ARTICLE III.-THE COMMONPLACE IN FICTION.

No fact strikes more often or more keenly the observer of modern fiction than its tendency toward the commonplace. Both authorship and criticism abound in the signs of its steadily increasing influence. Even so great a lover of marvel as Sir Walter Scott professes to make his exploits and wonders subsidiary to the delineation of manners and customs, and the same feeling has been more or less handed down to later romance. Macaulay, in his essay on Madame d'Arblay, censures her excessive use of oddities, and notes with favor the comparatively every-day types from whom Miss Austen drew her more delicate portraits.. George Eliot began her literary career, in her Scenes from Clerical Life, by invoking the interest and sympathy of her readers for the great mass of common people whose joys and sorrows make up everywhere the bulk of life. With courage augmented by success she repeated and emphasized this protest in Adam Bede. In this country Mr. Howells has based much of his fiction and criticism on the idea. expressed by one of his characters that "the commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which they've never got into their confounded books yet." "The novelist," he goes on, "who could interpret the common feelings of common people would have the answer to the riddle of the painful earth' on his tongue." The Russian novel, meanwhile, has been giving actuality to ideas which on English and American soil were still largely theoretic. In Count Tolstoï's writings the commonplace is not merely powerful; it is dominant, and its complete supremacy produces a change from the older fiction which amounts almost to revolution. He describes a common thunder storm in the same spirit that another man would describe a meteoric shower. He paints the routine of life as exactly as others do its crises. He approaches the common influences of his own age and nation, such as, for example, the hunt, the theatre, the ball, in the same temper that other men approach the corresponding influences of foreign nations and

remote ages. Every incident which presents itself to him for treatment grounds its claim for respect on the share which it has in the universal life of man. The commonplace, in his hands, is no longer a theory which the world can afford to slight or smile at; it is a reality, whose claim to the consideration and judgment of mankind, like that of all realities, is peremptory and undisputed.

When one first meets this idea, one is inclined to think it at war with human nature. It is certainly so far at war with the past that fiction in accepting it disowns and denies the feelings from which its own origin is derived. Under whatever name it has disguised itself, whether as the supernatural, the marvelous, the odd, the rare, or the eminent, it has always been the exceptional, that which violates the ordinary structure of things or reverses the normal course of events, which has delighted and allured mankind. The Middle Ages, among whose narrations we must grope to find the roots of our modern fiction, never dreamed of admiring the commonplace. The group of eager faces that bent their dilated eyes on the monk or palmer rehearsing his saintly legend prized his narrative only for the marvels it contained. The squires and yeomen who left the wine-glass half drained and the shield half burnished to throng the hall where the wandering harper sang the deeds of chivalry, were moved by no higher feeling than a love of the marvelous. It was the same in the simpler pursuits of life. The host of the wayside inn, delaying with yet one more hurried question the already mounted traveler at his door, craved from him only the rarities which had marked his jour ney. These good people have transmitted to their modern descendants not a little of their own way of thinking. If in our times the passion is not so great, yet the devices for its gratification have so multiplied as to render it even more conspicuous. The immense majority of the fictions which are poured out from our teeming presses are written, published, and read for no other reason than their capacity to gratify this feeling. Its influence here is only one phase of its universal ascendancy. The aim of most conversation, as of most letterwriting, is to sift out of the great mass of things the few rarities which have brightened their monotony. The newsboy

sells his journals, the conjurer draws his crowd, the theatrical manager fills his house, by adroit appeals to this master-passion. The cheap museums cater to its grosser forms. Anything that is abnormal, that violates ordinary laws, that shows us nature, as it were, standing on her head, is eagerly caught up and turned into an agency for feeding the avarice of the few and the curiosity of the many. Culture itself is not free from this tendency. It numbers among its unconscious subjects even those men whose intelligence has taught them to find in the commonplace the true source of values. The newspaper which distracts our minds from our morning coffee records, not the regular order of daily activities, but the inversions by which it is broken; and the books among which we divide our evening leisure are often only more delicate touches on the same powerful string. In the face of this feeling so manifold in its aspects and so despotic in sway, comes the quiet assertion of recent thinkers that the commonplace is the great subject for the artist's contemplation and portrayal.

This counter-current in modern life has not flowed exclusively from any one source; but nothing has contributed more to its formation than the development of science. The direct result of scientific teaching in limiting credulity has done something toward this end; the contagion of its spirit has done even more. The stronghold of the marvelous has always been the supernatural. No force has ever so mastered the imaginations of men as that which professes to emanate from the unseen world. The great mass of superstitions which thus arose yielded to the new spirit of inquiry. The saintly legend, the ghost story, the fairy tale, the imputations of witchcraft, all disappeared before the same dispersing touch. The old fancy which made the elfin ring vanish at the approach of daybreak was only the exquisite symbol of the host of superstitions dissipated by the dawn of science. The new influence seemed at first destined to narrow and to despoil. It took away from our ancestors that fabulous world which was to them no less actual a possession than their cattle or their acres; it fenced in the imagination, and shut up life within the bare round of daily trivialities. Yet out of these very commonplaces, within which it confined the roving fancy of earlier times, science has evoked

new wonders which take rank with those which it supplanted. This is so undeniable that we involuntarily borrow the old terms of magic and enchantment to describe its achievements, and our poets call its revelations fairy tales. It is not so much the greatness of these wonders, however, as their source to which we now wish to point attention. It has been from common surroundings, from the objects of daily contact and vision, from those things which it might have been expected man's senses would long ago have drained of all interest, that science has drawn its marvels. The rock, the water, the star, the plant, the animal, have each been investigated and forced to yield up its store of prodigies. The operations of nature have afforded the same results as her materials. The ordinary process has been raised into the exalted place formerly held by the anomaly or the catastrophe; and science, as if resolute to give back to the world all it had taken away, has even in large measure atoned for the inroads it made on religion, by revealing to us the same divine majesty in the fulfillment of law which our ancestors found in its abrogation.

The logical step by which the new tendency passed into fiction was easy. If common objects and forces reward investigation with such splendid results, why not also common feelings and actions? The change in the aim of fiction, however, sprang not so much from direct inference as from the great revolution in the general mind of which the scientific movement was the earliest and most brilliant outcome. There is a certain period in the lives of men, as in the history of nations, in which the common and the universal begin to draw to themselves a large part of that interest and regard which formerly flowed to their opposites. The commonplace is that which recurs often in space or time, and the man of culture cannot help but regard the endless repetition of this or that particular feature throughout the universe as a sort of stress or emphasis laid on it by nature in order to draw to it his earnest and prolonged attention. That which occurs everywhere and always must have occupied no small place in the intelligence that created the world, and deserves for that reason alone no light regard from the contemplating intelligence of man. Men feel that mere extent confers a certain dignity. "A patch of sand," says Mr. Lowell,

"is unpleasing; a desert has all the awe of ocean." An incident which, viewed as the single act of an individual, excites little interest, augments in worth, if looked at as the habit of a lifetime, and even rises almost into impressiveness when we regard it as the custom of an age. As our respect for the commonplace increases, we begin to feel its influence in a gradual decline of our love for rarities. We learn to think, at length, that the anomalies or pranks of nature bear the same relation to the regular and orderly arrangement of things that the levities of a great mind bear to its serious and solemn utterances. We cease to care for eccentricities, and pass by without a glance the tent that exhibits the two-headed woman. An opposite feeling slowly asserts itself, and makes us disdain the interest which we once took, or perhaps in our backsliding moments still take, in things which are simply monstrosities. As the regularity of law becomes more and more pleasing to us, we begin to feel toward all deviations from its symmetry and evenness the same repulsion that we have toward an object placed askew or awry. It is a feeling like this which, having already achieved so much in science, is now extending its supremacy over the domain of fiction.

The scientific spirit has been much aided in the accomplishment of its task by that other great factor in modern life, the spirit of democracy. The world of ideas is at length feeling the force of that mighty impulse which, under the name of republicanism, has already re-fashioned the world of action. We have transferred to the common man the functions which formerly belonged to the prince; we are just beginning to transfer to average humanity the interest and reverence which once flowed to the philosopher and the saint. A nobler idea, an idea which makes great men merely the employés of mankind, is gradually replacing the old feeling which made common men as much appendages to the hero as the tassels on his shield, and which afterwards, in a more refined form, centred all values in intellectual and moral pre-eminence. The average man, according to the new gospel, is the heart of things. All things besides are only his court and retinue, and even fiction herself is obliged to leave reluctantly her gods and heroes and to follow in his train. The very neglect with