The Culture Element in Fiction.
One of the chief elements in fiction which make for culture is,
primarily, its disclosure of the elementary types of character and
experience. A single illustration of this quality will suggest its
presence in all novels of the first rank and its universal interest
and importance. The aspirations, dreams, devotions, and sacrifices of
men are as real as their response to self-interest or their tendency
to the conventional and the commonplace; and they are, in the long
run, a great deal more influential. They have wider play; they are
more compelling; and they are of the very highest significance,
because they spring out of that which is deepest and most distinctive
in human nature. A host of men never give these higher impulses, these
spiritual aptitudes and possibilities, full play; but they are in all
men, and all men recognise them and crave an expression of them.
Nothing is truer, on the lowest and most practical plane, than the old
declaration that men do not live by bread alone; they sometimes exist
on bread, because nothing better is to be had at the moment; but they
live only in the full and free play of all their activities, in the
complete expression not only of what is most pressing in interest and
importance at a given time, but of that which is potential and
possible at all times.
The novel of romance and adventure has had a long history, and the
elements of which it is compounded are recognisable long before they
took the form of fiction. Two figures appear and reappear in the
mythology of every poetic people,--the hero and the wanderer; the man
who achieves and the man who experiences; the man who masters life
by superiority of soul or body, and the man who masters it by
completeness of knowledge. It is interesting and pathetic to find how
universally these two figures held the attention and stirred the
hearts of primitive men; how infinitely varied are their tasks, their
perils, and their vicissitudes. They wear so many guises, they bear so
many names, they travel so far and compass so much experience that it
is impossible, in any interpretation of mythology, to escape the
conviction that they were the dominant types in the thought of the
myth-makers. And these earliest story-makers were not idle dreamers,
entertaining themselves by endless manufacture of imaginary incidents,
conditions, and persons. They were, on the contrary, the observers,
the students, the scientists of their period; their endeavour was not
to create a fiction, but to explain the world and themselves. Their
observation was imperfect, and they made ludicrous mistakes of fact
because they lacked both knowledge and training; but they made free
use of the creative faculty, and there is, consequently, a good deal
more truth in their daring guesses than in many of those provisional
explanations of nature and ourselves which have been based too
exclusively on scrutiny of the obvious fact, and indifference to the
fact, which is not less a fact because it is elusive.
The myth-makers endeavoured to explain the world, but that was only
one-half of their endeavour; they attempted also to explain
themselves. They discovered the striking analogies between certain
natural phenomena or processes and the phenomena and processes of
their own nature; they discovered the tasks and wanderings of the sun,
and they perceived the singular resemblance of these tasks and
wanderings to the happenings of their own lives. So the hero and the
wanderer became subjective as well as objective, and symbolised what
was deepest and most universal in human nature and human experience,
as well as what was most striking in the external world. When
primitive men looked into their hearts and their experience, they
found their deepest hopes, longings, and possibilities bound up and
worked out in two careers,--the career of the hero and the career of
the wanderer.
These two figures became the commanding types of all the nobler
mythologies, because they symbolised what was best, deepest, and most
real in human nature and life. They represent the possible reach and
the occasional achievement of the human soul; they stand for that
which is potential as well as for that which is actual in human
experience. Few men achieve or experience on a great scale; but these
few are typical, and are, therefore, transcendent in interest. The
average commonplace man fills great space in contemporary history, as
in the history of all times, and his character and career are well
worth the closest study and the finest art of the writer; but the
average man, who never achieves greatly, and to whom no striking or
dramatic experience comes, has all the possibilities of action and
suffering in his nature, and is profoundly interested in these more
impressive aspects of life. Truth to fact is essential to all sound
art, but absolute veracity involves the whole truth,--the truth of the
exceptional as well as of the average experience; the truth of the
imagination as well as of observation.
The hero and the wanderer are still, and always will be, the great
human types; and they are, therefore, the types which will continue to
dominate fiction; disappearing at times from the stage which they may
have occupied too exclusively, but always reappearing in due
season,--the hero in the novel of romance, the wanderer in the novel
of adventure. These figures are as constant in fiction as they were in
mythology; from the days of the earliest Greek and Oriental stories to
these days of Stevenson and Barrie, they have never lost their hold on
the imagination of the race. When the sense of reality was feeble,
these figures became fantastic, and even ridiculous; but this false
art was the product of an unregulated, not of an illegitimate,
exercise of the imagination; and while "Don Quixote" destroyed the old
romance of chivalry, it left the instinct which produced that romance
untouched. As the sense of reality becomes more exacting and more
general, the action of the imagination is more carefully regulated;
but it is not diminished, either in volume or in potency. Men have not
lost the power of individual action because society has become so
highly developed, and the multiplication of the police has not
materially reduced the tragic possibilities of life. There is more
accurate and more extensive knowledge of environment than ever before
in the history of the race, but temperament, impulse, and passion
remain as powerful as they were in primitive men; and tragedy finds
its materials in temperament, impulse, and passion, much more
frequently than in objective conditions and circumstances.
The soul of man has passed through a great education, and has
immensely profited by it; but its elemental qualities and forces
remain unchanged. Two things men have always craved,--to come to close
quarters with life, and to do something positive and substantial.
Self-expression is the prime need of human nature; it must know, act,
and suffer by virtue of its deepest instincts. The greater and richer
that nature, the deeper will be its need of seeing life on many sides,
of sharing in many kinds of experience, of contending with multiform
difficulties. To drink deeply of the cup of life, at whatever cost,
appears to be the insatiable desire of the most richly endowed men and
women; and with such natures the impulse is to seek, not to shun,
experience. And that which to the elect men and women of the race is
necessary and possible is not only comprehensible to those who cannot
possess it: it is powerfully and permanently attractive. There is a
spell in it which the dullest mortal does not wholly escape.[1]
1. Reprinted in part, by permission, from the "Forum."