether he is savage or civilized; for this reasonI cannot thank the novelist who teaches us not to know but to unknow ourkind. Yet I should by no means hold him to such strict account asEmerson, who felt the absence of the best motive, even in the greatest ofthe masters, when he said of Shakespeare that, after all, he was onlymaster of the revels. The judgment is so severe, even with the praisewhich 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 isapt to ask, defiantly, Well, what is better than being such a master ofthe revels as Shakespeare was? Let each judge for himself. To the heartagain of serious youth, uncontaminate and exigent of ideal good, it mustalways be a grief that the great masters seem so often to have beenwilling to amuse the leisure and vacancy of meaner men, and leave theirmission to the soul but partially fulfilled. This, perhaps, was whatEmerson had in mind; and if he had it in mind of Shakespeare, who gaveus, with his histories and comedies and problems, such a searching homilyas "Macbeth," one feels that he scarcely recognized the limitations ofthe dramatist's art. Few consciences, at times, seem so enlightened asthat of this personally unknown person, so withdrawn into his work, andso lost to the intensest curiosity of after-time; at other times he seemsmerely Elizabethan in his coarseness, his courtliness, his imperfectsympathy.

  XX.

  Of the finer kinds of romance, as distinguished from the novel, I wouldeven encourage the writing, though it is one of the hard conditions ofromance that its personages starting with a 'parti pris' can rarely becharacters with a living growth, but are apt to be types, limited to theexpression of one principle, simple, elemental, lacking the God-givencomplexity of motive which we find in all the human beings we know.

  Hawthorne, the great master of the romance, had the insight and the powerto create it anew as a kind in fiction; though I am not sure that 'TheScarlet Letter' and the 'Blithedale Romance' are not, strictly speaking,novels rather than romances. They, do not play with some oldsuperstition long outgrown, and they do not invent a new superstition toplay with, but deal with things vital in every one's pulse. I am notsaying that what may be called the fantastic romance--the romance thatdescends from 'Frankenstein' rather than 'The Scarlet Letter'--ought notto be. On the contrary, I should grieve to lose it, as I should grieveto lose the pantomime or the comic opera, or many other graceful thingsthat amuse the passing hour, and help us to live agreeably in a worldwhere men actually sin, suffer, and die. But it belongs to thedecorative arts, and though it has a high place among them, it cannot beranked with the works of the imagination--the works that represent andbody forth human experience. Its ingenuity, can always afford a refinedpleasure, and it can often, at some risk to itself, convey a valuabletruth.

  Perhaps the whole region of historical romance might be reopened withadvantage to readers and writers who cannot bear to be brought face toface with human nature, but require the haze of distance or a farperspective, in which all the disagreeable details shall be lost. Thereis no good reason why these harmless people should not be amused, ortheir little preferences indulged.

  But here, again, I have my modest doubts, some recent instances are sofatuous, as far as the portrayal of character goes, though I find themadmirably contrived in some respects. When I have owned the excellenceof the staging in every respect, and the conscience with which thecarpenter (as the theatrical folks say) has done his work, I am at theend of my praises. The people affect me like persons of our generationmade up for the parts; well trained, well costumed, but actors, andalmost amateurs. They have the quality that makes the histrionics ofamateurs endurable; they are ladies and gentlemen; the worst, thewickedest of them, is a lady or gentleman behind the scene.

  Yet, no doubt it is well that there should be a reversion to the earliertypes of thinking and feeling, to earlier ways of looking at humannature, and I will not altogether refuse the pleasure offered me by thepoetic romancer or the historical romancer because I find my pleasurechiefly in Tolstoy and Valdes and Thomas Hardy and Tourguenief, andBalzac at his best.

  XXI.

  It used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance inAmerica, which Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that therewere so few shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity;and it is one of the reflections suggested by Dostoievsky's novel, 'TheCrime and the Punishment,' that whoever struck a note so profoundlytragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing--as falseand as mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certainnudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying. Whatever theirdeserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, orfinally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth; and in a land wherejourneymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sumof hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the wrong from class toclass has been almost inappreciable, though all this is changing for theworse. Our novelists, therefore, concern themselves with the moresmiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek theuniversal in the individual rather than the social interests. It isworth while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true toour well-to-do actualities; the very passions themselves seem to besoftened and modified by conditions which formerly at least could not besaid 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 oneto 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 notpeculiarly American, as the large, cheerful average of health and successand happy life is. It will not do to boast, but it is well to be true tothe facts, and to see that, apart from these purely mortal troubles,the race here has enjoyed conditions in which most of the ills that havedarkened its annals might be averted by honest work and unselfishbehavior.

  Fine artists we have among us, and right-minded as far as they go; and wemust not forget this at evil moments when it seems as if all the womenhad taken to writing hysterical improprieties, and some of the men weretrying 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, thepeople are segregated if not sequestered, and the scene is sparselypopulated. The effect may be in instinctive response to the vacancy ofour social life, and I shall not make haste to blame it. There are fewplaces, few occasions among us, in which a novelist can get a largenumber of polite people toge
ther, or at least keep them together. Unlesshe carries a snap-camera his picture of them has no probability; theyaffect one like the figures perfunctorily associated in such deadly oldengravings as that of "Washington Irving and his Friends." Perhaps it isfor this reason that we excel in small pieces with three or four figures,or in studies of rustic communities, where there is propinquity if notsociety. Our grasp of more urbane life is feeble; most attempts toassemble it in our pictures are failures, possibly because it is tootransitory, too intangible in its nature with us, to be truthfullyrepresented as really existent.

  I am not sure that the Americans have not brought the short story nearerperfection in the all-round sense that almost any other people, and forreasons very simple and near at hand. It might be argued from thenational hurry and impatience that it was a literary form peculiarlyadapted to the American temperament, but I suspect that its extraordinarydevelopment 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 notonly from the courage to decide which ought to please, but from theknowledge of what does please; and it is probable that, aside from thepictures, it is the short stories which please the readers of our bestmagazines. The serial novels they must have, of course; but rather moreof course they must have short stories, and by operation of the law ofsupply and demand, the short stories, abundant in quantity and excellentin quality, are forthcoming because they are wanted. By anotheroperation of the same law, which political economists have more recentlytaken account of, the demand follows the supply, and short stories aresought for because there is a proven ability to furnish them, and peopleread them willingly because they are usually very good. The art ofwriting them is now so disciplined and diffused with us that there is nolack either for the magazines or for the newspaper "syndicates" whichdeal in them almost to the exclusion of the serials.

  An interesting fact in regard to the different varieties of the shortstory among us is that the sketches and studies by the women seemfaithfuller and more realistic than those of the men, in proportion totheir number. Their tendency is more distinctly in that direction, andthere 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 suchRussian writers as I have read, and I should praise rather than blametheir free use of our different local parlances, or "dialects," as peoplecall them. I like this because I hope that our inherited English may beconstantly freshened and revived from the native sources which ourliterary decentralization will help to keep open, and I will own that asI turn over novels coming from Philadelphia, from New Mexico, fromBoston, from Tennessee, from rural New England, from New York, everylocal 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 languageto wade into! We poor fellows who work in the language of an oldcivilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only tofind 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 manygenerations of monarchs that it seems like presumption on the part of anylate-born pretender to attempt to wear them."

  This grief is, of course, a little whimsical, yet it has a certainmeasure of reason in it, and the same regret has been more seriouslyexpressed 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 inEnglish, but something of this divine despair we may feel too in thinkingof "the spacious times of great Elizabeth," when the poets were tryingthe stops of the young language, and thrilling with the surprises oftheir own music. We may comfort ourselves, however, unless we prefer aluxury of grief, by remembering that no language is ever old on the lipsof 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 theshops and fields to find the "spacious times" again; and from thebeginning Realism, before she had put on her capital letter, had divinedthis near-at-hand truth along with the rest. Lowell, almost the greatestand finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us that Elizabethwas still Queen where he heard Yankee farmers talk. One need not inviteslang into the company of its betters, though perhaps slang has beendropping its "s" and becoming language ever since the world began, and iscertainly sometimes delightful and forcible beyond the reach of thedictionary. I would not have any one go about for new words, but if oneof them came aptly, not to reject its help. For our novelists to try towrite Americanly, from any motive, would be a dismal error, but beingborn Americans, I then use "Americanisms" whenever these serve theirturn; and when their characters speak, I should like to hear them speaktrue American, with all the varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian,Bostonian, and New York accents. If we bother ourselves to write whatthe critics imagine to be "English," we shall be priggish and artificial,and still more so if we make our Americans talk "English." There is alsothis serious disadvantage about "English," that if we wrote the best"English" in the world, probably the English themselves would not knowit, or, if they did, certainly would not own it. It has always beensupposed by grammarians and purists that a language can be kept as theyfind it; but languages, while they live, are perpetually changing. Godapparently meant them for the common people; and the common people willuse them freely as they use other gifts of God. On their lips ourcontinental 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 theyunconsciously can. Matthew Arnold complained that he found no"distinction" in our life, and I would gladly persuade all artistsintending greatness in any kind among us that the recognition of the factpointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to be a source of inspiration to them,and not discouragement. We have been now some hundred years building upa state on the affirmation of the essential equality of men in theirrights and duties, and whether we have been right or been wrong the godshave taken us at our word, and have responded to us with a civilizationin which there is no "distinction" perceptible to the eye that loves andvalues it. Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty,common grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality ofsolidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to thedisadvantage of anything else. It seems to me that these conditionsinvite the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and tothe portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which uniterather than sever humanity, if he would thrive in our new order ofthings. The talent that is robust enough to front the every-day worldand catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, neednot fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured inthe superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, thedistinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving orwriting. The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have theexpression of America in art; and the reproach which Arnold was halfright 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 ourfiction is narrow; though in the same sense I suppose the present Englishfiction is as narrow as our own; and most modern fiction is narrow in acertain sense. In Italy the best men are writing novels as brief andrestricted in range as ours; in Spain the novels are intense and deep,and not spacious; the French school, with the exception of Zola, isnarrow; the Norwegians are narrow; the Russians, except Tolstoy, arenarrow, and the next greatest after him, Tourguenief, i
s the narrowestgreat novelist, as to mere dimensions, that ever lived, dealing nearlyalways with small groups, isolated and analyzed in the most Americanfashion. In fact, the charge of narrowness accuses the whole tendency ofmodern fiction as much as the American school. But I do not by any meansallow that this narrowness is a defect, while denying that it is auniversal characteristic of our fiction; it is rather, for the present,a virtue. Indeed, I should call the present American work, North andSouth, 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 usintimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhoodor a class, has done something which cannot in any, bad sense be callednarrow; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all; and thisdepth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization likeours, where the differences are not of classes, but of types, and not oftypes either so much as of characters. A new method was necessary indealing with the new conditions, and the new method is worldwide, becausethe whole world is more or less Americanized. Tolstoy is exceptionallyvoluminous among modern writers, even Russian writers; and it might besaid 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 notas a whole. I think that our writers may be safely counselled tocontinue their work in the modern way, because it is the best way yetknown. If they make it true, it will be large, no matter what itssuperficies are; and it would be the greatest mistake to try to make itbig. A big book is necessarily a group of episodes more or less looselyconnected by a thread of narrative, and there seems no reason why thisthread must always be supplied. Each episode may be quite distinct, orit may be one of a connected group; the final effect will be from thetruth of each episode, not from the size of the group.