Criticism and Fiction

  Ships readily drive upon rocks in the early twilight, and offer excitingdifficulties of salvage; and the heavy snows gather quickly round thesteps of wanderers who lie down to die in them, preparatory to theirdiscovery and rescue by immediate relatives. The midnight weather isalso very suitable for encounter with murderers and burglars; and thecontrast of its freezing gloom with the light and cheer in-doors promotesthe gayeties which merge, at all well-regulated country-houses, in loveand marriage. In the region of pure character no moment could be soavailable for flinging off the mask of frivolity, or imbecility, orsavagery, which one has worn for ten or twenty long years, say, for thepurpose of foiling some villain, and surprising the reader, and helpingthe author out with his plot. Persons abroad in the Alps, or Apennines,or Pyrenees, or anywhere seeking shelter in the huts of shepherds or thedens of smugglers, find no time like it for lying in a feigned slumber,and listening to the whispered machinations of their suspicious lookingentertainers, and then suddenly starting up and fighting their way out;or else springing from the real sleep into which they have sunkexhausted, and finding it broad day and the good peasants whom they hadso unjustly doubted, waiting breakfast for them.

  We need not point out the superior advantages of the Christmas season foranything one has a mind to do with the French Revolution, of the Arcticexplorations, or the Indian Mutiny, or the horrors of Siberian exile;there is no time so good for the use of this material; and ghosts onshipboard are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In our own loggingcamps the man who has gone into the woods for the winter, afterquarrelling with his wife, then hears her sad appealing voice, and ismoved to good resolutions as at no other period of the year; and in themining regions, first in California and later in Colorado, the hardenedreprobate, dying in his boots, smells his mother's doughnuts, andbreathes his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and thelittle brother, or sister, or the old father coming to meet him fromheaven; while his rude companions listen round him, and dry their eyes onthe butts of their revolvers.

  It has to be very grim, all that, to be truly effective; and here,already, we have a touch in the Americanized Christmas story of themoralistic quality of the American Thanksgiving story. This was seldomwritten, at first, for the mere entertainment of the reader; it was meantto entertain him, of course; but it was meant to edify him, too, and toimprove him; and some such intention is still present in it. I ratherthink that it deals more probably with character to this end than itsEnglish cousin, the Christmas story, does. It is not so improbable thata man should leave off being a drunkard on Thanksgiving, as that heshould leave off being a curmudgeon on Christmas; that he should conquerhis appetite as that he should instantly change his nature, by goodresolutions. He would be very likely, indeed, to break his resolutionsin either case, but not so likely in the one as in the other.

  Generically, the Thanksgiving story is cheerfuller in its drama andsimpler in its persons than the Christmas story. Rarely has it dealtwith the supernatural, either the apparition of ghosts or theintervention of angels. The weather being so much milder at the close ofNovember than it is a month later, very little can be done with theelements; though on the coast a northeasterly storm has been, and can be,very usefully employed. The Thanksgiving story is more restricted in itsrange; the scene is still mostly in New England, and the characters areof New England extraction, who come home from the West usually, or NewYork, for the event of the little drama, whatever it may be. It may bethe reconciliation of kinsfolk who have quarrelled; or the union oflovers long estranged; or husbands and wives who have had hard words andparted; or mothers who had thought their sons dead in California and findthemselves agreeably disappointed in their return; or fathers who for oldtime's sake receive back their erring and conveniently dying daughters.The notes are not many which this simple music sounds, but they have aSabbath tone, mostly, and win the listener to kindlier thoughts andbetter moods. The art is at its highest in some strong sketch of RoseTerry Cooke's, or some perfectly satisfying study of Miss Jewett's, orsome graphic situation of Miss Wilkins's; and then it is a very fine art.But mostly it is poor and rude enough, and makes openly, shamelessly, forthe reader's emotions, as well as his morals. It is inclined to berather descriptive. The turkey, the pumpkin, the corn-field, figurethroughout; and the leafless woods are blue and cold against the eveningsky behind the low hip-roofed, old-fashioned homestead. The parlance isusually the Yankee dialect and its Western modifications.

  The Thanksgiving story is mostly confined in scene to the country; itdoes not seem possible to do much with it in town; and it is a seriousquestion whether with its geographical and topical limitations it canhold its own against the Christmas story; and whether it would not bewell for authors to consider a combination with its elder rival.

  The two feasts are so near together in point of time that they could beeasily covered by the sentiment of even a brief narrative. Under theagglutinated style of 'A Thanksgiving-Christmas Story,' fictionappropriate to both could be produced, and both could be employednaturally and probably in the transaction of its affairs and thedevelopment of its characters. The plot for such a story could easily bemade to include a total-abstinence pledge and family reunion atThanksgiving, and an apparition and spiritual regeneration over a bowl ofpunch at Christmas.

  XXVI.

  It would be interesting to know the far beginnings of holiday literature,and I commend the quest to the scientific spirit which now specializesresearch in every branch of history. In the mean time, without being tooconfident of the facts, I venture to suggest that it came in with theromantic movement about the beginning of this century, when mountainsceased to be horrid and became picturesque; when ruins of all sorts, butparticularly abbeys and castles, became habitable to the most delicateconstitutions; when the despised Gothick of Addison dropped its "k," andarose the chivalrous and religious Gothic of Scott; when ghosts wereredeemed from the contempt into which they had fallen, and resumed theirplace in polite society; in fact, the politer the society; the welcomerthe ghosts, and whatever else was out of the common. In that day theAnnual flourished, and this artificial flower was probably the firstliterary blossom on the Christmas Tree which has since borne so muchtinsel foliage and painted fruit. But the Annual was extremely Oriental;it was much preoccupied with, Haidees and Gulnares and Zuleikas, withHindas and Nourmahals, owing to the distinction which Byron and Moore hadgiven such ladies; and when it began to concern itself with theactualities of British beauty, the daughters of Albion, though inscribedwith the names of real countesses and duchesses, betrayed their descentfrom the well-known Eastern odalisques. It was possibly through anAmerican that holiday literature became distinctively English inmaterial, and Washington Irving, with his New World love of the past, mayhave given the impulse to the literary worship of Christmas which hassince so widely established itself. A festival revived in popularinterest by a New-Yorker to whom Dutch associations with New-year's hadendeared the German ideal of Christmas, and whom the robust gayeties ofthe season in old-fashioned country-houses had charmed, would be one ofthose roundabout results which destiny likes, and "would at least beEarly English."

  If we cannot claim with all the patriotic confidence we should like tofeel that it was Irving who set Christmas in that light in which Dickenssaw its aesthetic capabilities, it is perhaps because all origins areobscure. For anything that we positively know to the contrary, theDruidic rites from which English Christmas borrowed the invitingmistletoe, if not the decorative holly, may have been accompanied by therecitations of holiday triads. But it is certain that several plays ofShakespeare were produced, if not written, for the celebration of theholidays, and that then the black tide of Puritanism which swept overmen's souls blotted out all such observance of Christmas with thefestival itself. It came in again, by a natural reaction, with thereturning Stuarts, and throughout the period of the Restoration itenjoyed a perfunctory favor. There is mention of it; often enough in theeighteenth-century essayists, in the Spectators and Idlers and Tatle
rs;but the world about the middle of the last century laments the neglectinto which it had fallen. Irving seems to have been the first to observeits surviving rites lovingly, and Dickens divined its immense advantageas a literary occasion. He made it in some sort entirely his for a time,and there can be no question but it was he who again endeared it to thewhole English-speaking world, and gave it a wider and deeper hold than ithad ever had before upon the fancies and affections of our race.

  The might of that great talent no one can gainsay, though in the light ofthe truer work which has since been done his literary principles seemalmost as grotesque as his theories of political economy. In no onedirection was his erring force more felt than in the creation of holidayliterature as we have known it for the last half-century. Creation, ofcourse, is the wrong word; it says too much; but in default of a betterword, it may stand. He did not make something out of nothing; thematerial was there before him; the mood and even the need of his timecontributed immensely to his success, as the volition of the subjecthelps on the mesmerist; but it is within bounds to say that he was thechief agency in the development of holiday literature as we have knownit, as he was the chief agency in universalizing the great Christianholiday as we now have it. Other agencies wrought with him and afterhim; but it was he who rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust, andhumanized it and consecrated it to the hearts and homes of all.

  Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in working his miracle, butthere is no doubt about his working it. One opens his Christmas storiesin this later day--'The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man, The Cricketon the Hearth,' and all the rest--and with "a heart high-sorrowful andcloyed," asks himself for the preternatural virtue that they once had.The pathos appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; thecharacter theatrical; the joviality pumped; the psychology commonplace;the sociology alone funny. It is a world of real clothes, earth, air,water, and the rest; the people often speak the language of life, buttheir motives are as disproportioned and improbable, and their passionsand purposes as overcharged, as those of the worst of Balzac's people.Yet all these monstrosities, as they now appear, seem to have once hadsymmetry and verity; they moved the most cultivated intelligences of thetime; they touched true hearts; they made everybody laugh and cry.

  This was perhaps because the imagination, from having been fed mostlyupon gross unrealities, always responds readily to fantastic appeals.There has been an amusing sort of awe of it, as if it were the channel ofinspired thought, and were somehow sacred. The most preposterousinventions of its activity have been regarded in their time as thegreatest feats of the human mind, and in its receptive form it has beennursed into an imbecility to which the truth is repugnant, and the factthat the beautiful resides nowhere else is inconceivable. It has beenflattered out of all sufferance in its toyings with the mere elements ofcharacter, and its attempts to present these in combinations foreign toexperience are still praised by the poorer sort of critics asmasterpieces of creative work.

  In the day of Dickens's early Christmas stories it was thought admirablefor the author to take types of humanity which everybody knew, and to addto them from his imagination till they were as strange as beasts andbirds talking. Now we begin to feel that human nature is quite enough,and that the best an author can do is to show it as it is. But in thosestories of his Dickens said to his readers, Let us make believe so-and-so; and the result was a joint juggle, a child's-play, in which thewholesome allegiance to life was lost. Artistically, therefore, thescheme was false, and artistically, therefore, it must perish. It didnot perish, however, before it had propagated itself in a whole school ofunrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder thosesentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandonedlong after the original conjurer had wearied of his performance.

  Under his own eye and of conscious purpose a circle of imitators grew upin the fabrication of Christmas stories. They obviously formedthemselves upon his sobered ideals; they collaborated with him, and itwas often hard to know whether it was Dickens or Sala or Collins who waswriting. The Christmas book had by that time lost its direct applicationto Christmas. It dealt with shipwrecks a good deal, and with perilousadventures of all kinds, and with unmerited suffering, and with ghostsand mysteries, because human nature, secure from storm and danger in awell-lighted room before a cheerful fire, likes to have these thingsimaged for it, and its long-puerilized fancy will bear an endlessrepetition of them. The wizards who wrought their spells with themcontented themselves with the lasting efficacy of these simple means;and the apprentice-wizards and journeyman-wizards who have succeeded thempractise the same arts at the old stand; but the ethical intention whichgave dignity to Dickens's Christmas stories of still earlier date hasalmost wholly disappeared. It was a quality which could not be worked solong as the phantoms and hair-breadth escapes. People always knew thatcharacter is not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux; that a ghostcannot do much towards reforming an inordinately selfish person; that alife cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, bythe most allegorical apparition; that want and sin and shame cannot becured by kettles singing on the hob; and gradually they ceased to makebelieve that there was virtue in these devices and appliances. Yet theethical intention was not fruitless, crude as it now appears.

  It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of theold, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and theendeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are theprinciples upon which alone the world holds together and gets forward.It was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in mind of thesavagery and suffering all round them, and to be taught, as Dickens wasalways teaching, that certain feelings which grace human nature, astenderness for the sick and helpless, self-sacrifice and generosity,self-respect and manliness and womanliness, are the common heritage ofthe race; the direct gift of Heaven, shared equally by the rich and poor.It did not necessarily detract from the value of the lesson that, withthe imperfect art of the time, he made his paupers and porters not onlyhuman, but superhuman, and too altogether virtuous; and it remained truethat home life may be lovely under the lowliest roof, although he likedto paint it without a shadow on its beauty there. It is still a factthat the sick are very often saintly, although he put no peevishness intotheir patience with their ills. His ethical intention told for manhoodand fraternity and tolerance, and when this intention disappeared fromthe better holiday literature, that literature was sensibly the poorerfor the loss.

  XXVII.

  But if the humanitarian impulse has mostly disappeared from Christmasfiction, I think it has never so generally characterized all fiction.One may refuse to recognize this impulse; one may deny that it is in anygreater degree shaping life than ever before, but no one who has thecurrent of literature under his eye can fail to note it there. Peopleare 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 theconditions in which we would fain have rested are sacred or immutable.Especially in America, where the race has gained a height never reachedbefore, the eminence enables more men than ever before to see how evenhere vast masses of men are sunk in misery that must grow every day morehopeless, or embroiled in a struggle for mere life that must end inenslaving and imbruting them.

  Art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does not make friendswith Need it must perish. It perceives that to take itself from the manyand leave them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few whomit can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error that kills. The menand women who do the hard work of the world have learned that they have aright to pleasure in their toil, and that when justice is done them theywill 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 everyform of literature. But this is only one phase of the devotion of thebest literature of our
time to the service of humanity. No book writtenwith a low or cynical motive could succeed now, no matter how brilliantlywritten; and the work done in the past to the glorification of merepassion and power, to the deification of self, appears monstrous andhideous. The romantic spirit worshipped genius, worshipped heroism, butat its best, in such a man as Victor Hugo, this spirit recognized thesupreme claim of the lowest humanity. Its error was to idealize thevictims of society, to paint them impossibly virtuous and beautiful; buttruth, which has succeeded to the highest mission of romance, paintsthese victims as they are, and bids the world consider them not becausethey are beautiful and virtuous, but because they are ugly and vicious,cruel, filthy, and only not altogether loathsome because the divine cannever wholly die out of the human. The truth does not find these victimsamong the poor alone, among the hungry, the houseless, the ragged; but italso finds them among the rich, cursed with the aimlessness, the satiety,the despair of wealth, wasting their lives in a fool's paradise of showsand semblances, with nothing real but the misery that comes ofinsincerity and selfishness.

  I do not think the fiction of our own time even always equal to thiswork, or perhaps more than seldom so. But as I once expressed, to thelong-reverberating discontent of two continents, fiction is now a finerart than it, has been hitherto, and more nearly meets the requirements ofthe infallible standard. I have hopes of real usefulness in it, becauseit is at last building on the only sure foundation; but I am by no meanscertain that it will be the ultimate literary form, or will remain asimportant as we believe it is destined to become. On the contrary, it isquite imaginable that when the great mass of readers, now sunk in thefoolish joys of mere fable, shall be lifted to an interest in the meaningof things through the faithful portrayal of life in fiction, then fictionthe most faithful may be superseded by a still more faithful form ofcontemporaneous history. I willingly leave the precise character of thisform to the more robust imagination of readers whose minds have beennurtured upon romantic novels, and who really have an imagination worthspeaking of, and confine myself, as usual, to the hither side of theregions of conjecture.