The historical novel, and other essays

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CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

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I The Historical Navel 3

II Romance against Romanticism ... 31 'III New Trials for Old Favorites ... 49

II

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 varies. But the terms which any critic of art must use lack this useful rigidity; they are ever flexible, 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 he is addressing. Tiie epithet which to one savors of eulogy to another reeks with opprobrium. 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 definition 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 understood 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 scientific 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 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 distinction 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 moderation, 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 neutrality. And what he is in matters of public policy 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 disagreement among those who prefer the Romantic as to the full meaning of the word. The first chapter 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 movement 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 development 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 romantic," and that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is 34

"truly a classic." And Pater, taking a hint perhaps 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 Romantic. " First it was mystery, then aspiration; now it is the appeal to the emotions by the method of suggestion. And yet there is, perhaps, 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, indefiniteness, incompleteness, emotional suggestiveness; 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 confusion 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 and the unusual revealed with incomplete suggestiveness are to be counted with the Romantics, 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 honestly. 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 imitation. Classic is free, while Classicism is bound. 36

Shakspere is the great English classic ; but Classicism 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 brother Romanticism— between the genuine Romantic and the imitative Romanticist.

The Romantic calls up the idea of something primary, spontaneous, and perhaps medieval, while the Romanticist suggests something secondary, 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 delightful; 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 Romanticism gets out of date with every twist of the ftOMANCE AGAINSt ROMANTICISM

kaleidoscope of literary fashion. The Romantic is eternally and essentially true, but the Romanticist is inevitably false. Romance is sterling, but Romanticism is shoddy.

It may be admitted that this distinction between the Romantic and the Romanticist is not self-evident, and that it is not always easily apprehended. 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 Hawthorne 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 circumstances to a great extent of the writer's own choosing or creation."

Here Hawthorne asks no release from the eternal 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 Bohemia which is a desert country by the sea, illumined 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 special providences happen many times a day. It is in fact an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns — except to tell travelers' tales. It is a kingdom where dwell blameless 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 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 Romanticist 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 sions and strivings of men; and it takes no account of costume and of furniture and of the accidental accompaniments of human existence.

Romance lived with the Cave-men and the Lake-folk; with the Norseman and the Crusader; 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 hearthsmoke 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,

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 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 importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war, and murder, 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 boisterous 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 stageproperties and supernumeraries of the pseudo-historic. 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. Hawthorne is less likely to go astray than most : he is sometimes somewhat over-insistent on his fantasy, but he never slips headlong into the slough of Romanticism. His footing is more secure in 42 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 Romanticism 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 Romance 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 Romanticist 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

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 particularly 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 shallow." But the heroes of Romance, of true Romance, 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 melancholy 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, consumed by passion as he was, is no dreamy milksop, but a full-blooded man, prompt to overleap a garden wall and ready to

The Romanticist is not seldom as sickly as it is shallow, but the truly Romantic is always 44 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 forget 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 creature 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 mortification 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 adventure, 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 brother, 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 distinction between two things often carelessly confused. Even though Romanticism is not the best possible word to identify the ape of genuine Romance, 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 between 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)

Ill

NEW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITEf

IN the book of travels which he has called ' Following 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 further, and calls Goldsmith's masterpiece " a singular book," with "not a sincere line in it; a book which is one long waste-pipe discharge of goodygoody 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 respect for the clearness of vision which Mark Twain has often revealed in dealing with literature, as in dealing with life itself, and with a full recognition of the implacable common sense which is always his chief characteristic, I cannot but think that he has here overstated his case against Goldsmith, as he once overstated his case against Cooper. The sentence of annihilation which he passes upon the 'Vicar of Wakefield ' is as severe as that which he passed upon the Leatherstocking Tales; and they both of them seem to suggest rather the glad exaggeration 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 inconsistencies " 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 persons answer to their names with such opportune precision ? " And he confessed also that " we may gape a little over some of its old-fashioned maxims. . • . We may even think Squire Thornhill a little too much of the stage-libertine ; we may have our doubts touching that ubiquitous philanthropist, 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 sincerity is the very quality not to be denied to the 50 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 milkwhite hind, " immortal and unchanged," and that he holds them to be " such friendly, such accustomed 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 elsewhere 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 Primrose 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 eighteenth-century attitude toward the established order in church and in state which is not pleasing in our nineteenth-century eyes, and which ig 5J probably the cause of Mark Twain's contemptuous 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 shoulder. 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 masterpieces 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 impeccable, 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 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, Longfellow's 'Evangeline.' Le Sage's picaresque romance inspired Smollett's robustious 'Roderick Random ' ; it influenced Dickens in the ' Pickwick 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 exactly and to measure their faults with precision. 53

NfiW TRIALS FOR OLD FAVORITES

We are justified in insisting on a careful examination, not only of their credentials from the past, but of the works themselves. They come to us with the indorsement of preceding generations; 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 because 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 posterity. Nothing is more unwholesome for a living literature than a willingness to accept a tradition without question, blindfold and obedient. Nothing is worse for the welfare of a living literature than an acceptance of that maxim of Pudd'n'- head Wilson's, in which he asserts that a classic 54 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.