The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1904-01-31
LIFE IN FICTION.

Tame declared Henry Esmond the most
artistic OF Thackeray's novels. AS a
rule, Thackeray devotes himself to satire,
although it is often true that he is at
the same time quite sentimental. There
are passages in Pendennis and in the
Newcemes that are unsurpassed in pa
thetic power, but Tame asserted that
Henry Esmond alone of Thackeray' s
books is story told for it's own sake,
and that seemed to him essential to a
work of pure art in fiction The novel
with purpose may be a powerful story,
but it is too likely to treat of everything
from a particular point of view, and to
keep the moral aim persistently in view.
1t was Taine's impression of the Anglo
Saxon mind that it was intensely and in.
veterately serious and almost incapable
of separating aesthetic from ethical tests
of value in the criticism of art and lit
erature.
Some of the best known characters of
Dickens struck him simply as the in
carnation of this, that or the other vice
or defect. Pecksniff, for instance, might
just as we'll have been named Hypocrisy
at once At any hour of the day or
night, at which he may be introduced,
drunk or sober, Pecksniff is still the hy-
pocrite Moliere, according to Taine,
deals more naturally with that vice,
though he portrays it none the less eff
fectively. His Tartuffe is a hypocrite
who has held the stage for two hundred
years. He is, so to speak, the ideal n.y.
pocrite, but Moliere has not forgotten
that Tartuffe is, after all, human, and
that hypocrisy is not the only trait in his
character.
Taine seemed to hold that the novelist
should pursue his studies of society in
the spirit of a naturalist. A man like
John Burroughs goes into the woods to
learn the ways of the birds and the other
creatures that are at home there. He
is impartially interested in them all. IT
he finds that the hawk and the owl have
no sense of mercy, or that the fox be-
trays an apparent Indifference to prop
erty rights, he is not disturbed on that ac-
count. He is attracted by them all be-
cause they represent distinct forms of
life, and possess peculiar powers of mind
and body. Just so it is that saints and
sinners, misers and spendthrifts, philan-
thropists and egoists, philosophers and
coxcombs, arrest the attention of nov
elist like Balzac and find each an appro-
pirate place in his Coincide Humane.
Balzac did not intend to preach, perhaps,
but his most impersonal delineations of
life are, nevertheless, in the nature of
sermons. A fairy story, pure and simple,
may have no philosophic or moral signifi-
canoe whatever, but every true story of
life, based on actual experience and OBJ
servation, must convey some lesson of
prudence, temperance, honesty and of
right living generally, by the illustra-
lions it affords of the naturalness and in
evitableness of the punishment of vice
and every form of selfishness. A pro-
found student of human nature would
not pretend that bad men are never sue
cessful in their undertakings, or that the
good never suffer in mind: body or estate
because of their devotion to humanity and
Justice but he will show that human so.
ciety is constituted upon basis of virtue,
and that the happiness of individual men
and women is, after all, dependent upon
obedience to the fundamental laws of
right living. But it is only necessary to
hold the mirror up to nature, and the
sermon will preach itself.