MODERN FICTION
By Charles Dudley Warner
One of the worst characteristics of modern fiction is its so-called truth to nature. For fiction is an art, as painting is, as sculpture is, as acting is. A photograph of a natural object is not art; nor is the plaster cast of a man's face, nor is the bare setting on the stage of an actual occurrence. Art requires an idealization of nature. The amateur, though she may be a lady, who attempts to represent upon the stage the lady of the drawing-room, usually fails to convey to the spectators the impression of a lady. She lacks the art by which the trained actress, who may not be a lady, succeeds. The actual transfer to the stage of the drawing-room and its occupants, with the behavior common in well-bred society, would no doubt fail of the intended dramatic effect, and the spectators would declare the representation unnatural.
However our jargon of criticism may confound terms, we do not need to be reminded that art and nature are distinct; that art, though dependent on nature, is a separate creation; that art is selection and idealization, with a view to impressing the mind with human, or even higher than human, sentiments and ideas. We may not agree whether the perfect man and woman ever existed, but we do know that the highest representations of them in form--that in the old Greek sculptures--were the result of artistic selection of parts of many living figures.
When we praise our recent fiction for its photographic fidelity to nature we condemn it, for we deny to it the art which would give it value. We forget that the creation of the novel should be, to a certain extent, a synthetic process, and impart to human actions that ideal quality which we demand in painting. Heine regards Cervantes as the originator of the modern novel. The older novels sprang from the poetry of the Middle Ages; their themes were knightly adventure, their personages were the nobility; the common people did not figure in them. These romances, which had degenerated into absurdities, Cervantes overthrew by "Don Quixote." But in putting an end to the old romances he created a new school of fiction, called the modern novel, by introducing into his romance of pseudo-knighthood a faithful description of the lower classes, and intermingling the phases of popular life. But he had no one-sided tendency to portray the vulgar only; he brought together the higher and the lower in society, to serve as light and shade, and the aristocratic element was as prominent as the popular. This noble and chivalrous element disappears in the novels of the English who imitated Cervantes. "These English novelists since Richardson's reign," says Heine, "are prosaic natures; to the prudish spirit of their time even pithy descriptions of the life of the common people are repugnant, and we see on yonder side of the Channel those bourgeoisie novels arise, wherein the petty humdrum life of the middle classes is depicted." But Scott appeared, and effected a restoration of the balance in fiction. As Cervantes had introduced the democratic element into romances, so Scott replaced the aristocratic element, when it had disappeared, and only a prosaic, bourgeoisie fiction existed. He restored to romances the symmetry which we admire in "Don Quixote." The characteristic feature of Scott's historical romances, in the opinion of the great German critic, is the harmony between the artistocratic and democratic elements.
This is true, but is it the last analysis of the subject? Is it a sufficient account of the genius of Cervantes and Scott that they combined in their romances a representation of the higher and lower classes? Is it not of more importance how they represented them? It is only a part of the achievement of Cervantes that he introduced the common people into fiction; it is his higher glory that he idealized his material; and it is Scott's distinction also that he elevated into artistic creations both nobility and commonalty. In short, the essential of fiction is not diversity of social life, but artistic treatment of whatever is depicted. The novel may deal wholly with an aristocracy, or wholly with another class, but it must idealize the nature it touches into art. The fault of the bourgeoisie novels, of which Heine complains, is not that they treated of one class only, and excluded a higher social range, but that they treated it without art and without ideality. In nature there is nothing vulgar to the poet, and in human life there is nothing uninteresting to the artist; but nature and human life, for the purposes of fiction, need a creative genius. The importation into the novel of the vulgar, sordid, and ignoble in life is always unbearable, unless genius first fuses the raw material in its alembic.
When, therefore, we say that one of the worst characteristics of modern fiction is its so-called truth to nature, we mean that it disregards the higher laws of art, and attempts to give us unidealized pictures of life. The failure is not that vulgar themes are treated, but that the treatment is vulgar; not that common life is treated, but that the treatment is common; not that care is taken with details, but that no selection is made, and everything is photographed regardless of its artistic value. I am sure that no one ever felt any repugnance on being introduced by Cervantes to the muleteers, contrabandistas, servants and serving-maids, and idle vagabonds of Spain, any more than to an acquaintance with the beggar-boys and street gamins on the canvases of Murillo. And I believe that the philosophic reason of the disgust of Heine and of every critic with the English bourgeoisie novels, describing the petty, humdrum life of the middle classes, was simply the want of art in the writers; the failure on their part to see that a literal transcript of nature is poor stuff in literature. We do not need to go back to Richardson's time for illustrations of that truth. Every week the English press--which is even a greater sinner in this respect than the American--turns out a score of novels which are mediocre, not from their subjects, but from their utter lack of the artistic quality. It matters not whether they treat of middle-class life, of low, slum life, or of drawing-room life and lords and ladies; they are equally flat and dreary. Perhaps the most inane thing ever put forth in the name of literature is the so-called domestic novel, an indigestible, culinary sort of product, that might be named the doughnut of fiction. The usual apology for it is that it depicts family life with fidelity. Its characters are supposed to act and talk as people act and talk at home and in society. I trust this is a libel, but, for the sake of the argument, suppose they do. Was ever produced so insipid a result? They are called moral; in the higher sense they are immoral, for they tend to lower the moral tone and stamina of every reader. It needs genius to import into literature ordinary conversation, petty domestic details, and the commonplace and vulgar phases of life. A report of ordinary talk, which appears as dialogue in domestic novels, may be true to nature; if it is, it is not worth writing or worth reading. I cannot see that it serves any good purpose whatever. Fortunately, we have in our day illustrations of a different treatment of the vulgar. I do not know any more truly realistic pictures of certain aspects of New England life than are to be found in Judd's "Margaret," wherein are depicted exceedingly pinched and ignoble social conditions. Yet the characters and the life are drawn with the artistic purity of Flaxman's illustrations of Homer. Another example is Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd." Every character in it is of the lower class in England. But what an exquisite creation it is! You have to turn back to Shakespeare for any talk of peasants and clowns and shepherds to compare with the conversations in this novel, so racy are they of the soil, and yet so touched with the finest art, the enduring art. Here is not the realism of the photograph, but of the artist; that is to say, it is nature idealized.
When we criticise our recent fiction it is obvious that we ought to remember that it only conforms to the tendencies of our social life, our prevailing ethics, and to the art conditions of our time. Literature is never in any age an isolated product. It is closely related to the development or retrogression of the time in all departments of life. The literary production of our day seems, and no doubt is, more various than that of any other, and it is not easy to fix upon its leading tendency. It is claimed for its fiction, however, that it is analytic and realistic, and that much of it has certain other qualities that make it a new school in art. These aspects of it I wish to consider in this paper.
It is scarcely possible to touch upon our recent fiction, any more than upon our recent poetry, without taking into account what is called the Esthetic movement--a movement more prominent in England than elsewhere. A slight contemplation of this reveals its resemblance to the Romantic movement in Germany, of which the brothers Schlegel were apostles, in the latter part of the last century. The movements are alike in this: that they both sought inspiration in mediaevalism, in feudalism, in the symbols of a Christianity that ran to mysticism, in the quaint, strictly pre-Raphael art which was supposed to be the result of a simple faith. In the one case, the artless and childlike remains of old German pictures and statuary were exhumed and set up as worthy of imitation; in the other, we have carried out in art, in costume, and in domestic life, so far as possible, what has been wittily and accurately described as "stained-glass attitudes." With all its peculiar vagaries, the English school is essentially a copy of the German, in its return to mediaevalism. The two movements have a further likeness, in that they are found accompanied by a highly symbolized religious revival. English aestheticism would probably disown any religious intention, although it has been accused of a refined interest in Pan and Venus; but in all its feudal sympathies it goes along with the religious art and vestment revival, the return to symbolic ceremonies, monastic vigils, and sisterhoods. Years ago, an acute writer in the Catholic World claimed Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a Catholic writer, from the internal evidence of his poems. The German Romanticism, which was fostered by the Romish priesthood, ended, or its disciples ended, in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. It will be interesting to note in what ritualistic harbor the aestheticism of our day will finally moor. That two similar revivals should come so near together in time makes us feel that the world moves onward--if it does move onward--in circular figures of very short radii. There seems to be only one thing certain in our Christian era, and that is a periodic return to classic models; the only stable standards of resort seem to be Greek art and literature.
The characteristics which are prominent, when we think of our recent fiction, are a wholly unidealized view of human society, which has got the name of realism; a delight in representing the worst phases of social life; an extreme analysis of persons and motives; the sacrifice of action to psychological study; the substitution of studies of character for anything like a story; a notion that it is not artistic, and that it is untrue to nature, to bring any novel to a definite consummation, and especially to end it happily; and a despondent tone about society, politics, and the whole drift of modern life. Judged by our fiction, we are in an irredeemably bad way. There is little beauty, joy, or light-heartedness in living; the spontaneity and charm of life are analyzed out of existence; sweet girls, made to love and be loved, are extinct; melancholy Jaques never meets a Rosalind in the forest of Arden, and if he sees her in the drawing-room he poisons his pleasure with the thought that she is scheming and artificial; there are no happy marriages --indeed, marriage itself is almost too inartistic to be permitted by our novelists, unless it can be supplemented by a divorce, and art is supposed to deny any happy consummation of true love. In short, modern society is going to the dogs, notwithstanding money is only three and a half per cent. It is a gloomy business life, at the best. Two learned but despondent university professors met, not long ago, at an afternoon "coffee," and drew sympathetically together in a corner. "What a world this would be," said one, "without coffee!" "Yes," replied the other, stirring the fragrant cup in a dejected aspect "yes; but what a hell of a world it is with coffee!"
The analytic method in fiction is interesting, when used by a master of dissection, but it has this fatal defect in a novel--it destroys illusion. We want to think that the characters in a story are real persons. We cannot do this if we see the author set them up as if they were marionettes, and take them to pieces every few pages, and show their interior structure, and the machinery by which they are moved. Not only is the illusion gone, but the movement of the story, if there is a story, is retarded, till the reader loses all enjoyment in impatience and weariness. You find yourself saying, perhaps, What a very clever fellow the author is! What an ingenious creation this character is! How brightly the author makes his people talk! This is high praise, but by no means the highest, and when we reflect we see how immeasurably inferior, in fiction, the analytic method is to the dramatic. In the dramatic method the characters appear, and show what they are by what they do and say; the reader studies their motives, and a part of his enjoyment is in analyzing them, and his vanity is flattered by the trust reposed in his perspicacity. We realize how unnecessary minute analysis of character and long descriptions are in reading a drama by Shakespeare, in which the characters are so vividly presented to us in action and speech, without the least interference of the author in description, that we regard them as persons with whom we might have real relations, and not as bundles of traits and qualities. True, the conditions of dramatic art and the art of the novel are different, in that the drama can dispense with delineations, for its characters are intended to be presented to the eye; but all the same, a good drama will explain itself without the aid of actors, and there is no doubt that it is the higher art in the novel, when once the characters are introduced, to treat them dramatically, and let them work out their own destiny according to their characters. It is a truism to say that when the reader perceives that the author can compel his characters to do what he pleases all interest in them as real persons is gone. In a novel of mere action and adventure, a lower order of fiction, where all the interest centres in the unraveling of a plot, of course this does not so much matter.
Not long ago, in Edinburgh, I amused myself in looking up some of the localities made famous in Scott's romances, which are as real in the mind as any historical places. Afterwards I read "The Heart of Midlothian." I was surprised to find that, as a work of art, it was inferior to my recollection of it. Its style is open to the charge of prolixity, and even of slovenliness in some parts; and it does not move on with increasing momentum and concentration to a climax, as many of Scott's novels do; the story drags along in the disposition of one character after another. Yet, when I had finished the book and put it away, a singular thing happened. It suddenly came to me that in reading it I had not once thought of Scott as the maker; it had never occurred to me that he had created the people in whose fortunes I had been so intensely absorbed; and I never once had felt how clever the novelist was in the naturally dramatic dialogues of the characters. In short, it had not entered my mind to doubt the existence of Jeanie and Effie Deans, and their father, and Reuben Butler, and the others, who seem as real as historical persons in Scotch history. And when I came to think of it afterwards, reflecting upon the assumptions of the modern realistic school, I found that some scenes, notably the night attack on the old Tolbooth, were as real to me as if I had read them in a police report of a newspaper of the day. Was Scott, then, only a reporter? Far from it, as you would speedily see if he had thrown into the novel a police report of the occurrences at the Tolbooth before art had shorn it of its irrelevancies, magnified its effective and salient points, given events their proper perspective, and the whole picture due light and shade.
The sacrifice of action to some extent to psychological evolution in modern fiction may be an advance in the art as an intellectual entertainment, if the writer does not make that evolution his end, and does not forget that the indispensable thing in a novel is the story. The novel of mere adventure or mere plot, it need not be urged, is of a lower order than that in which the evolution of characters and their interaction make the story. The highest fiction is that which embodies both; that is, the story in which action is the result of mental and spiritual forces in play. And we protest against the notion that the novel of the future is to be, or should be, merely a study of, or an essay or a series of analytic essays on, certain phases of social life.
It is not true that civilization or cultivation has bred out of the world the liking for a story. In this the most highly educated Londoner and the Egyptian fellah meet on common human ground. The passion for a story has no more died out than curiosity, or than the passion of love. The truth is not that stories are not demanded, but that the born raconteur and story-teller is a rare person. The faculty of telling a story is a much rarer gift than the ability to analyze character and even than the ability truly to draw character. It may be a higher or a lower power, but it is rarer. It is a natural gift, and it seems that no amount of culture can attain it, any more than learning can make a poet. Nor is the complaint well founded that the stories have all been told, the possible plots all been used, and the combinations of circumstances exhausted. It is no doubt our individual experience that we hear almost every day--and we hear nothing so eagerly--some new story, better or worse, but new in its exhibition of human character, and in the combination of events. And the strange, eventful histories of human life will no more be exhausted than the possible arrangements of mathematical numbers. We might as well say that there are no more good pictures to be painted as that there are no more good stories to be told.
Equally baseless is the assumption that it is inartistic and untrue to nature to bring a novel to a definite consummation, and especially to end it happily. Life, we are told, is full of incompletion, of broken destinies, of failures, of romances that begin but do not end, of ambitions and purposes frustrated, of love crossed, of unhappy issues, or a resultless play of influences. Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. If you interest me in the preparations of two persons who are starting on a journey, and expend all your ingenuity in describing their outfit and their characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell them afterwards, I do not call that a story. Nor am I any better satisfied when you describe two persons whom you know, whose characters are interesting, and who become involved in all manner of entanglements, and then stop your narration; and when I ask, say you have not the least idea whether they got out of their difficulties, or what became of them. In real life we do not call that a story where everything is left unconcluded and in the air. In point of fact, romances are daily beginning and daily ending, well or otherwise, under our observation.
Should they always end well in the novel? I am very far from saying that. Tragedy and the pathos of failure have their places in literature as well as in life. I only say that, artistically, a good ending is as proper as a bad ending. Yet the main object of the novel is to entertain, and the best entertainment is that which lifts the imagination and quickens the spirit; to lighten the burdens of life by taking us for a time out of our humdrum and perhaps sordid conditions, so that we can see familiar life somewhat idealized, and probably see it all the more truly from an artistic point of view. For the majority of the race, in its hard lines, fiction is an inestimable boon. Incidentally the novel may teach, encourage, refine, elevate. Even for these purposes, that novel is the best which shows us the best possibilities of our lives--the novel which gives hope and cheer instead of discouragement and gloom. Familiarity with vice and sordidness in fiction is a low entertainment, and of doubtful moral value, and their introduction is unbearable if it is not done with the idealizing touch of the artist.
Do not misunderstand me to mean that common and low life are not fit subjects of fiction, or that vice is not to be lashed by the satirist, or that the evils of a social state are never to be exposed in the novel. For this, also, is an office of the novel, as it is of the drama, to hold the mirror up to nature, and to human nature as it exhibits itself. But when the mirror shows nothing but vice and social disorder, leaving out the saving qualities that keep society on the whole, and family life as a rule, as sweet and good as they are, the mirror is not held up to nature, but more likely reflects a morbid mind. Still it must be added that the study of unfortunate social conditions is a legitimate one for the author to make; and that we may be in no state to judge justly of his exposure while the punishment is being inflicted, or while the irritation is fresh. For, no doubt, the reader winces often because the novel reveals to himself certain possible baseness, selfishness, and meanness. Of this, however, I (speaking for myself) may be sure: that the artist who so represents vulgar life that I am more in love with my kind, the satirist who so depicts vice and villainy that I am strengthened in my moral fibre, has vindicated his choice of material. On the contrary, those novelists are not justified whose forte it seems to be to so set forth goodness as to make it unattractive.
But we come back to the general proposition that the indispensable condition of the novel is that it shall entertain. And for this purpose the world is not ashamed to own that it wants, and always will want, a story--a story that has an ending; and if not a good ending, then one that in noble tragedy lifts up our nature into a high plane of sacrifice and pathos. In proof of this we have only to refer to the masterpieces of fiction which the world cherishes and loves to recur to.
I confess that I am harassed with the incomplete romances, that leave me, when the book is closed, as one might be on a waste plain at midnight, abandoned by his conductor, and without a lantern. I am tired of accompanying people for hours through disaster and perplexity and misunderstanding, only to see them lost in a thick mist at last. I am weary of going to funerals, which are not my funerals, however chatty and amusing the undertaker may be. I confess that I should like to see again the lovely heroine, the sweet woman, capable of a great passion and a great sacrifice; and I do not object if the novelist tries her to the verge of endurance, in agonies of mind and in perils, subjecting her to wasting sicknesses even, if he only brings her out at the end in a blissful compensation of her troubles, and endued with a new and sweeter charm. No doubt it is better for us all, and better art, that in the novel of society the destiny should be decided by character. What an artistic and righteous consummation it is when we meet the shrewd and wicked old Baroness Bernstein at Continental gaming-tables, and feel that there was no other logical end for the worldly and fascinating Beatrix of Henry Esmond! It is one of the great privileges of fiction to right the wrongs of life, to do justice to the deserving and the vicious. It is wholesome for us to contemplate the justice, even if we do not often see it in society. It is true that hypocrisy and vulgar self-seeking often succeed in life, occupying high places, and make their exit in the pageantry of honored obsequies. Yet always the man is conscious of the hollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accurate measure of it. It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into such a career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justice by letting us see the true nature of such prosperity. The unscrupulous man amasses wealth, lives in luxury and splendor, and dies in the odor of respectability. His poor and honest neighbor, whom he has wronged and defrauded, lives in misery, and dies in disappointment and penury. The novelist cannot reverse the facts without such a shock to our experience as shall destroy for us the artistic value of his fiction, and bring upon his work the deserved reproach of indiscriminately "rewarding the good and punishing the bad." But we have a right to ask that he shall reveal the real heart and character of this passing show of life; for not to do this, to content himself merely with exterior appearances, is for the majority of his readers to efface the lines between virtue and vice. And we ask this not for the sake of the moral lesson, but because not to do it is, to our deep consciousness, inartistic and untrue to our judgment of life as it goes on. Thackeray used to say that all his talent was in his eyes; meaning that he was only an observer and reporter of what he saw, and not a Providence to rectify human affairs. The great artist undervalued his genius. He reported what he saw as Raphael and Murillo reported what they saw. With his touch of genius he assigned to everything its true value, moving us to tenderness, to pity, to scorn, to righteous indignation, to sympathy with humanity. I find in him the highest art, and not that indifference to the great facts and deep currents and destinies of human life, that want of enthusiasm and sympathy, which has got the name of "art for art's sake." Literary fiction is a barren product if it wants sympathy and love for men. "Art for art's sake" is a good and defensible phrase, if our definition of art includes the ideal, and not otherwise.
I do not know how it has come about that in so large a proportion of recent fiction it is held to be artistic to look almost altogether upon the shady and the seamy side of life, giving to this view the name of "realism"; to select the disagreeable, the vicious, the unwholesome; to give us for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the "shady"--to borrow the language of the society she seeks--the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious; to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bring us into relations only with the sordid and the common; to force us to sup with unwholesome company on misery and sensuousness, in tales so utterly unpleasant that we are ready to welcome any disaster as a relief; and then--the latest and finest touch of modern art--to leave the whole weltering mass in a chaos, without conclusion and without possible issue. And this is called a picture of real life! Heavens! Is it true that in England, where a great proportion of the fiction we describe and loathe is produced; is it true that in our New England society there is nothing but frivolity, sordidness, decay of purity and faith, ignoble ambition and ignoble living? Is there no charm in social life--no self-sacrifice, devotion, courage to stem materialistic conditions, and live above them? Are there no noble women, sensible, beautiful, winning, with the grace that all the world loves, albeit with the feminine weaknesses that make all the world hope? Is there no manliness left? Are there no homes where the tempter does not live with the tempted in a mush of sentimental affinity? Or is it, in fact, more artistic to ignore all these, and paint only the feeble and the repulsive in our social state? The feeble, the sordid, and the repulsive in our social state nobody denies, nor does anybody deny the exceeding cleverness with which our social disorders are reproduced in fiction by a few masters of their art; but is it not time that it should be considered good art to show something of the clean and bright side?
This is pre-eminently the age of the novel. The development of variety of fiction since the days of Scott and Cooper is prodigious. The prejudice against novel-reading is quite broken down, since fiction has taken all fields for its province; everybody reads novels. Three-quarters of the books taken from the circulating library are stories; they make up half the library of the Sunday-schools. If a writer has anything to say, or thinks he has, he knows that he can most certainly reach the ear of the public by the medium of a story. So we have novels for children; novels religious, scientific, historical, archaeological, psychological, pathological, total-abstinence; novels of travel, of adventure and exploration; novels domestic, and the perpetual spawn of books called novels of society. Not only is everything turned into a story, real or so called, but there must be a story in everything. The stump-speaker holds his audience by well-worn stories; the preacher wakes up his congregation by a graphic narrative; and the Sunday-school teacher leads his children into all goodness by the entertaining path of romance; we even had a President who governed the country nearly by anecdotes. The result of this universal demand for fiction is necessarily an enormous supply, and as everybody writes, without reference to gifts, the product is mainly trash, and trash of a deleterious sort; for bad art in literature is bad morals. I am not sure but the so-called domestic, the diluted, the "goody," namby-pamby, unrobust stories, which are so largely read by school-girls, young ladies, and women, do more harm than the "knowing," audacious, wicked ones,--also, it is reported, read by them, and written largely by their own sex. For minds enfeebled and relaxed by stories lacking even intellectual fibre are in a poor condition to meet the perils of life. This is not the place for discussing the stories written for the young and for the Sunday-school. It seems impossible to check the flow of them, now that so much capital is invested in this industry; but I think that healthy public sentiment is beginning to recognize the truth that the excessive reading of this class of literature by the young is weakening to the mind, besides being a serious hindrance to study and to attention to the literature that has substance.
In his account of the Romantic School in Germany, Heine says, "In the breast of a nation's authors there always lies the image of its future, and the critic who, with a knife of sufficient keenness, dissects a new poet can easily prophesy, as from the entrails of a sacrificial animal, what shape matters will assume in Germany." Now if all the poets and novelists of England and America today were cut up into little pieces (and we might sacrifice a few for the sake of the experiment), there is no inspecting augur who could divine therefrom our literary future. The diverse indications would puzzle the most acute dissector. Lost in the variety, the multiplicity of minute details, the refinements of analysis and introspection, he would miss any leading indications. For with all its variety, it seems to me that one characteristic of recent fiction is its narrowness--narrowness of vision and of treatment. It deals with lives rather than with life. Lacking ideality, it fails of broad perception. We are accustomed to think that with the advent of the genuine novel of society, in the first part of this century, a great step forward was taken in fiction. And so there was. If the artist did not use a big canvas, he adopted a broad treatment. But the tendency now is to push analysis of individual peculiarities to an extreme, and to substitute a study of traits for a representation of human life.
It scarcely need be said that it is not multitude of figures on a literary canvas that secures breadth of treatment. The novel may be narrow, though it swarms with a hundred personages. It may be as wide as life, as high as imagination can lift itself; it may image to us a whole social state, though it pats in motion no more persons than we made the acquaintance of in one of the romances of Hawthorne. Consider for a moment how Thackeray produced his marvelous results. We follow with him, in one of his novels of society, the fortunes of a very few people. They are so vividly portrayed that we are convinced the author must have known them in that great world with which he was so familiar; we should not be surprised to meet any of them in the streets of London. When we visit the Charterhouse School, and see the old forms where the boys sat nearly a century ago, we have in our minds Colonel Newcome as really as we have Charles Lamb and Coleridge and De Quincey. We are absorbed, as we read, in the evolution of the characters of perhaps only half a dozen people; and yet all the world, all great, roaring, struggling London, is in the story, and Clive, and Philip, and Ethel, and Becky Sharpe, and Captain Costigan are a part of life. It is the flowery month of May; the scent of the hawthorn is in the air, and the tender flush of the new spring suffuses the Park, where the tide of fashion and pleasure and idleness surges up and down-the sauntering throng, the splendid equipages, the endless cavalcade in Rotten Row, in which Clive descries afar off the white plume of his ladylove dancing on the waves of an unattainable society; the club windows are all occupied; Parliament is in session, with its nightly echoes of imperial politics; the thronged streets roar with life from morn till nearly morn again; the drawing-rooms hum and sparkle in the crush of a London season; as you walk the midnight pavement, through the swinging doors of the cider-cellars comes the burst of bacchanalian song. Here is the world of the press and of letters; here are institutions, an army, a navy, commerce, glimpses of great ships going to and fro on distant seas, of India, of Australia. This one book is an epitome of English life, almost of the empire itself. We are conscious of all this, so much breadth and atmosphere has the artist given his little history of half a dozen people in this struggling world.
But this background of a great city, of an empire, is not essential to the breadth of treatment upon which we insist in fiction, to broad characterization, to the play of imagination about common things which transfigures them into the immortal beauty of artistic creations. What a simple idyl in itself is Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea"! It is the creation of a few master-touches, using only common material. Yet it has in it the breadth of life itself, the depth and passion of all our human struggle in the world-a little story with a vast horizon.
It is constantly said that the conditions in America are unfavorable to the higher fiction; that our society is unformed, without centre, without the definition of classes, which give the light and shade that Heine speaks of in "Don Quixote"; that it lacks types and customs that can be widely recognized and accepted as national and characteristic; that we have no past; that we want both romantic and historic background; that we are in a shifting, flowing, forming period which fiction cannot seize on; that we are in diversity and confusion that baffle artistic treatment; in short, that American life is too vast, varied, and crude for the purpose of the novelist.
These excuses might be accepted as fully accounting for our failure--or shall we say our delay?--if it were not for two or three of our literary performances. It is true that no novel has been written, and we dare say no novel will be written, that is, or will be, an epitome of the manifold diversities of American life, unless it be in the form of one of Walt Whitman's catalogues. But we are not without peculiar types; not without characters, not without incidents, stories, heroisms, inequalities; not without the charms of nature in infinite variety; and human nature is the same here that it is in Spain, France, and England. Out of these materials Cooper wrote romances, narratives stamped with the distinct characteristics of American life and scenery, that were and are eagerly read by all civilized peoples, and which secured the universal verdict which only breadth of treatment commands. Out of these materials, also, Hawthorne, child-endowed with a creative imagination, wove those tragedies of interior life, those novels of our provincial New England, which rank among the great masterpieces of the novelist's art. The master artist can idealize even our crude material, and make it serve. These exceptions to a rule do not go to prove the general assertion of a poverty of material for fiction here; the simple truth probably is that, for reasons incident to the development of a new region of the earth, creative genius has been turned in other directions than that of fictitious literature. Nor do I think that we need to take shelter behind the wellworn and convenient observation, the truth of which stands in much doubt, that literature is the final flower of a nation's civilization.
However, this is somewhat a digression. We are speaking of the tendency of recent fiction, very much the same everywhere that novels are written, which we have imperfectly sketched. It is probably of no more use to protest against it than it is to protest against the vulgar realism in pictorial art, which holds ugliness and beauty in equal esteem; or against aestheticism gone to seed in languid affectations; or against the enthusiasm of a social life which wreaks its religion on the color of a vestment, or sighs out its divine soul over an ancient pewter mug. Most of our fiction, in its extreme analysis, introspection and self-consciousness, in its devotion to details, in its disregard of the ideal, in its selection as well as in its treatment of nature, is simply of a piece with a good deal else that passes for genuine art. Much of it is admirable in workmanship, and exhibits a cleverness in details and a subtlety in the observation of traits which many great novels lack. But I should be sorry to think that the historian will judge our social life by it, and I doubt not that most of us are ready for a more ideal, that is to say, a more artistic, view of our performances in this bright and pathetic world.
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. FROUDE'S "PROGRESS"
By Charles Dudley Warner
To revisit this earth, some ages after their departure from it, is a common wish among men. We frequently hear men say that they would give so many months or years of their lives in exchange for a less number on the globe one or two or three centuries from now. Merely to see the world from some remote sphere, like the distant spectator of a play which passes in dumb show, would not suffice. They would like to be of the world again, and enter into its feelings, passions, hopes; to feel the sweep of its current, and so to comprehend what it has become.
I suppose that we all who are thoroughly interested in this world have this desire. There are some select souls who sit apart in calm endurance, waiting to be translated out of a world they are almost tired of patronizing, to whom the whole thing seems, doubtless, like a cheap performance. They sit on the fence of criticism, and cannot for the life of them see what the vulgar crowd make such a toil and sweat about. The prizes are the same dreary, old, fading bay wreaths. As for the soldiers marching past, their uniforms are torn, their hats are shocking, their shoes are dusty, they do not appear (to a man sitting on the fence) to march with any kind of spirit, their flags are old and tattered, the drums they beat are barbarous; and, besides, it is not probable that they are going anywhere; they will merely come round again, the same people, like the marching chorus in the "Beggar's Opera." Such critics, of course, would not care to see the vulgar show over again; it is enough for them to put on record their protest against it in the weekly "Judgment Days" which they edit, and by-and-by withdraw out of their private boxes, with pity for a world in the creation of which they were not consulted.
The desire to revisit this earth is, I think, based upon a belief, well-nigh universal, that the world is to make some progress, and that it will be more interesting in the future than it is now. I believe that the human mind, whenever it is developed enough to comprehend its own action, rests, and has always rested, in this expectation. I do not know any period of time in which the civilized mind has not had expectation of something better for the race in the future. This expectation is sometimes stronger than it is at others; and, again, there are always those who say that the Golden Age is behind them. It is always behind or before us; the poor present alone has no friends; the present, in the minds of many, is only the car that is carrying us away from an age of virtue and of happiness, or that is perhaps bearing us on to a time of ease and comfort and security.
Perhaps it is worth while, in view of certain recent discussions, and especially of some free criticisms of this country, to consider whether there is any intention of progress in this world, and whether that intention is discoverable in the age in which we live.
If it is an old question, it is not a settled one; the practical disbelief in any such progress is widely entertained. Not long ago Mr. James Anthony Froude published an essay on Progress, in which he examined some of the evidences upon which we rely to prove that we live in an "era of progress." It is a melancholy essay, for its tone is that of profound skepticism as to certain influences and means of progress upon which we in this country most rely. With the illustrative arguments of Mr. Froude's essay I do not purpose specially to meddle; I recall it to the attention of the reader as a representative type of skepticism regarding progress which is somewhat common among intellectual men, and is not confined to England. It is not exactly an acceptance of Rousseau's notion that civilization is a mistake, and that it would be better for us all to return to a state of nature--though in John Ruskin's case it nearly amounts to this; but it is a hostility in its last analysis to what we understand by the education of the people, and to the government of the people by themselves. If Mr. Froude's essay is anything but an exhibition of the scholarly weapons of criticism, it is the expression of a profound disbelief in the intellectual education of the masses of the people. Mr. Ruskin goes further. He makes his open proclamation against any emancipation from hand-toil. Steam is the devil himself let loose from the pit, and all labor-saving machinery is his own invention. Mr. Ruskin is the bull that stands upon the track and threatens with annihilation the on-coming locomotive; and I think that any spectator who sees his menacing attitude and hears his roaring cannot but have fears for the locomotive.
There are two sorts of infidelity concerning humanity, and I do not know which is the more withering in its effects. One is that which regards this world as only a waste and a desert, across the sands of which we are merely fugitives, fleeing from the wrath to come. The other is that doubt of any divine intention in development, in history, which we call progress from age to age.
In the eyes of this latter infidelity history is not a procession or a progression, but only a series of disconnected pictures, each little era rounded with its own growth, fruitage, and decay, a series of incidents or experiments, without even the string of a far-reaching purpose to connect them. There is no intention of progress in it all. The race is barbarous, and then it changes to civilized; in the one case the strong rob the weak by brute force; in the other the crafty rob the unwary by finesse. The latter is a more agreeable state of things; but it comes to about the same. The robber used to knock us down and take away our sheepskins; he now administers chloroform and relieves us of our watches. It is a gentlemanly proceeding, and scientific, and we call it civilization. Meantime human nature remains the same, and the whole thing is a weary round that has no advance in it.
If this is true the succession of men and of races is no better than a vegetable succession; and Mr. Froude is quite right in doubting if education of the brain will do the English agricultural laborer any good; and Mr. Ruskin ought to be aided in his crusade against machinery, which turns the world upside down. The best that can be done with a man is the best that can be done with a plant-set him out in some favorable locality, or leave him where he happened to strike root, and there let him grow and mature in measure and quiet--especially quiet--as he may in God's sun and rain. If he happens to be a cabbage, in Heaven's name don't try to make a rose of him, and do not disturb the vegetable maturing of his head by grafting ideas upon his stock.
The most serious difficulty in the way of those who maintain that there is an intention of progress in this world from century to century, from age to age--a discernible growth, a universal development--is the fact that all nations do not make progress at the same time or in the same ratio; that nations reach a certain development, and then fall away and even retrograde; that while one may be advancing into high civilization, another is lapsing into deeper barbarism, and that nations appear to have a limit of growth. If there were a law of progress, an intention of it in all the world, ought not all peoples and tribes to advance pari passu, or at least ought there not to be discernible a general movement, historical and contemporary? There is no such general movement which can be computed, the law of which can be discovered--therefore it does not exist. In a kind of despair, we are apt to run over in our minds empires and pre-eminent civilizations that have existed, and then to doubt whether life in this world is intended to be anything more than a series of experiments. There is the German nation of our day, the most aggressive in various fields of intellectual activity, a Hercules of scholarship, the most thoroughly trained and powerful--though its civilization marches to the noise of the hateful and barbarous drum. In what points is it better than the Greek nation of the age of its superlative artists, philosophers, poets--the age of the most joyous, elastic human souls in the most perfect human bodies?
Again, it is perhaps a fanciful notion that the Atlantis of Plato was the northern part of the South American continent, projecting out towards Africa, and that the Antilles are the peaks and headlands of its sunken bulk. But there are evidences enough that the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea were within historic periods the seat of a very considerable civilization--the seat of cities, of commerce, of trade, of palaces and pleasure--gardens--faint images, perhaps, of the luxurious civilization of Baia! and Pozzuoli and Capri in the most profligate period of the Roman empire. It is not more difficult to believe that there was a great material development here than to believe it of the African shore of the Mediterranean. Not to multiply instances that will occur to all, we see as many retrograde as advance movements, and we see, also, that while one spot of the earth at one time seems to be the chosen theatre of progress, other portions of the globe are absolutely dead and without the least leaven of advancing life, and we cannot understand how this can be if there is any such thing as an all-pervading and animating intention or law of progress. And then we are reminded that the individual human mind long ago attained its height of power and capacity. It is enough to recall the names of Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Paul, Homer, David.
No doubt it has seemed to other periods and other nations, as it now does to the present civilized races, that they were the chosen times and peoples of an extraordinary and limitless development. It must have seemed so to the Jews who overran Palestine and set their shining cities on all the hills of heathendom. It must have seemed so to the Babylonish conquerors who swept over Palestine in turn, on their way to greater conquests in Egypt. It must have seemed so to Greece when the Acropolis was to the outlying world what the imperial calla is to the marsh in which it lifts its superb flower. It must have seemed so to Rome when its solid roads of stone ran to all parts of a tributary world--the highways of the legions, her ministers, and of the wealth that poured into her treasury. It must have seemed so to followers of Mahomet, when the crescent knew no pause in its march up the Arabian peninsula to the Bosporus, to India, along the Mediterranean shores to Spain, where in the eighth century it flowered into a culture, a learning, a refinement in art and manners, to which the Christian world of that day was a stranger. It must have seemed so in the awakening of the sixteenth century, when Europe, Spain leading, began that great movement of discovery and aggrandizement which has, in the end, been profitable only to a portion of the adventurers. And what shall we say of a nation as old, if not older than any of these we have mentioned, slowly building up meantime a civilization and perfecting a system of government and a social economy which should outlast them all, and remain to our day almost the sole monument of permanence and stability in a shifting world?
How many times has the face of Europe been changed--and parts of Africa, and Asia Minor too, for that matter--by conquests and crusades, and the rise and fall of civilizations as well as dynasties? while China has endured, almost undisturbed, under a system of law, administration, morality, as old as the Pyramids probably--existed a coherent nation, highly developed in certain essentials, meeting and mastering, so far as we can see, the great problem of an over-populated territory, living in a good degree of peace and social order, of respect for age and law, and making a continuous history, the mere record of which is printed in a thousand bulky volumes. Yet we speak of the Chinese empire as an instance of arrested growth, for which there is no salvation, except it shall catch the spirit of progress abroad in the world. What is this progress, and where does it come from?
Think for a moment of this significant situation. For thousands of years, empires, systems of society, systems of civilization--Egyptian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Moslem, Feudal--have flourished and fallen, grown to a certain height and passed away; great organized fabrics have gone down, and, if there has been any progress, it has been as often defeated as renewed. And here is an empire, apart from this scene of alternate success and disaster, which has existed in a certain continuity and stability, and yet, now that it is uncovered and stands face to face with the rest of the world, it finds that it has little to teach us, and almost everything to learn from us. The old empire sends its students to learn of us, the newest child of civilization; and through us they learn all the great past, its literature, law, science, out of which we sprang. It appears, then, that progress has, after all, been with the shifting world, that has been all this time going to pieces, rather than with the world that has been permanent and unshaken.
When we speak of progress we may mean two things. We may mean a lifting of the races as a whole by reason of more power over the material world, by reason of what we call the conquest of nature and a practical use of its forces; or we may mean a higher development of the individual man, so that he shall be better and happier. If from age to age it is discoverable that the earth is better adapted to man as a dwelling-place, and he is on the whole fitted to get more out of it for his own growth, is not that progress, and is it not evidence of an intention of progress?
Now, it is sometimes said that Providence, in the economy of this world, cares nothing for the individual, but works out its ideas and purposes through the races, and in certain periods, slowly bringing in, by great agencies and by processes destructive to individuals and to millions of helpless human beings, truths and principles; so laying stepping-stones onward to a great consummation. I do not care to dwell upon this thought, but let us see if we can find any evidence in history of the presence in this world of an intention of progress.
It is common to say that, if the world makes progress at all, it is by its great men, and when anything important for the race is to be done, a great man is raised up to do it. Yet another way to look at it is, that the doing of something at the appointed time makes the man who does it great, or at least celebrated. The man often appears to be only a favored instrument of communication. As we glance back we recognize the truth that, at this and that period, the time had come for certain discoveries. Intelligence seemed pressing in from the invisible. Many minds were on the alert to apprehend it. We believe, for instance, that if Gutenberg had not invented movable types, somebody else would have given them to the world about that time. Ideas, at certain times, throng for admission into the world; and we are all familiar with the fact that the same important idea (never before revealed in all the ages) occurs to separate and widely distinct minds at about the same time. The invention of the electric telegraph seemed to burst upon the world simultaneously from many quarters--not perfect, perhaps, but the time for the idea had come--and happy was it for the man who entertained it. We have agreed to call Columbus the discoverer of America, but I suppose there is no doubt that America had been visited by European, and probably Asiatic, people ages before Columbus; that four or five centuries before him people from northern Europe had settlements here; he was fortunate, however, in "discovering" it in the fullness of time, when the world, in its progress, was ready for it. If the Greeks had had gunpowder, electro-magnetism, the printing press, history would need to be rewritten. Why the inquisitive Greek mind did not find out these things is a mystery upon any other theory than the one we are considering.
And it is as mysterious that China, having gunpowder and the art of printing, is not today like Germany.
There seems to me to be a progress, or an intention of progress, in the world, independent of individual men. Things get on by all sorts of instruments, and sometimes by very poor ones. There are times when new thoughts or applications of known principles seem to throng from the invisible for expression through human media, and there is hardly ever an important invention set free in the world that men do not appear to be ready cordially to receive it. Often we should be justified in saying that there was a widespread expectation of it. Almost all the great inventions and the ingenious application of principles have many claimants for the honor of priority.
On any other theory than this, that there is present in the world an intention of progress which outlasts individuals, and even races, I cannot account for the fact that, while civilizations decay and pass away, and human systems go to pieces, ideas remain and accumulate. We, the latest age, are the inheritors of all the foregoing ages. I do not believe that anything of importance has been lost to the world. The Jewish civilization was torn up root and branch, but whatever was valuable in the Jewish polity is ours now. We may say the same of the civilizations of Athens and of Rome; though the entire organization of the ancient world, to use Mr. Froude's figure, collapsed into a heap of incoherent sand, the ideas remained, and Greek art and Roman law are part of the world's solid possessions.
Even those who question the value to the individual of what we call progress, admit, I suppose, the increase of knowledge in the world from age to age, and not only its increase, but its diffusion. The intelligent schoolboy today knows more than the ancient sages knew--more about the visible heavens, more of the secrets of the earth, more of the human body. The rudiments of his education, the common experiences of his everyday life, were, at the best, the guesses and speculations of a remote age. There is certainly an accumulation of facts, ideas, knowledge. Whether this makes men better, wiser, happier, is indeed disputed.
In order to maintain the notion of a general and intended progress, it is not necessary to show that no preceding age has excelled ours in some special, development. Phidias has had no rival in sculpture, we may admit. It is possible that glass was once made as flexible as leather, and that copper could be hardened like steel. But I do not take much stock in the "lost arts," the wondering theme of the lyceums. The knowledge of the natural world, and of materials, was never, I believe, so extensive and exact as it is today. It is possible that there are tricks of chemistry, ingenious processes, secrets of color, of which we are ignorant; but I do not believe there was ever an ancient alchemist who could not be taught something in a modern laboratory. The vast engineering works of the ancient Egyptians, the remains of their temples and pyramids, excite our wonder; but I have no doubt that President Grant, if he becomes the tyrant they say he is becoming, and commands the labor of forty millions of slaves--a large proportion of them office --holders--could build a Karnak, or erect a string of pyramids across New Jersey.
Mr. Froude runs lightly over a list of subjects upon which the believer in progress relies for his belief, and then says of them that the world calls this progress--he calls it only change. I suppose he means by this two things: that these great movements of our modern life are not any evidence of a permanent advance, and that our whole structure may tumble into a heap of incoherent sand, as systems of society have done before; and, again, that it is questionable if, in what we call a stride in civilization, the individual citizen is becoming any purer or more just, or if his intelligence is directed towards learning and doing what is right, or only to the means of more extended pleasures.
It is, perhaps, idle to speculate upon the first of these points--the permanence of our advance, if it is an advance. But we may be encouraged by one thing that distinguishes this period--say from the middle of the eighteenth century--from any that has preceded it. I mean the introduction of machinery, applied to the multiplication of man's power in a hundred directions--to manufacturing, to locomotion, to the diffusion of thought and of knowledge. I need not dwell upon this familiar topic. Since this period began there has been, so far as I know, no retrograde movement anywhere, but, besides the material, an intellectual and spiritual kindling the world over, for which history has no sort of parallel. Truth is always the same, and will make its way, but this subject might be illustrated by a study of the relation of Christianity and of the brotherhood of men to machinery. The theme would demand an essay by itself. I leave it with the one remark, that this great change now being wrought in the world by the multiplicity of machinery is not more a material than it is an intellectual one, and that we have no instance in history of a catastrophe widespread enough and adequate to sweep away its results. That is to say, none of the catastrophes, not even the corruptions, which brought to ruin the ancient civilizations, would work anything like the same disaster in an age which has the use of machinery that this age has.
For instance: Gibbon selects the period between the accession of Trajan and the death of Marcus Aurelius as the time in which the human race enjoyed more general happiness than they had ever known before, or had since known. Yet, says Mr. Froude, in the midst of this prosperity the heart of the empire was dying out of it; luxury and selfishness were eating away the principle that held society together, and the ancient world was on the point of collapsing into a heap of incoherent sand. Now, it is impossible to conceive that the catastrophe which did happen to that civilization could have happened if the world had then possessed the steam-engine, the printing-press, and the electric telegraph. The Roman power might have gone down, and the face of the world been recast; but such universal chaos and such a relapse for the individual people would seem impossible.
If we turn from these general considerations to the evidences that this is an "era of progress" in the condition of individual men, we are met by more specific denials. Granted, it is said, all your facilities for travel and communication, for cheap and easy manufacture, for the distribution of cheap literature and news, your cheap education, better homes, and all the comforts and luxuries of your machine civilization, is the average man, the agriculturist, the machinist, the laborer any better for it all? Are there more purity, more honest, fair dealing, genuine work, fear and honor of God? Are the proceeds of labor more evenly distributed? These, it is said, are the criteria of progress; all else is misleading.
Now, it is true that the ultimate end of any system of government or civilization should be the improvement of the individual man. And yet this truth, as Mr. Froude puts it, is only a half-truth, so that this single test of any system may not do for a given time and a limited area. Other and wider considerations come in. Disturbances, which for a while unsettle society and do not bring good results to individuals, may, nevertheless, be necessary, and may be a sign of progress. Take the favorite illustration of Mr. Froude and Mr. Ruskin--the condition of the agricultural laborer of England. If I understand them, the civilization of the last century has not helped his position as a man. If I understand them, he was a better man, in a better condition of earthly happiness, and with a better chance of heaven, fifty years ago than now, before the "era of progress" found him out. (It ought to be noticed here, that the report of the Parliamentary Commission on the condition of the English agricultural laborer does not sustain Mr. Froude's assumptions. On the contrary, the report shows that his condition is in almost all respects vastly better than it was fifty years ago.) Mr. Ruskin would remove the steam-engine and all its devilish works from his vicinity; he would abolish factories, speedy travel by rail, new-fangled instruments of agriculture, our patent education, and remit him to his ancient condition--tied for life to a bit of ground, which should supply all his simple wants; his wife should weave the clothes for the family; his children should learn nothing but the catechism and to speak the truth; he should take his religion without question from the hearty, fox-hunting parson, and live and die undisturbed by ideas. Now, it seems to me that if Mr. Ruskin could realize in some isolated nation this idea of a pastoral, simple existence, under a paternal government, he would have in time an ignorant, stupid, brutal community in a great deal worse case than the agricultural laborers of England are at present. Three-fourths of the crime in the kingdom of Bavaria is committed in the Ultramontane region of the Tyrol, where the conditions of popular education are about those that Mr. Ruskin seems to regret as swept away by the present movement in England--a stagnant state of things, in which any wind of heaven would be a blessing, even if it were a tornado. Education of the modern sort unsettles the peasant, renders him unfit for labor, and gives us a half-educated idler in place of a conscientious workman. The disuse of the apprentice system is not made good by the present system of education, because no one learns a trade well, and the consequence is poor work, and a sham civilization generally. There is some truth in these complaints. But the way out is not backward, but forward. The fault is not with education, though it may be with the kind of education. The education must go forward; the man must not be half but wholly educated. It is only half-knowledge like half-training in a trade that is dangerous.
But what I wish to say is, that notwithstanding certain unfavorable things in the condition of the English laborer and mechanic, his chance is better in the main than it was fifty years ago. The world is a better world for him. He has the opportunity to be more of a man. His world is wider, and it is all open to him to go where he will. Mr. Ruskin may not so easily find his ideal, contented peasant, but the man himself begins to apprehend that this is a world of ideas as well as of food and clothes, and I think, if he were consulted, he would have no desire to return to the condition of his ancestors. In fact, the most hopeful symptom in the condition of the English peasant is his discontent. For, as skepticism is in one sense the handmaid of truth, discontent is the mother of progress. The man is comparatively of little use in the world who is contented.
There is another thought pertinent here. It is this: that no man, however humble, can live a full life if he lives to himself alone. He is more of a man, he lives in a higher plane of thought and of enjoyment, the more his communications are extended with his fellows and the wider his sympathies are. I count it a great thing for the English peasant, a solid addition to his life, that he is every day being put into more intimate relations with every other man on the globe.
I know it is said that these are only vague and sentimental notions of progress--notions of a "salvation by machinery." Let us pass to something that may be less vague, even if it be more sentimental. For a hundred years we have reckoned it progress, that the people were taking part in government. We have had a good deal of faith in the proposition put forth at Philadelphia a century ago, that men are, in effect, equal in political rights. Out of this simple proposition springs logically the extension of suffrage, and a universal education, in order that this important function of a government by the people may be exercised intelligently.
Now we are told by the most accomplished English essayists that this is a mistake, that it is change, but no progress. Indeed, there are philosophers in America who think so. At least I infer so from the fact that Mr. Froude fathers one of his definitions of our condition upon an American. When a block of printer's type is by accident broken up and disintegrated, it falls into what is called "pi." The "pi," a mere chaos, is afterwards sorted and distributed, preparatory to being built up into fresh combinations. "A distinguished American friend," says Mr. Froude, "describes Democracy as making pi." It is so witty a sarcasm that I almost think Mr. Froude manufactured it himself. Well, we have been making this "pi" for a hundred years; it seems to be a national dish in considerable favor with the rest of the world--even such ancient nations as China and Japan want a piece of it.
Now, of course, no form of human government is perfect, or anything like it, but I should be willing to submit the question to an English traveler even, whether, on the whole, the people of the United States do not have as fair a chance in life and feel as little the oppression of government as any other in the world; whether anywhere the burdens are more lifted off men's shoulders.
This infidelity to popular government and unbelief in any good results to come from it are not, unfortunately, confined to the English essayists. I am not sure but the notion is growing in what is called the intellectual class, that it is a mistake to intrust the government to the ignorant many, and that it can only be lodged safely in the hands of the wise few. We hear the corruptions of the times attributed to universal suffrage. Yet these corruptions certainly are not peculiar to the United States: It is also said here, as it is in England, that our diffused and somewhat superficial education is merely unfitting the mass of men, who must be laborers, for any useful occupation.
This argument, reduced to plain terms, is simply this: that the mass of mankind are unfit to decide properly their own political and social condition; and that for the mass of mankind any but a very limited mental development is to be deprecated. It would be enough to say of this, that class government and popular ignorance have been tried for so many ages, and always with disaster and failure in the end, that I should think philanthropical historians would be tired of recommending them. But there is more to be said.
I feel that as a resident on earth, part owner of it for a time, unavoidably a member of society, I have a right to a voice in determining what my condition and what my chance in life shall be. I may be ignorant, I should be a very poor ruler of other people, but I am better capable of deciding some things that touch me nearly than another is. By what logic can I say that I should have a part in the conduct of this world and that my neighbor should not? Who is to decide what degree of intelligence shall fit a man for a share in the government? How are we to select the few capable men that are to rule all the rest? As a matter of fact, men have been rulers who had neither the average intelligence nor virtue of the people they governed. And, as a matter of historical experience, a class in power has always sought its own benefit rather than that of the whole people. Lunacy, extraordinary stupidity, and crime aside, a man is the best guardian of his own liberty and rights.
The English critics, who say we have taken the government from the capable few and given it to the people, speak of universal suffrage as a quack panacea of this "era of progress." But it is not the manufactured panacea of any theorist or philosopher whatever. It is the natural result of a diffused knowledge of human rights and of increasing intelligence. It is nothing against it that Napoleon III. used a mockery of it to govern France. It is not a device of the closet, but a method of government, which has naturally suggested itself to men as they have grown into a feeling of self-reliance and a consciousness that they have some right in the decision of their own destiny in the world. It is true that suffrage peculiarly fits a people virtuous and intelligent. But there has not yet been invented any government in which a people would thrive who were ignorant and vicious.
Our foreign critics seem to regard our "American system," by the way, as a sort of invention or patent right, upon which we are experimenting; forgetting that it is as legitimate a growth out of our circumstances as the English system is out of its antecedents. Our system is not the product of theorists or closet philosophers; but it was ordained in substance and inevitable from the day the first "town meeting" assembled in New England, and it was not in the power of Hamilton or any one else to make it otherwise.
So you must have education, now you have the ballot, say the critics of this era of progress; and this is another of your cheap inventions. Not that we undervalue book knowledge. Oh, no! but it really seems to us that a good trade, with the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments back of it, would be the best thing for most of you. You must work for a living anyway; and why, now, should you unsettle your minds?
This is such an astounding view of human life and destiny that I do not know what to say to it. Did it occur to Mr. Froude to ask the man whether he would be contented with a good trade and the Ten Commandments? Perhaps the man would like eleven commandments? And, if he gets hold of the eleventh, he may want to know something more about his fellow-men, a little geography maybe, and some of Mr. Froude's history, and thus he may be led off into literature, and the Lord knows where.
The inference is that education--book fashion--will unfit the man for useful work. Mr. Froude here again stops at a half-truth. As a general thing, intelligence is useful in any position a man occupies. But it is true that there is a superficial and misdirected sort of education, so called, which makes the man who receives it despise labor; and it is also true that in the present educational revival there has been a neglect of training in the direction of skilled labor, and we all suffer more or less from cheap and dishonest work. But the way out of this, again, is forward, and not backward. It is a good sign, and not a stigma upon this era of progress, that people desire education. But this education must be of the whole man; he must be taught to work as well as to read, and he is, indeed, poorly educated if he is not fitted to do his work in the world. We certainly shall not have better workmen by having ignorant workmen. I need not say that the real education is that which will best fit a man for performing well his duties in life. If Mr. Froude, instead of his plaint over the scarcity of good mechanics, and of the Ten Commandments in England, had recommended the establishment of industrial schools, he would have spoken more to the purpose.
I should say that the fashionable skepticism of today, here and in England, is in regard to universal suffrage and the capacity of the people to govern themselves. The whole system is the sharp invention of Thomas Jefferson and others, by which crafty demagogues can rule. Instead of being, as we have patriotically supposed, a real progress in human development, it is only a fetich, which is becoming rapidly a failure. Now, there is a great deal of truth in the assertion that, whatever the form of government, the ablest men, or the strongest, or the most cunning in the nation, will rule. And yet it is true that in a popular government, like this, the humblest citizen, if he is wronged or oppressed, has in his hands a readier instrument of redress than he has ever had in any form of government. And it must not be forgotten that the ballot in the hands of all is perhaps the only safeguard against the tyranny of wealth in the hands of the few. It is true that bad men can band together and be destructive; but so they can in any government. Revolution by ballot is much safer than revolution by violence; and, granting that human nature is selfish, when the whole people are the government selfishness is on the side of the government. Can you mention any class in this country whose interest it is to overturn the government? And, then, as to the wisdom of the popular decisions by the ballot in this country. Look carefully at all the Presidential elections from Washington's down, and say, in the light of history, if the popular decision has not, every time, been the best for the country. It may not have seemed so to some of us at the time, but I think it is true, and a very significant fact.
Of course, in this affirmation of belief that one hundred years of popular government in this country is a real progress for humanity, and not merely a change from the rule of the fit to the rule of the cunning, we cannot forget that men are pretty much everywhere the same, and that we have abundant reason for national humility. We are pretty well aware that ours is not an ideal state of society, and should be so, even if the English who pass by did not revile us, wagging their heads. We might differ with them about the causes of our disorders. Doubtless, extended suffrage has produced certain results. It seems, strangely enough, to have escaped the observation of our English friends that to suffrage was due the late horse disease. No one can discover any other cause for it. But there is a cause for the various phenomena of this period of shoddy, of inflated speculation, of disturbance of all values, social, moral, political, and material, quite sufficient in the light of history to account for them. It is not suffrage; it is an irredeemable paper currency. It has borne its usual fruit with us, and neither foreign nor home critics can shift the responsibility of it upon our system of government. Yes, it is true, we have contrived to fill the world with our scandals of late. I might refer to a loose commercial and political morality; to betrayals of popular trust in politics; to corruptions in legislatures and in corporations; to an abuse of power in the public press, which has hardly yet got itself adjusted to its sudden accession of enormous influence. We complain of its injustice to individuals sometimes. We might imagine that something like this would occur.
A newspaper one day says: "We are exceedingly pained to hear that the Hon. Mr. Blank, who is running for Congress in the First District, has permitted his aged grandmother to go to the town poorhouse. What renders this conduct inexplicable is the fact that Mr. Blank is a man of large fortune."
The next day the newspaper says: "The Hon. Mr. Blank has not seen fit to deny the damaging accusation in regard to the treatment of his grandmother."
The next day the newspaper says: "Mr. Blank is still silent. He is probably aware that he cannot afford to rest under this grave charge."
The next day the newspaper asks: "Where's Blank? Has he fled?"
At last, goaded by these remarks, and most unfortunately for himself, Mr. Blank writes to the newspaper and most indignantly denies the charge; he never sent his grandmother to the poorhouse.
Thereupon the newspaper says: "Of course a rich man who would put his own grandmother in the poorhouse would deny it. Our informant was a gentleman of character. Mr. Blank rests the matter on his unsupported word. It is a question of veracity."
Or, perhaps, Mr. Blank, more unfortunately for himself, begins by making an affidavit, wherein he swears that he never sent his grandmother to the poorhouse, and that, in point of fact, he has not any grandmother whatever.
The newspaper then, in language that is now classical, "goes for" Mr. Blank. It says: "Mr. Blank resorts to the common device of the rogue --the affidavit. If he had been conscious of rectitude, would he not have relied upon his simple denial?"
Now, if an extreme case like this could occur, it would be bad enough. But, in our free society, the remedy would be at hand. The constituents of Mr. Blank would elect him in triumph. The newspaper would lose public confidence and support and learn to use its position more justly. What I mean to indicate by such an extreme instance as this is, that in our very license of individual freedom there is finally a correcting power.
We might pursue this general subject of progress by a comparison of the society of this country now with that of fifty years ago. I have no doubt that in every essential this is better than that, in manners, in morality, in charity and toleration, in education and religion. I know the standard of morality is higher. I know the churches are purer. Not fifty years ago, in a New England town, a distinguished doctor of divinity, the pastor of a leading church, was part owner in a distillery. He was a great light in his denomination, but he was an extravagant liver, and, being unable to pay his debts, he was arrested and put into jail, with the liberty of the "limits." In order not to interrupt his ministerial work, the jail limits were made to include his house and his church, so that he could still go in and out before his people. I do not think that could occur anywhere in the United States today.
I will close these fragmentary suggestions by saying that I, for one, should like to see this country a century from now. Those who live then will doubtless say of this period that it was crude, and rather disorderly, and fermenting with a great many new projects; but I have great faith that they will also say that the present extending notion, that the best government is for the people, by the people, was in the line of sound progress. I should expect to find faith in humanity greater and not less than it is now, and I should not expect to find that Mr. Froude's mournful expectation had been realized, and that the belief in a life beyond the grave had been withdrawn.
ENGLAND
By Charles Dudley Warner
England has played a part in modern history altogether out of proportion to its size. The whole of Great Britain, including Ireland, has only eleven thousand more square miles than Italy; and England and Wales alone are not half so large as Italy. England alone is about the size of North Carolina. It is, as Franklin, in 1763, wrote to Mary Stevenson in London, "that petty island which, compared to America, is but a stepping-stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one's shoes dry."
A considerable portion of it is under water, or water-soaked a good part of the year, and I suppose it has more acres for breeding frogs than any other northern land, except Holland. Old Harrison says that the North Britons when overcome by hunger used to creep into the marshes till the water was up to their chins and there remain a long time, "onlie to qualifie the heats of their stomachs by violence, which otherwise would have wrought and beene readie to oppresse them for hunger and want of sustinance." It lies so far north--the latitude of Labrador--that the winters are long and the climate inhospitable. It would be severely cold if the Gulf Stream did not make it always damp and curtain it with clouds. In some parts the soil is heavy with water, in others it is only a thin stratum above the chalk; in fact, agricultural production could scarcely be said to exist there until fortunes made in India and in other foreign adventure enabled the owners of the land to pile it knee-deep with fertilizers from Peru and elsewhere. Thanks to accumulated wealth and the Gulf Stream, its turf is green and soft; figs, which will not mature with us north of the capes of Virginia, ripen in sheltered nooks in Oxford, and the large and unfrequent strawberry sometimes appears upon the dinner-table in such profusion that the guests can indulge in one apiece.
Yet this small, originally infertile island has been for two centuries, and is today, the most vital influence on the globe. Cast your eye over the world upon her possessions, insular and continental, into any one of which, almost, England might be dropped, with slight disturbance, as you would transfer a hanging garden. For any parallel to her power and possessions you must go back to ancient Rome. Egypt under Thotmes and Seti overran the then known world and took tribute of it; but it was a temporary wave of conquest and not an assimilation. Rome sent her laws and her roads to the end of the earth, and made an empire of it; but it was an empire of barbarians largely, of dynasties rather than of peoples. The dynasties fought, the dynasties submitted, and the dynasties paid the tribute. The modern "people" did not exist. One battle decided the fate of half the world--it might be lost or won for a woman's eyes; the flight of a chieftain might settle the fate of a province; a campaign might determine the allegiance of half Asia. There was but one compact, disciplined, law-ordered nation, and that had its seat on the Tiber.
Under what different circumstances did England win her position! Before she came to the front, Venice controlled, and almost monopolized, the trade of the Orient. When she entered upon her career Spain was almost omnipotent in Europe, and was in possession of more than half the Western world; and besides Spain, England had, wherever she went, to contend for a foothold with Portugal, skilled in trade and adventure; and with Holland, rich, and powerful on the sea. That is to say, she met everywhere civilizations old and technically her superior. Of the ruling powers, she was the least in arts and arms. If you will take time to fill out this picture, you will have some conception of the marvelous achievements of England, say since the abdication of the Emperor Charles V.
This little island is today the centre of the wealth, of the solid civilization, of the world. I will not say of art, of music, of the lighter social graces that make life agreeable; but I will say of the moral forces that make progress possible and worth while. Of this island the centre is London; of London the heart is "the City," and in the City you can put your finger on one spot where the pulse of the world is distinctly felt to beat. The Moslem regards the Kaaba at Mecca as the centre of the universe; but that is only a theological phrase. The centre of the world is the Bank of England in Leadenhall Street. There is not an occurrence, not a conquest or a defeat, a revolution, a panic, a famine, an abundance, not a change in value of money or material, no depression or stoppage in trade, no recovery, no political, and scarcely any great religious movement--say the civil deposition of the Pope or the Wahhabee revival in Arabia and India--that does not report itself instantly at this sensitive spot. Other capitals feel a local influence; this feels all the local influences. Put your ear at the door of the Bank or the Stock Exchange near by, and you hear the roar of the world.
But this is not all, nor the most striking thing, nor the greatest contrast to the empires of Rome and of Spain. The civilization that has gone forth from England is a self-sustaining one, vital to grow where it is planted, in vast communities, in an order that does not depend, as that of the Roman world did, upon edicts and legions from the capital. And it must be remembered that if the land empire of England is not so vast as that of Rome, England has for two centuries been mistress of the seas, with all the consequences of that opportunity--consequences to trade beyond computation. And we must add to all this that an intellectual and moral power has been put forth from England clear round the globe, and felt beyond the limits of the English tongue.
How is it that England has attained this supremacy--a supremacy in vain disputed on land and on sea by France, but now threatened by an equipped and disciplined Germany, by an unformed Colossus--a Slav and Tartar conglomerate; and perhaps by one of her own children, the United States? I will mention some of the things that have determined England's extraordinary career; and they will help us to consider her prospects. I name:
I. The Race. It is a mixed race, but with certain dominant qualities, which we call, loosely, Teutonic; certainly the most aggressive, tough, and vigorous people the world has seen. It does not shrink from any climate, from any exposure, from any geographic condition; yet its choice of migration and of residence has mainly been on the grass belt of the globe, where soil and moisture produce good turf, where a changing and unequal climate, with extremes of heat and cold, calls out the physical resources, stimulates invention, and requires an aggressive and defensive attitude of mind and body. The early history of this people is marked by two things:
( 1 ) Town and village organizations, nurseries of law, order, and self-dependence, nuclei of power, capable of indefinite expansion, leading directly to a free and a strong government, the breeders of civil liberty.
( 2 ) Individualism in religion, Protestantism in the widest sense: I mean by this, cultivation of the individual conscience as against authority. This trait was as marked in this sturdy people in Catholic England as it is in Protestant England. It is in the blood. England never did submit to Rome, not even as France did, though the Gallic Church held out well. Take the struggle of Henry II. and the hierarchy. Read the fight with prerogative all along. The English Church never could submit. It is a shallow reading of history to attribute the final break with Rome to the unbridled passion of Henry VIII.; that was an occasion only: if it had not been that, it would have been something else.
Here we have the two necessary traits in the character of a great people: the love and the habit of civil liberty and religious conviction and independence. Allied to these is another trait--truthfulness. To speak the truth in word and action, to the verge of bluntness and offense--and with more relish sometimes because it is individually obnoxious and unlovely--is an English trait, clearly to be traced in the character of this people, notwithstanding the equivocations of Elizabethan diplomacy, the proverbial lying of English shopkeepers, and the fraudulent adulteration of English manufactures. Not to lie is perhaps as much a matter of insular pride as of morals; to lie is unbecoming an Englishman. When Captain Burnaby was on his way to Khiva he would tolerate no Oriental exaggeration of his army rank, although a higher title would have smoothed his way and added to his consideration. An English official who was a captive at Bokhara (or Khiva) was offered his life by the Khan if he would abjure the Christian faith and say he was a Moslem; but he preferred death rather than the advantage of a temporary equivocation. I do not suppose that he was a specially pious man at home or that he was a martyr to religious principle, but for the moment Christianity stood for England and English honor and civilization. I can believe that a rough English sailor, who had not used a sacred name, except in vain, since he said his prayer at his mother's knee, accepted death under like circumstances rather than say he was not a Christian.
The next determining cause in England's career is:
II. The insular position. Poor as the island was, this was the opportunity. See what came of it:
( 1 ) Maritime opportunity. The irregular coastlines, the bays and harbors, the near islands and mainlands invited to the sea. The nation became, per force, sailors--as the ancient Greeks were and the modern Greeks are: adventurers, discoverers--hardy, ambitious, seeking food from the sea and wealth from every side.
( 2 ) Their position protected them. What they got they could keep; wealth could accumulate. Invasion was difficult and practically impossible to their neighbors. And yet they were in the bustling world, close to the continent, commanding the most important of the navigable seas. The wealth of Holland was on the one hand, the wealth of France on the other. They held the keys.
( 3 ) The insular position and their free institutions invited refugees from all the Continent, artisans and skilled laborers of all kinds. Hence, the beginning of their great industries, which made England rich in proportion as her authority and chance of trade expanded over distant islands and continents. But this would not have been possible without the third advantage which I shall mention, and that is:
III. Coal. England's power and wealth rested upon her coal-beds. In this bounty nature was more liberal to the tight little island than to any other spot in Western Europe, and England took early advantage of it. To be sure, her coal-field is small compared with that of the United States--an area of only 11,900 square miles to our 192,000. But Germany has only 1,770; Belgium, 510; France, 2,086; and Russia only in her expansion of territory leads Europe in this respect, and has now 30,000 square miles of coal-beds. But see the use England makes of this material: in 1877, she took out of the ground 134,179,968 tons. The United States the same year took out 50,000,000 tons; Germany, 48,000,000; France, 16,000,000; Belgium, 14,000,000. This tells the story of the heavy industries.
We have considered as elements of national greatness the race itself, the favorable position, and the material to work with. I need not enlarge upon the might and the possessions of England, nor the general beneficence of her occupation wherever she has established fort, factory, or colony. With her flag go much injustice, domineering, and cruelty; but, on the whole, the best elements of civilization.
The intellectual domination of England has been as striking as the physical. It is stamped upon all her colonies; it has by no means disappeared in the United States. For more than fifty years after our independence we imported our intellectual food--with the exception of politics, and theology in certain forms--and largely our ethical guidance from England. We read English books, or imitations of the English way of looking at things; we even accepted the English caricatures of our own life as genuine--notably in the case of the so-called typical Yankee. It is only recently that our writers have begun to describe our own life as it is, and that readers begin to feel that our society may be as interesting in print as that English society which they have been all their lives accustomed to read about. The reading-books of children in schools were filled with English essays, stories, English views of life; it was the English heroines over whose woes the girls wept; it was of the English heroes that the boys declaimed. I do not know how much the imagination has to do in shaping the national character, but for half a century English writers, by poems and novels, controlled the imagination of this country. The principal reading then, as now--and perhaps more then than now--was fiction, and nearly all of this England supplied. We took in with it, it will be noticed, not only the romance and gilding of chivalry and legitimacy, such as Scott gives us, but constant instruction in a society of ranks and degrees, orders of nobility and commonalty, a fixed social status, a well-ordered, and often attractive, permanent social inequality, a state of life and relations based upon lingering feudal conditions and prejudices. The background of all English fiction is monarchical; however liberal it may be, it must be projected upon the existing order of things. We have not been examining these foreign social conditions with that simple curiosity which leads us to look into the social life of Russia as it is depicted in Russian novels; we have, on the contrary, absorbed them generation after generation as part of our intellectual development, so that the novels and the other English literature must have had a vast influence in molding our mental character, in shaping our thinking upon the political as well as the social constitution of states.
For a long time the one American counteraction, almost the only, to this English influence was the newspaper, which has always kept alive and diffused a distinctly American spirit--not always lovely or modest, but national. The establishment of periodicals which could afford to pay for fiction written about our society and from the American point of view has had a great effect on our literary emancipation. The wise men whom we elect to make our laws--and who represent us intellectually and morally a good deal better than we sometimes like to admit--have always gone upon the theory, with regard to the reading for the American people, that the chief requisite of it was cheapness, with no regard to its character so far as it is a shaper of notions about government and social life. What educating influence English fiction was having upon American life they have not inquired, so long as it was furnished cheap, and its authors were cheated out of any copyright on it.
At the North, thanks to a free press and periodicals, to a dozen reform agitations, and to the intellectual stir generally accompanying industries and commerce, we have been developing an immense intellectual activity, a portion of which has found expression in fiction, in poetry, in essays, that are instinct with American life and aspiration; so that now for over thirty years, in the field of literature, we have had a vigorous offset to the English intellectual domination of which I spoke. How far this has in the past molded American thought and sentiment, in what degree it should be held responsible for the infidelity in regard to our "American experiment," I will not undertake to say. The South furnishes a very interesting illustration in this connection. When the civil war broke down the barriers of intellectual non-intercourse behind which the South had ensconced itself, it was found to be in a colonial condition. Its libraries were English libraries, mostly composed of old English literature. Its literary growth stopped with the reign of George III. Its latest news was the Spectator and the Tatler. The social order it covered was that of monarchical England, undisturbed by the fiery philippics of Byron or Shelley or the radicalism of a manufacturing age. Its chivalry was an imitation of the antiquated age of lords and ladies, and tournaments, and buckram courtesies, when men were as touchy to fight, at the lift of an eyelid or the drop of the glove, as Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and as ready for a drinking-bout as Christopher North. The intellectual stir of the North, with its disorganizing radicalism, was rigorously excluded, and with it all the new life pouring out of its presses. The South was tied to a republic, but it was not republican, either in its politics or its social order. It was, in its mental constitution, in its prejudices, in its tastes, exactly what you would expect a people to be, excluded from the circulation of free ideas by its system of slavery, and fed on the English literature of a century ago. I dare say that a majority of its reading public, at any time, would have preferred a monarchical system and a hierarchy of rank.
To return to England. I have said that English domination usually carries the best elements of civilization. Yet it must be owned that England has pursued her magnificent career in a policy often insolent and brutal, and generally selfish. Scarcely any considerations have stood in the way of her trade and profit. I will not dwell upon her opium culture in India, which is a proximate cause of famine in district after district, nor upon her forcing the drug upon China--a policy disgraceful to a Christian queen and people. We have only just got rid of slavery, sustained so long by Biblical and official sanction, and may not yet set up as critics. But I will refer to a case with which all are familiar--England's treatment of her American colonies. In 1760 and onward, when Franklin, the agent of the colonies of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, was cooling his heels in lords' waiting-rooms in London, America was treated exactly as Ireland was--that is, discriminated against in every way; not allowed to manufacture; not permitted to trade with other nations, except under the most vexatious restrictions; and the effort was continued to make her a mere agricultural producer and a dependent. All that England cared for us was that we should be a market for her manufactures. This same selfishness has been the keynote of her policy down to the present day, except as the force of circumstances has modified it. Steadily pursued, it has contributed largely to make England the monetary and industrial master of the world.
With this outline I pass to her present condition and outlook. The dictatorial and selfish policy has been forced to give way somewhat in regard to the colonies. The spirit of the age and the strength of the colonies forbid its exercise; they cannot be held by the old policy. Australia boldly adopts a protective tariff, and her parliament is only nominally controlled by the crown. Canada exacts duties on English goods, and England cannot help herself. Even with these concessions, can England keep her great colonies? They are still loyal in word. They still affect English manners and English speech, and draw their intellectual supplies from England. On the prospect of a war with Russia they nearly all offered volunteers. But everybody knows that allegiance is on the condition of local autonomy. If united Canada asks to go, she will go. So with Australia. It may be safely predicted that England will never fight again to hold the sovereignty of her new-world possessions against their present occupants. And, in the judgment of many good observers, a dissolution of the empire, so far as the Western colonies are concerned, is inevitable, unless Great Britain, adopting the plan urged by Franklin, becomes an imperial federation, with parliaments distinct and independent, the crown the only bond of union--the crown, and not the English parliament, being the titular and actual sovereign. Sovereign power over America in the parliament Franklin never would admit. His idea was that all the inhabitants of the empire must be citizens, not some of them subjects ruled by the home citizens. The two great political parties of England are really formed on lines constructed after the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832. The Tories had been long in power. They had made many changes and popular concessions, but they resisted parliamentary reform. The great Whig lords, who had tried to govern England without the people and in opposition to the crown in the days of George III., had learned to seek popular support. The Reform Bill, which was ultimately forced through by popular pressure and threat of civil war, abolished the rotten boroughs, gave representation to the large manufacturing towns and increased representation to the counties, and the suffrage to all men who had 'paid ten pounds a year rent in boroughs, or in the counties owned land worth ten pounds a year or paid fifty pounds rent. The immediate result of this was to put power into the hands of the middle classes and to give the lower classes high hopes, so that, in 1839, the Chartist movement began, one demand of which was universal suffrage. The old party names of Whig and Tory had been dropped and the two parties had assumed their present appellations of Conservatives and Liberals. Both parties had, however, learned that there was no rest for any ruling party except a popular basis, and the Conservative party had the good sense to strengthen itself in 1867 by carrying through Mr. Disraeli's bill, which gave the franchise in boroughs to all householders paying rates, and in counties to all occupiers of property rated at fifteen pounds a year. This broadening of the suffrage places the power irrevocably in the hands of the people, against whose judgment neither crown nor ministry can venture on any important step.
In general terms it may be said that of these two great parties the Conservative wishes to preserve existing institutions, and latterly has leaned to the prerogatives of the crown, and the Liberal is inclined to progress and reform, and to respond to changes demanded by the people. Both parties, however, like parties elsewhere, propose and oppose measures and movements, and accept or reject policies, simply to get office or keep office. The Conservative party of late years, principally because it has the simple task of holding back, has been better able to define its lines and preserve a compact organization. The Liberals, with a multitude of reformatory projects, have, of course, a less homogeneous organization, and for some years have been without well-defined issues. The Conservative aristocracy seemed to form a secure alliance with the farmers and the great agricultural interests, and at the same time to have a strong hold upon the lower classes. In what his opponents called his "policy of adventure," Lord Beaconsfield had the support of the lower populace. The Liberal party is an incongruous host. On one wing are the Whig lords and great landowners, who cannot be expected to take kindly to a land reform that would reform them out of territorial power; and on the other wing are the Radicals, who would abolish the present land system and the crown itself, and institute the rule of a democracy. Between these two is the great body of the middle class, a considerable portion of the educated and university trained, the majorities of the manufacturing towns, and perhaps, we may say, generally the Nonconformists. There are some curious analogies in these two parties to our own parties before the war. It is, perhaps, not fanciful to suppose that the Conservative lords resemble our own aristocratic leaders of democracy, who contrived to keep near the people and had affiliations that secured them the vote of the least educated portion of the voters; while the great Liberal lords are not unlike our old aristocratic Whigs, of the cotton order, who have either little sympathy with the people or little faculty of showing it. It is a curious fact that during our civil war respect for authority gained us as much sympathy from the Conservatives, as love for freedom (hampered by the greed of trade and rivalry in manufactures) gained us from the Liberals.
To return to the question of empire. The bulk of the Conservative party would hold the colonies if possible, and pursue an imperial policy; while certainly a large portion of the Liberals--not all, by any means--would let the colonies go, and, with the Manchester school, hope to hold England's place by free-trade and active competition. The imperial policy may be said to have two branches, in regard to which parties will not sharply divide: one is the relations to be held towards the Western colonies, and the other in the policy to be pursued in the East in reference to India and to the development of the Indian empire, and also the policy of aggression and subjection in South Africa.
An imperial policy does not necessarily imply such vagaries as the forcible detention of the forcibly annexed Boer republic. But everybody sees that the time is near when England must say definitely as to the imperial policy generally whether it will pursue it or abandon it. And it may be remarked in passing that the Gladstone government, thus far, though pursuing this policy more moderately than the Beaconsfield government, shows no intention of abandoning it. Almost everybody admits that if it is abandoned England must sink to the position of a third-rate power like Holland. For what does abandonment mean? It means to have no weight, except that of moral example, in Continental affairs: to relinquish her advantages in the Mediterranean; to let Turkey be absorbed by Russia; to become so weak in India as to risk rebellion of all the provinces, and probable attack from Russia and her Central Asian allies. But this is not all. Lost control in Asia is lost trade; this is evident in every foot of control Russia has gained in the Caucasus, about the Caspian Sea, in Persia. There Russian manufactures supplant the English; and so in another quarter: in order to enjoy the vast opening trade of Africa, England must be on hand with an exhibition of power. We might show by a hundred examples that the imperial idea in England does not rest on pride alone, on national glory altogether, though that is a large element in it, but on trade instincts. "Trade follows the flag" is a well-known motto; and that means that the lines of commerce follow the limits of empire.
Take India as an illustration. Why should England care to keep India? In the last forty years the total revenue from India, set down up to 1880 as L 1,517,000,000, has been L 53,000,000 less than the expenditure. It varies with the years, and occasionally the balance is favorable, as in 1879, when the expenditure was L 63,400,000 and the revenue was L 64,400,000. But to offset this average deficit the very profitable trade of India, which is mostly in British hands, swells the national wealth; and this trade would not be so largely in British hands if the flag were away.
But this is not the only value of India. Grasp on India is part of the vast Oriental network of English trade and commerce, the carrying trade, the supply of cotton and iron goods. This largely depends upon English prestige in the Orient, and to lose India is to lose the grip. On practically the same string with India are Egypt, Central Africa, and the Euphrates valley. A vast empire of trade opens out. To sink the imperial policy is to shut this vision. With Russia pressing on one side and America competing on the other, England cannot afford to lose her military lines, her control of the sea, her prestige.
Again, India offers to the young and the adventurous a career, military, civil, or commercial. This is of great weight--great social weight. One of the chief wants of England today is careers and professions for her sons. The population of the United Kingdom in 1876 was estimated at near thirty-four millions; in the last few decades the decennial increase had been considerably over two millions; at that rate the population in 1900 would be near forty millions. How can they live in their narrow limits? They must emigrate, go for good, or seek employment and means of wealth in some such vast field as India. Take away India now, and you cut off the career of hundreds of thousands of young Englishmen, and the hope of tens of thousands of households.
There is another aspect of the case which it would be unfair to ignore. Opportunity is the measure of a nation's responsibility. I have no doubt that Mr. Thomas Hughes spoke for a very respectable portion of Christian England, in 1861, when he wrote Mr. James Russell Lowell, in a prefatory note to "Tom Brown at Oxford," these words:
"The great tasks of the world are only laid on the strongest shoulders. We, who have India to guide and train, who have for our task the educating of her wretched people into free men, who feel that the work cannot be shifted from ourselves, and must be done as God would have it done, at the peril of England's own life, can and do feel for you."
It is safe, we think, to say that if the British Empire is to be dissolved, disintegration cannot be permitted to begin at home. Ireland has always been a thorn in the side of England. And the policy towards it could not have been much worse, either to impress it with a respect for authority or to win it by conciliation; it has been a strange mixture of untimely concession and untimely cruelty. The problem, in fact, has physical and race elements that make it almost insolvable. A water-logged country, of which nothing can surely be predicted but the uncertainty of its harvests, inhabited by a people of most peculiar mental constitution, alien in race, temperament, and religion, having scarcely one point of sympathy with the English. But geography settles some things in this world, and the act of union that bound Ireland to the United Kingdom in 1800 was as much a necessity of the situation as the act of union that obliterated the boundary line between Scotland and England in 1707. The Irish parliament was confessedly a failure, and it is scarcely within the possibilities that the experiment will be tried again. Irish independence, so far as English consent is concerned, and until England's power is utterly broken, is a dream. Great changes will doubtless be made in the tenure and transfer of land, and these changes will react upon England to the ultimate abasement of the landed aristocracy; but this equalization of conditions would work no consent to separation. The undeniable growth of the democratic spirit in England can no more be relied on to bring it about, when we remember what renewed executive vigor and cohesion existed with the Commonwealth and the fiery foreign policy of the first republic of France. For three years past we have seen the British Empire in peril on all sides, with the addition of depression and incipient rebellion at home, but her horizon is not as dark as it was in 1780, when, with a failing cause in America, England had the whole of Europe against her.
In any estimate of the prospects of England we must take into account the recent marked changes in the social condition. Mr. Escott has an instructive chapter on this in his excellent book on England. He notices that the English character is losing its insularity, is more accessible to foreign influences, and is adopting foreign, especially French, modes of living. Country life is losing its charm; domestic life is changed; people live in "flats" more and more, and the idea of home is not what it was; marriage is not exactly what it was; the increased free and independent relations of the sexes are somewhat demoralizing; women are a little intoxicated with their newly-acquired freedom; social scandals are more frequent. It should be said, however, that perhaps the present perils are due not to the new system, but to the fact that it is new; when the novelty is worn off the peril may cease.
Mr. Escott notices primogeniture as one of the stable and, curious enough, one of the democratic institutions of society. It is owing to primogeniture that while there is a nobility in England there is no noblesse. If titles and lands went to all the children there would be the multitudinous noblesse of the Continent. Now, by primogeniture, enough is retained for a small nobility, but all the younger sons must go into the world and make a living. The three respectable professions no longer offer sufficient inducement, and they crowd more and more into trade. Thus the middle class is constantly recruited from the upper. Besides, the upper is all the time recruited from the wealthy middle; the union of aristocracy and plutocracy may be said to be complete. But merit makes its way continually from even the lower ranks upward, in the professions, in the army, the law, the church, in letters, in trade, and, what Mr. Escott does not mention, in the reformed civil service, newly opened to the humblest lad in the land. Thus there is constant movement up and down in social England, approaching, except in the traditional nobility, the freedom of movement in our own country. This is all wholesome and sound. Even the nobility itself, driven by ennui, or a loss of former political control, or by the necessity of more money to support inherited estates, goes into business, into journalism, writes books, enters the professions.
What are the symptoms of decay in England? Unless the accumulation of wealth is a symptom of decay, I do not see many. I look at the people themselves. It seems to me that never in their history were they more full of vigor. See what travelers, explorers, adventurers they are. See what sportsmen, in every part of the globe, how much they endure, and how hale and jolly they are--women as well as men. The race, certainly, has not decayed. And look at letters. It may be said that this is not the age of pure literature--and I'm sure I hope the English patent for producing machine novels will not be infringed--but the English language was never before written so vigorously, so clearly, and to such purpose. And this is shown even in the excessive refinement and elaboration of trifles, the minutia of reflection, the keenness of analysis, the unrelenting pursuit of every social topic into subtleties untouched by the older essayists. And there is still more vigor, without affectation, in scientific investigation, in the daily conquests made in the realm of social economy, the best methods of living and getting the most out of life. Art also keeps pace with luxury, and shows abundant life and promise for the future.
I believe, from these and other considerations, that this vigorous people will find a way out of its present embarrassment, and a way out without retreating. For myself, I like to see the English sort of civilization spreading over the world rather than the Russian or the French. I hope England will hang on to the East, and not give it over to the havoc of squabbling tribes, with a dozen religions and five hundred dialects, or to the military despotism of an empire whose morality is only matched by the superstition of its religion.
The relations of England and the United States are naturally of the first interest to us. Our love and our hatred have always been that of true relatives. For three-quarters of a century our 'amour propre' was constantly kept raw by the most supercilious patronage. During the past decade, when the quality of England's regard has become more and more a matter of indifference to us, we have been the subject of a more intelligent curiosity, of increased respect, accompanied with a sincere desire to understand us. In the diplomatic scale Washington still ranks below the Sublime Porte, but this anomaly is due to tradition, and does not represent England's real estimate of the status of the republic. There is, and must be, a good deal of selfishness mingled in our friendship--patriotism itself being a form of selfishness--but our ideas of civilization so nearly coincide, and we have so many common aspirations for humanity that we must draw nearer together, notwithstanding old grudges and present differences in social structure. Our intercourse is likely to be closer, our business relations will become more inseparable. I can conceive of nothing so lamentable for the progress of the world as a quarrel between these two English-speaking peoples.
But, in one respect, we are likely to diverge. I refer to literature; in that, assimilation is neither probable nor desirable. We were brought up on the literature of England; our first efforts were imitations of it; we were criticised--we criticised ourselves on its standards. We compared every new aspirant in letters to some English writer. We were patted on the back if we resembled the English models; we were stared at or sneered at if we did not. When we began to produce something that was the product of our own soil and our own social conditions, it was still judged by the old standards, or, if it was too original for that, it was only accepted because it was curious or bizarre, interesting for its oddity. The criticism that we received for our best was evidently founded on such indifference or toleration that it was galling. At first we were surprised; then we were grieved; then we were indignant. We have long ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indignant at anything the English critics say of us. We have recovered our balance. We know that since Gulliver there has been no piece of original humor produced in England equal to "Knickerbocker's New York"; that not in this century has any English writer equaled the wit and satire of the "Biglow Papers." We used to be irritated at what we called the snobbishness of English critics of a certain school; we are so no longer, for we see that its criticism is only the result of ignorance--simply of inability to understand.
And we the more readily pardon it, because of the inability we have to understand English conditions, and the English dialect, which has more and more diverged from the language as it was at the time of the separation. We have so constantly read English literature, and kept ourselves so well informed of their social life, as it is exhibited in novels and essays, that we are not so much in the dark with regard to them as they are with regard to us; still we are more and more bothered by the insular dialect. I do not propose to criticise it; it is our misfortune, perhaps our fault, that we do not understand it; and I only refer to it to say that we should not be too hard on the Saturday Review critic when he is complaining of the American dialect in the English that Mr. Howells writes. How can the Englishman be expected to come into sympathy with the fiction that has New England for its subject--from Hawthorne's down to that of our present novelists--when he is ignorant of the whole background on which it is cast; when all the social conditions are an enigma to him; when, if he has, historically, some conception of Puritan society, he cannot have a glimmer of comprehension of the subtle modifications and changes it has undergone in a century? When he visits America and sees it, it is a puzzle to him. How, then, can he be expected to comprehend it when it is depicted to the life in books?
No, we must expect a continual divergence in our literatures. And it is best that there should be. There can be no development of a nation's literature worth anything that is not on its own lines, out of its own native materials. We must not expect that the English will understand that literature that expresses our national life, character, conditions, any better than they understand that of the French or of the Germans. And, on our part, the day has come when we receive their literary efforts with the same respectful desire to be pleased with them that we have to like their dress and their speech.
THE NOVEL AND THE COMMON SCHOOL
By Charles Dudley Warner
There has been a great improvement in the physical condition of the people of the United States within two generations. This is more noticeable in the West than in the East, but it is marked everywhere; and the foreign traveler who once detected a race deterioration, which he attributed to a dry and stimulating atmosphere and to a feverish anxiety, which was evident in all classes, for a rapid change of condition, finds very little now to sustain his theory. Although the restless energy continues, the mixed race in America has certainly changed physically for the better. Speaking generally, the contours of face and form are more rounded. The change is most marked in regions once noted for leanness, angularity, and sallowness of complexion, but throughout the country the types of physical manhood are more numerous; and if women of rare and exceptional beauty are not more numerous, no doubt the average of comeliness and beauty has been raised. Thus far, the increase of beauty due to better development has not been at the expense of delicacy of complexion and of line, as it has been in some European countries. Physical well-being is almost entirely a matter of nutrition. Something is due in our case to the accumulation of money, to the decrease in an increasing number of our population of the daily anxiety about food and clothes, to more leisure; but abundant and better-prepared food is the direct agency in our physical change. Good food is not only more abundant and more widely distributed than it was two generations ago, but it is to be had in immeasurably greater variety. No other people existing, or that ever did exist, could command such a variety of edible products for daily consumption as the mass of the American people habitually use today. In consequence they have the opportunity of being better nourished than any other people ever were. If they are not better nourished, it is because their food is badly prepared. Whenever we find, either in New England or in the South, a community ill-favored, dyspeptic, lean, and faded in complexion, we may be perfectly sure that its cooking is bad, and that it is too ignorant of the laws of health to procure that variety of food which is so easily obtainable. People who still diet on sodden pie and the products of the frying-pan of the pioneer, and then, in order to promote digestion, attempt to imitate the patient cow by masticating some elastic and fragrant gum, are doing very little to bring in that universal physical health or beauty which is the natural heritage of our opportunity.
Now, what is the relation of our intellectual development to this physical improvement? It will be said that the general intelligence is raised, that the habit of reading is much more widespread, and that the increase of books, periodicals, and newspapers shows a greater mental activity than existed formerly. It will also be said that the opportunity for education was never before so nearly universal. If it is not yet true everywhere that all children must go to school, it is true that all may go to school free of cost. Without doubt, also, great advance has been made in American scholarship, in specialized learning and investigation; that is to say, the proportion of scholars of the first rank in literature and in science is much larger to the population than a generation ago.
But what is the relation of our general intellectual life to popular education? Or, in other words, what effect is popular education having upon the general intellectual habit and taste? There are two ways of testing this. One is by observing whether the mass of minds is better trained and disciplined than formerly, less liable to delusions, better able to detect fallacies, more logical, and less likely to be led away by novelties in speculation, or by theories that are unsupported by historic evidence or that are contradicted by a knowledge of human nature. If we were tempted to pursue this test, we should be forced to note the seeming anomaly of a scientific age peculiarly credulous; the ease with which any charlatan finds followers; the common readiness to fall in with any theory of progress which appeals to the sympathies, and to accept the wildest notions of social reorganization. We should be obliged to note also, among scientific men themselves, a disposition to come to conclusions on inadequate evidence--a disposition usually due to one-sided education which lacks metaphysical training and the philosophic habit. Multitudes of fairly intelligent people are afloat without any base-line of thought to which they can refer new suggestions; just as many politicians are floundering about for want of an apprehension of the Constitution of the United States and of the historic development of society. An honest acceptance of the law of gravitation would banish many popular delusions; a comprehension that something cannot be made out of nothing would dispose of others; and the application of the ordinary principles of evidence, such as men require to establish a title to property, would end most of the remaining. How far is our popular education, which we have now enjoyed for two full generations, responsible for this state of mind? If it has not encouraged it, has it done much to correct it?
The other test of popular education is in the kind of reading sought and enjoyed by the majority of the American people. As the greater part of this reading is admitted to be fiction, we have before us the relation of the novel to the common school. As the common school is our universal method of education, and the novels most in demand are those least worthy to be read, we may consider this subject in two aspects: the encouragement, by neglect or by teaching, of the taste that demands this kind of fiction, and the tendency of the novel to become what this taste demands.
Before considering the common school, however, we have to notice a phenomenon in letters--namely, the evolution of the modern newspaper as a vehicle for general reading-matter. Not content with giving the news, or even with creating news and increasing its sensational character, it grasps at the wider field of supplying reading material for the million, usurping the place of books and to a large extent of periodicals. The effect of this new departure in journalism is beginning to attract attention. An increasing number of people read nothing except the newspapers. Consequently, they get little except scraps and bits; no subject is considered thoroughly or exhaustively; and they are furnished with not much more than the small change for superficial conversation. The habit of excessive newspaper reading, in which a great variety of topics is inadequately treated, has a curious effect on the mind. It becomes demoralized, gradually loses the power of concentration or of continuous thought, and even loses the inclination to read the long articles which the newspaper prints. The eye catches a thousand things, but is detained by no one. Variety, which in limitations is wholesome in literary as well as in physical diet, creates dyspepsia when it is excessive, and when the literary viands are badly cooked and badly served the evil is increased. The mind loses the power of discrimination, the taste is lowered, and the appetite becomes diseased. The effect of this scrappy, desultory reading is bad enough when the hashed compound selected is tolerably good. It becomes a very serious matter when the reading itself is vapid, frivolous, or bad. The responsibility of selecting the mental food for millions of people is serious. When, in the last century, in England, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information, which accomplished so much good, was organized, this responsibility was felt, and competent hands prepared the popular books and pamphlets that were cheap in price and widely diffused. Now, it happens that a hundred thousand people, perhaps a million in some cases, surrender the right of the all-important selection of the food for their minds to some unknown and irresponsible person whose business it is to choose the miscellaneous reading-matter for a particular newspaper. His or her taste may be good, or it may be immature and vicious; it may be used simply to create a sensation; and yet the million of readers get nothing except what this one person chooses they shall read. It is an astonishing abdication of individual preference. Day after day, Sunday after Sunday, they read only what this unknown person selects for them. Instead of going to the library and cultivating their own tastes, and pursuing some subject that will increase their mental vigor and add to their permanent stock of thought, they fritter away their time upon a hash of literature chopped up for them by a person possibly very unfit even to make good hash. The mere statement of this surrender of one's judgment of what shall be his intellectual life is alarming.
But the modern newspaper is no doubt a natural evolution in our social life. As everything has a cause, it would be worth while to inquire whether the encyclopaedic newspaper is in response to a demand, to a taste created by our common schools. Or, to put the question in another form, does the system of education in our common schools give the pupils a taste for good literature or much power of discrimination? Do they come out of school with the habit of continuous reading, of reading books, or only of picking up scraps in the newspapers, as they might snatch a hasty meal at a lunch-counter? What, in short, do the schools contribute to the creation of a taste for good literature?
Great anxiety is felt in many quarters about the modern novel. It is feared that it will not be realistic enough, that it will be too realistic, that it will be insincere as to the common aspects of life, that it will not sufficiently idealize life to keep itself within the limits of true art. But while the critics are busy saying what the novel should be, and attacking or defending the fiction of the previous age, the novel obeys pretty well the laws of its era, and in many ways, especially in the variety of its development, represents the time. Regarded simply as a work of art, it may be said that the novel should be an expression of the genius of its writer conscientiously applied to a study of the facts of life and of human nature, with little reference to the audience. Perhaps the great works of art that have endured have been so composed. We may say, for example, that "Don Quixote" had to create its sympathetic audience. But, on the other hand, works of art worthy the name are sometimes produced to suit a demand and to please a taste already created. A great deal of what passes for literature in these days is in this category of supply to suit the demand, and perhaps it can be said of this generation more fitly than of any other that the novel seeks to hit the popular taste; having become a means of livelihood, it must sell in order to be profitable to the producer, and in order to sell it must be what the reading public want. The demand and sale are widely taken as the criterion of excellence, or they are at least sufficient encouragement of further work on the line of the success. This criterion is accepted by the publisher, whose business it is to supply a demand. The conscientious publisher asks two questions: Is the book good? and Will it sell? The publisher without a conscience asks only one question: Will the book sell? The reflex influence of this upon authors is immediately felt.
The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the silk-weavers of Lyons, they are made for the central establishment on individual looms at home; but if demand for the sort of goods furnished at present continues, there is no reason why they should not be produced, even more cheaply than they are now, in great factories, where there can be division of labor and economy of talent. The shoal of English novels conscientiously reviewed every seventh day in the London weeklies would preserve their present character and gain in firmness of texture if they were made by machinery. One has only to mark what sort of novels reach the largest sale and are most called for in the circulating libraries, to gauge pretty accurately the public taste, and to measure the influence of this taste upon modern production. With the exception of the novel now and then which touches some religious problem or some socialistic speculation or uneasiness, or is a special freak of sensationalism, the novels which suit the greatest number of readers are those which move in a plane of absolute mediocrity, and have the slightest claim to be considered works of art. They represent the chromo stage of development.
They must be cheap. The almost universal habit of reading is a mark of this age--nowhere else so conspicuous as in America; and considering the training of this comparatively new reading public, it is natural that it should insist upon cheapness of material, and that it should require quality less than quantity. It is a note of our general intellectual development that cheapness in literature is almost as much insisted on by the rich as by the poor. The taste for a good book has not kept pace with the taste for a good dinner, and multitudes who have commendable judgment about the table would think it a piece of extravagance to pay as much for a book as for a dinner, and would be ashamed to smoke a cigar that cost less than a novel. Indeed, we seem to be as yet far away from the appreciation of the truth that what we put into the mind is as important to our well-being as what we put into the stomach.
No doubt there are more people capable of appreciating a good book, and there are more good books read, in this age, than in any previous, though the ratio of good judges to the number who read is less; but we are considering the vast mass of the reading public and its tastes. I say its tastes, and probably this is not unfair, although this traveling, restless, reading public meekly takes, as in the case of the reading selected in the newspapers, what is most persistently thrust upon its attention by the great news agencies, which find it most profitable to deal in that which is cheap and ephemeral. The houses which publish books of merit are at a disadvantage with the distributing agencies.
Criticism which condemns the common-school system as a nurse of superficiality, mediocrity, and conceit does not need serious attention, any more than does the criticism that the universal opportunity of individual welfare offered by a republic fails to make a perfect government. But this is not saying that the common school does all that it can do, and that its results answer to the theories about it. It must be partly due to the want of proper training in the public schools that there are so few readers of discrimination, and that the general taste, judged by the sort of books now read, is so mediocre. Most of the public schools teach reading, or have taught it, so poorly that the scholars who come from them cannot read easily; hence they must have spice, and blood, and vice to stimulate them, just as a man who has lost taste peppers his food. We need not agree with those who say that there is no merit whatever in the mere ability to read; nor, on the other hand, can we join those who say that the art of reading will pretty surely encourage a taste for the nobler kind of reading, and that the habit of reading trash will by-and-by lead the reader to better things. As a matter of experience, the reader of the namby-pamby does not acquire an appetite for anything more virile, and the reader of the sensational requires constantly more highly flavored viands. Nor is it reasonable to expect good taste to be recovered by an indulgence in bad taste.
What, then, does the common school usually do for literary taste? Generally there is no thought about it. It is not in the minds of the majority of teachers, even if they possess it themselves. The business is to teach the pupils to read; how they shall use the art of reading is little considered. If we examine the reading-books from the lowest grade to the highest, we shall find that their object is to teach words, not literature. The lower-grade books are commonly inane (I will not say childish, for that is a libel on the open minds of children) beyond description. There is an impression that advanced readers have improved much in quality within a few years, and doubtless some of them do contain specimens of better literature than their predecessors. But they are on the old plan, which must be radically modified or entirely cast aside, and doubtless will be when the new method is comprehended, and teachers are well enough furnished to cut loose from the machine. We may say that to learn how to read, and not what to read, is confessedly the object of these books; but even this object is not attained. There is an endeavor to teach how to call the words of a reading-book, but not to teach how to read; for reading involves, certainly for the older scholars, the combination of known words to form new ideas. This is lacking. The taste for good literature is not developed; the habit of continuous pursuit of a subject, with comprehension of its relations, is not acquired; and no conception is gained of the entirety of literature or its importance to human life. Consequently, there is no power of judgment or faculty of discrimination.
Now, this radical defect can be easily remedied if the school authorities only clearly apprehend one truth, and that is that the minds of children of tender age can be as readily interested and permanently interested in good literature as in the dreary feebleness of the juvenile reader. The mind of the ordinary child should not be judged by the mind that produces stuff of this sort: "Little Jimmy had a little white pig." "Did the little pig know Jimmy?" "Yes, the little pig knew Jimmy, and would come when he called." "How did little Jimmy know his pig from the other little pigs?" "By the twist in his tail." ("Children," asks the teacher, "what is the meaning of 'twist'?") "Jimmy liked to stride the little pig's back." "Would the little pig let him?" "Yes, when he was absorbed eating his dinner." ("Children, what is the meaning of 'absorbed'?") And so on.
This intellectual exercise is, perhaps, read to children who have not got far enough in "word-building" to read themselves about little Jimmy and his absorbed pig. It may be continued, together with word-learning, until the children are able to say (is it reading?) the entire volume of this precious stuff. To what end? The children are only languidly interested; their minds are not awakened; the imagination is not appealed to; they have learned nothing, except probably some new words, which are learned as signs. Often children have only one book even of this sort, at which they are kept until they learn it through by heart, and they have been heard to "read" it with the book bottom side up or shut! All these books cultivate inattention and intellectual vacancy. They are--the best of them--only reading exercises; and reading is not perceived to have any sort of value. The child is not taught to think, and not a step is taken in informing him of his relation to the world about him. His education is not begun.
Now it happens that children go on with this sort of reading and the ordinary text-books through the grades of the district school into the high school, and come to the ages of seventeen and eighteen without the least conception of literature, or of art, or of the continuity of the relations of history; are ignorant of the great names which illuminate the ages; have never heard of Socrates, or of Phidias, or of Titian; do not know whether Franklin was an Englishman or an American; would be puzzled to say whether it was Ben Franklin or Ben Jonson who invented lightning--think it was Ben Somebody; cannot tell whether they lived before or after Christ, and indeed never have thought that anything happened before the time of Christ; do not know who was on the throne of Spain when Columbus discovered America--and so on. These are not imagined instances. The children referred to are in good circumstances and have had fairly intelligent associations, but their education has been intrusted to the schools. They know nothing except their text-books, and they know these simply for the purpose of examination. Such pupils come to the age of eighteen with not only no taste for the best reading, for the reading of books, but without the ability to be interested even in fiction of the first class, because it is full of allusions that convey nothing to their minds. The stories they read, if they read at all--the novels, so called, that they have been brought up on--are the diluted and feeble fictions that flood the country, and that scarcely rise above the intellectual level of Jimmy and the absorbed pig.
It has been demonstrated by experiment that it is as easy to begin with good literature as with the sort of reading described. It makes little difference where the beginning is made. Any good book, any real book, is an open door into the wide field of literature; that is to say, of history--that is to say, of interest in the entire human race. Read to children of tender years, the same day, the story of Jimmy and a Greek myth, or an episode from the "Odyssey," or any genuine bit of human nature and life; and ask the children next day which they wish to hear again. Almost all of them will call for the repetition of the real thing, the verity of which they recognize, and which has appealed to their imaginations. But this is not all. If the subject is a Greek myth, they speedily come to comprehend its meaning, and by the aid of the teacher to trace its development elsewhere, to understand its historic significance, to have the mind filled with images of beauty, and wonder. Is it the Homeric story of Nausicaa? What a picture! How speedily Greek history opens to the mind! How readily the children acquire knowledge of the great historic names, and see how their deeds and their thoughts are related to our deeds and our thoughts! It is as easy to know about Socrates as about Franklin and General Grant. Having the mind open to other times and to the significance of great men in history, how much more clearly they comprehend Franklin and Grant and Lincoln! Nor is this all. The young mind is open to noble thoughts, to high conceptions; it follows by association easily along the historic and literary line; and not only do great names and fine pieces of literature become familiar, but the meaning of the continual life in the world begins to be apprehended. This is not at all a fancy sketch. The writer has seen the whole assembly of pupils in a school of six hundred, of all the eight grades, intelligently interested in a talk which contained classical and literary allusions that would have been incomprehensible to an ordinary school brought up on the ordinary readers and text-books.
But the reading need not be confined to the classics nor to the master-pieces of literature. Natural history--generally the most fascinating of subjects--can be taught; interest in flowers and trees and birds and the habits of animals can be awakened by reading the essays of literary men on these topics as they never can be by the dry text-books. The point I wish to make is that real literature for the young, literature which is almost absolutely neglected in the public schools, except in a scrappy way as a reading exercise, is the best open door to the development of the mind and to knowledge of all sorts. The unfolding of a Greek myth leads directly to art, to love of beauty, to knowledge of history, to an understanding of ourselves. But whatever the beginning is, whether a classic myth, a Homeric epic, a play of Sophocles, the story of the life and death of Socrates, a mediaeval legend, or any genuine piece of literature from the time of Virgil down to our own, it may not so much matter (except that it is better to begin with the ancients in order to gain a proper perspective) whatever the beginning is, it should be the best literature. The best is not too good for the youngest child. Simplicity, which commonly characterizes greatness, is of course essential. But never was a greater mistake made than in thinking that a youthful mind needs watering with the slops ordinarily fed to it. Even children in the kindergarten are eager for Whittier's "Barefoot Boy" and Longfellow's "Hiawatha." It requires, I repeat, little more pains to create a good taste in reading than a bad taste.
It would seem that in the complete organization of the public schools all education of the pupil is turned over to them as it was not formerly, and it is possible that in the stress of text-book education there is no time for reading at home. The competent teachers contend not merely with the difficulty of the lack of books and the deficiencies of those in use, but with the more serious difficulty of the erroneous ideas of the function of text-books. They will cease to be a commercial commodity of so much value as now when teachers teach. If it is true that there is no time for reading at home, we can account for the deplorable lack of taste in the great mass of the reading public educated at the common schools; and we can see exactly what the remedy should be--namely, the teaching of the literature at the beginning of school life, and following it up broadly and intelligently during the whole school period. It will not crowd out anything else, because it underlies everything. After many years of perversion and neglect, to take up the study of literature in a comprehensive text-book, as if it were to be learned--like arithmetic, is a ludicrous proceeding. This, is not teaching literature nor giving the scholar a love of good reading. It is merely stuffing the mind with names and dates, which are not seen to have any relation to present life, and which speedily fade out of the mind. The love of literature is not to be attained in this way, nor in any way except by reading the best literature.
The notion that literature can be taken up as a branch of education, and learned at the proper time and when studies permit, is one of the most farcical in our scheme of education. It is only matched in absurdity by the other current idea, that literature is something separate and apart from general knowledge. Here is the whole body of accumulated thought and experience of all the ages, which indeed forms our present life and explains it, existing partly in tradition and training, but more largely in books; and most teachers think, and most pupils are led to believe, that this most important former of the mind, maker of character, and guide to action can be acquired in a certain number of lessons out of a textbook! Because this is so, young men and young women come up to college almost absolutely ignorant of the history of their race and of the ideas that have made our civilization. Some of them have never read a book, except the text-books on the specialties in which they have prepared themselves for examination. We have a saying concerning people whose minds appear to be made up of dry, isolated facts, that they have no atmosphere. Well, literature is the atmosphere. In it we live, and move, and have our being, intellectually. The first lesson read to, or read by, the child should begin to put him in relation with the world and the thought of the world. This cannot be done except by the living teacher. No text-book, no one reading-book or series of reading-books, will do it. If the teacher is only the text-book orally delivered, the teacher is an uninspired machine. We must revise our notions of the function of the teacher for the beginners. The teacher is to present evidence of truth, beauty, art. Where will he or she find it? Why, in experimental science, if you please, in history, but, in short, in good literature, using the word in its broadest sense. The object in selecting reading for children is to make it impossible for them to see any evidence except the best. That is the teacher's business, and how few understand their business! How few are educated! In the best literature we find truth about the world, about human nature; and hence, if children read that, they read what their experience will verify. I am told that publishers are largely at fault for the quality of the reading used in schools--that schools would gladly receive the good literature if they could get it. But I do not know, in this case, how much the demand has to do with the supply. I am certain, however, that educated teachers would use only the best means for forming the minds and enlightening the understanding of their pupils. It must be kept in mind that reading, silent reading done by the scholar, is not learning signs and calling words; it is getting thought. If children are to get thought, they should be served with the best--that which will not only be true, but appeal so naturally to their minds that they will prefer it to all meaner stuff. If it is true that children cannot acquire this taste at home--and it is true for the vast majority of American children--then it must be given in the public schools. To give it is not to interrupt the acquisition of other knowledge; it is literally to open the door to all knowledge.
When this truth is recognized in the common schools, and literature is given its proper place, not only for the development of the mind, but as the most easily-opened door to history, art, science, general intelligence, we shall see the taste of the reading public in the United States undergo a mighty change: It will not care for the fiction it likes at present, and which does little more than enfeeble its powers; and then there can be no doubt that fiction will rise to supply the demand for something better. When the trash does not sell, the trash will not be produced, and those who are only capable of supplying the present demand will perhaps find a more useful occupation. It will be again evident that literature is not a trade, but an art requiring peculiar powers and patient training. When people know how to read, authors will need to know how to write.
In all other pursuits we carefully study the relation of supply to demand. Why not in literature? Formerly, when readers were comparatively few, and were of a class that had leisure and the opportunity of cultivating the taste, books were generally written for this class, and aimed at its real or supposed capacities. If the age was coarse in speech or specially affected in manner, the books followed the lead given by the demand; but, coarse or affected, they had the quality of art demanded by the best existing cultivation. Naturally, when the art of reading is acquired by the great mass of the people, whose taste has not been cultivated, the supply for this increased demand will, more or less, follow the level of its intelligence. After our civil war there was a patriotic desire to commemorate the heroic sacrifices of our soldiers in monuments, and the deeds of our great captains in statues. This noble desire was not usually accompanied by artistic discrimination, and the land is filled with monuments and statues which express the gratitude of the people. The coming age may wish to replace them by images and structures which will express gratitude and patriotism in a higher because more artistic form. In the matter of art the development is distinctly reflex. The exhibition of works of genius will slowly instruct and elevate the popular taste, and in time the cultivated popular taste will reject mediocrity and demand better things. Only a little while ago few people in the United States knew how to draw, and only a few could tell good drawing from bad. To realize the change that has taken place, we have only to recall the illustrations in books, magazines, and comic newspapers of less than a quarter of a century ago. Foreign travel, foreign study, and the importation of works of art (still blindly restricted by the American Congress) were the lessons that began to work a change. Now, in all our large towns, and even in hundreds of villages, there are well-established art schools; in the greater cities, unions and associations, under the guidance of skillful artists, where five or six hundred young men and women are diligently, day and night, learning the rudiments of art. The result is already apparent. Excellent drawing is seen in illustrations for books and magazines, in the satirical and comic publications, even in the advertisements and theatrical posters. At our present rate of progress, the drawings in all our amusing weeklies will soon be as good as those in the 'Fliegende Blatter.' The change is marvelous; and the popular taste has so improved that it would not be profitable to go back to the ill-drawn illustrations of twenty years ago. But as to fiction, even if the writers of it were all trained in it as an art, it is not so easy to lift the public taste to their artistic level. The best supply in this case will only very slowly affect the quality of the demand. When the poor novel sells vastly better than the good novel, the poor will be produced to supply the demand, the general taste will be still further lowered, and the power of discrimination fade out more and more. What is true of the novel is true of all other literature. Taste for it must be cultivated in childhood. The common schools must do for literature what the art schools are doing for art. Not every one can become an artist, not every one can become a writer--though this is contrary to general opinion; but knowledge to distinguish good drawing from bad can be acquired by most people, and there are probably few minds that cannot, by right methods applied early, be led to prefer good literature, and to have an enjoyment in it in proportion to its sincerity, naturalness, verity, and truth to life.
It is, perhaps, too much to say that all the American novel needs for its development is an audience, but it is safe to say that an audience would greatly assist it. Evidence is on all sides of a fresh, new, wonderful artistic development in America in drawing, painting, sculpture, in instrumental music and singing, and in literature. The promise of this is not only in the climate, the free republican opportunity, the mixed races blending the traditions and aptitudes of so many civilizations, but it is in a certain temperament which we already recognize as American. It is an artistic tendency. This was first most noticeable in American women, to whom the art of dress seemed to come by nature, and the art of being agreeable to be easily acquired.
Already writers have arisen who illustrate this artistic tendency in novels, and especially in short stories. They have not appeared to owe their origin to any special literary centre; they have come forward in the South, the West, the East. Their writings have to a great degree (considering our pupilage to the literature of Great Britain, which is prolonged by the lack of an international copyright) the stamp of originality, of naturalness, of sincerity, of an attempt to give the facts of life with a sense of their artistic value. Their affiliation is rather with the new literatures of France, of Russia, of Spain, than with the modern fiction of England. They have to compete in the market with the uncopyrighted literature of all other lands, good and bad, especially bad, which is sold for little more than the cost of the paper it is printed on, and badly printed at that. But besides this fact, and owing to a public taste not cultivated or not corrected in the public schools, their books do not sell in anything like the quantity that the inferior, mediocre, other home novels sell. Indeed, but for the intervention of the magazines, few of the best writers of novels and short stories could earn as much as the day laborer earns. In sixty millions of people, all of whom are, or have been, in reach of the common school, it must be confessed that their audience is small.
This relation between the fiction that is, and that which is to be, and the common school is not fanciful. The lack in the general reading public, in the novels read by the greater number of people, and in the common school is the same--the lack of inspiration and ideality. The common school does not cultivate the literary sense, the general public lacks literary discrimination, and the stories and tales either produced by or addressed to those who have little ideality simply respond to the demand of the times.
It is already evident, both in positive and negative results, both in the schools and the general public taste, that literature cannot be set aside in the scheme of education; nay, that it is of the first importance. The teacher must be able to inspire the pupil; not only to awaken eagerness to know, but to kindle the imagination. The value of the Hindoo or the Greek myth, of the Roman story, of the mediaeval legend, of the heroic epic, of the lyric poem, of the classic biography, of any genuine piece of literature, ancient or modern, is not in the knowledge of it as we may know the rules of grammar and arithmetic or the formulas of a science, but in the enlargement of the mind to a conception of the life and development of the race, to a study of the motives of human action, to a comprehension of history; so that the mind is not simply enriched, but becomes discriminating, and able to estimate the value of events and opinions. This office for the mind acquaintance with literature can alone perform. So that, in school, literature is not only, as I have said, the easiest open door to all else desirable, the best literature is not only the best means of awakening the young mind, the stimulus most congenial, but it is the best foundation for broad and generous culture. Indeed, without its co-ordinating influence the education of the common school is a thing of shreds and patches. Besides, the mind aroused to historic consciousness, kindled in itself by the best that has been said and done in all ages, is more apt in the pursuit, intelligently, of any specialty; so that the shortest road to the practical education so much insisted on in these days begins in the awakening of the faculties in the manner described. There is no doubt of the value of manual training as an aid in giving definiteness, directness, exactness to the mind, but mere technical training alone will be barren of those results, in general discriminating culture, which we hope to see in America.
The common school is a machine of incalculable value. It is not, however, automatic. If it is a mere machine, it will do little more to lift the nation than the mere ability to read will lift it. It can easily be made to inculcate a taste for good literature; it can be a powerful influence in teaching the American people what to read; and upon a broadened, elevated, discriminating public taste depends the fate of American art, of American fiction.
It is not an inappropriate corollary to be drawn from this that an elevated public taste will bring about a truer estimate of the value of a genuine literary product. An invention which increases or cheapens the conveniences or comforts of life may be a fortune to its originator. A book which amuses, or consoles, or inspires; which contributes to the highest intellectual enjoyment of hundreds of thousands of people; which furnishes substance for thought or for conversation; which dispels the cares and lightens the burdens of life; which is a friend when friends fail, a companion when other intercourse wearies or is impossible, for a year, for a decade, for a generation perhaps, in a world which has a proper sense of values, will bring a like competence to its author. (1890.)