THE REALISTIC SPIRIT

THE REALISTIC SPIRIT

IN describing the history of English fiction since 1740 as a war between sentimentalism and satire, which I roughly identified respectively with the emotional and the intellectual elements in fiction, I had in mind a certain great change which has but lately come over the spirit of the novel; a change which amounts to nothing less than a pact of peace eter this long feud, and which is so important that it seems to promise sweeping changes in the novel of the future, a quite different direction and set of intellectual ideals. r have already mentioned several middle and late Victorian symptoms of the struggle of the modern novel toward intellectual disinterestedness: such symptoms as Thackeray's indulgence toward the foibles of his persona, George Eliot's philosophical interest in the nature and significance of evil, Samuel Butler's analysis of heredity, Hardy's indictment of the whole world-purpose as a cruel irresponsibleness, and Gissing's researches in sociology ; to which we may add, of course, Meredith's re- creation of Comedy as "the laughter of the mind. " All these point to the one fact : the passing of the old violent and arbitrary antipathies. Hatred becomes an anachronism and contempt an impertinence. A broader interpretation of what the world-organism is, and of how cause interlocks with effect, helps the novelist see that all of

WI equally are what we were made, what we cannot help being ; and more and more the ideal goal of fiction becomes this elemental truth of cause and effect, the truth of what life and character are without reference to what the novelist personally would like them to be. The old intellectualism of satire was a criticism of life in the adverse sense of being a denunciation of what it ought not to be. The new intellectualism is a criticism of life in the sense of being simply an interpretation of what life is, beyond our power to help or prevent. The temperamental indulgence of Thlekeray becomes the philosophical tolerance, the rooted conviction, of the present age; the spirit of satire becomes what I shall call, to distinguish it from the realistic technique or method, the new Realistic Spirit.

I have said that this recent triumph of the realistic spirit, the triumph of intellectualism in the novel, marks the end of the old war of satirist and sentimentalist; and indeed that is a fact which we need to perceive if we are to understand what the fiction of the present is about, and what the fiction of the future is most likely to be about. Sentimentalism was sympathy, capriciously and arbitrarily exerted: the realistic spirit is universal sympathy, an attempt to understand everything from its own point of view. Satire was a half- impersonal attempt to define something that everybody ought to hate : the realistic spirit is a much more impersonal attempt to show that there is nothing human which a really enlightened mind ought to hate. The old novel was intellectual about in proportion as it was polemical : it thought and fought,

or it felt and waxed irresponsible. The new spirit makes it at once less polemical and more intellectual. The new sympathy is more analytical than the old satire—besides being far more inclusive than the old sympathy. The realist—I speak of him still as the child of his time, the present, peering as far as I can through the dust raised by lesser conflicts of fashions and personalities—the realist is the legitimate child of satirist and sentimentalist. He thinks with his sensibilities, feels with his intellect; criticism and enjoyment fuse. Sentimentalism dealt with the egocentric life, the emotional seemings of things to susceptible folk; satire dealt with the ethical life, the possibilities of things. Our realist records the possibilities and the seemings, but not to identify himself with either; for he sees them as incidental to the more probing question of what life inscrutably is.

We may leave aside for the moment the question of whether this sweeping change in fiction is a change for the better, a growth. I think we can see pretty readily that it is inevitable, and that its inevitability lifts it above the rank of the mere fashions, the flux and reflux, that in every age exert a transient effect on the shape and composition of the novel. I can best state the importance of this change if I say that it is the response of the novel to the corresponding change which has come over everything else. Anyone who will take the trouble to read the polemical and controversial writings of such a man as Huxley will see how man's conception of the world changed its center of gravity in the thirty-five years after the

publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The world as an organization, a product of will, became the world as an organism, the product of natural law; the province of faith appeared to shrink and that of sight to expand; the higher criticism had its way, first with Moses, then wit% the four gospels; and before 1890, before the end of Huxley 's long controversy with Gladstone over The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, it was possible for Mrs. Humphry Ward, whom it is moderately difficult to think of as a violent iconoclast, to write an important novel, Robert Elsmere, about the difficulty which any modern man of both intelligence and courage must experience in believing the dogmas of Christian theology. For good or evil, the world had to consider its own meaning and interpret its own natural history more broadly, less arbitrarily. The natural outcome of this new vision of man in relation to all things was the rise of the social sciences ; the perception that social problems are often perhaps insoluble, that at any rate there is no panacea. And fiction, partly anticipating and partly following the tendency visible everywhere else, acquired this open-mindedness, became impersonal and disinterested to the last degree.

Both sentimentalism and satire are very comfortable postures in an orthodox universe, governed by divine law and dedicated to some ultimate enforcement of order. The sentimentalist feels that everything is already settled without his connivance, and that he may as well enjoy what appeals to him; the satirist thinks he knows just how everything is settled, and, under

standing the law, can do no less than lay it down. But either attitude seems childish when the decay of faith turns the universe into an overwhelming riddle, its truths into antiquated speculations, its fixed moral laws into mere truisms about animal behavior. The mature man then is he who senses the relative, provisional, and impermanent status of all that is thought or known—the man without prejudices. Our realist escapes all prejudices by respecting all opinions, and rejecting all. He has the open inquiring mind, the steeled heart. He believes in everything as an evidence, but in nothing as a proof. His mind is a sympathetic and submissive recording instrument for the actual; for every experience, thought, memory, impression, or dream. He sympathizes with all, because his philosophical conscience tells him that whatever exists is worthy of sympathetic understanding. In short, his unremitting effort is to get outside himself, his own likes and dislikes, and finally to get outside the world, outside everything. For it is only from that impersonal point of vantage, he tells himself, that it is possible to see through everything. Likes and dislikes become relatively meaningless in a world conceived as an evolutionary unit, in which we are all necessarily parts of each other.

II

This new mood that has come over the practice of fiction can be summarized as a selfless and pervasive

curiosity. The old hatreds have passed, irrecoverably, it would seem. Even so vigorous a fighting man as Huxley, defending himself from the charge of having gone out of his way to assail things commonly held sacred, says: "I . . . steadfastly deny that 'hatred of Christianity' is a feeling with which I have any acquaintance. There are very few things which I find it permissible to hate; and though, it may be, that some of the organizations, which arrogate to themselves the Christian name, have richly earned a place in the category of hateful things, that ought to have nothing to do with one's estimation . of the religion, which they have perverted and disfigured out of all likeness to the original. " Thus, in the chief controversialist of his age, a scientific impartiality takes the place of bias; and presently that mood of the laboratory, the mood of research, has conquered the novel and annexed it as an invaluable province.

When we look for illustrations through fiction of the last twenty years, we do not have to go unrewarded. If we examine the only literary career since George Eliot's that can compare in length, in dignity, and in originality with the careers of Hardy and Meredith, —that of Henry James, —we shall find it animated from the earliest years by this very impulse of curiosity. Henry James won his first distinction as a student of international situations, with special reference to the American abroad; and of all the writers in his generation who dealt with such themes, he alone

portrayed Americans and Europeans who were wise enough to learn much from each other, too wise to try to teach each other anything. He creates the best elements discoverable in modern characters who are products of quite separate places and traditions of breeding, and then simply throws those contrasting elements together in crucial situations to see what will happen. He takes his spoil, his trophy, and gives us our reward, not in the triumph of one set of characters or interests over another, but simply in the triumph of understanding all round. And, late in his life when his work of fiction was almost over and he sat down to make the Prefaces to the definitive New York edition of it, —a series of the most valuable documents ever produced in constructive criticism of fiction as an art, —his constant emphasis was upon the unflagging ingenuity and patience with which he had drawn his clues from life and extricated them from the mass of interfering attendant circumstances. The exertion of selfless curiosity is to him a good in itself; curiosity is the only one of his emotions to which the baffling element in life makes any challenge worth accepting; a problematical character or situation is an importunate plea addressed to his intuition ; and in him this essentially modern disinterested emotion of curiosity enlarges its scope until it includes compassion, chivalry, self-renunciation, the uttermost extension of delicacy, and what Professor Wendell has called, in a fine commemorative tribute, his "exquisite solicitude. " Henry James made of curiosity nothing less than a whole philosophy of art

and life. The emotion extends its scope from Roderick Hudson and The American, books of his first fame, to The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, his crowning attempts to tell "the story that cannot be told. " And The Sacred Fount, the one novel into which he deliberately put a partial portrait of himself, is nothing more than a dramatization of enlightened curiosity, of a sort of sublimated appetite for benevolent gossip, at work in a tangled social situation where all the clues are not material but spiritual and intuitional.

This spirit of curiosity, as exhibited quintessentially in the novels and tales of Henry James, strangely fulfils the commandment to love one's neighbor as one's self; the realist's effort is precisely to get outside himself and inside his neighbor, to see others as they see themselves. This self-suppression is conceived, not as a moral duty, but as an intellectual privilege; but the result is largely the same. Why blame things for being what they are, when everything is what it cannot help being? "To understand is to forgive. " Mr. John Galsworthy expresses the modern spirit, in one of his brave if slightly discouraged sketches, The Inn of Tranquility, ' when he says that it is wrong for one of us to despise another, because "we are all little bits of continuity. " "To despise one another is to deny continuity; and to deny continuity is to deny eternity. " Each of us is only a drop in the same ocean of being And Mr. Joseph Conrad, who is

hardly less illuminating in discussion of his art than in the practice of it, says in a memorable passage: ". . . the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth. " 1 "The detached curiosity of a subtle mind" is the faculty which he dramatims in Chance—in fact, in all the stories related by Marlow—and his whole philosophy is implied in the statement that "Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a shazn. "

It would be easy to find plenty of other testimony to this same effect, but none more authoritative than that of these three artists who happen also to be critics of their art. Impersonal curiosity, in that ultimate development where it becomes almost a synonym of Christian charity, has entered the novel to the exclusion of the old prides, prejudices, and hates; and it is impossible for us to imagine what can ever drive it out again. Science has created a new world and destroyed the old world behind us; we cannot, if we would, retreat into that old world of fixed standards where we were commanded to love some things and hate others. Our generation has seen the literature of sentimentalism become more "unofficial" than ever, and sink its appeal to the lowest intelligences. Meanwhile, the literature of satire has descended to mere muck-raking. The falling to pieces of these traditional extremes and the emergence between them of I he present official literature of curiosity, of investigation under the realistic spirit, constitute the final evidence of the change that has come over things, and of its general irrevocableness.

III

So far I find myself sufficiently occupied with merely describing and reporting the tendency which I have called by this name of the realistic spirit. But to describe is not necessarily to approve; nor do I mean to let the discussion become wholly uncritical. The realistic tendency may be inevitable, yet at the same time deplorable ; and if we, necessarily the children of our time, see inherent weaknesses and shortcomings in the mood that rules us, we must not be afraid to state them squarely, and to ask, in a spirit of fearless comparison, where that mood is likely to bring us out.

Anyone can see, I think, that the realistic spirit is not without its defects and dangers, and that the first among these is the danger of losing the sense of criticism of life. That fiction, to deserve its place, must be in some sense a critical test of values in reality, in character and in conduct, I must hold as a first postulate. Fiction is criticism when it takes sides, as satire does; fiction is criticism when it fearlessly and impartially investigates the nature of life and society, as modern realism does. But the spirit which makes

everything in the world seem worth investigation, this indefatigable modern curiosity, may result in the substitution of a lesser faculty for interpretative criticism—the lesser faculty, I mean, which contents itself with reporting the existence and the unnumbered aspects of reality, quite forgetting the while that the tremendous question is what we want, what we need. The patient scrutiny of everything in the field of vision may result at length in a curious optical defect; not exactly a blurring of the sight, for our realist is nearly always a clear-eyed person, but a loss of proportion and perspective. In short, he who is interested in everything and intolerant of nothing tends to become equally interested in everything; to make actuality, and not worth, his test of values. . Some of us, if we read critically, think we have lately seen the love of reality for its own sake pushed to that excess where it defeats the meaning of reality. One can see a crowd only by being out of it; and one can evaluate the masses of facts in a novel only when one knows through what philosophical window one is looking at them. The "documenting, " note-taking, data-gathering novelist who says to us simply: "These things are so, my word for it : make what you choose of them, " is giving us no philosophical window through which to see his crowd ; and if our critical sense is numbed and the spectacle becomes for us a meaningless pageant of the real, that outcome is hardly to be wondered at.

This loss of criticism is the destiny which has obviously overtaken some of the current reputations de

general assumption that literature is criticism of life is an implication that literature has something to do with making life better. I raised a moment ago, and now raise again, the question of what we modern people want. I suppose that, being modern people, we want, as Mr. Galsworthy does, more of the feeling of continuity—the sense of universal human kinship as we look upon our fellow men and their affairs, the sense of cosmic unity as we contemplate the whole of nature. Mr. Galsworthy has said that, to gain the feeling of continuity, we must deny ourselves contempt, which is the destruction of continuity. Well, then, we must rejoice at whatever tends to lessen the number of things which evoke contempt from the natural human heart—for it remains wholly improbable that the human heart can ever be reconstituted through the intellect. Contempt grows by what it finds to feed on; and the one chance of purging the soul of hate seems to be through destroying hateful things—intolerance, for example—and making a better world. And to destroy hateful things, it is probably necessary to hate them, or at least to see that they are hateful.

Now, here we come to still another implied weakness in the realistic spirit, if it be true that that spirit means loss of the critical sense. The realist would destroy hateful things by persuading himself that they are not hateful. He does not want to destroy ugliness in order to beautify the world; he wants to teach the soul to find beauty even in ugliness, in order to beautify the soul. And, however little we

may like to admit it, we must see that this surrender of standards and aversions is essentially weak, sterile, and static ; at least it is and must be so over any stretch of social history that we can comprehend in one glimpse. Our coldly intellectual and serene modern charity simply does not and cannot get anything done. It is the fiction of satire which has brought things to pass. Why, even the "unofficial sentimentalism, " with all its ignorance and bias, has done more than impartial realism—witness Uncle Tom's Cabin and All Sorts and Conditions of Men.

The truth seems to be that only violent likes and dislikes are really dynamic. It may be disheartening, but it is certainly probable, that animal matter reacts most readily and decisively to antipathies pointed with scorn. So it has been, and is, in politics and religion: we do well to entertain the thought that it may be so in literature. It may be one of the strange ironies of evolution that modern man, swayed by a passion to get things done, has grown up to an intellectual contempt for the only possible means of getting anything done. Having the desire, we despise the means—and then try to hide our impotence by belittling the desire. These may be the facts ; and from this point of view the extreme development of the impersonal outlook may be our modern nemesis— the tragedy of indifferentism.

Two of the three modern artists named a moment

ago furnish some evidence of the lack Of dynamic farce in the modern gospel. Mr. Conrad is put to some pains to explain that his resignation is not in

difference; that he wills "what the gods will" just as fervently as though he were in the secret of what their will is. And Henry James was frequently charged—very authoritatively by Mr. W. C. Brownell, ' for example—with having no interest whatever in his characters except as specimens, or in life except as a quarry wherein to dig specimens. Nostromo and Under Western Eyes are not indifferent; nor is The Golden Bowl aridly esthetic. But the modern detachment which is so patently necessary to these novels has too much the effect of making both writers over to a very specialized part of the public.

Still more interesting is the test which the scientific posture received in the career of George Gissing, the first British novelist of considerable eminence to turn fiction into sociology. Gissing wrote about cities, slums, socialism, conditions of labor, the problem of illegitimacy, economic independence for women, the education of the poor,, and a host of other such matters, and wrote about them from first-hand knowledge gained through the enforced privations of his own thwarted life. Gissing wrote about these themes, not because he had them at heart, and certainly not because he loved or believed in the folk whom these themes embraced, but because the facts were there and he knew them. Himself by instinct a classicist and something of a hedonist, both sensitive to beauty and aloof from the democratic instincts and ideals, he portrayed the sordid surroundings into which accident had forced him, and wrote one novel after another, in all conscience to be sure, but without love and without hope, saying again and again, in effect, "I show you things that are. " His pseudo-biographer says: "The essence of his best work was that it was founded on deep and accurate knowledge and keen observation. Its power lay in a bent, in a mood of mind, not by any means in any subject, even though his satiric discussion of what he called the 'ignobly decent' showed his strength, and indirectly his inner character. His very repugnance to his early subjects led him to choose them. "1

Gissing is a disciple, almost an apostle, of the realistic spirit. Mr. Chesterton, in his life of Dickens, draws the obvious comparison between the effect of the underworld as Dickens colored it with his own fierce hates and loves, and the effect of that same underworld as Gissing portrayed it with a resignation akin to despair. Gissing was a brave enough man to "look on with undimmed eyes, " but not a brave enough man to hope against hope. He was much too scientific for that. And the result is that his children of apathy and of futility hardly move us at all, hardly stir the heart to those impulses of compassion which result in disinterested action ; whereas the poor of Dickens's London are a perpetual delight and a perpetual lesson in brotherhood. It is Mr. Chesterton 's view that we long to be succoring brothers to Dickens's poor precisely because they do not need us so

itch as we need them; whereas we are left cold and benumbed by Gissing's outcasts because their need is so much greater than our capacity to give. In the unscientific optimism of Dickens, the difference between joy and despair turns on a smile or a joke ; in the scientific pessimism of Gissing, there is nothing that can make any difference. That very impartiality chills us, atrophies the will, and dries at their source the springs of pity. Hardly any parallel could show more succinctly the penalty which fiction has to pay for intellectual poise, when that poise is so sustained as to resemble indifference.

V

I am aware that there are many readers, and some critics, to whom it is offensive to think of fiction as having any such function as I have here ascribed to it, and who see in any insistence that fiction ought to direct the will and inspire it nothing more than a plea for crass cloddish didacticism. Nor do I recede by a step from my own position in relation to didacticism I maintain, as before, that fiction must be disinterested in the sense of telling valuable truth, let what will come of it, and that a novel which stands or falls by a special plea for or against something is incurably weak-kneed. But this is not to say that a novel is bad because it rouses a burning moral indignation against things which are unquestionably wrong, or a moral passion for things which are un

questionably right. If any member of "the ineffable company of pure msthetes" condemns Nicholas Nickleby because it had a reformatory effect on English private schools, or against Hard Cash because it called attention to the need for reform in English private asylums for the insane, he is a person for whom one is not obliged to throw away one's own conscience. It is something to the credit of the novel if it can show why vice is vicious, and do justice to the virtue of vicious characters; but I do not think this achievement is comparable to that of the novel which fortifies our instinct to place virtue above vice, kindness above cruelty, and discipline above lawlessness. And if realism must go on seeing primarily the sameness in things and persons, to the exclusion of the invaluable differences, then it were a thousand times better to make the best of the old determined and inflexible dogmas of satire at its most dogmatic.

But all this is in criticism of the realistic spirit as it most commonly is, not as it might be. I have named some of the defects and dangers which realism is heir to, and of which we have seen it the frequent victim during the past two decades. But there is nothing in the nature of realism that need commit it irrevocably to a deadening resignation, lack of a critical interpretation of things, and weak or insignificant characters. Interest in all sides of life is in itself a great good; the attempt to interpret all persons as they seem to themselves, and to bring all reality within the radiated warmth of the social emotions of sympathy and compassion, that too is in itself a great

good. The man who is interested in everything does not have to part with his scale of values; great genius can go into the murky places of life without living there perpetually, and without forgetting that they are murky. And when the realistic spirit produces its great individual genius, we shall see the great character once more crowned in fiction; for the creation of great characters, more than any other aspect of fiction, is the function of original genius, and has next to nothing to do with an author's philosophy. Meredith's doctrine of comedy may be a product of Meredith's social philosophy, but Meredith's Roy Richmond is the product simply of Meredith. And when fiction has another Meredith it will have other Roy Richmonds, other Sandras and Dianas and Clara Middletons—and it will have them just the same, though their creator be a theosophist or a Mormon.

It was not my intention then to prove that realism can never escape the difficulties which beset even realists so great as Henry James and Conrad. It is well to state roundly and emphatically the case against realism, and to name the worst possible eventuality. But the temptations of realism are not necessarily its downfall—and besides, there remains the important question whether the realistic spirit has not inherent potentialities which belong to the creative impulse in no other form.

This question I can answer in but one way. The realist does have, in his feeling of harmony with the world- purpose, his sense of oneness with all creation,

a solid philosophical and emotional foundation for his art. And it is a sort of foundation which, because it implies a naturalistic and self-perpetuating world, leaves the artist most free for those facts and phases of reality which mean most in art; that is, he has no longer to be the conscious servant or the unconscious slave of a preordained and everlasting law, and all his care may be for the artist's proper task, to present the immediate and tangible as it is in itself and for his temperament.

Moreover—and this second consideration is still more important—the naturalistic world confers upon the artist the dignity of some added importance. In the world of orthodox conception, the whole was unchangeable whatever became of the parts ; the great facts of destiny were established once for all. In the world of naturalism, it was manifest that whatever came to pass must come through man's own efforts; if he wanted a better world, be must make it. The decay of faith means the rise of the social sciences. The fatherhood of God meant that no one of us was his brother's keeper; but the brotherhood of man makes each of us the keeper of all. And the novelist has felt this new responsibility. He has turned from exceptional and unique individuals to the laws of society, the individual in his relation to his age and his group, the intricate problems of our common welfare. Something of this is what Meredith means when he Says that "all right use of life . . . is to pave ways for the firmer footing of those who succeed us, " and

that "the novel, exposing and illustrating the natural history of man, may help us to such sustaining road. side gifts. "

Something must indeed come of so much striving and groping and piercing of the veils of the elder reticence. It is unthinkable that all this conscience, this selfless and unwearying devotion to truth, should come to naught. The means may be slow, but the end may also be sure. Perhaps the imperceptible increase in understanding, in appreciation of what life is and calls for, may result in great and sweeping changes, in which fiction shall have played its creditable part. So changes do come about: so came, for example, a long sequence of developments in the social history of woman, in which perhaps the novel has not been entirely negligible. The realistic spirit has done more than any of its ancestors for the diffusion of high merit throughout fiction ; even without the recurrence of first- rate individual genius, the novel is a more natural instrument for the propagation of ideas than it has ever been, simply because it has put so many skilled pens to work.

We shall know more about the realistic spirit at the end of another decade ; for, as a world-spirit in the broadest sense, and not merely as an agency in art, it is now going through its ordeal by fire. In the warring countries we see it becoming an intellectual majority in such men as Romain Rolland and Bertrand Russell, the seers of a new and greater internationalism, even now called upon to bear great burdens of hatred, and bear them with equanimity and

self-possession When the curtain of smoke rises from the battlefields of this war, will such men have shown the road that leads away from the hatreds of the past? or will the thing that has proved itself strong enough to conquer art be, for some generations yet, too weak to conquer the lives of nations and enforce a new gospel of goodwill through the sense of brotherhood?