Confessions and Criticisms

eaders of the "New York Ledger" suppose it to be a romance of angelic virtue at last triumphant over satanic villany. The aristocracy of culture describe it as a philosophic analysis of

it should contain a brace or two o

eristic badge and vindication of human nature; imagination is the badge, and art is the vindication. Reason, which gets so much vulgar glorification, is, after all, a secondary quality. It is posterior to imagination,-it is one of the means by which imagination seeks to realize its ends. Some animals reason, or seem to do so: but the most cultivated ape

shortcomings, and an aspiration towards a loftier ideal. It is, in fact, a truly divine force in man, reminding him of his heavenly origin, and stimulating him to rise again to the level whence he fell. For it has glimpses of the divine Image within or behind the material veil; and its cons

s needed. For such things as mathematics, moral philosophy, and political economy also belong to the mental sphere, and yet they are not art. But these, though not actually existing on the plane of material necessities, yet do exist solely in order to relieve such necessities. Unlike beauty, they are not their own excuse for being. Their embodiment is utilitarian, that of art is aesthetic. Political economy, for example, shows me how to buy two drinks for the same price I used to pay for one; while art inspires me to transmute a pewter

d story,-their conceptions of the world around them. According to many philologists, poetry was the original form of human speech. Be that as it may, whatever flows into the mind, from the spectacle of nature and of mankind, that influx the mind tends instinctively to reproduce, in a shape accordant with its peculiar bias and genius. And those minds in

would be little better than savages. For the effect of pure literature upon a receptive mind is something more than can be definitely stated. Like sunshine upon a landscape, it is a kind of miracle. It demands from its disciple almost as much as it gives him, and is never revealed save to the disinterested and loving eye. In our best m

an readily afford. The poet of old used to clothe in the garb of verse his every observation on life and nature; but to-day he reserves for it only his most ideal and abstract conceptions. The merit of Cervantes is not so much that he laughed Spain's chivalry away, as that he heralded the modern novel of character and manners. It is the latest, most pliable, most catholic solution of the old problem,-how to unfold man to himsel

is incompatible with inventiveness, or imitation. Imitation is death, imagination is life. Imitation is servitude, imagination is royalty. He who claims the name of artist must rise to that vision of a loftier reality-a more true because a more beautiful world-which only imagination can reveal. A truer world,-for the world of facts is not and cannot be true. It is barren, incoherent, misleading. But behind every fact there is a truth: and these truths are enlightening, unifying, creative. Fasten your hold upon them, and facts will become your servants instead of your tyrants. No charm of detail will be lost, no homely picturesque circumstance, no touch of human pathos or humor; but all har

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ty or forty years had been gradually making itself comfortable after the disturbances consequent upon the French Revolution; the theoretical rights of man had been settled for the moment; and interest was directed no longer to the assertion and support of these rights, but to the social condition and character which were their outcome. Good people were those who climbed through reverses and sorrows towards the conventional heaven; bad people were those who, in spite of worldly and temporary successes and triumphs, gravitated towards the conventional hell. Novels designed on this basis in so far filled the bill, as the phrase is: their greater or less excellence depended solely on the veracity with which the aspect, the temperament, and the conduct of the dramatis personae were reported, and upon the amount of ingenuity wherewith the web of events and circumstances was woven, and the conclusion reached. Nothing more was expected, and, in general, little or nothing more was attempted. Little more, certainly, will be found in the writings of Thackeray or of Balzac, who, it is commonly admitted,

al, be logically supported; and spirit is, if not illogical, at any rate outside the domain of logic,-but as being a hopelessly vague and untrustworthy hypothesis. The Bible is a human book; Christ was a gentleman, related to the Buddha and Plato families; Joseph was an ill-used man; death, so far as we have any reason to believe, is annihilation of personal existence; life is-the predicament of the body previous to death; morality is the enlightened selfishness of the greatest number; civilization is the compromises men make with one another in order to get the most they can out of the world; wisdom is acknowledgment of these propositions; folly is to hanker after what may lie beyond the sphere of sense. The supporter of these doctrines by no means permits himself

tively definite belief in something-no matter what. It is a transient state-the interval between one creed and another. The agnostic no longer holds to what is behind him, nor knows what lies before, so he contents himself with feeling the ground beneath his feet. That, at least, though the heavens fall, is likely to remain; meanwhile, let the heavens take care of themselves. It may be the part of valor to champion divine revelation, but the better part of valor is discretion, and if divine revelatio

efore, it seems to be divided between discreet and supercilious skepticism on one side, and, on the other, the clamorous jugglery of charlatanism. The case is not really so bad as that: nihilists are not discreet and even the Bishop of Rome is not necessarily a charlatan. Nevertheless, the outlook may fairly be described as confused and the issue uncertain. And-to come without further preface to the subject of this paper-it is with this material that the modern novelist, so far as he is a modern and not a future novelist, or a novelist temporis acti, has to work. Unless a man have the gift to forecast the years, or, at least, to catch the first ray

r purpose, no divine and eternal significance. This being conceded, what meaning would there be in designing works of art? If art has not its prototype in creation, if all that we see and do is chance, uninspired by a controlling and forming intelligence behind or within it, then to construct a work of art would be to make something arbitrary and grotesque, something unreal and fugitive, something out of accord with the general sense (or nonsense) of things, something with no further basis or warrant than is supplied by the maker's idle and irresponsible fancy. But since no man cares to expend the trained energies of his mind upon the manufacture of toys, it will come to pass (upon the accidental hypothesis of creation) that artists will become shy of justifying their own title. They will adopt the

d idols and criterions done away with were something new and better, or as good, substituted for them. But apparently nothing definite has yet been decided on. Doubt still reigns, and, once more, doubt is not creative. One of two things must presently happen. The time will come when we must stop saying that we do not know whether or not God, and all that God implies, exists, and affirm definitely and finally either that he does not exist or that he does. That settled, we shall soon see what will become of art. If there is a God, he will be understood and worshipped, not superstitiously and literally as heretofore, but in a new and enlightened spirit; and an art will arise commensurate with this new and loftier revelation. If there is no God, it is difficult to see how art can have the face to show herself any more

a character he never loses his grasp on it: on the contrary, he masters it more and more, and only lets go of it when the last recesses of its organism have been explored. In the quality and conduct of his plots he is equally unprecedented. His scenes are modern, and embody characteristic events and problems in the recent history of Russia. There is in their arrangement no attempt at symmetry, nor poetic justice. Temperament and circumstances are made to rule, and against their merciless fiat no appeal is allowed. Evil does evil to the end; weakness never gathers strength; even goodness never varies from its level: it suffers, but is not corrupted; it is the goodness of instinct, not of struggle and aspiration; it happens to belong to this or that person, just as his hair happens to be black or brown. Everything in the surroundings and the action is to the last degree matter-of-fact, commonplace, inevitable; there are no picturesque coincidences, no providential interferences, no desperate victories over fate; the tale, like the world of the materialist, moves onward from a predetermined beginning to a helpless and tragic close. And yet few books have been written of deeper and more permanent fascination than these. Their grim veracity; the creative sympathy and steady dispassionateness of their portrayal of mankind; their constancy of motive, and their sombre earnestness, have been surpassed by none. This earnestness is worth dwelling upon for a moment. It bears no likeness to the dogmatism of the bigot or the fanaticism of the enthusiast. It is the concentration of a broadly gifted masculine mind, devoting its unstinted energies to depicting certain aspects of society and civilization, which are powerfully representative of the tendencies of the day. "Here is the unvarnished fact-give heed to it!" is the unwritten motto. The author avoid

superiors in finish and culture, but their faculty of convincing and presenting is less. Their interest in their own work seems less serious than his; they may entertain us more, but they do not move and magnetize so much. The persons and events of their stories are conscientiously studied, and are nothing if not natural; but they lack distinction. In an epitome of life so concise as the longest novel must needs be, to use any but types is waste of time and space. A typical character is one who combines the traits or beliefs of a certain class to which he is affiliated-who is, practically, all of them

trary, the reader must open his eyes to be aware of it. He finds the story clear and easy of comprehension; the characters come home to him familiarly and remain distinctly in his memory; he understands something which was, till now, vague to him: but he is as likely to ascribe this to an exceptional lucidity in his own mental condition as to any special merit in the author. Indeed, it often happens that the author who puts out-of-the-way personages into h

ociations both personal and inherited, the average English novelist is better circumstanced than the American. Nevertheless, the English novelist is not at present writing better novels than the American. The reason seems to be that he uses no material which has not been in use for hundred

buys him up, at the rate of a million copies a year. Our own best writers are more read in England, or, at any rate, more talked about, than their native crop; not so much, perhaps, because they are different as because their difference is felt to be of a significant and typical kind. It has in it a gleam of the new day. They are realistic; but realism, so far as it involves a faithful study of nature, is useful. The illusion of a loftier reality, at which we should aim, must be evolved from adequate knowledge of reality itself. The spontaneous and assured faith, which is the mainspring of sane imagination, must be preceded by the doubt and reje

ion of enabling its American author to write it. In the second place, they had nothing to write about, for the national life was too crude and heterogeneous for ordinary artistic purposes. Thirdly, they had no one to write for: because, although, in one sense, there might be readers enough, in a higher sense there were scarcely any,-that is to say, there was no organized critical body of literary opinion, from which an author could confidently look t

ng them a course analogous to that which Napoleon is said to have pursued with the letters sent to him while in Italy. He left them unread until a certain time had elapsed, and then found that most of them no longer needed attention. We are thus brought face to face with the

yielding unconditionally to the great Russian. Especially his critical familiarity with French literature operated to broaden, if at the same time to render less trenchant, his method and expression. His characters are drawn with fastidious care, and closely follow the tones and fashions of real life. Each utterance is so exactly like what it ought to be that the reader feels the same sort of pleased surprise as is afforded by a phonograph which repeats, with all the accidental pauses and inflections, the speech spoken into it. Yet the words come through a medium; they are not quite spontaneous; these figures have not the sad, human inevitableness of Turguénieff's people. The reason seems to be (leaving the difference between the genius of the two writers out of account) that the American, unlike the Russian, recognizes no tragic importance in the situation. To the latter, the v

ion of a mountain; and, instead of receiving an outline, naked and severe, perhaps, but true and impressive, we are introduced to a tiny field on its immeasurable side, and we go botanizing and insect-hunting there. This is realism; but it is the realism of texture, not of form and relation. It encourages our glance to be near-sighted instead of comprehensive. Above all, there is a misgiving that we do not touch the writer's true quality, and that these scenes of his, so elaborately and conscientiously prepared, have cost him much thought and pains, but not one throb of the heart or throe of the spirit. The experiences that he depicts have not, one fancies, marked wrinkles on his forehead or turned his hair gray. There are two kinds of reserve-the reserve which feels that its message is too mighty for it, and the reserve which feels that it is too mighty for its message. Our new school of writers is reserved, but its reserve does not strike one as being of the former kind. It cannot be said of any one of Mr. James's stories, "This is his best," or "This is his worst," because no one of them is all one way. They have their phases of strength and veracity, and, also, phases that are neither veracious nor strong. The ca

ative,-in the sense in which I have attempted to define the word. There are two ways of warning a man against unwholesome life-one is, to show him a picture of disease; the other is, to show him a picture of health. The former is the negative, the latter the positive treatment. Both have their merits; but the latter is, perhaps, the better adapted to novels, the former to essays. A novelist should not only know what he has got; he should also know what he wants. His mind should have an active, or th

atures of infinitely complicated structure, and that even the least of these complications, if it is portrayed at all, is worth portraying truthfully. But we cannot forget, on the other hand, that honest emotion and hearty action are necessary to the wholesomeness of society, because in their absence society is afflicted with a lamentable sameness and triviality; the old primitive impulses remain, but the food on which they are compelled to feed is insipid and unsustaining; our eyes are turned inward instead of outward, and each one of us becomes himself the Rome towards which all his roads lead. Such books as these authors have written are not the Great American Novel, because they take life and humanity not in their loftier, but in their lesser manifestations. They are the side scenes and the background of a story that has yet to be written. That story will have the interest not only of the collision of private passions and efforts, but of the great ideas and principles which characterize and animate a nation. It will discriminate between what is accidental and what is permanent, between what is realisti