My Contemporaries In Fiction | Page 2

and beloved Stevenson, who, unless rescued
by some judicious hand, is likely to be buried under foolish and
unmeasured praises.
It would be easy to fill pages with verifications of the charge here made.
Books of the last half-dozen years or so, which have already proved the
ephemeral nature of their own claim, have been received with plaudits
which would have been exaggerated if applied to some of our
acknowledged classics. The critical declaration that 'Eric Bright-eyes'
could have been written by no other Englishman of the last six hundred
years than Mr. Rider Haggard may be allowed its own monumental
place in the desert of silly and hysteric judgments.
It is time, for the sake of mere common-sense, to get back to something
like a real standard of excellence. It is time to say plainly that our
literature is in danger of degradation, and that the mass of readers is

systematically misled.
Before I go further, I will offer one word in self-excuse. I have taken
this work upon my own shoulders, because I cannot see that anybody
else will take it, and because it seems to me to be calling loudly to be
done. My one unwillingness to undertake it lies in the fact that I have
devoted my own life to the pursuit of that art the exercise of which by
my contemporaries I am now about to criticise. That has an evil and
ungenerous look. But, whatever the declaration may seem to be worth,
I make it with sincerity and truth. I have never tasted the gall of envy in
my life. I have had my share, and my full share, of the critical
sugarplums. I have never, in the critics, apprehension, 'rivalled or
surpassed Sir Walter,' but on many thousands of printed pages (of
advertisement) it is recorded that I have 'more genius for the
delineation of rustic character than any half-dozen surviving novelists
put together.' I laugh when I read this, for I remember Thomas Hardy,
who is my master far and far away. I am quite persuaded that my critic
was genuinely pleased with the book over which he thus
'pyrotechnicated' (as poor Artemus used to say), but I think my
judgment the more sane and sober of the two. I have not the faintest
desire to pull down other men's flags and leave my own flag flying.
And there is the first and last intrusion of myself. I felt it necessary, and
I will neither erase it nor apologise for its presence.
Side by side with the exaggerated admiration with which our
professional censors greet the crowd of new-comers, it is instructive to
note the contempt into which some of our old gods have fallen. The
Superior Person we have always with us. He is, in his essence, a Prig;
but when, as occasionally happens, his heart and intelligence ripen, he
loses the characteristics which once made him a superior person. Whilst
he holds his native status his special art is not to admire anything which
common people find admirable. A year or two ago it became the
shibboleth of his class that they couldn't read Dickens. We met
suddenly a host of people who really couldn't stand Dickens. Most of
them (of course) were 'the people of whom crowds are made,' owning
no sort of mental furniture worth exchange or purchase. They killed the
fashion of despising Dickens as a fashion, and the Superior Person,

finding that his sorrowful inability was no longer an exclusive thing,
ceased to brag about it. When a fashion in dress is popular on
Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday festivals, the people who originally
set the fashion discard it, and set another. In half a generation some of
our superiors, for the mere sake of originality in judgment, will be
going back to the pages of that immortal master-immortal as men count
literary immortality--and will begin to tell us that after all there was
really something in him.
It was Mr. W. D. Howells, an American writer of distinguished ability,
as times go, who set afloat the phrase that since the death of Thackeray
and Dickens fiction has become a finer art. If Mr. Howells had meant
what many people supposed him to mean, the saying would have been
merely impudent He used the word 'finer' in its literal sense, and meant
only that a fashion of minuteness in investigation and in style had come
upon us. There is a sense in which the dissector who makes a
reticulation of the muscular and nervous systems of a little finger is a
'finer' surgeon than the giant of the hospitals whose diagnosis is an
inspiration, and whose knife carves unerringly to the root of disease.
There is a sense in which a sculptor, carving on cherrystones likenesses
of commonplace