Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/699

Rh a beautiful suggestion, which close analysis only makes more convincing, is directly conveyed. But when he calls the stars "the forget-me-nots of the angels" or compares the Delta of the Nile to an outspread fan, the drapery of fancy obscures the reality. There should be no bric-à-brac in the house of Imagination. Veils there may be, enhancing the beauty of the truth, but no superfluous vesture, however alluring.

In the poetic expression of a simple, strong feeling we resent all similes save those which are right in the way like a door that is opened, those which are spontaneous and seem inevitable, as in the old song:

It is a distinguishing excellence of the great Victorian poets that they rejected the indirection of such conceits as abound in Elizabethan verse.

But what we have been saying relates to forms already discarded before the writers of our new generation were well at work, and it is with this new generation that we are reckoning. The writers whose work is now well-nigh done have not only continued, and we may say completed, the eradication of traditional affectations and masquerades,—they have not only achieved this negative accomplishment, but have put literature on an entirely new basis by their attitude toward life and the world. Perhaps Browning sounded the heralding note of the new method, though he was a poet, and it has been in prose rather than in verse that the original scheme has found expression, and mainly in works of fiction like those of Meredith, Mark Twain, James, and Howells. Pater and Symonds, who have passed away, illustrated the new method in their interpretations of history, art, and literature.

We get some idea of what such writers have accomplished when we consider what they have displaced. Take, for example, such a vital force as Charles Dickens was fifty years ago, in volume like that of a tidal wave, matched only in prevalent and overwhelming effect by Victor Hugo, who to the same degree dominated French fiction. Each of these forces seemed to fill the whole space within the limits of its horizon. These giants of literature are still read with delight for what they were—for the might and variety of their dramatic effects,—but in to-day's literature there is no trace of their influence. Upon all their work was the theatrical gloss which the new method has repudiated. The appeal to sensibility was heightened by the dramatic exaggeration, but the operation went on in a plane removed by the masquerade from that of the direct appeal—the trait of to-day.

In the new interpretation of life it is seen that all superficial aspects are masques, and that if we would be saved from blank realism we must be rid of the gloss of actuality. There may be also the gloss of idealism—of that kind of idealism which is the product not of the creative imagination, but of an arbitrary fancy or of a purely mental determination, and which is as much the evasion of reality as the superficial aspect or incident is its disguise.

We can understand why Charles Reade put in a plea for the truth of his Cloister and the Hearth as against what seemed to him the fallacy of George Eliot's Romola. But on the other hand we think the novelist of to-day is justified in repudiating Charles Reade's scrapbook of facts as an aid to fiction. Reade probably more than any modern writer protested against what he might truly have called the gloss of invention. Shakespeare instinctively appreciated a certain virtue in actuality as something free from this gloss, and was thus led to adopt already established stories and dramatic embodiments of them which had already impressed generations of men, just as Reade felt on firm ground when there was an old story at his hand. But the creative imagination of Shakespeare not only illumined but transformed the actuality, which he took as he found it rather than incur the perils of invention.

The modern interpretation is not invention, but that true idealism which beneath their superficial aspects reaches to the souls of things. Thus is made possible that intimate appeal which is the most direct, most free from all masques and glosses, The pulse of life—its very own pulse and not the turbulent motions of the writer's, so often mistaken for that of all life—is thus immediately felt