The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1891-08-02

Iul Kiss. Dut this Is the mere selnsn cour-
age that 70 win what it wants. whether il
Is . neighbours cattle, money or lands, or
a neighbor's wife, will gamble its life on
the issue. No touch Of heroism in these
fellows; they are but opponents Of the
primitive passions of the savage man, lust
and avarice; they are fighting but for their
own hand; they win face danger, as did
Samson, for Delilah, but viii never face
danger for public duty that Is not
blended with personal advantage; they
viii shake dice with death for
wicked prize but they are all
men, in life or death, made solely for self;
they forget father, mother, wife, sister,
brother or lover when self rises up to
plead its cause: they will dare and do
nothing for duty; they viii risk nothing for
ANYTHING that does not promise to quickly
delare a dividend in this world; they
cynicalIy describe '1aying up treasure in
heaven" by life Of duty and sacrifice for
noble things that are always difficult as an
expensive accumulation in foreign coun-
try of non-dividend paying security which
no modern man of business can afford.
These folk are admirers of Mr. Howells,
who is never weary of saying that the
heroic type of humanity, sketched by
Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, George Eliot
and Charles Reade, stands either for pic
lures of morbid persons or for an obsolete
expression of humanity. The fiction of
the future, Mr.. Howells would fill with
what he calls realism substituted for what
he calls the idealism of the heroic and
romantic school,
So We have dreary, depressing realism
in his fiction that is instinct with nothing
that stands for life, but for the living
instinct with nothing that stands for the
inspiration, aspiration, warning and re-
buke we find in "Middlemarch." We get
nothing but the dreary dribble of the
world of social Liliput, where the men
are either all colorless, squeaking snobs
and depraved dudes, or vulgar, coarse,
boastful American doubles of Dickens
Mr.. Bounderby. The women Of Howells
are fit mates for his manikin masculines,
and altogether his books stand for echoes
and lights from a world of moral and
mental opacity and faulty; for folly with
out blood, and selfishness without brains,
for sentimentalism without soul, for su-
perficial refinement and social languor
without good feeling; for a very gross
materialism whose delicate hands and soft
voice do not make its wooden
head any the less visible. OF course,
if Thackeray, Dickens. George Eliot,
Scott were all wrong, and heroism is
only the diseased action of morbid minds;
it all romance is really rot, and systematic
seltishness the true guide, philosopher and
friend of the best American life, why then
we are in bad way. The most disgusting
realism of the toughest Western frontier
town would be more hopeful condition
than an insipid, forceless, feeble, yawning,
frivolous, silly civilization, peopled with
nothing but featherheaded dolls, emascu-
lated, cackling dudes, or the stupid, bleat-
ing golden calves of herd of Wall street
ssbulls"
The Liliput of society is not American
life, although it appears to be the only side
that Howells ever saw. and the heroic in
manhood and womanhood Is not the ex-
preston of morbid, diseased humanity; for
it is the ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
non-talkative-non-morbid, plain Ameri-
can common people that are always sur
prising Us by heroic action and chivalric
conduct.
Real heroism in act and spirit resides
with all kinds of men and women; rich
and poor; educated or illiterate, but it is
the characteristic of healthy minds and
bodies, not of morbid organizations.
Morbid minds may under the influence
of superstition be capable of self-torture,
but heroic unselfshness and untiinching
devotion to duty when expressed in deeds
rather than in words is the expression of
a healthy, not morbid mind, whether
you find it in an humble miner or a mar
quis. Washington and Lincoln would
have behaved just as periodically, been
just as self-forgetful had they been in
Miner Samuel Hudson's place, as they
did in the great sphere in which they were
summoned to shine. The sentimental
affectation of heroics; the loquacious en-
thusiasm Of perennial cranks never crys-
heroism or self-sacrifice, but it is
the healthy, plain people of the
worlds great races, not their maniacal,
fanatical, sentimental folk that oftenest
without effort rise instantly to the level of
heroic self-sacrihce. There is not a mine
in America or Europe, railroad, steam
ship line, life-saving station that has not
illustrated the everyday, instructive
heroism OF the plain. common people,
that have never become morbidized by
unwholesome habits of mind or body.
II Howells is right then the great painters
of human nature from Homer down to
Shakespeare were all wrong, for the
capacity of self-sacrifce is as old as the
maternal instinct.
The figures of Hector, Antigone, Alcestis
light up the dawn of the worlds great
hterature-the primitive figures of self
abnegation and self-sacridce; the same
heroic figures have been painted with a
broad, free hand and warm color by all
the great artists of literature since
Homer's day, and it is safe to say that
human nature is about the same in
its passions and motives, vast and
deep, as it was when Homer
sang of Hector and Shakespeare wrote. If
it is, then the world will continue to pre-
fer the fiction that fills its pages with men
and women of the heroic type to fiction
that is filed with pigmy men and women;
dudes and dolls selfish or siliy: shallow