THE ROOTS OF MODERN TASTE
529
hunting for a house. This knowledge-it is Donne's, it is Pascal's,
it is ToIstoy's-may in literature be a cause of great delight because
it
is
so rare and difficult; beside it the knowledge of pure spirit
is
comparatively easy.
To james's first statement about Howells,
his
second is clearly a
corollary-"He hates a story." We cannot nowadays be sure that
all of our reading public loves a story in the way James did. Quite
simple readers can be counted on to love a story, but there
is
a
large, consciously intelligent middle part of our reading public that
is inclined to suspect a story, in James's sense, as a little dishonest.
However, where theory of a certain complexity prevails, the im–
plications of story, and even of "artificial fable," are nowadays
easily understood. In these uplands of taste we comprehend that
artificial devices, such as manipulated plot, are a way not of escaping
from reality but of representing it, and we speak with vivacity of
"imaginary gardens with real toads
in
them." Indeed, we have
come to believe that the toad is the less real when the garden is also
real. Our metaphysical habits lead us to feel the deficiency of what
we call literal reality and to prefer what we call essential reality. To
be sure, when we speak of literal reality, we are aware that there is
really no such thing, that everything that is perceived is in some
sense conceived, or created, that it
is
controlled by intention and
indicates intention, and so on. Nevertheless, bound as we are by
society and convention, if not by certain necessities of the mind,
there still is a thing that we persist in calling "literal reality," and we
recognize a greater or less approximation to it. Having admitted its
existence, we give it a low status in our judgment of art. Naturalism,
which
is
the form of art which makes its effects by the accumulation
of the details of literal reality, is now in poor repute among us. We
dismiss it as an analogue of an outmoded science and look to con–
temporary science to give authority to our preference for the ab–
stract and conceptual, or we look to music to justify our impatience
with the representational, and we derive a kind of political satisfac–
tion from our taste, remembering that reactionary governments hate
what we admire.
Our metaphysical and aesthetic prejudices even conspire to
