Meredith's Ridiculous Egoist

 

     Reader may wish to have a look at my piece on “Meredith’s Poetic Novel: Diana of the Crossways” at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2025/09/merediths-poetic-novel-diana-of.html.  Page references in parentheses refer to the Penguin English Library edition edited by George Woodcock.

 

     The fiction of George Meredith is distinguished from that of other Victorian novelists by a number of factors.  He stands practically alone in his feminism and he can be compared only to late Henry James and perhaps the George Eliot of Middlemarch in his portrayal of the gossamer threads of motive that precipitate our acts (and velleities as well).  He was a great practitioner and theoretician of comedy.  Yet surely Meredith’s most striking characteristic is his mannered style which can occasionally oblige even a seasoned reader to scan a page a second time.  He is capable of passages which are often delightfully witty, syntactically complex, and sometimes of staggering beauty in which style is clearly the governing principle guiding the content which must be content simply to tag along. 

     Oscar Wilde skewered the downside of Meredith’s remarkable prose in “The Decay of Lying.”

 

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare−−Touchstone, I think−− talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist.

 

     In his influential theoretical essay in “An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” Meredith argues that comedy, as opposed to humor and satire, encourages moral behavior and aims at reforming human folly.  No carnival license for him, instead “comedy is the fountain of sound sense.”  In his view “it is the first condition of sanity to believe” that “our civilization is founded in common-sense” (a term more problematic than Meredith allowed) and it is the violations of these norms in his view that gives rise to “the contrasts the Comic Spirit perceives,” which provides the comic writer the work of correcting these deviations.  (In a writer so modern in many ways, it is a bit startling to find moralism stern enough to find Restoration comedy “beyond blushing” and full of “cynical licentiousness.”) 

     But his heart seldom seems seldom centered on the censorious correction of human error.  What sustains a novel by Meredith is his talent for striking figures of speech, his playful wit, and his elegant if somewhat elaborate style.  Even on the theme of the nature of comedy, in the novel the topic is organized about Meredith’s fanciful imps that crouch about their figure of fun mocking, hardly a notion compatible with common sense.

     The witticisms of the formidable Mrs. Montstuart Jenkinson such as her characterization of Vernon as “a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar” or of Laetitia “here she comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes” (like those of Meredith’s Diana) are surely to be appreciated for their cleverness alone (42).  A longer passage from the “Prelude” which generally sketches the narrative’s progress raises the author’s rhetorical standard high over everyday usage such that the exuberance of his language becomes the point far more than any strictures on proper behavior.

 

     Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation.

 

     Here Meredith opens with a ship as a metaphor for his story and water as ballast identified with pathos.  It is surely inaccurate to claim that every narrative must have pathos.  While a Chaplin movie may well include a good deal there will be none at all in with the Three Stooges.  Yet few would notice to dubious claim as the ingenious figures of speech carry the reader along like a tide.  “It can hardly be the cargo,” i. e. The Egoist is fundamentally comic rather than sentimental or melodramatic.  The image shifts then to clothing; the egoist derives his self-worth from the opinions of others, “clothing himself” at others’ expense, yet finding himself so embarrassed (“naked”) that he will serve as a personification  of pity.  Yet, as the comedy is sustained, he does not demand your tears (after the manner of Little Nell), and “there is the innovation.”

     This is all very well, if slightly elaborately stated, but the following paragraph which introduces the figure of the Egoist is even more distinctly characteristic of Meredith.  Here the reader encounters the imps of comedy, central to the book’s themes however far distant from commonsensical concepts.

 

     You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes, to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings round the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. They dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait. (36-37)

 

     The imps practice a kind of “freakish wickedness,” but they also may bide their time, conceding their object’s prestigious social role and importance under feudalism.  Yet it is the very artificiality of his aristocratic standing that guarantees he will prove by the late nineteenth century ridiculous.  There is after all, something inherently absurd in the fact that he has always been highly regarded, purely because of the accident of his birth.  He is certain eventually therefore to fall prey to fatuous “frolic and antic,” emitting steam which attracts the imps with their “detective vision.”  Like pagan orgiasts they dance in “merry rings” about the great man, the “colossus,” who has, like Britain’s aristocracy in Victorian times, outlived his social usefulness and thus become preposterous and laughable. 

     Here the reader finds a rich stew of figures of speech.  The egoist is an “idol,” a “colossus,” while less perceptive readers who take his pose for his true nature are “angels.”  The imps, meanwhile, are like a besieging army with their camp pitched all about the egoist as he transforms into a sort of absurd engine puffing steam as the imps (and the readers) look on amused.  

     Meredith is as earnest a Victorian as Matthew Arnold, but he is far more of an aesthete.  While he maintained high-minded principles of moral behavior, social justice, and political idealism, he was fond as well of playing with words and of building ingenious verbal structures that are more obviously entertaining than they are improving.  Surely considered only as a reformer or an ethicist he would have little name by this time; it is as an imaginative and inventive storyteller who can hold the reader’s interest with his language alone that we read him today.  The reader knew Willoughby for an ass when he first appeared.  The novel would have been excruciatingly prolonged had that demonstration been the point of the story.  Instead Meredith fills more than half a thousand pages with wit, fascinating figures of speech, and rhetoric by turns stately and effervescent.  One concludes with a wistful regret in part arising from seeing Laetitia accepting a loveless marriage and in part for one’s own departure from Patterne Hall after a pleasant stay.  Though Meredith may have conceived of comedy ultimately serving the cause of the betterment of humanity, he, and we as well, will consider that we have gained something merely by having our fancy tickled. 

Around the World in Eighty Days as Popular Literature

 

 

   Jules Verne has long been identified as an exceedingly successful popular genre author, the writer of entertaining and adventurous fast reads.  To many his work, like that of Robert Lewis Stevenson, is primarily appropriate for children.  Even in his own time his immense sales led some critics to suspect that his work lacked qualities required to gain admission to Parnassus.   A counter-tendency has emerged in our own time in which ingenious contrarian critics find in Verne a writer who anticipated surrealism and practiced postmodernism avant la lettre [1].

     While the revisionists seeking to elevate Verne’s status among writers can justly argue that his reputation has suffered from a combination of hasty or incompetent translations, abridgements, and countless editions designed to appeal to children, he has always been a demonstrably popular author among both young and old, not only in his sales but in his style as well.  While Verne’s early work was applauded by littérateurs such as George Sand and Théophile Gautier, his immense popularity overwhelmed this initial critical receptivity.  

     Around the World in Eighty Days originally appeared in installments in Le Temps.  While appearance in a popular journal itself indicates a mass audience, serial publication has not similarly impacted the critical reputation of other Victorian novelists such as Thackery, George Eliot, Dickens, and Trollope.  When it came out in book form, Around the World in Eighty Days did prove an immediate bestseller and was soon translated into the major European languages (Verne is the very most translated of authors after Agatha Christie [2]).  The author collaborated with Adolphe d'Ennery on a staged version which was a hit for decades.  Verne’s fiction, his "romans de la science" [3] often based on technological innovation or scientific discoveries he had studied in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France [4], had an immense readership, but this very success in the marketplace led many critics to think him imperfectly literary. 

     Whether Verne deserves a place on the pantheon of French greats is a matter of judgement, of course, and the general notion that elite art, often indecipherable to hoi polloi, deserves more praise than best-sellers is not as universally accepted as it once was.  The popular character of his work is undeniable, proven as much by the formal characteristics of the novel as by its sales.  Though he is often placed among the Realists, Around the World in Eighty Days has significant unrealistic, even metafictional elements.  Many think of him as the father of science fiction, no small title in literary history, and the genre’s very name embodies a contradiction, since science deals with observed reality and fiction with fantasies.  Thus, “science fiction” is concerned with imaginative possibilities that do  not currently exist yet are described as though they were factual. 

     Around the World in Eighty Days is, like The Mysterious Island or Five Weeks in a Balloon,  more a tale of adventure than science fiction, though it does take advantage of public awareness and excitement about new feats of engineering in the years just preceding the novel’s publication: the Suez Canal and the construction of rail lines across the United States and India.  The popular interest in the practicality of a trip like Phileas Fogg’s is indicated by the Thomas Cook travel agency marketing for the first time an around the world tour (taking not eighty days but rather seven months) a short time after the book had appeared.  That the theme retained its appeal is evident from Nelly Bly’s account of a seventy-two-day circumnavigation on which she embarked in 1889 for the New York World.

     Though the greatest works can  rely heavily on plot, that element is virtually always foregrounded in popular works to the disadvantage of psychology, description, and theme, and, indeed, Verne’s characters are simple and transparent.  While Fogg is somewhat enigmatic, he seems at the same time shallow.  His reserve, quiet confidence, and conformity to gentlemanly behavior do sketch a personality, but hardly a complex or profound one.  Other characters are no more convincing.  Not only does Passepartout behave predictably; his very name (“Passport”) indicates that he is not to be considered a person with a fully-developed psyche [5].  Finn and Aouda are simpler yet.

     Readers’ interest in the story is sustained by the wager, a rather artificial device, and then satisfied by the twist at the end, when Fogg thinks he has failed to make the deadline until he realizes the day had changed in the middle of the Pacific, today’s International Date Line.  Such a lapse, of course, is not what one would expect of a man so often called methodical and meticulous.  Inevitably less satisfying at second reading, suspense and a surprise in the denouement are characteristic of genre stories, though used by some prominent writers such as de Maupassant and O. Henry.  The theme of a trip around the globe could have been the occasion for a series of colorful vignettes and picturesque delineations of landscape, but, since Fogg is said to have no interest in his surroundings, only the most minimal descriptions are included [5].  This must have been a convenience for Verne as, though his works spanned the globe, the author never traveled outside Europe [6]. 

     The appearance of Finn generates added interest by suggesting that Fogg, who seems a proper gentleman, is in fact a bank robber, a suspicion that turns out to be groundless.   Finn is thus adventitious, a red herring of the sort familiar from detective mysteries that imply a likely suspect only to distract from the real culprit.  This uncertainty about Fogg’s character is another element that, effective upon an initial reading, would lose its effect thereafter. 

     Though Around the World in Eighty Days lacks the fantasy elements of Journey to the Center of the Earth or From the Earth to the Moon several of the chief episodes are contrived.  The Indian attack, though not altogether impossible, is surely designed to satisfy the European audience with a taste of the Wild West [7].  The rescue of Aouda from death on her husband’s funeral pyre is an important element in the story, itself most improbable and rendered impossible by the identification of Aouda as a “Parsi,” a sect that condemned the sacrifice of widows [8]. 

     Verne conforms as well to the expectation  that popular literature must be unadventurous in theme, accepting received ideas without challenge.  Thus the only female in the story, Aouda, is entirely passive, the foreigners are often barbaric, and Fogg’s “gentlemanliness” constitutes his virtue [9].    

    None of this will matter, of course, to the casual reader seeking a few hours entertainment.  The book is a pleasant read, well-suited to pass the time in an airport or under a beach umbrella.  Verne has a certain dash of his own to which his enduring popularity is a convincing testament.  He was (like Kurt Vonnegut more recently) certainly galled by being relegated to a sub-literary category.  It is little wonder that he felt mistreated by characterizations like that of Zola who called him “un aimable vulgarisateur” [10] reacting in interview with the complaint that, though he considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal," he felt that “the great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature." [11] 

     The author’s disappointment was a reaction to the habitual disparagement of popular genres by many savants; in fact, Verne’s work admirably fulfils the conventions of first-class popular fiction.  In Journey to the Center of the Earth M. Fridriksson sensibly observes, “We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.”  Rather than feeling chagrin at the reaction of those who found his works wanting, the author might have gloried in their general appeal.  More than a hundred years later, despite the judgement of some literati, his novels seem far more likely to be worn out from use than to grow moldy from being ignored.

 

 

1.  A useful survey of critical opinion, both positive and negative on Verne’s literary qualities is provided by Arthur B. Evans in “Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon” (in Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, edited by Edmund J. Smyth (2000).  See also Marc Angenot, "Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism," Science Fiction Studies I (Spring 1973).

2.  "Statistics: 'Top 50' Author," Index Translationum, UNESCO Culture Sector, 2013.

3.  Some critics have thought his work should be called “scientific fiction” rather than “science fiction” because of his use of scientific facts. 

4.  See Quentin R. Skrabec. “Jules Verne’s Use of Victorian Scientific Models,” Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, VIII (2025).

5.  Even his own country is barely described.  In the story of Fogg’s setting out; for instance, there is no mention of the calamity of the recently concluded Franco-Prussian War.

6.  Much of his excitement about exotic realms was inspired by his friendship with Jacques Arago, a writer, artist, and explorer who continued his world travels even after becoming blind.  

6.  Phileas Fogg may be a more subtle sprechende Name.  Fogg certainly conveys a sense of mystery.  The Greek-derived Phileas, odd enough to draw attention in either French or English, seems slyly ironic since he is described as anything but a “lover” or “lovable.”  He does, of course ultimately make a match with Aouda, so the name proves true in the end.

7.  Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was highly popular in Europe after their first tour in 1887.  This taste has not vanished.  In the souvenir shops of International terminal of JFK one will yet today  find considerable merchandise associated with cowboys and Indians. 

8.  Verne lays enough emphasis on her “Parsi” identity that I suspect it may be to remove her, as a sort of Persian closer to civilization than the Hindus who are perceived as more barbaric

9.  Contrast with Flaubert’s ridicule of the bourgeoisie, most pointedly, perhaps, in Bouvard et Péchuchet and in Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues.

11.  Émile Zola in “Adolphe d'Ennery,” Œuvres complètes, p. 271.

12.  R.H. Sherard, “Jules Verne at Home,” McClure’s Magazine, January 1894.

The Voluptuous Salammbô! With a Cast of Thousands!

 

 

poster for Grieco's The Loves of Salammbo (1960) 

     Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) resembles nothing so much as a ‘fifties Biblical or Classical epic, amounting to the verbal equivalent of a Technicolor, wide-screen spectacular with a cast of thousands, exotic sets and costumes, and a good share of sex and violence [1].  Just as such films focused on characters dressed in elaborate and strange apparel set in scenes of faraway times and places, Flaubert’s historical novel offers the reader exceedingly detailed descriptions of exotic clothing, jewelry, and even cosmetics.  Like a Cecil B. DeMille feature, Salammbô alternates warfare and torture with erotic excitement and love-longing, so as never to lack some appeal to the back-brain. 

     The author’s habitual obsession with precise concrete delineation of every scene, his famous pursuit of le mot juste, here is combined with the prodigious research with which he prepared to write the novel.  The reader of Salammbô, even with a good knowledge of French, might likely be slowed by the vocabulary for military units, maneuvers, siege engines, and the like.  (Latin scholars may recall a similar demand on readers of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.)  This fact, as well as the occurrence of numerous out-of-the-way terms for gems, fabrics, and the like, can make the text difficult.  Footnotes would often help.  One suspects that Flaubert was loathe to waste a single fact from his notes, as though the use of many obsolete, foreign, or otherwise out-of-the-way words would strengthen the substance, gravitas, and beauty in his story.

     After Madame Bovary, which had been meant as an uncompromisingly realistic portrayal with verisimilitude as its chief value, but which brought the author an obscenity trial (at which he was acquitted), he chose to direct his gaze to the past.  Just as Hedy Lamarr could be sexy in DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), under the protection of the story’s antiquity and, in that case, Biblical authority, Salammbô can fascinate men in the novel with less danger of legal action.  Such exotic women had been popular in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) as well as in visual art.  Though putatively representing antiquity the rather languid view of the past seen in pre-Raphaelite paintings or those by Lawrence Alma-Tadema or John William Waterhouse has more of a scent of nineteenth century Romanticism and, ultimately, Decadence than their medieval and classical models.  Artists who depicted Flaubert’s own invention, Salammbô herself, included Victor Prové (1893), Alphonse Mucha (1896), Desiré Maurice Ferrary (1899), and Henri Adrien Tanoux (1921) [2].

     While erotic elements are surely critically important for the book’s popularity, violence, just as in the movies, runs a close second.  To some the most boring stretches of Flaubert’s narration, battle sequences stretch on for page after page with few single combats and a great many compilations of nations of mercenaries, units of various sorts, slingers, archers, cavalry and the like, as though the book might be used to train officers in strategy.  But while such large-scale violence might at times be tiresome, the periodic massacres of prisoners and the recurring scenes of torture and mutilation are more disturbing.  In fact both violence and steaming sexuality are more nakedly presented in than in Bovary, but in the later novel a wash of ancient history makes the sensational more acceptable.

     Though aesthetic value is unprovable, Flaubert’s reputation as a stylist, reinforced very likely by the reader’s own experience, is sufficient to suggest that each passage is cunningly crafted to accomplish its effects.  The cinematic parallel would be, perhaps, the mature Eisenstein of Ivan the Terrible in which every frame is artfully composed, a standard that few would suggest DeMille ever even sought to achieve.  The attention here is not to the actual complexity of a work of art, but the maker’s level of intention.  Whereas Flaubert was hoping to do something new and to  compose a novel of lasting value, based on its formal qualities alone, most Hollywood filmmakers seek to adhere to convention and have little ambition more far=reaching than to sell tickets upon the picture’s release. 

     Virtually all critics would agree that Flaubert’s prose is beautiful, and their expositions of this point are readily available.  In many passages the rhythm of Flaubert’s hypnotic periodic phrasing and the melodious sound of his descriptions is foregrounded even if a passage contains little specific information, like this.

 

     They were not Libyans from the area of Carthage who had long made up the third army, but rather nomads from the plateau of Barca, bandits from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Derné, some from Phazzana and Marmarique.  They had gone over the desert drinking from brackish wells amid the bones of camels.  The Zuaèces, adorned with ostrich feathers, had come on quadrigæ, Garamantes, veiled with black masks, arrived on their painted mounts, others were riding asses, onagers, zebras, and buffalo.  Some among them pulled the rood of their boat-shaped with their families and their idols.  There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by the water of their hot springs, Atarantians who curse the sun, Troglodytes who inter their dead laughing under tree branches, and the hideous Ausians who eat grasshoppers; the Achyrmachides, who eat lice, and the Gysantes, painted with vermilion, who eat monkeys. [3]

 

     Surely there is meant to be something incantatory in this list of place names.  The exotic customs, none of which, of course, play any role in the plot, far from reinforcing the historic verisimilitude, are curiosities, reminiscent of the dog-headed men in Pliny or the immense aspidochelone of the Physiologus.  Whether or not the reader is susceptible to Flaubert’s calculated cadences, the list of nationalities, all of which are likely unknown to the reader, in fact makes the narration not more “real,” but considerably more fanciful.  Still Flaubert’s self-consciously meticulous style is undeniable, but here its appeal is based neither on authenticity nor on painting an imaginable picture, but rather on the appeal of the unfamiliar and the charm of sound alone, as in  magic formulae. 

     The other characteristic that most fundamentally marks the contrast between Salammbô and a spectacular Hollywood epic is more objectively demonstrable.  Mid-twentieth century American movies made for a mass audience will present an unambiguous moral universe, with clearly demarcated heroes and villains and a strong tendency toward retributive justice.  The audience is cheering for one side because it is represented as fundamentally right whereas its opponents are not.  There is no room for doubt. 

     In Salammbô on the other hand, while the reader identifies with the heroine emotionally, there seems little to choose between the rulers of Carthage and their barbarian mercenaries.  Each side is engaged in corrupt power struggles [4].  The motivation that stands apart is the erotic bond between Matho and Salammbô.  Even there Matho's passion seems a weakness, contributing to the great fighter’s downfall, and Salammbô’s death at the end makes her a pathetic rather than an admirable character.  The reader is impressed with the power of these portraits, but has no wish to emulate them. 

     This pose of thematic indifference, a reluctance to delineate moral judgements or other conclusions about lived experience, is axiomatic in Flaubert’s realism.  To impose value judgements would be for him to compromise the representation of reality itself.  As Flaubert put it “stupidity consists of wanting to come to conclusions” [5].  For him true realism must be, like science, objective. 

     Far from  accidental, this distinction illustrates one of the principal characteristics distinguishing popular from “high art,” called in various contexts elite, courtly, or learned.  Every imagined portrayal of reality satisfies some reader expectations while challenging or twisting others.  Works consumed by a mass audience, both tribal or folk art without a known creator and modern commercial productions like movies, television shows, and potboilers, tend to confirm consumers’ anticipations and artistic conventions, while those with a smaller yet more sophisticated readership will more often deny expected ideas and point out problems, contradictions, and  mysteries.  The former serves the social function of confirming and perpetuating group values and customs, whereas the latter opens the way for change and allows for uncertainty. 

     Thus Salammbô may be read, just as a DeMille epic would be viewed, for its more sensational elements of sex and violence; it may be considered for its success in creating a world of the past through the accumulation of detail, or it may be contemplated simply as an aesthetic object, a series of melodious sentences. 

 

 

1.  A number of films have, in fact, been based on Flaubert’s novel, including Arturo Ambrosio’s Salammbo (1911), Domenico Gaido’s Salambo (1914), Réda Ait’s Salambo (1916), Pierre Marodon’s  Salammbô (1925), Sergio Grieco’s The Loves of Salammbô (1960), and Jacques Perconte’s Salammbô (2022).  The predominance of early titles and the fact that all the cinematic versions were made in Europe suggests that the reputation of Flaubert’ novel lingered into the twentieth century.  There are in addition operas by y Modest Mussorgsky, (1865, unfinished), Ernest Reyer (1890), and Philippe Fénelon (1992).  More recently Barney B. Johnson composed an opera-ballet on the theme.

2.  An exhibition in the Musée des Beaux-arts in Rouen in 2021 collected many such works for an exhibit called "Salammbô: Fureurs! Passion! Éléphants!"  The costumes described in the novel are said to have influenced French fashion, particularly the use of veils, cloaks, and mantles.  In an odd legacy of the book the area, today a part of Tunis, called Le Kram in 1921 changed it s name to Salammbo after the discovery there of Carthaginian archaeological remains.

3.  Ce n'étaient pas les Libyens des environs de Carthage; depuis longtemps ils composaient la troisième armée; mais les nomades du plateau de Barca, les bandits du cap Phiscus et du promontoire de Derné, ceux du Phazzana et de la Marmarique. Ils avaient traversé le désert en buvant aux puits saumâtres maçonnés avec des ossements de chameau; les Zuaèces, couverts de plumes d'autruche, étaient venus sur des quadriges; les Garamantes, masqués d'un voile noir, assis en arrière sur leurs cavales peintes; d'autres sur des ânes, sur des onagres, sur des zèbres, sur des buffles; et quelques-uns traînaient, avec leurs familles et leurs idoles, le toit de leur cabane en forme de chaloupe. Il y avait des Ammoniens aux membres ridés par l'eau chaude des fontaines; des Atarantes, qui maudissent le soleil; des Troglodytes, qui enterrent en riant leurs morts sous des branches d'arbre; et les hideux Auséens, qui mangent des sauterelles; les Achyrmachides, qui mangent des poux, et les Gysantes, peints de vermillon, qui mangent des singes. (From Chapter 12)

4.  Some characters are more attractive than others.  Spendius, for instance, the former slave, is depicted as more venal than either Matho or Hamilcar.  Yet these distinctions do not guide the narrative or shape a definitive theme. 

5.  Letter to Louis Bouilhet of September 4,1850.  “L’ineptie consiste à vouloir conclure.”  Later in the letter the sentiment is repeated: “Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure.”

Are de Maupassant’s Stories Realistic?

 

     Having found the total corpus of de Maupassant’s contes beyond my ambition for the present, I here consider evidence from thirty-four stories which are listed with their titles and possible English translations of the titles appended.  In a list appended to this essay I have numbered them in an alphabetical list and I generally refer to the title itself, but on two occasions, when citing a number of examples, I use the numbers I have assigned.

 

     Flaubert is justly called a Realist due to his meticulous and precisely detailed descriptions, sometimes only too full.  Balzac likewise justifies the label with the comprehensive, all-embracing scope of his Comédie Humaine.  Zola deserves the title of Naturalist for his quasi-scientific attention to hitherto neglected realms of life.  Yet Guy de Maupassant, who is often labeled both Realist and Naturalist, though the protégé of Flaubert, has always seemed to me to rely heavily on narrative formulae and conventions, notably in his most popular works, his short stories.  Indeed, his literary artifice is the basis for the popularity of the contes, both in his time and today.

     It is scarcely necessary to document Maupassant’s reputation as a Realist or as a Naturalist.  Thus the normative Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne titles his section “Portrait of a Master of Literary Realism.” For one critic he possesses “absolute truthfulness, the best test of realism,” while for another he “transcribed reality so objectively, so serenely, and so intensely, that, as Faguet remarks, " le lecteur ne sait pas, quand il lit Maupassant, si c'est de I'art de Maupassant, ou seulement de la réalité qu'il a le goȗt."  For these readers the implication is clear that he accurately records details of the lives of more or less ordinary people.   Yet Maupassant himself rejected the labels, saying to his friend Paul Alexis "Pourquoi se restreindre? . . . Le naturalisme est aussi limité que le fantastique"[1].  

     Of course, no story is ”realistic,” in the literal sense of corresponding to life itself.  A book is black marks on a page, a static artifact that bears only a highly mediated resemblance to anyone’s lived experience.  Yet some narratives are more likely to seem real to readers, a quality called verisimilitude.  Since Realism was first championed by Champfleury the word has been associated with various more specific literary practices – including Naturalism, Verismo, and Socialist Realism – but it has regularly been understood to mean characters who seem ordinary, usually of the middle and lower class and certainly not deities or monarchs.  The events of Realistic stories are mundane, a slice of life, rather than world-shaking or melodramatic.  Realist writers, while perhaps craftsmanlike, have typically adopted a writing style which does not call attention to itself, but rather seems transparent, a straightforward statement of facts.  Their narratives seem to resemble day-to-day lived experience rather than imitating earlier works or conforming to literary conventions.  Chekhov is an author who meets a great part of these specifications.  Joyce’s Dubliners illustrates how Realism need not interfere with a story’s sublimity. 

     Maupassant’s stories do indeed concern people of the middle and lower stations in society, and their language rarely calls attention to itself in the way that Proust’s sentences, which may go for a promenade before finding a conclusion, may do.  Maupassant ultimately developed an interest in the supernatural (a clear example is “The Horla”) but most of his stories are at least plausible.  Still, the great majority of his contes are narratives highly shaped by literary convention. 

      One of his favorite devices, used in nearly a third of the stories in my sample is the framing story [2].  This had originally been meant to enhance verisimilitude, since one may accept that the narrator was told even a fabulous story more readily than that the incidents might in fact have actually occurred.  Yet the frame, known since  antiquity in Egypt (in, for example, the “Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor,” and “The Eloquent Peasant” in the Papyrus Westcar) as well as in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, One Thousand and One Nights, the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales, became so commonly used that it came to signify literariness rather than documentary truth.  In Maupassant the frames not only imply the character of the speaker; in addition, they generate a genial atmosphere of relaxed recreational social listening that spreads from the page to the solitary reader.

     Most of Maupassant’s stories fall into one of two types, both designed to make a dependable impact with maximum effect in the conclusions.  They conclude with either violence or heavy irony.  These simple appeals are the reason that Maupassant enjoys considerable popular favor even today.  Surely, for many people, “The Necklace” is one classroom assignment that the student relished and remembered.  Yet neither dramatic brutality nor obvious irony is consistent with the Realist story as a sample of everyday life. 

     Five of the stories (17, 19, 24, 25, and 26) depict incidents from the Franco-Prussian War from a nationalist point of view.  In each of these a canny French patriot exacts revenge against the invaders, though in three of the denouements the protagonist is caught and executed.  Here national feelings increase the thrill of the action.

     This motive is absent in other stories which portray gratuitous, almost sensational cruelty.  In “Le Gueux” a beggar dies after a vicious assault by barbaric country people.  Similarly, a fisherman prefers to sacrifice his brother’s arm rather than to lose his catch in “En mer.”  A wolf is cruelly punished in “Le loup.”  The same theme appears in humorous mode as two peasants in “Une vente” nearly kill the wife of one of them trying to measure her volume and in the two silly pranks recounted in “La farce.”  In a milder thriller mode is the ghost of “Apparition” and the elegiac remembrance of the “Miss Harriet” the pious suicide. 

      The violence or threat is compounded with irony in the wreck in “L’épave” in which the teller is rescued only to lose the love of his life, the woman with whom he had been in danger.    Likewise, the man who goes off to Africa after discovering his wife with an old general, run off  as much from chagrin at his wife’s taste as from any more substantial motive in “Une soirée.”  In “Petit soldat” the lover wins the lady only to drown soon after. 

     Whereas these stories tend to conclude with climactic violence (or its threat or a sudden rescue or at least drastic action), in these last three the effect is multiplied by the use of irony. De Maupassant developed the time-honored device of a concluding twist into a specialty, doubtless in large part responsible for his popularity with a general audience both in his own time and today. 

     Sometimes the irony is a simple surprise, as in “Un Lache” in which the accomplished swordsman turns out to be a coward, or in “Clair de lune” the moralistic abbe learns tolerance, while in “Mon oncle Sosthène” an unbeliever acquires a measure of faith and in “Yvette” the courtesan’s daughter turns out to be moral. In “La ficelle” what seems altogether trivial turns out to be life-altering.

     Irony may also occur in comic form as in the inappropriate insurance claim of “Le parapluie.”  In contrast to the implication of “La parure” that concern for the trappings of wealth may bring misery, “Le bonheur” is unusually optimistic in its depiction of a couple who truly find happiness by rejecting the affluence sought by others.  Other twists on the narrative of romance include “Le retour” in which a woman’s first husband, who had been lost at sea, returns looking like a vagabond only to find her remarried and “L’attente” in which a woman spends her life regretting the loss of her son who ran off when he saw her kissing a lover.  In “En voyage” an aristocratic lady saves a refugee who is afterwards devoted to her though apart.   “La Reine Hortense” a dying spinster imagines the joys of family while her own behaves coldly toward her.  In “La Confession” and “Le diable” unlikely unjust acts amounting to murder are admitted by the victims’ apparently loving companions, and in “Aux champs” a son the parents refused to give up for adoption complains that he was thereby mistreated. 

     The distance of plots such as these from Realism is obvious in the fact that each story turns out other than the reader probably expected, that is, other than lived experience would at first suggest.  The surprise generated by the gap between the reader’s usual “reality” and the author’s plan is in fact the source of de Maupassant’s effects.  “Solitude,” a sort of monologue on human separation even in the midst of society, casts doubt on the extent to which experience can be shared with others, while a good many of the other stories imply that things often turn out in surprising ways.  Far from presenting a sort of norm or typical incident, Maupassant deals in the extraordinary, the unexpected, indeed an outcome the very opposite of what the reader would anticipate in everyday life. 

     The stories then depend heavily either on such irony or else on the intrusion of traumatic action, including war and murder, to engage the readers’ interest.  The skillful use of literary devices is in fact the heart of verbal art, and the illusion of Realism is one significant technique.  Yet in his short stories de Maupassant regularly depends on effects other than verisimilitude.  It is the critics using the term Realist who misjudge, not the canny author whose stories have attracted readers for generations.

     If the stories are in this way deemed “artificial” (of course, all art is by definition artificial), this descriptor implies no value judgement.  Aesthetic reactions occur at the point of reception and most readers, even unsophisticated ones, are gratified by Maupassant’s artful manipulation of expectations.  The beauty of a Maupassant story may be often modest, but reading him is a highly reliable pleasure, perhaps even more reliable than if the stories were in fact Realistic.

 

 

1.  For the Cours, see https://www.ccfs-sorbonne.fr/en/guy-de-maupassant-portrait-of-a-master-of-literary-realism/.   The critics quoted are (in order) Charles Henry Conrad Wright in A History of French Literature, Kathleen Theresa Butler’s A History of French Literature, and Janneke van de Stadt, “Seeing “Amiss” or Misreading ‘A Miss’: Imperfect Vision in Maupassant's ‘Les Tombales,’” Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 51 (Summer 2000).

 

2. In stories numbered 1, 2, 3, 10, 16, 20, 29, 30, 33, and 34.

Stories included in the study:

1   “Apparition” (“A Ghost”)

2   “L’attente” (“The Waiting”) 

3   “Le bonheur” (“Happiness”) 

4   “Aux champs”(“In the Country”) 

5   “Clair de Lune” (“Moonlight”) 

6   “La Confession” (“The Confession”) 

7   “Deux amis” (“Two Friends”) 

8   “Le diable” (“The Devil”) 

9   “Un duel” (“A Duel”) 

10   “Lépave” (“The Wreck”) 

11   “La farce” (“The Joke”)  

12   “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”) 

13   “Le Gueux” (“The Beggar”) 

14   “L’ivrogne” (“The Drunk”) 

15   “Un Lache” (“A Coward”) 

16   “Le Loup” (“The Wolf”) 

17   “Mademoiselle Fifi” (“Miss Fifi”) 

18   “En mer” (“At Sea”) 

19   “La Mère Sauvage” (“The Savage Mother”) 

20   “Miss Harriet” (“Miss Harriet”) 

21   “Mon oncle Sosthène” (“My Uncle Sosthenes”) 

22   “Le parapluie” (“The Umbrella”) 

23   “La Parure” (“The Necklace”) 

24   “Le père Milon” (“ Father Milon”) 

25   “Petit Soldat” (“Little Soldier”) 

26   “Les prisonniers” (“The Prisoners”) 

27   “La Reine Hortense” (“Queen Hortense”) 

28   “Le retour” (“The Return”) 

29   “Une ruse” (“A Ruse”) 

30   “Une soirée” (“One Evening”) 

31   “Solitude” (“Solitude”) 

32   “Une vente” (“A Sale”) 

33   “En voyage” (“On the Way”) 

34   “Yvette” (“Yvette”)

Notes on Recent Reading 49 (Balzac, Hauptmann, Updike)

 

Eugénie Grandet (Balzac)

     Rereading Eugénie Grandet, one of Balzac’s finest novels, I was struck by the role of commercial transactions in characterization.  The entire narrative is built around the disposition of Grandet’s fortune and his clever transactions express his nature.  Similarly the machinations of the de Grassines and the Cruchots, Charles’ alienation from Eugénie, the town’s interest in the winegrower’s affairs, all have a financial base.  The rise of the capitalist cash nexus as the lens through which things make most sense is explicit.  Each of the succeeding regimes of France offered the miser opportunities he was shrewd enough to seize.

     Yet, stripped of the political, economic, and social elements that so engaged Balzac, the story might have been written centuries earlier.  Eugénie is after all a saintly type, too good for this world, while her father is a model of the sin of greed, Charles a selfish liar (enriched by the wicked practice of slavery), and the townspeople idle gossips.  Poor Eugénie is that perennial favorite, a lovely and long-suffering woman.  For all the nineteenth century socio-economic analysis, most of the plot would not be out of place in medieval hagiography. 

     Like other portions of his Comédie humaine this story preserves a provincial tranche de vie in the author’s straightforward, often uninspired, style, sometimes including superfluous data in the interest of history.  Yet he also punctuates the illusion of the plot as an objectively recorded “reality show” with asides and addresses to the reader that highlight the artifice of the text, generating a satisfying dialectic.

 

.   

Der Biberpelz  (Hauptmann)

     Moe dramatically viable than most of Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalistic dramas, Der Biberpelz  (The Beaver Coat) in its farcical elements reminds me of the Second Shepherd’s Play with its comic thievery.  Only whereas the Miracle Play ends with the dazzling radiance of Christ’s birth, here we never depart from the social theme. An obtuse official, von Wehrhahn, is too interested in sniffing out liberal subversives such Dr. Fleischer to attend to actual crimes.  Hauptmann’s satire in  a way anticipates works like Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk (1923) and Zuckmayer’s Captain of Kōpinick (1931).  Krȗger is an amusing example of an aggrieved bourgeois, exasperated at his loss of property while Frau Wolff is a cool and clever miscreant. Brecht was fond of this play and it was filmed in Germany three times (1928, 1937, and 1949), but it has been infrequently produced on English stages.  Some of the same characters appear in a sequel Der Rote Hahn  (1901, called in English The Conflagration) which concludes in a far graver tone.

 

 

In the Beauty of the Lilies (Updike)

     With perhaps a bit of the magisterial ambition that might naturally arise in an acclaimed writer, Updike has spread an epic canvas, stretching over nearly a century, with generations of characters urban and semi-rural, with odd variations like Hollywood types and apocalyptic cultists to punch up the plot.  Basically working the vein still of nineteenth century realism, Updike includes, as is his custom, references to the news and the pop culture of several generations.  The research shows a bit too clearly sometimes, but an amusing aspect of Lilies is the consistent references to films, giving the sense of a sort of history of the United States in all of its collective fantasies.  The grim conclusion is foreseeable from a considerable distance, but Updike’s readers will appreciate the solidity of the plot-line, and the emotional weight he lends his characters, whose peregrinations, though they may feel lost and wandering seem, when seen as here in the long view, to hang together and make a sort of sense.  Too weak to be fully tragic actors, Updike’s people’s lives may strike the reader as reassuringly less competent than their own, at least until they think twice.

Thematic Instability in Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse

     The center of Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse is elusive. Though the book is a part of Balzac’s Scenes of Provincial Life a good part of the narrative occurs in Paris.  The family dynamics between Joseph, Phillipe, and their mother seem to be heart of the book until Flore appears and then Maxence with their designs on the Rouget money.

     The unusual instability of the novel’s title reflects this thematic ambiguity.  First published as Les Deux Frères in 1840, it became Un Ménage de Garçon in 1842 and then La Rabouilleuse in 1843.  The final choice is perhaps the most puzzling as Flore, la rabouilleuse herself, has a limited role and is clearly more a motive than an active agent in the plot.  In translation it has appeared as The Black Sheep in Donald Adamson’s version, as A Bachelor’s Establishment in Clara Bell’s, and as The Two Brothers in Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s. 

     Clearly these shifts in the title imply an uncertainty about the central theme of the story.  While the original title focuses on the comparison of Joseph and Phillipe, the second seems to turn primarily to Joseph as protagonist, though it remains uncertain whether the “bachelor” is Phillipe before his marriage, or Joseph whose ménage includes his mother. 

     Balzac’s comments in a brief avant-propos only complicate the question of the book’s primary subject further.  Balzac claims in a dedication to Charles Nodier that his principal theme is to point out the harm done by the weakening of patriarchy.  Few readers might have guessed.  He explains that his story carries “a great lesson for the family and for Motherhood” by calling attention to “the effects of diminished paternal authority.”  In fact, he finds a general decay of morality in modern society which he finds “based solely on the power of money.”  For Balzac as an orthodox believer, the remedy is obvious: the country must “return to the Catholic Church for purification of the masses by religious feeling” and all will be well. [1]

     All these highly conventional opinions seem to have little, though, to do with the narrative in spite of the author’s assertions.  Only in a harsh verdict on Agathe’s husbandless household and her acting the hapless woman by preferring her ne’er-do-well son to the dutiful one might “diminished paternal authority” be relevant to the plot.  Dr. Rouget, a strong husband of the previous generation, clearly errs in his mistreatment of his daughter.  Jean-Joseph, Phillipe, and Maxence are all “strong” male characters with far from exemplary behavior, while the laudable Joseph is quiet and unassertive.  Likewise, apart from the priest’s deathbed counseling of Agathe bringing her to the realization that she had been wronging her more virtuous son, the novel contains little to support the notion that regeneration must come from the Church.  Balzac, perhaps motivated by moralistic critics of his work, claims with little basis that the most respectable values underly his novel.     

     The theme of greed displacing ethics is, however, in a general way, appropriate, as the characters motivated by money or by money’s glow reflected in social prestige are depicted as amoral while those with more humane motivations behave better.  In the plot’s mainline clear patterns of retributive justice govern the paths of Joseph, the character most positively portrayed who finds success and even ennoblement in spite of his indifference to such rewards and the avaricious Maxence, Phillipe, and Flore  all of whom come to ruin.  The final miseries of Flore read almost like a medieval exemplum.  Yet, though she has no worldly ambition, Agathe is profoundly misguided in her treatment of her sons., while the community in general is neither pious nor wicked, [2] though often self-interested and gossipy. 

     This novel is only a small portion of Balzac’s grand project, La Comédie humaine, comprising ninety-one completed works and the planning for another forty-six over a period of two decades.   Balzac’s introductory note to the novel points out the thematic complexity allowed by his comprehensive plan.  His soldiers, he says, in this story indicate the “depravity” that “results from the exigencies of war in certain minds which dare to act in private life as they would on the field of battle,” but the reader can see that this is no general verdict due to the “fine characters,” motivated by “great and noble devotion” depicted in his Scenes of Military Life. 

     The conflicted focus implied by the multiple titles may, then, be an answer as well as a question.  As La Rabouilleuse is a single mosaic stone in a large composition in which every portion need not mimic the whole, the themes of one isolated portion need not agree with those of another.  Even the irreligious among Balzac’s nineteenth or twenty-first century readers may echo Dryden’s cogent praise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales “Here is God's plenty.”  A certain exhilarating liberty emerges, allowing Balzac to compose without preconception. 

     Balzac’s approach to theme, nuanced far beyond his conscious, expressed values, is evident in the ambivalence of his political implications.  Though Balzac was himself a conservative royaloist, Marx and Engels had the highest regard for his work.  Marx had enough respect for the Comédie humaine to envision writing a major, full-length study of it, though he never completed this project.  Engels praised Balzac for writing that belied the conscious reactionary theme, often betraying (to a receptive reader at least) what looks quite like revolutionary implications. 

 

Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

   Engels to Margaret Harkness April 1888

 

     The same authorial freedom that allowed Marx and Engels to see their notions of French society reflected in Balzac’s epic canvas also enables the reader without a partisan view to see large and complex patterns in this narrative world which, like those we observe in life, offer in general no easy answers and include many shades between the extremes, even now and then to revealing the unexpected. 

     The liberty that enables ambiguity need not result in randomness.  Balzac employs observations of unprogrammed lived experience mixed with literary conventions, and he has no difficulty in developing incidents that suggest generalizations that might be called themes.  Rather like some painters who chose to work en plein air claiming to reproduce their sense impressions on canvas, but in fact propelling art in new directions, Balzac’s pose as a scientifical observer of society allowed him to construct fictions in a new vein.

     La Rabouilleuse, a novel that has met more blame than praised from critics, [2] has at any rate a gripping story, punctuated with dramatic incident and scenes of pathos.  The reader who hunts after a theme reducible to a single line may be missing both that simple narrative excitement and the grander sense, based on Balzac’s life’s work, that his novels provide access to a complete and coherent scene of human life, one as subjective as individual as any writer’s.  The specific correspondence to historical moments in France during the author’s life seems almost immaterial, in spite of the references to documented events.  In the end La Rabouilleuse and the entire Comédie humaine are, not because of topical or documentary detail, but by virtue of the specifically Balzacian imagination they record, as resistant to reductive formulae and sometimes as enigmatic as life itself. 

 

 

1. The passages quoted in Clara Bell’s rendering are in the original French: “grands enseignements et pour la famille et pour la maternité; “des effets produits par la diminution de la puissance paternelle;” “puisse une société basée uniquement sur le pouvoir de l'argent;” and “puisse-t-elle recourir promptement au catholicisme pour purifier les masses par le sentiment religieux.”  “Assez de beaux caractères, assez de grands et nobles dévouements brilleront dans les Scènes de la Vie militaire, pour qu’il m’ait été permis d’indiquer ici combien de dépravation causent les nécessités de la guerre chez certains esprits, qui dans la vie privée osent agir comme sur les champs de bataille.”

2.  In  his introduction to the entire Comédie humaine, Balzac notes that in his view “Man is neither good nor bad” (“L’homme n’est ni bon ni méchant”).

3.  A number of negative judgements are mentioned at the outset of Allan H. Pasco, “Process Structure in Balzac's ‘La Rabouilleuse,’" Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1/2 (Fall and Winter 2005-2006).

 

 

 

 

Note of an Accidental Bibliophile

     Feeling I have enough to do to attend to the authors’ words, I don’t seek out rare editions of books, but now and then I happen across an interesting old title in a Salvation Army or library book sale, and I am quite willing then to enjoy a volume’s particular qualities.  My English copy of La Rabouilleuse, titled A Bachelor’s Establishment, was published by J. M. Dent in 1896, translated by the indefatigable Clara Bell and introduced by George Saintsbury, part of his twenty-volume edition of the Comédie Humaine.  (The Times reviewer, grandly named E. Irenaeus Stevenson, welcomed the set on June 25, 1898 in a piece “Balzac in English” which began by noting that Balzac “is not even yet read and measured nicely by all those men and women quick in perception [and] broad in cultivation.”  “It may be doubted,” he goes on, “whether in English translation and with Anglo-Saxons, Balzac will ever attain a much more general circulation that his masterpieces today receive.”

     The design of my copy has charm in its art nouveau cover lettering and decoration, deckle edges and irregular signatures, thick, palpable pages, and engraved illustrations by the Scots painter and printmaker D. Murray Smith.  While not memorable art, they and their inlaid protective tissues grace the book. 

The Limits of Howell’s Realism in Theory and Practice [A Modern Instance]

 

Endnotes appear in brackets.  References in parentheses refer to the original edition of Criticism and Fiction or to the Penguin edition of A Modern Instance which reproduces the 1977 University of Indiana edition.

 

     Probably the most influential American man of letters in the late nineteenth century, William Dean Howells produced not only a great deal of fiction, but abundant criticism and reviews as well, introducing American readers to a wide range of foreign authors and advocating Realism.  Since he, like many writers of polemics, was prone to overstate his case, his exposition of the concept of Realism was not wholly consistent internally, nor was its application.  An examination of the ideas in his Criticism and Fiction (1891) and of their use in his novel A Modern Instance (1882) [1] clarifies the limits of his Realism in both theory and practice. 

     Howells opens Criticism and Fiction by agreeing with an author with whom he might be thought to have little sympathy, John Addington Symonds, who notes that Bolognese painting was once highly regarded, but, Symonds says, had come to be condemned for its “emptiness and soullessness.” (1)  Objecting to the fluctuation in artistic value judgements, Symonds proposes that art should be judged by permanent criteria and prescribes that paintings should be “simple, natural, and honest” (2).  He hopes that “the scientific spirit” might make men progressively more and more conscious of the “bleibende Verhältnisse” (“enduring relationships,” what might be called general truths) implied by artistic works such that, since  everyone has comparable experience of life, any reader may readily “test the excellence” of any work.  As an opening thematic statement, albeit at second-hand, this seems more obfuscatory than revealing.

     After all, apart from the gap between Howell’s very bourgeois American concerns and Symonds’ aestheticism (not to mention his homosexual themes), Symonds’ views raise more questions than they answer.  What to do with the many works which seem to fail the stated standard, that is, to some extent to be complex, artificial, and even misleading, yet have been celebrated by readers for centuries, such as Noh drama, the poems of the Troubadours, or The Faerie Queene.  Even less of the literature and art valued in the last century could be described as “simple, natural, and honest,” adjectives that do not apply to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, or Pablo Picasso, to pick a few names at random.  And how in the world is one to know which are the important “bleibende Verhältnisse” when vision differs so from one artist to another?  Besides, must thematic implications be the heart of every work of art?  Finally, the notion that, given the right standards, everyman will be an equally qualified critic seems as unlikely as it is pointless, though the idea seems to have convinced Howells. [2]

     Howells’ own often-quoted formula seems straightforward.  “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” (73)  He quotes with approval Burke’s claim that art must be judged neither by other art nor by critics but solely by fidelity to nature (7).  Nature, though, is itself problematic.  For Howells the word is capitalized to indicate its metaphysical significance, already a suspiciously unnatural sign.  “No author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature’s lips and caught her very accent.” (14) 

     This insistence leads him to question conventional views of beauty.  Since in his view true art embraces the whole of the observed world, it cannot be judged by its prettiness: “The ugly delights as well as the beautiful.” (4)  He turns the tables on those (plentiful in his time) who would shrink from distasteful scenes.  “We are really a mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world ; but that is not bad ; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore ‘the worth of the vulgar,’; in believing that the superfine is better.” (81)

     The excessive gentility of the taste of his day to which he was responding is clear in the initial review of A Modern Instance in The Nation.  The critic objects to the vulgarity of Howells’ depiction of “cheap boarding-houses and restaurants, and of the internal economy of a newspaper establishment.”  Declaring “here is a collection of disagreeable people whom he would gladly forget,” he pronounces Howells characters “unpleasant individuals,” “people whom one does not care to number among his intimate associates,” “types of character from which we turn away with irritation.”  For him the novel focuses unpleasantly on “that which is ignoble.” [5]  

     Howells shared nonetheless a preference for the proper.  His characters were middle-class, not working class, and he shrank from any representation of the sordid or the really wicked.  Howells’ rhetoric identifies Realism with democracy and the great American middle class.  He quotes Daudet in support of the idea that European culture is worn-out.  “We poor fellows who work in the language of an old civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing.” (135)  In contrast America has freshness and “the large, cheerful average of health and success” (129) as well as a wholesome classlessness noted by Matthew Arnold who “found no ‘distinction’ in our life” (138).  He calls for an end to “fine literary airs” in favor of “the dialect, the language, that most Americans know -- the language of unaffected people everywhere” (104).  “The arts must become democratic,” he proclaims, “and then we shall have the expression of America in art.” (140)

     If literature is simply “the expression of life,” every man is an equally qualified critic.  Howells welcomes the advent of a “communistic” era in taste in which he says, using Burke’s authority to reinforce a view that in recent years has been associated with reader response criticism, that “the true standard of the artist is in every man’s power” (8).  To Howells Grant’s Personal Memoirs, one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century in America, is “a great piece of literature” (90) and possesses “natural” excellence (89) specifically because it is non-literary (43).  The assumption that every simple straightforward effect must necessarily be true and beautiful is, of course, an absurdity on its face.

     The apparent plain-spokenness in Howell’s formula for Realism, “nothing more and nothing less,” belies the elusiveness and editorial choice entailed in deciding what is “truthful” as well as what “treatment” best serves to express it.  Howells acknowledged that just recording facts will not automatically generate beauty.  In spite of his use of Keats’ well-known formula “Beauty is Truth, truth beauty (6), he plays Symonds’ wild card he had earlier introduced, the “bleibende Verhältnisse,” as a further qualification.  He specifically denies that an accumulation of data is sufficient, saying that when the writer “heaps up facts merely, maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish, too.” (15-6)  The simple ideal of mimesis has all but vanished.

     Howells readily accepts artful alteration of nature, praising in Gogol and Balzac “the touch of exaggeration which typifies” (19), though such efforts should be discreet since “intense effects” are “cheap effects” (151).  Most essential to his project is the preservation of the traditional claim that art teaches morality.  He quotes Juan Valera in favor of art for art’s sake only in order to object by maintaining that beauty is “a divine and spiritual principle” and thus “perforce moral” (60-61).  To him “as long as men are men and women are women” ethics will always be inferred, beauty inevitably “clothes” morality and art always has either a good or bad ethical effect (83).

     Howells is no Baudelaire, so he insists on the beneficial option only.  With the close association he imagines between beauty and ethics, he believes that novels should coax a reader into being be “a helpfuler and wholesomer creature” (106).  Thus licentious French novels cannot be aesthetically successful, and in fact stories of more virtuous love are “truer to life” (150). The moral role of literature is for him critical.  “If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous” (95).  Stories without retributive justice are “deadly poison,” (95) while mere entertainment will “clog the soul” (96).

     To Howells realism, truth, and beauty are identified, a link he seems to consider a novel insight in  spite of the precedent of Plato.  Thus, for him, asking “is it true” involves “the highest morality and the highest artistry” and “this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak.” (99)  “No one hereafter,” he maintains, “will be able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties.”  “No conscientious man can now set about painting an image of life without perpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling bound to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is right and what is wrong.” (98) 

     Bartley Hubbard’s life is unquestionably shaped by moral considerations.  His career is a cautionary ironic American success story, from rags to riches like Horatio Alger’s popular novels which were popular when A Modern Instance was published, but Bartley, unlike Ragged Dick or Tattered Tom, had a corrupt heart and for that reason his eventual fall was as inevitable and as much a convention as their rise.  The critique of capitalism’s amoral rapacity inverts Alger’s optimistic enthusiasm about social mobility in America. [4]

     Other central concerns of the book are likewise ethical and social.  His observations about the potential for damage of newspapers governed primarily by the profit motive (as virtually all still are) and his implied acceptance of divorce in some cases may have excited topical interest, but, if so, such appeal has faded.  As a theory Howells’ Realism requires, apart from observation of lived reality, the assumption of a natural moral order uncreated by humans, embodied in a sort of Platonic form that conflates truth, beauty, and morality.  

     Though Howells opened with Symonds’ comment objecting to changing fashions in visual art, Howells in other passages enthusiastically accepted the evolution of standards.  He notes the overturning of neo-Classicism by Romanticism (15), and even speculates on some post-Realist era, though he usually depicts Realism as a climax in art’s evolution

     In practice Howell’s Realism promoted a focus on middle class characters, which is to say the group that composed the majority of his readers.  They are not only middle class, they are also generally of mixed character, neither exemplary heroes nor utter villains.  He fancies that such characters are more “real” than other varieties of humankind.  Likewise, he approvingly quotes Valdés’ condemnation  of “effectism,” by which he means seeking “vivid and violent emotions” through the means of displaying “invention and originality,” (65) preferring instead a prose style close to that of everyday educated speech.  To flaunt one’s idiosyncratic language would be to him vulgar.

     For Howells “the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper” deserves representation.  He declares that “the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic cardboard grasshopper must die out.” (12)  This judgement fails to recognize either the array of potential expressive possibilities of the image or the fact that Howells’ “realistic” grasshopper is every bit as artificial as the alternatives.  Yet for a time Howells represented progress.  He enlarged the scope of fiction and developed further a sense of American identity which he embodied in both theory and practice.  While he did move on from prior models to occupy territory already claimed in  France by Balzac and Zola, he remained an American, man of his times whose very limitations are perhaps more instrumental than his themes in his pictures of lived experience.  He was unaware that what he did not know, what he preferred not to express, was as significant what he included.  The fact that he was unconscious of such considerations only makes them more meaningful.    

 

  

1.  In Criticism and Fiction Howells had the scope to develop the ideas he had been promoting in his “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s Monthly.  To George Perkins A Modern Instance was Howell’s first major work of fiction.  See his “A Modern Instance: Howells' Transition to Artistic Maturity,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 1974).

2.  See below for Howells’ notion of the coming “communistic” era of taste.

3.  As it happens, Alger, like Howells, wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln.

4.  Howells was a progressive, though no radical.  Apart from supporting Lincoln’s presidential campaign, he defended those arrested for Haymarket “riot” and was active in the Anti-Imperialist Society.  He was a Christian socialist at a time when many, among them William Dwight Porter Bliss, Henry James Sr., and  William Henry Channing, found capitalism inconsistent with the gospel. 

5.  Atlantic Monthly, November1882.  This and similar attacks are detailed in Herbert Edwards, “Howells and the Controversy over Realism in American Fiction,” American Literature Vol. 3, No. 3 (Nov., 1931).