by Frank Norris
Because it is so all-powerful to-day, the people turn to him who wields this instrument with every degree of confidence. They expect — and rightly — that results shall be commensurate with means. The unknown archer who grasps the bow of Ulysses may be expected by the multitude to send his shaft far and true.
If he is not true nor strong he has no business with the bow. The people give heed to him only because he bears a great weapon. He himself knows before he shoots whether or no he is worthy.
It is all very well to jeer at the People and at the People’s misunderstanding of the arts, but the fact is indisputable that no art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation. In the larger view, in the last analysis, the People pronounce the final judgment. The People, despised of the artist, hooted, caricatured and vilified, are after all, and in the main, the real seekers after Truth. Who is it, after all, whose interest is liveliest in any given work of art?
It is not now a question of esthetic interest — that is, the artist’s, the amateur’s, the cognerscente’s. It is a question of vital interest. Say what you will, Maggie Tulliver — for instance — is far more a living being for Mrs. Jones across the street than she is for your sensitive, fastidious, keenly critical artist, litterateur, or critic. The People — Mrs. Jones and her neighbours — take the life history of these fictitious characters, these novels, to heart with a seriousness that the esthetic cult have no conception of. The cult consider them almost solely from their artistic sides. The People take them into their innermost lives. Nor do the People discriminate. Omnivorous readers as they are to-day, they make little distinction between Maggie Tulliver and the heroine of the last “popular novel.” They do not stop to separate true from false; they do not care.
How necessary it becomes, then, for those who, by the simple art of writing, can invade the heart’s heart of thousands, whose novels are received with such measureless earnestness — how necessary it becomes for those who wield such power to use it rightfully. Is it not expedient to act fairly? Is it not in Heaven’s name essential that the People hear, not a lie, but the Truth?
If the novel were not one of the most important factors of modem life; if it were not the completest expression of our civilization; if its influence were not greater than all the pulpits, than all the newspapers between the oceans, it would not be so important that its message should be true.
But the novelist to-day is the one who reaches the greatest audience. Right or wrong, the People turn to him the moment he speaks, and what he says they believe.
For the Million, Life is a contracted affair, is bounded by the walls of the narrow channel of affairs in which their feet are set. They have no horizon. They look to-day as they never have looked before, as they never will look again, to the writer of fiction to give them an idea of life beyond their limits, and they believe him as they never have believed before and never will again.
This being so, is it not difficult to understand how certain of these successful writers of fiction — these favoured ones into whose hands the gods have placed the great bow of Ulysses — can look so frivolously upon their craft? It is not necessary to specify. One speaks of those whose public is measured by “one hundred and fifty thousand copies sold.” We know them, and because the gods have blessed us with wits beyond our deserving we know their work is false. But what of the “hundred and fifty thousand” who are not discerning and who receive this falseness as Truth, who believe this topsy-turvy picture of Life beyond their horizons is real and vital and sane?
There is no gauge to measure the extent of this malignant influence. Public opinion is made no one can say how, by infinitesimal accretions, by a multitude of minutest elements. Lying novels, surely, surely in this day and age of indiscriminate reading, contribute to this more than all other influences of present-day activity.
The Pulpit, the Press and the Novel — these indisputably are the great moulders of public opinion and public morals to-day. But the Pulpit speaks but once a week; the Press is read with lightning haste and the morning news is waste-paper by noon. But the novel goes into the home to stay. It is read word for word; is talked about, discussed; its influence penetrates every chink and corner of the family.
Yet novelists are not found wanting who write for money. I do not think this is an unfounded accusation. I do not think it asking too much of credulity. This would not matter if they wrote the Truth. But these gentlemen who are “in literature for their own pocket every time” have discovered that for the moment the People have confounded the Wrong with the Right, and prefer that which is a lie to that which is true. “Very well, then,” say these gentlemen. “If they want a lie they shall have it;” and they give the People a lie in return for royalties.
The surprising thing about this is that you and I and all the rest of us do not consider this as disreputable — do not yet realize that the novelist has responsibilities. We condemn an editor who sells his editorial columns, and we revile the pulpit attainted of venality. But the venal novelist — he whose influence is greater than either the Press or Pulpit — him we greet with a wink and the tongue in the cheek.
This should not be so. Somewhere the protest should be raised, and those of us who see the practice of this fraud should bring home to ourselves the realization that the selling of one hundred and fifty thousand books is a serious business. The People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is not right that they be exploited and deceived with false views of life, false characters, false sentiment, false morality, false history, false philosophy, false emotions, false heroism, false notions of self-sacrifice, false views of religion, of duty, of conduct and of manners.
The man who can address an audience of one hundred and fifty thousand people who — unenlightened — believe what he says, has a heavy duty to perform, and tremendous responsibilities to shoulder; and he should address himself to his task not with the flippancy of a catch-penny juggler at the county fair, but with earnestness, with soberness, with a sense of his limitations, and with all the abiding sincerity that by the favour and mercy of the gods may be his.
THE TRUE REWARD OF THE NOVELIST
Not that one quarrels with the historical novel as such; not that one does not enjoy good fiction wherever found, and in whatever class. It is the method of attack of the latter-day copyists that one deplores — their attitude, the willingness of so very, very many of them to take off the hat to Fashion, and then hold the same hat for Fashion to drop pennies in.
Ah, but the man must be above the work or the work is worthless, and the man better off at some other work than that of producing fiction. The eye never once should wander to the gallery, but be always with single purpose turned inward upon the work, testing it and retesting it that it rings true What one quarrels with is the perversion of a profession, the detestable trading upon another man’s success. No one can find fault with those few good historical novels that started the fad. There was good workmanship in these, and honesty. But the copyists, the fakirs — they are not novelists at all, though they write novels that sell by the hundreds of thousands. They are business men. They find out — no, they allow some one else to find out — what the public wants, and they give it to the public cheap, and advertise it as a new soap is advertised. Well, they make money; and, if that is their aim — if they are content to prostitute the good name of American literature for a sliding scale of royalties — let’s have done with them. They have their reward. But the lamentable result will be that these copyists will in the end so prejudice the people against an admirable school of fiction — the school of Scott — that for years to come the tale of historic times will be discredited and many a great story remain unwritten, and many a man of actual worth and real power hold back in the ranks for very shame of treading where so many fools have rushed in.
For the one idea of the fakir — the copyist — and of the public which for the moment list
ens to him, is Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, first, last and always Clothes. Not Clothes only in the sense of doublet and gown, but Clothes of speech, Clothes of manner, Clothes of customs. Hear them expatiate over the fashion of wearing a cuff, over a trick of speech, over the architecture of a house, the archeology of armour and the like. It is all well enough in its way, but so easily dispensed with if there be flesh and blood underneath. Veronese put the people of his “Marriage at Cana” into the clothes of his contemporaries. Is the picture any less a masterpiece?
Do these Little People know that Scott’s archeology was about one thousand years “out” in Ivanhoe, and that to make a parallel we must conceive of a writer describing Richelieu — say — in small clothes and a top hat? But is it not Richelieu we want, and Ivanhoe, not their clothes, their armour? And in spite of his errors Scott gave us a real Ivanhoe. He got beneath the clothes of an epoch and got the heart of it, and the spirit of it (different essentially and vitally from ours or from every other, the spirit of feudalism); and he put forth a masterpiece.
The Little People so very precise in the matter of buttons and “bacinets” do not so. Take the clothes from the people of their Romances and one finds only wooden manikins. Take the clothes from the epoch of which they pretend to treat and what is there beneath? It is only the familiar, well-worn, well-thumbed nineteenth or twentieth century after all. As well have written of Michigan Avenue, Chicago, as “La Rue de la Harpe,”
“The Great North Road” or the “Appian Way.”
It is a masquerade, the novel of the copyists; and the people who applaud them — are they not the same who would hold persons in respect because of the finery of their bodies? A poor taste, a cheap one; the taste of serving-men, the literature of chambermaids.
To approach the same subject by a different radius: why must the historical novel of the copyist always be conceived of in the terms of Romance? Could not the formula of Realism be applied at least as well, not the Realism of mere externals (the copyists have that), but the Realism of motives and emotions? What would we not give for a picture of the fifteenth century as precise and perfect as one of Mr. James’s novels? Even if that be impossible, the attempt, even though half-way successful, would be worth while, would be better than the wooden manikin in the tin-pot helmet and baggy hose. At least we should get somewhere, even if no farther than Mr. Kingsley took us in “Hereward,” or Mr. Blackmore in “Lorna Doone.”
How about the business life and the student life, and the artizan life and the professional life, and above all, the home life of historic periods? Great Heavens! There was something else sometimes than the soldier life. They were not always cutting and thrusting, not always night-riding, escaping, venturing, posing.
Or suppose that cut-and-thrust must be the order of the day, where is the “man behind,” and the heart in the man and the spirit in the heart and the essential vital, elemental, all important true life within the spirit? We are all Anglo-Saxons enough to enjoy the sight of a fight, would go a block or so out of the way to see one, or be a dollar or so out of pocket. But let it not be these jointed manikins worked with a thread. At least let it be Mr. Robert Fitzsimmons or Mr. James Jeffries.
Clothes, paraphernalia, panoply, pomp and circumstance, and the copyist’s public and the poor bedeviled, ink-corroded hack of an overdriven, underpaid reviewer on an inland paper speak of the “vivid colouring” and “the fine picture of a bygone age” — it is easy to be vivid with a pot of vermilion at the elbow. Any one can scare a young dog with a false-face and a roaring voice, but to be vivid and use grays and browns, to scare the puppy with the lifted finger, that’s something to the point. The difficult thing is to get at the life immediately around you — the very life in which you move. No romance in it? No romance in you, poor fool. As much romance on Michigan Avenue as there is realism in King Arthur’s court. It is as you choose to see it. The important thing to decide is, which formula is the best to help you grip the Real Life of this or any other age. Contemporaries always imagine that theirs is the prosaic age, and that chivalry and the picturesque died with their forbears. No doubt Merlin mourned for the old time of romance. Cervantes held that romance was dead. Yet most of the historical romances of the day are laid in Cervantes’s time, or even after it.
Romance and Realism are constant qualities of every age, day and hour. They are here to-day. They existed in the time of Job. They will continue to exist till the end of time, not so much in things as in point of view of the people who see things.
The difficulty, then, is to get at the immediate life — immensely difficult, for you are not only close to the canvas, but are yourself part of the picture.
But the historic age is almost done to hand. Let almost any one shut himself in his closet with a history and Violet Le Duc’s Dictionaire du Mobilier and, given a few months’ time, he can evolve an historical novel of the kind called popular. He need not know men — just clothes and lingo, the “what-ho-without-there” gabble. But if he only chose he could find romance and adventure in Wall Street or Bond Street. But romance there does not wear the gay clothes and the showy accouterments, and to discover it — the real romance of it — means hard work and close study, not of books, but of people and actualities.
Not only this, but to know the life around you you must live — if not among people, then in people. You must be something more than a novelist if you can, something more than just a writer. There must be that nameless sixth sense or sensibility in you that great musicians have in common with great inventors and great scientists; the thing that does not enter into the work, but that is back of it; the thing that would make of you a good man as well as a good novelist; the thing that differentiates the mere business man from the financier (for it is possessed of the financier and poet alike — so only they be big enough).
It is not genius, for genius is a lax, loose term so flippantly used that its expressiveness is long since lost. It is more akin to sincerity. And there once more we halt upon the great word — sincerity, sincerity, and again sincerity. Let the writer attack his historical novel with sincerity and he cannot then do wrong. He will see then the man beneath the clothes, and the heart beneath both, and he will be so amazed at the wonder of that sight that he will forget the clothes. His public will be small, perhaps, but he will have the better reward of the knowledge of a thing well done. Royalties on editions of hundreds of thousands will not pay him more to his satisfaction than that. To make money is not the province of a novelist. If he is the right sort, he has other responsibilities, heavy ones. He of all men cannot think only of himself or for himself. And when the last page is written and the ink crusts on the pen-point and the hungry presses go clashing after another writer, the “new man” and the new fashion of the hour, he will think of the grim long grind of the years of his life that he has put behind him and of his work that he has built up volume by volume, sincere work, telling the truth as he saw it, independent of fashion and the gallery gods, holding to these with gripped hands and shut teeth — he will think of all this then, and he will be able to say: “I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now.”
And that is his reward — the best that a man may know; the only one really worth the striving for.
THE NOVEL WITH A “PURPOSE”
After years of indoctrination and expostulation on the part of the artists, the people who read appear at last to have grasped this one precept— “the novel must not preach,” but “the purpose of the story must be subordinate to the story itself.” It took a very long time for them to understand this, but once it became apparent they fastened upon it with a tenacity comparable only to the tenacity of the American schoolboy to the date “1492.”
“The novel must not preach,” you hear them say.
As though it were
possible to write a novel without a purpose, even if it is only the purpose to amuse. One is willing to admit that this savours a little of quibbling, for “purpose” and purpose to amuse are two different purposes. But every novel, even the most frivolous, must have some reason for the writing of it, and in that sense must have a “purpose.” Every novel must do one of three things — it must (I) tell something, (2) show something, or (3) prove something. Some novels do all three of these; some do only two; all must do at least one.
The ordinary novel merely tells something, elaborates a complication, devotes itself primarily to things. In this class comes the novel of adventure, such as “The Three Musketeers.”
The second and better class of novel shows something, exposes the workings of a temperament, devotes itself primarily to the minds of human beings. In this class falls the novel of character, such as “Romola.”
The third, and what we hold to be the best class, proves something, draws conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social tendencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to a study of men but of man. In this class falls the novel with the purpose, such as “Les Misérables.”
And the reason we decide upon this last as the highest form of the novel is because that, though setting a great purpose before it as its task, it nevertheless includes, and is forced to include, both the other classes. It must tell something, must narrate vigorous incidents and must show something, must penetrate deep into the motives and character of type-men, men who are composite pictures of a multitude of men. It must do this because of the nature of its subject, for it deals with elemental forces, motives that stir whole nations. These cannot be handled as abstractions in fiction. Fiction can find expression only in the concrete. The elemental forces, then, contribute to the novel with a purpose to provide it with vigorous action. In the novel, force can be expressed in no other way. The social tendencies must be expressed by means of analysis of the characters of the men and women who compose that society, and the two must be combined and manipulated to evolve the purpose — to find the value of x.
