Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/872

810 psychical interest, which touches vibrant and throbbing human life in its intimate recesses and deep involvements, and which discloses the truths of life in life's own terms—that it is the most signal mark of our progress in culture, having its complement in the very large audience which demands such fiction and derives therefrom its highest satisfaction.

The novelist in this field foregoes the advantage of the picturesque of which Sir Walter Scott so freely availed in his portrayal of medieval society. If picturesque at all, his work is such incidentally. Modern progress is in all directions away from the picturesque. In the outward investiture of our life, thus reduced to its simplest terms—in institutional functions and social forms—the loss finds compensation only in greater practical utility, but in the field of culture there is a larger gain for the inward life, thus freed from external distractions. A like emancipation is in the way of being effected by thoroughly organized capitalization and industry, so that the most complex materialism shall help rather than hinder the spirit.

The novelist of this high order finds in his themes a psychical interest which transcends the interest of the spectacle, and in this view his proper audience agrees with him. His field, instead of being contracted, is widened as well as deepened, since his discovery of psychical truth gives new and luminous significance to every outward aspect and relation of life. He has the freedom of the whole realm of thought and feeling by virtue of his creative insight. No theme pertaining to that realm is forbidden him, because he is fit to treat all such themes. With his proper audience there can never be in this matter any other question than that of his fitness—that is his complete justification. It is a quite different thing when a writer furtively peeps into the hidden chambers of the human heart and has furthermore only a furtive or meretricious motive in his shallow disclosure.

The freedom of the master novelist in this field is not that of arbitrary action, as in the construction of a plot by ingenious invention of incident and character and by contrivance of situations and of a dénouement. Life in his view is not merely dramatic; it is drastic, and he must trace the lines of destiny. Here lies the great difficulty; and if so often the masters themselves fail, betrayed by their very masterfulness, how great and how frequent must be the errors of lesser novelists from lack of steadfast vision, from caprice of the imagination, or from the vice of self-consciousness.

In this order of creative work the manner is as important as the matter. It is here that we especially note that old trait of all creative genius—the Hellenic tentation, the effect of which is quite distinct from that of what is called the literary art. The directness of appeal, upon which we have recently laid so much stress, is a trait of the writer's attitude—to his theme and to the sensibility of the reader,—not of his style, except as we may say of this that it achieves directness of appeal by its own indirection—by the "long way round." The writer must have abandoned all the old tricks of indirection—all glosses obscuring the truth—but he finds an indirection which is indispensable to his portrayal of that kind of truth which is not a fixed certitude, and which does not present itself obviously but as an implication. Our progress in thought as an interpretation of life has brought us into uncharted courses. We can fix conventions relating to outward conduct within definite and clearly seen limitations, but the life of the spirit refuses this mural confinement—it has an infinite flux, and our concern here is always as to how much we can see and as to the course of new paths opened to our vision. Our courage and our faith are such that we are not frightened because we are "all at sea." The novelist therefore who undertakes to tell the truth of life is feeling his way, and his style registers the course of his tentative thought, which follows the course of his tentative drama, the events of which come as surprises to himself as they come to his readers, in moments which are flashes of illumination.