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Those Immoral Romanticists
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (January 14, 1911) : 21
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      They do such a lot of harm and cause so much much unhappiness. They lead us astray, raise impossible hopes, spoil us for this workaday world, and it is with complete justification that we cry out to have some one put an end to them. We have long known that the gentlemen who illustrate mawkish love-stories with appropriate pictures were doing real damage to the farmers’ daughters who devour the periodicals in which such things flourish. These deluded young women are being made to believe that unless one is clasped in the arms of a masterful man in faultless evening clothes, while the moon shines on one’s own silken draperies, one is not living. The idea is a very bad preparation for one’s becoming the competent helpmate of a homely farmer, and, even if the girl is perversely happy when leading a normal humdrum life, she always feels that it is a makeshift and that she has been deprived of what every one deserves. Though we have long railed at the immorality of the sweetly pretty story, there is, one finds, on reaching maturer years, a certain irritation felt against the master romanticists, and we feel a little misled, a little wronged and made a fool of, by even such men as Meredith himself there is, one finds, on reaching maturer years, a certain irritation felt against the master romanticists, and we feel a little misled, a little wronged and made a fool of, by even such men as presumably George Meredith (1828-1909), poet, novelist
wikipedia
author of Diana of the Crossways (1885)
wikipedia Meredith himself.
      Was it altogether fair of him to give us the impression, perhaps unintentionally, that there existed whole neighborhoods where every one was as brilliantly interesting as Meredith himself? His pig-headed old squires, and brainless women, and egotistical young men, and colorless bores were always absorbing and never as personally enraging as the same people in real life. His bores never bored us, no matter what they did to the other characters in the book, so that we got it into our heads that there were places where such bores actually existed. The slightly trying people were inevitably heavily out-numbered in the quietest country districts by the colossally delightful ones. There were dozens of them everywhere. And such people! Always above life size, but so consistently and convincingly so that, instead of their seeming fictitious, they made us seem wofully unfortunate in having found life a place where the few personalities we knew were more or less isolated and invariably surrounded by a multitude of suffocating philistines; where we were lucky and proud to bring our list of interesting minds up to eight, no three of whom were ever in the same country at the same time.
      We believed Meredith, we liked to think that his way was the rule and ours the unhappy exception. Rather than doubt that there were people who had grooms, grandmothers, and guests, fiancés, fathers, and fellow townsmen all made out of Meredith, we preferred to think that we had been born strangely out of our proper milieu, and that, though depressing, it was a catastrophe which might be remedied by much travelling and a conscientious moving every May.
      As we grow older —and we begin to do this from the very beginning, keeping it up consistently till fifty years of age, when most of us prattle childishly and happily of comfortably material and engagingly romantic things — we come to feel in spite of ourselves that the romanticists make life more difficult, and we edge away from the romantic attitude with the wariness of one already wounded and we edge away from the romantic attitude with the wariness of one already wounded. Those beautiful, beautiful young men, who with their dashing attributes and unnatural brilliancy spoiled our adolescent days! Their rich, dazzling personalities were to be found glowing between the covers of every book we picked up, one at least in even those pages pretending to realism, until it was small wonder that we resembled the mermaids in the “Bab Ballads,” collection of light verse by W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911), illustrated with his own comic drawings.
wikipedia“Bab Ballads,” who turned from what they could attain, and, swimming ecstatically alongside the ship, hypnotized by the unlikely charms of the gentleman in an element not theirs, murmured enchantedly, “That is the way a gentleman should end.” This was very hard on the mermen, seriously upset the birth statistics, and did no good to anyone.
      Though the time comes when heroes of fiction finally seem impracticable, if pleasing, it takes us much longer to give up the heroines, for these we hope to realize ourselves, and of our own possibilities we give up hope last. Though the time comes when heroes of fiction finally seem impracticable, if pleasing, it takes us much longer to give up the heroines, for these we hope to realize ourselves, and of our own possibilities we give up hope last. We are fairly on in life when we have to face the hard fact that it is not expeditious to attempt any longer to become Diana Warwicks, that it even may not be wholly desirable. Her intoxicating and aloof sparkle is betrayed to us when she says to her maid, “You may embrace me, Danvers,” and bends a cool brow to the salute of her serving-woman. There comes a time when this incident leaps at us from the printed page and we sadly know her for the fiction she is, and know at the same time that that enjoyable time has gone by when we can persuade ourselves to the contrary.
      The disillusionment brings humility with it, and forever after we humbly if insistently make sure that our stories be frankly, extravagantly, jauntily impossible, or else realism unadorned by anything other than tenderness and clearness of understanding. Dickens’s black and white writing is for those under fifteen, Meredith is for the stirring bravery of thirty, after which one needs truth and selection and quietly settles to it in the clarified essences of James Dickens’s black and white writing is for those under fifteen, Meredith is for the stirring bravery of thirty, after which one needs truth and selection and quietly settles to it in the clarified essences of James, essences being but a synonym for verities. We have found that it is not half so much to the point to be hotly admiring of the eminently presentable virtues of fiction as it is to be humorously gentle toward, and aware of, the human absurdities of daily life; and it is James feeling for the pathetic barrennesses, the staunch aridities and loyal banalities of as funny futile humans that warms and satisfies us. Our dull, undecorative nobilities, our dogged, entirely askew idealism and perception of the intertwined complexities and unaccountable delicacies and brutalities of human nature — these are the real things, and it is such as these alone that aid us in looking about on our generally absurd, perpetually trying, and forever absorbing familiars, crying in James phraseology, “How farcically tragic, and almost, as it were, bravely, hugely unimportant we are.” There is an unkindness as well as a waste in our failure to see ourselves, just as there would have been a churlish crabbedness if we had been content in our young days with coloring less high, or been willing to read in a key a whit lower, with one of the sonorous, fluent adjectives removed. There were days in the history of portraiture when every sitter had full cupid lips, curling nostrils, a flashing, liquid eye, and a mane of waving unruly hair. There is a time in the taste of each of us when we rightly and prodigally grant these symbolic characteristics to all our heroes. The underlying expression we find later on.
 

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