5
We have arrived at a point in our literary history (or, if you prefer, our social progress, our ideological advancement, our cultural development) when there is need for a new estimate of the task and aims of our modern literature or at least the re-establishment of certain values and standards previously set aside.
We must once again divorce literature from life, if by that we will understand that literature is not, and never was supposed to be, a mirror held up before our common life. We must discard the so-called “true-to-life” standard by which our critical attitudes have been governed for so many years. Above all, we must renounce the propaganda psychosis, and we must admit that even good propaganda is never literature and that even great literature is seldom propaganda. We have those, of course, who will rise to point out that such and such a book or novel or play was excellent propaganda for such and such a cause or event. To which we may answer: it was not so conceived. For the glibness with which the word propaganda is used is rivalled only by the glibness of the propagandists themselves. To make a case for any work of literature as a bit of effective propaganda for any cause is to distort and debase the purpose for which it was created.
There is much too much to do with literature today that has nothing to do with literature at all. We must learn again that the weavers of fantasy are, after all, the veritable realists. For it must be admitted that we have at hand ample evidence that this is so.
There is realism in great literature, but realism alone does not make great literature. The writer, or observer, who sees an event or an occurrence, however rare or moving an event it may be, who is moved to write about it merely to describe, with minute realism, what he had observed is no more creating literature than the earnest New Englander who writes to the Times or the Globe to report the first robin. But Arthur Machen has said these things before—and said them better.
You will find, in the closing pages of Hieroglyphics, this passage, which seems an excellent closing passage for this digressive chapter:
“Have you noticed how many of the greatest writers, so far from desiring that compliment of ‘fidelity to life,’ do their best to get away from life, to make their books, in ordinary phraseology, ‘unreal.’ I do not know whether anybody has compared the facts before or made the only possible inference from them; but you remember how Rabelais professes to derive his book from a little mouldy manuscript, found in a tomb, how Cervantes beginning to propria persona authoris, breaks off and discovers the true history of Don Quixote in the Arabic Manuscript of Cid Hamet Benengeli, how Hawthorne prologizes with the custom-house at Salem, and lights, in an old lumber-room, on the documents telling him the story of The Scarlet Letter. Pickwick was the transcript of the ‘Transactions’ or ‘Papers’ of the Pickwick Club, and Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur shelters itself, in the same way, behind the personality of an imaginary writer. There is a very profound significance in all this, and you find a trace of the same instinct in the Greek Tragedies, where the final scene, the peripeteia, is not shown on the stage, but described by a ‘messenger.’ The fact is that the true artist, so far from being the imitator of life, endures some of his severest struggles in endeavoring to get away from life, and until he can do this he knows that his labor is all in vain.”