Criticism and Fiction | Page 6

culture in that way. I've got a
grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and
expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it's a type. It's made
up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint,
and it's perfectly indestructible. It isn't very much like a real
grasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, and it's served to represent the
notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. You
may say that it's artificial. Well, it is artificial; but then it's ideal too;
and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You'll find the books
full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of
them. The thing that you are proposing to do is commonplace; but if
you say that it isn't commonplace, for the very reason that it hasn't been
done before, you'll have to admit that it's photographic."
As I said, I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the
common, average man, who always "has the standard of the arts in his
power," will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal
grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art,
because it is not "simple, natural, and honest," because it is not like a
real grasshopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and

that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the
heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted,
adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out
before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.
I am in no haste to compass the end of these good people, whom I find
in the mean time very amusing. It is delightful to meet one of them,
either in print or out of it--some sweet elderly lady or excellent
gentleman whose youth was pastured on the literature of thirty or forty
years ago --and to witness the confidence with which they preach their
favorite authors as all the law and the prophets. They have commonly
read little or nothing since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a
standard taken from these authors, and never dreamed of judging it by
nature; they are destitute of the documents in the case of the later
writers; they suppose that Balzac was the beginning of realism, and that
Zola is its wicked end; they are quite ignorant, but they are ready to
talk you down, if you differ from them, with an assumption of
knowledge sufficient for any occasion. The horror, the resentment, with
which they receive any question of their literary saints is genuine; you
descend at once very far in the moral and social scale, and anything
short of offensive personality is too good for you; it is expressed to you
that you are one to be avoided, and put down even a little lower than
you have naturally fallen.
These worthy persons are not to blame; it is part of their intellectual
mission to represent the petrifaction of taste, and to preserve an image
of a smaller and cruder and emptier world than we now live in, a world
which was feeling its way towards the simple, the natural, the honest,
but was a good deal "amused and misled" by lights now no longer
mistakable for heavenly luminaries. They belong to a time, just passing
away, when certain authors were considered authorities in certain kinds,
when they must be accepted entire and not questioned in any particular.
Now we are beginning to see and to say that no author is an authority
except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature's lips and
caught her very accent. These moments are not continuous with any
authors in the past, and they are rare with all. Therefore I am not afraid
to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not at all great, and
that we can profit by them only when we hold them, like our meanest

contemporaries, to a strict accounting, and verify their work by the
standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the simple, the
natural, and the honest.
Those good people must always have a hero, an idol of some sort, and
it is droll to find Balzac, who suffered from their sort such bitter scorn
and hate for his realism while he was alive, now become a fetich in his
turn, to be shaken in the faces of those who will not blindly worship
him. But it is no new thing in the history of literature: whatever is
established is sacred with those who do not think. At the beginning of
the