Prof. Derek P. Royal

ENG 442 – Survey of American Literature II

from William Dean Howells’s Criticism and Fiction (1891)

The romantic of that day and the real of this are in certain degree the same. Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature. It is not a new theory, but it has never before universally characterized literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too. Every true realist instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of overmoralizing. In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for destiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. He cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry. He feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth lives. In criticism it is his business to break the images of false gods and misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly, toys that many grown people would still like to play with.

. . . . .

[L]et fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the

motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires; let it show the different interests in their true proportions; let it forbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and prejudice, but frankly own these for what they are, in whatever figures and occasions they appear; let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know−−the language of unaffected people everywhere−−and there can be no doubt of an unlimited future, not only of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it.

. . . . .

[I]t has been said with a superficial justice that [American] fiction is narrow; though in the same sense I suppose the present English fiction is as narrow as our own; and most modern fiction is narrow in a certain sense. . . . In fact, the charge of narrowness accuses the whole tendency of modern fiction as much as the American school. But I do not by any means allow that this narrowness is a defect, while denying that it is a universal characteristic of our fiction; it is rather, for the present, a virtue. Indeed, I should call the present American work, North and South, thorough rather than narrow. In one sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in any, bad sense be called narrow; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all; and this depth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization like ours, where the differences are not of classes, but of types, and not of types either so much as of characters. A new method was necessary in dealing with the new conditions, and the new method is worldwide, because the whole world is more or less Americanized. . . . I think that our writers may be safely counselled to continue their work in the modern way, because it is the best way yet known. If they make it true, it will be large, no matter what its superficies are; and it would be the greatest mistake to try to make it big. A big book is necessarily a group of episodes more or less loosely connected by a thread of

narrative, and there seems no reason why this thread must always be supplied. Each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one of a connected group; the final effect will be from the truth of each episode, not from the size of the group.

from “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading: An Impersonal

Explanation” (1899)

By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is

ugly, and it is only the false which is immoral. The truth may be indecent, but it cannot be

vicious, it can never corrupt or deprave; and I should say this in defence of the grossest material

honestly treated in modern novels as against the painted and perfumed meretriciousness of the

novels that went before them. I conceive that apart from all the clamor about schools of fiction is

the question of truth, how to get it in, so that it may get itself out again as beauty, the divinely

living thing, which all men love and worship. So I make truth the prime test of a novel. If I do

not find that it is like life, then it does not exist for me as art; it is ugly, it is ludicrous, it is

impossible. I do not expect a novel to be wholly true; I have never read one that seemed to me so

except Tolstoy's5 novels; but I expect it to be a constant endeavor for the truth, and I perceive

beauty in it so far as it fulfills this endeavor. I am quite willing to recognize and enjoy whatever

measure of truth I find in a novel that is partly or mainly false; only, if I come upon the falsehood

at the outset I am apt not to read that novel. But I do not bear such a grudge against it as I do

against the novel which lures me on with a fair face of truth, and drops the mask midway.

. . . . .

The truth which I mean, the truth which is the only beauty, is truth to human experience, and

human experience is so manifold and so recondite, that no scheme can be too remote, too airy for

the test. It is a well ascertained fact concerning the imagination that it can work only with the

stuff of experience. It can absolutely create nothing; it can only compose. The most fantastic

extravagance comes under the same law that exacts likeness to the known as well as the closest

and severest study of life. Once for all, then, obedience to this law is the creed of the realist, and

rebellion is the creed of the romanticist. Both necessarily work under it, but one willingly, to

beautiful effect, and the other unwillingly to ugly effect.

. . . . .

The romance is of as great purity of intention as the novel, but it deals with life allegorically and

not representatively; it employs types rather than characters, and studies them in the ideal rather

than the real; it handles the passions broadly. Altogether the greatest in this kind are The Scarlet

Letter and The Marble Faun of Hawthorne, which partake of the nature of poems, and which, as

they frankly place themselves outside of familiar experience and circumstance, are not to be

judged by the rules of criticism that apply to the novel. . . .

The romanticistic novel professes like the real novel to portray actual life, but it does this with an excess of drawing and coloring which are false to nature. It attributes motives to people which do not govern real people, and its characters are of the quality of types; they are heroic, for good or for bad. It seeks effect rather than truth; and endeavors to hide in a cloud of incident the deformity and artificiality of its creations. It revels in the extravagant, the unusual and the bizarre. . . . If you wish to darken council by asking how it is that these inferior romanticists are still incomparably the most popular novelists, I can only whisper, in strict confidence, that by far the greatest number of people in the world, even the civilized world, are people of weak and childish imagination, pleased with gross fables, fond of prodigies, heroes, heroines, portents and improbabilities, without self-knowledge, and without the wish for it. Only in some such exceptional assemblage as the present, do they even prefer truth to lies in art, and it is a great advance for them to prefer the half-lies which they get in romanticistic novels.

. . . . .

The novel can teach, and for shame's sake, it must teach, but only by painting life truly. This is what it must above all things strive to do. If it succeeds, every good effect shall come from it: delight, use, wisdom. If it does not succeed in this, no good can come of it. Let no reader, and let no intending novelist suppose that this fidelity to life can be carried too far. After all, and when the artist has given his whole might to the realization of his ideal, he will have only an effect of life. I think the effect is like that in those cycloramas where up to a certain point there is real ground and real grass, and then carried indivisibly on to the canvas the best that the painter can do to imitate real ground and real grass. We start in our novels with something we have known of life, that is, with life itself; and then we go on and imitate what we have known of life. If we are very skilful and very patient we can hide the joint. But the joint is always there, and on one side of it are real ground and real grass, and on the other are the painted images of ground and grass. I do not believe that there was ever any one who longed more strenuously or endeavored more constantly to make the painted ground and grass exactly like the real, than I have done in my cycloramas. But I have to own that I have never yet succeeded to my own satisfaction. Some touch of color, some tone of texture is always wanting; the light is different; it is all in another region. At the same time I have the immense, the sufficient consolation, of knowing that I have not denied such truth as was in me by imitating unreal ground and grass, or even copying the effect of some other's effort to represent real ground and real grass.

. . . . .

In fine, at the end of the ends, as the Italians say, truth to life is the supreme office of the novel,

in whatever form. I am always saying this, and I can say no other. If you like to have it in

different words, the business of the novelist is to make you understand the real world through his

faithful effigy of it; or, as I have said before, to arrange a perspective for you with everything in

its proper relation and proportion to everything else, and this so manifest that you cannot err in it

however myopic or astigmatic you may be. It is his function to help you be kinder to your

fellows, juster to yourself, truer to all.

Mostly, I should say, he has failed. I can think of no one, except Tolstoy alone, who has met the

high requirements of his gift, though I am tempted to add Björnson in some of his later books.

But in spite of his long and almost invariable failure, I have great hopes of the novelist. His art,

which is as old as the world, is yet the newest in it, and still very imperfect. But no novelist can

think of it without feeling its immeasurable possibilities, without owning that in every instance

the weakness, the wrong is in himself, and not in his art.