The Gilded Age and Dawn of the Modern by Jeffrey H. Hacker

Author:Jeffrey H. Hacker [Hacker, Jeffrey H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century, General
ISBN: 9781317456612
Google: jjGLBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-11-20T03:37:44+00:00

Chapter 18, Criticism and Fiction (excerpt), 1891

As a literary critic, editor, and novelist in his own right, William Dean Howells was the foremost proponent of literary realism in America. His 1891 book Criticism and Fiction, a collection of magazine articles and essays, represents a specific effort to define and describe his brand of “reticent realism.” As Howells writes in Chapter 18, “Tests of Fiction,” excerpted here, the first question to ask about a work of fiction is simply “Is it true— true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women?”

[F]or my own part I will confess that I believe fiction in the past to have been largely injurious, as I believe the stage-play to be still almost wholly injurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and its aimlessness. It may be safely assumed that most of the novel-reading which people fancy an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation, hardly more related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the mental faculties than opiumeating; in either case the brain is drugged, and left weaker and crazier for the debauch. If this may be called the negative result of the fiction habit, the positive injury that most novels work is by no means so easily to be measured in the case of young men whose character they help so much to form or deform, and the women of all ages whom they keep so much in ignorance of the world they misrepresent. Grown men have little harm from them, but in the other cases, which are the vast majority, they hurt because they are not true—not because they are malevolent, but because they are idle lies about human nature and the social fabric, which it behooves us to know and to understand, that we may deal justly with ourselves and with one another. One need not go so far as our correspondent, and trace to the fiction habit “whatever is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious,” in one’s life; bad as the fiction habit is it is probably not responsible for the whole sum of evil in its victims, and I believe that if the reader will use care in choosing from this fungus-growth with which the fields of literature teem every day, he may nourish himself as with the true mushroom, at no risk from the poisonous species.

The tests are very plain and simple, and they are perfectly infallible. If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous; it may not kill, but it will certainly injure; and this test will alone exclude an entire class of fiction, of which eminent examples will occur to all. Then the whole spawn of so-called unmoral romances, which imagine a world where the sins of sense are unvisited by the penalties following, swift or slow, but inexorably sure, in the real world, are deadly poison: these do kill. The novels that merely tickle our prejudices and

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