UNIVERSITY OF CA RIVERSIDE, LIBRARY 
 
 3 12^017132109^3 OF FICTION 
 
 AND OTHER VENTURES 
 IN CRITICISri Msi^^-^^-^' 
 
 ft
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 AND OTHER 
 
 VENTURES IN CRITICISM 
 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 1 ^ ' 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 
 1896
 
 P//-: 
 
 
 By BRANDER MATTHEWS, 
 
 TALES OF FANTASY AND FACT. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, $i 25. 
 
 HIS FATHER'S SON. A Novel of New York. Illustrated. Post 8vo, 
 Cloth, $1 50. 
 
 THE ROYAL MARINE. An Idyl of Narragansett. Illustrated. 3imo, 
 Cloth, $1 00. 
 
 VIGNETTES OF MANHATTAN. Illustrated. Post 8vo. Cloth, $1 50. 
 THIS PICTURE AND THAT. A Comedy. Illustrated, szmo. Cloth, 
 50 cents. 
 
 STUDIES OF THE STAGE. With Portrait. i6mo. Cloth, $1 00. 
 
 THE DECISION OF THE COURT. A Comedy. Illustrated. 32mo, Cloth, 
 50 cents. 
 
 THE STORY OF A STORY, and Other Stories. Illustrated. i6mo. 
 
 Cloth, $1 25. 
 
 AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS, with Other Essays on Other Isms. 
 With Portrait. ]6mo. Cloth, $1 00. 
 
 IN THE VESTIBULE LIMITED. A Story. Illustrated. 32mo, Cloth, 
 50 cents. 
 
 Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 
 
 Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothers. 
 All rights reserved.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. American Literature 3 
 
 II. Two Studies of the South 25 
 
 III. The Penalty of Humor 43 
 
 IV. On Pleasing the Taste of the Public . . 59 
 V. On Certain Parallelisms between the An- 
 cient Drama and the Modern .... 83 
 VI. Two Scotsmen of Letters : — 
 
 I. MR. ANDREW LANG IO3 
 
 II. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 128 
 
 VII. Aspects of Fiction : — 
 
 I. THE GIFT of STORY-TELLING I41 
 
 II. CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING & CO. . . . l62 
 IIL THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANCOIS COPPEE 1 82 
 IV. THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY I96 
 V. MR. CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER AS A WRIT- 
 ER OF FICTION 206 
 
 VI. TEXT-BOOKS OF FICTION 226
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE
 
 [This address was delivered before the National Educational 
 Association, at Buffalo, July 8, 1896.]
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 The history of mankind is little more than 
 the list of the civilizations that have arisen one 
 on the ruin of the other, the Roman supplant- 
 ing the Greek, as the Assyrian had been ousted 
 by the Babylonian. The life of each of these 
 successive civilizations was proportioned to 
 the vitality of the ideas by which it was ani- 
 mated ; and we cannot estimate it or even under- 
 stand it except in so far as we are able to grasp 
 these underlying principles. What the ideas 
 were which dominated these vanished civiliza- 
 tions it is for us to discover for ourselves as 
 best we may by a study of all the records they 
 left behind them, and especially by a reverent 
 examination of their laws, their arts, and their 
 writings in so far as these have been preserved 
 to us. Of all these relics of peoples now dead 
 and gone, none is so instructive as literature, 
 and none is so interesting; by its aid we are 
 enabled to reconstruct the past, as we are also 
 helped to understand the present.
 
 4 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Of the literatures which thus explain to us 
 our fellow-man as he was and as he is, three 
 seem to me pre-eminent, standing out and 
 above the others not only by reason of the 
 greater number of men of genius who have 
 illustrated them, but also by reason of their 
 own more persistent strength and their own 
 broader variety. These three literatures are 
 the Greek, the French, and the English. 
 
 There are great names in the other modern 
 languages, no doubt — the names of Dante and 
 of Cervantes and of Goethe, than which, in- 
 deed, there are none greater. In French litera- 
 ture, however, and in English there are not 
 wanting names as mighty as these. Fortunate- 
 ly, the possession of genius is not the privilege 
 of any one language, of any one country, or 
 of any one century. Where French literature 
 and English can claim superiority over Italian, 
 Spanish, and German is rather in sustaining 
 a higher average of excellence for a longer pe- 
 riod of time. The literature of the Italian lan- 
 guage, of the Spanish, and of the German has 
 no such beadroll of writers of the first rank as 
 illustrates the literature of the French and of 
 the English. 
 
 There is perhaps no more manly instrument 
 of precision than the Latin language, none
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 5 
 
 which better repays the struggle for its mastery ; 
 but Latin literature, if not second-rate, when 
 tried by the loftiest standards, is at least sec- 
 ondary, being transplanted from Greece and 
 lacking resolute roots in its own soil. Nor is 
 any dispute possible as to the high value of 
 Hebrew literature ; as Coleridge declared with 
 characteristic insight, "sublimity is Hebrew by 
 birth "; but Hebrew literature has not the wide 
 range of the Greek, nor its impeccable beauty. 
 
 " Art is only form," said Georges Sand ; and 
 Goethe declared that the " highest operation 
 of art is form-giving." If we accept these say- 
 ings there is no need to dwell on the supreme 
 distinction of Greek literature, for it is only in 
 Greek that we find the undying perfection of 
 form. It is there only that we have clear and 
 deep thought always beautifully embodied. 
 Indeed, truth and beauty govern Greek litera- 
 ture so absolutely that, old as it is, it seems to 
 us ever fresh and eternally young. After two 
 thousand years and more it strikes us to-day 
 as startlingly modern. Thoreau — whose own 
 phrase was often Attic in its delicate precision 
 — Thoreau asked, " What are the classics but 
 the noblest recorded thoughts of man ? They 
 are the only oracles that are not decayed." 
 
 Nevertheless, the world has kept restlessly
 
 6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 moving since the fall of Athens, and mankind 
 has developed needs that the Greeks knew not. 
 As Moliere puts it pithily, " The ancients are 
 the ancients, and we are the men of to-day." 
 There are questions in America now, and not 
 a few of them, undreamed of in Sparta ; and 
 for the answers to these it is vain to go to 
 Greek literature, modern as it may be in so 
 many ways. 
 
 French literature has not a little of the mod- 
 eration and of the charm of Greek literature. 
 It is not violent ; it is not boisterous, even ; it 
 is never freakish. It has balance and order 
 and a broad sanity. It has an unfailing sense 
 of style. It has lightness of touch, and it has 
 also and always intellectual seriousness. The 
 literature is like the language ; and Voltaire 
 declared that what was not clear was not 
 French. And the language itself is the fit in- 
 strument of the people who use it and who 
 have refined it for their needs — a people logi- 
 cal beyond all others, gifted in mathematics, 
 devoid of hypocrisy, law-abiding, governed by 
 the social instinct, inheritors of the Latin tra- 
 dition and yet infused with the Celtic spirit. 
 
 To those of us who are controlled by the 
 Anglo-Saxon ideals, whether or not we come 
 of English stock, to those of us who adhere to
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE •j 
 
 Anglo-Saxon conventions, no other literature 
 can serve as a better corrective of our inherited 
 tendencies than the French. The chief char- 
 acteristic of English literature is energy, power 
 often ill-restrained, vigor often superabundant. 
 From the earliest rude war-songs of the stal- 
 wart Saxon fighters who were beginning to 
 make the English language, to the latest short 
 story setting forth the strife of an American 
 mining camp, there is never any lack of force 
 in English literature. There is always the 
 Teutonic boldness and rudeness — the Teutonic 
 readiness to push forward and to shoulder the 
 rest of the world out of the way — the Teutonic 
 independence that leads every man to fight for 
 his own hand, like the smith in Scott's story. 
 What we do not discover in English literature, 
 with all its overmastering vitality, is economy 
 of effort, the French self-control, the Greek 
 sense of form. 
 
 French literature and English literature have 
 existed side by side for many centuries, each 
 of them influencing the other now and again, 
 and yet each of them preserving its own indi- 
 viduality always, and ever revealing the domi- 
 nant characteristics of the people speaking its 
 language. We need not attempt to weigh 
 them one against the other, and to measure
 
 8 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 them with a foot-rule, and to declare which is 
 the greater. Equal they may be in the past 
 and in the present ; equal in the future they 
 are not likely to be. The qualities which make 
 French literature what it is tend also to keep 
 the French race from expansion ; just as the 
 qualities which make English literature what 
 it is have sent the English-speaking stock forth 
 to fill up the waste places of the earth, and to 
 wrest new lands from hostile savages or from 
 inhospitable nature. 
 
 French was the language of the courts of 
 Europe when English was little better than a 
 dialect of rough islanders. When Chaucer 
 chose his native English as the vehicle of his 
 verse, he showed both courage and prescience 
 — a courage and a prescience lacking in Bacon, 
 who lived two hundred years later, and who 
 did not feel himself insured against Time until 
 his great work was safely entombed in Latin. 
 Even at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury there were more men and women in the 
 world speaking French than there were speak- 
 ing English. But now at the end of the nine- 
 teenth century, with the steady spread of our 
 stock into the four quarters of the world, there 
 are more than twice as many people using 
 English as there are usinsr French,
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 9 
 
 And the end is not yet, for while four-fifths 
 of those who have French for their mother- 
 tongue abide in France or along its borders, 
 not a third of those who have English for 
 their mother-tongue dwell in England. Not 
 only in England, Ireland, and Scotland is 
 English spoken, and in all the many British 
 colonies which encompass the globe about — it 
 is also the native speech of the people of the 
 United States. English is the language of the 
 stock which bids fair to prove itself the most 
 masterful, hardy, and prolific, and which seems 
 to possess a marvellous faculty for assimilating 
 members of other allied stems and of getting 
 these newly received elements to accept its 
 own hereditary ideals. 
 
 English literature is likely, therefore, to be- 
 come in the future relatively more important 
 and absolutely more influential. As there has 
 been no relaxing of energy among the peoples 
 that now speak the English language, probably 
 there will be no alteration of the chief charac- 
 teristic of English literature, although in time 
 the changes of environment must make more 
 or less modification inevitable. It will be cu- 
 rious to see in a century how the ideals and 
 the practices of the race will alter, after the 
 race is no longer pent up in an island, after it
 
 lO ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 has scattered itself over the world and assim- 
 ilated other elements and adjusted itself to 
 other social organizations. Here in America 
 we can see already some of these results, for 
 already is the American differentiated from 
 the Englishman. We may not be able to 
 declare clearly wherein the difference consists ; 
 but we all recognize it plainly enough. 
 
 Colonel Higginson has suggested that the 
 American has an added drop more of nervous 
 fluid than the Englishman. It is perhaps ap- 
 parent already that the American is swifter 
 than the Englishman, slighter in build, spring- 
 ier in gait. Social changes are as evident as 
 physical. Lowell remarked that if it was a 
 good thing for an English duke that he had no 
 social superior, it surely was not a bad thing 
 for a Yankee farmer. Socially the American 
 is less girt in by caste than the Englishman. 
 These differences, obvious in life, are visible also 
 in literature. We feel now, even if we do not 
 care to define, the unlikeness of the writing of 
 the British authors to the writing of the Amer- 
 ican authors. Neither man nor nature is the 
 same in Great Britain as it is in the United 
 States ; and of necessity, therefore, there cannot 
 be any identity between the points of view of 
 the men of letters of the two countries.
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE II 
 
 In time, as there come to be more writers in 
 Canada, we shall have a perspective from yet 
 another point of view; and in due season 
 others will be presented to us from Australia 
 and from India. No doubt these future authors 
 will cherish the tradition of English literature 
 as loyally as we Americans cherish it here in 
 the United States — as loyally as the British 
 cherish it in the little group of islands which 
 was once the home of the ancestors of us all. 
 Race characteristics are inexorable, and it is 
 very unlikely that there will ever be any ir- 
 reconcilable divergence between these sepa- 
 rate divisions of the English-speaking peoples. 
 English literature will continue to flourish as 
 sturdily as ever after the parent stem has 
 parted into five branches. All of these branches 
 will take the same pride in their descent from 
 a common stock and in their possession of a 
 common literature and of a common language. 
 A common language, I say, for the English 
 language belongs to all those who use it, 
 whether they live in London or in Chicago or 
 in Melbourne. 
 
 It is not a little strange that it should now 
 ever be needful to say that the British have no 
 more ownership of the English language than 
 we Americans have. The English language is
 
 12 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 the mother-tongue of the inhabitants of the 
 British Isles, but so is it also the mother-tongue 
 of the inhabitants of the United States. It is 
 not a loan to us, Avhich may be recalled ; it is 
 not a gift, which we have accepted ; it is a 
 heritage, which we derived from our fore- 
 fathers. We hold it by right of birth, and our 
 title to it is just as good as the title of our kin 
 across the sea. No younger brother's portion 
 is it that we claim in the English language, but 
 a whole and undivided half. It is an American 
 possession as it is a British possession, no more 
 and no less ; and we hold it on the same terms 
 that our cousins do. We have the rights of 
 ownership, and the responsibilities also, exactly 
 as they have and to exactly the same extent. 
 The English language belongs to us also ; it is 
 ours to use as we please, just as the common 
 law is ours, to modify according to our own 
 needs; it is ours for us to keep pure and 
 healthy ; and it is ours for us to hand down to 
 our children unimpaired in strength and in 
 subtlety. 
 
 And as the language is a possession common 
 to all the English-speaking peoples, so also is 
 the literature. A share in the fame of Chaucer 
 and of Shakespeare, of Milton and of Dryden, 
 is part of the inheritance of every one of us
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE I3 
 
 who has English for his mother-tongue, what- 
 ever his father-land. If there be anywhere a 
 great poet or novelist or historian, it matters 
 not where his birth or his residence or what 
 his nationality, if he makes use of the English 
 language he is contributing to English litera- 
 ture. To distinguish the younger divisions of 
 English literature from the elder, we shall have 
 to call that elder division British ; meaning 
 thereby that portion of our common literature 
 which is now produced by those who were left 
 behind in the old home when the rest of the 
 family went forth one by one to make their 
 way in the world. Thus English literature, 
 which was one and undivided till the end of 
 the eighteenth century, has now in the nine- 
 teenth century two chief divisions — British and 
 American ; and it bids fair in the twentieth cen- 
 tury to have three more — Canadian, Austra- 
 lian, and Indian. 
 
 Some such distinction between the several 
 existing divisions of the English literature of 
 our own time is needful, and it will be found 
 useful. Absurd and very misleading is the 
 antithesis sometimes made between American 
 literature and English, since the American is 
 but one of the divisions of the English litera- 
 ture of our time. Not long ago a pupil of one
 
 14 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 of the best private schools in New York main- 
 tained that American literature is just as im- 
 portant as English literature, producing in 
 proof two companion manuals, of the same 
 size externally, although of course internally 
 on a wholly different scale. Such a lack of 
 proportion in the treatment of different parts 
 of the literature of the English language is 
 foolish and harmful. But a comparison of 
 American literature with the merely British 
 literature of to-day might be proper enough. 
 What we need to grasp clearly is the fact that 
 the stream of English literature had only one 
 channel until the end of the last century, and 
 that in this century it has two channels. The 
 new mouth that this massive current has made 
 for itself is American ; — and so we are com- 
 pelled to call the old mouth British. 
 
 Through which of these channels the fuller 
 stream shall flow in the next century no man 
 can foretell to-day. It is a fact that the popu- 
 lation of these United States is now nearly 
 twice as large as the population of the British 
 Isles, and not inferior in ability or in energy. 
 But it is a fact also that in America a smaller 
 proportion of the ability and the energy of the 
 people seems to be devoted to the cause of 
 letters. In a new country life itself offers the
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1 5 
 
 widest opportunities ; and literature here has 
 keener rivals and more of them than it can 
 have in a land which has been cleared and 
 tilled and tended since a time whereof the 
 memory of man runneth not to the contrary. 
 The earliest Americans had other duties than 
 the writing of books : they had to lay deep the 
 broad foundations of this mighty nation. It 
 was more than two hundred years after the 
 establishment of the first trading -post on the 
 island of Manhattan when Washington Irving 
 published the ' Sketch Book,' the first Avork 
 of American authership to win a wide popu- 
 larity beyond the borders of our own country 
 — before Fenimore Cooper a little later pub- 
 lished the ' Spy,' the first work of American 
 authorship to win a wide popularity beyond 
 the borders of our own language. We may 
 say that American literature is now but little 
 older than the threescore years and ten allot- 
 ted as the span of a man's natural life. 
 
 We had had authors, it is true, in the 
 eighteenth century, and at least two of these, 
 Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, 
 hold high rank ; but it was not until towards 
 the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth 
 century that we began really to have a litera- 
 ture. It is scarcely an overstatement to say
 
 1 6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 that there are men alive to-day who are as old 
 as American literature is. But in the past 
 three-quarters of a century American litera- 
 ture has taken root firmly and blossomed 
 forth abundantly and spread itself abroad 
 sturdily. Emerson followed Edwards and 
 Franklin. Hawthorne and Poe came after 
 Irving and Cooper. Bryant proved that Nat- 
 ure here in America was fit for the purposes 
 of Art ; and he was succeeded by Longfellow 
 and Lowell, by Whittier and Holmes. 
 
 During these same threescore years and ten 
 there were great writers in the other branch 
 of the literature of our language, in British 
 literature, perhaps greater writers than there 
 were here in America, and of a certainty there 
 were more of them. There is no need now 
 to call the roll of the mighty men of letters 
 alive in England at the middle of this century. 
 But much as we admire these British authors, 
 much as we respect them, I do not think that 
 they are as close to us as the authors of our 
 own country ; we do not cherish them with 
 the same affection. Just as the modern lit- 
 eratures are nearer to us than the ancient, 
 because we ourselves are modern, just as 
 English literature is nearer to us than French, 
 because we ourselves speak English, so the
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1 7 
 
 American division of that literature is closer 
 to us than the British. It helps us to under- 
 stand one another, and it explains us to our- 
 selves. If we accept the statement that, after 
 all, literature is only a criticism of life, it is 
 of value in proportion as its criticism of life 
 is truthful. Surely it needs no argument to 
 show that the life it is most needful for us 
 Americans to have criticised truthfully is our 
 own life. It is only in our own literature that 
 we can hope to learn the truth about our- 
 selves ; and this indeed is what we must al- 
 ways insist upon in our literature — the truth, 
 the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 
 Lowell reminded us that Goethe went to the 
 root of the matter when he said that " people 
 are always talking of the study of the ancients; 
 yet what does this mean but apply yourself 
 to the actual world and seek to express it, 
 since this is what the ancients did when they 
 were alive ?" 
 
 As we consider the brief history of the 
 American branch of English literature, we can 
 see that the growth of a healthy feeling in re- 
 gard to it has been hindered by two unfort- 
 unate failings — provincialism and colonialism. 
 By provincialism I mean the spirit of Little 
 Pedlington, the spirit that makes swans of all
 
 l8 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 our gccsc. By colonialism I mean the atti- 
 tude of looking humbly towards the old coun- 
 try for guidance and for counsel even about 
 our own affairs. 
 
 Provincialism is local pride unduly inflated. 
 It is the temper that is ready to hail as a Swan 
 of Avon any local gosling who has taught 
 himself to make an unnatural use of his own 
 quills. It is always tempting us to stand on 
 tiptoe to proclaim our own superiority. It 
 prevents our seeing ourselves in proper pro- 
 portion to the rest of the world. It leads to 
 the preparation of school-manuals in which 
 the three-score years and ten of American lit- 
 erature are made equal in importance to the 
 thousand years of literature produced in Great 
 Britain. It tends to render a modest writer, 
 like Longfellow, ridiculous by comparing him 
 implicitly with the half-dozen world-poets. In 
 the final resort, no doubt, every people must 
 be the judge of its own authors; but before 
 that final judgment is rendered every people 
 consults the precedents and measures its own 
 local favorites by the cosmopolitan and eternal 
 standards. 
 
 Colonialism is shown in the timid deference 
 towards foreign opinion about our own deeds 
 and in the unquestioning acceptance of the
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 19 
 
 foreign estimate upon our own writers. It 
 might be defined almost as a willingness to be 
 second-hand, a feeling which finds satisfaction 
 in calling Irving the American Goldsmith ; 
 Cooper, the American Scott ; Bryant, the 
 American Wordsworth ; and Whittier, the 
 American Burns. Fifty years ago, when this 
 silly trick was far more prevalent than it is now, 
 Lowell satirized it in the ' Fable for Critics ': 
 
 Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shan- 
 ties 
 That has not brought forth its Miltons and Dantes ; 
 I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shel- 
 
 leys. 
 Two Raphaels, six Titians (I think), one Apelles, 
 Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens; 
 One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens, 
 A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons, 
 In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons 
 He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain 
 Will be some very great person over again. 
 
 And elsewhere in the same poem Lowell 
 protests against the literature that 
 
 suits each whisper and motion 
 To what will be thought of it over the ocean. 
 
 The corrective of colonialism is a manly 
 self-respect, a wholesome self-reliance, a wish
 
 20 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 to stand firmly on our own feet, a resolve to 
 survey life with our own eyes and not through 
 any imported spectacles. The new world has 
 already brought forth men of action — Washing- 
 ton, for example, and Lincoln — worthy of com- 
 parison with the best that the old world has 
 enrolled on her records. Has the new world 
 produced any man of letters of corresponding 
 rank? Matthew Arnold thought that there 
 were only five w'orld-classics — Homer, Dante, 
 Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe. This seems 
 a list unduly scanted ; but it would need to be 
 five times larger before it included a single 
 American name. What of it? Even if the 
 American poets are no one of them to be in- 
 scribed among the twoscore chief singers of 
 the world, they are not the less interesting to 
 us Americans, not the less inspiring. When 
 an English author suggested to Sainte-Beuve 
 that he did not think Lamartine an important 
 poet, the great French critic suavely answered, 
 " He is important to us !" Without Lamar- 
 tine there would be a blank in French litera- 
 ture. So we Americans may see clearly the de- 
 fects of Bryant and of Whittier, and yet we may 
 say that they are important to us, even though 
 they, like Lamartine, are not among the fore- 
 most poets of their language or of their century.
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE 21 
 
 Colonialism and provincialism, although they 
 seem mutually destructive, still manage some- 
 how to exist side by side in our criticism to-day. 
 The best cure for them is a study of the two 
 other great literatures, Greek and French. Too 
 much attention to contemporary British litera- 
 ture is dangerous for us, since its chief character- 
 istics are ours by inheritance. Matthew Arnold 
 held that it was a work of supererogation for 
 Carlyle to preach earnestness to the English, 
 who already abounded in that sense. For us 
 to follow the lead of the British in literature or 
 in any other art is but saying ditto to ourselves. 
 It is like the marriage of cousins — and for the 
 same reasons to be deplored. But the study of 
 Greek literature supplies us instantly with the 
 eternal standards, the use of which cannot but 
 be fatal to provincialism. And the study of 
 French literature, which is as modern as our 
 own and yet as different as may be in its ideals 
 and its methods, is likely to serve as a certain 
 antidote to colonialism. 
 
 The study of Greek literature, the greatest 
 of the literatures of the past, and the study of 
 French literature, the other great literature of 
 the present, will lead us towards that American 
 cosmopolitanism which is the antithesis of both 
 provincialism and colonialism. An American
 
 22 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 cosmopolitanism, I say, for I agree with Cole- 
 ridge in thinking that " the cosmopoHtanism 
 which docs not spring out of, and blossom 
 upon, the deep-rooted stem of nationality or 
 patriotism, is a spurious and rotten growth," 
 " Stendhal," a Frenchman who did hot care for 
 France and who found himself, at last, a man 
 without a country, had for a motto, " I come 
 from Cosmopolis." A fit motto for an Ameri- 
 can author might be " I go to Cosmopolis" — 
 I go to see the best the world has to offer, the 
 best being none too good for American use; 
 I go as a visitor, and I return always a loyal 
 citizen of my own country. 
 
 As Plutarch tells us, "it is well to go for a 
 light to another man's fire, but not to tarry by 
 it, instead of kindling a torch of one's own." 
 A torch of one's own ! — that is a possession 
 worth having, whether it be a flaming beacon 
 on the hill-top or a tiny taper in the window. 
 We cannot tell how far a little candle throws 
 its beams, nor who is laying his course by its 
 flickering light. The most that we can do — 
 and it is also the least that we should do — is 
 to tend the flame carefully and to keep it 
 steady. 
 
 (1896.)
 
 TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH
 
 TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 
 
 " Only the literature of a country teaches us 
 to understand its institutions," said one of the 
 acutest of modern French critics, the late J. J. 
 Weiss, in a recent volume of essays ; and he 
 added, with perhaps not quite the same pro- 
 portion of truth, that "to the historian, who 
 grows pale over them, collections of ordinan- 
 ces, codes, and constitutions yield only lifeless 
 laws." That the laws afford us only the skel- 
 eton of a dead and gone society we may admit ; 
 and we are quick to see that it is literature 
 which cases these bare bones in flesh and 
 blood. Unless its literature is rooted in truth, 
 a civilization may pass away and be misjudged 
 — honestly misjudged, in good faith misunder- 
 stood — even at the moment of its passing. 
 Such, so Mr. Thomas Nelson Page declares, 
 has been the fate of the Old South ; it has had 
 no historian, and so it is in danger of perpet- 
 ual misinterpretation; its civihzation left no 
 literature ; and of its laws the best known is
 
 26 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 the slave code. The one book which deals 
 with the life of the Old South, and which has 
 gone to the farthest corners of the earth, is 
 the one book by which the lovers of the Old 
 South do not wish to see it judged — ' Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin.' The one book which was 
 actually written in the South between 1825 
 and 1850, and which seems to me to give the 
 most accurate account of one aspect of South- 
 ern civilization, is Mrs. Kemble's 'Journal of 
 a Residence on a Georgia Plantation ' ; and 
 that again is not a book by which the lov- 
 ers of the Old South would wish to see it 
 judged. 
 
 Why was it that the Old South contributed 
 so little to the literature of America ? Why 
 was it that before the war Mrs. E. D. E. N. 
 Southworth flourished and Mrs. Caroline Lee 
 Hentz? Why is it that immediately after the 
 war we had only the encyclopaedic romances 
 of Mrs. Augusta J. Evans and the saccharine 
 stories of ' Christian Reid,' as remote from 
 reality as though they had been translated 
 from the French of Georges Ohnet or from 
 the German of "E. Marlitt " ? Why was it that 
 Brer Rabbit, having had his misadventure with 
 the Tar Baby in countless plantations through- 
 out the South before the war, found no Uncle
 
 TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 27 
 
 Remus to come forward and tell them for our 
 delight until long after the war ? 
 
 These are questions which every student of 
 American literary history must put to himself 
 sooner or later; and there are many other 
 questions like these. For an answer one cannot 
 do better than turn to two books which were 
 published early in the last decade of the nine- 
 teenth century — two studies of the South, by 
 two representative Southern writers. One of 
 these books is the biography of * William Gil- 
 more Simms/ prepared for the American Men 
 of Letters Series by Professor William P. Trent ; 
 and the other is Mr. Thomas Nelson Page's 
 volume of essays on the ' Old South.' Both 
 books are welcome ; both are candid and hon- 
 est ; both are unusually well written, Professor 
 Trent's having the solid framework of the 
 historian, and Mr. Page's having the warm 
 coloring of the poet. Both books, moreover, 
 are the product of that young, hearty, loyal, 
 and energetic New South, which is the best 
 legacy the Old South left to the Union. Mr. 
 Page, as becomes a poet, has a fondness for 
 the past, while Professor Trent, as is fit in one 
 who is instructing youth, has his face set res- 
 olutely towards the future. 
 
 There are yet a few Southern writers who
 
 28 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 turn their backs on the present and prefer to 
 abide amid moribund memories. Professor 
 Trent is not one of these. He is willing to let 
 the dead past bury its dead. In this volume we 
 find a new spirit — a spirit not frequent even 
 now in works of Southern authorship. His 
 book is solid in research, worthy in workman- 
 ship, dignified in manner, and brave in tone ; 
 it is not only a good book, it is a good deed. 
 It is emphatically a proof of the existence of 
 that New South which has been so loudly pro- 
 claimed and so often. In telling the career of 
 William Gilmore Simms, Professor Trent has 
 taken occasion to sketch for us also the envi- 
 ronment which made Simms what he was — 
 which, indeed, kept him from being more than 
 he was. Believing " that Simms was a typical 
 Southerner," Professor Trent thinks that it 
 would be " impossible to convey a full idea of 
 his character without a constant reference to 
 the history of the Southern people during the 
 first seven decades of this century." As this 
 history has been little studied and still less un- 
 derstood, Professor Trent has been led to pre- 
 sent it with a fulness of treatment which at 
 first may seem disproportionate, but which at 
 least has resulted in giving to his book a 
 breadth and an interest not possible, if it had
 
 TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 29 
 
 been merely the biography of William Gilmore 
 Simms. The life of the author of ' Guy Riv- 
 ers ' and of the ' Yemassee ' is here set down 
 thoroughly and once for all ; but accompany- 
 ing it is a study of the literary conditions of 
 the South, such as no one has ever before 
 attempted. 
 
 Only one of Mr. Page's papers is devoted 
 specifically to the literature of the South, but 
 scattered throughout his book are passages 
 which cast a sudden and a penetrating light 
 on the social conditions of the South before 
 the war, and thus explain the circumstances 
 and the conditions under which that literature 
 was produced. Here, for example, is one pas- 
 sage : " The social life formed of these ele- 
 ments in combination was one of singular 
 sweetness and freedom from vice. . . . They 
 were a careless and pleasure -loving people; 
 but, as in most rural communities, their fes- 
 tivities were free from dissipation. There was 
 sometimes too great an indulgence on the part 
 of young men in the State drink, the julep ; 
 but whether it was that it killed early, or that 
 it was usually abandoned as the responsibili- 
 ties of life increased, an elderly man of dissi- 
 pated habits was almost unknown. . . . The 
 life was gay. In addition to the perpetual
 
 30 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 round of ordinary entertainment, there was 
 always on hand or in prospect some more for- 
 mal festivity — a club meeting, a fox-hunt, a 
 party, a tournament, a wedding. Little ex- 
 cuse was needed to bring them together where 
 every one was social, and where the great 
 honor was to be the host. Scientific horse- 
 racing was confined to the regular race-tracks, 
 where the races were not little dashes, but 
 four-mile heats, which tested speed and bot- 
 tom alike. But good blood was common, and 
 a ride even with a girl in an afternoon gen- 
 erally meant a dash along the level through 
 the woods, where, truth to tell, she was very 
 apt to win. Occasionally there was even a 
 dash from the church. . . . The chief sport, 
 however, was fox-hunting. It was, in season, 
 almost universal. Who that lived in Old Vir- 
 ginia does not remember the fox-hunts — the 
 eager chase after ' grays ' or ' old reds ?' " 
 
 This is a beautiful picture of a lovely life ; 
 but such an existence was too luxurious, too 
 easy-going, too enervating for the cultivation 
 of letters. Literature is not an affair of slip- 
 pers and arm-chair, of mint-julep and fox- 
 hunt ; it is a task, a toil, unceasing and un- 
 resting ; it is a labor of love, no doubt, but 
 none the less a labor. Literature is like the
 
 TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 3 1 
 
 other arts, a jealous mistress, and she refuses 
 her favors to all who do not woo her with 
 single-hearted devotion. This devotion litera- 
 ture received from no Southerner in the old 
 days except from Poe. Literature did not re- 
 ceive this devotion from Simms, as Professor 
 Trent makes clear to us; and Simms was a 
 man of ability who, under more favorable con- 
 ditions and under a stimulus to sterner self- 
 discipline, might have left a book likely to 
 last. 
 
 Of ability there was never any lack in the 
 South. As Mr. Page says : " The causes of 
 the absence of a Southern literature are to be 
 looked for elsewhere than in intellectual indi- 
 gence. The intellectual conditions were such 
 as might well have created a noble literature, 
 but the physical conditions were adverse to its 
 production and were too potent to be over- 
 come." 
 
 And he declares that the following were the 
 principal causes which deprived the South of 
 literature : 
 
 1. The people of the South were an agri- 
 cultural people, widely diffused, and lacking 
 the stimulus of immediate mental contact. 
 
 2. The absence of cities, which in the his- 
 tory of literary life have proved literary foci
 
 32 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 essential for its production, and the want of 
 publishing houses at the South. 
 
 3. The exactions of the institution of slav- 
 ery, and the absorption of the intellectual 
 forces of the people of the South in the solu- 
 tion of the vital problems it engendered. 
 
 4. The general ambition of the Southern 
 people for political distinction, and the appli- 
 cation of their literary powers to polemical 
 controversy. 
 
 5. The absence of a reading public at the 
 South for American authors, due in part to 
 the conservatism of the Southern people. 
 
 That all five of these causes were potent 
 there is no doubt. But I wonder how it is 
 that Mr. Page did not note that four of these 
 five causes are as potent now as they were be- 
 fore the war. Slavery has disappeared, that 
 is the only change ; the other conditions are 
 much the same. And yet that the New South 
 has a literature to-day she does not need to 
 declare, for whoever reads our language knows 
 the books of the new writers who have sprung 
 up since slavery was abolished. Mark Twain 
 has written about life on the Mississippi and 
 Mr. Cable about the Creoles of New Orleans; 
 Mr. Harris has given us Georgia sketches in 
 black and white, and Mr. Page himself has
 
 TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 33 
 
 painted the young men and maidens of Old 
 Virginia; Charles Egbert Craddock has taken 
 us up into the mountains of Tennessee; and 
 half a score of other authors have revealed to 
 us nooks of the earth and types of humanity 
 hitherto unsuspected. Yet the people of the 
 South are still agricultural, still ambitious of po- 
 litical distinction, still without cities and with- 
 out publishing houses and without a wide read- 
 ing public — for these new Southern authors 
 have been brought out at the North, in North- 
 ern magazines, and by Northern publishers. 
 
 This leads us to believe that of the five 
 causes given by Mr. Page one was more im- 
 portant than all the rest. This one was slavery. 
 There was, I think, another cause not given by 
 Mr. Page, but to this I shall return later. That 
 slavery was at bottom really responsible for 
 the Southern abstention from literature is evi- 
 dent to any impartial reader of Mr. Page's 
 volume and of Professor Trent's, As Mr. Page 
 himself puts it, " the standard of literary work 
 [in the South before the war] was not a purely 
 literary standard, but one based on public 
 opinion, which in its turn was founded on the 
 general consensus that the existing institution 
 was not to be impugned, directly or indirectly, 
 on any ground or by any means whatsoever.
 
 34 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 This was an atmosphere in which literature 
 could not flourish. In consequence, where lit- 
 erature was indulged in, it was in a half -apol- 
 ogetic way, as if it were not altogether com- 
 patible with the social dignity of the author. 
 Thought which in its expression has any other 
 standard than fidelity to truth, whatever sec- 
 ondary value it may have, cannot possess 
 much value as literature." And Professor 
 Trent again and again makes the same dec- 
 laration, telling us that " a Southerner had to 
 think in certain grooves." 
 
 Professor Trent also makes clear to us the 
 little-understood fact that the Southerners " re- 
 tained a large element of the feudal notion." 
 So we see that " slavery helped feudalism, and 
 feudalism helped slavery." " If feudal England 
 was merry England," says Professor Trent in a 
 passage I cannot forbear to quote, "the feudal 
 South was the merry and sunny South ; nay, 
 more, it was * a nation of men of honor and of 
 cavaliers.' The South was never barbarous, for 
 it possessed a picturesque civilization marked 
 by charm of mind and manners both in men 
 and women. But the South had forgotten 
 that, in the words of Burke, ' the age of chiv- 
 alry is gone.' It ignored the fact that while 
 chivalry was a good thing in its day, modern
 
 TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 35 
 
 civilization is a much higher thing. Even 
 now many otherwise well informed gentlemen 
 do not understand the full meaning of the 
 expression ' Southern chivalry,' which they 
 use so often. They know that it stands for 
 many bright and high things, but they seem 
 to forget its darker meaning. They forget 
 that it means that the people of the South 
 were leading a primitive life — a life behind 
 the age. They forget that it means that 
 Southerners were conservative, slow to change, 
 contented with the social distinctions already 
 existing. They forget all this, but the expres- 
 sion has meanings which probably were never 
 known to them. It means that Southerners 
 lived a life which, though simple and pictu- 
 resque, was nevertheless calculated to repress 
 many of the best faculties and powers of our 
 nature. It was a life affording few opportunities 
 to talents that did not lie in certain beaten 
 grooves. It was a life gaining its intellectual 
 nourishment, just as it did its material com- 
 forts, largely from abroad — a life that choked 
 all thought and investigation that did not tend 
 to conserve existing institutions and opinions — 
 a life that rendered originality scarcely possible 
 except under the guise of eccentricity." 
 
 In considering the Southern attitude towards
 
 36 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 slavery, both Mr. Page and Professor Trent 
 point out the fact that the Southern fechng 
 against slavery was growing at the time of 
 the Revolution. That it suddenly changed 
 was due probably as much to the invention 
 of the cotton-gin as to anything else. If 
 that Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, had 
 not whittled out his machine, slavery would 
 perhaps have disappeared as peaceably from 
 Virginia and North Carolina and Georgia as it 
 had done from New York and New Jersey and 
 Pennsylvania. But Eli Whitney did invent 
 the gin which made cotton king, and the neces- 
 sity for slave labor became at once apparent. 
 And at this juncture, when slavery was sharply 
 changed from a disappearing evil to a sacred 
 institution, feudalism was also resuscitated by 
 the vogue of the Waverley novels. 
 
 There is in Mark Twain's book on the Mis- 
 sissippi a strong statement of the evil wrought 
 in the South by Sir Walter Scott's stories. 
 After remarking that the French revolution 
 and its product, Napoleon, did much harm — 
 but they did also this good, they broke up the 
 feudal system, root and branch — he arraigns 
 the author of ' Ivanhoe ' in this wise : " Then 
 comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, 
 and by his single might checks this wave of
 
 TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 37 
 
 progress and even turns it back; sets the 
 world in love with dreams and phantoms; 
 with decayed and swinish forms of religion; 
 with decayed and degraded systems of govern- 
 ment; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, 
 sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chival- 
 ries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished 
 society. He did measureless harm — more real 
 and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other in- 
 dividual that ever wrote. Most of the world 
 has now outlived good part of these harms, 
 though by no means all of them ; but in our 
 South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not 
 so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, 
 but still forcefully. There, the genuine and 
 wholesome civilization of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury is curiously confused and commingled 
 with the Walter Scott middle-age sham civil- 
 ization, and so you have practical common 
 sense, progressive ideas and progressive works 
 mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, 
 and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past 
 that is dead, and out of charity ought to be 
 buried. . . . Enough is laid on slavery, with- 
 out fathering upon it these creations and con- 
 tributions of Sir Walter." 
 
 Slavery and feudalism, either of them, would 
 make literature difficult ; both of them together
 
 38 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 made it impossible. And lack of independence 
 of thought combined with the fascination of 
 the pseudo-chivalric to encourage the accept- 
 ance of foreign standards in literature; to keep 
 the Southern people, in fact, in an attitude of 
 colonial dependence to Great Britain at the 
 very time that the North was developing 
 authors of its own. Cooper to-day keeps his 
 place close at the heels of Scott, while Simms 
 is fading into oblivion as fast as G. P. R. James, 
 with whose work his may fairly be compared, 
 although Simms was probably far richer in 
 native gifts. 
 
 Now slavery is dead and feudalism has 
 departed, and with them is disappearing the 
 pseudo-chivalry which made the books of the 
 Southland ridiculous. Though oratory still 
 survives in the South, and though he who 
 " orates " is often tempted into perfervid 
 rhetoric, there are now not wanting writers 
 who take their stand on the solid realities of 
 life. The new authors of the New South are 
 not now making second-hand imitations of 
 foreign romance. They have come to the 
 knowledge of the great discovery that litera- 
 ture consists not so much in the mere making 
 up of stories as in the frank telling of the truth. 
 With the abolition of slaverv came the freedom
 
 TWO STUDIES OF THE SOUTH 39 
 
 to speak the truth, with an eye single to nature, 
 without any squint around the corner to be 
 sure that the truth might not perhaps interfere 
 somewhere with the pecuhar institution. With 
 the departure of feudal ideals came the ability 
 to see that life as it is — the every-day existence 
 of the plain people — is the stuff of which litera- 
 ture is made. Nowadays any one who chooses 
 to read any American magazine can assure 
 himself that the writers of the South have 
 laid firm hold of the "principle of literary art," 
 to quote Professor Trent, "which requires that 
 a man should write spontaneously and simply 
 about those things he is fullest of and best 
 understands." 
 (1892.)
 
 THE PENALTY OF HUMOR
 
 THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 
 
 When the time came for the people of the 
 thirteen united colonies to proclaim to the 
 world that they were free, and that they held 
 themselves absolved from all allegiance to the 
 British crown, and that all political connection 
 between them and Great Britain was totally 
 dissolved, a committee of the Continental Con- 
 gress was appointed to draw up a declaration 
 of independence. The members of this com- 
 mittee were Benjamin Franklin, of Pennsyl- 
 vania; John Adams, of Massachusetts ; Roger 
 Sherman, of Connecticut ; Robert R. Living- 
 ston, of New York, and Thomas Jefferson, of 
 Virginia. Why was it that their colleagues 
 committed the writing of the Declaration of 
 Independence to Thomas Jefferson, and not 
 to Benjamin Franklin ? The Virginian was 
 not the most prominent man even of his own 
 section, and although his reputation could not 
 fairly be termed local, it was but little more, 
 while the name of the Pennsylvanian was well
 
 44 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 known throughout the whole civilized world. 
 Franklin was not only the foremost citizen of 
 Philadelphia, where the Congress was sitting, 
 he was the most experienced publicist and the 
 most accomplished man of letters in all the 
 thirteen colonies ; and he was especially well 
 equipped for the drawing up of an appeal to 
 Europe, as he had but just returned from Lon- 
 don, where he had been pleading the cause of 
 his countrymen with indomitable courage and 
 indisputable skill. Yet Franklin was not asked 
 to write the Declaration of Independence; and 
 although he and Adams made a few verbal 
 amendments, the credit of that great state 
 paper belongs to Jefferson. And why was it 
 that this responsibility was placed on Jeffer- 
 son and not on Franklin ? 
 
 I think the explanation lies in the fact that 
 Franklin was a humorist. Not only was Frank- 
 lin's sturdy common-sense felt to be too plain 
 a homespun for wear in the courts of Europe 
 when the thought needed to be attired in all 
 the lofty rhetoric that the most fervid enthu- 
 siasm could produce, but also, I fear me great- 
 ly, his colleagues were afraid that Franklin 
 would have his joke. It would be a good 
 joke, no doubt — probably a very good joke ; 
 but the very best of jokes would not be in
 
 THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 45 
 
 keeping with the stately occasion. They were 
 acute, those leaders of the Continental Con- 
 gress, and they knew that every man has the 
 defects of his qualities, and that a humorist is 
 likely to be lacking in reverence, and that the 
 writer of the Declaration of Independence had 
 a theme which demanded the most reverential 
 treatment. 
 
 So it was that Benjamin Franklin had to 
 pay the penalty of humor in the last century, 
 just as Abraham Lincoln had to pay it in this 
 century. Because Lincoln was swift to seize 
 upon an incongruity, and because he sought 
 relief for his abiding melancholy in playful- 
 ness, there were not a few who refused to take 
 him seriously. Even after his death there 
 were honest folk who held the shrewdest and 
 loftiest of our statesmen to have been little 
 better than a buffoon. Of the three greatest 
 Americans, Franklin, Washington, and Lin- 
 coln, two were humorists ; and it is perhaps 
 his deficiency of humor which makes Wash- 
 ington seem more remote from us and less 
 friendly than either of the others. 
 
 " Never dare to be as funny as you can," is 
 probably a good motto for all men in public life. 
 No doubt the British statesman who was born 
 in the same year as Lincoln has found his de-
 
 46 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 ficiency in humor an absolute advantage to 
 him ; and no doubt a potent factor of Mr. 
 Gladstone's success has been his inability to 
 discover anything absurd in the solemn refu- 
 tation of a novel like ' Robert Elsmere' by the 
 Prime-Minister who rules the mighty British 
 Empire. Of course it was not merely because 
 they were wits that Canning and Beaconsfield 
 were distrusted ; but beyond all question their 
 ability to barb an epigram made it harder for 
 them to keep their hold on their party. If 
 they had been as impervious to a joke as Mr. 
 Gladstone is, Canning and Disraeli would have 
 found it much easier to wring from the British 
 public due appreciation of their political sagac- 
 ity. Like all other luxuries, the perpetration 
 of an epigram has to be paid for. 
 
 Ample as the English vocabulary is to-day, 
 since it has been enriched with the spoils of 
 every other speech, and opulent as it is in 
 semi-synonyms for the expression of delicate 
 shades of difference in meaning, it is some- 
 times strangely deficient in needful terms, and 
 often we find ourselves sorely at a loss for a 
 word to indicate a necessary distinction. Thus 
 it is that we have nothing but the inadequate 
 phrase se7ise of Jmmor to denominate a quality 
 which is often carelessly confounded with hu-
 
 THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 47 
 
 inor itself, and which should always be sharp- 
 ly discriminated from it. Humor is positive, 
 while the sense-of-humor is negative. A man 
 with humor may make a joke, and a man with 
 the sense-of-humor may take one. Neither 
 includes the other; for a man able to make 
 a joke may be incapable of taking one. 
 From an inadequate sense-of-humor many a 
 humorist is guilty of taking himself too se- 
 riously. 
 
 Carlyle, for instance, had humor, and not 
 the sense-of-humor. Mr. John Morley has 
 called Carlyle a "great transcendental humor- 
 ist," and a great humorist Carlyle was, even if 
 he were great in no other way ; but Carlyle was 
 so devoid of the sense-of-humor that he seems 
 never to have suspected how comic a spectacle 
 he presented vehemently preaching the virtue 
 of silence in not less than forty successive vol- 
 umes. Dickens also was a humorist and noth- 
 ing else; but Dickens took himself so seriously 
 that he broke with Punch because that journal 
 refused to publish his account of his quarrel 
 with the wife he had promised to love, cherish, 
 and protect. Probably, also, if the sense-of- 
 humor had been more acutely developed in 
 Dickens he would have spared us the blank- 
 verse pathos of his dying children; he might
 
 48 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 even have refrained from out-hcroding Herod 
 in his massacre of the innocents. 
 
 These two quahties, humor and the sense-of- 
 humor, seem to me to be wholly distinct, and it 
 is really a misfortune that the terms for differen- 
 tiating them are so unsatisfactory. If we had 
 sharply contrasting words for the positive hu- 
 mor, which is creative, and for the negative hu- 
 mor, Avhich is mainly critical, we should not 
 be forced to the paradoxical declaration that 
 humorists have often no sense-of-humor. A 
 friend of mine now makes it a rule never to 
 risk a gibe with funny men, because he had 
 twice ventured to crack a joke with accredited 
 wits, and they both failed to take it, turning 
 the merry jest into a serious matter. Of the 
 two qualities, therefore, the sense-of-humor is 
 the more highly to be prized. It is an invalu- 
 able possession, adding an unfailing savor to 
 the enjoyment of life ; and any woman who 
 may chance to be endowed with it is always 
 company for herself. It is so good a thing 
 that one can hardly have too much of it, al- 
 though an ardent reformer might find that an 
 excess of it chilled the heat of his resolution. 
 
 As it is an advantage of the sense-of-humor 
 that it prevents you from taking yourself too 
 seriously, so it is a disadvantage of humor itself
 
 THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 49 
 
 that it prevents others from taking you seri- 
 ously. And there is the danger, also, that 
 those who possess humor are sometimes pos- 
 sessed by it. They may thus be led to the 
 perpetration of incongruities they would be 
 the swiftest to perceive in another. Lowell 
 was a poet and a humorist ; but the poet wrote 
 the lofty poem the * Cathedral ' ; the humor- 
 ist was responsible for the jarring note when 
 one of the two Englishmen met beneath the 
 shadow of the church at Chartres took the 
 American for a Frenchman : 
 
 'Esker vous ate a nabitang?' he asked. 
 ' I never ate one ; are they good }' asked I. 
 
 In the ' Biglow Papers ' the poet and the hu- 
 morist were one being, not two separate entities, 
 and the result of the fusion is the finest satire in 
 our language since the ' Hudibras' of the But- 
 ler whose wit Lowell abundantly appreciated. 
 But even the author of the 'Biglow Papers' 
 had to pay the penalty of humor. Because 
 the Yankee dialect of Hosea was phonetically 
 represented with artistic feeling and scientific 
 precision, the British pirates lying in wait for 
 books of " American humor " published the 
 ' Biglow Papers ' as though it was a fit com- 
 
 4
 
 50 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 panlon for the misspelt writings of Artemus 
 Ward. It is a fact that before he was ap- 
 pointed minister of the United States at the 
 Court of St. James, Lowell was known to the 
 British not as the poet, the scholar, the critic, 
 but rather as the rival of Josh Billings. If he 
 had not been a humorist, Lowell might have 
 been wholly unknown to the readers of Great 
 Britain ; and perhaps this would have been 
 better than to be greeted as an emulator of 
 those purveyors of " comic copy " who kept a 
 misfit orthography as the leading article of 
 their stock in trade. 
 
 And yet why should we think the less of a 
 poet for that he has made us laugh? As Low- 
 ell himself has said : " Let us not be ashamed 
 to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, 
 we take the profoundest satisfaction in the 
 farce. It is a mark of sanity." But if this 
 confession were the only mark of sanity, how 
 few of us could get a clean bill of health ! We 
 are ashamed of our laughter; often we think 
 it a thing to be apologized for. Nor do we 
 thank the author of the farce for the profound 
 satisfaction we take in it ; and appreciation of 
 the broad fun of farce is more often than not 
 semi-contemptuous, as though it were an easy 
 matter to make people laugh. It is, indeed.
 
 THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 5 1 
 
 as easy to make them laugh as to make them 
 weep, and no easier. Heine protested against 
 our praising the tragic poet for his faculty of 
 drawing tears — " a talent which he has in com- 
 mon with the meanest onion." 
 
 In the theatre farce is looked down on even by 
 those who prefer it. Yet farce is a legitimate 
 form of the drama of the most honorable an- 
 tiquity. It is a form of the drama in which 
 Aristophanes and Plautus delighted, in Avhich 
 Shakespeare and Moliere wrote masterpieces, 
 in which Goldsmith and Sheridan excelled, in 
 which Regnard and Labiche revelled. It is 
 a form of the drama having not only the high 
 authority of these great names, but having also 
 at all times enjoyed the widest popularity with 
 the broad body of play-goers. But the broad 
 body of play-goers are ashamed to confess the 
 profound satisfaction they take in it; they be- 
 grudge the comic dramatist the double reward 
 of praise and laughter ; and thus they make him 
 pay the penalty of humor. 
 
 It would be easier to understand this semi- 
 contemptuous attitude if it were shown towards 
 the mere clowns only. Grinning through a 
 horse-collar is not the most exalted way of earn- 
 ing a living — although there are worse. But 
 the same treatment is bestowed also towards
 
 52 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 those in whose works humor is only the out- 
 ward expression of serious thought. Because 
 the ' Fable for Critics' was full of fun, many 
 readers in 1849 ^'^^ ^^^ discover that it was the 
 acutest criticism to which our young American 
 literature had until then been subjected. Per- 
 haps no mask is more difficult to penetrate than 
 the jester's, and no disguise is more effective 
 than the cloak of humor. Just as Shylock was 
 long acted as a comic part, so 'Don Quixote' was 
 long accepted as a jest-book ; and no part of 
 Mr, Ormsby's introduction to his spirited trans- 
 lation of the masterpiece of Cervantes is more 
 illuminative than the pages in which he sketch- 
 es for us the successive stages of the discovery 
 that ' Don Quixote,' so far from being a mere 
 piece of fooling, is really one of the wisest books 
 of the world. In like manner his boisterous out- 
 bursts of gigantic fun, always extravagant and 
 exaggerated, often tasteless and obscene, veil 
 the knowledge and the wisdom of Rabelais. 
 
 It is not easy to suggest a philosophical ex- 
 planation for the kindly condescension which 
 the world is wont to bestow on the humorist. 
 The condescension is kindly, even if it be semi- 
 contemptuous, and there is no suggestion of an- 
 imosity in it. Humor evokes little or none of 
 the hatred that wit so often arouses. And there
 
 THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 53 
 
 is a kind of wit of which it is well to be dis- 
 trustful, for it is dangerous. This is the scofifing, 
 girding wit which, to use George Eliot's phrase, 
 debases the moral currency. The persiflage of 
 Voltaire was often inspired by honest convic- 
 tions ; but there are writers on the newspapers 
 of New York who have cultivated a wit not un- 
 like Voltaire's, but with even less of sincerity 
 in it, soiling whatever it touches — corroding 
 and disintegrating. 
 
 There is no affinity between this sharp and 
 envenomed wit and true humor — sometimes 
 broad, perhaps, but always cheerful and hearty, 
 wholesome and antiseptic. Nor is the doubt 
 awakened by the bitter wit the cause of the pub- 
 lic attitude towards the joyous humorist. For 
 that we must seek deeper. Having no desire 
 to lose myself in the mists of metaphysics, it is 
 perhaps sufficient now to suggest that we seem 
 to have an intuitive feeling that laughter is less 
 elevating than weeping. Mr. Lecky thinks that 
 a man of cheerful disposition, having enjoyed 
 a tragedy and a farce, will admit that the plea- 
 sure derived from the former is of a higher or- 
 der than that derived from the latter, and there- 
 fore, although mere enjoyment might lead him 
 to the farce, a sense of its nobler character in- 
 clines him to the tragedy.
 
 54 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 111 other words, wc intuitively feel a master- 
 piece of tragedy to be superior to the master- 
 piece of farce ; we admit it to be higher in kind. 
 From this intuitive behef may be deduced the 
 reason why our attitude towards humor is semi- 
 contemptuous. It is the reason for this intui- 
 tive behef that it would be interesting to have 
 elucidated. Why does a laugh strike many of 
 us as a thing unseemly in itself, and therefore 
 to be apologized for? Admitting with Mr, 
 Lecky that most of us feel that humor is in- 
 ferior to pathos, that the tear is superior to the 
 smile, what is the basis of this feeling ? what is 
 its scientific foundation? 
 
 Whatever its cause, this feeling is as potent 
 to-day in the United States as it was in France 
 in the days of Rabelais, or in Spain in the days 
 of Cervantes. And the very strangest of its 
 effects now, as then, is that it blinds us to the 
 other merits of a writer who may amuse us. 
 Though we enjoy the fun he gives us, we set 
 him down as a fun-maker only ; and when a 
 man makes us laugh abundantly we refuse to 
 look into his writings to see if they do not con- 
 tain more than mere mirth. There is no more 
 striking example of this injustice than one now 
 before our eyes. 
 
 We have to-day here in the United States as
 
 THE PENALTY OF HUMOR 55 
 
 a contemporary a great humorist, who is also 
 one of the masters of English prose. He is 
 one of the foremost story-tellers of the world, 
 with the gift of swift narrative, with the certain 
 grasp of human nature, with a rare power of pre- 
 senting character at a passionate crisis. There 
 is not in the fiction of our language and of our 
 country anything finer of its kind than any one 
 of half a dozen chapters in ' Tom Sawyer,' in 
 'Huckleberry Finn,' in 'Pudd'nhead Wilson.' 
 
 Partly because his fiction is uneven, and is 
 never long sustained at its highest level of ex- 
 cellence, partly because he has also written too 
 much that is little better than burlesque and 
 extravaganza, but chiefly because he is primari- 
 ly a humorist, because he is free from cant and 
 sham pathos, because he does not take himself 
 too seriously, because his humor is free, flowing, 
 unfailing, because his laughter is robust and con- 
 tagious and irresistible, because he has made 
 more of our scattered English-speaking people 
 laugh than any other man of our time — because 
 of all these things we do not see that in all fic- 
 tion, since the single footprint on the shore fell 
 under the eyes of the frightened Crusoe, there is 
 no more thrilling moment than that when the 
 hand of Indian Joe (his one enemy) comes slow- 
 ly within the vision of Tom Sawyer, lost in the
 
 56 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 cave ; wc do not see that no one of our Amer- 
 ican novelists has ever shown more insight into 
 the springs of human action or more dramatic 
 force than is revealed in Huck Finn's account 
 of the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud, and of 
 the attempt to lynch Colonel Sherburn ; we do 
 not see that it would be hard to select from all 
 the story-tellers of the nineteenth century a 
 scene of immeasurable pathos surpassing that 
 in * Pudd'nhead Wilson ' when the wretched 
 Chambers knowingly sells his own mother 
 " down the river." 
 
 When we find that the man who wrote these 
 chapters, and so many more only a little less 
 marvellous in their vigor and their truth, is set 
 down in most accounts of American literature 
 as a funny man only, when we see him dis- 
 missed with a line or two of patronizing com- 
 ment, as though Mark Twain were only a news- 
 paper humorist, a chance rival of John Phoenix 
 or Artemus Ward or Orpheus C. Kerr as a ven- 
 der of comic copy, then we have it brought 
 home to us that humor is a possession for which 
 the possessor must meet the bill. Mr. Clem- 
 ens, having more humor than any one else of 
 his generation, has had to pay a higher price. 
 
 (1894)
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 
 
 Two lines of the prologue for the opening 
 of Drury Lane Theatre, which Dr. Johnson 
 wrote to be spoken by his former pupil, David 
 Garrick, still linger on our lips as a famihar 
 quotation : 
 
 The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, 
 And we that live to please must please to live. 
 
 This pair of rymes is characterized by the 
 robust common -sense which at once limits 
 Johnson's criticism and gives it its chief value. 
 Common-sense kept the man who could thus 
 compact a simple truth into a striking couplet 
 from giving to his assertion an extension not 
 warranted by his own long-continued observa- 
 tion of the methods and the motives of men 
 of letters. An absence of this caution has led 
 later writers to ascribe the broad success of 
 this or that author to the skill with which this 
 or that author has gauged the popular taste at 
 the moment of publication, artfully preparing
 
 6o ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 his literary wares to meet a widespread de- 
 mand which he has shrewdly foreseen. 
 
 This is a most unsatisfactory and a most un- 
 scientific attempt to explain away what seems 
 often inexplicable — the interest sometimes 
 shown by the book-buying public in the writ- 
 ings of an author whose works are not es- 
 teemed by his fellow-craftsmen. As it is hard 
 to prove a negative I will not maintain that no 
 author has ever been clear-sighted enough to 
 guess at the probable duration of the next 
 swing of the pendulum; but I am certain that 
 the lucky hits of this sort must be very far be- 
 tween, and that any author who should rely 
 mainly on his ability to guess at the kind of 
 book the public was going to thirst after six 
 months or a year later would be very likely to 
 go hungry himself. 
 
 And I venture to believe also that there is a 
 fallacy concealed in the phrase which speaks 
 of " the taste of the public," for it assumes 
 that there is a public, — one public having a 
 taste in common with all its members. I am 
 inclined to think that, so far from there being 
 only one public, the number of publics having 
 widely divergent likes and dislikes is indefinite, 
 not to say infinite. These smaller publics are 
 no two of them of the same size ; and no
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 6l 
 
 doubt the membership of some of them is too 
 limited for an author to hope to make his Hv- 
 ing by pleasing it. There are in fact as many- 
 different publics as there are separate authors ; 
 and there must be, since no two writers ever 
 made precisely the same appeal to their read- 
 ers. No two leaders in literature ever had ex- 
 actly the same set of followers. The admirers 
 of Byron when he burst forth first had been 
 many of them the admirers of Scott ; but the 
 two circles have not the same radius ; and 
 they are intersecting and not concentric. 
 
 The broad reading public, to which a pop- 
 ular author is supposed to address himself, is 
 really rent in twain by the differences of its dis- 
 putes over literary principles. Just as a man 
 must take either the Hebraic view of life or the 
 Hellenic, to use the distinction that Matthew 
 Arnold borrowed from Heine, just as he must 
 be either an Aristotelian or a Platonist, whether 
 he knows it or not, so he is also (perhaps from 
 inquiry and conviction, but more probably 
 from native temperament) either an Ancient 
 or a Modern, either a Classicist or a Roman- 
 ticist, either an Idealist or a Realist. The 
 standards are opposed and the conflict is irre- 
 pressible. Whoever enlists under one of these 
 banners is ready with the torch to torture
 
 62 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 those who volunteer to uphold the other. The 
 very acrimony of these discussions is all the 
 evidence any one can demand before being as- 
 sured that the public is not one, single, and in- 
 divisible. 
 
 The public is really but a congeries of war- 
 ring factions ; and sometimes these factions are 
 representative of the degree of development 
 to which those who compose it have attained. 
 Each, as it rises a step higher in the scale of 
 civilization, naturally despises that which re- 
 mains below on the plane it has just aban- 
 doned, and it is in turn detested by that over 
 which it boasts its new superiority. Probably 
 a similar state of affairs is visible wherever 
 there is progress ; those who are going to the 
 front looking back with contempt on those 
 who linger in the rear — a contempt which is 
 repaid with frank and justifiable hatred. Per- 
 haps as apt an illustration of this as any now 
 available may be found in the present state of 
 affairs existing among the vast body of men 
 and women who are fond of the game of 
 whist. 
 
 In Dr. Pole's calm and scientific discussion 
 of the ' Evolution of Whist, a Study of the Pro- 
 gressive Changes which the Game has passed 
 through from its Origin to the Present Time,'
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 63 
 
 we are told that the development of whist has 
 had four periods. In the first of these the 
 player relied chiefly on his master- cards and 
 his trumps, following suit with any one of his 
 low cards ; and this Dr. Pole calls the Primi- 
 tive Game. In the second stage the game was 
 raised into a really intellectual pastime by 
 Hoyle and his followers, and long whist gave 
 way before short whist. The Game of Hoyle 
 was the basis of the development taking place 
 during the third period, during which there 
 was evolved the Philosophical Game, indisso- 
 lubly connected with the names of Clay and 
 * Cavendish.' The fourth period is that of 
 the Latterday Improvements, in which the 
 American Leads have been adopted with other 
 concomitant devices of like delicacy and sub- 
 tlety. 
 
 As it happens there is a department of lit- 
 erature in which the development is singularly 
 similar to the evolution of whist, and in which 
 we can also declare four chronological periods, 
 the one following the other and flowering from 
 it. This is the art of fiction. In the begin- 
 ning fiction dealt with the Impossible — with 
 wonders, with mysteries, with the supernatu- 
 ral; and these are the staple of the 'Arabian 
 Nights,' of Greek romances like the ' Golden
 
 64 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Ass,' and of the tales of chivalry like 'Amadis 
 of Gaul.' In the second stage the merely Im- 
 probable was substituted for the frankly Impos- 
 sible ; and the hero went through adventures 
 in kind such as might befall anybody, but in 
 quantity far more than are likely to happen to 
 any single man, unless his name were Gil Bias 
 or Quentin Durward, Natty Bumppo or d'Ar- 
 tagnan. Then in the course of years the Im- 
 probable was superseded by the Probable ; and 
 it is by their adroit presentation of the Proba- 
 ble that Balzac and Thackeray hold their high 
 places in the history of the art. But the craft 
 of the novelist did not come to its climax with 
 the masterpieces of Balzac and of Thackeray ; 
 its development continued perforce, and there 
 arose story-tellers who preferred to deal rather 
 with the Inevitable than with the Probable 
 only. Of this fourth stage of the evolution of 
 fiction perhaps the most salient examples are 
 the 'Scarlet Letter' of Hawthorne and the 
 * Romola ' of George Eliot, the ' Smoke ' of 
 Turgeneff and the 'Anna Karenina' of Tolstoi. 
 The four stages of whist are thus shown to 
 have each its parallel in the four stages of fic- 
 tion." The Primitive Game of Dr. Pole is not 
 
 * One of the editors of the Chicago Dm/ has sug-
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 65 
 
 simpler or more rudimentary than the tale of 
 the Impossible. The Game of Hoyle is close- 
 ly akin to the story of the Improbable. The 
 Philosophical Game can be matched fitly with 
 the novel of the Probable. The Latter day Im- 
 provements of Dr. Pole have a rigorous logic 
 which assimilates them to the most modern 
 form of fiction in which the Inevitable deduc- 
 tions are made from the characters presented. 
 " We have noticed four steps or stages mark- 
 ing the progress, and producing four varieties 
 of game, all really whist, but whist in differ- 
 ent stages of development," says Dr. Pole, and 
 his words can be applied absolutely to the 
 four varieties of fiction also. " The later forms 
 have, indeed, grown out of the earlier ones, 
 but have not necessarily extinguished or abol- 
 ished them" — and this is true of fiction too. 
 " The admirers of any late step are perfectly 
 justified in showing its superiority to the one 
 before it, but there is room enough in the 
 world for both to continue to exist side by 
 side"; and it is from this lofty attitude of 
 broad toleration thus recommended by Dr. 
 
 gested that mention should here be made of the fact 
 that "there is, and has always been, a fifth kind of 
 fiction, corresponding to the variety of whist known 
 as Bumblepuppy." 
 5
 
 66 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Pole that certain American critics have de- 
 parted when they commented harshly on the 
 amazing predilection certain British critics had 
 declared for the more primitive forms of fiction. 
 The novel-readers who prefer tales of the Im- 
 possible or of the Improbable resemble the 
 whist-players who prefer the Primitive Game, 
 which, so Dr. Pole informs us, is still " played 
 by enormous numbers of domestic players, who 
 find incidents enough in it to amuse them for 
 hours together. And though many of them 
 would doubtless be able to learn and to enjoy 
 a more intellectual form, there is no reason 
 why it should be thrust upon them, or why 
 they should be calumniated for adhering to 
 their innocent form of entertainment. It is 
 probable that they follow fairly the general 
 mode of play in the infancy of the game." 
 
 We all see that it was in the infancy of fic- 
 tion that it dealt with the Impossible and in 
 its boyhood that it began to attempt the Im- 
 probable. Although the liking for the Impos- 
 sible still survives among children, and is likely 
 to survive among them always, I am inclined 
 to think that it is almost dead among men 
 and women who have attained their majority. 
 The bulk of the novel-readers of this last dec- 
 ade of the nineteenth century are either in the
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 67 
 
 second stage of development or in the third ; 
 they have been wearied by the exploiting of 
 the Impossible, but they are not yet ready to 
 enjoy the discussion of the Inevitable ; and 
 they do not care much whether the incidents 
 of the stories they lounge through negligently 
 are doubtfully Improbable or actually Proba- 
 ble. But there is a certain portion of the 
 public which takes its fiction seriously, which 
 respects the art of narrative, which sees the 
 possibilities now open before the novelist, and 
 which holds the story-teller up to the highest 
 standard. This portion of the public — wel- 
 coming warmly the fiction which gives the 
 most truthful interpretation of life — is steadily 
 gaining in numbers and in influence. 
 
 I fear that its swifter increase is not a little 
 retarded by its own intolerance towards the 
 novel-readers who yet delight in the Primitive 
 Game. This attitude is easy to understand, 
 but none the less is it unfortunate. " We may 
 take it for granted that, whatever may be the 
 exclusive notions of the select whist aristoc- 
 racy, there will always be a large democratic 
 body who will please themselves as to what 
 sort of game they will play," says Dr. Pole, 
 very pertinently. " The amiable lady who be- 
 gins by playing out her aces, or the pleasant
 
 68 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 club-member who leads his lowest card from 
 five, ought not to be upbraided for bad play. 
 All that should be said is that they play vari- 
 eties of the game differing from that recom- 
 mended in 'Cavendish's' latest edition." In 
 like manner the late Professor Boyesen should 
 not have berated Mr. Andrew Lang for pre- 
 ferring Mr. Haggard's gory romances to Tol- 
 stoi's more serious discussions of human expe- 
 rience. The American critic should have con- 
 tented himself Avith pointing out that his Brit- 
 ish colleague liked the Primitive Game better 
 than the Latterday Improvements. And really 
 it was unreasonable in Professor Boyesen to 
 expect that Mr. Lang should appreciate the 
 new American Leads, either in literature or in 
 life. 
 
 Any movement forward by the more intelli- 
 gent is like the sending ahead of skirmishers, 
 and we have no right to expect to find the 
 main body of the army close at the heels of 
 the advance-guard. The most we can hope 
 is that the ground taken by the few pio- 
 neers yesterday shall be held in force to-day. 
 Generally any improvement in taste makes its 
 way slowly, and the bulk of the public must 
 always lag long behind the keener intellects 
 that delight to spy out a new land for them-
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 69 
 
 selves. In New York City, for instance, the 
 last thirty years have seen a most extraordi- 
 nary increase in the popular appreciation of 
 music. 
 
 Toward the end of the sixties Mr. Theodore 
 Thomas and his orchestra played every sum- 
 mer night in the old Central Park Garden, 
 and the programme was made up largely of 
 medleys from Offenbach's operettas and of 
 dance-music. Owing to Mr. Thomas's increas- 
 ing efforts to give better and better music as 
 he educated the New York concert-goer, and 
 owing also to the labors of Dr. Damrosch and 
 Mr, Seidl, there is now perhaps no city in the 
 world where more music of the highest class 
 is heard in the course of the year than in New 
 York, and none where it is more delicately en- 
 joyed. The finest of Wagner's music-dramas 
 are not now too solid fare for the subscribers 
 of the Metropolitan Opera-house, who no 
 longer find any satisfaction even in the most 
 expensive performance of sugary trifles like 
 the ' Lucia' of Donizetti. 
 
 But though the subscribers of the Metro- 
 politan Opera-house have lost their liking for 
 'Traviata' and for ' Trovatore,' the occasional 
 experiments of other opera companies in other 
 New York theatres and in opera-houses in
 
 70 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 other cities of the Union seem to show that 
 there arc perhaps as many music-lovers as 
 ever who have advanced just far enough to 
 understand and enjoy these simple favorites 
 of former days. The opera-goers of this class 
 are like the whist-players who stick to the 
 Primitive Game, or the novel-readers who revel 
 in romances of the Improbable. And I have 
 no doubt that if a young conductor possess- 
 ing such shrewdness and force as Mr. Thomas 
 revealed, should give summer-night concerts 
 in New York, placing on his programme dance- 
 tunes and medleys from operettas, he would 
 have now quite as large a following as Mr. 
 Thomas had thirty years ago ; and in time he 
 could slowly lead on this portion of the public 
 to the acceptance of music demanding a more 
 careful appreciation. 
 
 There is ready at hand yet another example 
 of the ease with which a portion of the public 
 can be educated to have a relish for the finer 
 forms of art. It was in the sixties that Mr. 
 Theodore Thomas began his elevating work 
 here in New York; and it w^as in the seventies 
 that the American magazines began to seek 
 for a fresher and a richer pictorial embellish- 
 ment, a search which slowly brought into ex- 
 istence the illustrated monthly due to the lov-
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 71 
 
 ing co-operation of the editor, the artist, the 
 engraver, and the printer. The best of these 
 sumptuous publications, having gradually cre- 
 ated the taste by which they were estimated, 
 attained to an enormous circulation — a fact 
 which might seem to prove them to be pre- 
 cisely " the kind of periodical that the public 
 wants." 
 
 Yet early in the nineties we saw the appear- 
 ance of a swarm of cheaper monthlies, filled 
 with process- blocks from photographs; and 
 some of these slight magazines also attained 
 to an enormous circulation. But as the suc- 
 cess of these new periodicals affected only a 
 little (if at all) the sale of the older and solider 
 magazines, it is obvious that " the kind of 
 periodical that the public wants " is a question 
 to which there are now two answers. In other 
 words, while one segment of the reading circle 
 has been led to develop a liking for the more 
 substantial merits of the established maga- 
 zines, another segment is attracted by the 
 cheap tawdriness of the more flimsy novelties. 
 And it is quite within the bounds of possibil- 
 ity that an inventive editor might now devise 
 a third form of periodical which should also 
 attain to an enormous circulation without 
 interfering with the profits of either class of
 
 72 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 monthly now most in favor ; he would only 
 be proving the existence of a third segment 
 of the reading circle. 
 
 So I return to the assertion made in an 
 early paragraph of this essay : there is really 
 no such entity as tJie public. There is a pub- 
 lic ready to welcome eveiything which is good 
 in its kind ; and there are as many publics as 
 there are different kinds of good things. Fev/ 
 of us are so limited in our likings as to belong 
 to one public only. The extreme Wagnerite 
 is often warmest in praise of a captivating 
 waltz by Strauss ; and the extreme veritist can 
 acknowledge the charm of a romantic fantasy 
 of Stevenson's. Perhaps a reader of extraor- 
 dinary catholicity might belong almost to all 
 the different publics. 
 
 Some of these publics are very large indeed 
 and some of them are very small. ' Hamlet/ 
 for example, appeals to almost every type of 
 play-goer, while the performance of Ibsen's 
 ' Ghosts ' pleases only a chosen few. In gen- 
 eral, of course, the higher up the pyramid is 
 cut, the smaller will be the area of the cross- 
 section — ' Hamlet ' being one of the rare works 
 which are so nearly universal as rather to bi- 
 sect the pyramid than to cut across it. When 
 one has once grasped firmly the idea that the
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE TUELIC 73 
 
 people at large are massed in a pyramid, one 
 layer above the other, with the most intelli- 
 gent at the apex, one cannot but see the futil- 
 ity of all assertions that " the public wants to 
 be amused," and " the public wants sensation 
 and excitement," and "the public does not 
 want analysis and disquisition," There is a 
 public that wants to be amused ; and perhaps 
 the larger portion of this public wants sensa- 
 tion and excitement, and does not want anal- 
 ysis and disquisition. But there is a public 
 also which does want analysis and disquisition, 
 and does not want sensation and excitement. 
 There is a segment of the reading circle with 
 the keenest relish for airy fantasy and for deli- 
 cate humor. There is another segment hungry 
 for the naked truth. There is yet another 
 which has no real liking for knowledge of it- 
 self, and which therefore likes to hear over 
 and over again the old outworn tales and to 
 listen again and again to old outworn rymes 
 of love and dove, of Jieart and ^arL 
 
 This diversity of public taste has always ex- 
 isted — except perhaps in the compact com- 
 munity of Athens. In the prologue he wrote 
 for the third performance of one of his come- 
 dies, Terence denounced the foolish public be- 
 cause at the first performance it was all excite-
 
 74 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 ment over an exhibition on the tight -rope 
 which was to follow, and because at the second 
 performance the theatre emptied itself sudden- 
 ly in the middle of the play when a rumor 
 ran around the house that there were going to 
 be gladiators elsewhere in the neighborhood. 
 (If I may open a parenthesis here, I should 
 like to drop the query as to whether Gresham's 
 Law may not be as potent in art as it is in 
 finance, the inferior product driving out the 
 superior, as the bloody shows of the arena in 
 Rome finally extinguished the Latin literary 
 drama.) In England, under Elizabeth, the 
 wooden theatres in which Shakespeare's sub- 
 limest tragedies were acted served on other 
 days of the week as a ring for the sport of 
 bear-baiting. In the early part of the nine- 
 teenth century in London, when Sarah Sid- 
 dons and John Philip Kemble were in the 
 plenitude of their powers, they played often 
 to the bare benches of Drury Lane, while the 
 same night Covent Garden would be packed 
 with people eager to behold a real elephant 
 take part in a spectacular pantomime. The 
 elephant and the bear-baiting and the gladia- 
 tors, each in their turn, pleased that part of the 
 public which was still playing the Primitive 
 Game — to use Dr. Pole's phrase — and which
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 75 
 
 therefore was wholly incapable of understand- 
 ing the Philosophic Game, so to speak, of Mrs. 
 Siddons, of Shakespeare, and of Terence. 
 
 And yet that portion of the public which 
 clings to the Primitive Game has at least one 
 fine quality: it is perfectly sincere. It is not 
 a humbug or a sham. It knows what it likes, 
 and it is not ashamed of its prejudices. It 
 makes no pretence of regard for the more ad- 
 vanced art it is unable to appreciate. It is 
 frank and outspoken in its conviction that 
 Hawthorne is slow and Turgeneff dull ; and it 
 makes no effort whatever to conceal its opin- 
 ion that Ibsen is tiresome and that Mr. How- 
 ells is colorless. It is wholly without the 
 snobbishness which induces not a few of those 
 readers who really most enjoy the romances of 
 Mr. Rider Haggard to pretend that they pre- 
 fer the novels of Mr. George Meredith merely 
 because there was once a Meredith cult among 
 the cultured. 
 
 I am inclined to believe that the position of 
 that portion of the public which retains its 
 primitive taste in literature is often misrepre- 
 sented and even more often misunderstood. 
 For one thing, this portion of the public is com- 
 posed of plain people who are not only sincere 
 themselves in their literary likes and dislikes,
 
 76 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 but arc also swift to detect insincerity in the 
 authors who seek to interest them. They re- 
 volt at the slightest hint of condescension. 
 They insist on being taken seriously; — and this 
 is why the ingenious tales of accomplished lit- 
 erators often fall flat, while hundreds of thou- 
 sands were sold of the sensational stories of 
 " Hugh Conway," who was not at all a man of 
 letters. 
 
 Here we find a possible explanation for a 
 problem which has puzzled more than one gen- 
 eration of literary critics — why do the writings 
 of certain authors have an immense vogue, al- 
 though these authors are seen to be without the 
 really great qualities? Is success in literature 
 onl)'- a lottery? Is the general public a fool 
 then, easily to be led by the nose ? As there is 
 no effect without a cause, there must be a reason 
 for the popularity v/hich sometimes seems to us 
 unaccountable. The real explanation of the wel- 
 come which was bestowed on the ' Proverbial 
 Philosophy ' of the late Martin Farquhar Tup- 
 per, for example, or on the novels of the late 
 E. P. Roe, is to be sought in the sincerity of 
 these two w'riters. Neither was in any way a 
 charlatan. Both of them gave the public the 
 best they had in them ; and, as it happened, 
 they thus voiced the unformulated feelings
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 77 
 
 of the segment of the reading circle to which 
 they themselves belonged. So far from writ- 
 ing doivn to the public taste, as they were 
 accused of doing, they were, in fact, writing 
 lip to the taste of the portion of the public 
 that welcomed their works. By their own 
 birth and bringing up, both Mr. Tupper and 
 Mr. Roe were in a measure representative of 
 the "plain people," as Lincoln phrased it; and 
 they could not help taking the plain people's 
 point of view. This the plain people recog- 
 nized promptly ; and the writers had their re- 
 ward on the spot. Their writings lacked the 
 permanent qualities of literature, no doubt, 
 and that is why their vogue was temporary 
 only. 
 
 More accomplished men of letters than either 
 Mr. Tupper or Mr. Roe have not taken this 
 point of view naturally, and thus they have 
 failed to voice the feelings of the very segment 
 of the reading circle they hoped to please. In- 
 deed, I doubt if any author who has tried to 
 guess at the taste of the public that he might 
 flatter it, has ever made a hit satisfactory to 
 himself ; and I am certain that no author who 
 really despised his audience, as more than one 
 author may have pretended that he did, has 
 ever really pleased those to whom he made
 
 yS ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 his appeal thus cynically. It happens that I 
 have met at one time or another many of the 
 novelists and dramatists of France, of England, 
 and of America — those whom the critics delight 
 to honor and those also at whom the criticas- 
 ters joy to gird ; and the quality which the lat- 
 ter class seemed to me to have most abundant- 
 ly was earnestness. They believed in their own 
 work, and they were doing it as well as in them 
 lay. Their success was due to the fact that 
 their best corresponded absolutely with the 
 ideal of a certain segment of the reading circle 
 or of a certain proportion of the play-goers. 
 In other words, and to use another of the keen 
 phrases attributed to Lincoln, these popular 
 novelists and dramatists were producing " just 
 the kind of thing that a man would like who 
 liked that kind of thing." And that is why they 
 met with a far wider success than the far cleverer 
 and far more accomplished men of letters whose 
 merits might be vaunted by all who had them- 
 selves so far progressed in literature as to appre- 
 ciate the Latterday Improvements, as Dr. Pole 
 calls them. It is only now and again that there 
 comes a rare writer able to delight at once his 
 brethren of the craft and the plain people also ; 
 and he does this not by trying to please the 
 public, but rather by expressing himself and
 
 ON PLEASING THE TASTE OF THE PUBLIC 79 
 
 by doing always the best he knows how. His 
 segment of reading circle subtends a very wide 
 angle because his art is as firm as his outlook 
 on our common humanity is broad. 
 (189SO
 
 ON CERTAIN PARALLELISMS BETWEEN 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MOD- 
 ERN DRAMA
 
 [This paper was originally contributed to ' Classical Studies in 
 
 Honor of Henr}- Drisler,' published in 1S94 by the 
 
 Columbia University Press.]
 
 ON CERTAIN PARALLELISMS BETWEEN 
 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN 
 
 DRAMA 
 
 For the man of letters who has let his clas- 
 sical studies lapse on leaving college, and who 
 takes them up again a score of years later, there 
 are compensations, as I have recently discov- 
 ered by personal experience. What the man 
 of letters who does this has lost is incalculable 
 and irrecoverable, no doubt, and what he may 
 gain is but little indeed and of small worth — 
 yet it is something if it be only a renewed fresh- 
 ness of view. And it is indisputable that this 
 is the chief gain — this ability to look at old 
 texts from new standpoints, and to interpret 
 the life and the literature of the past by the aid 
 of a deeper knowledge of the life and the litera- 
 ture of the present. 
 
 The vital principles of any art are always the 
 same, and they subsist through the ages essen- 
 tially unchanged, however much they may seem 
 to be modified superficially by the varying fash-
 
 84 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 ions of succeeding generations. Of no art 
 are the fundamental laws more absolutely- 
 fixed than are those of the drama. When, 
 therefore, one who has given his attention 
 for twenty-five years to the modern stage re- 
 turns to the study of the ancient theatre, he 
 might fairly be expected now and again to 
 note points of contact between the old and the 
 new. 
 
 A knowledge of the manners and customs of 
 the players and the plaj- wrights of Paris and 
 London and New York enables the student to 
 understand better than he could otherwise the 
 manners and the customs of the players and the 
 playwrights of Athens and Rome. When any 
 one having an acquaintance with the modern 
 playhouse inquires into the practices of the an- 
 cient theatre, he cannot but remark in the older 
 plays features which are often supposed to be 
 the sole property of the most recent play- 
 wrights. In the Greek theatre, for instance, it 
 is not difificult to discover that the dramatist 
 was generally careful to provide an " exit- 
 speech " whenever an important character left 
 the stage; nor is it hard to detect among the 
 plays of Euripides more than one specimen of 
 the " star-piece." Though there may be no 
 Greek equivalents for these technical terms,
 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 85 
 
 the things these words denote existed in Greece 
 none the less. 
 
 The terminology of the contemporary thea- 
 tre is precise and copious, although it has not 
 as yet been recorded fully in any dictionary of 
 the English language, or even in any technical 
 vocabulary of its own. A " star -piece," for 
 example, is a play so devised as to display all 
 the histrionic powers of the performer of the 
 chief part. Certain of Shakespeare's plays are 
 obviously *' star-pieces ": ' Hamlet,' for one, and 
 'Richard III.,'foranother; and so is the 'Medea' 
 of Euripides. Medea is not only the " star- 
 part," but the other characters of the play are 
 little more than mere "feeders" — that is to 
 say, they exist, not for their own sake, but 
 solely for their relation to Medea ; and they 
 speak, not to reveal themselves, but solely to 
 afford occasion to Medea to express herself 
 fully and at length and under the strain of the 
 most poignant emotions. The character played 
 by the protagonist is all-important, and the char- 
 acters played by the deuteragonist and by the 
 tritagonist are all of them subordinated and 
 effaced. It is known that there were strolling 
 companies of performers in Greece and in the 
 Grecian colonies, as there have been of late 
 years in Great Britain and the United States
 
 86 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 (Haigh's ' Attic Theatre,' p. 43) ; and to give a 
 fairly satisfactory performance of the 'Medea' 
 only one great actor was needed. 
 
 A renowned Athenian protagonist could " go 
 on the road" with the 'Medea' as certain of 
 pleasing the multitudes who would flock to 
 see him act in the theatres of the smaller 
 Greek cities as Madame Sarah - Bernhardt is 
 now certain to delight the audiences who fill 
 the playhouses of all the larger towns of the 
 whole world to behold her suffer and die in 
 ' La Tosca.' Nor has M. Sardou contrived ' La 
 Tosca ' more adroitly for this special portabil- 
 ity than Euripides composed the ' Medea.' 
 Euripides is like M. Sardou in more ways 
 than one ; in his exceeding cleverness, for in- 
 stance, in his dramaturgic dexterity, in his 
 mastery of theatrical device, in his predilec- 
 tion for women as his chief characters. 
 
 " It is stated," so Mr. Haigh reminds us in 
 his admirable volume on the 'Attic Theatre' 
 (p. 76), citing the authorities for the statement, 
 " that Sophocles was accustomed to write his 
 plays with a view to the capacities of his ac- 
 tors." No one who has investigated the meth- 
 ods of the great modern dramatists would ven- 
 ture to dispute this assertion ; and it would be 
 easy to adduce reasons for thinking that Eurip-
 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 87 
 
 ides did what Sophocles was accused of doing.* 
 An analysis of the ' Medea' has convinced me 
 that in composing this play Euripides was, in 
 all probability, carefully " fitting " — to use the 
 technical term of the theatre of to-day — some 
 Athenian actor by whose extraordinary histri- 
 onic ability he wished to profit, just as M. Sar- 
 dou, in composing 'La Tosca,' fitted Madame 
 Sarah-Bernhardt, just as Moliere, for that mat- 
 ter, certainly fitted Mademoiselle de Moliere 
 when he was writing ' Le Misanthrope,' and just 
 as Shakespeare possibly fitted Master Bur- 
 bage when he was writing ' Hamlet.' And while 
 ' Hamlet' and 'Le Misanthrope' are the master- 
 pieces of their authors, the ' Medea,' again, is 
 rather like ' La Tosca,' in that it owes its per- 
 manent popularity to the histrionic opportuni- 
 ties it affords. After all, what we go to the 
 theatre to see is — in the final analysis — acting. 
 Whatever we may like in the library, in the 
 theatre we prefer the plays which give most 
 scope to the actors. 
 
 " Exit-speech " is the name given to the final 
 words spoken by a character before he leaves 
 the stage after an important scene. Nowa- 
 days an exit-speech is generally a point of 
 
 * Compare Aristotle, ' Poetics,' 9 (145 1 b 38).
 
 88 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 one kind or another, rhetorical or jocular. In 
 Shakespeare's time the exit-speech very often 
 ended with a couplet, the rymes of which 
 were signals to the groundlings to be ready 
 with their applause. In the great period of 
 the Spanish drama, which was contemporary 
 with the Elizabethan drama of England, the 
 utility of the exit-speech was perfectly under- 
 stood, and in the 'Arte nuevo de hacer come- 
 dias,' in which Lope de Vega laid down pre- 
 cepts for the guidance of practical dramatists, he 
 advises the 'prentice playwright thus: "Adorn 
 the end of your scenes with some swelling 
 phrase, with some joke, with lines more care- 
 fully polished, so that the actor at his exit 
 does not leave the audience in ill-humor." In 
 the Greek drama the exit-speech is frequent. 
 In the ' Medea,' again, Jason's final words at 
 the end of the stormy scene with his wife have 
 all the characteristics of the exit - speech 
 (619-22) : — 
 
 aXX ovv f'yd) fiev dalfiovas ixapTvpofxai, 
 COS Trdvd' vnovpyeiv aol re Kal reKvois OeXo) " 
 (Tol S' ovK dpeaKei rdydd', aXX' aidaBLO. 
 cpiXovs aTrade'l. • Toiyap akyvvel liKiov. 
 
 [Yet I call the gods to witness that I seek to help 
 thee in all things and our children as well ; but thou
 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 89 
 
 carest nought for favors but spurnest thy friends in 
 wilfulness, and for this thou shalt have the greater 
 sorrow.] 
 
 An exit-speech also of the most approved 
 type is Medea's, when she leaves the stage 
 after the marvellously pathetic scene with her 
 children, and after the messenger has declared 
 the success of her scheme to kill her rival 
 (1244-50):— 
 
 ay' S rdXaiva ^alp ifjLTj, Xa/3e ilfj^os, 
 Xd/3', epne irpos /3aX/3iSa Xv7rr]pav 0iov, 
 Kal fif] KaKiaOfjs, fxrjK dvapvrjcrdjis reKvcov 
 ws cjiiXraB', as eTLKres ■ dXXa Tr]v8e ye 
 XaOov fipa'^elav rjpipav TTaibav cridev, 
 KaTTevra Bpijvei • Kal yap el KTevels (r(f)' opens 
 cptXoi y €(}>vcrav, Svcrrvx^rjS 5' eyu> yvvt). 
 
 [Come, thou daring hand of mine, grasp, grasp the 
 sword ! Put thyself at the start of a miserable life ; 
 and become not weak nor give thought to thy chil- 
 dren, how dear to thee, how thou didst give them 
 birth ! But forget thy children for this brief day, at 
 least, and then bewail them ; for even if thou goest 
 about to slay them, they were born into thy affection, 
 and I — a wretched woman !] 
 
 The complement of the exit -speech is the 
 device now known as " working up an entrance." 
 A leading actor likes to have his coming before 
 the audience for the first time in the play care-
 
 go ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 fully prepared and plainly announced, so that 
 expectancy may be aroused and recognition 
 may follow at once upon his appearance on 
 the stage. Every play-goer can recall instances 
 of the ingenuity with which the modern play- 
 wrights have been able to work up the en- 
 trance of important characters ; there is no 
 better example, perhaps, than the first appear- 
 ance of the heroine in 'Adrienne Lecouvreur,' 
 the drama devised for Rachel by Scribe and 
 M. Legouve. Now this working up an en- 
 trance for the chief persons of the play was 
 far more needful in the Greece of old than it 
 is in the Paris and in the New York of to-day, 
 for the Grecian theatres were many times the 
 size of ours, and the actors wore masks which 
 hid their features, and — so far as I know, at 
 least — there were no programs to aid in 
 identification. Therefore, we find that the 
 Greek dramatists were very careful to work 
 up the entrance even of unimportant charac- 
 ters. In the ' Medea,' once more, after the pro- 
 logue in which the nurse declares herself, no 
 person of the play comes on unannounced by 
 some one already on the stage ; and the ap- 
 pearance of Medea herself is worked up quite 
 in the most modern manner, her loud bewail- 
 ings off the stage being expounded by the nurse.
 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 9 1 
 
 The fact is that the psychology of the the- 
 atrical spectator is very much the same in all 
 climes and in all ages. The New York boy 
 who perches in the upper gallery of the Broad- 
 way Theatre, however deficient in intelligence 
 when compared with the citizen of Athens 
 seated on a marble bench in the beautiful 
 theatre of Dionysus, has needs like his in so 
 far as they are both play-goers. Both demand 
 clearness above all things ; both desire not to 
 be left in doubt as to what is going on before 
 them. For a man at the play, understanding 
 is the condition precedent of enjoyment. 
 
 It is greatly to be desired that some classical 
 scholar should familiarize himself with the 
 modern theatre, so that he might approach 
 the study of the drama of antiquity with a full 
 understanding of the present methods of the 
 same art. Much of the value of Patin's ' Tra- 
 giques Grecs ' is due to his knowledge of the 
 French theatre and to his constant use of the 
 modern stage for comparison with the ancient. 
 In this, as in other respects, Professor Mahaffy 
 has followed in Patin's footsteps. But no one 
 has yet done for the Greeks what the late M. 
 Goumy attempted to do for the Latins — to 
 explain the past in terms of the present. It 
 would be too much to say that M. Goumy,
 
 92 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 who died before he had half finished his task, 
 was wholly successful in finding modern equiv- 
 alents for ancient experiences. But ' Les La- 
 tins ' is a volume to be read wath refreshment 
 and stimulation ; and it is good for us to be told 
 that Caesar's 'Commentaries ' was really what 
 we Americans might call " a campaign auto- 
 biography," and that Cicero did not deliver 
 his orations as they have come down to us, 
 but " asked leave to print," so to speak, that he 
 might polish his periods at leisure. 
 
 Though I have neither the scholarship nor 
 the time to undertake the explanation of the 
 ancient drama by the modern theatre in the 
 method I have suggested, I can furnish a few 
 additional instances of parallelism perhaps not 
 unworthy of record. The likeness of the Greek 
 tragedy, with its appropriate music, its slow 
 and stately movement, and its use of local 
 legend, to the Wagnerian music-drama has been 
 dwelt on sufficiently ; and, even as I penned 
 these paragraphs, I found in the second number 
 of the new Revue de Paris an essay on the 
 specific resemblances of ' Die Walkiire ' to the 
 ' Antigone.' But less attention has been drawn 
 to a more recent return to Greek principles of 
 playmaking, Ibsen's presentation of only the 
 culminating point of the plot, and his concen-
 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 93 
 
 tration of all the interest of the action into its 
 compact climax, in which the * QEdipus Rex ' 
 itself is scarcely more skilfully contrived than 
 is * Ghosts.' 
 
 It may seem most irreverent to suggest a 
 similarity between a masterpiece of humor like 
 the 'Frogs' and an amusing modern burlesque 
 like the 'Adonis,' in which Mr. Dixey parodied 
 the peculiarities of Mr. Henry Irving, much 
 as some Athenian comedian must have mim- 
 icked the mannerisms of Euripides; but never- 
 theless the similarity of the two pieces is strik- 
 ing enough. Indeed, the difference between 
 'Adonis ' and the ' Frogs ' is due mainly to the 
 fact that the author of ' Adonis ' was only a 
 clever comic playwright, while the author of 
 the ' Frogs ' happened also to be a great poet — 
 just as it is also his poetic power which gives 
 Euripides his immeasurable superiority over 
 M. Sardou. In the ' Frogs,' for example, Bac- 
 chus, in the costume of Hercules, is like a 
 modern actor in classic attire, crowned with 
 the very latest style of stove-pipe hat ; and 
 when Bacchus appeals to his priest sitting of- 
 ficially in front of the stage, he is not unlike 
 the comedian of our time who holds a colloquy 
 with the leader of the band. I confess that 
 the comic servant, Xanthias, in the ' Frogs,'
 
 94 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 complaining that he is not allowed to complain, 
 reminds me of the comic servant, Greppo, in 
 the * Black Crook,' also involved in mysterious 
 adventures which he does not understand. 
 
 I wonder whether or not it was a tradition 
 of the Grecian theatres that the performer who 
 played Xanthias, or any other comic servant of 
 the sort, should wear many garments of con- 
 trasting colors, superimposed one on the other 
 so that he might excite the laughter of un- 
 thinking spectators by removing them one by 
 one. This "business" is traditional with the 
 Second Grave-digger in the 'Hamlet' of 
 Shakespeare, and with Jodelet in the ' Pre- 
 cieuses Ridicules' of Moliere; and it is derived 
 probably from some forgotten farce of the 
 Middle Ages, which in turn was possibly de- 
 scended from some Roman pantomime. Vis- 
 ible jests of this kind are very long-lived, and 
 no doubt many of them passed over from the 
 'LB.tin fabitlce Atella)ice to the Italian coinmedie 
 delV arte. 
 
 For the adapted comedies of Plautus and 
 Terence, with abundant Roman allusions flow- 
 ering out of Grecian plots, more or less skil- 
 fully transplanted, there are many modern 
 parallels. It is not at all uncommon to see 
 on the modern English-speaking stage a French
 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 95 
 
 or a German play, roughly twisted into con- 
 formity with the conditions of British or Amer- 
 ican life. They may be amusing, like Mr. 
 Augustin Daly's later adaptations from the 
 German, or they may be exciting like some of 
 his earlier adaptations from the French ; yet 
 there cannot but be always an obvious and 
 inevitable unreality in any drama merely de- 
 canted in this fashion. While the comedies 
 of Plautus may thus be likened, not unfairly, 
 to the modern English localized arrangements 
 of foreign plays, the skill with which the Latin 
 dramatist presented the every-day life of the 
 Roman household and market-place suggests 
 that his comedies may also be compared with 
 the amusing and broadly sketched pieces in 
 which Mr. Harrigan has most comically set 
 before us the characteristics of the polyglot 
 population of New York. 
 
 Perhaps no peculiarity of Greek comedy has 
 seemed stranger to latter-day commentators 
 than the parabasis ; and yet to discover mod- 
 ern equivalents even for this is not difficult. 
 I think it is even possible to derive from our 
 own experience the reason why the earlier 
 dramatists were moved to make use of this 
 device. The parabasis — so Miiller describes it 
 in the ' History of the Literature of Ancient
 
 g6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Greece (i., p. 401) — is "an address of the chorus 
 in the middle of the comedy"; and in it "the 
 poet makes his chorus speak of his own poet- 
 ical affairs, of the object and end of his pro- 
 ductions, of his services to the state, of his 
 relation to his rivals, and so forth." Then the 
 chorus sings a lyrical poem, and recites in tro- 
 chaic verse " some joking complaint, some 
 reproach against the city, some witty sally 
 against the people." It is this second part of 
 the parabasis that Professor Mahaff}', in his 
 * History of Greek Literature ' (i., chap, xx.) 
 likens to the "topical song" of the modern 
 burlesque, " which is always composed on cur- 
 rent events, and ha? verses added from week 
 to week, as new points of public interest crop 
 
 J) 
 
 up. 
 
 The first part of the parabasis, wherein the 
 poet makes the chorus his own mouthpiece, 
 and addresses the audience almost in his own 
 person, is very closely akin to the Elizabethan 
 prologue, in which the dramatist discussed the 
 play about to be performed, in which occasion- 
 ally he abused his rivals, and in which he some- 
 times vaunted himself. And here the prologue, 
 like the parabasis, performed a useful function ; 
 for as the psychology of the play-goer changes 
 but little through the ages, so also the psychol-
 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 97 
 
 ogy of the playwright is substantially the same 
 in Pcriclean Athens and in Elizabethan Lon- 
 don. Above all things, the spectator wants 
 to be able to understand what he is seeing, 
 and the dramatist wishes to have his work 
 seen from his own point of view. The play- 
 wright is glad to have the right of rising to a 
 personal explanation. Nowadays the novelist 
 and the poet can declare in a preface the code 
 by which they wish to be judged. The dram- 
 atist cannot avail himself of this privilege ; 
 and the prologue is the only preface he is per- 
 mitted. If he cannot get the ear of the public 
 for an explanation outside of his work, he must 
 perforce make this explanation a part of the 
 work itself, placing it either at the beginning, 
 as Ben Jonson did, or in the middle, as did 
 Aristophanes. 
 
 The frequency with which the prologue was 
 made to perform this function is well brought 
 out in 'A Study of the Prologue and Epilogue 
 in English Literature,' (by " G. S. B.," London, 
 1884), wherein it is shown that the prologue 
 was of real service to Ben Jonson, and that it 
 was useful even to Dryden, although he had 
 already other means of reaching the public ear. 
 The prologue and the epilogue still accom- 
 panied new plays at the end of the eighteenth
 
 98 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 centur}'-, although they had ceased to have any 
 close connection with the pieces before and 
 after which they were spoken. It is obvious 
 that the prologue and epilogue in Sheridan's 
 plays, for example, are mere survivals of an 
 outworn fashion. 
 
 Yet even in this century, when the dramatist 
 can call on the journalists to publish abroad 
 any declaration he may desire to make, there 
 are occasions when the temptation to expound 
 his own theories of his art inside the work of 
 art itself are too strong to be overcome. In 
 the 'Antony' of the elder Dumas, in the fourth 
 act, there is a discussion between Eugene and 
 the Baron de Marsanne about Romanticism ; 
 what is this but a prose parabasis cut into dia- 
 logue? And in the ' Denise ' of the younger 
 Dumas, the analysis of the thesis of the piece 
 by Thouvenin — in what manner does this dif- 
 fer essentially from the parabasis? So frequent 
 has been the use of a character like Thouvenin 
 by M. Dumas fils, and by certain of his con- 
 temporaries, that the French critics have been 
 forced to find a name for this new stage-type ; 
 they call the character who explains the play a 
 raisonnciir. K's, it happens, the delivery of the 
 parabasis is not the sole duty of the raisonne^ir, 
 for he performs other functions of the chorus,
 
 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN DRAMA 99 
 
 of which multiple personality he may be sup- 
 posed to be a condensation into a single per- 
 son. He listens to the talk of the hero and of 
 the heroine, taking the part of the cojifidant of 
 French tragedy (itself a feeble substitute for 
 the chorus of Greek tragedy) ; he asks the 
 proper questions to evoke the fullest expres- 
 sion of the hero's and the heroine's sentiments; 
 he is properly sympathetic; and he also serves 
 as a speaking-trumpet for the author, being 
 sometimes, as in ' Les Idees de Madame Au- 
 brey,' charged with the utterance of the final 
 moral. 
 
 To the ancient chorus and to the modern 
 raisonneiir there was even a medieval ana- 
 logue. In the interludes — which followed the 
 mysteries and the moralities, and which with 
 them prepared players and play-goers for the 
 coming of the dramatized chronicle and of the 
 romantic drama — "not infrequently," so Sy- 
 monds records in his ' Shakespeare's Predeces- 
 sors in the English Drama' (p. 176), "a Doctor, 
 surviving from the Expositor of the miracles, 
 interpreted the allegory as the action pro- 
 ceeded." 
 
 (1894.)
 
 TWO SCOTSMEN OF LETTERS
 
 TWO SCOTSMEN OF LETTERS 
 
 I.-MR. ANDREW LANG 
 
 The most lifelike photograph of a friend is 
 no more than a reminder of what we have 
 seen for ourselves, since the camera has neither 
 insight nor imagination ; a portrait by a true 
 artist may bring out qualities but doubtfully 
 glimpsed before, or it may even reveal depths 
 of character hitherto unsuspected. In one of 
 the London exhibitions during the season of 
 1885, amidst many a " portrait of a gentleman," 
 there was at least one portrait of a man — 
 nervous, significant, vital. At a glance it was 
 obvious that the man here depicted was a 
 gentleman and a scholar, although the picture 
 had none of the prim propriety of the ordinary 
 academic portrait. There was an air of dis- 
 tinction about the sitter, twisted around in 
 his chair, with his frankly humorous gaze. The 
 casual stranger whose eye might fall on the 
 painting could not but feel that the restless
 
 I04 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 attitude was inevitably characteristic, and he 
 could not but confess the charm of a most 
 interesting personality. And, indeed, Mr. 
 Richmond's picture of Mr. Andrew Lang 
 seems to me one of the most successful of 
 modern portraits. 
 
 Perhaps the first effect it makes on the be- 
 holder is to suggest the extreme cleverness 
 of its subject — an effect which may do an in- 
 justice to Mr. Lang, for cleverness is best as 
 an extra, as the superfluity of him who has 
 some quality other and better. Moliere was 
 not clever, and M. Sardou is clever beyond 
 belief. When cleverness is all a man's having, 
 though he make a brave show for a while, 
 he is poor indeed. Cleverness Mr. Lang has, 
 and a plethora of it; but he has also a richer 
 endowment. He may be called the Admira- 
 ble Crichton of modern letters ; and he is a 
 graduate of St. Andrew's, that ancient Scottish 
 university where the original Crichton was 
 once a student three centuries earlier. Thence 
 he went to Oxford, where there lingered 
 memories of Landor and Shelley, where he 
 took the Newdigate prize for poetry, and 
 where in due season he was elected a Fellow 
 of Merton, the college of Anthony Wood. 
 Herein, I think, we may grasp the clew to Mr.
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG 105 
 
 Lang's character, and to his career : he is a 
 Scotsman who has been tinctured by Oxford, 
 but who still grips his stony native land with 
 many a clinging radicle. 
 
 Mr. Andrew Lang and the late Robert Louis 
 Stevenson were for a while the two Scottish 
 chiefs of literature. Both lived out of Scotland, 
 yet both were loyal to the land of their birth, 
 and loved it with all the ardor of a good son's 
 love. Neither was in robust health, but there 
 was no taint of invalidism in the writings of 
 either, no hint of morbid complaint or of un- 
 wholesome self-compassion. Both were reso- 
 lutely optimistic, as becomes Scotchmen. Both 
 were critics, with sharp eyes for valuing, and 
 with a faculty of enthusiastic and appetizing 
 enjoyment of what is best. They had both 
 attempted fiction, and both belong to the ro- 
 mantic school. In differing degrees each was 
 a poet, and each was master of a prose than 
 which no better is written in our language 
 nowadays. Mr. Lang's style has not the tor- 
 tured felicity of Stevenson's ; its happiness 
 is easier and less wilful. The author of ' Let- 
 ters to Dead Authors ' is not an artificer of 
 cunning phrase like the author of ' Memories 
 and Portraits'; his style is not hand-made nor 
 the result of taking thought ; it grows more
 
 Io6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 of its own accord. The style of each is trans- 
 parent, but while Stevenson's is as hard as 
 crystal, Mr. Lang's is fluid like water ; it flows, 
 and sometimes it sings as it flows, like the 
 beautiful brooks he longs to linger beside, 
 changing with the sky and the rocks and the 
 trees, but always limpid and delightful. 
 
 American readers, annoyed at the sloven- 
 liness of most modern British essayists, are 
 struck by the transparent clearness of Mr. 
 Lang's style ; for though he was born north 
 of the Tweed his pages are spoiled by no Scot- 
 ticisms, and though he dwells by the banks of 
 the Thames they are disfigured by no Briti- 
 cisms. They are free from the doubtful Eng- 
 lish which has the " largest circulation in the 
 world." A constant perusal of the fine prose 
 of the great Frenchmen whom Mr. Lang ad- 
 mires and a devoted study of the great Greeks 
 whom he loves may have helped to give his 
 pages their indisputable ease. 
 
 Li his pellucid prose, as in his intellectual 
 alertness and in his lightness of touch, Mr. 
 Lang is rather French than English. He is a 
 nephew of Voltaire and a cousin of M. Jules 
 Lemaitre. As we read his graceful and ner- 
 vous sentences sometimes our ear catches an 
 echo of Thackeray's cadences ; and it was in
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG I07 
 
 France that Thackeray served his apprentice- 
 ship to the trade of author. Sometimes our 
 eye rejoices in the play of a humor always 
 lambent and often Lamb-like ; and it is per- 
 haps from Charles Lamb that Mr. Lang has 
 got the knack of the quotation held in solu- 
 tion. Like Dryden and Burke and Bagehot, 
 three masters of English prose, Mr. Lang 
 quotes abundantly and from a full memory, 
 and not always exactly. " Verify your quo- 
 tations " is not a warning that he has taken 
 to heart. The books from which he can draw 
 illustrations at will are numberless, and they 
 are to be found in every department of the 
 library. In Greek literature, and in French 
 as well as in English, he has the minute thor- 
 oughness of the scholar ; but his main read- 
 ing seems to have been afield, as happens 
 to every man who loves books, and who likes 
 to browse among them without let or hinder- 
 ance. 
 
 The equipment of a critic Mr. Lang has, and 
 the insight, and also the sympathy, without 
 which the two other needful qualities lose half 
 their value. There are limits to his sympathy, 
 and he tells us that he does " not care for Mr. 
 Gibbon except in his autobiography, nor for the 
 elegant plays of M. Racine, nor very much for
 
 loS ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Mr. William Wordsworth, though his' genius is 
 undeniable"; but the range of his knowledge 
 and of his understanding seems to me as wide 
 as that of any other contemporary British 
 critic. He is unfailing in affection for Homer, 
 Herodotus, Theocritus, and Lucian, for Vergil 
 and Horace, for Rabelais, Moliere, and Dumas, 
 for Shakespeare, Fielding, Miss Austen, and 
 Thackeray, for Scott and Burns. He delights 
 in the skittish writings of the hvely lady who 
 calls herself " Gyp," while for the psychologic 
 subtleties of M. Paul Bourget he cares as lit- 
 tle as does "Gyp" herself. He was prompt 
 in praise of the author of ' King Solomon's 
 Mines'; in fact, Mr. Haggard's tales of battle, 
 murder, and sudden death have found no 
 warmer eulogist than the author of ' Ballades 
 in Blue China.' 
 
 Longfellow declared that " many readers 
 judge of the power of a book by the shock it 
 gives their feelings, as some savage tribes de- 
 termine the power of muskets by their recoil ; 
 that being considered the best which fairly 
 prostrates the purchaser." Mr. Lang's taste is 
 too refined for this saying to be justly appli- 
 cable to him ; but he does not think the worse 
 of a book because it tells a tale of daring-do. 
 He is eager for a story of
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG 
 
 109 
 
 battles, sieges, fortunes 
 
 Of moving accidents by fiood and field, 
 Of hair -breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly- 
 breach. 
 
 He is quick to give a cordial greeting to a 
 traveller's history of ** antres vast and deserts 
 idle," of " Anthropophagi, and men whose heads 
 do grow beneath their shoulders." In other 
 words, Mr. Lang is a romanticist to the bitter 
 end. Broad as his sympathy is, it is not 
 broad enough to comprehend realism. He is 
 restive when realism is lauded. Unconscious- 
 ly, no doubt, he resents it a little; and he does 
 not quite understand it. Mr. Lang can enjoy 
 Rabelais, and praise him for the qualities which 
 make him great in spite of his wilful foulness; 
 but in M. Zola Mr. Lang sees little to com- 
 mend. Quite the most perfunctory essay of 
 Mr. Lang's that I ever read was one on the 
 author of * L'Assommoir,' which did but scant 
 justice to the puissant laborer who toiled un- 
 ceasingly on the massive edifice of the ' Rou- 
 gon-Macquart ' series, as mightily planned and 
 solid in structure as a medieval cathedral, and, 
 like it, disfigured and defiled by needless and 
 frequent indecencies. Tolerant towards most 
 literary developments, Mr. Lang is a little in- 
 tolerant towards the analysts. Amiel delights
 
 no ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 him not, nor Marie Bashkirtseff either ; and it 
 irks him to hear Ibsen praised, or Tolstoi, 
 though the pitiful figure of Anna Karenina 
 lingers in his memory. And as for Mr. How- 
 ells, it is hard to say whether it is as novelist 
 or critic that he irritates Mr. Lang more. Mr. 
 Howells once spoke of the critical essaylets 
 which issued monthly from the ' Editor's 
 Study ' as " arrows shot into the air in the 
 hope that they will come down somewhere and 
 hurt somebody." Enough of them have hit 
 Mr. Lang to make him look like St. Sebastian, 
 if only he had not plucked them out swiftly, 
 one by one, and sent them hurtling back across 
 the Atlantic. Fortunately, the injuries were 
 not fatal on either side of the water, and there 
 was no poison on the tips of the weapons to 
 rankle in the wounds. Sensitive as most Brit- 
 ish writers are to the darts of transatlantic 
 criticism, it has seemed to me sometimes that 
 Mr. Lang is even tenderer of skin than are 
 most of his fellow-sufferers. 
 
 The ocean that surges between Mr. Howells 
 and Mr. Lang is unfordable, and there is no hope 
 of a bridge. There is no common standing- 
 ground anywhere for those who hold fiction to 
 be primarily an amusement and those who be- 
 lieve that it ought to be chiefly a criticism of
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG III 
 
 life. The romanticist considers fiction as an art, 
 and as an art only, whilst the extreme realist 
 is inclined to look on it almost as a branch 
 of science. Kindly as Mr. Lang may be in his 
 reception of a realistic book, now and then, he 
 stands firmly on the platform of the extreme 
 romanticists. " Find forgetfulness of trouble, 
 and taste the anodyne of dreams — that is what 
 we desire " of a novel, he declares in his cordial 
 essay on Dumas. And in another paper he 
 calls again for a potion against insomnia : 
 
 Pour out the nepenthe, in short, and I shall not 
 ask if the cup be gold-chased by Mr. Stevenson, or a 
 buffalo-born beaker brought by Mr. Haggard from 
 Kakuana-land — the Baron of Bradwardine's Bear, or 
 ' The Cup of Hercules ' of Theophile Gautier, or mere- 
 ly a common cafe wineglass of M. Fortune du Bois- 
 gobey's or M. Xavier de Montepin's. If only the 
 nepenthe be foaming there — the delightful draught of 
 dear forgetfulness — the outside of the cup may take 
 care of itself; or, to drop metaphor, I shall not look 
 too closely at an author's manner and style, while he 
 entertains me in the dominion of dreams. 
 
 Here Mr. Lang is in accord with Merimee, 
 who wrote in 1865 that "there is at present 
 but one man of genius : it is Ponson du Ter- 
 rail . . . No one handles crime as he does, 
 nor assassination. J'cn fais mes dclicesr But
 
 112 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 M^rimee's humorous exaggeration is not in 
 accord with his own practice ; however abun- 
 dant in imaginative vigor his stories might 
 be, nothing could be more rigorously realistic 
 in treatment. Mr. Lang seems to me happiest 
 as a story-teller when his practice departs from 
 his theory. His longest story, the ' Mark of 
 Cain,' is as who should say a tale by M. Xavier 
 de Mont^pin, but by a Montepin who was a 
 Scotsman, and had been to Oxford, and did 
 not take himself quite seriously. Now, for a 
 romanticist not to take himself seriously is to 
 give up the fight before the battle is joined. 
 Mr. Lang has balladed the praises of " Miss 
 Braddon and Gaboriau," and he may be sure 
 that these masters of sensation believed in 
 themselves, else would they never have held 
 thousands breathless. If an author once lets 
 his readers suspect that he is only " making 
 believe," instantly he loses his grip on their 
 attention, and may as well put away the pup- 
 pets, since few spectators will care to wait till 
 the fall of the curtain. 
 
 The one fault that Mr. James found with 
 Trollope — that " he took a suicidal satisfaction 
 in reminding the reader that the story he was 
 telling was only, after all, a make - believe " — 
 Mr. Lang never commits of malice prepense ;
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG 1x3 
 
 but though he docs not confess this unpar- 
 donable sin in so many words, yet his tone, 
 his manner, his confidential approach, make 
 the confession for him, and readers find them- 
 selves glancing up from the printed page to 
 to see if the author has not his tongue in his 
 cheek or is not laughing in his sleeve. And 
 the crime is the more heinous in story-tell- 
 ing according to the romantic tradition than 
 in fiction of the realistic school. Mr. James 
 reminds us that " there are two kinds of taste 
 in the appreciation of imaginative literature 
 -7- the taste for emotions of surprise, and 
 the taste for emotions of recognition." It is 
 the latter that ' Barchester Towers ' gratifies, 
 and it is to the former that the ' Mark of 
 Cain ' appeals ; and the taste for the emotions 
 of surprise is not satisfied if it suspects the 
 writer of treating tragic moments with levity, 
 or even of being capable of such treatment. 
 But perhaps the real reason why a public that 
 accepted the tawdry ' Called Back' did not 
 take kindly to the ' Mark of Cain ' is that the 
 latter story was too clever by half — a thing 
 resented by most of those Avho share Mr. 
 Lang's taste for the emotions of surprise. 
 
 Perhaps the same criticism applies to some 
 of the stories in the collection called ' In
 
 114 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 the Wrong Paradise ' — to the Poc-hkc tale of 
 'A Cheap Negro,' for example. But others 
 of the stories in this volume, especially the 
 uncanny tales of spooks and of medicine- 
 men, are most delicious fooling — and fooling 
 founded on the impregnable rock of modern 
 science. What could be better in its way 
 than the ' Great Gladstone Myth ?' — wherein 
 the grand old man is resolved into his ele- 
 ments in the fashion familiar to students of 
 sun -myths. Equally amusing, and quite as 
 pregnant in suggestion, is the description of 
 the poor souls who found themselves each 
 ' In the Wrong Paradise ' — the scalped Scotch- 
 man dwelling with the Apaches in their happy 
 hunting-grounds, and the wretched cockney 
 esthete desperately out of place in the For- 
 tunate Islands of the Greeks. And in the 
 volume of pleasant papers on ' Books and 
 Bookmen ' there is an eery tale of painful 
 and humorous misadventure in * A Bookman's 
 Purgatory.' Akin to these in method, and 
 even superior to them in charm, is the story 
 of ' Prince Prigio,' which of all Mr, Lang's fic- 
 tions I like best, unhesitatingly proclaiming 
 it the most delightful of modern fairy-tales 
 since the ' Rose and the Ring ' ; and if any 
 one should tell me that he found no fun in
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG II5 
 
 the awful combat between the Firedrake and 
 the Remora, I should make answer that such 
 an one, waking or sleeping, does not deserve 
 ever to receive as a gift, or even as a loan, 
 the seven-leagued boots, the cap of darkness, 
 or the purse of Fortunatus — all properties of 
 fairy -lore with which. Prince Prigio was duly 
 accoutred. 
 
 From fairy -land to the doubtful region of 
 folk-lore is no seven-leagued stride, and Mr. 
 Lang is master in both territories. He stands 
 ready to trace the kinship of Barbarossa and 
 Barbe-bleue, and to insist that neither is a 
 child of the sun. In defence of his theories 
 Mr. Lang is armed to give battle to Profess- 
 or Max Miiller and his men ; and they find 
 him a redoubtable opponent, in no danger of 
 putting off the heavy armor of scholarship 
 because he has not proved it, and never with- 
 out a smooth stone in his scrip to cast full at 
 the forehead of his adversary. Lowell has 
 protested against that zeal which seeks to ex- 
 plain away every myth as a personification of 
 the dawn and the day. " There's not a sliver 
 left of Odin," he declared : 
 
 Or else the core his name enveloped 
 Was from a solar myth developed
 
 Il6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Which, hunted to its primal shoot, 
 Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root. 
 Thereby to instant death explaining 
 The little poetry remaining. 
 Try it with Zeus, 't is just the same; 
 The thing evades, we hug a name ; 
 Nay, scarcely that — perhaps a vapor 
 Born of some atmospheric caper. 
 
 Against the philologic school of mytholo- 
 gists of whom Professor Max Miiller is the 
 chief, Mr. Lang has led a revolt in behalf of an 
 anthropological explanation of those habits, 
 customs, beliefs, and legends for which the up- 
 holders of the sun-myth theory provided an 
 etymological interpretation. Mr. Lecky tells 
 us that invariably with increased education the 
 belief in fairies passes away, and " from the 
 uniformity of this decline, we infer that fairy- 
 tales are the normal product of a certain con- 
 dition of the imagination ; and this position is 
 raised to a moral certainty when we find that 
 the decline of fairy-tales is but one of a long 
 series of similar transformations." Inspired 
 by McLennan and Professor Tylor, and fol- 
 lowing Fontenelle, Mr. Lang has given battle 
 to those who maintain that the descriptions of 
 the elemental processes of nature developed 
 into myths, and who accept a personification
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG II7 
 
 of fire, storm, cloud, or lightning as the origin 
 of Apollo and his chariot, Thor and his ham- 
 mer, Cinderella and her slipper, and B'rer Rab- 
 bit and the tar-baby. 
 
 In the stead of the arbitrary interpretations 
 of the philologists, wherein scarcely any two 
 of them are agreed, Mr. Lang proffers an ex- 
 planation derived from a study of the history 
 of man and founded on the methods of com- 
 parative anthropology. He turns to account 
 the evolution of humanity from savagery to 
 civilization, and he examines the irrational 
 beliefs and absurd customs which survived in 
 Greece even in the days of Pericles by the aid 
 of a study of the beliefs and customs of sav- 
 age tribes still in the condition in which the 
 ancient Greeks had once been. Thus he is 
 ready to see in the snake-dance of the Moquis 
 of Arizona a possible help to the right un- 
 derstanding of a similar ceremony described 
 by Demosthenes. He seeks to show that in 
 savagery we have " an historical condition of 
 the human intellect to which the element in 
 myths, regarded by us as irrational," seems 
 rational enough. Further, he urges that as 
 savagery is a stage through which all civilized 
 races have passed, the universality of the 
 mythopcEic mental condition will explain not
 
 Il8 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 only the origin, but also the diffusion through- 
 out the world, of myths strangely alike one to 
 another. 
 
 That this ethnological hypothesis has gained 
 general acceptance, and placed the philologic 
 theory on the defensive, is due almost alto- 
 gether to the untiring advocacy of Mr, Lang. 
 His views have been presented modestly but 
 firmly and incessantly. He has prepared the 
 case himself, examined the witnesses, and 
 summed up for the plaintiff. And he is an 
 awkward antagonist, quick-witted and keen- 
 sighted, and heavy-laden with the results of 
 original anthropological investigation. He has 
 scholarship in the old sense of the word ; and 
 to this he adds the advantage of a memory 
 which retains every pertinent fact accumu- 
 lated during omnivorous reading over a mar- 
 vellously wide range of subjects. Most dis- 
 interested scholars have now accepted either 
 as a whole or in part the theory Mr. Lang has 
 set forth. 
 
 Of the scholarship which forms the solid 
 basis for Mr. Lang's scientific inquiry he has 
 given abundant evidence in his nervous prose 
 translations of the 'Odyssey' and the 'Iliad' 
 done in partnership with friends, in his refined 
 rendering of the ' Idyls ' of Theocritus, and
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG II9 
 
 in his fresh and fragrant version of that other 
 idyl, 'Aucassin and Nicolette.' His transla- 
 tions reveal an unusual union of scholarly ex- 
 actness with idiomatic vigor ; they are grace- 
 ful — almost the rarest quality of a translation 
 — and they are unfailingly poetic. Perhaps 
 an enforced quaintness, and an occasional 
 insistence on an archaic word, seem almost 
 like affectation, but this may be forgiven in 
 the charm and the felicity of the rendering as 
 a whole. The secret of this charm is to be 
 found, I think, in Mr. Lang's attitude towards 
 the authors he translates. To him Homer, 
 and Theocritus, and the old man who sang 
 of 'Aucassin and Nicolette,' are still living, 
 and their works are alive. Scholar as he is, 
 his interest is never grammatical or philo- 
 logical, but always literary and human. He 
 never regards these writings as verse to scan, 
 or as prose to parse, but poetry to be enjoyed. 
 As it happens, Mr. Lang has attempted no 
 long translations in verse, but some of his 
 briefer metrical attempts are almost as happy 
 as Longfellow's, than which there can hard- 
 ly be higher praise. No doubt the carrying 
 over of a lyric from one language to another 
 is an easier task than the transferring of an 
 epic, but nevertheless it is a feat many a
 
 120 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 minor poet has failed to accomplish. The 
 difficulty lies in the double duty of the trans- 
 lator to present the thought of his original 
 and to preserve the form, not sacrificing the 
 spirit, and at least suggesting the atmosphere. 
 Mr, Lang has given us the most satisfactory 
 version of Villon's ' Ballade of Dead Ladies ' 
 (although Rossetti attempted it earlier), and 
 of Clement Marot's ' Brother Lubin ' (although 
 both Longfellow and Bryant severally essayed 
 it, neglecting to retain the ballade form). 
 
 In his brightsome 'Ballades in Blue China,' 
 and in his brilliant * Rhymes a la Mode,' 
 Mr. Lang shows his mastery of the accom- 
 plishment of verse, and his skill in that de- 
 partment of poetry which seems easy and is 
 beset with danger. Voltaire tells us that 
 difficulty conquered in whatsoever form of art 
 is a large share of the merit ; and neither in 
 sonnet, nor ballade, nor other fixed form of 
 verse, has Mr. Lang shirked any difficulty. If 
 the game is worth the candle, Mrs. Battle is 
 right in insisting on the rigor of the game. 
 In his freer stanzas Mr. Lang has sometimes 
 something of the singing simplicity of Long- 
 fellow and Heine, where the music of the 
 verse sustains the emotion. In ' Twilight on 
 Tweed '—
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG 121 
 
 A mist of memory broods and floats. 
 
 The Border waters flow : 
 The air is full of ballad notes, 
 
 Borne out of long ago, 
 
 and in the ' Last Cast,' the angler's thoughts 
 wander to the rivers he has never fished, and 
 then go back to the streams of Scotland 
 again : 
 
 Unseen, Eurotas, southward steal. 
 Unknown, Alpheus, westward glide. 
 
 You never heard the ringing reel, 
 The music of the water-side ! 
 
 Though gods have walked your woods among, 
 Though nymphs have fled your banks along, 
 
 You speak not that familiar tongue 
 Tweed murmurs like ray cradle-song. 
 
 My cradle-song — nor other hymn 
 
 I'd choose, nor gentler requiem dear 
 
 Than Tweed's, that through death's twilight dim 
 Mourned in the last Minstrel's ear. 
 
 Mr. Lang has taken for an epigraph Mo- 
 liere's Ce ne sont point de grands vers pom- 
 peiix, inais de petit vers, yet he has at times 
 the gift of lofty lines. It is only fair to judge 
 a poet by his highest effort. In the case of 
 the present poet these seem to me to be two
 
 122 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 sonnets on Homer, of a sustained and noble 
 elevation. For love of Homer's heroine Mr. 
 Lang has written his longest poem, ' Helen 
 of Troy,' a brevet-epic. 
 
 The face that launch'd a thousand ships 
 And burnt the topless towers of Ilium 
 
 holds its fascination still across the centuries. 
 Nor is " Sweet Helen," as Faustus calls her, 
 the only lady of Mr. Lang's affections. He 
 has a wealth of platonic love for many a fair 
 dame (in poetry), and for many a damsel in 
 distress (in prose). I doubt if he would deny 
 his devotion to Beatrix Esmond, for whose 
 sake the author of the ' Faithful Fool ' (a 
 comedy once performed by Her Majesty's 
 Servants) broke his sword before his king. I 
 question whether he would not admit an affec- 
 tion for Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, nde Sharp, a 
 green-eyed lady who once acted Clytemnestra 
 at the Gaunt House theatricals. I know that 
 he confessed a fondness for Manon Lescaut, 
 a young person of reprehensible morals, who 
 lightly sinned in France and then died happily 
 in Louisiana. And I think that he is ready 
 to boast of his liking for Miss Annie P. Miller 
 of Schenectady, New York, an American girl 
 who was known to her intimates as " Daisy,"
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG 1 23 
 
 and who died in Rome after an imprudent 
 visit to the Colosseum by moonlight. 
 
 Mr. Lang has the same frank and sturdy- 
 love for literature that he has for some of its 
 captivating female figures. No reader of his 
 could be in doubt as to his ceaseless and loyal 
 study of Homer and Theocritus, of Rabelais 
 and Moliere, of Shakespeare and Thackeray. 
 And in sports, too, his tastes are as wholesome 
 and as abundant as his predilections in let- 
 ters. He cherishes the cricket of Oxford and 
 the golf of St. Andrews ; he follows with equal 
 zest trout- fishing and book- hunting. Than 
 this last there is indeed no better sport ; and 
 the poetic author of ' Books and Bookmen ' 
 has proved his interest in the bees of De 
 Thou as well as in those that made the hon- 
 ey of Hymettus. The original Crichton, we 
 may remember, sent an epistle in verse to 
 Aldus Manutius, the great printer -publisher 
 of Venice. 
 
 Mr. Lang is at his best when he writes 
 about the Scots and about the Greeks of old, 
 for these he knows and loves ; and perhaps he 
 appears to least advantage when he is writing 
 about the American writers of to-day, since 
 these he neither likes nor cares to know — 
 and unsympathetic criticism is foredoomed to
 
 124 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 sterility. The native Americans Mr. Lang is 
 most familiar with are the red men, and he is 
 fonder of them, I fancy, than he is of the pale 
 faces who have built towns by the banks of 
 the streams over which Uncas and Hard-Heart 
 skilfully propelled their birch - bark canoes. 
 It might have been better, therefore, had he 
 not laid himself open to Mr. Fiske's rebuke 
 for the " impatient contempt " with which he 
 chose to speak of a man of Lewis H. Morgan's 
 calibre ; and if he had not permitted himself 
 a doubtfully courteous attack on Professor Boy- 
 esen. And a more careful understanding of 
 American literary history would have saved 
 Mr. Lang from that farewell to Poe, in the 
 ' Letters to Dead Authors,' in which the 
 author of the ' Raven ' is hailed as " a gentle- 
 man among canaille ! " — surely as strange an 
 opinion as one can find in all the long annals 
 of criticism. 
 
 ' Letters to Dead Authors ' is one of the 
 minor masterpieces of letters, the keenest and 
 cleverest volume of playful criticism since the 
 ' Fable for Critics ' was published twoscore 
 years ago, as that in its turn was the brightest 
 book of the kind since ' Rejected Addresses.' 
 But I am afraid to linger over this delight- 
 ful tome for fear I may laud it extravagantly.
 
 MR, ANDREW LANG 125 
 
 The ' Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope,' a mar- 
 vel of parody with many lines as good as the 
 one which tells the poet that 
 
 Dunces edit him whom dunces feared ! 
 
 the letter to " Monsieur de Moliere, Valet-de- 
 Chambre du Roi," with its delicious sugges- 
 tion that if the great and sad French humorist 
 were alive to-day he might write a new com- 
 edy on les Holier ist es ; the communication to 
 Herodotus, with its learned fooling; the mis- 
 sive to Alexandre Dumas, with its full current 
 of hearty admiration and enjoyment — these 
 and many another I dare not dwell on, because, 
 as I read in the letter to W M. Thackeray, 
 " there are many things that stand in the way 
 of the critic when he has a mind to praise the 
 living." Quite as welcome as these are some 
 of the essays in epistolary parody to be found 
 in ' Old Friend.' 
 
 Of necessity every man has the defects of 
 his qualities, and the very success of Mr. 
 Lang's briefer essays tends to prevent his 
 attempting longer labors. He gets most out 
 of a subject which may be treated on the 
 instalment plan, when every portion is com- 
 plete in itself, and yet unites with the oth- 
 ers to form a complete whole. A book like
 
 126 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 ' Letters to Dead Authors,' which is avowedly 
 a collection of separable essays, has not only 
 a broader outlook but also a stronger unity 
 than the pleasantly discursive volume on Ox- 
 ford, for example. A collection of Tanagra 
 figurines, however, is in no wise inferior in 
 interest to a colossal statue ; art has nothing 
 to do with mere bulk, nor has literature. Mr. 
 Lang cultivates to best advantage ground 
 which can most easily be cut into allotments. 
 
 It is to be noted also that despite his ex- 
 treme multifariousness there are certain seg- 
 ments of life and of literature in which Mr. 
 Lang takes little interest or none.* Though 
 he once wrote a poem on General Gordon, 
 and though he is ever chaffing Mr. Gladstone, 
 it is obvious that he cares not for the con- 
 tentions of politics ; and apparently he cares 
 as little for the disputes of theology, although 
 he did. write a chance article on ' Robert 
 Elsmere.' For art, music, and the drama he 
 reveals no natural inclination. We may guess 
 that it has been his fate to serve as art-critic, 
 toiling in the galleries yearly ; but we can 
 discover no signs of any real understanding 
 of art, either pictorial or plastic, nor of any 
 aptitude for it. Of music he says almost 
 nothing, and he seems to know as little about
 
 MR. ANDREW LANG 1 27 
 
 it as we know about the song the Syrens sang. 
 And as for the acted drama, I am afraid 
 that he is a heretic, even as Lamb was heret- 
 ical in regard to the performance of Shake- 
 speare's plays. I hesitate to assert, though 
 I am inclined to believe, that to him ' As You 
 Like It ' and ' Much Ado About Nothing ' 
 are comedies to be read in the fields or by 
 the fireside, rather than stage -plays to be 
 acted before the footlights. 
 
 (1893.)
 
 II.— MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 The news of the death of Robert Louis 
 Stevenson in that far-off Pacific isle, removed 
 by half a continent from his native Scotland, 
 gives a sudden shock to all Avho care for our 
 later literature ; and it has left us, I think, 
 with a sense of personal loss, as though he had 
 died with whom we had held delightful inter- 
 course in the past, and with whom we could 
 hope to have many another stimulating talk 
 in the future. This feeling is doubled and far 
 deeper in those of us who had the privilege of 
 knowing Stevenson, even if our acquaintance, 
 with him were as slight as mine — and I can 
 treasure the precious memory of but a single 
 long afternoon on the same sofa with him, in 
 the dingy back smoking - room of the Savile 
 Club, one dismal day of a London summer 
 nearly ten years ago. Chiefly we talked of 
 our craft, of the art of story - telling, of the 
 technic of play-making. I remember distinct- 
 ly his hearty praise of Mark Twain's ' Huckle-
 
 MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1 29 
 
 berry Finn,' and his cordial belief that it was 
 a great book, riper in art and ethically richer 
 than the * Tom Sawyer ' of which it is the 
 sequel. I recall the courtesy and the frank- 
 ness with which he gave me his opinion of a 
 tale of mine he happened to have read recent- 
 ly. Frankness, indeed, was a constant quality 
 of his conversation ; and perhaps his spoken 
 word was fresher and freer than his written 
 lines — it could not but be less premeditated. 
 With a very strong individuality, there was no 
 pose in his manner, no affectation, no airs and 
 graces. He looked unlike other men, with his 
 tall thin figure, his long thin face, his nervous 
 thin hands. As one's eyes first fell on him 
 one felt that he was somebody, and not any- 
 body at random. If one had dropped into 
 talk with him by chance in a train or in a 
 doctor's waiting-room, one could not have 
 resisted the impress of his personality. He 
 talked well, although not perhaps with the 
 spontaneous many-sidedness of his friend 
 Fleeming Jenkin (whom he introduced as 
 Cockshot in his own essay on ' Talk and 
 Talkers '). He talked well, standing up square- 
 ly against the other party to the conversation, 
 holding his own stoutly, expressing his views 
 in straightforward fashion, with no beating
 
 130 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 about the bush, no questing of epigram, no 
 strain of phrase-making. He talked well, as 
 he wrote well, because he had something to 
 say, and because he had taught himself how 
 best to say it. 
 
 In the writing of the author, as in the talk 
 of the man himself, perhaps the two salient 
 qualities were vigor and variety. The vigor 
 every one has felt who chances to have read a 
 single book of Stevenson's — and who of us, 
 having read any one of them, has not sat him- 
 self down to read them all ? The variety is 
 equally evident if we look down the long list 
 of his works — and the list is really very long 
 indeed, when we remember that the books on 
 it were written, all of them, by a dying man, 
 who finally departed this life before he was 
 fifty. He was a poet of distinction, although 
 not of high achievement. Although no single 
 one of his poems has been taken home to the 
 hearts of the people of his speech, yet ' A 
 Child's Garden of Verses' is as unlike any 
 r}^mes of earlier poets as any volume of verse 
 of this last quarter of the nineteenth century. 
 He was a writer of travel-sketches, and here 
 again he revealed the same originality ; and 
 he was able to describe ' Edinburgh,' his boy- 
 hood's home, with the same freedom from
 
 MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 131 
 
 staleness, the same eschewal of the common- 
 place, that gave freshness to ' Silverado Squat- 
 ters ;' while in * Travels with a Donkey ' and 
 'An Inland Voyage' he achieved a detach- 
 ment of the man from his circumstances 
 unattempted by anybody before, excepting 
 only the author of ' Walden.' He was a biog- 
 rapher and a literary critic, and although his 
 life of ' Fleeming Jenkin ' is the least suc- 
 cessful of his works, being marred by a hint 
 of a patronizing manner entirely unbecoming 
 towards a man of the character and accomplish- 
 ment of " The Flamer," still the task was done 
 in workmanlike fashion ; and Stevenson's other 
 sketches of authors in his ' Familiar Studies 
 of Men and Books,' and elsewhere, are free 
 from this defect. It is to be noted here that 
 he was one of the rare British critics capable 
 of appreciating Walt Whitman with sanity, 
 while another American, Thoreau, was per- 
 haps almost the strongest of all the influences 
 which moulded him — quite the strongest after 
 Scott, I think. He was an essayist, and 
 among the most piquant and individual of his 
 time, an essayist of the race and lineage of 
 Montaigne, of Lamb, and of Lowell, interested 
 in life as much as in literature, seeing for him- 
 self, always inquiring and always acquisitive.
 
 132 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 having philosophical standards of his own, and 
 using them to measure men and manners, and 
 yet never intolerant, though ever sincere. He 
 was a dramatist at least one of whose plays, 
 'Deacon Brodie,'was fairly successful in with- 
 standing the touchstone test of the actual 
 theatre ; yet it must be admitted that his 
 dramas, written, all of them, in conjunction 
 with Mr. W. E. Henley, have rather the 
 robustious manner of that burly writer than 
 the commingled delicacy and force of Steven- 
 son's other work. And, lastly, he was also a 
 story-teller. 
 
 It is as a story-teller that he won his widest 
 triumphs; it is as a story-teller that he is 
 most likely to linger on the shelves of our 
 grandchildren's libraries ; it was as a story- 
 teller that he revealed his greatest variety. 
 First and last he tried his hand at four kinds 
 of fiction. In the ' New Arabian Nights,' 
 with its sequel, the ' Dynamiter,' he revived 
 the tale of fantasy with an inventive ingenuity 
 unequalled certainly since Poe published the 
 ' Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque.' 
 In the ' Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
 Hyde,' and in ' Markheim,' he gave us the 
 strongest stories of introspection and imagi- 
 nation since Hawthorne's ' Scarlet Letter ' and
 
 MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 133 
 
 ' Marble Faun.' In ' Kidnapped ' and in 
 ' David Balfour ' and in the ' Master of Bal- 
 lantrae ' he presented us with the most vivid 
 and actual of Scotch romances since Scott 
 came home from vacant exile to die at Abbots- 
 ford. And in the * Wrecker ' and certain of 
 its fellows he tried, not without a large measure 
 of success, to varnish with sheer art the vulgar 
 detective-story, and to give a tincture of litera- 
 ture to the tale of crime committed and the 
 secret ferreted out at last. And even now, 
 though it has been easy to show that as a 
 teller of tales Stevenson's versatility has thus 
 four phases, ' Treasure Island ' has to be left 
 out of the account, simply because it refuses 
 to classify itself with the others — perhaps be- 
 cause it prefers to take its chances with ' Rob- 
 inson Crusoe.' 
 
 Stevenson had his theory of fiction, and his 
 practice was like his preaching — which is an- 
 other proof of his originality. In the evolu- 
 tion of the modern novel from the primitive 
 romance, in the progress first from the Impos- 
 sible to the Improbable, and then from the 
 Probable to the Inevitable, he refused to go to 
 the end. 
 
 He preferred the Improbable to the Inevi- 
 table. He was a romanticist to the backbone,
 
 134 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 a reactionary, so those of us think who most 
 relish in literature the essence of actual life. 
 But though he fought for his own hand, and 
 defended his own doctrine stanchly, with char- 
 acteristic good faith he tried to understand 
 the point of view of those with whom he con- 
 tended. Himself liking the dramatic novel, 
 as he called it, the bold romance wherein is 
 set forth the strife of passionate character 
 against passionate character, he did not ap- 
 prove of Mr. Henry James's habit of keeping 
 the sec ne-a-f aire behind closed doors. Yet in 
 his reply to Mr. James's paper on the ' Art of 
 Fiction,' a reply which he modestly entitled 
 *A Humble Remonstrance,' he combated the 
 views of the author of ' Daisy Miller ' with the 
 utmost courtesy ; and in a postscript to the 
 same paper he recorded his dissent from what 
 he called the "narrow convictions" of Mr, 
 Howells; but he seized the occasion to declare 
 the author of ' Silas Lapham ' to be " a poet, a 
 finished artist, a man in love with the ap- 
 pearance of life, a cunning reader of the 
 mind." 
 
 Being a Scotsman, Stevenson was nearer to 
 the American than the Englishman can be, 
 and he had a quicker willingness to under- 
 stand the American character. As a Scots-
 
 MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 135 
 
 man, also, he had keener artistic perceptions 
 than an Englishman is likely to have. He 
 was not only a born story-teller, as Scott w^as, 
 but he was also a master of the craft, a loving, 
 devoted, untiring student of the art, which 
 Scott was not. He never attained to the 
 mastery of form which Guy de Maupassant 
 derived as a tradition from the French classics ; 
 his stories are often straggling. And he had 
 not the relish for fresh technicalities which is 
 one of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's peculiarities. I 
 remember Fleeming Jenkin telling me how 
 his sons, who had sailed a boat from their 
 earliest youth, were sorely puzzled by the im- 
 possible manoeuvres of the ship in * Treasure 
 Island,' and how they came to their father 
 despairingly to declare that " this never hap- 
 pened, did it? It couldn't, could it?" 
 
 Not only these deficiencies have been dwelt 
 on, but the absence has been pointed out of 
 what is known as the " female interest " in 
 his stories; and it is a fact that almost the 
 only satisfactory and enticing petticoats of Mr. 
 Stevenson's draping are in ' David Balfour.' 
 But these defects are as naught against the 
 narrative skill of Stevenson, his unfailing fer- 
 tility of invention, his firm grasp of character, 
 his insight into the springs of human nature,
 
 136 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 and, above all, his contagious interest in the 
 tale he is telling. 
 
 Whether it is a tale he is telling, or a drama 
 with its swift sharp dialogue, or an essay ram- 
 bling and ambling skilfully to its unseen end, 
 the style is always the style of a man who has 
 learnt how to make words bend to his bidding. 
 He writes as one to whom the parts of speech 
 must needs obey. He had a picked vocabu- 
 lary at his command, and he was ever on the 
 watch for the unexpected phrase. He strove 
 incessantly to escape from the hackneyed form 
 of words, and cut-and-dried commonplaces of 
 speech — and no doubt the effort is evident 
 sometimes, although the instances are rare 
 enough. There is at times, it is true, more 
 than a hint of preciousness, but he never fell 
 into the self-consciousness which marred many 
 of the late Mr. Walter Pater's periods. ' Prince 
 Otto,' written obviously under the influence 
 of Mr. George Meredith, had more of these 
 aniline patches, as it was also the feeblest of 
 his fictions. The open letter on Father Da- 
 mien, for example, had a sturdy directness 
 of statement which suggested Walt Whitman 
 again. 
 
 The impression of mere dilettante idling 
 which one may get at first from some of the
 
 MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1 37 
 
 earlier essays is evanescent. As Mr. James 
 put it, much as Stevenson "cares for his phrase, 
 he cares more for Hfe, and for a certain tran- 
 scendently lovable part of it." And herein Mr. 
 James saw " the respectable, desirable moral." 
 To me, at least, there was no need to seek a 
 moral between the lines, for was not Steven- 
 son a true Scotchman, and could he ever for- 
 get the chief end of man ? Only a Scotsman 
 could have written the ' Strange Case of Dr. 
 Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' as only a New-Eng- 
 lander could have written the ' Scarlet Letter.' 
 There is an inheritance from the Covenanters 
 and a memory of the Shorter Catechism in 
 Stevenson's bending and twisting the dark 
 problems of our common humanity to serve 
 as the core of his tales. 
 
 It is curious that a writer so independent as 
 Stevenson and so various should have been 
 tempted so often into collaboration ; but it is 
 a fact that no man of letters of our time and 
 our language has taken more literary partners. 
 With Mr. W. E. Henley he composed at least 
 four plays, and they are to be set down rather 
 to Mr. Henley's credit, as I have suggested, 
 than to Stevenson's. With Mrs. Stevenson he 
 wrote the ' Dynamiter ;' and with her son, Mr. 
 Lloyd Osbourne, he told three tales, the ' Wrong
 
 138 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Box,' the 'Wrecker,' and the 'Ebb-Tide,' in 
 which we find a more open humor than in his 
 other stories. But, as those only know who 
 have themselves collaborated in good faith, it 
 is always impossible to disentangle the contri- 
 bution of one partner from that of the other, 
 if, indeed, there has been not a mere mechan- 
 ical mixture, but a true chemical union. What- 
 ever associates Stevenson had now and again, 
 he was the senior partner always, and it was 
 his trade-mark that warranted the goods of 
 the firm. 
 
 (1894.)
 
 ASPECTS OF FICTION
 
 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 I —THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 
 
 Whenever the annalist of English litera- 
 ture shall record the history of the year 1894, 
 one of the most curious items he will have to 
 set down in his account cannot but be the 
 sudden success achieved in fiction by a mature 
 practitioner of another art. To take all hearts 
 by storm, Trilby had only to appear, and no 
 sooner did she show herself than hundreds of 
 thousands of readers lay prostrate at her in- 
 comparable feet. Irresistible as was Mr. Du 
 Maurier's charming heroine, and however ac- 
 ceptable the tale of Trilby's misadventures 
 may be as a reproduction of actual life, it is 
 not a masterpiece of narrative art. Delightful 
 as it is, full as it is of the freshness of youth 
 and of the joy of living, it could easily be torn 
 to pieces, as a story merely, were any critic 
 hard-hearted enough for the hateful task. No 
 one knows better than Mr. Du Maurier that
 
 142 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 his unpretentious romance is not savaniment 
 filtf, as he might say himself. He has not 
 studied fiction as an art diligently from his 
 youth up ; and it was late in life, and almost 
 by accident, that he discovered his ownership 
 of the gift of story-telling. 
 
 The gift of story-telling ! This it is which 
 Mr. Du Maurier has, and which he obviously 
 did not know he had, or he would have re- 
 vealed it earlier in his career. It is this gift 
 of story-telling which Mr. Du Maurier has un- 
 expectedly found himself to possess in a high 
 degree that enables him so to enchant us with 
 his tale that we overlook all the evidences of 
 his inexpertness as a maker of romances. It 
 is this native faculty of narrative which the 
 writer of fiction must needs have as a condi- 
 tion precedent to the practice of his craft, and 
 without some small portion of which the con- 
 scious art of the most highly trained novelist 
 is of no avail. 
 
 This gift of story-telling can exist indepen- 
 dently of any other faculty. It may be all 
 that its possessor has. He might be wholly 
 without any of the qualifications of the litera- 
 tor; he might lack education and intelligence; 
 he might have no knowledge of the world, no 
 experience of life, and no insight into charac-
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 1 43 
 
 ter ; he might be devoid of style, and even of 
 grammar ; — all these deficiencies are as nothing 
 if only he have the gift of story-telling. With- 
 out that, he may have all the other qualifica- 
 tions and still fail as a writer of fiction. With 
 that, even though without them, he may make 
 sure of an audience whenever and wherever he 
 shall choose to take up his tale. 
 
 In so far as the gift of story-telling exists in- 
 dependently, it is like the ability to make an 
 effective speech, the knack of writing an acta- 
 ble play, the power of acquiring money ; and 
 its possession is no proof whatever that the 
 possessor is abler than his fellows except in 
 that one direction. That a man succeeds in 
 anything is evidence that he had not mischos- 
 en his calling; that whatever his general in- 
 telligence may be, and however slight it may 
 be, he has at least a full share of the special 
 intelligence needed in the art in question (be 
 that only the humble art of making money). 
 Here we have an explanation of the surprise 
 which has shocked us often on meeting the 
 maker of an immense fortune when he revealed 
 himself as a man of no great intelligence. It 
 accounts for the sharp disappointment we have 
 felt on finding that the musician, the painter, 
 the tragedian of high rank in his profession
 
 144 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 may be a man of no more than ordinary intel- 
 lectual force. 
 
 A chance remark of a distinguished French 
 comedian first suggested to me this simple ex- 
 planation. I had met a member of the com- 
 pany, and I had found him almost stupid, 
 although as a performer he was more than 
 acceptable ; and I asked my friend how this 
 could be, that so dull a man could be so good 
 an actor. He shrugged his shoulders and 
 smiled, and answered: "Why not? It is just 
 the same in the other arts." I was forced to 
 admit that I had known musicians also who 
 had nothing to recommend them but their 
 music. " Painters too," he returned. " Look 
 
 at M , the greatest painter we have, and 
 
 he's an old chump !" for so I venture freely 
 to render the untranslatable French phrase 
 vieille ganache. " It is the same in all the 
 arts : to succeed in any of them one needs the 
 intelligence of that art — one doesn't need any 
 other intelligence." 
 
 A further consideration has led me to make 
 a threefold classification of successful actors — 
 first, those who have the histrionic faculty and 
 nothing else ; second, those who are intelligent, 
 and who make their intelligence a substitute 
 for the natural gift ; and third, those few who,
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 145 
 
 besides being born actors, are also men of in- 
 tellect and character. Charles Lamb's friend 
 Munden may be taken as the type of the actor 
 who is an actor only. Munden must have been 
 a great comedian ; but it is only as a comedian 
 that he was great ; in the ordinary relations of 
 life he was a very ordinary man. Macready, 
 on the other hand, is an instance of the suc- 
 cess with which a deficiency of the native his- 
 trionic faculty can be supplemented by force 
 of character and by general intelligence. Ma- 
 cready was not a born actor ; he was a made 
 actor. Lewes — than whom there is no shrewder 
 English dramatic critic — declares his belief that 
 Macready would have made his way to the 
 front either at the bar or in the Church quite 
 as well as he did on the stage. But v/ho could 
 imagine Munden in any other calling than the 
 comedian's? 
 
 A large majority of the actors of any time 
 belong to the first of these classes ; they act 
 because " it is their nature to "; their readings 
 and their gestures are right more often than 
 not from unconscious intuition, not from any 
 reason they could give. Smaller and yet al- 
 ways well represented is the second division, 
 men and women of little natural endowment 
 for the theatre, making up for this deficiency
 
 146 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 by exceeding carefulness, by conscientious 
 study, by sheer force of determination. These 
 are the performers who are coldly praised as 
 "scholarly." In London I once asked a friend 
 who really understands the theatre what sort 
 of an actor so-and-so was. " So-and-so ?" he 
 answered ; " he is a most scholarly actor, un- 
 derstanding his art thoroughly ; but sooner 
 than see him act, I'd rather be all alone by 
 myself in a dark room !" 
 
 The third class, consisting of those who have 
 intellect and character and culture as well as a 
 natural gift for their vocation, is as rare on the 
 stage as it is in the studio or in the library ; it 
 must always be very rare everywhere. The 
 typical actor having this double endowment 
 was David Garrick, who was at once the first 
 tragedian of his time and the first comedian, 
 who v/as the foremost manager and one of the 
 leading dramatists, who wrote delightful light 
 verse, and who held his own as a talker with 
 the best men of The Club, and who was alto- 
 gether the marvel of the stage. In our own 
 days it is not difficult to designate actors who 
 have not only the histrionic faculty in a very 
 high degree, but who have also, like Garrick, a 
 full share of culture and character and intel- 
 lect. Mr. Joseph Jefferson here in America,
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 1 47 
 
 M. Coquelin in Paris, Herr Barnay in Berlin — 
 these are among the first names that now come 
 to mind. 
 
 A triple classification like this here attempted 
 for actors can be made for all other artists — for 
 painters, for sculptors, and for architects, for 
 orators, for poets, and for dramatists. All fall 
 into the three divisions — those with the special 
 temperament, those with general ability, and 
 the scanty few who have both the general abil- 
 ity and the special temperament. Turner, for 
 example, was born to be a painter, and he knew 
 nothing but how to paint ; Washington AU- 
 ston made himself a painter by indomitable per- 
 severance ; while Michael Angelo had ability 
 of many kinds, and in a high degree. To turn 
 from one art to another, Shell was a born 
 speech-maker, and Whitfield had the same gift 
 of eloquence, but neither of them had anything 
 to say which has survived ; while Burke was 
 the profoundest political thinker of his cen- 
 tury, yet he had so little of the natural gift of 
 the orator that his delivery of the speeches we 
 still study emptied the House of Commons. 
 Strangely infrequent is the power of impress- 
 ing an immediate audience with words that 
 will also abide after the interest of the occa- 
 sion has departed. Daniel Webster achieved
 
 I4S ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 this triumph more than once, though he never 
 equalled the pregnant simplicity of Lincoln's 
 Gettysburg speech, which carried away the 
 listening thousands on the battle-field then, 
 and now is cherished in the hundreds of thou- 
 sands of memories. 
 
 Among the dramatists the second of these 
 three classes is very small indeed. In the 
 making of a play to please the broad public 
 (to which the dramatist must always appeal), 
 temperament counts for far more than culture. 
 Without the inborn dramaturgic faculty the 
 ablest man of letters finds himself absolutely 
 at a loss. This dramaturgic faculty is wholly 
 distinct from literar}^ ability ; and it sometimes 
 is to be found in the possession of men having 
 little or no tincture of literature. And this is 
 why critics, trained to appreciate purely literary 
 qualities, so often fail wholly to understand the 
 success of a popular play, the literary defects 
 of which are too obvious; this is why they are 
 so often forced to wonder at the failure of the 
 brilliantly written comedy of a man of letters 
 who happens to be without the dramatic tem- 
 perament. It is the born playwright who has 
 interested the broad public at all times; he has 
 interested it none the less when he chanced 
 also to have literature. As a substitute for
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING I49 
 
 the specific gift literary art was inadmissible, 
 but as a supplement it was welcome. It is 
 style alone that survives; and so most of the 
 plays of the past which had the widest popu- 
 larity have sunk out of sight, and their makers' 
 names are forgotten. 
 
 Lamb calls Heywood a "prose Shake- 
 speare ;" and of all the early Elizabethan 
 dramatists none was more acceptable to the 
 play-goers of the period than Fleywood ; he 
 had the dramaturgic faculty, he was a born 
 playwright, but it was only now and again 
 that he rose to the level of literature. Ben 
 Jonson sought to make up for his lack of the 
 natural gift by scholarship and energy and 
 toil ; and in most cases he had his labor for 
 his pains, and he took his pay in contempt for 
 those who refused to be amused by his hard 
 work. Shakespeare had the native endow- 
 ment, and he was the best " Shakescene of 
 them all " — the most popular playwright of 
 his time. That he was the hack-dramatist of 
 his theatre, patching up old plays to tempt 
 the groundlings, and knowing every trick of 
 the trade and up to every device of the craft, 
 did not prevent him from being also the great- 
 est of English poets. But it is not the abiding 
 beauty of his verse, it is not his profound
 
 150 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 insight into human recognized character, it is 
 his native gift of play-making by contemporary 
 play-goers which keeps a third of his come- 
 dies and tragedies on the boards now nearly 
 three hundred years after his death. 
 
 Just as one man succeeds in the theatre 
 because he is a born playwright, despite his 
 deficiency in all other qualities, so another 
 man wins his way as a poet because he is a 
 born lyrist. If he have but the gift of song, 
 we have no right to expect from him any- 
 thing else. From a songster it is absurd to 
 demand thought ; if he but give us melody, 
 that is enough. A poet may be a literary vir- 
 tuoso of incomparable technic, like Theophile 
 Gautier, for example — a surpassingly skilful 
 artist in words, and quite incapable of any- 
 thing fairly to be called an original thought. 
 His verse may be a marvellous instrument for 
 the reproduction of tones and tints and deli- 
 cate shades of sensation and emotion, and he 
 himself may have a small mind and a little 
 soul. There are those who have proclaimed 
 Wordsworth to be a thinker as well as a poet, 
 but they would be daring indeed who should 
 set up such a claim for Tennyson, than whom 
 the literary history of England records no 
 more accomplished master of the art of verse.
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 151 
 
 Yet the l^ate poet-laureate eagerly assimilated 
 much of the best thought of his time, and 
 thus nourished his stanzas and gave them 
 substance and solidity. But the French poet 
 who was Tennyson's contemporary and rival 
 was less receptive ; it might almost be said 
 that Victor Hugo was as impervious to 
 thought as he was to humor. He was a singer 
 of lyrics, a painter of pictures in rhyme ; just 
 a poet and nothing else. As one of the acutest 
 of recent French critics, M. Jules Lemaitre, 
 has put it, compactly, " A man for whom 
 Robespierre, Saint-Just, and even Hebert and 
 Marat, are giants, for whom Bossuet and De 
 Maistre are odious monsters, and for whom 
 Nisard and M^rimee are imbeciles, this man 
 may have genius, but, beyond all question, 
 genius is all he has." And yet no one has 
 been ampler than M, Lemaitre in praise of 
 Hugo as a poet pure and simple. The author 
 of ' Odes et Ballades ' was the greatest of French 
 lyrists, making a stubborn and rebellious lan- 
 guage soar and sing, and doing this easily, 
 abundantly, unceasingly. 
 
 It was the gift of poetry that Hugo had, 
 and Tennyson, just as Munden had the gift of 
 comedy, as Sheil had the gift of eloquence, as 
 Turner had the gift of painting — just as Mr.
 
 152 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Du Maun'er has the gift of story-telling. No 
 doubt Mr. Du Maurier has other qualities also 
 — a pleasant humor, for example, and broad 
 sympathy ; but these would all be of little 
 avail if he had not also the gift of stoiy-telling. 
 The possessor of this precious birthright seems 
 to divine many of the secrets of the art of 
 narrative almost intuitively, and he has no 
 difficulty in holding our attention while he 
 spins the yarn. However inexperienced he 
 may be, he is rarely ineffective ; and at his 
 first attempt he often does easily and without 
 effort what those who have not the gift must 
 take thought to accomplish, and attain only 
 after striving and straining. 
 
 The gift of story-telling all the most popular 
 romancers of the time possess and must possess 
 or else they would not have won popularity. 
 And sometimes this gift is all their having. 
 Sometimes they own little or no more, having 
 neither wit nor wisdom, neither style nor psy- 
 chology — possessing, indeed, no general ideas 
 even about the art they practise with applause. 
 This is how it comes to pass that more than 
 one of the purveyors of popular fiction of our 
 day has made a sorry spectacle of himself when 
 he took it upon himself to discourse upon his 
 own art and to discuss its secrets. The public
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 1 53 
 
 had read his books because he was a born 
 teller of tales, but for criticism of craftmanship 
 he had no gift, and in attempting it he was 
 merely giving himself away. 
 
 As one glances down the long and interest- 
 ing history of fiction, one can readily pick out 
 the names of novelists belonging to one and 
 another of the three classes. And yet the 
 writer who has the gift of story-telling and 
 nothing else, who has neither style nor humor 
 nor the ability to create character, who is a 
 spinner of yarns only, has no staying power; 
 however immense his immediate popularity 
 may be, he sinks into oblivion almost as soon 
 as he ceases to produce. Perhaps there are 
 no more typical specimens of the story-teller 
 pure and simple than the late Ponson du 
 T^rrail in France (the historian of the mis- 
 deeds of Rocambole), and the late " Hugh 
 Conway " in England (the author of ' Called 
 Back '). Perhaps it would be invidious to point 
 out any living writers of tales belonging in 
 this class; and yet the temptation to name 
 names is wellnigh irresistible. 
 
 In the second division, containing those 
 without the native faculty and yet with ability 
 which they impress as a substitute for the 
 gift, it is probably perfectly fair to include Dr.
 
 154 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Johnson. ' Rasselas' reveals no natural endow- 
 ment for the pursuit of fiction ; it is the result 
 of main strength misapplied. Perhaps also 
 Diderot is to be included in this class, for the 
 author of ' La Religieuse ' had the gift of story- 
 telling as little as he had the dramaturgic 
 faculty. It may be unfair to Diderot, whose 
 intelligence was alert and swift, to link his 
 name with that of Johnson, who moved pon- 
 derously ; and yet they are both examples of 
 the inadequacy of intellect alone as an equip- 
 ment for the practice of an art without some 
 portion, however slight, of natural endowment. 
 For the spinning of yarns, the intelligence 
 alone will not sufifice. 
 
 The two great contemporaries Boccaccio 
 and Chaucer had both the gift of story-telling 
 in fullest measure ; they were also among the 
 most accomplished and most intellectual men 
 of their time. Boccaccio was a scholar; he 
 was perhaps the first Italian to study Greek ; 
 he was chosen to deliver the earliest course of 
 lectures on Dante. Chaucer was also a scholar ; 
 he was a traveller and a man of affairs. Both 
 of them were conscious artists, masters of the 
 narrative art, treating the raw material they 
 found ready to their hands with the utmost 
 freedom, and understanding all the advan-
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 155 
 
 tages of selection, unity, compression, variety, 
 proportion, movement, and climax. Their 
 tales can be studied to-day as masterpieces of 
 craftsmanship. They had the gift of story- 
 telling, and also the knowledge how best to 
 put that having to usury, and how to make it 
 return the fullest revenue. 
 
 The two great writers whose names come 
 next in chronological sequence in the history 
 of fiction are Rabelais and Cervantes. The 
 Frenchman and the Spaniard had a profounder 
 philosophy of life than the Italian and the 
 Englishman, but they lacked the sense of art, 
 as the most careless contrast would show. The 
 tales of Boccaccio and of Chaucer are swift 
 and beautifully proportioned, while the stories 
 of Rabelais and Cervantes are slow and lum- 
 bering. The involute clumsiness of ' Don Quix- 
 ote,' considered merely as a specimen of nar- 
 rative art, is indisputable ; and the slovenliness 
 of its structure, the negligence of the narrator, 
 and his insufficient respect for the master- 
 piece which he had begotten unawares, are 
 equally evident. But careless as is the scheme 
 of ' Don Quixote,' it is superior to the wilful 
 and sprawling formlessness of the chronicle of 
 ' Gargantua.' The gift of story- telling, the 
 sheer ability to hold the reader's attention by
 
 156 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 a string of adventures, put together almost at 
 hap-hazard, and told almost as artlessly — this 
 both Rabelais and Cervantes must needs have 
 had. 
 
 There is no necessity now to attempt an 
 analysis of this gift and a declaration of its 
 constituent elements, even if it were possible 
 to do so — which may be doubted. What is 
 obvious enough is that it is sometimes accom- 
 panied by the keenest understanding of the 
 principles of narrative art, and sometimes it is 
 not so accompanied. Those who possess it 
 may also have knowledge and wisdom, or 
 they may not own these additional qualifica- 
 tions. But without some small share of this 
 native faculty no novelist can hope to attain 
 his purpose — no novelist, and no historian. 
 
 The author of the 'Short History of the 
 English People ' once defined the novel as 
 " history that did not happen ;" and turning this 
 happy suggestion inside out, we may call his- 
 tory " fiction that did happen." Macaulay 
 deliberately desired to write a history of Eng- 
 land which should be read as eagerly as the 
 latest novel, and he had his wish. Probably 
 Green was inspired by a similar motive, and 
 indubitably he achieved a similar triumph. 
 The novel which Motley once wrote, and the
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 157 
 
 novel which Parkman once wrote, failed to find 
 favor in the eyes of the general reader, and 
 dropped swiftly out of sight ; but yet who could 
 deny the gift of story-telling to the historian 
 of the siege of Antwerp, or to the historian of 
 the conspiracy of Pontiac ? Prescott had the 
 gift also when he told the most marvellous of 
 all true stories, the tale of the conquest of 
 Mexico by Cortez and his companions. Froude 
 had it, even if he lacked other indispensable 
 qualities of the great historian ; and — to take a 
 long stride backward — Herodotus had it, even 
 though he may have availed himself now and 
 again of the novelist's other privileges. Xeno- 
 phon revealed his possession of it more in his 
 story of the retreat of the ten thousand, which 
 was fact, than in his story of the training of 
 Cyrus, which was fiction. 
 
 Of course it will not do to force the classifi- 
 cation too rigorously ; in art the hard and fast 
 lines of science are impossible. None the less 
 is it amusing to call the roll of English novel- 
 ists, and, without insisting on an inexorable 
 division of the sheep from the goats, to try 
 and see which of them had this gift, and 
 which of them had to make up for a defi- 
 ciency of it by an abundance in other direc- 
 tions. Defoe, for instance, like Le Sage, was
 
 158 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 a story-teller above all things ; he had this 
 precious faculty in the highest degree, and 
 perhaps he had little else. Swift had it in 
 an equally full proportion, and he had many 
 other things besides; indeed, the final proof 
 of Swift's possession of this gift, were any 
 needed, might be found in the fact that owing 
 to it his bitter satire of his contemporaries, 
 his misanthropic and malignant attack on 
 humanity at large and for all time, survives 
 now as a classic of childhood, and that the 
 boys and girls of America in the nineteenth 
 century read the travels of Lemuel Gulliver 
 as innocently as they read the adventures of 
 Robinson Crusoe, with no suspicion that be- 
 neath the surface of the entrancing story there 
 lies an evil allegory. This is a stroke of the 
 irony of fate which Swift himself would appre- 
 ciate. 
 
 Of the three great English novelists of the 
 eighteenth century perhaps Smollett had the 
 most of this faculty, and Richardson the least, 
 although Fielding had a richer nature than 
 either of the others, and a finer art, and there- 
 fore he got the utmost out of his having. 
 Goldsmith's one attempt at fiction is engag- 
 ingly artless and continually interesting ; Gold- 
 smith, like Irving, who resembled him in
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING 1 59 
 
 many other respects also, had his full share of 
 this native faculty, though he did not culti- 
 vate it as carefully as Irving did. In like 
 manner Cooper was a more conscientious 
 workman than Scott, and he put his frame- 
 work together better, inferior as the American 
 romancer was to the Scottish master in rich- 
 ness of humor and in insight into human char- 
 acter. 
 
 Of the three great British novelists of the 
 nineteenth century Dickens was the only one 
 who was a true story-teller, having a far larger 
 share of the native gift even than Thackeray, 
 while George Eliot had less of it than almost 
 any other of those who have become famous 
 as writers of fiction. Dickens was a man of 
 limited culture and of narrow intelligence — 
 as his 'Pictures from Italy' proves, and his 
 ' American Notes ' — and he had absurd artistic 
 ideals ; but his was the faculty of telling a 
 tale so that we cannot choose but hear. 
 Thackeray, a more accomplished craftsman, 
 was often a more careless artificer ; he had 
 a far finer intelligence than Dickens, and a 
 deeper nature; but merely as a story-teller 
 Dickens seems to me to be his superior. 
 
 George Eliot (like Tolstoi, another great 
 writer who uses fiction as a medium for
 
 l6o ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 morality) strikes me always as not naturally a 
 teller of tales, like Swift, for instance, and 
 Goldsmith. In reading ' Adam Bede ' and 
 ' Middlemarch,' as in reading ' Anna Kar^nina,' 
 we have a constant sense of effort, as though the 
 authors were struggling with a consciousness 
 that stoiy-telling was not that for which they 
 were born. That George Eliot and Tolstoi 
 were not wholly devoid of the requisite endow- 
 ment is evident from these books and their 
 fellows ; but the permanent value of George 
 Eliot's writings and of Tolstoi's is not to be 
 sought in their stories considered merely as 
 stories. And if it were not that the ' Sorrows 
 of Werther' had met with instant acceptance 
 all over Europe, I should venture to suggest 
 that, great as Goethe was, his gift of story- 
 telling was singularly small. There is nothing 
 easy or spontaneous about ' Wilhelm Meister,' 
 as it is an effort of the intellect rather than a 
 story. One might call it the first tendenz- 
 rouian — the first novel-with-a-purpose — if one 
 could make out clearly what its purpose was. 
 Certainly one can see in ' Wilhelm Meister ' 
 the ancestor of ' Daniel Deronda ' and of 
 ' Robert Elsmere ' and of ' John Ward, Preach- 
 er' — just as one can call Miss Austen the 
 maiden "grandmother of Mr. Howells. It is
 
 THE GIFT OF STORY-TELLING l6l 
 
 to be noted that Goethe, keen-sighted toward 
 all things, saw himself also with clear eyes. 
 He confessed to Eckermann that his tendency 
 towards the practice of the plastic arts had 
 been an error, since he had no natural dis- 
 position towards them. 
 
 (1894.)
 
 II. -CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 
 
 M. Anatole France, one of the most 
 discriminating and inconsequent of essayists, 
 has suggested that criticism at its best is Ht- 
 tle more than a recital of the adventures of 
 the critic's mind in contact with masterpieces. 
 Perhaps one reason why criticism is so infre- 
 quently at its best is that the critic's mind is 
 in contact with masterpieces less often than it 
 might be. It is with the writings of his con- 
 temporaries that the critic has to deal for the 
 most part ; and how few of any man's con- 
 temporaries are masters ! It is only by return- 
 ing resolutely again and again to the master- 
 pieces of the past that a critic is able to sustain 
 his standard and to prevent his taste from sink- 
 ing to the level of the average of contempo- 
 rary writing. 
 
 And this return, always its own reward, is 
 not without its own surprises. Either the 
 accepted work is worthy of its high repute — 
 and then there is the pleasure of expounding
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 163 
 
 it afresh to a new generation and of showing 
 its fitness to modern conditions despite its age 
 — or else it is unworthy and lacks true dura- 
 bility — and then there is the sad duty of ex- 
 plaining how it deserved its fame once, and 
 why it is now outworn. To one critic it hap- 
 pened one summer to be reading * Don Quix- 
 ote ' (in Mr. Ormsby's nervous and satisfactory 
 translation), when he received, by the same 
 post, the ' Debacle ' of M. Emile Zola, and 
 the ' Naulahka ' of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and 
 the late Wolcott Balestier ; and when he had 
 made an end of the perusal of these three 
 books — the novel of the Spaniard, the novel 
 of the Frenchman, and the novel of the British 
 subject and the American citizen — it occurred 
 to him that he had in them material for a litera- 
 ry comparison not without a certain piquancy. 
 To criticise these three books adequately would 
 permit the writing of the history of fiction 
 during the past three centuries; it would au- 
 thorize a thorough discussion of the princi- 
 ples of the novelist's art, as these have been 
 developed by the man}^ mighty story-tellers 
 who lived after Cervantes and before M. Zola. 
 For a siege as formidable as this I have not 
 the critical apparatus, even if I had the desire. 
 The most that I can do here is to set down
 
 164 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 honestly and frankly a few of my impressions 
 as I read in turn these three novels, strangely 
 consorted and sharply contrasting. To sum 
 up the merits of M. Zola's book is easy ; and 
 it is not hard to form and to formulate an 
 opinion about the Indo-American tale of the 
 two young collaborators ; but the great work 
 of Cervantes is not so lightly disposed of. 
 The danger of any effort to record the advent- 
 ures of the critic's mind in contact with a 
 masterpiece like * Don Quixote ' is that it is 
 exceedingly dil^cult for the critic to be frank 
 with himself or honest with his readers. His 
 mind does not come squarely in contact with 
 the masterpiece ; it is warded off by the cloud 
 of commentators with whom every masterpiece 
 is encompassed about. He can read only 
 through the spectacles of the countless critics 
 who have preceded him. He knows what he 
 ought to think about ' Don Quixote,' and 
 this makes it almost impossible for him to 
 think for himself as he ought. 
 
 For the critic in search of mental advent- 
 ures, it is a safeguard to have a hearty distrust 
 of philosophic criticism, so-called — to have a 
 profound disbelief in the allegorical interpre- 
 tation of simple stories. Cervantes was like 
 all the other great makers of fiction in that
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 1 65 
 
 he wrote first to amuse himself and to reheve 
 himself, and only secondarily to amuse his 
 readers, to move them, to instruct them even. 
 " There is no mighty purpose in this book," 
 is a proper motto for the title-page of most of 
 the masterpieces in which philosophical criti- 
 cism sees a myriad of mighty purposes, and 
 which were written easily and carelessly and 
 with no intention of creating a masterpiece, 
 and with scarcely a thought of the message 
 which the world has since deciphered between 
 the lines. " He builded better than he knew " 
 is true of most great writers ; perhaps it is not 
 wholly true of Dante and of Milton, who were 
 conscious artists always, and careful ; but it is 
 absolutely true of Shakespeare and of Cer- 
 vantes. In their pages we find many a moral 
 which would surprise them ; and into their 
 words we are forever reading meanings of our 
 own of which they had never a suspicion. 
 That ' Hamlet ' and ' Don Quixote ' yield 
 up to us to-day meanings and morals their 
 straightforward authors never intended, is per- 
 haps the best possible evidence that ' Hamlet' 
 and ' Don Quixote ' are masterpieces. The 
 work of art which has only the meaning and 
 the moral its maker intended, is likely to be 
 thin and barren.
 
 1 66 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 The author of ' Hamlet ' was like his close 
 contemporary, the author of ' Don Quixote,' 
 in that he thought less apparently of the great 
 work which has survived in the affections of 
 the world for two centuries and a half than 
 he thought of his other writings, now recalled 
 chiefly because they are due to the pen which 
 gave us also the masterpieces. Obviously, 
 Cervantes did not read the proof of ' Don 
 Quixote,' the first editions of which abound in 
 printer's errors almost as many and as serious 
 as those which mar the first folio of Shake- 
 speare. It would be easy to maintain the as- 
 sertion that Cervantes set as little store by 
 * Don Quixote ' as Shakespeare did by ' Ham- 
 let ' and its fellows, the great Spaniard esteem- 
 ing more highly his plays and his poems, just 
 as Shakespeare seems to have cherished rather 
 his poetry than his plays, each man holding 
 lightly that which he had wrought most read- 
 ily and with least effort. 
 
 Indeed, the carelessness with which Cervantes 
 has treated his masterpiece is one of the first 
 things to strike a critic who reads the seven- 
 teenth-century story with nineteenth-century 
 fastidiousness. Conscious of the temerity of 
 my opinion, and aware of the awful fate which 
 may befall me for declaring it, I venture to
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 1 67 
 
 suggest that the art of fiction is a finer art to- 
 day than it was Avhen 'Don Quixote' was writ- 
 ten. In the whole history of story-telhng there 
 is no greater name than the name of Cervantes; 
 but it would be a painful reflection on progress 
 if the efforts of successive generations of nov- 
 elists — however inferior to him any one of 
 these might be — had not put the art forward. 
 The writers of fiction nowadays are scrupu- 
 lous where Cervantes was reckless ; they take 
 thought where he gave none. Merely in the 
 mechanism of plot, in the joinery of incident, 
 in the craftsmanship of story- telling, 'Don 
 Quixote ' is indisputably less skilful than M. 
 Zola's ' Debacle,' or the Kipling-Balestier ' Nau- 
 lahka' — however inferior these may be in more 
 vital points. 
 
 Consider for a moment the awkward pre- 
 tence of a translation from the manuscript of 
 the Moor, Hamet Benengeli, as needless as it 
 is ill-sustained. Consider the frank artlessness 
 of the narrative, with its irrelevant tales in- 
 jected into the manuscript merely because 
 Cervantes happened to have them on hand. 
 Consider the many anachronisms and incon- 
 sistencies which Cervantes troubled himself 
 about quite as little as Shakespeare thought 
 or cared whether or not Bohemia was a desert
 
 1 68 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 country by the sea. Consider the extraordi- 
 nary series of coincidences which brought to- 
 gether at the inn four marvellously beautiful 
 women, when the captive met his brother and 
 Cardenio recovered Luscinda, all of which is 
 improbable to the vanishing-point, and all of 
 which, worse yet, has nothing whatever to do 
 with the true subject of the story. Consider- 
 ing all these slovenlinesses, it is impossible not 
 to wonder whether the art of fiction did not 
 retrograde with Cervantes, for both Boccaccio 
 and Chaucer had attained vigor and supple- 
 ness in narrative ; their tales were naif, no 
 doubt, and direct, but they were always art- 
 fully composed and presented. To this day 
 the ' Decameron ' and the ' Canterbury Tales ' 
 are models of simple story-telling. Great as 
 are his other qualities, Cervantes, merely as a 
 teller of tales, is as inferior to Boccaccio and to 
 Chaucer as he is superior to Rabelais. 
 
 It is in its humanity, in its presentation of 
 men and women, in its character -drawing, as 
 the modern phrase is, that the story of Cer- 
 vantes excels all the stories of Boccaccio, of 
 Chaucer, and of Rabelais. Alongside the gi- 
 gantic figure of the Knight of La Mancha, 
 what are the characters in the brilliant little 
 comedies of Chaucer and of Boccaccio but
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 169 
 
 thumb-nail sketches? What are Gargantua 
 and Panurge but broad caricatures when 
 compared with the delicately limned Don 
 Quixote? Where, before, had any one put 
 into fiction so much of our everyday humanity? 
 And what, after all, do we seek in a novel, if 
 it is not human nature? To catch mankind in 
 the act, as it were ; to surprise the secrets of 
 character and to show its springs ; to get into 
 literature the very trick of life itself ; to dis- 
 play the variety of human existence, its rich- 
 ness, its breadth, its intensity ; to do these 
 things with unforced humor, with unfailing 
 good-humor, with good-will towards all men, 
 with tolerance, with benignity, with loving 
 kindness — this is what no writer of fiction had 
 done before Cervantes wrote ' Don Quixote,' 
 and this is what no writer of fiction has ever 
 done better than Cervantes did it when he 
 wrote ' Don Quixote.' 
 
 Chaucer is shrewd and kindly at once, but 
 even he lacks the commingled benevolence and 
 worldly wisdom of Cervantes. The characters 
 of the ' Canterbury Tales ' have a sharper out- 
 line than the more softly rounded figures with 
 whom Don Quixote is associated. Chaucer 
 had a full share of the milk of human kind- 
 ness, but there is the very cream of it in Cer-
 
 lyo ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 vantes. Perhaps there is no better test of the 
 greatness of a humorist than this — that his 
 humor has no curdhng acidity. It is easy to 
 amuse when there is a wilhngness to wound 
 wantonly ; and Swift, though he may laugh 
 and shake in Rabelais' easy-chair, does not fill 
 that huge throne, because he has the pettiness 
 of brutality. ' Gulliver ' is inferior to ' Gar- 
 gantua ' in that the author of the former hated 
 humanity, while the author of the latter loved 
 his fellow-man, and took life easily and was 
 happy. 
 
 Cervantes was not a merry man, and he had 
 a hard life, and perhaps he wrote his great 
 book in prison ; but there is no discontent in 
 ' Don Quixote.' There is a wholesome phi- 
 losophy in it and a willingness to make the 
 best of the world, a world which is not so bad, 
 after all. ' Don Quixote' is a very long book, 
 not so long as ' Amadis of Gaul,' or as the 
 romances of Mademoiselle de Scudery, or as 
 the ' Three Musketeers ' with its tail of sequels, 
 but longer even than ' Daniel Deronda ' and 
 than 'Robert Elsmere'; it is very long and 
 it is crowded with characters, but among all 
 these people there is no one man or woman 
 whom the reader hates ; there is no one whom 
 the author despises or insults. Cervantes is
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 171 
 
 not severe with the children of his brain ; he 
 loves them all ; he treats them all with the 
 toleration which comes of perfect understand- 
 ing. Here, indeed, is the quality in which 
 he is most modern, in which he is still unsur- 
 passable. Fielding caught it from him ; and 
 Thackeray, who borrowed so many things 
 from Fielding and so much, did not take over 
 this also, or he could never have pursued and 
 run down and harried Becky Sharp as he 
 thought fit to do. 
 
 Just as Fielding began 'Joseph Andrews' 
 merely to guy Richardson's virtuous ' Pamela,' 
 and just as he ended by falling in love with his 
 own handiwork and by giving us the exquisite 
 portrait of Parson Adams, so Cervantes, intend- 
 ing at first little more than to break a lance 
 with the knights of romance, came to respect 
 his own work more and more, and to treat 
 Don Quixote with increasing courtesy. Much 
 of the first part is horse-play, fun of the most 
 robust sort. The humor of physical misad- 
 venture is rarely refined, and it takes a stout 
 stomach to relish some of Don Quixote's ear- 
 lier misfortunes. Even in the second part, 
 the practical joke of the belled cats may fairly 
 be called cruel, and it is altogether unworthy 
 of the hero. Perhaps this is nineteenth-cen-
 
 172 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 tury hyperci'iticism, but Cervantes is to blame 
 if he lias presented to us a character so lovable 
 that we revolt when any one takes an unfair 
 advantage of Don Quixote. 
 
 We do not resent the indignities which be- 
 fall Sancho, for he has a tough hide and a 
 stout heart and a mouth full of proverbs for 
 his own consolation. Yet, in his way, the 
 worthy squire is as lovable as the honorable 
 knight he served. Just as Sam Weller (who 
 made the success of the ' Pickwick Papers ') 
 was an afterthought, so was Sancho, who owed 
 his being apparently to the chance remark of 
 the Landlord, that a knight should be attended 
 by a squire. Nothing reveals the genius of 
 Cervantes more plainly than the development 
 of Sancho Panza, who was at first only a clown, 
 nothing but a droll, a variant of the gracioso 
 or low comedian accompanying the hero of 
 every Spanish comedy. By degrees he is ele- 
 vated from a mere mask into an actual man, 
 the mouthpiece of our common humanity. 
 The lofty Knight of La Mancha, wath his im- 
 possible aspirations, may be taken as a person- 
 ification of the soul, while Sancho is the body 
 — of the earth, earthy, and having his feet on 
 the ground firmly. " There is a moral in ' Don 
 Quixote,' " said Lowell, " and a very profound
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 1 73 
 
 one, whether Cervantes consciously put it there 
 or not, and it is this : That Avhoever quarrels 
 with the nature of things, wittingly or unwit- 
 tingly, is certain to get the worst of it." San- 
 cho had never a quarrel with the nature of 
 things. 
 
 Lowell also reminded us that " Cervantes is 
 the father of the modern novel, in so far as it 
 has become a study and delineation of char- 
 acter, instead of being a narrative seeking to 
 interest by situation and incident." ' Don 
 Quixote ' is one of the most original of stories ; 
 it had no predecessors of its kind, and it 
 evolved itself by the spontaneous generation 
 of genius. But its posterity is as ample as its 
 ancestry was meagre. When we see Fielding's 
 Parson Adams, or Goldsmith's Dr. Primrose, 
 or Scott's Antiquary, we see children of Don 
 Quixote. When we follow Mr. Pickwick in 
 his foolish wanderings, when we listen to Tar- 
 tarin of Tarascon telling of the lions he has 
 slain, when we hear Col. Carter of Cartersville 
 urging the desire of the Garden Spot of Vir- 
 ginia for an outlet to the sea, we have before 
 us the progeny of the Knight of the Sorrow- 
 ful Countenance. The make-believe of Tom 
 Sawyer in trying to get Jim out of prison in 
 full accordance with the authorities recalls
 
 174 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Don Quixote's going mad in imitation of Or- 
 lando ; and in the pages of an earlier Amer- 
 ican humorist than Mark Twain, in Irving's 
 ' Knickerbocker/ there is more than a hint of 
 the manner of Cervantes. As Lowell puts it 
 sharply, "the pedigrees of books are as inter- 
 esting and instructive as those of men." 
 
 If Cervantes was the father of the modern 
 novel, we may wonder what he would think 
 of some of his great -great -grandchildren. 
 What, for example, would be his opinion of 
 the ' Naulahka,' written by a Londoner who 
 had been East and by a New-Yorker who had 
 been West. Cervantes grew to manhood with 
 the sons of the Conquistadores, with the men 
 of iron who had won for Spain the golden 
 lands of Mexico and Peru ; would he have 
 foregathered with the Argonauts of Forty- 
 nine? A scant half-century before his birth 
 the Portuguese had pushed their way around 
 Africa in search of Golconda and Cathay ; 
 would he have been interested by this story of 
 the West and the East ? 
 
 Of one thing, indeed, we may fairly be cer- 
 tain — that Cervantes would not have been at 
 all surprised by the manner of the ' Naulahka,' 
 for it is a tale of a kind he was abundantly 
 familiar with. It is a story of a sort older by
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO, 175 
 
 far than * Don Quixote'; it is a story, in fact, 
 of the sort that ' Don Quixote ' was written 
 to satirize. In the new tale we have new 
 dresses, of course, and new scenery and new 
 properties, but the tale itself is the old, old 
 story of the hero in search of adventures ; it 
 is the tale of the hero always on the brink of 
 death, but bearing a charmed life ; it is the 
 tale of the hero skilled in all manner of sports, 
 expert with all manner of weapons, fertile in 
 resource and prompt in decision ; it is the 
 tale, in short, of the bravura hero of concert- 
 pitch romance. What is Tarvin of Topaz 
 but Amadis of Gaul? What is the Crichton 
 of Colorado but Palmerin of England, with all 
 the modern improvements? What is he but 
 Belianis of Greece brought down to date? 
 
 The death-dealing and unkillable Tarvin may 
 also be called a Yankee D'Artagnan. Like 
 the Gascon hero, he goes in search of jewels 
 of great price ; but he is a nobler hero even 
 than Dumas's, for he is alone, while the three 
 musketeers were always four. Tarvin, indeed, 
 is the very acme of heroes, than which there 
 can be no man more accomplished and ver- 
 satile — not even Mr. Barnes of New York, 
 or Mr. Potter of Texas. He is a real-estate 
 boomer and an engineer; he has been a
 
 176 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 broncho-breaker and a telegraph operator ; he 
 is a dead shot with a revolver, hitting a half- 
 dollar spun in the air while keeping an easy 
 seat on a bucking horse. 
 
 The main adventure in which the heroic 
 Tarvin is engaged is simply childish ; the 
 word need not be taken as a reproach — I 
 merely mean that it is a thing to be told to 
 amuse children. It is what the French call 
 a conte a dorinir dcboiit. Like most of the 
 romantic fiction of this late day, the ' Nau- 
 lahka ' reveals rather invention than imagi- 
 nation. It is ingeniously constructed ; it has 
 not a little of the cleverness its authors have 
 shown in other work; it has passages of 
 beauty ; it gives the reader moments of ex- 
 citement ; it is lighted now and again by 
 flashes of insight ; and, as a whole, it is a 
 hollow disappointment. 
 
 And the reason is not far to seek. It is be- 
 cause romance of this sort is not what either 
 of the collaborators did best. It is because 
 neither Mr. Kipling nor his brother-in-law 
 could put his whole strength into so hopeless a 
 make-believe. Balestier was a realist ; beyond 
 all question, the man who wrote the little tale 
 of ' RefTey ' was a realist, with the imagination 
 a true realist needs more than the ordinary
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPlInG AND CO. 1 77 
 
 romanticist. Mr. Kipling is sometimes a real- 
 ist and sometimes an idealist ; he is a humor- 
 ist often, and, when he is at his best, he is a 
 poet also. Why did two such men join forces 
 in a vain effort to pump the breath of life into 
 a disestablished idol ? 
 
 Of course, the ' Naulahka ' is not without 
 touches of character worthy of the author of 
 the * Courting of Dinah Shadd,' although 
 there is little or nothing in it really worthy of 
 the author of the ' Gate of a Hundred Sor- 
 rows ' and of ' Without Benefit of Clergy.' 
 The gypsy queen is a fine conception, and her 
 son is a live child, and the heir-apparent is 
 also a human being ; all of these ring true. 
 And here and there in the Indian chapters of 
 the story are other evidences of Mr. Kipling's 
 robust talent, of his knack of the unhackneyed 
 epithet, of his power of revealing character as 
 by a lightning flash. Perhaps it is due to the 
 milder influence of his collaborator that there 
 is in the ' Naulahka' less of the bluster, of the 
 swagger, of the precocious knowingness which 
 made some of the ' Plain Talcs from the Hills ' 
 offensive in the eyes of those who do not like 
 a style made up wholly of the primary colors. 
 There is less also of the violence which was 
 the key-note of the 'Light that Failed'; and
 
 17S ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Mr. Kipling is no longer looking for effects, 
 immediate, obvious, and barbaric — like the ar- 
 chitecture of the India his stories give us so 
 strong a desire not to visit. 
 
 While the * Naulahka ' is, as I have said, 
 the kind of a story which was popular a full 
 century before 'Don Quixote' was written, 
 *La Debacle' is the kind of a story which 
 has come into fashion two and a half centuries 
 after ' Don Quixote ' first appeared. If Cer- 
 vantes would find himself at home in reading 
 the adventures of Tarvin of Topaz, what would 
 he think of M. Zola's solidly built and broadly 
 painted panorama of the Second Empire's 
 catastrophe ? Perhaps, as an old soldier, as 
 one who had fought at Lepanto, Cervantes 
 would be most impressed by the sustained 
 force of M. Zola's battle-pieces, than which 
 there are none more vigorous in all fiction. 
 Not Stendhal's Waterloo, not Victor Hugo's, 
 not Thackeray's — done by indirection, but all 
 the more moving for that — not Tolstoi's 
 Sebastopol even, gives the reader so vivid a 
 realization of the waste of war, of its destruc- 
 tiveness, of the weariness of it and the hunger, 
 of the horrors of every kind which are inevitable 
 and necessar}^, and which M. Zola makes us feel 
 more keenly than Callot could or Verestchagin.
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. 1 79 
 
 There is in ' La Debacle ' little of the realism 
 M. Zola has praised, little or nothing of the 
 naturalism he has proclaimed ; there is an 
 epic simplicity, a mighty movement, a Cyclo- 
 pean architecture not to be found in the 
 work of any other novelist in all the luminous 
 list of names since Cervantes. We have here 
 no miniature portraits of dandy soldiers ; we 
 have no mere genre - painting of troops in 
 picturesque attitudes ; we have rather a series 
 of masterly frescoes, brushed in boldly with 
 a broad sweep of the arm, without hesitancy, 
 with the consciousness of strength. M. Zola 
 has Taine's faculty of accumulating typical 
 details; he has the same power of handling 
 immense masses of facts and of compelling 
 each into its proper place ; and never has he 
 used this faculty and this power to better 
 advantage than in ' La Debacle ' — not even in 
 ' Germinal.' 
 
 The story is far too long; it has two hun- 
 dred pages too many ; it is extended to include 
 the last wild struggle of the Commune; it 
 grows wearisome at last ; but what a splendid 
 succession of pictures is presented to us before 
 we feel the first fatigue ! We are made to see 
 the incredible mismanagement of the imperial 
 army, due to mingled knavery and incompe-
 
 l8o ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 tence ; wc are shown the complete collapse of 
 the French commissariat and ordnance depart- 
 ment ; we are made spectators of the moral 
 disintegration of impending defeat as the 
 French were shut in by the inexorable iron 
 ring of the Germans ; we have brought before 
 us the whole helpless empire, from the invalid 
 monarch down to the privates and the peasants. 
 
 The unending passage of the Prussian artil- 
 lery through the village by night at a hard 
 gallop ; the sudden vision, in the midst of the 
 battle, of a peasant ploughing peacefully, in a 
 hidden hollow — repeated again when the fight 
 is over ; the execution of Weiss under the 
 eyes of his wife, after a defence of his house, 
 which is a realization in words of the ' Last 
 Cartridge'; the ghastly group of the dead 
 Zouaves carousing ; the frantic charge of the 
 riderless horses across the silent battle - field ; 
 the assassination of Goliath in the presence of 
 his child ; these are things which cling to the 
 memory obstinately. These are scenes also 
 which Cervantes v/ould appreciate as he would 
 appreciate the massive structure of ' La De- 
 bacle ' when compared with the haphazard inci- 
 dents and the hesitating plot of ' Don Quixote.' 
 
 What Cervantes would most miss in M. 
 Zola's book would be joyousness and humor.
 
 CERVANTES, ZOLA, KIPLING AND CO. l8l 
 
 M. Zola has no humor, either positive or neg- 
 ative — positive which breaks in upon the 
 seriousness of the reader, or negative which 
 prevents the author from taking himself too 
 seriously. M. Zola has little joy in life, although 
 he has softened of late. Once he saw all man- 
 kind darkly, as though he hated humanity or 
 despised it ; and the characters in his novels 
 were etched by the acid of his malice. Now 
 he uses a gentler crayon and he sketches with 
 suaver outlines ; he is not unfair even towards 
 the Germans. There are in ' La Debacle ' 
 men and women we can like — although there 
 is no one to love as we love Don Quixote and 
 Sancho. Brutal is what M. Zola used to be, 
 brutal and dirty. He is not brutal now and 
 he is less dirty. He is still fond of foul words, 
 and there are half a dozen of them repeated 
 again and again in ' La Debacle.' But as a 
 whole, the story is surprisingly clean. There 
 is nothing in it to shock Cervantes certainly, 
 for he too could be plain-spoken at times — 
 quite as plain-spoken as M. Zola. But what- 
 ever his speech, however frank and hearty, 
 however exactly he reproduces the vocabulary 
 of the common people, the mind of Cervantes 
 was always clean, pure, lofty. 
 (1892.)
 
 III.— THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANCOIS 
 COPPEE. 
 
 Like Moli^re, like Boileau, like Regnard, 
 like Voltaire, and like Musset, M. Francois 
 Coppee was born in Paris, and more than any 
 other of the half-dozen is he a true child of 
 the fair city by the Seine, loving her more 
 ardently, and leaving her less willingly. The 
 facts of his simple and uneventful career have 
 been set forth by his friend M. de Lescure in 
 'Francois Coppee: I'Homme, la Vie et I'CEu- 
 vre (i 842-1 889).' From this we learn that 
 the poet was born in 1842, that he was the 
 youngest child of a poor clerk in the War De- 
 partment, that he had three elder sisters, one 
 of whom survives still to take care of her 
 brother, that he spent most of his struggling 
 childhood in old houses on the left (and 
 more literary) bank of the Seine, that he was 
 not an apt scholar in his youth, that he be- 
 gan to write verses very early in his teens, 
 and that at last his father died, and he sue-
 
 THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANQOIS COPPEE 183 
 
 ceeded to the modest position in the War 
 Department, becoming the head of the family 
 at twenty-one. In time he made acquaintance 
 with other young poets, and was admitted 
 into the " Parnassians," as they were called 
 — followers of Victor Hugo, of Theophile 
 Gautier, of Theodore de Banville, students of 
 new and old rhythms, and seekers after 
 rich rymes, as ardent in the search as the Ar- 
 gonauts of ' Forty-nine. M. Copp^e burned 
 every one of his juvenile poems, and wrote 
 many another of more cunning workmanship ; 
 and of these newer poems two volumes were 
 published in the next few years — ' Le Reli- 
 quaire ' and 'Les Intimites' — but they did 
 not sell two hundred copies all told. 
 
 Then, in 1869, came the first golden gleam 
 of fortune. ' Le Passant,' a little one-act com- 
 edy in verse, was acted one night at the Odeon, 
 and the next day the name of Francois Cop- 
 p^e was no longer unknown to any of those 
 who care for letters. ' Le Passant' is unde- 
 niably artificial, and at bottom it is probably 
 forced in feeling, if not false ; but beyond all 
 question the poet believed in it and accepted 
 its truth, and delighted in his work. The sen- 
 timent is charmingly youthful, with a spring- 
 like freshness, and the versification is abso-
 
 184 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 lutely impeccable. For years M. Coppee was 
 called " the author of ' Le Passant,' " until he 
 came almost to hate his first-born. But only 
 one of his later plays has rivalled it in popular 
 acceptance ; this is the pathetic ' Luthier de 
 Cremone,' of which there are several adapta- 
 tions in English. A third one-act play, ' Le 
 Pater,' forbidden in Paris by the stage censors, 
 was, strangely enough, brought out here in 
 New York at Daly's Theatre shortly after as 
 the ' Prayer.' As a dramatist, M. Coppee con- 
 tinues the romanticist tradition, now a little 
 outworn ; and his longer plays lack the direct- 
 ness of his later poems and prose tales. No 
 one of them has had more than a merely hon- 
 orable success, and no one of them — with a 
 single exception only — has shown itself strong 
 enough to stand the perils of translation. 
 
 During the dark days of 1870 and 1871 M. 
 Coppee did his duty in the ranks, like many 
 another artist in letters and with the brush. 
 Of course, he wrote war poems, both during 
 the fighting and after, neither better nor worse, 
 most of them, than the war poems of other 
 French poets. Better than any of these mar- 
 tial rymes are the * Greve des Forgerons,' 
 written just before the war, and ' Les Hum- 
 bles,' a volume of verse written shortly after
 
 THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANQOIS COPPEE 1S5 
 
 peace had been restored. The * Greve des 
 Forgerons' is a dramatic monologue, in which 
 a striking iron-worker explains how it came 
 to pass that he killed a man, and why he did 
 the deed. It suggests Browning in its min- 
 gling of movement and introspection, but it is 
 neither as rugged in form nor as swift in ac- 
 tion as the British poet would have made it. 
 
 It is in ' Les Humbles' that there was first 
 revealed the French poet with whom we of 
 Anglo-Saxon stock can perhaps feel ourselves 
 most in sympathy. The note which domi- 
 nates the poems in that collection, and in most 
 of M. Copp^e's later volumes of verse, is less 
 seldom found in English literature than in 
 French. This is the note of sympathy with 
 the lowly, with the unsuspected victims of 
 fate. It is the note of compassion for those 
 who struggle secretly and in vain, for those 
 who are borne down beneath the burdens of 
 commonplace existence, for those who have 
 never had a chance in life. It is the note 
 we mark now and again, for instance, in the 
 deeper poems of Mr. Austin Dobson. Many 
 of the foremost French authors of late years 
 are mere mandarins, writing exclusively for 
 their peers ; they are Brahmins, despising all 
 outside their own high caste ; they are wholly
 
 1 86 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 without bowels of compassion for their fellow- 
 man. Compare, for example, again, the con- 
 temptuous and contemning attitude of Flau- 
 bert towards the creatures of his own making, 
 whom he regards distantly, as though they 
 were doubtful insects under a microscope, and 
 the warmer tolerance George Eliot shows even 
 for her least worthy characters. 
 
 M. Coppee is as detached from his humble 
 heroes and heroines as any one could wish ; 
 he is too profoundly an artist ever to intervene 
 in his own person ; but he is not chill and 
 inaccessible in his telling of their little lives, 
 made up of a thousand banalities and lit by a 
 single gleam of poetry, not cast by the glare 
 of a great self-sacrifice, but falling from the 
 pure flame of daily duties performed without 
 thought of self. * Les Humbles' is but a 
 gallery of pictures in the manner of the little 
 masters of Holland — a series of portraits of 
 the down -trodden in their every -day garb, 
 with that suggestion of their inner life which 
 illuminates every painting by an artist of true 
 insight. In the old-fashioned sense of the 
 word there is little " heroic " in ' Les Humbles ;' 
 and there is absolutely nothing of the exag- 
 gerated larger- than - life - and - twice- as - natural 
 manner of Victor Hugo, set off with violent
 
 THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANQOIS COPPEE 1 87 
 
 contrasts and startling antitheses. Instead 
 we have an accompHshed poet telling us of the 
 simple lives of the poor in the simple speech 
 of the people. M. Copp6e has a homeliness 
 of phrase not unlike that of Theocritus, but 
 perhaps less consciously literary. 
 
 Indeed, nothing more clearly shows the 
 delicacy of his art than his extraordinary skill 
 in concealing all trace of artifice, so that a 
 most carefully constructed poem is seemingly 
 spontaneous. To most of us French poetry 
 is rarely interesting ; it is obviously artificial ; 
 it strikes us as somewhat remote ; possibly 
 from the enforced use of words of Romance 
 origin (which therefore seem to us secondary) 
 to describe heartfelt emotion, expressed by 
 us in words of Teutonic stock (which are 
 therefore to us primary). Lowell has told 
 us that it is only the high polish of French 
 verse that keeps out decay. We do not feel 
 this in reading the best of M. Copp^e's poetry ; 
 it seems to us as natural an outgrowth almost 
 as Heine's or Longfellow's. In another essay 
 Lowell says that perhaps the great charm of 
 Gray's ' Elegy ' is to be found " in its embody- 
 ing that pensively stinglcss pessimism which 
 comes with the first gray hair, that vague 
 sympathy with ourselves which is so much
 
 1 88 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 cheaper than sympathy with others, that placid 
 melancholy which satisfies the general appe- 
 tite for an emotion that titillates rather than 
 wounds." That M. Coppee has put into 
 French verse, unmusical as it is, the qualities 
 which Lowell finds in Gray's ' Elegy ' is evi- 
 dence that neither in manner nor in matter 
 is he like most French poets. 
 
 But this acceptability of his poetry to ears 
 attuned to more Teutonic rhythms has not 
 been won by any accidental dereliction from 
 the strictest rule of the Parnassians. M. Coppee 
 has besieged and captured the final fastnesses 
 of French metrical art, and his work is com- 
 pletely satisfactory even to Banville, who be- 
 strides his hobby of " rich " rymes as though 
 it were Pegasus itself. M. Coppee early gave 
 proof of remarkable skill at the difficult game 
 of French versification, and he still plays it 
 scientifically, and with great good luck. Of 
 late years he has been called upon frequently 
 to sing to order, to write verses for a celebra- 
 tion, and he has always been as ready as Dr. 
 Holmes was once to lay a garland of rymes 
 on the grave of a hero. The art of writing 
 occasional verse which shall be worthy of the 
 occasion is not a common gift. M. Coppee 
 possesses it abundantly, and his many poems
 
 THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANQOIS COPPEE 189 
 
 for feasts or fasts are always appropriate, ade- 
 quate, and dignified. 
 
 'Olivier* is M. Coppee's most ambitious 
 longer poem. But it is not in his longer poems 
 that he is seen at his best. What he does to 
 perfection is the conte en vers — the tale in verse. 
 The conte is a form of fiction in which the 
 French have always delighted, and in which 
 they have always excelled, from the days of 
 th.e Jongleurs and the tronvcrcs, past the periods 
 of La Fontaine and Voltaire, down to the pres- 
 ent. The conte is a tale something more than 
 a sketch, it may be, and something less than a 
 short story. In verse it is at times but a mere 
 rymed anecdote, or it may attain almost to 
 the direct swiftness of a ballad. The ' Canter- 
 bury Tales' are contcs most of them, if not all, 
 and so are some of the ' Tales of a Way-side 
 Inn.' The free-and-easy tales of Prior were 
 written in imitation of the French conte en vers; 
 and that likewise was the model of more than 
 one of the lively narrative poems of Mr. Austin 
 Dobson. 
 
 No one has succeeded more admirably in the 
 conte en vers than M. Coppee. Where was 
 there ever anything better of its kind than 
 ' L' Enfant de la Balle ' ? — that gentle portrait 
 of the infant phenomenon, framed in a chain of
 
 IQO ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 occasional gibes at the sordid ways of theatrical 
 managers, and at their hostility toward poetic 
 plays. Where is there anything of a more 
 simple pathos than ' L'Epave ' ? — that story of 
 a sailor's son whom the widowed mother vain- 
 ly strives to keep from the cruel waves that 
 killed his father. (It is worthy of a parenthesis 
 that although the ship M. Copp^e loves best is 
 that which sails the blue shield of the city of 
 Paris, he knows the sea also, and he depicts 
 sailors with affectionate fidelity.) But whether 
 at the sea-side by chance, or more often in the 
 streets of the city, the poet seeks for the sub- 
 ject of his story some incident of daily occur- 
 rence made significant by his interpretation ; he 
 chooses some character commonplace enough, 
 but made firmer by conflict with evil and by 
 victory over self. Those wdiom he puts into 
 his poems are still the humble, the forgotten, 
 the neglected, the unknown, and it is the feel- 
 ings and the struggles of these that he tells us, 
 with no maudlin sentimentality, and with no 
 dead-set at our sensibilities. The sub -title 
 j\Irs. Stowe gave to ' Uncle Tom's Cabin ' would 
 serve to cover most of M. Coppee's contcs either 
 in prose or verse ; they are nearly all pictures 
 of "life among the lowly." But there is no 
 forcing of the note in his painting of poverty
 
 THE PROSE TALES OF M. FRANQOIS COPPEE 191 
 
 and labor; there is no harsh juxtaposition of 
 the blacks and the whites. The tone is always 
 manly and wholesome. 
 
 ' La Marchande de Journaux' and the other 
 little masterpieces of story-telling in verse are 
 unfortunately untranslatable, as are all poems 
 but a lyric or two now and then by a happy 
 accident. A translated poem is a boiled straw- 
 berry, as some one once brutally put it. But 
 the tales which M. Coppee has written in prose 
 — a true poet's prose, nervous, vigorous, flex- 
 ible, and firm — these can be Englished by tak- 
 ing thought and time and pains, without which 
 a translation is always a betrayal. Ten of these 
 tales have been rendered into English by Mr. 
 Learned, and the ten chosen for translation 
 are amoiig the best of the twoscore and more of 
 M. Coppee's contes en prose. These ten tales 
 are fairly representative of his range and va- 
 riety. Compare, for example, the passion in 
 the ' Foster-sister' — pure, burning, and fatal — • 
 with the Black Forest naivetd of the ' Wooden 
 Shoes of Little Wolff.' Contrast the touching 
 pathos of the ' Substitute,' poignant in his mag- 
 nificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who 
 has conquered his shameful past goes back 
 willingly to the horrible life he has fled from, 
 that he may save from a like degradation and
 
 192 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 from an inevitable moral decay the one friend 
 lie has in the world, all unworthy as this friend 
 is — contrast this with the story of the gigantic 
 deeds ' My Friend Meutrier' boasts about un- 
 ceasingly, not knowing that he has been dis- 
 covered in his little round of daily domestic 
 duties — making the coffee of his good old 
 mother, and taking her poodle out for a 
 walk. 
 
 Among these ten there are tales of all sorts, 
 from the tragic adventure of ' An Accident ' to 
 the pendant portraits of the ' Two Clowns,' cut- 
 ting in its sarcasm, but not bitter; from the 
 * Captain's Vices,' which suggests at once 
 George Eliot's ' Silas Marner ' and Mr. Austin 
 Dobson's ' Tale of Polypheme,' to the sombre 
 reverie of the poet ' At the Table,' a sudden 
 and searching light cast on the labor and mis- 
 ery which underlie the luxury of our complex 
 modern existence. Like 'At the Table,' the 
 ' Dramatic Funeral ' is a picture more than it 
 is a story; it is a marvellous reproduction of 
 the factitious emotion of the good-natured 
 stage-folk, who are prone to overact even their 
 own griefs and joys. The ' Dramatic Funeral ' 
 seems to me always as though it might be a 
 painting of M. Jean Beraud, that most Parisian 
 of artists, just as certain stories of Maupas-
 
 THE PROSE TALES OF M, FRANQOIS COI'PEE 1 93 
 
 sant's inevitably suggest the bold freedom of 
 M. Forain's sketches in black and white. 
 
 An ardent admirer of the author of the stories 
 in the ' Odd Number ' has protested to me 
 that M. Coppee is not an etcher like Mau- 
 passant, but rather a painter in water-colors. 
 And why not ? Thus might we call M. Alphonse 
 Daudet an artist in pastels, so adroitly does 
 he suggest the very bloom of color. No doubt 
 M. Coppee's conies have not the sharpness of 
 Maupassant's nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet's. 
 But what of it? They have qualities of their 
 own. They have sympathy, poetry, and a 
 power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I 
 think, by those of either Maupassant or M. 
 Daudet. M. Coppee's street views in Paris, 
 his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life 
 under the shadow of Notre Dame, are con- 
 vincingly successful. They are intensely to 
 be enjoyed by those of us who take the same 
 keen delight in the varied phases of life in 
 New York. They are not, to my mind, really 
 rivalled either by those of Maupassant, who 
 was a Norman by birth and a nomad by 
 choice, or by those of M. Daudet, who is a 
 native of Provence, although now for thirty 
 years a resident of Paris. M. Coppee is a 
 Parisian from his youth up, and even in prose
 
 194 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 he is a poet. Perhaps this is why his pict- 
 ures of Paris are unsurpassable in their fehcity 
 and in their verity. 
 
 It may be fancy, but I seem to see also a 
 finer morality in M. Copp6e's work than in 
 Maupassant's, or in M. Daudet's, or in that of 
 almost any other of the Parisian story-tellers 
 of to-day. In his tales we breathe a purer 
 moral atmosphere, more wholesome and more 
 bracing. It is not that M. Coppee probably 
 thinks of ethics rather than esthetics ; in this 
 respect his attitude is undoubtedly that of the 
 others. There is no sermon in his song, or at 
 least none for those who will not seek it for 
 themselves ; there is never a hint of a preach- 
 ment. But for all that, I have found in his 
 work a trace of the tonic morality which in- 
 heres in Moliere, for example — also a Parisian 
 by birth — and in Rabelais, too, despite his dis- 
 guising grossness. This finer morality comes 
 possibly from a wider and a deeper survey of 
 the universe ; and it is as different as possible 
 from the morality which is externally applied, 
 and which always punishes the villain in the 
 fifth act. 
 
 It is of good augury for our own letters that 
 the best French fiction of to-day is getting it- 
 self translated in the United States, and that
 
 THE PROSE TALES OF M, FRANQOIS COPPEE 195 
 
 the liking for it is growing apace. Fiction is 
 more consciously an art in France than any- 
 where else, perhaps partly because the French 
 are now foremost in nearly all forms of artistic 
 endeavor. In the short story especially, in 
 the tale, in the conte, their supremacy is incon- 
 testable, and their skill is shown and their 
 esthetic instinct exemplified partly in the 
 sense of form, in the constructive method 
 which underlies the best short stories, how- 
 ever trifling these may appear to be, and part- 
 ly in the rigorous suppression of non-essen- 
 tials, due in a measure, it may be, to the 
 example of Merimee. That is an example 
 we in America may study to advantage, and 
 from the men who are writing fiction in 
 France we may gain much. 
 (1890.)
 
 IV.-THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC 
 HALEVY 
 
 To most American readers of fiction I fan- 
 cy that M. Ludovic Halevy is known chiefly, 
 if not solely, as the author of that most 
 charming of modern French novels, the ' Abb6 
 Constantin.' Some of these readers may have 
 disliked this or that novel of M. Zola's be- 
 cause of its bad moral, and this or that novel 
 of M. Ohnet's because of its bad taste, but 
 all of them were delighted to discover in M. 
 Halevy's interesting and artistic work a story 
 written by a French gentleman for young 
 ladies. Here and there a scoffer might sneer 
 at the tale of the old French priest and the 
 young women from Canada as innocuous but 
 saccharine ; but the story of the good Abbe 
 Constantin and of his nephew, and of the girl 
 the nephew loved in spite of her American 
 millions — this story had the rare good fortune 
 of pleasing at once the broad public of indis- 
 criminate readers of fiction and the narrower
 
 THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALlfiVY 197 
 
 circle of real lovers of literature. Artificial 
 the atmosphere of the tale might be, but it 
 was with an artifice at once delicate and de- 
 licious ; and the tale itself won its way into the 
 hearts of the women of America as it had into 
 the hearts of the women of France. 
 
 There is even a legend — although how solid 
 a foundation it may have in fact I do not dare 
 to discuss — there is a legend that the lady- 
 superior of a certain convent near Paris was 
 so fascinated by the 'Abbe Constantin,' and 
 so thoroughly convinced of the piety of its 
 author, that she ordered all his other works, 
 receiving in due season the lively volumes 
 wherein are recorded the sayings and doings 
 of Monsieur and Madame Cardinal, and of 
 the two lovely daughters of Monsieur and 
 Madame Cardinal. To note that these very 
 amusing studies of certain aspects of life in 
 a modern capital originally appeared in that 
 extraordinary journal La Vie Parisienne — now 
 sadly degenerate — is enough to indicate that 
 they are not precisely what the good lady- 
 superior expected to receive. We may not 
 say that the ' Famille Cardinal ' is one of the 
 books every gentleman's library should be 
 without ; but to appreciate its value requires 
 a far different knowledge of the world and of
 
 iqS aspects of fiction 
 
 its wickedness than is needed to understand 
 the 'Abbe Constantin.' 
 
 Yet the picture of the good priest and the 
 portraits of the little Cardinals are the work 
 of the same hand, plainly enough. In both 
 of these books, as in ' Criquette ' (M, Halevy's 
 only other novel), as in 'A Marriage for Love ' 
 and the two-score other short stories he has 
 written during the past thirty years, there are 
 the same artistic qualities, the same sharpness 
 of vision, the same gentle irony, the same con- 
 structive skill, and the same dramatic touch. 
 It is to be remembered always that the author 
 of the ' Abbe Constantin ' is also the half- 
 author of ' Froufrou ' and of 'Tricoche et Ca- 
 colet,' as well as of the librettos of the ' Belle 
 Helene' and of the 'Grande Duchesse de 
 Gerolstein.' 
 
 In the two novels, as in the two-score short 
 stories and sketches — the contcs and the non- 
 vellcs which are now spring-like idyls and now 
 wintry episodes, now sombre etching and now 
 gayly colored pastels — in all the works of the 
 story-teller we see the firm grasp of the dram- 
 atist. The characters speak for themselves ; 
 each reveals himself with the swift directness 
 of the personages of a play. They are not 
 talked about and about, for all analysis has
 
 THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY 1 99 
 
 been done by the playwright before he rings 
 up the curtain in the first paragraph. And 
 the story unrolls itself, also, as rapidly as 
 does a comedy. The movement is straight- 
 forward. There is the cleverness and the in- 
 genuity of the accomplished dramatist, but the 
 construction has the simplicity of the high- 
 est skill. The arrangement of incidents is so 
 artistic that it seems inevitable; and no one 
 is ever moved to wonder whether or not the 
 tale might have been better told in different 
 fashion. 
 
 Nephew of the composer of 'La Juive ' — an 
 opera not now heard as often as it deserves, 
 perhaps — and son of a playwright no one of 
 whose productions now survives, M. Halevy 
 grew up in the theatre. At fourteen he was on 
 the free-list of the Opera, the Opera Comique, 
 and the Odeon. After he left school and went 
 into the civil service his one wish was to write 
 plays, and so to be able to afford to resign 
 his post. In the civil service he had an inside 
 view of French politics, which gave him a dis- 
 taste for the mere game of government with- 
 out in any way impairing the vigor of his pa- 
 triotism — as is proved by certain of the short 
 stories dealing with the war of 1870 and the 
 revolt of the Paris Communists. And while
 
 200 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 he did his work faithfully, he had spare hours 
 to give to literature. He wrote plays and 
 stories, and they were rejected. The manager 
 of the Odeon declared that one early play of 
 M. Halcvy's was exactly suited to the Gym- 
 nase, and the manager of the Gymnase pro- 
 tested that it was exactly suited to the Odeon. 
 The editor of a daily journal said that one 
 early tale of M. Halevy's was too brief for a 
 novel, and the editor of a w^eekly paper said 
 that it was too long for a short story. 
 
 In time, of course, his luck turned ; he had 
 plays performed and stories published ; and at 
 last he met M. Henri Meilhac, and entered on 
 that collaboration of nearly twenty years' du- 
 ration to which we owe ' Froufrou ' and ' Tri- 
 coche et Cacolet * on the one hand, and on the 
 other the books of Offenbach's most brilliant 
 operas — ' Barbebleue,' for example, and ' La 
 Perichole.' When this collaboration termi- 
 nated, shortly before M. Halevy wrote the 
 ' Abbe Constantin,' he gave up writing for the 
 stage. The training of the playwright he could 
 not give up, if he would, nor the intimacy with 
 the manners and customs of the people who 
 live, move, and have their being on the far side 
 of the curtain. 
 
 Obviously M. Halevy is fond of the actors
 
 THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALlSVY 20I 
 
 and the actresses with whom he spent the years 
 of his manhood. They appear again and again 
 in his tales ; and in his treatment of them there 
 is never anything ungentlemanly, as there was 
 in M. Jean Richepin's volume of theatrical 
 sketches. M. Halevy's liking for the men 
 and women of the stage is deep ; and wide is 
 his knowledge of their changing moods. The 
 young Criquette and the old Karikari and the 
 aged Dancing - master — he knows them all 
 thoroughly, and he likes them heartily, and he 
 sympathizes with them cordially. Indeed, no- 
 ivhere can one find more kindly portraits of the 
 kindly player-folk than in the writings of this 
 half-author of ' Froufrou ' ; it is as though the 
 successful dramatist felt ever grateful towards 
 the partners of his toil, the companions of his 
 struggles. He is not blind to their manifold 
 weaknesses, nor is he the dupe of their easy 
 emotionalism, but he is tolerant of their fail- 
 ings, and towards them, at least, his irony is 
 never mordant. 
 
 Irony is one of M. Halevy's chief character- 
 istics, perhaps the chiefest. It is gentle when 
 he deals with the people of the stage — far 
 gentler then than when he is dealing with the 
 people of society, with fashionable folk, with 
 the aristocracy of wealth. When he is telling
 
 202 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 US of the young loves of millionaires and of 
 million-heiresses, his touch may seem caressing, 
 but for all its softness the velvet paw has claws 
 none the less. It is amusing to note how often 
 M, Halevy has chosen to tell the tale of love 
 among the very rich. The heroine of the 
 'Abbe Constantin ' is immensely wealthy, as 
 we all know, and immensely wealthy are the 
 heroines of ' Princesse,' of 'A Grand Marriage,' 
 and of ' In the Express.' Sometimes the heroes 
 and the heroines are not only immensely 
 wealthy, they are also of the loftiest birth ; 
 such, for instance, are the young couple whose 
 acquaintance we make in ' Only a Waltz.' 
 
 There is no trace or taint of snobbery in M, 
 Halevy's treatment of all this magnificence; 
 there is none of the vulgarity which marks the 
 pages of ' Lothair,' for example ; there is no 
 mean admiration of mean things. There is, 
 on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging 
 satire. He lets us see that all this luxury is a 
 little cloying, and perhaps not a little enervat- 
 ing. He suggests (although he takes care never 
 to say it) that perhaps wealth and birth are not 
 really the best the world can offer. The amia- 
 ble egotism of the hero of ' In the Express,' 
 and the not unkindly selfishness of the heroine 
 of that most Parisian love-story, are set before
 
 THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY 203 
 
 US without insistence, it is true, but with an 
 irony so keen that even he who runs as he 
 reads may not mistake the author's real opinion 
 of the characters he has evoked. 
 
 To say this is to say that M. Halevy's irony 
 is delicate and playful. There is no harshness 
 in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We 
 do not find in his pages any of the pessimism 
 which is perhaps the dominant characteristic 
 of the best French fiction of our time. To 
 M. Halevy, as to every thinking man, life is 
 serious, no doubt, but it need not be taken 
 sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems 
 still enjoyable, as it must to most of those who 
 have a vivid sense of humor. He is not dis- 
 illusioned utterly, he is not reduced to the 
 blankness of despair as are so many of the 
 disciples of Flaubert, who are cast into the 
 outer darkness, and who hopelessly revolt 
 against the doom they have brought on them- 
 selves. 
 
 Indeed, it is Merimee that M. Halevy would 
 hail as his master, and not Flaubert, whom 
 most of his fellow French writers of fiction 
 follow blindly. Now, while the author of 
 * Salammbo ' was a romanticist turned sour, 
 the author of 'Carmen' was a sentimentalist 
 sheathed in irony. To Gustave Flaubert the
 
 204 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 world was hideously ugly, and he wished it 
 strangely and splendidly beautiful, and he de- 
 tested it the more because of his impossible 
 ideal. To Prosper Merim^e the world was 
 what it is, to be taken and made the best of, 
 every man keeping himself carefully guarded. 
 Like M^rimee, M. Hal6vy is detached, but he 
 is not disenchanted. His work is more joyous 
 than Merimee's, if not so vigorous and com- 
 pact, and his delight in it is less disguised. 
 Even in the Cardinal sketches there is noth- 
 ing that leaves an acrid after -taste, nothing 
 corroding — as there is not seldom in the 
 stronger and sterner short stories of Maupas- 
 sant. 
 
 More than Maupassant or Flaubert or Mdri- 
 m^e is M. Halevy a Parisian. Whether or not 
 the characters of his tale are dwellers in the 
 capital, whether or not the scene of his story 
 is laid in the city by the Seine, the point of 
 view is always Parisian. The Circus Charger 
 did his duty in the stately avenues of a noble 
 country place, and Blacky performed his task 
 near a rustic waterfall ; but the men who record 
 their intelligent actions are Parisians of the 
 strictest sect. Even in the patriotic pieces 
 called forth by the war of 1870, in the * Insur- 
 gent ' and in the ' Chinese Ambassador,' it is the
 
 THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALEVY 205 
 
 siege of Paris and the struggle of the Commu- 
 nists which seem to the author most important. 
 His style even, his swift and limpid prose — the 
 prose which somehow corresponds to the best 
 vers de soci^te in its brilliancy and buoyancy — 
 is the style of one who lives at the centre of 
 things. Cardinal Newman once said that while 
 Livy and Tacitus and Terence and Seneca 
 wrote Latin, Cicero wrote Roman; so while 
 M. Zola on the one side, and M. Georges Ohnet 
 on the other, may write French, M. Hal6vy 
 writes Parisian. 
 
 ('S93)
 
 V.-MR. CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER AS A 
 WRITER OF FICTION 
 
 The late Matthew Arnold had a far wider 
 outlook than any of his contemporaries among 
 British critics, but none the less was he ca- 
 pable of insularity on occasion, as when he 
 made his taunting remark about the people of 
 the United States reading the works of " a 
 native author named Roe " rather than the 
 masterpieces of literature — the remark being 
 made at the very moment when the people 
 of Great Britain were reading the works of a 
 native author named Haggard, when the peo- 
 ple of France were reading the works of a 
 native author named Ohnet, and when the 
 people of Germany were reading the works 
 of a native author named " ?vlarlitt." And 
 yet a few years before the distinguished critic 
 sneered thus inexpensively at this transient 
 failing of ours, which happened to have at 
 the time an equivalent in every other coun- 
 try, there Avas another American weakness
 
 MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 207 
 
 at which he could have girded more effec- 
 tively. This weakness was an uneasy desire 
 for a strange and portentous work of fic- 
 tion which was to be hailed at once, on its 
 appearance, as The Great American Novel. 
 The satirist would have had a fair target in 
 this parochial expectancy of the impossible. 
 How should there ever be so monstrous an 
 entity as The Great American Novel ? Is 
 there such a thing as The Great British 
 Novel, or The Great French Novel ? And 
 if there is, what is the name thereof, and 
 who proclaimed and proved its unique great- 
 ness? 
 
 It is pleasant to observe that this silly 
 demand for an impossible object, frequent 
 enough when we had no novelists, or very 
 few, has died away now that we have a com- 
 pact corps of trained writers of fiction — a 
 corps in which promising recruits are enlisted 
 almost every month. These conscripts in 
 story-telling are often veterans in other divis- 
 ions of the literary body ; and they are drawn 
 especially from the rapidly thinning ranks of 
 the essayists. It may be doubted whether 
 the historians of literature have hitherto paid 
 sufficient attention to the strong influence of 
 the English essayists upon the development
 
 20S ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 of the English novel. Addison and Steele 
 made the way straight for Henry Fielding and 
 for Jane Austen. 'Rasselas' and the 'Vicar 
 of Wakefield ' are simply numbers of the Ra7/i- 
 blcr and of the Citizen of the ]Vo?'ld soracwhvit 
 expanded. So Curtis, after the ' Potiphar 
 Papers,' wrote ' Prue and I' and 'Trumps'; 
 so ]\Ir. Howclls, after ' Suburban Sketches,' 
 set out on ' Their Wedding Journey ' and 
 formed ' A Chance Acquaintance '; so Mr. 
 Charles Dudley Warner, after spending a 
 ' Summer in a Garden,' and after making a 
 series of * Back-Log Studies,' went away also 
 on 'Their Pilgrimage,' and took part in 'A 
 Little Journey in the World.' 
 
 It was Moore who pointed out in his me- 
 moir of Sheridan that English comedy had 
 been the work of very young men — which 
 would tend to account for its vivacity, per- 
 haps, and for its immaturity also. That the 
 novelists of our language have, on the con- 
 trary, flowered later in life, more often than 
 not, has also been noted before now. Richard- 
 son was fifty when he celebrated the triumph 
 of virtue in 'Pamela'; Fielding was thirty- 
 five when he made fun of poor Pamela by 
 giving her a brother, 'Joseph Andrews'; 
 Scott was forty when he finally finished
 
 MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 209 
 
 * Waverley ' ; Thackeray did not begin ' Van- 
 ity Fair,' and George Eliot did not sketch 
 the first of her ' Scenes of Clerical Life,' until 
 they had reached one-half of the allotted limit 
 of threescore years and ten ; and Mr. Howells 
 was about the same age when he took his 
 first timid flight in fiction with ' Their Wed- 
 ding Journey.' Mr, Warner was older than 
 Richardson when he turned story-teller and 
 wrote the fascinating journal of ' Their Pil- 
 grimage,' and he was full sixty when he fol- 
 lowed this travel tale with a full-fledged novel, 
 'A Little Journey in the World.' Like Field- 
 ing and Scott, like Thackeray and Mr. How- 
 ells, Mr. Warner had made proof of his liter- 
 ary faculty long before he ventured into the 
 doubtful labyrinth of fiction, wherein the most 
 accomplished man of letters may lose his way 
 if he cannot keep a firm grasp of the thread 
 of interest, the only clew which can guide him 
 and his readers to a joyful safety. 
 
 It is characteristic of Mr. Warner's modesty 
 that even now, when he has come to his re- 
 ward, when he has made a hit as a humorist, 
 when he has been welcomed as a writer of 
 travels, when he has won a place for himself 
 in the front rank of essayists, when he has 
 appeared thrice as a novelist, that he is wont
 
 2IO ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 to speak of himself not as a man of letters, 
 but as a journalist. His career has the unex- 
 pectedness to be discovered in the lives of so 
 many energetic Americans who set out in one 
 direction and then go suddenly in another — 
 reaching their original goal in the end, it may 
 be, but only after a circumnavigation of the 
 globe. Born in Massachusetts in 1829, grad- 
 uating from Hamilton in 185 1, he lived on 
 the frontier for a year or two, and then studied 
 law at the University of Pennsylvania — al- 
 though I must confess that the critic who sits 
 in the Editor's Study does not look in the 
 least like the " Philadelphia lawyer" of popu- 
 lar fancy. He practised law in Chicago until 
 i860, when he went to Hartford to take charge 
 of a paper since consolidated with the Coiirant 
 (in which Mr. Warner is still interested). 
 
 It was in the spring of 1870 that Mr. Warner 
 began to contribute to the Coiirant a series of 
 papers chronicling the experiences and the mis- 
 adventures of an amateur gardener. Amusing 
 as these little essays were, they had none of 
 the " acrobatic comedy" (as it has been called) 
 of the ordinary newspaper funny man, who 
 has his easily learned formulas for extracting 
 laughs. The humor of Mr. Warner's record 
 of his tribulations in the garden was not
 
 MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 211 
 
 machine-made; it was original, individual, 
 delicate, playful, and at bottom thoughtful ; 
 it was the easy fooling of a gentleman and a 
 scholar. It happened to hit the popular taste, 
 and the successive papers were copied far and 
 wide, and quoted and talked about, and finally 
 gathered into a book, for which Henry Ward 
 Beecher wrote a preface — omitted from the 
 later editions now that Mr. Warner has ceased 
 to need an introduction. ' My Summer in a 
 Garden ' was popular not only in the United 
 States but in Great Britain as well, where, 
 indeed, three rival publishers showed their 
 appreciation by reprinting it promptly. One 
 of these gentry even changed the title and 
 chose to call the little book 'Pusley'; but 
 no one of the three thought it needful to 
 transmit any pecuniary honorarium to the 
 American author, in spite of the fact that it 
 was even then possible to make transfers of 
 money by the Atlantic cable. 
 
 After the success of ' My Summer in a 
 Garden,' the author bound up in a book a 
 selection of ' Saunterings,' an apt title for 
 sketches of travel. Then he wrote a series of 
 * Back -Log Studies,' suggested possibly by 
 the ' Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,' and 
 possibly by the ' Reveries of a Bachelor,' and
 
 212 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 possibly owinf;^ nothing to cither of these, for 
 it was full of what we now know to be the 
 flavor of Mr. Warner's own personality. The 
 first requisite of an essayist, the one thing 
 needful, without which he is as nothing, is to 
 have his own point of view, to own himself, 
 to be his own master. The artist, so Goethe 
 tells us, " make what contortions he will, can 
 bring to light only his own individuality"; 
 Mr. Warner is no literary contortionist, and 
 it is without violence or wrench that he brings 
 his individuality to light. The more amusing 
 side of this individuality had been shown in 
 ' My Summer in a Garden,' and it was rather 
 the deeper aspect which was first revealed in 
 ' Back-Log Studies,' wherein the wit and the 
 humor flame up and crackle and sparkle, 
 while the thought beneath glows and burns 
 steadily. 
 
 Probably Mr. Warner himself would not ap- 
 prove of any suggestion that all his various writ- 
 ings, his editorial articles, his essays, his books 
 of travels, his biographies, his social studies — 
 or at least such of them as had appeared be- 
 fore 1886 — were merely preparations for their 
 author's first venture into fiction. But cer- 
 tainly, and whatever their value may be in 
 other respects, they were each in its different
 
 MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 213 
 
 degree advantageous to him when he took up 
 the new art of story-telling. In writing them 
 Mr. Warner had trained his eye and his hand ; 
 he had proved his weapons, and he had meas- 
 ured himself. The change of the essayist into 
 the novelist was a slow development, and not 
 a sudden expansion, as had been the change 
 of the lawyer into the journalist a quarter of 
 a century before. He could not but be aware 
 that he had the literary faculty in a high de- 
 gree; it remained to be seen whether he had 
 also the gift of story-telling, without which 
 the novelist is as naught. 
 
 It does not seem to me that this crucial 
 question is answered in ' Their Pilgrimage.' 
 In this first attempt Mr. Warner was diffident 
 and modest. While there is more incident in 
 'Their Pilgrimage' than there was in Curtis's 
 first attempt at fiction, the ' Potiphar Papers,' 
 and more even than there is in Mr. Howells's 
 * Their Wedding Journey,' still the book is 
 hardly to be classed among novels, unless, in- 
 deed, there were a separate division for topo- 
 graphic fiction. It is the record of a voyage 
 of discovery among the American summer 
 resorts, extending from Bar Harbor to the 
 White Sulphur, and including Saratoga and 
 Long Branch, Newport and Narragansett Pier
 
 2 14 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 and Niagara. It was natural that the essayist 
 turning novelist should be a portrayer of social 
 conditions rather than a story-teller, pure and 
 simple. He has a story to tell, of course (he 
 is no needy knife-grinder), and he tells it well, 
 bringing the hero to the proposal promptly, 
 and allowing the heroine the cherished privi- 
 lege of self-sacrifice ; but none the less are 
 we allowed to guess that the shifting pano- 
 rama is almost as interesting as are the fig- 
 ures making love in the foreground. Now and 
 again, as is the duty of the essayist, he lets us 
 catch a glimpse of his own individuality, not 
 suppressing it vigorously, as is the wont of the 
 most advanced story-tellers of to-day. 
 
 But still, the book " lets itself be read," to 
 use the useful German phrase. However slight 
 as a story, it is delightful as the work of an 
 accomplished man of letters, deftly sketching 
 a bit of scenery here and adroitly outlining a 
 bit of character there. And especially does it 
 abound in good talk — in good talk which is 
 not merely a sequence of clever phrases, but 
 really talk, with the flavor of give and take, 
 to and fro, hit or miss, cut and thrust, which 
 is the essence of friendly conversation. The 
 late Lord Houghton declared that " good con- 
 versation is to ordinary talk what whist is
 
 MR. C. D.WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 215 
 
 to playing cards"; and Mr. Warner has here 
 proved himself a most expert whist- player, 
 with the fullest understanding of American 
 leads. "A man always talks badly who has 
 nothing to say," Voltaire remarked ; but it 
 does not follow that the reverse is true, and 
 that the man who has something to say is 
 sure to talk well. Mr. Warner and Mr. War- 
 ner's companions in 'Their Pilgrimage' have 
 always something to say, and something to 
 which the reader is delighted to listen ; and 
 they say it in such fashion as to make conver- 
 sation seem the very cream of culture. 
 
 In ' Their Pilgrimage ' Mr. Warner showed 
 that he had a firm grasp of the essential facts 
 of American life and character ; in ' A Little 
 Journey in the World ' he revealed that he had 
 also mastered the art of fiction, and was able 
 to fix the reader's attention not on the scenery 
 and the chorus which had amused us in the 
 earlier book, but on the characters of the men 
 and women, and on the influence of these 
 characters one on the other. He had turned 
 from the externals of existence to the internals. 
 He had thrust the panorama into the back- 
 ground and concentrated his attention on the 
 figures in the foreground. And these figures 
 are Avell worthy of his attention and of ours.
 
 2l6 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 He groups together the delicate, sensitive New 
 England girl of high ideals and the rather 
 common but clever New York girl — of a kind 
 seen in the city often enough, and yet not at 
 all a typical New York girl, if such an entity 
 may be said to exist. He shows us a new 
 variety of the English lord whom it is the duty 
 of the American girl to reject ; and he makes 
 us see what a fine fellow the Englishman is, 
 and what a mistake the girl makes in accept- 
 ing, instead of his, the love of a Wall Street 
 speculator, handsome, bold, scheming, and un- 
 scrupulous. And here it is that Mr. Warner 
 proves at once his insight into life and his 
 newly acquired skill as a story - teller ; he 
 makes us see and understand, and even accept 
 as inevitable, the slow process of deterioration 
 which follows on the mating of a young woman 
 of lofty standards with a dominating character 
 of coarser and tougher substance. The disin- 
 tegration of Margaret's moral fibre under the 
 repeated shocks of worldliness, incessantly re- 
 curring, until at last the strain breaks down all 
 resistance, seems to me one of the finest things 
 in recent American literature. 
 
 At the end of ' A Little Journey in the 
 World,' the gentle Margaret, after wedding 
 the daring speculator Henderson, had suffer-
 
 MR. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 217 
 
 ed a slow moral disintegration, under which 
 she finally faded away and died, whereupon 
 the swift vengeance of Heaven pursued Hen- 
 derson, and the book closes with his marriage 
 to the easy-going Carmen. That these two 
 characters, thus fitly disposed of in ' A Little 
 Journey in the World,' should reappear in the 
 ' Golden House ' is a surprise, not to say a 
 shock, and yet it must be confessed that the 
 result justifies Mr. Warner's daring. We can 
 see now that the author was right in thinkinf? 
 that the career of Henderson, and also the 
 career of his second wife, might be carried 
 further with advantage. Henderson's career, 
 indeed, the author has seen fit to carry out 
 to the end — to his sudden and lonely death 
 in the midst of his millions. 
 
 Of all the many attempts to represent in fic- 
 tion the American money-maker, the man who 
 has amassed an immense fortune, and who goes 
 on increasing it with no thought of resting from 
 his labor, the man who exists solely for the sake 
 of making money, surrendering all tastes that 
 interfere with this passion, giving up every- 
 thing else, abandoning his whole life to gain, 
 and not from any sordid avarice, not even from 
 any great desire to use what he accumulates, 
 but moved mainly by an interest in the sport
 
 2l8 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 of speculation, and finding the zest of his life 
 in the game of moncj^-making, wholly regard- 
 less of the cash value of the stakes — of all the 
 many efforts to put such a man before us in the 
 pages of a novel, this study of Mr. Warner's 
 seems to me to be the most successful. Hen- 
 derson is vigorously presented, and we get to 
 know him, and to understand how it is that he 
 is not unkindly, and that he is absolutely un- 
 scrupulous. We perceive why he has no malice 
 towards those he injured by his scheming, and 
 why he bears them no ill will even after he has 
 ruined them. We see how all the better im- 
 pulses of the man have been starved and choked 
 by the growth of the one all-absorbing passion ; 
 and it is not without pity that we discover that 
 not only his impulses, but his tastes, his minor 
 interests in life, his faculty of enjoyment, have 
 been eliminated, one by one, until at last he 
 has nothing left but the one thing on which 
 he has set his heart, and to which he has bent 
 his whole being. Then at length even this 
 one thing loses its savor, and is as dust and 
 ashes in his mouth. At the very acme and 
 climax of his triumph Henderson knows that 
 his life has been a failure. 
 
 This boldly projected figure of Henderson 
 dominates the book as his exemplars tower
 
 MR. C. D.WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 2ig 
 
 aloft over the social organization of our time. 
 In our modern society the millionaire has in 
 great measure taken the place held aforetime 
 by the nobleman ; and it may very well be that 
 we allow him to enjoy too many of the feudal 
 advantages of his predecessor. Perhaps Mr. 
 Kidd is right in thinking that we are according 
 to captains of industry an undue proportion of 
 the powers and of the honors which were for- 
 merly bestowed rightly enough on command- 
 ers in war. One of the merits of the ' Golden 
 House ' is that it forces the reader to take 
 thought about society. The book is no tract, 
 no parable, no allegory, no Tcndenz-Roman even, 
 as the Germans phrase it, no novel with a pur- 
 pose ; it is a story, pure and simple, with strong- 
 ly drawn characters, in whose sayings and do- 
 ings we are interested for their own sakes ; but 
 none the less even the casual reader who turns 
 its pages carelessly has forced upon him a con- 
 sciousness that our social system is strangely 
 inadequate and startlingly imperfect. 
 
 Perhaps nothing is more harmful to-day than 
 the frequent denunciations of the existing order 
 of things with the obvious inference that a so- 
 ciety so deformed needs to be rooted up and 
 cleared away and made over. What ought to 
 be clear to us is that, with all the defects of
 
 220 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 the social organization in our time, this organ- 
 ization is less defective than it ever was before; 
 that there has been steady progress in the 
 world from generation to generation ; that 
 there has been no century in which the aver- 
 age man has not been better off than he was 
 in the previous century ; that it is our duty 
 to do all that in us lies to help forward this 
 progress; and that nothing tends to retard 
 this improvement more than violent and in- 
 flammatory declamation. The pessimist who 
 refuses to believe in any advance is quite as 
 wrong as the optimist who denies that there is 
 any necessity for a forward movement. Now, 
 as always, discontent is a duty, for it is a con- 
 dition precedent to progress. It is not dis- 
 content that throws the dynamite bomb ; it is 
 despair. 
 
 While Mr. Warner's novel is the work of a 
 thinker, and while it affords food for thought 
 even to the cursory reader, it is wholly free 
 from denunciation. By its perusal we are led 
 not to wish to destroy society, but rather to 
 desire its reorganization ; and we are made at 
 least to suspect the complexity of the problem. 
 Mr. Warner shows us the poor as well as the 
 rich— Mulberry Bend after Madison Avenue — 
 and he does not idealize the one more than the
 
 MR. C. D.WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 221 
 
 other. Perhaps, after all, the pinch of poverty 
 does not squeeze the soul more than the weight 
 of riches — although it numbs the body sooner. 
 
 It is poverty that saves Jack Delancy, who is 
 perhaps to be called the hero of the ' Golden 
 House,' and who is certainly a most skilful 
 piece of portraiture. We all know Jack; he is 
 the clever young fellow, moving easily through 
 life along the line of least resistance, and hav- 
 ing no shadows in his path except when he 
 stands in his own light. If such a young man 
 has had the good fortune to be born poor, he 
 can save himself, and the world is the richer 
 by a fine fellow. If he has the bad luck of 
 Jack Delancy, and inherits twenty thousand 
 dollars a year, he is not likely to save himself, 
 for enniii is the devil's advocate — and as Mr. 
 Warner tersely puts it, " wherever the devil is, 
 there is always a quorum present for business." 
 Even after Jack marries an ideal wife his fate 
 is in doubt, and it needs not only her aid but 
 the sharp douche of sudden poverty to stimu- 
 late him into making the best of his life. 
 
 As it is no fairy tale that Mr. Warner is writ- 
 ing, he does not let Jack reform in the twink- 
 ling of an eye, but only after a long struggle 
 with himself and his habits ; for while a noble 
 impulse may make a man volunteer for a for-
 
 222 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 lorn hope, only a firm Avill can keep him stead- 
 fast under fire. It would be futile to wonder 
 how a Parisian novelist would have treated the 
 relations of Jack and Carmen, but it may be 
 doubted whether that treatment would be as 
 calmly truthful as Mr, Warner's. The Amer- 
 ican author knew his type when he made Hen- 
 derson conscious that Carmen was as " passion- 
 less as a diamond." 
 
 How true to life Carmen may be, and how 
 accurate Edith Delancy, I do not know ; for 
 how is a mere man to decide on the niceties of 
 feminine character? Every novel really worth 
 criticising needs two critics — a man to discuss 
 the male characters, and a woman to discuss 
 the female. It is easy enough for any man to 
 say that the heroes of many women's novels 
 are impossible, for the most part either prigs 
 or brutes ; but may not the woman retort on 
 us, and declare the irresistible heroines of men's 
 novels equally impossible ? To us men Carmen 
 is coherent and convincing ; Edith Delancy is 
 almost flawless, and quite too good for that 
 very human creature Jack; Dr. Ruth Leigh is 
 most sympathetically drawn ; but what do the 
 women think of these creatures of a masculine 
 brain ? I can bear testimony to the dignity 
 and the strength with which Father Damon is
 
 MK. C. D. WARNER AS A WRITER OF FICTION 223 
 
 delineated ; but I lack the knowledge to take 
 the stand in behalf of Dr. Ruth, who seems to 
 me quite as well conceived, and quite as hap- 
 pily presented. 
 
 In this his third work of fiction the author 
 is more the master of the art than in the earlier 
 studies. He possesses his materials now ; he 
 is not possessed by them. He keeps his story 
 more firmly in hand ; the construction is sol- 
 ider; the movement is swifter; and there are 
 fewer digressions from the main path. To a 
 certain extent the modern novel is the result 
 of a marriage of the essay and the drama ; and 
 it is natural enough that the child should re- 
 semble now one of the parents and now the 
 other. In Mr. Warner's hands, as was to be 
 expected, the tendency is rather towards the 
 essay, yet there is no obtrusion of the nar- 
 rator's personality, and there is no lack of 
 dramatic force in certain of the situations. 
 In more than one of them — in the parting of 
 the doctor and the priest, for example — there 
 is the swift simplicity of tragedy, inevitable, 
 inexorable, final. 
 
 (1894)
 
 VI.-TEXT-BOOKS OF FICTION 
 
 During the many recent attempts to sep- 
 arate the study of Hterature from the study 
 of linguistics, and to consider literature itself 
 artistically rather than scientifically, an increas- 
 ing attention has been paid to American liter- 
 ature and to the British literature of the nine- 
 teenth century. Here in these two subjects is 
 matter which the students can readily assimi- 
 late, and in the treatment of which it is pos- 
 sible for the professor often to excite in them 
 the first germs of that " taste for reading " that 
 only too many of our college graduates are 
 wholly without. For the instructor who wishes 
 to arouse young men to some understanding 
 of the underlying principles of literature, a 
 course in modern fiction may be made even 
 more stimulant than the two courses already 
 mentioned. The evolution of the narrative 
 art, from the 'Gesta Romanorum' down to the 
 writings of Mr. Howells and Mr. Kipling, its 
 modification by the practitioners who follow-
 
 TEXT-BOOKS OF FICTION 225 
 
 ed the Rabelaisian tradition on the one hand 
 and the Cervantine on the other, its increasing 
 complexity, as the puppets in vacuo of Boc- 
 caccio were followed after many years by 
 the full-blooded characters of Turgenef seen 
 against a background of real life — all these 
 things can be made interesting to the student, 
 who soon finds himself reading the ordinary 
 fiction of the day with some appreciation of 
 its merits and with some understanding of the 
 school to which it belongs. 
 
 Unfortunately there is no single book which 
 serves not necessarily as a text -book — in a 
 course of this sort, when the pupils read the 
 authors for themselves, a text-book is almost 
 an impertinence — there is no book to serve 
 as a work of reference even. Dunlop's ' His- 
 tory of Fiction ' is hopelessly out of date, even 
 in the late revised edition ; and the most of 
 the books about the novel err in considering 
 it only in a single language. Now, if anything 
 is clear in the history of fiction, it is that there 
 has been incessant international borrowing ; 
 the principles and the practice of a Spanish 
 author influencing an author in France, who, 
 in turn, may have modified the native manner 
 of an author in England. Mr. Henry James 
 studied his art under Turgenef, and M. Paul
 
 226 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Bourget obviously modelled his earlier novels 
 on those of Mr. Henry James. Again, Mr. 
 Rudyard Kipling was a disciple of Mr. Bret 
 Harte, who was a follower of Dickens, who 
 avowedly copied the methods of Smollett, 
 who confessed his imitation of Le Sage, who 
 borrowed the form of the Spanish picaresque 
 tales, which, in turn, may or may not have 
 been derived, in some measure, from the Greek 
 romances. 
 
 M. Paul Morillot's ' Roman en France' is a 
 discussion of the novel in France, and Mr. 
 Walter Raleigh's 'English Novel' is a discus- 
 sion of the novel in Great Britain, while Mr. 
 William Edward Simonds, in his * Introduc- 
 tion to the Study of English Fiction,' de- 
 voting himself chiefly to the English novel, 
 rashly wanders off now and again into a con- 
 sideration of the great writers of other lan- 
 guages. Of the three books Mr. Simonds's 
 is the least satisfactory. He has no firm grasp 
 on the principles of fiction ; he does not seem 
 to be able to follow the steps of its steady 
 progress; he is lacking in the sense of propor- 
 tion, or he would not be so absurdly inade- 
 quate in his treatment of Hawthorne, who is 
 actually introduced and dismissed in the 
 same paragraph with Bulwer Lytton. Mr.
 
 TEXT-BOOKS OF FICTION 227 
 
 Simonds fails altogether to understand the 
 position of contemporary American fiction. 
 Nowhere does he record the extraordinary- 
 skill with which almost every locality in the 
 United States has been translated into liter- 
 ature. Nowhere does he praise the vigor with 
 which American character has been presented 
 by the best of our later writers of fiction. His 
 attitude is often colonial in its deference to 
 the opinion of British critics; and it is through 
 the spectacles of British critics that Mr. Si- 
 monds sees not only the American novelists, 
 but the French as well. The whole chapter 
 on the 'Tendencies of To-day' is ill-digested 
 and inadequate ; sometimes it is even mislead- 
 ing. One sentence (in which Mr. Simonds 
 declares that " it is not only a perfected art 
 that puts Alphonse Daudet far above Ohnet, 
 De Maupassant, Zola, and the other realists, 
 great and small ") is even more startling than 
 the late Walter Pater's setting up of Octave 
 Feuillet as a rival of Gustave Flaubert ; it is 
 almost as astonishing as Jeffrey's casual lump- 
 ing together of Victor Hugo, Balzac, and 
 Paul de Kock as the three great French nov- 
 elists of his time. 
 
 Mr. Simonds fills more than half of his vol- 
 ume with selected passages, specimens of nar-
 
 228 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 ration from 'Beowulf to 'Tristram Shandy.' 
 M. Morillot also gives up a great many of his 
 pages to selections, more carefully made than 
 Mr. Simonds's, and far ampler and more rep- 
 resentative than those in the American book. 
 But I doubt the advantage of a volume of 
 selections from fiction. Specimen bricks can- 
 not even suggest elaborate structure. Con- 
 densation is possible and often advisable ; but 
 mere excerpting is of doubtful utility. Some- 
 times, as the late Henry Morley declared, the 
 half is greater than the whole ; and probably 
 it is better that the student should read the 
 ' Decameron' and ' Gargantua' in the compact 
 volumes of the Universal Library than in 
 complete editions. Extracts draw attention 
 rather to the mere writing of the novelist, 
 to his style chiefly ; and they are of little or 
 no help to us in any endeavor to grasp the 
 primary conception of a novel, to disengage 
 the skeleton of the story, to see how skilfully 
 it is articulated, and to decide for ourselves 
 whether or not the work has the supreme 
 grace of form. So rare is real symmetry of 
 construction in British fiction that Mr. Si- 
 monds, for example, cannot understand why 
 Mr. Henry James should find the Joyeuse 
 episodes of the ' Nabab' excrescences.
 
 TEXT-BOOKS OF FICTION 229 
 
 M. Morillot's selections seem to be well 
 made, and the brief notices with which he 
 introduces them are intelligent and to the 
 point. Especially to be commended is his 
 cordiality to Mme. de Lafayette, whose ' Prin- 
 cess of Cleves' was as far in advance of its 
 time as was the best of Miss Austen's equally 
 feminine and equally introspective fictions. 
 His treatment of Alexandre Dumas will not 
 satisfy the neo- romanticists, who hail the 
 author of the 'Three Musketeers' as one of 
 the great masters of fiction ; but it is quite 
 in accord with the consensus of critical opin- 
 ion in France to-day. His assertion that the 
 moral significance of Octave Feuillet's novels 
 is " very virile and very pure " is probably also 
 in agreement with contemporary judgment in 
 France ; but it will seem unfounded to many 
 of us who believe nearly all of Feuillet's hec- 
 tic tales of fashionable life to be profoundly 
 false, and, therefore, to be radically immoral. 
 
 Perhaps Mr. Raleigh's is the best of these 
 three books. The favorable impression it 
 makes on the interested reader is due partly, 
 it may be, to the fact that it contains no ex- 
 tracts to interrupt the current of the author's 
 criticism. Mr. Raleigh considers first the ori- 
 gins of the English novel ; and then he dis-
 
 230 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 cusses at length the Elizabethan romances, 
 devoting himself chiefly, I am sorry to say, 
 to their style, and not giving sufficient atten- 
 tion to the underlying stories themselves, al- 
 most overwhelmed out of sight by the overflow 
 of rhetoric. (Nowhere, so far as I know, has 
 the actual art of narration among the Eliza- 
 bethans been adequately considered except in 
 an essay by Mr. R. A. Ashworth in a number 
 of the Sewanee Review for 1894.) Mr. Raleigh, 
 while confining himself to the development of 
 the novel in England, follows carefully its ex- 
 pansion in France, and is ready always to point 
 out the influences exerted across the Channel. 
 He also shows what a service was rendered to 
 the art of fiction by the improvement of the 
 art of character- drawing consequent on the 
 starting of the Tatlcr, the Spectator, and their 
 imitators. He conducts the history of English 
 fiction only to the advent of Scott; and it is 
 to be hoped that he will be encouraged to carry 
 it forward at least to the death of Thackeray. 
 
 Excellent as Mr. Raleigh's book is, with its 
 criticism at once solid and brilliant ; with its 
 subordination of mere biographical and biblio- 
 graphical detail to the more important work of 
 tracing the development of the art itself ; with 
 its many merits, not the least of which is its
 
 TEXT-BOOKS OF FICTION 231 
 
 readableness ; excellent as it is altogether, it 
 still leaves room for a book about the modern 
 novel which should not confine itself to a single 
 language, but which should show, by a judi- 
 cious selection of the salient stories of all the 
 nations of Europe, where the novel of to-day 
 got its complexity. The time has come for a 
 history of modern fiction in which shall be set 
 forth the successive steps of the story-tellers 
 who narrated at the first things quite Impos- 
 sible ; and then things only Improbable — in 
 which stage the romanticists still linger even in 
 this last decade of the nineteenth century, when 
 riper artists have already tried to pass from the 
 description of the merely Probable to a depict- 
 ing of the absolutely Inevitable. The histo- 
 rian of fiction will need self-control if he 
 wishes to declare with precision the merits 
 and the demerits of the masterpieces in each 
 of these four classes. 
 
 Neither the future historian of fiction nor 
 the present instructor who is trying to trace 
 the manifold developments of the art of story- 
 telling as it is to-day, will be greatly helped by 
 a very curious little book recently edited by 
 Mr. Richard G. Moulton — ' Four Years of Novel 
 Reading: an account of an experiment in 
 popularizing the study of fiction.' It appears
 
 232 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 that in a group of mining villages in Northum- 
 berland near the German Ocean the so-called 
 University Extension movement led to the 
 formation of a society for the study of classical 
 fiction, one novel being read every two months 
 by every member, after an expert had drawn up 
 a list of points to which the attention of read- 
 ers was specially to be directed. Upon one or 
 more of these points papers were written, and 
 upon others a debate was held. Obviously a 
 scheme like this, well carried out, would do 
 much to enliven village circles, and might even 
 aid in increasing the readers' understanding of 
 human nature. But the experts who choose 
 the books and who draw up the lists of points 
 to be considered, debated, and written about 
 must needs be men of unusual equipment and 
 insight, or else we shall see the blind leading 
 the blind. 
 
 The list of the twenty-five novels read by 
 these Northumberland villagers does not in- 
 spire confidence in the wisdom of their experts. 
 The object of the course was avowedly to read 
 classical novels — and it included one tale by 
 Mr. Robert Buchanan ! The other twenty-four 
 novels were four of them by Dickens, three by 
 Scott, two by Thackeray, by George Eliot, by 
 Charles Kingsley, and by Charles Reade, and
 
 TEXT-BOOKS OF FICTION 233 
 
 one each by Mr. George Meredith, Mr. R. D. 
 Blackmore, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Bronte, Miss 
 Austen, Dr. Holmes, Victor Hugo, Dumas, 
 and Eugene Sue — surely as odd a selection 
 of "classical novels" as could be made. They 
 are most inexpert experts who are capable of 
 including Mr. Robert Buchanan and Charles 
 Reade and Eugene Sue in a list of authors 
 of "classical novels" while excluding Cooper 
 and Hawthorne, Balzac and George Sand, Tur- 
 genef and Tolstoi. And some of the com- 
 ments are quite worthy of the selections. The 
 editor calls ' Monte Cristo ' " a masterpiece of 
 the French school " and " a consummate piece 
 of literary workmanship from beginning to 
 end." Mr. W. E. Norris (himself a novelist) 
 tells us that to have discovered something 
 about the methods by which Tito in 'Romola' 
 " has been made to stand on his feet is, no 
 doubt, to have discovered something about 
 the technical side of light literature " : — it is 
 indeed a discovery to find that any man able 
 to read and write is capable of classifying as 
 "light literature" the acute and subtle study 
 of the processes of Tito's steady moral disin- 
 tegration under recurring temptation. 
 
 Although other British novelists — Mr. Justin 
 McCarthy, Mr. J. H. Shorthouse, Mr. S. J.
 
 234 ASPECTS OF FICTION 
 
 Weyman — are also among the experts, scarce- 
 ly once is attention called to the merits of the 
 story as a story, or to the principles of the art 
 of narrative. So slight is the sense of form 
 among British writers of fiction that no notice 
 is taken of the bifurcation of the plot of ' Van- 
 ity Fair,' or of the sprawling end of ' Monte 
 Cristo,' or of the beautiful simplicity of struc- 
 ture of ' Silas Marner' — a simplicity not to be 
 seen in any other of George Eliot's novels. In 
 the suggestions of the experts, as in the in- 
 troduction of the editor, stress is laid chiefly 
 on moral questions, on ethics rather than on 
 esthetics. 
 {1895.) 
 
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