CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE PR 99.M4Hr"""'""'*'"-"'"^ 3 1924 013 355 916 Date Due ^ufU^^jmrr^rz liHfiUi6'40 06 0tt NO. 23233 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 335591 6 'Books by 'Brander {Matthews : Essays and Criticisms French Dramatists of the 19th Century Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more or less importance Aspects of Fiction, and Other Essays The Historical Novel, and Other Essays Essays on English (in press) THE HISTORICAL NOVEL AND OTHER ESSAYS THE HISTORICAL NOVEL AND OTHER ESSAYS BY BRANDER MATTHEWS NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1901 K 7s k TR A. 14 5 2^-0 Copyright, 1901, by Brander Matthews THE CAXTON PRESS NEW YORK. TO MARK TWAIN IN TESTIMONY OF MY REGARD FOR THE MAN AND OF MY RESPECT FOR THE LITERARY ARTIST CONTENTS PAGE I The Historical Navel 3 II Romance against Romanticism ... 31 'III New Trials for Old Favorites ... 49 IV The Study of Fiction 75 • V Alphonse Daudet 109 VI On a Novel of Thackeray's . . . .149 VII H. C. Bunner 165 VIII Literature as a Profession . . . .193 IX The Relation of the Drama to Literature 2 1 7 X The Conventions of the Drama . . .241 XI yi Critic of the Acted Drama: William Archer 273 XII The Art and Mystery of Collaboration . 295 I THE HISTORICAL NOVEL THE HISTORICAL NOVEL WHEN Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his 'Note on Realism,' and declared that "the historical novel is dead," he did not think he would live to be the author of the ' Master of Ballantrae.' But when Prosper Merimee ex- pressed to a correspondent his belief that the historical novel was a "bastard form," he could look back without reproach upon his own ' Chronique de Charles IX ' — bne of the finest examples of the kind of fiction he chose to de- spise. Whether or not most readers of English fiction at the end of the nineteenth century ap- prove Merimee's opinion that the historical novel is illegitimate by birth, few of them will agree with Stevenson in deeming it defunct. If we can judge by the welcome it receives from the writers of newspaper notices, it is not moribund even ; and if we are influenced by the immense sale of 'Ben-Hur' and by the broadening vogue of 'Quo Vadis,' we may go so far as to believe that it was never stronger or fuller of life. THE HISTORICAL NOVEL We might even suggest that the liking for his- torical fiction is novi^ so keen that the public is not at all particular as to the veracity of the his- tory out of which the fiction has been manufac- tured, since it accepts the invented facts of the Chronicles of Zenda quite as eagerly as it re- ceives the better-documented ' Memoirs of a Min- ister of France.' More than any other British author of his years, Stevenson worked in accord w^ith the theories of art which have been elaborated and expounded in France ; and it may be that when he declared the historical novel to be dead he was thinking rather of French literature than of English. There is no doubt that in France the historical novel is not cherished. No one of the living masters of fiction in France has attempted any but contem- porary studies. M. Daudet, M. Zola, M. Bourget, find all the subjects they need in the life of their own times. Flaubert's fame is due to his mas- terly 'Madame Bovary,' and not to his splendid 'Salammbd.' So sharp is the French reaction against Romanticism that even impressionist critics like M. Jules Lemaitre and M. Anatole France do not overpraise the gay romances of the elder Dumas, as Stevenson did. In France the historical novel has no standing in the court of serious criticism. As Merimee wrote in the correspondence from which one quotation has 4 THE HIStORICAL NOVEL already been made, "History, in my eyes, is a I sacred thing." Historical fiction suffers in France from the same discredit as historical painting, and for the same reasons. It is either too easy to be worth while — a French critic might say — or so diffi- cult as to be impossible. When a young man once went to Courbet for advice, saying that his vocation was to be a historical painter, the artist promptly responded: "I don't doubt it; and therefore begin by giving three months to mak- ing a portrait of your father! " Perhaps French opinion is nowhere more ac- curately voiced than by M. Anatole France in the 'Jardin d'Epicure': "We cannot reprio^ duce with any accuracy what no longer exists^ When we see that a painter has to take all thel trouble in the world to represent to us, more or less exactly, a scene in the time of Louis Philippe, we may despair of his ever being able to give us the slightest idea of an event contemporary with Saint Louis or Augustus. We weary ourselves copying armor and old chests ; but the artists of the past did not worry themselves about so empty an exactness. They lent to the hero of legend or history the costume and the looks of their own contemporaries; and thus they depicted naturally their own soul and their own century. Now what can an artist do better ? " THE HISTORICAL NOVEL In Other words, Paul Veronese's ' Marriage at Cana ' is franltly a revelation of the Italian Rena- scence; and this revelation is not contaminated by any fifteenth-century guess at the manners and customs of Judea in the first century. It is difficult to surmise hov\^ some of the laboriously archeological pictures of the nineteenth century will affect an observer of the twenty-first century. As in painting, so in the drama: Shakspere made no effort to suggest the primitive manners and customs of Scotland to the spectators of his 'Macbeth'; and if the characters of 'Julius Caesar ' are Roman, it is chiefly because of the local color that chanced to leak through from North's Plutarch. What Shakspere aimed at was the creation of living men and women — interesting because of their intense humanity, eternal because of their truth and vitality. He never sought to differentiate Scotchmen and Danes of the past from Englishmen of the present. He lent to all his personages the vocabulary, the laws, the usages, the costumes which were familiar to the playgoers that flocked to applaud his pieces. Archeology was unknown to him and to them ; anachronism did not affright them or him. Probably he would have brushed aside any demand for exactness of fact as an attempt to impose an unfair restraint upon the liberty of the dramatist — whose business it was to write 6 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL plays to be acted in a theater, and not to prepare lectures4o be delivered in a college hall. Shak- spere and Veronese, each in his own art, worked freely, as though wholly unconscious of any dif- ference between their own contemporaries and the subjects of the Caesars. The compilers of the ' Gesta Romanorum ' had no conception of the elements of either geog- raphy or chronology; and the authors of the Romances of Chivalry seem to have been as ignorant, although their scientific nihilism is per- haps wilful — like Stockton's when he tells us a 'Tale of Negative Gravity.' /The essential like- ness of the Romances of Chivalry to the Wa- verley Novels has been pointed out more than once; and in each group of tales we find the hero, or the technical hero's rescuing friend, om- nipresent, omniscient, and almost omnipotent. The essential difference between the two kinds of fiction is quite as obvious also : it lies in the fact that Scott and his followers know what history is, and that even when they vary from it they are aware of what they are doing. / The historical novel, as we understand it to- day, like the historical drama and like historical painting, could not come into being until after history had established itself, and after chronology and geography had lent to history their indispen- sable aid. Nowadays the novelist and the drama- 7 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL tist and the painter are conscious that people do not talk and dress and behave as they did a hun- dred years ago, or a thousand.'--' They do not know precisely how the people of those days did feel and think and act: they cannot know these things. The most they can do is to study the records of the past and make a guess, the success of which depends on their equipment and insight. / They accept their obligation to history and to its handmaids — an obligation which Shakspere and Veronese would have de- nied quite as frankly as the compilers of the ' Gesta Romanorum ' or the writers of the Ro- mances of Chivalry. Scott was appealing to a circle of more or less sophisticated readers, any one of whom might be an antiquary: he was to be tried by a jury of his peers. But the author of 'Amadis of Gaul,' for example, wrote for a public that cared as little as he himself did about the actual facts of the countries or of the periods his hero traversed in search of strange adventure. Although it is not difficult to detect here and there in Scott's predecessors the more or less fragmentary hints of which he availed himself, it would be absurd to deny that Scott is really the inventor of the historical novel, just as Poe was afterward the inventor of the detective story. In the ' Castle of Otranto ' Horace Walpole essayed to recall to life the Gothic period as he under- 8 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL Stood it; but — if we may judge by Mrs. Radcliffe and the rest of his immediate imitators — it was the tale of mystery he succeeded in writing and not the true historical novel. For this last, Wal- pole was without two things which Scott pos- sessed abundantly — the gift of story-telling and an intimate knowledge of more than one epoch of the past. And Scott had also two other qualifications which Walpole lacked: he was a poet and he was a humorist. As it happens, the steps that led Scott to the Waverley Novels are not hard to count. He began by collecting the ballads of the Border; and soon he wrote new ballads in the old manner. Then he linked ballads together, and so made ' Marmion ' and the ' Lady of the Lake.' When he thought that the public was weary of his verse, he told one of these ballad tales in prose, and so made 'Waverley.' But he had read Miss Edgeworth, and he wished to do for the Scottish peasant what she had done for the Irish : thus it is that the prose tales contained sketches of character at once robust and delicate. In time, when he tired of Scotch subjects, he crossed the Border; and in 'Ivanhoe' he first applied to an English subject the formula he had invented for use in North Britain, helped in his handling of a medieval theme by his recollections of the ' Gotz von Berlichingen ' of Goethe, which 9 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL he had translated in his prentice days. After a while he crossed the Channel, and found that the method acquired in telling the Scotch stories en- abled him to write 'Quentin Durward,' a story of France, and the ' Talisman, ' a story of Palestine. Although he had to forego his main advantage when he left his native land, Scott did not aban- don his humor; and these later tales contain more than one memorable character, even if they reveal none so unforgetable as are a dozen or more in the Scotch stories. Probably the immense vogue of the Waverley Novels, as they came forth swiftly one after an- other in the first quarter of the nineteenth cen- tury, was due rather to the qualities they had in common with the 'Castle of Otranto' than to the qualities they had in common with 'Castle Rackrent.' No doubt it was the union of the merits of both schools that broadened the audi- ence to which the Waverley Novels appealed; but, in attaining his contemporary triumph, Scott owed more to Horace Walpole than to Maria Edgeworth. He surpassed Walpole immeasur- ably, because he was a man of deeper knowledge and broader sympathy. His audience was far wider than Miss Edgeworth's, because he infused into his Scottish tales a romantic flavor which she carefully excluded from her veracious por- trayals of Irish character. The historical novel Yet it may be suggested that the stories of Scott most likely to survive the centenary of their publication and to retain readers in the first quar- ter of the twentieth century are perhaps those in which he best withstands the comparison with Miss Edgeworth — the stories in which he has recorded types of Scottish character, with its mingled humor and pathos. For mere excite- ment our liking is eternal: but the fashion thereof is fickle; and we prefer our romantic adventures cut this way to-day and another way to-morrow. Our interest in our fellow-man subsists unchanged forever, and we take a perennial delight in the revelation of the subtleties of human nature. It is in the ' Antiquary ' and in the ' Heart of Mid- lothian ' that Scott is seen at his best; and it is by creating characters like Caleb Balderstone and Dugald Dalgetty and Wandering Willie that he has deserved to endure. In work of this kind Scott showed himself a Realist. He revealed himself as a humorist with a compassionate understanding of his fellow-crea- tures. He gave play to that sense of reality which Bagehot praises as one of the most valuable of his characteristics. When he is dealing with me- dieval life, — which he knew not at first hand, as he knew his Scottish peasants, but afar off from books, — the result is unreal. He was as well read in history as any man of his time; and he THE HISTOarCAL NOVEL himself explained his superiority over the host of imitators who encompassed him about, by say- ing that they read to write, while he wrote because he had read. But this knowledge was second-hand, at best: it was not like his day-in- day-out acquaintance with the men of his own time ; and this is why the unreality of ' Ivanhoe, ' for instance, is becoming more and more obvious to us. The breaking of the lances in the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch is to us a hollow sham, like the polite tournament at Eglinton. The deeds of daring of Ivanhoe and of the Black Knight and of Robin Hood still appeal to the boy in us ; but they are less and less convincing to the man. Although Ivanhoe and Robin Hood and the Black Knight are boldly projected figures, their psychology is summary. How could it be any- thing else ? With all his genius, Scott was em- phatically a man of his own time and of his own country, with the limitations and the preju- dices of the eighteenth century and of the British Isles. Few of his warmest admirers would ven- ture to suggest that he was as broad in sympathy as Shakspere, or as universal in his vision; and yet he was trying to reconstruct the past for us, in deed and feeling and thought — the very thing that Shakspere never attempted. The author of ' Much Ado about Nothing ' and of the ' Comedy of Errors ' was content to people the foreign plots THE HISTORICAL NOVEL he borrowed so lightly with the Elizabethans he knew so well. The author of ' Ivanhoe ' and of the ' Talisman ' made a strenuous effort to body forth the very spirit of epochs and of lands wholly unlike the spirit of the eighteenth century in the British Isles. It is a proof of Scott's genius that he came so near success; but failure was inevitable. "After all," said Taine, "his char- acters, to whatever age he transports them, are his neighbors — canny farmers, vain lairds, gloved gentlemen, young marriageable ladies, all more or less commonplace, that is, well ordered by education and character, hundreds of miles away from the voluptuous fools of the Restoration or the heroic brutes and forcible beasts of the Mid- dle Ages." The fact is that no man can step off his own/" shadow. By no effort of the^wjll. can he thrust/ himself backward into the past and shed his share of the accumulations of the ages, of all the myriad accretions of thought and sentiment and know- ledge, stored up in the centuries that lie between him and the time he is trying to treat. Of ne- cessity he puts into his picture of days gone by more or less of the days in which he is living^ Shakspere frankly accepted the situation: Scott attempted the impossible. Racine wrote trage- dies on Greek subjects ; and he submitted to be bound by rules which he supposed to have been '3 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL laid down by a great Greek critic. To the spec- tator who saw these plays when they were first produced, they may have seemed Greek; but to us, two hundred years later, they appear to be perhaps the most typical product of the age of Louis XIV; and a great French critic has sug- gested that to bring out their full flavor they should be performed nowadays by actors wear- ing, not the flowing draperies of Athens, but the elaborate court-dress of Versailles. ' Phddre ' is interesting to us to-day, not because it is Greek, but because it is French; and some of Scott's stories, hailed on their publication as faithful re- productions of medieval manners, will doubtless have another interest, in time, as illustrations of what the beginning of the nineteenth century believed the Middle Ages to be. Not only is itimpossible for a man to get away from his own J^SS^, but it is equally impossi- ble for him to get away from his own nationality. How rarely has an author been able to create a character of a different stock from his own ! Cer- tainly most of the great figures of fiction are compa- triots of their makers. We have had many carpet- bag novelists of late — men and women who go forth gaily and study a foreign country from the platform of a parlor-car; and some of these are able to spin yarns which hold the attention of listening thousands. What the people of the "4 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL foreign countries think of these superficial tales we can measure when we recall the contempt in which we Americans hold the efforts made by- one and another of the British novelists to lay the scene of a story here in the United States. Dickens and Trollope and Reade were men of varied gifts, keen observers all of them ; but how lamentable the spectacle when they endeavored to portray an American! Probably most Ameri- can endeavors to portray an Englishman are quite as foolish in the eyes of the British. Dickens twice chose to compete with the carpet-bag nov- elists ; and if we Americans are unwilling to see a correct picture of our life in 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' we may be sure that the French are as unwilling to acknowledge the ' Tale of Two Cities ' as an accurate portrayal of the most dramatic epoch in their history. There are those who think it was a piece of impertinence for a Londoner like Dickens to suppose that he could escape the in- exorable limitations of his birth and education and hope to see Americans or Frenchmen as they really are; finer artists than Dickens have failed in this — artists of a far more exquisite touch. The masterpieces of the great painters instantly declare the race to which the limner himself be- longed. Rubens and Velasquez and Titian trav- eled and saw the world ; they have left us por- traits of men of many nationalities : and yet every >5 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL man and woman Rubens painted seems to us Dutch ; every man and woman Velasquez painted seems to us Spanish ; every man and woman Ti- tian painted seems to us Italian. The artists of our own time, for all their cosmopolitanism, are no better off; and when M. Bonnat has for sitters Americans of marked characteristics he cannot help reproducing them on canvas as though they had been reflected in a Gallic mirror. In short, a man can no more escape from his race than he can escape from his century ; it is the misfortune of the historical novelist that he must try to do both. The ' Atalanta in Calydon ' of Mr. Swinburne has been praised as the most Greek of all modern attempts to reproduce Greek tragedy; and it may deserve this eulogy — but what of it ? It may be the most Greek of the modern plays, but is it really Greek after all? Would not an ancient Greek have found in it many things quite incom- prehensible to him ? Even if it is more or less Greek, is it as Greek as the plays the Greeks themselves wrote ? Why should an Englishman pride himself on having written a Greek play .? At best he has but accomplished a feat of main strength, a tour de force, an exercise in literary gymnastics 1 A pastiche, a paste jewel, is not a precious possession. A Greek play written by a modern Englishman remains absolutely outside |6 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL the current of contemporary literature. It is a Itind of thing the Greeks never dreamed of doing; they wrote Greek plays because they were Greeks and could do nothing else; they did not imitate the literature of the Assyrians nor that of the Egyptians; they swam in the full center of the current of their own time. If Sophocles were a modern Englishman, who can doubt that he would write English plays, with no backward glance toward Greek tragedy ? The lucidity, the sobriety, the elevation of the Greeks we may borrow from them, if we can, without taking over also the mere external forms due to the accidents of their age. Art has difficulties enough without imposing ! on it limitations no longer needful. Let the]/ dead past bury its dead. This has been the motto of every great artist, ancient and modern, of Dante, of Shakspere, and of Moliere. A man who has work to do in the world does not em- barrass himself by using a dead language to con- vey his ideas. Milton's Latin verse may be as elegant as its admirers assert; but if he had written nothing else, this page might need a foot-note to explain who he was. If a layman may venture an opinion, the use of Gothic archi- tecture in America at the end of the nineteenth century seems an equivalent anachronism. Gothic is a dead language; and no man to-day in the >7 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL United States uses it naturally, as he does the vernacular. One of the most accomplished of American architects recently drev^^ attention to the fact that "such a perfect composition and exquisite design as M. Vaudremer's church of Montrouge, Paris, unquestionably the best and ablest attempt in our time to revive medieval art, is considered cold even by his own pupils " ; and then Mr. Hastings explains that "this is be- cause it lacks the life we are living, and at the same time is without the real medieval life." Gothic was at its finest when it was the only architecture that was known, and when it was used naturally and handled freely and uncon- sciously — just as the best Greek plays were written by the Greeks. fin other words, the really trustworthy histori- cal novels are those which were a-writing while the history was a-making. If the ' Tale of Two Cities ' misrepresents the Paris of 1789, the ' Pick- wick Papers ' represents with amazing humor and with photographic fidelity certain aspects of the London of 1837. The one gives us what Dickens guessed about France in the preceding century, and the other tells us what he saw in England in his own time. Historical novel for historical novel, ' Pickwick ' is superior to the 'Tale of Two Cities,' and 'Nicholas Nickleby' to ' Barnaby Rudge.' No historical novelist will THE HISTORICAL NOVEL ever be able to set before us the state of affairs in the South in the decade preceding the Civil War with the variety and the veracity of ' Uncle Tom's Cabin,' written in that decade. No American historian has a more minute acquaintance with the men who made the United States than Mr. Paul Leicester Ford ; and yet one may venture to predict that Mr. Ford will never write a historical novel having a tithe of the historical value pos- sessed by his suggestive study of the conditions of contemporary politics in New York city, the •Honorable Peter Stirling.' Nevertheless there are few librarians bold enough to catalogue ' Pick- wick ' and 'Uncle Tom ' and ' Peter Stirling ' under historical fiction. One of the foremost merits of the novel, as of the drama, is that it enlarges our sympathy. It compels us to shift our point of view, and often to assume that antithetic to our custom. It forces us to see not only how the other half lives, but also how it feels and how it thinks. We learn not merely what the author meant to teach us : we absorb, in addition, a host of things he did not know he was putting in — things he took for granted, some of them, and things he implied as a matter of course. This unconscious rich- ness of instruction cannot but be absent from the historical novel — or at best it is so obscured as to be almost non-existent. '9 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL In ' Anna Karenina ' one can see Russian life in the end of this century as Tolstoy knows it, having beheld it with his own eyes: in 'War and Peace ' we have Russian life in the begin- ning of this century as Tolstoy supposes it to have been, not having seen it. One is the testi- mony of an eye-witness : the other is given on information and belief. 'Pendennis' and the 'Newcomes' and 'Vanity Fair' — for all that the last includes the battle of Waterloo, fought when Thackeray was but a boy — are written out of the fulness of knowledge : ' Henry Esmond ' is | \ written out of the fulness of learning only. In ^ the former there is an unconscious accuracy of reproduction, while in the latter unconsciousness ■ is impossible. The historical novel cannot help being what the French call voulu — a word j j ' that denotes both effort and artificiality. The I i story-teller who deals honestly with his own time achieves, without taking thought, a fidelity '^ "'' simply impossible to the story-teller who deals with the past, no matter how laboriously the lat- j ter may toil after it. : ,' In fact, the more he labors, the less life is there likely to be in the tale he is telling: humanity is choked by archeology. It calls for no research to set forth the unending conflict of duty and desire, for example. If we examine carefully the\ ^ best of the stories usually classed under historical ' ' THE HISTORICAL NOVEL fiction we shall find those to be the most satis- factory in which the history is of least importance, in which it is present only as a background.. The examination may lead to a subdivision of the class of historical fiction into the actual his- torical novel and the novel in which history is wholly subordinate, not to say merely incidental. A British critic. Professor George Saintsbury, has laid down the law that "the true historical novelist employs the reader's presumed interest in historical scene and character as an instrument to make his own work attractive." Although it would be easy to dissent from this dictum, it may be used to explain the distinction drawn in the preceding paragraph. >jC^ le of the past is_.jiQt necessarilyj true hi^torkayiovel: it is a true his- fbricaTnovel only when the historical events are woven into the texture of the story.,/ Applying this test, we see that the ' Bride of Lammermoor' is not a true historical novel ; and this is perhaps the reason why it is held in high esteem by all lovers of genuine Romance. By the same token, the ' Scarlet Letter ' is not a true historical novel. Neither in the ' Bride of Lammermoor ' nor in the ' Scarlet Letter ' is there any reliance upon historical scene or character for attraction. Scott was narrating again a legend of an inexplicable mystery: but although the period of its occur- rence was long past when he wrote, he presented THE HISTORICAL NOVEL simply the characters enmeshed in the fateful ad- venture, and relied for the attractiveness of his story upon the inherent interest of the weird climax toward which the reader is hurried breath- less under the weight of impending doom. Hawthorne was captivated by a study of con- science, the incidents of which could be brought out more conveniently and more effectively by throwing back the time of the tale into the re- mote past. In another story of Scott's, not equal to the 'Bride of Lammermoor' in its tragic intensity, but superb in its resolute handling of emotion, the 'Heart of Midlothian,' there is perhaps a stitfer infusion of actual history; but it would be rash to suggest that in its composition the author relied on historical scene or character to make his work attractive. The attraction of the ' Heart of Midlothian ' lies in its presentation of character at the crisis of its existence. So in the ' Romola ' of George Eliot, although the author obviously spent her strength in trying to transmute the an- nals of Florence into her narrative, the historical part is unconvincing; the episode of Savonarola is seen to be an excrescenc^; and what remains erect now is a wholly imaginary trinity — the noble figure of Romola, the pretty womanliness of little Tessa, and the easy-going Tito, with his moral fiber slowly disintegrating under succes- THE HISTORICAL NOVEL sive temptations. Tito is one of the great tri- umphs of modern fiction, not because he is a Greek of the Renascence, but because he is eternal and to be found whenever and wherever man lacks strength to resist himself. . Ji we were thus to go down the list of so-called \ historical novels, one by one, we might discover I that those which were most solidly rooted in our | regard and affection are to be included in the sub- . division wherein history itself is only a casual | framework for a searching study of human char- ! acter, and that they are cherished for the veryi same qualities as are possessed by the great nov-' els of modern life./ Without going so far as toj say that the best historical novel is that which': has the least history, we may at least confess the ; frank inferiority of the other subdivision in which j the author has been rash enough to employ his- torical scene and character to make his own work attractive. What gives charm and valuejtd 'Henry Esmond' is exactly what gives charrn^ and value to ' Vanity Fair ' — Thackeray's under- standing of his fellow-man, his sympathetic in- sight into human nature, his happy faculty for dramatically revealing character by situation. Perhaps the eighteenth-century atmosphere, with which Thackeray was able to surround Esmond only by infinite skill, is not breathed comfortably by the most of those who enjoy the book for its 23 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL manly qualities. One feels that the author has won his wager — but at what a cost, and at what a risk ! Some logical readers of this essay may be moved to put two and two together, and to accuse the present writer of a desire to disparage the historical novel, because he hks tried to show, first, that the novelists cannot reproduce in their pages the men and women of another epoch as these really thought and felt, and, sec- ond, that the novelists who have attempted his- torical fiction have best succeeded when they brought the fiction to the center of the stage and left the history in the background. But to draw this conclusion would be unjust, since the writer really agrees with the views of Sainte-Beuve as expressed in a letter to Champfleury: "The novel is a vast field of experiment, open to all the forms of genius. It is the future epic, the only one, probably, that modern manners will hereafter justify. Let us not bind it too tightly; let us not lay down its theory too rigidly; let us not organize it." To point out that a historical novel is great — when it is great — because of its possession of the identical qualities that give validity to a study of modern life, is not to suggest that only the contemporary novel is legitimate. To dwell on the deficiencies of the historical novel is not to propose that only realistic fiction be tolerated 24 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL hereafter. But perhaps a due consideration of these inherent defects of the historical novel may lead the disinterested reader to confess its essen- tial inferiority to the more authentic fiction, in which the story-teller reports on humanity as he actually sees it. And if Romance is preferred to Realism, Romance is purest when purged of all affectation. Genuine Romance is always as delightful as shoddy Romanticism is always detestable. Fan- tasy is ever beautiful, when it presents itself frankly as fantasy. ' Undine ' does not pretend to accuracy; and the 'Arabian Nights' never vaunted itself as founded on the facts of Haroun- al-Rashid's career. Stevenson's romances, artis- tically truthful, though they contradict the vulgar facts of every-day existence, — 'Markheim,' for example, and the ' Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' — bid fair to outlive his Romanticist admixtures of Scott and Dumas; and the 'New Arabian Nights,' with its matter-of-fact impossi- bility, will outweigh the ' Master of Ballant_rae^' a dozen times over. But pure Romance andl frank fantasy are strangely rare ; there are very few| Hoffmanns and Fouques, Poes and Stevensons,! in a century — and only one Hawthorne. J Not long ago an enterprising American journal- ist wrote to some twoscore of the story-tellers of Great Britain and of the United States to inquire 25 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL what, in their opinion, the object of the novel was. Half a dozen of the replies declared that it was "to realize life"; and the rest — an immense majority — were satisfied to say that it was "to amuse. " Here we see the practitioners of the art divided in defining its purpose ; and a like diver- sity of opinion can be detected among the vast army of novel-readers. Some think that fiction ought to be literature, and that " literature is a criticism of life." Some hold that fiction is mere story-telling — the stringing together of adven- ture, the heaping up of excitement, with the wish of forgetting life as it is, of getting outside of the sorry narrowness of sordid and common- place existence into a fairy-land of dreams where Cinderella always marries Prince Charming and where the haughty sisters always meet with their just punishment. It is to readers of this sec- ond class that the ordinary historical novel ap- peals with peculiar force ; for it provides the drug they desire, while they can salve their conscience during this dissipation with the belief that they are, at the same time, improving their minds. The historical novel is aureoled with a pseudo- sanctity, in that it purports to be more instruc- tive than a mere story : it claims — or at least the claim is made in its behalf — that it is teaching history. There are those who think that it thus adds hypocrisy to its other faults. 26 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL Bagehot — and there is no acuter critic of men / and books, and none with less literary bias — Bagehot suggested that the immense popularity of Ivanhoe' was due to the fact that "it de- scribes the/.Middle Ages as we should wish them to be." /This falsification characteristic of the historical novel in general is one of its chief charms in the eyes of those who like to be rav- ished out of themselves into an illusion of a world better than the one they, unfortunately, have to live in< " All sensible people know that the Middle Ages must have been very uncom- fortable," continues Bagehot. "No one knew the abstract facts on which this conclusion rests better than Scott; but his delineation gives no general idea of the result: a thoughtless reader rises with the impression that the Middle Ages had the same elements of happiness which we have at present, and that they had fighting be- sides." Scott knew better, of course; but though " when aroused, he could take a distinct view of the opposing facts, he liked his own mind to rest for the most part in the same pleasing illu- sion." Perhaps Bagehot might have agreed with some later critics who have held that many of Scott's novels are immoral because of this falsifi- cation of historic truth — a charge which receives no support from the 'Bride of Lammermoor,' for example, nor from the ' Heart of Midlothian,' 27 THE HISTORICAL NOVEL and half a dozen other of his stories, in which Scott's strong sense of reality and his fine feel- ing for Romance are displayed in perfect harmony. (■897) 28 II ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM AN obvious advantage which science possesses J~\ over art is that its vocabulary is precise and exact. When a man of science has occasion to use terms like Horse-power, Foot-ton, Peroxid, Volt, not only does he himself know absolutely what he himself means, but he can be confident that those whom he addresses must also know absolutely what he means. These scientific terms may be awkward or ugly, — as indeed many of them are, — but nevertheless they are accepted as having an unchanging content. They never suggest more or less at one time than at another. They pass current everywhere at their face-value; the rate of exchange never va- ries. But the terms which any critic of art must use lack this useful rigidity; they are ever flex- ible, not to say fluid. They are all things to all men. They are chameleons, changing color while we gaze at them. They are modified by the personality of the user first of all, and then by that of every several individual among those ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM he is addressing. Tiie epithet which to one savors of eulogy to another reeks with oppro- brium. The word which is a term of reproach in the mouth of a speaker belonging to one school is a badge of honor at the hands of an adherent of another theory. When, for example, have any two theoreticians of esthetics ever agreed on a definition of beauty ? When have any two critics of literature ever accepted the same defini- tion of poetry ? We may each of us think that he understands the difference between Classic and Romantic, between Romantic and Realistic, between Realistic and Idealistic, and between Realistic and Naturalistic; but any of us would be sadly rash if he should expect that the half or the quarter of those he was trying to reach un- derstood this antithesis or that exactly as he did. In all artistic discussion the meaning each of the disputants attaches to the special words he is using is the final expression of his personal equation. Although there is really no hope that any sci- entific precision will ever be attained in the terminology of esthetics or that men of letters will ever agree on the meaning they will attach to important words, discussion may help to bring about clearer knowledge. Especially may it lead to a sharper differentiation between words often loosely regarded as synonymous. Few 32 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM lovers of poetry, who desire not merely to enjoy but seek also to understand and appreciate, would deny the abiding value of the distinction between fancy and the imagination — a distinc- tion first insisted upon by the Lake Poets a scant century ago. Who was it who said that every man was born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, whether he knew it or not ? So, in another sense, must every man be born either a Greek or a Goth. His native temperament either forces him to accept the Latin tradition of restraint and mod- eration, or else it urges him to follow rather the Teutonic ideal of individuality and self-assertion. If he is really interested in life, he cannot choose but enlist in the one camp or the other, however strong his desire to preserve a benevolent neu- trality. And what he is in matters of public pol- icy he is likely to be in his private tastes also. Either he delights in the Classic or else he prefers the Romantic : for him to be an Eclectic is a stark impossibility; and it is only the few who care nothing for the cause of the quarrel who can raise the cry, "A plague on both your houses! " But among those who delight in the Classic there is no unanimity in declaring just what the Classic is: and there is even greater disagree- ment among those who prefer the Romantic as to the full meaning of the word. The first chap- ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM ter of Professor Beers's illuminative ' History of English Romanticism ' is taken up with an attempt to collect and to classify the manifold definitions of the spirit which animated the Romantic move- ment in Germany and France and England; and in all the various histories of literature in all the various modern languages it would be difficult to discover a chapter more interesting or more instructive; and a careful perusal of it may be recommended to every historian of literary de- velopment who persists dogmatically in using the terms of esthetic criticism as though they had a scientific precision. Professor Beers quotes Heine's assertion that "all the poetry of the Middle Ages has a certain definite character, through which it differs from the poetry of the Greeks and Romans," and that "in reference to this difference, the former is called Romantic, the latter Classic," although these names "are misleading and have caused the most vexatious confusion." One reason why these terms are misleading is that in our ordinary use of the two words we are accustomed to find in Classic a certain worthiness, as of abiding merit, whereas in Romantic we feel a certain unworthiness, as conveying at least a flavor of extravagance or freakishness. Thus we say that Angelica Kauflfmann's marriage was "very roman- tic," and that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is 34 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM "truly a classic." And Pater, taking a hint per- haps from this ordinary use of words, came to the conclusion that the Classic has "order in beauty," and the Romantic "strangeness added to beauty. " So Professor Beers keeps on assembling and comparing the criterions proposed successively for determining the essential quality of the Ro- mantic. " First it was mystery, then aspiration; now it is the appeal to the emotions by the method of suggestion. And yet there is, per- haps, no inconsistency on the critic's part in this continual shifting of his ground. He is apparently presenting different facets of the same truth ; he means one thing by his mystery, aspiration, in- definiteness, incompleteness, emotional sugges- tiveness; that quality or effect which we all feel to be present in Romantic and absent from Classical work." Perhaps it is rash for any one to venture a further effort to distinguish more precisely things which we all recognize as dissimilar, not to say antithetic. But it may not be adding to the con- fusion to assert that those of us who seek in a work of art specially the normal and the typical presented with rigorous severity of form are on the side of the Classics, no matter what we may choose to call ourselves; and that, on the other hand, those of us who relish rather the abnormal 35 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM and the unusual revealed with incomplete sug- gestiveness are to be counted with the Roman- tics, whatever we ourselves may declare. On the one side are those who enjoy simplicity and worship beauty, and on the other are those who prefer complexity, and who get their pleasure from the picturesque. As it happens, the noblest examples of simple beauty are Greek, and the finest illustrations of complex picturesqueness are medieval. But whether it is the Parthenon or Notre Dame, whether it is the work of the Athenians or of the Parisians, a masterpiece of the Classic or a masterpiece of the Romantic is always the direct and honest expression of the men who wrought it. But the high merit of these masterpieces has attracted imitators, lacking in sincerity and not seeking to express themselves directly or hon- estly. Of course it is right and proper in all the arts that the young should model themselves at first on their elders and betters, learning all these have to teach, and beginning where these left off; but this fertile acceptance is as different as may be from sterile copying of formulas. One is a free-hand drawing and the other is a mere mechanical tracing. Classic denotes imperishable beauty, while Classicism (to me at least) connotes a frigid imi- tation. Classic is free, while Classicism is bound. 36 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM Shakspere is the great English classic ; but Classi- cism in English literature is embodied in Pope. So Romance is genuine, while Romanticism is pinchbeck. True Romance, whether ancient or medieval or modern, is as sincere and as direct and as honest as the Classic itself. And it needs to be distinguished sharply from Romanticism, which is often insincere, generally indirect, and sometimes artistically dishonest. Just as we need to set off sham Classicism from the noble Classic, so we ought to dwell on the essential difference between Romance and its bastard bro- ther Romanticism— between the genuine Ro- mantic and the imitative Romanticist. The Romantic calls up the idea of something primary, spontaneous, and perhaps medieval, while the Romanticist suggests something sec- ondary, conscious, and of recent fabrication. Romance, like many another thing of beauty, is very rare; but Romanticism is common enough nowadays. The truly Romantic is difficult to achieve; but the artificial Romanticist is so easy as to be scarce worth the attempting. The Romantic is ever young, ever fresh, ever delight- ful; but the Romanticist is stale and second-hand and unendurable. Romance is never in danger of growing old, for it deals with the spirit of man without regard to times and seasons ; but Roman- ticism gets out of date with every twist of the 37 ftOMANCE AGAINSt ROMANTICISM kaleidoscope of literary fashion. The Romantic is eternally and essentially true, but the Roman- ticist is inevitably false. Romance is sterling, but Romanticism is shoddy. It may be admitted that this distinction be- tween the Romantic and the Romanticist is not self-evident, and that it is not always easily ap- prehended. Perhaps his failure to bring it out clearly and to emphasize it is one reason why Mr. Howells's attitude toward Romance has been misunderstood and that he has been accused of intolerance and even of attack, when it is only barren Romanticism he detests and despises, and when he has more than once gladly recorded his delight in true Romance. Difficult it is always to expose a sham, without seeming to be disrespectful toward that which it degrades by its mimicry. So the unsparing laying bare of hypocrisy in Moliere's 'Tartuffe' was held by many good people to be little better than an assault on the church itself. It was Mill who said that " the truth of poetry is to paint the human soul truly," and that "the truth of fiction is to give a true picture of life." Romance, however, detached from the accidental and encumbering facts of existence, is always in accord with the essential truth of life. Romance never contradicts reality, whereas Romanticism is in constant disaccord not merely with fact but 38 ROMANCE AdAINST ROMANTICISM . even more with truth itself. The elder Haw- thorne was a writer of Romance and the elder Dumas was a compounder of Romanticism; and it was the author of the ' House of the Seven Gables ' who asserted that Romance, " while as a work of art it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart, has fairly a right to present that truth under cir- cumstances to a great extent of the writer's own choosing or creation." Here Hawthorne asks no release from the eter- nal verities, but insists on permission to deal with brave translunary things, and to lay the scene of his story in the Forest of Arden or in the Bo- hemia which is a desert country by the sea, illu- mined by a light that never was and echoing with battles long ago. But how far are these enchanted realms from the topsy-turvy territory where the throng of disciples of Dumas invite us to follow — a strange place indeed, where happy accidents and marvelous coincidences and spe- cial providences happen many times a day. It is in fact an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns — except to tell trav- elers' tales. It is a kingdom where dwell blame- less heroes of a perfect courage who strive with villains of an abhorrent turpitude and who adore scornful ladies of an ethereal beauty. In a region ^9 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM inhabited by these unnatural monsters, what chances of acceptance have the eternal verities ? — what possibility is there for a true picture of life or for a true painting of the human soul ? For these shabby puppets of the worn-out Ro- manticist true Romance cares nothing, needing no more than a man and a maid and a spring morning. Romance is in the heart of man, and not in the circus-trappings of pseudo-history. Romance is, in the nature of things, young and eternal : it is not a machine-made output of a fiction-factory. Romance is not necessarily one who discerns No character or glory in his times, And trundles back his soul five hundred years, Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court. Romance is not a thing that lived yesterday and is dead to-day — although it blossoms in the twilight atmosphere of Once upon a Time. Romance has no more to do with the tilting at Ashby-de-la-Zouch than it has to do with a corner on the Stock Exchange : it has to do with men, medieval or modern, no matter— with men as they go forth to do their duty, to be tempted and lured, to conquer the lust of the flesh, to fall into sin and to pay the penalty, to make the brave fight, be the end of the struggle what it may. Romance is where men are, with the pas- 40 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM sions and strivings of men; and it takes no ac- count of costume and of furniture and of the acci- dental accompaniments of human existence. Romance lived with the Cave-men and the Lake-folk; with the Norseman and the Crusa- der; with the Cavalier and the Puritan; with the Minute-men of Lexington and with the Young Guard at Waterloo ; with every man who is stout of soul and who has an eye for a pretty girl ; with every woman who is, or hopes to be, a wife and a mother. "Where heart-blood beat or hearth- smoke curled," there Romance wove his spell, " Romance! " the season tickets mourn. " He never ran to catch his train, But passed with coach and guard and horn — And left the local — late again! Confound Romance! " And all unseen Romance brought up the nine-fifteen. His hand was on the lever laid. His oil-can soothed the worrying cranks, His whistle waked the snow-bound grade, His fog-horn cut the reeking Banks : By dock and deep and mine and mill The Boy-god, reckless, labored still! And after this quotation in verse from Mr. Kipling, let me make another in prose from Mr. Stevenson: "True romantic art again makes a Romance of all things. It reaches into the highest 41 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM abstraction of the ideal ; it does not refuse the most pedestrian Realism. ' Robinson Crusoe ' is as realistic as it is romantic: both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does Romance depend upon the material impor- tance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war, and mur- der, is to conjure with great names, and, in the event of failure, double the disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon's villa is a very trifling incident : yet we may read a dozen boister- ous stories from beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an impression of adventure." This is Romance as Stevenson saw it; and Romanticism is not like unto this. Romanticism is feebly fond of the "strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war, and murder" — the stage- properties and supernumeraries of the pseudo-his- toric. The ' Bride of Lammermoor ' is Romance indeed and of a lofty type: but is not 'Ivanhoe' contaminated with mere Romanticism ? Now and again Dickens struck the true note, but only infrequently; and the ' Tale of Two Cities,' with the immoral self-sacrifice at the core of it, is Romanticism in its most tortuous type. Haw- thorne is less likely to go astray than most : he is sometimes somewhat over-insistent on his fan- tasy, but he never slips headlong into the slough of Romanticism. His footing is more secure in 42 Romance agaInst Romanticism the 'Blithedale Romance' than in the 'Marble Faun.' He complained that there was as yet here in America no "Faery Land, so like the real world that in suitable remoteness one cannot well tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own " — and yet we all see a solid certainty in his Brook Farm, while few can help feeling a faint unreality in his Rome. The truly Romantic is not morbid ; rather is it sane and sunny, even if the clouds gather in time and the light is quenched at last. But the Romanticist, where it is not merely foolish, is often sickly, as Goethe said, contrasting Roman- ticism with the Classic. To a student of German literature. Romanticism suggests 1802 and the blue flower of Novalis. To a student of French literature. Romanticism evokes 1830 and the red waistcoat of Gautier. And it was Goethe again who dismissed ' Hernani ' as absurd. True Ro- mance there is in both languages, ' Undine ' in the one and the ' Princess of Cleves ' in the other, for example : but in neither language is the Ro- manticist ever really healthy. In German there is an obvious tendency to degenerate into mere gush : and in French there is an equally obvious tendency toward illegality. Hugo and Dumas were prone to exalt the outlaw; and it was 43 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM Thiers who declared that the Communists of 1 87 1 were only the Romanticists of 1830. This note of revolt is to be heard more particu- larly in the Romanticism of France, although it is at times audible also in England; it is resonant enough in Byron. But the special peculiarity of the heroes of English Romanticism is their lack of common sense. They are feeble folk, most of them, the pale spirits evoked by Keats and Shelley, mooning foolishly through a useless existence. "Uncanny creatures," they have been called, "spectral, prone to posing, psychologically shal- low." But the heroes of Romance, of true Ro- mance, are not of this sort ; they are brave boys, all of them, hearty and honest and sturdy. Are not Romeo and Orlando heroes of Romance? and are they spectral or uncanny ? Orlando, it is true, roamed the forest, hanging verses on the melan- choly boughs; but he was a fine fellow for all that — a good trencherman of a certainty, and could try a fall on occasion. And Romeo, con- sumed by passion as he was, is no dreamy milk- sop, but a full-blooded man, prompt to overleap a garden wall and ready to seal with a righteous kiss A dateless bargain to engrossing death. The Romanticist is not seldom as sickly as it is shallow, but the truly Romantic is always 44 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTICISM wholesome. Indeed, it may even be bracing — who ever felt any relaxing of fiber after reading the ' Scarlet Letter ' ? It charms and it gives an exquisite pleasure, but it does not enervate or disintegrate like Romanticist fictions. It may be tonic; it is never anodyne. Mr. Howells was not thinking of true Romance, but of the false Romanticism, when he expressed his contempt for the stories that are intended to take the reader's mind off himself and to " make one for- get life and all its cares and duties," and that "are not in the least like the novels which make you think of these, and shame you into at least wishing to be a helpfuUer and wholesomer crea- ture than you are." And then Mr. Howells with ill-restrained scorn discusses the Romanticist fictions with no sordid details of verity, "no wretched being humbly and weakly struggling to do right and to be true, suffering for his follies and his sins, tasting joy only through the mortifi- cation of self and in the help of others ; nothing of all this : but a great, whirling splendor of peril and achievement, a wild scene of heroic adven- ture, and of emotional ground and lofty tumbling, with a stage picture at the fall of the curtain, and all the good characters in a row, their left hands pressed upon their hearts, and kissing their right hands to the audience." To try to point out the difference between the 45 ROMANCE AGAINST ROMANTiaSM truly Romantic and its illegitimate younger bro- ther, the artificial Romanticist, is not to indulge in a vain dispute about terms ; it is to accomplish the needful task of bringing out the essential dis- tinction between two things often carelessly con- fused. Even though Romanticism is not the best possible word to identify the ape of genuine Ro- mance, it remains the best word available for the purpose. As we have no warrant to make new words at will, we must needs differentiate an old word by a new use. Whatever the word that shall finally win acceptance as describing the thing here called Romanticism, there can be no doubt that the thing itself needs to be set apart from Romance. Already do we distinguish be- tween fancy and imagination, between wit and humor — although here both of the objects thus set off one from another are worthy. How much more needful, then, is it for us to set off Romanticism from Romance just so soon as we see clearly that only Romance is really worthy and that Romanticism is obviously unworthy of association with it. (1900) 46 Ill NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITEf IN the book of travels which he has called ' Fol- lowing the Equator,' Mark Twain casually speaks of the ' Vicar of Wakefield ' as " that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical Cheap-John heroes and heroines who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and of good people who are fatiguing." And the iconoclastic humorist, not satisfied with this sweeping censure, goes fur- ther, and calls Goldsmith's masterpiece " a singu- lar book," with "not a sincere line in it; a book which is one long waste-pipe discharge of goody- goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a book which is full of pathos which revolts, and of humor which grieves the heart." This is strong language; and with all due re- spect for the clearness of vision which Mark Twain has often revealed in dealing with litera- ture, as in dealing with life itself, and with a full recognition of the implacable common sense which is always his chief characteristic, I cannot 49 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES but think that he has here overstated his case against Goldsmith, as he once overstated his case against Cooper. The sentence of annihila- tion which he passes upon the 'Vicar of Wake- field ' is as severe as that which he passed upon the Leatherstocking Tales; and they both of them seem to suggest rather the glad exaggera- tion of the wanton humorist than the severe restraint of the cautious critic. And yet it may be noted that Mr. Austin Dobson, the latest biographer of Goldsmith, had frankly admitted in advance not a few of the charges which Mark Twain has harshly urged. Mr. Dobson remarked upon the " structural in- consistencies " of the story and upon " its naive neglect of probability"; and he asked: "Where, in the world about us, do events succeed each other in such convenient sequence? Where do per- sons answer to their names with such opportune precision ? " And he confessed also that " we may gape a little over some of its old-fashioned max- ims. . • . We may even think Squire Thornhill a little too much of the stage-libertine ; we may have our doubts touching that ubiquitous philan- thropist, his uncle." Where the British critic would join issue with the American humorist is in traversing the charge that there is " not a sincere line in it," since sin- cerity is the very quality not to be denied to the 50 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES genial Irishman. And when Mark Twain insists that the good characters in the little tale are all fatiguing, it is well to recall that Mr, Dobson finds the family of Wakefield to be like Dryden's milk- white hind, " immortal and unchanged," and that he holds them to be " such friendly, such accus- tomed figures, they are so fixed and settled in our intimacy, that we have forgotten to remember how good they are— how clearly and roundly realized, how winningly and artlessly presented." Mr. Dobson is not one of the biographers who get their saint only because they refuse to allow free speech and fair play to the devil's advocate; and he appreciates fully Voltaire's saying, that criticism of detail is never fatal. Voltaire else- where asserted that the critic does not know his trade who cannot discover the causes of a book's success; and Mr. Dobson has pointed out the real reasons why the ' Vicar of Wakefield ' has pleased long and pleased many, in spite of its obvious shortcomings. Goldsmith presented the Prim- rose family so simply and so sympathetically that the world was delighted to take them to its heart, notwithstanding the clumsiness of the plot and the staginess of many of the personages. We can now detect in Dr. Primrose a certain eigh- teenth-century attitude toward the established order in church and in state which is not pleas- ing in our nineteenth-century eyes, and which ig 5J NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES probably the cause of Mark Twain's contemptu- ous accusation of " complacent hypocrisy " ; but, in spite of this, the record of the Vicar's little vanities and little weaknesses is not fatiguing, and the Vicar himself lingers in our memory as a Christian gentleman. Mark Twain is a good workman ; but he is not unwilling to carry one of his chips on his shoul- der. He has a hatred of humbug almost as hearty as Moliere's, and a scorn of hypocrisy almost as hot; and it may be that he was moved to this violent outbreak in protest against the unthinking lip-reverence with which books like the ' Vicar of Wakefield ' are treated generally. Any one who truly loves literature, and who takes a real interest in its history, can hardly fail to be annoyed by the superstitious veneration paid to the minor master- pieces of the past. They are mentioned with bated breath, as though they were flawless gems, to hint a spot on which were akin to sacrilege. It is the very negation of criticism to act on the theory that even the great poets were impecca- ble, that Homer never nodded and that Shakspere never slept; and a willingness to close the eyes resolutely to all the weak points in their works may lead in time to an inability to see where their real strength lies. And if it is safest for the honest critic not to blind himself to the fact that in ' Hamlet,' in the fifth act especially, there 52 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES are still obvious traces of the earlier and inferior tragedy-of-blood upon which it was founded, and that in ' Don Quixote ' the pretense of a translated manuscript is tedious and ill sustained, so it is doubly important that the honest critic should keep his eyes open wide when he comes to deal with the lesser classics, with books like the ' Vicar of Wakefield' and 'Gil Bias' and 'Paul and Virginia' —books each of which has a place of its own in the complex development of the modern novel, but for which it is absurd to claim verbal inspiration. Goldsmith's domestic idyl suggested Goethe's ' Hermann and Dorothea,' and, indirectly, Long- fellow's 'Evangeline.' Le Sage's picaresque romance inspired Smollett's robustious 'Rod- erick Random ' ; it influenced Dickens in the ' Pick- wick Papers ' and in ' Nicholas Nickleby ' ; and it even provided an unconscious model for Mark Twain's 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' Saint-Pierre's exotic love-story revealed to later novelists the possibility of making the forces of nature— the flowers of the field and the winds of heaven— play a part in the tragedy of life. The ' Vicar of Wakefield ' and ' Gil Bias ' and ' Paul and Virginia' are all of them important in the history of fiction, for one reason or another; but they are none of them so mighty in their scope that we need be afraid to weigh their merits ex- actly and to measure their faults with precision. 53 NfiW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES We are justified in insisting on a careful ex- amination, not only of their credentials from the past, but of the works themselves. They come to us with the indorsement of preceding genera- tions; but we gave no preceding generation a power of attorney to decide what we should like in literature, or to declare what we must admire. Every generation exercises the right of private judgment for itself. Every generation is a Court of Appeals, which never hesitates to overrule and reverse the judgments of its predecessors. When a book has been praised since a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, the probability is large that the commendation is deserved. But there is always a possibility that its reputation has been preserved merely be- cause the book has become unreadable and has thus tempted nobody to explode its inherited fame. We have always a right to reopen the case whenever fresh evidence is discovered. In the Court of Criticism there is no doctrine of stare decisis : precedent cannot estop the action of pos- terity. Nothing is more unwholesome for a living literature than a willingness to accept a tradi- tion without question, blindfold and obedient. Nothing is worse for the welfare of a living litera- ture than an acceptance of that maxim of Pudd'n'- head Wilson's, in which he asserts that a classic 54 NEW tRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES is a book everybody praises and nobody reads, unless it is an acting upon the maxim of Samuel Rogers, who said that whenever a new book came out he read an old one. We need the new and the old ; but we need the old for what it is to us now, and not for what it was to readers of the last century. When Mr. Howells aroused the rage of the British lion by his innocent suggestion that the art of fiction is a finer art nowadays than it had been in Thackeray's time, he was, in fact, guilty of an obvious commonplace. Guy de Maupas- sant may or may not be a better shot than Honore de Balzac, but there is no doubt as to the superi- ority of the younger writer's rifle. So Thackeray himself had a better gun than Scott; and Scott could have had a better gun than Fielding, al- though for some reason he apparently preferred the old-fashioned bow of yew with its cloth-yard arrow. No wonder is it, therefore, that some readers of to-day, accustomed to the feats of long- range marksmanship made possible by the latest weapons of precision, are often impatient at the results of the target-practice of our ancestors. Scott declared that few have read 'Gil Bias' " without remembering, as one of the most de- lightful occupations of their life, the time which they first employed in its perusal " ; and he goes further, and suggests that " if there is anything 55 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES like truth in Gray's opinion, tliat to lie upon a couch and read new novels was no bad idea of Paradise, how would that beatitude be enhanced could human genius afford us another 'Gil Bias ' ! " Thackeray asserted that " the novel of ' Humphrey Clinker ' is, 1 do think, the most laughable story that has been written since the goodly art of novel-writing began." Coleridge maintained that the three finest plots in the whole history of literature were to be found in the ' CEdipus ' of Sophocles, the ' Alchemist ' of Ben Jonson, and the ' Tom Jones ' of Fielding. Scott and Thackeray and Coleridge are critics whose equipment and insight and disinterested- ness every lover of literature must respect. But Coleridge died before the modern novel had reached its full development, and if he over- praised the plot of 'Tom Jones,' it was perhaps because he could not foresee the ' Scarlet Letter ' or 'Smoke.' No doubt Thackeray relished the eighteenth century exceedingly; but when he singled out ' Humphrey Clinker ' as a masterpiece of laughter-making, he could have had no pre- monition of ' Tom Sawyer' and of ' Tartarin on the Alps.' And in like manner Scott's eulogy of ' Gil Bias ' falls on deaf ears now that it is addressed t^ ihose who have feasted their eyes on the far more varied panorama provided in the Waverley Novels. 56 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES Much of our veneration for the classics is a sham, the result, in part, of our sheep-like un- willingness to think for ourselves. Follow-my- leader is the game most of us play when we are called upon to declare our preferences. We put 'Tom Jones,' for example, into our lists of the Hundred Best Books— lists, for the most part, as fatuous as they are absurd; but if we were honest with ourselves, as I suppose we should be if the choice was actual, very few of us would pack ' Tom Jones ' in the chest we express to the mythical desolate island. There is no doubt that ' Tom Jones ' is a great novel, one of the greatest in our language, and perhaps one of the greatest in the modern literature of any country. It has form and substance; it is admirably planned and beautifully written ; it abounds in humor and in irony and in knowledge of human nature; it is peopled by a company of living men and women ; it reveals to us a most manly character, the char- acter of Henry Fielding himself— sturdy, honest, and sincere, clear-eyed and plain-spoken. The book is eternal in its verity, and therefore in its interest; but it has the remote morality of the eighteenth century, and the hardness of tone of that unlovely era; it belongs to an earlier stage in the development of fiction ; it demands for its full enjoyment a certain measure of culture in its readers ; and therefore it is becoming year by year 57 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES more and more a novel for the few, and less and less a novel for the many. As with ' Tom Jones ' so with ' Don Quixote ' —a greater book, making a wider appeal, and not bounded by the horizon of a single century. The carelessness with which Cervantes put his story together, the fortuitous adventures and the in- congruous meetings— these things are of little consequence; for, as George Sand aptly put it, "the best books are not those with the fewest faults, but those with the greatest merits." The merits of ' Don Quixote' are great beyond dispute; but are they such as can be appreciated by that impossible entity, the Average Reader? Spain's chivalry has been laughed away so thoroughly that nowadays a man must needs have studied in the schools to' understand the circumstances of Cervantes's satire. The genuine appreciation of 'Don Quixote'— and of 'Tom Jones' also— calls for a preparation that few readers of fiction pos- sess, and for an effort which few of them are in- clined to make. If this is true, is it not best to admit it frankly —to say honestly that the ' Vicar of Wakefield ' is a tissue of improbabilities, that Gil Bias, in the course of his rambles, happens upon much that is no longer entertaining, and that 'Humphrey Clinker' is not the most amusing volume now available ? The penalty for not speaking the truth 58 KEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES boldly is pretty serious. It consists in the very real danger that he who is enticed by traditional eulogy to attempt these books and others like them, and who recoils with disappointment, as many a time he must, will thereafter distrust his judgment, and will be inclined to suppose that literature is something hard, something dull, something repellent, something beyond his reach. When Mr. Reed defined a statesman as " a suc- cessful politician who is dead," he voiced a sen- timent very like that which rules many of our literary guides. In their minds, nothing is litera- ture that was not written either in a dead language or by a dead man, and everything is literature which was written by a dead man in a dead lan- guage. They praise the old books which they either read with an effort or do not read at all; and it rarely occurs to them to analyze the source of their pleasure in the new books which they read with joy. ' Huckleberry Finn,' for example, has been devoured with delight by hundreds of thousands of Americans ; but the rare references to it in print are most of them doubtful and pa- tronizing. Now ' Huckleberry Finn ' contains the picture of a civilization nowhere else adequately recorded in literature: it abounds in adventure and in char- acter, in fun and in philosophy. It appears to me to be a work of extraordinary merit, and a 59 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES better book of the same kind than 'Gil Bias,' richer in humor, and informed by a riper human- ity. But Mark Twain's story is a book of to-day, and it is American ; it is not a book of yesterday and foreign; it can be enjoyed by anybody, even by a boy, and it seems to make no demand on the understanding. There is no tradition of laudation encompassing it about, and it is not sanctified by two centuries of eulogy. It is easy for us to read, since the matter is familiar and the manner also; but it is difficult for us to praise, since the critics who preceded us have not set us the example. Probably it was at a new opera that Rufus Choate besought his daughter to interpret to him the libretto, lest he dilate with the wrong emo- tion. At all the old operas every man of us knows with what emotion it is that he ought to dilate, since we are prone to accept the tradition, if only to save us the trouble of thinking for ourselves. To arouse us from our laziness and our lethargy there is nothing like a vehement assault on the in- herited opinion— even if the charge is too sweep- ing, like Mark Twain's annihilation of Goldsmith's little masterpiece. If a study of the history of literature reveals anything clearly, it is that a reversal of the judg- ments of our ancestors, or at least a revision, after argument, is a condition of progress. If the 6a NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES old favorites cannot stand a new trial, there may be a recommendation to mercy ; but there is no doubt about the verdict. For us to advance in the right path, we must look at literature, as we look at life, with our own eyes, and not through the spectacles of our grandfathers. The critics of the Renascence in every country of Europe were united in holding that the model of the drama had been set by the Greeks once for all, and that this model was in no wise to be modified or departed from ; and the insistence on this theory deprived Italy of a drama of its own, and came desperately near to strangling the drama of England and that of Spain. Fortunately, the populace of London and of Madrid were not awed by the authority of criticism; they knew what they wanted; they refused to accept the kind of play that had pleased the Greeks but did not happen to please them; and they would not rest satisfied till they had Shakspere and Calderon. In the lapse of time Calderon and Shakspere got themselves slowly accepted as classics, but after how hard a struggle in the case of Shak- spere!— a struggle ending in the triumph of the dramatist only toward the end of the eighteenth century and with the revival of the romantic. No department of literary history is, I think, more instructive, and none, I am sure, tends more to teach us humility, than the record of the fluctua- 61 neW trials for old favorites tions in the fame of one or another of the masters of literature— such a record as Professor Louns- bury has given us in one of his luminous ' Studies of Chaucer.' Each of these masters has had his eclipses, from which he has emerged at last; and many of the minor bards have had, each in his turn, their periods of effulgence, now come to an end forever. For nearly a century Shakspere was held to be inferior to Ben Jonson ; and for an even longer period Homer was held in lower esteem than the smoother Vergil. Two or three hundred years ago the Italians used to speak of the Four Poets, meaning Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso ; and in those days the rest of the civilized world was ready enough to admit the supremacy of this quartet. The canon of to-day also admits four poets— Homer, Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe. We who speak English may wish to add Milton as a fifth ; they who speak French might claim admission for Hugo instead ; while the Latins would put in a plea for the inclusion of Vergil. But how Vol- taire would have scoffed at any list that included the Gothic Dante and the barbarian Shakspere! And how Voltaire's followers, the little German critics who came before Lessing, would have shrieked with horror at the omission of Pope, Boileau, and Horace ! 1 wonder sometimes whe- ther some of our opinions— even those upon 62 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES which all the authoritative critics of our time are united— will not strike the more enlightened twenty-first century as equally jejune. And yet I need not wonder; for few things are more certain to come about than that the future will jeer at more than one judgment of the present, just as we scoff haughtily at many of the judgments of the past. Every century— even every generation —contributes material for a new chapter on the vicissitudes of artistic reputation. For a decade or more Byron was universally accepted as the foremost poet of all Europe. Fifty years later Byron was ranked by most British critics below Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth, no one of whom has ever had any vogue outside of his own language. Now, again, as the cen- tury draws to an end, there are plentiful signs of a revolution in Byron's favor. But if Byron ever reconquers a fame like that which he possessed just before his death, it will be by virtue of his real qualities and not by favor of accompanying faults — although his earlier notoriety seemed to be due almost as much to the latter as to the former. In like manner Lamartine is regaining to-day in France a position such as he occupied once before; only he is solidly supported now, and far better able to repel assault. So, too, Victor Hugo, against whom there was a violent reaction after his death,— a reaction perhaps not 63 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES yet at an end in Paris itself,— is coming slowly to be recognized, especially by foreign critics, as the finest lyric poet of France, and even as the foremost lyrist of Europe in the nineteenth cen- tury. This recognition has been made possible only by the perspective of time, which has re- vealed the ' Legende des Siecles ' looming aloft above the immense mass of Hugo's other verse, and far above his romances and his dramas. During a man's lifetime there is a tendency to estimate him by his average work: after he is dead and gone a juster valuation is arrived at by weighing only his best. At Scott's death there was an outburst of eu- logy—as much a testimony of admiration for the final struggle of the man as it was an expression of gratitude for the pleasure given by the author. Soon the thermometer fell, and there were signs of a frost. Then Lockhart published the biog- raphy; and Carlylewas ready with a review, the underlying tone of which was the same contemp- tuous envy he showed toward almost every one of his successful contemporaries. Scott's merits were real enough to withstand, on the one side, Carlyle's disparagement, and, on the other, the discredit derived from a host of clumsy imitators. Yet he seems a sadly belated critic who now praises Scott for his tournaments, or for his pinchbeck chivalry, or for any other of the medie- 64 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES val gauds which glittered so bravely in the eyes of those who read ' Ivanhoe ' when it first came out. Scott's title to survival is seen at last to be founded, like the title of Fielding and of Le Sage and of Cervantes, on his vigorous and veracious portrayal of human character, on his truthful reproduction of the shrewd and sturdy men and women whom he knew so well and loved so dearly. In the same way has the fame of George Eliot and of Dickens wavered for a long while, estab- lishing itself more firmly as time winnows their writings, leaving it to rest on only the best works of each and not merely on the bulk of them. In George Eliot's case, ' Daniel Deronda ' has already been dropped behind, and no longer impedes the full appreciation of ' Silas Marner '—perhaps the only one of her books which is direct and shapely. Dickens had even less sense of form than George Eliot; and yet he strove for constructive effects again and again, only to fail lamentably. This is one reason why those of his books are best liked now in which there is little or no pretense of a plot, in which, in fact, there is only a central figure serv- ing as an excuse for the linking together of amus- ing characters and lively scenes. In 'Nicholas Nickleby ' there is hardly any more formal frame- work than there is in 'Gil Bias' itself; and in 'Gil Bias' the correlation of the incidents is 65 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES frankly fortuitous. In fact, ' Nicholas Nickleby ' is one of the best specimens of the picaresque in our language. For many of us the ' Pickwick Papers ' is the most readable of Dickens's works, because it contains the least plot and the least pathos, and because it was written with the least effort and the least striving for effect. Dickens affords us an admirable example of the changing point of view of successive generations. In his own day the blank-verse death-beds of Little Nell and Paul Dombey were successful in draw- ing tears even from unsympathetic souls like Jeffrey. In our time these scenes annoy us; they are felt to be offensive ; and they are apologized for even by the thick-and-thin defenders of Dickens. So, too, the " effects " which Dickens worked up conscientiously and with an immen- sity of pains strike us to-day as tawdry, not to say theatrical, and we feel the essential falseness of the devices which Dickens took obvious pride in. What makes Mr. George Gissing's recent study of Dickens's method significant is the strange frankness with which the friendly critic admits the justice of the accusations brought against the earlier novelist's art, and the ingenuity with which he shows us that, in spite of all, Dickens's power is indisputable and his genius undeniable. All the characteristics of Dickens's writing which Mr. Howells has expressed his distaste for, Mr. Gissing 66 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES allows to be execrable; he shows how Dickens yielded without a struggle to the popular liking for happy endings, and how he never hesitated at the most illogical transmogrification of char- acter in order to bring this about; and then he seeks to establish Dickens's fame solidly for the future on the novelist's veracity in dealing with types of character in the lower middle class of London, denying that Mrs. Gamp is in any way exaggerated, calling her almost photographic, and declaring that the reproduction of Mrs. Varden's talk is phonographic in its accuracy. Mr. Gissing even ventures to compare Dickens with Balzac, with Victor Hugo, with Dostoyevsky, and with Daudet, finding "in Balzac a stronger intellect, but by no means a greater genius." Mr. Gissing's essay reveals genuine insight into the principles of the novelist's art; it is modest and moderate; it is convincing. At least one reader, who would have confessed to little liking for Dickens either as a man or as an artist, laid it down with the feeling that the critic had made out his case, and that the adverse decision against Dickens must needs be revised now in the light of Mr. Gissing's argument, so cogent is this plea of confession and avoidance. And yet a doubt arises again when we recall the pregnant saying of Joseph de Maistre, that, to judge a book, " it is enough to know by whom 67 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES it is loved and by whom it is hated." Now as between Dickens and Thackeray,— to bring up again the comparison which is apparently as inevitable as it is absurd,— one may have a suspicion that the former is more admired by the weaklings and the sentimentalists, by the gently hypocritical and the morally short-sighted, while the latter pleases rather those who think for themselves and who stand firmly on their own feet and who take the world as it is. One robust British critic, whose own manners are notoriously bad, seems to me to prefer Dickens chiefly be- cause Thackeray was a gentleman. In comparing Dickens with Victor Hugo, Mr. Gissing sets Inspector Bucket by the side of Javert, and finds a realistic character in the British de- tective, and a type in the French, " an incarnation of the penal code, neither more nor less." Then he declares that 'Les Mis6rables' "is one of the world's great books," and admits that this " cannot be said of any one of Dickens's." This raises a most interesting question: What are the world's great books ? Of course, the list would be drawn up very differently in different countries and in different centuries. The American list would not be quite the same as the British list, although there is identity of language and of liter- ary tradition. Either of these English lists would diverge widely from the French. The Italian list 68 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES and the Spanish would be closer to the French, and the German list would approach the English. If a score of competent critics, chosen from the chief modern languages, were empowered to select a dozen cosmopolitan classics there would be agreement only in regard to the ancients. About the moderns there would be the utmost diversity of opinion. No book of Dickens's would be put on the list, nor any book of Thackeray's, either, nor aught of Hawthorne's ; while a volume of Poe's short stories might perhaps survive the discussion, and so might 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' Perhaps ' Gil Bias ' and ' Paul and Virginia ' and the ' Vicar of Wakefield ' would be able to make good their claims, and perhaps not. Perhaps, indeed, the only books in our language (except a play or two of Shakspere's) that are absolutely certain of insertion are the two books of our boy- hood, 'Gulliver's Travels' and ' Robinson Crusoe,' both of them tales of seafaring, and both of them intimately characteristic of the stock that speaks English on the opposite shores of the Atlantic. If the malignant Swift has any knowledge now of what is happening among the descendants of the men and women he despised and cringed be- fore, it must feed fat his humor that the book he wrote to record his hatred of humanity survives to-day as a fairy-tale in the nursery. He meant it for gall and wormwood, and lo! it is found to 69 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES be spoon-meat for babes. Books have their strange fates, like men; but surely none could be stranger than this, the very irony of circum- stance. As for 'Robinson Crusoe,' its permanence can be explained easily enough. M. de Vogue has recently declared that the list of cosmopolitan classics must finally be restricted to two books, \Don Quixote ' and ' Robinson Crusoe.' He tells us that " other masterpieces take higher rank, from the perfection of their art or from the sub- limity of their thought, but they do not address themselves to every age and to every condition ; they demand for their enjoyment a mind already formed and an intellectual culture not given to every one. Cervantes and Defoe alone have solved the problem of interesting . . . the little child and the thoughtful old man, the servant- girl and the philosopher." M. de Vogile declares ' Don Quixote ' to be the most pessimistic of books, and ' Robinson Crusoe' the most optimistic. He discovers in the first the whole history of Spain, and in the latter the true portrait of the English-speaking race. He sees in the shipwrecked solitary the type of the mythic hero of the north— stout-hearted and devout, ready with his hands, and sure of himself. That 'Don Quixote' is a greater book than ' Robinson Crusoe' few would deny; but if the 70 NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES cosmopolitan classics are two, then is the Spanish masterpiece less cosmopolitan than the English, since its appeal is not so universal, and to appre- ciate it calls for more knowledge and more effort. A boy needs to learn what knight-errantry is be- fore he can enter into sympathy with the hero of Cervantes and begin to make-believe with him. But what boy is there who cannot invent for himself a desert island and hostile savages ? De- foe's hero is a type of all mankind; Robinson Crusoe's struggle for existence is ours also ; and in his adventures we foresee our own— every man fighting for his own hand, every man with his back against the wall. (1898) 7' IV THE STUDY OF FICTION [This address was prepared, at the request of the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, to take its place in a course of lectures on Books and Reading, delivered in 1898-99.] THE STUDY OF FICTION MANY of us can remember a time— and a time not so very remote— when we would have scouted as an arrant absurdity any sugges- tion that literature was to be studied. Without giving thought to the question, we held it blindly as an article of faith that literature was for enjoy- ment only and for refreshment; and we may even have had a vague feeling that it was not quite solid enough to be matter for study— that it was, in fact, too entertaining to be taken seriously. If we chanced to recall De Quincey's suggestive dis- tinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power, we might have admitted that the works belonging to the literature of knowledge— history, for example, and biogra- phy—might well be read with a desire for self- improvement; but as for the books belonging to the literature of power,— poetry and the drama, romance and the essay,— these were for recrea- tion and 'for pleasure. They were no more to be studied than a sunset or a rainbow or a wo- 75 THE STUDY OF FICTION man's face or anything else that is beautiful and variable. But of late a change has come over us, and the scales have fallen from our eyes. Just as we are inquiring into the phenomena of the sunset and the rainbow, and just as we are classifying the types of female beauty, so also are we analyzing poetry, lyric and epic and tragic, and investigating the conditions of the essay and of the romance. The ballad serves as a basis for research, and so likewise does the short-story. A lilting legend still gives us joy, no doubt, but our delight is no longer unalloyed. It was Froissart who said that our sturdy English ancestors took their pleasure sadly;. and if there were to-day to arrive among us an observer as acute and as sympathetic as the old chronicler, he might record that now we take our pleasure curiously, dissecting our emotions and seeking always to discover the final cause of our amusement. Sometimes one or another of us may be led to wonder whether this later attitude is altogether satisfactory, and whether the new theory is not held a little too rigorously. There is something lacking more often than not in our effort to find a scientific foundation for our artistic appreciation, and the attempt itself may even tend to lessen our enjoyment. We have all seen editions of the masterpieces of poetry in which notes have 76 THE STUDY OF FICTION Sprung up so luxuriantly as to threaten to choke the life out of the unfortunate lyrist. Diagrams have even been devised to explain the mystery of the plays which plain people were once able to enjoy unthinkingly in the theater, a place where the task of the commentator is necessarily super- fluous. Instead of centering its attention on the fructi- fying kernel, much of the so-called teaching of literature to-day has to do chiefly with barren husks, with the mere dates of authors' biogra- phies, and with the external facts of literary an- nals. When I see that pedants and pedagogs are cramming Milton's lesser lyrics and Shak- spere's sylvan dramas down the unwilling throats of green boys and girls, I cannot but rejoice that my own school-days were past long before these newer methods were adopted. Indeed, I think myself fortunate that I had never studied litera- ture until I was most unexpectedly called upon to teach it. I had read freely for the fun of it, finding the labor its own reward, or rather not finding it labor at all ; and 1 had been led to look up the lives of the authors whose works interested me, and to compare one with another; but as for any formal study of literature, I hardly knew that such a thing was practised by any one. Yet I can see now, as I look back at my own haphazard reading, that I might have been saved 77 THE STUDY OF FICTION much time, and that my enjoyment in literature, keen as it always was, might have been sharp- ened if I had had some guide to show me the lines along which the drama and the novel had developed, and to suggest to me the interesting relationships of the different literary forms— a guide who could supply me with reasons for the preferences I had dumbly felt, and who might even aid me to combine these preferences into an esthetic theory of my own, or who could at least help me to discover for myself the principles underlying my preferences. Useful as such a guide would be in considering the essay, for in- stance, the history of which has not yet been thoroughly worked out, in no department of literature would he be more useful than in the broad field of fiction ; first, because the field is so very broad and so sharply diversified, and, sec- ondly, because the novel is still so young that there is hardly yet a tradition of criticism to aid us in the necessary classification. This youth of the novel, as compared with the drama, for example, with oratory, with lyric poetry, must ever be borne in mind. There were nine muses of old in Greece, but to no one of them was committed the care of the novel, since 78 THE STUDY OF FICTION the making of a fictitious tale in prose had not yet occurred to any of the Greek men of letters. It is easy for us to see now that it is a mere accident whether a story be told in verse or in prose, and that therefore the earliest of all ro- mances of adventure is the ' Odyssey,' the bold and crafty Ulysses being thus the legitimate ancestor of Gil Bias the unscrupulous and of D'Artagnan the invulnerable. The art of the story-teller is ancient and honorable; but prose lags long after verse, and when our remote pro- genitor, the cave-dweller, anticipated the Athe- nian in liking to hear and to tell some new thing, it was in rime that he told it, though it might be only his own boastful autobiography. Even after the revival of letters, when Boccaccio and Chau- cer rivaled one another in delicate perfection of narrative art, the Englishman chose verse often to tell the selfsame story for which the Italian had preferred prose ; and it was the unrhythmic ' Vicar of Wakefield ' which suggested the met- rical 'Hermann and Dorothea,' just as the still earlier ' Daphnis and Chloe ' in prose may have been in some measure the model of the later ' Evangeline ' in verse. The modern novel in prose may almost be called a creature of the nineteenth century. In many of its developments it is a thing of yesterday, and we do not yet quite know how to take it. Even 79 THE STUDY OF FICTION now distinctions as essential as that between the novel and the romance and that between the novel and the short-story are imperfectly seized bymany of those who discuss the art of fiction. 1 was about to declare that the novel is like a younger brother who has gone forth to make his way in the world, and who has returned at last, wealthier by far than any of his elders who have lived leisurely by the family hearth. But this figure limps a little; indeed, 1 must confess that it is both inadequate and inaccurate. The novel is rather the heir of the ages, rich not only with the fortune of his father, but having received also legacies from various elderly relatives, old maids most of them. The novel has taken the heritage of the epic, and it is engaged in a hot dispute with the serious drama for the possession of what little property moribund tragedy may have to bequeath. It has even despoiled the essay of the character-sketch ; and it has laid violent hands on the fountain of personal emotion formerly the sole property of the lyric. Not content with thus robbing poetry and the drama, the novel vaunts itself as a rival of history in recording the great deeds of the past ; and it also claims the right to wield the weapons of oratory in discussing the burning questions of the present. In fact, fiction, at the end of the nineteenth century, may be likened to Napoleon at the very height of his 80 THE STUDY OF FICTION power, when no other monarch could make sure of resting in peace upon the throne of his fathers. This is perhaps the most striking fact in the history of the literature of the nineteenth century —this immense vogue of the novel and of the short-story. Fiction fills our monthly magazines, and it is piled high on the counters of our book- stores. Dr. Holmes once said that during the Civil War the cry of the American populace was for "bread and the newspapers." It would be an exaggeration, of course, to say that during periods of peace the cry of the fairer half of our population is for " clothes and the novel," but it is an exaggeration only ; it is not a misrepresen- tation. Almost every year brings forth a story which has the surprising sale of a quarter of a million copies or more, while it is only once in a lifetime that a work in any other department of literature achieves so wide a circulation. Of late years there has been only one Grant's ' Personal Memoirs ' to set off against a score of stories like 'Called Back,' like 'Mr. Barnes of New York,' like ' Trilby ' ; and the sale of the great leader's autobiography has not been the half of that of a novel written by one of the generals who served under him. In the past quarter of a century no essay in political economy (with the possible exception of ' Progress and Poverty ') has really rivaled the circulation attained by ' Looking Back- Si THE STUDY OF FICTION ward '; and no theological treatise (with the pos- sible exception of the 'Greatest Thing in the World ') has had a tithe of the readers ' Robert Elsmere ' had. It was a primitive Scotchman who wanted to write the songs of a nation rather than its laws ; and even in our more advanced civilization we can understand the wish, although it is perhaps easier for us Americans to be proud of the Constitution of the United States merely as literature than of ' Yankee Doodle ' or of the ' Star-Spangled Ban- ner/ But in these days, when few know how to sing and all know how to read, the story may be more potent than the lyric. When Mrs. Stowe visited the White House, Lincoln bent over her, saying, " And is this the little woman who made this big war ? " A few years later the Czar told Turgenieff that the freeing of the serfs was the result of thoughts aroused in the autocrat of Russia by the reading of the novelist's story. No doubt the effect of ' Uncle Tom's Cabin ' has been equaled only by that of the ' Memoirs of a Sportsman.' But the influence of many another novel has been both wide and deep. The fiction which abides has been patterned after life, and in its turn it serves as a model to the living men and women who receive it eagerly. The shabby heroes of Balzac found many imitators in Paris in the middle of this century, just as the rakish 83 THE STUDY OF FICTION heroes of Byron had found many imitators in London at the beginning of the century. The interaction of life on literature, and of literature again on life, is one of the most interesting of phenomena for the student of social development ; and its importance is seen more clearly since the French psychologist M. Tarde has formulated what he terms the Law of Imitation, and since he has revealed how immense and how far-reach- ing is the force of an example placed conspicu- ously before men's eyes as a model. Plainer than ever before is the duty of the novelist now to set up no false ideals, to erect no impossible stan- dards of strength or courage or virtue, to tell the truth about life as he sees it with his own eyes. There are various ways in which the study of fiction may be approached. We may consider chiefly the contents of the book, its pictures of life and of manners, its disclosure of human char- acteristics and of national peculiarities ; we may devote our attention rather to the form in which the story is cast, the way it is told, the methods of the narrator; or we may enlarge our views to cover the history of the art of fiction as it slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent, re- cording carefully the birth of every new species. 8^ THE STUDY OF FICTION In the first case we should find a fertile field of inquiry if we sought to test the fulness and the accuracy with which race-characteristics are re- corded in the fiction of a language— how the en- ergy and the humor of the Anglo-Saxon stock dominate the novels of the English language; how the logic and the clearness and the wit of the French people are represented in French fic- tion ; and how the diffuseness, the dreaminess, and the sentimentality of the Germans charac- terize German romance. In the second case, there would be instructive matter for comparison in setting side by side the mock-epic style of Fielding, the confidential attitude of Sterne and Thackeray, and the impassive manner of Flau- bert and Maupassant. And in the third case, we should find ourselves facing many interesting questions: Who invented the detective story? Who wrote the first sea-tale ? What is the ear- liest novel with a purpose ? What is the origin of the historical novel ? Who first made use of the landscape and of the weather as sustaining accompaniments of. a story? How and when has the fiction of the English language been in- fluenced by the fiction of the Italian, the Spanish, and the French ? And how and when has it in turn affected the story-telling of other tongues ? How far are the range and the precision of the rnodern novel due to these indefatigable interna-. S4 THE STUDY OF FICTION tional rivalries and to the interaction of various literatures one on the other ? Of these three ways of approach, perhaps the most satisfactory is the third, the historical ; for it can easily be made to yield most of the ad- vantages of the others. No one has yet written an adequate history of the development of the modern novel; but the material for an analysis of this most interesting evolution is abundant and accessible. Starting with the ill-told anec- dotes of the 'Gesta Romanorum,' on the one hand, and on the other with the high-flown ro- mances of chivalry, both of them frankly unreada- ble to-day, we can see how in Italy the former supplied the seed for the fully ripe tales of the 'Decameron,' and how in Spain the latter sug- gested by reaction the low-life narratives, those rambling autobiographies of thieves and beggars which are known as the picaresque romances, and which served as a model for ' Gil Bias.' We can trace the steps whereby the simplified figures of Boccaccio— mere masks of a Priest, a Husband, a Wife, for instance, labeled rather than individ- ualized, existing solely for the sake of the adven- tures in which they are involved, and moving as though in a vacuum with no effort to surround themselves with an atmosphere— are succeeded by the more complicated creatures of Le Sage, with their recognizable human weaknesses. 85 THE STUDY OF FICTION We can note how slow was the growth of the desire for unity when we remark that master- pieces like ' Don Quixote ' and ' Tom Jones ' are each of them dilated and enfeebled by the injec- tion of extraneous stories, supposed to be told by one of the characters and needlessly arresting the flow of the main narrative. We can discover how even to-day, when the beauty of unity is acknow- ledged, we have still two contrasting forms, and how a novel may now either be Greek in its sim- plicity, its swiftness, its directness, as the ' Bride of Lammermoor' is, and the 'Scarlet Letter,' and ' Smoke,' with the interest centered in one or two or three characters only ; or it may be Eliza- bethan rather, with a leisurely amplitude, peopled with many characters, such as we see in the 'Heart of Midlothian,' in 'Vanity Fair,' and in 'Anna Karenina.' The historical study of fiction affords us an opportunity for interesting investigations into what may be called literary genealogy— the in- quiry as to the exact value of the inheritance each of the novelists received from his immediate pre- decessors and as to which particular predecessor it was of whom he is the chief heir. Consciously or unconsciously, every artist is a debtor to the past. The most original of innovators has made his originality partly out of himself, partly out of what he has appropriated and absorbed from 86 THE STUDY OF FICTIOt^ those who practised his art before him. Only a few of his separate contrivances are his own, and the most he may claim is a patent on the combi- nation. Now it is not without instruction for us to disentangle the new from the old, and to ascertain whence each of the novelists derived this or that device of which he has made effec- tive use. Every artist studies in the studio of one or more of his elders, and it is there that he picks up the secrets of his art and receives the precious tra- ditions of the craft. The novice may be abso- lutely unlike his master; but he must begin by doing what his master tells him to do; and it is only after he has learned his trade that he knows enough to try to develop his own individuality. And so we see how it is that the great Michel- angelo was a student under Ghirlandajo, who was not great, and how Botticelli profited by the instruction of Fra Filippo Lippi, who had studied under Masaccio, who had for his master Maso- lino; and it is instructive for the student of the history of painting to know also that Giulio Ro- mano was the pupil of Raphael, who was the pupil of Perugino, who was the pupil of Nicolo da Foligno, who was the pupil of Benozzo Goz- zoli, who was the pupil of Fra Angelico, who although not a pupil was a follower of Giotto, who was a pupil of Cimabue. Thus, and thus 87 THE STUDY OF FICTION only, can the indispensable technic be passed down from generation to generation, every man handing on the accumulation he has received, in- creasing it by his own contribution. The young artist is a weakling if he openly robs any single one of his predecessors ; he is a dolt if he does not borrow from as many of them as may have the separate qualities he is striving to combine. The arts are one in reality ; and what is true of painting and sculpture and architecture is true also of literature— of prose and verse. For example, there are few men of letters of our time whose prose has been more praised for its freshness and its individuality than the late Robert Louis Steven- son; but his was an originality compounded of many simples. He confessed frankly that he had sat at the feet of the masters, playing the " sedu- lous ape " to a dozen or more, and at last slowly learning how to be himself. Again, the verse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti has a note of its own, a note which many younger poets have delighted to echo and reecho; but Rossetti told a friend that the exciting cause of his ' Blessed Damozel ' was the ' Raven ' of Edgar Allan Poe ; and Poe's own indebtedness to Coleridge is obvious even if it had not been expressly avowed. In literature as in life, it is a wise child that knows its own father; and the family-tree of fiction is not easy to trace in all its roots and 88 THE STUDY OF FICTION branches. Certain types persist from one gen- eration to another. We have no hesitation in declaring that the author of the ' Master of Ballan- trae ' had for his grandfathers in story-telling the author of ' Guy Mannering ' and the author of the ' Three Musketeers ' ; and we may even ven- ture to believe that the young Scotchman w^ho wrote ' Treasure Island ' was a literary nephew of the American who wrote the ' Gold Bug ' and a great-grandnephew of the Englishman who wrote 'Robinson Crusoe.' Sometimes we can pick out a novelist who is the remote descendant of a series of international marriages. The Italian Signer Gabriele d'Annunzio, for example, came forward first as a writer of fiction with a story which had obviously been inspired by a study of the psychologic subtleties of the Frenchman M. Paul Bourget. But M. Bourget's first novel was obviously modeled upon the delicate work of Mr. Henry James, to whom, indeed, it was dedicated as to a master. Now the earlier tales of the American novelist were plainly written under the influence of a Russian, Ivan Turgenieff. As a whole, Signor d'Annunzio's writings are very different from M. Bourget's, and M. Bourget's from Mr. James's, and Mr. James's from Tur- genieff's; but none the less the line of filiation is clearly to be perceived. Of course there is here intended no suggestion of unfair imitation, still tHE STUDY OF FICTION less of vulgar plagiarism ; the desire is merely to show how each of these accomplished artists in fiction served his apprenticeship in the workshop of an elder craftsman. In literature there are very few self-made men. As it happens, these four nineteenth-century novelists have a strong family likeness ; they are of kin spiritually; they are all of them far more interested in the subtle workings of the mind of man than in any overt actions of his body. It would not be difficult, however, to find another group, linked together in like manner, in which there is marked opposition between the succes- sive authors, the younger availing themselves of the technical devices of their masters, but turning these to totally different uses. For example, no writer of his years has a more vigorous freshness than Mr. Rudyard Kipling; none has shown originality in more diverging lines than he. Yet Mr. Kipling's first tales from the Indian hills reveal plainly the strong impression left on his youthful genius by the Californian stories of Mr. Bret Harte; and the style at least of Mr. Bret Harte's earlier stories showed how forcibly he had been affected by Charles Dickens. Now Dickens has recorded that his own earlier sketches were deliberately cast in the mold supplied by Smollett in his robust comic portraitures; and Smollett, in the preface of one of his novels, has 90 THE STUDY OF FICTION avowed his emulation of Le Sage. But ' Gil Bias ' is an adroit arrangement of material from Spanish sources according to the model set by the authors of ' Lazarillo de Tormes ' and ' Guzman de Al- farache,' the original picaresque romances. Be- tween these picaresque romances and ' Gil Bias ' and Smollett's full-blooded and coarse-grained fictions there are many points of resemblance; but Dickens, even in the rougher farcical tales of his youth, is not to be classed with them ; Mr. Bret Harte's work, as a whole, exhibits no close similarity to Dickens's; and Mr. Rudyard Kip- ling's, as a whole, exhibits no likeness at all to either Dickens's or Mr. Bret Harte's. Sometimes the literary ancestry of an author is mixed, and he is not merely a chip of the old block and not quite the image of his father, but has traits inherited from his mother also, and from a dozen other progenitors, maternal and paternal. Mr. Howells is an instance of this felicitous cross-breeding, and he can trace his descent from ancestors as different as Henry Heine and Jane Austen, Turgeniefif and Tolstoy. Sometimes an author of our time throws back to a remote forefather; the skeleton of ' Huckleberry Finn,' for example, is loosely articulated like the skeleton of ' Gil Bias,' although Mark Twain once told me, when I drew his attention to this, that he had absolutely no recollection of Le Sage's 9> THE STUDY OF FICTION story and certainly no predilection for it. The form here is the picaresque form, which has for its hero some humble and hopelessly unheroic figure, before whose wondering eyes more or less of the strange panorama of life is slowly unrolled. From ' Gil Bias ' to ' Huckleberry Finn ' the line is long, running through ' Roderick Random'' and the ' Pickwick Papers ' and more than one of Marryat's happy-go-lucky narratives. Indeed, the laxly knit tale of this type is likely always to be attrac- tive to the story-teller, as it releases the author from any obligation to construct a logical plot, and as it allows him to utilize immediately any striking situation he may invent or any strange character he may meet. Ill As the only unity the picaresque romance can have is due to the fact that a certain character has been a spectator of the various scenes or an actor in the various adventures, this character is gen- erally allowed to tell the story himself, and the tale takes the shape of an autobiography. The auto- biography and the history— these are the two usual methods of communicating to the reader the events in which his interest is to be aroused ; either one of the characters tells the tale in the first person or else the author tells it himself in 92 THE STUDY OF FICTION the third person. There are other methods, of course. The story may be cast in the form of a diary kept by one of the characters, recording events from day to day, and revealing in this act his feelings at the moment of making the entry; the method of the contemporaneous autobiog- raphy, this might be called, and it has been em- ployed skilfully by Mr. Paul Leicester Ford in his ' Story of an Untold Love.' Or the author may suppress everything except what his people say to one another, cutting his story down to dia- logue only, with but summary indication either of actual action or of unexpressed feeling. This semi-dramatic method has been developed in France of late by half a dozen clever writers, under the lead of the lady who calls herself " Gyp, " and it has been employed by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in the ' Story of the Gadsbys. ' Or certain of the characters may exchange letters— which is a very leisurely way of affording us the infor- mation we are seeking. But this method has its advantage, if the center of interest is not so much in what happened as in how these happen- ings affected the several actors— as in Smollett's ' Humphrey Clinker,' for example, and in Mr. James's 'Bundle of Letters,' much of the humor of these pleasantries arising from the unconscious Self-revelation of different characters in the pres- ence of the same fact. On the other hand, modern 9} THE STUDY OF FICTION readers find it an immense weariness to be forced to go through all the outlying formulas of epis- tolary art, when the theme itself is emotion pure and simple— as in Richardson's 'Clarissa Har- lowe,' which is to-day left unread partly because of the intolerable sluggishness of its telling. Wilkie Collins found it profitable elaborately to combine letters and diaries and statements of this character and that, thus keeping up an incessant cross-fire of suggestions and suspicions under cover of which the ultimate secret might lie con- cealed a little longer. Two young friends of mine, in the wantonness of inventive exuberance, once pieced together a coherent story out of race- cards, play-bills, pawn-tickets, newspaper para- graphs, advertisements, telegrams, and a few letters, without a single line of direct narrative. This ingenuity is well enough once in a way, but in the long run there is no doubt that it is worse than wasted. In the art of the story-teller, as in any other art, the less the mere form is flaunted in the eyes of the beholder the better. The simpler the manner of telling the story, the more attention will the reader be able to bestow upon the matter. So we find that the most of the great novels of the world are singularly free from intricacies of composition, and that in them the story is set forth directly either by one of the characters or by the author himself, 94 THE STUDY OF FICTION Probably the autobiographic form is earlier than the narrative in the third person. As Mr. Kipling once suggested to me when we were discussing the question, primitive man assumes no mod- esty, but is frankly vainglorious, rejoicing in his own prowess and delighting to vaunt himself. " I did it," he cries, "alone I did it; 1 seized him, I smote him, 1 slew him— with my own right hand I slew him!" And even now there is an almost irresistible tendency to boast when a man is talking about himself. Henry Esmond is as modest as he is manly, but we discover that he is aware of his own merits. Barry Lyndon is outrageously self-laudatory, which does not pre- vent our perceiving that he is an unmitigated scoundrel. In these two masterpieces Thackeray uses the autobiographic form with perfect suc- cess ; but when he employs Arthur Pendennis to unravel for us the family history of the New- comes, we cannot but think he is less felicitous. The personality of Pendennis is out of place in the later story, and his presence is distracting; besides, we are compelled to ask ourselves more than once how it is that Pendennis knows all the secrets of the highly respectable family, and we do not enjoy the suspicion that he must have employed detectives or listened at the keyhole. Nine times out of ten the simplest form is the ^est, the plain narrative in the third person by the 95 THE STUDY OF FICTION author, who is supposed to be ubiquitous and omniscient, having seen everything, heard every- thing, and remembered everything. The modern novelist, Mr. Howells once reminded me, is the direct heir of the epic poet, who knew all things because he was inspired by the muse herself, her aid having been duly invoked at the beginning. The most accomplished artists in fiction are the French, and they very rarely use any but the plain narrative ; and this has been preferred also by Tur- genieff in Russia and by Hawthorne in America, with that unerring instinct which makes them the despair of less gifted story-tellers. Turgenieff even managed to endow his plain narrative with some of the advantage of the autobiography, singling out one of his characters, analyzing this one's feelings only, and telling us always how the other characters affected this one. IV It may seem to some that I am lingering' too long over questions of technic, to which few readers of fiction ever give a thought, being in- terested in the events of the story, in the people who carry it on, in what is felt and said and done, rather than in the way in which it happens to be told. But a certain understanding of technic is a first requisite for any adequate appreciation of THE STUDY OF FICTION an art; and the technic of the art of the novelist is now singularly rich and varied and worthy of consideration. In our English-speaking commu- nity there is no danger that too much attention will be paid to matters of craftsmanship. In art we tend to be slovens, attaining our aim rather by an excessive expenditure of energy than by adroit husbanding of force. The ordinary British novel is a sprawling invertebrate— not to call it an inorganic conglomerate. Even the works of the British masters are often almost amorphous— the ' Mutual Friend ' for one and ' Middlemarch ' for another, both of which disclose an astound- ing disregard for the principles of composition. ' Vanity Fair ' has two separate stories arbitrarily conjoined— the one recording the rise and fall of Becky Sharp, and the other dealing with the two wooings of Amelia. When we turn from technic to theme, from the manner of telling to the matter of the tale, there are many aspects of fiction inviting atten- tion, and there are not a few questions of the hour upon which light can be thrown by an ex- amination of the novels of the day. For example, there is incessant discussion about the equality of the sexes and about the difference between feminine and masculine ideals ; and here instruc- tion can be had by a comparison of the novels written by men with the novels written by 97 THE STUDY OF FICTION women. Apparently what man most admires in woman is charm and submissiveness ; and therefore we discover that heroines of men's novels are likely to be both lovely and insipid, and that they are really clever only when they incline toward wickedness— Amelia on the one hand and on the other Becky Sharp. And seem- ingly what woman most admires in man is strength and goodness; and therefore we find that the heroes of women's novels tend to be brutes, like Rochester in 'Jane Eyre,' or to be prigs, like Daniel Deronda. Wholly without in- tention, the writers, men and women both, have disclosed the unformulated and fundamental be- liefs of each sex about the other; and the testi- mony is the stronger from the fact that the witnesses were not aware they were on the stand. Almost as brisk as this eternal debate between the sexes is the present discussion in regard to race-characteristics, and whether or not, for in- stance, the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon is really superior to that of the Latin and that of the Slav. Here again fiction may be of invaluable assistance in coming to a wise conclusion. Con- sider, for example, how the chief qualities of a people are unconsciously disclosed in its nov- ' els. Robinson Crusoe is as typically English in his sturdiness and in his religious feeling as the THE STUDY OF FICTION sorrowful Werther is typically German or the light-hearted Manon Lescaut is typically French. Any one who chanced to be familiar with the serious fiction of Spain and America might have forecast the conduct of the recent war between the two countries and foretold the result. Per- haps the salient inconsistency of the Spanish character, the immense chasm between its poetic side and its prosaic, could be seized by the mas- tery of a single volume, one of the world's great- est books, ' Don Quixote.' But a casual perusal of two earlier stories, ' Lazarillo de Tormes ' and 'Guzman de Alfarache,' now nearly three cen- turies old, would remind us how deeply rooted are certain of the characteristics of the Spanish race— on the one hand empty honor, careless cruelty, besotted superstition, administrative cor- ruption, and on the other sobriety, uncomplain- ing industry, and cheerful courage. These same characteristics are discoverable also in the later novels of Valdes and Perez Galdos, although not quite so brutally displayed. And as to America, whoever had read and understood the recent seri- ous fiction of the United States, the ' Rise of Silas Lapham ' and the ' Hazard of New Fortunes,' the stories of Mr. Hamlin Garland and Mr. Owen Wister, the tales of Miss Wilkins and of " Octave Thanet," might have sized up us Americans, and might have made a pretty good guess at the way THE STUDY OF FICTION a war, once entered upon, would bring out the en- ergy of the race, the tenacity, the resolution, the ingenuity— and even the good-humored and easy- going toleration which is perhaps our chief de- fect as a people, and which is responsible in some measure for the preventable sufferings of our sick soldiers. I said that a reader of the serious fiction of the two countries might have forecast the result of the war; and by serious fiction I meant what is often called Realistic fiction, the fiction in which the author has tried to tell the truth about life as he sees it. I doubt whether any valid deduction whatever could have been made by a reader of Romanticist fiction, the fiction in which the au- thor feels himself at liberty to dress up the facts of life to suit his market or to delight his caprice. The Romanticist fictions are more exciting than the veritistic; surprise follows surprise, and so- called effects are heaped one on the other. Life as we all know it, with its commonplace duties, seems drear and gray after these excursions into fairy-land with impossible heroes who face impos- sible perils with impossible fortitude. But story- telling of this sort is as dangerous as any other departure from the truth ; and if it " takes us out THE STUDY OF FICTION of ourselves," as the phrase is, if it supplies the "anodyne of dreams," as a British critic calls it, we had best remember that the morphine habit, once acquired, is not readily relinquished. The purpose of the novel, as of all literature indeed, is partly to amuse, to delight, to relieve. At a certain stage of mental development we are most amused by the unnatural and by the super- natural. As we grow to man's estate we are likely to discover that life itself offers the most interesting outlook to us, and that the fiction which most refreshes us is that which best inter- prets for us life as we know it. The boy in us, it may be,— the boy that survives more or less in every man who ever had a boyhood of his own, —the boy in us has a boyish liking still for deeds of daring and for swift sequences of hairbreadth escapes; but such puerilities pall sooner or later after a man has once plumbed the depths of life and seen for himself its seriousness. " When I was a child, I spake as a child," said the apostle, " I understood as a child, I thought as a child : but when I became a man, I put away childish things." And the skeptic Montaigne tells us in his essay on books how he outgrew his youthful fondness for the marvelous. " As to the Ama- dises, and such kind of stuff, they had not the credit to take me so much as in my childhood. And I will moreover say (whether boldly or rashly) 101 The study of FiCTidN that this old heavy soul of mine is now no longer delighted with Ariosto, no, nor with the good fel- low Ovid ; his facility and invention, with which I was formerly so ravished, are now of no rel- ish, and I can hardly have the patience to read him. " If Montaigne felt thus three hundred years ago, before the birth of the modern novel, we may perhaps maintain now that a continued pref- erence for narratives of physical excitement is a sign of mental immaturity. Montaigne could see only the first of the four stages through which fiction has been developed, and the fourth of them has been evolved only in our own time. Fiction dealt first with the Im- possible, then with the Improbable, next with the Probable, and now at last with the Inevitable. The romances of chivalry, the ' Amadis of Gaul,' and its sequels, of which Montaigne wearied, may serve as a type of the first stage, abounding as they do in deeds frankly impossible; and it is not unfair to find specimens of the second class in the Waverley Novels, in the Leatherstocking Tales, and in the cycle of the Three Musketeers, wherein we are entranced by adventures, perhaps always possible but often highly improbable. In the third group come the gentle novels of Jane Austen, confining themselves wholly to things probable; and in the final division we have Tur- genieff, for example, handling the common stuff THE STUDY OF FICTION of humanity, the plain matters of daily life, so as to bring out the inevitable result of the action and reaction of circumstance and character. Sir Walter Scott once quoted the lumbering and inadequate definitions by means of which Dr. Johnson sought to differentiate the romance and the novel. A romance, in Dr. Johnson's eyes, was " a military fable of the Middle Ages, a tale of wild adventure in love and chivalry," while a novel was "a smooth tale, generally of love." Scott himself proposed to amend by defining a romance as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse, the interest of which turns upon marvel- ous or uncommon incidents," and a novel as "a fictitious narrative, differing from the romance because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society." With his usual clear-headed common sense Scott seized the true line of de- marcation, and his definition holds to-day, al- though the novel has expanded immensely of late and has aspects now that would greatly have sur- prised him. The novel takes for its own what is likely, what is usual, what is ordinary, while the romance revels in the unlikely, the unusual, and the extraordinary. The novel could not come into existence until after fiction had progressed from the Impossible and the Improbable at least to the Probable. To this day the romance seems 103 THE STUDY OF FICTION to many a mere amusement, the sport of an idle hour, and therefore none too respectable ; whereas the novel is held to a higher responsibility, and since it aspires to the dignity of the drama it must be judged by the same lofty standards. Romance is fond of trying to improve its liter- ary standing by pretending that it is also history. It was John Richard Green who once defined a novel as "history without documents— nothing to prove it " ; and it is possible that the historian of the English people meant by this to exclude that bastard hybrid of fact and fancy which is known as the historical romance. We recognize that the tales of Russian life, for instance, which traveling Frenchmen have narrated, cannot be wholly trustworthy, or at least we can guess at their inexactness by recalling the stories of Amer- ica written by British authors; and we cannot deny that the author of a historical romance is also a carpet-bagger,— not through space, but through time,— and if his blunders be not so obvious, none the less must he blunder abun- dantly. As the best novels of Russian life are those written by the Russians themselves and the best novels of American life are those written by Americans, so the best novels of eighteenth- century manners, for example, are those written in the eighteenth century, and the most adequate stories of the Italian Renascence are the stories 104 THE STUDY OF FICTION written by Italians during the Renascence. If ' Romola ' is a great book, it is great not because of its historical pretensions, but in spite of them. The historical romances of writers less well equipped than George Eliot need detain the stu- dent of fiction but very briefly. VI A consideration of the history of the modern novel brings out two facts : first, that the tech- nic has been steadily improving, that the story is now told more directly, that character is now portrayed more carefully and elaborately, and that the artist is more self-respecting and takes his work more seriously; and, second, that the desire to reproduce life with all its intricacies has increased with the ability to accomplish this. The best fiction of the nineteenth century is far less artificial and less arbitrary than the best fic- tion of the eighteenth century. Serious novelists now seek for the interest of their narratives not in the accidents that befall the hero, nor in the external perils from which he chances to escape, but rather in the man himself, in his character with its balance of good and evil, in his struggle with his conscience, in his reaction against his heredity and his environment. Know thyself, said the Greek philosopher, and the English poet 105 THE STUDY OF FICTION told US that the proper study of mankind is man. The modern novel, wisely studied, is an instru- ment of great subtlety for the acquiring of a knowledge of ourselves and of our fellow-men. It broadens our sympathy by telling us how the other half lives, and it also sharpens our insight into humanity at large. It helps us to take a large and liberal view of life; it enlightens, it sustains, and it cheers. What Mr. John Morley once said of literature as a whole is even more accurate when applied to fiction alone: its pur- pose is "to bring sunshine into our hearts and to drive moonshine out of our heads." (1898) 106 V ALPHONSE DAUDET [This biographical criticism was written to serve as an Intro- duction to the translation of Daudet's works issued by Messrs. Little, Brown & Co.] ALPHONSE DAUDET ALPHONSE DAUDET is one of the most richly Jx gifted of modern French novelists and one of the most artistic ; he is perhaps the most de- lightful, and he is certainly the most fortunate. In his own country earlier than any of his con- temporaries he saw his stories attain to the very wide circulation that brings both celebrity and wealth. Beyond the borders of his own lan- guage he swiftly won a popularity both with the broad public and with the professed critics of literature second only to that of Victor Hugo and still surpassing that of Balzac, who is only of late beginning to receive from us the attention he has so long deserved. Daudet has had the rare luck of pleasing parti- zans of almost every school; the Realists have joyed in his work and so have the Romanticists ; his writings have found favor in the eyes of the frank Impressionists and also at the hands of the severer custodians of academic standards. Mr, Henry James has declared that Daudet is "at the 109 ALPHONSE DAUDET head of his profession," and has called him " an admirable genius." Jvlr. Robert Louis Stevenson thought Daudet "incomparably" the best of the present French novelists, and asserted that ' Kings in Exile' comes "very near to being a master- piece." (M. Jules Lemaitre tells us that Daudet "trails all hearts after him — because he has charm, as indefinable in a work of art as in a woman's face."\ M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, who has scant relish for latter-day methods in lit- erature, admits ungrudgingly that "there are certain corners of the great city and certain as- pects of Parisian manners, there are some physi- ognomies that perhaps no one has been able to render so well as Daudet, with that infinitely subtle and patient art which succeeds in giving even to inanimate things the appearance of life. " The documents are abundant for an analysis of Daudet such as Sainte-Beuve would have under- taken with avidity; they are more abundant, indeed, than for any other contemporary French man of letters even in these days of unhesitating self-revelation ; and they are also of an absolutely impregnable authenticity. M. Ernest Daudet has written a whole volume to tell us all about his brother's boyhood and youth and early manhood ALPHONSE DAUDET and first steps in literature. M. Leon Daudet has written another solid tome to tell us all about his father's literary principles and family life and later years and death. Daudet himself put forth a pair of pleasant books of personal gossip about himself, narrating his relations with his fellow- authors, and recording the circumstances under which he came to compose each of his earlier stories. Montaigne — whose ' Essays ' was Dau- det's bedside book, and who may be accepted not unfairly as an authority upon egotism — as- sures us that ' ' there is no description so difficult, nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of one's self." And Daudet's own interest in himself is not unlike Montaigne's — it is open, innocent, and illuminating. Cuvier may have been able to reconstruct an extinct monster from the inspection of a single bone; but it is a harder task to revive the figure of a man, even by the aid of these family testi- monies, this self-analysis, the diligence of count- less interviewers of all nationalities, and the in- discretion of a friend like fidmond de Goncourt (who seems to have acted on the theory that it is the whole duty of man to take notes of the talk of his fellows for prompt publication). Yet we have ample material to enable us to trace Daudet's heredity, and to estimate the influence of his environment in the days of his youth, and III ALPHONSE DAUDET to allow for the effect which certain of his own physical peculiarities must have had upon his exercise of his art. His near-sightedness, for example — would not Sainte-Beuve have seized upon this as significant? Would he not have seen in this a possible source of Daudet's mastery of description ? And the spasms of pain borne bravely and uncomplainingly, the long agony of his later years, what mark has this left on his work, how far is it responsible for a modification of his attitude — for the change from^the careless gaiety of 'Tartarin of TarasconNto the somber satire of ' Port Tarascon ' ? What caused ( the joyous story-teller of the ' Letters from my Mill ')to develop into the bitter iconoclast of the ' Immortal ' ? These questions are insistent; and yet, after all, what matters the answer to any of them ? The fact remains that Daudet had his share of that incommunicable quality which we are agreed to call genius. This once admitted, we may do our best to weigh it and to resolve it into its ele- ments ; it is at bottom the vital spark that resists all examination, however scientific we may seek to be. ( We can test for this and for that, but in the final analysis genius is inexplicable. It is what it is because it is. It might ' have been different, no doubt, but it is not. It is its own excuse for being; and, for all that we can say to ALPHONSE DAUDET the contrary, it is its own cause, sufficient unto itself. Even if we liad Sainte-Beuve's scalpel, we could not surprise the secret. ^ Yet an inquiry into the successive stages of Daudet's career, a consideration of his ancestry, of his parentage, of his birth, of the circumstances of his boyhood, of his youthful adventures — these things are interesting in themselves, and they are not without instruction. They reveal to us the reasons for the transformation that goes so far to explain Daudet's peculiar position — the transformation of a young Provenfal poet into a brilliant Parisian veritist. Daudet was a Proven- cal who became a Parisian; and in this trans- lation we may find the key to his character as a writer of fiction. He was from Provence as Maupassant was from Normandy; and Daudet had the Southern expansiveness and abundance, just as Maupassant had the Northern reserve and caution. ( If an author is ever to bring forth fruit after his kind he must have roots in the soil of his nativity.N ^Daudet was no orchid, beautiful and scentless; his writings have always the full flavor of the Southern soil.VHe was able to set Tartarin be- fore us so sympathetically and to make Numa Roumestan so convincing because he recognized in himself the possibility of a like exuberance. ' He could never take the rigorously impassive' "3 ALPHONSE DAUDET attitude which Flaubert taught Maupassant to assume. (Daudet not only feels for his characters, but he is quite willing that we should be aware of his compassion. \ He is not only incapable of the girding enmity which Taine detected and detested in Thackeray's treatment of Becky Sharp, but(he is also devoid of the callous detachment with which Flaubert dissected Emma Bovary under the microscope.] Daudet is never flagrantly hostile toward one oi his creatures; and however contemptible or des- picable the characters he has called into being, he is scrupulously fair to them. Sidonie and Fe- licia Ruys severally throw themselves away, but Daudet is never intolerant. He is inexorable, but he is not insulting. I cannot but think that it is Provence whence Daudet derived the precious birthright of sympathy, and that it is Provence again which bestowed on him the rarer gift of sentiment. ( It is by his possession of sympathy and of sentiment that he has escaped the arid- ity which suffocates us in the works of so many other Parisian novelists.N The South endowed him with warmth and heartiness and vivacity; andl^what he learned from Paris was the power of self-restraint and the duty of finish.N He was born in Provence and he'aied in Paris; he began as a poet and he ended as a veritist; and in each case there was logical evolution and 114 ALPHONSE DAUDET not contradiction. The Parisian did not cease to be a Provencal; and(tlie novelist was a lyrist still.^ (Poet though he was, he had an intense Hieing for the actual, the visible, the tangible.N He so hun- gered after truth that he was ready sometimes to stay his stomach with facts in its stead — mere fact being but the outward husk, whereas truth is the rich kernel concealed within. His son tells us that Daudet might have taken as a motto the title of Goethe's autobiography, ' Dichtung und Wahrheit ' — ' Poetry and Truth.' And this it is that has set Daudet apart and that has caused his vogue with readers of all sorts and conditions — this unique combination of imagination and verity. " His originality," M. Jules Lemaitre has acutely remarked, "is closely to unite observa- tion and fantasy, to extract from the truth all that it contains of the improbable and the sur- prising, to satisfy at the same time the readers of M. Cherbuliez and the readers of M. Zola, to write novels which are at the same time Realistic and Romantic, and which seem Romantic only because they are very sincerely and very pro- foundly Realistic." Alphonse Daudet was born m 1840, and it was at Nimes that he first began to observe mankind ; and he has described his birth place and his boyhood ALPHONSE DAUDET in('Little What's-his-name,' a novel even richer in autobiographical revelation than is ' David Copperfield.'N His father was a manufacturer whose business was not prosperous and who was forced at last to remove with the whole fam- ily to Lyons in the vain hope of doing better in the larger town. After reading the account of this parent's peculiarities in M. Ernest Daudet's book, we are not surprised that the affairs of the family did not improve, but went from bad to worse. Alphonse Daudet suffered bitterly in these years of desperate struggle, buiyie gained an understanding of the conditions of mercantile life to be serviceable later in the composition of ' Fromont and Risler,' j When he was sixteen he secured a place as pton in a boarding-school in the Cevennes. A pion is a poor devil of a youth hired to keep watch on the boys. How painful this position was to the young poet can be read indirectly in 'Little What's-his-name,' but more explicitly in the history of that story, printed now in ' Thirty Years of Paris.' From this remote prison he was rescued by his elder brother, Ernest, who was trying to make his way in Paris, and who sent for Alphonse as soon as he had been engaged to help an old gentleman in writing his memoirs. The younger brother has described his arrival in Paris, and his first dress-coat, and his earliest ii6 ALPHONSE DAUDET literary acquaintances. Ernest's salary was sev- enty-five francs a month, and on this the two brothers managed to live; no doubt fifteen dol- lars went further in Paris in 1857 than they did forty years later. In those days of privation and ambition Dau- det's longing was to make himself famous as a poet; and when at last, not yet twenty years old, he began his career as a man of letters, it was by the publication of a volume of verse, just as his fellow-novelists, M. Paul Bourget and Signor Gabriele d'Annunzio have severally done. Immature as juvenile lyrics are likely to be, these early rimes of Daudet's have a flavor of their own, a faintly recognizable note of individuality. He is more naturally a poet than most modern literators who possess the accomplishment of verse as part of their equipment for the literary life, but who lack a spontaneous impulse toward rhythm. It may even be suggested that(his little poems are less artificial than most French verse ; ^ they are the result of a less obvious eflbrt. He lisped in numbers ; and with him it was rather prose that had to be consciously acquired. ( His lyric note, although not keen and not deep, is heard again and again in his novels\and it sus- tains some of the most graceful and tender of his short-stories — the 'Death of the Dauphin,' for instance, and the ' Sous-pr6fet in the Fields.' 117 ALPHONSE DAUDET Daudet extended poetry to include play making; and alone or with a friend he attempted more than one little piece in rime — tiny plays of a type familiar enough at the Odeon. He has told us how the news of the production of one of these poetic dramas came to him afar in Algiers, whither he had been sent because of a weakness of the lungs, threatening to become worse in the gray Parisian winter. Other plays of his, some of them far more important than this early effort, were produced in the next few years. The most ambitious of these was the 'Woman of Aries,' which he had elaborated from a touching short- story, and for which Bizet composed incidental music as beautiful and as overwhelming as that prepared by Mendelssohn for the 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' No one of Daudet's dramatic attempts was really successful — not the 'Woman of Aries,' which is less moving in the theater than in its briefer narrative form, not even the latest of them all, the freshest and the most vigorous, the ' Struggle for Life, ' with its sinister figure of Paul Astier taken over from the ' Immortal.' Appar- ently, with all his desire to write for the stage, Daudet must have been inadequately endowed with the dramaturgic faculty, that special gift of playmaking which many a poet lacks and many a novelist, but which the humblest playwright ii8 ALPHONSE DAUDET must needs have and which all the great drama- tists have possessed abundantly in addition to their poetic power. Perhaps it was the unfavorable reception of his successive dramas which is responsible for the chief of Daudet's lapses from the kindliness with which he treats the characters that people his stories. He seems to have kept hot a grudge against the theater, and he relieves his feelings by taking it out of the stage-folk he introduces into his novels. To actors and actresses he is intolerant and harsh. What is factitious and self-overvaluing in the Provencal type, he un- derstood and he found it easy to pardon; but what was factitious and self-overvaluing in the player type, he would not understand and he refused to pardon. And here he shows in strong contrast with a successful dramatist, M. Ludovic Halevy, whose knowledge of the histrionic tem- perament is at least as wide as Daudet's and whose humor is as keen, but whose judgment is softened by the grateful memory of many vic- tories won by the united effort of the author and the actor. Through his brother's influence, Alphonse Daudet was appointed by the Duke of Morny to a semi-sinecure; and he has recorded how he told his benefactor before accepting the place that he was a Legitimist, and how the Duke smilingly "9 ALPHONSE DAUDET retorted that the Empress was also. Although it was as a poet that Daudet made his bow in the world of letters, his first appearance as a dramatist was not long delayed thereafter; and he soon came forward also as a journalist — or rather as a contributor to the papers. While many of the articles he prepared for the daily and weekly press were of ephemeral interest only, as the necessity of journalism demands, to be for- gotten forty-eight hours after they were printed, not a few of them were sketches having more than a temporary value. Parisian newspapers are more hospitable to literature than are tha newspapers of New York or of London, and a goodly proportion of the young Southerner's journalistic writing proved worthy of preserva- tion. It has been preserved for us in three volumes of short-stories and sketches, of fantasies and impressions. Not all the contents of the ' Let- ters from my Mill,' of the 'Monday Tales,' and of 'Artists' Wives,' as we have these collections now, were written in these early years of Dau- det's Parisian career, but many of them saw the light before 1870, and what has been added since conforms in method to the work of his prentice days. No doubt the war with Prussia enlarged his outlook on life; and there is more depth in the satires this conflict suggested and more pa- ALPHONSE DAUDET thos in the pictures it evoked. The ' Last Les- son,' for example, that simple vision of the old French schoolmaster taking leave of his Alsatian pupils, has a symbolic breath not easy to match in the livelier tales written before the surrender at Sedan; and in the 'Siege of Berlin' there is a vibrant patriotism far more poignant than we can discover in any of the playful apologues published before the war. He had had an inside view of the Second Empire; he could not help seeing its hollowness, and he revolted against the selfish- ness of its servants; no single chapter of M. Zola's splendid and terrible ' Downfall ' contains a more damning indictment of the leaders of the imperial army than is to be read in Daudet's 'Game of Billiards.' (The short-story, whether in prose or in verse, is a literary form in which the French have ever displayed an easy mastery; jand from Daudet's three volumes it would not be difficult to select half a dozen little masterpieces. The Provencal tales lack only rimes to stand confessed as poesy; and many a reader may prefer these first flights, before Daudet set his Pegasus to toil in the mill of realism. The 'Pope's Mule,' for in- stance, is not this a marvel of blended humor and fantasy.? And the 'Elixir of Father Gaucher,' what could be more naively ironic ? Like a true Southerner, Daudet delights in girding at the ALPHONSE DAUDET church; and /these tales bristle with gibes at ecclesiastical aignitaries; but his stroke is never malignant, and there is no barb to his shaft nor poison on the tip. \ Scarcely inferior to the war stories or to the Provencal sketches are certain vignettes of the capital, swift silhouettes of Paris, ghmpsed by an unforgetting eye — the 'Last Book,' for one, in which an unlovely character is treated with kindly contempt; and for another, the ' Book- keeper,' the most Dickens-like of Daudet's shorter pieces, yet having a literary modesty Dickens never attained. The alleged imitation of the British novelist by the French may be left for later consideration; but it is possible now to note that in the earlier descriptive chapters of the ' Letters from my Mill ' one may detect a certain similarity of treatment and attitude, not to Dick- ens but to two of the masters on whom Dickens modeled himself— Goldsmith and Irving. The scene in the diligence, when the baker gently pokes fun at the poor fellow whose wife is inter- mittent in her fidelity, is quite in the manner of the 'Sketch-Book.' There is the same freshness and fertility in the collection called ' Artists' Wives ' as in the ' Let- ters from my Mill' and the 'Monday Tales,' but not the same playfulness and fun. They are severe studies, all of them ; and they all illustrate ALPHONSE DAUDET the truth of Bagehot's saying that a man's mother might be his misfortune, but his wife was his fault. It is a rosary of marital infelicities that Daudet has strung for us in this volume, and in every one of them the husband is expiating his blunder. With ingenious variety the author rings the changes on one theme, on the sufferings of the ill-mated poet or painter or sculptor, despoiled of the sympathy he craves, and shackled even in the exercise of his art. And the picture is not out of drawing, for Daudet can see the wife's side of the case also; he can appreciate her be- wilderment at the ugly duckling whom it is so difficult for her to keep in the nest. The women have made shipwreck of their lives too, and they are companions in misery, if not helpmeets in understanding. This is perhaps the saddest of all Daudet's books, the least relieved by humor, the most devoid of the gaiety which illumines the ' Letters from my Mill ' and the first and second Tartarin volumes. But it is also one of the most veracious; it is life itself firmly grasped and honestly presented. It is not matrimonial incongruity at large in all its shifting aspects that Daudet here considers; it is only the married unhappiness of the artist, whatever his mode of expression and which- ever of the muses he has chosen to serve ; it is only the wedded life of the man incessantly in 123 ALPHONSE DAUDET search of the ideal, and never relaxing in the strain of his struggle with the inflexible material from which he must shape his vision of existence. Not only in this book but in many another has Daudet shown that he perceives the needs of the artistic temperament, its demands, its limitations, and its characteristics. There is a playwright in 'Rose and Ninette'; there is a painter in the 'Immortal'; there is an actor in 'Fromont and Risler ' ; there are a sculptor, a poet, and a novelist on the roll of the heroine's lovers in 'Sapho.' Daudet handles them gently always, unless they happen to belong to the theater. Toward the stage-folk he is pitiless; for all other artists he has abundant appreciation; he is not blind to their little weaknesses, but these he can forgive even though he refuses to forget; he is at home with them. He is never patronizing, as Thack- eray is, who also knows them and loves them. Thackeray's attitude is that of a gentleman born to good society, but glad to visit Bohemia, be- cause he can speak the language; Daudet's is that of a man of letters who thinks that his fellow-artists are really the best society. Ill Not with pictures of artists at home did Dau- det conquer his commanding position in litera- 124 ALPHONSE DAUDET ture, not with short-stories, not with plays, not with verses. These had served to make him known to the inner circle of lovers of literature who are quick to appreciate whatever is at once new and true; but they did not help him to break through the crust and to reach the hearts of the broad body of readers who care little for the delicacies of the season, but must ever be fed on strong meat. When the latest of the three vol- umes of short-stories was published, and when the ' Woman of Aries ' was produced, the trans- formation was complete : the poet had developed into a veritist without ceasing to be a poet, and the Provencal had become a Parisian. His wan- der-years were at an end, and he had made a happy marriage. Lucky in the risky adventure of matrimony, as in so many others, he chanced upon a woman who was congenial, intelligent, and devoted, and who became almost a collabo- rator in all his subsequent works. His art was ready for a larger effort; it was ripe for a richer fruitage. Already had he made more than one attempt at a long story, but this was before his powers had matured and before he had come to a full knowledge of himself ( ' Little What's-his-name,' as he himself has confessed, lacks perspective; it was composed too soon after the personal experiences out of which it was made A- before time had put the scenes in proper ' 123 ALPHONSE DAUDET proportion and before his hand was firm in its stroite. ('Robert Helmont' is the journal of an observer who happens also to be a poet and a patriot; but it has scarcely substance enough to warrant calling it a story. \ Much of the material used in the making of these books was very good indeed ; but the handling was a little uncertain, and the result is not quite satisfactory, charming as both of them are, with (the seductive grace which is Daudet's birthright and his trade-mark.'\ In his brief tales he had shown that he had the story-telling faculty, the ability to project charac- ter, the gift of arousing interest; but it remained for him to prove that he possessed also the main strength requisite to carry him through the long labor of a full-grown novel. It is not by gen- tle stories like ' Robert Helmont ' and ' Little What's-his-name ' that a novelist is promoted to the front rank; and after he had written these two books he remained where he was before, in the position of a promising young author. The promise was fulfilled by the publication of 'Fromont and Risler' — not the best of his novels, but the earliest in which his full force was displayed. Daudet has told us how this was planned originally as a play, how the failure of the ' Woman of Aries ' led him to relinquish the dramatic form, and how the supposed neces- sities of the stage warped the logical structure 1 2$ ALPHONSE DAUDET of the story, wrenching to the intrigues of the young wife the interest which should have been concentrated upon the partnership, the business rivalry, the mercantile integrity, whence the novel derived its novelty. Daudet yielded only this once to the falsifying habit of thrusting marital infidelity into the foreground of fiction when the theme itself seems almost to exclude any dwelling on amorous misadventure; and this is one reason why/ a truer view of Parisian life can be found in his pages than in those of any of his competitors,\and why his works are far less monotonous than theirs. He is not squeamish, as every reader of ' Sapho ' can bear witness ; bul^he does not wan- tonly choose a vulgar adultery as the staple of his stories.N I French fiction, ever since the tale of ' Tristan and Yseult ' was first told, has tended to be a poem of love triumphant over every ob- stacle, even over honor ;\and Daudet is a French- man, with French ideas 'about woman and love and marriage. He is not without his share of Gallic salt; but he is too keen an observer not to see thatlthere are other things in life than illicit wooings — business, for example, and politics, and religion — important factors all of them in our complicated modern existence.N At the root of him Daudet had a steadfast desire to see life as a whole and to tell the truth about jt unhesjtatr 127 ALPHONSE DAUDET ingly; and this is a characteristic he shares only with(the great masters of fiction — essentially ve- racious, every one of themX Probably Dickens, frequently as he contorted the facts of life into conformity with his rather primitive artistic code, believed that he also was telling the truth. It is in Daudet's paper explain- ing how he came to write ' Fromont and Risler ' that he discusses the accusation that he was an imitator of Dickens — an accusation which seems absurd enough now that the careers of both writers are closed, and that we can compare their complete works. Daudet records that the charge was brought against him very early, long before he had read Dickens, and he explains that any likeness that may exist is due not to copy- ing but to kinship of spirit. "I have deep in my heart," he says, "the same love Dickens has for the maimed and the poor, for the children brought up in all the deprivation of great cities." This pity for the disinherited, for those that have had no chance in life, is not the only similarity between the British novelist and the French; there is also the peculiar combination of senti- ment and humor. ^ Daudet is not so overmaster- ing as Dickens; but he is far more discreet, far truer to nature, far finer in his art; he does not let his humor carry him into caricature, nor his sentiment weaken into sentimentality. \ 128 ' ALPHONSE DAUDET (Even the minor French novelists strive for beauty of form, and would be ashamed of the fortuitous scaffolding that satisfies the British story-tellers. \ A eulogist of Dickens, Mr. George Gissing, has recently remarked acutely that "Daudet has a great advantage in his mastery of construction. Where, as in ' Fromont and Risler,' he constructs too well, that is to say, on the stage model, we see what a gain it was to him to have before his eyes the Paris stage of the Second Empire, instead of that of London in the earlier Victorian time." Where Dickens emu- lated the farces and the melodramas of forgotten British playwrights, Daudet was influenced rather by the virile dramas of Dumas fils and Augier. But(in 'Fromont and Risler,' not only is the plot a trifle stagy, but the heroine herself seems almost a refugee from the footlights. \ Ex- quisitely presented as Sidonie is, she fails quite to captivate or convince, perhaps because her sisters have been seen so often before in this play and in that. And(now and again even in his later novels we discover that Daudet has need- lessly achieved the adroit arrangement of events so useful in the theater and not requisite in the library. \ In the 'Nabob,' for example, it is the "lotTg arm of coincidence " that brings Paul de Gery to the inn on the Riviera, and to the very next room therein at the exact moment 129 ALPHONSE DAUDET when Jenkins catches up with the fleeing Felicia. Yet these lapses into the arbitrary are infre- quent after all; and as 'Fromont and Risler' was followed first by one and then by another novel, the evil influence of theatrical conventionalism disappears. Daudet occasionally permits him- self an underplot; but he acted always on the principle he once formulated to his son: "Every book is an organism ; if it has not its organs in place, it dies, and its corpse is a scandal." Some- times, as in 'Fromont and Risler,' he starts at the moment when the plot thickens, returning soon to make clear the antecedents of the char- acters first shown in action ; and sometimes, as in ' Sapho,' he begins right at the beginning and goes straight through to the end. But, whatever his method, there is never any doubt as to the theme ; and the essential unity is always apparent. This severity of design in no way limits the va- riety of the successive acts of his drama. While a novel of Balzac's is often no more than an analysis of character, and while a novel of Zola's is a massive epic of human endeavor,/ a novel of Daudet's is a gallery of pictures, brushed in with the sweep and certainty of a master hand — portraits, landscapes with figures, ma- rines, battle-pieces, bits of genre, views of Paris.\ And the views of Paris outnumber the others, 130 ALPHONSE DAUDET and almost outvalue them also. Mr. Henry James has noted that the 'Nabob' is "full of episodes which are above all pages of execution, triumphs of translation. The author has drawn up a list of the Parisian solemnities, and painted the portrait or given a summary of each of them. The opening day at the Salon, a funeral at Pere la Chaise, a debate in the Chamber of Deputies, the premiere of a new play at a favorite theater, furnish him with so many opportunities for his gymnastics of observation." And the 'Nabob' is only a little more richly decorated than the 'Immortal,' and 'Numa Roumestan,' and 'Kings in Exile.' These pictures, these carefully wrought mas- terpieces of rendering, are not lugged in, each for its own sake ; they are not outside of the narra- tive; they are actually part of the substance of the story. Daudet excels in describing, and every artist is prone to abound in the sense of his superiority. As the French saying puts it, a man has always the defects of his qualities. (Yet Daudet rarely obtrudes his descriptions, and he generally uses them to explain character and to set off or bring out the moods of his personages. They are so swift that I am tempted to call them ^ash-lights; but photographic is just what they are not, for they are artistic in their vigorous sup- pression of unessentials ; they are never gray or '3' ALPHONSE DAUDET cold or hard ; they vibrate with color and tingle with emotion A Andhust as a painter keeps filling his sketch- books with graphic hints for elaboration later, so Daudet was indefatigable in note-takingX He explains his method in his paper of 'Fromont and Risler': how he had for a score of years made a practice of jotting down in little note- books not only his remarks and his thoughts, but also a rapid record of what he had heard with his ears ever on the alert, and what he had seen with those tireless eyes of his. Yet he never let the dust of these note-books choke the life out of him. ^Every one of his novels was founded on fact — plot, incidents, characters, and scenery .N He used his imagination to help him to see; he used it also to peer into and behind the mere facts. (All that he needed to invent was a con- necting link now and again ; and it may as well be admitted at once that these mere inventions are sometimes the least satisfactory part of his stories. J The two young men in the 'Nabob,' for instance, whom Mr. Henry James found it difficult to tell apart, the sculptor-painter in the ' Immortal, '(the occasional other characters which we discover to be made up, lack the individuality and the vitality of figures taken from real life by a sympathetic effort of interpretative imagination.^ Delobelle, Gardinois, "all the personages of 132 ALPHONSE DAUDET ' Fromont ' have lived," Daudet declares; and he adds a regret that in depicting old Gardinois he gave pain to one he loved, but he "could not suppress this type of egotist, aged and terrible." Since the beginning of the art of story-telling, the narrators must have gone to actuality to get suggestions for their character-drawing; and nothing is commoner than the accusation that this or that novelist has stolen his characters ready-made — filching them from nature's shop- window, without so much' as a by-your-leave. Daudet is bold in committing these larcenies from life, and frank in confessing them — far franker than Dickens, who tried to squirm out of the charge that he had put Landor and Leigh Hunt unfairly into fiction. Perhaps Dickens was bolder than Daudet, if it is true that he drew Micawber from his own father, and Mrs. Nickleby from his own mother. Daudet was taxed with ingrati- tude that he had used as the model of Mora the Duke of Morny, who had befriended him ; and he defended himself by declaring that he thought the Duke would find no fault with the way Mora had been presented. Bul(a great artist has never copied his models slavishly; he has utilized them in the effort to realize to his own satisfaction what he has already imagined..\ Daudet main- tained to his son that those wno are without imagination cannot even observe accurately. \jn- '33 ALPHONSE DAUDET vention alone, mere invention, an inferior form of mental exercise, suffices to provide a pretty fair Romanticist tale, remote from the facts of every- day life; but only true imagination can sustain a Realistic novel, where every reader's experience qualifies him to check off the author's progress, step by stepA IV It would take too long — although the task would be amusing — to call the roll of Daudet's novels written after 'Fromont and Risler' had revealed to him his own powers, and to discuss what fact of Parisian history had been the start- ing-point of each of them, and what notabilities of Pads had sat for each of the chief characters. Mr. Henry James, for instance, has seen it sug- gested that Felicia Ruys is intended as a portrait of Mme. Sarah Bernhardt; M. Zola, on the other hand, denies that Felicia Ruys is Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, and hints that she is rather Mme. Judith Gautier. Daudet himself refers to the equally absurd report that Gambetta was the ori- ginal of Numa Roumestan — a report over which the alleged subject and the real author laughed together. Daudet's own attitude toward his creations is a little ambiguous or at least a little inconsistent; in one paper he asserts that every character of his has had a living original, and in '34 ALPHONSE fiAUDET another he admits that filysSe Meraut, for e:id- ample, is only in part a certain Therion. The admission is more nearly exact than the assertion. ^ Every novelist whose work is to en- dure even for a generation must draw from life, ^ sometimes generalizing broadly and sometimes keeping close to the single individual, but always free to modify the mere fact as he may have ob- served it to conform with the larger truth of the fable he shall devise. /Most story-tellers tend to generalize, and their fictions lack the sharpness of outline we find in nature.X Daudet preferred to retain as much of the actual individual as he dared without endangering the web of his com- position; and often the transformation is very slight — Mora, for instance, who is probably a close copy of Morny, but who stands on his own feet in the ' Nabob, ' and lives his own life as independently as though he was a sheer imagi- nation. More rarely the result is not so satis- factory — J. Tom Levis, for example, for whose authenticity the author vouches, but who seems out of place in ' Kings in Exile, ' like a fantastic invention, such as Balzac sometimes permitted himself as a relief from his rigorous realism. (For incident as well as for character Daudet goes to real life. \ The escape of Colette from under the eyes of her father-in-law — that actu- ally happened, but none the less does it fit into U5 alphonse daudeT ' Kings, in Exile ' ; and Colette's cutting off her hair in grief at her husband's death — that actu- ally happened also ; but it belongs artistically in the 'Immortal.' On the other hand, the fact which served as the foundation of the ' Immor- tal' — the taking in of a savant by a lot of forged manuscripts — has been falsified by chang- ing the savant from a mathematician (who might easily be deceived about a matter of autographs) to a historian (whose duty it is to apply all known tests of genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past). This borrowing from the newspapers has its evident advantages, but it has its dangers also, even in the hands of a poet as adroit as Daudet and as imaginative./ Per- haps the story of his which is most artistic in its telling, most shapely, most harmonious in its modulations of a single theme to the inevitable end, developed without haste and without rest, is ' Sapho '\and ("Sapho ' is the novel of Daudet's in which thtre seems to be the least of this sten- ciling of actual fact, in which the generalization is the broadest, and in which the observation is least restricted to single individuals. \ But in 'Sapho' the theme itself' is narrow, narrower than in 'Numa Roumestan,' and far narrower than in either the 'Nabob' or 'Kings in Exile'; and this is why 'Sapho,' fine as it is, and subtle, is perhaps less satisfactory. No other 136 ALPHONSE DAUDET French novelist of the final half of the nineteenth century, not Flaubert, not Goncourt, not M. Zola, not Maupassant, has four novels as solid as these, as varied in incident, as full of life, as rich in character, as true. They form the quadrilateral wherein Daudet's fame is secure. ( ' Sapho ' is a daughter of the ' Lady of the Camellias,' and a granddaughter of 'Manon Lescaut ' — Frenchvi^omen, all of them, and of a class French authors have greatly affected.N But Daudet's book is not a specimen of what Lowell called " that corps-de-ballet literature in which the most animal of the passions is made more tempt- ingly naked by a veil of French gauze." ( It is at bottom a moral book, much as ' Tom Jones ' is moral, j Fielding's novel is English, robust, hearty, brutal in a way, and its morality is none too lofty. Daudet's is French, softer, more ener- vating, and with(an almost complacent dwelling on the sins of the flesh.N But neither Fielding nor Daudet is guilty of(sEntimentality, the one unforgivable crime in art.\ In his treatment of the relation of the sexes Daudet was above all things truthful; his veracity is inexorable. He shows how man is selfish in love and woman also, and how the egotism of the one is not as the egotism of the other. He shows how Fanny Legrand slangs her lover with the foul language of the gutter whence she sprang, and how Jean, "37 ALPHONSE DAUDEt when he strikes back, refrains from foul blow^. He shows how Jean, weak of will as he was, gets rid of the millstone about his neck, only be- cause of the weariness of the woman to whom he has bound himself. He shows us the various aspects of the love which is not founded on esteem, the Hettema couple, De Potter and Rose, Dechelette and Alice Dore, all to set off the sorry idyl of Fanny and Jean. In ' Numa Roumestan ' there is a larger vision of life than in ' Sapho,' even if there is no deeper insight. The construction is almost as severe; and the movement is unbroken from beginning to end, without excursus or digression. The central figure is masterly — the kindly and selfish Southerner, easy-going and soft-spoken, an orator who is so eloquent that he can convince even himself, a politician who thinks only when he is talking, a husband who loves his wife as pro- foundly as he can love anybody except himself, and who loves his wife more than his temporary mistress, even during the days of his dalliance. /Numa is a native of the South of France, as was Daudet himself; and it is out of the fulness of knowledge that the author evolves the character,\ brushing in the portrait with bold strokes and' unceasingly adding caressing touches till the man actually lives and moves before our eyes. The veracity of the picture is destroyed by no final .38 ALPHONSE DAUDEt inconsistency. What Numa is, Numa will be. [At the end of his novels Daudet never descends like a god from the machine to change character in the twinkling of an eye, and to convert bad men to good thoughts and good deeds.\ I He can give us goodness when he chooses, a human goodness, not offensively perfect, not priggish, not mawkish, but high-minded and engaging.A There are two such types in 'Kings in Exile,' tne Queen and filysee Meraut, essen- tially honest both of them, thinking little of self, and sustained by lofty purpose. [Naturalistic novelists generally (and M. Zola in particular) live in a black world peopled mainly by fools and knaves "Vrom this blunder Daudet is saved by his Southerrl temperament, by his lyric fervor, and, at bottom, by his wisdom. He knows better; he knows that while a weak creature like Christian II is common, a resolute soul like Frederique is not so very rare. He knows that the contrast and the clash of these characters is interesting matter for the novelist. And no novelist has had a happier inspiration than that which gave us 'Kings in Exile,' a splendid subject, splendidly handled, and lending itself perfectly to the dis- play of Daudet's best qualities, his poetry, his ability to seize the actual, and his power of deal- ing with material such as the elder Dumas would have delighted in with a restraint and a logic the 139 ALPHONSE DAUDET younger Dumas would have admired. Plot and counter-plot, bravery, treachery, death — these are elements for a Romanticist farrago; and in Daudet's hands they are woven into a tapestry almost as stiff as life itself. The stuff is Roman- tic enough, but the treatment is unhesitatingly Realistic; and 'Kings in Exile,' better than any other novel of Daudet's, explains his vogue with readers of the most divergent tastes. In the 'Nabob,' the romantic element is slighter than in ' Kings in Exile ' ; the subject is not so striking, and the movement of the story is less straightforward. But what a panorama of Paris it is that he unrolls before us in this story of a luckless adventurer in the city of luxury then under the control of the imperial band of brig- ands! No doubt the Joyeuse family is an obtru- sion and an artistic blemish, since they do not logically belong in the scheme of the story; and yet they (and their fellows in other books of Daudet's) testify to his effort to get the truth and the whole truth into his picture of Paris life. Mora and Felicia Ruys and Jenkins, these are the obverse of the medal, exposed in the shop- windows that every passer-by can see. The Joy- euse girls and their father are the reverse, to be viewed only by those who take the trouble to look at the under side of things. They are sam- ples orf the simple, gentle, honest folk of whom 140 ALPHONSE DAUDET there must be countless thousands in France and even in its capital, but who fail to interest most French novelists just because they are not eccen- tric or wicked or ugly.N Of a truth, Aline Joy- euse is as typically Frisian as Felicia Ruys herself; both are needed if the census is to be complete; and the omission of either is a source of error. There is irony in Daudet's handling of these humbler figures, but it is compassionate and almost affectionate. If he laughs at Father Joy- euse there is no harshness and no hostility in his mirth. For the Joyeuse daughters he has indul- gence and pity; and his humor plays about them and leaves them scart-free. It never stings them or scorches or sears, as it does Astier-Rehu and Christian II and the Prince of Axel, in spite of all his desire to be fair toward all the creatures of his brain. Irony is only one of the manifestations of Dau- det's humor. Wit he has also, and satire. And he is doubly fortunate in that he has both humor and the sense-of-humor — the positive and the negative. It is the sense-of-humor, so called, that many humorists are without, a deprivation which allows them to take themselves so seri- ously that they become a laughing-stock for the world. Mt is the sense-of-humor that makes the master of comedy, that helps him to see things 141 ALPHONSE DAUDET in due proportion and perspective, that keeps him from exaggeration and emphasis, from sen- timentality and melodrama and bathosA It is the sense-of-humor that prevents our making fools of ourselves ; it is humor itself that softens our laughter at those who make themselves ridicu- lous. In his serious stories Daudet employs this negative humor chiefly, as though he had in memory La Bruyere's assertion that "he who makes us laugh is rarely able to win esteem for himself." His positive humor — gay, exuberant, contagious — finds its full field for display in some of the short-stories, and more especially in the Tartarin series. Has any book of our time caused more laughter than 'Tartarin of Tarascon' — unless it be 'Tar- tarin on the Alps' ? I can think only of one rival pair, 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' — for Mark Twain and Alphonse Daudet both achieved the almost impossible feat of writing a successful sequel to a successful book, of forcing fortune to a repetition of a happy accident. (The abundant laughter the French humorist excited is like that evoked by the American humorist — clean, hearty, healthy, self-respecting ;\ it is in both cases what George Eliot in one of her letters called "the ex- quisite laughter that comes from a gratification of the reasoning faculty." Daudet and Mark Twain are imaginative Realists ; their most amus- 143 ALPHONSE DAUDET ing extravagance is but an exaggeration of the real thing; and they never let factitious fantasy sweep their feet off the ground. / Tartarin is as typical of Provence as Colonel Sellers — to take that figure of Mark Twain's which is most like — is typical of the Mississippi valley. \ Tartarin is as true as Numa Roumestan; in fact, they may almost be said to be sketched from the same model but in a very different temper. In 'Numa Roumestan' we are shown the sober side of the Southern temperament, the sorrow it brings in the house though it displays joy in the street; and in 'Tartarin' we behold only the immense comicality of the incessant incongruity between the word and the deed. Tartarin is Southern, it is true, and French; but he is very human also. There is a boaster and a liar in most of us, lying in wait for a chance to rush out ^ and put us to shame, (it is this universality of Daudet's satire that has given ' Tartarin ' its vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. \ The ingenuity of Tartarin's misadventures, the v'ariety of them in Algiers and in Switzerland, the obvious reason- ableness of them all, the delightful probability of these impossibilities, the frank gaiety and the unflagging high spirits — these are precious qualities, all of them; but(it is rather the essen- tial humanness of Tartarin himself that has given him a reputation throughout the world.^ Very 143 ALPHONSE DAUDET rarely indeed, now or in the past, has an author been lucky enough to add a single figure to the cosmopolitan gallery of fiction. Cervantes, De- foe, Swift, Le Sage, Dumas, have done it; Field- ing and Hawthorne and Turgenieff have not. It is no wonder that Daudet took pride in this. The real joy of the novelist, he declared, is to create human beings, to put on their feet types of humanity which thereafter circulate through the world with the name, the gesture, the grimace he has given them and which are cited and talked about without reference to their creator and with- out even any mention of him. And whenever Daudet heard some puppet of politics or litera- ture called a Tartarin, a shiver ran through him — " the shiver of pride of a father, hidden in the crowd that is applauding his son and wanting all the time to cry out, ' That 's my boy ! ' " The time has not yet come for a final estimate of Daudet's position — if a time ever arrives when any estimate can be final. But already has a selection been made of the masterpieces which survive, and from which an author is judged by the next generation, that will have leisure to criti- cize only the most famous of the works this gen- eration leaves behind it. We can see also that '44 ALPHONSE DAUDET much of Daudet's later writing is slight and not up to his own high standard, aIthough(even his briefest trifle had always something of his charm, of his magic, of his seductive grace. \ We can see how rare an endowment he has when we note that he is an acute observer of mankind, and yet without any taint of misanthropy, and that he combines fidelity of reproduction with poetic elevation. He is — to say once more what has already been said in these pages more than once — he is a lover of romance with an unfaltering respect for reality. We all meet with strange experiences once in our lives, with "things you could put in a story," as the phrase is; but we none of us have hairbreadth escapes every morning before break- fast. (The romantic is as natural as anything else; it is the excess of the romantic which is in bad taste. \It is the piling up of the agony which is disgustirrg. (It is the accumulation upon one impossible hero of many exceptional adventures which is untrue and therefore immoral.N Daudet's most individual peculiarity was his skfll in seiz- ing the romantic aspects of the commonplace. In one of his talks with his son he said that a novelist must beware of an excess of lyric en- thusiasm; he himself sought for emotion, and emotion escaped when human proportions were exceeded. /Balance, order, reserve, symmetry,. 145 ALPHONSE DAUDET sobriety — these are the qualities he was ever praising.N (The real, the truthful, the sincere — these are what he sought always to attain./ Daudet may lack the poignant intensity of Balzac, the lyric sweep of Hugo, the immense architectural strength of M. Zola, the implacable disinterestedness of Flaubert, the marvelous con- centration of Maupassant, bul(he has more humor than any of them and more charm — more sym- pathy than any but Hugo, and more sincerity than any but Flaubert. \ His is perhaps a rarer combination than any of theirs — the gift of story-telling, the power of character-drawing, the grasp of emotional situation, the faculty of analy- sis, the feeling for form, the sense of style, an unfailing and humane interest in his fellow-men, and an irresistible desire to tell the truth about life as he saw it with his own eyes. (1898) VI ON A NOVEL OF THACKERAY'S [This essay was written as one of a series in ' My Favorite Novelist and his Best Book,' appearing in Munsey's Maga^jine.'] ON- A NOVEL OF THACKERAY'S AS the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' once f\ wrote to the author of 'Silas Marner,' "So many stories are tramping over one's mind in every modern magazine, nowadays, that one is macadamized, so to speak " ; and therefore it is good for one to be forced, now and again, to plow up one's mind, as it were, that the seed falling by the wayside may have a chance to take root. To let light and air into the mind, to admit the re- freshing water that stimulates to renewed activity, nothing is fitter than the cultivation of the habit of comparative criticism. For those of us who love books and reading— if I may now leave the fields for the library— it is well always to set the newer claimants for fame beside the old masters, to measure them without prejudice, and to weigh them in the equal scales. And so I should wel- come the call to choose out of all the host of story-tellers the craftsman whose work most de- lights me, and to deliver the reasons for the faith '49 ON A NOVEL OF THACKERAY S that is in me— were it not for one insuperable obstacle to any such selection. This difficulty is easy to define: it is simply that no true lover of books and reading can be expected to limit his liking to the works of any one author. He is not so poor as to have only one favorite; he resembles rather the Sultan in having a harem full of them. Mr. Howells re- minded us, not long ago, that man is still im- perfectly monogamous; and whatever may be thought of this assertion when applied to life, it is absolutely true when applied to literature. He who marries a single book is likely, sooner or later, to weary of its charms and to seek a di- vorce, that he may bestow his affection upon another subject. Though he be no universal lover, the bookman is often mutable and swiftly inconstant. • No man who can read and write and taste what he reads is so narrow-minded as to confine him- self solely to the writings of a single author. His moods must vary with the revolving seasons and with the lapse of years. In the spring the Greek lyrists may charm him who in midwinter delighted rather in the Elizabethan dramatists. The romance of adventure stirs his blood in youth ; later in life, when he knows the world better, he finds his account rather in the novel of character, with its flashes of self-revelation. For 150 ON A NOVEL OF THACKERAY'S myself, I have outv^^orn my relish for Poe's tales, gruesome or melancholic, although I esteem his art not lower than I did ; and the artifice of Sheri- dan's comedies palls upon me nov\^, although once I held them to be the perfection of wit. To-day the list is long of novelists in whose books 1 can lose myself with satisfaction; the list is long and of a most cosmopolitan com- plexion. As I visualize it in a column, 1 find American and British names, French and Russian. There is Thackeray, for one, and for another, Thackeray's master, Balzac. There is Haw- thorne, and there is Turgenieff, Hawthorne's rival in ethical richness and in constructive sym- metry. There is Mr. Howells, with his incarna- tion of the more sophisticated American as he is seen to-day on the Atlantic seaboard ; and there is Mark Twain, with his resuscitation of the more primitive American as he was to be discerned once upon a time on the banks of the Mississippi. All these pleasure me at one time or another. I cannot tell how often 1 have read the ' Scarlet Letter' and ' Smoke,' ' Henry Esmond ' and ' Pere Goriot,' the ' Rise of Silas Lap ham ' and the ' Ad- ventures of Huckleberry Finn. ' To make a choice of them is frankly impossible, or even to say that these six are the favorite half-dozen. But if a selection is imperative, I am ready, for the mo- ment at least, to declare that Thackeray is the >5» ON A NOVEL OF THACKERAY S novelist I would rather discuss here and now, well aware that no favorite has a right to expect a long continuance in grace. And the reason why I pick out Thackeray from among the other nov- elists I like as well as I like him (if not better) is that I may thus call attention to a book of his which I believe to be somewhat neglected. 1 hold this book to be his best artistically, the one most to be respected, if not the one to be regarded with the most warmth. It is perhaps the only story of Thackeray's which the majority of his readers have never taken up. It is the tale of his telling which most clearly reveals some of his best qualities and which most artfully masks some of his worst defects. It is the ' Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., Written by Himself.' It was published originally in a British maga- zine, and so little liked at first that it was not re- published as a book for many years— indeed, not until after ' Vanity Fair ' and ' Henry Esmond ' had at last revealed Thackeray's genius, and lent in- terest even to the timid firstlings of his muse. " If the secret history of books could be written," so he told us in the pages of ' Pendennis,' "and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting and dull tales excite the reader." 'Barry Lyndon' is neither insipid nor dull ; yet its secret history would be 152 ON A NOVEL OF THACKERAY'S interesting enough. It was written when Thack- eray was not yet thirty-five years of age— for he flowered late, like most of the greater novelists. Born in 1811, he was married in 1836; and in 1840 he had been forced to place his wife in con- finement. Two years later he made a tour in Ire- land, the record of which we can read in the 'Irish Sketch-Book, ' published in 1843; and in 1844 he followed these Hibernian sketches with the full-length portrait of the Irish Barry. It was not until 1847 that 'Vanity Fair' began to appear; and the veracious history of Colonel Henry Esmond was not given to the world until 1852. After these later stories beamed forth, the earlier tale shone with a reflected light only ; and yet I cannot but think it to be Thackeray's high- est achievement as an artist in letters. Perhaps, if 'Barry Lyndon' had not unfortunately failed of appreciation, Thackeray might have taken his art more seriously in the broader and deeper fic- tions he set before us afterward. In them the prevailing faults are an affectation of knowing- ness, an excess of sentiment, an obtruded mor- alizing, a tendency toward caricature (due, prob- ably, to the overwhelming vogue of Dickens), a looseness of structure (due, perhaps, to the mode of publication in monthly parts), a confi- dential manner, and a personal intervention of '53 ON A NOVEL OF THACKERAY S the showman constantly reminding us that the puppets are but the work of his hands after all. In ' Barry Lyndon ' the defects are minimized or disappear altogether. The knowingness which is almost offensive when Arthur Pendennis is tell- ing us about the Newcomes is a touch of char- acter when it is Barry Lyndon who sets forth his own adventures, appealing to the reader as a man of the world, or else the hero will not be viewed from the proper perspective. The fact that Barry himself is the narrator prevents any overplus of moralizing or sentiment. The confidential man- ner is proper enough in an autobiography, which has the further advantage of forbidding the ap- pearance of the showman in front of the figure he is manipulating. The fact that the book deals with but the chosen episodes of one man's career gives it a unity not found in any other of Thack- eray's works except ' Henry Esmond ' ; and, ex- cept ' Esmond,' again, no story of Thackeray's is so free from caricature as ' Barry Lyndon.' Those of us who prefer the impersonal and im- passive method of story-telling used by Merimee and Flaubert, by Hawthorne and Turgenieff, in which the author seems never to intervene, but only to set down the inevitable actions of his characters, are annoyed by the malignity with which Thackeray pursues Becky Sharp ; we feel that he is guilty of meanness in taking sides against one of his own creations. We are dis- '54 ON A NOVEL OF THACKERAY'S turbed by the reflections with which he pads the chapters of his novels, —although we hold that his vagabond moralizing is delightful in the ' Round- about Papers,' since it is the privilege of the es- sayist to be discursive. Thackeray has a native bias toward the didactic, but no doubt he felt he had the warrant of Fielding, and claimed the right to revive the intercalary essays of 'Tom Jones.' Yet in Fielding's case these invocations of the muse, these discussions of the art of prose epic, these comments on character, were frankly prefixed to the several books of ' Tom Jones ' ; they were, as who should say, a series of pref- aces to successive volumes, while Thackeray's digressions exist for their own sake, and arrive, seemingly, whenever the fabulist is out of matter. Twice only was Thackeray able to conquer this bias— in ' Henry Esmond ' and in ' Barry Lyndon.' These are his only novels in the form of autobi- ography, whence we may infer that this im- posed on him a needed reserve. Of the various ways in which fiction may be presented to the reader— the novel in letters and the novel in dialogue, the novel told in the third person and the novel told in the first person— the last is the best for self-revelation and for adventure. Is not the interest of ' Robinson Crusoe ' doubled for us by our knowledge that it is the cast- away himself who is recording his shipwrecks and his prayers ? '55 ON A NOVEL OF THACKERAY S Perhaps ' Barry Lyndon ' is not so flawless in structure nor so substantially planned as ' Henry Esmond.' In general, Thackeray gave little heed to the architectonics of fiction; he was an im- proviser, as Scott was; and the evolution of most of his novels is fortuitous, even though he never repeated the blunder of the bifurcated plot which is the chief est blemish of 'Vanity Fair'— as it is also of 'Anna Karenina.' It may be that the autobiographic form forced Thackeray to the forethought he more than often shirked; so it happens that these two stories have each its own unity, and are not mere congeries of straggling episodes. But if the framework of ' Barry Lyndon ' is a little less artfully proportioned than that of 'Henry Esmond,' this is its only inferiority. In sustaining the assumed tone the earlier book is far superior to the later, and the task was far more dangerous. Thackeray had made 'Es- mond ' in his own image ; well aware of his own tendency to preach, he endowed the colonel with a ready willingness to point a moral, in season and out; and he confessed to Trollope that the impeccable hero was a bit of a prig. Henry Esmond is a perfect gentleman at all times, and Barry Lyndon is ever an unblushing rascal ; and while the portrayal of the former was not diffi- cult to Thackeray, there is greater gusto, I think, >54 THE ART AND MYSTERY OF COLLABORATION round him. In Wales's ' London,' letter B, third shelf, you will find an account of Lambeth, and some prints of the place. Color in with local coloring. The daughter will come down and speak to her lover in his wherry at Lambeth Stairs." "Jones (an intelligent young man) ex- amines the medical, historical, topographical books necessary ; his chief points out to him in Jeremy Taylor (fol. London, MDCLV) a few remarks such as might befit a dear old archbishop departing this life. When 1 come back to dress for dinner the archbishop is dead on my table in five pages,— medicine, topography, theology, all right,— and Jones has gone home to his family some hours." This was Thackeray's whimsical suggestion; but if he had ventured to adopt it himself, I fear we should have been able to dis- tinguish the prentice hand from the fine round sweep of the master. This paper is, perhaps, rather a consideration of the principle of collaboration than an explana- tion of its methods. To point out the depart- ments of literature in which collaboration may be of advantage and to indicate its more apparent limitations have been my objects, and I have postponed as long as I could any attempt to explain "how it is done." Such an explanation is at best but a doubtful possibility. Perhaps the first requisite is a sympathy be- THE ART AND MYSTERY OF COLLABORATION tween the two partners not sufficient to make them survey life from the same point of view, but yet enough to make them respect each other's suggestions and be prepared to accept them. There is needed in both openness of mind as well as alertness, an ability to take as well as to give, a willingness to put yourself in his place and to look at the world from his stand- point. Probably it is best that the two authors shall not be too much alike in temperament. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, for example, although not twins, thought alike on most sub- jects; and so close was their identity of cerebra- tion that when they were sitting at the same table at work on the same book, they sometimes wrote almost the same sentence at the same moment. This is collaboration carried to an abnormal and unwholesome extreme ; and there is much that is morbid and much that is forced in the books the Goncourts composed together. Collaboration may once more be likened to matrimony, and we may consider MM. Erck- mann-Chatrian and Messrs. Besant and Rice as monogamists, while Scribe and Labiche, who were ready to collaborate at large, are polyga- mists. In marriage husband and wife are one, and that is not a happy union when either in- quires as to which one it is : the unity should be so complete that the will of each is merged in 316 THE ART AND MYSTERY OF COLLABORATION that of the other. So it should be in a literary partnership. Respect for each other, mutual esteem, is, perhaps, the first requisite for collab- oration, as for matrimony; and good temper is assuredly the second. In discussing the practice of collaboration with that passed master of the art Sir Walter Besant, he declared to me that it was absolutely essential that one of the two partners should be the head of the firm. He did not tell me who was the head of the firm of Besant and Rice, and 1 have no direct testimony to offer in support of my belief that the dominant member was Sir Walter himself; but there is a plenty of circumstantial evidence to that effect, and, as Thoreau says, " some circumstantial evidence is very strong— as when you find a trout in the milk." What Sir Walter Besant meant, 1 take it, was that there must be a unity of impulse so that the resulting product shall seem the outcome of a single controlling mind. This may be attained by the domination of one partner, no doubt, as when Dumas availed himself of the aid of Ma- quet; but it can be the result also of an harmoni- ous equality, as when Meilhac and M. Halevy were writing together. In collaboration as in matrimony, again, it is well when the influence of the masculine element does not wholly over- power the feminine. 5'7 THE ART AND MYSTERY OF COLLABORATION As there are households where husband and wife fight like cat and dog, and where marriage ends in divorce, so there are literary partnerships which are dissolved in acrimony and anger. Alexandre Dumas fils has lent his strength to the authors of the ' Supplice d'une Femme,' ' He- lolse Paranquet,' and the 'Danicheff,' and there followed bad feelings and high words. Warned by this bitter experience, Dumas is said to have answered a request to collaborate with the query, " Why should I wish to quarrel with you ? " But Dumas was a bad collaborator, I fancy, de- spite his skill and his strength. He was like the powerful ally a weak country sometimes calls in to its own undoing. Yet in his case the usual cause of disagreement between collaborators was lacking, for the plays succeeded which he recast and stamped with his own image and superscription. In general it is when the work fails that the collaborators fall out. Racine made an epigram against the two now forgotten authors of a now forgotten tragedy, that each claimed it before it was produced and both re- nounced it after it had been acted. If I may be allowed to offer myself as a wit- ness, I shall testify to the advantage of a literary partnership which halves the labor of the task and doubles the pleasure. It may be that I have been exceptionally skilful in choosing my allies 318 THE ART AND MYSTERY OF COLLABORATION or exceptionally fortunate In them, but I can declare unhesitatingly that I have never had a hard word with a collaborator while our work was in hand and never a bitter word with him afterward. My collaborators have always been my friends before and they have always remained my friends after. Sometimes our literary part- nership was the unpremeditated outcome of a friendly chat in the course of which we chanced upon a subject, and in sport developed it until unexpectedly it seemed promising enough to be worthy of artistic consideration. Such a subject belonged to both of us, and had best be treated by both together. There was no dispute as to our respective shares in the result of our joint labors, because we could not ourselves even guess what each had done when both had been at work together. As Augier said in the preface to the ' Lionnes Pauvres,' which he wrote with fidouard Foussier, we must follow the example of " the married people who say one to the other, 'your son.'" I have collaborated in writing stories, in mak- ing plays, and in editing books. Sometimes I may have thought that 1 did more than my share, and sometimes I knew that 1 did less than I should, but always there was harmony, and never did either of us seek to assert a mastery. How- ever done, and by whichever of the two, the 3'9 THE ART AND MYSTERY OF COLLABORATION subject was always thoroughly discussed be- tween us ; it was turned over and over and upside down and inside out; it was considered from all possible points of view and in every stage of development. When a final choice was made of what seemed to us best, the mere putting on paper was wholly secondary. I have written a play of which I prepared the dialogue of one act and my associate prepared that of the next; 1 have written a play in which 1 wrote the scenes in which certain characters appeared and my ally wrote those in which certain other characters appeared; I have written a short-story in two chapters of which one was in my autograph and the other in my partner's : but none the less was he the half-author of the portions 1 set on paper, and none the less was I the half-author of the portions he set on paper. Probably the most profitable method is that of alternate development; certainly it is for a drama. After the subject begins to take form, A makes out a tentative sequence of scenes ; and this, after several talks, B fills up into an outline of the story. Slowly, and after careful consulta- tion, A elaborates this into a detailed scenario in which every character is set forth, every entrance and every exit, with the reasons for them, every scene and every effect— in fact, everything except the words to be spoken. Then B takes this THE ART AND MYSTERY OF COLLABORATION scenario, and from it he writes a first rough draft of the play itself, complete in dialogue and in "business." This rough draft A revises, and rewrites where need be. Then it goes to the copyist ; and when the clean type-written manu- script returns both A and B go over it again and again, pointing and polishing, until each is satis- fied with their labor in common. Perhaps the drama is the only form of literature in which so painstaking a process would be advantageous, or in which it would be advisable even ; but of a play the structure can hardly be too careful or too precise, nor can the dialogue be too compact or too polished. "I am no pickpurse of another's wit," as Sir Philip Sidney boasts, but I cannot forego the malign pleasure of quoting, in conclusion, Mr. Andrew Lang's insidious suggestion to " young men entering on the life of letters." He advises them " to find an ingenious and industrious and successful partner, stick to him, never quarrel with him, and do not survive him." (1890) 321