Criticism and Fiction | Page 4

wish to sample the author's ideas before making
an entire meal of them. D.W.]

CRITICISM AND FICTION
By William Dean Howells

The question of a final criterion for the appreciation of art is one that
perpetually recurs to those interested in any sort of aesthetic endeavor.
Mr. John Addington Symonds, in a chapter of 'The Renaissance in
Italy' treating of the Bolognese school of painting, which once had so
great cry, and was vaunted the supreme exemplar of the grand style, but
which he now believes fallen into lasting contempt for its emptiness
and soullessness, seeks to determine whether there can be an enduring
criterion or not; and his conclusion is applicable to literature as to the
other arts. "Our hope," he says, "with regard to the unity of taste in the
future then is, that all sentimental or academical seekings after the ideal
having been abandoned, momentary theories founded upon

idiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, and nothing accepted
but what is solid and positive, the scientific spirit shall make men
progressively more and more conscious of these 'bleibende
Verhaltnisse,' more and more capable of living in the whole; also, that
in proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world,
we shall come to comprehend with more instinctive certitude what is
simple, natural, and honest, welcoming with gladness all artistic
products that exhibit these qualities. The perception of the enlightened
man will then be the task of a healthy person who has made himself
acquainted with the laws of evolution in art and in society, and is able
to test the excellence of work in any stage from immaturity to
decadence by discerning what there is of truth, sincerity, and natural
vigor in it."

I
That is to say, as I understand, that moods and tastes and fashions
change; people fancy now this and now that; but what is unpretentious
and what is true is always beautiful and good, and nothing else is so.
This is not saying that fantastic and monstrous and artificial things do
not please; everybody knows that they do please immensely for a time,
and then, after the lapse of a much longer time, they have the charm of
the rococo. Nothing is more curious than the charm that fashion has.
Fashion in women's dress, almost every fashion, is somehow delightful,
else it would never have been the fashion; but if any one will look
through a collection of old fashion plates, he must own that most
fashions have been ugly. A few, which could be readily instanced, have
been very pretty, and even beautiful, but it is doubtful if these have
pleased the greatest number of people. The ugly delights as well as the
beautiful, and not merely because the ugly in fashion is associated with
the young loveliness of the women who wear the ugly fashions, and
wins a grace from them, not because the vast majority of mankind are
tasteless, but for some cause that is not perhaps ascertainable. It is quite
as likely to return in the fashions of our clothes and houses and
furniture, and poetry and fiction and painting, as the beautiful, and it
may be from an instinctive or a reasoned sense of this that some of the

extreme naturalists have refused to make the old discrimination against
it, or to regard the ugly as any less worthy of celebration in art than the
beautiful; some of them, in fact, seem to regard it as rather more worthy,
if anything. Possibly there is no absolutely ugly, no absolutely beautiful;
or possibly the ugly contains always an element of the beautiful better
adapted to the general appreciation than the more perfectly beautiful.
This is a somewhat discouraging conjecture, but I offer it for no more
than it is worth; and I do not pin my faith to the saying of one whom I
heard denying, the other day, that a thing of beauty was a joy forever.
He contended that Keats's line should have read, "Some things of
beauty are sometimes joys forever," and that any assertion beyond this
was too hazardous.

II
I should, indeed, prefer another line of Keats's, if I were to profess any
formulated creed, and should feel much safer with his "Beauty is Truth,
Truth Beauty," than even with my friend's reformation of the more
quoted verse. It brings us back to the solid ground taken by Mr.
Symonds, which is not essentially different from that taken in the great
Mr. Burke's Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful--a singularly
modern book, considering how long ago it was wrote (as the great Mr.
Steele would have written the participle a little longer ago), and full of
a certain well-mannered and agreeable instruction. In some things it is