We cannot
demand of the writer that he have no moral purpose or that he leave
morality out of his story. For, since the artist is also a man, he
cannot rid himself of an ethical interest in human problems or with
good conscience fail to use his art to help toward their solution. His
observations of moral experience will inevitably result in beliefs
about it, and these will reveal themselves in his work. Yet we should
demand that his view of what life ought to be shall not falsify his
representation of life as it is. Just as soon as the moral of a tale
obtrudes, we begin to suspect that the tale is false. We have such
suspicions about Bourget, for example, because, as in _Une Divorce_, we
are never left in doubt from the beginning as to the conventions he is
advocating. And along with the feeling for the reality of the story goes
the feeling for the validity of the moral; they stand and fall together.
A story's moral, like life's moral, is convincing in proportion as it is
an inference from the facts. The novelist, fearing that we may not have
the wits to discern it, is justified in drawing this inference himself;
yet it must show itself to be strictly an inference from the story--the
story must not seem to have been constructed to prove it. "_Die
Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,_" wrote Schiller; even so, the
delineation of life is the criticism of life. To show the scope of
disillusion, monotony, repression--life's generous impulses narrowed and
made timid by the social, economic, and political machine--would be a
criticism of our modern world; there would be no need of moralizing.
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