Magic and wonder in literature (cont.)
Part 3 of John Erskine's essay by the same name from *The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent*
But the career of magic was not over. Milton rejected it, as Homer had done, as Scott did later, and many another individual here and there; but it is not for their rejection of magic that Homer or Milton or Scott has been widely praised. We have advanced far enough to ask that our talismans be of a less obvious kind than satisfied men a thousand years ago, but a talisman of some kind we still delight in. Witness three novelists, undeniably great, who are supposed to account for life genuinely and honestly, yet who show a certain reluctance to accept the universe of order, and hark back rather to the old magical transformation.
One of these novelists is Fielding. Criticism has stressed his manliness, his insistence on frankness, his ability to deal with a fact. Yet in none of his stories, except Jonathan Wild, does he treat his heroes as though character were really conditioned by causes and consequences. We watch the good and the bad traits in Tom Jones, for the first twenty-five years of his life, and then we are asked to believe that, once happily married, he reformed, and his faults not only disappeared, but obligingly left no traces. In Amelia we must believe the same miracle of Booth, with the added difficulty that he is older when he reforms. In the minor details of both stories, as also in Joseph Andrews, there is a lucky juxtaposition of events to help out the character, which suggests the fairy godmother rather than the observer of this world. No ill effects result from bad choices, and good fortune is not the result of wisdom in the characters, but of benevolence in the author. Fielding has had his reputation from his hearty interest in life and his advance in verisimilitude over his predecessors. Looking back now, however, we see that his interest in life was neither wide nor deep, and that he had no use for the conception of the world as a sequence of inexorable justice; he preferred to think of it as a career where manliness was a sufficient talisman—where the effects of conduct suspended themselves for a possibly erring heart, so long as it was stout.
To make a similar criticism of Dickens requires some resolution, for he enlists our loyalty as Fielding never does. Our affection convinces us rightly that whatever the literary critic may pronounce upon David Copperfield or Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend, the emotions which those books stirred in us were noble. The fact is that Dickens uses the miraculous in both ways at once, as an interpretation and as an account of life. With him the same incident serves to state an ideal and to chronicle a fact. If only his facts had been correct, he would have illustrated the perfect formula of art. As it is, we fall in love with his ideals; and we learn better than to believe his picture of life. He accounted for experience, and explained it, by the simple magic of goodness. Before a good man, the problems of this world melt away. There is a wide difference between this goodness and the old chivalric magic of being right. If one is right, at least one is in unconscious accord with the facts and the laws of the universe. In Dickens the admirable characters are often mistaken, even horribly in the wrong, but they are good, and so long as they remain good they excite admiration and surmount difficulties. The illustrations of this magic occur in the most characteristic parts of Dickens' work—in the Christmas Carol, for example. To read this story for its emotions is to learn generosity and brotherly love; but how disconcerting to learn our virtues from a false picture of life! Do misers like Scrooge repent? Can anyone turn over a new leaf and undo all his past? And does such goodness as Tiny Tim's or Bob Cratchit's really solve the difficulties of their situation as completely as Dickens represents? The pity that we feel for Tiny Tim is a tribute to what is true in the story; the comfortable optimism with which we put down the book, is evidence of some trick of magic, some eluding of truth—for looking at men and women around us, we are convinced that such satisfaction is not reached that way. Besides, we have learned to think that people in poverty or misery are still in trouble even though they are brave about it; if we could agree that goodness is a talisman, we might as well give up all social work, on the ground that the worthy poor are as happy as possible, and the unhappy poor must be unworthy.
What Dickens has done, then, is to state his ideals in terms of what pretends to be real experience. Our admiration cannot be withheld from the ideals, nor can our intelligence endorse the account of life. If it is a fairy story that we are reading, we ought not to be deceived into mistaking it for history. There is reason to think, however, that Dickens did not consider it a disadvantage to be the victim of illusion. At least he portrayed many "illusionists," as a German scholar called them, who tabulated and classified them all, Mr. Pickwick, Mrs. Nickleby, Swiveller, Tom Pinch, David Copperfield, and of course Mr. Micawber, are among the illusionists. The French critic Taine made the same point by saying that many characters in Dickens have a touch of insanity.
In the world as Dickens represents it, these illusioned characters get on very well, but in the real world they come to grief. Of such disillusion Thackeray is the kindliest example. At least he represents a partial reaction from the magic of goodness; he can no longer believe in it, but he wishes with all his heart he could. What really happens to absolute goodness in this world is portrayed, not in Bob Cratchit, nor in David Copperfield, but in Colonel Newcome. With magic Thackeray is convinced, we might say, that the novel should have nothing to do, yet he devotes his art to no religion of wonder. Because he has so gently and persuasively corrected Dickens' picture of life, at the same time endorsing, as it were, his ideals, Thackeray has had much reputation for wisdom and modernness. Yet in the cardinal emotions of wonder and delight he is not modern at all; the logic of character, the unalterable order, whereby Colonel Newcome suffered for his mistakes, however excellent his motives—this saddens Thackeray, even though he is in honor bound to present it. For an ordered universe he has no love, nor any passion for the career of the mind. Perhaps it is only his sentimentality that hides from us the materialism in his picture of life—the implication that the good are victims of inevitable laws; whereas they are really victims of their own ignorance. The laws of human nature, if Colonel Newcome were only wise enough to make them the instruments of happiness, would seem reliable, to wonder at, rather than inexorable, to fear.
Of stories and plays written in our own time it is enough to say that few of them show any persuasion that there is consequence in the world. If you open any of the numerous manuals which tell you how to write fiction, you may read that actions should be motivated, that there should be reasons why things happen—as though cause and effect were subdivisions of the literary art. Few of our contemporary writers seem to practise this instruction, and still fewer of their readers know whether they practise it or not. We have with us still, of course, special schools of fiction, which insist on a precise or a continuous or an unselected rendering of experience—realistic and naturalistic schools; and individual masters of realism or naturalism from time to time captivate many readers. But even these individual successes, added together, seem to make no total impression on the reading world. In contemporary fiction characters slough off the past, serpent-like, and emerge brighter than ever; or they change their nature in a twinkling; and it seems that few readers seriously protest against the miracle. Our supposed faith in the logic of personality, our faith that a given character will act in a certain way, our faith especially that a man's conduct or occupation influences his character, that he is marked by what he does—all this we seem to have surrendered, substituting in its place a misty benevolence, a magic of the Dickens type, a persuasion that any character, viewed sympathetically, will seem, or will actually become, as admirable as any other character.
One illustration may be found in the stories of the underworld, where the professional criminal or wrongdoer is shown in the final paradox to be essentially righteous and permanently reformed. We are convinced, of course, that to be a professional crook will in the end lead to some moral deterioration. We read with pleasure, however, these fables which keep the soul of the crook unspotted from his own conduct. Our pleasure is based on a fine humaneness, on the undoubted fact that criminals are largely manufactured or at least encouraged by circumstances, and that few of them were originally bad at heart. But this doctrine, excellent as a vantagepoint from which to enter upon social responsibility and rescue, has been stretched in our fiction until it misrepresents the consequences of wrongdoing, and even diminishes, strangely enough, that sense of social responsibility from which it sprang. We felt to blame for letting our fellow-man become a criminal, but after the story or the play has demonstrated how excellent morally the criminal is, we feel less guilty. In such tales, however, there is always an inconsistency; the hero is singled out for admiration, but his comrades in guilt are saved by no miracle—so much is conceded to our general knowledge of the facts.
Another illustration may be drawn from a very different region of interest, from those stories or plays, like The Passing of the Third Floor Back, or The Servant in the House, which show the miraculous influence of a perfect character. In such fiction a stranger is represented as entering a community, a group of people formed and settled, and by the magic of his presence transmuting them into quite different persons. This kind of story must express some precious ideal, or it would not be so tenderly popular; but as a picture of life it is both incorrect and immoral, for it both contradicts our experience and relieves us—provided we can entertain the stranger—of responsibility for our conduct. To be sure, the public thinks this type of story far from immoral—rather a religious parable, for does not the author suggest that the stranger is Christ? And does not that suggestion explain the miracles? But here we see how an inclination to magic befuddles our ordinary intelligence. Because the stranger converts everybody he meets, we think he is Christ-like, forgetting that the New Testament gives no such account of Christ.
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