"Nothing could be more obvious," says John Gardner [in On Moral Fiction], "than that art should be moral and that the first business of criticism, at least some of the time, should be to judge works of literature (or painting or even music) on grounds of the production's moral worth." Acknowledging our usual embarrassment in the presence of words like "morality," he sets out to demonstrate the practice of moral criticism. Gardner positions his moral telescope. He scans the contemporary literary scene as though it were a night sky. And he finds himself as distressed by its occasional cold dazzle as by its expanses of emptiness. Gardner admits outright that he is a constellation hunter in search of the human image writ large, the illuminations of world and self classically provided by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. Our stars, he concludes, shed no radiance because they shine primarily for and upon themselves….

Gardner has an eye for those fine-line failures of concentration, commitment, and craftsmanship that widen out until they fracture a novel's foundation in illusion. Whenever he charges a contemporary with carelessness, he brings the novelist's fictional world sharply into focus, to show us the cracks and flaws. Since he sees so well, it seems peculiar to complain that he also sees badly. But he does. His perspective is inconsistent and shifts about disconcertingly. (p. 935)

The close-ups dissolve, replaced by ethical panoramas, by platonic vistas, by civics lessons. We have the watery sense of things looked at over eonic time and from very far away.

Gardner's sensitivity to craft is forever at odds with his grander purpose. Two distinct modes of vision alternate, each claiming to be the moral perspective of On Moral Fiction. His stated mode is teleological; vast and prescriptive, it points insistently heavenward:

… true art treats ideals, affirming and clarifying the Good; the True, and the Beautiful. Ideals are art's ends; the rest is methodology.

But another mode, narrower in scope, is also at work. This operational mode has but one moral imperative, artistic integrity:

The morality of art is, as I've said, far less a matter of doctrine than of process. Art is the means by which an artist comes to see; it is his peculiar, highly sophisticated and extremely demanding technique of discovery.

Here Gardner's concern is the small-scale exchanges between an author and his conception, his audience, and his text that permit a novel to maintain "the artistic illusion of a coherent, self-sustained fictional world."

When he views fiction operationally, Gardner implies that a lack of commitment is our current problem. Modern novelists are tricky, but they are not invested in the process of artifice. They are clever, but they shirk the consequences of their own intellectual premises, preferring short-cuts, rant, easy sensationalism. If he is correct, and modern novelists have made it a habit to avoid commitment, why do they hold back? The question teases. And it will continue to tease. Although Gardner could further clarify it—might indeed eventually resolve it—were he to stick by his operational method, he continually wanders away in search of "eternal verities."

His departure is doubly unfortunate. Not only does he leave a significant cultural issue behind, but his teleological quest draws him into a philosophical marshland. What is the nature of "the Good" toward which all true works of art bend like plants to the sun? Is the ideal religious, or is it statistical, "what happy human beings have found good for centuries (children and dogs, God, peace, wealth, comfort, love, hope, and faith)"? Is it immanent in individual actions, or in the social group, or manifest on a cosmic scale as an assertion of order against "chaos and death, against entropy"? At one point or another, Gardner's teleology absorbs each of these possibilities. Most often, however, "the Good" seems to represent no more than the promptings of John Gardner's own good heart, his personal beliefs raised to the status of Belief. As a standard for everyday behavior, his sociable morality cannot be faulted: Gardner's values encourage neighborliness; his concern for children is genuine and entirely admirable. But it is one thing to assert as a matter of common sense that all men have loved dogs and warm fires; it is quite another to apotheosize these objects of affection into "relative absolutes" toward which all good art must tend.

In several cases, Gardner's need to universalize a humane, private conscience distorts his otherwise acute operational vision. (pp. 936-37)

The ponderous weight of Gardner's teleology causes more than minor disproportions in his argument, however; it unbalances his entire esthetic. On Moral Fiction is canted away from comedy toward tragedy ("Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy"). It leans toward social responsibility, sobriety, and the status quo, and thus away from all literature that has its genius in raw inventive energy. If Gardner's standards were retroactively applied, the losses would be telling. Wuthering Heights hardly offers "a benevolent vision of the possible which can inspire and incite human beings toward virtue." Wilde and Waugh ignore "eternal verities" in order to present delicate surfaces or to explore irritations that occur at the outermost ends of the nerves…. Like F. R. Leavis' "great tradition," Gardner's teleology simply shuts out valuable counter-traditions—pushing aside the irrational, the demonic, the fantastical.

Evidently Gardner does not realize how strait he has made the gate through which moral fiction must pass. An exclusionary statement often seems to sneak up on him as subtly as it does on us. "True art," he tells us,

is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms.

He has hardly finished telling us that literature must explore freely when, apparently unaware of the contradiction, he predetermines its destination:

As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientific hypotheses, moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action.

Gardner likely believes that he has in mind the unbiased process of scientific research. But in fact, his analogy draws upon another source, the college chemistry "lab"—where a desired result predicates any "experiment." Moral art must precipitate out his own values—tragic, familial, Christian. Such a test is no test at all. (pp. 937-38)