the scientific investigator, when he surprises nature in some hitherto unsuspected aspect, and of the historian or philosopher when he finds a clue to some new and significant interpretation.
The novelist who is simply an observer, seeing life with the outward eye alone, has no such reward, and, while he may be entertaining, in so far as his observations are novel, he has for his reader none of those surprises which are yielded to insight and interpretation.
But why should not the novelist represent life as it appears to the casual observer? Are not these phenomena its actual investiture? Is not its picturesqueness right here, at the surface, in the outward show of color and costume and action? Are the hues which meet the eye in Nature's glowing moments any more impressive when by chemical analysis we trace them to their source? Such questions may have some justification as regards purely physical phenomena, which are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever in the direct impressions they make upon human sensibility; which belong to a harmony in which there are no disorders or misfits; and whose deceptions are due wholly to our false inferences, which, however repugnant they may be to science, blend happily enough with our emotions and imaginations in life and in the expression of life through art and literature. Yet even in the portrayal of natural scenery the painter comes to have a culture of vision which enables him to see much that escapes the eye of a casual observer, just as a novelist, even though he treats human life merely as a spectacle, may have that culture of observation and of literary expression which gives to his portrayal not only completeness, but an unusual charm.
But the drama of human life is very different from its physical background. Not only is it forever changing, but its fluctuations proceed from arbitrary choices determined by hidden motives. The obvious incident is not significant in itself, and the concurrence of such incidents in the actual situations of daily life seems blind and fortuitous. As the record of actual occurrences by a historian is inert and indeed misleading if he does not see, and make his readers see, beneath the confused drifting currents at the surface, the actors as they are—their relation to the compelling spirit of the time and their individual motives,—and the events in their true meanings and values, having that inevitability which must be evident in a harmonious coordination, so the novelist's representation is false as well as shallow if he lacks insight and interpretation—if he does not follow the lines of life so that their course shall seem convincingly relentless without violence to the freedom of individual wills.
Every revolution in the history of modern literature has been a reaction against the masquerade of truth and for its presentation, free from all glosses, in its own living investiture. This attitude of the writer toward the truth, as we have been insisting in the two preceding numbers of the Study, is the characteristic trait of our best contemporary literature, and it is in fiction that it is most manifest. The novel has had its development during just that period of modern culture in which the truth of life—in human consciousness and experience—has been most ardently sought and most courageously confronted; and it has been the medium of the most faithful expression of this truth.
It is true that nearly the whole field of fiction has been and is and will long continue to be given up to the masquerade—to the portrayal of life as a spectacle. With the vast majority of story-writers the object in view is a stirring and picturesque drama, in which the romantic motive is usually prominent, but which is devoid of any psychical interest as a fresh revelation of vital truth; and this is the kind of story that the vast majority of readers want. Fiction of this order is not to be disparaged. It may be amusing and even intellectually entertaining, the restful pleasure of a statesman's or professional man's weary hour. Much of it has high artistic excellence. What we wish to say is that such work, excellent and pleasing as it may be, marks no step in advance in the continuous development of human culture. And, in this respect, fiction written for a distinctly moral purpose is far less significant.
We claim for what we consider a higher order of fiction—that which is mainly of
