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Updated: May 27, 2025
Not altogether different is the conception of wedlock in Mrs. Haywood's novels of domestic life written at about the same period, but the pictures there shown are painted in incomparably greater detail, with a fuller appreciation of character, and without that pious didacticism which even the most lively exertions of Eliza Haywood's romancing genius failed to leaven in her essays.
In neither the naturalistic school of fiction, nor the psychological, in so far as the latter is represented by Bourget, has Balzac's influence been a gain. Bourget has borrowed Balzac's furniture, his pompous didacticism, his occasional indecency in fine, all that is least essential in the elder's assets, without learning how to breathe objective life into one of his characters.
Incidentally the didacticism of modern writers, and their absorption in the affairs of the moment, have not only served to make a breach between themselves and English literature as a whole, to the detriment of their perspective, but have also set a gulf between themselves and those of another school, for whom world literature is more important than the literature of to-day, for whom erudition and interest in the past are not to be lightly dismissed as academicism.
"An idler is a watch that wants both hands, As useless if it goes as when it stands." "Vociferated logic kills me quite; A noisy man is always in the right." The bare didacticism of these poems is softened and sweetened by the gentle, devout nature of the poet, and is enlivened by a vein of pure humor.
Reflection, didacticism, description, the turgid, the obscure. A poet with a thesis to sustain is more or less barred from the freedom of pure art. It is by direct and unconsidered expression, says Scherer, that art communicates with reality.
He is one of the truest of friends, and he is as game as a brook trout. He has associated with drunkards, but was never drunk; and during his early days in Chicago he lived with gamblers, but he came out an honorable man." "I have been reading his novels," said Henry, "and in places he is as sharp as broken glass." "Yes, but he is too much given to didacticism.
This may account for the indefiniteness and mystery of effect often felt, as well as for the inartistic didacticism in the concluding sentences, frequently to be observed, where it appears as one or more afterthoughts possibly to be drawn from the story, but not exhausting its moral significance.
His didacticism is more in evidence in the tales than in the romances, where the fuller body allows the writer to be more objective: still, judged by present-day standards, there are times when he is too obviously the preacher to please modern taste. In "The Great Stone Face," for instance, it were better, one feels, if the moral had been more veiled, more subtly implied.
"Mary" is less explicit in its teaching than the two great novels just summarized, but what it misses in didacticism it more than gains in art. The radiant creature who gives her name to the book is one of Bjoernson's most exquisite figures. She is the very embodiment of youthful womanhood, filled with the joy of life, and bringing sunshine wherever she goes.
One evil day she went alone; and when she came back, Thyrsis, as usual, pounced upon his mail, and came upon a letter from a magazine-editor whom he had been trying to please with an article, and who now scolded him mercilessly for his obstinacy and his egotism and his didacticism, and all his other unpublishable qualities.
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