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A Book ot Prefaces

BY H. L. MENCKEN

Ventures Into Verse {Out of
print)

George Bernard Shaw: His
Plays (Out of print)

The Philosophy of Friedrich
Nietzsche

The Gist of Nietzsche {Out of
print)

Men vs. the Man (with R. R.
LaMonte)

Europe After 8:15 (with IV. H.
Wright and George Jean Na-
than)

The Artist

A Book of Burlesques

A Little Book in C Major

A Book of Prefaces

By

H. L. Mencken

[Opus 13]

New York Alfred A. Knopf Mcmxvii

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF

Published September, 1917

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

The design of these essays is indicated by the
word used to designate them. Each of the first
three prepares an approach to a definite man; the
fourth seeks to indicate some of the effects of a
literary influence that is often sensed but not often
examined. Of necessity, there is some criticism
of criticism in them, and particularly in the one on
Dreiser, an author who seems doomed to arouse
rages in the stupid. Worse, they invite criticism of
criticism of criticism, perhaps the last word in futile
writing. But I print them in the hope that, here
and there, they may at least blow a wind through
the prevailing fogs, and unveil what is sound and
important in some first-rate books. This, as I
conceive it, is what criticism is for: to find out what
an author is trying to do, and to beat a drum for
him when it is worth doing and he does it well.
Such chances to perform the ideal office are not too
numerous. More often the drumstick must labour
a tenderer leather and the critic must give a lowlier
show. Mencken.

Baltimore, 1917.

CONTENTS

I. Joseph Conrad 11

II. Theodore Dreiser 67

III. James Huneker 151

IV. Puritanism as a Literary Force 197

I. JOSEPH CONRAD

A BOOK OF PREFACES

u

JOSEPH CONRAD

§1

"1 TNDER all his stories there ebbs and
flows a kind of tempered melancholy, a
sense of seeking and not finding . . ."
I take the words from a little book on Joseph Con-
rad by Wilson Follet, privately printed, and now,
I believe, out of print.1 They define both the mood
of the stories as works of art and their burden and
direction as criticisms of life. Like Dreiser, Con-
rad is forever fascinated by the "immense indiffer-
ence of things," the tragic vanity of the blind grop-
ing that we call aspiration, the profound meaning-
lessness of life — fascinated, and left wondering.
One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of

i Joseph Conrad : A short study of his intellectual and emo-
tional attitude toward his work and of the chief characteris-
tics of his novels, by Wilson Follet; New York, Doubleday,
Page & Co. (1915).

11

12 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser,
more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind
an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile
supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last,
faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact.
His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer
fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted
by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone.
Each protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a
sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness
Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and dis
aster, leaving nothing behind him save an unan
swered question. I can scarcely recall an excep
tion. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo
Captain Whalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst
Gaspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and all they are de
stroyed and made a mock of by the blind, in
comprehensible forces that beset them.

Even in "Youth," "Typhoon," and "The
Shadow Line," superficially stories of the indomi-
table, that same consuming melancholy, that same
pressing sense of the irresistible and inexplicable,
is always just beneath the surface. Captain Mac
Whirr gets the Nan-Shan to port at last, but it is a
victory that stands quite outside the man himself;
he is no more than a marker in the unfathomable
game; the elemental forces, fighting one another,

JOSEPH CONRAD 13

almost disregard him; the view of him that we get
is one of disdain, almost one of contempt. So,
too, in "Youth." A tale of the spirit's triumph,
of youth besting destiny? I do not see it so. To
me its significance, like that of "The Shadow Line,"
is all subjective; it is an aging man's elegy
upon the hope and high resolution that the
years have blown away, a sentimental rem-
iniscence of what the enigmatical gods have
had their jest with, leaving only its gallant mem-
ory behind. The whole Conradean system sums
itself up in the title of "Victory," an incomparable
piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that
tragic record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that
matchless picture, in microcosm, of the relent-
lessly cruel revolutions in the macrocosm!

Mr. Follet, perhaps with too much critical fa-
cility, finds the cause of Conrad's unyielding pes-
simism in the circumstances of his own life; — his
double exile, first from Poland, and then from the
sea. But this is surely stretching the facts to fit
an hypothesis. Neither exile, it must be plain,
was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. Conrad
has been back to Poland, and he is free to return
to the ships whenever the spirit moves him. I see
no reason for looking in such directions for his
view of the world, nor even in the direction of his

14 A BOOK OF PREFACES

nationality. We detect certain curious qualities in
every Slav simply because he is more given than
we are to revealing the qualities that are in all
of us. introspection and self -revelation are his
habit; he carries the study of man and fate to a
point that seems morbid to westerners; he is for-
ever gabbling about what he finds in his own soul.
But in the last analysis his verdicts are the imme-
morial and almost universal ones. Surely his res-
ignationism is not a Slavic copyright; all human
philosophies and religions seem doomed to come
to it at last. Once it takes shape as the concept
of Nirvana, the desire for nothingness, the will
to not-will. Again, it is fatalism in this form or
that — Mohammedanism, Agnosticism . . . Cal-
vinism! Yet again, it is the "Out, out, brief can-
dle!" of Shakespeare, the "Eheu fugaces" of Hor-
ace, the "Vanitas vanitatum; omnis vanitas!" of
the Preacher. Or, to make an end, it is millen-
niarism, the theory that the world is going to
blow up tomorrow, or the day after, or two weeks
hence, and that all sweating and striving are thus
useless. Search where you will, near or far, in
ancient or modern times, and you will never find
a first-rate race or an enlightened age, in its mo-
ments of highest reflection, that ever gave more
than a passing bow to optimism. Even Christian-

JOSEPH CONRAD 15

ity, starting out as "glad tidings," has had to take
on protective coloration to survive, and today its
chief professors moan and blubber like Johann in
Herod's rain-barrel. The sanctified are few and
far between. The vast majority of us must suffer
in hell, just as we suffer on earth. The divine
grace, so omnipotent to save, is withheld from us.
Why? There, alas, is your insoluble mystery,
your riddle of the universe ! . . .

This conviction that human life is a seeking
without a finding, that its purpose is impenetrable,
that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless, you will
see written largely in the work of most great cre-
ative artists. It is obviously the final message, if
any message is genuinely to be found there, of the
nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, or, at
any rate, of the three which show any intellectual
content at all. Mark Twain, superficially a hu-
mourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it in
secret, as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal re-
currence : it forced itself through his guard in "The
Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" In
Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts
to a veritable obsession. And what else is there
in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere, Turgenieff, Ib-
sen, Dostoievski, Romain Rolland, Anatole France?
Or in the Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La

16 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Debacle," the whole Rougon-Macquart series?
(The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and par-
ticularly of "Fecondite," turned meliorist and
idealist, and became ludicrous.) Or in the Haupt-
mann of "Fuhrmann Henschel," or in Hardy, or in
Sudermann? (I mean, ofA course, Sudermann the
novelist. Sudermann the dramatist is a mere
mechanician.) . . . The younger men in all coun-
tries, in so far as they challenge the current sen-
timentality at all, seem to move irresistibly toward
the same disdainful skepticism. Consider the last
words of "Riders to the Sea." Or Gorky's "Nach-
tasyl." Or Frank Norris' "McTeague." Or Ste-
phen Crane's "The Blue Hotel." Or the ironical
fables of Dunsany. Or Dreiser's "Jennie Ger-
hardt." Or George Moore's "Sister Teresa."

Conrad, more than any of the other men I have
mentioned, grounds his work firmly upon this sense
of cosmic implacability, this confession of unin-
telligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz,
in "Heart of Darkness," is that it is pointless, that
Kurtz's death is as meaningless as his life, that
the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale
negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the
point of the story of Falk, and that of Almayer, and
of that of Jim. Mr. Follet (he must be an Ameri-
can, and forward-looking!) finds himself, in the

JOSEPH CONRAD 17

end, unable to accept so profound a determinism
unadulterated, and so he injects a gratuitous and
mythical romanticism into it, and hymns Conrad
"as a comrade, one of a company gathered under
the ensign of hope for common war on despair."
With even greater error, William Lyon Phelps ar-
gues that his books "are based on the axiom of the
moral law." * The one notion is as unsound as
the other. Conrad makes war on nothing; he is
pre-eminently not a moralist. He swings, indeed,
as far from revolt and moralizing as is possible,
for he does not even criticize God. His undoubted
comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul
he vivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty,
but of moral agnosticism. He neither protests
nor punishes; he merely smiles and pities. Like
Mark Twain he might well say: "The more I see
of men, the more they amuse me — and the more I
pity them." He is simpatico precisely because of
this ironical commiseration, this infinite disillu-
sionment, this sharp understanding of the narrow
limits of human volition and responsibility ... I
have said that he does not criticize God. One may
even imagine him pitying God . . .

i The Advance of the English Novel. New York, Dodd,
Mead & Co., 1916, p. 215.

18 A BOOK OF PREFACES

§2

But in this pity, I need not add, there is no touch
of sentimentality. No man could be less the ro-
mantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his own
Werthers. No novelist could have smaller like-
ness to the brummagem emotion-squeezers of the
Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and
their naif ethical cocksureness. The thing that
sets off Conrad from these facile fellows, and from
the shallow pseudo-realists who so often coalesce
with them and become indistinguishable from
them, is precisely his quality of irony, and that
irony is no more than a proof of the greater ma-
turity of his personal culture, his essential supe-
riority as a civilized man. It is the old difference
between a Huxley and a Gladstone, a philosophy
that is profound and a philosophy that is merely
comfortable, "Quid est Veritas?" and "Thus saith
the Lord!" He brings into the English fiction of
the day, nor only an artistry that is vastly more
fluent and delicate than the general, but also a
highly unusual sophistication, a quite extraordi-
nary detachment from all petty rages and puerile
certainties. The winds of doctrine, howling all
about him, leave him absolutely unmoved. He

JOSEPH CONRAD 19

belongs to no party and has nothing to teach, save
only a mystery as old as man. In the midst of the
hysterical splutterings and battle-cries of the Kip-
lings and Chestertons, the booming pedagogics of
the Wellses and Shaws, and the giggling at key-
holes of the Bennetts and de Morgans, he stands
apart and almost alone, observing the sardonic
comedy of man with an eye that sees every point
and significance of it, but vouchsafing none of that
sophomoric indignation, that Hyde Park wisdom,
that flabby moralizing which freight and swamp
the modern English novel. "At the centre of his
web," says Arthur Symons, "sits an elemental sar-
casm discussing human affairs with a calm and
cynical ferocity . . . He calls up all the dreams
and illusions by which men have been destroyed
and saved, and lays them mockingly naked . . .
He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden
heroism of every vice and crime. He summons
before him all the injustices that have come to birth
out of ignorance and self-love . . . And in all this
there is no judgment, only an implacable compre-
hension, as of one outside nature, to whom joy
and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and civili-
zation, are equal and indifferent . . ." *

Obviously, no Englishman! No need to explain

i Conrad, in the Forum, May, 1915.

20 A BOOK OF PREFACES

(with something akin to apology) that his name
is really not Joseph Conrad at all, but Teodor
Josef Konrad Karzeniowski, and that he is a Pole
of noble lineage, with a vague touch of the Asiatic
in him. The Anglo-Saxon mind, in these later
days, becomes increasingly incapable of his whole
point of view. Put into plain language, his doc-
trine can only fill it with wonder and fury. That
mind is essentially moral in cut; it is believing,
certain, indignant; it is as incapable of skepticism,
save as a passing coryza of the spirit, as it is of wit,
which is skepticism's daughter. Time was when
this was not true, as Congreve, Pope, Wycherley
and even Thackeray show, but that time was be-
fore the democratic enlightenment, the great intel-
lectual levelling, the emancipation of the chandala.
In these our days the Englishman is an incurable
democrat, and being so he must needs take in with
his mother's milk the vast repertoire of delusions
which go with democracy, and particularly the
master delusion that all human problems, in the
last analysis, are soluble, and that all that is re-
quired for their solution is to take counsel freely,
to listen to wizards, to count votes, to agree upon
legislation. This is the prime and immovable doc-
trine of the mobile vulgus set free; it is the loveli-
est of all the fruits of its defective powers of obser-

JOSEPH CONRAD 21

vation and reasoning, and above all, of its defective
knowledge of demonstrated facts, especially in his-
tory. Take away this notion that there is some
mysterious infallibility in the sense of the major-
ity, this theory that the consensus of opinion is
inspired, and the democratic idea begins to wither;
in fact, it ceases to have any intelligibility at all.
But the notion is not taken away; it is nourished;
it flourishes on its own effluvia. And out of it
spring the two rules which give direction to all
democratic thinking, the first being that no concept
in politics or conduct is valid (or more accurately
respectable), which rises above the comprehension
of the great masses of men, or which violates any
of their inherent prejudices or superstitions, and
the second being that the articulate individual in
the mob takes on some of the authority and inspira-
tion of the mob itself, and that he is thus free to
set himself up as a soothsayer, so long as he does
not venture beyond the aforesaid bounds — in brief,
that one man's opinion, provided it observe the
current decorum, is as good as any other man's.

Practically, of course, this is simply an invita-
tion to quackery. The man of genuine ideas is
hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audience
already agape. The reply to the invitation, in the
domain of applied ethics, is the revived and rein-

22 A BOOK OF PREFACES

forced Sklavmoral that besets all of us of English
speech — the huggermugger morality of timorous,
whining, unintelligent and unimaginative men —
envy turned into law, cowardice sanctified, stupid-
ity made noble, Puritanism. And in the theoret-
ical field there is an even more luxuriant crop of
bosh. Mountebanks almost innumerable tell us
what we should believe and practice, in politics,
religion, philosophy and the arts. England and
the United States, between them, house more creeds
than all the rest of the world together, and they
are more absurd. They rise, they flame, they fall
and go out, but always there are new^ones, always
the latest is worse than the last. What modern
civilization save the Anglo-Saxon could have pro-
duced Christian Science, or the New Thought, or
Billy Sundayism? What other could have yielded
up the mawkish bumptiousness of the Uplift?
What other could accept gravely the astounding
imbecilities of English philanthropy and American
law? The native output of fallacy and sentimen-
tality, in fact, is not enough to satisfy the stupen-
dous craving of the mob unleashed; there must
needs be a constant importation of the aberrant
fancies of other peoples. Let a new messiah leap
up with a new message in any part of the world,
and at once there is a response from the two great

JOSEPH CONRAD 23

democracies. Once it was Tolstoi with a mouldy
asceticism made of catacomb Christianity and se-
nile soul-sickness; again it was Bergson, with a
perfumed quasi-philosophy for the boudoirs of the
faubourgs; yet again came Eucken and Pastor
Wagner, with their middle-class German beeriness
and banality. The list need go no further. It
begins with preposterous Indian swamis and yog-
his (most of them, to do them justice, diligent Jews
from Grand street or the bagnios of Constantino-
ple), and it ends with the fabulous Ibsen of the
symbols (no more the real Ibsen than Christ was a
prohibitionist), the Ellen Key of the new gyneola-
try and the Signorina Montessori of the magical
Method. It was a sure instinct that brought Eu-
sapia Palladino to New York. It was the same
sure instinct that brought Hall Caine.

I have mentioned Ibsen. A glance at the liter-
ature he has spawned in the vulgate is enough to
show how much his falser aspects have intrigued
the Anglo-Saxon mind and how little it has reacted
to his shining skill as a dramatic craftsman — his
one authentic claim upon fame. Read Jennette
Lee's "The Ibsen Secret," * perhaps the most suc-
cessful of all the Ibsen gemaras in English, if you
would know the virulence of the racial appetite for

i New York and London. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907.

24 A BOOK OF PREFACES

. _. -

bogus revelation. And so in all the arts. What-
ever is profound and penetrating we stand off
from; whatever is facile and shallow, particularly
if it reveal a moral or mystical color, we embrace.
Ibsen the first-rate dramatist was rejected with in-
dignation precisely because of his merits — his
sharp observation, his sardonic realism, his unsen-
timental logic. But the moment a meretricious
and platitudinous ethical purpose began to be read
into him — how he protested against it! — he was
straightway adopted into our flabby Kultur. Com-
pare Hauptmann and Brieux, the one a great artist,
the other no more than a raucous journalist.
Brieux's elaborate proofs that two and two are four
have been hailed as epoch-making; one of his worst
plays, indeed, has been presented with all the sol-
emn hocus-pocus of a religious rite. But Haupt-
mann remains almost unknown; even the Nobel
Prize did not give him a vogue. Run the roll:
Maeterlinck and his languishing supernaturalism,
Tagore and his Asiatic wind music, Selma Lagerlof
and her old maid's mooniness, Bernstein, Molner
and company and their out-worn tricks — but I pile
up no more names. Consider one fact: the civili-
zation that kissed Maeterlinck on both cheeks, and
Tagore perhaps even more intimately, has yet to
shake hands with Anatole France. , . .

JOSEPH CONRAD 25

This bemusement by superficial ideas, this neck-
bending to quacks, this endless appetite for sesames
and apocalypses, is depressingly visible in our na-
tive literature, as it is in our native theology, phil-
osophy and politics. "The British and American
mind," says W. L. George,1 "has been long honey-
combed with moral impulse, at any rate since the
Reformation; it is very much what the German
mind was up to the middle of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury." The artist, facing an audience which seems
incapable of differentiating between aesthetic and
ethical values, tends to become a preacher of son-
orous nothings, and the actual moralist-propagan-
dist finds his way into art well greased. No other
people in Christendom produces so vast a crop of
tin-horn haruspices. We have so many Orison
Swett Mardens, Martin Tuppers, Edwin Markhams,
Gerald Stanley Lees, Dr. Frank Cranes and Dr. Syl-
vanus Stalls that their output is enough to supply
the whole planet. We see, too, constantly, how
thin is the barrier separating the chief Anglo-
Saxon novelists and playwrights from the pasture
of the platitudinarian. Jones and Pinero both
made their first strikes, not as the artists they un-
doubtedly are, but as pinchbeck moralists, moan-

i The Intelligence of "Woman. Boston, Little, Brown & Co.,
1916, p. 6-7.

26 A BOOK OF PREFACES

ing over the sad fact that girls are seduced.
Shaw, a highly dexterous dramaturgist, smothers
his dramaturgy in a pifflish iconoclasm that is no
more than a disguise for Puritanism. Bennett and
Wells, competent novelists, turn easily from the
novel to the volume of shoddy philosophizing.
Kipling, with "Kim" behind him, becomes a vo-
ciferous leader-writer of the Daily Mail school,
whooping a pothouse patriotism, hurling hysterical
objurgations at the foe. Even W. L. George, po-
tentially a novelist of sound consideration, drops
his craft for the jehad of the suffragettes. Doyle,
Barrie, Caine, Locke, Barker, Mrs. Ward, Beres-
ford, Hewlett, Watson, Quiller-Couch — one and
all, high and low, they are tempted by the public
demand for sophistry, the ready market for pills.
A Henry Bordeaux, in France, is an exception; in
England he is the rule. The endless thirst to be
soothed with cocksure asseverations, the great mob
yearning to be dosed and comforted, is the undo-
ing, over there, of three imaginative falents out
of five.

And, in America, of nearly five out of five.
Winston Churchill may serve as an example. He
is a literary workman of very decent skill; the na-
tive critics speak of him with invariable respect;
his standing within the craft was shown when he

JOSEPH CONRAD 27

was unanimously chosen first president of the Auth-
ors' League of America. Examine his books in
order. They proceed steadily from studies of
human character and destiny, the proper business
of the novelist, to mere outpourings of social and
economic panaceas, the proper business of leader
writers, chautauquas rabble-rousers and hedge poli-
ticians. "The Celebrity" and "Richard Carvel,"
within their limits, are works of art; "The Inside
of the Cup" is no more than a compendium of
paralogy, as silly and smattering as a speech by
William Jennings Bryan or a shocker by Jane Ad-
dams. Churchill, with the late Jack London to
bear him company, may stand for a large class;
in its lower ranks are such men as Reginald Wright
Kauffman and Will Levington Comfort. Still
more typical of the national taste for moral pur-
pose and quack philosophy are the professional
optimists and eye-dimmers, with their two grand
divisions, the boarding-school romantics and the
Christian Endeavor Society sentimentalists. Of
the former I give you George Barr McCutcheon,
Owen Wister, the late Richard Harding Davis, and
a horde of women — most of them now humanely
translated to the moving pictures. Of the latter I
give you the fair authors of the "glad" books, so
gigantically popular, so lavishly praised in the

28 A BOOK OF PREFACES

newspapers — with the wraith of the later Howells,
the virtuous, kittenish Howells, floating about in
the air above them. No other country can parallel
this literature, either in its copiousness or in its
banality. It is native and peculiar to a civiliza-
tion which erects the smug vanities and certainties
of the ignorant and quack-ridden into a national
way of life. . . .

§3

My business, however, is not with the culture of
Anglo-Saxondom, but only with Conrad's place
therein. That place is isolated and remote; he is
neither of it nor quite in it. In the midst of a
futile meliorism which deceives the more, the more
it soothes, he stands out like some sinister skele-
ton at the feast, regarding the festivities with a
flickering and impenetrable grin. "To read him,"
says Arthur Symons, "is to shudder on the edge of
a gulf, in a silent darkness." There is no need
to be told that he is there almost by accident, that
he came in a chance passerby, a bit uncertain of
the door. It was not an artistic choice that made
him write English instead of French; it was a
choice with its roots in considerations far afield.
But once made, it concerned him no further. In

JOSEPH CONRAD 29

his first book he was plainly a stranger, and all
himself; in his last he is a stranger still — strange
in his manner of speech, strange in his view of life,
strange, above all, in his glowing and gorgeous
artistry, his enthusiasm for beauty per se, his ab-
solute detachment from that heresy which would
make it no more than a servant to some bald and de-
pressing theory of conduct, some axiom of the un-
comprehending. He is, like Dunsany, a pure art-
ist. His work, as he once explained, is not to
edify, to console, to improve or to encourage, but
simply to get upon paper some shadow of his own
eager sense of the wonder and prodigality of life
as men live it in the world, and of its unfathom-
able romance and mystery. "My task," he went
on, "is, by the power of the written word, to make
you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to
make you see. That — and no more, and it is
everything." . . ,1

This detachment from all infra-and-ultra-artistic
purpose, this repudiation of the role of propa-
gandist, this avowal of what Nietzsche was fond
of calling innocence, explains the failure of Con-
rad to fit into the pigeon-holes so laboriously pre-
pared for him by critics who must shelve and
label or be damned. He is too big for any of

i In The New Review, Dec, 1897.

30 A BOOK OF PREFACES

them, and of a shape too strange. He stands
clear, not only of all the schools and factions that
obtain in latter-day English fiction, but also of
the whole stream of English literature since the
Restoration. He is as isolated a figure as George
Moore, and for much the same reason. Both are
exotics, and both, in a very real sense, are public
enemies, for both war upon the philosophies that
caress the herd. Is Conrad the beyond-Kipling, as
the early criticism of him sought to make him?
Nonsense! As well speak of Mark Twain as the
beyond-Petroleum V. Nasby (as, indeed, was ac-
tually done). He is not only a finer artist than
Kipling; he is a quite different kind of artist.
Kipling, within his limits, shows a talent of a
very high order. He is a craftsman of the utmost
deftness. He gets his effects with almost perfect
assurance. Moreover, there is a poet in him; he
known how to reach the emotions. But once his
stories are stripped down to the bare carcass their
emptiness becomes immediately apparent. The
ideas in them are not the ideas of a reflective and
perspicacious man, but simply the ideas of a mob-
orator, a mouther of inanities, a patriot, a school-
girl. Reduce any of them to a simple proposition,
and that proposition, in so far as it is intelligible
at all, will be ridiculous. It is precisely here that

JOSEPH CONRAD 31

Conrad leaps immeasurably ahead. His ideas are
not only sound ; they are acute and unusual. They
plough down into the sub-strata of human motive
and act. They unearth conditions and considera-
tions that lie concealed from the superficial glance.
They get at the primary reactions. In particular
and above all, they combat the conception of man
as a pet and privy councillor of the gods, working
out his own destiny in a sort of vacuum and con-
stantly illumined by infallible revelations of his
duty, and expose him as he is in fact: an organ-
ism infinitely more sensitive and responsive than
other organisms, but still a mere organism in the
end, a brother to the wild things and the protozoa,
swayed by the same inscrutable fortunes, con-
demned to the same inchoate errors and irresolu-
tions, and surrounded by the same terror and dark-
ness . . .

But is the Conrad I here describe simply a new
variety of moralist, differing from the general only
in the drift of the doctrine he preaches? Surely
not. He is no more a moralist than an atheist is
a theologian. His attitude toward all moral sys-
tems and axioms is that of a skeptic who rejects
them unanimously, even including, and perhaps
especially including, those to which, in moments
of aesthetic detachment, he seems to give a formal

32 A BOOK OF PREFACES

and resigned sort of assent. It is this constant
falling back upon "I do not know," this incessant
conversion of the easy logic of romance into the
harsh and dismaying logic of fact, that explains
his failure to succeed as a popular novelist, despite
his skill at evoking emotion, his towering artistic
passion, his power to tell a thumping tale. He is
talked of, he brings forth a mass of punditic criti-
cism, he becomes in a sense the fashion; but it
would be absurd to say that he has made the
same profound impression upon the great class of
normal novel-readers that Arnold Bennett once
made, or H. G. Wells, or William de Morgan in
his brief day, or even such cheap-jacks as Anthony
Hope Hawkins and William J. Locke. His show
fascinates, but his philosophy, in the last analysis,
is unbearable. And in particular it is unbearable
to women. One rarely meets a woman who,
stripped of affection, shows any genuine enthu-
siasm for a Conrad book, or, indeed, any genuine
comprehension of it. The feminine mind, which
rules in English fiction, both as producer and as
consumer, craves inevitably a more confident and
comforting view of the world than Conrad has to
offer. It seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. It
protects itself against the disquieting questioning
of life by pretending that all the riddles have been

JOSEPH CONRAD 33

solved, that each new sage answers them afresh,
that a few simple principles suffice to dispose of
them. Women, like democrats, have to subscribe
to absurdities in order to account for themselves
at allf it is the instinct of self-preservation which
sends them to priests, as to other quacks. This is
not because they are unintelligent, but rather be-
cause they have that sharp and sure sort of intelli-
gence which is instinctive, and which passes under
the name of intuition. It teaches them that the
taboos which surround them, however absurd at
bottom, nevertheless penalize their courage and
curiosity with unescapable dudgeon, and so they
become partisans of the existing order, and, per
corollary, of the existing ethic. They may be men-
aced by phantoms, but at all events these phan-
toms really menace them. A woman who reacted
otherwise than with distrust to such a book as "Vic-
tory" would be as abnormal as a woman who em-
braced "Jenseits von Gut und Bose" or "The In-
estimable Life of the Great Gargantua."
/ As for Conrad, he retaliates by approaching the
' sex somewhat gingerly. His women, in the main,
are no more than soiled and tattered cards in a
game played by the gods. The effort to erect them
into the customary "sympathetic" heroines of fic-
tion always breaks down under the drum fire of

34 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the plain facts. He sees quite accurately, it
seems to me, how vastly the role of women has
been exaggerated, how little they amount to in the
authentic struggle of man. His heroes are moved
by avarice, by ambition, by rebellion, by fear, by
that "obscure inner necessity" which passes for
nobility or the sense of duty — never by that puer-
ile passion which is the mainspring of all mascu-
line acts and aspirations in popular novels and on
the stage. If they yield to amour at all, it is only
at the urging of some more powerful and character-
istic impulse, e.g., a fantastic notion of chivalry, as
in the case of Heyst, or the thirst for dominion, as in
the case of Kurtz. The one exception is offered
by Razumov — and Razumov is Conrad's picture
of a flabby fool, of a sentimentalist destroyed by
his sentimentality. Dreiser has shown much the
same process in Witla and Cowperwood, but he is
less free from the conventional obsession than,
Conrad ; he takes a love affair far more naively, and
hence far more seriously.

I used to wonder why Conrad never tackled a
straight-out story of adultery under Christianity,
the standard matter of all our more pretentious
fiction and drama. I was curious to see what his
ethical agnosticism would make of it. The con-
clusion I came to at first was that his failure

JOSEPH CONRAD 35

marked the limitations of his courage — in brief,
that he hesitated to go against the orthodox axioms
and assumptions in the department where they were
most powerfully maintained. But it seems to me
now that his abstinence has not been the fruit of
timidity, but of disdain. He has shied at the hy-
pothesis, not at its implications. His whole work,
in truth, is a destructive criticism of the prevailing
notion that such a story is momentous and worth
telling. The current gyneolatry is as far outside
his scheme of things as the current program of re-
wards and punishments, sins and virtues, causes
and effects. He not only sees clearly that the des-
tiny and soul of man are not moulded by petty
jousts of sex, as the prophets of romantic love
would have us believe; he is so impatient of the
fallacy that he puts it as far behind him as possi-
ble, and sets his conflicts amid scenes that it cannot
penetrate, save as a palpable absurdity. Love, in
his stories, is either a feeble phosphorescence or
a gigantic grotesquerie. In "Heart of Darkness,"
perhaps, we get his typical view of it. Over all
the frenzy and horror of the tale itself floats the
irony of the trusting heart back in Brussels. Here
we have his measure of the master sentimentality
of them all. . . .

36 A BOOK OF PREFACES

§4

As for Conrad the literary craftsman, opposing
him for the moment to Conrad the showman of the
human comedy, the quality that all who write about
him seem chiefly to mark in him is his scorn of
conventional form, his tendency to approach his
story from two directions at once, his frequent
involvement in apparently inextricable snarls of
narrative, sub-narrative and sub-sub-narrative.
"Lord Jim," for example, starts out in the third
person, presently swings into an exhaustive psycho-
logical discussion by the mythical Marlow, then
goes into a brisk narrative at second (and some-
times at third) hand, and finally comes to a halt
upon an unresolved dissonance, a half -heard chord
of the ninth: "And that's the end. He passes
away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, for-
gotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic."
"Falk" is also a story within a story; this time the
narrator is "one who had not spoken before, a man
over fifty." In "Amy Foster" romance is filtered
through the prosaic soul of a country doctor; it is
almost as if a statistician told the tale of Horatius
at the bridge. In "Under Western Eyes" the ob-
fuscation is achieved by "a teacher of languages,"
endlessly lamenting his lack of the "high gifts of

JOSEPH CONRAD 37

imagination and expression." In "Youth" and
"Heart of Darkness" the chronicler and specu-
lator is the shadowy Marlow, a "cloak to goe in-
bisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance"
there are two separate stories, imperfectly welded
together. Elsewhere there are hesitations, goings
back, interpolations, interludes in the Socratic
manner. And almost always there is heaviness
in the getting under weigh. In "Heart of Dark-
ness" we are on the twentieth page before we see
the mouth of the great river, and in "Falk" we
are on the twenty-fourth before we get a glimpse of
Falk. "Chance" is nearly half done before the
drift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Al-
mayer's Folly" we are thrown into the middle of
a story, and do not discover its beginning until we
come to "An Outcast of the Islands," a later book.
As in structure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to ex-
plain, to speculate, to look about. Whole chap-
ters concern themselves with detailed discussions
of motives, with exchanges of views, with generali-
zations abandoned as soon as they are made. Even
the author's own story, "A Personal Record" (in
the English edition, "Some Reminiscences") starts
near the end, and then goes back, halting tortu-
ously, to the beginning.

In the eyes of orthodox criticism, of course, this

38 A BOOK OF PREFACES

is a grave fault. The Kipling- Wells style of swift,
shouldering, button-holing writing has accustomed
readers and critics alike to a straight course and
a rapid tempo. Moreover, it has accustomed them
to a forthright certainty and directness of state-
ment; they expect an author to account for his
characters at once, and on grounds instantly com-
prehensible. This omniscience is a part of the
prodigality of moral theory that I have been dis-
cussing. An author who knows just what is the
matter with the world may be quite reasonably ex-
pected to know just what is the matter with his
hero. Neither sort of assurance, I need not say,
is to be found in Conrad. He is an inquirer, not
a law-giver; an experimentalist, not a doctor. One
constantly derives from his stories the notion that
he is as much puzzled by his characters as the
reader is — that he, too, is feeling his way among
shadowy evidences. The discoveries that we
make, about Lord Jim, about Nostromo or about
Kurtz, come as fortuitously and as unexpectedly
as the discoveries we make about the real figures
of our world. The picture is built up bit by bit;
it is never flashed suddenly and completely as by
best-seller calciums; it remains a bit dim at the
end. But in that very dimness, so tantalizing and
yet so revealing, lies two-thirds of Conrad's art, or

JOSEPH CONRAD 39

his craft, or his trick, or whatever you choose to call
it. What he shows us is blurred at the edges, but
so is life itself blurred at the edges. We see least
clearly precisely what is nearest to us, and is hence
most real to us. A man may profess to understand
the President of the United States, but he seldom
alleges, even to himself, that he understands his
own wife.

In the character and in its reactions, in the act
and in the motive: always that tremulousness, that
groping, that confession of final bewilderment.
"He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at
heart . . ." And the cloud enshrouds the inner
man as well as the outer, the secret springs of his
being as well as the overt events of his life. "His
meanest creatures," says Arthur Symons, "have in
them a touch of honour, of honesty, or of heroism;
his heroes have always some error, weakness, or
mistake, some sin or crime, to redeem." What is
Lord Jim, scoundrel and poltroon or gallant
knight? What is Captain MacWhirr, hero or sim-
ply ass? What is Falk, beast or idealist? One
leaves "Heart of Darkness" in that palpitating con-
fusion which is shot through with intense curiosity.
Kurtz is at once the most abominable of rogues
and the most fantastic of dreamers. It is impos-
sible to differentiate between his vision and his

40 A BOOK OF PREFACES

crimes, though all that we look upon as order in
the universe stands between them. In Dreiser's
novels there is the same anarchy of valuations,
and it is chiefly responsible for the rage he excites
in the unintelligent. The essential thing about
Cowperwood is that he is two diverse beings at
once ; a puerile chaser of women and a great artist,
a guinea pig and half a god. The essential thing
about Carrie Meeber is that she remains innocent
in the midst of her contaminations, that the virgin
lives on in the kept woman. This is not the art
of fiction as it is conventionally practised and
understood. It is not explanation, labelling, as-
surance, moralizing. In the cant of newspaper
criticism, it does not "satisfy." But the great
artist is never one who satisfies in that feeble
sense; he leaves the business to mountebanks who
do it better. "My purpose," said Ibsen, "is not
to answer questions; it is to ask them." The spec-
tator must bring something with him beyond the
mere faculty of attention. If, coming to Conrad,
he cannot, he is at the wrong door.

§5

Conrad's predilection for barbarous scenes and
the more bald and shocking sort of drama has an

JOSEPH CONRAD 41

obviously autobiographical basis. His own road
ran into strange places in the days of his youth.
He moved among men who were menaced by all
the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost un-
checked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men,
without any appreciable barriers, whether of law,
of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them.
The struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well
nigh as purely physical among human beings as
among the carnivora of the jungle. Some of his
stories, and among them his very best, are plainly
little more than transcripts of his own experience.
He himself is the enchanted boy of "Youth"; he
is the ship-master of "Heart of Darkness" ; he hov-
ers in the background of all the island books and
is visibly present in most of the tales of the sea.

And what he got out of that early experience was
more than a mere body of reminiscence; it was a
scheme of valuations. He came to his writing
years with a sailor's disdain for the trifling haz-
ards and emprises of market places and drawing
rooms, and it shows itself whenever he sets pen
to paper. A conflict, it would seem, can make
no impression upon him save it be colossal. When
his men combat, not nature, but other men, they
carry over into the business the gigantic method of
sailors battling with a tempest. "The Secret

42 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Agent" and "Under Western Eyes" fill the dull
back streets of London and Geneva with pursuits,
homicides and dynamitings. "Nostromo" is a
long record of treacheries, butcheries and carnali-
ties. "A Point of Honor" is coloured by the sense-
less, insatiable ferocity of Gobineau's "Renais-
sance." "Victory" ends with a massacre of all
the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of
blood. Whenever he turns from the starker lusts
to the pale passions of man under civilization, Con-
rad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly infirm
piece of writing — a second rate magazine story.
One concludes at once that the author himself does
not believe in it. "The Inheritors" is worse; it be-
comes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificial-
ity, a bore. It is impossible to imagine the chief
characters of the Conrad gallery in such scenes.
Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to social
tradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war,
Lena Hermann seduced by the fashions, Almayer
a candidate for office! As well think of Huckle-
berry Finn at Harvard, or Tom Jones practising
law.

These things do not interest Conrad, chiefly, I
suppose, because he does not understand them.
His concern, one may say, is with the gross anatomy
of passion, not with its histology. He seeks to de-

JOSEPH CONRAD 43

pict emotion, not in its ultimate attenuation, but
in its fundamental innocence and fury. Inevi-
tably, his materials are those of what we call melo-
drama; he is at one, in the bare substance of his
tales, with the manufacturers of the baldest shock-
ers. But with a difference! — a difference, to wit,
of approach and comprehension, a difference abys-
mal and revolutionary. He lifts melodrama to
the dignity of an important business, and makes
it a means to an end that the mere shock-monger
never dreams of. In itself, remember, all this
up-roar and blood-letting is not incredible, nor
even improbable. The world, for all the pressure
of order, is still full of savage and stupendous con-
flicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes in-
describable and adventures almost unimaginable.
One cannot reasonably ask a novelist to deny them
or to gloss over them; all one may demand of him
is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render
them understandable — that he logically account for
them, that he give them plausibility by showing
their genesis in intelligible motives and colourable
events.

The objection to the conventional melodramatist
is that he fails to do this. It is not that his efforts
are too florid, but that his causes are too puny.
For all his exuberance of fancy, he seldom shows

44 A BOOK OF PREFACES

us a downright impossible event ; what he does con-
stantly show us is an inadequate and hence uncon-
vincing motive. In a cheap theatre we see a bad
actor, imperfectly disguised as a viscount, bind a
shrieking young woman to the railroad tracks, with
an express train approaching. Why does he do it?
The melodramatist offers a double-headed reason,
the first part being that the viscount is an amalgam
of Satan and Don Juan and the second being that
the young woman prefers death to dishonour.
Both parts are absurd. Our eyes show us at once
that the fellow is far more the floorwalker, the head
barber, the Knight of Pythias than either the Satan
or the Don Juan, and our experience of life tells us
that young women in yellow wigs do not actually
rate their virginity so dearly. But women are un-
doubtedly done to death in this way — not every day,
perhaps, but now and then. Men bind them, trains
run over them, the newspapers discuss the crime,
the pursuit of the felon, the ensuing jousting of
the jurisconsults. Why, then? The true answer,
when it is forthcoming at all, is always much more
complex than the melodramatist's answer. It may
be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend
all the normal laws of cause and effect. It may be
an answer made up largely, or even wholly, of the
fantastic, the astounding, the unearthly reasons of

JOSEPH CONRAD 45

lunacy. That is the chief, if not the only differ-
ence between melodrama and reality. The events
of the two may be, and often are identical. It is
only in their underlying network of causes that they
are dissimilar and incommensurate.

Here, in brief, you have the point of essential
distinction between the stories of Conrad, a supreme
artist in fiction, and the trashy confections of the
literary artisans — e.g., Sienkiewicz, Dumas, Lew
Wallace, and their kind. Conrad's materials, at
bottom, are almost identical with those of the arti-
sans. He, too, has his chariot races, his castaways,
his carnivals of blood in the arena. He, too, takes
us through shipwrecks, revolutions, assassinations,
gaudy heroisms, abominable treacheries. But
always he illuminates the nude and amazing event
with shafts of light which reveal not only the last
detail of its workings, but also the complex of ori-
gins and inducements behind it. Always, he
throws about it a probability which, in the end, be-
comes almost inevitability. His "Nostromo," for
example, in its externals, is a mere tale of South
American turmoil; its materials are those of "Sol-
diers of Fortune." But what a difference in
method, in point of approach, in inner content!
Davis was content to show the overt act, scarcely
accounting for it at all, and then only in terms of

46 A BOOK OF PREFACES

conventional romance. Conrad penetrates to the
motive concealed in it, the psychological spring and
basis of it, the whole fabric of weakness, habit and
aberration underlying it. The one achieved an
agreeable romance, and an agreeable romance only.
The other achieves an extraordinarily brilliant and
incisive study of the Latin-American temperament
— a full length exposure of the perverse passions
and incomprehensible ideals which provoke pre-
sumably sane men to pursue one another
like wolves, and of the reactions of that in-
cessant pursuit upon the men themselves, and
upon their primary ideas, and upon the institutions
under which they live. I do not say that Conrad is
always exhaustive in his explanations, or that he is
accurate. In the first case I know that he often is
not, in the second case I do not know whether he is
or he isn't. But I do say that, within the scope of
his vision, he is wholly convincing; that the men
and women he sets into his scene show ineluctably
vivid and persuasive personality; that the theories
he brings forward to account for their acts are in-
telligible; that the effects of those acts, upon actors
and immediate spectators alike, are such as might
be reasonably expected to issue; that the final im-
pression is one of searching and indubitable
veracity. One leaves "Nostromo" with a memory

JOSEPH CONRAD 47

as intense and lucid as that of a real experience.
The thing is not mere photography. It is interpre-
tative painting at its highest.

In all his stories you will find this same concern
with the inextricable movement of phenomena and
noumena between event and event, this same cur-
iosity as to first causes and ultimate effects. Some-
times, as in "The Point of Honor" and "The End
of the Tether," he attempts to work out the obscure
genesis, in some chance emotion or experience, of
an extraordinary series of transactions. At other
times, as in "Typhoon," "Youth," "Falk" and "The
Shadow Line," his endeavour is to determine the
effect of some gigantic and fortuitous event upon the
mind and soul of a given man. At yet other times,
as in "Almayer's Folly," "Lord Jim" and "Under
Western Eyes," it is his aim to show how cause and
effect are intricately commingled, so that it is diffi-
cult to separate motive from consequence, and con-
sequence from motive. But always it is the proc-
ess of mind rather than the actual act that interests
him. Always he is trying to penetrate the actor's
mask and interpret the actor's frenzy. It is this
concern with the profounder aspects of human na-
ture, this bold grappling with the deeper and more
recondite problems of his art, that gives him con-
sideration as a first-rate artist. He differs from

48 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the common novelists of his time as a Beethoven
differs from a Mendelssohn. Some of them are
quite his equals in technical skill, and a few of
them, notably Bennett and Wells, often show an ac-
tual superiority, but when it comes to that graver
business which underlies all mere virtuosity, he is
unmistakably the superior of the whole corps of
them.

This superiority is only the more vividly revealed
by the shop-worn shoddiness of most of his ma-
terials. He takes whatever is nearest to hand, out
of his own rich experience or out of the common
store of romance. He seems to disdain the petty
advantages which go with the invention of novel
plots, extravagant characters and unprecedented
snarls of circumstance. All the classical doings of
anarchists are to be found in "The Secret Agent";
one has heard them copiously credited, of late, to
German spies. "Youth," as a story, is no more
than an orthodox sea story, and W. Clark Russell
contrived better ones. In "Chance" we have a stern
father at his immemorial tricks. In "Victory"
there are villains worthy of Jack B. Yeats' melo-
dramas of the Spanish Main. In "Nostromo" we
encounter the whole stock company of Richard
Harding Davis and 0. Henry. And in "Under
Western Eyes" the protagonist is one who finds his

JOSEPH CONRAD 49

love among the women of his enemies — a situation
at the heart of all the military melodramas ever
written.

But what Conrad makes of that ancient and fly-
blown stuff, that rubbish from the lumber room of
the imagination! Consider, for example, "Under
Western Eyes," by no means the best of his stories.
The plot is that of "Shenandoah" and "Held by the
Enemy" — but how brilliantly it is endowed with a
new significance, how penetratingly its remotest
currents are followed out, how magnificently it is
made to fit into that colossal panorama of Holy
Russia ! It is always this background, this complex
of obscure and baffling influences, this drama under
the drama, that Conrad spends his skill upon, and
not the obvious commerce of the actual stage. It is
not the special effect that he seeks, but the general
effect. It is not so much man the individual that
interests him, as the shadowy accumulation of tra-
ditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes the
individual's destiny. Here, true enough, we have
a full-length portrait of Razumov, glowing with life.
But here, far more importantly, we also have an
amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the
Russian character, with all its confused mingling
of Western realism and Oriental fogginess, its crazy
tendency to go shooting off into the spaces of an in-

50 A BOOK OF PREFACES

comprehensible metaphysic, its general transcend-
ence of all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold
to be true of human motive and human act. Russia
is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of
the tale. In the island stories we have the same
elaborate projection of the East, of its fantastic bar-
barism, of brooding Asia. And in the sea stories
we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction,
a vast and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol
at once of man's eternal striving and of his eternal
impotence. Here, at last, the colossus has found its
interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The
Nigger of the Narcissus," and, above all, in "The
Mirror of the Sea," a poetic evocation of the sea's
stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outside the
ancient sagas. Conrad describes it with a degree
of graphic skill that is superb and incomparable.
He challenges at once the pictorial vigour of Hugo
and the aesthetic sensitiveness of Lafcadio Hearn,
and surpasses them both. And beyond this mere
dazzling visualization, he gets into his pictures an
overwhelming sense of that vast drama of which
they are no more than the flat, lifeless representation
— of that inexorable and uncompassionate struggle
which is life itself. The sea to him is a living
thing, an omnipotent and unfathomable thing, al-
most a god. He sees it as the Eternal Enemy, de-

JOSEPH CONRAD 51

ceitful in its caresses, sudden in its rages, relent-
less in its enmities, and forever a mystery.

§6

Conrad's first novel, "Almayer's Folly," was
printed in 1895. He tells us in "A Personal Rec-
ord" that it took him seven years to write it — seven
years of pertinacious effort, of trial and error, of
learning how to write. He was, at this time thirty-
eight years old. Seventeen years before, landing
in England to fit himself for the British merchant
service, he had made his first acquaintance with the
English language. The interval had been spent
almost continuously at sea — in the Eastern islands,
along the China coast, on the Congo and in the
South Atlantic. How he hesitated between French
and English is a story often told. Flaubert, in
those days, was his idol, and there is reason to be-
lieve that he actually sketched parts of "Almayer's
Folly" in French, but in the end the speech of his
daily business won, and English literature reaped
the greatest of all its usufructs from English sea
power. To this day there are marks of his vacilla-
tion in his style. His periods, more than once, have
an inept and foreign smack. In fishing for the
right phrase one sometimes feels that he finds a

52 A BOOK OF PREFACES

French phrase, or even a Polish phrase, and that it
loses something by being done into English.

The credit for discovering "Almayer's Folly,"
as the publishers say, belongs to Edward Garnett,
then a reader for T. Fisher Unwin. The book was
brought out modestly and seems to have received
little attention. The first edition, it would appear,
ran to no more than a thousand copies; at all events,
specimens of it are now very hard to find, and col-
lectors pay high prices for them. When "An Out-
cast of the Islands" followed, a year later, a few
alert readers began to take notice of the author,
and one of them was Sir (then Mr.) Hugh Clif-
ford, a former Governor of the Federated Malay
States and himself the author of several excellent
books upon the Malay. Clifford gave Conrad en-
couragement privately and talked him up in liter-
ary circles, but the majority of English critics re-
mained unaware of him. After an interval of two
years, during which he struggled between his desire
to write and the temptation to return to the sea, he
published "The Nigger of the Narcissus." ' It
made a fair success of esteem, but still there was
no recognition of the author's true stature. Then
followed "Tales of Unrest" and "Lord Jim," and

i Printed in the United States as Children of the Sea, but
now restored to its original title.

JOSEPH CONRAD 53

after them the feeblest of all the Conrad books,
"The Inheritors," written in collaboration with
Ford Madox Hueffer. It is easy to see in this col-
laboration, and no less in the character of the book,
an indication of irresolution, and perhaps even of
downright loss of hope. But success, in fact, was
just around the corner. In 1902 came "Youth,"
and straightway Conrad was the lion of literary Lon-
don. The chorus of approval that greeted it was
almost a roar; all sorts of critics and reviewers,
from H. G. Wells to W. L. Courtney, and from
John Galsworthy to W. Robertson Nicholl, took a
hand. Writing home to the New York Times, W.
L. Alden reported that he had "not heard one dis-
senting voice in regard to the book," but that the
praise it received "was unanimous," and that the
newspapers and literary weeklies rivalled one an-
other "in their efforts to express their admiration
for it."

This benign whooping, however, failed to awaken
the enthusiasm of the mass of novel-readers and
brought but meagre orders from the circulating li-
braries. "Typhoon" came upon the heels of
"Youth," but still the sales of the Conrad books
continued small and the author remained in very
uncomfortable circumstances. Even after four or
five years he was still so poor that he was glad to

54 A BOOK OF PREFACES

accept a modest pension from the British Civil
List. This official recognition of his genius, when
it came at last, seems to have impressed the public,
characteristically enough, far more than his books
themselves had done, and the foundations were thus
laid for that wider recognition of his genius which
now prevails. But getting him on his legs was
slow work, and such friends as Hueffer, Clifford
and Galsworthy had to do a lot of arduous log-
rolling. Even after the splash made by "Youth"
his manuscripts continued to be hawked about from
publisher to publisher. His first eleven books show
six different imprints; it was not until his twelfth
that he settled down to a publisher. His American
editions tell an even stranger story. The first six
of them were brought out by six different publish-
ers ; the first eight by no less than seven. Even to-
day, though he has a regular American publisher
at last, he is once more on the town, so to speak,
in England, and some of his books are out of print.
Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of that Amer-
ican publisher (who labours for Gene Stratton-Por-
ter and Gerald Stanley Lee in the same manner)
Conrad has been forced upon the public notice in
the United States, and it is the fashion among all
who pretend to aesthetic consciousness to read him,
or, at all events, to talk about him. His books have

JOSEPH CONRAD 55

been brought together in a uniform edition for the
newly intellectual, bound in blue leather, like the
"complete library sets" of Kipling, 0. Henry, Guy
de Maupassant and Paul de Koch. The more liter-
ary newspapers print his praises; he is hymned
by professorial critics as a prophet of virtue; his
genius is certificated by such diverse authorities as
Hildegarde Hawthorne and Louis Joseph Vance; I
myself sit on a vague Conrad Committee, along with
Booth Tarkington, David Belasco, Irvin Cobb, Wal-
ter Pritchard Eaton and Hamlin Garland — surely
an astounding posse of literati! Moreover, Conrad
himself shows a disposition to reach out for a wider
audience. His "Victory," first published in Mun-
sey's Magazine, revealed obvious efforts to be in-
telligible to the general. A few more turns of the
screw and it might have gone into the Saturday-
Evening Post, between serials by Harris Dickson
and Rex Beach.

Meanwhile, in the shadow of this painfully grow-
ing celebrity as a novelist, Conrad takes on con-
deration as a bibelot, and the dealers in first edi-
tions probably make more profit out of some of his
books than ever he has made himself. His manu-
scripts are cornered, I believe, by an eminent
collector of literary curiosities in New York, who
seems to have a contract with the novelist to take

56 A BOOK OF PREFACES

them as fast as they are produced — perhaps the
only arrangement of the sort in literary history.
His first editions begin to bring higher premiums
than those of any other living author. Considering
the fact that the oldest of them is less than twenty-
five years old, they probably set new records for
the trade. Even the latest in date are eagerly
sought, and it is not uncommon to see an English
edition of a Conrad book sold at an advance in
New York within a month of its publication.1

As I hint, however, there is not much reason to
believe that this somewhat extravagant fashion is
based upon any genuine liking, or any very wide-

i Here are some actual prices from booksellers' catalogues:

1914-1915 1916 1917

Almayer's Folly (1895) $12. $24. $25.

An Outcast of the Islands (1896) . . 11.50 20. 25.

The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898) 7.50 20. 20.

Tales of Unrest (1898) 12.50 20. 25.

Lord Jim (1900) 7.50 22.50 25.

The Inheritors (1901) 12. 20. 30.

Youth (1902) 5. 7.50 15.

Typhoon (1903) 4. 5.50 15.

Romance (1903) 5. 7.50 9.

Nostromo (1904) 2.50 4.50 5.

The Mirror of the Sea (1906) 5. 11. 15.

A Set of Six (1908) 3. 7.50 10.

Under Western Eyes (1911) 4.50 4.50 5.

Some Reminiscences (1912) 4.50 9. 12.50

Chance (1913) 2. 5. 15.

Victory (1915) 2. 2.50 4.

JOSEPH CONRAD 57

spread understanding. The truth is that, for all
the adept tub-thumping of publishers, Conrad's
sales still fall a good deal behind those of even the
most modest of best-seller manufacturers, and that
the respect with which his successive volumes are
received is accompanied by enthusiasm in a rela-
tively narrow circle only. A clan of Conrad fa-
natics exists, and surrounding it there is a body of
readers who read him because it is the intellectual
thing to do, and who talk of him because talking of
him is expected. But beyond that he seems to make
little impression. When "Victory" was printed in
Munseys Magazine it was a failure; no other single
novel, indeed, contributed more toward the aban-
donment of the policy of printing a complete novel
in each issue. The other popular magazines show
but small inclination for Conrad manuscripts.
Some time ago his account of a visit to Poland in
war-time was offered on the American market by an
English author's agent. At the start a price of
$2,500 was put upon it, but after vainly inviting
buyers for a couple of months it was finally dis-
posed of to a literary newspaper which seldom
spends so much as $2,500, I daresay, for a whole
month's supply of copy.

In the United States, at least, novelists are made
and unmade, not by critical majorities, but by

58 A BOOK OF PREFACES

women, male and female. The art of fiction
among us, as Henry James once said, "is almost
exclusively feminine." In the books of such a
man as William Dean Howells it is difficult to find
a single line that is typically and exclusively mas-
culine. One could easily imagine Edith Wharton,
or Mrs. Watts, or even Agnes Repplier, writing all
of them. When a first-rate novelist emerges from
obscurity it is almost always by some fortuitous
plucking of the dexter string. "Sister Carrie," for
example, has made a belated commercial success,
not because its dignity as a human document is
understood, but because it is mistaken for a sad
tale of amour, not unrelated to "The Woman Thou
Gavest Me" and "Dora Thorne." In Conrad there
is no such sweet bait for the fair and sentimental.
The sedentary multipara, curled up in her boudoir
on a rainy afternoon, finds nothing to her taste in
his grim tales. The Conrad philosophy is harsh,
unyielding, repellent. The Conrad heroes are
nearly all boors and ruffians. Their very love-mak-
ing has something sinister and abhorrent in it; one
cannot imagine them in the moving pictures, played
by tailored beauties with long eye-lashes. More, I
venture that the censors would object to them, even
disguised as floor-walkers. Surely that would be
a besotted board which would pass the irregular

JOSEPH CONRAD 59

amours of Lord Jim, the domestic brawls of Al-
mayer, the revolting devil's mass of Kurtz, Falk's
disgusting feeding in the Southern Ocean, or the
butchery on Heyst's island. Stevenson's "Treasure
Island" has been put upon the stage, but "An Out-
cast of the Islands" would be as impossible there as
"Barry Lyndon" or "La Terre." The world fails
to breed actors for such roles, or stage managers
to penetrate such travails of the spirit, or audiences
for the revelation thereof.

With the Conrad cult, so discreetly nurtured out
of a Barabbasian silo, there arises a considerable
Conrad literature, most of it quite valueless.
Huneker's essay, in "Ivory, Apes and Peacocks," *
gets little beyond the obvious; William Lyon
Phelps, in "The Advance of the English Novel,"
achieves only a meagre judgment; 2 Frederic Taber
Cooper tries to estimate such things as "The
Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes" in terms
of the Harvard enlightenment; 3 John Galsworthy
wastes himself upon futile comparisons ; 4 even Sir
Hugh Clifford, for all his quick insight, makes ir-
relevant objections to Conrad's principles of Malay

i New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1915, pp. 1-21.

2 New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916, pp. 192-217.

3 Some English Story Tellers a A Book of the Younger Nov-
elists; New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1912, pp. 1-30.

4 A Disquisition on Conrad, Fortnightly Review, April, 1908.

60 A BOOK OF PREFACES

psychology.1 Who cares? Conrad is his own
God, and creates his own Malay! The best of the
existing studies of Conrad, despite certain senti-
mentalities arising out of youth and race, is in the
little book of Wilson Follet, before mentioned.
The worst is in the official biography by Richard
Curie,2 for which Conrad himself obtained a pub-
lisher and upon which his imprimatur may be thus
assumed to lie. If it does, then its absurdities are
nothing new, for we all know what a botch Ibsen
made of accounting for himself. But, even so, the
assumption stretches the probabilities more than
once. Surely it is hard to think of Conrad put-
ting "Lord Jim" below "Chance" and "The Secret
Agent" on the ground that it "raises a fierce moral
issue." Nothing, indeed, could be worse nonsense
— save it be an American critic's doctrine that "Con-
rad denounces pessimism." "Lord Jim" no more
raises a moral issue than "The Titan." It is, if
anything, a devastating exposure of a moral issue.
Its villain is almost heroic; its hero, judged by his
peers, is a scoundrel. . . .

Hugh Walpole, himself a competent novelist, does

1 The Genius of Mr. Joseph Conrad, North American Re-
view, June, 1904.

2 Joseph Conrad : A Study ; New York, Doubleday, Page &
Co., 1914.

JOSEPH CONRAD 61

far better in his little volume, "Joseph Conrad." '
In its brief space he is unable to examine all of the
books in detail, but he at least manages to get
through a careful study of Conrad's method, and
his professional skill and interest make it valuable.

There is a notion that judgments of living artists
are impossible. They are bound to be corrupted,
we are told, by prejudice, false perspective, mob
emotion, error. The question whether this or that
man is great or small is one which only posterity
can answer. A silly begging of the question, for
doesn't posterity also make mistakes? Shake-
speare's ghost has seen two or three posterities,
beautifully at odds. Even today, it must notice a
difference in flitting from London to Berlin. The
shade of Milton has been tricked in the same way.
So, also, has Johann Sebastien Bach's. It needed
a Mendelssohn to rescue it from Coventry — and
now Mendelssohn himself, once so shining a light,
is condemned to the shadows in his turn. We are
not dead yet; we are here, and it is now. There-
fore, let us at least venture, guess, opine.

My own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of

i Joseph Conrad; London, Nisbet & Co. (1916).

62 A BOOK OF PREFACES

living fiction that I know, is that Conrad's figure
stands out from the field like the Alps from the
Piedmont plain. He not only has no masters in the
novel; he has scarcely a colourable peer. Perhaps
Thomas Hardy and Anatole France — old men both,
their work behind them. But who else? James
is dead. Meredith is dead. So is George Moore,
though he lingers on. So are all the Russians of
the first rank; Andrieff, Gorki and their like are
light cavalry. In Sudermann, Germany has a
writer of short stories of very high calibre, but
where is the German novelist to match Conrad?
Clara Viebig? Thomas Mann? Gustav Frens-
sen? Arthur Schnitzler? Surely not! As for
the Italians, they are either absurd tear-squeezers
or more absurd harlequins. As for the Spaniards
and the Scandinavians, they would pass for gen-
iuses only in Suburbia. In America, setting aside
an odd volume here and there, one can discern only
Dreiser — and of Dreiser's limitations I shall dis-
course anon. There remains England. England
has the best second-raters in the world; nowhere
else is the general level of novel writing so high;
nowhere else is there a corps of journeyman novel-
ists comparable to Wells, Bennett, Benson, Walpole,
Beresford, George, Galsworthy, Hichens, De Mor-
gan, Miss Sinclair, Hewlett and company. They

JOSEPH CONRAD 63

have a prodigious facility; they know how to write;
even the least of them is, at all events, a more com-
petent artisan than, say, Dickens, or Bulwer-Lytton,
or Sienkiewicz, or Zola. But the literary grande
passion is simply not in them. They get nowhere
with their suave and interminable volumes. Their
view of the world and its wonders is narrow and
superficial. They are, at bottom, no more than
clever quacks.
• ^ As Galsworthy has said, Conrad lifts himself
r immeasurably above them all. One might well call
him, if the term had not been cheapened into cant,
a cosmic artist. His mind works upon a colossal
scale; he conjures up the general out of the par-
ticular. What he sees and describes in his books
is not merely this man's aspiration or that woman's
destiny, but the overwhelming sweep and devasta-
tion of universal forces, the great central drama
that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic
struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupid-
ity and obscene joking of the gods. "In the novels
of Conrad," says Galsworthy, "nature is first, man
is second." But not a mute, a docile second ! He
may think, as Walpole argues, that "life is too
strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons
of men," but he does not think that they are too
weak and poor in spirit to challenge it. It is the

64 A BOOK OF PREFACES

challenging that engrosses him, and enchants him,
and raises up the magic of his wonder. It is as
futile, in the end, as Hamlet's or Faust's — but still
a gallant and a gorgeous adventure, a game up-
roariously worth the playing, an enterprise "in-
scrutable . . . and excessively romantic." . . .
If you want to get his measure, read "Youth" or
V "Falk" or "Heart of Darkness," and then try to
read the best of Kipling. I think you will come to
some understanding, by that simple experiment, of
the difference between an adroit artisan's bag of
tricks and the lofty sincerity and passion of a first-
rate artist.

II. THEODORE DREISER

II

THEODORE DREISER

$ 1

OUT of the desert of American fictioneering,
so populous and yet so dreary, Dreiser
stands up — a phenomenon unescapably
visible, but disconcertingly hard to explain. What
forces combined to produce him in the first place,
and how has he managed to hold out so long against
the prevailing blasts — of disheartening misunder-
standing and misrepresentation, of Puritan suspi-
cion and opposition, of artistic isolation, of com-
mercial seduction? There is something downright
heroic in the way the man has held his narrow and
perilous ground, disdaining all compromise, un-
moved by the cheap success that lies so inviting
around the corner. He has faced, in his day, al-
most every form of attack that a serious artist can
conceivably encounter, and yet all of them together
have scarcely budged him an inch. He still plods
along in the laborious, cheerless way he first
marked out for himself; he is quite as undaunted
by baited praise as by bludgeoning, malignant
abuse; his later novels are, if anything, more un-

67

68 A BOOK OF PREFACES

yieldingly dreiserian than his earliest. As one
who has long sought to entice him in this direction
or that, fatuously presuming to instruct him in what
would improve him and profit him, I may well hear
a reluctant and resigned sort of testimony to his
gigantic steadfastness. It is almost as if any
change in his manner, any concession to what is
usual and esteemed, any amelioration of his blind,
relendess exercises of force majeure, were a physi-
cal impossibility. One feels him at last to be au-
thentically no more than a helpless instrument (or
victim) of that inchoate flow of forces which he him-
self is so fond of depicting as at once the answer to
the riddle of life, and a riddle ten times more vex-
ing and accursed.

And his origins, as I say, are quite as mysterious
as his motive power. To fit him into the unrolling
chart of American, or even of English fiction is ex-
tremely difficult. Save one thinks of H. B. Fuller
(whose "With the Procession" and "The Cliff-
Dwellers" are still remembered by Huneker, but by
whom else? 1), he seems to have had no fore-runner

i Fuller's disappearance is one of the strangest phenomena of
American letters. I was astonished some time ago to discover
that he was still alive. Back in 1899 he was already so far
forgotten that William Archer mistook his name, calling him
Henry Y. Puller. Vide Archer's pamphlet, The American Lan-
guage; New York, 1899.

THEODORE DREISER 69

among us, and for all the discussion of him that
goes on, he has few avowed disciples, and none of
them gets within miles of him. One catches echoes
of him, perhaps, in Willa Sibert Gather, in Mary
S. Watts, in David Graham Phillips, in Sherwood
Anderson and in Joseph Medill Patterson, but, after
all, they are no more than echoes. In Robert Her-
rick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in im-
itators further removed to sheer burlesque. All the
latter-day American novelists of consideration are
vastly more facile than Dreiser in their philosophy,
as they are in their style. In the fact, perhaps, lies
the measure of their difference. What they lack,
great and small, is the gesture of pity, the note of
awe, the profound sense of wonder — in a phrase,
that "soberness of mind" which William Lyon
Phelps sees as the hallmark of Conrad and Hardy,
and which even the most stupid cannot escape in
Dreiser. The normal American novel, even in its
most serious forms, takes colour from the national
cocksureness and superficiality. It runs monoto-
nously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile
smugness and hopefulness, a habit of reducing the
unknowable to terms of the not worth knowing.
What it cannot explain away with ready formulae,
as in the later Winston Churchill, it snickers over
as scarcely worth explaining at all, as in the later

70 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Howells. Such a brave and tragic book as "Ethan
Frome" is so rare as to be almost singular, even with
Mrs. Wharton. There is, I daresay, not much mar-
ket for that sort of thing. In the arts, as in the
concerns of everyday, the American seeks escape
from the insoluble by pretending that it is solved.
A comfortable phrase is what he craves beyond all
things — and comfortable phrases are surely not to
be sought in Dreiser's stock.

I have heard argument that he is a follower of
Frank Norris, and two or three facts lend it a
specious probability. "McTeague" was printed in
1899; "Sister Carrie" a year later. Moreover,
Norris was the first to see the merit of the latter
book, and he fought a gallant fight, as literary ad-
visor to Doubleday, Page & Co., against its sup-
pression after it was in type. But this theory runs
aground upon two circumstances, the first being that
Dreiser did not actually read "McTeague," nor, in-
deed, grow aware of Norris, until after "Sister
Carrie" was completed, and the other being that
his development, once he began to write other books,
was along paths far distant from those pursued by
Norris himself. Dreiser, in truth, was a bigger
man than Norris from the start; it is to the latter's
unending honour that he recognized the fact in-
stanter, and yet did all he could to help his rival.

THEODORE DREISER 71

It is imaginable, of course, that Norris, living fifteen
years longer, might have overtaken Dreiser, and
even surpassed him; one finds an arrow pointing
that way in "Vandover and the Brute" (not printed
until 1914) . But it swings sharply around in "The
Epic of the Wheat." In the second volume of that
incomplete trilogy, "The Pit," there is an obvious
concession to the popular taste in romance ; the thing
is so frankly written down, indeed, that a play has
been made of it, and Broadway has applauded it.
And in "The Octopus," despite some excellent writ-
ing, there is a descent to a mysticism so fantastic
and preposterous that it quickly passes beyond seri-
ous consideration. Norris, in his day, swung even
lower — for example, in "A Man's Woman" and in
some of his short stories. He was a pioneer, per-
haps only half sure of the way he wanted to go, and
the evil lures of popular success lay all about him.
It is no wonder that he sometimes seemed to lose
his direction.

0

Emile Zola is another literary father whose
paternity grows dubious on examination. I once
printed an article exposing what seemed to me to
be a Zolaesque attitude of mind, and even some
trace of the actual Zola manner, in "Jennie Ger-
hardt"; there came from Dreiser the news that he
had never read a line of Zola, and knew nothing

72 A BOOK OF PREFACES

about his novels. Not a complete answer, of
course; the influence might have been exerted at
second hand. But through whom? I confess that
I am unable to name a likely medium. The effects
of Zola upon Anglo-Saxon fiction have been almost
nil; his only avowed disciple, George Moore, has
long since recanted and reformed; he has scarcely
rippled the prevailing romanticism. . . . Thomas
Hardy? Here, I daresay, we strike a better scent.
There are many obvious likenesses between "Tess
of the D'Urbervilles" and "Jennie Gerhardt" and
again between "Jude the Obscure" and "Sister
Carrie." All four stories deal penetratingly and
poignantly with the essential tragedy of women ; all
disdain the petty, specious explanations of popular
fiction ; in each one finds a poetical and melancholy
beauty. Moreover, Dreiser himself confesses to an
enchanted discovery of Hardy in 1896, three years
before "Sister Carrie" was begun. But it is easy
to push such a fact too hard, and to search for like-
nesses and parallels that are really not there. The
truth is that Dreiser's points of contact with Hardy
might be easily matched by many striking points of
difference, and that the fundamental ideas in their
novels, despite a common sympathy, are anything
but identical. Nor does one apprehend any pon-
derable result of Dreiser's youthful enthusiasm for

THEODORE DREISER 73

Balzac, which antedated his discovery of Hardy by
two years. He got from both men a sense of the
scope and dignity of the novel; they taught him that
a story might be a good one, and yet considerably
more than a story; they showed him the essential
drama of the commonplace. But that they had
more influence in forming his point of view, or even
in shaping his technique, than any one of half a
dozen other gods of those young days — this I
scarcely find. In the structure of his novels, and
in their manner of approach to life no less, they
call up the work of Dostoevski and Turgenief far
more than the work of either of these men — but of
all the Russians save Tolstoi (as of Flaubert)
Dreiser himself tells us that he was ignorant until
ten years after "Sister Carrie." In his days of
preparation, indeed, his reading was so copious and
so disorderly that antagonistic influences must have
well-nigh neutralized one another, and so left the
curious youngster to work out his own method and
his own philosophy. Stevenson went down with
Balzac, Poe with Hardy, Dumas fils with Tolstoi.
There were even months of delight in Sienkiewicz,
Lew Wallace and E. P. Roe! The whole repertory
of the pedagogues had been fought through in
school and college: Dickens, Thackeray, Haw-
thorne, Washington Irving, Kingsley, Scott. Only

74 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Irving and Hawthorne seem to have made deep im-
pressions. "I used to lie under a tree," says
Dreiser, "and read 'Twice Told Tales' by the hour.
I thought 'The Alhambra' was a perfect creation,
and I still have a lingering affection for it." Add
Bret Harte, George Ebers, William Dean Howells,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and you have a literary
stew indeed! . . . But for all its bubbling I see a
far more potent influence in the chance discovery
of Spencer and Huxley at twenty -three — the year of
choosing! Who, indeed, will ever measure the ef-
fect of those two giants upon the young men of that
era — Spencer with his inordinate meticulousness,
his relentless pursuit of facts, his overpowering syl-
logisms, and Huxley with his devastating agnosti-
cism, his insatiable questionings of the old axioms,
above all, his brilliant style? Huxley, it would
appear, has been condemned to the scientific hulks,
along with bores innumerable and unspeakable ; one
looks in vain for any appreciation of him in trea-
tises on beautiful letters.1 And yet the man was a

i For example, in The Cambridge History of English Lit-
erature, which runs to fourteen large volumes and a total of
nearly 10,000 pages, Huxley receives but a page and a quar-
ter of notice, and his remarkable mastery of English is barely
mentioned in passing. His two debates with Gladstone, in
which he did some of the best writing of the century, are not
noticed at all.

THEODORE DREISER 75

superb artist in works, a master-writer even more
than a master-biologist, one of the few truly great
stylists that England has produced since the time
of Anne. One can easily imagine the effect of two
such vigorous and intriguing minds upon a youth
groping about for self-understanding and self-ex-
pression. They swept him clean, he tells us, of the
lingering faith of his boyhood — a mediaeval, Rhen-
ish Catholicism ; — more, they filled him with a new
and eager curiosity, an intense interest in the life
that lay about him, a desire to seek out its hidden
workings and underlying causes. A young man
set afire by Huxley might perhaps make a very bad
novelist, but it is a certainty that he could never
make a sentimental and superficial one. There is
no need to go further than this single moving ad-
venture to find the genesis of Dreiser's disdain of
the current platitudes, his sense of life as a complex
biological phenomenon, only dimly comprehended,
and his tenacious way of thinking things out, and
of holding to what he finds good. Ah, that he had
learned from Huxley, not only how to inquire, but
also how to report! That he had picked up a
talent for that dazzling style, so sweet to the ear, so
damnably persuasive, so crystal-clear!

But the more one examines Dreiser, either as
writer or as theorist of man, the more his essential

76 A BOOK OF PREFACES

isolation becomes apparent. He got a habit of
mind from Huxley, but he completely missed Hux-
ley's habit of writing. He got a view of woman
from Hardy, but he soon changed it out of all re-
semblance. He got a certain fine ambition and
gusto out of Balzac, but all that was French and
characteristic he left behind. So with Zola, How-
ells, Tolstoi and the rest. The tracing of likenesses
quickly becomes rabbinism, almost cabalism. The
differences are huge and sprout up in all directions.
Nor do I see anything save a flaming up of colonial
passion in the current efforts to fit him into a Ger-
man frame, and make him an agent of Prussian
frightfulness in letters. Such bosh one looks for
in the Nation and the Boston Transcript, and there
is where one actually finds it. Even the New Re-
public has stood clear of it; it is important only
as material for that treatise upon the Anglo-Saxon
under the terror which remains to be written. The
name of the man, true enough, is obviously Ger-
manic, he has told us himself, in "A Traveler at
Forty," how he sought out and found the tombs of
his ancestors in some little town of the Rhine coun-
try. There are more of these genealogical revela-
tions in "A Hoosier Holiday," but they show a
Rhenish strain that was already running thin in
boyhood. No one, indeed, who reads a Dreiser

THEODORE DREISER 77

novel can fail to see the gap separating the author
from these half-forgotten forbears. He shows
even less of German influence than of English in-
fluence.

There is, as a matter of fact, little in modern
German fiction that is intelligibly comparable to
"Jennie Gerhardt" and "The Titan," either as a
study of man or as a work of art. The naturalistic
movement of the eighties was launched by men
whose eyes were upon the theatre, and it is in that
field that nine-tenths of its force has been spent.
"German naturalism," says George Madison Priest,
quoting Gotthold Klee's "Grunziige der deutschen
Literaturgeschichte" "created a new type only in
the drama." * True enough, it has also produced
occasional novels, and some of them are respectable.
Gustav Frenssen's "Jorn Uhl" is a specimen: it has
been done into English. Another is Clara Viebig's
"Das tagliche Brot," which Ludwig Lewissohn com-
pares to George Moore's "Esther Waters." Yet
another is Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks." But
it would be absurd to cite these works as evidences
of a national quality, and doubly absurd to think
of them as inspiring such books as "Jennie Ger-
hardt" and "The Titan," which excel them in every-

iA Brief History of German Literature; New York, Chas.
Scribner's Sons, 1909.

78 A BOOK OF PREFACES

thing save workmanship. The case of Mann re-
veals a tendency that is visible in nearly all of his
contemporaries. Starting out as an agnostic real-
ist not unlike the Arnold Bennett of "The Old
Wives' Tale," he has gradually taken on a hesitating
sort of romanticism, and in one of his later books,
"Konigliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal High-
ness") he ends upon a note of sentimentalism bor-
rowed from Wagner's "Ring." Fraulein Viebig has
also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes.
Her "Die Wacht am Rheim," for all its merits in
detail, is, at bottom, no more than an eloquent hymn
to patriotism — the most doggish and dubious of all
the virtues. As for Frenssen, he is a parson by
trade, and carries over into the novel a good deal
of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. All of these
German naturalists — and they are the only German
novelists worth considering — share the weakness of
Zola, their Stammvater. They, too, fall into the
morass that engulfed "Fecondite," and make senti-
mental propaganda.

I go into this matter in detail, not because it is
intrinsically of any moment, but because the eifort
to depict Dreiser as a secret agent of the Wilhelm-
strasse, told off to inject subtle doses of Kultur into
a naif and pious people, has taken on the propor-
tions of an organized movement. The same critical

THEODORE DREISER 79

imbecility which detects naught save a Tom cat in
Frank Cowperwood can find naught save an abhor-
rent foreigner in Cowperwood's creator. The
truth is that the trembling patriots of letters, male
and female, are simply at their old game of seeing
a man under the bed. Dreiser, in fact, is densely
ignorant of German literature, as he is of the bet-
ter part of French literature, and of much of Eng-
lish literature. He did not even read Hauptmann
until after "Jennie Gerhardt" had been written,
and such typical German moderns as Ludwig
Thoma, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Richard Dehmel
remain as strange to him as Heliogabalus.

§2

In his manner, as opposed to his matter, he
is more the Teuton, for he shows all of the racial
patience and pertinacity and all of the racial lack
of humour. Writing a novel is as solemn a busi-
ness to him as trimming a beard is to a German
barber. He blasts his way through his intermi-
nable stories by something not unlike main strength;
his writing, one feels, often takes on the character
of an actual siege operation, with tunnellings, drum
fire, assaults in close order and hand-to-hand fight-
ing. Once, seeking an analogy, I called him the

80 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Hindenburg of the novel. If it holds, then "The
'Genius' " is his Poland. The field of action bears
the aspect, at the end, of a hostile province meticu-
lously brought under the yoke, with every road and
lane explored to its beginning, and every cross-
roads village laboriously taken, inventoried and
policed. Here is the very negation of Gallic light-
ness and intuition, and of all other forms of im-
pressionism as well. Here is no series of illuminat-
ing flashes, but a gradual bathing of the whole scene
with white light, so that every detail stands out.

And many of those details, of course, are trivial;
even irritating. They do not help the picture; they
muddle and obscure it; one wonders impatiently
what their meaning is, and what the purpose may
be of revealing them with such a precise, portentous
air. . . . Turn to page 703 of "The 'Genius.' '
By the time one gets there, one has hewn and hacked
one's way through 702 large pages of fine print
— 97 long chapters, more than 250,000 words.
And yet, at this hurried and impatient point, with
the coda already begun, Dreiser halts the whole nar-
rative to explain the origin, nature and inner mean-
ing of Christian Science, and to make us privy to
a lot of chatty stuff about Mrs. Althea Jones, a pro-
fessional healer, and to supply us with detailed
plans and specifications of the apartment house in

THEODORE DREISER 81

which she lives, works her tawdry miracles, and has
her being. Here, in sober summary, are the par-
ticulars :

1. That the house is "of conventional design."

2. That there is "a spacious areaway" between its two
wings.

3. That these wings are "of cream-coloured pressed brick."

4. That the entrance between them is "protected by a hand-
some wrought-iron door."

5. That to either side of this door is "an electric lamp sup-
port of handsome design."

6. That in each of these lamp supports there are "lovely
cream-coloured globes, shedding a soft lustre."

7. That inside is "the usual lobby."

8. That in the lobby is "the usual elevator."

9. That in the elevator is the usual "uniformed negro ele-
vator man."

10. That this negro elevator man (name not given) is "in-
different and impertinent."

11. That a telephone switchboard is also in the lobby.

12. That the building is seven stories in height.

In "The Financier" there is the same exasperat-
ing rolling up of irrelevant facts. The court pro-
ceedings in the trial of Cowperwood are given with
all the exactness of a parliamentary report in the
London Times. The speeches of the opposing
counsel are set down nearly in full, and with them
the remarks of the judge, and after that the opinion
of the Appellate Court on appeal, with the dissenting
opinions as a sort of appendix. In "Sister Carrie"
the thing is less savagely carried out, but that is

82 A BOOK OF PREFACES

not Dreiser's fault, for the manuscript was revised
by some anonymous hand, and the printed version
is but little more than half the length of the original.
In "The Titan" and "Jennie Gerhardt" no such
brake upon exuberance is visible; both books are
crammed with details that serve no purpose, and
are as flat as ditch-water. Even in the two volumes
of personal record, "A Traveler at Forty" and "A
Hoosier Holiday," there is the same furious accu-
mulation of trivialities. Consider the former. It
is without structure, without selection, without reti-
cence. One arises from it as from a great babbling,
half drunken. On the one hand the author fills a
long and gloomy chapter with the story of the
Borgias, apparently under the impression that it is
news, and on the other hand he enters into intimate
and inconsequential confidences about all the per-
sons he meets en route, sparing neither the innocent
nor the obscure. The children of his English host
at Bridgely Level strike him as fantastic little crea-
tures, even as a bit uncanny — and he duly sets it
down. He meets an Englishman on a French train
who pleases him much, and the two become good
friends and see Rome together, but the fellow's wife
is "obstreperous" and "haughty in her manner" and
so "loud-spoken in her opinions" that she is "really
offensive" — and down it goes. He makes an im-

THEODORE DREISER 83

pression on a Mile. Marcelle in Paris, and she ac-
companies him from Monte Carlo to Ventimiglia,
and there gives him a parting kiss and whispers,
" Avril-F ontainebleau" — and lo, this sweet one is
duly spread upon the minutes. He permits himself
to he arrested by a fair privateer in Piccadilly, and
goes with her to one of the dens of sin that suf-
fragettes see in their nightmares, and cross-examines
her at length regarding her ancestry, her profes-
sional ethics and ideals, and her earnings at her
dismal craft — and into the book goes a full report
of the proceedings. He is entertained by an emi-
nent Dutch jurist in Amsterdam — and upon the
pages of the chronicle it appears that the gentleman
is "waxy" and "a little pedantic," and that he is
probably the sort of "thin, delicate, well barbered"
professor that Ibsen had in mind when he cast about
for a husband for the daughter of General Gabler.
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands
it and practises it — an endless piling up of min-
utiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of irons,
electrons and molecules, an unshakable determina-
tion to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like
diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperat-
ing disregard for the ease of his readers. A
Dreiser novel, at least of the later canon, cannot be
read as other novels are read — on a winter evening

84 A BOOK OF PREFACES

or summer afternoon, between meal and meal,
travelling from New York to Boston. It demands
the attention for almost a week, and uses up the
faculties for a month. If, reading "The 'Genius,' "
one were to become engrossed in the fabulous man-
ner described in the publishers' advertisements, and
so find oneself unable to put it down and go to
bed before the end, one would get no sleep for three
days and three nights.

Worse, there are no charms of style to mitigate
the rigours of these vast steppes and pampas of
narration. Joseph Joubert's saying that "words
should stand out well from the paper" is quite in-
comprehensible to Dreiser; he never imitates Flau-
bert by writing for "la respiration et Voreille"
There is no painful groping for the inevitable word,
or for what Walter Pater called "the gipsy phrase" ;
the common, even the commonplace, coin of speech
is good enough. On the first page of "Jennie Ger-
hardt" one encounters "frank, open countenance,"
"diffident manner," "helpless poor," "untutored
mind," "honest necessity," and half a dozen other
stand-bys of the second-rate newspaper reporter.
In "Sister Carrie" one finds "high noon," "hurry-
ing throng," "unassuming restaurant," "dainty
slippers," "high-strung nature," and "cool, calculat-

THEODORE DREISER 85

ing world" — all on a few pages. Carrie's sister,
Minnie Hanson, "gets" the supper. Hanson him-
self is "wrapped up" in his child. Carrie decides
to enter Storm and King's office, "no matter what."
In "The Titan" the word "trig" is worked to death;
it takes on, toward the end, the character of a banal
and preposterous refrain. In the other books one
encounters mates for it — words made to do duty
in as many senses as the American verb "to fix" or
the journalistic "to secure." . . .

I often wonder if Dreiser gets anything properly
describable as pleasure out of this dogged accumu-
lation of threadbare, undistinguished, uninspiring
nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, par-
ticiples and conjunctions. To the man with an ear
for verbal delicacies — the man who searches pain-
fully for the perfect word, and puts the way of say-
ing a thing above the thing said — there is in writing
the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy ac-
cident. A phrase springs up full blown, sweet and
caressing. But what joy can there be in rolling
up sentences that have no more life and beauty in
them, intrinsically, than so many election bulletins?
Where is the thrill in the manufacture of such a
paragraph as that in which Mrs. Althea Jones'
sordid habitat is described with such inexorable par-

86 A BOOK OF PREFACES

ticularity? Or in the laborious confection of
such stuff as this, from Book I, Chapter IV, of "The
'Genius'"?:

The city of Chicago — who shall portray it ! This vast ruck
of life that had sprung suddenly into existence upon the dank
marshes of a lake shore!

Or this from the epilogue to "The Financier" ;

There is a certain fish whose scientific name \s,Mycteroperca
Bonaci, and whose common name is Black Grouper, which is
of considerable value as an afterthought in this connection,
and which deserves much to be better known. It is a healthy
creature, growing quite regularly to a weight of two hundred
and fifty pounds, and living a comfortable, lengthy existence
because of its very remarkable ability to adapt itself to con-
ditions. . . .

Or this from his pamphlet, "Life, Art and Amer-
ica": x

Alas, alas ! for art in America. It has a hard stubby row
to hoe.

But I offer no more examples. Every reader of
the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding speci-
mens— of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of
whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as
brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.
Here and there, as in parts of "The Titan" and
again in parts of "A Hoosier Holiday," an evil

i New York, 1917; reprinted from The Seven Arts for Feb.,
1917.

THEODORE DREISER 87

conscience seems to haunt him and he gives hard
striving to his manner, and more than once there
emerges something that is almost graceful. But
a backsliding always follows this phosphorescence
of reform. "The 'Genius,' " coming after "The
Titan," marks the high tide of his bad writing.
There are passages in it so clumsy, so inept, so ir-
ritating that they seem almost unbelievable ; nothing
worse is to be found in the newspapers. Nor is
there any compensatory deftness in structure, or
solidity of design, to make up for this carelessness
in detail. The well-made novel, of course, can be
as hollow as the well-made play of Scribe — but let
us at least have a beginning, a middle and an end!
Such a story as "The 'Genius' " is as gross and
shapeless as Briinnhilde. It billows and bulges out
like a cloud of smoke, and its internal organization
is almost as vague. There are episodes that, with
a few chapters added, would make very respectable
novels. There are chapters that need but a touch or
two to be excellent short stories. The thing ram-
bles, staggers, trips, heaves, pitches, struggles, tot-
ters, wavers, halts, turns aside, trembles on the edge
of collapse. More than once it seems to be foun-
dering, both in the equine and in the maritime
senses. The tale has been heard of a tree so tall
that it took two men to see to the top of it. Here

88 A BOOK OF PREFACES

is a novel so brobdingnagian that a single reader
can scarcely read his way through it. . . .

§3

Of the general ideas which lie at the bottom of
all of Dreiser's work it is impossible to be in igno-
rance, for he has exposed them at length in "A
Hoosier Holiday" and summarized them in "Life,
Art and America." In their main outlines they are
not unlike the fundamental assumptions of Joseph
Conrad. Both novelists see human existence as a
seeking without a finding; both reject the prevailing
interpretations of its meaning and mechanism; both
take refuge in "I do not know." Put "A Hoosier
Holiday" beside Conrad's "A Personal Record,"
and you will come upon parallels from end to end.
Or better still, put it beside Hugh Walpole's "Joseph
Conrad," in which the Conradean metaphysic is
condensed from the novels even better than Con-
rad has done it himself: at once you will see how
the two novelists, each a worker in the elemental
emotions, each a rebel against the current assur-
ance and superficiality, each an alien to his place
and time, touch each other in a hundred ways.

"Conrad," says Walpole, "is of the firm and
resolute conviction that life is too strong, too clever

THEODORE DREISER 89

and too remorseless for the sons of men." And
then, in amplification: "It is as though, from
some high window, looking down, he were able to
watch some shore, from whose security men were
forever launching little cockleshell boats upon a
limitless and angry sea. . . . From his height he
can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles,
their fortitude to the very end. He admires their
courage, the simplicity of their faith, but his irony
springs from his knowledge of the inevitable
end." . . .

Substitute the name of Dreiser for that of Con-
rad, and you will have to change scarcely a word.
Perhaps one, to wit, "clever." I suspect that
Dreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be
tempted to make it "stupid," or, at all events, "un-
intelligible." The struggle of man, as he sees it,
is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purpose-
less. There is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no
skilful adaptation of means to end, no moral (or
even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe.
He can get out of it only a sense of profound and
inexplicable disorder. The waves which batter the
cockleshells change their direction at every instant.
Their navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerably
fortuitous and inept — a voyage without chart, com-
pass, sun or stars. . . .

90 A BOOK OF PREFACES

So at bottom. But to look into the blackness
steadily, of course, is almost beyond the endurance
of man. In the very moment that its impenetra-
bility is grasped the imagination begins attacking
it with pale beams of false light. All religions, I
daresay, are thus projected from the questioning
soul of man, and not only all religious, but also
all great agnosticisms. Nietzsche, shrinking from
the horror of that abyss of negation, revived the
Pythagorean concept of der ewigen Wiederkunft —
a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it,
after a while, he added explanations almost Chris-
tian— a whole repertoire of whys and wherefores,
aims and goals, aspirations and significances. The
late Mark Twain, in an unpublished work, toyed
with a equally daring idea: that men are to some
unimaginably vast and incomprehensible Being
what the unicellular organisms of his body are to
man, and so on ad infinitum. Dreiser occasion-
ally inclines to much the same hypothesis ; he likens
the endless reactions going on in the world we
know, the myriadal creation, collision and destruc-
tion of entities, to the slow accumulation and or-
ganization of cells in utero. He would make us
specks in the insentient embryo of some gigantic
Presence whose form is still unimaginable and
whose birth must wait for Eons and Eons. Again,

THEODORE DREISER 91

he turns to something not easily distinguishable
from philosophical idealism, whether out of Berke-
ley or Fichte it is hard to make out — that is, he
would interpret the whole phenomenon of life as
no more than an appearance, a nightmare of some
unseen sleeper or of men themselves, an "uncanny
blur of nothingness" — in Euripides' phrase, "a
song sung by an idiot, dancing down the wind."
Yet again, he talks vaguely of the intricate poly-
phony of a cosmic orchestra, cacophonous to our
dull ears. Finally, he puts the observed into the
ordered, reading a purpose in the displayed event:
"life was intended to sting and hurt" . . . But
these are only gropings, and not to be read too
critically. From speculations and explanations he
always returns, Conrad-like, to the bald fact: to
"the spectacle and stress of life." All he can make
out clearly is "a vast compulsion which has nothing
to do with the individual desires or tastes of im-
pulses of individuals." That compulsion springs
"from the settling processes of forces which we do
not in the least understand, over which we have no
control, and in whose grip we are as grains of dust
or sand, blown hither and thither, for what pur-
pose we cannot even suspect." 1 Man is not only
doomed to defeat, but denied any glimpse or un-

i Life, Art and America, p. 5.

92 A BOOK OF PREFACES

derstanding of his antagonist. Here we come
upon an agnosticism that has almost got beyond
curiosity. What good would it do us, asks Dreiser,
to know? In our ignorance and helplessness, we
may at least get a slave's consolation out of cursing
the unknown gods. Suppose we saw them striving
blindly, too, and pitied them? . . .

But, as I say, this scepticism is often tempered
by guesses at a possibly hidden truth, and the con-
fession that this truth may exist reveals the prac-
tical unworkableness of the unconditioned system,
at least for Dreiser. Conrad is far more resolute,
and it is easy to see why. He is, by birth and
training, an aristocrat. He has the gift of emo-
tional detachment. The lures of facile doctrine
do not move him. In his irony there is a disdain
which plays about even the ironist himself.
Dreiser is a product of far different forces and
traditions, and is capable of no such escapement.
Struggle as he may, and fume and protest as he
may, he can no more shake off the chains of his in-
tellectual and cultural heritage than he can change
the shape of his nose. What that heritage is you
may find out in detail by reading "A Hoosier Holi-
day," or in summary by glancing at the first few
pages of "Life, Art and America." Briefly de-
scribed, it is the burden of a believing mind, a

THEODORE DREISER 93

moral attitude, a lingering superstition. One-half
of the man's brain, so to speak, wars with the other
half. He is intelligent, he is thoughtful, he is a
sound artist — but there come moments when a dead
hand falls upon him, and he is once more the In-
diana peasant, snuffing absurdly over imbecile sen-
timentalities, giving a grave ear to quackeries,
snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them.
One generation spans too short a time to free the
soul of man. Nietzsche, to the end of his days,
remained a Prussian pastor's son, and hence two-
thirds a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness,
toward the end, into a sort of holy war. Kipling,
the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the
tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth
and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon
his fundamentals. And that other English novelist
who springs from the servants' hall — let us not be
surprised or blame him if he sometimes writes like
a bounder.

The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the
transition stage between Christian Endeavour and
civilization, between Warsaw, Indiana and the
Socratic grove, between being a good American and
being a free man, and so he sometimes vacillates
perilously between a moral sentimentalism and a
somewhat extravagant revolt. "The 'Genius,' " on

94 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the one hand, is almost a tract for rectitude, a
Warning to the Young; its motto might be Scheut
die Dirnenl And on the other hand, it is full of a
laborious truculence that can only be explained
by imagining the author as heroically determined
to prove that he is a plain-spoken fellow and his
own man, let the chips fall where they may. So,
in spots, in "The Financier" and "The Titan," both
of them far better books. There is an almost moral
frenzy to expose and riddle what passes for mor-
ality among the stupid. The isolation of irony is
never reached; the man is still evangelical; his
ideas are still novelties to him; he is as solemnly
absurd in some of his floutings of the Code Ameri-
can as he is in his respect for Bouguereau, or in
his flirtings with the New Thought, or in his naif
belief in the importance of novel-writing. Some-
where or other I have called all this the Greenwich
Village complex. It is not genuine artists, serving
beauty reverently and proudly, who herd in those
cockroached cellars and bawl for art; it is a mob
of half-educated yokels and cockneys to whom the
very idea of art is still novel, and intoxicating —
and more than a little bawdy.

Not that Dreiser actually belongs to this raga-
muffin company. Far from it, indeed. There is
in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive artist,

THEODORE DREISER 95

and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his
muddled way, held back by the manacles of his
race and time, and his steps made uncertain by a
guiding theory which too often eludes his own com-
prehension, he yet manages to produce works of
art of unquestionable beauty and authority, and to
interpret life in a manner that is poignant and
illuminating. There is vastly more intuition in
him than intellectualism; his talent is essentially
feminine, as Conrad's is masculine; his ideas al-
ways seem to be deduced from his feelings. The
view of life that got into "Sister Carrie," his first
book, was not the product of a conscious thinking
out of Carrie's problems. It simply got itself there
by the force of the artistic passion behind it; its
coherent statement had to wait for other and more
reflective days. The thing began as a vision, not
as a syllogism. Here the name of Franz Schubert
inevitably comes up. Schubert was an ignoramus,
even in music; he knew less about polyphony, which
is the mother of harmony, which is the mother
of music, than the average conservatory profes-
sor. But nevertheless he had such a vast instinc-
tive sensitiveness to musical values, such a pro-
found and accurate feeling for beauty in tone, that
he not only arrived at the truth in tonal relations, but
even went beyond what, in his day, was known to

96 A BOOK OF PREFACES

be the truth, and so led an advance. Likewise,
Giorgione da Castelfranco and Masaccio come to
mind : painters of the first rank, but untutored, un-
sophisticated, uncouth. Dreiser, within his limits,
belongs to this cabot-shod company of the elect.
One thinks of Conrad, not as artist first, but as
savant. There is something of the icy aloofness of
the laboratory in him, even when the images he
conjures up pulsate with the very glow of life.
He is almost as self-conscious as the Beethoven of
the last quartets. In Dreiser the thing is more in-
timate, more disorderly, more a matter of pure
feeling. He gets his effects, one might almost say,
not by designing them, but by living them.

But whatever the process, the power of the image
evoked is not to be gainsaid. It is not only bril-
liant on the surface, but mysterious and appealing
in its depths. One swiftly forgets his intolerable
writing, his mirthless, sedulous, repellent manner,
in the face of the Athenian tragedy he instils into
his seduced and soul-sick servant girls, his bar-
baric pirates of finances, his conquered and ham-
strung supermen, his wives who sit and wait. He
has, like Conrad, a sure talent for depicting the
spirit in disintegration. Old Gerhardt, in "Jennie
Gerhardt," is alone worth all the dramatis per-
sonae of popular American fiction since the days

THEODORE DREISER 97

of "Rob o' the Bowl"; Howells could no more
have created him, in his Rodinesque impudence of
outline, than he could have created Tartuffe or
Gargantua. Such a novel as "Sister Carrie" stands
quite outside the brief traffic of the customary
stage. It leaves behind it an unescapable impres-
sion of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. It is
not a mere story, not a novel in the customary
American meaning of the word; it is at once a
psalm of life and a criticism of life — and that
criticism loses nothing by the fact that its burden
is despair. Here, precisely, is the point of Drei-
ser's departure from his fellows. He puts into
his novels a touch of the eternal W eltschmerz.
They get below the drama that is of the mo-
ment and reveal the greater drama that is with-
out end. They arouse those deep and lasting
emotions which grow out of the recognition of
elemental and universal tragedy. His aim is
not merely to tell a tale; his aim is to show the
vast ebb and flow of forces which sway and condi-
tion human destiny. One cannot imagine him con-
senting to Conan Doyle's statement of the purpose
of fiction, quoted with characteristic approval by the
New York Times', "to amuse mankind, to help
the sick and the dull and the weary." Nor is his
purpose to instruct; if he is a pedagogue it is only

98 A BOOK OF PREFACES

incidentally and as a weakness. The thing he
seeks to do is to stir, to awaken, to move. One does
not arise from such a book as "Sister Carrie" with
a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely
touched.

§ 4

It is, indeed, a truly amazing first book, and one
marvels to hear that it was begun lightly. Dreiser
in those days (circa 1899), had seven or eight years
of newspaper work behind him, in Chicago, St.
Louis, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and
New York, and was beginning to feel that reaction
of disgust which attacks all newspaper men when
the enthusiasm of youth wears out. He had been
successful, but he saw how hollow that success was,
and how little surety it held out for the future.
The theatre was what chiefly lured him; he had
written plays in his nonage, and he now proposed to
do them on a large scale, and so get some of the
easy dollars of Broadway. It was an old friend
from Toledo, Arthur Henry, who turned him to-
ward story-writing. The two had met while Henry
was city editor of the Blade, and Dreiser a reporter
Looking for a job.1 A firm friendship sprang up, and
Henry conceived a high opinion of Dreiser's ability,

i The episode is related in A Hoosier Holiday.

THEODORE DREISER 99

and urged him to try a short story. Dreiser was
distrustful of his own skill, but Henry kept at him,
and finally, during a holiday the two spent together
at Maumee, Ohio, he made the attempt. Henry
had the manuscript typewritten and sent it to
Ainslee's Magazine. A week or so later there came
a cheque for $75.

This was in 1898. Dreiser wrote four more
stories during the year following, and sold them
all. Henry now urged him to attempt a novel, but
again his distrust of himself held him back.
Henry finally tried a rather unusual argument:
he had a novel of his own on the stocks,1 and he
represented that he was in difficulties with it and in
need of company. One day, in September, 1899,
Drieser took a sheet of yellow paper and wrote a
title at random. That title was "Sister Carrie,"
and with no more definite plan than the mere name
offered the book began. It went ahead steadily
enough until the middle of October, and had come
by then to the place where Carrie meets Hurstwood.
At that point Dreiser left it in disgust. It seemed
pitifully dull and inconsequential, and for two
months he put the manuscript away. Then, under
renewed urgings by Henry, he resumed the writing,
and kept on to the place where Hurstwood steals

i A Princess of Arcady, published in 1900.

100 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the money. Here he went aground upon a com-
paratively simple problem; he couldn't devise a
way to manage the robbery. Late in January he
gave it up. But the faithful Henry kept urging
him, and in March he resumed work, and soon had
the story finished. The latter part, despite many-
distractions, went quickly. Once the manuscript
was complete, Henry suggested various cuts, and
in all about 40,000 words came out. The fair copy
went to the Harpers. They refused it without
ceremony and soon afterward Dreiser carried the
manuscript to Doubleday, Page & Co. He left
it with Frank Doubleday, and before long there
came notice of its acceptance, and, what is more, a
contract. But after the story was in type it fell into
the hands of the wife of one of the members of
the firm, and she conceived so strong a notion of
its immorality that she soon convinced her husband
and his associates. There followed a series of
acrimonious negotiation, with Dreiser holding reso-
lutely to the letter of his contract. It was at this
point that Frank Norris entered the combat —
bravely but in vain. The pious Barabbases, con-
fronted by their signature, found it impossible to
throw up the book entirely, but there was no nomi-
nation in the bond regarding either the style of
binding or the number of copies to be issued, and

THEODORE DREISER 101

so they evaded further dispute by bringing out
the book in a very small edition and with modest
unstamped covers. Copies of this edition are now
eagerly sought by book-collectors, and one in good
condition fetches $25 or more in the auction rooms.
Even the second edition (1907), bearing the im-
print of B. W. Dodge & Co., carries an increasing
premium.

The passing years work strange farces. The
Harpers, who had refused "Sister Carrie" with a
spirit bordering upon indignation in 1900, took
over the rights of publication from B. W. Dodge &
Co., in 1912, and reissued the book in a new (and
extremely hideous) format, with a publisher's note
containing smug quotations from the encomiums
of the Fortnightly Review, the Athenaeum, the
Spectator, the Academy and other London critical
journals. More, they contrived humorously to
push the date of their copyright back to 1900. But
this new enthusiasm for artistic freedom did not last
long. They had published "Jennie Gerhardt" in
1911 and they did "The Financier" in 1912, but
when "The Titan" followed, in 1914, they were
seized with qualms, and suppressed the book after
it had got into type. In this emergency the Eng-
lish firm of John Lane came to the rescue, only to
seek cover itself when the Comstocks attacked "The

102 A BOOK OF PREFACES

'Genius,' " two years later. . . . For his high serv-
ices to American letters, Walter H. Page, of
Doubleday, Page & Co., was made ambassador to
England, where "Sister Carrie" is regarded (ac-
cording to the Harpers), as "the best story, on the
whole, that has yet come out of America." A
curious series of episodes. Another proof, per-
haps, of that cosmic imbecility upon which Dreiser
is so fond of discoursing. . . .

But of all this I shall say more later on, when
I come to discuss the critical reception of the Drei-
ser novels, and the efforts made by the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice to stop their
sale. The thing to notice here is that the author's
difficulties with "Sister Carrie" came within an
ace of turning him from novel-writing completely.
Stray copies of the suppressed first edition, true
enough, fell into the hands of critics who saw the
story's value, and during the first year or two of
the century it enjoyed a sort of esoteric vogue, and
encouragement came from unexpected sources.
Moreover, a somewhat bowdlerized English edi-
tion, published by William Heinemann in 1901,
made a fair success, and even provoked a certain
mild controversy. But the author's income from
the book remained almost nil, and so he was forced
to seek a livelihood in other directions. His his-

THEODORE DREISER 103

tory during the next ten years belongs to the tragi-
comedy of letters. For five of them he was a Grub
Street hack, turning his hand to any literary job
that offered. He wrote short stories for the popu-
lar magazines, or special articles, or poems, accord-
ing as their needs varied. He concocted fabulous
tales for the illustrated supplements of the Sunday
newspapers. He rewrote the bad stuff of other
men. He returned to reporting. He did odd
pieces of editing. He tried his hand at one-act
plays. He even ventured upon advertisement
writing. And all the while, the best that he could
get out of his industry was a meagre living.

In 1905, tiring of the uncertainties of this life,
he accepted a post on the staff of Street & Smith,
the millionaire publishers of cheap magazines, serv-
ant-girl romances and dime-novels, and here, in
the very slums of letters, he laboured with tongue
in cheek until the next year. The tale of his duties
will fill, I daresay, a volume or two in the autobiog-
raphy on which he is said to be working; it is a
chronicle full of achieved impossibilities. One of
his jobs, for example, was to reduce a whole series
of dime-novels, each 60,000 words in length, to
30,000 words apiece. He accomplished it by cut-
ting each one into halves, and writing a new end-
ing for the first half and a new beginning for the

104 A BOOK OF PREFACES

second, with new titles for both. This doubling
of their property aroused the admiration of his
employers; they promised him an assured and easy
future in the dime-novel business. But he tired
of it, despite this revelation of a gift for it, and in
1906 he became managing editor of the Broadway
Magazine, then struggling into public notice. A
year later he transferred his flag to the Butterick
Building, and became chief editor of the Delin-
eator, the Designer and other such gospels for the
fair. Here, of course, he was as much out of water
as in the dime-novel foundry of Street & Smith, but
at all events the pay was good, and there was a
certain leisure at the end of the day's work. In
1907, as part of his duties, he organized the Na-
tional Child Rescue Campaign, which still rages as
the Delineator s contribution to the Uplift. At
about the same time he began "Jennie Gerhardt."
It is curious to note that, during these same years,
Arnold Bennett was slaving in London as the editor
of Woman.

Dreiser left the Delineator in 1910, and for the
next half year or so endeavoured to pump vitality
into the Bohemian Magazine, in which he had ac-
quired a proprietary interest. But the Bohemian
soon departed this life, carrying some of his sav-
ings with it, and he gave over his enforced leisure

THEODORE DREISER 105

to "Jennie Gerhardt," completing the book in 1911.
Its publication by the Harpers during the same
year worked his final emancipation from the edi-
torial desk. It was praised, and what is more, it
sold, and royalties began to come in. A new edi-
tion of "Sister Carrie" followed in 1912, with "The
Financier" hard upon its heels. Since then Dreiser
has devoted himself wholly to serious work. "The
Financier" was put forth as the first volume of "a
trilogy of desire"; the second volume, "The
Titan," was published in 1914; the third is yet to
come. "The 'Genius'" appeared in 1915; "The
Bulwark" is just announced. In 1912, accom-
panied by Grant Richards, the London publisher,
Dreiser made his first trip abroad, visiting England,
France, Italy and Germany. His impressions were
recorded in "A Traveler at Forty," published in
1913. In the summer of 1915, accompanied by
Franklin Booth, the illustrator, he made an automo-
bile journey to his old haunts in Indiana, and the
record is in "A Hoosier Holiday," published in
1916. His other writings include a volume of
'Tlays of the Natural and the Supernatural"
(1916); "Life, Art and America," a pamphlet
against Puritanism in letters (1917); a dozen or
more short stories and novelettes, a few poems, and
a three-act drama, "The Hand of the Potter."

106 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Dreiser was born at Terre Haute, Indiana, on
August 27, 1871, and, like most of us, is of mon-
grel blood, with the German, perhaps, predom-
inating. He is a tall man, awkward in movement
and nervous in habit; the boon of beauty has been
denied him. The history of his youth is set forth in
full in "A Hoosier Holiday." It is curious to note
that he is a brother to the late Paul Dresser, author
of "The Banks of the Wabash" and other popular
songs, and that he himself, helping Paul over a hard
place, wrote the affecting chorus:

Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash,

From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay;

Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming . . .

But no doubt you know it.

§5

The work of Dreiser, considered as craftsman-
ship pure and simple, is extremely uneven, and the
distance separating his best from his worst is almost
infinite. It is difficult to believe that the novelist
who wrote certain extraordinarily vivid chapters in
"Jennie Gerhardt," and "A Hoosier Holiday," and,
above all, in "The Titan," is the same who achieved
the unescapable dulness of parts of "The Finan-
cier" and the general stupidity and stodginess of

THEODORE DREISER 107

"The 'Genius.' ' Moreover, the tide of his writing
does not rise or fall with any regularity ; he neither
improves steadily nor grows worse steadily. Only
half an eye is needed to see the superiority of
"Jennie Gerhardt," as a sheer piece of writing, to
"Sister Carrie," but on turning to "The Financier,"
which followed "Jennie Gerhardt" by an interval
of but one year, one observes a falling off which,
at its greatest, is almost indistinguishable from a
collapse. "Jennie Gerhardt" is suave, persuasive,
well-ordered, solid in structure, instinct with life.
"The Financier," for all its merits in detail, is
loose, tedious, vapid, exasperating. But had any
critic, in the autumn of 1912, argued thereby that
Dreiser was finished, that he had shot his bolt, his
discomfiture would have come swiftly, for "The
Titan," which followed in 1914, was almost as well
done as "The Financier" had been ill done, and
there are parts of it which remain, to this day, the
very best writing that Dreiser has ever achieved.
But "The 'Genius' "? Ay, in "The 'Genius' " the
pendulum swings back again! It is flaccid, ele-
phantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent, sopho-
moric, ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome. One
pities the jurisconsult who is condemned, by Com-
stockian clamour, to plough through such a novel.
In it there is a sort of humourless reductio ad ab-

108 A BOOK OF PREFACES

surdum, not only of the Dreiser manner, but even
of certain salient tenets of the Dreiser philosophy.
At its best it has a moral flavour. At its worst it is
almost maudlin. . . .

The most successful of the Dreiser novels,
judged by sales, is "Sister Carrie," and the causes
thereof are not far to seek. On the one hand, its
suppression in 1900 gave it a whispered fame that
was converted into a public celebrity when it was
republished in 1907, and on the other hand it shares
with "Jennie Gerhardt" the capital advantage of
having a young and appealing woman for its chief
figure. The sentimentalists thus have a heroine to
cry over, and to put into a familiar pigeon-hole;
Carrie becomes a sort of Pollyanna. More, it is,
at bottom, a tale of love — the one theme of per-
manent interest to the average American novel-
reader, the chief stuffing of all our best-selling
romances. True enough, it is vastly more than this
there is in it, for example, the astounding portrait
of Hurstwood — , but it seems to me plain that its
relative popularity is by no means a test of its rela-
tive merit, and that the causes of that popularity
must be sought in other directions. Its defect, as
a work of art, is a defect of structure. Like Nor-
ris' "McTeague" it has a broken back. In the
midst of the story of Carrie, Dreiser pauses to tell

THEODORE DREISER 109

the story of Hurstwood — a memorably vivid and
tragic story, to be sure, but still one that, consider-
ing artistic form and organization, does damage to
the main business of the book. Its outstanding
merit is its simplicity, its unaffected seriousness and
fervour, the spirit of youth that is in it. One feels
that it was written, not by a novelist conscious of
his tricks, but by a novice carried away by his own
flaming eagerness, his own high sense of the inter-
est of what he was doing. In this aspect, it is per-
haps more typically Dreiserian than any of its suc-
cessors. And maybe we may seek here for a good
deal of its popular appeal, for there is a contagion
in naivete as in enthusiasm, and the simple novel-
reader may recognize the kinship of a simple mind
in the novelist.

But it is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser first
shows his true mettle. . . . "The power to tell the
same story in two forms," said George Moore, "is
the sign of the true artist." Here Dreiser sets him-
self that difficult task, and here he carries it off with
almost complete success. Reduce the story to a
hundred words, and the same words would also
describe "Sister Carrie." Jennie, like Carrie, is a
rose grown from turnip-seed. Over each, at the
start, hangs poverty, ignorance, the dumb helpless-
ness of the Shudra, and yet in each there is that in-

110 A BOOK OF PREFACES

describable something, that element of essential
gentleness, that innate inward beauty which levels
all barriers of caste, and makes Esther a fit queen
for Ahasuerus. Some Frenchman has put it into a
phrase: "Une dme grande dans un petit destin"
— a great soul in a small destiny. Jennie has some
touch of that greatness; Dreiser is forever calling
her " a big woman"; it is a refrain almost as irri-
tating as the "trig" of "The Titan." Carrie, one
feels, is of baser metal; her dignity never rises to
anything approaching nobility. But the history of
each is the history of the other. Jennie, like Car-
rie, escapes from the physical miseries of the strug-
gle for existence only to taste the worse miseries of
the struggle for happiness. Don't mistake me; we
have here no maudlin tales of seduced maidens.
Seduction, in truth, is far from tragedy for either
Jennie or Carrie. The gain of each, until the actual
event has been left behind and obliterated by ex-
periences more salient and poignant, is greater than
her loss, and that gain is to the soul as well as to
the creature. With the rise from want to security,
from fear to ease, comes an awakening of the finer
perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, a grad-
ual unfolding of the delicate flower called per-
sonality, an increased capacity for loving and
living. But with all this, and as a part of it, there

THEODORE DREISER 111

comes, too, an increased capacity for suffering —
and so in the end, when love slips away and the
empty years stretch before, it is the awakened and
supersentient woman that pays for the folly of the
groping, bewildered girl. The tragedy of Carrie
and Jennie, in brief, is not that they are degraded,
but that they are lifted up, not that they go to the
gutter, but that they escape the gutter and glimpse
the stars.

But if the two stories are thus variations upon
the same sombre theme, if each starts from the same
place and arrives at the same dark goal, if each
shows a woman heartened by the same hopes and
tortured by the same agonies, there is still a vast
difference between them, and that difference is the
measure of the author's progress in his craft during
the eleven years between 1900 and 1911. "Sister
Carrie," at bottom, is no more than a first sketch, a
rough piling up of observations and ideas, disor-
dered and often incoherent. In the midst of the
story, as I have said, the author forgets it, and starts
off upon another. In "Jennie Gerhardt" there is no
such flaccidity of structure, no such vacillation in
aim, no such proliferation of episode. Consider-
ing that it is by Dreiser, it is extraordinarily adept
and intelligent in design; only in "The Titan" has
he ever done so well. From beginning to end the

112 A BOOK OF PREFACES

narrative flows logically, steadily, congruously.
Episodes there are, of course, but they keep their
proper place and bulk. It is always Jennie that
stands at the centre of the traffic; it is in Jennie's
soul that every scene is ultimately played out. Her
father and mother; Senator Brander, the god of her
first worship ; her daughter Vesta, and Lester Kane,
the man who makes and mars her — all these are
drawn with infinite painstaking, and in every one
of them there is the blood of life. But it is Jennie
that dominates the drama from curtain to curtain.
Not an event is unrelated to her; not a climax fails
to make clearer the struggles going on in her mind
and heart.

It is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser's view of
life begins to take on coherence and to show a gen-
eral tendency. In "Sister Carrie" the thing is still
chiefly representation and no more; the image is
undoubtedly vivid, but its significance, in the main,
is left undisplayed. In "Jennie Gerhardt" this
pictorial achievement is reinforced by interpreta-
tion; one carries away an impression that some-
thing has been said; it is not so much a visual
image of Jennie that remains as a sense of the
implacable tragedy that engulfs her. The book is
full of artistic passion. It lives and glows. It
awakens recognition and feeling. Its lucid idea-

THEODORE DREISER 113

tional structure, even more than the artless gusto
of "Sister Carrie," produces a penetrating and
powerful effect. Jennie is no mere individual; she
is a type of the national character, almost the arche-
type of the muddled, aspiring, tragic, fate-flogged
mass. And the scene in which she is set is bril-
liantly national too. The Chicago of those great
days of feverish money-grabbing and crazy aspira-
tion may well stand as the epitome of America, and
it is made clearer here than in any other American
novel — clearer than in "The Pit" or "The Cliff-
Dwellers" — clearer than in any book by an East-
erner— almost as clear as the Paris of Balzac and
Zola. Finally, the style of the story is indis-
solubly wedded to its matter. The narrative, in
places, has an almost scriptural solemnity; in its
very harshness and baldness there is something
subtly meet and fitting. One cannot imagine such
a history done in the strained phrases of Meredith
or the fugal manner of Henry James. One cannot
imagine that stark, stenographic dialogue adorned
with the tinsel of pretty words. The thing, to reach
the heights it touches, could have been done only
in the way it has been done. As it stands, I would
not take anything away from it, not even its jour-
nalistic banalities, its lack of humour, its incessant
returns to C major. A primitive and touching

114 A BOOK OF PREFACES

poetry is in it. It is a novel, I am convinced, of
the first consideration. . . .

In "The Financier" this poetry is almost wholly
absent, and fact is largely to blame for the book's
lack of charm. By the time we see him in "The
Titan" Frank Cowperwood has taken on heroic pro-
portions and the romance of great adventure is in
him, but in "The Financier" he is still little more
than an extra-pertinacious money-grubber, and not
unrelated to the average stock broker or corner
grocer. True enough, Dreiser says specifically
that he is more, that the thing he craves is not money
but power — power to force lesser men to execute his
commands, power to surround himself with beau-
tiful and splendid things, power to amuse him-
self with women, power to defy and nullify the
laws made for the timorous and unimagina-
tive. But the intent of the author never really
gets into his picture. His Cowperwood in this
first stage is hard, commonplace, unimaginative.
In "The Titan" he flowers out as a blend of
revolutionist and voluptuary, a highly civilized
Lorenzo the Magnificent, an immoralist who would
not hesitate two minutes about seducing a saint,
but would turn sick at the thought of harm-
ing a child. But in "The Financier" he is still in

THEODORE DREISER 115

the larval state, and a repellent sordidness hangs
about him.

Moreover, the story of his rise is burdened by
two defects which still further corrupt its effect.
One lies in the fact that Dreiser is quite unable to
get the feel, so to speak, of Philadelphia, just as he
is unable to get the feel of New York in "The
'Genius.' ' The other is that the style of the writ-
ing in the book reduces the dreiserian manner to
absurdity, and almost to impossibility. The in-
credibly lazy, involved and unintelligent descrip-
tion of the trial of Cowperwood I have already men-
tioned. We get, in this lumbering chronicle, not a
cohesive and luminous picture, but a dull, photo-
graphic representation of the whole tedious process,
beginning with an account of the political obliga-
tions of the judge and district attorney, proceeding
to a consideration of the habits of mind of each of
the twelve jurymen, and ending with a summary of
the majority and minority opinions of the court of
appeals, and a discussion of the motives, ideals,
traditions, prejudices, sympathies and chicaneries
behind them, each and severally. When Cowper-
wood goes into the market, his operations are set
forth in their last detail; we are told how many
shares he buys, how much he pays for them, what

116 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the commission is, what his profit comes to. When
he comes into chance contact with a politician, we
hear all about that politician, including his family
affairs. When he builds and furnishes a house,
the chief rooms in it are inventoried with such care
that not a chair or a rug or a picture on the wall is
overlooked. The endless piling up of such non-
essentials cripples and incommodes the story; its
drama is too copiously swathed in words to achieve
a sting; the Dreiser manner devours and defeats
itself.

But none the less the book has compensatory
merits. Its character sketches, for all the cloud of
words, are lucid and vigorous. Out of that enor-
mous complex of crooked politics and crookeder
finance, Cowperwood himself stands out in the
round, comprehensible and alive. And all the
other, in their lesser measures, are done almost
as well — Cowperwood's pale wife, whimpering in
her empty house; Aileen Butler, his mistress; his
doddering and eternally amazed old father; his old-
fashioned, stupid, sentimental mother; Stener, the
City Treasurer, a dish-rag in the face of danger;
old Edward Malia Butler, that barbarian in a boiled
shirt, with his Homeric hatred and his broken heart.
Particularly old Butler. The years pass and he
must be killed and put away, but not many readers

THEODORE DREISER 117

of the book, I take it, will soon forget him. Dreiser
is at his best, indeed, when he deals with old men.
In their tragic helplessness they stand as symbols of
that unfathomable cosmic cruelty which he sees as
the motive power of life itself. More, even, than
his women, he makes them poignant, vivid, memo-
rable. The picture of old Gerhardt is full of a
subtle brightness, though he is always in the back-
ground, as cautious and penny-wise as an ancient
crow, trotting to his Lutheran church, pathetically
ill-used by the world he never understands. But-
ler is another such, different in externals, but at
bottom the same dismayed, questioning, pathetic old
man. . . .

In "The Titan" there is a tightening of the
screws, a clarifying of the action, an infinite im-
provement in the manner. The book, in truth, has
the air of a new and clearer thinking out of "The
Financier," as "Jennie Gerhardt" is a new thinking
out of "Sister Carrie." With almost the same
materials, the thing is given a new harmony and
unity, a new plausibility, a new passion and pur-
pose. In "The Financier" the artistic voluptuary
is almost completely overshadowed by the dollar-
chaser; in "The Titan" we begin to see clearly that
grand battle between artist and man of money,
idealist and materialist, spirit and flesh, which is

118 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the informing theme of the whole trilogy. The con-
flict that makes the drama, once chiefly external,
now becomes more and more internal; it is played
out within the soul of the man himself. The result
is a character sketch of the highest colour and bril-
liance, a superb portrait of a complex and ex-
tremely fascinating man. Of all the personages in
the Dreiser books, the Cowperwood of "The Titan"
is perhaps the most radiantly real. He is accounted
for in every detail, and yet, in the end, he is not
accounted for at all; there hangs about him, to the
last, that baffling mysteriousness which hangs about
those we know most intimately. There is in him
a complete and indubitable masculinity, as the eter-
nal feminine is in Jennie. His struggle with the
inexorable forces that urge him on as with whips,
and lure him with false lights, and bring him to
disillusion and dismay, is as typical as hers is, and
as tragic. In his ultimate disaster, so plainly fore-
shadowed at the close, there is the clearest of all
projections of the ideas that lie at the bottom of all
Dreiser's work. Cowperwood, above any of them,
is his protagonist.

The story, in its plan, is as transparent as in its
burden. It has an austere simplicity in the telling
that fits the directness of the thing told. Dreiser,
as if to clear decks, throws over all the immemorial

THEODORE DREISER 119

baggage of the novelist, making short shrift of
"heart interest," conventional "sympathy," and
even what ordinarily passes for romance. In "Sis-
ter Carrie," as I have pointed out, there is still a
sweet dish for the sentimentalists ; if they don't like
the history of Carrie as a work of art they may still
wallow in it as a sad, sad love story. Carrie is
appealing, melting; she moves, like Marguerite
Gautier, in an atmosphere of romantic depression.
And Jennie Gerhardt, in this aspect, is merely Car-
rie done over — a Carrie more carefully and ob-
jectively drawn, perhaps, but still conceivably to be
mistaken for a "sympathetic" heroine in a best-
seller. A lady eating chocolates might jump from
"Laddie" to "Jennie Gerhardt" without knowing
that she was jumping ten thousand miles. The tear
jugs are there to cry into. Even in "The Finan-
cier" there is still a hint of familiar things. The
first Mrs. Cowperwood is sorely put upon; old But-
ler has the markings of an irate father; Cowper-
wood himself surfers the orthodox injustice and
languishes in a cell. But no one, I venture, will
ever fall into any such mistake in identity in ap-
proaching "The Titan." Not a single appeal to
facile sentiment is in it. It proceeds from begin-
ning to end in a forthright, uncompromising, confi-
dent manner. It is an almost purely objective

120 A BOOK OF PREFACES

account, as devoid of cheap heroics as a death cer-
tificate, of a strong man's contest with incontestable
powers without and no less incontestable powers
within. There is nothing of the conventional out-
law about him; he does not wear a red sash and
bellow for liberty; fate wrings from him no melo-
dramatic defiances. In the midst of the battle he
views it with a sort of ironical detachment, as if
lifted above himself by the sheer aesthetic spectacle.
Even in disaster he asks for no quarter, no gener-
osity, no compassion. Up or down, he keeps his
zest for the game that is being played, and is suffi-
cient unto himself.

Such a man as this Cowperwood of the Chicago
days, described romantically, would be indistin-
guishable from the wicked earls and seven-foot
guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers and The
Duchess. But described realistically and cold-
bloodedly, with all that wealth of minute and ap-
parently inconsequential detail which Dreiser piles
up so amazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly
vivid, lifelike and engrossing. He fits into no a
priori theory of conduct or scheme of rewards and
punishments; he proves nothing and teaches noth-
ing; the forces which move him are never obvious
and frequently unintelligible. But in the end he
seems genuinely a man — a man of the sort we see

THEODORE DREISER 121

about us in the real world — not a patent and auto-
matic fellow, reacting docilely and according to a
formula, but a bundle of complexities and contra-
dictions, a creature oscillating between the light and
the shadow — at bottom, for all his typical repre-
sentation of a race and a civilization, a unique and
inexplicable personality. More, he is a man of the
first class, an Achilles of his world; and here the
achievement of Dreiser is most striking, for he
succeeds where all fore-runners failed. It is easy
enough to explain how John Smith courted his wife,
and even how William Brown fought and died for
his country, but it is inordinately difficult to give
plausibility to the motives, feelings and processes
of mind of a man whose salient character is that
they transcend all ordinary experience. Too often,
even when made by the highest creative and inter-
pretative talent, the effort has resolved itself into a
begging of the question. Shakespeare made Ham-
let comprehensible to the groundlings by diluting
that half of him which was Shakespeare with a half
which was a college sophomore. In the same way
he saved Lear by making him, in large part, a
tedious and obscene old donkey — the blood brother
of any average ancient of any average English tap-
room. Tackling Caesar, he was rescued by Brutus'
knife. George Bernard Shaw, facing the same dif-

122 A BOOK OF PREFACES

iiculty, resolved it by drawing a composite portrait
of two or three London actor-managers and a half
a dozen English politicians. But Dreiser makes no
such compromise. He bangs into the difficulties of
his problem head on, and if he does not solve it
absolutely, he at least makes an extraordinarily
close approach to a solution. In "The Financier"
a certain incredulity still hangs about Cowperwood ;
in "The Titan" he suddenly comes unquestionably
real. If you want to get the true measure of this
feat, put it beside the failure of Frank Norris with
Curtis Jadwin in "The Pit." . . .

"The 'Genius,' " which interrupted the "trilogy
of desire," marks the nadir of Dreiser's accom-
plishment, as "The Titan" marks its apogee. The
plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one
that Dreiser, at his best, might have carried out with
undoubted success. What he is trying to show, in
brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of every
man of active mind between the desire for self-ex-
pression and the desire for safety, for public re-
spect, for emotional equanimity. It is, in a sense,
the story of Cowperwood told over again, but with
an important difference, for Eugene Witla is a much
less self-reliant and powerful fellow than Cowper-
wood, and so he is unable to muster up the vast
resolution of spirits that he needs to attain happi-

THEODORE DREISER 123

ness. "The Titan" is the history of a strong man.
"The 'Genius' " is the history of a man essentially
weak. Eugene Witla can never quite choose his
route in life. He goes on sacrificing ease to as-
piration and aspiration to ease to the end of the
chapter. He vacillates abominably and forever
between two irreconcilable desires. Even when, at
the close, he sinks into a whining sort of resigna-
tion, the proud courage of Cowperwood is not in
him; he is always a bit despicable in his pathos.

As I say, a story of simple outlines, and well
adapted to the dreiserian pen. But it is spoiled
and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity of
attack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse,
spineless and shapeless, and on the other hand, a
compendium of platitudes. It is as if Dreiser, sud-
denly discovering himself a sage, put off the high
passion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit.
It is almost as if he deliberately essayed upon a bur-
lesque of himself. The book is an endless emission
of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to
light up its killing monotony. It runs to 736 pages
of small type; its reading is an unbearable weari-
ness to the flesh ; in the midst of it one has forgotten
the beginning and is unconcerned about the end.
Mingled with all the folderol, of course, there is
stuff of nobler quality. Certain chapters stick in

124 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to the
fervid luminosity of "Jennie Gerhardt"; there are
character sketches that deserve all praise ; one often
pulls up with a reminder that the thing is the work
of a proficient craftsman. But in the main it lum-
bers and jolts, wabbles and bores. A sort of pon-
derous imbecility gets into it. Both in its elaborate
devices to shake up the pious and its imposing
demonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow
suggests the advanced thinking of Greenwich Vil-
lage. I suspect, indeed, that the vin rouge was in
Dreiser's arteries as he concocted it. He was at the
intellectual menopause, and looking back somewhat
wistfully and attitudinizingly toward the goatish
days that were no more.

But let it go! A novelist capable of "Jennie
Gerhardt" has rights, privileges, prerogatives. He
may, if he will, go on a spiritual drunk now and
then, and empty the stale bilges of his soul. Thack-
eray, having finished "Vanity Fair" and "Penden-
nis," bathed himself in the sheep's milk of "The
Newcomes," and after "The Virginians" he did
"The Adventures of Philip." Zola, with "Ger-
minal," "La Debacle" and "La Terre" behind him,
recreated himself horribly with "Fecondite." Tol-
stoi, after "Anna Karenina," wrote "What Is Art?"
Ibsen, after "Et Dukkehjem" and "Gengangere,"

THEODORE DREISER 125

wrote "Vildanden." The good God himself, after
all the magnificence of Kings and Chronicles,
turned Dr. Frank Crane and so botched his Writ
with Proverbs. ... A weakness that we must allow
for. Whenever Dreiser, abandoning his funda-
mental scepticism, yields to the irrepressible hu-
man (and perhaps also divine) itch to label, to
moralize, to teach, he becomes a bit absurd. Ob-
serve "The 'Genius,' " and parts of "A Hoosier
Holiday" and of "A Traveler at Forty," and of
"Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural." But
in this very absurdity, it seems to me, there is a
subtle proof that his fundamental scepticism is
sound. . . .

I mention the "Plays of the Natural and the
Supernatural." They are ingenious and sometimes
extremely effective, but their significance is not
great. The two that are "of the natural" are "The
Girl in the Coffin" and "Old Ragpicker," the first
a laborious evocation of the gruesome, too long by
half, and the other an experiment in photographic
realism, with a pair of policemen as its protago-
nists. All five plays "of the supernatural" follow
a single plan. In the foreground, as it were, we see
a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and
in the background (or in the empyrean above, as
you choose) we see the operation of the god-like

126 A BOOK OF PREFACES

imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The tech-
nical trick is well managed. It would be easy for
such four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque,
but in at least two cases, to wit, in "The Blue
Sphere" and "In the Dark," they go off with an air.
Superficially, these plays "of the supernatural"
seem to show an abandonment to the wheezy, black
bombazine mysticism which crops up toward
the end of "The 'Genius.' ' But that mysticism,
at bottom, is no more than the dreiserian
scepticism made visible. "For myself," says
Dreiser somewhere, "I do not know what truth
is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is."
And in another place: "I admit a vast compulsion
which has nothing to do with the individual desires
or tastes or impulses." The jokers behind the arras
pull the strings. It is pretty, but what is it all
about? . . . The criticism which deals only with
externals sees "Sister Carrie" as no more than a
deft adventure into realism. Dreiser is praised,
when he is praised at all, for making Carrie so clear,
for understanding her so well. But the truth is, of
course, that his achievement consists precisely in
making patent the impenetrable mystery of her, and
of the tangle complex of striving and aspiration of
which she is so helplessly a part. It is in this sense
that "Sister Carrie" is a profound work. It is not

THEODORE DREISER 127

a book of glib explanations, of ready formulae; it
is, above all else, a book of wonder. . . .

Of "A Traveler at Forty" I have spoken briefly.
It is heavy with the obvious; the most interesting
thing in it is the fact that Dreiser had never seen St.
Peter's or Piccadilly Circus until he was too old for
either reverence or romance. "A Hoosier Holi-
day" is far more illuminating, despite its platitu-
dinizing. Slow in tempo, discursive, reflective, in-
timate, the book covers a vast territory, and lingers
in pleasant fields. One finds in it an almost com-
plete confession of faith, artistic, religious, even
political. And not infrequently that confession
takes the form of ingenuous confidences — about the
fortunes of the house of Dreiser, the dispersed
Dreiser clan, the old neighbours in Indiana, new
friends made along the way. In "A Traveler at
Forty" Dreiser is surely frank enough in his vivi-
sections ; he seldom forgets a vanity or a wart. In
"A Hoosier Holiday" he goes even further; he
speculates heavily about all his dramatis personae,
prodding into the motives behind their acts, won-
dering what they would do in this or that situation,
forcing them painfully into laboratory jars. They
become, in the end, not unlike characters in a novel ;
one misses only the neatness of a plot. Strangely
enough, the one personage of the chronicle who re-

128 A BOOK OF PREFACES

mains dim throughout is the artist, Franklin Booth,
Dreiser's host and companion on the long motoi ride
from New York to Indiana, and the maker of the
book's excellent pictures. One gets a brilliant etch-
ing of Booth's father, and scarcely less vivid por-
traits of Speed, the chauffeur; of various persons
encountered on the way, and of friends and rela-
tives dredged up out of the abyss of the past. But
of Booth one learns little save that he is a Christian
Scientist and a fine figure of a man. There must
have been much talk during those two weeks of
careening along the high-road, and Booth must have
borne some part in it, but what he said is very
meagrely reported, and so he is still somewhat
vague at the end — a personality sensed but scarcely
apprehended.

However, it is Dreiser himself who is the chief
character of the story, and who stands out from it
most brilliantly. One sees in the man all the spe-
cial marks of the novelist: his capacity for photo-
graphic and relentless observation, his insatiable
curiosity, his keen zest in life as a spectacle, his
comprehension of and sympathy for the poor striv-
ing of humble folks, his endless mulling of insol-
uble problems, his recurrent Philistinism, his im-
patience of restraints, his fascinated suspicion of
messiahs, his passion for physical beauty, his relish

THEODORE DREISER 129

for the gaudy drama of big cities; his incurable
Americanism. The panorama that he enrols runs
the whole scale of the colours; it is a series of ex-
traordinarily vivid pictures. The sombre gloom of
the Pennsylvania hills, with Wilkes-Barre lying
among them like a gem; the procession of little
country towns, sleepy and a bit hoggish; the flash
of Buffalo, Cleveland, Indianapolis; the gargantum
coal-pockets and ore-docks along the Erie shore;
the tinsel summer resorts; the lush Indiana farm-
lands, with their stodgy, bovine people — all of these
things are sketched in simply, and yet almost mag-
nificently. I know, indeed, of no book which better
describes the American hinterland. Here we have
no idle spying by a stranger, but a full-length rep-
resentation by one who knows the thing he describes
intimately, and is himself a part of it. Almost
every mile of the road travelled has been Dreiser's
own road in life. He knew those unkempt In-
diana towns in boyhood; he wandered in the In-
diana woods; he came to Toledo, Cleveland, Buf-
falo as a young man; all the roots of his existence
are out there. And so he does his chronicle con
amore, with many a sentimental dredging up of
old memories, old hopes and old dreams.

Save for passages in "The Titan," "A Hoosier
Holiday" marks the high tide of Dreiser's writing

130 A BOOK OF PREFACES

— that is, as sheer writing. His old faults are in it,
and plentifully. There are empty, brackish
phrases enough, God knows — "high noon" among
them. But for all that, there is an undeniable glow
in it; it shows, in more than one place, an approach
to style ; the mere wholesaler of words has become,
in some sense a connoisseur, even a voluptuary.
The picture of Wilkes-Barre girt in by her hills is
simply done, and yet there is imagination in it, and
touches of brilliance. The sombre beauty of the
Pennsylvania mountains is vividly transferred to the
page. The towns by the wayside are differentiated,
swiftly drawn, made to live. There are excellent
sketches of people — a courtly hotelkeeper in some
God-forsaken hamlet, his self-respect triumphing
over his wallow; a group of babbling Civil War
veterans, endlessly mouthing incomprehensible
jests; the half-grown beaux and belles of the sum-
mer resorts, enchanted and yet a bit staggered by
the awakening of sex; Booth pere and his sinister
politics; broken and forgotten men in the Indiana
towns; policemen, waitresses, farmers, country
characters; Dreiser's own people — the boys and
girls of his youth; his brother Paul, the Indiana
Schneckenburger and Francis Scott Key; his sisters
and brothers; his beaten, hopeless, pious father; his
brave and noble mother. The book is dedicated to

THEODORE DREISER 131

this mother, now long dead, and in a way it is a
memorial to her, a monument to affection. Life
bore upon her cruelly ; she knew poverty at its lowest
ebb and despair at its bitterest; and yet there was in
her a touch of fineness that never yielded, a gallant
spirit that faced and fought things through. One
thinks, somehow, of the mother of Gounod. . . .
Her son has not forgotten her. His book is her
epitaph. He enters into her presence with love and
with reverence and with something not far from
awe. . . .

As for the rest of the Dreiser compositions, I
leave them to your curiosity.

§6

Dr. William Lyon Phelps, the Lampson profes-
sor of English language and literature at Yale,
opens his chapter on Mark Twain in his "Essays
on Modern Novelists" with a humorous account
of the critical imbecility which pursued Mark in his
own country down to his last years. The favourite
national critics of that era (and it extended to 1895,
at the least) were wholly blind to the fact that he
was a great artist. They admitted him, somewhat
grudgingly, a certain low dexterity as a clown, but

132 A BOOK OF PREFACES

that he was an imaginative writer of the first rank,
or even of the fifth rank, was something that, in
their insanest moments, never so much as occurred
to them. Phelps cites, in particular, an ass named
Professor Richardson, whose "American Liter-
ature," it appears, "is still a standard work" and "a
deservedly high authority" — apparently in col-
leges. In the 1892 edition of this magnum opus,
Mark is dismissed with less than four lines, and
ranked below Irving, Holmes and Lowell — nay,
actually below Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and
Petroleum V. Nasby! The thing is fabulous, fan-
tastic, unglaublich — but nevertheless true. Lack-
ing the "higher artistic or moral purpose of the
greater humourists" (exempli gratia, Rabelais,
Moliere, Aristophanes! ! ) , Mark is dismissed by this
Professor Balderdash as a hollow buffoon. . . .
But stay! Do not laugh yet! Phelps himself, indig-
nant at the stupidity, now proceeds to credit Mark
with a moral purpose! . . . Turn to "The Myste-
rious Stranger," or "What is Man?". . .

College professors, alas, never learn anything.
The identical gentleman who achieved this dis-
covery about old Mark in 1910, now seeks to dis-
pose of Dreiser in the exact manner of Richardson.
That is to say, he essays to finish him by putting him

THEODORE DREISER 133

into Coventry, by loftily passing over him. "Do
not speak of him," said Kingsley of Heine; "he was
a wicked man!" Search the latest volume of the
Phelps revelation, "The Advance of the English
Novel," and you will find that Dreiser is not once
mentioned in it. The late 0. Henry is hailed as a
genius who will have "abiding fame"; Henry Syd-
nor Harrison is hymned as "more than a clever
novelist," nay, "a valuable ally of the angels" (the
right-thinker complex! art as a form of snuffling!),
and an obscure Pagliaccio named Charles D. Stew-
art is brought forward as "the American novelist
most worthy to fill the particular vacancy caused by
the death of Mark Twain" — but Dreiser is not even
listed in the index. And where Phelps leads with
his baton of birch most of the other drovers of rah-
rah boys follow. I turn, for example, to "An In-
troduction to American Literature," by Henry S.
Pancoast, A.M., L.H.D., dated 1912. There are
kind words for Richard Harding Davis, for Amelie
Rives, and even for Will N. Harben, but not a
syllable for Dreiser. Again, there is a "A History
of American Literature," by Reuben Post Halleck,
A.M., LL.D., dated 1911. Lew Wallace, Marietta
Holley, Owen Wister and Augusta Evans Wilson
have their hearings, but not Dreiser. Yet again,

134 A BOOK OF PREFACES

there is "A History of American Literature Since
1870," by Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee,1 instructor in
"the English language and literature" somewhere
in Pennsylvania. Pattee has praises for Marion
Crawford, Margaret Deland and F. Hopkinson
Smith, and polite bows for Richard Harding Davis
and Robert W. Chambers, but from end to end of his
fat tome I am unable to find the slightest mention of
Dreiser.

So much for one group of heroes of the new
Dunciad. That it includes most of the acknowl-
edged heavyweights of the craft — the Babbitts,
Mores, Brownells and so on — goes without saying;
as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out,2 these mag-
nificoes are austerely above any consideration of
the literature that is in being. The other group,
more courageous and more honest, proceeds by
direct attack; Dreiser is to be disposed of by a
moral attentat. Its leaders are two more profes-
sors, Stuart P. Sherman and H. W. Boynton, and in
its ranks march the lady critics of the newspapers,
with much shrill, falsetto clamour. Sherman is
the only one of them who shows any intelligible
reasoning. Boynton, as always, is a mere parroter
of conventional phrases, and the objections of the

i New York, The Century Co., 1916.
2 In The Seven Arts, May, 1917.

THEODORE DREISER 135

ladies fade imperceptibly into a pious indignation
which is indistinguishable from that of the profes-
sional suppressors of vice.

What, then, is Sherman's complaint? In brief,
that Dreiser is a liar when he calls himself a realist;
that he is actually a naturalist, and hence accursed.
That "he has evaded the enterprise of representing
human conduct, and confined himself to a represen-
tation of animal behaviour." That he "imposes
his own naturalistic philosophy" upon his charac-
ters, making them do what they ought not to do, and
think what they ought not to think. That "he has
just two things to tell us about Frank Cowperwood:
that he has a rapacious appetite for money, and a
rapacious appetite for women." That this alleged
"theory of animal behaviour" is not only incorrect
but downright immoral, and that "when one-half
the world attempts to assert it, the other half rises
in battle.1

Only a glance is needed to show the vacuity of
all this brutum fulmen. Dreiser, in point of fact, is
scarcely more the realist or the naturalist, in any
true sense, than H. G. Wells or the later George
Moore, nor has he ever announced himself in either
the one character or the other — if there be, in fact,
any difference between them that any one save a

i The Nation, Dec. 2, 1915>

136 A BOOK OF PREFACES

pigeon-holding pedagogue can discern. He is
really something quite different, and, in his mo-
ments, something far more stately. His aim is not
merely to record, but to translate and understand;
the thing he exposes is not the empty event and act,
but the endless mystery out of which it springs; his
pictures have a passionate compassion in them that
it is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of
the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision
of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept
summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by
college professors for the empty, metriculous nasti-
ness of Zola in "Pot-Bouille" — in Nietzsche's
phrase, for "the delight to stink" — then surely the
folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has
been underestimated. What is the fact? The fact
is that Dreiser's attitude of mind, his manner of re-
action to the phenomena he represents, the whole
of his alleged "naturalistic philosophy," stems
directly, not from Zola, Flaubert, Augier and the
younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In the midst
of democratic cocksureness and Christian senti-
mentalism, of doctrinaire shallowness and profes-
sorial smugness, he stands for a point of view which
at least has something honest and courageous about
it; here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put
a motto to his books, and it might be:

THEODORE DREISER 137

Io> yeveal fipoTwv,

'fls v/xds 18a Kal to /xrjBlv

Z<»aa<i IvapiOfxiii.

If you protest against that as too harsh for
Christians and college professors, right-thinkers and
forward-lookers, then you protest against "Oedi-
pus Rex." *

As for the animal behaviour prattle of the learned
head-master, it reveals, on the one hand, only the
academic fondness for seizing upon high-sounding
but empty phrases and using them to alarm the pop-
ulace, and on the other hand, only the academic in-
capacity for observing facts correctly and report-
ing them honestly. The truth is, of course, that
the behaviour of such men as Cowperwood and
Witla and of such women as Carrie and Jennie, as
Dreiser describes it, is no more merely animal than
the behaviour of such acknowledged and undoubted
beings as Dr. Woodrow Wilson and Dr. Jane
Addams. The whole point of the story of Witla,
to take the example which seems to concern the
horrified watchmen most, is this: that his life is a
bitter conflict between the animal in him and the
aspiring soul, between the flesh and the spirit, be-

1 1186-1189. So translated by Floyd Dell: "O ye deathward-
going tribes of man, what do your lives mean except that they
go to nothingness?"

138 A BOOK OF PREFACES

tween what is weak in him and what is strong, be-
tween what is base and what is noble. Moreover,
the good, in the end, gets its hooks into the bad:
as we part from Witla he is actually bathed in the
tears of remorse, and resolved to be a correct and
godfearing man. And what have we in "The
Financier" and "The Titan"? A conflict, in the
ego of Cowperwood, between aspiration and am-
bition, between the passion for beauty and the
passion for power. Is either passion animal? To
ask the question is to answer it.

I single out Dr. Sherman, not because his pomp-
ous syllogisms have any plausibility in fact or
logic, but simply because he may well stand as
archetype of the booming, indignant corrupter of
criteria, the moralist turned critic. A glance at
his paean to Arnold Bennett * at once reveals the
true gravamen of his objection to Dreiser. What
offends him is not actually Dreiser's shortcoming
as an artist, but Dreiser's shortcoming as a Chris-
tian and an American. In Bennett's volumes of
pseudo-philosophy — e.g., "The Plain Man and
His Wife" and "The Feast of St. Friend"— he
finds the intellectual victuals that are to his taste.
Here we have a sweet commingling of virtuous con-
formity and complacent optimism, of sonorous

i The New York Evening Post, Dec. 31, 1915.

THEODORE DREISER 139

platitude and easy certainty — here, in brief, we
have the philosophy of the English middle classes
— and here, by the same token, we have the sort
of guff that the half -educated of our own country
can understand. It is the calm, superior num-
skullery that was Victorian; it is by Samuel Smiles
out of Hannah More. The offence of Dreiser is
that he has disdained this revelation and gone back
to the Greeks. Lo, he reads poetry into "the ap-
petite for women" — he rejects the Pauline doctrine
that all love is below the diaphragm! He thinks
of Ulysses, not as a mere heretic and criminal, but
as a great artist. He sees the life of man, not as
a simple theorem in Calvinism, but as a vast ad-
venture, an enchantment, a mystery. It is no won-
der that respectable school-teachers are against
him. . . .

The comstockian attack upon "The 'Genius' "
seems to have sprung out of the same muddled
sense of Dreiser's essential hostility to all that is
safe and regular — of the danger in him to that
mellowed Methodism which has become the na-
tional ethic. The book, in a way, was a direct
challenge, for though it came to an end upon a
note which even a Methodist might hear as sweet,
there were undoubted provocations in detail.
Dreiser, in fact, allowed his scorn to make off with

140 A BOOK OF PREFACES

his taste — and es ist nichts fiirchtlicher ah Einbil-
dungskraft ohne Geschmack. The Comstocks
arose to the bait a bit slowly, but none the less
surely. Going through the volume with the ter-
rible industry of a Sunday-school boy dredging
up pearls of smut from the Old Testament, they
achieved a list of no less than 89 alleged floutings
of the code — 75 described as lewd and 14 as pro-
fane. An inspection of these specifications affords
mirth of a rare and lofty variety; nothing could
more cruelly expose the inner chambers of the
moral mind. When young Witla, fastening his
best girl's skate, is so overcome by the carnality of
youth that he hugs her, it is set down as lewd. On
page 51, having become an art student, he is fired
by "a great, warm-tinted nude of Bouguereau" —
lewd again. On page 70 he begins to draw from
the figure, and his instructor cautions him that the
female breast is round, not square — more lewd-
ness. On page 151 he kisses a girl on mouth and
neck and she cautions him: "Be careful!
Mamma may come in" — still more. On page 161,
having got rid of mamma, she yields "herself to
him gladly, joyously" and he is greatly shocked
when she argues that an artist (she is by way of
being a singer) had better not marry — lewdness
doubly damned. On page 245 he and his bride,

THEODORE DREISER 141

being ignorant, neglect the principles laid down by
Dr. Sylvanus Stall in his great works on sex hy-
giene— lewdness most horrible! But there is no
need to proceed further. Every kiss, hug and
tickle of the chin in the chronicle is laboriously
snouted out, empanelled, exhibited. Every hint
that Witla is no vestal, that he indulges his un-
christian fleshliness, that he burns in the manner
of I Corinthians, VII, 9, is uncovered to the moral
inquisition.

On the side of profanity there is a less ardent
pursuit of evidences, chiefly, I daresay, because
their unearthing is less stimulating. (Beside, there
is no law prohibiting profanity in books: the whole
inquiry here is but so much lagniappe.) On page
408, in describing a character called Daniel C.
Summerfield, Dreiser says that the fellow is "very
much given to swearing, more as a matter of habit
than of foul intention," and then goes on to explain
somewhat lamely that "no picture of him would be
complete without the interpolation of his various
expressions." They turn out to be God damn and
Jesus Christ — three of the latter and five or six of
the former. All go down; the pure in heart must
be shielded from the knowledge of them. (But
what of the immoral French? They call the Eng-
lish Goddams.) Also, three plain damns, eight

142 A BOOK OF PREFACES

hells, one my God, five by Gods, one go to the devil,
one God Almighty and one plain God. Altogether,
31 specimens are listed. "The 'Genius' " runs to
350,000 words. The profanity thus works out to
somewhat less than one word in 10,000. . . . Alas,
the comstockian proboscis, feeling for such offend-
ings, is not as alert as when uncovering more sav-
oury delicacies. On page 191 I find an overlooked
by God. On page 372 there are Oh God, God
curse her, and God strike her dead. On page 373
there are Ah God, Oh God and three other invoca-
tions of God. On page 617 there is God help me.
On page 720 there is as God is my judge. On page
723 there is Vm no damned good. . . . But I be-
gin to blush.

When the Comstock Society began proceedings
against "The 'Genius,' " a group of English novel-
ists, including Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, W. L.
George and Hugh Walpole, cabled an indignant
caveat. This bestirred the Author's League of
America to activity, and its executive committee
issued a minute denouncing the business. Later
on a protest of American literati was circulated,
and more than 400 signed, including such highly
respectable authors as Winston Churchill, Percy
MacKaye, Booth Tarkington and James Lane Allen,
and such critics as Lawrence Gilman, Clayton

THEODORE DREISER 143

Hamilton and James Huneker, and the editors of
such journals as the Century, the Atlantic Monthly
and the New Republic. Among my literary lum-
ber is all the correspondence relating to this pro-
test, not forgetting the letters of those who refused
to sign, and some day I hope to publish it, that
posterity may not lose the joy of an extremely di-
verting episode. Meanwhile, the case moves with
stately dignity through the interminable corridors
of jurisprudence, and the bulk of the briefs and
exhibits that it throws off begins to rival the stag-
gering bulk of "The 'Genius' " itself.1

Dreiser, like Mark Twain and Emerson before
him, has been far more hospitably greeted in his
first stage, now drawing to a close, in England
than in his own country. The cause of this, I dare-
say, lies partly in the fact that "Sister Carrie" was
in general circulation over there during the seven
years that it remained suppressed on this side. It
was during these years that such men as Arnold
Bennett, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Frank Harris and

i Despite the comstockian attack, Dreiser is still fairly well
represented on the shelves of American public libraries. A
canvas of the libraries of the 25 principal cities gives the fol-
lowing result, an X indicating that the corresponding book
is catalogued, and a — that is not: [Over]

144 A BOOK OF PREFACES

H. G. Wells, and such critical journals as the Spec-
tator, the Saturday Review and the Athenaeum be-

O 3 c3

fe -as

O h 3

eg «u g fl .S "g
,"5 rh * eB <u SI

o o

c

S

2 O ° o

U2i-5HEh"<EhPh-<

New York X — - X X X X X

Boston — — — — X — X —

Chicago X X X X X X X X

Philadelphia X X X X X X X X

Washington — — — — X — X —

Baltimore — — — — X — — —

Pittsburgh - — X X X X — X

New Orleans — — — — — — — —

Denver X X X X X X X X

San Francisco X X X X X — — X

St. Louis X X X X X - X —

Cleveland X X X X - X X -

Providence — — — — — — — —

Los Angeles X X X X X X X X

Indianapolis X X X — X - X X

Louisville X X - X X X X X

St. Paul X X - - X - X X

Minneapolis X X X — X — X —

Cincinnati X X X — X — X X

Kansas City X X X X X X X X

Milwaukee — — - - X - X X

Newark X X X X X X X X

Detroit X X X - X X X X

Seattle X X - - X - X X

Hartford - - - - — — — X

[Over]

THEODORE DREISER 145

came aware of him, and so laid the foundations of
a sound appreciation of his subsequent work.
Since the beginning of the war, certain English
newspapers have echoed the alarmed American dis-
covery that he is a literary agent of the Wilhelm-
strasse, but it is to the honour of the English that
this imbecility has got no countenance from repu-
table authority and has not injured his position.

At home, as I have shown, he is less fortunate.
When criticism is not merely an absurd effort to
chase him out of court because his ideas are not
orthodox, as the Victorians tried to chase out
Darwin and Swinburne, and their predecessors
pursued Shelley and Byron, is too often designed to
identify him with some branch or other of "radi-
cal" poppycock, and so credit him with purposes
he has never imagined. Thus Chautauqua pulls
and Greenwich Village pushes. In the middle

This table shows that but two libraries, those of Providence
and New Orleans, bar Dreiser altogether. The effect of alarms
from newspaper reviewers is indicated by the scant distribu-
tion of the The "Genius," which is barred by 14 of the 25. It
should be noted that some of these libraries issue certain of
the books only under restrictions. This I know to be the case
in Louisville, Los Angeles, Newark and Cleveland. The New-
ark librarian informs me that Jennie Gerhardt is to be re-
moved altogether, presumably in response to some protest from
local Comstocks. In Chicago The "Genius" has been stolen,
and on account of the withdrawal of the book the Public Lib-
rary has been unable to get another copy.

146 A BOOK OF PREFACES

ground there proceeds the pedantic effort to dis-
pose of him by labelling him. One faction main-
tains that he is a realist; another calls him a nat-
uralist; a third argues that he is really a disguised
romanticist. This debate is all sound and fury,
signifying nothing, but out of it has come a valua-
tion by Lawrence Gilman ' which perhaps strikes
very close to the truth. He is, says Mr. Gilman,
"a sentimental mystic who employs the mimetic
gestures of the realist." This judgment is apt in
particular and sound in general. No such thing
as a pure method is possible in the novel. Plain
realism, as in Gorky's "Nachtasyl" and the war
stories of Ambrose Bierce, simply wearies us by
its vacuity; plain romance, if we ever get beyond
our nonage, makes us laugh. It is their artistic
combination, as in life itself, that fetches us — the
subtle projection of the concrete muddle that is
living against the ideal orderliness that we reach
out for — the eternal war of experience and aspira-
tion— the contrast between the world as it is and
the world as it might be or ought to be. Dreiser
describes the thing that he sees, laboriously and
relentlessly, but he never forgets the dream that is
behind it. "He gives you," continues Mr. Gilman,
"a sense of actuality; but he gives you more than

i The North American Review, Feb., 1916.

THEODORE DREISER 147

that: out of the vast welter and surge, the plethoric
irrelevancies, . . . emerges a sense of the infinite
sadness and mystery of human life." . . ,1

"To see truly," said Renan, "is to see dimly."
Dimness or mystery, call it what you will: it is in
all these overgrown and formless, but profoundly
moving books. Just what do they mean? Just
what is Dreiser driving at? That such questions
should be asked is only a proof of the straits to
which pedagogy has brought criticism. The an-
swer is simple: he is driving at nothing, he is
merely trying to represent what he sees and feels.
His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach,
to expound, to make simple; it is that "obscure
inner necessity" of which Conrad tells us, the ir-
resistible creative passion of a genuine artist, stand-
ing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma
that is life, enamoured by the strange beauty that
plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wonder-
ing and half-terrified sort of representation of what
passes understanding. And jenseits von Gut und
Bose. "For myself," says Dreiser, "I do not know
what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what
hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely and
I do not doubt any one absolutely. I think peo-

i Another competent valuation, by Randolph Bourne, is in
The Dial, June 14, 1917.

148 A BOOK OF PREFACES

pie are both evil and well-intentioned." The hatch-
ing of the Dreiser bugaboo is here; it is the flat
rejection of the rubber-stamp formulae that out-
rages petty minds; not being "good," he must be
"evil" — as William Blake said of Milton, a true
poet is always "of the devil's party." But in that
very groping toward a light but dimly seen there
is a measure, it seems to me, of Dreiser's rank and
consideration as an artist. "Now comes the pub-
lic," says Hermann Bahr, "and demands that we
explain what the poet is trying to say. The answer
is this: If we knew exactly he would not be a
poet. . . ."

III. JAMES HUNEKER

Ill

JAMES HUNEKER
§ 1

EDGAR ALLAN POE, I am fond of believ-
ing, earned as a critic a good deal of the
excess of praise that he gets as a romancer
and a poet, and another over-estimated American
dithyrambist, Sidney Lanier, wrote the best text-
book of prosody in English; * but in general the
critical writing done in the United States has been
of a low order, and most American writers of any
genuine distinction, like most American painters
and musicians, have had to wait for understanding
until it appeared abroad. The case of Emerson
is typical. At thirty, he was known in New Eng-
land as a heretical young clergyman and no more,
and his fame threatened to halt at the tea-tables of
the Boston Brahmins. It remained for Landor and
Carlyle, in a strange land, to discern his higher
potentialities, and to encourage him to his real life-
work. Mark Twain, as I have hitherto shown, suf-

iThe Science of English Verse; New York, Scribner, 1880.
151

152 A BOOK OF PREFACES

fered from the same lack of critical perception at
home. He was quickly recognized as a funny fel-
low, true enough, but his actual stature was not
even faintly apprehended, and even after "Huckle-
berry Finn" he was still bracketed with such labo-
rious farceurs as Artemus Ward. It was Sir Wal-
ter Besant, an Englishman, who first ventured to put
him on his right shelf, along with Swift, Cervantes
and Moliere. As for Poe and Whitman, the na-
tive recognition of their genius was so greatly con-
ditioned by a characteristic horror of their immor-
ality that it would be absurd to say that their own
country understood them. Both were better and
more quickly apprehended in France, and it was
in France, not in America, that each founded a
school. What they had to teach we have since got
back at second hand — the tale of mystery, which
was Poe's contribution, through Gaboriau and
Boisgobey; and vers libre, which was Whitman's,
through the French imagistes.

The cause of this profound and almost unbroken
lack of critical insight and enterprise, this puerile
Philistinism and distrust of ideas among us, is
partly to be found, it seems to me, in the fact that
the typical American critic is quite without any
adequate cultural equipment for the office he pre-
sumes to fill. Dr. John Dewey, in some late re-

JAMES HUNEKER 153

marks upon the American universities, has perhaps
shown the cause thereof. The trouble with our
educational method, he argues, is that it falls be-
tween the two stools of English humanism and Ger-
man relentlessness — that it produces neither a man
who intelligently feels nor a man who thoroughly
knows. Criticism, in America, is a function of
this half -educated and conceited class; it is not a
popular art, but an esoteric one; even in its crass-
est journalistic manifestations it presumes to a
certain academic remoteness from the concerns and
carnalities of everyday. In every aspect it shows
the defects of its practitioners. The American
critic of beautiful letters, in his common incarna-
tion, is no more than a talented sophomore, or, at
best, a somewhat absurd professor. He suffers
from a palpable lack of solid preparation; he has
no background of moving and illuminating experi-
ence behind him; his soul has not sufficiently ad-
ventured among masterpieces, nor among men.
Imagine a Taine or a Sainte-Beuve or a Macaulay
— man of the world, veteran of philosophies, "lord
of life" — and you imagine his complete antithesis.
Even on the side of mere professional knowledge,
the primary material of his craft, he always ap-
pears incompletely outfitted. The grand sweep
and direction of the literary currents elude him;

154 A BOOK OF PREFACES

he is eternally on the surface, chasing bits of drift-
wood. The literature he knows is the fossil litera-
ture taught in colleges — worse, in high schools.
It must be dead before he is aware of it. And in
particular he appears ignorant of what is going
forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to pene-
trate his consciousness, must first become stale, and
even then he is apt to purge it of all its remaining
validity and significance before adopting it.

This has been true since the earliest days. Em-
erson himself, though a man of unusual discern-
ment and a diligent drinker from German spigots,
nevertheless remained a dilettante in both aesthetics
and metaphysics to the end of his days, and the
incompleteness of his equipment never showed more
plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if
anything, was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first
and last, was nebulous and superficial, and all that
remains of his pleasant essays today is their some-
what smoky pleasantness. He was a Charles Dud-
ley Warner in nobler trappings, but still, at bottom,
a Charles Dudley Warner. As for Poe, though he
was by nature a far more original and penetrating
critic than either Emerson or Lowell, he was enor-
mously ignorant of good books, and moreover, he
could never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity
of taste, so painfully visible in the strutting of his

JAMES HUNEKER 155

style. The man, for all his grand dreams, had a
shoddy soul; he belonged authentically to the era
of cuspidors, "females" and Sons of Temperance.
His occasional affectation of scholarship has de-
ceived no one. It was no more than Yankee blus-
ter; he constantly referred to books that he had
never read. Beside, the typical American critic
of those days was not Poe, but his arch-enemy,
Rufus Wilmot Griswold, that almost fabulous ass —
a Baptist preacher turned taster of the beautiful.
Imagine a Baptist valuing Balzac, or Moliere, or
Shakespeare, or Goethe — or Rabelais!

Coming down to our own time, one finds the
same endless amateurishness, so characteristic of
everything American, from politics to cookery —
the same astounding lack of training and vocation.
Consider the solemn ponderosities of the pious old
maids, male and female, who write book reviews
for the newspapers. Here we have a heavy pre
tension to culture, a campus cocksureness, a la
borious righteousness — but of sound aesthetic un
derstanding, of alertness and hospitality to ideas
not a trace. The normal American book reviewer
indeed, is an elderly virgin, a superstitious blue
stocking, an apostle of Vassar Kultur; and her cus
tomary attitude of mind is one of fascinated horror
(The Hamilton Wright Mabie complex! The

156 A BOOK OF PREFACES

"white list" of novels!) William Dean Howells,
despite a certain jauntiness and even kittenishness
of manner, is spiritually of that company. For
all his phosphorescent heresies, he is what the up-
lifters call a right-thinker at heart, and soaked in
the national tradition. He is easiest intrigued,
not by force and originality, but by a sickly,
Ladies9 Home Journal sort of piquancy; it was this
that made him see a genius in the Philadelphia
Zola, W. B. Trites, and that led him to hymn an
abusive business letter by Frank A. Munsey, author
of "The Boy Broker" and "Afloat in a Great City,"
as a significant human document. Moreover How-
ells runs true to type in another way, for he long
reigned as the leading Anglo-Saxon authority on
the Russian novelists without knowing, so far as I
can make out, more than ten words of Russian.
In the same manner, we have had enthusiasts for
D'Annunzio and Mathilde Serao who knew no Ital-
ian, and celebrants of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren
whose French was of the finishing school, and Ibsen
authorities without a single word of Dano-Nor-
wegian — I met one once who failed to recognize
"Et Dukkehjem" as the original title of "A Doll's
House," — and performers upon Hauptmann who
could no more read "Die Weber" than they could
decipher a tablet of Tiglath-Pileser III.

JAMES HUNEKER 157

Here and there, of course, a more competent
critic of beautiful letters flings out his banner —
for example, John Macy, Ludwig Lewisohn, Andre
Tridon (it is a pity Tridon writes so little: his
slaughter of Maeterlinck was extraordinarily well
performed), Otto Heller, J. E. Spingarn, Willard
Huntington Wright, the late Percival Pollard.
Well-informed, intelligent, wide-eyed men — but
only two of them even Americans, and not one of
them with a wide audience, or any appreciable in-
fluence upon the main stream of American crit-
icism. Pollard's best work is buried in the per-
fumed pages of Town Topics; his book on the
Munich wits and dramatists * is almost unknown.
Heller and Lewisohn make their way slowly; a
patriotic wariness, I daresay, mixes itself up with
their acceptance. Wright turns to journalism and
to theoretical aesthetics — a colossal dispersal in-
deed. As for Macy, I recently found his "The
Spirit of American Literature," 2 by long odds the
soundest, wisest book on its subject, selling for
fifty cents on a Fifth avenue remainder counter.

How many remain? A few competent review-
ers who are primarily something else — Gilman,

i Masks and Minstrels of New Germany; Boston, John W.
Luce & Co., 1911.

2 New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913.

158 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Bourne, Untermeyer and company. A few young-
sters on the newspapers, struggling against the busi-
ness office. And then a leap to the Victorians, the
crepe-clad pundits, the bombastic word-mongers of
the Nation school — H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brow-
nell, Paul Elmer More, William Lyon Phelps,
Frederick Taber Copper et al. Here, undoubt-
edly, we have learning of a sort. More, it ap-
pears, once taught Sanskrit to the adolescent suf-
fragettes of Bryn Mawr — an enterprise as stimu-
lating (and as intelligible) as that of setting off
fire-works in a blind asylum. Phelps sits in a
chair at Yale. Boynton is a master of arts in Eng-
lish literature, whatever that may mean. Brow-
nell is both L.H.D. and Litt.D., thus surpassing
Samuel Johnson by one point, and Hazlitt, Col-
eridge and Malone by two. But the learning of
these august umbilicarii, for all its pretensions, is
precisely the sterile, foppish sort one looks for in
second-rate college professors. The appearance is
there, but not the substance. One ingests a horse-
doctor's dose of words, but fails to acquire any il-
lumination. Read More on Nietzsche 1 if you want
to find out just how stupid criticism can be, and yet
show the outward forms of sense. Read Phelps'

iThe Drift of Romanticism; Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1913.

JAMES HUNEKER 159

"The Advance of the English Novel" x if you would
see a fine art treated as a moral matter, and great
works tested by the criteria of a small-town Sunday-
school, and all sorts of childish sentimentality
whooped up. And plough through Brownell's
"Standards," 2 if you have the patience, and then
try to reduce its sonorous platitudes to straight-
forward and defensible propositions.

§2

Now for the exception. He is, of course, James
Gibbons Huneker, the solitary Iokanaan in this
tragic aesthetic wilderness, the only critic among
us whose vision sweeps the whole field of beauty,
and whose reports of what he sees there show any
genuine gusto. That gusto of his, I fancy, is two-
thirds of his story. It is unquenchable, contagious,
inflammatory ; he is the only performer in the com-
missioned troupe who knows how to arouse his
audience to anything approaching enthusiasm.
The rest, even including Howells, are pedants lec-
turing to the pure in heart, but Huneker makes a
joyous story of it; his exposition, transcending the
merely expository, takes on the quality of an ad-

i New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916.
2 New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1917.

160 A BOOK OF PREFACES

venture hospitably shared. One feels, reading
him, that he is charmed by the men and women he
writes about, and that their ideas, even when he
rejects them, give him an agreeable stimulation.
And to the charm that he thus finds and exhibits
in others, he adds the very positive charm of his
own personality. He seems a man who has found
the world fascinating, if perhaps not perfect; a
friendly and good-humoured fellow; no frigid
scholiast, but something of an epicure; in brief, the
reverse of the customary maker of books about
books. Compare his two essays on Ibsen, in
"Egoists" and "Iconoclasts" to the general body of
American writing upon the great Norwegian. The
difference is that between a portrait and a Bertillon
photograph, Richard Strauss and Czerny, a wed-
ding and an autopsy. Huneker displays Ibsen, not
as a petty mystifier of the women's clubs, but as a
literary artist of large skill and exalted passion,
and withal a quite human and understandable
man. These essays were written at the height of
the symbolism madness; in their own way, they
even show some reflection of it ; but taking them in
their entirety, how clearly they stand above the
ignorant obscurantism of the prevailing criticism of
the time — how immeasurably superior they are,
for example, to that favourite hymn-book of the

JAMES HUNEKER 161

Ibsenites, "The Ibsen Secret" by Jennette Lee!
For the causes of this difference one need not seek
far. They are to be found in the difference be-
tween the bombastic half-knowledge of a school
teacher and the discreet and complete knowledge
of a man of culture. Huneker is that man of cul-
ture. He has reported more of interest and value
than any other American critic, living or dead, but
the essence of his criticism does not lie so much in
what he specifically reports as in the civilized point
of view from which he reports it. He is a true
cosmopolitan, not only in the actual range of his
adventurings, but also and more especially in his
attitude of mind. His world is not America, nor
Europe, nor Christendom, but the whole universe
of beauty. As Jules Simon said of Taine: "Acun
ecrivain de nos jours na . . . decouvert plus
d'horizons varies et immenses."

Need anything else be said in praise of a critic?
And does an extravagance or an error here and
there lie validly against the saying of it? I think
not. I could be a professor if I would and show
you slips enough — certain ponderous nothings in
the Ibsen essays, already mentioned; a too easy
bemusement at the hands of Shaw; a vacillating
over Wagner; a habit of yielding to the hocus-
pocus of the mystics, particularly Maeterlinck.

162 A BOOK OF PREFACES

On the side of painting, I am told, there are even
worse aberrations; I know too little about painting
to judge for myself. But the list, made complete,
would still not be over-long, and few of its items
would be important. Huneker, like the rest of us,
has sinned his sins, but his judgments, in the over-
whelming main, hold water. He has resisted the
lure of all the wild movements of the generation;
the tornadoes of doctrine have never knocked him
over. Nine times out of ten, in estimating a new
man in music or letters, he has come curiously
close to the truth at the first attempt. And he has
always announced it in good time; his solo has al-
ways preceded the chorus. He was, I believe, the
first American (not forgetting William Morton
Payne and Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, the pioneers)
to write about Ibsen with any understanding of the
artist behind the prophet's mask; he was the first
to see the rising star of Nietzsche (this was back in
1888) ; he was beating a drum for Shaw the critic
before ever Shaw the dramatist and mob philoso-
pher was born (circa 1886-1890) ; he was writing
about Hauptmann and Maeterlinck before they had
got well set on their legs in their own countries;
his estimate of Sudermann, bearing date of 1905,
may stand with scarcely the change of a word to-
day; he did a lot of valiant pioneering for Strind-

JAMES HUNEKER 163

berg, Herview, Stirner and Gorki, and later on
helped in the pioneering for Conrad; he was in the
van of the MacDowell enthusiasts; he fought for
the ideas of such painters as Davies, Lawson, Luks,
Sloan and Prendergest (Americans all, by the way:
an answer to the hollow charge of exotic obsession)
at a time when even Manet, Monet and Degas were
laughed at; he was among the first to give a hand
to Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane
and H. B. Fuller. In sum, he gave some semblance
of reality in the United States, after other men had
tried and failed, to that great but ill-starred revolt
against Victorian pedantry, formalism and senti-
mentality which began in the early 90's. It would
be difficult, indeed, to overestimate the practical
value to all the arts in America of his intellectual
alertness, his catholic hospitality to ideas, his ar-
tistic courage, and above all, his powers of per-
suasion. It was not alone that he saw clearly what
was sound and significant; it was that he managed,
by the sheer charm of his writings, to make a few
others see and understand it. If the United States
is in any sort of contact today, however remotely,
with what is aesthetically going on in the more
civilized countries — if the Puritan tradition, for all
its firm entrenchment, has eager and resourceful
enemies besetting it — if the pall of Harvard quasi-

164 A BOOK OF PREFACES

culture, by the Oxford manner out of Calvinism,
has been lifted ever so little — there is surely no
man who can claim a larger share of credit for pre-
paring the way. . . .

§3

Huneker comes out of Philadelphia, that de-
pressing intellectual slum, and his first writing was
for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. He is
purely Irish in blood, and is of very respectable
ancestry, his maternal grandfather and godfather
having been James Gibbons, the Irish poet and
patriot, and president of the Fenian Brotherhood
in America. Once, in a review of "The Pathos of
Distance," I ventured the guess that there was a
German strain in him somewhere, and based it upon
the beery melancholy visible in parts of that book.
Who but a German sheds tears over the empty
bottles of day before yesterday, the Adelaide Neil-
son of 1877? Who but a German goes into wool-
len undershirts at 45, and makes his will, and be-
gins to call his wife "Mamma"? The green-sick-
ness of youth is endemic from pole to pole, as much
so as measles; but what race save the wicked one
is floored by a blue distemper in middle age, with
sentimental burblings a cappella, hallucinations of

JAMES HUNEKER 165

lost loves, and an unquenchable lacrymorrhea?
... I made out a good case, but I was wrong, and
the penalty came swiftly and doubly, for on the
one hand the Boston Transcript sounded an alarm
against both Huneker and me as German spies, and
on the other hand Huneker himself proclaimed that,
even spiritually, he was less German than Magyar,
less "Hun" than Hun. "I am," he said, "a Celto-
Magyar: Pilsner at Donneybrook Fair. Even the
German beer and cuisine are not in it with the
Austro-Hungarian." Here, I suspect, he meant to
say Czech instead of Magyar, for isn't Pilsen in
Bohemia? Moreover, turn to the chapter on
Prague in "New Cosmopolis," and you will find
out in what highland his heart really is. In this
book, indeed, is a vast hymn to all things Czechic —
the Pilsen Urquell, the muffins stuffed with poppy-
seed jam, the spiced chicken liver en casserole, the
pretty Bohemian girls, the rose and golden glory of
Hradcany Hill. . . . One thinks of other strange
infatuations: the Polish Conrad's for England, the
Scotch Mackay's for Germany, the Low German
Brahms' for Italy. Huneker, I daresay, is the first
Celto-Czech — or Celto-Magyar, as you choose.
(Maybe the name suggests something. It is not to
be debased to Hoon-eker, remember, but kept at
Hun-eker, rhyming initially with nun and gun.)

166 A BOOK OF PREFACES

An unearthly marriage of elements, by all the gods!
but there are pretty children of it. . . .

Philadelphia humanely disgorged Huneker in
1878. His father designed him for the law, and
he studied the institutes at the Philadelphia Law
Academy, but like Schumann, he was spoiled for
briefs by the stronger pull of music and the
cacoethes scribendi. (Grandpa John Huneker had
been a composer of church music, and organist at
St. Mary's.) In the year mentioned he set out
for Paris to see Liszt; his aim was to make himself
a piano virtuoso. His name does not appear on
his own exhaustive list of Liszt pupils, but he man-
aged to quaff of the Pierian spring at second-hand,
for he had lessons from Theodore Ritter (ne Ben-
net), a genuine pupil of the old walrus, and he
was also taught by the venerable Georges Mathias,
a pupil of Chopin. These days laid the founda-
tions for two subsequent books, the "Chopin: the
Man and His Music" of 1900, and the "Franz
Liszt" of 1911. More, they prepared the excava-
tions for all of the others, for Huneker began send-
ing home letters to the Philadelphia Bulletin on the
pictures that he saw, the books that he read and the
music that he heard in Paris, and out of them
gradually grew a body of doctrine that was to be

JAMES HUNEKER 167

developed into full-length criticism on his return
to the United States. He stayed in Paris until the
middle 80's, and then settled in New York.

All the while his piano studies continued, and
in New York he became a pupil of Rafael Joseffy.
He even became a teacher himself and was for ten
years on the staff of the National Conservatory,
and showed himself at all the annual meetings of
the Music Teachers' Association. But bit by bit
criticism elbowed out music-making, as music-mak-
ing had elbowed out criticism with Schumann and
Berlioz. In 1886 or thereabout he joined the
Musical Courier; then he went, in succession, to
the old Recorder, to the Morning Advertiser, to the
Sun, to the Times, and finally back to the Sun, in
whose columns he still occasionally holds forth.
Various weeklies and monthlies have also enlisted
him: Mile. New York, the Atlantic Monthly, the
Smart Set, the North American Review and Scrib-
ner's. He has even stooped to Puck, vainly trying
to make an American Simplicissimus of that dull
offspring of synagogue and barbershop. He has
been, in brief, an extremely busy and not too fas-
tidious journalist, writing first about one of the
arts, and then about another, and then about all
seven together. But music has been the steadiest

168 A BOOK OF PREFACES

of all his loves; his first three hooks dealt almost
wholly with it; of his complete canon more than
half have to do with it.

§ 4

His first book, "Mezzotints in Modern Music,"
published in 1899, revealed his predilections
clearly, and what is more, his critical insight and
sagacity. One reads it today without the slightest
feeling that it is an old story ; some of the chapters,
obviously reworkings of articles for the papers,
must go back to the middle 90's, and yet the judg-
ments they proclaim scarcely call for the change
of a word. The single noticeable weakness is a
too easy acquiescence in the empty showiness of
Saint-Saens, a tendency to bow to the celebrated
French parlour magician too often. Here, I dare-
say, is an echo of old Paris days, for Camille was
a hero on the Seine in 1880, and there was even
talk of pitting him against Wagner. The esti-
mates of other men are judiciously arrived at and
persuasively stated. Tschaikowsky is correctly
put down as highly talented but essentially shallow
fellow — a blubberer in the regalia of a philosopher.
Brahms, then still under attack by Henry T. Finck,
of the Evening Post (the press-agent of Massenet:

JAMES HUNEKER 169

ye gods, what Harvard can do, even to a Wurttem-
berger!) is subjected to a long, an intelligent and
an extremely friendly analysis; no better has got
into English since, despite too much stress on the
piano music. And Richard Strauss, yet a nine
days' wonder, is described clearly and accurately,
and his true stature indicated. The rest of the book
is less noteworthy; Huneker says the proper things
about Chopin, Liszt and Wagner, and adds a chap-
ter on piano methods, the plain fruit of his late
pedagogy. But the three chapters I have men-
tioned are enough; they fell, in their time, into a
desert of stupidity; they set a standard in musical
criticism in America that only Huneker himself has
ever exceeded.

The most popular of his music books, of course,
is the "Chopin" (1900). Next to "Iconoclasts,"
it is the best seller of them all. More, it has been
done into German, French and Italian, and is
chiefly responsible for Huneker's celebrity abroad
as the only critic of music that America has ever
produced. Superficially, it seems to be a monu-
ment of pedantry, a meticulous piling up of learn-
ing, but a study of it shows that it is very much
more than that. Compare it to Sir George Grove's
staggering tome on the Beethoven symphonies if
you want to understand the difference between mere

170 A BOOK OF PREFACES

scholastic diligence and authentic criticism. The
one is simply a top-heavy mass of disorderly facts
and worshipping enthusiasm; the other is an an-
alysis that searches out every nook and corner of
the subject, and brings it into coherence and in-
telligibility. The Chopin rhapsodist is always
held in check by the sound musician; there is a
snouting into dark places as well as a touching up
of high lights. I myself am surely no disciple of
the Polish tuberose — his sweetness, in fact, gags
me, and I turn even to Moszkowski for relief — but
I have read and re-read this volume with endless
interest, and I find it more bethumbed than any
other Huneker book in my library, saving only
"Iconoclasts" and "Old Fogy." Here, indeed,
Huneker is on his own ground. One often feels,
in his discussions of orchestral music, that he only
thinks orchestrally, like Schumann, with an effort
— that all music, in his mind, gets itself translated
into terms of piano music. In dealing with Chopin
no such transvaluation of values is necessary; the
raw materials are ready for his uses without prep-
aration; he is wholly at home among the black
keys and white.

His "Liszt" is a far less noteworthy book. It
is, in truth, scarcely a book at all, but merely a
collection of notes for a book, some of them con-

JAMES HUNEKER 171

siderably elaborated, but others set down in the
altogether. One reads it because it is about Liszt,
the most fantastic figure that ever came out of
Hungary, half devil and half clown; not because
there is any conflagration of ideas in it. The chap-
ter that reveals most of Huneker is the appendix
on latter-day piano virtuosi, with its estimates of
such men as de Pachmann, Rosenthal, Paderewski
and Hofmann. Much better stuff is to be found in
"Overtones," "The Pathos of Distance" and "Ivory,
Apes and Peacocks" — brilliant, if not always pro-
found studies of Strauss, Wagner, Schoenberg,
Moussorgsky, and even Verdi. But if I had my
choice of the whole shelf, it would rest, barring the
"Chopin," on "Old Fogy" — the scherzo of the
Hunekeran symphony, the critic taking a holiday,
the Devil's Mass in the tonal sanctuary. In it
Huneker is at his very choicest, making high- jinks
with his Davidsbund of one, rattling the skeletons
in all the musical closets of the world. Here,
throwing off his critic's black gown, his lays about
him right and left, knocking the reigning idols off
their perches; resurrecting the old, old dead and
trying to pump the breath into them; lambasting
on one page and lauding on the next; lampooning
his fellow critics and burlesquing their rubber
stamp fustian ; extolling Dussek and damning Wag-

172 A BOOK OF PREFACES

ner; swearing mighty oaths by Mozart, and after
him, Strauss — not Richard, but Johann! The Old
Fogy, of course, is the thinnest of disguises, a mere
veil of gossamer for "Editor" Huneker. That
Huneker in false whiskers is inimitable, incom-
parable, almost indescribable. On the one hand, he
is a prodigy of learning, a veritable warehouse of
musical information, true, half-true and apocry-
phal; on the other hand, he is a jester who delights
in reducing all learning to absurdity. Reading
him somehow suggests hearing a Bach mass re-
scored for two fifes, a tambourine in B, a wind
machine, two tenor harps, a contrabass oboe, two
banjos, eight tubas and the usual clergy and
strings. The substance is there; every note is
struck exactly in the middle — but what outlandish
tone colours, what strange, unearthly sounds! It
is not Bach, however, who first comes to mind when
Huneker is at his tricks, but Papa Haydn — the
Haydn of the Surprise symphony and the Farewell.
There is the same gargantuan gaiety, the same mag-
nificent irreverence. Haydn did more for the
symphony than any other man, but he also got
more fun out' of it than any other man.

"Old Fogy," of course, is not to be taken se-
riously: it is frankly a piece of fooling. But all
the same a serious idea runs through the book from

JAMES HUNEKER 173

end to end, and that is the idea that music is get-
ting too subjective to be comfortable. The makers
of symphonies tend to forget beauty altogether;
their one effort is to put all their own petty trials
and tribulations, their empty theories and specula-
tions into cacophony. Even so far back as
Beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had be-
gun. "Beethoven," says Old Fogy, is "dramatic,
powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tem-
pests; but his speech is the speech of a self-cen-
tred egotist. He is the father of all the modern
melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls,
write what they see therein — misery, corruption,
slighting selfishness and ugliness." Old Ludwig's
groans, of course, we can stand. He was not only
a great musician, but also a great man. It is just
as interesting to hear him sigh and complain as it
would be to hear the private prayers of Julius
Caesar. But what of Tschaikowsky, with his child-
ish Slavic whining? What of Liszt, with his cheap
playacting, his incurable lasciviousness, his ple-
beian warts? What of Wagner, with his delight in
imbecile fables, his popinjay vanity, his soul of
a Schnorrer? What of Richard Strauss, with his
warmed-over Nietzscheism, his flair for the merely
horrible? Old Fogy sweeps them all into his rag-
bag. If art is to be defined as beauty seen through

174 A BOOK OF PREFACES

a temperament, then give us more beauty and
cleaner temperaments! Back to the old gods,
Mozart and Bach, with a polite bow to Brahms and
a sentimental tear for Chopin! Beethoven tried
to tell his troubles in his music; Mozart was content
to ravish the angels of their harps. And as for
Johann Sebastian, "there was more real musical
feeling, uplifting and sincerity in the old Thomas-
kirche in Leipzig . . . than in all your modern
symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts put
together."

All this is argued, to be sure, in extravagant
terms. Wagner is a mere ghoul and impostor:
"The Flying Dutchman" is no more than a parody
on Weber, and "Parsifal" is "an outrage against
religion, morals and music." Daddy Liszt is "the
inventor of the Liszt pupil, a bad piano player, a
venerable man with a purple nose — a Cyrano de
Cognac nose." Tschaikowsky is the Slav gone
crazy on vodka. He transformed Hamlet into "a
yelling man" and Romeo and Juliet into "two
monstrous Cossacks, who gibber and squeak at each
other while reading some obscene volume." "His
Manfred is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on
God." And even Schumann is a vanishing star, a
literary man turned composer, a pathological case.
But, as I have said, a serious idea runs through all

JAMES HUNEKER 175

this concerto for slapstick and seltzer siphon, and
to me, at least, that idea has a plentiful reasonable-
ness. We are getting too much melodrama, too
much vivisection, too much rebellion — and too lit-
tle music. Turn from Tschaikowsky's Pathetique
or from any of his wailing tone-poems to Schu-
bert's C major, or to Mozart's Jupiter, or to
Beethoven's kleine Sinfonie in F dur: it is like com-
ing out of a Kaffeeklatsch into the open air, almost
like escaping from a lunatic asylum. The one
unmistakable emotion that much of this modern
music from the steppes and morgues and Biertische
engenders is a longing for form, clarity, coherence,
a self-respecting tune. The snorts and moans of
the pothouse Werthers are as irritating, in the long
run, as the bawling of a child, the squeak of a pig
under a gate. One yearns unspeakably for a com-
poser who gives out his pair of honest themes, and
then develops them with both ears open, and then
recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs a
brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

§5

So much for "Old Fogy" and the musical books.
They constitute, not only the best body of work that
Huneker himself has done, but the best body of

176 A BOOK OF PREFACES

musical criticism that any American has done.
Musical criticism, in our great Calvinist republic,
confines itself almost entirely to transient review-
ing, and even when it gets between covers, it keeps
its trivial quality. Consider, for example, the pub-
lished work of Henry Edward Krehbiel, for long
the doyen of the New York critics. I pick up his
latest book, "A Second Book of Operas," x open it
at random, and find this:

On January 31, 1893, the Philadelphia singers, aided by the
New York Symphony Society, gave a performance of the
opera, under the auspices of the Young Men's Hebrew Asso-
ciation, for the benefit of its charities, at the Carnegie Music
Hall, New York. Mr. Walter Damrosch was to have con-
ducted, but was detained in Washington by the funeral of Mr.
Blaine, and Mr. Hinrichs took his place.

0 Doctor admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissi-
mus! Needless to say the universities have not
overlooked this geyser of buttermilk: he is an
honourary A.M. of Yale. His most respectable
volume, that on negro folksong, impresses, one prin-
cipally by its incompleteness. It may be praised
as a sketch, but surely not as a book. The trouble
with Krehbiel, of course, is that he mistakes a
newspaper morgue for Parnassus. He has all of
the third-rate German's capacity for unearthing

i New York, The Macmillan Co., 1917.

JAMES HUNEKER 177

facts, but he doesn't know how either to think or to
write, and so his criticism is mere pretence and
pishposh. W. J. Henderson, of the Sun, doesn't
carry that handicap. He is as full of learning as
Krehbiel, as his books on singing and on the early
Italian opera show, but he also wields a slippery
and intriguing pen, and he could be hugely enter-
taining if he would. Instead, he devotes himself
to manufacturing primers for the newly intel-
lectual. I can find little of the charm of his Sun
articles in his books. Lawrence Gilman? A
sound musician but one who of late years has
often neglected music for the other arts. Philip
H. Goepp? His three volumes on the symphonic
repertoire leave twice as much to be said as they
say. Carl Van Vechten? A very promising nov-
ice, but not yet at full growth. Philip Hale?
His gigantic annotations scarcely belong to criti-
cism at all; they are musical talmudism. Beside,
they are buried in the program books of the Bos-
ton Symphony Orchestra, and might as well be in-
scribed on the temple walls of Baalbec. As for
Upton and other such fellows, they are merely
musical chautauquans, and their tedious commen-
taries have little more value than the literary
criticisms in the religious weeklies. One of them,
a Harvard maestro, has published a book on the

178 A BOOK OF PREFACES

orchestra in which, on separate pages, the reader is
solemnly presented with pictures of first and second
violins!

It seems to me that Huneker stands on a higher
level than any of these industrious gentlemen, and
that his writings on music are of much more value,
despite his divided allegiance among the beaux
arts. Whatever may be said against him, it must
at least be admitted that he knows Chopin, and that
he has written the best volumes upon the tuber-
culous Pole in English. Vladimir de Pachman,
that king of all Chopin players, once bore charac-
teristic testimony to the fact — I think it was in
London. The program was heavy with the etudes
and ballades, and Huneker sat in the front row of
fanatics. After a storm of applause de Pachmann
rose from the piano stool, levelled a bony claw at
Huneker, and pronounced his dictum: "//e knows
more than all of you." Joseffy seems to have had
the same opinion, for he sought the aid of his old
pupil in preparing his new edition of Chopin, the
first volume of which is all he lived to see in print.
. . . And, beyond all the others, Huneker disdains
writing for the kindergarten. There is no stoop-
ing in his discourse; he frankly addresses him-
self to an audience that has gone through the forms,
and so he avoids the tediousness of the A B C ex-

JAMES HUNEKER 179

positors. He is the only American musical critic,
save Van Vechten, who thus assumes invariably that
a musical audience exists, and the only one who
constantly measures up to its probable interests,
supposing it to be there. Such a book as "Old
Fogy," for all its buffoonery, is conceivable only
as the work of a sound musician. Its background
is one of the utmost sophistication; in the midst of
its wildest extravagances there is always a pro-
found knowledge of music on tap, and a profound
love of it to boot. Here, perhaps, more than any-
where else, Huneker's delight in the things he deals
with is obvious. It is not a seminary that he
keeps, but a sort of club of tone enthusiasts, and
membership in it is infinitely charming.

§6

This capacity for making the thing described
seem important and delightful, this quality of in-
fectious gusto, this father-talent of all the talents
that a critic needs, sets off his literary criticism no
less than his discourse on music and musicians.
Such a book as "Iconoclasts" or "Egoists" is full
of useful information, but it is even more full of
agreeable adventure. The style is the book, as it
is the man. It is arch, staccato, ironical, witty,

180 A BOOK OF PREFACES

galloping, playful, polyglot, allusive — sometimes,
alas, so allusive as to reduce the Drama Leaguer
and women's clubber to wonderment and ire. In
writing of plays or of books, as in writing of cities,
tone-poems or philosophies, Huneker always as-
sumes that the elements are already well-grounded,
that he is dealing with the initiated, that a pause
to explain would be an affront. Sad work for the
Philistines — but a joy to the elect! All this poly-
phonic allusiveness, this intricate fuguing of ideas,
is not to be confused, remember, with the hollow
showiness of the academic soothsayer. It is as
natural to the man, as much a part of him as the
clanging Latin of Johnson, or, to leap from art to
art Huneker-wise, the damnable cross-rhythms of
Brahms. He could no more write without his stock
company of heretic sages than he could write with-
out his ration of malt. And, on examination, all
of them turned out to be real. They are far up
dark alleys, but they are there! . . . And one finds
them, at last, to be as pleasant company as the
multilingual puns of Nietzsche or Debussy's chords
of the second.

As for the origin of that style, it seems to have
a complex ancestry. Huneker's first love was Poe,
and even today he still casts affectionate glances in
that direction, but there is surely nothing of Poe's

JAMES HUNEKER 181

elephantine labouring in his skipping, pizzicato
sentences. Then came Carlyle — the Carlyle of
"Sartor Resartus" — a god long forgotten. Hune-
ker's mother was a woman of taste; on reading his
first scribblings, she gave him Cardinal Newman,
and bade him consider the Queen's English. New-
man achieved a useful purging; the style that re-
mained was ready for Flaubert. From the author
of "L'Education Sentimentale," I daresay, came
the deciding influence, with Nietzsche's staggering
brilliance offering suggestions later on. Thus
Huneker, as stylist, owes nearly all to France, for
Nietzsche, too, learned how to write there, and to
the end of his days he always wrote more like a
Frenchman than a German. His greatest service
to his own country, indeed, was not as anarch, but
as teacher of writing. He taught the Germans that
their language had a snap in it as well as sighs and
gargles — that it was possible to write German and
yet not wander in a wood. There are whole pages
of Nietzsche that suggest such things, say, as the
essay on Maurice Barres in "Egoists," with its bold
tropes, its rapid gait, its sharp sforzandos. And
you will find old Friedrich at his tricks from end to
end of "Old Fogy."

Of the actual contents of such books as "Egoists"
and "Iconoclasts" it is unnecessary to say any-

182 A BOOK OF PREFACES

thing. One no longer reads them for their matter,
but for their manner. Every flapper now knows
all that is worth knowing about Ibsen, Strindberg,
Maeterlinck and Shaw, and a great deal that is not
worth knowing. We have disentangled Haupt-
mann from Sudermann, and, thanks to Dr. Lew-
isohn, may read all his plays in English. Even
Henry Becque has got into the vulgate and is
familiar to the Drama League. As for Anatole
France, his "Revolt of the Angels" is on the shelves
of the Carnegie Libraries, and the Comstocks have
let it pass. New gods whoop and rage in Valhalla:
Verhaeren, Artzibashef, Przhevalski. Huneker,
alas, seems to drop behind the procession. He
writes nothing about these second-hand third-raters.
He has come to Wedekind, Schnitzler, Schoenberg,
Korngold and Moussorgsky, and he has discharged
a few rounds of shrapnel at the Gallo-Asiatic petti-
coat philosopher, Henri Bergson, but here he has
stopped, as he has stopped at Matisse, Picasso, Ep-
stein and Augustus John in painting. As he says
himself, "one must get off somewhere." . . .

Particularly if one grows weary of criticism —
and in Huneker, of late, I detect more than one
sign of weariness. Youth is behind him, and with
it some of its zest for exploration and combat.
"The pathos of distance" is a phrase that haunts

JAMES HUNEKER 183

him as poignantly as it haunted Nietzsche, its
maker. Not so long ago I tried to induce him to
write some new Old Fogy sketches, nominating
Puccini, Strawinsky, Schoenberg, Korngold, Elgar.
He protested that the mood was gone from him
forever, that he could not turn the clock back
twenty years. His late work in Puck, the Times
and the Sun, shows an unaccustomed acquiescence
in current valuations. He praises such one-day
masterpieces as McFee's "Casuals of the Sea"; he
is polite to the kept idealists of the New Republic;
he gags a bit at Wright's "Modern Painting"; he
actually makes a gingery curtsy to Frank Jewett
Mather, a Princeton professor. . . . The pressure
in the gauges can't keep up to 250 pounds forever.
Man must tire of fighting after awhile, and seek
his ease in his inn. . . .

Perhaps the post-bellum transvaluation of all
values will bring Huneker to his feet again, and
with something of the old glow and gusto in him.
And if the new men do not stir up, then assuredly
the wrecks of the ancient cities will: the Paris of
his youth; Munich, Dresden, Vienna, Brussels,
London; above all, Prague. Go to "New Cos-
mopolis" and you will find where his heart lies, or,
if not his heart, then at all events his oesophagus
and pylorus. . . . Here, indeed, the thread of his

184 A BOOK OF PREFACES

meditations is a thread of nutriment. However
diverted by the fragrance of the Dutch woods, the
church bells of Belgium, the music of Stuttgart, the
bad pictures of Dublin, the plays of Paris, the
musty romance of old Wien, he always comes back
anon to such ease as a man may find in his inn.
"The stomach of Vienna," he says, "first interested
me, not its soul." And so, after a dutiful genu-
flexion to St. Stephen's ("Old Steffel," as the Vien-
nese call it), he proceeds to investigate the paprika-
chicken, the Gulyas, the Risi-bisi, the Apfelstrudel,
the Kaiserchmarn and the native and authentic
Wiener schnitzel. And from food to drink — spe-
cifically, to the haunts of Pilsner, to "certain semi-
sacred houses where the ritual of beer-drinking is
observed," to the shrines at which beer maniacs
meet, to "a little old house near a Greek church"
where "the best-kept Pilsner in Vienna may be
found."

The best-kept Pilsner in Vienna! The phrase
enchants like an entrance of the horns. The best
caviare in Russia, the worst actor on Broadway, the
most virtuous angel in Heaven! Such superlatives
are transcendental. And yet, — so rare is perfec-
tion in this world! — the news swiftly follows, un-
expected, disconcerting, that the best Pilsner in
Vienna is far short of the ideal. For some unde-

JAMES HUNEKER 185

termined reason — the influence of the American
tourist? the decay of the Austrian national charac-
ter?— the Vienna Bierwirte freeze and paralyze it
with too much ice, so that it chills the nerves it
should caress, and fills the heart below with heavi-
ness and repining. Avoid Vienna, says Huneker,
if you are one who understands and venerates the
great Bohemian brew! And if, deluded, you find
yourself there, take the first D-zug for Prague, that
lovely city, for in it you will find the Pilsen Ur-
quell, and in the Pilsen Urquell you will find the
best Pilsner in Christendom — its colour a phos-
phorescent, translucent, golden yellow, its foam
like whipped cream, its temperature exactly and in-
variably right. Not even at Pilsen itself (which
the Bohemians call Plzen) is the emperor of malt
liquors more stupendously grateful to the palate.
Write it down before you forget: the Pilsen Ur-
quell, Prague, Bohemia, 120 miles S. S. E. of
Dresden, on the river Moldau (which the natives
call the Vltava). Ask for Fraulein Ottilie. Men-
tion the name of Herr Huneker, the American
Schriftsteller.

Of all the eminent and noble cities between the
Alleghenies and die Balkans, Prague seems to be
Huneker's favourite. He calls it poetic, precious,
delectable, original, dramatic — a long string of

186 A BOOK OF PREFACES

adjectives, each argued for with eloquence that is
unmistakably sincere. He stands fascinated be-
fore the towers and pinnacles of the Hradcany, "a
miracle of tender rose and marble white with
golden spots of sunshine that would have made
Claude Monet envious." He pays his devotions to
the Chapel of St. Wenceslas, "crammed with the
bones of buried kings," or, at any rate, to the shrine
of St. John Nepomucane, "composed of nearly two
tons of silver." He is charmed by the beauty of
the stout, black-haired, red-cheeked Bohemian girls,
and hopes that enough of them will emigrate to the
United States to improve the fading pulchritude of
our own houris. But most of all, he has praises for
the Bohemian cuisine, with its incomparable apple
tarts, and its dumplings of cream cheese, and for
the magnificent, the overpowering, the ineffable
Pilsner of Prague. This Pilsner motive runs
through the book from cover to cover. In the
midst of Dutch tulip-beds, Dublin cobblestones,
Madrid sunlight and Atlantic City leg-shows, one
hears it insistently, deep down in the orchestra.
The cellos weave it into the polyphony, sometimes
clearly, sometimes in scarcely recognizable aug-
mentation. It is heard again in the wood-wind;
the bassoons grunt it thirstily; it slides around in
the violas; it rises to a stately choral in the brass.

JAMES HUNEKER 187

And chiefly it is in minor. Chiefly it is sounded
by one who longs for the Pilsen Urquell in a far
land, and among a barbarous and teetotaling peo-
ple, and in an atmosphere as hostile to the recrea-
tions of the palate as it is to the recreations of the
intellect.

As I say, this Huneker is a foreigner and hence
accursed. There is something about him as exotic
as a samovar, as essentially un-American as a
bashi-bazouk, a nose-ring or a fugue. He is filled
to the throttle with strange and unpatriotic heresies.
He ranks Beethoven miles above the national gods,
and not only Beethoven, but also Bach and Brahms,
and not only Bach and Brahms, but also Berlioz,
Bizet, Bruch and Biilow and perhaps even Bala-
kirew, Bellini, Balfe, Borodin and Bo'ieldieu. He
regards Budapest as a more civilized city than
his native Philadelphia, Stendhal as a greater lit-
erary artist than Washington Irving, "Kunstler
Leben" as better music than "There is Sunlight in
My Soul." Irish? I still doubt it, despite the
Stammbaum. Who ever heard of an Irish epicure,
an Irish flaneur, or, for that matter, an Irish con-
trapuntist? The arts of the voluptuous category
are unknown west of Cherbourg; one leaves them
behind with the French pilot. Even the Czech-
Irish hypothesis (or is it Magyar-Irish?) has a

188 A BOOK OF PREFACES

smell of the lamp. Perhaps it should be Irish-
Czech. . . .

§7

There remain the books of stories, "Visionaries"
and "Melomaniacs." It is not surprising to hear
that both are better liked in France and Germany
than in England and the United States. ("Vision-
aries" has even appeared in Bohemian.) Both are
made up of what the Germans call Kultur-N ovellen
— that is, stories dealing, not with the emotions
common to all men, but with the clash of ideas
among the civilized and godless minority. In
some of them, e.g., "Rebels of the Moon," what
one finds is really not a story at all, but a static dis-
cussion, half aesthetic and half lunatic. In others,
e.g., "Isolde's Mother," the whole action revolves
around an assumption incomprehensible to the gen-
eral. One can scarcely imagine most of these tales
in the magazines. They would puzzle and out-
rage the readers of Gouverneur Morris and Ger-
trude Atherton, and the readers of Howells and
Mrs. Wharton no less. Their point of view is es-
sentially the aesthetic one; the overwhelming im-
portance of beauty is never in any doubt. And the
beauty thus vivisected and fashioned into new de-
signs is never the simple Wordsworthian article,

JAMES HUNEKER 189

of fleecy clouds and primroses all compact; on the
contrary, it is the highly artificial beauty of pig-
ments and tone-colours, of Cezanne landscapes and
the second act of "Tristan und Isolde," of Dun-
sanyan dragons and Paracelsian mysteries. Here,
indeed, Huneker riots in the aesthetic occultism that
he loves. Music slides over into diabolism; the
Pobloff symphony rends the firmament of Heaven;
the ghost of Chopin drives Mychowski to drink; a
single drum-beat finishes the estimable consort of
the composer of the Tympani symphony. In "The
Eighth Deadly Sin" we have a paean to perfume —
the only one, so far as I know, in English. In
"The Hall of the Missing Footsteps" we behold
the reaction of hasheesh upon Chopin's ballads in F
major. . . . Strangely-flavoured, unearthly, per-
haps unhealthy stuff. I doubt that it will ever be
studied for its style in our new Schools of Liter-
ature; a devilish cunning if often there, but it
leaves a smack of the pharmacopoeia. However,
as George Gissing used to say, "the artist should
be free from everything like moral prepossession."
This lets in the Antichrist. . . .

Huneker himself seems to esteem these fantastic
tales above all his other work. Story-writing, in-
deed, was his first love, and his Opus 1, a bad imi-
tation of Poe, by name "The Comet," was done in

190 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Philadelphia so long ago as July 4, 1876. (Tem-
perature, 105 degrees Fahrenheit.) One rather
marvels that he has never attempted a novel. It
would have been as bad, perhaps, as "Love Among
the Artists," but certainly no bore. He might have
given George Moore useful help with "Evelyn
Innes" and "Sister Teresa": they are about music,
but not by a musician. As for me, I see no great
talent for fiction qua fiction in these two volumes
of exotic tales. They are interesting simply be-
cause Huneker the story teller so often yields place
to Huneker the playboy of the arts. Such things as
"Antichrist" and "The Woman Who Loved
Chopin" are no more, at bottom, than second-rate
anecdotes; it is the filling, the sauce, the embroid-
ery that counts. But what filling! What sauce!
What embroidery! . . . One never sees more of
Huneker. . . .

§8

He must stand or fall, however, as critic. It is
what he has written about other men, not what he
has concocted himself, that makes a figure of him,
and gives him his unique place in the sterile liter-
ature of the republic's second century. He stands
for a Weltanschauung that is not only un-national,
but anti-national; he is the chief of all the curbers

JAMES HUNEKER 191

and correctors of the American Philistine; in
praising the arts he has also criticized a civilization.
In the large sense, of course, he has had but small
influence. After twenty years of earnest labour,
he finds himself almost as alone as a Methodist in
Bavaria. The body of native criticism remains as
I have described it; an endless piling up of plati-
tudes, an homeric mass of false assumptions and
jejune conclusions, an insane madness to reduce
beauty to terms of a petty and pornographic mor-
ality. One might throw a thousand bricks in any
American city without striking a single man who
could give an intelligible account of either Haupt-
mann or Cezanne, or of the reasons for holding
Schumann to have been a better composer than
Mendelssohn. The boys in our colleges are still
taught that Whittier was a great poet and Fenni-
more Cooper a great novelist. Nine-tenths of our
people — perhaps ninety-nine hundredths of our
native-born — have yet to see their first good pic-
ture, or to hear their first symphony. Our Cham-
berses and Richard Harding Davises are national
figures; our Norrises and Dreisers are scarcely tol-
erated. Of the two undoubted world figures that
we have contributed to letters, one was allowed to
die like a stray cat up an alley and the other was
mistaken for a cheap buffoon. Criticism, as the

192 A BOOK OF PREFACES

average American "intellectual" understands it, is
what a Frenchman, a German or a Russian would
call donkeyism. In all the arts we still cling to
the ideals of the dissenting pulpit, the public ceme-
tery, the electric sign, the bordello parlour.

But for all that, I hang to a somewhat battered
optimism, and one of the chief causes of that op-
timism is the fact that Huneker, after all these
years, yet remains unhanged. A picturesque and
rakish fellow, a believer in joy and beauty, a dis-
dainer of petty bombast and moralizing, a sworn
friend of all honest purpose and earnest striving,
he has given his life to a work that must needs bear
fruit hereafter. While the college pedagogues of
the Brander Matthews type still worshipped the
dead bones of Scribe and Sardou, Robertson and
Bulwer-Lytton, he preached the new and revolu-
tionary gospel of Ibsen. In the golden age of Rosa
Bonheur's "The Horse Fair," he was expounding
the principles of the post-impressionists. In the
midst of the Sousa marches he whooped for Rich-
ard Strauss. Before the rev. professors had come
to Schopenhauer, or even to Spencer, he was haul-
ing ashore the devil-fish, Nietzsche. No stranger
poisons have ever passed through the customs than
those he has brought in his baggage. No man
among us has ever urged more ardently, or with

JAMES HUNEKER 193

sounder knowledge or greater persuasiveness, that
catholicity of taste and sympathy which stands in
such direct opposition to the booming certainty
and snarling narrowness of Little Bethel.

If he bears a simple label, indeed, it is that of
anti-Philistine. And the Philistine he attacks is
not so much the vacant and harmless fellow who
belongs to the Odd Fellows and recreates himself
with Life and Leslie s Weekly in the barber shop, as
that more belligerent and pretentious donkey who
presumes to do battle for "honest" thought and a
"sound" ethic — the "forward looking" man, the
university ignoramus, the conservator of orthodoxy,
the rattler of ancient phrases — what Nietzsche
called "the Philistine of culture." It is against
this fat milch cow of wisdom that Huneker has
brandished a spear since first there was a Huneker.
He is a sworn foe to "the traps that snare the atten-
tion from poor or mediocre workmanship — the
traps of sentimentalism, of false feeling, of cheap
pathos, of the cheap moral." He is on the trail of
those pious mountebanks who "clutter the market-
places with their booths, mischievous half-art and
tubs of tripe and soft soap." Superficially, as I
say, he seems to have made little progress in this
benign pogrom. But under the surface, concealed
from a first glance, he has undoubtedly left a mark

194 A BOOK OF PREFACES

— faint, perhaps, but still a mark. To be a civi-
lized man in America is measurably less difficult,
despite the war, than it used to be, say, in 1890.
One may at least speak of "Die Walkure" without
being laughed at as a half-wit, and read Stirner
without being confused with Castro and Rasuili,
and argue that Huxley got the better of Gladstone
without being challenged at the polls. I know of
no man who pushed in that direction harder than
James Huneker.

IV. PURITANISM AS A LITERARY FORCE

IV

PURITANISM AS A LITERARY FORCE

c

« « /^ ALVINISM," says Dr. Leon Kellner, in
in his excellent little history of Ameri-
can literature,1 "is the natural theology
of the disinherited; it never flourished, therefore,
anywhere as it did in the barren hills of Scotland
and in the wilds of North America." The learned
doctor is here speaking of theology in what may be
called its narrow technical sense — that is, as a
theory of God. Under Calvinism, in the New
World as well as in the Old, it became no more
than a luxuriant demonology; even God himself
was transformed into a superior sort of devil, ever
wary and wholly merciless. That primitive de-
monology still survives in the barbaric doctrines of
the Methodists and Baptists, particularly in the
South ; but it has been ameliorated, even there, by a
growing sense of the divine grace, and so the old
God of Plymouth Rock, as practically conceived,

i American Literature, tr. by Julia Franklin; New York,
Doubleday, Page & Co., 1915.

197

198 A BOOK OF PREFACES

is now scarcely worse than the average jail warden
or Italian padrone. On the ethical side, however,
Calvinism is dying a much harder death, and we
are still a long way from the enlightenment. Save
where Continental influences have measurably cor-
rupted the Puritan idea — e.g., in such cities as
New York, St. Louis and New Orleans, the prevail-
ing American view of the world and its mysteries
is still a purely moral one, and no other human con-
cern gets half the attention that is endlessly lav-
ished upon the problem of conduct, particularly of
the other fellow. It needed no announcement of a
President of the United States to define the repub-
lic's destiny as that of an international expert in
morals, and the mentor and exemplar of the less
righteous nations. Within, as well as without, the
eternal rapping of knuckles and proclaiming of
new austerities goes on. The American, save in
moments of conscious and swiftly lamented devil-
try, casts up all ponderable values, including even
the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong.
He is beyond all things else, a judge and a police-
man; he believes firmly that there is a mysterious
power in law; he supports and embellishes its
operation with a fanatical vigilance.

Naturally enough, this moral obsession has given
a strong colour to American literature. In truth, it

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 199

has coloured it so brilliantly that American lit-
erature is set off sharply from all other literatures.
In none other will you find so wholesale and ec-
static a sacrifice of aesthetic ideas, of all the fine
gusto of passion and beauty, to notions of what is
meet, proper and nice. From the books of grisly
sermons that were the first American contribution
to letters down to that amazing literature of "in-
spiration" which now flowers so prodigiously, with
two literary Presidents among its chief virtuosi,
one observes no relaxation of the moral pressure.
In the history of every other literature there have
been periods of what might be called moral inno-
cence— periods in which a naif joie de vivre has
broken through all concepts of duty and respon-
sibility, and the wonder and glory of the universe
have been hymned with unashamed zest. The age
of Shakespeare comes to mind at once : the violence
of the Puritan reaction offers a measure of the pen-
dulum's wild swing. But in America no such gen-
eral rising of the blood has ever been seen. The
literature of the nation, even the literature of the
enlightened minority, has been under harsh Puri-
tan restraints from the beginning, and despite a
few stealthy efforts at revolt — usually quite without
artistic value or even common honesty, as in the
case of the cheap fiction magazines and that of

200 A BOOK OF PREFACES

smutty plays on Broadway, and always very short-
lived— it shows not the slightest sign of emancipat-
ing itself today. The American, try as he will,
can never imagine any work of the imagination as
wholly devoid of moral content. It must either
tend toward the promotion of virtue, or be suspect
and abominable.

If any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the
critical articles in the newspapers and literary
weeklies; you will encounter enough proofs in a
month's explorations to convince you forever. A
novel or a play is judged among us, not by its dig-
nity of conception, its artistic honesty, its perfec-
tion of workmanship, but almost entirely by its
orthodoxy of doctrine, its platitudinousness, its
usefulness as a moral tract. A digest of the re-
views of such a book as David Graham Phillips'
"Susan Lenox" or of such a play as Ibsen's "Hedda
Gabler" would make astounding reading for a
Continental European. Not only the childish in-
competents who write for the daily press, but also
most of our critics of experience and reputation,
seem quite unable to estimate a piece of writing as
a piece of writing, a work of art as a work of art;
they almost inevitably drag in irrelevant gabble as
to whether this or that personage in it is respectable,
or this or that situation in accordance with the

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 201

national notions of what is edifying and nice.
Fully nine-tenths of the reviews of Dreiser's "The
Titan," without question the best American novel
of its year, were devoted chiefly to indigent de-
nunciations of the morals of Frank Cowperwood,
its central character. That the man was superbly
imagined and magnificently depicted, that he stood
out from the book in all the flashing vigour of life,
that his creation was an artistic achievement of a
very high and difficult order — these facts seem to
have made no impression upon the reviewers what-
ever. They were Puritans writing for Puritans,
and all they could see in Cowperwood was an anti-
Puritan, and in his creator another. It will re-
main for Europeans, I daresay, to discover the true
stature of "The Titan," as it remained for Euro-
peans to discover the true stature of "Sister Car-
rie."

Just how deeply this corrective knife has cut
you may find plainly displayed in Dr. Kellner's
little book. He sees the throttling influence of an
ever alert and bellicose Puritanism, not only in our
grand literature, but also in our petit literature, our
minor poetry, even in our humour. The Puritan's
utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all
romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of
opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak

202 A BOOK OF PREFACES

and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his
lust for relentless and barbarous persecution —
these things have put an almost unbearable burden
upon the exchange of ideas in the United States,
and particularly upon that form of it which in-
volves playing with them for the mere game's sake.
On the one hand, the writer who would deal se-
riously and honestly with the larger problems of
life, particularly in the rigidly-partitioned ethical
field, is restrained by laws that would have kept a
Balzac or a Zola in prison from year's end to year's
end; and on the other hand the writer who would
proceed against the reigning superstitions by mock-
ery has been silenced by taboos that are quite as
stringent, and by an indifference that is even
worse. For all our professed delight in and ca-
pacity for jocosity, we have produced so far but
one genuine wit — Ambrose Bierce — and, save to a
small circle, he remains unknown today. Our
great humourists, including even Mark Twain,
have had to take protective colouration, whether
willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailing ethi-
cal foliage, and so one finds them levelling their
darts, not at the stupidities of the Puritan majority,
but at the evidences of lessening stupidity in the
anti-Puritan minority. In other words, they have
done battle, not against, but for Philistinism — and

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 203

Philistinism is no more than another name for
Puritanism. Both wage a ceaseless warfare upon
beauty in its every form, from painting to religious
ritual, and from the drama to the dance — the first
because it holds beauty to be a mean and stupid
thing, and the second because it holds beauty to be
distracting and corrupting.

Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist;
there was in him something of that prodigality of
imagination, that aloof engrossment in the human
comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one asso-
ciates with the great artists of the Renaissance.
But his nationality hung around his neck like a
millstone; he could never throw off his native
Philistinism. One ploughs through "The Inno-
cents Abroad" and through parts of "A Tramp
Abroad" with incredulous amazement. Is such
coarse and ignorant clowning to be accepted as
humour, as great humour, as the best humour that
the most humorous of peoples has produced? Is
it really the mark of a smart fellow to lift a
peasant's cackle over "Lohengrin"? Is Titian's
chromo of Moses in the bullrushes seriously to be
regarded as the noblest picture in Europe? Is
there nothing in Latin Christianity, after all, save
petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship
of the knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints?

204 A BOOK OF PREFACES

May not a civilized man, disbelieving in it, still
find himself profoundly moved by its dazzling his-
tory, the lingering remnants of its old magnificence,
the charm of its gorgeous and melancholy loveli-
ness? In the presence of all beauty of man's crea-
tion— in brief, of what we roughly call art, what-
ever its form — the voice of Mark Twain was the
voice of the Philistine. A literary artist of very
high rank himself, with instinctive gifts that lifted
him, in "Huckleberry Finn" to kinship with Cer-
vantes and Aristophanes, he was yet so far the vic-
tim of his nationality that he seems to have had no
capacity for distinguishing between the good and
the bad in the work of other men of his own craft.
The literary criticism that one occasionally finds in
his writings is chiefly trivial and ignorant; his pri-
vate inclination appears to have been toward such
romantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys;
the thing that interested him in Shakespeare was not
the man's colossal genius, but the absurd theory
that Bacon wrote his plays. Had he been born in
France (the country of his chief abomination!)
instead of in a Puritan village of the American hin-
terland, I venture that he would have conquered
the world. But try as he would, being what he was,
he could not get rid of the Puritan smugness and
cocksureness, the Puritan distrust of new ideas, the

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 205

Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in
itself, and the full peer of the true and the good.

It is, indeed, precisely in the works of such men
as Mark Twain that one finds the best proofs of the
Puritan influence in American letters, for it is there
that it is least expected and hence most significant.
Our native critics, unanimously Puritans them-
selves, are anaesthetic to the flavour, but to Dr. Kell-
ner, with his half -European, half -Oriental culture,
it is always distinctly perceptible. He senses it,
not only in the harsh Calvinistic fables of Haw-
thorne and the pious gurglings of Longfellow, but
also in the poetry of Bryant, the tea-party niceness
of Howells, the "maiden-like reserve" of James
Lane Allen, and even in the work of Joel Chand-
ler Harris. What! A Southern Puritan? Well,
why not? What could be more erroneous than the
common assumption that Puritanism is exclusively
a Northern, a New England, madness? The truth
is that it is as thoroughly national as the kindred
belief in democracy, and runs almost unobstructed
from Portland to Portland and from the Lakes to
the Gulf. It is in the South, indeed, and not in the
North, that it takes on its most bellicose and ex-
travagant forms. Between the upper tier of New
England and the Potomac river there is not a single
prohibition state — but thereafter, alas, they come in

206 A BOOK OF PREFACES

huge blocks! And behind that infinitely pros-
perous Puritanism there is a long and unbroken tra-
dition. Berkeley, the last of the Cavaliers, was
kicked out of power in Virginia so long ago as
1650. Lord Baltimore, the Proprietor of Mary-
land, was brought to terms by the Puritans of the
Severn in 1657. The Scotch Covenanter, the most
uncompromising and unenlightened of all Puri-
tans, flourished in the Carolinas from the start, and
in 1698, or thereabout, he was reinforced from
New England. In 1757 a band of Puritans in-
vaded what is now Georgia — and Georgia has been
a Puritan barbarism ever since. Even while the
early (and half -mythical) Cavaliers were still in
nominal control of all these Southern plantations,
they clung to the sea-coast. The population that
moved down the chain of the Appalachians during
the latter part of the eighteenth century, and then
swept over them into the Mississippi valley, was
composed almost entirely of Puritans — chiefly in-
transigeants from New England (where Unita-
rianism was getting on its legs), kirk-crazy Scotch,
and that plupious and beauty-hating folk, the
Scotch-Irish. "In the South today," said John
Fiske a generation ago, "there is more Puritanism
surviving than in New England." In that whole
region, an area three times as large as France or

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 207

Germany, there is not a single orchestra capable of
playing Beethoven's C minor symphony, or a single
painting worth looking at, or a single public build-
ing or monument of any genuine distinction, or a
single factory devoted to the making of beautiful
things, or a single poet, novelist, historian, musi-
cian, painter or sculptor whose reputation extends
beyond his own country. Between the Mason and
Dixon line and the mouth of the Mississippi there is
but one opera-house, and that one was built by a
Frenchman, and is now, I believe, closed. The
only domestic art this huge and opulent empire
knows is in the hands of Mexican greasers ; its only
native music it owes to the despised negro; its only
genuine poet was permitted to die up an alley like
a stray dog.

§2

In studying the anatomy and physiology of
American Puritanism, and its effects upon the na-
tional literature, one quickly discerns two main
streams of influence. On the one hand, there is the
influence of the original Puritans — whether of New
England or of the South — , who came to the New
World with a ready-made philosophy of the utmost
clarity, positiveness and inclusiveness of scope, and
who attained to such a position of political and

208 A BOOK OF PREFACES

intellectual leadership that they were able to force
it almost unchanged upon the whole population, and
to endow it with such vitality that it successfully
resisted alien opposition later on. And on the
other hand, one sees a complex of social and eco-
nomic conditions which worked in countless irre-
sistible ways against the rise of that dionysian
spirit, that joyful acquiescence in life, that philos-
ophy of the Ja-sager, which offers to Puritanism,
today as in times past, its chief and perhaps only
effective antagonism. In other words, the Ameri-
can of the days since the Revolution has had Puri-
tanism diligently pressed upon him from without,
and at the same time he has led, in the main, a
life that has engendered a chronic hospitality to it,
or at all events to its salient principles, within.

Dr. Kellner accurately described the process
whereby the aesthetic spirit, and its concomitant
spirit of joy, were squeezed out of the original New
Englanders, so that no trace of it showed in their
literature, or even in their lives, for a century and a
half after the first settlements. "Absorption in
God," he says, "seems incompatible with the pres-
entation (i.e., aesthetically) of mankind. The God
of the Puritans was in this respect a jealous God
who brooked no sort of creative rivalry. The in-
spired moments of the loftiest souls were filled with

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 209

the thought of God and His designs; spiritual life
was wholly dominated by solicitude regarding sal-
vation, the hereafter, grace; how could such petty
concerns as personal experience of a lyric nature,
the transports or the pangs of love, find utterance?
What did a lyric occurrence like the first call of the
cuckoo, elsewhere so welcome, or the first sight of
the snowdrop, signify compared with the last Sun-
day's sermon and the new interpretation of the old
riddle of evil in the world? And apart from the
fact that everything of a personal nature must have
appeared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric
poetry were offensive and impious to Puritan
theology. . . . One thing is an established fact: up
to the close of the eighteenth century America had
no belletristic literature."

This Puritan bedevilment by the idea of personal
sin, this reign of the God-crazy, gave way in later
years, as we shall see, to other and somewhat milder
forms of pious enthusiam. At the time of the
Revolution, indeed, the importation of French
political ideas was accompanied by an importation
of French theological ideas, and such men as Frank-
lin and Jefferson dallied with what, in those days
at least, was regarded as downright atheism.
Even in New England this influence made itself
felt; there was a gradual letting down of Calvinism

210 A BOOK OF PREFACES

to the softness of Unitarianism, and that change was
presently to flower in the vague temporizing of
Transcendentalism. But as Puritanism, in the
strict sense, declined in virulence and took decep-
tive new forms, there was a compensating growth of
its brother, Philistinism, and by the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, the distrust of beauty, and
of the joy that is its object, was as firmly estab-
lished throughout the land as it had ever been in
New England. The original Puritans had at least
been men of a certain education, and even of a
certain austere culture. They were inordinately
hostile to beauty in all its forms, but one somehow
suspects that much of their hostility was due to a
sense of their weakness before it, a realization of
its disarming psychical pull. But the American of
the new republic was of a different kidney. He
was not so much hostile to beauty as devoid of any
consciousness of it; he stood as unmoved before its
phenomena as a savage before a table of loga-
rithms. What he had set up on this continent, in
brief, was a commonwealth of peasants and small
traders, a paradise of the third-rate, and its national
philosophy, almost wholly unchecked by the more
sophisticated and civilized ideas of an aristocracy,
was precisely the philosophy that one finds among
peasants and small traders at all times and every-

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 211

where. The difference between the United States
and any other nation did not lie in any essential
difference between American peasants and other
peasants, but simply in the fact that here, alone,
the voice of the peasant was the single voice of the
nation — that here, alone, the only way to eminence
and public influence was the way of acquiescence
in the opinions and prejudices of the stupid and
Philistine mob. Jackson was the Stammvater of
the new statesmen and philosophers; he carried the
mob's distrust of good taste even into the field of
conduct ; he was the first to put the rewards of con-
formity above the dictates of common decency; he
founded a whole hierarchy of Philistine messiahs,
the roaring of which still belabours the ear.

Once established, this culture of the intellec-
tually disinherited tended to defend and perpetuate
itself. On the one hand, there was no appearance
of a challenge from within, for the exigeant prob-
lems of existence in a country that was yet but half
settled and organized left its people with no energy
for questioning what at least met their grosser
needs, and so met the pragmatic test. And on the
other hand, there was no critical pressure from
without, for the English culture which alone
reached over the sea was itself entering upon its
Victorian decline, and the influence of the native

212 A BOOK OF PREFACES

aristocracy — the degenerating Junkers of the great
estates and the boorish magnates of the city bour-
geoisie— was quite without any cultural direction
at all. The chief concern of the American people,
even above the bread-and-butter question, was poli-
tics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by politi-
cal difficulties, both internal and external, of an
inordinate complexity, and these occupied all the
leisure they could steal from the sordid work of
everyday. More, their new and troubled political
ideas tended to absorb all the rancorous certainty
of their fading religious ideas, so that devotion to
a theory or a candidate became translated into de-
votion to a revelation, and the game of politics
turned itself into a holy war. The custom of con-
necting purely political doctrines with pietistic con-
cepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up
by skilful persuaders of the mob, has never quite
died out in the United States. There has not been
a presidential contest since Jackson's day without
its Armageddons, its marching of Christian sol-
diers, its crosses of gold, its crowns of thorns.
The most successful American politicians, begin-
ning with the anti-slavery agitators, have been those
most adept at twisting the ancient gauds and shib-
boleths of Puritanism to partisan uses. Every
campaign that we have seen for eighty years has

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 213

been, on each side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a de-
nunciation of heresies, a snouting up of immoral-
ities.

But it was during the long contest against slavery,
beginning with the appearance of William Lloyd
Garrison's Liberator in 1831 and ending at Ap-
pomattox, that this gigantic supernaturalization of
politics reached its most astounding heights. In
those days, indeed, politics and religion coalesced
in a manner not seen in the world since the
Middle Ages, and the combined pull of the
two was so powerful that none could quite resist
it. All men of any ability and ambition turned
to political activity for self-expression. It en-
gaged the press to the exclusion of everything
else; it conquered the pulpit; it even laid its
hand upon industry and trade. Drawing the
best imaginative talent into its service — Jeffer-
son and Lincoln may well stand as examples
— it left the cultivation of belles lettres, and
of all the other arts no less, to women and ad-
mittedly second-rate men. And when, breaking
through this taboo, some chance first-rate man gave
himself over to purely aesthetic expression, his re-
ward was not only neglect, but even a sort of
ignominy, as if such enterprises were not fitting
for males with hair on their chests. I need not

214 A BOOK OF PREFACES

point to Poe and Whitman, both disdained as
dreamers and wasters, and both proceeded against
with the utmost rigours of outraged Philistinism.

In brief, the literature of that whole period, as
Algernon Tassin shows in "The Magazine in Amer-
ica," 1 was almost completely disassociated from
life as men were then living it. Save one counts
in such crude politico-puritan tracts as "Uncle
Tom's Cabin," it is difficult to find a single con-
temporaneous work that interprets the culture of
the time, or even accurately represents it. Later
on, it found historians and anatomists, and in one
work, at least, to wit, "Huckleberry Finn," it was
studied and projected with the highest art, but no
such impulse to make imaginative use of it showed
itself contemporaneously, and there was not even
the crude sentimentalization of here and now that
one finds in the popular novels of today. Feni-
more Cooper filled his romances, not with the peo-
ple about him, but with the Indians beyond the
sky-line, and made them half-fabulous to boot.
Irving told fairy tales about the forgotten Knicker-
bockers; Hawthorne turned backward to the Puri-
tans of Plymouth Rock ; Longfellow to the Acadians
and the prehistoric Indians; Emerson took flight
from earth altogether; even Poe sought refuge in a

i New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 215

land of fantasy. It was only the frank second-
raters — e.g., Whittier and Lowell — who ventured
to turn to the life around them, and the banality
of the result is a sufficient indication of the crude-
ness of the current taste, and the mean position as-
signed to the art of letters. This was pre-emi-
nently the era of the moral tale, the Sunday-school
book. Literature was conceived, not as a thing in
itself, but merely as a hand-maiden to politics or
religion. The great celebrity of Emerson in New
England was not the celebrity of a literary artist,
but that of a theologian and metaphysician; he
was esteemed in much the same way that Jonathan
Edwards had been esteemed. Even down to our
own time, indeed, his vague and empty philosophiz-
ing has been put above his undeniable capacity
for graceful utterance, and it remained for Dr.
Kellner to consider him purely as a literary artist,
and to give him due praise for his skill.

The Civil War brought that era of sterility to an
end. As I shall show later on, the shock of it com-
pletely reorganized the American scheme of things,
and even made certain important changes in the
national Puritanism, or, at all events, in its ma-
chinery. Whitman, whose career straddled, so to
speak, the four years of the war, was the leader —
and for a long while, the only trooper — of a double

216 A BOOK OF PREFACES

revolt. On the one hand he offered a courageous
challenge to the intolerable prudishness and dirty-
mindedness of Puritanism, and on the other hand
he boldly sought the themes and even the modes of
expression of his poetry in the arduous, contentious
and highly melodramatic life that lay all about
him. Whitman, however, was clearly before his
time. His countrymen could see him only as im-
moralist; save for a pitiful few of them, they were
dead to any understanding of his stature as artist,
and even unaware that such a category of men ex-
isted. He was put down as an invader of the pub-
lic decencies, a disturber of the public peace; even
his eloquent war poems, surely the best of all his
work, were insufficient to get him a hearing; the
sentimental rubbish of "The Blue and the Gray"
and the ecstatic super-naturalism of "The Battle
Hymn of the Republic" were far more to the public
taste. Where Whitman failed, indeed, all sub-
sequent explorers of the same field have failed with
him, and the great war has left no more mark upon
American letters than if it had never been fought.
Nothing remotely approaching the bulk and beam
of Tolstoi's "War and Peace," or, to descend to a
smaller scale, Zola's "The Attack on the Mill," has
come out of it. Its appeal to the national imagina-
tion was undoubtedly of the most profound char-

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 217

acter; it coloured politics for fifty years, and is
today a dominating influence in the thought of
whole sections of the American people. But in all
that stirring up there was no upheaval of artistic
consciousness, for the plain reason that there was
no artistic consciousness there to heave up, and all
we have in the way of Civil War literature is a few
conventional melodramas, a few half-forgotten
short stories by Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane,
and a half dozen idiotic popular songs in the man-
ner of Randall's "Maryland, My Maryland."

In the seventies and eighties, with the appear-
ance of such men as Henry James, William Dean
Howells, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, a better day
seemed to be dawning. Here, after a full century
of infantile romanticizing, were four writers who
at least deserved respectful consideration as liter-
ary artists, and what is more, three of them turned
from the conventionalized themes of the past to the
teeming and colourful life that lay under their
noses. But this promise of better things was soon
found to be no more than a promise. Mark Twain,
after "The Gilded Age," slipped back into ro-
manticism tempered by Philistinism, and was pres-
ently in the era before the Civil War, and finally
in the Middle Ages, and even beyond. Harte, a
brilliant technician, had displayed his whole stock

218 A BOOK OF PREFACES

when he had displayed his technique: his stories
were not even superficially true to the life they
presumed to depict; one searched them in vain for
an interpretation of it; they were simply idle tales.
As for Howells and James, both quickly showed
that timorousness and reticence which are the dis-
tinguishing marks of the Puritan, even in his most
intellectual incarnations. The American scene
that they depicted with such meticulous care was
chiefly peopled with marionettes. They shrunk,
characteristically, from those larger, harsher
clashes of will and purpose which one finds in all
truly first-rate literature. In particular, they
shrunk from any interpretation of life which
grounded itself upon an acknowledgment of its in-
exorable and inexplicable tragedy. In the vast
combat of instincts and aspirations about them
they saw only a feeble jousting of comedians, un-
serious and insignificant. Of the great questions
that have agitated the minds of men in Howells'
time one gets no more than a faint and far-away
echo in his novels. His investigations, one may
say, are carried on in vacuo; his discoveries are
not expressed in terms of passion, but in terms of
giggles.

In the followers of Howells and James one finds
little save an empty imitation of their emptiness,

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 219

a somewhat puerile parodying of their highly art-
ful but essentially personal technique. To wade
through the books of such characteristic American
fictioneers as Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mary E.
Wilkins Freeman, F. Hopkinson Smith, Alice
Brown, James Lane Allen, Winston Churchill, Ellen
Glasgow, Gertrude Atherton and Sarah Orne Jewett
is to undergo an experience that is almost terrible.
The flow of words is completely purged of ideas;
in place of them one finds no more than a* romantic
restatement of all the old platitudes and formulae.
To call such an emission of graceful poppycock a
literature, of course, is to mouth an absurdity, and
yet, if the college professors who write treatises on
letters are to be believed, it is the best we have to
show. Turn, for example, to "A History of Amer-
ican Literature Since 1870," by Prof. Fred Lewis
Pattee, one of the latest and undoubtedly one of
the least unintelligent of these books. In it the
gifted pedagogue gives extended notice to no less
than six of the nine writers I have mentioned, and
upon all of them his verdicts are flattering. He
bestows high praises, direct and indirect, upon
Mrs. Freeman's "grim and austere" manner, her
"repression," her entire lack of poetical illumina-
tion. He compares Miss Jewett to both Howells
and Hawthorne, not to mention Mrs. Gaskell — and

220 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Addison! He grows enthusiastic over a hollow
piece of fine writing by Miss Brown. And he for-
gets altogether to mention Dreiser, or Sinclair, or
Medill Patterson, or Harry Leon Wilson, or George
Ade! . . .

So much for the best. The worst is beyond de-
scription. France has her Brieux and her Henry
Bordeaux; Germany has her Muhlbach, her stars of
the Gartenlaube; England contributes Caine, Cor-
elli, Oppenheim and company. But it is in our
country alone that banality in letters takes on the
proportions of a national movement ; it is only here
that a work of the imagination is habitually judged
by its sheer emptiness of ideas, its fundamental
platitudinousness, its correspondence with the im-
becility of mob thinking; it is only here that "glad"
books run up sales of hundreds of thousands.
Richard Harding Davis, with his ideals of a floor-
walker; Gene Stratton-Porter, with her snuffling
sentimentality; Robert W. Chambers, with his "so-
ciety" romances for shop-girls; Irvin Cobb, with
his laboured, Ayers Almanac jocosity; the authors
of the Saturday Evening Post school, with their
heroic drummers and stockbrokers, their ecstatic
celebration of the stupid, the sordid, the ignoble —
these, after all, are our typical literati. The Puri-
tan fear of ideas is the master of diem all. Some

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 221

of them, in truth, most of them, have undeniable
talent; in a more favourable environment not a
few of them might be doing sound work. But they
see how small the ring is, and they make their
tricks small to fit it. Not many of them ever
venture a leg outside. The lash of the ringmaster
is swift, and it stings damnably. . . .

I say not many; I surely do not mean none at
all. As a matter of fact, there have been intermit-
tent rebellions against the prevailing pecksniffery
and sentimentality ever since the days of Irving
and Hawthorne. Poe led one of them — as critic
more than as creative artist. His scathing attacks
upon the Gerald Stanley Lees, the Hamilton Wright
Mabies and the George E. Woodberrys of his time
keep a liveliness and appositeness that the years
have not staled; his criticism deserves to be better
remembered. Poe sensed the Philistine pull of a
Puritan civilization as none had before him, and
combated it with his whole artillery of rhetoric.
Another rebel, of course, was Whitman; how he
came to grief is too well known to need recalling.
What is less familiar is the fact that both the At-
lantic Monthly and the Century (first called Scrib-
Tier's) were set up by men in revolt against the
reign of mush, as Putnam 's and the Dial had been
before them. The salutatory of the Dial, dated

222 A BOOK OF PREFACES

1840, stated the case against the national mugginess
clearly. The aim of the magazine, it said, was to
oppose "that rigour of our conventions of religion
and education which is turning us to stone" and to
give expression to "new views and the dreams of
youth." Alas, for these brave revokes! Put-
nam's succumbed to the circumambient rigours and
duly turned to stone, and is now no more. The
Atlantic, once so heretical, has become as respecta-
ble as the New York Evening Post. As for the
Dial, it was until lately the very pope of orthodoxy
and jealously guarded the college professors who
read it from the pollution of ideas. Only the
Century has kept the faith unbrokenly. It is, in-
deed, the one first-class American magazine that
has always welcomed newcomers, and that main-
tains an intelligent contact with the literature that
is in being, and that consistently tries to make the
best terms possible with the dominant Philistinism.
It cannot go the whole way without running into
danger; let it be said to the credit of its editors
that they have more than once braved that danger.
The tale might be lengthened. Mark Twain, in
his day, felt the stirrings of revolt, and not all his
Philistinism was sufficient to hold him altogether
in check. If you want to find out about the strug-
gle that went on within him, read the biography by

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 223

Albert Bigelow Paine, or, better still, "The Mysteri-
ous Stranger" and "What is Man?" Alive, he had
his position to consider; dead, he now speaks out.
In the preface to "What is Man?" dated 1905,
there is a curious confession of his incapacity for
defying the taboos which surrounded him. The
studies for the book, he says, were begun "twenty-
five or twenty-seven years ago" — the period of "A
Tramp Abroad" and "The Prince and the Pauper."
It was actually written "seven years ago" — that is,
just after "Following the Equator" and "Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc." And why did it
lie so long in manuscript, and finally go out stealth-
ily, under a private imprint? x Simply because,
as Mark frankly confesses, he "dreaded (and could
not bear) the disapproval of the people around"
him. He knew how hard his fight for recognition
had been; he knew what direful penalties outraged
orthodoxy could inflict; he had in him the some-
what pathetic discretion of a respectable family
man. But, dead, he is safely beyond reprisal, and
so, after a prudent interval, the faithful Paine be-
gins printing books in which, writing knowingly
behind six feet of earth, he could set down his true
ideas without fear. Some day, perhaps, we shall

i The first edition for public sale did not appear until June,
1917, and in it the preface was suppressed.

224 A BOOK OF PREFACES

have his microbe story, and maybe even his picture
of the court of Elizabeth.

A sneer in Prof. Pattee's history, before men-
tioned, recalls the fact that Hamlin Garland was
also a rebel in his day and bawled for the Truth
with a capital T. That was in 1893. Two years
later the guardians of the national rectitude fell
afoul of "Rose of Dutchers' Coolly" and Garland
began to think it over; today he devotes himself to
the safer enterprise of chasing spooks; his name
is conspicuously absent from the Dreiser Protest.
Nine years before his brief offending John Hay had
set off a discreet bomb in "The Bread-Winners" —
anonymously because "my standing would be seri-
ously compromised" by an avowal. Six years
later Frank Norris shook up the Phelpses and
Mores of the time with "McTeague." Since then
there have been assaults timorous and assaults
head-long — by Bierce, by Dreiser, by Phillips, by
Fuller — by Mary MacLane and George Sylvester
Viereck — by ploughboy poets from the Middle
West and by jitney geniuses in Greenwich Village
— assaults gradually tapering off to a mere sopho-
moric brashness and deviltry. And all of them
like snow-ballings of Verdun. All of them petered
out and ineffectual. The normal, the typical
American book of today is as fully a remouthing

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 225

of old husks as the normal book of Griswold's day.
The whole atmosphere of our literature, in William
James' phrase, is "mawkish and dishwatery."
Books are still judged among us, not by their form
and organization as works of art, their accuracy
and vividness as representations of life, their valid-
ity and perspicacity as interpretations of it, but by
their conformity to the national prejudices, their
accordance with set standards of niceness and pro-
priety. The thing irrevocably demanded is a
"sane" book; the ideal is a "clean," an "inspir-
ing," a "glad" book.

§3

All this may be called the Puritan impulse from
within. It is, indeed, but a single manifestation
of one of the deepest prejudices of a religious and
half-cultured people — the prejudice against beauty
as a form of debauchery and corruption — the dis-
trust of all ideas that do not fit readily into certain
accepted axioms — the belief in the eternal validity
of moral concepts — in brief, the whole mental slug-
gishness of the lower orders of men. But in ad-
dition to this internal resistance, there has been laid
upon American letters the heavy hand of a Puritan
authority from without, and no examination of the

226 A BOOK OF PREFACES

history and present condition of our literature could
be of any value which did not take it constantly
into account, and work out the means of its in-
fluence and operation. That authority, as I shall
show, transcends both in power and in alertness the
natural reactions of the national mind, and is in-
comparably more potent in combating ideas. It
is supported by a body of law that is unmatched in
any other country of Christendom, and it is ex-
ercised with a fanatical harshness and vigilance
that make escape from its operations well nigh im-
possible. Some of its effects, both direct and in-
direct, I shall describe later, but before doing so
it may be well to trace its genesis and develop-
ment.

At bottom, of course, it rests upon the inherent
Puritanism of the people; it could not survive a
year if they were opposed to the principle visible in
it. That deep-seated and uncorrupted Puritanism,
that conviction of the pervasiveness of sin, of the
supreme importance of moral correctness, of the
need of savage and inquisitorial laws, has been a
dominating force in American life since the very
beginning. There has never been any question
before the nation, whether political or economic,
religious or military, diplomatic or sociological,
which did not resolve itself, soon or late, into a

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 227

purely moral question. Nor has there ever been
any surcease of the spiritual eagerness which lay
at the bottom of the original Puritan's moral obses-
sion: the American has been, from the very start,
a man genuinely interested in the eternal mysteries,
and fearful of missing their correct solution. The
frank theocracy of the New England colonies had
scarcely succumbed to the libertarianism of a god-
less Crown before there came the Great Awakening
of 1734, with its orgies of homiletics and its resto-
ration of talmudism to the first place among polite
sciences. The Revolution, of course, brought a
set-back: the colonists faced so urgent a need of
unity in politics that they declared a sort of Treuga
Dei in religion, and that truce, armed though it
was, left its imprint upon the First Amendment to
the Constitution. But immediately the young Re-
public emerged from the stresses of adolescence, a
missionary army took to the field again, and before
long the Asbury revival was paling that of White-
field, Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, not only in
its hortatory violence but also in the length of its
lists of slain.

Thereafter, down to the outbreak of the Civil
War, the country was rocked again and again by
furious attacks upon the devil. On the one hand,
this great campaign took a purely theological form,

228 A BOOK OF PREFACES

with a hundred new and fantastic creeds as its
fruits; on the other hand, it crystallized into the
hysterical temperance movement of the 30's and
40's, which penetrated to the very floor of Congress
and put "dry" laws upon the statute-books of ten
States; and on the third hand, as it were, it es-
tablished a prudery in speech and thought from
which we are yet but half delivered. Such ancient
and innocent words as "bitch" and "bastard" dis-
appeared from the American language; Bartlett
tells us, indeed, in his "Dictionary of American-
isms," * that even "bull" was softened to "male
cow." This was the Golden Age of euphemism,
as it was of euphuism; the worst inventions of the
English mid- Victorians were adopted and improved.
The word "woman" became a term of opprobrium,
verging close upon downright libel; legs became
the inimitable "limbs"; the stomach began to run
from the "bosom" to the pelvic arch; pantaloons
faded into "unmentionables"; the newspapers spun
their parts of speech into such gossamer webs as "a
statutory offence," "a house of questionable repute"
and "an interesting condition." And meanwhile
the Good Templars and Sons of Temperance
swarmed in the land like a plague of celestial
locusts. There was not a hamlet without its uni-

i Second edition; Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1859, xxvi.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 229

formed phalanx, its affecting exhibit of reformed
drunkards. The Kentucky Legislature succumbed
to a travelling recruiting officer, and two-thirds of
the members signed the pledge. The National
House of Representatives took recess after recess to
hear eminent excoriators of the Rum Demon, and
more than a dozen of its members forsook their
duties to carry the new gospel to the bucolic heathen
— the vanguard, one may note in passing, of the
innumerable Chautauquan caravan of later years.
Beneath all this bubbling on the surface, of
course, ran the deep and swift undercurrent of anti-
slavery feeling — a tide of passion which historians
now attempt to account for on economic grounds,
but which showed no trace of economic origin while
it lasted. Its true quality was moral, devout,
ecstatic; it culminated, to change the figure, in a
supreme discharge of moral electricity, almost fa-
tal to the nation. The crack of that great spark
emptied the jar; the American people forgot all
about their pledges and pruderies during the four
years of Civil War. The Good Templars, indeed,
were never heard of again, and with them into
memory went many other singular virtuosi of vir-
tue— for example, the Millerites. But almost be-
fore the last smoke of battle cleared away, a re-
naissance of Puritan ardour began, and by the mid-

230 A BOOK OF PREFACES

die of the 70's it was in full flower. Its high points
and flashing lighthouses halt the backward-looking
eye; the Moody and Sankey uproar, the triumphal
entry of the Salvation Army, the recrudescence of
the temperance agitation and its culmination in pro-
hibition, the rise of the Young Men's Christian As-
sociation and of the Sunday-school, the almost
miraculous growth of the Christian Endeavour
movement, the beginnings of the vice crusade, the
renewed injection of moral conceptions and rages
into party politics (the "crime" of 1873!), the
furious preaching of baroque Utopias, the inven-
tion of muckraking, the mad, glad war of exter-
mination upon the Mormons, the hysteria over the
Breckenridge-Pollard case and other like causes,
the enormous multiplication of moral and religious
associations, the spread of zoophilia, the attack
upon Mammon, the dawn of the uplift, and last but
far from least, comstockery.

In comstockery, if I do not err, the new Puritan-
ism gave a sign of its formal departure from the
old, and moral endeavour suffered a general over-
hauling and tightening of the screws. The differ-
ence between the two forms is very well represented
by the difference between the program of the half-
forgotten Good Templars and the program set forth
in the Webb Law of 1913, or by that between the

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 231

somewhat diffident prudery of the 40's and the as-
toundingly ferocious and uncompromising vice-
crusading of today. In brief, a difference between
the renunciation and denunciation, asceticism and
Mohammedanism, the hair shirt and the flaming
sword. The distinguishing mark of the elder
Puritanism, at least after it had attained to the
stature of a national philosophy, was its appeal to
the individual conscience, its exclusive concern
with the elect, its strong flavour of self-accusing.
Even the rage against slavery was, in large meas-
ure, an emotion of the mourners' bench. The
thing that worried the more ecstatic Abolitionists
was their sneaking sense of responsibility, the fear
that they themselves were flouting the fire by letting
slavery go on. The thirst to punish the concrete
slave-owner, as an end in itself, did not appear
until opposition had added exasperation to fervour.
In most of the earlier harangues against his prac-
tice, indeed, you will find a perfect willingness to
grant that slave-owner's good faith, and even to
compensate him for his property. But the new
Puritanism — or, perhaps more accurately, consider-
ing the shades of prefixes, the neo-Puritanism — is
a frank harking back to the primitive spirit. The
original Puritan of the bleak New England coast
was not content to flay his own wayward carcass:

232 A BOOK OF PREFACES

full satisfaction did not sit upon him until he had
jailed a Quaker. That is to say, the sinner who
excited his highest zeal and passion was not so much
himself as his neighbour; to borrow a term from
psychopathology, he was less the masochist than the
sadist. And it is that very peculiarity which sets
off his descendant of today from the ameliorated
Puritan of the era between the Revolution and the
Civil War. The new Puritanism is not ascetic, but
militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to
knock down sinners. Its supreme manifestation
is the vice crusade, an armed pursuit of helpless
outcasts by the whole military and naval forces of
the Republic. Its supreme hero is Comstock Him-
self, with his pious boast that the sinners he jailed
during his astounding career, if gathered into one
penitential party, would have filled a train of
sixty-one coaches, allowing sixty to the coach.

So much for the general trend and tenor of the
movement. At the bottom of it, it is plain, there
lies that insistent presentation of the idea of sin,
that enchantment by concepts of carnality, which
has engaged a certain type of man, to the exclusion
of all other notions, since the dawn of history.
The remote ancestors of our Puritan-Philistines of
today are to be met with in the Old Testament and
the New, and their nearer grandfathers clamoured

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 233

against the snares of the flesh in all the councils of
the Early Church. Not only Western Christianity
has had to reckon with them: they have brothers
today among the Mohammedan Sufi, and in obscure
Buddhist sects, and they were the chief preachers
of the Russian Raskol, or Reformation. "The
Ironsides of Cromwell and the Puritans of New
England," says Heard, in his book on the Russian
church, "bear a strong resemblance to the Old Be-
lievers." But here, in the main, we have asceti-
cism more than Puritanism, as it is now visible; here
the sinner combated is chiefly the one within. How
are we to account for the wholesale transvaluation
of values that came after the Civil War, the transfer
of ire from the Old Adam to the happy rascal across
the street, the sinister rise of a new Inquisition in
the midst of a growing luxury that even the Puritans
themselves succumbed to? The answer is to be
sought, it seems to me, in the direction of the Golden
Calf — in the direction of the fat fields of our Mid-
lands, the full nets of our lakes and coasts, the fac-
tory smoke of our cities — even in the direction of
Wall Street, that devil's chasm. In brief, Puritan-
ism has become bellicose and tyrannical by becom-
ing rich. The will to power has been aroused to
a high flame by an increase in the available draught
and fuel, as militarism is engendered and nour-

234 A BOOK OF PREFACES

ished by the presence of men and materials.
Wealth, discovering its power, has reached out its
long arms to grab the distant and innumerable sin-
ner; it has gone down into its deep pockets to pay
for his costly pursuit and flaying; it has created
the Puritan entrepreneur, the daring and imagina-
tive organizer of Puritanism, the baron of moral
endeavour, the invincible prophet of new austeri-
ties. And, by the same token, it has issued its let-
ters of marque to the Puritan mercenary, the pro-
fessional hound of heaven, the moral Junker, the
Comstock, and out of his skill at his trade there
has arisen the whole machinery, so complicated
and so effective, of the new Holy Office.

Poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of hu-
man activity, not excepting the spiritual, and even
the original Puritans, for all their fire, felt its
throttling caress. I think it is Bill Nye who has
humorously pictured their arduous life: how they
had to dig clams all winter that they would have
strength enough to plant corn, and how they had to
hoe corn all summer that they would have strength
enough to dig clams. That low ebb of fortune
worked against the full satisfaction of their zeal
in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it kept
them but ill-prepared for the cost of offensive en-
terprise: even their occasional missionarying raids

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 235

upon the Indians took too much productive energy
from their business with the corn and the clams.
And on the other hand, it kept a certain restrain-
ing humility in their hearts, so that for every
Quaker they hanged, they let a dozen go. Poverty,
of course, is no discredit, but at all events, it is a
subtle criticism. The man oppressed by material
wants is not in the best of moods for the more am-
bitious forms of moral adventure. He not only
lacks the means; he is also deficient in the self-
assurance, the sense of superiority, the secure and
lofty point of departure. If he is haunted by no-
tions of the sinfulness of his neighbours, he is apt
to see some of its worst manifestations within him-
self, and that disquieting discovery will tend to
take his thoughts from the other fellow. It is by
no arbitrary fiat, indeed, that the brothers of all
the expiatory orders are vowed to poverty. His-
tory teaches us that wealth, whenever it has come
to them by chance, has put an end to their soul-
searching. The Puritans of the elder generations,
with few exceptions, were poor. Nearly all Amer-
icans, down to the Civil War, were poor. And be-
ing poor, they subscribed to a Sklavmoral. That
is to say, they were spiritually humble. Their
eyes were fixed, not upon the abyss below them, but
upon the long and rocky road ahead of them.

236 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Their moral passion spent most of its force
in self-accusing, self-denial and self-scourging.
They began by howling their sins from the mourn-
ers' bench; they came to their end, many of them,
in the supreme immolation of battle.

But out of the War came prosperity, and out of
prosperity came a new morality, to wit, the Her-
renmoral. Many great fortunes were made in the
War itself; an uncountable number got started dur-
ing the two decades following. What is more, this
material prosperity was generally dispersed through
all classes: it affected the common workman and
the remote farmer quite as much as the actual mer-
chant and manufacturer. Its first effect, as we all
know, was a universal cockiness, a rise in preten-
sions, a comforting feeling that the Republic was
a success, and with it, its every citizen. This
change made itself quickly obvious, and even
odious, in all the secular relations of life. The
American became a sort of braggart playboy of the
western world, enormously sure of himself and
ludicrously contemptuous of all other men. And
on the ghostly side there appeared the same acces-
sion of confidence, the same sure assumption of au-
thority, though at first less self-evidently and of-
fensively. The religion of the American thus
began to lose its inward direction; it became less

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 237

and less a scheme of personal salvation and more
and more a scheme of pious derring-do. The re-
vivals of the 70's had all the bounce and fervour
of those of half a century before, but the mourners'
bench began to lose its standing as their symbol,
and in its place appeared the collection basket.
Instead of accusing himself, the convert volunteered
to track down and bring in the other fellow. His
enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he
began to call service. In brief, the national sense
of energy and fitness gradually superimposed itself
upon the national Puritanism, and from that mar-
riage sprung a keen Wille zur Macht, a lusty will
to power.1 The American Puritan, by now, was
not content with the rescue of his own soul ; he felt
an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to dis-
perse and multiply it, to ram it down reluctant
throats, to make it free, universal and compulsory.
He had the men, he had the guns and he had the
money too. All that was needed was organization.
The rescue of the unsaved could be converted into
a wholesale business, unsentimentally and economi-
cally conducted, and with all the usual aids to
efficiency, from skilful sales management to se-

i Of. The Puritan, by Owen Hatteras, The Smart Set, July,
1916; and The Puritan's Will to Power, by Randolph S.
Bourne, The Seven Arts, April, 1917.

238 A BOOK OF PREFACES

ductive advertising, and from rigorous accounting
to the diligent shutting off of competition.

Out of that new will to power came many en-
terprises more or less futile and harmless, with the
"institutional" church at their head. Piety was
cunningly disguised as basketball, billiards and
squash; the sinner was lured to grace with Turkish
baths, lectures on foreign travel, and free instruc-
tions in stenography, rhetoric and double-entry
book-keeping. Religion lost all its old contempla-
tive and esoteric character, and became a frankly
worldly enterprise, a thing of balance-sheets and
ponderable profits, heavily capitalized and astutely
manned. There was no longer any room for the
spiritual type of leader, with his white choker and
his interminable fourthlies. He was displaced by
a brisk gentleman in a "business suit" who looked,
talked and thought like a seller of Mexican mine
stock. Scheme after scheme for the swift evangeli-
zation of the nation was launched, some of them of
truly astonishing sweep and daring. They kept
pace, step by step, with the mushroom growth of
enterprise in the commercial field. The Y. M. C.
A. swelled to the proportions of a Standard Oil
Company, a United States Steel Corporation. Its
hugh buildings began to rise in every city; it de-
veloped a swarm of specialists in new and fantastic

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 239

moral and social sciences; it enlisted the same gar-
gantuan talent which managed the railroads, the
big banks and the larger national industries. And
beside it rose the Young People's Society of Chris-
tian Endeavour, the Sunday-school associations and
a score of other such grandiose organizations,
each with its seductive baits for recruits and
money. Even the enterprises that had come down
from an elder and less expansive day were pumped
up and put on a Wall Street basis: the American
Bible Society, for example, began to give away
Bibles by the million instead of by the thousand,
and the venerable Tract Society took on the fever-
ish ardour of a daily newspaper, even of a yellow
journal. Down into our own day this trustifica-
tion of pious endeavour has gone on. The Men
and Religion Forward Movement proposed to con-
vert the whole country by 12 o'clock noon of such
and such a day; die Order of Gideons plans to make
every traveller read the Bible (American Revised
Version!) whether he will or not; in a score of
cities there are committees of opulent devotees who
take half-pages in the newspapers, and advertise
the Decalogue and the Beatitudes as if they were
commodities of trade.

Thus the national energy which created the Beef
Trust and the Oil Trust achieved equal marvels in

240 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the field of religious organization and by exactly
the same methods. One needs be no psychologist
to perceive in all this a good deal less actual re-
ligious zeal than mere lust for staggering accom-
plishment, for empty bigness, for the unprece-
dented and the prodigious. Many of these great
religious enterprises, indeed, soon lost all save the
faintest flavour of devotion — for example, the Y,
M. C. A., which is now no more than a sort of
national club system, with its doors open to any one
not palpably felonious. (I have drunk cocktails in
Y. M. C. A. lamaseries, and helped fallen lamas to
bed.) But while the war upon godlessness thus
degenerated into a secular sport in one direction, it
maintained all its pristine quality, and even took on
a new ferocity in another direction. Here it was
that the lamp of American Puritanism kept on
burning; here, it was, indeed, that the lamp be-
came converted into a huge bonfire, or rather a
blast-furnace, with flames mounting to the very
heavens, and sinners stacked like cordwood at the
hand of an eager black gang. In brief, the new
will to power, working in the true Puritan as in the
mere religious sportsman, stimulated him to a cam-
paign of repression and punishment perhaps un-
equalled in the history of the world, and developed
an art of militant morality as complex in technique

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 241

and as rich in professors as the elder art of
iniquity.

If we take the passage of the Comstock Postal
Act, on March 3, 1873, as a starting point, the legis-
lative stakes of this new Puritan movement sweep
upward in a grand curve to the passage of the Mann
and Webb Acts, in 1910 and 1913, the first of
which ratifies the Seventh Commandment with a
salvo of artillery, and the second of which puts the
overwhelming power of the Federal Government
behind the enforcement of the prohibition laws in
the so-called "dry" States. The mind at once re-
calls the salient campaigns of this war of a gener-
ation: first the attack upon "vicious" literature, be-
gun by Comstock and the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice, but quickly extending to every
city in the land; then the long fight upon the open
gambling house, culminating in its practical dis-
appearance; then the recrudesence of prohibition,
abandoned at the outbreak of the Civil War, and
the attempt to enforce it in a rapidly growing list of
States; then the successful onslaught upon the
Louisiana lottery, and upon its swarm of rivals and
successors ; then the gradual stamping-out of horse-
racing, until finally but two or three States per-
mitted it, and the consequent attack upon the pool-
room; then the rise of a theatre-censorship in most

242 A BOOK OF PREFACES

of the large cities, and of a moving picture censor-
ship following it; then the revival of Sabbata-
rianism, with the Lord's Day Alliance, a Canadian
invention, in the van; then the gradual tightening
of the laws against sexual irregularity, with the
unenforceable New York Adultery Act as a typical
product; and lastly, the general ploughing up and
emotional discussion of sexual matters, with com-
pulsory instruction in "sex hygiene" as its mildest
manifestation and the mediaeval fury of the vice
crusade as its worst. Differing widely in their tar-
gets, these various Puritan enterprises had one
character in common: they were all efforts to com-
bat immorality with the weapons designed for
crime. In each of them there was a visible effort
to erect the individual's offence against himself into
an offence against society. Beneath all of them
there was the dubious principle — the very deter-
mining principle, indeed, of Puritanism — that it is
competent for the community to limit and condition
the private acts of its members, and with it the in-
evitable corollary that there are some members of
the community who have a special talent for such
legislation, and that their arbitrary fiats are, and of
a right ought to be, binding upon all.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 243

§ 4

This is the essential fact of the new Puritanism;
its recognition of the moral expert, the professional
sinhound, the virtuoso of virtue. Under the orig-
inal Puritan theocracy, as in Scotland, for example,
the chase and punishment of sinners was a purely
ecclesiastical function, and during the slow dis-
integration of the theocracy the only change intro-
duced was the extension of that function to lay
helpers, and finally to the whole body of laymen.
This change, however, did not materially corrupt
the ecclesiastical quality of the enterprise: the
leader in the so-called militant field still remained
the same man who led in the spiritual field. But
with the capitalization of Puritan effort there came
a radical overhauling of method. The secular
arm, as it were, conquered as it helped. That is to
say, the special business of forcing sinners to be
good was taken away from the preachers and put
into the hands of laymen trained in its technique
and mystery, and there it remains. The new
Puritanism has created an army of gladiators who
are not only distinct from the hierarchy, but who,
in many instances, actually command and intimi-
date the hierarchy. This is conspicuously evident

244 A BOOK OF PREFACES

in the case of the Anti-Saloon League, an enor-
mously effective fighting organization, with a large
staff of highly accomplished experts in its serv-
ice. These experts do not wait for ecclesiastical
support, not even ask for it; they force it. The
clergyman who presumes to protest against their
war upon the saloon, even upon the quite virtuous
ground that it is not effective enough, runs a risk of
condign and merciless punishment. So plainly is
this understood, indeed, that in more than one State
the clergy of the Puritan denominations openly
take orders from these specialists in excoriation,
and court their favour without shame. Here a
single moral enterprise, heavily capitalized and
carefully officered, has engulfed the entire Puritan
movement, and a part has become more than the
whole.1

In a dozen other directions this tendency to trans-
form a religious business into a purely secular
business, with lay backers and lay officers, is plainly
visible. The increasing wealth of Puritanism has
not only augmented its scope and its daring, but it
has also had the effect of attracting clever men, of

i An instructive account of the organization and methods of
the Anti-Saloon League, a thoroughly typical Puritan engine,
is to be found in Alcohol and Society, by John Koren; New
York, Henry Holt & Co., 1916.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 245

no particular spiritual enthusiasm, to its service.
Moral endeavour, in brief, has become a recognized
trade, or rather a profession, and there have ap-
peared men who pretend to a special and enormous
knowledge of it, and who show enough truth in their
pretension to gain the unlimited support of Puritan
capitalists. The vice crusade, to mention one ex-
ample, has produced a large crop of such self -con-
stituted experts, and some of them are in such de-
mand that they are overwhelmed with engage-
ments. The majority of these men have wholly lost
the flavour of sacerdotalism. They are not pas-
tors, but detectives, statisticians and mob orators,
and not infrequently their secularity becomes dis-
tressingly evident. Their aim, as they say, is to do
things. Assuming that "moral sentiment" is be-
hind them, they override all criticism and opposi-
tion without argument, and proceed to the business
of dispersing prostitutes, of browbeating and ter-
rorizing weak officials, and of forcing legislation of
their own invention through City Councils and State
Legislatures. Their very cocksureness is their
chief source of strength. They combat objection
with such violence and with such a devastating
cynicism that it quickly fades away. The more
astute politicians, in the face of so ruthless a fire,
commonly profess conversion and join the colours,

246 A BOOK OF PREFACES

just as their brethren go over to prohibition in the
"dry" States, and the newspapers seldom hold out
much longer. The result is that the "investigation"
of the social evil becomes an orgy, and that the
ensuing "report" of the inevitable "vice commis-
sion" is made up of two parts sensational fiction
and three parts platitude. Of all the vice commis-
sions that have sat of late in the United States, not
one has done its work without the aid of these sin-
gularly confident experts, and not one has con-
tributed an original and sagacious idea, nor even an
idea of ordinary common sense, to the solution of
the problem.

I need not go on piling up examples of this new
form of Puritan activity, with its definite departure
from a religious foundation and its elaborate de-
velopment as an everyday business. The impulse
behind it I have called a Wille zur Macht, a will to
power. In terms more homely, it was described
by John Fiske as "the disposition to domineer," and
in his usual unerring way, he saw its dependence on
the gratuitous assumption of infallibility. But
even stronger than the Puritan's belief in his own
inspiration is his yearning to make some one jump.
In other words, he has an ineradicable liking for
cruelty in him: he is a sportsman even before he is
a moralist, and very often his blood-lust leads him

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 247

into lamentable excesses. The various vice cru-
sades afford innumerable cases in point. In one
city, if the press dispatches are to be believed, the
proscribed women of the Tenderloin were pursued
with such ferocity that seven of them were driven to
suicide. And in another city, after a campaign of
repression so unfortunate in its effects that there
were actually protests against it by clergymen else-
where, a distinguished (and very friendly) con-
noisseur of such affairs referred to it ingenuously
as more fun "than a fleet of aeroplanes." Such
disorderly combats with evil, of course, produce no
permanent good. It is a commonplace, indeed,
that a city is usually in worse condition after it has
been "cleaned up" than it was before, and I need
not point to New York, Los Angeles and Des Moines
for the evidence as to the social evil, and to Savan-
nah, Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina, for
the evidence as to the saloon. But the Puritans
who finance such enterprises get their thrills, not
out of any possible obliteration of vice, but out of
the galloping pursuit of the vicious. The new
Puritan gives no more serious thought to the rights
and feelings of his quarry than the gunner gives to
the rights and feelings of his birds. From the
beginning of the prohibition campaign, for ex-
ample, the principle of compensation has been vio-

248 A BOOK OF PREFACES

lently opposed, despite its obvious justice, and a
complaisant judiciary has ratified the Puritan posi-
tion. In England and on the Continent that prin-
ciple is safeguarded by the fundamental laws, and
during the early days of the anti-slavery agitation
in this country it was accepted as incontrovertible,
but if any statesman of the "dry" States were to
propose today that it be applied to the license-
holder whose lawful franchise is taken away from
him arbitrarily, or to the brewer or distiller whose
costly plant is rendered useless and valueless, he
would see the days of his statesmanship brought to a
quick and violent close.

But does all this argue a total lack of justice in
the American character, or even a lack of common
decency? I doubt that it would be well to go so
far in accusation. What it does argue is a tend-
ency to put moral considerations above all other
considerations, and to define morality in the narrow
Puritan sense. The American, in other words,
thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is
bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an
unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made
violently enough, for actual proof and confession.
What is more, he takes an intense joy in the mere
chase: he has the true Puritan taste for an auto da
fe in him. "I am ag'inst capital punishment,"

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 249

said Mr. Dooley, "but we won't get rid av it so long
as the people enjie it so much." But though he is
thus an eager spectator, and may even be lured into
taking part in the pursuit, the average American
is not disposed to initiate it, nor to pay for it. The
larger Puritan enterprises of today are not popular
in the sense of originating in the bleachers, but only
in the sense of being applauded from the bleachers.
The burdens of the fray, both of toil and of expense,
are always upon a relatively small number of men.
In a State rocked and racked by a war upon the
saloon, it was recently shown, for example, that but
five per cent, of the members of the Puritan de-
nominations contributed to the war-chest. And
yet the Anti-Saloon League of that State was so
sure of support from below that it presumed to
stand as the spokesman of the whole Christian com-
munity, and even ventured to launch excommuni-
cations upon contumacious Christians, both lay and
clerical, who object to its methods. Moreover, the
great majority of the persons included in the con-
tributing five per cent, gave no more than a few
cents a year. The whole support of the League de-
volved upon a dozen men, all of them rich and all
of them Puritans of purest ray serene. These men
supported a costly organization for their private
entertainment and stimulation. It was their means

250 A BOOK OF PREFACES

of recreation, their sporting club. They were will-
ing to spend a lot of money to procure good sport
for themselves — i.e., to procure the best crusading
talent available — and they were so successful in
that endeavour that they enchanted the populace
too, and so shook the State.

Naturally enough, this organization of Puritan-
ism upon a business and sporting basis has had a
tendency to attract and create a type of "expert"
crusader, whose determination to give his em-
ployers a good show is uncontaminated by any con-
sideration for the public welfare. The result has
been a steady increase of scandals, a constant col-
lapse of moral organizations, a frequent unveiling
of whited sepulchres. Various observers have
sought to direct the public attention to this signifi-
cant corruption of the new Puritanism. The New
York Sun, for example, in the course of a protest
against the appointment of a vice commission for
New York, has denounced the paid agents of pri-
vate reform organizations as "notoriously corrupt,
undependable and dishonest," and the Rev. Dr. W.
S. Rainsford, supporting the charge, has borne testi-
mony out of his own wide experience to their law-
lessness, their absurd pretensions to special knowl-
edge, their habit of manufacturing evidence, and
their devious methods of shutting off criticism.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 251

But so far, at all events, no organized war upon
them has been undertaken, and they seem to flour-
ish more luxuriantly year after year. The indi-
vidual whose common rights are invaded by such
persons has little chance of getting justice, and less
of getting redress. When he attempts to defend
himself he finds that he is opposed, not only by a
financial power that is ample for all purposes of the
combat and that does not shrink at intimidating
juries, prosecuting officers and judges, but also by
a shrewdness which shapes the laws to its own uses,
and takes full advantage of the miserable cowardice
of legislatures. The moral gladiators, in brief,
know the game. They come before a legislature
with a bill ostensibly designed to cure some great
and admitted evil, they procure its enactment by
scarcely veiled insinuations that all who stand
against it must be apologists for the evil itself, and
then they proceed to extend its aims by bold infer-
ences, and to dragoon the courts into ratifying those
inferences, and to employ it as a means of persecu-
tion, terrorism and blackmail. The history of the
Mann Act offers a shining example of this purpose.
It was carried through Congress, over the veto of
President Taft, who discerned its extravagance, on
the plea that it was needed to put down the traffic
in prostitutes ; it is enforced today against men who

252 A BOOK OF PREFACES

are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than
you or I. Naturally enough, the effect of this ex-
tension of its purposes against which its author has
publicly protested, has been to make it a truly
deadly weapon in the hands of professional Puri-
tans and of denouncers of delinquency even less
honest. "Blackmailers of both sexes have arisen,"
says Mr. Justice McKenna, "using the terrors of
the construction now sanctioned by the [Supreme]
Court as a help — indeed, the means — for their
brigandage. The result is grave and should give
us pause." *

But that is as far as objection has yet gone; the
majority of the learned jurist's colleagues swal-
lowed both the statute and its consequences.2
There is, indeed, no sign as yet of any organized
war upon the alliance between the blackmailing
Puritan and the pseudo-Puritan blackmailer. It
must wait until a sense of reason and justice itself
in the American people, strong enough to over-
come their inherent prejudice in favour of the
moralist on the one hand, and their delight in bar-
barous pursuits and punishments on the other. I
see but faint promise of that change today.

i U. S. Rep., vol. 242, No. 7, p. 502.

2 The majority opinion, written by Mr. Justice Day, is given
in U. S. Rep., vol. 242, no. 7, pp. 482-496.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 253

§5

I have gone into the anatomy and physiology of
militant Puritanism because, so far as I know, the
inquiry has not been attempted before, and because
a somewhat detailed acquaintance with the forces
behind so grotesque a manifestation as com-
stockery, the particular business of the present
essay, is necessary to an understanding of its work-
ings, and of its prosperity, and of its influence upon
the arts. Save one turn to England or to the Brit-
ish colonies, it is impossible to find a parallel for
the astounding absolutism of Comstock and his imi-
tators in any civilized country. No other nation
has laws which oppress the arts so ignorantly and
so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation
handed over the enforcement of the statutes which
exist to agencies so openly pledged to reduce all
aesthetic expression to the service of a stupid and
unworkable scheme of rectitude. I have before me
as I write a pamphlet in explanation of his aims and
principles, prepared by Comstock himself and pre-
sented to me by his successor. Its very title is a
sufficient statement of the Puritan position:
"MORALS, Not Art or Literature." * The capi-

iNew York, (1914).

254 A BOOK OF PREFACES

tals are in the original. And within, as a sort of
general text, the idea is amplified: "It is a ques-
tion of peace, good order and morals, and not art,
literature or science." Here we have a statement
of principle that, at all events, is at least quite
frank. There is not the slightest effort to beg the
question; there is no hypocritical pretension to a
desire to purify or safeguard the arts; they are
dismissed at once as trivial and degrading. And
jury after jury has acquiesced in this; it was old
Anthony's boast, in his last days, that his per-
centage of convictions, in 40 years, had run to
98.5.1

Comstockery is thus grounded firmly upon that
profound national suspicion of the arts, that trucu-
lent and almost unanimous Philistinism, which I
have described. It would be absurd to dismiss it
as an excrescence, and untypical of the American
mind. But it is typical, too, in the manner in which
it has gone beyond that mere partiality to the ac-
cumulation of a definite power, and made that

1 1 quote from page 157 of Anthony Comstock, Fighter, the
official biography. On page 239 the number of his prosecutions
is given as 3,646, with 2,682 convictions, which works out to
but 73 per cent. He is credited with having destroyed 50 tons
of books, 28,425 pounds of stereotype plates, 16,900 photo-
graphic negatives, and 3,984,063 photographs — enough to fill
"sixteen freight cars, fifteen loaded with ten tons each, and the
other nearly full."

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 255

power irresponsible and almost irresistible. It was
Comstock himself, in fact, who invented the process
whereby his followers in other fields of moral en-
deavour have forced laws into the statute books
upon the pretence of putting down John Doe, an ac-
knowledged malefactor, and then turned them
savagely upon Richard Roe, a peaceable, well-
meaning and hitherto law-abiding man. And it was
Comstock who first capitalized moral endeavour
like baseball or the soap business, and made him-
self the first of its kept professors, and erected about
himself a rampart of legal and financial immunity
which rid him of all fear of mistakes and their con-
sequences, and so enabled him to pursue his jehad
with all the advantages in his favour. He was, in
brief, more than the greatest Puritan gladiator of
his time; he was the Copernicus of a quite new art
and science, and he devised a technique and handed
down a professional ethic that no rival has been
able to better.

The whole story is naively told in "Anthony
Comstock, Fighter," ' a work which passed under
the approving eye of the old war horse himself and
is full of his characteristic pecksniffery.2 His

iBy Charles Gallaudet Trumbull; New York, Fleming H.
Revell Co. (1913).

2 An example: "All the evil men in New York cannot harm

256 A BOOK OF PREFACES

beginnings, it appears, were very modest. When
he arrived in New York from the Connecticut hin-
terland, he was a penniless and uneducated clod-
hopper, just out of the Union army, and his first
job was that of a porter in a wholesale dry-goods
house. But he had in him several qualities of the
traditional Yankee which almost always insure suc-
cess, and it was not long before he began to make
his way. One of these qualities was a talent for
bold and ingratiating address; another was a vast
appetite for thrusting himself into affairs, a yearn-
ing to run things — what the Puritan calls public
spirit. The two constituted his fortune. The sec-
ond brought him into intimate relations with the
newly-organized Young Men's Christian Associa-
tion, and led him to the discovery of a form of
moral endeavour that was at once novel and fas-
cinating— the unearthing and denunciation of "im-

a hair of my head, were it not the will of God. If it be His
will, what right have I or any one to say aught? I am only a
speck, a mite, before God, yet not a hair of my head can be
harmed unless it be His will. Oh, to live, to feel, to be — Thy
will be done!" (pp. 84-5). Again: "I prayed that, if my bill
might not pass, I might go back to New York submissive to
God's will, feeling that it was for the best. I asked for for-
giveness and asked that my bill might pass, if possible; but
over and above all, that the will of God be done" (p. 6).
Nevertheless, Comstock neglected no chance to apply his back-
stairs pressure to the members of both Houses.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 257

moral" literature. The first, once he had at-
tracted attention thereby, got him the favourable
notice, and finally the unlimited support, of the late
Morris K. Jesup, one of the earliest and perhaps
the greatest of the moral entrepreneurs that I have
described. Jesup was very rich, and very eager to
bring the whole nation up to grace by force ma-
jeure. He was the banker of at least a dozen
grandiose programs of purification in the seventies
and eighties. In Comstock he found precisely the
sort of field agent that he was looking for, and the
two presently constituted the most formidable team
of professional reformers that the countiy had ever
seen.

The story of the passage of the Act of Congress
of March 3, 1873, x under cover of which the Com-
stock Society still carries on its campaigns of snout-
ing and suppression, is a classical tale of Puritan
impudence and chicanery. Comstock, with Jesup
and other rich men backing him financially and
politically,2 managed the business. First, a num-
ber of spectacular raids were made on the pub-
lishers of such pornographic books as "The
Memoirs of Fanny Hill" and "Only a Boy."

i Now, with amendments, sections 211, 212 and 245 of the
United States Criminal Code.
2 Vide Anthony Comstock, Fighter, pp. 81, 85, 94.

258 A BOOK OF PREFACES

Then the newspapers were filled with inflammatory
matter about the wide dispersal of such stuff, and
its demoralizing effects upon the youth of the repub-
lic. Then a committee of self -advertising clergy-
men and "Christian millionaires" was organized to
launch a definite "movement." And then a direct
attack was made upon Congress, and, to the tune of
fiery moral indignation, the bill prepared by Corn-
stock himself was forced through both houses. All
opposition, if only the opposition of inquiry, was
overborne in the usual manner. That is to say,
every Congressman who presumed to ask what it
was all about, or to point out obvious defects in the
bill, was disposed of the insinuation, or even the
direct charge, that he was a covert defender of
obscene books, and, by inference, of the carnal
recreations described in them. We have grown
familiar of late with this process: it was displayed
at full length in the passage of the Mann Act, and
again when the Webb Act and other such prohibi-
tion measures were before Congress. In 1873 its
effectiveness was helped out by its novelty, and so
the Comstock bill was rushed through both houses
in the closing days of a busy session, and President
Grant accommodatingly signed it.

Once it was upon the books, Comstock made fur-
ther use of the prevailing uproar to have himself

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 259

appointed a special agent of the Postoffice Depart-
ment to enforce it, and with characteristic cunning
refused to take any salary. Had his job carried a
salary, it would have excited the acquisitiveness of
other virtuosi; as it was, he was secure. As for
the necessary sinews of war, he knew well that he
could get them from Jesup. Within a few weeks,
indeed, the latter had perfected a special organ-
ization for the enforcement of the new statute, and
it still flourishes as the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice; or, as it is better known, the
Comstock Society. The new Federal Act, dealing
only with the mails, left certain loopholes; they
were plugged up by fastening drastic amendments
upon the New York Code of Criminal Procedure —
amendments forced through the legislature pre-
cisely as the Federal Act had been forced through
Congress.1 With these laws in his hands Comstock
was ready for his career. It was his part of the
arrangement to supply the thrills of the chase; it
was Jesup's part to find the money. The partner-
ship kept up until the death of Jesup, in 1908, and
after that Comstock readily found new backers.
Even his own death, in 1915, did not materially
alter a scheme of things which offered such admi-

i Now sections 11 il, 1142 and 1143 of the Penal Laws of
New York.

260 A BOOK OF PREFACES

rable opportunities for the exercise of the Puritan
love of spectacular and relentless pursuit, the Puri-
tan delusion of moral grandeur and infallibility,
the Puritan will to power.

Ostensibly, as I have said, the new laws were
designed to put down the traffic in frankly porno-
graphic books and pictures — a traffic which, of
course, found no defenders — but Comstock had so
drawn them that their actual sweep was vastly
wider, and once he was firmly in the saddle his en-
terprises scarcely knew limits. Having disposed
of "The Confessions of Maria Monk" and "Night
Life in Paris," he turned to Rabelais and the De-
cameron, and having driven these ancients under
the book-counters, he pounced upon Zola, Balzac
and Daudet, and having disposed of these too, he
began a pogrom which, in other hands, eventually
brought down such astounding victims as Thomas
Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" and Harold Frederic's
"The Damnation of Theron Ware." All through
the eighties and nineties this ecstatic campaign con-
tinued, always increasing in violence and effective-
ness. Comstock became a national celebrity; his
doings were as copiously reported by the news-
papers as those of P. T. Barnum or John L. Sulli-
van. Imitators sprang up in all the larger cities:
there was hardly a public library in the land that

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 261

did not begin feverishly expurgating its shelves;
the publication of fiction, and particularly of for-
eign fiction, took on the character of an extra
hazardous enterprise. Not, of course, that the
reign of terror was not challenged, and Comstock
himself denounced. So early as 1876 a national
organization demanding a reasonable amendment
of the postal laws got on its legs; in the late eighties
"Citizen" George Francis Train defied the whirl-
wind by printing the Old Testament as a serial;
many indignant victims, acquitted by some chance
in the courts, brought suit against Comstock for
damages. Moreover, an occasional judge, stand-
ing out boldly against the usual intimidation, de-
nounced him from the bench; one of them, Judge
Jenkins, accused him specifically of "fraud and
lying" and other "dishonest practices." * But the
spirit of American Puritanism was on his side.
His very extravagances at once stimulated and sat-
isfied the national yearning for a hot chase, a good
show— and in the complaints of his victims, that
the art of letters was being degraded, that the coun-
try was made ridiculous, the newspaper-reading
populace could see no more than an affectation.
The reform organization of 1876 lasted but five

i U. S. vs. Casper, reported in the Twentieth Century, Feb.
11. 1895.

262 A BOOK OF PREFACES

years; and then disbanded without having accom-
plished anything; Train was duly jailed for "de-
bauching the young" with an "obscene" serial; x
juries refused to bring in punitive verdicts against
the master showman.

In carrying on this way of extermination upon
all ideas that violated their private notions of vir-
tue and decorum, Comstock and his followers were
very greatly aided by the vagueness of the law. It
prohibited the use of the mails for transporting all
matter of an "obscene, lewd, lascivious ... or
filthy" character, but conveniently failed to define
these adjectives. As a result, of course, it was
possible to bring an accusation against practically
any publication that aroused the comstockian
blood-lust, however innocently, and to subject the
persons responsible for it to costly, embarrassing
and often dangerous persecution. No man, said
Dr. Johnson, would care to go on trial for his life
once a week, even if possessed of absolute proofs
of his innocence. By the same token, no man

i The trial court dodged the issue by directing the jury to
find the prisoner not guilty on the ground of insanity. The
necessary implication, of course, was that the publication com-
plained of was actually obscene. In 1895, one Wise, of Clay
Center, Kansas, sent a quotation from the Bible through the
mails, and was found guilty of mailing obscene matter. See
The Free Press Anthology, compiled by Theodore Schroeder;
New York, Truth Seeker Pub. Co., 1909, p. 258.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 263

wants to be arraigned in a criminal court, and dis-
played in the sensational newspapers, as a pur-
veyor of indecency, however strong his assurance
of innocence. Comstock made use of this fact in
an adroit and characteristically unconscionable
manner. He held the menace of prosecution over
all who presumed to dispute his tyranny, and when
he could not prevail by a mere threat, he did not
hesitate to begin proceedings, and to carry them
forward with the aid of florid proclamations to the
newspapers and ill concealed intimidations of
judges and juries.

The last-named business succeeded as it always
does in this country, where the judiciary is quite as
sensitive to the suspicion of sinfulness as the legis-
lative arm. A glance at the decisions handed down
during the forty years of Comstock's chief activity
shows a truly amazing willingness to accommodate
him in his pious enterprises. On the one hand,
there was gradually built up a court-made defini-
tion of obscenity which eventually embraced al-
most every conceivable violation of Puritan pru-
dery, and on the other hand the victim's means of
defence were steadily restricted and conditioned,
until in the end he had scarcely any at all. This is
the state of the law today. It is held in the lead-
ing cases that anything is obscene which may excite

264 A BOOK OF PREFACES

"impure thoughts" in "the minds ... of persons
that are susceptible to impure thoughts," 1 or
which "tends to deprave the minds" of any who,
because they are "young and inexperienced," are
"open to such influences" 2 — in brief, that any-
thing is obscene that is not fit to be handed to a
child just learning to read, or that may imaginably
stimulate the lubricity of the most foul-minded. It
is held further that words that are perfectly inno-
cent in themselves — "words, abstractly considered,
[that] may be free from vulgarism" — may yet be
assumed, by a friendly jury, to be likely to
"arouse a libidinous passion ... in the mind of
a modest woman." (I quote exactly! The court
failed to define "modest woman.") 3 Yet further,
it is held that any book is obscene "which is unbe-
coming, immodest. . . ." 4 Obviously, this last
decision throws open the door to endless imbecili-
ties, for its definition merely begs the question, and
so makes a reasonable solution ten times harder.
It is in such mazes that the Comstocks safely lurk.
Almost any printed allusion to sex may be argued

i U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9 (1877).

2 Idem, 362; People Vs. Muller, 96 N. Y., 411; U. S. vs.
Clark, 38 Fed. Rep. 734.

3TJ. S. VS. Moore, 129 Fed., 160-1 (1904).

4 U. S. vs. Heywood, judge's charge, Boston, 1877. Quoted
in U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 265

against as unbecoming in a moral republic, and
once it is unbecoming it is also obscene.

In meeting such attacks the defendant must do
his fighting without weapons. He cannot allege in
his defence that the offending work was put forth
for a legitimate, necessary and decent purpose; 1
he cannot allege that a passage complained of is
from a standard work, itself in general circula-
tion; 2 he cannot offer evidence that the person to
whom a book or picture was sold or exhibited was
not actually depraved by it, or likely to be depraved
by it; 3 he cannot rest his defence on its lack of such
effect upon the jurymen themselves;4 he cannot
plead that the alleged obscenity, in point of fact, is
couched in decent and unobjectionable language; 5
he cannot plead that the same or a similar work has
gone unchallenged elsewhere; 6 he cannot argue
that the circulation of works of the same class has

i U. S. vs. Slenker, 32 Fed. Rep., 693 ; People vs. Muller, 96
N. Y. 408-414; Anti-Vice Motion Picture Co. vs. Bell, reported
in the New York Law Journal, Sept. 22, 1916; Sociological Re-
search Film Corporation vs. the City of New York, 83 Misc.
815; Steele vs. Bannon, 7 L. R. C. L. Series, 267; U. S. vs.
Means, 42 Fed. Rep. 605, etc.

2U. S. vs. Cheseman, 19 Fed. Rep., 597 (1884).

3 People vs. Muller, 96 N. Y., 413.

4 U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9.
s U. S. vs. Smith, 45 Fed. Rep. 478.

e U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 360-1; People vs. Berry,
1 N. Y., Crim. R., 32.

266 A BOOK OF PREFACES

set up a presumption of toleration, and a tacit
limitation of the definition of obscenity.1 The
general character of a book is not a defence of a
particular passage, however unimportant; if there
is the slightest descent to what is "unbecoming,"
the whole may be ruthlessly condemned.2 Nor is
it an admissible defence to argue that the book was
not generally circulated, and that the copy in evi-
dence was obtained by an agent provacateur, and
by false representations.3 Finally, all the deci-
sions deny the defendant the right to introduce any
testimony, whether expert or otherwise, that a book
is of artistic value and not pornographic, and that
its effect upon normal persons is not pernicious.
Upon this point the jury is the sole judge, and it
cannot be helped to its decision by taking other
opinions, or by hearing evidence as to what is the
general opinion.

Occasionally, as I have said, a judge has re-
volted against this intolerable state of the court- and
Comstock-made law, and directed a jury to dis-
regard these astounding decisions.4 In a recent

i People vs. Muller, 32 Hun., 212-215.

2 U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 361.

s U. S. vs. Moore, 16 Fed. Rep., 39; U. S. vs. Wright, 38 Fed.
Rep., 106; U. S. vs. Dorsey, 40 Fed. Rep., 752; U. S. vs. Baker,
155 Mass., 287; U. S. vs. Grimm, 15 Supreme Court Rep., 472.

4 Various cases in point are cited in the Brief on Behalf of

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 267

New York case Judge Samuel Seabury actually
ruled that "it is no part of the duty of courts to ex-
ercise a censorship over literary productions." *
But in general the judiciary has been curiously
complaisant, and more than once a Puritan on the
bench has delighted the Comstocks by prosecuting
their case for them.2 With such decisions in their
hands and such aid from the other side of the bar, it
is no wonder that they enter upon their campaigns
with impudence and assurance. All the odds are
in their favour from the start. They have statutes
deliberately designed to make the defence onerous;
they are familiar by long experience with all the

Plaintiff in Dreiser vs. John Lane Co., App. Div. 1st Dept. N.
Y., 1917. I cite a few: People vs. Eastman, 188 N. Y., 478;
U. S. vs. Swearingen, 161 U. S., 446; People vs. Tylkoff, 212
N. Y., 197; In the matter of Worthington Co., 62 St. Rep.
116-7; St. Hubert Guild vs. Quinn, 64 Misc., 336-341. But
nearly all such decisions are in New York cases. In the Fed-
eral courts the Cqmstocks usually have their way.

i St. Hubert Guild vs. Quinn, 64 Misc., 339.

2 For example, Judge Chas. L. Benedict, sitting in U. S. vs.
Bennett, op. cit. This is a leading case, and the Comstocks
make much of it. Nevertheless, a contemporary newspaper
denounces Judge Benedict for his "intense bigotry" and al-
leges that "the only evidence which he permitted to be given
was on the side of the prosecution." (Port Jervis, N. Y.,
Evening Gazette, March 22, 1879.) Moreover, a juror in the
case, Alfred A. Valentine, thought it necessary to inform the
newspapers that he voted guilty only in obedience to judicial
instructions.

268 A BOOK OF PREFACES

tricks and surprises of the game; they are shel-
tered behind organizations, incorporated without
capital and liberally chartered by trembling legis-
latures, which make reprisals impossible in case
of failure; above all, they have perfected the busi-
ness of playing upon the cowardice and vanity of
judges and prosecuting officers. The newspapers,
with veiy few exceptions, give them ready aid.
Theoretically, perhaps, many newspaper editors are
opposed to comstockery, and sometimes they de-
nounce it with great eloquence, but when a good
show is offered they are always in favour of the
showman 1 — and the Comstocks are showmen of
undoubted skill. They know how to make a vic-
tim jump and writhe in the ring; they have a talent
for finding victims who are prominent enough to
arrest attention; they shrewdly capitalize the fact
that the pursuer appears more heroic than the prey,
and the further fact that the newspaper reader is
impatient of artistic pretensions and glad to see an
artist made ridiculous. And behind them there is
always the steady pressure of Puritan prejudice —
the Puritan feeling that "immorality" is the
blackest of crimes, and that its practitioner has no
rights. It was by making use of these elements

i Vide Newspaper Morals, by H. L. Mencken, the Atlantic
Monthly, March, 1914.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 269

that Comstock achieved his prodigies, and it is by-
making use of them that his heirs and assigns keep
up the sport today. Their livelihood depends upon
the money they can raise among the righteous, and
the amount they can raise depends upon the quality
of the entertainment they offer. Hence their adept
search for shining marks. Hence, for example, the
spectacular raid upon the Art Students' League, on
August 2, 1906. Hence the artful turning to their
own use of the vogue of such sensational dramatists
as Eugene Brieux and George Bernard Shaw, and
of such isolated plays as "Trilby" and "Sapho."
Hence the barring from the mails of the inflamma-
tory report of the Chicago Vice Commission — a
strange, strange case of dog eating dog.

But here we have humour. There is, however,
no humour in the case of a serious author who sees
his work damaged and perhaps ruined by a mali-
cious and unintelligent attack, and himself held
up to public obloquy as one with the vendors of
pamphlets of flagellation and filthy "marriage
guides." He finds opposing him a flat denial of
his decent purpose as an artist, and a stupid and ill-
natured logic that baffles sober answer.1 He finds

1 As a fair specimen of the sort of reasoning that prevails
among the consecrated brethren I offer the following extract
from an argument against birth control delivered by the

270 A BOOK OF PREFACES

on his side only the half-hearted support of a pub-
lisher whose interest in a single book is limited to
his profits from it, and who desires above all things
to evade a nuisance and an expense. Not a few
publishers, knowing the constant possibility of sud-
den and arbitrary attack, insert a clause in their
contracts whereby an author must secure them
against damage from any "immoral" matter in his
book. They read and approve the manuscript,
they print the book and sell it — but if it is unlucky
enough to attract the comstockian lightning, the
author has the whole burden to bear,1 and if they

present active head of the New York Society for the Sup-
pression of Vice before the Women's City Club of New York,
Nov. 17, 1916:

"Natural and inevitable conditions, over which we can have
no control, will assert themselves wherever population becomes
too dense. This has been exemplified time after time in the
history of the world where over-population has been corrected
by manifestations of nature or by war, flood or pestilence.
. . . Belgium may have been regarded as an over-populated
country. Is it a coincidence that, during the past two years,
the territory of Belgium has been devastated and its popula-
tion scattered throughout the other countries of the world?"

i For example, the printed contract of the John Lane Co.,
publisher of Dreiser's The "Genius," contains this provision:
"The author hereby guarantees . . . that the work . . . con-
tains nothing of a scandalous, an immoral or a libelous na-
ture." The contract for the publication of The "Genius" was
signed on July 30, 1914. The manuscript had been carefully
read by representatives of the publisher, and presumably
passed as not scandalous or immoral, inasmuch as the publi-

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 271

seek safety and economy by yielding, as often hap-
pens, he must consent to the mutilation or even the
suppression of his work. The result is that a
writer in such a situation, is practically beaten be-
fore he can offer a defence. The professional
book-baiters have laws to their liking, and courts
pliant to their exactions; they fill the newspapers
with inflammatory charges before the accused gets
his day in court; they have the aid of prosecuting
officers who fear the political damage of their
enmity, and of the enmity of their wealthy and
influential backers; above all, they have the com-
mand of far more money than any author can hope
to muster. Finally, they derive an advantage from
two of the most widespread of human weaknesses,
the first being envy and the second being fear.
When an author is attacked, a good many of his
rivals see only a personal benefit in his difficulties,

cation of a scandalous or immoral book would have exposed
the publisher to prosecution. About 8,000 copies were sold un-
der this contract. Two years later, in July, 1916, the Society
for the Suppression of Vice threatened to begin a prosecution
unless the book was withdrawn. It was withdrawn forthwith,
and Dreiser was compelled to enter suit for a performance of
the contract. The withdrawal, it will be noticed, was not in
obedience to a court order, but followed a mere comstockian
threat. Yet Dreiser was at once deprived of his royalties, and
forced into expensive litigation. Had it not been that eminent
counsel volunteered for his defence, his personal means would
have been insufficient to have got him even a day in court.

272 A BOOK OF PREFACES

and not a menace to the whole order, and a good
many others are afraid to go to his aid because
of the danger of bringing down the moralists'
rage upon themselves. Both of these weak-
nesses revealed themselves very amusingly in
the Dreiser case, and I hope to detail their oper-
ations at some length later on, when I describe that
cause celebre in a separate work.

Now add to the unfairness and malignancy of
the attack its no less disconcerting arbitrariness and
fortuitousness, and the path of the American
author is seen to be strewn with formidable en-
tanglements indeed. With the law what it is, he is
quite unable to decide a priori what is permitted by
the national delicacy and what is not, nor can he
get any light from the recorded campaigns of the
moralists. They seem to strike blindly, unintel-
ligently, without any coherent theory or plan.
"Trilby" is assaulted by the united comstockery of
a dozen cities, and "The Yoke" somehow escapes.
"Hagar Revelry" is made the subject of a double
prosecution in the State and Federal courts, and
"Love's Pilgrimage" and "One Man" go un-
molested. The publisher of Przhevalski's "Homo
Sapiens" is forced to withdraw it; the publisher
of Artzibashef's "Sanine" follows it with "The

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 273

Breaking Point." The serious work of a Forel
is brought into court as pornography, and the
books of Havelock Ellis are barred from the mails;
the innumerable volumes on "sex hygiene" by
tawdry clergymen and smutty old maids are circu-
lated by the million and without challenge. Frank
Harris is deprived of a publisher for his "Oscar
Wilde: His Life and Confession" by threats of im-
mediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile
dedicate thousands of columns to the filthy amuse-
ments of Harry Thaw. George Moore's "Memoirs
of My Dead Life" are bowdlerized, James Lane
Allen's "A Summer in Arcady" is barred from
libraries, and a book by D. H. Lawrence is forbid-
den publication altogether; at the same time half a
dozen cheap magazines devoted to sensational sex
stories attain to hundreds of thousands of circula-
tion. A serious book by David Graham Phillips,
published serially in a popular monthly, is raided
the moment it appears between covers; a trashy
piece of nastiness by Elinor Glyn goes unmolested.
Worse, books are sold for months and even years
without protest, and then suddenly attacked; Drei-
ser's "The 'Genius,' " Kreymborg's "Edna" and
Forel's "The Sexual Question" are examples. Still
worse, what is held to be unobjectionable in one

274 A BOOK OF PREFACES

State is forbidden in another as contra bonas
mores} Altogether, there is madness, and no
method in it. The livelihoods and good names of
hard-striving and decent men are at the mercy of
the whims of a horde of fanatics and mountebanks,
and they have no way of securing themselves
against attack, and no redress for their loss when
it comes.

§6

So beset, it is no wonder that the typical Amer-
ican maker of books becomes a timorous and in-
effective fellow, whose work tends inevitably to-
ward a feeble superficiality. Sucking in the Puri-
tan spirit with the veiy air he breathes, and per-
haps burdened inwardly with an inheritance of the
actual Puritan stupidity, he is further kept upon the
straight path of chemical purity by the very real
perils that I have just rehearsed. The result is a
literature full of the mawkishness that the late
Henry James so often roared against — a literature
almost wholly detached from life as men are living
it in the world — in George Moore's phrase, a liter-

1 The chief sufferers from this conflict are the authors of
moving pictures. What they face at the hands of imbecile
State boards of censorship is described at length by Channing
Pollock in an article entitled "Swinging the Censor" in the Bul-
letin of the Authors' League of America for March, 1917.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 275

ature still at nurse. It is on the side of sex that the
appointed virtuosi of virtue exercise their chief re-
pressions, for it is sex that especially fascinates the
lubricious Puritan mind; but the conventual reti-
cence that thus becomes the enforced fashion in one
field extends itself to all others. Our fiction, in
general, is marked by an artificiality as marked as
that of Eighteenth Century poetry or the later
Georgian drama. The romance in it runs to set
forms and stale situations; the revelation, by such
a book as "The Titan," that there may be a glamour
as entrancing in the way of a conqueror of men as
in the way of a youth with a maid, remains isolated
and exotic. We have no first-rate political or re-
ligious novel; we have no first-rate war story; de-
spite all our national engrossment in commercial
enterprise, we have few second-rate tales of busi-
ness. Romance, in American fiction, still means
only a somewhat childish amorousness and senti-
mentality— the love affairs of Paul and Virginia,
or the pale adulteries of their elders. And on the
side of realism there is an almost equal vacuity and
lack of veracity. The action of all the novels of
the Howells school goes on within four walls of
painted canvas; they begin to shock once they de-
scribe an attack of asthma or a steak burning below
stairs; they never penetrate beneath the flow of

276 A BOOK OF PREFACES

social concealments and urbanities to the passions
that actually move men and women to their acts,
and the great forces that circumscribe and condi-
tion personality. So obvious a piece of reporting
as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" or Robert Her-
rick's "Together" makes a sensation; the appear-
ance of a "Jennie Gerhardt" or a "Hagar Revelry"
brings forth a growl of astonishment and rage.

In all this dread of free inquiry, this childish
skittishness in both writers and public, this dearth
of courage and even of curiosity, the influence of
comstockery is undoubtedly to be detected. It con-
stitutes a sinister and ever-present menace to all
men of ideas; it affrights the publisher and para-
lyzes the author; no one on the outside can imagine
its burden as a practical concern. I am, in mo-
ments borrowed from more palatable business, the
editor of an American magazine, and I thus know
at first hand what the burden is. That magazine is
anything but a popular one, in the current sense.
It sells at a relatively high price; it contains no
pictures or other baits for the childish; it is frankly
addressed to a sophisticated minority. I may thus
assume reasonably, I believe, that its readers are
not sex-curious and itching adolescents, just as my
colleague of the Atlantic Monthly may assume rea-
sonably that his readers are not Italian immi-

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 277

grants. Nevertheless, as a practical editor, I find
that the Comstocks, near and far, are oftener in
my mind's eye than my actual patrons. The thing
I always have to decide about a manuscript offered
for publication, before ever I give any thought to
its artistic merit and suitability, is the question
whether its publication will be permitted — not even
whether it is intrinsically good or evil, moral or
immoral, but whether some roving Methodist
preacher, self -commissioned to keep watch on let-
ters, will read indecency into it. Not a week passes
that I do not decline some sound and honest piece
of work for no other reason. I have a long list of
such things by American authors, well-devised,
well-imagined, well-executed, respectable as human
documents and as works of art — but never to be
printed in mine or any other American magazine.
It includes four or five short stories of the very first
rank, and the best one-act play yet done, to my
knowledge, by an American. All of these pieces
would go into type at once on the Continent; no
sane man would think of objecting to them; they
are no more obscene, to a normal adult, than his
own bare legs. But they simply cannot be printed
in the United States, with the law what it is and the
courts what they are.

I know many other editors. All of them are in

278 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the same boat. Some of them try to get around
the difficulty by pecksniffery more or less open —
for example, by fastening a moral purpose upon
works of art, and hawking them as uplifting.1
Others, facing the intolerable fact, yield to it with
resignation. And if they didn't? Well, if one of
them didn't, any professional moralist could go
before a police magistrate, get a warrant upon a
simple affidavit, raid the office of the offending edi-
tor, seize all the magazines in sight, and keep them
impounded until after the disposition of the case.
Editors cannot afford to take this risk. Magazines
are perishable goods. Even if, after a trial has
been had, they are returned, they are worthless save
as waste paper. And what may be done with
copies found in the actual office of publication may
be done too with copies found on news-stands, and
not only in one city, but in two, six, a dozen, a hun-
dred. All the costs and burdens of the contest are
on the defendant. Let him be acquitted with
honour, and invited to dinner by the judge, he has
yet lost his property, and the Comstock hiding be-

i For example, the magazine which printed David Graham
Phillips' Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall as a serial prefaced
it with a moral encomium by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst.
Later, when the novel appeared in book form, the Comstocks
began an action to have it suppressed, and forced the publisher
to bowdlerize it.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 279

hind the warrant cannot be made to pay. In this
concealment, indeed, lurk many sinister things —
not forgetting personal enmity and business rivalry.
The actual complainant is seldom uncovered;
Comstockery, taking on a semi-judicial character,
throws its chartered immunity around the whole
process. A hypothetical outrage? By no means.
It has been perpetrated, in one American city or
another, upon fully half of the magazines of gen-
eral circulation published today. Its possibility
sticks in the consciousness of every editor and pub-
lisher like a recurrent glycosuria.1

But though the effects of comstockery are thus
abominably insane and irritating, the fact is not to
be forgotten that, after all, the thing is no more than
an effect itself. The fundamental causes of all the
grotesque (and often half -fabulous) phenomena
flowing out of it are to be sought in the habits of
mind of the American people. They are, as I have
shown, besotted by moral concepts, a moral en-
grossment, a delusion of moral infallibility. In
their view of the arts they are still unable to shake
off the naive suspicion of the Fathers.2 A work of

1 An account of a typical prosecution, arbitrary, unintelligent
and disingenuous, is to be found in Sumner and Indecency, by
Frank Harris, in Pearson's Magazine for June, 1917, p. 556.

2 For further discussions of this point consult Art in Amer-
ica, by Aleister Crowley, The English Review, Nov., 1913; Life,

280 A BOOK OF PREFACES

the imagination can justify itself, in their sight,
only if it show a moral purpose, and that purpose
must be obvious and unmistakable. Even in their
slow progress toward a revolt against the ancestral
Philistinism, they cling to this ethical bemusement :
a new gallery of pictures is welcomed as "improv-
ing," to hear Beethoven "makes one better." Any
questioning of the moral ideas that prevail — the
principal business, it must be plain, of the novelist,
the serious dramatist, the professed inquirer into
human motives and acts — is received with the ut-
most hostility. To attempt such an enterprise is to
disturb the peace — and the disturber of the peace,
in the national view, quickly passes over into the
downright criminal.

These symptoms, it seems to me, are only partly
racial, despite the persistent survival of that third-
rate English strain which shows itself so ingen-
uously in the colonial spirit, the sense of infe-
riority, the frank craving for praise from home.
The race, in truth, grows mongrel, and the protest
against that mongrelism only serves to drive in the
fact. But a mongrel race is necessarily a race still
in the stage of reaching out for culture; it has not

Art and America, by Theodore Dreiser, The Seven Arts, Feb.,
1917; and The American; His Ideas of Beauty, by H. L.
Mencken, The Smart Set, Sept., 1913.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 281

yet formulated defensible standards; it must needs
rest heavily upon the superstitions that go with
inferiority. The Reformation brought Scotland
among the civilized nations, but it took Scotland a
century and a half to live down the Reformation.1
Dogmatism, conformity, Philistinism, the fear of
rebels, the crusading spirit; these are the marks of
an upstart people, uncertain of their rank in the
world and even of their direction.2 A cultured Eu-
ropean, reading a typical American critical journal,
must needs conceive the United States, says H. G.
Wells, as "a vain, garrulous and prosperous female
of uncertain age and still more uncertain temper,
with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and
an ideal of refinement of the most negative descrip-
tion . . . the Aunt Errant of Christendom." 3
There is always that blushful shyness, that timorous
uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enun-
ciations of impeccable doctrine, sudden runnings
amuck. Formalism is the hall-mark of the na-
tional culture, and sins against the one are sins
against the other. The American is school-mas-
tered out of gusto, out of joy, out of innocence.

i Vide The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol.
XI, p. 225.

2 The point is discussed by H. V. Routh in The Cambridge
History of English Literature, vol. XI, p. 290.

3 In Boon; New York, George H. Doran Co., 1915.

282 A BOOK OF PREFACES

He can never fathom William Blake's notion that
"the lust of the goat is also to the glory of God."
He must be correct, or, in his own phase, he must
bust.

Via trita est tutissima. The new generation,
urged to curiosity and rebellion by its mounting
sap, is rigorously restrained, regimented, policed.
The ideal is vacuity, guilelessness, imbecility.
"We are looking at this particular book," said
Comstock's successor of "The 'Genius,' " "from the
standpoint of its harmful effect on female readers
of immature mind." * To be curious is to be lewd;
to know is to yield to fornication. Here we have
the mediaeval doctrine still on its legs: a chance
word may arouse "a libidinous passion" in the
mind of a "modest" woman. Not only youth must
be safeguarded, but also the "female," the un-
trustworthy one, the temptress. "Modest," is a
euphemism; it takes laws to keep her "pure." The
"locks of chastity" rust in the Cluny Museum; in
place of them we have comstockery. . . .

But, as I have said in hymning Huneker, there is
yet the munyonic consolation. Time is a great
legalizer, even in the field of morals. We have yet
no delivery, but we have at least the beginnings of
a revolt, or, at all events, of a protest. We have

i In a letter to Felix Shay, Nov. 24, 1916.

PURITANISM A LITERARY FORCE 283

already reached, in Howells, our Hannah More; in
Clemens, our Swift; in Henry James, our Horace
Walpole; in Woodberry, Robinson et al, our Cow-
pers, Southeys and Crabbes; perhaps we might
even make a composite and call it our Johnson.
We are sweating through our Eighteenth Century,
our era of sentiment, our spiritual measles.
Maybe a new day is not quite so far oif as it seems
to be, and with it we may get our Hardy, our Con-
rad, our Swinburne, our Thoma, our Moore, our
Meredith and our Synge.

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