Fashions in Literature | Page 4

as
perfect satisfaction to the cultivated taste as a drawing by Raphael.
While all the other illustrations of the human ingenuity in making the
human race appear fantastic or ridiculous amuse us or offend our taste,
--except the tailor fashion-plates of the week that is now,--these few
exceptions, classic or modern, give us permanent delight, and are
recognized as following the eternal law of beauty and utility. And we
know, notwithstanding the temporary triumph of bad taste and the
public lack of any taste, that there is a standard, artistic and
imperishable.
The student of manners might find an interesting field in noting how, in
our Occidental civilizations, fluctuations of opinions, of morals, and of
literary style have been accompanied by more or less significant
exhibitions of costumes. He will note in the Precieux of France and the
Euphuist of England a corresponding effeminacy in dress; in the frank
paganism of the French Revolution the affectation of Greek and Roman
apparel, passing into the Directoire style in the Citizen and the
Citizeness; in the Calvinistic cut of the Puritan of Geneva and of New
England the grim severity of their theology and morals. These
examples are interesting as showing an inclination to express an inner
condition by the outward apparel, as the Quakers indicate an inward
peace by an external drabness, and the American Indian a bellicose
disposition by red and yellow paint; just as we express by red stripes
our desire to kill men with artillery, or by yellow stripes to kill them
with cavalry. It is not possible to say whether these external displays
are relics of barbarism or are enduring necessities of human nature.
The fickleness of men in costume in a manner burlesques their shifty

and uncertain taste in literature. A book or a certain fashion in letters
will have a run like a garment, and, like that, will pass away before it
waxes old. It seems incredible, as we look back over the literary history
of the past three centuries only, what prevailing styles and moods of
expression, affectations, and prettinesses, each in turn, have pleased
reasonably cultivated people. What tedious and vapid things they read
and liked to read! Think of the French, who had once had a Villon,
intoxicating themselves with somnolent draughts of Richardson. But,
then, the French could match the paste euphuisms of Lyly with the
novels of Scudery. Every modern literature has been subject to these
epidemics and diseases. It is needless to dwell upon them in detail.
Since the great diffusion of printing, these literary crazes have been
more frequent and of shorter duration. We need go back no further than
a generation to find abundant examples of eccentricities of style and
expression, of crazes over some author or some book, as unaccountable
on principles of art as many of the fashions in social life.--The more
violent the attack, the sooner it is over. Readers of middle age can
recall the furor over Tupper, the extravagant expectations as to the
brilliant essayist Gilfillan, the soon-extinguished hopes of the poet
Alexander Smith. For the moment the world waited in the belief of the
rising of new stars, and as suddenly realized that it had been deceived.
Sometimes we like ruggedness, and again we like things made easy.
Within a few years a distinguished Scotch clergyman made a fortune by
diluting a paragraph written by Saint Paul. It is in our memory how at
one time all the boys tried to write like Macaulay, and then like Carlyle,
and then like Ruskin, and we have lived to see the day when all the
girls would like to write like Heine.
In less than twenty years we have seen wonderful changes in public
taste and in the efforts of writers to meet it or to create it. We saw the
everlastingly revived conflict between realism and romanticism. We
saw the realist run into the naturalist, the naturalist into the animalist,
the psychologist into the sexualist, and the sudden reaction to romance,
in the form of what is called the historic novel, the receipt for which
can be prescribed by any competent pharmacist. The one essential in
the ingredients is that the hero shall be mainly got out of one hole by
dropping him into a deeper one, until--the proper serial length being

attained--he is miraculously dropped out into daylight, and stands to
receive the plaudits of a tenderhearted world, that is fond of nothing so
much as of fighting.
The extraordinary vogue of certain recent stories is not so much to be
wondered at when we consider the millions that have been added to the
readers of English during the past twenty-five years. The wonder is that
a new book does not sell more largely, or it would be a wonder if the
ability