By the Christmas Fire

by Samuel McChord Crothers

Let us remember that only a very small amount of good literature falls within Shelley's definition of poetry as "the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." For these rare outpourings of joyous, healthy life we are duly thankful. They are to be received as gifts of the gods, but we must not expect too many of them. Even the best minds often leave no record of their happiest moments, while they become garrulous over what displeases them. The cave of Adullam has always been the most prolific literary centre. Every man who has a grievance is fiercely impelled to self-expression. He is not content till his grievance is published to the unheeding world. And it is well that it is so. We should be in a bad way if it were not for these inspired Adullamites who prevent us from resting in slothful indifference to evil.

Most writers of decided individuality are incited by a more or less iconoclastic impulse. There is an idol they want to smash, a conventional lie which they want to expose. It is the same impulse which moves almost every right-minded citizen, once or twice in his life, to write a letter of protest to the newspaper. Things are going wrong in his neighborhood, and he is impatient to set them right.

There are enough real grievances, and the full expression of them is a public service. But the trouble is that any one who develops a decided gift in that direction is in danger of becoming the victim of his own talent. Eloquent fault-finding becomes a mannerism. The original grievance loses its sharp outlines; it, as it were, passes from the solid to the gaseous state. It becomes vast, pervasive, atmospheric. It is like the London fog, enveloping all objects, and causing the eyes of those who peer through it to smart.

This happened, in the last generation, to Carlyle and Ruskin, and in a certain degree to Matthew Arnold. Each had his group of enthusiastic disciples who responded eagerly to their master's call. They renounced shams or machine-made articles or middle-class Philistinism as the case might be. They went in for sincerity, or Turner, or "sweetness and light," with all the ardor of youthful neophytes. And it was good for them. But after a while they became, if not exactly weary in well-doing, at least a little weary of the unintermittent tirades against ill-doing. They were in the plight of the good Christian who goes to church every Sunday only to hear the parson rebuke the sins of the people who are not there. The man who dated his moral awakening from "Sartor Resartus" began to find the "Latter Day Pamphlets" wear on his nerves. It is good to be awakened; but one does not care to have the rising bell rung in his ears all day long. One must have a little ease, even in Zion.

Ruskin had a real grievance, and so had Matthew Arnold. It is too bad that so much modern work is poorly done; and it is too bad that the middle-class Englishman has a number of limitations that are quite obvious to his candid friends,—and that his American cousin is no better.

But when all this has been granted, why should one talk as if everything were going to the dogs? Why not put a cheerful courage on as we work for better things? Even the Philistine has his good points, and perhaps may be led where he cannot be driven. At any rate, he is not likely to be improved by scolding.

I am beginning to feel the same way even about Ibsen. Time was when he had an uncanny power over my imagination. He had the wand of a disenchanter. Here, I said, is one who has the gift of showing us the thing as it is. There is not a single one of these characters whom we have not met. Their poor shifts at self-deceit are painfully familiar to us. In the company of this keen-eyed detective we can follow human selfishness and cowardice through all their disguises. The emptiness of conventional respectabilities and pieties and the futility of the spasmodic attempts at heroism are obvious enough.

It was an eclipse of my faith in human nature. The eclipse was never total because the shadow of the book could not quite hide the thought of various men and women whom I had actually known.

After a while I began to recover my spirits. Why should I be so depressed? This is a big world, and there is room in it for many embodiments of good and evil. There are all sorts of people, and the existence of the bad is no argument against the existence of quite another sort.

Let us take realism in literature for what it is and no more. It is, at best, only a description of an infinitesimal bit of reality. The more minutely accurate it is, the more limited it must be in its field. You must not expect to get a comprehensive view through a high-powered microscope. The author is severely limited, not only by his choice of a subject, but by his temperament and by his opportunities for observation. He is doing us a favor when he focuses our attention upon one special object and makes us see it clearly.