Criticism and Fiction

by William Dean Howells

  From the point of view of modern English criticism, which likes to bemelted, and horrified, and astonished, and blood-curdled, and goose-fleshed, no less than to be "chippered up" in fiction, Senor Valdes wereindeed incorrigible. Not only does he despise the novel of complicatedplot, and everywhere prefer 'Don Quixote' to 'Persiles and Sigismunda,'but he has a lively contempt for another class of novels much in favorwith the gentilities of all countries. He calls their writers "novelistsof the world," and he says that more than any others they have the rageof effectism. "They do not seek to produce effect by novelty andinvention in plot . . . they seek it in character. For this end theybegin by deliberately falsifying human feelings, giving them aparadoxical appearance completely inadmissible . . . . Love thatdisguises itself as hate, incomparable energy under the cloak ofweakness, virginal innocence under the aspect of malice and impudence,wit masquerading as folly, etc., etc. By this means they hope to make aneffect of which they are incapable through the direct, frank, andconscientious study of character." He mentions Octave Feuillet as thegreatest offender in this sort among the French, and Bulwer among theEnglish; but Dickens is full of it (Boffin in 'Our Mutual Friend' willsuffice for all example), and most drama is witness of the result of thiseffectism when allowed full play.

  But what, then, if he is not pleased with Dumas, or with the effectistswho delight genteel people at all the theatres, and in most of theromances, what, I ask, will satisfy this extremely difficult Spanishgentleman? He would pretend, very little. Give him simple, lifelikecharacter; that is all he wants. "For me, the only condition ofcharacter is that it be human, and that is enough. If I wished to knowwhat was human, I should study humanity."

  But, Senor Valdes, Senor Valdes! Do not you know that this smallcondition of yours implies in its fulfilment hardly less than the gift ofthe whole earth? You merely ask that the character portrayed in fictionbe human; and you suggest that the novelist should study humanity if hewould know whether his personages are human. This appears to me thecruelest irony, the most sarcastic affectation of humility. If you hadasked that character in fiction be superhuman, or subterhuman, orpreterhuman, or intrahuman, and had bidden the novelist go, not tohumanity, but the humanities, for the proof of his excellence, it wouldhave been all very easy. The books are full of those "creations," ofevery pattern, of all ages, of both sexes; and it is so much handier toget at books than to get at Men; and when you have portrayed "passion"instead of feeling, and used "power" instead of common-sense, and shownyourself a "genius" instead of an artist, the applause is so prompt andthe glory so cheap, that really anything else seems wickedly wasteful ofone's time. One may not make one's reader enjoy or suffer nobly, but onemay give him the kind of pleasure that arises from conjuring, or from apuppet-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 ayoung fool, half crazed with the spectacle of qualities and impulses likehis own in an apotheosis of achievement and fruition far beyond anyearthly experience.

  But apparently Senor Valdes would not think this any great artisticresult. "Things that appear ugliest in reality to the spectator who isnot an artist, are transformed into beauty and poetry when the spirit ofthe artist possesses itself of them. We all take part every day in athousand 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 ofrepugnance; but let the novelist come, and without betraying the truth,but painting them as they appear to his vision, he produces a mostinteresting work, whose perusal enchants us. That which in life left usindifferent, or repelled us, in art delights us. Why? Simply becausethe artist has made us see the idea that resides in it. Let not thenovelists, then, endeavor to add anything to reality, to turn it andtwist it, to restrict it. Since nature has endowed them with thisprecious gift of discovering ideas in things, their work will bebeautiful if they paint these as they appear. But if the reality doesnot impress them, in vain will they strive to make their work impressothers."

  XV.

  Which brings us again, after this long way about, to Jane Austen and hernovels, and that troublesome question about them. She was great and theywere beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with naturenearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism isnothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material,and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists totreat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, sheremains the most artistic of the English novelists, and alone worthy tobe matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists. Itis not a question of intellect, or not wholly that. The English havemind enough; but they have not taste enough; or, rather, their taste hasbeen perverted by their false criticism, which is based upon personalpreference, and not upon, principle; which instructs a man to think thatwhat he likes is good, instead of teaching him first to distinguish whatis good before he likes it. The art of fiction, as Jane Austen knew it,declined from her through Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens, and CharlotteBronte, and Thackeray, and even George Eliot, because the mania ofromanticism had seized upon all Europe, and these great writers could notescape the taint of their time; but it has shown few signs of recovery inEngland, because English criticism, in the presence of the Continentalmasterpieces, has continued provincial and special and personal, and hasexpressed a love and a hate which had to do with the quality of theartist rather than the character of his work. It was inevitable that intheir 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 tofalsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifyingpsychology after their own fancy," like Bulwer and Dickens, as well aslike Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention Balzac, the worst ofall 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 forthe rest: not, indeed, for the performance of this writer or that, forcriticism can never affect the actual doing of a thing; but for theesteem in which this writer or that is held through the perpetuation offalse ideals. The only observer of English middle-class life since JaneAusten worthy to be named with her was not George Eliot, who was firstethical and then artistic, who transcended her in everything but the formand method most essential to art, and there fell hopelessly below her.It was Anthony Trollope who was most like her in simple honesty andinstinctive truth, as unphilosophized as the light of common day; but hewas so warped from a wholesome ideal as to wish at times to be likeThackeray, and to stand about in his scene, talking it over with hishands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the illusionin which alone the truth of art resides. Mainly, his instinct was toomuch for his ideal, and with a low view of life in its civic relationsand a thoroughly bourgeois soul, he yet produced works whose beauty issurpassed only by the effect of a more poetic writer in the novels ofThomas Hardy. Yet if a vote of English criticism even at this late day,when all Continental Europe has the light of aesthetic truth, could betaken, the majority against these artists would be overwhelmingly infavor of a writer who had so little artistic sensibility, that he neverhesitated on any occasion, great or small, to make a foray among hischaracters, and catch them up to show them to the reader and tell him howbeautiful or ugly they were; and cry out over their amazing properties.

  "How few materials," says Emerson, "are yet used by our arts! The mass ofcreatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant," and to break newground 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 inthe old furrows of the worn-out fields; most of those whom they live toplease, or live by pleasing, prefer to have them remain there; it wantsrare 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 theordinary English novel, with its hackneyed plot
, scenes, and figures, ismore comfortable to the ordinary American than an American novel, whichdeals, at its worst, with comparatively new interests and motives. Toadjust one's self to the enjoyment of these costs an intellectual effort,and an intellectual effort is what no ordinary person likes to make. Itis only the extraordinary person who can say, with Emerson: "I ask notfor the great, the remote, the romantic . . . . I embrace the common;I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low . . . . Man issurprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrousthan things remote . . . . The perception of the worth of the vulgaris fruitful in discoveries . . . . The foolish man wonders at theunusual, but the wise man at the usual . . . . To-day always looksmean 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 ofwonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphos."

  Perhaps we ought not to deny their town of Troy and their temple ofDelphos to the dull people; but if we ought, and if we did, they wouldstill insist upon having them. An English novel, full of titles andrank, is apparently essential to the happiness of such people; their weakand childish imagination is at home in its familiar environment; theyknow what they are reading; the fact that it is hash many times warmedover reassures them; whereas a story of our own life, honestly studiedand faithfully represented, troubles them with varied misgiving. Theyare not sure that it is literature; they do not feel that it is goodsociety; 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 thesense of the literary worth of things in America is still faint and weakwith most people, with the vast majority who "ask for the great, theremote, the romantic," who cannot "embrace the common," cannot "sit atthe 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 finepeople we have read about. We are really a mixture of the plebeianingredients of the whole world; but that is not bad; our vulgarityconsists in trying to ignore "the worth of the vulgar," in believing thatthe superfine is better.

  XVII.

  Another Spanish novelist of our day, whose books have given me greatpleasure, is so far from being of the same mind of Senor Valdes aboutfiction that he boldly declares himself, in the preface to his 'PepitaXimenez,' "an advocate of art for art's sake." I heartily agree with himthat it is "in very bad taste, always impertinent and often pedantic, toattempt to prove theses by writing stories," and yet if it is true that"the object of a novel should be to charm through a faithfulrepresentation of human actions and human passions, and to create by thisfidelity to nature a beautiful work," and if "the creation of thebeautiful" is solely "the object of art," it never was and never can besolely its effect as long as men are men and women are women. If everthe race is resolved into abstract qualities, perhaps this may happen;but till then the finest effect of the "beautiful" will be ethical andnot aesthetic merely. Morality penetrates all things, it is the soul ofall things. Beauty may clothe it on, whether it is false morality and anevil soul, or whether it is true and a good soul. In the one case thebeauty will corrupt, and in the other it will edify, and in either caseit will infallibly and inevitably have an ethical effect, now light, nowgrave, according as the thing is light or grave. We cannot escape fromthis; we are shut up to it by the very conditions of our being. For themoment, it is charming to have a story end happily, but after one haslived a certain number of years, and read a certain number of novels, itis not the prosperous or adverse fortune of the characters that affectsone, 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 thatprinciple involved? I cannot hold him to less account than this: he mustbe true to what life has taught me is the truth, and after that he maylet any fate betide his people; the novel ends well that ends faithfully.The greater his power, the greater his responsibility before the humanconscience, which is God in us. But men come and go, and what they do intheir limited physical lives is of comparatively little moment; it iswhat they say that really survives to bless or to ban; and it is the evilwhich Wordsworth felt in Goethe, that must long sur vive him. There is akind of thing--a kind of metaphysical lie against righteousness andcommon-sense which is called the Unmoral; and is supposed to be differentfrom the Immoral; and it is this which is supposed to cover many of thefaults of Goethe. His 'Wilhelm Meister,' for example, is so far removedwithin the region of the "ideal" that its unprincipled, its evilprincipled, tenor in regard to women is pronounced "unmorality," and istherefore inferably harmless. But no study of Goethe is complete withoutsome recognition of the qualities which caused Wordsworth to hurl thebook across the room with an indignant perception of its sensuality.For the sins of his life Goethe was perhaps sufficiently punished in hislife by his final marriage with Christiane; for the sins of hisliterature many others must suffer. I do not despair, however, of theday when the poor honest herd of man kind shall give universal utteranceto the universal instinct, and shall hold selfish power in politics, inart, in religion, for the devil that it is; when neither its crazy pridenor its amusing vanity shall be flattered by the puissance of the"geniuses" who have forgotten their duty to the common weakness, and haveabused it to their own glory. In that day we shall shudder at manymonsters of passion, of self-indulgence, of heartlessness, whom we stillmore or less openly adore for their "genius," and shall account no manworshipful whom we do not feel and know to be good. The spectacle ofstrenuous achievement will then not dazzle or mislead; it will notsanctify or palliate iniquity; it will only render it the more hideousand pitiable.

  In fact, the whole belief in "genius" seems to me rather a mischievoussuperstition, and if not mischievous always, still always a superstition.From the account of those who talk about it, "genius" appears to be theattribute of a sort of very potent and admirable prodigy which God hascreated out of the common for the astonishment and confusion of the restof us poor human beings. But do they really believe it? Do they meananything more or less than the Mastery which comes to any man accordingto his powers and diligence in any direction? If not, why not have anend of the superstition which has caused our race to go on so longwriting and reading of the difference between talent and genius? It iswithin the memory of middle-aged men that the Maelstrom existed in thebelief of the geographers, but we now get on perfectly well without it;and why should we still suffer under the notion of "genius" which keepsso many poor little authorlings trembling in question whether they haveit, 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 wonderfullife as unconsciously as if it were all an every-day affair, notdifferent from other lives, except as a great exigency of the human racegave it importance. So far as he knew, he had no natural aptitude forarms, and certainly no love for the calling. But he went to West Pointbecause, as he quaintly tells us, his father "rather thought he wouldgo"; and he fought through one war with credit, but without glory. Theother war, which was to claim his powers and his science, found himengaged in the most prosaic of peaceful occupations; he obeyed its callbecause he loved his country, and not because he loved war. All theworld knows the rest, and all the world knows that greater militarymastery has not been shown than his campaigns illustrated. He does notsay this in his book, or hint it in any way; he gives you the facts, andleaves them with you. But the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, writtenas simply and straightforwardly as his battles were fought, couched inthe most unpretentious phrase, with never a touch of grandiosity orattitudinizing, familiar, homely in style, form a great piece ofliterature, because great literature is nothing more nor less than theclear expression of minds that have some thing great in them, whetherreligion, or beauty, or deep experience. Probably Grant would
have saidthat 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 tosupposing a case of "genius." Yet who would trifle with that great heirof fame, that plain, grand, manly soul, by speaking of "genius" and himtogether? Who calls Washington a genius? or Franklin, or Bismarck, orCavour, or Columbus, or Luther, or Darwin, or Lincoln? Were these mensecond-rate in their way? Or is "genius" that indefinable, preternaturalquality, sacred to the musicians, the painters, the sculptors, theactors, the poets, and above all, the poets? Or is it that the poets,having most of the say in this world, abuse it to shamelessself-flattery, and would persuade the inarticulate classes thatthey are on peculiar terms of confidence with the deity?