Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/17

 altogether absent to-day. It was n’t so much that men were agreed upon these things, about these things there have always been enormous divergences of opinion, as that men were emphatic, cock-sure, and unteachable, about whatever they did happen to believe, to a degree that no longer obtains. This is the Balfourian age and even religion now seeks to establish itself on Doubt.

There were perhaps just as many differences in the past as there are now, but the outlines were harder they were indeed so hard as to be almost, to our sense, savage. You might be a Roman Catholic, and in that case you did not want to hear about Protestants, Turks, Infidels, except in tones of horror and hatred. You knew exactly what was good, and what was evil. Your priest informed you upon these points, and all you needed in any novel you read was a confirmation, implicit or explicit, of these vivid rather than charming prejudices. If you were a Protestant you were equally clear and unshakable. Your sect, whichever sect you belonged to, knew the whole of truth and included all the nice people. It had nothing to learn in the world, and it wanted to learn nothing outside its sectarian convictions. And the unbelievers, you know, were just as bad, and said their Creeds with an equal fury merely interpolating note. And people of every sort, Catholic, Protestant, Infidel, or what not, were equally clear that good was good and bad was bad, that the world was made up of good characters whom you had to love, help, and admire, and of bad characters to whom one might in the interests of goodness even lie, and whom one had to foil, defeat, and triumph over shamelessly at every opportunity. That was the quality of the times. The novel reflected this quality of assurance, and its utmost charity was to unmask an apparent villain and show that he or she was really profoundly and correctly good, or to unmask an apparent saint and show the hypocrite. There was no such penetrating and pervading element of doubt and curiosity and charity about the rightfulness and beauty of conduct as one meets on every hand to-day.

The novel-reader of the past, therefore, like the novel-reader of the more provincial party of England to-day, judged a novel by the convictions that had been built up in him by his training and his priest or his pastor. If it agreed with these convictions he approved, if it did not agree, he disapproved often with great energy. The novel, where it was not unconditionally banned altogether as a thing disturbing and unnecessary, was regarded as a thing subordinated to the teaching of the priest or pastor, or whatever director and dogma were followed. Its modest moral confirmations began when authority had completed its direction. The novel was good, if it seemed to harmonize with the graver exercises conducted by Mr. Chadband, and it was bad and outcast if Mr. Chadband said so. And it is over the bodies of discredited and disgruntled Chadbands that the novel escapes from its servitude and inferiority.

Now the conflict of authority against criticism is one of the eternal conflicts of humanity. It is the conflict of organization against initiative, of discipline against freedom. It was the conflict of the priest against the prophet in ancient Judea, of the Pharisee against the Nazarene, of the Realist against the Nominalist, of the Church against the Franciscan and the Lollard, of the Respectable Person against the Artist, of the hedge-clippers of mankind against the shooting buds. And to-day, while we live in a period of tightening and extending social organization, we live