MODERN FICTION

By Charles Dudley Warner

One of the worst characteristics of modern fiction is its so-called truthto nature. For fiction is an art, as painting is, as sculpture is, asacting is. A photograph of a natural object is not art; nor is theplaster cast of a man's face, nor is the bare setting on the stage of anactual occurrence. Art requires an idealization of nature. The amateur, though she may be a lady, who attempts to represent upon the stage thelady of the drawing-room, usually fails to convey to the spectators theimpression of a lady. She lacks the art by which the trained actress, whomay not be a lady, succeeds. The actual transfer to the stage of thedrawing-room and its occupants, with the behavior common in well-bredsociety, would no doubt fail of the intended dramatic effect, and thespectators would declare the representation unnatural. 

However our jargon of criticism may confound terms, we do not need to bereminded that art and nature are distinct; that art, though dependent onnature, is a separate creation; that art is selection and idealization, with a view to impressing the mind with human, or even higher than human, sentiments and ideas. We may not agree whether the perfect man and womanever existed, but we do know that the highest representations of them inform--that in the old Greek sculptures--were the result of artisticselection of parts of many living figures. 

When we praise our recent fiction for its photographic fidelity to naturewe condemn it, for we deny to it the art which would give it value. Weforget that the creation of the novel should be, to a certain extent, asynthetic process, and impart to human actions that ideal quality whichwe demand in painting. Heine regards Cervantes as the originator of themodern novel. The older novels sprang from the poetry of the Middle Ages;their themes were knightly adventure, their personages were the nobility;the common people did not figure in them. These romances, which haddegenerated into absurdities, Cervantes overthrew by "Don Quixote. " Butin putting an end to the old romances he created a new school of fiction, called the modern novel, by introducing into his romance ofpseudo-knighthood a faithful description of the lower classes, andintermingling the phases of popular life. But he had no one-sidedtendency to portray the vulgar only; he brought together the higher andthe lower in society, to serve as light and shade, and the aristocraticelement was as prominent as the popular. This noble and chivalrouselement disappears in the novels of the English who imitated Cervantes. "These English novelists since Richardson's reign, " says Heine, "areprosaic natures; to the prudish spirit of their time even pithydescriptions of the life of the common people are repugnant, and we seeon yonder side of the Channel those bourgeoisie novels arise, wherein thepetty humdrum life of the middle classes is depicted. " But Scottappeared, and effected a restoration of the balance in fiction. AsCervantes had introduced the democratic element into romances, so Scottreplaced the aristocratic element, when it had disappeared, and only aprosaic, bourgeoisie fiction existed. He restored to romances thesymmetry which we admire in "Don Quixote. " The characteristic feature ofScott's historical romances, in the opinion of the great German critic, is the harmony between the artistocratic and democratic elements. 

This is true, but is it the last analysis of the subject? Is it asufficient account of the genius of Cervantes and Scott that theycombined in their romances a representation of the higher and lowerclasses? Is it not of more importance how they represented them? It isonly a part of the achievement of Cervantes that he introduced the commonpeople into fiction; it is his higher glory that he idealized hismaterial; and it is Scott's distinction also that he elevated intoartistic creations both nobility and commonalty. In short, the essentialof fiction is not diversity of social life, but artistic treatment ofwhatever is depicted. The novel may deal wholly with an aristocracy, orwholly with another class, but it must idealize the nature it touchesinto art. The fault of the bourgeoisie novels, of which Heine complains, is not that they treated of one class only, and excluded a higher socialrange, but that they treated it without art and without ideality. Innature there is nothing vulgar to the poet, and in human life there isnothing uninteresting to the artist; but nature and human life, for thepurposes of fiction, need a creative genius. The importation into thenovel of the vulgar, sordid, and ignoble in life is always unbearable, unless genius first fuses the raw material in its alembic. 

When, therefore, we say that one of the worst characteristics of modernfiction is its so-called truth to nature, we mean that it disregards thehigher laws of art, and attempts to give us unidealized pictures of life. The failure is not that vulgar themes are treated, but that the treatmentis vulgar; not that common life is treated, but that the treatment iscommon; not that care is taken with details, but that no selection ismade, and everything is photographed regardless of its artistic value. Iam sure that no one ever felt any repugnance on being introduced byCervantes to the muleteers, contrabandistas, servants and serving-maids, and idle vagabonds of Spain, any more than to an acquaintance with thebeggar-boys and street gamins on the canvases of Murillo. And I believethat the philosophic reason of the disgust of Heine and of every criticwith the English bourgeoisie novels, describing the petty, humdrum lifeof the middle classes, was simply the want of art in the writers; thefailure on their part to see that a literal transcript of nature is poorstuff in literature. We do not need to go back to Richardson's time forillustrations of that truth. Every week the English press--which is evena greater sinner in this respect than the American--turns out a score ofnovels which are mediocre, not from their subjects, but from their utterlack of the artistic quality. It matters not whether they treat ofmiddle-class life, of low, slum life, or of drawing-room life and lordsand ladies; they are equally flat and dreary. Perhaps the most inanething ever put forth in the name of literature is the so-called domesticnovel, an indigestible, culinary sort of product, that might be named thedoughnut of fiction. The usual apology for it is that it depicts familylife with fidelity. Its characters are supposed to act and talk as peopleact and talk at home and in society. I trust this is a libel, but, forthe sake of the argument, suppose they do. Was ever produced so insipid aresult? They are called moral; in the higher sense they are immoral, forthey tend to lower the moral tone and stamina of every reader. It needsgenius to import into literature ordinary conversation, petty domesticdetails, and the commonplace and vulgar phases of life. A report ofordinary talk, which appears as dialogue in domestic novels, may be trueto nature; if it is, it is not worth writing or worth reading. I cannotsee that it serves any good purpose whatever. Fortunately, we have in ourday illustrations of a different treatment of the vulgar. I do not knowany more truly realistic pictures of certain aspects of New England lifethan are to be found in Judd's "Margaret, " wherein are depictedexceedingly pinched and ignoble social conditions. Yet the characters andthe life are drawn with the artistic purity of Flaxman's illustrations ofHomer. Another example is Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd. "Every character in it is of the lower class in England. But what anexquisite creation it is! You have to turn back to Shakespeare for anytalk of peasants and clowns and shepherds to compare with theconversations in this novel, so racy are they of the soil, and yet sotouched with the finest art, the enduring art. Here is not the realism ofthe photograph, but of the artist; that is to say, it is natureidealized. 

When we criticise our recent fiction it is obvious that we ought toremember that it only conforms to the tendencies of our social life, ourprevailing ethics, and to the art conditions of our time. Literature isnever in any age an isolated product. It is closely related to thedevelopment or retrogression of the time in all departments of life. Theliterary production of our day seems, and no doubt is, more various thanthat of any other, and it is not easy to fix upon its leading tendency. It is claimed for its fiction, however, that it is analytic andrealistic, and that much of it has certain other qualities that make it anew school in art. These aspects of it I wish to consider in this paper. 

It is scarcely possible to touch upon our recent fiction, any more thanupon our recent poetry, without taking into account what is called theEsthetic movement--a movement more prominent in England than elsewhere. Aslight contemplation of this reveals its resemblance to the Romanticmovement in Germany, of which the brothers Schlegel were apostles, in thelatter part of the last century. The movements are alike in this: thatthey both sought inspiration in mediaevalism, in feudalism, in thesymbols of a Christianity that ran to mysticism, in the quaint, strictlypre-Raphael art which was supposed to be the result of a simple faith. Inthe one case, the artless and childlike remains of old German picturesand statuary were exhumed and set up as worthy of imitation; in theother, we have carried out in art, in costume, and in domestic life, sofar as possible, what has been wittily and accurately described as"stained-glass attitudes. " With all its peculiar vagaries, the Englishschool is essentially a copy of the German, in its return tomediaevalism. The two movements have a further likeness, in that they arefound accompanied by a highly symbolized religious revival. Englishaestheticism would probably disown any religious intention, although ithas been accused of a refined interest in Pan and Venus; but in all itsfeudal sympathies it goes along with the religious art and vestmentrevival, the return to symbolic ceremonies, monastic vigils, andsisterhoods. Years ago, an acute writer in the Catholic World claimedDante Gabriel Rossetti as a Catholic writer, from the internal evidenceof his poems. The German Romanticism, which was fostered by the Romishpriesthood, ended, or its disciples ended, in the bosom of the RomanCatholic Church. It will be interesting to note in what ritualisticharbor the aestheticism of our day will finally moor. That two similarrevivals should come so near together in time makes us feel that theworld moves onward--if it does move onward--in circular figures of veryshort radii. There seems to be only one thing certain in our Christianera, and that is a periodic return to classic models; the only stablestandards of resort seem to be Greek art and literature. 

The characteristics which are prominent, when we think of our recentfiction, are a wholly unidealized view of human society, which has gotthe name of realism; a delight in representing the worst phases of sociallife; an extreme analysis of persons and motives; the sacrifice of actionto psychological study; the substitution of studies of character foranything like a story; a notion that it is not artistic, and that it isuntrue to nature, to bring any novel to a definite consummation, andespecially to end it happily; and a despondent tone about society, politics, and the whole drift of modern life. Judged by our fiction, weare in an irredeemably bad way. There is little beauty, joy, orlight-heartedness in living; the spontaneity and charm of life areanalyzed out of existence; sweet girls, made to love and be loved, areextinct; melancholy Jaques never meets a Rosalind in the forest of Arden, and if he sees her in the drawing-room he poisons his pleasure with thethought that she is scheming and artificial; there are no happy marriages--indeed, marriage itself is almost too inartistic to be permitted by ournovelists, unless it can be supplemented by a divorce, and art issupposed to deny any happy consummation of true love. In short, modernsociety is going to the dogs, notwithstanding money is only three and ahalf per cent. It is a gloomy business life, at the best. Two learned butdespondent university professors met, not long ago, at an afternoon"coffee, " and drew sympathetically together in a corner. "What a worldthis would be, " said one, "without coffee!" "Yes, " replied the other, stirring the fragrant cup in a dejected aspect "yes; but what a hell of aworld it is with coffee!"

The analytic method in fiction is interesting, when used by a master ofdissection, but it has this fatal defect in a novel--it destroysillusion. We want to think that the characters in a story are realpersons. We cannot do this if we see the author set them up as if theywere marionettes, and take them to pieces every few pages, and show theirinterior structure, and the machinery by which they are moved. Not onlyis the illusion gone, but the movement of the story, if there is a story, is retarded, till the reader loses all enjoyment in impatience andweariness. You find yourself saying, perhaps, What a very clever fellowthe author is! What an ingenious creation this character is! How brightlythe author makes his people talk! This is high praise, but by no meansthe highest, and when we reflect we see how immeasurably inferior, infiction, the analytic method is to the dramatic. In the dramatic methodthe characters appear, and show what they are by what they do and say;the reader studies their motives, and a part of his enjoyment is inanalyzing them, and his vanity is flattered by the trust reposed in hisperspicacity. We realize how unnecessary minute analysis of character andlong descriptions are in reading a drama by Shakespeare, in which thecharacters are so vividly presented to us in action and speech, withoutthe least interference of the author in description, that we regard themas persons with whom we might have real relations, and not as bundles oftraits and qualities. True, the conditions of dramatic art and the art ofthe novel are different, in that the drama can dispense withdelineations, for its characters are intended to be presented to the eye;but all the same, a good drama will explain itself without the aid ofactors, and there is no doubt that it is the higher art in the novel, when once the characters are introduced, to treat them dramatically, andlet them work out their own destiny according to their characters. It isa truism to say that when the reader perceives that the author can compelhis characters to do what he pleases all interest in them as real personsis gone. In a novel of mere action and adventure, a lower order offiction, where all the interest centres in the unraveling of a plot, ofcourse this does not so much matter. 

Not long ago, in Edinburgh, I amused myself in looking up some of thelocalities made famous in Scott's romances, which are as real in the mindas any historical places. Afterwards I read "The Heart of Midlothian. " Iwas surprised to find that, as a work of art, it was inferior to myrecollection of it. Its style is open to the charge of prolixity, andeven of slovenliness in some parts; and it does not move on withincreasing momentum and concentration to a climax, as many of Scott'snovels do; the story drags along in the disposition of one characterafter another. Yet, when I had finished the book and put it away, asingular thing happened. It suddenly came to me that in reading it I hadnot once thought of Scott as the maker; it had never occurred to me thathe had created the people in whose fortunes I had been so intenselyabsorbed; and I never once had felt how clever the novelist was in thenaturally dramatic dialogues of the characters. In short, it had notentered my mind to doubt the existence of Jeanie and Effie Deans, andtheir father, and Reuben Butler, and the others, who seem as real ashistorical persons in Scotch history. And when I came to think of itafterwards, reflecting upon the assumptions of the modern realisticschool, I found that some scenes, notably the night attack on the oldTolbooth, were as real to me as if I had read them in a police report ofa newspaper of the day. Was Scott, then, only a reporter? Far from it, asyou would speedily see if he had thrown into the novel a police report ofthe occurrences at the Tolbooth before art had shorn it of itsirrelevancies, magnified its effective and salient points, given eventstheir proper perspective, and the whole picture due light and shade. 

The sacrifice of action to some extent to psychological evolution inmodern fiction may be an advance in the art as an intellectualentertainment, if the writer does not make that evolution his end, anddoes not forget that the indispensable thing in a novel is the story. Thenovel of mere adventure or mere plot, it need not be urged, is of a lowerorder than that in which the evolution of characters and theirinteraction make the story. The highest fiction is that which embodiesboth; that is, the story in which action is the result of mental andspiritual forces in play. And we protest against the notion that thenovel of the future is to be, or should be, merely a study of, or anessay or a series of analytic essays on, certain phases of social life. 

It is not true that civilization or cultivation has bred out of the worldthe liking for a story. In this the most highly educated Londoner and theEgyptian fellah meet on common human ground. The passion for a story hasno more died out than curiosity, or than the passion of love. The truthis not that stories are not demanded, but that the born raconteur andstory-teller is a rare person. The faculty of telling a story is a muchrarer gift than the ability to analyze character and even than theability truly to draw character. It may be a higher or a lower power, butit is rarer. It is a natural gift, and it seems that no amount of culturecan attain it, any more than learning can make a poet. Nor is thecomplaint well founded that the stories have all been told, the possibleplots all been used, and the combinations of circumstances exhausted. Itis no doubt our individual experience that we hear almost every day--andwe hear nothing so eagerly--some new story, better or worse, but new inits exhibition of human character, and in the combination of events. Andthe strange, eventful histories of human life will no more be exhaustedthan the possible arrangements of mathematical numbers. We might as wellsay that there are no more good pictures to be painted as that there areno more good stories to be told. 

Equally baseless is the assumption that it is inartistic and untrue tonature to bring a novel to a definite consummation, and especially to endit happily. Life, we are told, is full of incompletion, of brokendestinies, of failures, of romances that begin but do not end, ofambitions and purposes frustrated, of love crossed, of unhappy issues, ora resultless play of influences. Well, but life is full, also, ofendings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completeddramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell inordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. Ifyou interest me in the preparations of two persons who are starting on ajourney, and expend all your ingenuity in describing their outfit andtheir characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell themafterwards, I do not call that a story. Nor am I any better satisfiedwhen you describe two persons whom you know, whose characters areinteresting, and who become involved in all manner of entanglements, andthen stop your narration; and when I ask, say you have not the least ideawhether they got out of their difficulties, or what became of them. Inreal life we do not call that a story where everything is leftunconcluded and in the air. In point of fact, romances are dailybeginning and daily ending, well or otherwise, under our observation. 

Should they always end well in the novel? I am very far from saying that. Tragedy and the pathos of failure have their places in literature as wellas in life. I only say that, artistically, a good ending is as proper asa bad ending. Yet the main object of the novel is to entertain, and thebest entertainment is that which lifts the imagination and quickens thespirit; to lighten the burdens of life by taking us for a time out of ourhumdrum and perhaps sordid conditions, so that we can see familiar lifesomewhat idealized, and probably see it all the more truly from anartistic point of view. For the majority of the race, in its hard lines, fiction is an inestimable boon. Incidentally the novel may teach, encourage, refine, elevate. Even for these purposes, that novel is thebest which shows us the best possibilities of our lives--the novel whichgives hope and cheer instead of discouragement and gloom. Familiaritywith vice and sordidness in fiction is a low entertainment, and ofdoubtful moral value, and their introduction is unbearable if it is notdone with the idealizing touch of the artist. 

Do not misunderstand me to mean that common and low life are not fitsubjects of fiction, or that vice is not to be lashed by the satirist, orthat the evils of a social state are never to be exposed in the novel. For this, also, is an office of the novel, as it is of the drama, to holdthe mirror up to nature, and to human nature as it exhibits itself. Butwhen the mirror shows nothing but vice and social disorder, leaving outthe saving qualities that keep society on the whole, and family life as arule, as sweet and good as they are, the mirror is not held up to nature, but more likely reflects a morbid mind. Still it must be added that thestudy of unfortunate social conditions is a legitimate one for the authorto make; and that we may be in no state to judge justly of his exposurewhile the punishment is being inflicted, or while the irritation isfresh. For, no doubt, the reader winces often because the novel revealsto himself certain possible baseness, selfishness, and meanness. Of this, however, I (speaking for myself) may be sure: that the artist who sorepresents vulgar life that I am more in love with my kind, the satiristwho so depicts vice and villainy that I am strengthened in my moralfibre, has vindicated his choice of material. On the contrary, thosenovelists are not justified whose forte it seems to be to so set forthgoodness as to make it unattractive. 

But we come back to the general proposition that the indispensablecondition of the novel is that it shall entertain. And for this purposethe world is not ashamed to own that it wants, and always will want, astory--a story that has an ending; and if not a good ending, then onethat in noble tragedy lifts up our nature into a high plane of sacrificeand pathos. In proof of this we have only to refer to the masterpieces offiction which the world cherishes and loves to recur to. 

I confess that I am harassed with the incomplete romances, that leave me, when the book is closed, as one might be on a waste plain at midnight, abandoned by his conductor, and without a lantern. I am tired ofaccompanying people for hours through disaster and perplexity andmisunderstanding, only to see them lost in a thick mist at last. I amweary of going to funerals, which are not my funerals, however chatty andamusing the undertaker may be. I confess that I should like to see againthe lovely heroine, the sweet woman, capable of a great passion and agreat sacrifice; and I do not object if the novelist tries her to theverge of endurance, in agonies of mind and in perils, subjecting her towasting sicknesses even, if he only brings her out at the end in ablissful compensation of her troubles, and endued with a new and sweetercharm. No doubt it is better for us all, and better art, that in thenovel of society the destiny should be decided by character. What anartistic and righteous consummation it is when we meet the shrewd andwicked old Baroness Bernstein at Continental gaming-tables, and feel thatthere was no other logical end for the worldly and fascinating Beatrix ofHenry Esmond! It is one of the great privileges of fiction to right thewrongs of life, to do justice to the deserving and the vicious. It iswholesome for us to contemplate the justice, even if we do not often seeit in society. It is true that hypocrisy and vulgar self-seeking oftensucceed in life, occupying high places, and make their exit in thepageantry of honored obsequies. Yet always the man is conscious of thehollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accurate measureof it. It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into sucha career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justiceby letting us see the true nature of such prosperity. The unscrupulousman amasses wealth, lives in luxury and splendor, and dies in the odor ofrespectability. His poor and honest neighbor, whom he has wronged anddefrauded, lives in misery, and dies in disappointment and penury. Thenovelist cannot reverse the facts without such a shock to our experienceas shall destroy for us the artistic value of his fiction, and bring uponhis work the deserved reproach of indiscriminately "rewarding the goodand punishing the bad. " But we have a right to ask that he shall revealthe real heart and character of this passing show of life; for not to dothis, to content himself merely with exterior appearances, is for themajority of his readers to efface the lines between virtue and vice. Andwe ask this not for the sake of the moral lesson, but because not to doit is, to our deep consciousness, inartistic and untrue to our judgmentof life as it goes on. Thackeray used to say that all his talent was inhis eyes; meaning that he was only an observer and reporter of what hesaw, and not a Providence to rectify human affairs. The great artistundervalued his genius. He reported what he saw as Raphael and Murilloreported what they saw. With his touch of genius he assigned toeverything its true value, moving us to tenderness, to pity, to scorn, torighteous indignation, to sympathy with humanity. I find in him thehighest art, and not that indifference to the great facts and deepcurrents and destinies of human life, that want of enthusiasm andsympathy, which has got the name of "art for art's sake. " Literaryfiction is a barren product if it wants sympathy and love for men. "Artfor art's sake" is a good and defensible phrase, if our definition of artincludes the ideal, and not otherwise. 

I do not know how it has come about that in so large a proportion ofrecent fiction it is held to be artistic to look almost altogether uponthe shady and the seamy side of life, giving to this view the name of"realism"; to select the disagreeable, the vicious, the unwholesome; togive us for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, onlythe silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, theintrigante and the "shady"--to borrow the language of the society sheseeks--the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious;to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of thegay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever alongthe dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bringus into relations only with the sordid and the common; to force us to supwith unwholesome company on misery and sensuousness, in tales so utterlyunpleasant that we are ready to welcome any disaster as a relief; andthen--the latest and finest touch of modern art--to leave the wholeweltering mass in a chaos, without conclusion and without possible issue. And this is called a picture of real life! Heavens! Is it true that inEngland, where a great proportion of the fiction we describe and loatheis produced; is it true that in our New England society there is nothingbut frivolity, sordidness, decay of purity and faith, ignoble ambitionand ignoble living? Is there no charm in social life--no self-sacrifice, devotion, courage to stem materialistic conditions, and live above them?Are there no noble women, sensible, beautiful, winning, with the gracethat all the world loves, albeit with the feminine weaknesses that makeall the world hope? Is there no manliness left? Are there no homes wherethe tempter does not live with the tempted in a mush of sentimentalaffinity? Or is it, in fact, more artistic to ignore all these, and paintonly the feeble and the repulsive in our social state? The feeble, thesordid, and the repulsive in our social state nobody denies, nor doesanybody deny the exceeding cleverness with which our social disorders arereproduced in fiction by a few masters of their art; but is it not timethat it should be considered good art to show something of the clean andbright side?

This is pre-eminently the age of the novel. The development of variety offiction since the days of Scott and Cooper is prodigious. The prejudiceagainst novel-reading is quite broken down, since fiction has taken allfields for its province; everybody reads novels. Three-quarters of thebooks taken from the circulating library are stories; they make up halfthe library of the Sunday-schools. If a writer has anything to say, orthinks he has, he knows that he can most certainly reach the ear of thepublic by the medium of a story. So we have novels for children; novelsreligious, scientific, historical, archaeological, psychological, pathological, total-abstinence; novels of travel, of adventure andexploration; novels domestic, and the perpetual spawn of books callednovels of society. Not only is everything turned into a story, real or socalled, but there must be a story in everything. The stump-speaker holdshis audience by well-worn stories; the preacher wakes up his congregationby a graphic narrative; and the Sunday-school teacher leads his childreninto all goodness by the entertaining path of romance; we even had aPresident who governed the country nearly by anecdotes. The result ofthis universal demand for fiction is necessarily an enormous supply, andas everybody writes, without reference to gifts, the product is mainlytrash, and trash of a deleterious sort; for bad art in literature is badmorals. I am not sure but the so-called domestic, the diluted, the"goody, " namby-pamby, unrobust stories, which are so largely read byschool-girls, young ladies, and women, do more harm than the "knowing, "audacious, wicked ones, --also, it is reported, read by them, and writtenlargely by their own sex. For minds enfeebled and relaxed by storieslacking even intellectual fibre are in a poor condition to meet theperils of life. This is not the place for discussing the stories writtenfor the young and for the Sunday-school. It seems impossible to check theflow of them, now that so much capital is invested in this industry; butI think that healthy public sentiment is beginning to recognize the truththat the excessive reading of this class of literature by the young isweakening to the mind, besides being a serious hindrance to study and toattention to the literature that has substance. 

In his account of the Romantic School in Germany, Heine says, "In thebreast of a nation's authors there always lies the image of its future, and the critic who, with a knife of sufficient keenness, dissects a newpoet can easily prophesy, as from the entrails of a sacrificial animal, what shape matters will assume in Germany. " Now if all the poets andnovelists of England and America today were cut up into little pieces(and we might sacrifice a few for the sake of the experiment), there isno inspecting augur who could divine therefrom our literary future. Thediverse indications would puzzle the most acute dissector. Lost in thevariety, the multiplicity of minute details, the refinements of analysisand introspection, he would miss any leading indications. For with allits variety, it seems to me that one characteristic of recent fiction isits narrowness--narrowness of vision and of treatment. It deals withlives rather than with life. Lacking ideality, it fails of broadperception. We are accustomed to think that with the advent of thegenuine novel of society, in the first part of this century, a great stepforward was taken in fiction. And so there was. If the artist did not usea big canvas, he adopted a broad treatment. But the tendency now is topush analysis of individual peculiarities to an extreme, and tosubstitute a study of traits for a representation of human life. 

It scarcely need be said that it is not multitude of figures on aliterary canvas that secures breadth of treatment. The novel may benarrow, though it swarms with a hundred personages. It may be as wide aslife, as high as imagination can lift itself; it may image to us a wholesocial state, though it pats in motion no more persons than we made theacquaintance of in one of the romances of Hawthorne. Consider for amoment how Thackeray produced his marvelous results. We follow with him, in one of his novels of society, the fortunes of a very few people. Theyare so vividly portrayed that we are convinced the author must have knownthem in that great world with which he was so familiar; we should not besurprised to meet any of them in the streets of London. When we visit theCharterhouse School, and see the old forms where the boys sat nearly acentury ago, we have in our minds Colonel Newcome as really as we haveCharles Lamb and Coleridge and De Quincey. We are absorbed, as we read, in the evolution of the characters of perhaps only half a dozen people;and yet all the world, all great, roaring, struggling London, is in thestory, and Clive, and Philip, and Ethel, and Becky Sharpe, and CaptainCostigan are a part of life. It is the flowery month of May; the scent ofthe hawthorn is in the air, and the tender flush of the new springsuffuses the Park, where the tide of fashion and pleasure and idlenesssurges up and down-the sauntering throng, the splendid equipages, theendless cavalcade in Rotten Row, in which Clive descries afar off thewhite plume of his ladylove dancing on the waves of an unattainablesociety; the club windows are all occupied; Parliament is in session, with its nightly echoes of imperial politics; the thronged streets roarwith life from morn till nearly morn again; the drawing-rooms hum andsparkle in the crush of a London season; as you walk the midnightpavement, through the swinging doors of the cider-cellars comes the burstof bacchanalian song. Here is the world of the press and of letters; hereare institutions, an army, a navy, commerce, glimpses of great shipsgoing to and fro on distant seas, of India, of Australia. This one bookis an epitome of English life, almost of the empire itself. We areconscious of all this, so much breadth and atmosphere has the artistgiven his little history of half a dozen people in this struggling world. 

But this background of a great city, of an empire, is not essential tothe breadth of treatment upon which we insist in fiction, to broadcharacterization, to the play of imagination about common things whichtransfigures them into the immortal beauty of artistic creations. What asimple idyl in itself is Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea"! It is thecreation of a few master-touches, using only common material. Yet it hasin it the breadth of life itself, the depth and passion of all our humanstruggle in the world-a little story with a vast horizon. 

It is constantly said that the conditions in America are unfavorable tothe higher fiction; that our society is unformed, without centre, withoutthe definition of classes, which give the light and shade that Heinespeaks of in "Don Quixote"; that it lacks types and customs that can bewidely recognized and accepted as national and characteristic; that wehave no past; that we want both romantic and historic background; that weare in a shifting, flowing, forming period which fiction cannot seize on;that we are in diversity and confusion that baffle artistic treatment; inshort, that American life is too vast, varied, and crude for the purposeof the novelist. 

These excuses might be accepted as fully accounting for our failure--orshall we say our delay?--if it were not for two or three of our literaryperformances. It is true that no novel has been written, and we dare sayno novel will be written, that is, or will be, an epitome of the manifolddiversities of American life, unless it be in the form of one of WaltWhitman's catalogues. But we are not without peculiar types; not withoutcharacters, not without incidents, stories, heroisms, inequalities; notwithout the charms of nature in infinite variety; and human nature is thesame here that it is in Spain, France, and England. Out of thesematerials Cooper wrote romances, narratives stamped with the distinctcharacteristics of American life and scenery, that were and are eagerlyread by all civilized peoples, and which secured the universal verdictwhich only breadth of treatment commands. Out of these materials, also, Hawthorne, child-endowed with a creative imagination, wove thosetragedies of interior life, those novels of our provincial New England, which rank among the great masterpieces of the novelist's art. The masterartist can idealize even our crude material, and make it serve. Theseexceptions to a rule do not go to prove the general assertion of apoverty of material for fiction here; the simple truth probably is that, for reasons incident to the development of a new region of the earth, creative genius has been turned in other directions than that offictitious literature. Nor do I think that we need to take shelter behindthe wellworn and convenient observation, the truth of which stands inmuch doubt, that literature is the final flower of a nation'scivilization. 

However, this is somewhat a digression. We are speaking of the tendencyof recent fiction, very much the same everywhere that novels are written, which we have imperfectly sketched. It is probably of no more use toprotest against it than it is to protest against the vulgar realism inpictorial art, which holds ugliness and beauty in equal esteem; oragainst aestheticism gone to seed in languid affectations; or against theenthusiasm of a social life which wreaks its religion on the color of avestment, or sighs out its divine soul over an ancient pewter mug. Mostof our fiction, in its extreme analysis, introspection andself-consciousness, in its devotion to details, in its disregard of theideal, in its selection as well as in its treatment of nature, is simplyof a piece with a good deal else that passes for genuine art. Much of itis admirable in workmanship, and exhibits a cleverness in details and asubtlety in the observation of traits which many great novels lack. But Ishould be sorry to think that the historian will judge our social life byit, and I doubt not that most of us are ready for a more ideal, that isto say, a more artistic, view of our performances in this bright andpathetic world.