MR. HOWELLS AS A CRITIC.

"IN these latter days there is no artist who is not also a critic," so Turgenef once wrote to Flaubert; "in you the artist is very great, and you know how much I admire him, and love him; but I have also a high idea of the critic, and I am very happy to have his approval." It was in a private letter that the French novelist thus expressed his favorable opinion of the Russian, for neither of them was ever an open practitioner of the art of criticism. That they both kept for their friends their final convictions as to the true aim of the modern novel and as to the degree of success with which this ideal had been attained by one or another of their contemporaries and predecessors, and that they both refused resolutely to discuss in public the principles which underlie the fascinating craft of the story-teller- this reserve was very likely advantageous to the reception of their own works, since each of these was taken for what it was, and it was not required to be an exemplification of any theory which its author might have set forth in analyzing the narratives of some other novelist. This reticence from criticism had the further advantage for Flaubert and for Turgenef that they avoided arousing against their own books the noisy animosity of the ardent admirers of every dead and gone novelist, whose fading pages they might, perhaps, have failed to laud as loudly as ignorant partisanship would demand.

This voluntary self-exclusion from the arena of literary debate may have been for the immediate advantage of the two novelists themselves; but it was indisputably to the disadvantage of the rest of us, who wanted to be as fully enlightened as to Turgenef's theory of fiction, as we had been, or were to be, informed about M. Zola's and Mr. Henry James's and Robert Louis Stevenson's. We should have been glad to know Flaubert's opinion about the art which he found so despairingly difficult and to which he devoted himself with so Benedictine a determination. To those of us who are keenly interested in any art, there is never any criticism so suggestive and so interpretative as that of the artist himself. Where is there any inquiry into the principles of painting so penetrative and so subtle as Fromentin's unless perhaps it is Mr. John La Farge's?

Where is there any discussion of the elusive art of acting so acute and so stimulating as Cibber's unless it is Mr. Joseph Jefferson's? Of a truth the critics are not "those who have failed in literature and art "; rather are they those who have succeeded; and when accomplished craftsmen are willing to talk freely about their calling, the rest of us had best keep silent and profit by what we can pick up.

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It is well that we should be reminded now and again why it is that the artist always has precedence over the critic. Indeed, the artist must come first, or else the critic would have no subject-matter. All that the critic can be expected to do is to study the masterpieces in a vain search for the secret of their lasting beauty. And for this task, so difficult and so delicate, none are so fit as those fellow-craftsmen who happen also to have the faculty of articulate expression. Not every artist's opinion is worth having; for he may lack philosophy to understand not only his own processes, but even his own aims. It is not easy even for the intelligent artist and how few artists, pictorial or literary, are really intelligent!-to disentangle the principles which, when he is at work, he is forever applying consciously or unconsciously or subconsciously. But even from those who have only a limited insight into their own methods and who have no firm grasp of the vital principles of their art, there is sometimes something to be gleaned by which the cautious enquirer can benefit. The contribution of any single artist may be narrow; and more often than not his theory will be found to be only an attempt to expound his own practice: it will discover itself only as the result of his own way of doing things, and not as the cause. The criticism of a fellow-craftsman is rarely without the color of a fellow-feeling; and we cannot fairly expect it to be achromatic. But none the less ought we to be able to profit by it.

Of all the American authors at the opening of the new century, Mr. Howells is easily the most multifarious. It is as a novelist that he has presented himself most frequently; but he has also attempted the stage, although no one of his original dramas has had the good fortune to establish itself in the theatre. He has revealed himself as a poet of sombre imaginations, not made visible elsewhere in his works. He has given us a series of charming books of travel. He is one of the most delightful of our essayists, with an exquisite felicity of phrase, akin to Heine's. He is one of the most delicate of our humorists, with a reserve that recalls Hawthorne's. And he is a constant critic of contemporary literature, gracious of manner and courteous of phrase, except when expressing his scorn of what seems to him unworthy, mean, and base.

Such of his critical writing as he has selected for the brief immortality of a book is contained in half a dozen volumes. The first of these, published in 1887, was given up to sympathetic appreciations of the "Modern Italian Poets"; and it is perhaps the closest approach he has ever made to criticism of the more formal and academic type. Acceptable as the volume was to readers of cosmopolitan culture, it was necessarily without the personal note which has made his later opinions more interesting to the average American, who has only a languid liking for the literature of other languages. This personal note was struck firmly in the tiny tome called "Criticism and Fiction," which was published in 1891. In this little book, made up out of earlier articles then first set in order, Mr. Howells said boldly what he thought about certain idols of the market-place; and probably no one was more surprised than he at the turmoil he created. To many placid creatures of habit, the publication of this little book was very like the explosion of a bomb in a reading-room; and the reverberation has not yet died out.

Most of us like to move through life along the line of least resistance; and we are inclined to resent any sudden call to think out the reasons for our opinions. Mr. Howells's declaration of the faith that was in him could not fail to shock many a prevalent prejudice; and at times his manner was not so persuasive as it might be if, indeed, it was not fairly to be described as frankly aggressive. Himself free from the vulgar superstition of admiration for things once admired but no longer admirable, Mr. Howells wasted no perfunctory praise on what he had described as "those classics common to all languages - dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to the air." He did not foresee that his plain speech about these unwholesome inheritances from our fathers would savor of impiety; that it would seem to some almost like a violation of the sanctity of the tomb.

As so often happens in cases of like character, when we go back to see what it was that caused all this commotion half a score of years ago, we have some difficulty in discovering just where the dynamite was concealed. We see that the little book is plainly too insistent in its tone, too intolerant of the dullards, too impatient with those who persist in liking the things they ought not to like and in disliking the things they ought not to dislike, and who have no health in them. But it is not so very iconoclastic after all, even if we do detect a desire to "speak disrespectfully of the equator." At bottom all that Mr. Howells had done was to voice once again the demand that art, and more especially the

art of fiction, should deal with life simply, naturally, and honestly. This has ever been the watch-cry of the younger generation in every century. It is what the more open-minded of mankind have been striving for ever since the earliest of critics was able to compare the second artist with the first to the disadvantage of the second. A protest against sham and shoddy, a plea for sincerity, it could not help being very like the hundreds of other pleas and protests, apologies and prefaces, with which the histories of literature are filled.

Mr. Howells's plea and protest was straightforward and plain spoken. The novelist should deal truthfully with his material, which is human life in all its breadth and in all its depth. He should not sophisticate it, nor should he in any wise attempt to idealize it. He is to be a witness sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. "The object of a novel should be to charm through a faithful representation of human actions and human passions, and to create by this fidelity to nature a beautiful work" according to the pertinent dictum which Mr. Howells translated from Señor Valera. The novelist should deal with the mean of human life, and not with the exceptional, the abnormal, the monstrous, or else he will surely violate just proportion and present but a distorted vision of the world as it really is.

Above all, he will set up no false ideals of self-sacrifice, of heroism, of strength, of passion; for who is the novelist that he shall presume to improve upon human nature as it is? It was Emerson who said with his pithy shrewdness that "the foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual "; and Carlyle it was who declared that for grown persons reality was the only genuine romance. The novelist must beware of begetting high-strung and supersensitive ideals of life which falsify the simpler and saner ideals. He must refrain from the wild, the visionary, the exaggerated, the freakish. He must deal with man as he sees him and with woman as he sees her; observing carefully, with whatever insight and imagination he may have, and then recording faithfully the things of good report and the things of evil report. He must keep his pages free from the hectic flush, which follows when passion is exalted above principle. Though he must needs show sin and sorrow and suffering, he can never palter with the everlasting standards of right and wrong.

Before any work of the imagination there is one imperative question: "Is it true true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women?" And "this truth," Mr. Howells declares, “which necessarily includes the highest morality and the high

est artistry- -this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak; and without it all graces of style and feats of invention and cunning of construction are so many superfluities of naughtiness." Although this is more pungently put, there is nothing so new in this, nothing that many earlier writers had not striven to say as best they could; and, had Mr. Howells confined himself to preaching again the eternal verities, it may be that this sermon of his would have aroused as few of his auditors from their slumbers as other sermons are wont to do.

But Mr. Howells waked up the congregation by making a direct personal application of his principles — by naming names, by pointing out how Scott and Dickens and Thackeray had strayed from the path of truth. Then the British journalists, always supersensitive to American criticism, rose in their rage and emptied the vials of their wrath on the head of the American novelist, as they had years before cried out shrilly at a chance remark of an American romancer. Mr. Howells had instant proof of the pertinence of his own remark that "whatever is established is sacred for those who do not think." Not only did the rash American writer bring out the defects of the sacredly established Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, but he dared to express his own preference for Jane Austen and for Anthony Trollope. He even went farther, and said boldly that certain Russians and Spaniards and Italians set a better example than any then to be had in the English language.

The same beliefs inspired the next volume of criticism, a book far less polemic in tone, or at least less militant, but quite as individual and as sturdy. "My Literary Passions," published in 1895, was pleasantly novel in form; it was a discursive record of the fleeting impressions made on Mr. Howells as he had discovered for himself one after another of the authors the world has agreed to accept as great. It was frankly an attempt to set down the personal equation. All criticism must be more or less autobiographic, even when the writer is most confident that he has succeeded in stepping off his own shadow. Nowadays it savors of conceit for any critic to maintain that he has been able to take himself out of the way, and that he is merely the medium through which the final judgment of mankind is expressing itself. "The adventures of one's soul in contact with masterpieces" - this is one of M. Anatole France's definitions of criticism; and it is good that a critic should have a soul, and better that he should keep it in contact with masterpieces as constantly as may be. In "My Literary Passions" Mr. Howells was as little academic as M. France himself; and he was also as sympathetic and as honest. He was aiming not so much to warn us against what he