One of the most curious and depressing things about our modern literary
criticism is the tendency it has to slide into an ethical criticism
before we know what to expect. We go to a Browning Society, for
example,--at least some of us who are stout-hearted go,--presumably to
hear about Mr. Browning’s poetry. What we do hear about are his ethics.
Insinuate a doubt as to the artistic setting of a poem, and you are
met at once by the spirited counter-statement that the poet has taught
us a particularly noble lesson in that particularly noble verse. Push
your heresy a step further by hinting that the question at issue is
not so much the nobility of the lesson taught as the degree of beauty
which has been made manifest in the teaching, and you find yourself
in much the same position as that unfortunate Epicurean who strayed
wantonly into the lecture-hall of Epictetus, and got philosophically
crushed for his presumption. The fiction of the day, a commonplace
product for the most part, which surely merits lighter treatment at our
hands, is subjected to a similar discipline; and the novelist, finding
his own importance immensely increased thereby, rises promptly to the
emergency, and, with characteristic diffidence, consents to be our
guide, philosopher, and friend. It is amusing to hear Bishop Copleston,
writing for that young and vivacious generation who knew not the
seriousness of life, remind them pointedly that “the task of pleasing
is at all times easier than that of instructing.” It is delightful to
think that there ever was a period when people preferred to be pleased
rather than instructed. It is refreshing to go back in spirit to those
halcyon days when poets sang of their ladies’ eyebrows rather than of
the inscrutable problems of fate, and when Mrs. Battle relaxed herself,
after a game of whist, over that genial and unostentatious trifle
called a novel. Fancy Mrs. Battle relaxing herself to-day over “Daniel
Deronda,” or “The Ordeal of Richard Feveril,” or “The Story of an
African Farm”!
Vernon Lee, speaking by the mouth of Marcel, that shadowy young
Frenchman who is none the less unpleasant for being so indistinct,
would have us believe that this incorrigible habit of applying
ethical standpoints to artistic questions is merely an English
idiosyncrasy, one of those “weird and exquisite moral impressions”
which can be gathered only from contact with British soil. But in
view of the deductions recently drawn from French and Russian fiction
by an ingenious American critic, we are forced to conclude that
true didacticism is an exotic of such rare and subtle excellence as
frequently to be mistaken for vice. In fact, it is not its least
advantageous peculiarity that a novelist may, on high moral grounds,
treat of a great many subjects which he would be compelled rigorously
to let alone, if he had no nobler object before him than the mere
pleasure and entertainment of his readers. There are no improper
novels any longer, because even those that strike the uninitiated
as admirably adapted to the spiritual requirements of Commodus or
Elagabalus are, in truth, far more moral than morality itself, being
set up, like the festering heads of old-time criminals, as a stern
warning in the market-place. Zola, we all know, aspires as much to be
a teacher as George Eliot. His methods are different, to be sure, but
the directing principle is the same. He can neither amuse nor please,
but he can and will instruct. “When I have once shown you,” he seems
to say, “every known detail of every known sin,--and the list, it must
be confessed, is a long one,--you will then be glad to walk purely on
your appointed path. You will remember what I have described to you,
and be cautious.” But it may fairly be doubted whether the Spartan
boys, whose anxious fathers exhibited to them the drunken Helots
sprawling swine-like in the sun, were quite as deeply shocked at the
sight as classical history would give us to understand. There are some
old-fashioned lines by an old-fashioned poet to the effect that the
ugliness of Vice is no especial detriment to her seductions, if we will
only look at her often enough to forget it. Probably those Spartan
lads, after a few educational experiments, began to think that the
Helots, in their reeking filth and bestiality, were rather interesting
studies; were experiencing new and perhaps pleasurable emotions; were
more comfortable, at all events, than they themselves, sitting stiff
and upright at the public table, with a scanty plateful of unpalatable
broth; were, in short, having a jolly good time of it,--and why not try
for once what such thorough-going drunkenness was like?
This point of view, however, is far too shallow and frivolous to find
favor with the serious apostles who are regenerating the world by the
simple process of calling old and evil things by new and beautiful
names. In the days of our great-grandfathers, a novel was simply a
novel. Ten chances to one it was not as virtuous as it should have
been, in which case the great-grandfathers laughed over it jovially,
if they chanced to be light-minded, or shook their heads impressively,
if they were disposed to be grave; perhaps even going so far as to
lock it up, having previously satisfied their own curiosity, from
their equally curious families. But it never occurred to them to
make a merit of reading “Tom Jones” or “Humphry Clinker,” any more
than it occurred to the authors of those ingenious books to pose as
illustrative moralists before the world. The men of that robust
generation were better able to bear the theory of their amusements,
and vices were quite content to flourish shamelessly under their
proper names. Cruelty then took the form of pastime,--bear-baiting,
badger-drawing, cock-fighting; questionable pleasures, doubtless, yet
gentle as the sports of cherubs when compared with the ever-increasing
agonies of vivisection, with the ceaseless and nameless experiments of
German and Italian scientists, the “Fisiologia del Dolore” of Professor
Mantegazza, all of which horrors are justified and turned into painful
duties by our new evolutionary morality. Sensuality, too, which used
to show itself coarse, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now
serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities
that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism. The
moral animus with which Frenchmen write immoral books is one of the
paradoxes of our present system of ethics; and it occasionally happens
that the simple-minded reader, failing to appreciate the shadowy
elevation of their platform, fancies they are working _con amore_ amid
their unpromising and unsavory materials. So it was that Mr. Howells
startled a great many respectable people by the assurance that “Madame
Bovary” was “one impassioned cry of the austerest morality,” when they
had innocently supposed it to be something vastly different. Even
respectable critics, unemancipated English critics in particular, seem
to have been somewhat taken back by the breadth of this definition.
Perhaps they recalled Epictetus,--“Austerity should be both cleanly
and pleasing,”--and considered that “Madame Bovary” was neither.
Perhaps they thought, and with some reason, that never, since Swift’s
angry eyes were closed in death, has any writer expressed more harsh
and cruel scorn for his fellow-men than Gustave Flaubert, and that
concentrated contempt is seldom the most effective weapon for an
apostle. Perhaps they were merely conventional enough to fancy that a
novel, against which even wicked Paris protested, was hardly decorous
enough for sober London. At all events, it would appear as though a
goodly number of stragglers along the path of virtue felt themselves
insufficiently advanced for such a difficult and abstruse text-book of
ethics.
In the midst of this universal disclaimer, it never seems to occur
to anybody to ask the simple question, Why should “Madame Bovary” be
an impassioned cry of the austerest morality,--why should any novel
undertake to be an impassioned cry of morality at all? It is not the
office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not
the business of fiction to teach us anything. Scientific truths, new
forms of religion, the humorous eccentricities of socialism, the
countless fads of radical reformers, the proper way to live our own
lives,--these matters, which are now objects of such tender regard to
the story-teller, form no part of his rightful stock-in-trade. His
task is simply to give us pleasure, and his duty is to give it within
the not very Puritanical limits prescribed by our modern notions of
decency. If he chooses to overstep these limits, an offense against
propriety, it is exasperating to have him defended on the score of
an ethical purpose, an offense against art; for there is nothing so
hopelessly inartistic as to represent the world as worse than it
is, or to express a too vehement dissatisfaction with the men who
dwell in it. Art is never didactic, does not take kindly to facts, is
helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
Its knowledge is not that of a schoolmaster, and is not imparted
through the severe medium of lessons. It assumes no responsibilities,
undertakes no reformation, and, as George Sand neatly points out,
proves nothing. What are we to learn, she asks, from “Paul and
Virginia”? Merely that youth, friendship, love, and the tropics are
beautiful things when St. Pierre describes them. What from “Faust?”
Only that science, human life, fantastic images, profound, graceful,
or terrible ideas, are wonderful things when Goethe makes out of them
a sublime and moving picture. This sounds like high authority for Mr.
Oscar Wilde’s latest and most amusing heresy, that Nature gains her
true distinction from being reproduced, with necessary modifications,
by Art; that too close a copy of the original is fatal to the
perfection of the younger and fairer sister; that the insignificant
and sordid types in which Nature takes such reprehensible delight are
to be, if possible, forgotten, rather than dandled into insulting
prominence; and that not all the dreary vices of the most drearily
vicious man or woman whom Zola ever drew can give that man or woman
a right to breathe in the tranquil air of fiction. As for accepting
inartistic and repellent sinners for the sake of the moral lesson
which may, or may not, be drawn from their sin, Mr. Wilde is as prompt
as De Quincey himself to repudiate any such utilitarian theory. “If
you insist on my telling you what is the moral of the Iliad,” says
De Quincey, “I must insist on your telling me what is the moral of a
rattlesnake, or the moral of Niagara. I suppose the moral is, that you
must get out of their way if you mean to moralize much longer.”
But this light-hearted flippancy on the part of the critic was only
possible, or at least was only acceptable, in those days when the
novelist had not yet awakened to his serious duties in life. Content,
for the most part, to tell a story, he barely remembered now and then,
in the beginning, may be, or at the end, that there was such a thing
as an ethical purpose in existence. Even Richardson, the father of
English didactic fiction, was but an indifferent parent, starting
out with a great many gallant promises on behalf of his offspring,
and easily forgetting all about them. Miss Burney was as cheerfully
unconscious of her own grave obligations to society as was Miss Austen;
while in those few lines with which Sir Walter Scott closes “The Heart
of Mid-Lothian”--lines addressed to the “reader,” and containing some
irrefutable but not very original remarks about the happiness of virtue
and the infelicity of vice--we see an almost pathetic avowal on the
part of the great novelist that, in the mere delight of telling his
beautiful and best loved tale, he had well-nigh lost sight of any moral
lesson it might be fitted to convey, and was trying at the last moment
to make amends for this deficiency. Imagine George Eliot forgetting,
or permitting her readers to forget, the moral lesson of “Adam Bede,”
when every fresh development of character or of narrative has for its
conscious purpose the driving home of hard and bitter truths. No need
for the authoress of “Romola” to wind up her story with that paragraph
of excellent advice to poor little Lillo, who is after all rather young
to profit by it; while we who have followed Tito from his first joyous
entrance into Florence to that last dreadful moment when, floating,
bruised, beautiful, and helpless, down the Arno, he opens his dying
eyes to meet the horror of Baldassarre’s vengeance,--we surely do not
require to be warned afresh against the unpardonable sin of making
things easy for ourselves. In the pathetic history of the marred and
broken lives of “Middlemarch,” in the darker and harsher tragedy of
“Daniel Deronda,” we see forever present upon each succeeding page
the underlying motive of the tale; we hear George Eliot listening,
as Morley says, to the sound of her own voice, and announcing as
distinctly as she announced in life that her function is that of the
æsthetic teacher, to rouse the nobler emotions which make mankind
desire the social right.
If the test of the true artist be to conceal his art, then this
transparently didactic purpose is fatal to the perfection of any work
claiming to spring from the imagination. It is impossible to preach
a sermon out of the mouth of fiction without making the fiction
subordinate to the sermon, and thus at once destroying the just
proportions of a story, and forfeiting that subtle sympathy with life,
as it is, which gives to every artistic masterpiece its admirable air
of self-sufficing and harmonious repose. “I always tremble when I see
a philosophical idea attached to a novel,” said Sainte-Beuve, who was
spared by the kindly hand of death from the sight of countless novels
attached to philosophical ideas. Charles Lamb, with that unerring
intuition which was the most wonderful thing about his indolent
luminous genius, recognized, even in the comparative sunlight of
his day, the growing shadow of a speculative, disciplinal, analytic
literature which should sadly overrate its own responsibilities and
importance. “We turn away,” he said, “from the real essences of things
to hunt after their relative shadows, moral duties; whereas, if the
truth of things were fairly represented, the relative duties might
be safely trusted to themselves, and moral philosophy lose the name
of a science.” No one understood more thoroughly than Lamb that the
purely natural point of view, as apart from the purely ethical point of
view, supplies the proper basis for all imaginative writing. “I have
lived to grow into an indecent character,” he sighed, struggling with
whimsical dejection to comprehend the new forces at work; sometimes
protesting angrily against the “Puritanical obtuseness, the stupid,
infantile goodness which is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous
passions and virtues clad in flesh and blood;” sometimes contemplating,
with humorously lowered eyelids, “the least little men who spend their
time and lose their wits in chasing nimble and retiring Truth, to the
extreme perturbation and drying up of the moistures.”
“On court, hélas! après la vérité;
Ah! croyez-moi, l’erreur a son mérite.”
But if modern novelists are disposed to sacrifice their art to a
conscious ethical purpose, to write fiction, as Mr. Oscar Wilde wittily
says, “as though it were a painful duty,” it can hardly be denied that
they are giving the public what the public craves; that they are on
the safe side of criticism, and have chosen their position wisely,
if not well. Should any one feel inclined to doubt this, it might be
a convincing and salutary exercise to re-read as swiftly as possible
a few of the numerous essays and reviews which followed closely on
George Eliot’s death, and which have not altogether vanished from the
literary market now. With one or two distinct and admirable exceptions,
they deal almost exclusively with the didactic aspect of her novels;
they weigh and balance every social theory, every spiritual problem,
every moral lesson, to be extracted from her pages; they take her as
seriously as she took herself, and give their keenest praise to those
precise qualities which marred the artistic perfection of her work.
I have myself counted the obnoxious word “ethics” six times repeated
in the opening paragraph of one review, and have felt too deeply
disheartened by such an outset to penetrate any further. On the other
hand, her dramatic power, her subtle insight, her masterly style, her
warm and vivid pictures of a life that has touched us so closely,
the exquisite art with which her earlier tales are constructed, and,
above and beyond all, her delicious and inimitable humor,--these
things appear to be regarded as mere minor details, useful perhaps
and pleasing, but strictly subordinate to the nobler endowments of
her spirit. That some of us endure George Eliot the teacher for the
sake of George Eliot the story-teller is a truth too painful to be
put often into words. That little Maggie Tulliver spelling out the
examples in the Latin grammar, and secretly delighted at her own
amazing cleverness, enables some of us to support the processional
virtues of Romola, and the deadly priggishness of Daniel Deronda, is a
melancholy fact which perhaps it would be wiser to ignore. Maggie, as
we are aware, has deeply shocked the sensitive nature of Mr. Swinburne
by her grossness in falling in love with Stephen, for no better reason,
apparently, than because he was the first big, and strong, and handsome
man she had ever known. That wonderful scene on the boat, with its
commonplace setting and strained intensity of emotion; the short, sad,
rapturous flight; the few misty hours of passionate dreaming which
made poor Maggie’s little share of earthly happiness, have branded
her so deeply in the sight of this hardened moralist that even her
bitter agony of renunciation and her final triumph have failed to win
her pardon. With what chastened severity and with what an animated
vocabulary he condemns the “revolting avowal” of her love, the “hideous
transformation,” the “vulgar and brutal outrage,” the “radical and
moral plague spot,” which debases her into something too vile for pity
or redemption! Verily, this is the squeamishness of the true ascetic
who has somehow mistaken his vocation, and there will be a scant
allowance of cakes and ale for any of us when it is Mr. Swinburne’s
turn to be virtuous.
As for the humor of George Eliot’s novels, that mysterious humor which
she herself was not humorous enough to appreciate, it deserves better
treatment at our hands, were it only for the sake of its valuable
adaptability, were it only because it is pliant enough to fit in all
the time with our own duller imaginings, and to afford a basis and an
illustration for our own inadequate thoughts. From what depths of her
sombre nature came those arrow-points tipped with fire, or, choicer
still, those tempered shafts of reflective ridicule, which are kindly
enough to win our unhesitating acquiescence? With what pleasure we are
reminded that “people who live at a distance are naturally less faulty
than those immediately under our own eyes, and it seems superfluous,
when we consider the geographical position of the Ethiopians, and how
very little the Greeks had to do with them, to inquire further why
Homer calls them ‘blameless’”! Surely, to express a truth humorously
is to rob that truth of all offensive qualities, and Lucian himself
would be prepared to admit that, in a case like this, it is almost
as pleasant as falsehood. But to beguile us into the grateful shades
of fiction, as Jael beguiled Sisera into the shelter of her tent,
and then, with deadly purpose, to transfix us with a truth as sharp
and cruel as the nail with which Jael slew her guest, is a dastardly
betrayal of confidence. When a novelist undertakes to sit in judgment
upon his characters, for the sake of illustrating some moral lesson
with which he has no need to concern himself, he rudely breaks the
mystic web of illusion, and destroys the charm which binds us to his
side. What is it that gives to “Henry Esmond” its supreme artistic
value, if not the fact that Thackeray sank himself out of sight; was
content for once to look at things with Esmond’s gentle eyes, to judge
of things with Esmond’s tolerant soul; and forbore to whip his actors
through the play like criminals at the cart-tail? On the other hand,
what whimsical sense of responsibility induced Bulwer to elaborate
a character like Randal Leslie, only to make of him an educational
sign-post, after the approved fashion of Miss Edgeworth’s “Early
Lessons”? Judged by a purely ethical standard, Randal no doubt merited
his failure; judged by the standard of his ability and energy, Reynard
the Fox was as little likely to fail; and though Mr. Froude tells us
that “women, with their clear moral insight, have no sympathy with
Reynard’s successful villainy,” yet I doubt whether we should really
like to see him outwitted by a fool like Bruin, or beaten by a bully
like Isegrim. He is a terrible scamp, to be sure, but the charm of the
situation is that we are not compelled to watch it from a jury-box.
Now the disadvantage of being at once a novelist and a teacher is that
you have no neutral ground from which to observe your characters, no
friendly appreciation of things or people as you find them. What the
artist accepts with delicate sympathy, though with no pretense at
justification, the moralist must either justify or condemn. The first
course is common enough, and produces a class of literature essentially
vicious because of its very limitations,--six deadly sins held up to
public execration, and the seventh presented to us tenderly as an
ill-understood and sadly calumniated virtue. The second course--that
of implied condemnation--is equally open to a Sunday-school story or
to the least decorous of French novels; both have for their avowed
object the pillorying of vice, and both put forward this claim as a
reasonable excuse for existence. But art has no pillory, no stocks,
no whipping-post, no exclusive methods for fixing our attention upon
sin. Art gives us Lady Macbeth and Iago, and gives them to us without
reproaches, without extenuation, and without any attempt to reform.
It is less painful to watch the irresistible development of their
respective crimes than to hear Thackeray lashing with keen scorn
some poor sinner stumbling through the mazes of worldly wickedness,
or to see George Eliot pursuing one of her own creations with
inextinguishable severity and contempt. There is something paralyzing
in the cold anger with which Rosamond Vincy is branded and shamed;
there is something appalling in the conscientious vindictiveness with
which Tito is hunted down, step by step, to his final retribution.
That delightful essayist, Mr. Karl Hillebrand, whose artistic nature
is about as much at home among modern theories as a strayed Faun in a
button factory, has given us a half-humorous, half-despairing picture
of some old acquaintances under the new dispensation: of Manon Lescaut
threatened with Charlotte Brontë’s birch-rod; of Squire Western opening
his startled eyes as Zola proceeds to detail for his benefit the latest
and most highly realistic study of delirium tremens; of Falstaff, whom
that losel Shakespeare treated so indulgently, listening abashed to
George Eliot’s scathing denunciations. “For really, Sir John,” he hears
her say, “you have no excuse whatever. If you were a poor devil who had
never had any but bad examples before your eyes!--but you have had all
the advantages which destiny can give to man on his way through life.
Are you not born of a good family? Have you not had at Oxford the best
education England is able to give to her children? Have you not had the
highest connections? And, nevertheless, how low you have fallen! Do you
know why? I have warned my Tito over and over again against it: because
you have always done that only which was agreeable to you, and have
shunned everything that was unpleasant.”
This sounds like sad trifling to our sober and orthodox ears, but it is
not more audacious, on the whole, than the pathetic lamentations of Mr.
Oscar Wilde over the career of Charles Reade: the most disheartening,
he protests, in all literature; “wasted in a foolish attempt to be
modern, and to draw attention to the state of our convict prisons,
and the management of private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was
depressing enough, in all conscience, when he tried to arouse our
sympathy for the victims of the poor-law administration; but Charles
Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging
and roaring over the abuses of modern life like a common pamphleteer
or a sensational journalist, is really a sight for the angels to
weep over.” It is just possible that whatever personal interest the
angelic hosts take in our earthly lot may be directed to philanthropy
rather than to literature; but, for the idle and inglorious mortal, the
protest holds a world of truth and meaning. Reade, as a reformer, is
melancholy company; and Dickens is inexpressibly dismal when he drags
the Chancery business into “Bleak House,” and the pauper dinner-table
into “Oliver Twist,” and that dreary caricature, the Circumlocution
Office, into “Little Dorrit.” If these things really accomplished the
good that is claimed for them, it was dearly bought by the weariness of
so many millions of readers. “A fiction contrived to support an opinion
is a vicious composition,” said Jeffrey, who was as apt in his general
criticisms as he was awkward in their particular applications, and who
lived before the era of serious and educational novels. To-day we have
the unhesitating assertion of Mr. Howells that one of Tolstoï’s highest
claims to our consideration is his steadfast teaching “that all war,
private and public, is a sin.” Mr. Ruskin, it may be remembered, holds
somewhat different views: “There is no great art possible to a nation
but that which is based on war.” Yet as every man is entitled to his
own opinion in such matters, there is no reason why we should quarrel
with either the Russian or the Englishman for their chosen principles.
But Ruskin is no greater as an essayist because he approves of war, and
Tolstoï gains nothing as a novelist because he adheres to peace. The
glory of the battlefield, its pathos and its horror, are all fitting
subjects for the artist’s pen or pencil. He may stir our blood and
rouse our fighting instincts, like Homer or Scott; or he may move us
to pity, and sorrow, and shame, by the revelation of all the shattered
hopes and bitter agonies that lie beyond. But his own greatness depends
exclusively on his treatment of the subject, and not on his point
of view. Who knows and who cares what De Neuville thinks of war? He
paints for us a handful of men roused at dawn, and rushing gallantly to
their deaths, and we feel our hearts beat high as we look at them. The
terror, the awfulness, the self-forgetting courage, the gay defiance
of battle, all are there, imprisoned mysteriously in the artistic
grouping of a few blue-coated soldiers. But Verestchagin, who aspires
to teach us the wickedness of war, is powerless to thrill us in this
manner. He is probably sincere in his opinions, and he has striven hard
to give them form and expression, but, lacking the artistic impulse,
he has for the most part striven in vain. His huge canvases, packed
with dead and dying, are less impressive, less solemn, less painful
even, from their monotonous overcrowding, than a single Zouave, whose
wounds De Neuville has no need to emphasize with vast expenditure of
vermilion, when the faintness of a mortal agony draws his weary body
to the earth. “All real power,” says Ruskin, “lies in delicacy.” To
trouble the senses is an easy task, but it is through the imagination
only that we receive any strong and lasting impressions, and no
sincerity of purpose can suffice to turn a crude didacticism into art.
It is hard to analyze the peculiar nature of the claims asserted and
upheld by the disciples of modern realism. They are not content with
the splendid position which is theirs by right,--not content with the
admirable work they have done, and the hold they have secured on the
sympathies of our earnest, rationalistic, and unimaginative age; but
they assume in some subtle and incomprehensible way that their school
is based upon man’s love and appreciation for his fellow-creatures.
If we would but look upon all men as our brothers, it is plainly
hinted, all men would be of equal interest to us, and it is our duty,
as nineteenth-century citizens, to accept and cherish this universal
relationship. To the perpetual sounding of the humanitarian note, there
are some, it is true, who answer, with Vernon Lee’s very amusing and
very wicked skeptic, that “the new-fangled bore called mankind is as
great a plague as the old-fashioned nuisance called a soul;” but there
are others who, finding themselves in full possession of a conscience,
stoutly maintain that they love their undistinguished brother none the
less because they weary of his society in literature and art. It was
Ruskin, for example, who sneered at George Eliot’s characters as the
“sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus,”--a terrible misapplication of
an inspired phrase; but Ruskin is the last man in Christendom who can
be accused of an indifference to his fellow-men. His whole life is a
sufficient refutation of the charge. Voltaire is responsible for the
statement that the world is full of people who are not worth knowing.
Yet Voltaire was forever restlessly espousing some popular cause,
forever interesting himself in the supposed welfare of these eminently
undesirable associates. What he thought, and what he was quite right in
thinking, is that we gain nothing, intellectually or spiritually, from
the mass of men and women with whom we come in contact; and that it is
wiser to fix our attention upon graceful and exalted types than to go
on forever, as Charles Lamb expressed it, “encouraging each other in
mediocrity.”
The present stand of realism, however, is but one more phase of the
intrusion of ethics upon art,--the assumption that I cannot have a
sincere regard for the welfare of my washerwoman if I do not care for
her company either in a book or out of it. Tubs have grown in favor
since the day when Wordsworth was compelled, “in deference to the
opinion of friends,” to substitute an impossible turtle-shell for
the homely vessel in which the blind Highland boy set sail on Loch
Leven. All classes and all people, I am now given to understand,
are of supreme interest to the loving student of human nature, and
it is a “narrow conservatism”--chilling phrase--that seeks to limit
the artist’s field of action. But as limiting the artist’s field of
action is practically impossible, and not often essayed, it is hard to
understand what the respective schools of fiction find to fight over,
and why this new battle of the books should be raging as fiercely
as if there were any visible cause of war. It is not an orderly and
well-appointed battle, either, confined to the ranks of critics and
reviewers, but a free skirmish, where everybody who has written a novel
rushes in and plays an active part. Conflicting opinions rattle around
our heads like hail, and the voice of the peacemaker,--Mr. Andrew
Lang,--protesting that all schools are equally good, if the scholars
are equal to their tasks, is lost in the universal clamor. The only
point on which any two sharpshooters appear to agree is in laying
the blame for the “unmanly timidity of English fiction”--a timidity
not always so apparent as it might be--on the shoulders of women,
who, it seems, will have all novels modeled to suit themselves, and
who, with the arrogance of supreme power, have reversed the political
situation, and deprived mankind of their vote. This is the opinion of
Rider Haggard, and also of Vernon Lee, who asserts that “the ethics of
fiction are framed entirely for the benefit or the detriment of women,”
and that its enforced morality--a defect which, to do her justice, she
is striving her best to eradicate--is fatal to its mission in life.
But that fiction has a mission, nobody dares to doubt; that its ethics
are of paramount importance, nobody dares to deny. It devotes itself
in all seriousness to our moral and intellectual welfare; and if,
now and then, we are reminded of Sydney Smith, who would rather Mr.
Perceval had whipped his boys and saved his country, we stifle the
sinful impulse, and turn to biography and history for recreation,
for that purely imaginative element which places no tax upon our
conscience or credulity. Yet we may at least remember that all natures
do not develop on the same lines; that all goodness is not comprised
within certain recognized virtues, or limited to certain fields of
thought. Tolstoï, a figure on a grand scale, “filled with pity for
the oppressed, the poor, and the lowly,” has manifested the sincerity
of his creed by a life of hard work and hearty renunciation. But Sir
Walter Scott, the Tory, the “feudalist,” content to take the world as
he found it, and to believe that whatever is, is right, proved himself
no less the friend and benefactor of his kind. The halo round his
head is not that of genius only, but of love,--love freely given and
abundantly returned. The anxious whisper of the London workmen to Allan
Cunningham, “Do you know, sir, if this is the street where _he_ is
lying?” the rapturous cry of the little deformed tailor who, with his
last breath, sobbed out, “The Lord bless and reward you!” and, falling
back, expired,--these are the sounds that ring through generations to
bear witness to man’s fidelity to man.
“For the might
Of the whole world’s good wishes with him goes,”
sang Wordsworth, with whom affectionate hyperbole was hardly a common
fault. It cannot be that Mr. Howells believes in his heart that
American children need to be warned against Sir Walter’s errors, and
that it is the duty of American parents to give this solemn warning.
Consider that it is only in youth that our imagination triumphs vividly
over realities,--a triumph short-lived enough, but rich in fruits for
the future. The time comes all too soon when we doubt, and question,
and make room in our puzzled minds for the opinions of many men. Ah,
leave to the child, at least, his clear, intuitive, unbiased enjoyment,
his sympathy with things that have been! He is not so easily hurt as
we suppose; he is strong in his elastic ignorance, and has no need of
a pepsin pill with every mouthful of literary food he swallows. Mental
hygiene, it is said, is apt to lead to mental valetudinarianism; but if
we are to turn our very nurseries into hot-beds of prigs, we may say
once more what was said when Chapelain published his portentous epic,
that “a new horror has been added to the accomplishment of reading.”