Criticism and Fiction..........................................................................................................................................1

William Dean Howells .............................................................................................................................1

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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."

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

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 Beautifula 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 wellmannered and agreeable instruction. In some things it is of that droll

little eighteenthcentury 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 acceptanceit 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 commonsense into the selfdistrust 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 selfrighteousness. 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

stillborn, 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 everyday 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 lifelikeness out of them, and put the booklikeness 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 cardboard, 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

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 selfdevoted, adventureful, good old romantic cardboard 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 itsome 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

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

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 today 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 Giantkiller" or

"PussinBoots," 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.

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 selfconsciousness. 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

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 longwinded explanation and commentary; that,

except in the case of his lowerclass 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; slowerwitted, aesthetically untrained, and in maturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention

as the children of today. 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 artwhich is never anything but the reflection of lifeto 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, everyday 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 commonsense

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.

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 romanceit 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 boardinghouse, 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

indeed 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 selfdenial 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 everyday 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

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 reasonwhen 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,

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 scalpingknife 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 criticthe ordinary critic of commerce, so to speakis even now very,

well indeed. Collectively he is more than this; for the joint effect of our criticism is the pretty thorough

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 goodnature 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

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 littledigging, 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

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 thingusually 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

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 selfrespect that must forbid the

civilized man the savage pleasure of wounding, are what I would ask for our criticism, as something which

I would have my fellowcritics 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

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 authorthe 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

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 thingsthings 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 startingpoint,

and are reasonably uncertain of the race, not with those who have won it again and again in their own way.

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

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

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

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 selfgiven 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

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

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

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

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 fellowauthor 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 bowwow 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

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

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 pseudorealists, 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 "PussinBoots" and the hairbreadth escapes of

"Tom Thumb," under various aliases, only cast disrespect upon the immortals who have passed beyond these

"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 bloodcurdled, 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

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

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 commonsense, 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 puppetshow, or a modern stageplay, 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

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 today. 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 middleclass 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

"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 wornout 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 . . . . Today always looks mean to the

thoughtless; but today 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

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

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 thinga kind of metaphysical lie against righteousness and

commonsense 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 selfindulgence, 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

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 middleaged 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

One of the greatest captains who ever lived [General U. S. Grant D.W.] a plain, taciturn, unaffected

soulhas told the story of his wonderful life as unconsciously as if it were all an everyday 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; be 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 secondrate 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

In General Grant's confession of novelreading 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 makeup 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 highstrung and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and plodding

perseverance are despised, and matter offact poverty, or everyday, commonplace distress, meets with no

sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over the impossibly accumulated sufferings of some

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 stageplay 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

novelreading which people fancy an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation, hardly more related to

thought or the wholesome exercise of the mental faculties than opiumeating; 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 fungusgrowth with which the

fields of literature teem every day, he may nourish himself as with the true mushroom, at no risk from the

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

socalled 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 "matteroffact 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

selfsacrifice, 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 bestor

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 ditchwater," 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

The fiction that aims merely to entertainthe fiction that is to serious fiction as the operabouffe, the ballet,

and the pantomime are to the true dramaneed 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

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 lifethat is, of human naturewhich 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 rightminded 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 opiumjoint 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 cardplaying," 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 stageplay; and none of us can escape conviction except he prove himself worthy of his timea

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 farno one need really go out of

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 novelwriters 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 semifatuous persons of both

sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novelfabric into the dustcart, 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 semifatuous 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 "novelfabric," 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 selfrespect in these days compatible with the old trade of makebelieve, with

the production of the kind of fiction which is too much honored by classification with cardplaying and

horseracing. 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 knowthe language of unaffected people everywhereand there can be no doubt of an

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

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 hairbreadth 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

Within the last four or five years there has been throughout the whole Englishspeaking 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

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 noman'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 feelingfeeling 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

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

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 goodwill; 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 selfrighteousness. 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 aftertime; at other times he seems merely

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 Godgiven 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 romancethe 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 imaginationthe works that

represent and body forth human experience. Its ingenuity, can always afford a refined pleasure, and it can

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

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

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

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 thingas 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 welltodo 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

Fine artists we have among us, and rightminded 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 snapcamera 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

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

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 lateborn 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

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 nearathand 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

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 everyday world and catch the charm of its

workworn, careworn, 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 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

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 everythingall 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 bookshelf 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

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

At least threefifths 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

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

One of the first of these is the fact, generally lost sight of by those who censure the AngloSaxon 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 outofdoors

for saying to them, or of frankly giving notice of your intention, and so cutting yourself off from the

pleasureand it is a very high and sweet one of appealing to these vivid, responsive intelligences, which are

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.

"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 AngloSaxon novelist did

deal with such problemsDe 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

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 countryhouses, 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

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

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 masterworks (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

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

After all, it is a matter of business; and the insurgent novelist should consider the situation with coolness and

commonsense. 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

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

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 AngloSaxon 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 indoors promotes the

gayeties which merge, at all wellregulated countryhouses, 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,

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

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 cornfield, figure

throughout; and the leafless woods are blue and cold against the evening sky behind the low hiproofed,

oldfashioned 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

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 ThanksgivingChristmas 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

totalabstinence pledge and family reunion at Thanksgiving, and an apparition and spiritual regeneration over

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 wellknown 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 NewYorker to whom Dutch

associations with Newyear's had endeared the German ideal of Christmas, and whom the robust gayeties of

the season in oldfashioned countryhouses had charmed, would be one of those roundabout results which

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 eighteenthcentury 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 Englishspeaking world, and gave it a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before upon

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

halfcentury. 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

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 restand with "a heart highsorrowful 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

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

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 soand so;

and the result was a joint juggle, a child'splay, 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

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 welllighted room before a cheerful fire, likes to have these things imaged

for it, and its longpuerilized 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

apprenticewizards and journeymanwizards 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

hairbreadth 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, selfsacrifice and

generosity, selfrespect 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

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

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 longreverberating 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

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