Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/700

648 and permitted its own undisturbed communication. The view is clear. Life is seen by its own light. The seer there must be in order that there should be vision; but his attitude, creative as his imagination may—nay, indeed, must—be, is that of ready reception, that of one who sees with "the quiet eye."

In this clear view the writer is absolved of all cant and sentimentality, and we can see why he no longer flounders in the ditch or kicks against nothings or fights with windmills. The cultivated audience of to-day does not applaud these vain wrestlings, and it is to this audience that the writers who are making the literature of to-day must appeal; those who address another audience are outside the limits of our present consideration. The reader who has followed us thus far will see what whole classes of fiction and essays have been driven out of the field by the new method. It is interesting also to note the wide departures that have been made by writers of the new generation like Mrs. Humphry Ward and Margaret Deland from the themes that engaged their first efforts.

The new attitude of literature is also that of science and philosophy. William James is as original in his psychology as his brother Henry is in his fiction.

The intimate appeal has carried the novel from the field of outward incident and circumstance to that of the human spirit—a realm, if not of recent discovery, at least of recent appreciation and familiar habitation—how far away, indeed, in motive and atmosphere from the world of the Waverley Novels! The things of the world do not disappear from this world of the spirit, but they take their proper place, as incidental.

What, then, is to be expected of those new writers who have not yet reached their mature scope of literary accomplishment, and who are still at once within the light and within the shadow of their surviving masters? We doubt not that there is strength in their loins for a more radical transformation of literature in fiction and interpretative criticism, one that shall lead it to greater sincerity and develop a deeper and more fruitful culture of its subjective field—we hesitate to call it "spiritual," since that term suggests religiosity and is to that degree not pertinent to our meaning; it would be more exact to say "psychical." We do not lack brave instances for the confirmation of our hope in such writers as those already mentioned—Mrs. Humphry Ward and Margaret Deland,—and we may add to these Arthur Symons, Maeterlinck, Maurice Hewlett, Kenneth Grahame, Chesterton, Conrad, Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington, and Alice Brown without exhausting the list of names which represent established reputations based on high aims characteristic of the new era. Among those which are in the invisible succession to these may we not hope to have a more convincing apostle of the psychically wonderful than Maurice Maeterlinck and an even stronger master of impressionism than Arthur Symons?

Certain dogmas of the modern realistic school, fixing arbitrary limits to the possibilities of our human nature, along the low lines of a pessimistic theory, must give place to a more hopeful idealism, with ascending lines of deliverance from deepest abysses. This idealism follows the lines of a reaction which in life and nature is inevitable, and though it may seem to be absent from particular human lives, so besotted and depraved that sensibility has lost its quickness and responsive vibrancy, yet it is not the office of the great novelist to invite us to these chambers of dulness or to lead us into dark places that have no outlet to the light.

Are the future masters of fiction therefore to avoid the portrayal of shames and tortures and humiliations? Surely not. Let there be the descent into hell if need be—and it may be the inevitable course—but there must be the recourse of ascent. No living movement stops stock-still at its nadir. It is the depression of a superficial realism that is to be avoided.

We have been considering the new method only, the new attitude of literature toward reality, not the comparative greatness of the accomplishment in the terms of genius—that way lies the uncharted, the unexpected.