Moral Hesitations of the Novelist

I WAS reading one of the more brilliant of our recent novels the other day, when I stumbled upon the definition of a typical modern consciousness. Following the hesitations of its hero in his effort at self-recovery, as he tried to break the tie which bound him to the wife of another man, I was conscious all the time that while the situation was old enough, the moral criticism belonged to the present and not to the past. The story concerned itself with the difficulties of passion, but its chief emphasis was on the difficulties of a conscience alive to infinite possibilities of mistaking the right in a moral experience yet unmapped. What are the duties to one’s self and what to another in the tragedy of passion? That was the problem of the story. Charlotte Brontë answered the question easily enough, fifty years ago — a simpler problem in Jane Eyre, of course, because the woman may always sacrifice the man with less brutality than the man may sacrifice the woman. But simpler, also, I came to think, because for the author of Jane Eyre certain moral values held good which have lately themselves been questioned. In fact, this novel seemed to me diagnostic of a mood which is at present producing some of our best literary work, and confirmed certain of its traits in my mind. Readers of modern fiction will at once recognize the traits that I mean. The first is sincerity; not only the sincerity of an upright nature, but the sincerity of which we read in John Fiske’s description of Huxley, that lives in a resolute fear of self-deception. The second is a lack of dogmatism, especially dogmatism about the moral life, amounting almost to timidity. The modern novelist is perplexed, not only by the difficulties of conduct, but by the reality of the moral standards themselves.

Stevenson’s Pulvis et Umbra is the best known and most complete expression of this modern mood. In fact, Stevenson’s greatest hold upon us is not his style, but just the way in which he has given typical and humane expression to the new ideals. They were waiting for a personality so daringly unconventional as his to make them live. “The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong,” says Stevenson, “and we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with every climate, and no country where some action is not honored for a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at best a municipal fitness.” And again, in the Christmas Sermon he describes the same predicament, “Somehow or other, though he [man] does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good. ” My novel puts it more hopefully when it says that with the new ideas “there are so many more ways of being right. ” In both cases, however, the relativity of our experience is the fact brought home to the moralist. Absolute standards are out of date. Science has changed all that. We are called upon to reconsider all the old undebatable things which formerly put their check upon the will and the imagination. If a man’s acts are so many pathological symptoms, how shall we speak of morality at all ? Suppose even that what we have denounced as a sin may have in it something of natural virtue? We have lost the old touchstone, and where shall we discover a new ?

Stevenson would say that the new aim is larger charity of judgment, that the kindness possible to the new point of view is our compensation for the great loss we have suffered in faith and singleness of purpose. Whatever else we moderns are, at least egotism has become for us an impossible sin. We find ourselves and others conditioned alike by facts of birth and of surrounding beyond our own control. The suspended judgment, meekness in the presence of an inscrutable destiny, — this is what the revelations of the modern world have bred in us. And if we have lost on the side of our convictions, at least we have gained greatly in our power to sympathize and to perceive. The exercise of these gifts is our first duty.

Just here Howells and Stevenson agree. No writers are surely further apart in artistic conviction. We are always pitting them one against the other for the sake of argument. But we do not notice the identity of their moral feeling, although here they are both modern, both under the same dispensation. You will remember in Annie Kilburn how the minister of the new school cannot “prophesy worth a cent.” Neither can Mr. Howells, in those books which seem most characteristic of his quality. He shows us good and evil in a man’s life, he lays bare the causes of failure in character or in our imperfect society; but he is shy of judgment, or if he ends in a dogmatism at last, we feel that it is not without some violence to his own nature. Kane’s worldly but delicious comment on the dream of social betterment in the World of Chance reads like a betrayal of the author himself, unable to dismiss his humorous doubt of the ideal, which has yet won his serious devotion. When it comes to moral judgment of the individual, the same inconclusiveness reigns. What, after all, can we say of Northwick, creature of environment, or of Faulkner, a changeling of disease. Surprised, often sorrowful observers of life we may be, but never prophets and never judges of human conduct. Mr. Barrie’s Tommy and Grizel strikes the same note. It is so unlike the author’s characteristic good humor that I have sometimes thought the story showed the unfortunate influence of Stevenson upon a man of quite a different genius. But perhaps not. The fatalism of Tommy’s end reads, after all, like the fruit of that self-searching which in modern fiction is another name for sincerity. The modern author feels obliged to give account to himself of every motive; and if he stands very near to his experience, the result is a confusion of mind that overwhelms moral judgment. Is Tommy and Grizel the confession of such an acute self-consciousness ? The last chapter is not pleasant to read. It is an offense to me, as I hope it is to all good readers. The author is bound to extenuate nothing of the painful record, but he has pushed his scrutiny beyond the limit of his self-control.

The reader never feels so much the refinement of the modern conscience as when he turns from some older literature to the contemporary novel. There are some questions, for instance, that Shakespeare never asks, or never presses too far, in spite of the Elizabethan freedom of speculation, and that special subtlety of intellect which made him so hospitable to all moods and all facts. Beyond a certain range of speculation he does not go. Partly, perhaps, because the world beyond does not exist for the Elizabethan imagination; but partly the man’s instinct seems to guard the sanctity of accepted moral experience. ’T is to consider too curiously. There is something eminently practical in the attitude of even the emancipated Elizabethan toward the moral life. It is the saving grace of Hamlet. Perhaps no modern novelist, with an equally typical modern subtlety, has come so near this moral simplicity as Tourguenieff.

Shall we ever again recover it without a loss of sincerity ? Or would a deliberate return to the practical point of view mean a step backward ? Emerson stands to our latest generation of thinkers for a very positive mood, which only half represents the man. In fact Stillman was nearer the truth when he said that Emerson would willingly have gone to the stake, but he would have done so questioning the nature of his own emotions. And this is what the good reader of Emerson comes to feel. His serene independence of vision was a hard-won gift, the fruit of character rather than of temperament. “No sentence will hold the whole truth, ” this prophet exclaims, “and the only way in which we can be just is by giving ourselves the lie.” And again, “I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods, ” — a sentence one might reasonably ascribe to Amiel. Yet, in spite of all this imaginative restlessness, one carries away from Emerson an impression of the singleness of his character, of a moral integrity which I have heard to-day called egotism. Rather we may think it was the final fruit of the man’s insight. I have been looking in vain through his essays for a sentence which I remember well enough, in which he counsels the writer to speak as if, for the time, his truth were the one truth in the world. This is certainly a counsel not of arrogance but of self-discipline. The author is sacrificing the complete sincerity, which has so many temptations for the intellect, to what he takes to be the better cause.

Fénelon has made a distinction between simplicity and sincerity; it has a wonderfully modern application. According to Mrs. Craigie’s interesting theory, our modern turn for introspection is the heritage of the Roman confessional. If that is so, Fénelon, priest and confessor, had evidently direct acquaintance with our spiritual difficulties in his own day and generation. “Simplicity,” he says, “is an uprightness of soul which checks all useless dwelling upon one’s self and one’s actions. It is different from sincerity, which is a much lower virtue.” In other words, there is a rule of abstinence for the intellect which forbids us to analyze motive too far, and which tells us that truth cannot be captured by this elaborate sincerity that we feel to-day is our painful duty.

Who will say that this word, so true for practical life, is not the last word for art ? Simplicity is a higher virtue of style than sincerity, — almost an impossible virtue, one would think to-day, on account of the influences that have confused and suspended judgment. It is only by an effort of character that a man of imagination, a disinterested observer of human nature in the light of all that science has told us of its origin, can arrive at any moral conclusion about life. Yet it is just the lack of these final judgments which seems at the root of our modern pessimism and of the sense of futility that haunts the modern novel. There has been an almost licentious use of the perception. We have understood all sides; we have entered sympathetically into every point of view. But the will that lies at the bottom of all practical morality and all constructive art has been paralyzed by this act of speculation. The modern apologist finds himself in a world far more unreal than any he has tried to escape.

To return to Tommy and Grizel. For all the author strives so violently against self-deception, do we not feel that less truth than moral casuistry went into the invention of Tommy’s end; and that in real life nothing of the sort took place ? When we are disembarrassed of all personal feeling in the matter, we are sure that while Tommy continued to have sentimental lapses, he was yet at bottom a better man for the struggle he had made with himself. We are sure that Grizel, the mother, was not, after all, so unhappy; for of course the woman Grizel bore Tommy children, and in that simple and natural way bound him to herself. The story, so told, would of course be infinitely less clever than now, but nearer to what Thackeray and the old-fashioned novelist would have imagined it. And may not the old-fashioned novelist, with his old-fashioned ideals, have been the truer to life ?

Somehow it looks as if the next literary motive was to be a rediscovery of the simpler moral outlook. At least one feels in the work of the very latest school not so much a new method as a new way of feeling life. Tolstoy’s case is typical. He was born into the generation of the scientific novel; then by and by came the humanistic revolt, entirely inevitable for a nature so passionate and so imaginative. He found no help for any of his speculative difficulties ; yet he took refuge in a life which, whether it could bear the test of scientific analysis or not, had at least more reality for the man. Still, in Tolstoy’s case, there remains the great schism between the moral and the scientific instinct. He returned to the old mood with its simpler moral distinctions, his mind still unconvinced. But science itself is preparing the way for the younger writer. Since psychology is becoming humanized and is less and less inclined to confuse its own point of view with practical reality, sooner or later the psychological novelist is bound to confess a change in his own principle. He will be more inclined to credit the idealism of simple people and to let the will play its part in the story. Perhaps of all forms of imaginative literature the novel is the last to be able to voice a new intellectual inspiration. In the novel, ideas are the very body of experience ; and the observer, less easily than the thinker, can change his habit all at once. Whenever a change occurs with him, it must be not merely intellectual; it must be structural. So Howells, Hardy, Tolstoy even, belong to the older generation. But every year new writers are being born into the new set of influences, and the younger men are unconsciously infected. Instinctively they begin to trust the larger and more enthusiastic moods which were crowded down by a conscientious intellectualism. The new prejudice is away from subtlety toward more force and conviction in style. All this means that the author is regaining the courage of his personality, and that the next generation of novelists shall recover a certain hold upon life which those just passing have lost.

Edith Baker Brown.