GARY STEPHENS
73
twisted about, is supposed in certain circles
to
have some vaguely injurious
effect upon those who let it weigh in the balance ." For the artistic preoccu–
pation, " the search for form, " is "assumed
to
be opposed in some mysteri–
ous manner to morality,
to
amusement, to instruction. " But the full depth
of james's awareness and his consequent freedom to create a fiction which
could be, like a painted portrait , finished, sufficient, "a personal , a direct
impression of life, " without overt "moral" instructiveness, set him ofHrom
his fellow realists in America.
They felt too much the weight of the arguments which James attacked
as pernicious, the arguments against the concern with form and artistic
considerations
per se .
Their struggle was fundamentall y confused by the fact
that they shared to such a large extent the suspicion of art they were trying
to
resist . As a result, they were always emotionally compromised: writing
without the personal freedom to give themselves
to
"Art" and let moral
information follow however it would, they sought a middle way. They
wanted
to
write in a way that was instructive about daily life , fundamen–
tally moral, and yet not a distortion of reality . Thus, they wrote with an
ideal vision of our culture in mind, a vision which they believed their
writing could bring into existence. Paradoxically, then, their attendance
upon the real is so infused with notions of the ideal, that their work is often
strangely private, paying homage
to
old pieties which , though perhaps
honorable, have not proven of enduring interest.
One finds Howells , for example, downgrading the idea of a "great
American novel" because it runs counter to his belief that the local color or
regional life is the primary subject for fiction . As subjects for fiction, he
says, it is the provincial that is most important, then the national, then the
universal. And his disciple Hamlin Garland writes that it is not the
business of the literature of a time
to
express universals but
to
"sincerely
present its own minute and characteristic interpretation of life ." This is not
a simple call for inhibition of the imagination ;
to
a considerable extent such
advice was meant
to
discipline writing so that it would remain sharp and
specific in the face of the flaccid, garish, and vapidly romantic literature of
the period, a literature which was always straining after the " ideal." The
realists' advice that
to
create the best and most important art a writer should
focus upon the local and the time-bound is the logical development of their
belief that the ideal pattern of life itself was
to
be found in the real life lived
by men and women in America.
The deep , almost pietistic, belief in such essential patterns was
obviously associated in part with the decline of religious belief and the
growing confusion in the ideals associated with American life . They wrote
to
compensate for an apparent emptiness . But paradoxically, in order to
