DIDACTICISM

DIDACTICISM

IN nearly everything said thus far about the nature of fiction and of the criteria by which we should judge it, it is assumed that all great and good fiction has a purpose, and that that purpose is the impersonal and disinterested expression of imaginative insight into human nature and life. It appeared, or seemed to, that romance and realism are simply different ways of getting at this central thing, and that the differences between them are of means rather than of meaning, of process rather than of purpose. From the perception of this relation, we fell to considering one of the principal obstacles to the impersonal and disinterested expression of truth: the feeling which we call "sentimentalism, " an egotistical and interested spirit that will not have truth on truth's own arduous and austere terms, but is always pampering itself with thought of the rewards of truth, or of the superiority conferred by the possession of truth, or of the obnoxiousness of truth which it happens to dislike. Against this enemy of unselfish truth there is, we saw, one spirit which is sure to prevail : the spirit of Chaucer and Rabelais, of Shakespeare and Moliere, of Jane Austen, of Fielding, of Meredith—the sweetening and chastening influence of Comedy.

We come now to a second and on the whole less formidable enemy of disinterested truth. We as a

generation of readers have come to the conclusion that the novel at its best cannot be primarily a display of the author's personal emotions, the reactions of his own sensibility; and we have as certainly come to the conclusion that neither can it be primarily a display of his private opinions, his ethical sense striking attitudes in the presence of his subject-matter. In short, there has grown up among us a feeling amounting to conviction, and nearly always assumed by critics as a truism, that the novelist must not preach to us. Between the spirit that sentimentalizes and the spirit that preaches, there may be and often is a kinship. Some examples already named in speaking of sentimentalism—Uncle Tom's Cabin, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, the juvenile fiction of "Oliver Optic"-- are not only sentimental fiction, they are sentimental pulpiteering. They might equally well have been saved for illustration of this second enemy of sound worth in fiction : the pulpiteering spirit, or didacticism.

Our temperamental objection to this particular breach of artistic discipline seems to us deeply grounded, and so much a part of the nature of artistic strategy that we are prone to assume our rightness without argument or investigation. We readily take for granted, unless we have some reading, that the preceptorial tone could never have been a very reputable element in fiction, or have seemed palatable to any great fraction of even the most naive generation of readers. But does this assumption tally with the fact? Euphues and His England, which set a record of

progress in fiction for its own day, is practically a manual of polite usage, a discussion of social and moral codes; the ethical strain is one of the most prominent elements of Sidney's Arcadia (his Pamela, by the way, gives all of her name but its accent to Richardson's Pamela) ; and, as everybody knows, Richardson conceived Pamela in the process of creating a sort of manual of letter-writing, a book of models of polite sentimental correspondence for the untutored. From Lyly to the early 19th century in England, and from the middle 17th century to the middle 19th in America, the moral story, or novel written as practical advice and guide to conduct, was exceedingly popular. It is still not a rare genre in Sunday School libraries. The Aretina of Sir George Mackenzie, that most exquisite example of the effete "heroic romance, " was written on this theory, quoted with intense relish by Sir Walter Raleigh in his admirable little book The English Novel: "Albeit Essays be the choicest pearls in the jewel house of Moral Philosophy, yet I ever thought that they were set off to the best advantage, and appeared with the greatest lustre, when they were laced upon a Romance. " And the youthful essayist follows his own prescription by interspersing his tale with Euphuistic moralizing essays. Note how matter- of course is his assumption, the very opposite of ours, that the only tenable purpose of fiction, its one presentable self-justification, is its service as engine of "Moral Philosophy. "

There were many decades when all the licentiousness in fiction masqueraded as moral instruction by horrible example. The novel could allow itself the most excessive license in portrayal of vice and scandal, so long as it included the sanctimonious rebuke of evildoing. The work of Aphra Behn, Mrs. Eliza Haywood, and the once notorious Mrs. Mary de la Riviere Manley survived, at least for a time, the disapproval of good taste largely by virtue of its factitious and hypocritical acceptance of the popular moral judgment. It is sometimes hard for us to remember that the novel as we like it to be has had only a little more than a generation of unchallenged respectability; indeed there are those still living who count it an insidious agency of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Before that very recent attainment of repute, the novel was prone to purchase any cheapest sanction, if only that it might succeed in the struggle to survive at all; and no sanction could be more inexpensive, or more certain to undermine objection on moral grounds, than that of the commonly received theology, the popular ethics. The novelist circumvents the hostility of the pulpit by making his novel a sermon.

The existence of the former prejudice, and the anxiety of even the most innocent teller of tales to protect himself from the suspicion of having taught no moral lesson, may be illustrated by the Preface of Alonzo and Melissa: or The Unfeeling Father, an "American tale" signed "Daniel Jackson, Jr., " and published at Exeter in 1831. I quote the whole Preface: if its general quaintness fail to please, none can resist one long and strangely inconclusive sentence

which suggests that even in 1831 the incorrigible typesetter was a sore trial to helpless authorship. —

"Whether the story of Alonzo and Melissa will generally please, the writer knows not; if, however, he is not mistaken, it is not unfriendly to religion and virtue. —One thing was aimed to be shown, that a firm reliance on Providence, however the affections might be at war with its dispensations, is the only source of consolation in the gloomy hours of affliction; and that generally such dependence, though crossed by difficulties and perplexities, will be crowned with victory at last.

"It is also believed that the story contains no indecorous stimulants; nor is it filled with unmeaning and inexplicated incidents sounding upon the sense, but imperceptible to the understanding. When anxieties have been excited by involved and doubtful events, they are afterwards elucidated by the consequences.

"The writer believes that generally he has copied nature. In the ardent prospects raised in youthful bosoms, the almost consummation of their wishes, their sudden and unexpected disappointment, the sorrows of separation, the joyous and unlooked for meeting— in the poignant feelings of Alonzo, when at the grave of Melissa, he poured the feelings of his anguished soul over her niniature [sic] by the 'moon's pale ray;' —when Melissa, sinking on her knees before her father, was received to his bosom as a beloved daughter risen from the dead.

"If these scenes are not imperfectly drawn, they

will not fail to interest the refined sensibilities of the reader. "

Nor was it only in the "unofficial sentimentalism, " the outlaw fiction of the underworld of letters, that the moral purport of art became a very momentous and pressing problem. Dr. Johnson, of whose official status there could certainly be no question, worried himself, in what seems to us a most naive and archaic way, over the morality of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, says Johnson in the introduction to his edition of the plays, "sacrifices virtue to convenience, " and is "more careful to please than to instruct. " Not only does he make "no just distribution of good or evil, " but he is not "always careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked. " It is quite clear that Dr. Johnson would have considered Othello a more moral play if Othello had been made to upbraid Iago in sanctimonious platitudes. When Johnson says that Shakespeare "carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong"—that is, tells the truth of life— "and, at the close, dismisses them without further care, and leaves their example to operate by chance, " he utters what is from the modern angle the ultimate praise of Shakespeare’s objectivity, but what is, from his entirely typical 18th century point of view, the gravest censure of a defect which "the barbarity of the age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer's duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on tune and place. "

From such representative data it clearly transpires, and is indeed the fact, that throughout most of the

history of modern fiction the novelist's relation to the preacher has been a most real problem, with the tendency all for valuing the story-teller in proportion as he is homilist and sermonizer. Judged as a mere matter of testhetic taste, our modern predilection may be simply another of the shifting fashions of art, a swing of the pendulum. By the mere counting of heads, either among novelists since Defoe or among their readers, we should undoubtedly find our objection to didacticism overruled ; and indeed there is nothing in actual history to tell us that we are right, or that the great novelists of the future may not transmit their meaning or message to us in a gospel of practical conduct, with the strongest emphasis on what we ought to do and why we ought to do it.

II

On the other hand, there is nothing to confine us to the purely historical counting of heads.

Perhaps this is as fitting a context as any for the declaration of a personal faith that the novel as a form and as a possibility, regardless of any individual novelist and his achievement, is always becoming better. It is always learning from itself, its successes and its failures ; it is always learning something too, in a less important way, from its critics formal and informal ; and as a person is said to "better his condition" by marrying above his class, so the novel is always bettering its condition by marriage with new and important


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When we -. -aiteis numare 7;:eW of the artist's detachment from the prim; of homed:ate practical issues, on whatever wale propoim&d. . we see not only that it is imp:soak for his manithuitured evidence to prove the righthem of this or that efflume of conduct, but that if it were possille Er. would still be undesirable. He has a greater :king -o do and his only hope of being practieally- useful in the long run lies in his doing it without fear or favour—espedally without fear of the consequences if he renounee the popular expe, lieney of the passing moment, and without favor of one eharacter against another because of either's theories of conduct.

Some famous words of Matthew Arnold serve to remind us of what disaster to truth follows the writer's

dedication of himself to a partisan bias, or to anyone of the various self- interests of creed and class. Those words were written, to be sure, to preach a high ideal of criticism ; but if they apply to criticism, in one sense a secondary and derived art, how much more emphatically must they apply to literature of the primary and creative orders, in terms of which criticism exists!—

" It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit to the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word, —disinterestedness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from practice : by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches; by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country at any rate are certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and, by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence

given to them. Else criticism, besides being igivolly false to its own nature, merely continues in th" old rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, triand will certainly miss the chance now given to it. 1For what is at present the bane of criticism in this country ? It is that practical considerations cling to it alind stifle it; it subserves interests not its own ; our orgakos of criticism are organs of men and parties having prat. - tieal ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing, and the play of mind the second; so much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecution of those practical ends is all that is wanted. . . . It must needs be that men should set in sects and parties, that each of these sects and parties should have its organ, and should make this organ subserve the interests of its action; but it would be well, too, that there should be a criticism, not the minister of these interests, not their enemy, but absolutely and entirely independent of them. No other criticism will ever attain any real authority or make any real way towards its end, —the creating a current of true and fresh ideas.

"It is because criticism has so little kept in the pure intellectual sphere, has so little detached itself from practice, has been so directly polemical and controversial, that it has so ill accomplished, in this country, its best spiritual work ; which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things. A polemical practical

criticism makes men blind even to the ideal imperfection of their practice, makes them willingly assert its ideal perfection, in order the better to secure it against attack; and clearly this is narrowing and baneful for them. If they were reassured on the practical side, speculative considerations of ideal perfection they might be brought to entertain, and their spiritual horizon would thus gradually widen. . ..

"It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am thus prescribing for criticism, and that, by embracing in this manner the Indian virtue of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper work of criticism. The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. The rush and roar of practical life will always have a dizzying and attracting effect upon the most collected spectator, and tend to draw him into its vortex ; most of all will this be the case where that life is so powerful as it is in England. But it is only by remaining collected, and refusing to lend himself to the point of view of the practical man, that the critic can do the practical man any service; and it is only by the

greatest sincerity in pursuing his own course. and by at last convincing even the practical man of his sincerity. that he can escape misunderstandings which perpf. -tually threaten him. "'

Substitute, here, fiction and "novella. ' for "criticism. and critic, " and "English-speaking countries'. for "England, " and Arnold serves our purpose not leis well than he did his own. The passage cited identifies a partisan criticism, as I wish to identify a partisan fiction, with the sentimental Pharisaism of those who have interests to serve. From our two general objections to the partisan fiction—first, that it is invented expressly to prove something and can therefore prove nothing; second, that the novel has a greater privilege than to prove any controversial point —it will be evident that the preacher in fiction is in an altogether different category from that of the preacher in the pulpit. The point of the difference is not always seen, to be sure: one sometimes hears it urged: "But why should you not listen to the novelist's sermon as well as to the preacher's? Why should you not let the novelist, if he be also a moralist, lay down prescriptions of conduct? Why listen to the ethicist and the priest of religion, and not to him? Is not the counsel of these other two a valuable guider' To which the answer is, Only if they too be disinterested. The priest does not decide by political interest whom he wishes elected, and then derive his religious principles from his political interest; the sociologist does not divide his world into those whom it would profit

him to put into office and those whom it would profit him to put into jail, and then frame his prescription for society accordingly. At least, if he did we should do very well to distrust him also. Neither properly chooses his evidence to demonstrate a point: the point is considered as existing elsewhere and independently, for the one as part of a law which altereth not, for the other in the nature of society as it is constituted. It is obvious that the partisan novelist cannot be, in this sense, disinterested at all. Whether he- chooses the facts and finds a principle to embrace them, or chooses the principle and finds the facts to illustrate it, he is serving an interest other than that with which he has his proper concern—the truth of life, how things are and how they work together for good and for evil.

IV

It is the intention of the argument thus far, not exactly to show that didactic art is bad art, but to show that art is likely to be bad in so far as it is didactic—that is, the didactic element in it is a handicap, one more thing for it to succeed in spite of. Art that is nothing but didactic flatly fails; but in modern conditions it is wholly unlikely that a writing man will turn to the novel if his sole equipment is a set of moral precepts which he holds for ultimate truths. The evangelical novel, despite a few transient vogues such as that of the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon, — in His Steps will serve, for those who remember it,

to represent the whole school, —is pretty nearly defunct; and the didactic novel when its propagandizing is secular is always written by an author who has in him something, however obnubilated, of the artist.

That a novel may compete with some success against its own didacticism is shown in the rather illustrious history of protest in the novel. We might go back and retrace this from the indictment of debtors' prisons in The Vicar of Wakefield; or we might begin with such protests against institutions as those of Dickens against a certain type of private school in Nicholas Nickleby and of Reade against a certain type of private asylum for the insane, and against the laws relating to insanity, in Hard Cash. But, for one sufficiently coherent and centralized illustration, we need go no farther than the so-called "novel of protest" of the '50's and '60's.

The novels of this school are the fictional counterpart of the Chartist movement. The protest was against the industrial system of Great Britain—the exploitation of the laboring class, absentee landlordism, child labor, the fearful housing conditions of manufacturing districts, the long hours and unsanitary surroundings of work, merciless competition, and all the political applications of Benthamism and the Utilitarian philosophy as interpreted by those who liked the liberalism of Mill less than his rigor; in short, against the political and economic facts which, helped out by the lean crops of famine years, created all that was most unbearable in the "hungry '40's. " Fiction, in its protest against these facts, sounds often

like the sincere but ranting, inflammatory, and headlong utterances of the most modern socialistic demagogue of a violent type.

It is my present point that these novels were saved, not by the remedies proposed or the argument advanced, but solely by the amount of life they objectively depicted and by the open-eyed sympathy which they displayed for it. Disraeli attacked the intolerable conditions in his Sybil, —also entitled The Two Nations, i. e., the exploiter and the exploited, — and he saw the remedy in the infusion of a new sincerity and courage into the legislative system of England. Kingsley attacked them in Yeast and Alton Locke, his two burning indictments of the agricultural labourer's life in the country and of the artisan's in the city, and he saw the remedy in that "muscular Christianity" with which his name is commonly joined in some other connections. Mrs. Gaskell attacked them in Mary Barton, to my mind by all odds the most powerful book and still one of the most readable books of this whole school and period; and the remedy that she proposed was simply Christian sympathy, exhibited by the employee in forgiving his employer for wrongs done, and by the employer in so far unbending as to see the common humanity in his employee. It is significant that Mrs. Gaskell, when she wrote North and South a few years later, saw the burden of guilt as being somewhat differently distributed, and blamed the employee more, the employer less. The remedy was still to understand and forgive, but the need of forgiveness was no longer

confined to one side of the contention. Thus a great authoress, somewhat unfortunately known best by her most flawless novel, Cranford, and not ly her most striking, saw the impermanence of part of her own didacticism, and made its insufficiency a matter of record.

In all these stories of rebellious protest, the value lies, I say, not in the accusations or the proposed remedies, but in the truthful depiction of what conditions were, and what they did to human men and women and children. The truth revealed and the compassion evoked are enough, in the best of these stories, to carry the burden of theories that pass, solutions that do not solve, and economic doctrines that grow laughably archaic.

And the best of evangelical fiction shows the working of the same law. We value the Quo Vadis of the lamented Henry Sienkiewicz, not as a piece of Christian apologetics, not as a sort of sublimated muckraking of paganism, but as a delineation of what Christianity and Christian heroism and martyrdom were, and as an analysis of the chemical reaction that necessarily followed when Christianity and paganism were bottled up together in a part of the world too small to hold both. And if Kingsley's Hypatia may be said to live still, it lives only in so far as it did for Alexandria what Quo Vadis did for Rome. Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, a quasi-didactic anti-evangelical novel, is still impressive, not because it tries to prove that the modern man, if truly courageous and thoughtful, can no longer believe the

literal teachings of the Church, but because it shows, at once intensely and typically, the ferment of some modern doubts in the mind which will have truth at whatever cost. In all stories of which the controversial element is a part, whatever lasting value there is resides in the authenticity of the characters, the importance of the amount and kind of life faithfully portrayed, and the author's success in subordinating his own crotchets and private views to the complex actualities of the struggle which he undertakes to stage. A story is not necessarily bad if it contain a temporal issue didactically resolved and brought to some specious finality. But it is certainly harder for such a story to be good. Didacticism is not the death- warrant of a novel, but it is assuredly not the way of life for it either.

V

On the whole it is safe to say, then, that didacticism is essentially an inartistic spirit. It is among the conceivable possibilities that a novel written primarily for a didactic purpose might turn out to be a good story in all the necessary artistic ways ; but the excellence of such a novel would be in the last degree accidental, and it is quite certain that a finely conscientious artist would not project a story in the sermonizing spirit. There are trick pictures which in certain lights reveal hidden faces or, inverted, become other pictures entirely; and it is always possible that one of them might turn out to be a good picture. But a real

painter is concerned with something better than the production of such curiosities. The didactic strain in an otherwise good novel is like the concealed trick of the picture : it is no more important to the goodness of the novel than the Baconian cryptograms, supposing them to exist, are to the goodness of the Shakespeare plays. A moral precept hampers the work of fiction ; and the question for criticism to ask of the didactic novel is, How much else is there to offset the serious fault? The trouble with the "problem" play or novel, if the problem is really important, is the substitution of a false and arbitrary selective principle for the only valid principle. The material is assembled to prove a contentious opinion, not to represent life by facts chosen for their interest.

Are we then obliged, on these or similar grounds, to deny an allegory, such as Pilgrim's Progress, its acknowledged claim to a place among works of art? Indeed no : whether self-evidently or not, this form is an exception to the general indictment. Didactic it is, and partisan, but in a special way, and within a special realm of its own. I can express the matter no more pointedly than by saying that the allegory is nothing but didacticism. There is no other purpose than to clothe in striking and ingenious garb the moral precepts in which the allegory has its origin. I In other words, an allegory is simply an extended figure of speech, a self-propagating metaphor; and the only artistic questions it raises are, first, whether it is an effective expression of its meaning and, second,

whether it has in itself force and beauty. The didactic novel pretends to be doing one thing while really doing something else that is incompatible with the first thing; it makes an interested argument and offers it as a disinterested story. In allegory, the moral argument is the world in which the whole work is conceived, lives, moves, and has its being. It is in essence a set of convictions given shape as dramatis person, just as a proper pageant is tradition or geography or history come alive to teach us through the eye and the ear. There is no clash in allegory between. a moral purpose and an ostensibly disinterested reading of life, simply because there is no ostensibly disinterested reading of life.

Are we then to fall back on art that is "unmoral"

e., without any moral signification whatever'? Is the rejection of didacticism the acceptance of testheticism, art for art? By no means. Art can never be "unmoral" so long as either he who makes it or he who enjoys remains a moral being—and whatever art exists for, it is certainly not for itself. We are profoundly and eternally right when we assert that all fiction has some sort of moral basis, sound or unsound, and that, other things being equal, the excellence of the fiction will be in proportion to the soundness of its moral basis. What then do we mean by such statements, and how are they to be reconciled with our objections to the fiction which is preachment?

It is useful at this point to recall our preliminary distinction between the novelist's purpose in writing his book, and the meaning we get out of that book after it is written. The novelist's purpose, I asserted, is

reducible always to a disinterested search for the nature of life, what life is; his meaning, I may now assert, is his character—what he is. He may not willfully intrude himself into the spectacle ; but he is there none the less, by the very nature of the relation between the creator and the thing created. He may not have uttered a single sentiment avowedly his own; but he is in the whole composition, the whole composition is in the truest, most inescapable sense himself. Certain characters have been shown, certain issues proposed and fought out with some sort of spiritual or material triumph, sympathies have been attracted by some things in the spectacle and repelled by others—and all these matters are the artist's own moral choice, his character objectified. The persons he chooses to depict, the issues that are in his eyes important enough to be struggled over, the kind of triumph won, the direction taken by the reader's sympathy, even the very omissions and suppressions—all these things are the measure of the novelist's will, of the deep unconscious self which he can no more help expressing than the phenomena of nature can help expressing natural law.

It is that deep unconscious self that must, we say, be morally sound. The reader's sympathy must be made to take right directions ; the interest must be drawn to things that over-top mere differences of opinion ; the set of values implied in the given story must be those to which the moral judgment of mankind instinctively responds. Think what you will about property rights, democracy and autocracy, marriage, slavery, socialism,

revealed religion, you are never in any serious doubt about what is admirable and what detestable in men and women so long as your self-interest is not touched. And you say that a novel is morally sound when it makes you feel, without necessarily bothering to think, that the novelist is a person who admires and detests the same fundamental things that everybody else worth hearing admires and detests.

We have heard Dr. Samuel Johnson censure our English Shakespeare for his objectivity: Shakespeare "carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and, at the close, dismisses them without further care, and leaves their example to operate by chance. " But does it operate by chance? Does it not operate about the same way on Everyone of us? Professor Stuart Sherman, in a recent essay, The Humanism of Shakespeare, 1 points out that after all no one of us can possibly be in doubt whom of the Shakespeare characters we were meant to admire, whom to love, whom to regard indulgently despite their shortcomings, whom to laugh at, whom to loathe. The character may not receive justice on the stage, —in tragedy he seldom does, —but he always receives it in the audience, says Professor Sherman. And that is the only moral effect that counts at all in art. The moral basis of art is the moral consciousness of the race.

"To make the world better" may be, as Johnson says, a writer's duty ; but it is hardly a duty that

he can perform the better for being aware of it. He must have his eye outward upon the world ; and if he succeed in making the world better, it will be because his eye is such that he cannot help seeing the right things with the right relative values. His purpose must be only the truth. His moral meaning to us will be exactly what he is. Whatever a novel is or is not, it is inevitably a close and full revelation of the moral. sensibilities of the man who wrote it. It must, whether he will it to or not, express his ethical acceptance of life. In this sense the most "objective" piece of art ever penned on paper, painted on canvas, or carved in stone is as subjective as the most deliberately intimate self-revelation.