Confessions and Criticisms by Julian Hawthorne

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The pioneer, in whatever field of thought or activity, is apt to be also
the most distinguished figure therein. The consciousness of being the
first augments the keenness of his impressions, and a mind that can see
and report in advance of others a new order of things may claim a finer
organization than the ordinary. The vitality of nature animates him who
has insight to discern her at first hand, whereas his followers miss the
freshness of the morning, because, instead of discovering, they must be
content to illustrate and refine. Those of our writers who betray
Turguenieff's influence are possibly his 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 and
himself besides; and, when we know him, there is nothing left worth
knowing about the others. In Shakespeare's Hamlet and Enobarbus, in
Fielding's Squire Western, in Walter Scott's Edie Ochiltree and Meg
Merrilies, in Balzac's Pere Goriot and Madame Marneff, in Thackeray's
Colonel Newcome and Becky Sharp, in Turguenieff's Bazarof and Dimitri
Roudine, we meet persons who exhaust for us the groups to which they
severally belong. Bazarof, the nihilist, for instance, reveals to us the
motives and influences that have made nihilism, so that we feel that
nothing essential on that score remains to be learnt.

The ability to recognize and select types is a test of a novelist's talent
and experience. It implies energy to rise above the blind walls of one's
private circle of acquaintance; the power to perceive what phases of
thought and existence are to be represented as well as who represents
them; the sagacity to analyze the age or the moment and reproduce its
dominant features. The feat is difficult, and, when done, by no means
blows its own trumpet. On the contrary, 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 his stories--
characters that represent nothing but themselves, or possibly some
eccentricity of invention on their author's part, will gain the latter a
reputation for cleverness higher than his fellow's who portrays mankind in
its masses as well as in its details. But the finest imagination is not
that which evolves strange images, but that which explains seeming
contradictions, and reveals the unity within the difference and the
harmony beneath the discord.

Were we to compare our fictitious literature, as a whole, with that of
England, the balance must be immeasurably on the English side. Even
confining ourselves to to-day, and to the prospect of to-morrow, it must
be conceded that, in settled method, in guiding tradition, in training and
associations 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
hundreds of years; and to say that such material begins to lose its
freshness is not putting the case too strongly. He has not been able to
detach himself from the paralyzing background of English conventionality.
The vein was rich, but it is worn out; and the half-dozen pioneers had all
the luck.

There is no commanding individual imagination in England--nor, to say the
truth, does there seem to be any in America. But we have what they have
not--a national imaginative tendency. There are no fetters upon our fancy;
and, however deeply our real estate may be mortgaged, there is freedom for
our ideas. England has not yet appreciated the true inwardness of a
favorite phrase of ours,--a new deal. And yet she is tired to death of her
own stale stories; and when, by chance, any one of her writers happens to
chirp out a note a shade different from the prevailing key, the whole
nation pounces down upon him, with a shriek of half-incredulous joy, and
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
rejection of what is lifeless and insincere. We desire no resurrection of
the Ann Radclyffe type of romance: but the true alternative to this is not
such a mixture of the police gazette and the medical reporter as Emile
Zola offers us. So far as Zola is conscientious, let him live; but, in so
far as he is revolting, let him die. Many things in the world seem ugly
and purposeless; but to a deeper intelligence than ours, they are a part
of beauty and design. What is ugly and irrelevant, can never enter, as
such, into a work of art; because the artist is bound, by a sacred
obligation, to show us the complete curve only,--never the undeveloped
fragments.

But were the firmament of England still illuminated with her Dickenses,
her Thackerays, and her Brontes, I should still hold our state to be
fuller of promise than hers. It may be admitted that almost everything was
against our producing anything good in literature. Our men, in the first
place, had to write for nothing; because the publisher, who can steal a
readable English novel, will not pay for an American novel, for the mere
patriotic gratification 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 to receive his just meed of encouragement
and praise. Yet, in spite of all this, and not to mention honored names
that have ceased or are ceasing to cast their living weight into the
scale, we are contributing much that is fresh and original, and something,
it may be, that is of permanent value, to literature. We have accepted the
situation; and, since no straw has been vouchsafed us to make our bricks
with, we are trying manfully to make them without.

It will not be necessary, however, to call the roll of all the able and
popular gentlemen who are contending in the forlorn hope against
disheartening odds; and as for the ladies who have honored our literature
by their contributions, it will perhaps be well to adopt regarding 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 two men with whom
every critic of American novelists has to reckon; who represent what is
carefullest and newest in American fiction; and it remains to inquire how
far their work has been moulded by the skeptical or radical spirit of
which Turguenieff is the chief exemplar.

The author of "Daisy Miller" had been writing for several years before the
bearings of his course could be confidently calculated. Some of his
earlier tales,--as, for example, "The Madonna of the Future,"--while
keeping near reality on one side, are on the other eminently fanciful and
ideal. He seemed to feel the attraction of fairyland, but to lack
resolution to swallow it whole; so, instead of idealizing both persons and
plot, as Hawthorne had ventured to do, he tried to persuade real persons
to work out an ideal destiny. But the tact, delicacy, and reticence with
which these attempts were made did not blind him to the essential
incongruity; either realism or idealism had to go, and step by step he
dismissed the latter, until at length Turguenieff's current caught him. By
this time, however, his culture had become too wide, and his independent
views too confirmed, to admit of his 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 Turguenieff'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 vision of life is
so ominous that his voice waxes sonorous and terrible; his eyes, made keen
by foreboding, see the leading elements of the conflict, and them only; he
is no idle singer of an empty day, but he speaks because speech springs
out of him. To his mind, the foundations of human welfare are in jeopardy,
and it is full time to decide what means may avert the danger. But the
American does not think any cataclysm is impending, or if any there be,
nobody can help it. The subjects that best repay attention are the minor
ones of civilization, culture, behavior; how to avoid certain vulgarities
and follies, how to inculcate certain principles: and to illustrate these
points heroic types are not needed. In other words, the situation being
unheroic, so must the actors be; for, apart from the inspirations of
circumstances, Napoleon no more than John Smith is recognizable as a hero.

Now, in adopting this view, a writer places himself under several manifest
disadvantages. If you are to be an agnostic, it is better (for novel-
writing purposes) not to be a complacent or resigned one. Otherwise your
characters will find it difficult to show what is in them. A man reveals
and classifies himself in proportion to the severity of the condition or
action required of him, hence the American novelist's people are in
considerable straits to make themselves adequately known to us. They
cannot lay bare their inmost soul over a cup of tea or a picture by Corot;
so, in order to explain themselves, they must not only submit to
dissection at the author's hands, but must also devote no little time and
ingenuity to dissecting themselves and one another. But dissection is one
thing, and the living word rank from the heart and absolutely reeking of
the human creature that uttered it--the word that Turguenieff's people are
constantly uttering--is another. Moreover, in the dearth of commanding
traits and stirring events, there is a continual temptation to magnify
those which are petty and insignificant. Instead of a telescope to sweep
the heavens, we are furnished with a microscope to detect infusoria. We
want a description 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 cause may either lie in a lack of experience in a certain
direction on the writer's part; or else in his reluctance to write up to
the experience he has. The experience in question is not of the ways of
the world,--concerning which Mr. James has every sign of being politely
familiar,--nor of men and women in their every-day aspect; still less of
literary ways and means, for of these, in his own line, he is a master.
The experience referred to is experience of passion. If Mr. James be not
incapable of describing passion, at all events he has still to show that
he is capable of it. He has introduced us to many characters that seem to
have in them capacity for the highest passion,--as witness Christina
Light,--and yet he has never allowed them an opportunity to develop it. He
seems to evade the situation; but the evasion is managed with so much
plausibility that, although we may be disappointed, or even irritated, and
feel, more or less vaguely, that we have been unfairly dealt with, we are
unable to show exactly where or how the unfairness comes in. Thus his
novels might be compared to a beautiful face, full of culture and good
breeding, but lacking that fire of the eye and fashion of the lip that
betray a living human soul.

The other one of the two writers whose names are so often mentioned
together, seems to have taken up the subject of our domestic and social
pathology; and the minute care and conscientious veracity which he has
brought to bear upon his work has not been surpassed, even by Shakespeare.
But, if I could venture a criticism upon his productions, it would be to
the effect that there is not enough fiction in them. They are elaborate
and amiable reports of what we see around us. They are not exactly
imaginative,--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
theorizing, as well as a passive, or contemplative, side. He should have
energy to discount the people he personally knows; the power to perceive
what phases of thought are to be represented, as well as to describe the
persons who happen to be their least inadequate representatives; the
sagacity to analyze the age or the moment, and to reveal its tendency and
meaning. Mr. Howells has produced a great deal of finely wrought tapestry;
but does not seem, as yet, to have found a hall fit to adorn it with.

And yet Mr. James and Mr. Howells have done more than all the rest of us
to make our literature respectable during the last ten years. If texture
be the object, they have brought texture to a fineness never surpassed
anywhere. They have discovered charm and grace in much that was only blank
before. They have detected and described points of human nature hitherto
unnoticed, which, if not intrinsically important, will one day be made
auxiliary to the production of pictures of broader as well as minuter
veracity than have heretofore been produced. All that seems wanting thus
far is a direction, an aim, a belief. Agnosticism has brought about a
pause for a while, and no doubt a pause is preferable to some kinds of
activity. It may enable us, when the time comes to set forward again, to
do so with better equipment and more intelligent purpose. It will not do
to be always at a prophetic heat of enthusiasm, sympathy, denunciation:
the coolly critical mood is also useful to prune extravagance and promote
a sense of responsibility. The novels of Mr. James and of Mr. Howells have
taught us that men and women are creatures 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 realistic and what is real, between what is sentimental and what
is sentiment. It will show us not only what we are, but what we are to be;
not only what to avoid, but what to do. It will rest neither in the tragic
gloom of Turguenieff, nor in the critical composure of James, nor in the
gentle deprecation of Howells, but will demonstrate that the weakness of
man is the motive and condition of his strength. It will not shrink from
romance, nor from ideality, nor from artistic completeness, because it
will know at what depths and heights of life these elements are truly
operative. It will be American, not because its scene is laid or its
characters born in the United States, but because its burden will be
reaction against old tyrannies and exposure of new hypocrisies; a
refutation of respectable falsehoods, and a proclamation of
unsophisticated truths. Indeed, let us take heed and diligently improve
our native talent, lest a day come when the Great American Novel make its
appearance, but written in a foreign language, and by some author who--
however purely American at heart--never set foot on the shores of the
Republic.

CHAPTER III.

AMERICANISM IN FICTION.

Contemporary criticism will have it that, in order to create an American
Literature, we must use American materials. The term "Literature" has, no
doubt, come to be employed in a loose sense. The London _Saturday Review_
has (or used to have until lately) a monthly two-column article devoted to
what it called "American Literature," three-fourths of which were devoted
to an examination of volumes of State Histories, Statistical Digests,
Records of the Census, and other such works as were never, before or
since, suspected of being literature; while the remaining fourth mentioned
the titles (occasionally with a line of comment) of whatever productions
were at hand in the way of essays, novels, and poetry. This would seem to
indicate that we may have--nay, are already possessed of--an American
Literature, composed of American materials, provided only that we consent
to adopt the _Saturday Review's_ conception of what literature is.

Many of us believe, however, that the essays, the novels, and the poetry,
as well as the statistical digests, ought to go to the making up of a
national literature. It has been discovered, however, that the existence
of the former does not depend, to the same extent as that of the latter,
upon the employment of exclusively American material. A book about the
census, if it be not American, is nothing; but a poem or a romance, though
written by a native-born American, who, perhaps, has never crossed the
Atlantic, not only may, but frequently does, have nothing in it that can
be called essentially American, except its English and, occasionally, its
ideas. And the question arises whether such productions can justly be held
to form component parts of what shall hereafter be recognized as the
literature of America.

How was it with the makers of English literature? Beginning with Chaucer,
his "Canterbury Pilgrims" is English, both in scene and character; it is
even mentioned of the Abbess that "Frenche of Paris was to her unknowe";
but his "Legende of Goode Women" might, so far as its subject-matter is
concerned, have been written by a French, a Spanish, or an Italian
Chaucer, just as well as by the British Daniel. Spenser's "Faerie Queene"
numbers St. George and King Arthur among its heroes; but its scene is laid
in Faerie Lande, if it be laid anywhere, and it is a barefaced moral
allegory throughout. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, the elimination
of which from English literature would undeniably be a serious loss to it;
yet, of these plays twenty-three have entirely foreign scenes and
characters. Milton, as a political writer, was English; but his "Paradise
Lost and Regained," his "Samson," his "Ode on the Nativity," his "Comus,"
bear no reference to the land of his birth. Dryden's best-known work to-
day is his "Alexander's Feast." Pope has come down to us as the translator
of Homer. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are the great quartet
of English novelists of the last century; but Smollett, in his preface to
"Roderick Random," after an admiring allusion to the "Gil Blas" of Le
Sage, goes on to say: "The following sheets I have modelled on his plan";
and Sterne was always talking and thinking about Cervantes, and comparing
himself to the great Spaniard: "I think there is more laughable humor,
with an equal degree of Cervantic satire, if not more, than in the last,"
he writes of one of his chapters, to "my witty widow, Mrs. F." Many even
of Walter Scott's romances are un-English in their elements; and the fame
of Shelley, Keats, and Byron rests entirely upon their "foreign" work.
Coleridge's poetry and philosophy bear no technical stamp of nationality;
and, to come down to later times, Carlyle was profoundly imbued with
Germanism, while the "Romola" of George Eliot and the "Cloister and the
Hearth" of Charles Reade are by many considered to be the best of their
works. In the above enumeration innumerable instances in point are, of
course, omitted; but enough have been given, perhaps, to show that
imaginative writers have not generally been disowned by their country on
the ground that they have availed themselves, in their writings, of other
scenes and characters than those of their own immediate neighborhoods.

The statistics of the work of the foremost American writers could easily
be shown to be much more strongly imbued with the specific flavor of their
environment. Benjamin Franklin, though he was an author before the United
States existed, was American to the marrow. The "Leather-Stocking Tales"
of Cooper are the American epic. Irving's "Knickerbocker" and his
"Woolfert's Roost" will long outlast his other productions. Poe's most
popular tale, "The Gold-Bug," is American in its scene, and so is "The
Mystery of Marie Roget," in spite of its French nomenclature; and all that
he wrote is strongly tinged with the native hue of his strange genius.
Longfellow's "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" and "Miles Standish," and such
poems as "The Skeleton in Armor" and "The Building of the Ship," crowd out
of sight his graceful translations and adaptations. Emerson is the
veritable American eagle of our literature, so that to be Emersonian is to
be American. Whittier and Holmes have never looked beyond their native
boundaries, and Hawthorne has brought the stern gloom of the Puritan
period and the uneasy theorizings of the present day into harmony with the
universal and permanent elements of human nature. There was certainly
nothing European visible in the crude but vigorous stories of Theodore
Winthrop; and Bret Harte, the most brilliant figure among our later men,
is not only American, but Californian,--as is, likewise, the Poet of the
Sierras. It is not necessary to go any further. Mr. Henry James, having
enjoyed early and singular opportunities of studying the effects of the
recent annual influx of Americans, cultured and otherwise, into England
and the Continent, has very sensibly and effectively, and with exquisite
grace of style and pleasantness of thought, made the phenomenon the theme
of a remarkable series of stories. Hereupon the cry of an "International
School" has been raised, and critics profess to be seriously alarmed lest
we should ignore the signal advantages for _mise-en-scene_ presented by
this Western half of the planet, and should enter into vain and
unpatriotic competition with foreign writers on their own ground. The
truth is, meanwhile, that it would have been a much surer sign of
affectation in us to have abstained from literary comment upon the patent
and notable fact of this international _rapprochement_,--which is just as
characteristic an American trait as the episode of the Argonauts of 1849,
--and we have every reason to be grateful to Mr. Henry James, and to his
school, if he has any, for having rescued us from the opprobrium of so
foolish a piece of know-nothingism. The phase is, of course, merely
temporary; its interest and significance will presently be exhausted; but,
because we are American, are we to import no French cakes and English ale?
As a matter of fact, we are too timid and self-conscious; and these
infirmities imply a much more serious obstacle to the formation of a
characteristic literature than does any amount of gadding abroad.

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