Mr. Hardhack on the Sensational in Literature and Life

HAVE I read Miss Braddon’s last? Ay, and her first too. Why, during the last three or four months I have been through a whole course of sensational novels, and, in imagination, have married more wives than Brigham Young, and committed more homicides than Captain Kidd ; and I flatter myself I have got at the whole secret of the thing. It’s whiskey for the mind, sir,—the regular raw, rotbrain fluid of the Devil’s own distilling. What do you suppose is to become of the intellects and hearts of a generation which takes to such a terrible tipple ? They are all at it, — men and women, boys and girls, imbibing the stinging, burning, corroding beverage as though it were as innocent as milk. “ Drink, pretty creature, drink,”— that is the song of the Circes and the Comuses of the new school of depravity, as they hold their yellow cups to the lips of sweet fifteen: “This, my dear, has a delicious flavor of theft ; this of arson ; this of bigamy ; this of murder. Drink, and Newgate and the Old Bailey will be more familiar to you than the schoolhouse and the church ! Drink, and you will draw the charming convicts out of their cells, and have them all nicely housed in your own imagination ! Drink, drink, drink ! ”

But, you retort, do not the greatest writers deal with the greatest crimes ? Is Shakespeare himself an economist of the dagger and the bowl ? Why object to contemporary romancers for taking criminals for heroes, when criminality enters so largely into the heroes of all dramas and romances ? You think you have me, do you ? Well, others before you have been infatuated with the idea that they could get Solomon Hardhack into a corner, but he always found a road out of it as wide as the Appian Way. I admit at once that I have no objection to murders when they are perpetrated by Shakespeare or Scott. The more the better, say I. When the old woman told her doctor that she feared her health was failing, because during the past week she had not, in reading the newspaper, “ enjoyed her murders,” she caught a glimpse of the great principle of all art, sir. When I read Macbeth, when I see it performed by actors of imagination, I enjoy the murders. When I read or see a coarse melodrama, I don’t enjoy the murders. What’s the reason ? Why my artistic sense is satisfied by the first, and shocked by the second. The tragedy lifts your whole nature, — sentiment, conscience, reflection, imagination, whatever there is in you,—altogether above actual life into the ideal world of art. You become conscious of a new, strange, and vivid play of all your faculties ; and there is delight in that, even though you may now and then shudder or blubber. It is an escape out of all the conditions of your daily life, and you feel ten times the man you were before the fine sting of the dramatist’s genius sent its delicious torment into your soul. Now how is it with the melodrama ? Why, you are in the mud and dust of the earth all the time you listen ; everything is intensely commonplace, not excepting the rant and the crimes ; when a character is stabbed, or has his brains blown out, or, what is better, blows out his brains with his own hand, it is simple murder or suicide you witness, and there’s no enjoyment in witnessing either, except perhaps the enjoyment you feel in thinking that the wretched spectacle has come to an end.

And here we have the whole philosophy of the sensational in fiction. You are, let me suppose, a commonplace and common-sense man, sir. If I were a person without an atom of genius, and yet were compelled by circumstances, like many of my unfortunate fellow-creatures, to gain my living by writing novels, I should have you in my eye while I wrote. I should so manage my story as to galvanize a small part of your mediocrity out of all its relations to the other parts. You would still be the commonplace fellow you were before, plus “ a sensation.” My book would be as artistically worthless as a police report, but to you it would be a specimen of literature ; and I should have the inexpressible satisfaction of transferring money from your pocket into mine, without going through the extremely tedious process of attempting to get a fine sentiment into your heart or a new idea into your head.

Indeed, sir, you will find that it is your ordinary, matter-of-fact, breadand - butter, practical people, rather than your romantic and poetic ones, who are swindled by sensations. The sensational is a revolt against humdrum, through the means of a vulgar wonder. Let me tell you an illustrative story. Once upon a time a vagabond pedler appeared in a secluded village, and called the people round him by ringing a big bell. When his audience had become sufficiently large, he stopped ringing in order to make this announcement : “All you young women here with small mouths will have a husband ! ” The spinsters present pursed and puckered up their lips, and murmured, “Dear me ! what a pretty little man ! ” Then he rung his bell again, with still more startling emphasis, and said in his deepest and loudest tones: “ And all you young women here with large mouths will have two!” Instantly the lips were stretched to their utmost width, and from them all came the wondering exclamation, “ Law ! ” Now don’t tell me that Miss Braddon had n’t heard of this story when she wrote “ Aurora Floyd,” for it was exactly this open-mouthed wonder that she desired to produce when she made the interest of her plot centre in bigamy. You know, sir, how quickly you, and the rest of people like you, exclaimed, “ Law ! ”

The great defect, then, to my notion, of the romancers of rascality is, that there ’s no romance in them. They treat you to hard, ugly, “slangy,” prosaic fact, and throw in some wild nonsense, or brutal ruffianism, or cynical villany, just to give it a coarse zest. Neither sentiment nor imagination is addressed. The heroes commit just such crimes, and encounter just such penalties, as you find printed in the newspaper records of the criminal courts. Take Miss Braddon’s “ Birds of Prey,” which is one of her latest attempts at a sensation, and notice how bare and bleak is the atmosphere of the story, and how commonplace as well as bad is the company she drags you into. But this photographing of poisoners and swindlers is not characterization,— this power to interest you in society where you fear your pocket will be picked is not art.

So much for the novels that please a practical man like you, sir. Now what kind of author do you support when it enters your brain that your moral nature needs to be braced ? Tupper, of course, for you and your set have sent that “Proverbial Philosophy” of his through a hundred editions. He has just the combination of truism and vagueness, do-me-good reflection and windy vastness, to fill your idea of the moral sublime. And then what a poet he is in his ethics ! Your idea of the beautiful is of course identical with your notion of the big; and he goes over the whole universe to gather images of bigness for your delectation, doing a larger business in mountains, earthquakes, and firmaments than any other metaphor - monger of the day. Did it ever occur to you that, even in moral significance, one of Burns’s daisies outvalues all of Tupper’s empyreans ?

You must be a patron of art, too ; that is, you are one of those men of dollars who are engaged in corrupting all the promising painters of the land by urging them to the production of panoramic pictures, in which there shall be an almost photographic representation of some strange or big thing in nature, but in which all the life and spirit of nature shall be left out. You value things in art just in proportion as they recede from the artistic. Here is a little picture, representing a bit of grass, a cow, and a cottage. How you turn up your nose ! There’s nothing in it to create a sensation, I admit ; but there is something in it to touch a sentiment, if sentiment you had to touch. The landscape is thoroughly humanized, sir, and if you had ever seen a simple landscape in nature,— you’ve stared, no doubt, at thousands, — you would feel the fact. But that stupendous picture of mountains you can, of course, appreciate. You never even stared at such a phenomenon as that, and it stirs your languid consciousness with a new sensation. But still the painted bit of grass is greater, as a work of art, than the painted chain of mountains, and would be worth more in money if purses in our day had not unfortunately lost their artistic perception. Did you ever read Hawthorne’s essay on the town-pump of Salem ? Well, the town-pump of Salem is n’t so important a matter as the battle of Waterloo, but then Hawthorne’s description of the pump has infinitely more significance to the intellect than Alison’s description of the battle. Now in estimating pictures you make the mistake of judging by the subject painted, and not by the genius that paints. And so far you are a fool, sir. Don't redden ! The fools in art are the most sensible men in business, and at any rate are in the majority.

A man like you must have a religion, too, and as you pride yourself on being a very sensible and practical man, you probably have a false and bad one, sir. I don’t care where you go to church ; I know that, if you must have sensations in literature and art, you must have them also in religion. Ten to one you are a reader of Dr. Cumming, and are charmed with the grandiloquent way he transfixes Napoleon II. on one horn of the dilemma of the Beast, and the certainty he expresses every year that the world is to be destroyed in the next. No? Why you certainly cannot be a Mormon, though the novels you read might tempt you, if you lived in Utah, to look with favor on that over-connubial faith. I see how it is, — you 're a Spiritualist. You believe in no miracles that don’t pass under your own eyes and into your own ears. You need to have your religion rapped into you. You cannot perceive the spiritual, unless you have a sensation of it. Now, mind, I don’t doubt there are many fine natures interested in the phenomena of what is called Spiritualism, and expect to draw something out of it to satisfy their spiritual curiosity or aspiration. But they are not the sensation-mongers of the creed ; they are not the persons who exhibit the spirits of the departed to an intelligent public at so much a head. You, however, as I repeatedly have had the honor of reminding you, are an eminently practical man, and of course easily humbugged on all matters where real spiritual discernment comes into play. Your notion of spiritual communion with the dead is a gossip with ghosts. And such ghosts ! Why, your next world, sir, is filled with nothing but bores and dunces, and existence there would be passed by any reasonable man in one long, everlasting yawn ! You never read Bacon, or Milton, or Channing ; yet I admit you have succeeded in making Bacon and Milton and Channing talk to you — true table-talk! — but then Bacon, freed from all limitations of the flesh, talks like Tupper, and Milton like Robert Montgomery, and Channing like Mrs. Trimmer. You have got a spiritual world, I concede, but it is one into which poets pass only to be deprived of their imagination, philosophers of their wisdom, saints of their sanctity, and all persons of their brains. The “ revelations ” may be very creditable for tables to make, for tables are of wood, and “ wooden ” is English for bête; but considered as coming from disembodied souls, they cast discredit on the human mind itself. And then, sir, what follies you practical men slip into ! ’T is a pity that with all your boasted sense you have n’t some sense of humor to see the ludicrous element in your faith. The mediums who allow you to have a chat with the denizens of the spiritual world,— how inexpressibly moderate they are in their charges ! You know perfectly well that the mysteries of your religion are presided over, in many cases, by persons who communicate with the dead simply for the purpose of getting a living; by showmen turned priests and sempstresses ambitious to be sibyls,— priests who are content to exchange a revelation for a shilling, and sibyls who “ charge a pistareen a spasm ! ”

Well, it might at least be hoped that we should have none of these sensations in science. Never was a greater mistake, sir. In the process of being popularized, science is becoming melodramatic ; and such melodramas! I don’t know how it is with the real investigators, the plodding, conscientious fellows who are engaged in adding to our knowledge of facts and laws. It is, however, to be supposed that they are leading lives more or less obscure, arriving at limited results by hard labor and patient thought, loving truth more than notoriety, and untroubled by any ambition to excogitate a theory of the universe out of the depths of their own consciousness. Poor devils ! Do they suppose that a public, craving new sensations and desirous of having a slap-dash statement of the origin and development of all things and all beings, cares for the little they can tell about the works and ways of nature ? Probably if questioned as to some of the novel and splendid scientific theories now in vogue, they would profess complete ignorance of such deep matters. They would answer the querist somewhat as Mr. Prime Minister Pitt answered the lady who asked him for the latest news. He had n’t, he said, read the papers, to which, doubtless, she instantly referred, and found more information there about Mr. Pitt’s acts and intentions than Mr. Pitt himself could have given her. The fact is, the question we now put to every man of science is practically this : “ What is your pet method of allowing God Almighty to build the universe?” This, of course, compels every pushing, selfglorifying, sensational savant to bring out his plan of creation for our amusement and edification. We put the various schemes to vote, and the one which has the noisiest and most theatrical accompaniments commonly carries it. Now, I call all this creating God after man’s image, and the universe after man’s crotchets, for I find that every plan is the measure of the mind which gets it up, and is ridiculous considered as a measure of Infinite intelligence. Even if you leave the Deity altogether out of your scheme, as an “ hypothesis which has now ceased to have any practical interest,” you create, not a world, but merely a sensation. It is to be presumed that God can get along better without you than you can without him, and certainly his existence is not one of those questions which can be determined by popular suffrage. If the vote were unfavorable, I am not without a suspicion that he would still contrive to keep his place at the heart of things, and assert his reality in ways emphatic enough. In fact, the whole business of building up universes, as now conducted, is decidedly overdone, sir. You get nothing out of it but words, and what, as an old theologian says, are words “against Him who spoke worlds, — who worded heaven and earth out of nothing, and can when he pleases word them into nothing again ” ?

But you may say that in all I assert about the sensational in religion and science, I am talking of matters about which I know nothing. There you are right, sir. But how is it with business ? Here is something which a man of plain understanding and ordinary conscience may speak of without incurring the charge of presumption. Now what is one of the most frightful characteristics of our present mode of doing business ? Is it not the building up of great fortunes out of colossal robberies ? And the thing is done by a series of sensational addresses to the cupidity of the cheated. High interest notoriously goes with low security ; but we have, sir, in this country, a class of rogues who may be called the aristocracy of rascaldom, and who get rich by dazzling and astonishing others into the hope of getting rich. They are the contrivers of enterprises which propose to develop the wealth of the country, but which commonly turn out to be little more than schemes to transfer wealth already realized from the pockets of the honest into those of the knavish. They are the financial footpads who lure simple people into stock “corners,” and then proceed to plunder them. They make money so rapidly, so easily, and in such a splendid sensational way, that they corrupt more persons by their example than they ruin by their knaveries. As compared with common rogues, they appear like Alexander or Cæsar as compared with common thieves and cutthroats. As their wealth increases, our moral indignation at their method of acquiring it diminishes, and at last they steal so much that we come to look on their fortunes as conquests rather than burglaries. Indeed, their operations on ’Change vie with those of military commanders in the field, and are recorded with similar admiring minuteness of detail. They are the great sensations of the world of trade, and have, therefore, more influence on the imaginations of young men just starting in business than the dull chronicles of the great movements of legitimate commerce. Now, sir, take the universal American desire to get rich, and combine it with the rapid, rascally way of getting rich now in vogue, and you will find you are breeding up a race of trading sharks and wolves, which will eventually devour us all. Honesty will go altogether out of fashion, and respectability be associated with defect of intellect. Why, the old robber barons of the Middle Ages, who plundered sword in hand and lance in rest, were more honest than this new aristocracy of swindling millionnaires. Do you object that I am getting into a passion ? Why, sir, I have purchased dearly enough the right to rail. Didn’t I put my modest competence into copper? And to recover my losses in copper, didn’t I go madly into petroleum ? And did n't the small sum which petroleum was considerate enough to leave me disappear in that last little “ turn ” in Erie ?