  But if the humanitarian impulse has mostly disappeared from Christmas fiction, I think it has never so generally characterized all fiction. One may refuse to recognize this impulse; one may deny that it is in any greater degree shaping life than ever before, but no one who has the current of literature under his eye can fail to note it there. People are thinking and feeling generously, if not living justly, in our time; it is a day of anxiety to be saved from the curse that is on selfishness, of eager question how others shall be helped, of bold denial that the conditions in which we would fain have rested are sacred or immutable. Especially in America, where the race has gained a height never reached before, the eminence enables more men than ever before to see how even here vast masses of men are sunk in misery that must grow every day more hopeless, or embroiled in a struggle for mere life that must end in enslaving and imbruting them. Art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does not make friends with Need it must perish. It perceives that to take itself from the many and leave them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few whom it can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error that kills. The men and women who do the hard work of the world have learned that they have a right to pleasure in their toil, and that when justice is done them they will have it. In all ages poetry has affirmed something of this sort, but it remained for ours to perceive it and express it somehow in every form of literature. But this is only one phase of the devotion of the best literature of our time to the service of humanity. No book written with a low or cynical motive could succeed now, no matter how brilliantly written; and the work done in the past to the glorification of mere passion and power, to the deification of self, appears monstrous and hideous. The romantic spirit worshipped genius, worshipped heroism, but at its best, in such a man as Victor Hugo, this spirit recognized the supreme claim of the lowest humanity. Its error was to idealize the victims of society, to paint them impossibly virtuous and beautiful; but truth, which has succeeded to the highest mission of romance, paints these victims as they are, and bids the world consider them not because they are beautiful and virtuous, but because they are ugly and vicious, cruel, filthy, and only not altogether loathsome because the divine can never wholly die out of the human. The truth does not find these victims among the poor alone, among the hungry, the houseless, the ragged; but it also finds them among the rich, cursed with the aimlessness, the satiety, the despair of wealth, wasting their lives in a fool’s paradise of shows and semblances, with nothing real but the misery that comes of insincerity and selfishness. I do not think the fiction of our own time even always equal to this work, or perhaps more than seldom so. But as I once expressed, to the long-reverberating discontent of two continents, fiction is now a finer art than it, has been hitherto, and more nearly meets the requirements of the infallible standard. I have hopes of real usefulness in it, because it is at last building on the only sure foundation; but I am by no means certain that it will be the ultimate literary form, or will remain as important as we believe it is destined to become. On the contrary, it is quite imaginable that when the great mass of readers, now sunk in the foolish joys of mere fable, shall be lifted to an interest in the meaning of things through the faithful portrayal of life in fiction, then fiction the most faithful may be superseded by a still more faithful form of contemporaneous history. I willingly leave the precise character of this form to the more robust imagination of readers whose minds have been nurtured upon romantic novels, and who really have an imagination worth speaking of, and confine myself, as usual, to the hither side of the regions of conjecture. The art which in the mean time disdains the office of teacher is one of the last refuges of the aristocratic spirit which is disappearing from politics and society, and is now seeking to shelter itself in aesthetics. The pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste; but as before, it is averse to the mass of men; it consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise. It seeks to withdraw itself, to stand aloof; to be distinguished, and not to be identified. Democracy in literature is the reverse of all this. It wishes to know and to tell the truth, confident that consolation and delight are there; it does not care to paint the marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few. Men are more like than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity. Neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, except as they somehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to make the race better and kinder, are to be regarded as serious interests; they are all lower than the rudest crafts that feed and house and clothe, for except they do this office they are idle; and they cannot do this except from and through the truth. PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: Absence of distinction Advertising Aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers Ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns An artistic atmosphere does not create artists Anise-seed bag Any man’s country could get on without him Any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery Artist has seasons, as trees, when he cannot blossom As soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it Begun to fight with want from their cradles Blasts of frigid wind swept the streets Book that they are content to know at second hand Business to take advantage of his necessity Clemens is said to have said of bicycling Competition has deformed human nature Conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets Could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts Do not want to know about such squalid lives Early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable Encounter of old friends after the lapse of years Even a day’s rest is more than most people can bear Eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future Face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety Fate of a book is in the hands of the women For most people choice is a curse General worsening of things, familiar after middle life God of chance leads them into temptation and adversity Happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us Hard to think up anything new Heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows Heighten our suffering by anticipation Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn Historian, who is a kind of inferior realist Houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness I do not think any man ought to live by an art If he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading If one were poor, one ought to be deserving Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success Ladies make up the pomps which they (the men) forego Lascivious and immodest as possible Leading part cats may play in society Leaven, but not for so large a lump Literary spirit is the true world-citizen Literature beautiful only through the intelligence Literature has no objective value Literature is Business as well as Art Look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof Malevolent agitators Man is strange to himself as long as he lives Mark Twain Meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation Men read the newspapers, but our women read the books More zeal than knowledge in it Most journalists would have been literary men if they could Neatness that brings despair Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it No man ought to live by any art No rose blooms right along Noble uselessness Not lack of quality but quantity of the quality Openly depraved by shows of wealth Our deeply incorporated civilization Our huckstering civilization People have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions People might oftener trust themselves to Providence People of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy Picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad Plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best Pure accident and by its own contributory negligence Put aside all anxiety about style Refused to see us as we see ourselves Results of art should be free to all Reviewers Reward is in the serial and not in the book—19th Century Rogues in every walk of life Should be very sorry to do good, as people called it Should sin a little more on the side of candid severity So many millionaires and so many tramps So touching that it brought the lump into my own throat Solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer Some of it’s good, and most of it isn’t Some of us may be toys and playthings without reproach Summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone Superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great Take our pleasures ungraciously The old and ugly are fastidious as to the looks of others Their consciences needed no bossing in the performance There is small love of pure literature They are so many and I am so few Those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it Those who work too much and those who rest too much Trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind Two branches of the novelist’s trade: Novelist and Historian Unfailing American kindness Visitors of the more inquisitive sex Wald with the lurch and the sway of the deck in it Warner’s Backlog Studies We cannot all be hard-working donkeys We who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it Whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money Work would be twice as good if it were done twice |
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