Criticism and Fiction

by William Dean Howells

  XVIII.

  In General Grant's confession of novel-reading there is a sort ofinference that he had wasted his time, or else the guilty conscience ofthe novelist in me imagines such an inference. But however this may be,there is certainly no question concerning the intention of acorrespondent who once wrote to me after reading some rather braggingclaims I had made for fiction as a mental and moral means. "I have verygrave doubts," he said, "as to the whole list of magnificent things thatyou seem to think novels have done for the race, and can witness inmyself many evil things which they have done for me. Whatever in mymental make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever isinjurious, I can trace to the perusal of some work of fiction. Worsethan that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of lifethat plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter-of-fact poverty, or every-day, commonplace distress, meets with nosympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over theimpossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine."

  I am not sure that I had the controversy with this correspondent that heseemed to suppose; but novels are now so fully accepted by every onepretending to cultivated taste and they really form the wholeintellectual life of such immense numbers of people, without question oftheir influence, good or bad, upon the mind that it is refreshing to havethem frankly denounced, and to be invited to revise one's ideas andfeelings in regard to them. A little honesty, or a great deal ofhonesty, in this quest will do the novel, as we hope yet to have it, andas we have already begun to have it, no harm; and for my own part I willconfess that I believe fiction in the past to have been largelyinjurious, as I believe the stage-play to be still almost whollyinjurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and itsaimlessness. It may be safely assumed that most of the novel-readingwhich people fancy an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation,hardly more related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the mentalfaculties than opium-eating; in either case the brain is drugged, andleft weaker and crazier for the debauch. If this may be called thenegative result of the fiction habit, the positive injury that mostnovels work is by no means so easily to be measured in the case of youngmen whose character they help so much to form or deform, and the women ofall ages whom they keep so much in ignorance of the world theymisrepresent. Grown men have little harm from them, but in the othercases, which are the vast majority, they hurt because they are not true--not because they are malevolent, but because they are idle lies abouthuman nature and the social fabric, which it behooves us to know and tounderstand, that we may deal justly with ourselves and with one another.One need not go so far as our correspondent, and trace to the fictionhabit "whatever is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever isinjurious," in one's life; bad as the fiction habit is it is probably notresponsible for the whole sum of evil in its victims, and I believe thatif the reader will use care in choosing from this fungus-growth withwhich the fields of literature teem every day, he may nourish himself aswith the true mushroom, at no risk from the poisonous species.

  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 thistest will alone exclude an entire class of fiction, of which eminentexamples will occur to all. Then the whole spawn of so-called unmoralromances, which imagine a world where the sins of sense are unvisited bythe penalties following, swift or slow, but inexorably sure, in the realworld, are deadly poison: these do kill. The novels that merely tickleour prejudices and lull our judgment, or that coddle our sensibilities orpamper our gross appetite for the marvellous, are not so fatal, but theyare innutritious, and clog the soul with unwholesome vapors of all kinds.No doubt they too help to weaken the moral fibre, and make their readersindifferent to "plodding perseverance and plain industry," and to"matter-of-fact poverty and commonplace distress."

  Without taking them too seriously, it still must be owned that the "gaudyhero 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 thepassion 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 waslasting in the way she knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice,and was altogether a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason; thatlove alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly incomparison with it. More lately she has begun to idolize and illustrateDuty, 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 deplorableperson, has undoubtedly imposed himself upon the victims of the fictionhabit as admirable. With him, too, love was and is the great affair,whether in its old romantic phase of chivalrous achievement or manifoldsuffering for love's sake, or its more recent development of the"virile," the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more recent agoniesof self-sacrifice, as idle and useless as the moral experiences of theinsane asylums. With his vain posturings and his ridiculous splendor heis really a painted barbarian, the prey of his passions and hisdelusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the motives and ethics of asavage, which the guilty author of his being does his best--or his worst--in spite of his own light and knowledge, to foist upon the reader assomething generous and noble. I am not merely bringing this chargeagainst that sort of fiction which is beneath literature and outside ofit, "the shoreless lakes of ditch-water," whose miasms fill the air belowthe empyrean where the great ones sit; but I am accusing the work of someof the most famous, who have, in this instance or in that, sinned againstthe truth, which can alone exalt and purify men. I do not say that theyhave constantly done so, or even commonly done so; but that they havedone so at all marks them as of the past, to be read with the duehistorical allowance for their epoch and their conditions. For I believethat, while inferior writers will and must continue to imitate them intheir foibles and their errors, no one here after will be able to achievegreatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties.The light of civilization has already broken even upon the novel, and noconscientious man can now set about painting an image of life withoutperpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling boundto distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, betweenwhat is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what ishealth and what is perdition, in the actions and the characters heportrays.

  The fiction that aims merely to entertain--the fiction that is to seriousfiction as the opera-bouffe, the ballet, and the pantomime are to thetrue drama--need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply; buteven such fiction will not be gay or trivial to any reader's hurt, andcriticism should hold it to account if it passes from painting toteaching folly.

  I confess that I do not care to judge any work of the imagination withoutfirst of all applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before weask anything else, Is it true?--true to the motives, the impulses, theprinciples 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; andwithout it all graces of style and feats of invention and cunning ofconstruction are so many superfluities of naughtiness. It is well forthe truth to have all these, and shine in them, but for falsehood theyare merely meretricious, the bedizenment of the wanton; they atone fornothing, they count for nothing. But in fact they come naturally oftruth, and grace it without solicitation; they are added unto it. In thewhole range of fiction I know of no true picture of life--that is, ofhuman nature--which is not also a masterpiece of literature, full ofdivine and natural beauty. It may have no touch or tint of this specialcivilization or of that; it had better have this local color wellascertained; but the truth is deeper and finer than aspects, and if thebook is true to what men and women know of one another's souls it will betrue enough, and it will be great
and beautiful. It is the conception ofliterature as something apart from life, superfinely aloof, which makesit really unimportant to the great mass of mankind, without a message ora meaning for them; and it is the notion that a novel may be false in itsportrayal of causes and effects that makes literary art contemptible evento those whom it amuses, that forbids them to regard the novelist as aserious or right-minded person. If they do not in some moment ofindignation cry out against all novels, as my correspondent does, theyremain besotted in the fume of the delusions purveyed to them, with nohigher feeling for the author than such maudlin affection as thefrequenter of an opium-joint perhaps knows for the attendant who fillshis pipe with the drug.

  Or, as in the case of another correspondent who writes that in his youthhe "read a great many novels, but always regarded it as an amusement,like horse racing and card-playing," for which he had no time when heentered upon the serious business of life, it renders them merelycontemptuous. His view of the matter may be commended to the brotherhoodand sisterhood of novelists as full of wholesome if bitter suggestion;and I urge them not to dismiss it with high literary scorn as that ofsome Boeotian dull to the beauty of art. Refuse it as we may, it isstill the feeling of the vast majority of people for whom life isearnest, and who find only a distorted and misleading likeness of it inour books. We may fold ourselves in our scholars' gowns, and close thedoors of our studies, and affect to despise this rude voice; but wecannot shut it out. It comes to us from wherever men are at work, fromwherever they are truly living, and accuses us of unfaithfulness, oftriviality, of mere stage-play; and none of us can escape convictionexcept he prove himself worthy of his time--a time in which the greatmasters have brought literature back to life, and filled its ebbing veinswith the red tides of reality. We cannot all equal them; we need notcopy them; but we can all go to the sources of their inspiration andtheir power; and to draw from these no one need go far--no one needreally go out of himself.

  Fifty years ago, Carlyle, in whom the truth was always alive, but in whomit was then unperverted by suffering, by celebrity, and by despair, wrotein his study of Diderot: "Were it not reasonable to prophesy that thisexceeding great multitude of novel-writers and such like must, in a newgeneration, gradually do one of two things: either retire into thenurseries, and work for children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons ofboth sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novel-fabric intothe dust-cart, and betake themselves with such faculty as they have tounderstand and record what is true, of which surely there is, and willforever be, a whole infinitude unknown to us of infinite importance tous? Poetry, it will more and more come to be understood, is nothing buthigher knowledge; and the only genuine Romance (for grown persons),Reality."

  If, after half a century, fiction still mainly works for "children,minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes," it is nevertheless oneof the hopefulest signs of the world's progress that it has begun to workfor "grown persons," and if not exactly in the way that Carlyle mighthave solely intended in urging its writers to compile memoirs instead ofbuilding the "novel-fabric," still it has, in the highest and widestsense, already made Reality its Romance. I cannot judge it, I do noteven care for it, except as it has done this; and I can hardly conceiveof a literary self-respect in these days compatible with the old trade ofmake-believe, with the production of the kind of fiction which is toomuch honored by classification with card-playing and horse-racing. Butlet fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as theyare, 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 itforbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism andprejudice, but frankly own these for what they are, in whatever figuresand occasions they appear; let it not put on fine literary airs; let itspeak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know--the languageof unaffected people everywhere--and there can be no doubt of anunlimited future, not only of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it.

  XIX.

  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, ifit can, when we are sick or when we are silly, and I am not inclined todespise it in the performance of this office. Or, if people findpleasure in having their blood curdled for the sake of having ituncurdled again at the end of the book, I would not interfere with theiramusement, though I do not desire it.

  There is a certain demand in primitive natures for the kind of fictionthat does this, and the author of it is usually very proud of it. Thekind of novels he likes, and likes to write, are intended to take hisreader's mind, or what that reader would probably call his mind, offhimself; they make one forget life and all its cares and duties; they arenot in the least like the novels which make you think of these, and shameyou into at least wishing to be a helpfuller and wholesomer creature thanyou are. No sordid details of verity here, if you please; no wretchedbeing humbly and weakly struggling to do right and to be true, sufferingfor his follies and his sins, tasting joy only through the mortificationof self, and in the help of others; nothing of all this, but a great,whirling splendor of peril and achievement, a wild scene of heroicadventure and of emotional ground and lofty tumbling, with a stage"picture" at the fall of the curtain, and all the good characters in arow, their left hands pressed upon their hearts, and kissing their righthands to the audience, in the old way that has always charmed and alwayswill charm, Heaven bless it!

  In a world which loves the spectacular drama and the practicallybloodless sports of the modern amphitheatre the author of this sort offiction has his place, and we must not seek to destroy him because hefancies it the first place. In fact, it is a condition of his doing wellthe kind of work he does that he should think it important, that heshould 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 toforget itself, and he brings on his heroes, his goblins, his feats, hishair-breadth 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 inhis cabalistic robe is a philanthropist in disguise.

  Within the last four or five years there has been throughout the wholeEnglish-speaking world what Mr. Grant Allen happily calls the"recrudescence" of taste in fiction. The effect is less noticeable inAmerica than in England, where effete Philistinism, conscious of thedry-rot of its conventionality, is casting about for cure in anythingthat is wild and strange and unlike itself. But the recrudescence has beenevident enough here, too; and a writer in one of our periodicals has putinto convenient shape some common errors concerning popularity as a testof merit in a book. He seems to think, for instance, that the love ofthe marvellous and impossible in fiction, which is shown not only by"the unthinking multitude clamoring about the book counters" for fictionof that sort, but by the "literary elect" also, is proof of someprinciple in human nature which ought to be respected as well astolerated. He seems to believe that the ebullition of this passion formsa sufficient answer to those who say that art should represent life, andthat the art which misrepresents life is feeble art and false art. Butit appears to me that a little carefuller reasoning from a little closerinspection of the facts would not have brought him to these conclusions.In the first place, I doubt very much whether the "literary elect" havebeen fascinated in great numbers by the fiction in question; but if Isupposed them to have really fallen under that spell, I should still beable to account for their fondness and that of the "unthinking multitude"upon the same grounds, without honoring either very much. It is thehabit of hasty casuists to regard civilization as inclusive of all themembers of a civilized community; but this is a palpable error. Manypersons in every civilized community live in a state of more or lessevident savagery with respect to their habits, their morals, and th
eirpropensities; and they are held in check only by the law. Many more yetare savage in their tastes, as they show by the decoration of theirhouses and persons, and by their choice of books and pictures; and theseare left to the restraints of public opinion. In fact, no man can besaid to be thoroughly civilized or always civilized; the most refined,the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, inwhich the best, or even the second best, shall not please him. At thesetimes the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and theirgratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated personmay then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerelyand thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or a barbarian of any age.

  I do not blame him for these moods; I find something instructive andinteresting in them; but if they lastingly established themselves in him,I could not help deploring the state of that person. No one can reallythink that the "literary elect," who are said to have joined the"unthinking multitude" in clamoring about the book counters for theromances of no-man's land, take the same kind of pleasure in them as theydo in a novel of Tolstoy, Tourguenief, George Eliot, Thackeray, Balzac,Manzoni, Hawthorne, Mr. Henry James, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Senor PalacioValdes, or even Walter Scott. They have joined the "unthinkingmultitude," perhaps because they are tired of thinking, and expect tofind relaxation in feeling--feeling crudely, grossly, merely. For oncein a way there is no great harm in this; perhaps no harm at all. It isperfectly natural; let them have their innocent debauch. But let usdistinguish, for our own sake and guidance, between the different kindsof things that please the same kind of people; between the things thatplease them habitually and those that please them occasionally; betweenthe pleasures that edify them and those that amuse them. Otherwise weshall be in danger of becoming permanently part of the "unthinkingmultitude," and of remaining puerile, primitive, savage. We shall be soin moods and at moments; but let us not fancy that those are high moodsor fortunate moments. If they are harmless, that is the most that can besaid for them. They are lapses from which we can perhaps go forward morevigorously; but even this is not certain.