Criticism and Fiction | Page 9

be, is not
enough; there must be an imbecile, trembling dotard, willing to
promote even the liaisons of his daughters to give them happiness and
to teach the sublimity of the paternal instinct. The hero cannot
sufficiently be a selfish young fellow, with alternating impulses of
greed and generosity; he must superfluously intend a career of
iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by nothing but the most
cataclysmal interpositions. It can be said that without such personages
the plot could not be transacted; but so much the worse for the plot.
Such a plot had no business to be; and while actions so unnatural are
imagined, no mastery can save fiction from contempt with those who
really think about it. To Balzac it can be forgiven, not only because in
his better mood he gave us such biographies as 'Eugenie Grandet,' but
because he wrote at a time when fiction was just beginning to verify the
externals of life, to portray faithfully the outside of men and things. It
was still held that in order to interest the reader the characters must be
moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to be taught that "heroes"
and "heroines" existed all around us, and that these abnormal beings
needed only to be discovered in their several humble disguises, and
then we should see every-day people actuated by the fine frenzy of the
creatures of the poets. How false that notion was, few but the critics,
who are apt to be rather belated, need now be told. Some of these poor
fellows, however, still contend that it ought to be done, and that human
feelings and motives, as God made them and as men know them, are
not good enough for novel-readers.
This is more explicable than would appear at first glance. The critics

--and in speaking of them one always modestly leaves one's self out of
the count, for some reason--when they are not elders ossified in
tradition, are apt to be young people, and young people are necessarily
conservative in their tastes and theories. They have the tastes and
theories of their instructors, who perhaps caught the truth of their day,
but whose routine life has been alien to any other truth. There is
probably no chair of literature in this country from which the principles
now shaping the literary expression of every civilized people are not
denounced and confounded with certain objectionable French novels,
or which teaches young men anything of the universal impulse which
has given us the work, not only of Zola, but of Tourguenief and Tolstoy
in Russia, of Bjornson and Ibsen in Norway, of Valdes and Galdos in
Spain, of Verga in Italy. Till these younger critics have learned to think
as well as to write for themselves they will persist in heaving a sigh,
more and more perfunctory, for the truth as it was in Sir Walter, and as
it was in Dickens and in Hawthorne. Presently all will have been
changed; they will have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree;
and when it shall have become the old truth, they will perhaps see it all.

VI.
In the mean time the average of criticism is not wholly bad with us. To
be sure, the critic sometimes appears in the panoply of the savages
whom we have supplanted on this continent; and it is hard to believe
that his use of the tomahawk and the scalping-knife is a form of
conservative surgery. It is still his conception of his office that he
should assail those who differ with him in matters of taste or opinion;
that he must be rude with those he does not like. It is too largely his
superstition that because he likes a thing it is good, and because he
dislikes a thing it is bad; the reverse is quite possibly the case, but he is
yet indefinitely far from knowing that in affairs of taste his personal
preference enters very little. Commonly he has no principles, but only
an assortment of prepossessions for and against; and this otherwise
very perfect character is sometimes uncandid to the verge of dishonesty.
He seems not to mind misstating the position of any one he supposes
himself to disagree with, and then attacking him for what he never said,

or even implied; he thinks this is droll, and appears not to suspect that it
is immoral. He is not tolerant; he thinks it a virtue to be intolerant; it is
hard for him to understand that the same thing may be admirable at one
time and deplorable at another; and that it is really his business to
classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as the
naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to