Criticism and Fiction

by William Dean Howells

  V.

  In fact, a great master may sin against the "modesty of nature" in manyways, and I have felt this painfully in reading Balzac's romance--it isnot worthy the name of novel--'Le Pere Goriot,' which is full of amalarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art. After thatexquisitely careful and truthful setting of his story in the shabbyboarding-house, he fills the scene with figures jerked about by theexaggerated passions and motives of the stage. We cannot have a cynicreasonably wicked, disagreeable, egoistic; we must have a lurid villainof melodrama, a disguised convict, with a vast criminal organization athis command, and

  "So dyed double red"

  in deed and purpose that he lights up the faces of the horrifiedspectators with his glare. A father fond of unworthy children, andleading a life of self-denial for their sake, as may probably andpathetically be, is not enough; there must be an imbecile, tremblingdotard, willing to promote even the liaisons of his daughters to givethem happiness and to teach the sublimity of the paternal instinct.The hero cannot sufficiently be a selfish young fellow, with alternatingimpulses of greed and generosity; he must superfluously intend a careerof iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by nothing but the mostcataclysmal interpositions. It can be said that without such personagesthe 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 areimagined, no mastery can save fiction from contempt with those who reallythink about it. To Balzac it can be forgiven, not only because in hisbetter mood he gave us such biographies as 'Eugenie Grandet,' but becausehe wrote at a time when fiction was just beginning to verify theexternals of life, to portray faithfully the outside of men and things.It was still held that in order to interest the reader the charactersmust be moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to be taught that"heroes" and "heroines" existed all around us, and that these abnormalbeings needed only to be discovered in their several humble disguises,and then we should see every-day people actuated by the fine frenzy ofthe creatures of the poets. How false that notion was, few but thecritics, who are apt to be rather belated, need now be told. Some ofthese poor fellows, however, still contend that it ought to be done, andthat 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 ofthe count, for some reason--when they are not elders ossified intradition, are apt to be young people, and young people are necessarilyconservative in their tastes and theories. They have the tastes andtheories of their instructors, who perhaps caught the truth of their day,but whose routine life has been alien to any other truth. There isprobably no chair of literature in this country from which the principlesnow shaping the literary expression of every civilized people are notdenounced and confounded with certain objectionable French novels, orwhich teaches young men anything of the universal impulse which has givenus 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 Vergain Italy. Till these younger critics have learned to think as well as towrite for themselves they will persist in heaving a sigh, more and moreperfunctory, for the truth as it was in Sir Walter, and as it was inDickens and in Hawthorne. Presently all will have been changed; theywill have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree; and when itshall 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 savageswhom we have supplanted on this continent; and it is hard to believe thathis use of the tomahawk and the scalping-knife is a form of conservativesurgery. It is still his conception of his office that he should assailthose who differ with him in matters of taste or opinion; that he must berude with those he does not like. It is too largely his superstitionthat because he likes a thing it is good, and because he dislikes a thingit is bad; the reverse is quite possibly the case, but he is yetindefinitely far from knowing that in affairs of taste his personalpreference enters very little. Commonly he has no principles, but onlyan assortment of prepossessions for and against; and this otherwise veryperfect character is sometimes uncandid to the verge of dishonesty. Heseems not to mind misstating the position of any one he supposes himselfto disagree with, and then attacking him for what he never said, or evenimplied; he thinks this is droll, and appears not to suspect that it isimmoral. He is not tolerant; he thinks it a virtue to be intolerant; itis hard for him to understand that the same thing may be admirable at onetime and deplorable at another; and that it is really his business toclassify and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as thenaturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise orblame them; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in histrampling on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as inthe botanist's grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find itpretty. He does not conceive that it is his business rather to identifythe species and then explain how and where the specimen is imperfect andirregular. If he could once acquire this simple idea of his duty hewould be much more agreeable company than he now is, and a more usefulmember of society; though considering the hard conditions under which heworks, his necessity of writing hurriedly from an imperfect examinationof far more books, on a greater variety of subjects, than he can evenhope to read, the average American critic--the ordinary critic ofcommerce, so to speak--is even now very, well indeed. Collectively he ismore than this; for the joint effect of our criticism is the prettythorough appreciation of any book submitted to it.

  VII.

  The misfortune rather than the fault of our individual critic is that heis 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 ofglib and lively expression is competent to write of almost any branch ofpolite literature; its manners are what we know. The American, whom ithas largely formed, is by nature very glib and very lively, and commonlyhis criticism, viewed as imaginative work, is more agreeable than that ofthe Englishman; but it is, like the art of both countries, apt to beamateurish. In some degree our authors have freed themselves fromEnglish models; they have gained some notion of the more serious work ofthe Continent: but it is still the ambition of the American critic towrite like the English critic, to show his wit if not his learning, tostrive 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 hisbusiness to display himself, but that it is altogether his duty to placea book in such a light that the reader shall know its class, itsfunction, its character. The vast good-nature of our people preserves usfrom 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 offensivewithout knowing that he is so. Now and then he acts simply underinstruction from higher authority, and denounces because it is thetradition of his publication to do so. In other cases the critic isobliged to support his journal's repute for severity, or for wit, or formorality, 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 sonatural to be personal, and so instantly attractive. In this respect ourcriticism has not improved from the accession of numbers of ladies to itsranks, though we still hope so much from women in our politics when theyshall come to vote. They have come to write, and with the effect toincrease the amount of little-digging, which rather superabounded in ourliterary criticism before. They "know what they like"--that perniciousmaxim of those who do not know what they ought to like and they passreadily from censuring an author's performance to censuring him. Theybring a stock of lively misapprehensions and prejudices to their work;they would rather have heard about than known about a book; a
nd they takekindly to the public wish to be amused rather than edified. But neitherhave they so much harm in them: they, too, are more ignorant thanmalevolent.

  VIII.

  Our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the critic to learnfrom an author, and his readiness to mistrust him. A writer passes hiswhole life in fitting himself for a certain kind of performance; thecritic does not ask why, or whether the performance is good or bad, butif he does not like the kind, he instructs the writer to go off and dosome other sort of thing--usually the sort that has been done already,and done sufficiently. If he could once understand that a man who haswritten the book he dislikes, probably knows infinitely more about itskind and his own fitness for doing it than any one else, the critic mightlearn something, and might help the reader to learn; but by puttinghimself 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 himby writing the kind of book he does not like; he will be far moreprofitably employed on behalf of the reader in finding out whether theyhad better not both like it. Let him conceive of an author as not in anywise on trial before him, but as a reflection of this or that aspect oflife, 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 thata book is not a misdemeanor, a decent self-respect that must forbid thecivilized man the savage pleasure of wounding, are what I would ask forour criticism, as something which will add sensibly to its presentlustre.

  IX.

  I would have my fellow-critics consider what they are really in the worldfor. The critic must perceive, if he will question himself morecarefully, that his office is mainly to ascertain facts and traits ofliterature, not to invent or denounce them; to discover principles, notto establish them; to report, not to create.

  It is so much easier to say that you like this or dislike that, than totell why one thing is, or where another thing comes from, that manyflourishing critics will have to go out of business altogether if thescientific method comes in, for then the critic will have to knowsomething besides his own mind. He will have to know something of thelaws of that mind, and of its generic history.

  The history of all literature shows that even with the youngest andweakest author criticism is quite powerless against his will to do hisown work in his own way; and if this is the case in the green wood, howmuch more in the dry! It has been thought by the sentimentalist thatcriticism, if it cannot cure, can at least kill, and Keats was longalleged in proof of its efficacy in this sort. But criticism neithercured nor killed Keats, as we all now very well know. It wounded, itcruelly hurt him, no doubt; and it is always in the power of the criticto give pain to the author--the meanest critic to the greatest author--for no one can help feeling a rudeness. But every literary movement hasbeen violently opposed at the start, and yet never stayed in the least,or arrested, by criticism; every author has been condemned for hisvirtues, but in no wise changed by it. In the beginning he reads thecritics; but presently perceiving that he alone makes or mars himself,and that they have no instruction for him, he mostly leaves off readingthem, though he is always glad of their kindness or grieved by theirharshness when he chances upon it. This, I believe, is the generalexperience, modified, of course, by exceptions.

  Then, are we critics of no use in the world? I should not like to thinkthat, though I am not quite ready to define our use. More than one soberthinker is inclining at present to suspect that aesthetically orspecifically 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 preparedto admit that aesthetic criticism is useless, though in view of itsfutility in any given instance it is hard to deny that it is so.It certainly seems as useless against a book that strikes the popularfancy, and prospers on in spite of condemnation by the best critics,as it is against a book which does not generally please, and which nocritical favor can make acceptable. This is so common a phenomenon thatI wonder it has never hitherto suggested to criticism that its point ofview was altogether mistaken, and that it was really necessary to judgebooks not as dead things, but as living things--things which have aninfluence and a power irrespective of beauty and wisdom, and merely asexpressions of actuality in thought and feeling. Perhaps criticism has acumulative 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 himthrough the reader. It may in some cases enlarge or diminish hisaudience for a while, until he has thoroughly measured and tested his ownpowers. If criticism is to affect literature at all, it must be throughthe writers who have newly left the starting-point, and are reasonablyuncertain of the race, not with those who have won it again and again intheir own way.

  X.

  Sometimes it has seemed to me that the crudest expression of any creativeart is better than the finest comment upon it. I have sometimessuspected that more thinking, more feeling certainly, goes to thecreation 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 anycensure of it live? Who can endure to read old reviews? One can hardlyread them if they are in praise of one's own books.

  The author neglected or overlooked need not despair for that reason, ifhe will reflect that criticism can neither make nor unmake authors; thatthere have not been greater books since criticism became an art thanthere were before; that in fact the greatest books seem to have come muchearlier.

  That which criticism seems most certainly to have done is to have put aliterary consciousness into books unfelt in the early masterpieces,but unfelt now only in the books of men whose lives have been passed inactivities, who have been used to employing language as they would haveemployed any implement, to effect an object, who have regarded a thing tobe said as in no wise different from a thing to be done. In this sort Ihave seen no modern book so unconscious as General Grant's 'PersonalMemoirs.' 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 menfor the accomplishment of a feat of arms. There is not a moment wastedin preening and prettifying, after the fashion of literary men; there isno thought of style, and so the style is good as it is in the 'Book ofChronicles,' as it is in the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' with a peculiar,almost plebeian, plainness at times. There is no more attempt atdramatic effect than there is at ceremonious pose; things happen in thattale of a mighty war as they happened in the mighty war itself, withoutsetting, without artificial reliefs one after another, as if they wereall of one quality and degree. Judgments are delivered with the sameunimposing quiet; no awe surrounds the tribunal except that which comesfrom the weight and justice of the opinions; it is always an unaffected,unpretentious man who is talking; and throughout he prefers to wear theuniform of a private, with nothing of the general about him but theshoulder-straps, which he sometimes forgets.

  XI.

  Canon Fairfax,'s opinions of literary criticism are very much to myliking, 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 nosense the legislators of literature, barely even its judges and police";and he reminds them of Mr. Ruskin's saying that "a bad critic is probablythe most mischievous person in the world," though a sense of theirrelative proportion to the whole of life would perhaps acquit the worstamong them of this extreme of culpability. A bad critic is as bad athing as can be, but, after all, his mischief does not carry very far.Otherwise it would be mainly the conventional books and not the originalbooks which would survive; for the censor who imagines himself alaw-giver can give law only to the imitative and never to the creativemind. Criticism has condemned whatever was, from time to time, fresh andvital in literature; it has always fought the new good thing in behalf ofthe old good thing; it has invariably fostered and encouraged the tame,the trit
e, the negative. Yet upon the whole it is the native, the novel,the positive that has survived in literature. Whereas, if bad criticismwere the most mischievous thing in the world, in the full implication ofthe words, it must have been the tame, the trite, the negative, thatsurvived.