'Brain for brain, in no market can you sell your abilities
to such poor advantage. Don't take to literature if you've capital enough in
hand to buy a good broom, and energy enough to annex a vacant crossing'
(1892)
The
North American Review, Vol. 163,
No. 477 (Aug., 1896), pp. 223-235
The nineteenth century has tolerated to some extent
that inartistic and jejune gaud, the novel without a purpose: the twentieth
century, holding higher and truer conceptions of art, will soon outgrow it.
I am well aware that to many readers at the present
day this forecast will sound like a wild paradox. It is the novel with a purpose that they have heard decried as puerile and
inartistic. But what is a paradox? In nine
cases out of ten, is it not the bold statement of an obvious but neglected
truth, too long obscured by blatant iteration of a clamorous falsehood? Now, in
this matter of the object and function of fiction, a certain dominant, (though
retrogressive and obscurantist) school of critics has for some twenty years
been dinning into our ears a dogma wholly alien to the real tendencies which
this age has displayed for at least a century. It has been preaching and
vociferating its poor little formula of “Art for Art’s sake,” in season and out
of season, till most people at last have almost begun to believe it for its
much speaking. It has essayed to convince us that the childish desire for a
story which is no more than a story ought somehow to rank above the adult
preference for a story which points a moral, besides adorning a tale. And it
has done this in spite of the patent fact that all the most successful novels
of the last half century, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Jude
the Obscure, have been novels with a purpose; that the tendency to write and to read
such novels with a purpose has steadily increased throughout the whole of this
period; and that the purpose itself has become with each decade more and more
important, relatively to the mere infantile pleasure of telling or hearing a
story of adventure. In short, our critics have set out with a false theory of
art, and then have attempted to twist plain facts into accordance with their
theory.
In opposition to this obsolescent school of criticism
I wish to show here two things: first, that as a matter of fact the tendency of
the higher fiction, from beginning to end, has been all in the direction of a
constantly deeper and more plainly avowed purpose; and second, that as a matter
of principle the highest and truest art is and must be the art with a purpose.
And I shall further suggest as a corollary the conclusion that the twentieth
century—presumably one in which the ethical impulse will have even a stronger hold
than it has had in the nineteenth—is likely to demand a still larger amount of
purpose in its art, and a deeper conception of what purpose is adequate.
I begin with the matter
of fact. I think it undeniable, to anybody who examines as a whole the fiction
of the nineteenth century, compared with that of the eighteenth, that the
ethical element in the newer work far outweighs that in the older. In England,
especially, most of the fiction of the Georgian period precisely mirrors the
essentially unprogressive thought of the epoch in which it was produced. It is
either decorously dull and conventional, like Richardson; or else boisterously
vulgar and human, like Fielding. It lacks inner meaning. True, in certain of
its outcomes, such as Clarissa Harlowe, an attempt is made at a certain impression of a supposed moral lesson;
but this moral lesson is almost always trite and commonplace—a lesson of the
most trivial copybook order: “Be
virtuous as your grandmother understood virtue!” It marks no advance in the ethical thought of the
race; it is statical, like Adam Bede,
not dynamical, like Eousseau, Shelley, Tolstoi, Ibsen. In this half-and-half
category, I would place those eighteenth-century works, such as The Vicar of Wakefield, or Pamela,
or even Paul
et Virginie, in whose pages the
accepted code of morals is enforced and accentuated by means of a story whose
main interest depends upon its character and incident, or its descriptive
passages, not on its position as marking progress for humanity. The literature
of the eighteenth century in England knows nothing of problems.
In France, the impulses which went to make up the nineteenth
century awoke and realized themselves earlier than elsewhere. Therefore it is
in France that we find the novel with a purpose already becoming a weapon of
progressive thought in the powerful hands of Voltaire and Rousseau. This it is,
I think, which gives to such sketches as Candide and
the Nouvelle
Heloise their universal and
lasting value. Outside England and English-speaking America, how many people
know anything of Tom Jones or of Sir Charles Grandison? But all the world, from St. Petersburg to Lima, knows
Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. And why? Because these French thinkers (oh! yes, I
know that Rousseau was Swiss)—these French thinkers represent a moment in the
development of human thought; they mark time for the race; what they had to say
was new and interesting in all countries equally. The nineteenth century had
its precursors in the eighteenth, especially in France, and it is those
precursors who speak to us still with most world-wide authority.
In England, the novel with a purpose began its course
feebly with Sandford
and Merton and Miss Edgeworth’s
stories. I acknowledge that these examples are damaging to my cause; but I have
confidence enough in my case to expose them frankly to the barbed shaft of the
enemy. During the early half of the present century, the movement towards
purposive fiction did not make much headway either in Britain or America. Its
place was taken, as we shall see a little later, by the purposive poetry of
Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. Godwin’s Caleb Williams, however, is an example to the contrary; and so are a few others like
the curious romances of Thomas Love Peacock. Yet on the whole, it must be
confessed, the essentially reactionary Romanticist school, represented early by
Byron, Scott, and Chateaubriand, later by Bulwer Lytton, Victor Hugo, and Tennyson
(I am speaking very broadly) carried the day for awhile both in England and
France as against the newer purposive and ethical literature heralded by
Shelley. It is noteworthy that the dogma of “Art for Art’s sake” derives its
origin from this romantic school—from Gautier and Baudelaire: it is, in fact, a
legacy of the reaction of Waterloo and the evil days before 1830.
As the nineteenth century progressed, however, it
became abundantly clear that the novel without a purpose was ceasing to engage
the best intellects of the nations. Gradually fiction began to think and to
teach, instead of merely amusing. In England Charlotte Bronte, that double-dyed
Celt—half Irish, half Cornish—raised the true Celtic dragon-standard of revolt
in Jane Eyre and elsewhere. The purpose as yet was not indeed
obtrusive; but it was there undeniably, and it had germinal value; it set
people thinking. The function of the Celt in literature, indeed, is always the
same. “Have ye a government?” he asks. “Thin I’m agin it.” He is the preacher of upheaval. The
popular novelists of the mid-century, it is true—Thackeray, Dickens,
Trollope—did not try to think, or to make others think, either. They were
content with mere passive delineation of character. But while they were in the
zenith of their fame, a new and revolutionary school, beginning with the
Brontes, was slowly working its way upward into favor. George Eliot did think, though in a formless way, and often with
strangely reactionary results; her whole literary work seemed to those who knew
her like a deliberate contradiction of the aspirations for freedom in her life
and conduct; it is wonderful how a woman, who felt and acted as she did, could
have stooped to write novels so unworthy of her place as a pioneer in the
movement for the emancipation of women. George Meredith also dates back his
beginnings to this formative period; and anyone who follows him from The Shaving of Shagpat and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel down to Diana of the Crossways, One of Our Conquerors, and Lord Ormont and his Aminta, cannot fail to observe the constant growth in importance
of the underlying purpose. Nor is it immaterial to observe that the same world
which devoured The
Newcomes and Nicholas Nickleby took little note at the time of Meredith’s masterpieces.
The last decade or two in particular have given us
increasing proof of the growth in popularity of the novel with a purpose, and
the consequent relegation of the novel without a purpose to its proper
place—the school-room or the nursery. We have been overwhelmed by stories like
Mrs. Humphry Ward’s—instinct with moral lessons. Now, I do not for a moment
mean to imply that Mrs. Humphry Ward’s moral lessons commend themselves to my
soul. The popularity of Robert Elsmere is a marvel to those who had outgrown Robert Elsmerism before they
were born; while the popularity of David Grieve,
a smug exhibition of the British sense of moral superiority to those vicious
Continentals, is an insult to the ethical tone of France and of enlightened
England. Still, the fact remains that these essentially purposive books, be
they good, bad, or mediocre, have attained an enormous circulation in our own
time, and have done so mainly on the strength of their purposes. Another
similar instance was that ponderous John Inglesant. Later still, the chief successes of the decade have been made by The Heavenly Twins, The Yellow Aster, Keynotes, Tess, and
a dozen more equally purposive stories. Miss Marie Corelli and Edna Lyall, each
in her own way, illustrate the same tendency. Even Trilby owes part at least of its singular popularity to what
it may contain of widening and expanding power—it is largely accepted as a
covert protest against prevalent English and American Puritanism.
If one sets against these distinctly purposive
successes the success of such other writers as Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope,
Stanley Weyman, and Conan Doyle, it will be clear, I think, that the former
class as a whole mark the taste of adult men and women, of the more thoughtful
and progressive, of the makers and moulders of the coming century; while the
latter class as a whole mark the taste of boys and girls and casual readers, of
the survivors from the past, of the conservative and reactionary as against the
progressive and ascending element. I do not mean that Doyle and Weyman have not
done admirable work of its kind; I merely mean that their work (as a rule) does
not aim at the highest audience. (Even this is not true of Doyle’s work in all
cases.) Books, on the other hand, like Hardy’s Tess and Jude,
like Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, strike the keynote of our century. They are instinct
with our hopes, our fears, our problems. They could not have been written in
any age save this; while She and A Gentleman of France might almost equally have stepped out of some other
century. I do not deny, of course, that the romantic temperament and the love
for books of adventure (especially among the young) will always live on; but I
believe that side by side with these the taste for books of thought and ethical
teaching will always increase, and in an accelerated ratio. I think men and
women will less and less be content, like children, with mere hearing of a
story; they will demand from their novelists something that at the same time
instructs and elevates them.
“But where do you put Stevenson in this gallery of
recent writers?” Ah, Stevenson is—Stevenson. A great artist in his way—perhaps
even more of an artist in fibre than Meredith and Hardy, though less of a
thinker—he was an artist alone, and little beyond it. He had his ideas, it is
true, his aperçus, his rebellions, his fancies; and those who can look
an inch below the surface may often read them. Yet, on the whole, I am prepared
to give Stevenson over as a free gift to the enemy—to treat him rather as a
survivor from the early nineteenth than as a precursor and herald of the
twentieth century. He was a semi-barbaric Scandinavian-Celt of the Western
Islands, at home at Skerryvore, among the foam of the Atlantic. His boyishness,
indeed, with its natural concomitant in love of adventure, was one of his most
charming and lovable characteristics. Great craftsman of words as he was, he
never quite grew up; he loved to sleep out in a sack in the Cevennes, to canoe
on French rivers, to fraternize with Samoans on the beach of Falesá; and the
childish side in him endeared him to all of us. But I cannot help thinking the
adult and virile temperament of Meredith, the adult and civilized temperament
of Hardy, is higher and deeper than the untamable boyishness and delicious
waywardness of the hermit of Samoa.
Kipling again? Well, Kipling is undoubtedly a real
force in our literature, a typical embodiment of the bulldog instincts of the
Englishman. But he stands somewhat aside from either of the main currents of
the day. Nor do I desire to class all writers as better or worse, simply in so
far as they happen to represent or not to represent purpose in fiction.
Nevertheless, I would say that, in a wider sense, Kipling too is purposive. His
aim is exegetical. He does not merely put before us vivid and graphic pictures
of Anglo-Indian society, of the jungle world, of military or seafaring life, of
the East End of London. He has a mission of his own, in a globe that is daily
becoming more and more complex. It is the mission of interpretation. He set out
to a great extent as the literary exponent of the Romance of the Clash of
Races. Our planet is daily shrinking—and also expanding. Shrinking as regards
distances, and the time taken to traverse them; expanding as regards the number
of nations, races, creeds, and moral codes which the average citizen now begins
to cognize or to come in contact with. East and West have joined hands; Egypt,
Japan, South Africa are part of us. Kipling has made himself, on one side of
his work, the laureate of the resulting strife and intermixture. In this
direction, many other writers of the day may be fairly classed with
him—Stevenson in his Pacific stories; Rider Haggard in his wild South African
tales; Hall Caine in his Morocco romance; Gilbert
Parker in his admirable Canadian episodes. I am not here classing these
writers together, of course, as regards literary merit; their planes are
various; I am merely huddling them into the same rough category as exponents,
each on his own plane, of the cosmopolitan ideas necessarily engendered by an
age of rapid European and American expansion. For to make us grasp in its
totality the vast and varied world in which we live and move and have our being
is surely in itself an adequate purpose.
Closely allied with this group of quasi-purposive
authors, whose vogue shows at least the interest felt by the general reading
public in the wider world around them, I would place the other and overlapping
or partially coincident group of authors who deal with outlying factors or
minor elements in our own more domestic western civilization. Time was when
English and American fiction dealt mainly with the ladies and gentlemen of
England, the cultured New Englanders, the polite society of New York or
Philadelphia; if more than that, then at best it concerned itself with the
farmers of the Midland Counties, the rough Yorkshire moorlanders, the miners of
the Western States, the grangers of the prairies. But nowadays, that intense
desire of half the world to know how the other half lives has produced a new
type and crop of fiction. We want to hear of kings and tinkers. Thrums and
Donegal have begun to find voice. Tommy Atkins himself is no longer mute.
Zangwill tells the West End all about the Jews in the slums of Whitechapel.
Miss Murfree tells the North and East all about the ins and outs of life in the
Tennessee mountains. We are familiar with Cape Cod and Simla, with “Brer Fox ”
and “Brer Rabbit,” with Cablets Creoles, and Rolf Boldrewood’s Australians.
Amelie Rives introduces us to West Virginian ginseng diggers. Thomas Hardy
transports us to the old-world cabins of Wessex peasants and woodlanders;
William Black to the bothies of Highland crofters. “Q,” with his Cornishmen,
Mrs. Field with her Moonlighters, are other instances. There is no part of
Connemara, no district of the Sierras or the Canadian West, which now lacks its
vates sacer, its inspired illustrator. And I hold that this
tendency to minute specialization and localization is closely bound up with the
purposive tendency in fiction; both because the same men and women are engaged
in either type, and because the delineation of strange undercurrents and phases
of human life is in itself educational.
Hardy, for example, who gave us Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd, is also Hardy who gave us Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Hall Caine, who sets before us the Isle of Man and its Deemsters, is
Hall Caine who though from the conservative side (as I take it), approaches
those same underlying problems of sex which form the main theme of Hardy and
Meredith. Moreover, the passion for the description of local, rural, and
distinctively tribal or provincial life is closely bound up with the revolt of
race, the seething and pervasive democratic movement which in Europe at least
is bringing the Celt, the Slav, the Czech, and the Magyar to the front, as
against the old dominant English, German, and Latin elements. The dregs and the
scum will have their innings. Hence the modern Celtic revival in Scotland,
represented by Fiona Macleod, William Sharp, Patrick Geddes, and their
compeers; hence the Celtic revival in Ireland, represented by Yeats, Nora Hopper,
and so many other vigorous new writers; hence the Scandinavian outburst, the
fresh young Russian literature; hence Jokai and Maeterlinck; hence the
flowering of the Breton in Renan, Guy de Maupassant, and seafaring Pierre
Loti—the latter of whom represents for France the same roving or specializing
tendencies as are represented for England by Stevenson and Kipling, for America
by Bret Harte, Miss Murfree, and Cable. (I need hardly say I am speaking again
not as to style but as to subject-matter.) Nay, is it not even a significant
fact in the same direction that England has read with deep attention Miss Mary
Wilkins’s New England tales and Mr. Harold Fredericks Illumination—in which forcible story we are transported on the enchanted
carpet of fiction to a village in Northern New York, where mention of Europe is
not, yet where the self-same problems of faith and life meet the local minister
which meet every thinker in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna? It is the purpose
that makes such localized work universally interesting.
If we take Europe as a whole, I do not think we can
doubt the constant progress of its literature in purposiveness during the past
half-century. Even Hugo, prince and false prophet of romanticists—poor fallen
god, whom all may now rail at—showed in his own way the prevailing tendency.
For what is Les
Misérables but a sermon on the
underlying text of socialism? What are Le Roi s’amuse, and Les
Travailleurs de la Mer, but
disguised social and political pamphlets? With the younger generation, however,
the tendency has been still more marked. Even Alexandre Dumas fils showed it. In Zola purposiveness reigns supreme—a
cold, scientific, plodding purposiveness, as wooden as French scientific work
in general; yet full of meaning in every line and touch and incident. A
careless reader might deny the same note to Guy de Maupassant and Bourget, who,
indeed, fall largely into the same wide category as our own Stevenson. (I hope
it will be borne in mind that I am everywhere dealing with all these writers
from a single standpoint only—not that
of technical literary criticism.) But Maupassant and Bourget
themselves—especially the latter—have an underlying purposiveness that cannot
be masked by their artistic conscience. As for the North, the case is clear.
Ibsen more than any other man stands out for us to-day as the accepted pioneer
of the twentieth century; and Ibsen never writes except because he has
something in his soul to teach us. The Doll’s House, Hedda
Gabler, Ghosts, The Master Builder—what
does the outcry against them signify save that Ibsen had an original idea to
impose upon the world, and that the world as yet was not ready to accept it?
Only new principles can ever rouse such virulent opposition. And similarly with
the Russians. Tolstoi’s ideas do not seem to me the ideas that are likely to
rule the coming world; but at any rate they are ideas; and it is for the sake
of the ideas that Tolstoi writes, not merely to give us passing pleasure.
Taking the world round, then, I say (and omitting on purpose
America, with which I do not feel myself competent to deal), I see one truth
standing out quite clearly. From first to last, the nineteenth century has
constantly demanded, and has constantly been supplied with, more and more
purposive fiction. The demand and the supply still continue to increase.
Therefore I infer that the literature of the twentieth century in turn will be
increasingly purposive.
And in being so, it will also be right. It will follow a law of all literary development from
the beginning of all things. A broad survey of the progress of literature from
its outset will show us that purpose has ever played a larger and larger part
in literary work with each age in each nation.
Every literature begins with naive and somewhat
childish narration—the myth, the epic, the fairy-tale, the saga. As it
progresses, it grows deeper, more philosophic, more ethical, more purposive.
The best never comes out of a civilized man, save when he is profoundly stirred
by some overpowering social or moral emotion. Our test of the higher as opposed
to the lower art is just, other things equal, the proportion of this
philosophic and ethical interest to the mere aesthetic element. I do not mean
to say, of course, that the highest literature, as literature, is the scientific treatise, the
philosophic essay, the ethical pamphlet. To guard against that misconception, I
insert above on purpose the saving clause, “other
things equal.” Literature must needs above all things be literary—it must have
grace of style, beauty and aptness and novelty of wording; it must appeal first
of all to the aesthetic sense, not to the pure reason or the moral nature. But
granting the presence of these purely literary qualities, that literature is
highest which most combines with them a deeper philosophic and moral value. Why
do we all feel Shelley to be far and away the greatest of English poets? (I
exclude Shakespeare, who is the first of English novelists and dramatists, but
not quite the first of English poets.) Clearly because we all feel that Shelley
touched heights of philosophic thinking and of moral beauty never elsewhere
combined with such exquisite imagery, such poetic imagination, such immortal
melody. Why do we all feel Keats to stand just one degree beneath Shelley’s
level? Clearly because Keats, in other respects the most poetical of English
poets, the finest example of pure poetic temperament, falls short of
philosophic and moral height; he is merely the perfection of the artistic
nature. Why do we think Hamlet,
again, a greater play than Romeo and Juliet? Clearly because we feel the deeper and more purposive
thought in Hamlet. What makes Faust the
chief crown of glory in German literature? Clearly, the breadth of its
philosophic outlook, the vastness of its aim, the profound moral vistas of
which it allows us here and there to catch passing glimpses. Height may be
measured, other things equal, by the greatness of the philosophic and ethical
admixture.
Take in detail a few examples. Hellenic literature
begins, like all other literatures, with the mere heroic story. We admire in
its first efforts the Homeric ring, the full-mouthed sonorousness; we are
captivated by the remoteness from our world and its problems—by the clash of
bronze arms, the naïveté and simplicity of
the domestic relations, the clang of the Iliad, “the roar and thunder of the Odyssey.” We listen
open-mouthed to the doughty deeds of Diomede, the song of the Sirens, the tale
of Calypso, the ravings of Polyphemus. But we feel to the end that, strange and
beautiful and weird as are these old-world imaginings, with their vivid
pictures and their rolling music, they are childish at heart with the
childishness of the barbarian; they do not in any way satisfy the longings and
aspirations of civilized humanity; their interest is largely fictitious and
archaeological. Indeed, it is as a relief and refuge from our “obstinate questionings of invisible things” that we
most enjoy the change from our own literature to the purely objective and
barbaric atmosphere of the Homeric poems.
Very different is the tone of the great Athenian
tragedians. There we feel at once the conservative grandeur and solemnity of Eschylus;
the philosophic doubt and ethical inquiry of Sophocles; the frank scepticism
and human reconstruction in many plays of Euripides. What a gulf between the
quarrels of the gods in the Iliad and the sublime suffering and patience of the
bound Prometheus! What a gulf between the despotic tone of the Homeric
Agamemnon or the Homeric Odysseus, say in the incident of Thersites and the
paean of triumphant freedom in the Persae,
the outburst of human passion in the Antigone
or the Bacchae! Greek literature grows steadily from the descriptive
and interesting to the profound and purposive; it finds its culminating point at
last in the reasoned philosophic and ethical thinking of the Attic tragedians.
Take the three other great epics of the world,
again—the AEneid, the Divina Commedia, and Paradise
Lost; what comfort can the
advocates of the novel or poem without a purpose derive from those great works?
They must be clever indeed if they can wriggle round them. Look at the AEneid first. What made a brother bard break forth
beforehand in that enthusiastic declaration,
“Cedite
Romani scriptores, cedite Graii, Nescio
quid majus nascitur Iliade?”
Was it not his consciousness that the AEneid was the worthy and fitting epic of a great unifying and
cosmopolitanizing movement—that movement which made Rome not so much the
mistress as the embodiment of a pacified and unified world, and which enabled a
later poet to apostrophize her with truth in that eloquent pentameter,
“Urbem fedsti
quod prius orbis erat?”
It is this overpowering sense of the majesty and the
moral destiny of Rome—this conception of the organic evolution of a world-city
from a small beginning—that inspired Virgil so high above even the level of the
Second Georgic. This it is that makes him recur so often to the mighty future
of the race of AEneas and to set in the very forefront of his noble exordium
the stirring line:
“Tantae
molis erat Romanam condere gentem.”
Or, look at Dante again. Can anybody deny that the
main inspiring idea of Dante’s colossal work is the true mundane order, the
proper relation of Church and State, of Priest and Prince, of Pope and Emperor?
There, as on the frescoed wall of Santa Maria Novella, we behold the
crystallized concept of the great European party to which the poet belonged—the
concept of a well-organized and well-governed Europe, still regulated by the
splendid Roman and Virgilian ideal, plus the
new feature of the Christian religion. Whether we agree with this ideal or not,
it was, at least, a large and liberal conception; it was vital in its day, and
it dominates every line of the Tuscan poet’s thinking.
As for Milton, he pleads guilty to purposiveness from
the very beginning—pleads guilty, and glories in it. “To vindicate the ways of God to man” is the expressed
purpose of the argument in his epic. And every word the mighty Puritan wrote is
intensely purposive. Paradise Lost is a theory
of theology—and heretical at that. Samson Agonistes is a political pamphlet, Comus is
a singularly unconvincing though beautiful and fanciful tract on the ascetic
side of the question of sex—just as the essay on Freedom of Divorce is a later expression of mature opinion in favor of a
particular form of laxity. From beginning to end, Milton was a glorified and
ennobled pamphleteer; he wrote his pamphlets with a purpose first and a divine
beauty second, for without the purpose they would never have been written.
Every other literature tells us the same tale. We
start in all with sagas, stories, folk-songs, marchen. We progress to the drama and novel of character; we
end with the Euripideses, the Ibsens, the Merediths. Chancer and Boccaccio form
the first term in a series which goes steadily on to Shelley and Goethe. And we
all instinctively feel that the greatest and truest poets and romancers are
those who have taught their age somewhat: Wordsworth, not Scott; Shelley, not
Byron. Even outside the more definitely purposive work, we also feel that
relative height may best be gauged by intensity of purpose. Keats himself, when
judged by this standard, is really purposive; for in a world too dead to the worth of pure beauty,
he revived the naked Greek ideal of the simply beautiful. With Tennyson, the
highest work is surely that which, like In Memoriam, Maud, and such lyrics as Wages, or
The Higher
Pantheism, strives to
realize some aspect of the philosophic and religious thought of the epoch he mirrored.
Anybody who looks for the keynote in Bossetti and Swinburne will similarly find
it in the love sonnets and in such poems as The Blessed Damosel, the Ode to Victor Hugo, Hertha,
the Lines to
a Crucifix, the Hymn to Proserpine, and Dolores—all
of which image forth some thought of the period. I end where I began. The
greatest novels and the greatest poems are thus clearly seen to be those which
most mark
time for humanity.
A work of art, I admit, is not a pamphlet or a
proposition in Euclid, but it must enclose a truth, and a new truth, at that,
if it is to find a place permanently in the front rank of its own order. Even
of other arts than literature this is essentially true—as witness Botticelli,
Burne Jones, Donatello, Wagner. Painting, sculpture, music, to be truly great,
must crest the wave of their own epoch. In literature, however, no work can be
considered as really first-rate unless it teaches us somewhat—not merely pleases
us. The critic who insists on absence of purpose is shown by the greatest
examples of the past, and by the working of the time-spirit, to be merely a
belated and antiquated anachronism.
Thus the novel without a purpose stands condemned on
its very face as belonging inherently to the second class, and to the infancy
of humanity. It will continue to be written, no doubt, for the younger
generation, and the inferior minds; but in the twentieth century, I venture to
believe, the adult and educated public will more and more demand from its
literary caterers adult interests, adult sympathies, a philosophic aim, an
ethical purpose.
Grant Allen.
