River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1890-03-13
AMERICAN FICTION.
It's Tendencies at the Present Time Are
Decidedly Dangerous.

Tendencies
Decidedly Dangerous.
An eminent physician once exclaimed:
GOD bless the novelists, they take US
out of the cares and trials that beset
our daily paths and open up new and
ideal worlds of enjoyment to us!'' Sure
~ these words were spoken before the
days of modern realism, in the good old
times when people read novels for limo
cent diversion and have been known to
read far into the small hours, without
having their souls stirred 10 their
depths by some question of doctrine or
morality, lured on to regardlessness of
the flight of time by their absorbing in
terest in labyrinthine misunderstand-
ing between Dorothea and st. Giles, or
the relentless treatment of loves young
dream by some stern parent or guardian
1t is not, however, upon realism of the
deadly dull sort that we would dwell;
that has already been talked about
more than enough, and will doubtless
wear itself out in the hands of the
many less skillful writer's who are en-
deavoring to follow the footsteps
of its gifted high-priests. An
other phase, and one that threat
ems far greater danger to literature
and TO life, is that which comes from
foreign schools and which, unwhole-
some as it is in its native habitat, is
still more dangerous and disastrous
when transplanted to other soils. For
some years we were almost solely de-
pendent upon France for microscopic
studies of morbid life, character and
situation; but within short period the
extensive importations from Russia and
other northern countries have enlarged
the realistic horizon, and still more re-
Gently Spain has begun to send in her
returns. Many of these novels, notably
those of Tolstoi, have in them, with all
the objections which may be made to
the scenes and characters introduced, a
high moral purpose and teach valuable
and impressive lessons. Some of our
novelists, however, with strange fatal
ity, and as if in defiance of the charge
of American seriousness in literature,
have seized what may be looked upon
as the outer shell of realism, carefully
| avoiding its inner spirit. Hence we
have in some of our later fiction the dis
tortions in life and situation that the
French realists delight in depicting,
united to certain gross elaborat ton
that marks the northern novelist, with
| the moral lessons entirely left out-a
sort of literary Summing for its own
sake, with no good end in view, that is
not only aimless, but distinctly debas-
| ing in its tendencies. If we do not de-
mand high moral lesson to be taught by
what is called our best fiction. which too
apparent purpose seems to be the ground
and front of its offending in the eye of
many of its critics, let us at least require
of it 4 reasonable degree of wholesome
ness, that old-fashioned ideals of good
ness be not entirely sacrificed to fine
spun theories, and that there be enough
ideality left in it to act as a corrective
to the gross materialism of the age.
George Eliot, in consequence of the
| fidelity and conscientious accuracy with
which she drew her characters and
scenes, deserves a high place in the
| temple of realism, and yet how much
more was she than realist?-touching
always the life that she portrayed with
| the finer touch Spirituality, and treat
| ing her personalities, whatever their
| faults and failures, and whatever she
herself may have protested to believe or
/ to disbelieve, as the children of Father
who designed them all for the mob lest
uses. and would be satisfied with nothing
short of the perfection of sonship. Why
else did she judge her characters with
such memorable severity, being satisfied
with no standard short of the highest?
Anne III. Wharton, in Philadelphia
| American