place in modern life. However strong may be the expression of
disapprobation against certain individual books, no one in these days
attempts to deny the value of imaginative literature in the development
of mind and the formation of character; yet so strong is the Puritan
strain in the blood of the English race that there is still a good deal
of lingering ascetic disapproval of novels.
It must be remembered in this connection that there are novels and
novels. The objections which have from time to time been heaped upon
fiction in general are more than deserved by fiction in particular; and
that, too, by the fiction most in evidence. The books least worthy are
for the most part precisely those which in their brief day are most
likely to excite comment. That the flaming scarlet toadstools which
irresistibly attract the eye in the forest are viciously poisonous does
not, however, alter the fact that mushrooms are at once delicious and
nutritious. It is no more logical to condemn all fiction on account of
the worthlessness or hurtfulness of bad books than it would be to
denounce all food because things have often been eaten which are
dangerously unwholesome.
The great value of fiction as a means of intellectual and of moral
training lies in the fact that man is actually and vitally taught
nothing of importance save by that which really touches his feelings.
Advice appeals to the intellect, and experience to the emotions. What
has been didactically told to us is at best a surface treatment, while
what we have felt is an inward modification of what we are. We approve
of advice, and we act according to experience. Often when we have
decided upon one course of life or action, the inner self which is the
concrete result of our temperament and our experiences goes quietly
forward in a path entirely different. What we have resolved seldom comes
to pass unless it is sustained by what we have felt. For centuries has
man been defining himself as a being that reasons while he has been
living as a being that feels.
The sure hold of fiction upon mankind depends upon the fact that it
enables the reader to gain experience vicariously. Seriously and
sympathetically to read a story which is true to life is to live through
an emotional experience. How vivid this emotion is will manifestly
depend upon the imaginative sympathy with which one reads. The young man
who has appreciatively entered into the life of Arthur Pendennis will
hardly find that he is able to go through the world in a spirit of
dandified self-complaisance without a restraining consciousness that
such an attitude toward life is most absurd folly. A man of confirmed
worldliness is perhaps not to be turned from his selfish and ignoble
living by studying the history of Major Pendennis, to read about whom is
not unlike drinking dry and rare old Madeira; yet it is scarcely to be
doubted that an appreciation of the figure cut by the old beau,
fluttering over the flowers of youth like a preserved butterfly poised
on a wire, must tend to lead a man to a different career. No reader can
have felt imaginatively the passionate spiritual struggles of Arthur
Dimmesdale without being thereafter more sensitive to good influences
and less tolerant of self-deception and concealed sin. These are the
more obvious examples. The experiences which one gains from good fiction
go much farther and deeper. They extend into those most intangible yet
most real regions where even the metaphysician, the psychologist, and
the maker of definitions have not yet been able to penetrate; those dim,
mysterious tracts of the mind which are still to us hardly better known
than the unexplored mid-countries of Asia or Africa.
As a means of accomplishing a desired end didactic literature is
probably the most futile of all the unavailing attempts of mankind. In
the days when ringlets and pantalets were in fashion, when small boys
wore frilled collars and asked only improving questions, when the most
delirious literary dissipation of which the youthful fancy could
conceive was a Rollo book or a prim tale by Maria Edgeworth, it was
generally believed that moral precepts and wise maxims had a prodigious
influence upon the young. It was held possible to mould the rising
generation by putting one of the sentences of Solomon at the head of a
copy-book page, and to make a permanent impression upon the spirit by
saws and sermons. If this were ever true, it is certainly not true now.
If sermon or saw has touched the imagination of the hearer, it has had
some effect which will be lasting; and this the saw does oftener than
the sermon, the proverb than the precept. If it has won only an
intellectual assent, there is small ground for supposing that it will
bring about any alteration which will be permanent and effective.
Taking into account these considerations, one might sum up the whole
matter somewhat in this way: To read fiction is certainly a pleasure; it
is to be looked upon as no less important a means of intellectual
development; while in the cultivation of the moral and spiritual sense
the proper use of fiction is one of the most effectual and essential
agencies to-day within the reach of men. In other words the proper
reading of fiction is, from the standpoint of pleasure, of intellectual
development, or of moral growth, neither more nor less than a distinct
and imperative duty.
I have been careful to say, "the proper reading of fiction." Whatever
strictures may be laid upon careless readers in general may perhaps be
quadrupled when applied to bad reading of novels. It is the duty of
nobody to read worthless fiction; and it is a species of moral iniquity
to read good novels carelessly, flippantly, or superficially. There is
small literary or intellectual hope for those whom Henry James describes
as "people who read novels as an exercise in skipping." There are two
tests by which the novel-reader is to be tried: What sort of fiction
does he read, and how does he read it? If the answers to these questions
are satisfactory, the whole matter is settled.
Of course it is of the first importance that the reader think for
himself; that he form his own opinions, and have his own appreciations.
Small minds are like weak galvanic cells; one alone is not strong enough
to generate a sensible current; they must be grouped to produce an
appreciable result. One has no opinion; while to accomplish anything
approaching a sensation a whole circle is required. It takes an entire
community of such intellects to get up a feeling, and of course the
feeling when aroused is shared in common. There are plenty of
pretentious readers of all the latest notorious novels who have as small
an individual share in whatever emotion the book excites as a Turkish
wife has in the multifariously directed affections of her husband. It is
impossible not to see the shallowness, the pretense, and the
intellectual demoralization of these readers; and it is equally idle to
deny the worthlessness of the books in which they delight.
What, then, is to be learned from fiction, that so much stress is to be
laid upon the necessity of making it a part of our intellectual and
moral education? The answer has in part at least been so often given
that it seems almost superfluous to repeat it. The more direct lessons
of the novel are so evident as scarcely to call for enumeration. Nobody
needs at this late day to be told how much may be learned from fiction
of the customs of different grades of society, of the ways and habits of
all sorts and conditions of men, and of the even more fascinating if not
actually more vitally important manners and morals of all sorts and
conditions of women. Every reader knows how much may be learned from
stories of the facts of human relations and of social existence,--facts
which one accumulates but slowly by actual experience, while yet a
knowledge of them is of so great importance for the full appreciation
and the proper employment and enjoyment of life.
Civilization is essentially an agreement upon conventions. It is the
tacit acceptance of conditions and concessions. It is conceded that if
human beings are to live together it is necessary that there must be
mutual agreement, and as civilization progresses this is extended to all
departments and details of life. What is called etiquette, for instance,
is one variety of social agreement into which men have entered for
convenience and comfort in living together. What is called good breeding
is but the manifestation of a generous desire to observe all those human
regulations by which the lives of others may be rendered more happy.
These concessions and conventions are not natural. A man may be born
with the spirit of good breeding, but he must learn its methods. Nature
may bestow the inclination to do what is wisest and best in human
relations, but the forms and processes of social life and of all human
intercourse must be acquired. It is one of the functions of fiction to
instruct in all this knowledge; and only he who is unacquainted with
life will account such an office trivial.
Intimate familiarity with the inner characteristics of humanity, and
knowledge of the experiences and the nature of mankind, are a still more
important gain from fiction. Almost unconsciously the intelligent
novel-reader grows in the comprehension of what men are and of what they
may be. This art makes the reader a sharer in those moments when
sensation is at its highest, emotion at its keenest. It brings into the
life which is outwardly quiet and uneventful, into the mind which has
few actual experiences to stir it to its deeps, the splendid
exhilaration of existence at its best. The pulse left dull by a
colorless life throbs and tingles over the pages of a vivid romance; the
heart denied contact with actualities which would awaken it beats hotly
with the fictitious passion made real by the imagination; so that life
becomes forever richer and more full of meaning.
In one way it is possible to gain from these imaginative experiences a
knowledge of life more accurate than that which comes from life itself.
It is possible to judge, to examine, to weigh, to estimate the emotions
which are enjoyed æsthetically; whereas emotions arising from real
events benumb all critical faculties by their stinging personal quality.
He who has never shared actual emotional experiences has never lived,
it is true; but he who has not shared æsthetic emotions has never
understood.
What should be the character of fiction is pretty accurately indicated
by what has been said of the part which fiction should play in human
development. Here, as in all literature, men are less influenced by the
appeal to the reason than by the appeal to the feelings. The novelist
who has a strong and lasting influence is not he who instructs men
directly, but he who moves men. This is instruction in its higher sense.
The guidance of life must come from the reason; equally, however, must
the impulse of life come from the emotions. The man who is ruled by
reason alone is but a curious mechanical toy which mimics the movements
of life without being really alive.
This prime necessity of touching and moving the reader determines one of
the most important points of difference between literature and science.
It forces the story-teller to modify, to select, and to change if need
be the facts of life, in order to produce an impression of truth. Out of
the multifarious details of existence the author must select the
significant; out of the real deduce the possibility which shall commend
itself to the reader as verity.
Above everything else is an artist who is worthy of the name truthful in
his art. He never permits himself to set down anything which is not a
verity to his imagination, or which fails to be consistent with the
conditions of human existence. He realizes that fiction in which a
knowledge of the outward shell and the accidents of life is made the
chief object cannot be permanent and cannot be vitally effective. The
novelist is not called upon to paint life, but to interpret life. It is
his privilege to be an artist; and an artist is one who sees through
apparent truth to actual verity. It is his first and most essential duty
to arouse the inner being, and to this necessity he must be ready to
sacrifice literal fact. Until the imagination is awake, art cannot even
begin to do its work. It is true that there may be a good deal of
pleasant story-telling which but lightly touches the fancy and does not
reach deeper. It is often harmless enough; but it is as idle to expect
from this any keen or lasting pleasure, and still more any mental
experience of enduring significance, as it would be to expect to warm
Nova Zembla with a bonfire. What for the moment tickles the fancy goes
with the moment, and leaves little trace; what touches the imagination
becomes a fact of life.
Macaulay, in his extraordinarily wrong-headed essay on Milton, has
explicitly stated a very wide-spread heresy when he says:--
We cannot unite the incompatible advantages of reality and deception,
the clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction.
This is the ground generally held by unimaginative men. Macaulay had
many good gifts and graces, but his warmest admirers would hardly
include among them a greatly endowed or vigorously developed
imagination. If one cannot unite the advantages of reality and
deception, if he cannot join clear discernment of truth to the
exquisite enjoyment of fiction, it is because he fails of all just and
adequate comprehension of literature. To call fiction deception is
simply to fail to understand that real truth may be independent of
apparent truth. It would from the point of view of this sentence of
Macaulay's be competent to open the Gospels and call the parable of the
sower a falsehood because there is no probability that it referred to
any particular incident. The stupidity of criticism of fiction which
begins with the assumption that it is not true is not unlike that of an
endeavor to swallow a chestnut burr and the consequent declaration that
the nut is uneatable. If one is not clever enough to get beneath the
husk, his opinion is surely not of great value.
In order to enjoy a novel, it is certainly not necessary to believe it
in a literal sense. No sane man supposes that Don Quixote ever did or
ever could exist. To the intellect the book is little more than a
farrago of impossible absurdities. The imagination perceives that it is
true to the fundamental essentials of human nature, and understands that
the book is true in a sense higher than that of mere literal verity. It
is the cultivated man who has the keenest sense of reality, and yet only
to the cultivated man is possible the exquisite enjoyment of "Esmond,"
of "Les Misérables," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Return of the Native,"
or "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel." So far from being incompatible, the
clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction are
inseparable.
An artist who is worthy of the name is above all else truthful in his
art. He never permits himself to set down anything which he does not
feel to be true. It is with a truth higher than a literal accuracy,
however, that he is concerned. His perception is the servant of his
imagination. He observes and he uses the outward facts of life as a
means of conveying its inner meanings. It is this that makes him an
artist. The excuse for his claiming the attention of the world is that
in virtue of his imagination he is gifted with an insight keener and
more penetrating than that of his fellows; and his enduring influence
depends upon the extent to which he justifies this claim.
With the novel of trifles it is difficult to have any patience whatever.
The so-called Realistic story collects insignificant nothings about a
slender thread of plot as a filament of cobweb gathers dust in a barn.
The cobweb seems to me on the whole the more valuable, since at least it
has the benefit of the old wives' theory that it is good to check
bleeding. It is a more noble office to be wrapped about a cut finger
than to muffle a benumbed mind.
One question which the great mass of novel-readers who are also students
of literature are interested to have answered is, How far is it well to
read fiction for simple amusement? With this inquiry, too, goes the
kindred one whether it is well or ill to relax the mind over light tales
of the sort sometimes spoken of as "summer reading." To this it is
impossible to give a categorical reply. It is like the question how
often and for how long it is wise to sit down to rest while climbing a
hill. It depends upon the traveler, and no one else can determine a
point which is to be decided by feelings and conditions known alone to
him. It is hardly possible and it is not wise to read always with
exalted aims. Whatever you might be advised by me or by any other, you
would be foolish not to make of fiction a means of grateful relaxation
as well as a help in mental growth. Always it is important to remember,
however, that there is a wide difference in the ultimate result,
according as a person reads for diversion the best that will entertain
him or the worst. It is a matter of the greatest moment that our
amusements shall not be allowed to debauch our taste. It is necessary to
have some standard even in the choice of the most foamy fiction, served
like a sherbet on a hot summer afternoon. One does not read vulgar and
empty books, even for simple amusement, without an effect upon his own
mind. The Chinese are said to have matches in which cockroaches are
pitted against each other to fight for the amusement of the oblique-eyed
heathen. To be thus ignoble in their very sports indicates a peculiar
degradation and poverty of spirit; and there are certain novels so much
in the same line that it is difficult to think of their being read
without seeing in fancy a group of pig-tailed Celestials hanging
breathlessly over a bowl in which struggle the disgusting little insect
combatants. To give the mind up to this sort of reading is not to be
commended in anybody.
Fortunately we are in this day provided with a great deal of light
fiction which is sound and wholesome and genuine as far as it goes. Some
of it even goes far in the way of being imaginative and good. As
examples--not at all as a list--may be named Blackmore, Crawford,
Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope, or the numerous writers of admirable short
stories, Cable, Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, J. M. Barrie, Ian Maclaren,
or Thomas Nelson Page. All these and others may be read for simple
entertainment, and all are worth reading for some more or less strongly
marked quality of permanent worth. There are plenty of writers, too,
like William Black and Clark Russell and Conan Doyle, concerning the
lasting value of whose stories there might easily be a question, yet who
do often contrive to be healthily amusing, and who furnish the means of
creating a pleasant and restful vacuity in lives otherwise too full.
Every reader must make his own choice, and determine for himself how
much picnicking he will do on his way up the hill of life. If he is wise
he will contrive to find his entertainment chiefly in books which
besides being amusing have genuine value; and he will at least see to it
that his intellectual dissipations shall be with the better of such
books as will amuse him and not with the poorer.
The mention of the short story brings to mind the great part which this
form of fiction plays to-day. The restlessness of the age and the
fostering influence of the magazines have united to develop the short
story, and it has become one of the most marked of the literary
features of the time. It has the advantage of being easily handled and
comprehended as a whole, but it lessens the power of seizing in their
entirety works which are greater. It tends rather to increase than to
diminish mental restlessness, and the lover of short stories will do
well not to let any considerable length of time go by without reading
some long and far-reaching novel by way of corrective. Another
consequence of the wide popularity of the short story is that we have
nowadays so few additions to that delightful company of fictitious yet
most admirably real personages whose acquaintance the reader makes in
longer tales. The delight of knowing these characters is not only one of
the most attractive joys of novel-reading, but it is one which helps
greatly to brighten life and enhance friendship. Few things add more to
the sympathy of comradeship than a community of friends in the enchanted
realms of the imagination. Strangers in the flesh become instantly
conscious of an intimacy in spirit when they discover a common love for
some character in fiction. Two men may be strangers, with no common
acquaintances in the flesh, but if they discover that both admire
Elizabeth Bennet, or Lizzie Hexam, or Laura Bell, or Ethel Newcome; that
both are familiar friends with Pendennis, or Warrington, or Harry
Richmond, or Mulvaney, or Alan Breck, or Mowgli, or Zagloba; or belong
to the brave brotherhood of D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, they
have a community of sympathy which brings them very close together.
It is seldom and indeed almost never that the short story gives to the
reader this sense of knowing familiarly its characters. If there be a
series, as in Kipling's "Jungle Book" or Maclaren's tales, where the
same actors appear again and again, of course the effect may be in this
respect the same as that of a novel; but cases of this sort are not
common. All the aged women of Miss Wilkins' stories, for instance, are
apt in the memory either to blend into one composite photograph of the
New England old woman, or to stand remotely, not as persons that we
know, but rather as types about which we know. The genuine novel-reader
will realize that this consideration is really one of no inconsiderable
weight; and it is one which becomes more and more pressing with the
increase of the influence of the short story.
This consideration is the more important from the fact that novels in
which the reader is able to identify himself with the characters are by
far the most effective, because thus is he removed from the realities
which surround him, and for the time being freed from whatever would
hamper his imagination. That which in real life he would be, but may
not, he may in fiction blissfully and expandingly realize. The innate
sense of justice--not, perhaps, unseconded by the innate vanity; we are
all of us human!--demands that human possibilities shall be realized,
and in the story in which the reader merges his personality in that of
some actor, all this is accomplished. In actual outward experience life
justifies itself but rarely; to most men its justification is reached
only by the aid of the imagination, and it is largely by the aid of
literature that the imagination works. Even more true is this of the
other sex. Much that men learn from life women must learn from books; so
that to women fiction is the primer of life as well as the text-book of
the imagination. By the novels he reads the man gives evidence of his
imaginative development; the woman of her intellectual existence.