Doses of Honesty

What Has Happened When Children Cry for Castor Oil?

Once readers were ignorant, and naively vain of their erudition Later readers were honest, and openly proud of their vices. Later still readers were gentle, and sentimentally enamored of their poses. Now readers are literate, and remarkably fond of their opinions. Elizabethan, Restoration, Victorian, Modern literature -- where is it going?

In a world so basely consecrated to the truth, Fiction (which is the art of lying) is still at least a semi-honorable profession. It is, because it makes a puissant defense, saying: "I make a hero, and my reader imagines all my hero's virtues to himself. I make a villain and my reader estimates that he himself will avoid the deeds and dooms of villainy." And there's the kernel of the cabbage: the reader dreams himself the man whom all the story turns about. There is the power and the pleasure of the lies that we call Fiction.

And there's the problem, too, for what of Babbitt, Moon Calf, Eric Dorn? Who can enjoy the mirrors of his mediocrity? Who can revel in the garbage of his prurience ? It is human nature, moralists to the contrary, to enjoy a good s duction with Tom Jones or Roderick Random. It is human nature to picture yourself a glorious Ivanhoe or a clever Pendennis. It is not human nature to imagine yourself a nobody Babbitt doing any no-account and nasty business in any Middle Western babbitt warren. There is no vanity in futility and filth.

Why, then, does this modern realism sell? The public pays to be castigated. It prefers castor oil to Coca-Cola. Perhaps this realism is a sort of invert flattery. Everyone sees Babbitt in his neighbor. Nobody sees Babbitt in himself. That is highly satisfactory.

As for Moon Calf (Felix) and Eric Dorn: they are too despicable to be yourself and have too fine a sinful time to be your neighbor. He lives inside a commutation ticket and brings the groceries home at night.

But people read Moon Calf and Eric Dorn because they like to hear their own opinions What can one say of Waverly? What devastating paradox can one derive from Peregrine Pickle? But turn to Many Marriages and its kind and by comparison criticism flows as voluminously, noisily, instinctively as Niagara. When other vanities pass, there still remains one's own invincible opinion.

The hero of day dreams is no longer fashionable. Those who loved him drop a pathetic tear or turn to Robert W. Chambers. They give up their sophisticated friends and pine for literary atavism.

M.G.