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    A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction
    A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction
    A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction
    Ebook44 pages37 minutes

    A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction

    By William Dean Howells

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 25, 2013
    A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction
    Author

    William Dean Howells

    William Dean Howells was a realist novelist, literary critic, and playwright, nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters". He was particularly known for his tenure as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, as well as for his own prolific writings.

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      A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction - William Dean Howells

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Psychological Counter-current in Recent Fiction, by William Dean Howells

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: A Psychological Counter-current in Recent Fiction

      Author: William Dean Howells

      Posting Date: July 23, 2008 [EBook #726] Release Date: November, 1996

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT ***

      Produced by Anthony J. Adam.

      A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION.

      by

      William Dean Howells

      It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems a cataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the opposite quarter. It is so divinable, if not so perceptible, that its presence may usually be recognized as a beginning of the turn in every tide which is sure, sooner or later, to come. In reform, it is the menace of reaction; in reaction, it is the promise of reform; we may take heart as we must lose heart from it. A few years ago, when a movement which carried fiction to the highest place in literature was apparently of such onward and upward sweep that there could be no return or descent, there was a counter-current in it which stayed it at last, and pulled it back to that lamentable level where fiction is now sunk, and the word novel is again the synonym of all that is morally false and mentally despicable. Yet that this, too, is partly apparent, I think can be shown from some phases of actual fiction which happen to be its very latest phases, and which are of a significance as hopeful as it is interesting. Quite as surely as romanticism lurked at the heart of realism, something that we may call psychologism has been present in the romanticism of the last four or five years, and has now begun to evolve itself in examples which it is the pleasure as well as the duty of criticism to deal with.

      I.

      No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism, now decadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at its worst just because he was so much better than it was at its worst, because he was a poet of undeniable quality, and because he could bring to its intellectual squalor the graces and the powers which charm, though they could not avail to save it from final contempt. He saves himself in his latest novel, because, though still so largely romanticistic, its prevalent effect is psychologistic, which is the finer analogue of realistic, and which gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now it gives romanticism whatever will survive it. In The Right of Way Mr. Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, where there is nothing but the happening of things, and where this one or that one is important or unimportant according

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