In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

212 The Moral Element in Fiction Since art implies the truthful and conscientious study of life as it is, we contend that to be a radically defective view of art which would preclude from it the ruling constituents of life. Moral character is to human life what air is to the natural world—it is elemental. There was more than literary science in Matthew Arnold’s arithmetic when he called “conduct three-fourths of life.”¹ Possibly the Creator did not make the world chiefly for the purpose of providing studies for gifted novelists; but if he had done so, we can scarcely imagine that he could have offered anything much better in the way of material, even though one look the moral element squarely in the face and abide by the fact of its tremendous proportion in the scheme of things. The moral element, it cannot be denied, predominates enormously in the human drama.The moral struggle, the creation of character, the moral ideal, failure and success in reaching it, anguish and ecstasy in missing or gaining it, the instinct to extend the appreciation of moral beauty and to worship its Eternal Source—these exist wherever human being does.The whole magnificent play of the moral nature sweeps over the human stage with a force, a splendor, and a diversity of effect which no artist can deny if he would, which the greatest artist never tries to withstand , and against which the smallest will protest in vain. Strike “ethicism” out of life, good friends, before you shake it out of story! Fear less to seem “Puritan” than to be inadequate. Fear more to be superficial than to seem “deep.” Fear less to point your moral than to miss your opportunity. It is for us to remind you, since it seems to us that you overlook the fact, that in any highly formed or fully formed creative power the “ethical” as well as the “æsthetical” sense is developed . Where “the taste”is developed at the expense of “the conscience” the artist is incomplete. He is, in this case, at least as incomplete as he 213 The Moral Element in Fiction is where the ethical sense is developed at the expense of the æsthetic. Specialism in literary art, as in science, has its uses, but it is not symmetry ; and this is not a law intended to work only one way. It is an ancient and honorable rule of rhetoric, that he is the greatest writer who, other things being equal, has the greatest subject. He is, let us say, the largest artist who, other things being equal, holds the largest view of human life.The largest view of human life, we contend, is that which recognizes it in the greatest way. In a word, the province of the artist is to portray life as it is, and life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette ; but is it steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility. An artist can no more fling off the moral sense from his work than he can oust it from his private life. A great artist (let me repeat) is too great to try to do so. With one or two familiar expectations, of which more might be said, the greatest have laid in the moral values of their pictures just as life lays them in; and in life they are not to be evaded.There is a squeamishness against “ethicism”which is quite as much to be avoided as any squeamishness about “the moral nude in art”or other debatable question.The great way is to go grandly in, as the Creator did when he made the models which we are fain to copy. After all, the Great Artist is not a poor master; all His foregrounds stand out against the perspective of the moral nature. Why go tiptoeing about the easel to avoid it? This short essay is an excerpt from the chapter “Art for Truth’s Sake”in Phelps’s autobiography, Chapters from a Life, first published as a serial in McClure’s Magazine , December 1895–June 1896, and then as a book by...

Share