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.IRRftRY
[QRIA UNIVERSITY
UBRARY
THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF
THE NOVELIST
BOOKS BY
FRANK NORRIS
A DEAL IN WHEAT, And Other Stories of
the New and Old West
THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE NOVELIST
THE PIT )
} " The Epic of the Wheat "
THE OCTOPUS )
A MAN'S WOMAN
McTEAGUE
BLIX
MORAN OF THE LADY LETTY
THE RESPONSIBILITIES
OF THE NOVELIST
AND OTHER LITERARY
ESSAYS
BY
FRANK NORRIS
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS
1903
PNso
JUN 71965
< /
. J5.
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Responsibilities of the Novelist . i
The True Reward of the Novelist . .13
The Novel with a " Purpose" . . . 23
Story-Tellers vs. Novelists . . -35
The Need of a Literary Conscience . .47
A Neglected Epic 57
The Frontier Gone at Last . . .67
The Great American Novelist . . .83
New York as a Literary Centre . .91
The American Public ancf ''Popular"
Fiction ...... 101
Child Stories for Adults . . . .109
Newspaper Criticismgi and American
Fiction 117
Novelists to Order — While* You Wait . 125
The "Nature" Revival in Literature . 135
The Mechanics of Fiction ? . . .145
Fiction Writing as a Business . . .155
The "Volunteer Manuscript" . . .167
Retail Bookseller: Literary Dictator . 181
CONTENTS— Continued
PAGE
An American School of Fiction? . .191
Novelists of the Future . . . .201
A Plea for Romantic Fiction . . .211
A Problem in Fiction , . . .221
Why Women Should Write the Best Novels 229
Simplicity in Art • ... . . . .239
Salt and Sincerity . . . . .249
Bibliography, Essays, Articles, Letters . 305
Short Stories . . •• . . . 307
Poems Published . . . . .310
Books Published . . . . .310
THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF
THE NOVELIST
THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF
THE NOVELIST
IT is not here a question of the "unarrived,"
the " unpublished" ; these are the care-free
irresponsibles whose hours are halcyon and
whose endeavours have all the lure, all the
recklessness of adventure. They are not recog-
nized; they have made no standards for
themselves, and if they play the saltimbanque
and the charlatan nobody cares and nobody
(except themselves) is affected.
But the writers in question are the successful
ones who have made a public and to whom
some ten, twenty or a hundred thousand
people are pleased to listen. You may believe
if you choose that the novelist, of all workers,
is independent — that he can write what he
pleases, and that certainly, certainly he should
never "write down to his readers" — that he
should never consult them at all.
On the contrary, I believe it can be proved
that the successful novelist should be more
than all others limited in the nature and charac-
ter of his work more than all others he should
3
4 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
be careful of what he says ; more than all others
he should defer to his audience; more than all
others — more even than the minister and the
editor — he should feel "his public" and watch
his every word, testing carefully his every
utterance, weighing with the most relentless
precision his every statement; in a word, pos-
sess a sense of his responsibilities.
For the novel is the great expression of mod-
ern life. Each form of art has had its turn at
reflecting and expressing its contemporaneous
thought. Time was when the world looked to
the architects of the castles and great cathedrals
to truly reflect and embody its ideals. And
the architects — serious, earnest men — produced
such " expressions of contemporaneous thought"
as the Castle of Coucy and the Church of
Notre Dame. Then with other times came
other customs, and the painters had their day.
The men of the Renaissance trusted Angelo
and Da Vinci and Velasquez to speak for them,
and trusted not in vain. Next came the age of
drama. Shakespeare and Marlowe found the
value of x for the life and the times in which
they lived. Later on contemporary life had
been so modified that neither painting, archi-
tecture nor drama was the best vehicle of
expression, the day of the longer poems arrived,
and Pope and Dry den spoke for their fellows.
The Responsibilities of the Novelist 5
Thus the sequence Each age speaks with
its own peculiar organ, and has left the Word
for us moderns to read and unders and. The
Castle of Coucy and the Church of Notre Dame
are the spoken words of the Middle Ages. The
Renaissance speaks — and intelligib y — to us
through the sibyls of the Sistine chapel and the
Mona Lisa. " Macbeth" and " Tamerlane"
resume the whole spirit of the Elizabethan age,
while the "Rape of the Lock" is a wireless
message to us straight from the period of the
Restoration.
To-day is the day of the novel. In no other
day and by no other vehicle is contempora-
neous life so adequately expressed; and the
critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing
our times, striving to reconstruct our civiliza-
tion, will look not to the painters, not to the
architects nor dramatists, but to the novelists
to find our idiosyncrasy.
I think this is true. I think if the matter
could in any way be statisticized, the figures
would bear out the assumption. There is no
doubt the novel will in time "go out" of popu-
lar favour as irrevocably as the long poem has
gone, and for the reason that it is no longer
the right mode of expression.
It is interesting to speculate upon what will
take its place. Certainly the coming civiliza-
6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
tion will revert to no former means of expressing
its thought or its ideals. Possibly music will
be the interpreter of the life of the twenty-first
and twenty-second centuries. Possibly one
may see a hint of this in the characterization
of Wagner's operas as the " Music of the Future."
This, however, is parenthetical and beside
the mark. Remains the fact that to-day is the
day of the novel. By this one does not mean
that the novel is merely popular. If the novel
was not something more than a simple diver-
sion, a means of whiling away a dull evening,
a long railway journey, it would not, believe
me, remain in favour another day.
If the novel, then, is popular, it is popular
with a reason, a vital, inherent reason ; that is
to say, it is essential. Essential — to resume
once more the proposition — because it expresses
modern life better than architecture, better
than painting, better than poetry, better than
music. It is as necessary to the civilization
of the twentieth century as the violin is neces-
sary to Kubelik, as the piano is necessary to
Paderewski, as the plane is necessary to the
carpenter, the sledge to the blacksmith, the
chisel to the mason. It is an instrument, a
tool, a weapon, a vehicle. It is that thing
which, in the hand of man, makes him civilized
and no longer savage, because it gives him a
The Responsibilities of the Novelist 7
power of durable, permanent expression. So
much for the novel — the instrument.
Because it is so all-powerful to-day, the
people turn to him who wields this instrument
with every degree of confidence. They expect
— and rightly — that results shall be commen-
surate with means. The unknown archer who
grasps the bow of Ulysses may be expected by
the multitude to send his shaft far and true.
If he is not true nor strong he has no business
with the bow. The people give heed to him
only because he bears a great weapon. He
himself knows before he shoots whether or no
he is worthy.
It is all very well to jeer at the People and at
the People's misunderstanding of the arts, but
the fact is indisputable that no art that is not
in the end understood by the People can live
or ever did live a single generation. In the
larger view, in the last analysis, the People
pronounce the final judgment. The People,
despised of the artist, hooted, caricatured and
vilified, are after all, and in the main, the real
seekers after Truth. Who is it, after all, whose
interest is liveliest in any given work of art?
It is not now a question of esthetic interest —
that is, the artist's, the amateur's, the cogno-
scente's. It is a question of vital interest. Say
what you will, Maggie Tulliver — for instance
8 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
— is far more a living being for Mrs. Jones across
the street than she is for your sensitive, fastidi-
ous, keenly critical artist, litterateur, or critic.
The People — Mrs. Jones and her neighbours —
take the life history of these fictitious charac-
ters, these novels, to heart with a seriousness
that the esthetic cult have no conception of.
The cult consider them almost solely from their
artistic sides. The People take them into their
innermost lives. Nor do the People discrimi-
nate. Omnivorous readers as they are to-day,
they make little distinction between Maggie
Tulliver and the heroine of the last "popular
novel." They do not stop to separate true
from false ; they do not care.
How necessary it becomes, then, for those
who, by the simple art of writing, can invade
the heart's heart of thousands, whose novels
are received with such measureless earnestness
— how necessary it becomes for those who
wield such power to use it rightfully. Is it not
expedient to act fairly? Is it not in Heaven's
name essential that the People hear, not a lie,
but the Truth?
If the novel were not one of the most impor-
tant factors of modern life ; if it were not the
completest expression of our civilization ; if its
influence were not greater than all the pulpits,
than all the newspapers between the oceans, it
The Responsibilities of the Novelist 9
would not be so important that its message
should be true.
But the novelist to-day is the one who reaches
the greatest audience. Right or wrong, the
People turn to him the moment he speaks, and
what he says they believe.
For the Million, Life is a contracted affair, is
bounded by the walls of the narrow channel of
affairs in which their feet are set. They have
no horizon. They look to-day as they never
have looked before, as they never will look
again, to the writer of fiction to give them an
idea of life beyond their limits, and they believe
him as they never have believed before and
never will again.
This being so, is it not difficult to understand
how certain of these successful writers of fiction
— these favoured ones into whose hands the
gods have placed the great bow of Ulysses — can
look so frivolously upon their craft ? It is not
necessary to specify. One speaks of those
whose public is measured by "one hundred
and fifty thousand copies sold." We know
them, and because the gods have blessed us
with wits beyond our deserving we know their
work is false. But what of the "hundred and
fifty thousand" who are not discerning and
who receive this falseness as Truth, who
believe this topsy-turvy picture of Life
io The Responsibilities of the Novelist
beyond their horizons is real and vital and
sane?
There is no gauge to measure the extent of
this malignant influence. Public opinion is
made no one can say how, by infinitesimal
accretions, by a multitude of minutest elements.
Lying novels, surely, surely in this day and age
of indiscriminate reading, contribute to this
more than all other influences of present-day
activity.
The Pulpit, the Press and the Novel — these
indisputably are the great moulders of public
opinion and public morals to-day. But the
Pulpit speaks but once a week ; the Press is read
with lightning haste and the morning news is
waste-paper by noon. But the novel goes into
the home to stay. It is read word for word ; is
talked about, discussed ; its influence penetrates
every chink and corner of the family.
Yet novelists are not found wanting who
write for money. I do not think this is an
unfounded accusation. I do not think it asking
too much of credulity. This would not matter
if they wrote the Truth But these gentlemen
who are "in literature for their own pocket
every time" have discovered that for the
moment the People have confounded the Wrong
with the Right, and prefer that which is a lie
to that which is true. "Very well, then," say
The Responsibilities of the Novelist 1 1
these gentlemen. "If they want a lie they
shall have it;" and they give the People a lie
in return for royalties.
The surprising thing about this is that you
and I and all the rest of us do not consider this
as disreputable — do not yet realize that the
novelist has responsibilities. We condemn an
editor who sells his editorial columns, and we
revile the pulpit attainted of venality. But
the venal novelist — he whose influence is greater
than either the Press or Pulpit — him we greet
with a wink and the tongue in the cheek.
This should not be so. Somewhere the
protest should be raised, and those of us who
see the practice of this fraud should bring home
to ourselves the realization that the selling of
one hundred and fifty thousand books is a
serious business. The People have a right to
the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. It is not right
that they be exploited and deceived with false
views of life, false characters, false sentiment,
false morality, false history, false philosophy,
false emotions, false heroism, false notions of
self-sacrifice, false views of religion, of duty, of
conduct and of manners.
The man who can address an audience of
one hundred and fifty thousand people who —
unenlightened — believe what he says, has a
12 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
heavy duty to perform, and tremendous respon-
sibilities to shoulder; and he should address
himself to his task not with the flippancy of a
catch-penny juggler at the county fair, but with
earnestness, with soberness, with a sense of his
limitations, and with all the abiding sincerity
that by the favour and mercy of the gods
may be his.
THE TRUE REWARD OF THE NOVELIST
THE TRUE REWARD OF THE NOVELIST
NOT that one quarrels with the historical
novel as such; not that one does not
enjoy good fiction wherever found, and in what-
ever class. It is the method of attack of the
latter-day copyists that one deplores — their
attitude, the willingness of so very, very many
of them to take off the hat to Fashion, and then
hold the same hat for Fashion to drop pennies in.
Ah, but the man must be above the work or
the work is worthless, and the man better off at
some other work than that of producing fiction.
The eye never once should wander to the
gallery, but be always with single purpose
turned inward upon the work, testing it and
retesting it that it rings true
What one quarrels with is the perversion of a
profession, the detestable trading upon another
man's success. No one can find fault with
those few good historical novels that started
the fad. There was good workmanship in
these, and honesty. But the copyists, the
fakirs — they are not novelists at all, though
they write novels that sell by the hundreds of
1 6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
thousands. They are business men. They
find out — no, they allow some one else to find
out — what the public wants, and they give it
to the public cheap, and advertise it as a new
soap is advertised. Well, they make money;
and, if that is their aim — if they are content to
prostitute the good name of American literature
for a sliding scale of royalties — let's have done
with them. They have their reward. But the
lamentable result will be that these copyists
will in the end so prejudice the people against
an admirable school of fiction — the school of
Scott — that for years to come the tale of historic
times will be discredited and many a great
story remain unwritten, and many a man of
actual worth and real power hold back in the
ranks for very shame of treading where so
many fools have rushed in.
For the one idea of the fakir — the copyist —
and of the public which for the moment listens
to him, is Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, first, last
and always Clothes. Not Clothes only in the
sense of doublet and gown, but Clothes of
speech, Clothes of manner, Clothes of customs.
Hear them expatiate over the fashion of wear-
ing a cuff, over a trick of speech, over the archi-
tecture of a house, the archeology of armour
and the like. It is all well enough in its way,
but so easily dispensed with if there be flesh and
The True Reward of the Novelist 17
blood underneath. Veronese put the people
of his "Marriage at Cana" into the clothes of
his contemporaries. Is the picture any less a
masterpiece ?
Do these Little People know that Scott's
archeology was about one thousand years
"out" in Ivanhoe, and that to make a paral-
lel we must conceive of a writer describing
Richelieu — say — in small clothes and a top hat ?
But is it not Richelieu we want, and Ivanhoe,
not their clothes, their armour? And in spite
of his errors Scott gave us a real Ivanhoe. He
got beneath the clothes of an epoch and got
the heart of it, and the spirit of it (different
essentially and vitally from ours or from every
other, the spirit of feudalism) ; and he put forth
a masterpiece.
The Little People so very precise in the
matter of buttons and "bacinets" do not so.
Take the clothes from the people of their
Romances and one finds only wooden manikins.
Take the clothes from the epoch of which they
pretend to treat and what is there beneath ? It
is only the familiar, well-worn, well-thumbed
nineteenth or twentieth century after all. As
well have written of Michigan Avenue, Chicago,
as "La Rue de la Harpe," "The Great North
Road" or the "Appian Way."
It is a masquerade, the novel of the copyists ;
1 8 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
and the people who applaud them — are they
not the same who would hold persons in
respect because of the finery of their bodies?
A poor taste, a cheap one ; the taste of serving-
men, the literature of chambermaids.
To approach the same subject by a different
radius: why must the historical novel of the
copyist always be conceived of in the terms
of Romance ? Could not the formula of Real-
ism be applied at least as well, not the Realism
of mere externals (the copyists have that), but
the Realism of motives and emotions ? What
would we not give for a picture of the fifteenth
century as precise and perfect as one of Mr.
James's novels? Even if that be impossible,
the attempt, even though half-way successful,
would be worth while, would be better than
the wooden manikin in the tin-pot helmet and
baggy hose. At least we should get some-
where, even if no farther than Mr. Kingsley
took us in "Hereward," or Mr. Blackmore in
"Lorna Doone."
How about the business life and the student
life, and the artizan life and the professional
life, and above all, the home life of historic
periods ? Great Heavens ! There was some-
thing else sometimes than the soldier life.
They were not always cutting and thrusting, not
always night-riding, escaping, venturing, posing.
The True Reward of the Novelist 19
Or suppose that cut-and-thrust must be the
order of the day, where is the "man behind,"
and the heart in the man and the spirit in the
heart and the essential vital, elemental, all-
important true life within the spirit ? We are
all Anglo-Saxons enough to enjoy the sight of
a fight, would go a block or so out of the way
to see one, or be a dollar or so out of pocket.
But let it not be these jointed manikins worked
with a thread. At least let it be Mr. Robert
Fitzsimmons or Mr. James Jeffries.
Clothes, paraphernalia, panoply, pomp and
circumstance, and the copyist's public and the
poor bedeviled, ink-corroded hack of an over-
driven, underpaid reviewer on an inland paper
speak of the "vivid colouring" and "the fine
picture of a bygone age" — it is easy to be
vivid with a pot of vermilion at the elbow.
Any one can scare a young dog with a false-
face and a roaring voice, but to be vivid and
use grays and browns, to scare the puppy with
the lifted finger, that's something to the point.
The difficult thing is to get at the life imme-
diately around you — the very life in which you
move. No romance in it? No romance in
you, poor fool. As much romance on Michigan
Avenue as there is realism in King Arthur's
court. It is as you choose to see it. The
important thing to decide is, which formula is
20 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
the best to help you grip the Real Life of this
or any other age. Contemporaries always
imagine that theirs is the prosaic age, and that
chivalry and the picturesque died with their
forbears. No doubt Merlin mourned for the
old time of romance. Cervantes held that
romance was dead. Yet most of the historical
romances of the day are laid in Cervantes' s
time, or even after it.
Romance and Realism are constant qualities
of every age, day and hour. They are here
to-day. They existed in the time of Job.
They will continue to exist till the end of time,
not so much in things as in point of view of the
people who see things.
The difficulty, then, is to get at the immediate
life — immensely difficult, for you are not only
close to the canvas, but are yourself part of
the picture.
But the historic age is almost done to hand.
Let almost any one shut himself in his closet
with a history and Violet LeDuc's Dictionaire
du Mobilier and, given a few months' time, he
can evolve an historical novel of the kind called
popular. He need not know men — just clothes
and lingo, the " what-ho-without-there " gabble.
But if he only chose he could find romance and
adventure in Wall Street or Bond Street. But
romance there does not wear the gay clothes
The True Reward of the Novelist 21
and the showy accouterments, and to discover
it — the real romance of it — means hard work
and close study, not of books, but of people
and actualities.
Not only this, but to know the life around
you you must live — if not among people, then
in people. You must be something more than
a novelist if you can, something more than just
a writer. There must be that nameless sixth
sense or sensibility in you that great musicians
have in common with great inventors and great
scientists; the thing that does not enter into
the work, but that is back of it ; the thing that
would make of you a good man as well as a
good novelist ; the thing that differentiates the
mere business man from the financier (for it
is possessed of the financier and poet alike —
so only they be big enough).
It is not genius, for genius is a lax, loose term
so flippantly used that its expressiveness is
long since lost. It is more akin to sincerity.
And there once more we halt upon the great
word — sincerity, sincerity, and again sincerity.
Let the writer attack his historical novel with
sincerity and he cannot then do wrong. He
will see then the man beneath the clothes, and
the heart beneath both, and he will be so
amazed at the wonder of that sight that he will
forget the clothes. His public will be small,
22 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
perhaps, but he will have the better reward of
the knowledge of a thing well done. Royalties
on editions of hundreds of thousands will not
pay him more to his satisfaction than that.
To make money is not the province of a novelist.
If he is the right sort, he has other responsibili-
ties, heavy ones. He of all men cannot think
only of himself or for himself. And when the
last page is written and the ink crusts on the
pen-point and the hungry presses go clashing
after another writer, the "new man" and the
new fashion of the hour, he will think of the
grim long grind of the years of his life that he
has put behind him and of his work that he has
built up volume by volume, sincere work,
telling the truth as he saw it, independent of
fashion and the gallery gods, holding to these
with gripped hands and shut teeth — he will
think of all this then, and he will be able to say :
"I never truckled; I never took off the hat to
Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God,
I told them the truth. They liked it or they
didn't like it. What had that to do with me ?
I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth
then, and I know it for the truth now."
And that is his reward — the best that a
man may know ; the only one really worth the
striving for.
THE NOVEL WITH A " PURPOSE
THE NOVEL WITH A "PURPOSED
A FTER years of indoctrination and expos-
-*- *• tulation on the part of the artists, the
people who read appear at last to have grasped
this one precept — "the novel must not preach,"
but "the purpose of the story must be subordi-
nate to the story itself." It took a very long
time for them to understand this, but once it
became apparent they fastened upon it with a
tenacity comparable only to the tenacity of the
American schoolboy to the date "1492." " The
novel must not preach," you hear them say.
As though it were possible to write a novel
without a purpose, even if it is only the pur-
pose to amuse. One is willing to admit that
this savours a little of quibbling, for "pur-
pose" and purpose to amuse are two different
purposes. But every novel, even the most friv-
olous, must have some reason for the writing
of it, and in that sense must have a "purpose."
Every novel must do one of three things —
it must (i) tell something, (2) show something,
°r (3) prove something. Some novels do all
three of these; some do only two; all must do
at least one.
25
26 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
The ordinary novel merely tells something,
elaborates a complication, devotes itself pri-
marily to things. In this class comes the
novel of adventure, such as "The Three
Musketeers."
The second and better class of novel shows
something, exposes the workings of a temper-
ament, devotes itself primarily to the minds
of human beings. In this class falls the novel
of character, such as "Romola."
The third, and what we hold to be the best
class, proves something, draws conclusions
from a whole congeries of forces, social ten-
dencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to
a study of men but of man. In this class falls
the novel with the purpose, such as "Les
Miserables."
And the reason we decide upon this last as
the highest form of the novel is because that,
though setting a great purpose before it as its
task, it nevertheless includes, and is forced to
include, both the other classes. It must tell
something, must narrate vigorous incidents
and must show something, must penetrate
deep into the motives and character of type-
men, men who are composite pictures of a
multitude of men. It must do this because
of the nature of its subject, for it deals with
elemental forces, motives that stir whole
The Novel with a "Purpose" 27
nations. These cannot be handled as abstrac-
tions in fiction. Fiction can find expression
only in the concrete. The elemental forces,
then, contribute to the novel with a purpose
to provide it with vigorous action. In the
novel, force can be expressed in no other way.
The social tendencies must be expressed by
means of analysis of the characters of the men
and women who compose that society, and
the two must be combined and manipulated
to evolve the purpose — to find the value of x.
The production of such a novel is probably
the most arduous task that the writer of fiction
can undertake. Nowhere else is success more
difficult ; nowhere else is failure so easy. Unskil-
fully treated, the story may dwindle down and
degenerate into mere special pleading, and the
novelist become a polemicist, a pamphleteer,
forgetting that, although his first consideration
is to prove his case, his means must be living
human beings, not statistics, and that his tools
are not figures, but pictures from life as he sees
it. The novel with a purpose is, one contends,
a preaching novel. But it preaches by telling
things and showing things. Only, the author
selects from the great storehouse of actual
life the things to be told and the things to be
shown, which shall bear upon his problem, his
purpose. The preaching, the moralizing, is
28 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
the result not of direct appeal by the writer,
but is made — should be made— to the reader
by the very incidents of the story.
But here is presented a strange anomaly, a
distinction as subtle as it is vital. Just now
one has said that in the composition of the kind
of novel under consideration the purpose is
for the novelist the all-important thing, and
yet it is impossible to deny that the story, as
a mere story, is to the story-writer the one
great object of attention. How reconcile then
these two apparent contradictions?
For the novelist, the purpose of his novel,
the problem he is to solve, is to his story what
the keynote is to the sonata. Though the
musician cannot exaggerate the importance of
the keynote, yet the thing that interests him
is the sonata itself. The keynote simply
coordinates the music, systematizes it, brings
all the myriad little rebellious notes under a
single harmonious code.
Thus, too, the purpose in the novel. It is
important as an end and also as an ever-
present guide. For the writer it is as important
only as a note to which his work must be
attuned. The moment, however, that the
writer becomes really and vitally interested in
his purpose his novel fails.
Here is the strange anomaly. Let us suppose
The Novel with a "Purpose" 29
that Hardy, say, should be engaged upon a
story which had for purpose to show the injus-
tices under which the miners of Wales were
suffering. It is conceivable that he could
write a story that would make the blood boil
with indignation. But he himself, if he is to
remain an artist, if he is to write his novel suc-
cessfully, will, as a novelist, care very little
about the iniquitous labour system of the
Welsh coal-mines. It will be to him as imper-
sonal a thing as the key is to the composer of a
sonata. As a man Hardy may or may not
be vitally concerned in the Welsh coal-miner.
That is quite unessential. But as a novelist,
as an artist, his sufferings must be for him a
matter of the mildest interest. They are
important, for they constitute his keynote.
They are not interesting for the reason that
the working out of his story, its people,
episodes, scenes and pictures, is for the
moment the most interesting thing in all
the world to him, exclusive of everything
else. Do you think that Mrs. Stowe was
more interested in the slave question than
she was in the writing of "Uncle Tom's
Cabin " ? Her book, her manuscript, the
page-to-page progress of the narrative, were
more absorbing to her than all the Negroes
that were ever whipped or sold. Had it not
30 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
been so, that great purpose-novel never would
have succeeded.
Consider the reverse — "Fecondite*," for in-
stance. The purpose for which Zola wrote the
book ran away with him. He really did care
more for the depopulation of France than
he did for his novel. Result — sermons on the
fruitfulness of women, special pleading, a far-
rago of dry, dull incidents, overburdened and
collapsing under the weight of a theme that
should have intruded only indirectly.
This is preeminently a selfish view of the
question, but it is assuredly the only correct
one. It must be remembered that the artist
has a double personality, himself as a man,
and himself as an artist. But, it will be urged,
how account for the artist's sympathy in his
fictitious characters, his emotion, the actual
tears he sheds in telling of their griefs, their
deaths, and the like ?
The answer is obvious. As an artist his
sensitiveness is quickened because they are
characters in his novel. It does not at all
follow that the same artist would be moved to
tears over the report of parallel catastrophes
in real life. As an artist, there is every reason
to suppose he would welcome the news with
downright pleasure. It would be for him
4 'good material." He would see a story in it,
The Novel with a "Purpose''1 31
a good scene, a great character. Thus the
artist. What he would do, how he would
feel as a man is quite a different matter.
To conclude, let us consider one objection
urged against the novel with a purpose by the
plain people who read. For certain reasons,
difficult to explain, the purpose novel always
ends unhappily. It is usually a record of
suffering, a relation of tragedy. And the
plain people say, "Ah, we see so much suffering
in the world, why put it into novels? We
do not want it in novels."
One confesses to very little patience with
this sort. "We see so much suffering in the
world already!" Do they? Is this really
true? The people who buy novels are the
well-to-do people. They belong to a class
whose whole scheme of life is concerned solely
with an aim to avoid the unpleasant. Suffer-
ing, the great catastrophes, the social throes,
that annihilate whole communities, or that
crush even isolated individuals — all these are
as far removed from them as earthquakes and
tidal-waves. Or, even if it were so, suppose
that by some miracle these blind eyes were
opened and the sufferings of the poor, the
tragedies of the house around the corner,
really were laid bare. If there is much pain
in life, all the more reason that it should appear
32 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
in a class of literature which, in its highest form,
is a sincere transcription of life.
It is the complaint of the coward, this cry
against the novel with a purpose, because it
brings the tragedies and griefs of others to
notice. Take this element from fiction, take
from it the power and opportunity to prove
that injustice, crime and inequality do exist,
and what is left? Just the amusing novels,
the novels that entertain. The juggler in
spangles, with his balancing-pole and gilt ball,
does this. You may consider the modern
novel from this point of view. It may be a
flippant paper-covered thing of swords and
cloaks, to be carried on a railway journey and
to be thrown out the window when read,
together with the sucked oranges and peanut
shells. Or it may be a great force, that works
together with the pulpit and the universi-
ties for the good of the people, fearlessly prov-
ing that power is abused, that the strong
grind the faces of the weak, that an evil tree
is still growing in the midst of the garden, that
undoing follows hard upon unrighteousness,
that the course of Empire is not yet finished,
and that the races of men have yet to work out
their destiny in those great and terrible move-
ments that crush and grind and rend asunder
the pillars of the houses of the nations.
The Novel with a "Purpose" 33
Fiction may keep pace with the Great
March, but it will not be by dint of amusing
the people. The muse is a teacher, not a
trickster. Her rightful place is with the
leaders, but in the last analysis that place is
to be attained and maintained not by cap-and-
bells, but because of a serious and sincere
interest, such as inspires the great teachers,
the great divines, the great philosophers, a
well-defined, well-seen, courageously sought-for
purpose.
STORY-TELLERS VS. NOVELISTS
STORY-TELLERS VS. NOVELISTS
TT is a thing accepted and indisputable that
a story-teller is a novelist, but it has
often occurred to one that the reverse is not
always true and that the novelist is not of
necessity a story-teller. The distinction is
perhaps a delicate one, but for all that it seems
to be decisive, and it is quite possible that
with the distinction in mind a different judg-
ment might be passed upon a very large part
of present-day fiction. It would even be
entertaining to apply the classification to the
products of the standard authors.
The story-telling instinct seems to be a gift,
whereas — we trend to the heretical — the art of
composing novels — using the word in appo-
sition to stories, long or short — may be
an acquirement. The one is an endowment,
the other an accomplishment. Accordingly
throughout the following paragraphs the expres-
sion, novelists of composition, for the time
being will be used technically, and will be
applied to those fiction-writers who have not
the story-telling faculty.
It would not be fair to attempt a proof that
37
38 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
the one is better or worse than the other.
The difference is surely of kind and not of
degree. One will only seek to establish the
fact that certain eminent and brilliant novel-
writers are quite bereft of a sense of fiction,
that some of them have succeeded in spite of
this deficiency, and that other novel-writers
possessing this sense of fiction have succeeded
because of it, and in spite of many drawbacks
such as lack of training and of education.
It is a proposition which one believes to be
capable of demonstration that every child con-
tains in himself the elements of every known
profession, every occupation, every art, every
industry. In the five-year-old you may see
glimpses of the soldier, trader, farmer, painter,
musician, builder, and so on to the end of
the roster. Later, circumstances produce the
atrophy of all of these instincts but one, and
from that one specialized comes the career.
Thus every healthy-minded child — no matter
if he develops in later years to be financier or
boot-maker — is a story-teller. As soon as he
begins to talk he tells stories. Witness the
holocausts and carnage of the leaden platoons
of the nursery table, the cataclysms of the
Grand Trans-Continental Playroom and Front-
Hall Railroad system. This, though, is not
real story-telling. The toys practically tell
Story-tellers vs. Novelists 39
the story for him and are no stimulant to the
imagination. However, the child goes beyond
the toys. He dramatizes every object of
his surroundings. The books of the library
shelves are files of soldiers, the rugs are isles
in the seaway of the floor, the easy chair is a
comfortable old gentleman holding out his
arms, the sofa a private brig or a Baldwin
locomotive, and the child creates of his sur-
roundings an entire and complex work of
fiction of which he is at one and the same
time hero, author and public.
Within the heart of every mature human
being, not a writer of fiction, there is the
withered remains of a little story-teller who
died very young. And the love of good
fiction and the appreciation of a fine novel in
the man of the world of riper years is — I like
to think — a sort of memorial tribute which he
pays to his little dead playmate of so very long
ago, who died very quietly with his little broken
tin locomotive in his hands on the cruel day
when he woke to the realization that it had
outlived its usefulness and its charm.
Even in the heart of some accepted and
successful fiction-writer you shall find this
little dead story-teller. These are the novelists
of composition, whose sense of fiction, under
stress of circumstances, has become so blunted
40 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
that when they come at last to full maturity
and to the power of using the faculty they can no
longer command it. These are novelists rather
of intellect than of spontaneous improvisation ;
and all the force of their spendid minds, every
faculty other than the lost fiction-faculty,
must be brought into play to compensate for
the lack. Some more than compensate for it,
so prodigal in resource, so persistent in effort,
so powerful in energy and in fertility of inven-
tion, that — as it were by main strength — they
triumph over the other writer, the natural
story-teller, from whose pen the book flows
with almost no effort at all.
Of this sort — the novelists of intellect, in
whom the born story-teller is extinct, the
novelists of composition in a word — the great
example, it would seem, is George Eliot. It
was by taking thought that the author of
"Romola" added to her stature. The result
is superb, but achieved at what infinite pains,
with what colossal labour — of head rather than
of the heart ! She did not feel, she knew, and
to attain that knowledge what effort had to
be expended ! Even all her art cannot exclude
from her pages evidences of the labour, of
the superhuman toil. And it was labour
and toil for what? To get back, through
years of sophistication, of solemn education,
Story-tellers vs. Novelists 41
of worldly wisdom, back again to the point
of view of the little lost child of the doll-house
days.
But sometimes the little story-teller does
not die, but lives on and grows with the man,
increasing in favour with God, till at [last he
dominates the man himself, and the playroom
of the old days simply widens its walls till it
includes the street outside, and the street
beyond and other streets, the whole city, the
whole world, and the story-teller discovers a
set of new toys to play with, and new objects
of a measureless environment to dramatize
about, and in exactly, exactly the same spirit
in which he trundled his tin train through the
halls and shouted boarding orders from the
sofa he moves now through the world's play-
room "making up stories"; only now his
heroes and his public are outside himself and
he alone may play the author.
For him there is but little effort required.
He has a sense of fiction. Every instant of
his day he is dramatizing. The cable-car has
for him a distinct personality. Every window
in the residence quarters is an eye to the soul
of the house behind. The very lamp-post on
the corner, burning on through the night and
through the storm, is a soldier, dutiful, vigilant
in stress. A ship is Adventure; an engine
42 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
a living brute ; and the easy chair of his library
is still the same comfortable and kindly old
gentleman holding out his arms.
The men and women of his world are not
apt to be— to him — so important in themselves
as in relation to the whirl of things in which
he chooses to involve them. They cause
events, or else events happen to them, and by
an unreasoned instinct the story-teller pre-
serves the consistencies (just as the child
would not have run the lines of the hall railway
across the seaway of the floor between the
rugs). Much thought is not necessary to him.
Production is facile, a constant pleasure. The
story runs from his pen almost of itself; it
takes this shape or that, he knows not why;
his people do this or that and by some blessed
system of guesswork they are somehow always
plausible and true to life. His work is hap-
hazard, yet in the end and in the main tremen-
dously probable. Devil-may-care, slipshod,
melodramatic, but invincibly persuasive, he
uses his heart, his senses, his emotions, every
faculty but that of the intellect. He does
not know; he feels.
Dumas was this, and "The Three Musketeers/'
different from "Romola" in kind but not in
degree, is just as superb as Eliot at her best.
Only the Frenchman had a sense of fiction
Story-tellers vs. Novelists 43
which the Englishwoman had not. Her novels
are character studies, are portraits, are por-
trayals of emotions or pictures of certain
times and certain events, are everything you
choose, but they are not stories, and no stretch
of the imagination, no liberalness of criticism
can make them such. She succeeded by dint
of effort where the Frenchman — merely wrote.
George Eliot compensated for the defect arti-
ficially and succeeded eminently and conclu-
sively, but there are not found wanting cases —
in modern literature — where "novelists of com-
position" have not compensated beyond a very
justifiable doubt, and where, had they but re-
joiced in a very small modicum of this dowry
of the gods, their work would have been — to
one's notion — infinitely improved.
As, for instance, Tolstoi ; incontestably great
though he be, all his unquestioned power has
never yet won for him that same vivid sense
of fiction enjoyed by so (comparatively) unim-
portant a writer as the author of "Sherlock
Holmes." And of the two, judged strictly
upon their merits as story-tellers, one claims
for Mr. Doyle the securer if not the higher
place, despite the magnificent genius of the
novelist.
In the austere Russian — gloomy, sad, ac-
quainted with grief — the child died irrevoca-
44 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
bly long, long ago ; and no power however vast,
no wisdom however profound, no effort how-
ever earnest, can turn one wheel on the little
locomotive of battered tin or send it one inch
along the old right-of-way between the nursery
and the front room. One cannot but feel that
the great author of "Anna Karenina" realizes
as much as his readers the limitations that
the loss of this untainted childishness imposes.
The power was all his, the wonderful intellectual
grip, but not the fiction spirit — the child's
knack and love of "making up stories." Given
that, plus the force already his own, and what
a book would have been there ! The perfect
novel ! No doubt, clearer than all others, the
great Russian sees the partial failure of his
work, and no doubt keener and deeper than all
others sees that, unless the child-vision and the
child-pleasure be present to guide and to stimu-
late, the entrances of the kingdom must stay
forever shut to those who would enter, storm
they the gates never so mightily and beat they
never so clamorously at the doors.
Whatever the end of fiction may be, what-
ever the reward and recompense bestowed,
whatever object is gained by good work, the
end will not be gained, nor the reward won,
nor the object attained by force alone — by
strength of will or of mind. Without the
Story-tellers vs. Novelists 45
auxiliary of the little playmate of the old days
the great doors that stand at the end of the
road will stay forever shut. Look once, how-
ever, with the child's eyes, or for once touch
the mighty valves with the child's hand, and
Heaven itself lies open with all its manifold
wonders.
So that in the end, after all trial has been
made and every expedient tested, the simplest
way is the best and the humblest means the
surest. A little child stands in the midst of
the wise men and the learned, and their wis-
dom and their learning are set aside and they
are taught that unless they become as one of
these they shall in nowise enter into the
Kingdom of Heaven.
THE NEED OF A LITERARY
CONSCIENCE
THE NEED OF A LITERARY CONSCIENCE
T)ILATE saith unto them: what is truth?"
•*• and it is of record that he received no
answer — and for very obvious reasons. For
is it not a fact, that he who asks that question
must himself find the answer, and that not
even one sent from Heaven can be of hope or
help to him if he is not willing to go down into
his own heart and into his own life to find it ?
To sermonize, to elaborate a disquisition on
nice distinctions of metaphysics is not appro-
priate here. But it is — so one believes —
appropriate to consider a certain very large
class of present day novelists of the United
States who seldom are stirred by that spirit
of inquiry that for a moment disturbed the
Roman, who do not ask what is truth, who do
not in fact care to be truthful at all, and who
— and this is the serious side of the business —
are bringing the name of American literature
perilously near to disrepute.
One does not quarrel for one instant with
the fact that certain books of the writers in
question have attained phenomenally large
circulations. This is as it should be. There
49
50 The Responsibilities of ike Novelist
are very many people in the United States,
and compared with such a figure as seventy
million, a mere hundred thousand of books
sold is no great matter.
But here — so it seems — is the point. He
who can address a hundred thousand people
is, no matter what his message may be, in an
important position. It is a large audience,
one hundred thousand, larger than any roofed
building now standing could contain. Less
than one one-hundredth part of that number
nominated Lincoln. Less than half of it won
Waterloo.
And it must be remembered that for every
one person who buys a book there are three
who will read it and half a dozen who will
read what some one else has written about it, so
that the sphere of influence widens indefinitely,
and the audience that the writer addresses
approaches the half -million mark.
Well and good; but if the audience is so
vast, if the influence is so far-reaching, if the
example set is so contagious, it becomes incum-
bent to ask, it becomes imperative to demand
that the half -million shall be told the truth and
not a lie.
And this thing called truth— "what is it?"
says Pilate, and the average man conceives at
once of an abstraction, a vague idea, a term
The Need of a Literary Conscience 51
borrowed from the metaphysicians, certainly
nothing that has to do with practical, tangible,
concrete work-a-day life.
Error ! If truth is not an actual workaday
thing, as concrete as the lamp-post on the
corner, as practical as a cable-car, as real and
homely and workaday and commonplace as a
bootjack, then indeed are we of all men most
miserable and our preaching vain.
And truth in fiction is just as real and just
as important as truth anywhere else — as in
Wall Street, for instance. A man who does not
tell the truth there, and who puts the untruth
upon paper over his signature, will be very
promptly jailed. In the case of the Wall
Street man the sum of money in question
may be trivial — $100, $50. But the untruth-
ful novelist who starts in motion something
like half a million dollars invokes not fear nor
yet reproach. If truth in the matter of the
producing of novels is not an elusive, intangible
abstraction, what, then, is it ? Let us get at the
hard nub of the business, something we can hold
in the hand. It is the thing that is one's own,
the discovery of a subject suitable for fictitious
narration that has never yet been treated,
and the conscientious study of that subject and
the fair presentation of results. Not a difficult
matter, it would appear, not an abstraction, not
52 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
a philosophical kink. Newspaper reporters,
who are not metaphysicians, unnamed, unre-
warded, despised, even, and hooted and
hounded, are doing this every day. They do
it on a meager salary, and they call the affair
a "scoop." Is the standard of the novelist —
he who is entrusted with the good name of
his nation's literature — lower than that of a
reporter ?
"Ah, but it is so hard to be original," "ah,
but it is so hard to discover anything new."
Great Heavens ! when a new life comes into
the world for every tick of the watch in your
pocket — a new life with all its complications,
and with all the thousand and one other com-
plications it sets in motion !
Hard to be original ! when of all of those
billion lives your own is as distinct, as indi-
vidual, as "original," as though you were born
out of season in the Paleozoic age and yours
the first human face the sun ever shone upon.
Go out into the street and stand where the
ways cross and hear the machinery of life
work clashing in its grooves. Can the utmost
resort of your ingenuity evolve a better story
than any one of the millions that jog your
elbow? Shut yourself in your closet and turn
your eyes inward upon yourself — deep into
yourself, down, down into the heart of you;
The Need of a Literary Conscience 53
and the tread of the feet upon the pavement
is the systole and diastole of your own being —
different only in degree. It is life ; and it is
that which you must have to make your book,
your novel — life, not other people's novels.
Or look from your window. A whole Lit-
erature goes marching by, clamouring for a
leader and a master hand to guide it. You
have but to step from your doorway. And
instead of this, instead of entering into the
leadership that is yours by right divine, instead
of this, you must toilfully, painfully endeavour
to crawl into the armour of the chief of some
other cause, the harness of the leader of some
other progress.
But you will not fit into that panoply. You
may never brace that buckler upon your
arm, for by your very act you stand revealed
as a littler man than he who should be chief —
a littler man and a weaker; and the casque
will fall so far over your face that it will only
blind you, and the sword will trip you, and
the lance, too ponderous, will falter in your
grip, and all that life which surges and thun-
ders behind you will in time know you to be
the false leader, and as you stumble will trample
you in its onrush, and leave you dead and for-
gotten upon the road.
And just as a misconception of the truth
54 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
makes of this the simplest and homeliest of
things, a vagary, an abstraction and a bugbear,
so it is possible that a misconception of the
Leader creates the picture of a great and
dreadful figure wrapped in majesty, solemn
and profound. So that perhaps for very lack
of self-confidence, for very diffidence, one
shrinks from lifting the sword of him and
from enduing one's forehead with the casque
that seems so ponderous.
In other causes no doubt the leader must
be chosen from the wise and great. In science
and finance one looks to him to be a strong
man, a swift and a sure man. But the litera-
ture that to-day shouts all in vain for its chief
needs no such a one as this. Here the battle is
not to the strong nor yet the race to the swift.
Here the leader is no vast, stern being, profound,
solemn, knowing all things, but, on the contrary,
is as humble as the lowliest that follow after
him. So that it need not be hard to step into
that place of eminence. Not by arrogance,
nor by assumption, nor by the achievement of
the world's wisdom, shall you be made worthy
of the place of high command. But it will
come to you, if it comes at all, because you shall
have kept yourself young and humble and pure
in heart, and so unspoiled and unwearied and
un jaded that you shall find a joy in the mere
The Need of a Literary Conscience 55
rising of the sun, a wholesome, sane delight
in the sound of the wind at night, a pleasure in
the sight of the hills at evening, shall see God
in a little child and a whole religion in a brood-
ing bird.
A NEGLECTED EPIC
A NEGLECTED EPIC
OUDDENLY we have found that there is
*^ no longer any Frontier. The westward-
moving course of empire has at last crossed
the Pacific Ocean. Civilization has circled the
globe and has come back to its starting point,
the vague and mysterious East.
The thing has not been accomplished peace-
fully. From the very first it has been an affair
of wars — of invasions. Invasions of the East
by the West, and of raids North and South —
raids accomplished by flying columns that
dashed out from both sides of the main army.
Sometimes even the invaders have fought
among themselves, as for instance the Trojan
War, or the civil wars of Italy, England and
America; sometimes they have turned back on
their tracks and, upon one pretext or another,
reconquered the races behind them, as for
instance Alexander's wars to the eastward, the
Crusades, and Napoleon's Egyptian campaigns.
Retarded by all these obstacles, the march
has been painfully slow. To move from
Egypt to Greece took centuries of time. More
59
60 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
centuries were consumed in the campaign
that brought empire from Greece to Rome,
and still more centuries passed before it crossed
the Alps and invaded northern and western
Europe.
But observe. Once across the Mississippi,
the West — our Far West — was conquered in
about forty years. In all the vast campaign
from east to west here is the most signal vic-
tory, the swiftest, the completest, the most
brilliant achievement — the wilderness subdued
at a single stroke.
Now all these various fightings to the
westward, these mysterious race-movements,
migrations, wars and wanderings have pro-
duced their literature, distinctive, peculiar,
excellent. And this literature we call epic.
The Trojan War gave us the " Iliad," the
"Odyssey" and the "./^neid"; the campaign
of the Greeks in Asia Minor produced the
"Anabasis"; a whole cycle of literature grew
from the conquest of Europe after the fall of
Rome— "The Song of Roland," "The Nibel-
ungenlied," "The Romance of the Rose,"
" Beowulf, " " Magnusson, " " The Scotch Border
Ballads," "The Poem of the Cid," "The
Hemskringla, " " Orlando Furioso, " "Jerusalem
Delivered," and the like.
On this side of the Atlantic, in his clumsy,
A Neglected Epic 61
artificial way, but yet recognized as a producer
of literature, Cooper has tried to chronicle the
conquest of the eastern part of our country.
Absurd he may be in his ideas of life and
character, the art in him veneered over with
charlatanism; yet the man was solemn enough
and took his work seriously, and his work is
literature.
Also a cycle of romance has grown up around
the Civil War. The theme has had its poets
to whom the public have been glad to listen.
The subject is vast, noble ; is, in a word, epic,
just as the Trojan War and the Retreat of the
Ten Thousand were epic.
But when at last one comes to look for the
literature that sprang from and has grown
up around the last great epic event in the
history of civilization, the event which in
spite of stupendous difficulties was consum-
mated more swiftly, more completely, more
satisfactorily than any like event since the
westward migration began — I mean the con-
quering of the West, the subduing of the
wilderness beyond the Mississippi — What has
this produced in the way of literature? The
dime novel ! The dime novel and nothing else.
The dime novel and nothing better.
The Trojan War left to posterity the charac-
ter of Hector ; the wars with the Saracens gave
62 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
us Roland; the folklore of Iceland produced
Grettir ; the Scotch border poetry brought forth
the Douglas; the Spanish epic the Cid. But
the American epic, just as heroic, just as ele-
mental, just as important and as picturesque,
will fade into history leaving behind no finer
type, no nobler hero than Buffalo Bill.
The young Greeks sat on marble terraces
overlooking the ^Egean Sea and listened to
the thunderous roll of Homer's hexameter.
In the feudal castles the minstrel sang to the
young boys, of Roland. The farm folk of
Iceland to this very day treasure up and read
to their little ones hand-written copies of the
Gretla Saga chronicling the deeds and death of
Grettir the Strong. But the youth of the
United States learn of their epic by paying a
dollar to see the " Wild West Show. "
The plain truth of the matter is that we
have neglected our epic — the black shame of it
be on us — and no contemporaneous poet or
chronicler thought it worth his while to sing
the song or tell the tale of the West because
literature in the day when the West was being
won was a cult indulged in by certain well-bred
gentlemen in New England who looked east-
ward to the Old World, to the legends of
England and Norway and Germany and Italy
for their inspiration, and left the great, strong,
A Neglected Epic 63
honest, fearless, resolute deeds of their own
countrymen to be defamed and defaced by
the nameless hacks of the "yellow back"
libraries.
One man — who wrote "How Santa Claus
Came to Simpson's Bar" — one poet, one
chronicler did, in fact, arise for the moment,
who understood that wild, brave life and who
for a time gave promise of bearing record of
things seen.
One of the requirements of an epic — a true
epic — is that its action must devolve upon some
great national event. There was no lack of
such in those fierce years after '49. Just that
long and terrible journey from the Mississippi
to the ocean is an epic in itself. Yet no serious
attempt has ever been made by an American
author to render into prose or verse this event
in our history as "national" in scope, in origin
and in results as the Revolution itself. The
prairie schooner is as large a figure in the
legends as the black ship that bore Ulysses
homeward from Troy. The sea meant as
much to the Argonauts of the fifties as it did to
the ten thousand.
And the Alamo! There is a trumpet-call
in the word; and only the look of it on the
printed page is a flash of fire. But the very
histories slight the deed, and to many an
64 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
American, born under the same flag that the
Mexican rifles shot to ribbons on that splendid
day, the word is meaningless. Yet Thermopylae
was less glorious, and in comparison with that
siege the investment of Troy was mere wanton
riot. At the very least the Texans in that
battered adobe church fought for the honour
of their flag and the greater glory of their
country, not for loot or the possession of the
person of an adultress. Young men are taught
to consider the " Iliad, " with its butcheries, its
glorification of inordinate selfishness and vanity,
as a classic. Achilles, murderer, egoist, ruffian
and liar, is a hero. But the name of Bowie,
the name of the man who gave his life to his
flag at the Alamo, is perpetuated only in the
designation of a knife. Crockett is the hero
only of a " funny story " about a sagacious coon ;
while Travis, the boy commander who did what
Gordon with an empire back of him failed to do,
is quietly and definitely ignored.
Because we have done nothing to get at the
truth about the West ; because our best writers
have turned to the old-country folklore and
legends for their inspiration; because ''melan-
choly harlequins" strut in fringed leggings
upon the street-corners, one hand held out for
pennies, we have come to believe that our West,
our epic, was an affair of Indians, road-agents
A Neglected Epic 65
and desperadoes, and have taken no account
of the brave men who stood for law and justice
and liberty, and for those great ideas died by
the hundreds, unknown and unsung — died that
the West might be subdued, that the last stage
of the march should be accomplished, that the
Anglo-Saxon should fulfil his destiny and
complete the cycle of the world.
The great figure of our neglected epic, the
Hector of our ignored Iliad, is not, as the dime
novels would have us believe, a lawbreaker,
but a lawmaker; a fighter, it is true, as is
always the case with epic figures, but a fighter
for peace, a calm, grave, strong man who
hated the lawbreaker as the hound hates the
wolf.
He did not lounge in barrooms; he did not
cheat at cards; he did not drink himself to
maudlin fury; he did not " shoot at the drop of
the hat. " But he loved his horse, he loved
his friend, he was kind to little children ; he was
always ready to side with the weak against the
strong, with the poor against the rich. For
hypocrisy and pretense, for shams and subter-
fuges he had no mercy, no tolerance. He
was too brave to lie and too strong to steal.
The odds in that lawless day were ever against
him; his enemies were many and his friends
were few; but his face was always set bravely
66 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
against evil, and fear was not in him even at
the end. For such a man as this could die no
quiet death in a land where law went no further
than the statute books and lite lay in the crook
of my neighbour's forefinger.
He died in defense of an ideal, an epic hero,
a legendary figure, formidable, sad. He died
facing down injustice, dishonesty and crime;
died "in his boots"; and the same world that
has glorified Achilles and forgotten Travis
finds none too poor to do him reverence. No
literature has sprung up around him — this
great character native to America. He is of all
the world-types the one distinctive to us —
peculiar, particular and unique. He is dead
and even his work is misinterpreted and mis-
understood. His very memory will soon be
gone, and the American epic, which, on the
shelves of posterity, should have stood shoulder
to shoulder with the " Hemskringla " and the
" Tales of the Nibelungen" and the "Song of
Roland, " will never be written.
THE FRONTIER GONE AT LAST
THE FRONTIER GONE AT LAST
T TNTIL the day when the first United States
^ marine landed in China we had always
imagined that out yonder somewhere in the
West was the borderland where civilization
disintegrated and merged into the untamed.
Our skirmish-line was there, our posts that
scouted and scrimmaged with the wilderness,
a thousand miles in advance of the steady
march of civilization.
And the Frontier has become so much an
integral part of our conception of things that
it will be long before we shall all understand
that it is gone. We liked the Frontier; it was
romance, the place of the poetry of the Great
March, the firing-line where there was action
and fighting, and where men held each other's
lives in the crook of the forefinger. Those
who had gone out came back with tremendous
tales, and those that stayed behind made up
other and even more tremendous tales.
When we — we Anglo-Saxons — busked our-
selves for the first stage of the march, we
began from that little historic reach of ground
69
70 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
in the midst of the Friesland swamps, and we
set our faces Westward, feeling no doubt the
push of the Slav behind us. Then the Frontier
was Britain and the sober peacefulness of land
where are the ordered, cultivated English farm-
yards of to-day was the Wild West of the
Frisians of that century ; and for the little chil-
dren of the Frisian peat cottages Hengist was
the Apache Kid and Horsa Deadwood Dick —
freebooters, law-defiers, slayers-of-men, epic
heroes, blood brothers, if you please, of Boone
and Bowie.
Then for centuries we halted and the van
closed up with the firing-line, and we filled all
England and all Europe with our clamour
because for awhile we seemed to have gone
as far Westward as it was possible; and the
checked energy of the race reacted upon itself,
rebounded as it were, and back we went to the
Eastward again — crusading, girding at the
Mahommedan, conquering his cities, breaking
into his fortresses with mangonel, siege-engine
and catapult — just as the boy shut indoors
finds his scope circumscribed and fills the
whole place with the racket of his activity.
But always, if you will recall it, we had a
curious feeling that we had not reached the
ultimate West even yet, and there was still a
Frontier. Always that strange sixth sense
The Frontier Gone at Last 71
turned our heads toward the sunset; and all
through the Middle Ages we were peeking and
prying into the Western horizon, trying to reach
it, to run it down, and the queer tales about
Vineland and that storm-driven Viking* s ship
would not down.
And then at last a naked savage on the
shores of a little island in what is now our
West Indies, looking Eastward one morning,
saw the caravels, and on that day the Frontier
was rediscovered, and promptly a hundred
thousand of the more hardy rushed to the
skirmish-line and went at the wilderness as
only the Anglo-Saxon can.
And then the skirmish-line decided that it
would declare itself independent of the main
army behind and form an advance column of
its own, a separate army corps ; and no sooner
was this done than again the scouts went for-
ward, went Westward, pushing the Frontier
ahead of them, scrimmaging with the wilder-
ness, blazing the way. At last they forced
the Frontier over the Sierra Nevadas down
to the edge of the Pacific. And here it would
have been supposed that the Great March
would have halted again as it did before the
Atlantic, that here at last the Frontier ended.
But on the first of May, 1898, a gun was fired
in the Bay of Manila, still farther Westward,
72 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
and in response the skirmish-line crossed the
Pacific, still pushing the Frontier before it.
Then came a cry for help from Legation Street
in Peking, and as the first boat bearing its
contingent of American marines took ground
on the Asian shore, the Frontier — at last after
so many centuries, after so many marches,
after so much fighting, so much spilled blood,
so much spent treasure, dwindled down and
vanished; for the Anglo-Saxon in his course of
empire had circled the globe and brought the
new civilization to the old civilization, and
reached the starting point of history, the place
from which the migrations began. So soon as
the marines landed there was no longer any
West, and the equation of the horizon, the
problem of the centuries for the Anglo-Saxon
was solved.
So, lament it though we may, the Frontier
is gone, an idiosyncrasy that has been with us
for thousands of years, the one peculiar pic-
turesqueness of our life is no more. We may
keep alive for many years the idea of a Wild
West, but the hired cowboys and paid rough
riders of Mr. William Cody are more like
"the real thing" than can be found to-day in
Arizona, New Mexico or Idaho. Only the
imitation cowboys, the college-bred fellows
who "go out on a ranch," carry the revolver
The Frontier Gone at Last 73
or wear the concho. The Frontier has become
conscious of itself, acts the part for the Eastern
visitor; and this self -consciousness is a sign,
surer than all others, of the decadence of a
type, the passing of an epoch. The Apache
Kid and Deadwood Dick have gone to join
Hengist and Horsa and the heroes of the
Magnusson Saga.
But observe. What happened in the Middle
Ages when for awhile we could find no Western
Frontier? The race impulse was irresistible.
March we must, conquer we must, and checked
in the Westward course of empire, we turned
Eastward and expended the resistless energy
that by blood was ours in conquering the Old
World behind us.
To-day we are the same race, with the same
impulse, the same power and, because there is
no longer a Frontier to absorb our overplus of
energy, because there is no longer a wilderness
to conquer and because we still must march,
still must conquer, we remember the old days
when our ancestors before us found the outlet
for their activity checked and, rebounding,
turned their faces Eastward, and went down
to invade the Old World. So we. No sooner
have we found that our path to the Westward
has ended than, reacting Eastward, we are at
the Old World again, marching against it,
74 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
invading it, devoting our overplus of energy
to its subjugation.
But though we are the same race, with the
same impulses, the same blood-instincts as the
old Frisian marsh people, we are now come
into a changed time and the great word of our
century is no longer War, but Trade.
Or, if you choose, it is only a different word
for the same race-characteristic. The desire
for conquest — say what you will — was as big
in the breast of the most fervid of the Crusaders
as it is this very day in the most peacefully
disposed of American manufacturers. Had
the Lion-Hearted Richard lived to-day he
would have become a " leading representative
of the Amalgamated Steel Companies," and
doubt not for one moment that he would have
underbid his Manchester rivals in the matter
of bridge-girders. Had Mr. Andrew Carnegie
been alive at the time of the preachings of
Peter the Hermit he would have raised a com-
pany of gens d'armes sooner than all of his
brothers-in-arms, would have equipped his men
better and more effectively, would have been
first on the ground before Jerusalem, would have
built the most ingenious siege-engine and have
hurled the first cask of Greek-fire over the walls.
Competition and conquest are words easily
interchangeable, and the whole spirit of our
The Frontier Gone at Last 75
present commercial crusade to the Eastward
betrays itself in the fact that we cannot speak
of it but in terms borrowed from the glossary
of the warrior. It is a commercial " invasion,"
a trade "war," a "threatened attack" on the
part of America; business is "captured,"
opportunities are "seized," certain industries
are "killed," certain former monopolies are
"wrested away." Seven hundred years ago a
certain Count Baldwin, a great leader in the
attack of the Anglo-Saxon Crusaders upon the
Old World, built himself a siege-engine which
would help him enter the beleaguered city of
Jerusalem. Jerusalem is beleaguered again
to-day, and the hosts of the Anglo-Saxon
commercial crusaders are knocking at the
gates. And now a company named for
another Baldwin — and, for all we know, a
descendant of the Count — leaders of the
invaders of the Old World, advance upon
the city, and, to help in the assault,
build an engine — only now the engine is no
longer called a mangonel, but a locomotive.
The difference is hardly of kind and scarcely
of degree. It is a mere matter of names, and
the ghost of Saladin watching the present
engagement might easily fancy the old days
back again.
So perhaps we have not lost the Frontier,
76 The Responsibilities of ike Novelist
after all. A new phrase, reversing that of
Berkeley's, is appropriate to the effect that
"Eastward the course of commerce takes its
way," and we must look for the lost battle-
line not toward the sunset, but toward the
East. And so rapid has been the retrograde
movement that we must go far to find it, that
scattered firing-line, where the little skirmishes
are heralding the approach of the Great March.
We must already go farther afield than England.
The main body, even to the reserves, are
intrenched there long since, and even conti-
nental Europe is to the rear of the skirmishers.
Along about Suez we begin to catch up with
them where they are deepening the great canal,
and we can assure ourselves that we are fairly
abreast of the most distant line of scouts only
when we come to Khiva, to Samarcand, to
Bokhara and the Trans-Baikal country.
Just now one hears much of the " American
commercial invasion of England." But adjust
the field-glasses and look beyond Britain and
seach for the blaze that the scouts have left
on the telegraph poles and mile-posts of
Hungary, Turkey, Turkey in Asia, Persia,
Baluchistan, India and Siam. You'll find the
blaze distinct and the road, though rough hewn,
is easy to follow. Prophecy and presumption
be far from us, but it would be against all
The Frontier Gone at Last 77
precedent that the Grand March should rest
forever upon its arms and its laurels along the
Thames, the Mersey and the Clyde, while its
pioneers and frontiersmen are making roads
for it to the Eastward.
Is it too huge a conception, too inordinate
an idea to say that the American conquest of
England is but an incident of the Greater
Invasion, an affair of outposts preparatory to
the real maneuver that shall embrace Europe,
Asia, the whole of the Old World? Why not?
And the blaze is ahead of us, and every now
and then from far off there in the countries
that are under the rising sun we catch the faint
sounds of the skirmishing of our outposts. One
of two things invariably happens under such
circumstances as these: either the outposts fall
back upon the main body or the main body
moves up to the support of its outposts. One
does not think that the outposts will fall back.
And so goes the great movement, Westward,
then Eastward, forward and then back. The
motion of the natural forces, the elemental
energies, somehow appear to be thus alterna-
tive— action first, then reaction. The tides
ebb and flow again, the seasons have their
slow vibrations, touching extremes at periodic
intervals. Not impossibly, in the larger view,
78 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
is the analogy applicable to the movements of
the races. First Westward with the great
migrations, now Eastward with the course
of commerce, moving in a colossal arc measured
only by the hemispheres, as though upon the
equator a giant dial hand oscillated, in gradual
divisions through the centuries, now marking
off the Westward progress, now traveling pro-
portionately to the reaction toward the East.
Races must follow their destiny blindly,
but is it not possible that we can find in this
great destiny of ours something a little better
than mere battle and conquest, something a
little more generous than mere trading and
underbidding? Inevitably with constant
change of environment comes the larger view,
the more tolerant spirit, and every race move-
ment, from the first step beyond the Friesland
swamp to the adjustment of the first American
theodolite on the Himalayan watershed, is an
unconscious lesson in patriotism. Just now
we cannot get beyond the self -laudatory mood,
but is it not possible to hope that, as the prog-
ress develops, a new patriotism, one that shall
include all peoples, may prevail? The past
would indicate that this is a goal toward which
we trend.
In the end let us take the larger view, ignor-
ing the Frieslanders, the Anglo-Saxons, the
The Frontier Gone at Last 79
Americans. Let us look at the peoples as
people and observe how inevitably as they
answer the great Westward impulse the true
patriotism develops. If we can see that it is
so with all of them we can assume that it must
be so with us, and may know that mere victory
in battle as we march Westward, or mere
supremacy in trade as we react to the East,
is not after all the great achievement of the
races, but patriotism. Not our present selfish
day conception of the word, but a new patriot-
ism, whose meaning is now the secret of the
coming centuries.
Consider then the beginnings of patriotism.
At the very first, the seed of the future nation
was the regard of family; the ties of common
birth held men together, and the first feeling
of patriotism was the love of family. But the
family grows, develops by lateral branches,
expands and becomes the clan. Patriotism is
the devotion to the clan, and the clansmen
will fight and die for its supremacy.
Then comes the time when the clans, tired
of the roving life of herders, halt a moment
and settle down in a chosen spot; the tent,
becoming permanent, evolves the dwelling-
house, and the encampment of the clan becomes
at last a city. Patriotism now is civic pride;
the clan absorbed into a multitude of clans is
8o The Responsibilities of the Novelist
forgotten ; men speak of themselves as Atheni-
ans, not as Greeks, as Romans, not as Italians.
It is the age of cities.
The city extends its adjoining grazing fields;
they include outlying towns, other cities, and
finally the State comes into being. Patriotism
no longer confines itself to the walls of the
city, but is enlarged to encompass the entire
province. Men are Hanoverians or Wurt em-
burgers, not Germans; Scots or Welsh, not
English; are even Carolinians or Alabamans
rather than Americans.
But the States are federated, pronounced
boundaries fade, State makes common cause
with State, and at last the nation is born.
Patriotism at once is a national affair, a far
larger, broader, truer sentiment than that first
huddling about the hearthstone of the family.
The word " brother" may be applied to men
unseen and unknown, and a countryman is
one of many millions.
We have reached this stage at the present,
but if all signs are true, if all precedent may
be followed, if all augury may be relied on
and the tree grow as we see the twig is bent,
the progress will not stop here.
By war to the Westward the family fought
its way upward to the dignity of the nation ; by
reaction Eastward the nation may in patriotic
The Frontier Gone at Last 81
effect merge with other nations, and others
and still others, peacefully, the bitterness of
trade competition may be lost, the business
of the nations seen as a friendly quid pro quo,
give and take arrangement, guided by a gen-
erous reciprocity. Every century the bound-
aries are widening, patriotism widens with
the expansion, and our countrymen are those of
different race, even different nations.
Will it not go on, this epic of civilization,
this destiny of the races, until at last and at
the ultimate end of all we who now arrogantly
boast ourselves as Americans, supreme in
conquest, whether of battle-ship or of bridge-
building, may realize that the true patriotism
is the brotherhood of man and know that the
whole world is our nation and simple humanity
our countrymen?
THE GREAT AMERICAN
NOVELIST
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST
all the overworked phrases of over-
worked book reviewers, the phrase, the
"Great American Novelist," is beyond doubt
worn the thinnest from much handling — or
mishandling. Continually the little literary
middlemen who come between the producers
and the consumers of fiction are mouthing the
words with a great flourish of adjectives, scare-
heading them in Sunday supplements or pla-
carding them on posters, crying out, "Lo, he
is here!" or "lo, there!" But the heathen
rage and the people imagine a vain thing.
The G. A. N. is either as extinct as the Dodo
or as far in the future as the practical aeroplane.
He certainly is not discoverable at the present.
The moment a new writer of fiction begins to
make himself felt he is gibbeted upon this
elevation — upon this false, insecure elevation,
for the underpinning is of the flimsiest, and at
any moment is liable to collapse under the
victim's feet and leave him hanging in midair
by head and hands, a fixture and a mockery.
And who is to settle the title upon the aspi-
rant in the last issue ? Who is to determine
85
86 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
what constitutes the G. A. N. Your candidate
may suit you, but your neighbour may have
a very different standard to which he must
conform. It all depends upon what you mean
by Great, what you mean by American. Shake-
speare has been called great, and so has Mr.
\ Stephen Phillips. Oliver Wendell Holmes
was American, and so is Bret Harte. Who is
to say?
And many good people who deplore the
decay of American letters are accustomed to
refer to the absence of a G. A. N. as though
there were a Great English Novelist or a Great
French Novelist. But do these two people
exist? Ask any dozen of your friends to
mention the Great English Novelist, and out of
the dozen you will get at least a half-dozen
different names. It will be Dickens or Scott or
Thackeray or Bronte or Eliot or Stevenson,
and the same with the Frenchman. And it
seems to me that if a novelist were great
enough to be universally acknowledged to be
the Great one of his country, he would cease
to belong to any particular geographical area
and would become a heritage of the whole
world ; as for instance Tolstoi ; when one thinks
of him it is — is it not ? — as a novelist first and
as a Russian afterward.
But if one wishes to split hairs, one might
The Great American Novelist 87
admit that while the Great American Novelist
is yet to be born, the possibility of A — note
the indefinite article — A Great American Novel
is not too remote for discussion. But such a
novel will be sectional. The United States is
a Union, but not a unit, and the life in one part
is very, very different from the life in another.
It is as yet impossible to construct a novel
which will represent all the various charac-
teristics of the different sections. It is only
possible to make a picture of a single locality.
What is true of the South is not true of the
North. The West is different, and the Pacific
Coast is a community by itself.
Many of our very best writers are working
on this theory. Bret Harte made a study of
the West as he saw it, and Mr. Howells has
done the same for the East. Cable has worked
the field of the Far South, and Eggleston has
gone deep into the life of the Middle West.
But consider a suggestion. It is an argu-
ment on the other side, and to be fair one must
present it. It is a good argument, and if based
on fact is encouraging in the hope that the
Great man may yet appear. It has been said
that "what is true — vitally and inherently
true — for any one man is true for all men."
Accordingly, then, what is vitally true of the
Westerner is true of the Bostonian — yes, and
88 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
of the creole. So that if Mr. Cable, say, should
only go deep enough into the hearts and lives of
his Creoles, he would at last strike the universal
substratum and find the elemental thing that
is common to the Creole and to the Puritan
alike — yes, and to the Cowboy and Hoosier
and Greaser and Buckeye and Jay Hawker,
and that, once getting hold of that, he could
produce the Great American Novel that should
be a picture of the entire nation.
Now, that is a very ingenious argument and
sounds very plausible. But it won't do, and
for this reason: If an American novelist
should go so deep into the lives of the people
of any 9ne community that he would find the
thing that is common to another class of people
a thousand miles away, he would have gone
too deep to be exclusively American. He
would not only be American, but English as
well. He would have sounded the world-note ;
he would be a writer not national, but inter-
national, and his countrymen would be all
humanity, not the citizens of any one nation.
He himself would be a heritage of the whole
world, a second Tolstoi, which brings us back
to the very place from which we started.
And the conclusion of the whole matter?
That fiction is very good or very bad — there
is no middle ground; that writers of fiction ir>
The Great American Novelist 89
their points of view are either limited to a cir-
cumscribed area or see humanity as a tremen-
dous conglomerate whole; that it must be
either Mary Wilkins or George Eliot, Edward
Eggleston or William Shakespeare; that the
others do not weigh very much in the balance
of the world's judgment; and that the Great
American Novel is not extinct like the Dodo,
but mythical like the Hippogriff , and that the
thing to be looked for is not the Great American
Novelist, but the Great Novelist who shall also
be an American.
NEW YORK AS A LITERARY
CENTRE
NEW YORK AS A LITERARY CENTRE
TT has been given to the present writer
•*• to know a great many of what one
may call The Unarrived in literary work, and
of course to be one himself of that "innumer-
able caravan," and speaking authoritatively
and of certain knowledge, the statement may
be made, that of all the ambitions of the Great
Unpublished, the one that is strongest, the
most abiding, is the ambition to get to New
York. For these, New York is the "point de
depart," the pedestal, the niche, the indispensa-
ble vantage ground; as one of the unpub-
lished used to put it : " It is a place that I can
stand on and holler."
This man lived in a second-class town west
of the Mississippi, and one never could persuade
him that he might holler from his own, his
native heath, and yet be heard. He said it
would be "the voice of one crying in the
wilderness." New York was the place for
him. Once land him in New York and all
would be gas and gaiters.
There are so many thousands like this young
man of mine that a word in this connection
93
94 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
seems appropriate; and the object of this
present writing is to protest against this blind
and unreasoned hegira, and to urge the point
that tradition, precedent to the contrary not-
withstanding, New York is not a literary
centre.
I am perfectly well aware that this statement
savours of hearsay, but at the same time I think
it can be defended. As for instance :
Time was when Boston claimed the dis-
tinction that one now denies to New York.
But one asserts that Boston made her claims
good. In those days the reactionary movement
of populations from the cities toward the coun-
try had not set in. A constant residence
winter and summer in the country was not
dreamed of by those who had the leisure and
the money to afford it. As much as possible
the New England writers crowded to Boston,
or to Cambridge, which is practically the same
thing, and took root in the place. There was
their local habitation; there they lived, and
thence they spread their influence. Remember
that at the height of the development of the
New England school there were practically no
other writers of so great importance the length
and breadth of the land. This huddling about
a common point made it possible to visit all
the homes of nearly all of the most eminent
New York as a Literary Centre 95
American literati in a single day. The younger
men, the aspirants, the Unpublished, however,
thrown into such society, could not fail to be
tremendously impressed, and, banded together
as these great ones were, their influence counted
enormously. It was no unusual sight to see
half a dozen of these at the same dinner table.
They all knew each other intimately, these
Bostonians, and their word was Lex, and the
neophites came from all corners of the compass
to hear them speak, and Boston did in good
earnest become the Hub, the centre of Literary
thought and work in the United States.
But no such conditions obtain in New York
to-day. During the last ten years two very
important things have happened that bear upon
this question. First has come the impulse
toward a country life — a continued winter and
summer residence in the country. Authors
more than any other class of workers can afford
this since their profession can be carried any-
where. They need no city offices. They
are not forced to be in touch with the actual
business life of Broadway. Secondly, since
the days of the Bostonian supremacy a tre-
mendous wave of literary production has
swept over the United States. Now England
has ceased to be the only place where books are
written. Poems are now indited in Dakota,
g6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
novels composed in Wyoming, essays written
in Utah, and criticisms flourish in Kansas. A
thousand and one Little Centres have sprung
up. Literary groups are formed everywhere,
in Buffalo, in San Francisco, in Indianapolis
and Chicago.
All this detracts from the preponderance of
any one city, such as New York, as Literary
dictator. You shall find but a very small and
meager minority of the Greater Men of Letters
who have their homes in Manhattan. Most of
them preferred to live in the places whereof
they treat in their books, in New Orleans,
in Indiana, in Kentucky, or Virginia, or
California, or Kansas, or Illinois. If they
come to New York at all it is only tem-
porarily, to place their newest book or to
arrange with publishers for future work.
The result of this is as is claimed. New
York is not a literary centre. The publishing
houses are there, the magazines, all the dis-
tributing machinery, but not the writers. They
do not live there. They do not care to come
there. They regard the place simply as a
distributing point for their wares.
Literary centres produce literary men. Paris,
London and Boston all have their long lists of
native-born writers — men who were born in
these cities and whose work was identified
New York as a Literary Centre 97
with them. But New York can claim but
ridiculously few of the men of larger caliber
as her own. James Whitcomb Riley is from
Indiana, Joel Chandler Harris is a Southerner.
Howells came from Boston, Cable from New
Orleans, Hamlin Garland from the West. Bret
Harte from California, Mark Twain from the
Middle West, Harold Frederic and Henry
James found England more congenial than the
greatest city of their native land. Even among
the younger generation there are but few who
can be considered as New Yorkers. Although
Richard Harding Davis wrote accurately and
delightfully of New York people, he was not
born in New York, did not receive his first
impetus from New York influences, and does
not now live in New York. Nor is his best
work upon themes or subjects in any way
related to New York.
In view of all these facts it is difficult to see
what the Great Unpublished have to gain by
a New York residence. Indeed, it is much
easier to see how very much they have to lose.
The writing of fiction has many drawbacks,
but one of its blessed compensations is the fact
that of all the arts it is the most independent.
Independent of time, of manner and of place.
Wherever there is a table and quiet, there the
novel may be written. "Ah, but the publishing
98 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
houses are in New York." What has that to do
with it? Do not for a moment suppose that
your novel will be considered more carefully
because you submit it in person. It is not as
though you were on the lookout for odd jobs
which, because of a personal acquaintance with
editors and publishers, might be put in your
way. The article, the story, the essay, poem
or novel is just as good, just as available, just as
salable whether it comes from Washington
Territory or Washington Square.
Not only this, but one believes that actual
residence in New York is hostile and inimical
to good work. The place, admittedly, teems
with literary clubs, circles, associations, organ-
izations of pseudo-literati, who foregather at
specified times to ''read papers" and "discuss
questions." It is almost impossible for the
young writer who comes for a first time to the
city to avoid entangling himself with them;
and of the influences that tend to stultify
ambition, warp original talent and definably
and irretrievably stamp out the last spark of
productive ability one knows of none more
effective than the literary clubs.
You will never find the best men at these
gatherings. You will never hear the best work
read in this company, you will never evolve
any original, personal, definite ideas or ideals
New York as a Literary Centre 99
under such influence. The discussions of the
literary clubs are made up of puerile argu-
ments that have done duty for years in the
college text-books. Their work — the papers
quoted and stories read aloud — is commonplace
and conventional to the deadliest degree, while
their "originality" — the ideas that they claim
are their very own — is nothing but a distor-
tion and dislocation of preconceived notions,
mere bizarre effects of the grotesque and the
improbable. "Ah, but the spur of competi-
tion." Competition is admirable in trade —
it is even desirable in certain arts. It has no
place in a literary career. It is not as though
two or more writers were working on the
same story, each striving to better the others.
That would, indeed, be true competition. But
in New York, where the young writer — any
writer — may see a dozen instances in a week of
what he knows is inferior work succeeding
where he fails, competition is robbed of all
stimulating effect and, if one is not very careful,
leaves only the taste of ashes in the mouth
and rancour and discontent in the heart.
With other men's novels the novelist has
little to do. What this writer is doing, what
that one is saying, what books this publishing
house is handling, how many copies so-and-so's
book is selling — all this fuss and feathers
ioo The Responsibilities of the Novelist
of "New York as a literary centre" should be
for him so many distractions. It is all very-
well to say "let us keep in touch with the
best thought in our line of work." "Let us be
in the movement." The best thought is not
in New York; and even if it were, the best
thought of other men is not so good for you as
your own thought, dug out of your own vitals
by your own unaided efforts, be it never so
inadequate.
You do not have to go to New York for that.
Your own ideas, your own work will flourish
best if left alone untrammeled and uninfluenced.
And believe this to be true, that wherever
there is a table, a sheet of paper and a pot of
ink, there is a Literary Centre if you will. You
will find none better the world over.
THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AND
"POPULAR" FICTION
THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AND u POPU-
LAR" FICTION
HE American people judged by Old World
standards — even sometimes according
to native American standards — have always
been considered a practical people, a material
people.
We have been told and have also told our-
selves that we are hard-headed, that we rejoiced
in facts and not in fancies, and as an effect of
this characteristic were not given to books.
We were not literary, we assumed, were not
fond of reading. We, who were subjugating
a continent, who were inventing machinery
and building railroads, left it to the older and
more leisurely nations — to France and to
England to read books.
On the face of it this would seem a safe
assumption. As a matter of fact, the American
people are the greatest readers in the world.
That is to say, that, count for count, there
are more books read in the United States in one
year than in any other country of the globe in
the same space of time.
Nowhere do the circulations attain such
103
104 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
magnitude as they do with us. A little while
ago — ten years ago — the charge that we did
not read was probably true. But there must
exist some mysterious fundamental connection
between this recent sudden expansion of things
American — geographic, commercial and other-
wise— and the demand for books. Imperialism,
Trade Expansion, the New Prosperity and the
Half Million Circulation all came into existence
at about the same time.
Merely the fact of great prosperity does not
account for the wider reading. Prosperous
periods, good prices, easy credit and a mobile
currency have occurred often before without
producing the demand for books. Something
more than prosperity has suddenly swept across
the continent and evaded the spirit of the
times. Something very like an awakening,
something very like a renaissance and the
70,000,000 have all at once awakened to the
fact that there are books to be read. As
with all things sudden, there is noticeable with
this awakening a lack of discrimination, the
70,000,000 are so eager for books that, faute
de mieux, anything printed will pass current for
literature. It is a great animal, this American
public, and having starved for so long, it is
ready, once aroused, to devour anything. And
the great presses of the country are for the most
The American Public and "Popular" Fiction 105
part merely sublimated sausage machines that
go dashing along in a mess of paper and printer's
ink turning out the meat for the monster.
There are not found wanting many who
deplore this and who blackguard the great
brute for his appetite. Softly, softly. If the
Megatherium has been obliged to swallow
wind for sustenance for several hundred years,
it would be unkind to abuse him because he eats
the first lot of spoiled hay or over-ripe twigs
that is thrust under the snout of him. Patience
and shuffle the cards. Once his belly filled, and
the pachyderm will turn to the new-mown
grass and fruit trees in preference to the hay
and twigs.
So the studios and the Browning classes need
not altogether revile the great American public.
Better bad books than no books ; better half a
loaf of hard bread than no frosted wedding-
cake. The American people, unlike the English,
unlike the French and other Europeans, have
not been educated and refined and endoctrinated
for 2,000 years, and when you remember what
they have done in one hundred years, tamed an
entire continent, liberated a race, produced a
Lincoln, invented the telegraph, spanned the
plains — when you remember all this, do not
spurn the 70,000,000 because they do not
understand Henry James, but be glad that they
io6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
even care for "The Duchess" and "Ouida."
The wonder of it is not that they do not read
or appreciate the best, but that they have set
apart any time at all in the struggle of civiliz-
ing the wilderness and forging steel rivets to
so much as pick up any kind or description of
a book.
Consider the other nations, France for
instance — the very sanctum of Art, the home
and birthplace of literature. Compare the
rural districts of France with the rural dis-
tricts of the United States, and in the com-
parison allow, if you like, for all the centuries
of quiet uninterrupted growth, the wilderness
tamed, life domesticated, reduced to routine
that modern France enjoys. Do you suppose for
one moment that a bourgeois family of — say —
Tours is on the same level in the matter of
its reading as the household of a contractor's
family in — for example — Martinez, California,
or Cheyenne, Wyoming ?
I tell you there is no comparison whatever.
The West may be wild even yet, may be what
Boston would call uncultured, but it reads.
There are people in Cheyenne and Martinez
who can express an opinion — and a more
intelligent opinion, mark you — on Maeterlinck
and Bourget, better than the same class of
readers in Belgium and France. And quite
The American Public and "Popular" Fiction 107
as likely as not the same class of people in the
very native countries of the two writers named
have never so much as heard of these writers.
This, admittedly, is the exception, but if our
exceptional Martinez and Cheyenne people are
so far advanced in literary criticism, we may
reasonably expect that the rank and file below
them are proportionately well on. Maeterlinck
and Bourget are closed books to those rank-
and-file readers yet. But again I say, this is not
the point. The point is, that they are readers
at all. Let them — in the name of future
American literature — read their Duchesses and
Ouidas and Edna Lyalls and Albert Rosses.
What are their prototypes in France, Germany
and Russia reading? They simply are not
reading at all, and as often as not it is not
because of the lack of taste, but because of
the lack of sheer downright ability, because
they do not know how to read.
A very great man once said that " books
never have done harm," and under this sign let
us conquer. There is hardly a better to be
found. Instead, then, of deploring the vast
circulation of mediocre novels, let us take
the larger view and find in the fact not a
weakness, but a veritable strength. The more
one reads — it is a curious consolatory fact —
the more one is apt to discriminate. The
io8 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
ten-year-old who reads "Old Sleuth" to-day,
in a little while will find Scott more to his liking.
Just now the 70,000,000 is ten years old. But
it is started right. Patience. Books have
never done harm, and in the end let us be
certain that the day will come when the real
masterpiece, the real literature, will also be
selling in its "five hundredth thousand."
CHILD STORIES FOR ADULTS
CHILD STORIES FOR ADULTS
'TpHERE was a time, none too remote at
•*• this date of writing, when juvenile and
adult fiction were two separate and distinct
classifications. Boys read stories for boys
and girls stories for girls, and the adults con-
tented themselves with the wise lucubrations
of their equals in years. But the last few
years have changed all that — have changed
everything in American literature, in fact.
Some far-distant day, when the critics and
litterateurs of the twenty-second and twenty-
third centuries shall be writing of our day and
age, they will find a name for the sudden and
stupendous demand for reading matter that
has penetrated to all classes and corners since
1890. A great deal could be said upon this
sudden demand in itself, and I think it can be
proved to be the first effects of a genuine awak-
ening— a second Renaissance. But the sub-
ject would demand an article by itself, and
in the meanwhile we may use the term awaken-
ing as a self-evident fact and consider not so
much the cause as the effects.
One of the effects, as has been already sug-
iii
ii2 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
gested, is the change in classifications. Old
forms and formulas are, or are being rapidly
broken up, and one school and style merging
into others, till now what was once amusement
for the children has become entertaining for the
elders. And vice versa. The abruptness of
the awakening has disjointed and inverted all
the old fabric. "Robinson Crusoe," written
for adults, is now exclusively a "juvenile,"
while "Treasure Island," written for boys, has
been snapped up by the parents.
Simultaneously with this topsy-turvy busi-
ness, and I am sure in some way connected
with it, comes the craze for stories about very
young children for adult reading. A boy's
story must now be all about the doings of men,
fighters preferably, man-slayers, terrible fellows
full of blood and fury, stamping on their
quarter-decks or counting doubloons by torch-
light on unnamed beaches. Meanwhile the
boy's father with a solemn interest is following
the fortunes of some terrible infant of the
kindergarten, or the vagaries of a ten-year-old
of a country town, or the teacup tragedy of
"The Very Little Girl," or "The Indiscretion
of Pinky Trevethan," or "The Chastening of
Skinny McCleave," etc., etc.
It is interesting to try to account for this.
It may either be a fad or a phase. It is almost
Child Stories for Adults 113
too soon to tell, but in either case the matter
is worth considering.
Roughly speaking, the Child's Stories for
Adults fall into three classes. First there is
'The Strange Child Story." This is a very
old favourite, and was pretty well installed
long before the more recent developments.
In "The Strange Child Story" the bid for the
reader's pity and sympathy fairly clamoured
from between the lines. Always and per-
sistently The Strange Child was misunderstood.
He had "indefinable longings" that were
ridiculed, budding talents that were nipped,
heartaches — terrible, tear-compelling heart-
aches— that were ignored; and he lived in an
atmosphere of gloom, hostility and loneliness
that would have maddened an eremite.
But as his kind declined in popular esti-
mate the country boy, the ten-year-old — who
always went in swimmin' and lost his tow —
appeared in the magazines. There is no
sentiment about him. Never a tear need be
shed over the vicarious atonements of Pinky
Trevethan or Skinny McCleave.
It is part of the game to pretend that the
Pinkys and Skinnys and Peelys and Mickeys
are different individuals. Error. They are
merely different names of the boy that peren-
nially and persistently remains the same. Do
ii4 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
you know who he is? He is the average
American business man before he grew up.
That accounts for his popularity. The average
business man had clean forgotten all about
those early phases of primitive growth, and it
amuses him immensely to find out that the
scribe has been making a study of him and
bringing to light the forgotten things that are
so tremendously familiar when presented to
the consideration. It is not fiction nor yet
literature in the straightest sense of the word,
this rehabilitation of Skinny McCleave. It has
a value vaguely scientific, the same value that a
specimen, a fossil insect, has when brought to
the attention of the savant. It is the study of
an extinct species, a report upon the American
boy of thirty years ago.
Then lastly — the latest development — there
is the cataclysm of the kindergarten, the
checked apron drama, the pigtail passion, the
epic of the broken slate-pencil. This needs
a delicacy of touch that only a woman can
supply, and as a matter of fact it is for the most
part women who sign the stories. The interest
in these is not so personal and retrospective as
in the Skinny McCleave circle, for the kinder-
garten is too recent to be part of the childhood
memories of the present generation of adult
magazine readers. It is more informative, a
Child Stories for Adults 115
presentation of conditions hitherto but vaguely
known, and at the same time it is an attempt to
get at and into the heart and head of a little
child.
And in this last analysis it would seem as if
here existed the barrier insurmountable. It
is much to be doubted if ever a genius will
arise so thoughtful, so sensitive that he will
penetrate into more than the merest outside
integument of a child's heart. Certain phases
have been guessed at with beautiful intention,
certain rare insights have been attained
with exquisite nicety, but somehow even
the most sympathetic reader must feel
that the insight is as rare as the interest is
misguided.
Immanuel Kant conceived of, and, in the
consummate power of his intellect, executed
the "Critique of Pure Reason "; Darwin had
taken the adult male and female human and
tracked down their every emotion, impulse,
quality and sentiment. The intellectual powers
and heart-beats of a Napoleon or a Shake-
speare have been reduced to more common-
place corner gossip, but after thousands of
years of civilization, with the subject ever be-
fore us, its workings as near to us as air itself,
the mind of a little child is as much a closed
book, as much an enigma, as much a blank
n6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
space upon the charts of our intellectual
progress as at the very first.
Volumes have been written about the child,
and stories for and of the child, and very
learned men have lectured and other very
eminent and noble men have taught, and it
has all been going on for nineteen hundred and
two years. And yet, notwithstanding all this,
there lurks a mystery deep down within the
eye of the five-year-old, a mystery that neither
you nor I may know. You may see and
understand what he actually does, but the
thinking part of him is a second hidden nature
that belongs to him and to other children, not
to adults, not even to his mother. Once the
older person invades the sphere of influence of
this real undernature of the child and it congeals
at once. It thaws and thrives only in the
company of other children, and at the best we
older ones may see it from a distance and from
the outside. Between us and them it would
appear that a great gulf is bridged; there
is no knowing the child as he really is, and until
the real child can be known the stories about
him and the fiction and literature about him
can at best be only a substitute for the real
knowledge that probably never shall be ours.
NEWSPAPER CRITICISMS AND
AMERICAN FICTION
NEWSPAPER CRITICISMS AND AMERICAN
FICTION
/TpHE limitations of space impose a re-
-*• stricted title, and one hastens to
qualify the substantive " criticisms" by the
adjective ''average." Even "average" is not
quite specialized enough; "vast majority" is
more to the sense, and the proposition expanded
to its fullest thus stands, "How is the vast
majority of newspaper criticisms made, and
how does it affect American Fiction?" And
it may not be inappropriate at the outset to
observe that one has adventured both hazards
— criticism (of the "vast majority" kind) and
also Fiction. One has criticized and has been
criticized. Possibly then it may be permitted
to speak a little authoritatively; not as the
Scribes. Has it not astonished you how many
of those things called by the new author
"favourable reviews" may attach themselves
— barnacles upon a lifeless hulk — to a novel
that you know, that you know every one must,
must know, is irretrievably bad? "On the
whole, Mr. 's story is a capital bit of vigor-
ous writing that we joyfully recommend" —
119
i2o The Responsibilities of the Novelist
11 A thrilling story palpitating with life," "One
of the very best novels that has appeared in
a long time," and the ever-new, ever-dutiful,
ever-ready encomium, " Not a dull page in the
book" (as if by the furthest stretch of con-
ceivable human genius a book could be written
that did not have a dull page ; as if dull pages
were not an absolute necessity). All these
you may see strung after the announcement of
publication of the novel. No matter, I repeat,
how outrageously bad the novel may be. Now
there is an explanation of this matter, and it
is to be found not in the sincere admiration
of little reviewers who lack the ingenuity to
invent new phrases, but in the following fact:
it is easier to write favourable than unfavour-
able reviews. It must be borne in mind that
very few newspapers (comparatively) employ
regularly paid book-reviewers whose business
it is to criticize novels — and nothing else. Most
book-reviewing is done as an odd job by sub-
editors, assistants and special writers in the
intervals between their regular work. They
come to the task with a brain already jaded,
an interest so low as to be almost negligible,
and with — as often as not — a mind besieged
by a thousand other cares, responsibilities
and projects.
The chief has said something like this
Newspaper Criticisms and American Fiction 121
(placing upon the scribe's table a column of
novels easily four feet high, sent in for review) :
"Say, B , these things have been stacking
up like the devil lately, and I don't want 'em
kicking 'round the office any longer. Get
through with them as quick as you can, and
remember that in an hour there's such and
such to be done."
I tell you I have seen it happen like this a
hundred times. And the scribe "must" read
and "review" between twenty and thirty
books in an hour's time. One way of doing it
is to search in the pages of the book for the
"publisher's notice," a printed slip that has a
favourable review — that is what it amounts
to — all ready-made. The scribe merely turns
this in with a word altered here and there.
How he reviews the books that have not this
publisher's notice Heaven only knows. He
is not to blame, as they must be done in
.an hour. Twenty books in sixty minutes —
three minutes to each book. Now, it is impos-
sible to criticize a book adversely after a
minute and a half of reading (we will allow a
minute and a half for writing the review). In
order to write unfavourably it is necessary to
know what one is writing about. But it is
astonishing how much commendatory palaver
already exists that can be applied to any kind
122 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
or condition of novel. Is it a novel of adven-
ture (the reviewer may know if it be such by
the ship on the cover design) — it will be appro-
priate to use these terms: " Vibrant with
energy," or "Full of fine fighting," or "The
reader is carried with breathless interest from
page to page of this exciting romance." Is it
a novel of rural life ? These may be made use
of : " Replete with quaint humour," " A faithful
picture of an interesting phase of American
life," etc., etc. Is it a story of the West (you
can guess that from the chapter headings), it
will be proper to say, "A strong and vital por-
traying of the wild life of the trail and frontier."
And so one might run through the entire
list. The books must be reviewed, the easiest
way is the quickest, and the quickest way is
to write in a mild and meaningless phraseology,
innocuous, "favourable." In this fashion is
made the greater mass of American criticism.
As to effects: It nas of course no effect upon
the novel's circulation. Only one person is at
all apt to take these reviews, this hack-work,
seriously.
Only one person, I observed, is at all apt to
take these reviews seriously. This way lies the
harm. The new writer, the young fellow with
his first book, who may not know the ways of
reviewers. The author, who collects these
Newspaper Criticisms and American Fiction 123
notices and pastes them in a scrap-book. He
is perilously prone to believe what the hacks
say, to believe that there is "no dull page in
the story," that his novel is " one of the notable
contributions to recent fiction," and cherishing
this belief he is fated to a wrench and a heart-
ache when, six months after publication day,
the semi-annual account of copies sold is
rendered. There is unfortunately no palaver
in the writing of this — no mild-mannered
phraseology; and the author is made to see
suddenly that "this exciting romance" which
the reviewers have said the readers "would
follow with a breathless interest till the end
is reached and then wish for more, " has circu-
lated among — possibly — five hundred of the
breathless.
Thus, then, the vast majority of criticisms.
It is not all, however, and it is only fair to say
that there are exceptions-^great papers which
devote whole supplements to the consideration
of literary matters and whose reviewers are
deliberate, thoughtful fellows, who do not read
more than one book a week, who sign their opin-
ions and who have themselves a name, a reputa-
tion, to make or keep These must have an
effect. But even the most conspicuous among
them cannot influence very widely. They
may help, so one believes, a good book which
124 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
is already becoming popular. No one of them
can "make" a book by a "favourable review,"
as they could a little while ago in France. No
number of them could do it, here in America.
There are too many other reviewers. No one
man, nor aggregation of men, can monopolize
the requisite authority. And then with us the
spirit of independent thinking and judgment
is no doubt too prevalent.
NOVELISTS TO ORDER-WHILE
YOU WAIT
NOVELISTS TO ORDER— WHILE YOU
WAIT
at all absurd, "Novelists to order—
while you wait," provided you order
the right sort, and are willing to wait long
enough. In other words, it is quite possible
to make a novelist, and a good one, too,
if the thing is undertaken in the right spirit,
just as it is possible to make a painter, or an
actor, or a business man.
I am prepared to hear the old objections
raised to this: "Ah, it must be born in you";
"no amount of training can 'make' an artist" ;
"poets are born and not made," etc., etc.
But I am also willing to contend that a very
large percentage of this talk is sheer non-
sense, and that what the world calls "genius"
is, as often as not, the results of average
ability specialized and developed. The original
"spark" in the child-mind, that later on
"kindles the world into flame with its light,"
I do believe could be proved to be the same for
the artist, the actor, the novelist, the inventor,
even the financier and "magnate." It is only
made to burn in different lamps. Nor does any
127
128 The Responsibilities of ike Novelist
one believe that this " spark" is any mysterious,
supernatural gift, some marvelous, angelic
"genius," God-given, Heaven-given, etc., etc.,
etc., but just plain, forthright, rectangular,
everyday common sense, nothing more extra-
ordinary or God-given than sanity. If it were
true that Genius were the gift of the gods, it
would also be true that hard work in cultivat-
ing it would be superfluous. As well be with-
out genius if some plodder, some dullard, can
by such work equal the best you can do — you
with your God-given faculties.
Is it not much more reasonable — more noble,
for the matter of that — to admit at once that all
faculties, all intellects are God-given, the only
difference being that some are specialized to one
end, some to another, some not specialized at
all. We call Rostand and Mr. Carnegie geniuses,
but most of us would be unwilling to admit
that the genius of the American financier
differed in kind from the genius of the French
dramatist. However, one believes that this is
open to debate. As for my part, I suspect that,
given a difference in environment and training,
Rostand would have consolidated the American
steel companies and Carnegie have written
"L'Aiglon." But one dares to go a little
further — a great deal further — and claims that
the young Carnegie and the young Rostand
Novelists to Order — While You Wait 129
were no more than intelligent, matter-of-fact
boys, in no wise different from the common
house variety, grammar school product. They
have been trained differently, that is all.
Given the ordinarily intelligent ten-year-old,
and, all things being equal, you can make
anything you like out of him — a minister of
the gospel or a green-goods man, an electrical
engineer or a romantic poet, or — return to our
muttons — a novelist. If a failure is the result,
blame the method of training, not the quantity
or quality of the ten-year-old's intellect. Don't
say, if he is a failure as a fine novelist, that he
lacks genius for writing, and would have been
a fine business man. Make no mistake, if he
did not have enough " genius" for novel-writing
he would certainly have not had enough for
business.
' 'Why, then," you will ask, "is it so impos-
sible for some men, the majority of them, to
write fine novels, or fine poems, or paint fine
pictures? Why is it that this faculty seems
to be reserved for the chosen few, the more
refined, cultured, etc. ? Why is it, in a word,
that, for every artist (using the word to in-
clude writers, painters, actors, etc.) that appears
there are thousands of business men, com-
mercial ' ' geniuses' ' ?
The reason seems to lie in this: and it is
130 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
again a question of training. From the very
first the average intelligent American boy is
trained, not with a view toward an artistic
career, but with a view to entering a business
life. If the specialization of his faculties along
artistic lines ever occurs at all it begins only
when the boy is past the formative period. In
other words, most people who eventually
become artists are educated for the first eighteen
or twenty years of their life along entirely
unartistic lines. Biographies of artists are
notoriously full of just such instances. The
boy who is to become a business man finds, the
moment he goes to school, a whole vast machin-
ery of training made ready for his use, and not
only is it a matter of education for him, but the
whole scheme of modern civilization works in
his behalf. No one ever heard of obstacles
thrown in the way of the boy who announces
for himself a money-making career; while for
the artist, as is said, education, environment,
the trend of civilization are not merely indiffer-
ent, but openly hostile and inimical. One hears
only of those men who surmount — and at what
cost to their artistic powers — those obstacles.
How many thousands are there who succumb
unrecorded !
So that it has not often been tried — the
experiment of making a novelist while you
Novelists to Order — While You Wait 131
wait — i. e.y taking a ten-year-old of average
intelligence and training him to be a novelist.
Suppose all this modern, this gigantic perfected
machinery — all this resistless trend of a com-
mercial civilization were set in motion in favour
of the little aspirant for honours in artistic
fields, who is to say with such a training he
would not in the end be a successful artist,
painter, poet, musician or novelist. Training,
not "genius," would make him.
Then, too, another point. The artistic train-
ing should begin much, much earlier than the
commercial training — instead of, as at present,
so much later.
Nowadays, as a rule, the artist's training
begins, as was said, after a fourth of his life,
the very best, the most important has been
lived. You can take a boy of eighteen and
make a business man of him in ten years. But
at eighteen the faculties that make a good
artist are very apt to be atrophied, hardened,
unworkable. Even the ten-year-old is almost
too old to begin on. The first ten years of
childhood are the imaginative years, the creative
years, the observant years, the years of a
fresh interest in life. The child "imagines"
terrors or delights, ghosts or fairies, creates a
world out of his toys, and observes to an extent
that adults have no idea of. ("Give me," a
132 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
detective once told me, "a child's description
of a man that is wanted. It beats an adult's
every single time . " ) And imagination, creation,
observation and an unblunted interest in life are
exactly the faculties most needed by novelists.
At eighteen there comes sophistication — or a
pretended sophistication, which is deadlier.
Other men's books take the place of imagination
for the young man; creation in him is satisfied
by dramas, horse-races and amusements. The
newspapers are his observation, and oh, how
he assumes to be above any pleasure in simple,
vigorous life !
So that at eighteen it is, as a rule, too late
to make a fine novelist out of him. He may
start out in that career, but he will not go
far — so far as he would in business. But if he
was taken in hand as soon as he could write in
words of three syllables, and instead of being
crammed with commercial arithmetic (How
many marbles did A have? If a man buys a
piece of goods at I2j4 cents and sells it for
15 cents, etc., etc.) —
If he had been taken in hand when his
imagination was alive, his creative power
vigorous, his observation lynxlike, and his
interest keen, and trained with a view toward
the production of original fiction, who is to say
how far he would have gone?
Novelists to Order — While You Wait 133
One does not claim that the artist is above
the business man. Far from it. Only, when
you have choked the powers of imagination
and observation, and killed off the creative
ability, and deadened the interest in life, don't
call it lack of genius.
Nor when some man of a different race than
ours, living in a more congenial civilization,
whose training from his youth up has been
adapted to a future artistic profession, succeeds
in painting the great picture, composing the
great prelude, writing the great novel, don't
say he was born a "genius," but rather admit
that he was made "to order" by a system whose
promoters knew how to wait.
THE "NATURE" REVIVAL IN
LITERATURE
THE « NATURE » REVIVAL IN LITER-
ATURE
r
T has been a decade of fads, and "the
people have imagined a vain thing,"
as they have done from the time of Solomon
and as no doubt they will till the day of the
New Jerusalem . And in no other line of activity
has the instability and changeableness of the
taste of the public been so marked as in that
of literature. Such an overturning of old gods
and such a setting up of new ones, such an
image-breaking, shrine-smashing, relic-ripping
carnival I doubt has ever been witnessed in all
the history of writing. It has been a sort of
literary Declaration of Independence. For
half a century certain great names, from
Irving down to Holmes, were veritable Abra-
cadabras— impeccable, sanctified. Then all at
once the fin de siecle irreverence seemed to
invade all sorts and conditions simultaneously,
and the somber, sober idols were shouldered
off into the dark niches, and not a man of us
that did not trundle forth his own little tin-
god-on-wheels, kowtowing and making obei-
137
138 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
sance, and going before with cymbals and a
great noise, proclaiming a New Great One;
now it was the great Colonial Image, now the
Great Romantic Image, now the Great Minor-
German Kingdom Image.
There are a great many very eminent and
very wise critics who frown upon and deplore
the reaction. But it is a question if, after all,
the movement will not prove — ultimately —
beneficial. Convention, blind adherence to
established forms, inertia, is the dry rot of a
national literature. Better the American public
should read bad books than no books, and
that same public is reading now as never
before. It is a veritable upheaval, a breaking-
up of all the old grounds. Better this than
supineness ; better this than immobility. Once
the ground turned over a bit, harrowed and
loosened, and the place is made ready for the
good seed.
Some of this, one chooses to believe, has
already been implanted. In all the parade of
the new little tin-gods some may be discovered
that are not tin, but sterling. Of all the fads,
the most legitimate, the most abiding, the
most inherent — so it would appear — is the
" Nature" revival. Indeed, it is not fair
to call it a fad at all. For it is a return
to the primitive, sane life of the country,
The "Nature" Revival in Literature 139
and the natural thing by its very character
cannot be artificial, cannot be a "fad." The
writers who have followed where Mr. Thompson
Seton blazed the way are so numerous and so
well known that it is almost superfluous in this
place to catalogue or criticize them. But it is
significant of the strength of this movement
that such an outdoor book as " Bob, Son of
Battle," was unsuccessful in England, and only
attained its merited popularity when published
here in America. We claimed the "good gray
dog" as our own from the very first, recognizing
that the dog has no nationality, being indeed a
citizen of the whole world. The flowers in
" Elizabeth's German Garden" — also world citi-
zens— we promptly transplanted to our own
soil. Mr. Mowbray, with his mingling of fact
and fiction, made his country home for the
benefit — I have no doubt — of hundreds who
have actually worked out the idea suggested
in his pages. The butterfly books, the garden
books, the flower books, expensive as they are,
have been in as much demand as some very
popular novels. Mr. Dugmore astonished and
delighted a surprisingly large public with his
marvelous life-photographs of birds, while
even President Roosevelt himself deemed
Mr. Wallihan's "Photographs of Big Game"
of so much importance and value that
140 The Responsibilities of ike Novelist
he wrote the introductory notice to that ex-
cellent volume.
It is hardly possible to pick up a magazine
now that does not contain the story of some
animal hero. Time was when we relegated
this sort to the juvenile periodicals. But now
we cannot get too much of it. Wolves, rabbits,
hounds, foxes, the birds, even the reptilia, all
are dramatized, all figure in their little roles.
Tobo and the Sand-hill Stag parade upon the
same pages as Mr. Christie's debutantes and
Mr. Smedley's business men, and, if you please,
have their love affairs and business in precisely
the same spirit. All this cannot but be signifi-
cant, and, let us be assured, significant of good.
The New England school for too long domi-
nated the entire range of American fiction —
limiting it, specializing it, polishing, refining
and embellishing it, narrowing it down to a
veritable cult, a thing to be safeguarded by
the elect, the few, the aristocracy. It is small
wonder that the reaction came when and as
it did ; small wonder that the wearied public,
roused at length, smashed its idols with
such vehemence ; small wonder that, declaring
its independence and finding itself suddenly
untrammeled and unguided, it flew off
"mobishly" toward false gods, good only
because they were new.
The "Nature" Revival in Literature 141
All this is small wonder. The great wonder
is this return to nature, this unerring groping
backward toward the fundamentals, in order
to take a renewed grip upon life. If you care
to see a proof of how vital it is, how valuable,
look into some of the magazines of the seventies
and eighties. It is astonishing to consider
that we ever found an interest in them. The
effect is like entering a darkened room. And
not only the magazines, but the entire literature
of the years before the nineties is shadowed and
oppressed with the bugbear of "literature."
Outdoor life was a thing apart from our read-
ing. Even the tales and serials whose mise
en scene was in the country had no breath of
the country in them. The " literature " in them
suffocated the life, and the humans with their
everlasting consciences, their heated and arti-
ficial activities, filled all the horizon, admitting
the larks and the robins only as accessories ; con-
sidering the foxes, the deer and the rabbits only
as creatures to be killed, to be pursued, to be
exterminated. But Mr. Seton and his school,
and the Mowbrays, and the Ollivants, the
Dugmores and the Wallihans opened a door,
opened a window, and mere literature has had
to give place to life. The sun has come in and
the great winds, and the smell of the baking
alkali on the Arizona deserts and the reek of the
142 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
tar-weed on the Colorado slopes; and nature
has ceased to exist as a classification of science,
has ceased to be w*s-understood as an aggregate
of botany, zoology, geology and the like, and
has become a thing intimate and familiar and
rejuvenating.
There is no doubt that the estate of Ameri-
can letters is experiencing a renaissance. For-
mality, the old idols, the demi-gorgons
and autocrats no longer hold an absolute
authority. A multitude of false gods are
clamouring for recognition, shouldering
one another about to make room for their
altars, soliciting incense as if it were
patronage. No doubt these "draw many after
them," but the "nature revival" has brought
the galvanizing, vital element into this tumult
of little inkling sham divinities and has shown
that life is better than "literature," even if the
"literature" be of human beings and the life
be that of a faithful dog.
Vitality is the thing, after all. Dress the
human puppet never so gaily, bedeck it never
so brilliantly, pipe before it never so cunningly,
and, fashioned in the image of God though it
be, just so long as it is a puppet and not a
person, just so long the great heart of the
people will turn from it, in weariness and
disgust, to find its interest in the fidelity of
The "Nature'1 Revival in Literature 143
the sheep-dog of the North o' England, the
intelligence of a prairie wolf of Colorado, or
the death-fight of a bull moose in the tim-
berlands of Ontario.
THE MECHANICS OF FICTION
THE MECHANICS OF FICTION
'ITT'E approach a delicate subject. And
if the manner of approach is too
serious it will be very like the forty thousand
men of the King of France who marched terribly
and with banners to the top of the hill with the
meager achievement of simply getting there.
Of all the arts, as one has previously observed,
that of novel-writing is the least mechanical.
Perhaps, after all, rightly so; still it is hard
to escape some formality, some forms. There
must always be chapter divisions, also a begin-
ning and an end, which implies a middle, con-
tinuity, which implies movement, which in turn
implies a greater speed or less, an accelerated,
retarded or broken action; and before the
scoffer is well aware he is admitting a multitude
of set forms. No one who sets a thing in
motion but keeps an eye and a hand upon its
speed. No one who constructs but keeps
watch upon the building, strengthening here,
lightening there, here at the foundations
cautious and conservative, there at the cornice
fantastic and daring. In all human occupa-
tions, trades, arts or business, science, morals
147
148 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
or religion, there exists, way at the bottom,
a homogeneity and a certain family likeness,
so that, quite possibly after all, the discussion
of the importance of the mechanics of fiction
may be something more than mere speculative
sophistry.
A novel addresses itself primarily to a reader,
and it has been so indisputably established
that the reader's time and effort of attention
must be economized that the fact need not be
mentioned in this place — it would not econo-
mize the reader's time nor effort of attention.
Remains then the means to be considered,
or in other words, How best to tell your story.
It depends naturally upon the nature of the
story. The formula which would apply to one
would not be appropriate for another. That
is very true, but at the same time it is hard to
get away from that thing in any novel which,
let us call, the pivotal event. All good novels
have one. It is the peg upon which the fabric
of the thing hangs, the nucleus around which
the shifting drifts and currents must — suddenly
— coagulate, the sudden releasing of the
brake to permit for one instant the entire
machinery to labour, full steam, ahead. Up
to that point the action must lead; from it, it
must decline.
But — and here one holds at least one mechan-
The Mechanics of Fiction 149
ical problem — the approach, the leading up to
this pivotal event must be infinitely slower
than the decline. For the reader's interest
in the story centres around it, and once it is
disposed of attention is apt to dwindle very
rapidly — and thus back we go again to the
economy proposition.
It is the slow approach, however, that tells.
The unskilled, impatient of the tedium of
meticulous elaboration, will rush at it in a
furious gallop of short chapters and hurried
episodes, so that he may come the sooner to
the purple prose declamation and drama that
he is sure he can handle with such tremendous
effect.
Not so the masters. Watch them during
the first third — say — of their novels. Nothing
happens — or at least so you fancy. People
come and go, plans are described, localities,
neighbourhoods; an incident crops up just for
a second for which you can see no reason, a note
sounds that is puzzlingly inappropriate. The
novel continues. There seems to be no prog-
ress; again that perplexing note, but a little
less perplexing. By now we are well into the
story. There are no more new people, but the
old ones come back again and again, and yet
again; you remember them now after they
are off the stage; you are more intimate with
150 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
the two main characters. Then comes a series
of pretty incidents in which these two are
prominent. The action still lags, but little by
little you are getting more and more acquainted
with these principal actors. Then perhaps
comes the first acceleration of movement. The
approach begins — ever so little — to rise, and
that same note which seemed at first so out of
tune sounds again and this time drops into place
in the progression, beautifully harmonious,
correlating the whole gamut. By now all the
people are "on"; by now all the groundwork
is prepared. You know the localities so well
that you could find your way about among
them in the dark; hero and heroine are inti-
mate acquaintances.
Now the action begins to increase in speed.
The complication suddenly tightens; all along
the line there runs a sudden alert. An episode
far back there in the first chapter, an episode
with its appropriate group of characters, is
brought forward and, coming suddenly to the
front, collides with the main line of development
and sends it off upon an entirely unlooked-
for tangent. Another episode of the second
chapter — let us suppose — all at once makes
common cause with a more recent incident, and
the two produce a wholly unlooked-for counter-
influence which swerves the main theme in
The Mechanics of Fiction 151
still another direction, and all this time the
action is speeding faster and faster, the compli-
cation tightening and straining to the breaking
point, and then at last a ' 'motif" that has been
in preparation ever since the first paragraph
of the first chapter of the novel suddenly comes
to a head, and in a twinkling the complication
is solved with all the violence of an explosion,
and the catastrophe, the climax, the pivotal
event fairly leaps from the pages with a rush
of action that leaves you stunned, breathless
and overwhelmed with the sheer power of its
presentation. And there is a master-work of
fiction.
Reading, as the uninitiated do, without an
eye to the mechanics, without a consciousness
of the wires and wheels and cogs and springs
of the affair, it seems inexplicable that these
great scenes of fiction — short as they are —
some of them less than a thousand words in
length — should produce so tremendous an
effect by such few words, such simple language ;
and that sorely overtaxed word, "genius," is
made to do duty as the explanation. But the
genius is rare that in one thousand simple words,
taken by themselves, could achieve the effect—
for instance — of the fight aboard The Flying
Scud in Stevenson's ' 'Wrecker." Taken by
itself, the scene is hardly important except
152 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
from the point of view of style and felicity of
expression. It is the context of the story
that makes it so tremendous, and because
Osborne and Stevenson prepared for that
very scene from the novel's initial chapter.
And it seems as if there in a phrase one could
resume the whole system of fiction-mechanics —
preparations of effect.
The unskilled will invariably attempt to
atone for lack of such painstaking preparation
for their " Grande Scenes" by hysteria, and by
exclamation in presenting the catastrophe.
They declaim, they shout, stamp, shake then-
fists and flood the page with sonorous adjectives,
call upon heaven and upon God. They sum-
mon to their aid every broken-down device to
rouse the flaccid interest of the reader, and con-
clusively, irretrievably and ignominiously fail.
It is too late for heroic effort then, and the
reader, uninterested in the character, unfamiliar
with the locale, unattracted by any charm of
"atmosphere," lays down the book unper-
turbed and forgets it before dinner.
Where is the fault? Is it not in defective
machinery? The analogies are multitudinous.
The liner with hastily constructed boilers will
flounder when she comes to essay the storm;
and no stoking however vigorous, no oiling
however eager, if delayed till then, will avail
The Mechanics of Fiction 153
to aid her to ride through successfully. It is
not the time to strengthen a wall when the
hurricane threatens; prop and stay will not
brace it then. Then the thing that tells is
the plodding, slow, patient, brick-by-brick
work, that only half shows down there at the
foot half -hidden in the grass, obscure, unnoted.
No genius is necessary for this sort of work,
only great patience and a willingness to plod,
for the time being.
No one is expected to strike off the whole
novel in one continued fine frenzy of inspiration.
As well expect the stone-mason to plant his
wall in a single day. Nor is it possible to lay
down any rule of thumb, any hard-and-fast
schedule in the matter of novel writing. But
no work is so ephemeral, so delicate, so — in a
word — artistic that it cannot be improved by
systematizing.
There is at least one indisputably good
manner in which the unskilled may order his
work — besides the one of preparation already
mentioned. He may consider each chapter
as a unit, distinct, separate, having a definite
beginning, rise, height and end, the action
continuous, containing no break in time, the
locality unchanged throughout — no shifting
of the scene to another environment. Each
chapter thus treated is a little work in itself,
154 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
and the great story of the whole novel is told
thus as it were in a series of pictures, the author
supplying information as to what has inter-
vened between the end of one chapter and the
beginning of the next by suggestion or by
actual resume. As often as not the reader
himself can fill up the gap by the context.
This may be over-artificial, and it is con-
ceivable that there are times when it is neces-
sary to throw artificiality to the winds. But
it is the method that many of the greatest
fiction writers have employed, and even a
defective system is — at any rate, in fiction —
better than none.
FICTION WRITING AS A
BUSINESS
FICTION WRITING AS A BUSINESS
E exaggerated and exalted ideas of the
•*• unenlightened upon this subject are, I
have found, beyond all reason and beyond all
belief. The superstition that with the
publication of the first book comes fame and
affluence is as firmly rooted as that other
delusion which asks us to suppose that "a
picture in the Paris Salon" is the1 certificate of
success, ultimate, final, definite.
One knows, of course, that very naturally
the "Eben Holden" and " David Harum" and
" Richard Carvel" fellows make fortunes, and
that these are out of the discussion; but also
one chooses to assume that the average, honest,
middle-class author supports himself and even
a family by the sale of his novels — lives on his
royalties.
Royalties ! Why in the name of heaven were
they called that, those microscopic sums that
too, too often are less royal than beggarly?
It has a fine sound — royalty. It fills the
mouth. It can be said with an air — royalty.
But there are plenty of these same royalties
that will not pay the typewriter's bill.
158 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
Take an average case. No, that will not
do, either, for the average published novel — I
say it with my right hand raised — is, irretriev-
ably, hopelessly and conclusively, a financial
failure.
Take, then, an unusually lucky instance,
literally a novel whose success is extraordinary,
a novel which has sold 2,500 copies. I repeat
that this is an extraordinary success. Not one
book out of fifteen will do as well. But let us
consider it. The author has worked upon it
for — at the very least — three months. It is
published. Twenty-five hundred copies are
sold. Then the sale stops. And by the word
stop one means cessation in the completest
sense of the word. There are people — I know
plenty of them — who suppose that when a book
is spoken of as having stopped selling, a gener-
ality is intended, that merely a falling off of the
initial demand has occurred. Error. When
a book — a novel — stops selling, it stops with
the definiteness of an engine when the fire goes
out. It stops with a suddenness that is appall-
ing, and thereafter not a copy, not one single,
solitary copy is sold. And do not for an instant
suppose that ever after the interest may be
revived. A dead book can no more be resusci-
tated than a dead dog.
But to go back. The 2,500 have been sold.
Fiction Writing as a Business 159
The extraordinary, the marvelous has been
achieved. What does the author get out of
it ? A royalty of ten per cent. Two hundred
and fifty dollars for three months' hard work.
Roughly, less than $20 a week, a little more than
$2.50 a day. An expert carpenter will easily
make twice that, and the carpenter has infi-
nitely the best of it in that he can keep the
work up year in and year out, where the
novelist must wait for a new idea, and the
novel writer must then jockey and maneuver
for publication. Two novels a year is about
as much as the writer can turn out and yet
keep a marketable standard. Even admitting
that both the novels sell 2,500 copies, there is
only $500 of profit. In the same time the
carpenter has made his $1,800, nearly four
times as much. One may well ask the
question: Is fiction writing a money-making
profession ?
The astonishing thing about the affair is
that a novel may make a veritable stir, almost
a sensation, and yet fail to sell very largely.
There is so-and-so's book. Everywhere you
go you hear about it. Your friends have read
it. It is in demand at the libraries. You don't
pick up a paper that does not contain a review
of the story in question. It is in the "Book
of the Month" column. It is even, even — the
160 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
pinnacle of achievement — in that shining roster,
the list of best sellers of the week.
Why, of course the author is growing rich!
Ah, at last he has arrived ! No doubt he will
build a country house out of his royalties.
Lucky fellow ; one envies him.
Catch him unawares and what is he doing?
As like as not writing unsigned book reviews
at five dollars a week in order to pay his
board bill — and glad of the chance.
It seems incredible. But one must remem-
ber this : That for every one person who buys
a book, there will be six who will talk about it.
And the half -thousand odd reviewers who are
writing of the book do not buy it, but receive
"editorial" copies from the publishers, upon
which no royalty is paid.
I know it for an undisputed fact that a certain
novel which has ever been called the best
American novel of the nineteenth century, and
which upon publication was talked about,
written about and even preached about, from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, took ten years in
which to attain the sale of 10,000 copies. Even
so famous, so brilliant an author as Harold
Frederic did not at first sell conspicuously.
"That Lawton Girl," "The Copperhead,"
"Seth's Brother's Wife," masterpieces though
they are, never made money for the writer.
Fiction Writing as a Business 161
Each sold about 2,000 copies. Not until
"Theron Ware" was published did Mr.
Frederic reap his reward.
Even so great a name as that of George
Meredith is not a * 'sesame," and only within
the last few years has the author of "Evan
Harrington" made more than five or six
hundred dollars out of any one of his world-
famous books.
But of course there is another side. For
one thing, the author is put to no expense in
the composing of his novel. (It is not always
necessary to typewrite the manuscript.) The
carpenter must invest much money in tools;
must have a shop. Shop rent and tools repaired
or replaced cut into his $1,800 of profit. Or
take it in the fine arts. The painter must have
a studio, canvases, models, brushes, a whole
equipment ; the architect must have his draught-
ing room, the musician his instrument. But
so far as initial expense is concerned, a half-
dollar will buy every conceivable necessary
tool the novelist may demand. He needs no
office, shop or studio ; models are not required.
The libraries of the city offer him a quiet
working place if the home is out of the
question. Nor, as one has so often urged, is
any expensive training necessary before his
money-earning capacity is attained. The archi-
1 62 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
tect must buy instruction for many years.
The painter must study in expensive studios,
the musician must learn in costly conservatories,
the singer must be taught by high-priced
maestros. Furthermore, it is often necessary
for the aspirant to travel great distances to
reach the cities where his education is to be
furthered; almost invariably a trip to and a
residence in Europe is indispensable. It is a
great undertaking and an expensive one to
prepare for the professions named, and it takes
years of time — years during which the aspirant
is absolutely non-productive.
But the would-be novel writer may deter-
mine between breakfast and dinner to essay
the plunge, buy (for a few cents) ink and
paper between dinner and supper, and have
the novel under way before bedtime.
How much of an outlay of money does his
first marketable novel represent? Practically
nothing. On the other hand, let us ask the
same question of, say, the painter. How
much money has he had to spend before he was
able to paint his first marketable picture ? To
reach a total sum he must foot up the expenses
of at least five years of instruction and study,
the cost of living during that time, the cost of
materials, perhaps even the price of a trip to
Paris. Easily the sum may reach $5,000.
Fiction Writing as a Business 163
Fifty cents' worth, of ink and paper do not
loom large beside this figure.
Then there are other ways in which the fiction
writer may earn money — by fiction. The
novelist may look down upon the mere writer
of short stories, or may even look down upon
himself in the same capacity, but as a rule the
writer of short stories is the man who has the
money. It is much easier to sell the average
short story than the average novel. Infinitely
easier. And the short story of the usual length
will fetch $100. One thousand people — think
of it — one thousand people must buy copies of
your novel before it will earn so much for you.
It takes three months to complete the novel —
the novel that earns the $250. But with
ingenuity, the writer should be able to turn
out six short stories in the same time, and
if he has luck in placing them there is $600
earned — more than twice the sum made by
the novel. So that the novelist may eke out
the alarming brevity of his semiannual state-
ments by writing and selling " short stuff."
Then — so far as the novel is concerned —
there is one compensation, one source of revenue
which the writer enjoys and which is, as a rule,
closed to all others. Once the carpenter sells
his piece of work it is sold for good and all.
The painter has but one chance to make money
164 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
from the sale of his picture. The architect
receives payment for his design and there is the
end. But the novelist — and one speaks now of
the American — may sell the same work over
many times. Of course, if the novel is a fail-
ure it is a failure, and no more is said. But
suppose it is a salable, readable, brisk bit of
narrative, with a swift action and rapid move-
ment. Properly managed, this, under favour-
able conditions, might be its life history:
First it is serialized either in the Sunday press
or, less probably, in a weekly or monthly.
Then it is made up into book form and sent over
the course a second time. The original pub-
lisher sells sheets to a Toronto or Montreal
house and a Canadian edition reaps a like
harvest. It is not at all unlikely that a special
cheap cloth edition may be bought and launched
by some large retailer either of New York or
Chicago. Then comes the paper edition — with
small royalties, it is true, but based upon an
enormous number of copies, for the usual paper
edition is an affair of tens of thousands. Next
the novel crosses the Atlantic and a small sale
in England helps to swell the net returns, which
again are added to — possibly — by the " colonial
edition" which the English firm issues. Last
of all comes the Tauchnitz edition, and with
this (bar the improbable issuing of later special
Fiction Writing as a Business 16$
editions) the exploitation ceases. Eight separate
times the same commodity has been sold, no
one of the sales militating against the success of
the other seven, the author getting his fair slice
every time. Can any other trade, profession
or art (excepting only the dramatist, which is,
after all, a sister art) show the like? Even
(speaking of the dramatist) there may be a
ninth reincarnation of the same story and the
creatures of the writer's pages stalk forth upon
the boards in cloak and buskin.
And there are the indirect ways in which he
may earn money. Some of his ilk there are
who lecture. Nor are there found wanting
those who read from their own works. Some
write editorials or special articles in the maga-
zines and newspapers with literary depart-
ments. But few of them have "princely"
incomes.
THE "VOLUNTEER MANU-
SCRIPT"
THE "VOLUNTEER MANUSCRIPT"
AT a conservative estimate there are
* *• 70,000,000 people in the United States.
At a liberal estimate 100,000 of these have lost
the use of both arms; remain then 69,900,000
who write novels. Indeed, many are called,
but few — oh, what a scanty, skimped handful
that few represent — are chosen.
The work of choosing these few, or rather
of rejecting these many, devolves upon the
manuscript readers for the baker's dozen of
important New York publishing houses, and a
strange work it is, and strange are the contri-
butions that pass under their inspection.
As one not unfamiliar with the work of
" reading," the present writer may offer a little
seasonable advice.
i. First have your manuscript typewritten.
The number of manuscripts is too great and
the time too short to expect the reader to
decipher script; and, besides, ideas presented
or scenes described in type are infinitely more
persuasive, more plausible than those set down
in script. A good story typewritten will appear
169
170 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
to better advantage; a poor one similarly
treated seems less poverty stricken.
2. Do not, by any manner of means, announce
in a prefatory note that you "lay no claim to
literary excellence," with the intention thereby
of ingratiating yourself with regard to the
"reader," winning him over by a parade of
modesty. Invariably the statement is prejudi-
cial, producing an effect exactly contrary to
the one desired. It will make the mildest of
"readers" angry. If you have no claims upon
literary excellence, why in Heaven's name are
you bothering him to read your work?
3. Enclose a forwarding address in case
of rejection. This, seemingly, is superfluous
advice. But it is astonishing how many manu-
scripts come in innocent even of the author's
name, with never a scrap nor clue as to their
proper destination.
4. Don't ask for criticism. The reader is
not a critic. He passes only upon the avail-
ability of the manuscript for the uses of the
publisher who employs him. And a manu-
script of paramount literary quality may be
rejected for any number of reasons, none of
which have anything to do with its literary
worth — or accepted for causes equally outside
the domain of letters. Criticism is one thing,
professional "reading" quite another.
The "Volunteer Manuscript" 171
5. Don't bother about "enclosing stamps for
return." The manuscript will go back to you
by c. o. d. express.
6. Don't submit a part of a manuscript.
It is hard enough sometimes to judge the story
as a whole, and no matter how discouraging
the initial chapter may be the publisher will
always ask to see the remaining portions before
deciding.
7. Don't write to the publisher beforehand
asking him if he will consider your manuscript.
If it is a novel he will invariably express his
willingness to consider it. How can he tell
whether he wants it or not until he, through
his "reader," has seen it?
8. Don't expect to get an answer much
before a month. Especially if your story has
merit, it must pass through many hands and
be considered by many persons before judg-
ment is rendered. The better it is the longer
you will wait before getting a report.
9. Don't, in Heaven's name, enclose com-
mendatory letters written by your friends,
favourable reviews by your pastor or by the
president of the local college. The story will
speak for itself more distinctly than any of
your acquaintances.
10. Don't say you will revise or shorten to
suit the tastes or judgment of the publisher.
172 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
At best that's a servile humility that in itself
is a confession of weakness and that will make
you no friends at court.
11. Don't forward a letter of introduction,
no matter from how near a friend of the pub-
lisher. The publisher will only turn the MS.
over to his " readers," and with them the letter
from a stranger carries no weight.
12. Don't write a Colonial novel.
13. Don't write a Down East novel.
14. Don't write a " Prisoner of Zenda" novel.
15. Don't write a novel.
1 6. Try to keep your friends from writing
novels.
And of all the rules, one is almost tempted
to declare that the last two are the most
important. For to any one genuinely inter-
ested in finding "good stuff" in the ruck
and run of volunteer manuscripts, nothing is
more discouraging, nothing more apparently
hopeless of ultimate success than the consistent
and uniform trashiness of the day's batch of
submitted embryonic novels. Infinitely better
for their author had they never been written;
infinitely better for him had he employed his
labour — at the very least it is labour of three
months — upon the trade or profession to which
he was bred. It is very hard work to write a
good novel, but it is much harder to write a
The "Volunteer Manuscript" 173
bad one. Its very infelicity is a snare to the
pen, its very clumsiness a constant demand
for laborious boosting and propping.
And consider another and further word of
advice — number 17, if you please. Don't go
away with that popular idea that your manu-
script will be considered, or if really and unde-
niably good will be heedlessly rejected. Bad
manuscripts are not read from cover to cover.
The reader has not the right to waste his
employer's time in such unremunerative dili-
gence. Often a page or two will betray the
hopelessness of the subsequent chapters, and no
one will demand of the "reader" a perusal of a
work that he knows will be declined in the end.
Nor was there ever a sincere and earnest
effort that went unappreciated in a publisher's
place of business. I have seen an entire office
turned upside down by a " reader" who believed
he had discovered among the batch of volumin-
ous MS. something "really good, you know,"
and who almost forced a reading of the offering
in question upon every member of the firm
from the senior partner down to the assistant
salesman.
As a rule, all manuscripts follow the same
routine. From the clerk who receives them
at the hands of the expressman they go to the
recorder, who notes the title, address and date
174 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
of arrival, and also, after turning them over
to the junior reader, the fact of the transfer.
The junior reader's report upon the manu-
script is turned in to one of the members of
the firm, whose decision is final. The manu-
script itself goes up to the senior reader,
who also reports upon it to the firm member.
If both reports are unfavourable, this latter
directs the manuscript to be returned with or
without a personal letter, as he deems proper.
If both the readers' reports are favourable, or
even if one is sufficiently laudatory, he calls
for the manuscript and reads it himself. If he
disagrees with the readers' reports, the manu-
script is declined. If not, he passes the manu-
script on to one of the partners of the house,
who also reads it. The two " talk it over," and
out of the conference comes the ultimate
decision in the matter.
Sometimes the circulation manager and head
salesman are consulted to decide whether or
not — putting all questions of the book's literary
merits aside — the "thing will sell." And
doubt not for a moment that their counsel
carries weight.
Another feature of the business which it is
very well to remember is that all publishers
cannot be held responsible for the loss of or
damage to unsolicited manuscripts. If you
The "Volunteer Manuscript11 175
submit the MS. of a novel you do it at your own
risk, and the carelessness of an office-boy may
lose for you the work of many months — years,
even ; work that you could never do over again.
You could demand legally no reparation. The
publishers are not responsible. Only in a case
where a letter signed by one of the ''heads"
has been sent to the author requesting that the
manuscript be forwarded does the situation
become complicated. But in the case of an
unknown writer the monetary value of his work
in a court of law would be extremely difficult
to place, and even if an award of damages could
be extorted it would hardly more than pay the
typewriter's bill.
But the loss of manuscript may be of serious
import to the publisher for all that. That
reputation for negligence in the matter of
handling unsolicited matter fastens upon a
firm with amazing rapidity. Bothersome as
the number of volunteer manuscripts are, they
do — to a certain extent — gauge the importance
of a given concern. And as they arrive in
constantly increasing quantities, the house
may know that it is growing in favour and in
reputation : and so a marked falling off reverses
the situation. Writers will be naturally averse
to submitting manuscripts to offices which are
known to be careless. And I know of at least
176 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
one instance where the loss of a couple of manu-
scripts within a month produced a marked
effect upon the influx of the volunteers. Some-
how the news of the loss always gets out, and
spreads by some mysterious means till it is
heard of from strangely remote quarters. The
author will, of course, tell his friends of the
calamity, and will make more ado over the
matter than if his story was accepted. Of
course, this particular story is the one great
masterpiece of his career; the crass stupidity
of the proud and haughty publisher has ruined
his chance of success, and the warning: " Don't
send your stuff to that firm. It will be lost !"
is passed on all along the line. So that repeated
instances of the negligence may in the end
embarrass the publisher, and the real master-
piece, the first novel of a New Man, goes to a
rival.
I have in mind one case where a manuscript
was lost under peculiarly distressing circum-
stances. The reader, who had his office in
the editorial rooms of a certain important house
of New York, was on a certain day called to
the reception room to interview one of the host
of writers who came daily to submit their
offerings in person.
In this case the reader confronted a little
gentleman in the transition period of genteel
The "Volunteer Manuscript" 177
decay. He was a Frenchman. His mustache,
tight, trim and waxed, was white. The frock
coat was buttoned only at the waist; a silk
handkerchief puffed from the pocket, and a
dried carnation, lamentably faded, that had
done duty for many days, enlivened with a
feeble effort the worn silk lapel.
But the innate French effervescence, debo-
nair, insouciant, was not gone yet. The
little gentleman presented a card. Of course
the name boasted that humblest of titles —
baron. The Baron, it appeared, propitiated
destiny by ''Instruction in French, German
and Italian," but now instruction was no
longer propitious. With a deprecating giggle
this was explained; the Baron did not
wish to make the "reader" feel bad — to
embarrass him.
"I will probably starve very soon," he
observed, still with the modifying little giggle,
and, of course, the inevitable shrug, "unless —
my faith — something turns up."
It was to be turned up, evidently, by means of
an attenuated manuscript which he presented.
He had written — during the intervals of
instruction — a series of articles on the charac-
ter of Americans as seen by a Frenchman, and
these had been published by a newspaper of
the town in which he instructed — an absolutely
178 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
obscure town, lost and forgotten, away up
among the New Hampshire hills.
The articles, he insinuated, might be made
into a book — a book that might be interesting
to the great American public. And, with a
naivete that was absolutely staggering, he
assumed without question that the firm would
publish his book — that it was really an impor-
tant contribution to American literature.
He would admit that he had not been paid
very liberally by the country paper for the
articles as they appeared. He was not Emile
Zola. If he was he might have sold his articles
at fifteen or twenty dollars each.
He said just that. Think of it! The poor
little Instructor-Baron Zola ! Fifteen dollars !
Well!
He left the articles — neatly cut out and
pasted in a copy-book — with the "reader," and
gave as his address a dreadfully obscure hotel.
The "reader" could not make up his mouth to
tell him, even before looking over the first para-
graph of the first article, that as a book the
commercial value of the offering was absolutely,
irrevocably and hopelessly nil, and so the little
manuscript went into the mill — and in two days
was lost.
I suppose that never in the history of that
particular firm was the search for a missing
The "Volunteer Manuscript" 179
manuscript prosecuted with half the energy
or ardour that ensued upon the discovery of
this particular loss. From the desk-files of
the senior partner to the shipping-slips of the
packer's assistant the hunt proceeded — and all
in vain.
Meanwhile the day approached on which the
Baron was to come for his answer and at last it
arrived, and promptly at the appointed hour
the poor little card with the hyphenated titled
name written carefully and with beautiful
flourishes in diluted ink was handed in.
Do you know what the publisher did? He
wrote the absurd, pompous name across the
order line of a check and signed his own name
underneath, and the check was for an amount
that would make even unpropitious Destiny
take off his hat and bow politely.
And I tell you that my little Instructor-
Baron, with eminent good-humour, but with the
grand manner, a Marechal du royaume, waved
it aside. Turenne could have been no more
magnificent. (They do order these matters
better in France.) His whole concern —
hunger-pinched as he may easily have been
at the very moment — his whole concern was
to put the embarrassed publisher at his ease,
to make this difficulty less difficult.
He assured him that his articles were written
180 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
comme-ci, comme-ca, for his own amusement,
that he could not think of accepting, etc.
And I like to remember that this whole
affair, just as if it had been prepared in
advance for a popular magazine whose editor
insisted upon "happy endings," did end
well, and the publisher, who at the moment
was involved in the intricacies of a vast corre-
spondence with a Parisian publishing house,
found a small position as translator in one of
his sub-departments for the little Instructor-
Baron who had the great good fortune to
suffer the loss of a manuscript — in the right
place.
And now the card — engraved, if you please —
bears proudly the Baron's name, supported
by the inscription, "Official Translator and
Director of Foreign Correspondence to the
of & Co., Publishers. "
RETAIL BOOKSELLER: LITERARY
DICTATOR
RETAIL BOOKSELLER: LITERARY
DICTATOR
all the various and different kinds
and characters of people who are con-
cerned in the writing and making of a novel,
including the author, the publisher, the critic,
the salesman, the advertisement writer,
the drummer — of all this " array of talent,"
as the bill-boards put it, which one has the most
influence in the success of the book? Who,
of all these, can, if he chooses, help or hurt the
sales the most? — assuming for the moment
that sales are the index of success, the kind of
success that at the instant we are interested in.
Each one of these people has his followers
and champions. There are not found wanting
those who say the publisher is the all-in-all.
And again it is said that a critic of authority
can make a book by a good review or ruin it
by an unfavourable one. The salesman, others
will tell you — he who is closest allied to the
money transaction — can exert the all-powerful
influence. Or again, surely in this day of
exploitation and publicity the man who con-
cocts great "ads" is the important one.
184 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
The author is next included. He can do no
more than write the book, and as good books
have failed and bad ones have succeeded —
always considering failure and success in their
most sordid meanings — the mere writing need
not figure. But the fact remains that there
are cases where publishers have exerted every
device to start a book and still have known it
to remain upon their hands; that critics have
raved to heaven or damned to hell, and the
novel has fallen or flown in spite and not
because of them; that salesmen have cajoled
and schemed, and yet have returned with
unfilled orders, and that advertisements that
have clamoured so loudly that even they who
ran must have read, and yet the novel in
question remained inert, immovable, a failure,
a "plug."
All these, then, have been tried and at times
have been found wanting. There yet remains
one exponent of the business of distributing
fiction who has not been considered. He, one
claims, can do more than any or all of the gen-
tlemen just mentioned to launch or strand a
novel.
Now let it be understood that by no possible
manner of means does one consider him infalli-
ble. Again and again have his best efforts
come to nothing. This, however, is what is
Retail Bookseller: Literary Dictator 185
claimed: he has more influence on success or
failure than any of the others. And who is he ?
The retailer. One can almost affirm that
he is a determining factor in American fiction ;
that, in a limited sense, with him, his is the
future. Author, critic, analyst and essayist
may hug to themselves a delusive phantom of
hope that they are the moulders of public
opinion, they and they alone. That may be,
sometimes. But consider the toiling and spin-
ning retailer. What does the failure or success
of the novel mean to the critic ? Nothing more
than a minute and indefinite increase or decrease
of prestige. The publisher who has many
books upon his list may recoup himself on one
failure by a compensating success. The sales-
man's pay goes on just the same whether his
order slips are full or blank; likewise the
stipend of the writer of "ads." The author
has no more to lose — materially — than the price
of ink and paper. But to the retail bookseller
a success means money made ; failure, money
lost. If he can dispose of an order of fifty
books he is ahead by calculable, definite, con-
crete profits. If he cannot dispose of the fifty
his loss is equally calculable, equally definite,
equally concrete. Naturally, being a business
man, he is a cautious man. He will not order
a book which he deems unsalable, but he will
1 86 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
lay in a stock of one that promises returns.
Through him the book is distributed to the
public. If he has a book in stock, the public
gets it. If he does not have it, the public goes
without. The verdict of the public is the essen-
tial to popularity or unpopularity, and the
public can only pass verdict upon what it has
read. The connection seems clear and the
proposition proved that the retail bookseller
is an almost paramount influence in American
literature.
It is interesting to see what follows from this
and to note how the retailer in the end can
effectually throttle the sham novelist who has
fooled the public once. Were it not for the
retailer, the sham novelist would get an
indefinite number of chances for his life ; but so
long as the small book-dealer lives and acts,
just so long will bad work — and one means by
this wholly bad, admittedly bad, hopelessly
bad work — fail to trick the reading public twice.
Observe now the working of it. Let us take a
typical case. A story by an unknown writer
is published. By strenuous exploitation the
publishers start a vogue. The book begins
to sell. The retailer, observing the campaign
of publicity managed by the publishers, stocks
up with the volume ; surely when the publishers
are backing the thing so strong it will be a safe
Retail Bookseller: Literary Dictator 187
venture; surely the demand will be great. It
does prove a safe venture ; the demand is great ;
the retailer disposes of fifty, then of a second
order of one hundred, then of two hundred,
then of five hundred. The book is now in the
hands of the public. It is read and found
sadly, sadly wanting. It is not a good story;
it is trivial; it is insincere. Far and wide the
story is condemned.
Meanwhile the unknown writer, now become
famous, is writing a second novel. It is finished,
issued, and the salesman who travels for the
publishers begins to place his orders. The
retailer, remembering the success of this author's
past venture, readily places a large order. Two
hundred is not, in his opinion, an overstock. So
it goes all over the country. Returns are made
to the author, and he sees that some fifty
thousand have been sold. Encouraging, is it
not? Yes, fifty thousand have been sold —
by the publisher to the retailer; but here is the
point — not by the retailer to the public. Of
the two hundred our dealer took from the
publisher's traveling salesman, one hundred
and ninety yet remain upon his counters. The
public, fooled once, on the first over-praised,
over-exploited book, refuse to be taken in a
second time. Who is the loser now ? Not the
author, who draws royalties on copies sold to
1 88 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
the tradesman — the retailer ; not the publisher,
who makes his profit out of the same trans-
action; but the retailer, who is loaded down
with an unsalable article.
Meanwhile our author writes his third novel.
So far as he can see, his second book is as great
a popular success as his first. His semiannual
statements are there to show it — there it is in
black and white; figures can't lie. The third
novel is finished and launched. At the end of
the first six months after publication day the
author gets his publisher's statement of sales.
Instead of the expected 10,000 copies sold,
behold the figure is a bare 1,500. At the end of
the second six months the statement shows
about 250. The book has failed. Why? Be-
cause the retailer refuses to order it. He has
said to the soliciting salesman, "Why should I,
in Heaven's name, take a third book by this
man when I have yet one hundred and ninety
copies of his second novel yet to sell?"
It is hard for the salesman to controvert
that argument. He may argue that the third
book is a masterpiece, and — mark this — it may
in fact be a veritable, actual masterpiece, a
wonderful contribution to the world's litera-
ture; it is all of no effect. There stands the
block of unsold books, 190 strong, and all the
eloquence in the world will not argue them
Retail Bookseller: Literary Dictator 189
off the counter. After this our author's pub-
lisher will have none of his books. Even if he
writes a fourth and submits it, the publisher
incontinently declines it. This author is no
longer a " business proposition."
There cannot but be an element of satisfac-
tion in all this, and a source of comfort to those
who take the welfare of their country's litera-
ture seriously to heart. The sham novelist
who is in literature (what shall we say) "for his
own pocket every time" sooner or later meets
the wave of reaction that he cannot stem nor
turn and under which he and his sham are con-
clusively, definitely and irrevocably buried.
Observe how it works out all down the line.
He fools himself all of the time, he fools the
publisher three times, he fools the retail dealer
twice, and he fools the Great American Public
just exactly once.
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF
FICTION?
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF FICTION?
TT seems to me that it is a proposition
not difficult of demonstration that the
United States of America has never been able
to boast of a school of fiction distinctively its
own. And this is all the more singular when
one considers that in all other activities
Americans are peculiarly independent in
thought and in deed, and have acquired
abroad a reputation — even a notoriety — for
being original.
In the mechanical arts, in the industries, in
politics, in business methods, in diplomacy, in
ship-building, in war, even in dentistry, if you
please — even in the matter of riding race-horses
— Americans have evolved their own methods,
quite different from European methods.
Hardy and adventurous enough upon all other
lines, disdainful of conventions, contemptuous
of ancient custom, we yet lag behind in the
arts — slow to venture from the path blazed
long ago by Old World masters.
It is preeminently so in the fine arts. No
sooner does an American resolve upon a career
of painting, sculpture or architecture than
193
194 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
straight he departs for Paris, the Beaux Arts
and the Julien atelier; and, his education
finished, returns to propagate French ideas;
French methods; and our best paintings to-
day are more French than American ; French
in conception, in composition, in technique
and treatment.
I suppose that the nearest we ever came to
an organized school of native-born Americans,
writing about American things from an Ameri-
can point of view, was in the days of Lowell,
Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier and the rest of
that illustrious company. But observe : How
is this group spoken of and known to literature ?
Not as the American school, but as the New
England school. Even the appellation " New"
England as differentiated from ''old" England
is significant. And New England is not
America.
Hawthorne, it will be urged, is a great name
among American writers of fiction. Not pecu-
liarly American, however. Not so distinctively
and unequivocally as to lay claim to a vigorous
original Americanism. "The Scarlet Letter"
is not an American story, but rather a story of
an English colony on North American soil.
"The Marble Faun " is frankly and unreservedly
foreign. Even the other novels were pictures
An American School of Fiction? 195
of a very limited and circumscribed life — the
life of New England again.
Cooper, you will say, was certainly American
in attitude and choice of subject ; none more so.
None less, none less American. As a novelist
he is saturated with the romance of the con-
temporary English story-tellers. It is true
that his background is American. But his
heroes and heroines talk like the characters out
of Bulwer in their most vehement moods, while
his Indians stalk through all the melodramatic
tableaux of Byron, and declaim in the periods
of the border noblemen in the pages of Walter
Scott.
Poe we may leave out of classification; he
shone in every branch of literature but that of
novel-writing. Bret Harte was a writer of
short stories and — oh, the pity of it, the folly
of it ! — abandoned the field with hardly more
than a mere surface-scratching.
There can be no doubt that had Mr. Henry
James remained in America he would have been
our very best writer. If he has been able to
seize the character and characteristics so forci-
bly of a people like the English, foreign to
him, different, unfamiliar, what might he not
have done in the very midst of his own country-
men, into whose company he was born, reared
and educated. All the finish of style, the
196 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
marvelous felicity of expression would still have
been his and at the same time, by the very
nature of the life he lived and wrote about,
the concrete, the vigorous, the simple direct
action would have become a part of his work,
instead of the present ultimate vagueness and
indecision that so mars and retards it.
Of all the larger names remain only those
of Mr. Howells and Mr. Clemens. But as the
novelists, as such, are under consideration,
even Mark Twain may be left out of the dis-
cussion. American to the core, posterity will
yet know him not as a novel-writer, but as a
humourist. Mr. Howells alone is left, then,
after the elimination is complete. Of all pro-
ducers of American fiction he has had the broad-
est vision, at once a New Englander and a New
Yorker, an Easterner and — in the Eastern sense
— a Westerner. But one swallow does not make
a summer, nor does one writer constitute a
"school." Mr. Howells has had no successors.
Instead, just as we had with "Lapham"
and "The Modern Instance" laid the founda-
tion of fine, hardy literature, that promised to
be our very, very own, we commence to build
upon it a whole confused congeries of borrowed,
faked, pilfered romanticisms, building a crum-
bling gothic into a masonry of honest brown-
stone, or foisting colonial porticos upon facades
An American School of Fiction? 197
of Montpelier granite, and I cannot allow this
occasion to pass without protest against what
I am sure every serious-minded reader must
consider a lamentable discrowning.
Of the latter-day fiction writers Miss Wilkins
had more than all others convinced her public
of her sincerity. Her field was her own; the
place was ceded to her. No other novelist
could invade her domain and escape the censure
that attaches to imitation. Her public was
loyal to her because it believed in her, and it
was a foregone conclusion that she would be
loyal to it.
More than this: A writer who occupies so
eminent a place as Miss Wilkins, who has
become so important, who has exerted and
still can exert so strong an influence, cannot
escape the responsibilities of her position.
She cannot belong wholly to herself, cannot be
wholly independent. She owes a duty to the
literature of her native country.
Yet in spite of all this, and in spite of the fact
that those who believe in the future of our
nation's letters look to such established repu-
tations as hers to keep the faith, to protest,
though it is only by their attitude, silently and
with dignity, against corruptions, degradations ;
in spite of all this, and in the heyday of her
power, Miss Wilkins chooses to succumb to
198 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
the momentary, transitory set of the tide, and
forsaking her own particular work, puts forth,
one of a hundred others, a "colonial romance."
It is a discrowning. It can be considered as
no less. A deliberate capitulation to the
clamour of the multitude. Possibly the novel-
ist was sincere, but it is perilously improbable
that she would have written her "Colonial
Romance" had not "colonial romances" been
the fashion. On the face of it Miss Wilkins
has laid herself open to a suspicion of dis-
ingenuousness that every honest critic can
only deplore. Even with all the sincerity in
the world she had not the right to imperil the
faith of her public, to undermine its confidence
in her. She was one of the leaders. It is as
if a captain, during action, had deserted to
the enemy.
It could not have been even for the baser
consideration of money. With her success
assured in advance Miss Wilkins can be
above such influences. Nor of fame. Surely
no great distinction centres upon writers of
"colonial romances" of late. Only the author
herself may know her motives, but we who
looked to her to keep the standard firm — and
high — have now to regret the misfortune of a
leader lost, a cause weakened
However, it is a question after all if a "school,"
An American School of Fiction? 199
understood in the European sense of the word,
is possible for America just yet. France has
had its schools of naturalism and romance,
Russia its schools of realism, England its schools
of psychologists. But France, Russia and
England now, after so many centuries of
growth, may be considered as units. Certain
tendencies influence each one over its whole
geographical extent at the same time. Its
peoples have been welded together to a certain
homogeneousness. It is under such conditions
that "schools" of fiction, of philosophy, of
science and the like arise.
But the United States are not yet, in the
European sense, united. We have existed as
a nation hardly more than a generation and
during that time our peoples have increased
largely by emigration. From all over the
globe different races have been pouring in upon
us. The North has been settled under one
system, the South under another, the Middle
West under another, the East under another.
South Central and Far West under still others.
There is no homogeneousness among us as yet.
The Westerner thinks along different lines from
the Easterner and arrives at different con-
clusions. What is true of California is false of
New York. Mr. Cable's picture of life is a far
different thing than that of Mr. Howells.
200 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
The " school" implies a rallying of many
elements under one standard. But no such
thing is possible to-day for American writers.
Mr. Hamlin Garland could not merge his per-
sonality nor pool his ideals with Edith Wharton.
Their conceptions of art are as different as the
conditions of life they study in their books.
The school of fiction American in thought,
in purpose and in treatment will come in time,
inevitably. Meanwhile the best we can expect
of the leaders is to remain steadfast, to keep
unequivocably to the metes and bounds of the
vineyards of their labours; no trespassing, no
borrowing, no niching of the grapes of another
man's vines. The cultivation of one's own
vine is quite sufficient for all energy. We want
these vines to grow — in time — to take root deep
in American soil so that by and by the fruit
shall be all of our own growing.
We do not want — distinctly and vehemently
we do not want-the vine-grower to leave his own
grapes to rot while he flies off to the gathering
of — what? The sodden lees of an ancient
crushing.
NOVELISTS OF THE FUTURE
NOVELISTS OF THE FUTURE
TT seems to me that a great deal could be
-^ said on this subject — a great deal that
has not been said before. There are so many
novelists these latter days. So many whose
works show that they have had no training,
and it does seem that so long as the fiction
writers of the United States go fumbling and
stumbling along in this undisciplined fashion,
governed by no rule, observing no formula,
setting for themselves no equation to solve,
that just so long shall we be far from the desir-
able thing — an American school of fiction.
Just now (let us say that it is a pity) we have
no school at all. We acknowledge no master,
and we are playing at truant, incorrigible,
unmanageable, sailing paper boats in the creek
behind the schoolhouse, or fishing with bent
pins in the pools and shallows of popular favour.
That some catch goldfish there is no great
matter, and is no excuse for the truancy. We
are not there for the goldfish, if you please, but
to remain in the school at work till we have
been summoned to stand up in our places and
tell the master what we have learned.
203
204 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
There's where we should be, and if we do not
observe the rules and conform to some degree
of order, we should be rapped on the knuckles
or soundly clumped on the head, and by vigor-
ous discipline taught to know that formulas
(a — b; a-|-b) are important things for us to
observe, and that each and all of us should
address ourselves with all diligence to finding
the value of x in our problems.
It is the class in the Production of Original
Fiction which of all the school contains the
most truants. Indeed, its members believe
that schooling for them is unnecessary. Not
so with the other classes. Not one single mem-
ber of any single one of them who does not
believe that he must study first if he would pro-
duce afterward. Observe, there on the lower
benches, the assiduous little would-be car-
penters and stone-masons ; how carefully they
con their tables of measurement, their squares
and compasses. "Ah, the toilers," you say,
"the grubby manual fellows — of course they
must learn their trade !"
Very well, then. Consider — higher up the
class, on the very front row of benches — the
Fine Arts row, the little painters and architects
and musicians and actors of the future. See
how painfully they study, and study and study.
The little stone-mason will graduate in a few
Novelists of the Future 205
months; but for these others of the Fine Arts
classes there is no such thing as graduation.
For them there shall never be a diploma, signed
and sealed, giving them the right to call
themselves perfected at their work. All their
lives they shall be students. In the vacations
— maybe — they write, or build, or sing, or act,
but soon again they are back to the benches,
studying, studying always; working as never
carpenter or stone-mason worked. Now and
then they get a little medal, a bit of gold and
enamel, a bow of ribbon, that is all ; the stone-
mason would disdain it, would seek it for the
value of the metal in it. The Fine Arts people
treasure it as the veteran treasures his cross.
And these little medals you — the truants, the
bad boys of the paper boats and the goldfish —
you want them, too; you claim them and
clamour for them. You who declare that no
study is necessary for you; you who are not
content with your catch of goldfish, you must
have the bits of ribbon and enamel, too. Have
you deserved them? Have you worked for
them ? Have you found the value of x in your
equation? Have you solved the parenthesis
of your problem? Have you even done the
problem at all? Have you even glanced or
guessed at the equation? The shame of it be
upon you ! Come in from the goldfish and go
206 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
to work, or stay altogether at the fishing and
admit that you are not deserving of the medal
which the master gives as a reward of merit.
" But there are no books that we can study/'
you contest. " The architect and the musician,
the painter and the actor — all of these have
books ready to hand; they can learn from
codified, systematized knowledge. For the
novelist, where is there of cut-and-dried science
that he can learn that will help him?'1
And that is a good contention. No, there
are no such books. Of all the arts, the art of
fiction has no handbook. By no man's teach-
ing can we learn the^knack of putting a novel
together in the best way. No one has ever
risen to say, "Here is how the plan should be;
thus and so should run the outline."
We admit the fact, but neither does that
excuse the goldfishing and the paper-boat busi-
ness. Some day the handbook may be com-
piled— it is quite possible — but meanwhile, and
faute de mieux, there is that which you may
study better than all handbooks.
Observe, now. Observe, for instance, the
little painter scholars. On the fly-leaves of
their schoolbooks they are making pictures —
of what? Remember it, remember it and
remember it — of the people around them. So
is the actor, so the musician — all of the occu-
Novelists of the Future 207
pants of the Fine Arts bench. They are study-
ing one another quite as much as their boots
— even more, and they will tell you that it is
the most important course in the curriculum.
You — the truant little would-be novelist —
you can do this, quite as easily as they, and for
you it is all the more important, for you must
make up for the intimate knowledge of your
fellows what you are forced to lack in the igno-
rance of forms. But you cannot get this
knowledge out there behind the schoolhouse —
hooking goldfish. Come in at the tap of the
bell and, though you have no books, make
pictures on your slate, pictures of the Fine
Arts bench struggling all their lives for the
foolish little medals, pictures of the grubby
little boys in the stone-mason's corner, jeering
the art classes for their empty toiling. The
more you make these pictures, the better you
shall do them. That is the kind of studying
you can do, and from the study of your fellows
you shall learn more than from the study of all
the text-books that ever will be written.
But to do this you must learn to sit very
quiet, and be very watchful, and so train your
eyes and ears that every sound and every
sight shall be significant to you and shall
supply all the deficiency made by the absence
of text-books.
2o8 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
This, then, to drop a very protracted alle-
gory, seems to be the proper training of the
novelist: The achieving less of an aggressive
faculty of research than of an attitude of mind
— a receptivity, an acute sensitiveness. And
this can be acquired.
But it cannot be acquired by shutting one-
self in one's closet, by a withdrawal from the
world, and that, so it would appear, is just the
mistake so many would-be fiction writers allow
themselves. They would make the art of the
novelist an aristocracy, a thing exclusive, to
be guarded from contact with the vulgar,
humdrum, bread-and-butter business of life,
to be kept unspotted from the world, consider-
ing it the result of inspirations, of exaltations,
of subtleties and — above all things — of refine-
ment, a sort of velvet jacket affair, a studio
hocus-pocus, a thing loved of women and of
esthetes.
What a folly ! Of all the arts it is the most
virile; of all the arts it will not, will not, will
not flourish indoors. Dependent solely upon
fidelity to life for existence, it must be practised
in the very heart's heart of life, on the street
corner, in the market-place, not in the studios.
God enlighten us ! It is not an affair of women
and esthetes, and the muse of American fiction
is no chaste, delicate, superfine mademoi-
Novelists of the Future 209
selle of delicate poses and "elegant" attitudin-
izings, but a robust, red-armed bonne femme,
who rough-shoulders her way among men and
among affairs, who finds a healthy pleasure in
the jostlings of the mob and a hearty delight
in the honest, rough-and-tumble, Anglo-Saxon
give-and-take knockabout that for us means
life. Choose her, instead of the sallow, pale-
faced statue-creature, with the foolish tablets
and foolish, upturned eyes, and she will lead
you as brave a march as ever drum tapped to.
Stay at her elbow and obey her as she tells you
to open your eyes and ears and heart, and as you
go she will show things wonderful beyond
wonder in this great, new, blessed country of
ours, will show you a life untouched, untried,
full of new blood and promise and vigour.
She is a Child of the People, this muse of our
fiction of the future, and the wind of a new
country, a new heaven and a new earth is in
her face and has blown her hair from out the
fillets that the Old World muse has bound across
her brow, so that it is all in disarray. The tan
of the sun is on her cheeks, and the dust of the
highway is thick upon her buskin, and the
elbowing of many men has torn the robe of her,
and her hands are hard with the grip of many
things. She is hail-fellow-well-met with every
one she meets, unashamed to know the clown
2io The Responsibilities of the Novelist
and unashamed to face the king, a hardy,
vigorous girl, with an arm as strong as a man's
and a heart as sensitive as a child's.
Believe me, she will lead you far from the
studios and the esthetes, the velvet jackets
and the uncut hair, far from the sexless crea-
tures who cultivate their little art of writing
as the fancier cultivates his orchid. Tramping
along, then, with a stride that will tax your best
paces, she will lead you — if you are humble
with her and honest with her — straight into
a World of Working Men, crude of speech, swift
of action, strong of passion, straight to the heart
of a new life, on the borders of a new time, and
there and there only will you learn to know
the stuff of which must come the American
fiction of the future.
A PLEA FOR ROMANTIC FICTION
A PLEA FOR ROMANTIC FICTION
T ET us at the start make a distinction.
Observe that one speaks of romanti-
cism and not sentimentalism. One claims that
the latter is as distinct from the former as is
that other form of art which is called Realism.
Romance has been often put upon and over-
. burdened by being forced to bear the onus of
abuse that by right should fall to sentiment;
but the two should be kept very distinct, for
a very high and illustrious place will be claimed
for romance, while sentiment will be handed
down the scullery stairs.
Many people to-day are composing mere
sentimentalism, and calling it and causing it to
be called romance; so with those who are too
busy to think much upon these subjects, but
who none the less love honest literature,
Romance, too, has fallen into disrepute.
Consider now the cut-and-thrust stories.
They are all labeled Romances, and it is
very easy to get the impression that Romance
must be an affair of cloaks and daggers,
or moonlight and golden hair. But this is
not so at all. The true Romance is a
213
214 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
more serious business than this. It is not
merely a conjurer's trick-box, full of flimsy
quackeries, tinsel and claptraps, meant
only to amuse, and relying upon deception to
do even that. Is it not something better than
this? Can we not see in it an instrument,
keen, finely tempered, flawless — an instrument
with which we may go straight through the
clothes and tissues and wrappings of flesh down
deep into the red, living heart of things ?
Is all this too subtle, too merely speculative
and intrinsic, too precieuse and nice and
" literary " ? Devoutly one hopes the contrary.
So much is made of so-called Romanticism in
present-day fiction that the subject seems
worthy of discussion, and a protest against the
misuse of a really noble and honest formula
of literature appeals to be timely — misuse, that
is, in the sense of limited use. Let us suppose
for the moment that a romance can be made
out of a cut-and-thrust business. Good
Heavens, are there no other things that are
romantic, even in this — falsely, falsely called
— humdrum world of to-day? Why should it
be that so soon as the novelist addresses himself
— seriously — to the consideration of contem-
porary life he must abandon Romance and take
up that harsh, loveless, colourless, blunt tool
called Realism?
A Plea for Romantic Fiction 215
Now, let us understand at once what is
meant by Romance and what by Realism.
Romance, I take it, is the kind of fiction that
takes cognizance of variations from the type of
normal life. Realism is the kind of fiction
that confines itself to the type of normal life.
According to this definition, then, Romance
may even treat of the sordid, the un-
lovely— as for instance, the novels of M. Zola.
(Zola has been dubbed a Realist, but he is, on the
contrary, the very head of the Romanticists.)
Also, Realism, used as it sometimes is as a term
of reproach, need not be in the remotest sense
or degree offensive, but on the other hand
respectable as a church and proper as a deacon
— as, for instance, the novels of Mr. Howells.
The reason why one claims so much for
Romance, and quarrels so pointedly with
Realism, is that Realism stultifies itself. It
notes only the surface of things. For it, Beauty
is not even skin deep, but only a geometrical
plane, without dimensions and depth, a mere
outside. Realism is very excellent so far as it
goes, but it goes no further than the Realist
himself can actually see, or actually hear.
Realism is minute ; it is the drama of a broken
teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block,
the excitement of an afternoon call, the adven-
ture of an invitation to dinner. It is the visit
2i6 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
to my neighbour's house, a formal visit, from
which I may draw no conclusions. I see my
neighbour and his friends — very, oh, such very !
probable people — and that is all. Realism
bows upon the doormat and goes away and
says to me, as we link arms on the sidewalk:
"That is life." And I say it is not. It is not,
as you would very well see if you took Romance
with you to call upon your neighbour.
Lately you have been taking Romance a
weary journey across the water — ages and
the flood of years — and haling her into the
fusby, musty, worm-eaten, moth-riddled, rust-
corroded "Grandes Salles" of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance, and she has found the
drama of a bygone age for you there. But
would you take her across the street to your
neighbour's front parlour (with the bisque
fisher-boy on the mantel and the photograph
of Niagara Falls on glass hanging in the front
window) ; would you introduce her there ? Not
you. Would you take a walk with her on Fifth
Avenue, or Beacon Street, or Michigan Avenue ?
No, indeed. Would you choose her for a com-
panion of a morning spent in Wall Street, or an
afternoon in the Waldorf-Astoria? You just
guess you would not.
She would be out of place, you say — inap-
propriate. She might be awkward in my
A Plea for Romantic Fiction 217
neighbour's front parlour, and knock over the
little bisque fisher-boy. Well, she might. If
she did, you might find underneath the base of
the statuette, hidden away, tucked away —
what ? God knows. But something that would
be a complete revelation of my neighbour's
secretest life.
So you think Romance would stop in the
front parlour and discuss medicated flannels
and mineral waters with the ladies? Not for
more than five minutes. She would be off up-
stairs with you, prying, peeping, peering into
the closets of the bedroom, into the nursery,
into the sitting-room; yes, and into that little
iron box screwed to the lower shelf of the closet
in the library; and into those compartments
and pigeon-holes of the secretaire in the
study. She would find a heartache (maybe)
between the pillows of the mistress's bed, and
a memory carefully secreted in the master's
deed-box. She would come upon a great hope
amid the books and papers of the study-table
of the young man's room, and — perhaps —
who knows — an affair, or, great Heavens, an
intrigue, in the scented ribbons and gloves and
hairpins of the young lady's bureau. And she
would pick here a little and there a little,
making up a bag of hopes and fears and a pack-
age of joys and sorrows — great ones, mind you
218 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
— and then come down to the front door, and,
stepping out into the street, hand you the bags
and package and say to you — "That is Life !"
Romance does very well in the castles of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance chateaux,
and she has the entree there and is very well
received. That is all well and good. But let
us protest against limiting her to such places
and such times. You will find her, I grant you,
in the chatelaine's chamber and the dungeon
of the man-at-arms; but, if you choose to look
for her, you will find her equally at home in the
brownstone house on the corner and in the
office-building downtown. And this very day,
in this very hour, she is sitting among the rags
and wretchedness, the dirt and despair of the
tenements of the East Side of New York.
" What ? " I hear you say, " look for Romance
• — the lady of the silken robes and golden crown,
our beautiful, chaste maiden of soft voice and
gentle eyes — look for her among the vicious
ruffians, male and female, of Allen Street and
Mulberry Bend?" I tell you she is there, and
to your shame be it said you will not know
her in those surroundings. You, the aristo-
crats, who demand the fine linen and the purple
in your fiction ; you, the sensitive, the delicate,
who will associate with your Romance only so
long as she wears a silken gown. You will not
A Plea for Romantic Fiction 219
follow her to the slums, for you believe that
Romance should only amuse and entertain you,
singing you sweet songs and touching the harp
of silver strings with rosy-tipped fingers. If
haply she should call to you from the squalour
of a dive, or the awful degradation of a dis-
orderly house, crying: "Look! listen! This,
too, is life. These, too, are my children ! Look
at them, know them and, knowing, help!"
Should she call thus you would stop your ears ;
you would avert your eyes and you would
answer, "Come from there, Romance. Your
place is not there !" And you would make of
her a harlequin, a tumbler, a sword-dancer,
when, as a matter of fact, she should be by
right divine a teacher sent from God.
She will not often wear the robe of silk, the
gold crown, the jeweled shoon; will not always
sweep the silver harp. An iron note is hers
if so she choose, and coarse garments, and
stained hands; and, meeting her thus, it is for
you to know her as she passes — know her for
the same young queen of the blue mantle
and lilies. She can teach you if you will be
humble to learn — teach you by showing.
God help you if at last you take from Romance
her mission of teaching; if you do not believe
that she has a purpose — a nobler purpose and a
mightier than mere amusement, mere enter-
22O The Responsibilities of ike Novelist
tainment. Let Realism do the entertaining
with its meticulous presentation of teacups,
rag carpets, wall-paper and haircloth sofas,
stopping with these, going no deeper than it
sees, choosing the ordinary, the untroubled,
the commonplace.
But to Romance belongs the wide world for
range, and the unplumbed depths of the human
heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems
of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia
of the soul of man. You, the indolent, must
not always be amused. What matter the
silken clothes, what matter the prince's houses ?
Romance, too, is a teacher, and if — throwing
aside the purple — she wears the camel' s-hair
and feeds upon the locusts, it is to cry aloud
unto the people, "Prepare ye the way of the
Lord; make straight his path."
A PROBLEM IN FICTION
A PROBLEM IN FICTION
OO many people — writers more especially
- — claim stridently and with a deal of
gesturing that because a thing has happened
it is therefore true. They have written a
story, let us say, and they bring it to you to
criticize. You lay your finger upon a certain
passage and say "Not true to life." The
author turns on you and then annihilates you
— in his own mind — with the words, "But it
actually happened." Of course, then, it must
be true. On the contrary, it is accurate only.
For the assumption is, that truth is a higher
power of accuracy — that the true thing includes
the accurate; and assuming this, the authors
of novels — that are not successful — suppose
that if they are accurate, if they tell the thing
just as they saw it, that they are truthful. It
is not difficult to show that a man may be
as accurate as the spectroscope and yet lie like
a Chinese diplomat. As for instance: Let us
suppose you have never seen a sheep, never
heard of sheep, don't know sheep from shav-
ings. It devolves upon me to enlighten your
223
224 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
ignorance. I go out into the field and select
from the flock a black sheep, bring it before
you, and, with the animal there under our
eyes, describe it in detail, faithfully, omitting
nothing, falsifying nothing, exaggerating noth-
ing. I am painfully accurate. But you go
away with the untrue conviction that all sheep
are black ! I have been accurate, but I have
not been true.
So it is with very, very many novels, written
with all earnestness and seriousness. Every
incident has happened in real life, and because
it is picturesque, because it is romantic, because,
in a word, it is like some other novel, it is seized
upon at once, and serves as the nucleus of a tale.
Then, because this tale fails of success, because
it fails to impress, the author blames the public,
not himself. He thinks he has gone to life for
his material, and so must be original, new and
true. It is not so. Life itself is not always
true ; strange as it may seem, you may be able
to say that life is not always true to life — from
the point of view of the artist. It happened
once that it was my unfortunate duty to tell
a certain man of the violent death of his only
brother, whom he had left well and happy but
an hour before. This is how he took it: He
threw up both hands and staggered back, pre-
cisely as they do in melodrama, exclaiming all
A Problem in Fiction 225
in a breath: "Oh, my God! This is terrible!
What will mother say?" You may say what
you please, this man was not true to life.
From the point of view of the teller of tales
he was theatrical, false, untrue, and though the
incident was an actual fact and though the
emotion was real, it had no value as " material,"
and no fiction writer in his senses would have
thought of using it in his story.
Naturally enough it will be asked what, then,
is the standard. How shall the writer guide
himself in the treatment of a pivotal, critical
scene, or how shall the reader judge whether
or not he is true. Perhaps, after all, the word
"seem," and not the word "true," is the most
important. Of course no good novelist, no
good artist, can represent life as it actually is.
Nobody can, for nobody knows. Who is to say
what life actually is ? It seems easy — easy for
us who have it and live in it and see it and hear
it and feel it every millionth part of every
second of the time. I say that life is actually
this or that, and you say it is something else,
and number three says " Lo ! here," and number
four says "Lo! there." Not even science is
going to help you; no two photographs, even,
will convey just the same impression of the
same actuality; and here we are dealing not
with science, but with art, that instantly
226 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
involves the personality of the artist and all
that that means. Even the same artist will
not see the same thing twice exactly alike.
His personality is one thing to-day and another
thing to-morrow — is one thing before dinner
and another thing after it. How, then, to
determine what life actually is ?
The point is just this. In the fine arts we
do not care one little bit about what life actually
is, but what it looks like to an interesting,
impressionable man, and if he tells his story
or paints his picture so that the majority of
intelligent people will say, "Yes, that must
have been just about what would have hap-
pened under those circumstances," he is true.
His accuracy cuts no figure at all. He need
not be accurate if he does not choose to be.
If he sees fit to be inaccurate in order to make
his point — so only his point be the conveying
of a truthful impression — that is his affair. We
have nothing to do with that. Consider the
study of a French cuirassier by Detaille ; where
the sunlight strikes the brown coat of the horse,
you will see, if you look close, a mere smear of
blue — light blue. This is inaccurate. The
horse is not blue, nor has he any blue spots.
Stand at the proper distance and the blue smear
resolves itself into the glossy reflection of the
sun, and the effect is true.
A Problem in Fiction 227
And in fiction: Take the fine scene in
"Ivanhoe," where Rebecca, looking from the
window, describes the assault upon the outer
walls of the castle to the wounded knight lying
on the floor in the room behind her. If you
stop and think, you will see that Rebecca
never could have found such elaborate language
under the stress of so great excitement — -those
cleverly managed little climaxes in each phrase,
building up to the great climax of the para-
graph, all the play of rhetoric, all the nice chain
and adjustment of adjectives; she could not
possibly have done it. Neither you nor I, nor
any of us, with all the thought and time and
labour at our command, could have ever written
the passage. But is it not admirably true —
true as the truth itself ? It is not accurate : it
is grossly, ludicrously inaccurate; but the fire
and leap and vigour of it; there is where the
truth is. Scott wanted you to get an impres-
sion of that assault on the barbican, and you
do get it. You can hear those axes on the outer
gate as plainly as Rebecca could; you can see
the ladders go up, can hear them splinter, can
see and feel and know all the rush and trample
and smashing of that fine fight, with the Fetter-
lock Knight always to the fore, as no merely
accurate description — accurate to five points
of decimals — could ever present it.
228 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
So that one must remember the distinction,
and claim no more for accuracy than it deserves
— and that's but little. Anybody can be
accurate — the man with the foot-rule is that.
Accuracy is the attainment of small minds,
the achievement of the commonplace, a mere
machine-made thing that comes with nig-
gardly research and ciphering and mensuration
and the multiplication table, good in its place,
so only the place is very small. In fiction it
can under certain circumstances be dispensed
with altogether. It is not a thing to be striven
for. To be true is the all-important business,
and, once attaining that, "all other things shall
be added unto you." Paint the horse pea-
green if it suits your purpose ; fill the mouth of
Rebecca with gasconades and rhodomontades
interminable: these things do not matter. It
is truth that matters, and the point is whether
the daubs of pea-green will look like horseflesh
and the mouth-filling words create the impres-
sion of actual battle.
WHY WOMEN SHOULD WRITE
THE BEST NOVELS
WHY WOMEN SHOULD WRITE THE
BEST NOVELS
TT is rather curious upon reflection and upon
A looking over the rank and file of achieve-
ment during the period of recorded history,
to observe that of all the occupations at first
exclusively followed by men, that of writing
has been — in all civilizations and among all
people — one of the very first to be successfully
— mark the qualification of the adverb — to be
successfully invaded by women. We hear of
women who write poetry long before we hear
of women who paint pictures or perform upon
musical instruments or achieve distinction
upon the stage.
It would seem as if, of all the arts, that of
writing is the one to which women turn the
quickest. Great success in the sciences or in
mercantile pursuits is, of course, out of the
question, so that — as at the first — it may be
said, speaking largely, that of all the masculine
occupations, that of writing is the first to be
adopted by women.
If it is the first it must be because it is the
easiest. Now to go very far back to the
231
232 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
earliest beginnings, all occupations, whether
artistic or otherwise, were the prerogative of
the male; considering this fact, I say, does it
not follow, or would not the inference be strong,
that — given an equal start — women would
write more readily than men, would do so
because they could do so; that writing is
a feminine — not accomplishment merely — but
gift.
So that the whole matter leads up to the point
one wishes to make, namely, that here, in our
present day and time, it should be easier for
women to write well than for men. And
as writing to-day means the writing of fiction,
we arrive, somewhat deviously and perhaps —
after jumping many gaps and weak spots en
route — a little lamely, at the very last result of
all, which is this: Women should be able to
write better novels than men.
But under modern conditions there are
many more reasons for this success of women
in fiction than merely a natural inherent gift
of expression.
One great reason is leisure. The average
man, who must work for a living, has no time
to write novels, much less to get into that
frame of mind, or to assume that mental
attitude by means of which he is able to see
possibilities for fictitious narrative in the
Why Women Should Write the Best Novels 233
life around him. But, as yet, few women
(compared with the armies of male workers)
have to work for a living, and it is an unusual
state of affairs in which the average woman of
moderate circumstances could not, if she would,
take from three to four hours a day from her
household duties to devote to any occupation
she deemed desirable.
Another reason is found, one believes, in
the nature of women's education. From almost
the very first the young man studies with an
eye to business or to a profession. In many
State colleges nowadays all literary courses,
except the most elementary — which, indeed,
have no place in collegiate curriculums — are
optional. But what girls' seminary does not
prescribe the study of literature through all
its three or four years, making of this study a
matter of all importance ? And while the courses
of literature do not, by any manner of means,
make a novelist, they familiarize the student
with style and the means by which words are
put together. The more one reads the easier
one writes.
Then, too (though this reason lies not so
much in modern conditions as in basic princi-
ples), there is the matter of temperament.
The average man is a rectangular, square-cut,
matter-of-fact, sober-minded animal who does
234 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
not receive impressions easily, who is not
troubled with emotions and has no over-
mastering desire to communicate his sensations
to anybody. But the average woman is just
the reverse of all these. She is impressionable,
emotional and communicative. And impres-
sionableness, emotionality and communicative-
ness are three very important qualities of mind
that make for novel writing.
The modern woman, then, in a greater
degree than her contemporaneous male, has
the leisure for novel writing, has the education
and has the temperament. She should be
able to write better novels, and as a matter
of fact she does not. It is, of course, a con-
ceded fact that there have been more great men
novelists than women novelists, and that to-day
the producers of the best fiction are men and
not women. There are probably more women
trying to write novels than there are men, but
for all this it must be admitted that the ranks
of the "arrived" are recruited from the razor
contingent.
Why, then, with such a long start and with
so many advantages of temperament, opportu-
nity and training should it be that women do not
write better novels than men ?
One believes that the answer is found in
the fact that life is more important than liter-
Why Women Should Write the Best Novels 235
ature, and in the wise, wise, old, old adage that
experience is the best teacher. Of all the
difficult things that enter into the learning of a
most difficult profession, the most difficult of all
for the intended novelist to acquire is the
fact that life is better than literature. The
amateur will say this with conviction, will
preach it in public and practise the exact
reverse in private. But it still remains true
that all the temperament, all the sensitiveness
to impressions, all the education in the world
will not help one little, little bit in the writing
of the novel if life itself, the crude, the raw, the
vulgar, if you will, is not studied. An hour's
experience is worth ten years of study — of
reading other people's books. But this fact
is ignored, and the future writer of what it is
hoped will be the great novel of his day and age
studies the thoughts and products of some
other writer, of some other great novel, of some
other day and age, in the hope that thereby
much may be learned. And much will be learned
— very much, indeed — of the methods of con-
struction ; and if the tyro only has wits enough
to study the great man's formula, well and good.
But the fascination of a great story-writer —
especially upon the young, untried little story-
writer — is strong, and before the latter is well
aware he is taking from the big man that which
236 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
he has no right to take. He is taking his code
of ethics, his view of life, his personality, even
to the very incidents and episodes of his story.
He is studying literature and not life.
If he had gone direct to life itself, all would
have been different. He would have developed
in his own code, his own personality, and he
would have found incidents and episodes that
were new — yes, and strikingly forceful, better
than any he could have imagined or stolen,
and which were all his own. In the end, if the
gods gave him long life and a faculty of appli-
cation, he would have evolved into something
of a writer of fiction.
All this digression is to try to state the
importance of actual life and actual experience,
and it bears upon the subject in hand in this,
that women who have all the other qualifica-
tions of good novelists are, because of nature
and character that invariably goes with these
qualifications, shut away from the study of,
and the association with, the most important
thing of all for them — real life. Even making
allowances for the emancipation of the New
Woman, the majority of women still lead, in
comparison with men, secluded lives. The
woman who is impressionable is by reason
of this very thing sensitive (indeed, sensi-
tiveness and impressionableness mean almost
Why Women Should Write the Best Novels 237
the same thing), and it is inconceivably hard for
the sensitive woman to force herself into the
midst of that great, grim complication of men's
doings that we call life. And even admitting
that she finds in herself the courage to do
this, she lacks the knowledge to use knowl-
edge thus gained. The faculty of selection
comes even to men only after many years of
experience.
So much for causes exterior to herself, and it
is well to admit at once that the exterior causes
are by far the most potent and the most impor-
tant ; but there are perhaps causes to be found
in the make-up of the woman herself which
keep her from success in fiction. Is it not a fact
that protracted labour of the mind tells upon
a woman quicker than upon a man. Be it
understood that no disparagement, no invidious
comparison is intended. Indeed, it is quite
possible that her speedier mental fatigue is due
to the fact that the woman possesses the more
highly specialized organ.
A man may grind on steadily for an almost
indefinite period, when a woman at the same
task would begin, after a certain point, to "feel
her nerves," to chafe, to fret, to try to do too
much, to polish too highly, to develop more
perfectly. Then come fatigue, harassing
doubts, more nerves, a touch of hysteria occa-
238 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
sionally, exhaustion, and in the end complete
discouragement and a final abandonment of
the enterprise: and who shall say how many
good, even great, novels have remained half
written, to be burned in the end, because their
women authors mistook lack of physical
strength for lack of genuine ability ?
SIMPLICITY IN ART
SIMPLICITY IN ART
upon a time I had occasion to buy
so uninteresting a thing as a silver
soup-ladle. The salesman at the silversmith's
was obliging and for my inspection brought
forth quite an array of ladles. But my purse
was flaccid, anemic, and I must pick and
choose with all the discrimination in the world.
I wanted to make a brave showing with my
gift — to get a great deal for my money. I
went through a world of soup-ladles — ladles
with gilded bowls, with embossed handles, with
chased arabesques, but there were none to my
taste. "Or perhaps," says the salesman,
"you would care to look at something like
this, ' ' and he brought out a ladle that was as
plain and as unadorned as the unclouded sky —
and about as beautiful. Of all the others this
was the most to my liking. But the price ! ah,
that anemic purse ; and I must put it from me !
It was nearly double the cost of any of the rest.
And when I asked why, the salesman said :
"You see, in this highly ornamental ware
the flaws of the material don't show, and you
241
242 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
can cover up a blow-hole or the like by wreaths
and beading. But this plain ware has got to
be the very best. Every defect is apparent. "
And there, if you please, is a conclusive com-
ment upon the whole business — a final basis of
comparison of all things, whether commercial
or artistic; the bare dignity of the unadorned
that may stand before the world all unashamed,
panoplied rather than clothed in the conscious-
ness of perfection. We of this latter day, we
painters and poets and writers — artists — must
labour with all the wits of us, all the strength
of us, and with all that we have of ingenuity
and perseverance to attain simplicity. But
it has not always been so. At the very earliest,
men — forgotten, ordinary men — were born with
an easy, unblurred vision that to-day we would
hail as marvelous genius. Suppose, for instance,
the New Testament was all unwritten and one
of us were called upon to tell the world that
Christ was born, to tell of how we had seen
Him, that this was the Messiah. How the
adjectives would marshal upon the page, how
the exclamatory phrases would cry out, how
we would elaborate and elaborate, and how
our rhetoric would flare and blazen till — so we
should imagine — the ear would ring and the
very eye would be dazzled; and even then we
would believe that our words were all so few
Simplicity in Art 243
and feeble. It is beyond words, we should
vociferate. So it would be. That is very
true — words of ours. Can you not see how we
should dramatize it? We would make a point
of the transcendent stillness of the hour, of the
deep blue of the Judean midnight, of the lip-
lapping of Galilee, the murmur of Jordan, the
peacefulness of sleeping Jerusalem. Then the
stars, the descent of the angel, the shepherds —
all the accessories. And our narrative would
be as commensurate with the subject as the
flippant smartness of a "bright" reporter in
the Sistine chapel. We would be striving to
cover up our innate incompetence, our impo-
tence to do justice to the mighty theme by
elaborateness of design and arabesque intricacy
of rhetoric.
But on the other hand — listen:
"The days were accomplished that she
should be delivered, and she brought forth
her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling
clothes and laid him in a manger, because there
was no room for them in the inn. "
Simplicity could go no further. Absolutely
not one word unessential, not a single adjective
that is not merely descriptive. The whole
matter stated with the terseness of a military
report, and yet — there is the epic, the world
epic, beautiful, majestic, incomparably digni-
244 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
fied, and no ready writer, no Milton nor Shak-
spere, with all the wealth of their vocabularies,
with all the resources of their genius, with all
their power of simile or metaphor, their pomp
of eloquence or their royal pageantry of hexa-
meters, could produce the effect contained in
these two simple declarative sentences.
The mistake that we little people are so
prone to make is this: that the more intense
the emotional quality of the scene described,
the more "vivid," the more exalted, the more
richly coloured we suppose should be the
language.
When the crisis of the tale is reached there
is where we like the author to spread himself,
to show the effectiveness of his treatment.
But if we would only pause to take a moment's
thought we must surely see that the simplest,
even the barest statement of fact is only not
all-sufficient but all-appropriate.
Elaborate phrase, rhetoric, the intimacy
of metaphor and allegory and simile is for-
givable for the unimportant episodes where
the interest of the narrative is languid; where
we are willing to watch the author's ingenuity
in the matter of scrolls and fretwork and
mosaics-rococo work. But when the catas-
trophe comes, when the narrative swings clear
upon its pivot and we are lifted with it from
Simplicity in Art 245
out the world of our surroundings, we want
to forget the author. We want no adjectives
to blur our substantives. The substantives
may now speak for themselves. We want no
metaphor, no simile to make clear the matter.
If at this moment of drama and intensity the
matter is not of itself preeminently clear no
verbiage, however ingenious, will clarify it.
Heighten the effect. Does exclamation and
heroics on the part of the bystanders ever make
the curbstone drama more poignant? Who
would care to see Niagara through coloured
fire and calcium lights.
The simple treatment, whether of a piece
of silversmith work or of a momentous religious
epic, is always the most difficult of all. It
demands more of the artist. The unskilful
story-teller as often as not tells the story to
himself as well as to his hearers as he goes along.
Not sure of exactly how he is to reach the end,
not sure even of the end itself, he must feel his
way from incident to incident, from page to
page, fumbling, using many words, repeating
himself. To hide the confusion there is one
resource — elaboration, exaggerated outline,
violent colour, till at last the unstable outline
disappears under the accumulation, and the
reader is to be so dazzled with the wit of the
dialogue, the smartness of the repartee, the
246 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
felicity of the diction, that he will not see the
gaps and lapses in the structure itself — just
as the "nobby" drummer wears a wide and
showy scarf to conceal a soiled shirt-bosom.
But in the master-works of narrative there
is none of this shamming, no shoddyism, no
humbug. There is little more than bare out-
line, but in the care with which it is drawn,
how much thought, what infinite pains go to
the making of each stroke, so that when it is
made it falls just at the right place and exactly
in its right sequence. This attained, what need
is there for more? Comment is superfluous.
If the author make the scene appear terrible
to the reader he need not say in himself or in
the mouth of some protagonist, " It is terrible !"
If the picture is pathetic so that he who reads
must weep, how superfluous, how intrusive
should the author exclaim, "It was pitiful to
the point of tears. " If beautiful, we do not
want him to tell us so. We want him to make
it beautiful and our own appreciation will
supply the adjectives.
Beauty, the ultimate philosophical beauty,
is not a thing of elaboration, but on the con-
trary of an almost barren nudity: a jewel may
be an exquisite gem, a woman may have a
beautiful arm, but the bracelet does not make
the arm more beautiful, nor the arm the brace-
Simplicity in Art 247
let. One must admire them separately, and
the moment that the jewel ceases to have a
value or a reason upon the arm it is better in
the case, where it may enjoy an undivided
attention.
But after so many hundreds of years of art
and artists, of civilization and progress, we have
got so far away from the sane old homely
uncomplex way of looking out at the world
that the simple things no longer charm, and
the simple declarative sentence, straightforward,
plain, seems flat to our intellectual palate — flat
and tasteless and crude.
What we would now call simple our forbears
would look upon as a farrago of gimcrackery,
and all our art — the art of the better-minded
of us — is only a striving to get back to the
unblurred, direct simplicity of those writers
who could see that the Wonderful, the Coun-
selor, the mighty God, the Prince of Peace,
could be laid in a manger and yet be the
Saviour of the world.
It is this same spirit, this disdaining of sim-
plicity that has so warped and inflated The
First Story, making of it a pomp, an affair of
gold-embroidered vestments and costly choirs,
of marbles, of jeweled windows and of incense,
unable to find the thrill as formerly in the plain
and humble stable, and the brown-haired,
248 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
grave-eyed peasant girl, with her little baby;
unable to see the beauty in the crumbling mud
walls, the low-ceiled interior, where the only
incense was the sweet smell of the cow's breath,
the only vestments the swaddling clothes,
rough, coarse-fibered, from the hand-looms of
Nazareth, the only pomp the scanty gifts of
three old men, and the only chanting the
crooning of a young mother holding her first-
born babe upon her breast.
SALT AND SINCERITY
SALT AND SINCERITY
I
TF the signs of the times may be read
aright, and the future forecasted, the
volume of short stories is in a fair way of
becoming a "rare book." Fewer and fewer
of this kind of literature are published every
year, and only within the last week one of the
foremost of the New York publishers has said
that, so far as the material success was con-
cerned, he would prefer to undertake a book
of poems rather than a book of stories. Also
he explains why. And this is the interesting
thing. One has always been puzzled to account
for this lapse from a former popularity of a
style of fiction certainly legitimate and incon-
testably entertaining. The publisher in ques-
tion cites the cheap magazines — the monthlies
and weeklies — as the inimical factors. The
people go to them for their short stories, not
to the cloth-bound volumes for sale at a dollar
or a dollar and a half. Why not, if the cheap
magazines give "just as good"? Often, too,
they give the very same stories which, later,
are republished in book form. As the case
251
252 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
stands now, any fairly diligent reader of two
or three of the more important monthlies and
weeklies may anticipate the contents of the
entire volume, and very naturally he cannot
be expected to pay a dollar for something he
already has.
Or even suppose — as is now generally
demanded by the publisher — the author adds
to the forthcoming collection certain hitherto
unpublished stories. Even this does not tempt
the buyer. Turning over the leaves at the
bookseller's, he sees two, three, five, half a
dozen familiar titles. "Come," says he, "I
have read three-fourths of this book already.
I have no use for it. "
It is quite possible that this state of affairs
will produce important results. It is yet,
perhaps, too soon to say, but it is not outside
the range of the probable that, in America
at least, it will, in time to come, engender a
decay in the quality of the short story. It
may be urged that the high prices paid by
periodicals to the important short-story writers
— the best men — will still act as a stimulus to
production. But this does not follow by any
means. Authors are queer cattle. They do
not always work for money, but sometimes for
a permanent place in the eyes of the world.
Books give them this — not fugitive short
Salt and Sincerity 253
stories, published here and there, and at
irregular intervals. Reputations that have
been made by short stories published in periodi-
cals may be counted upon the ringers of one
hand. The "life of a novel" — to use a trade
term — is to a certain extent indeterminable.
The life of a short story, be it never so excellent,
is prolonged only till the next issue of the
periodical in which it has appeared. If the
periodical is a weekly it will last a week, if a
monthly a month — and not a day more. If
very good, it will create a demand for another
short story by the same author, but that one
particular contribution, the original one, is
irretrievably and hopelessly dead.
If the author is in literature "for his own
pocket every time, " he is generally willing to
accept the place of a short-story writer. If
he is one of the "best men," working for a
"permanent place," he will turn his attention
and time, his best efforts, to the writing of
novels, reverting to the short story only when
necessary for the sake of boiling the Pot and
chasing the Wolf. He will abandon the field
to the inferior men, or enter it only to dispose
of "copy" which does not represent him at his
best. And, as a result, the quality of the short
story will decline more and more.
So, "taking one consideration with another, "
254 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
it may be appropriate to inquire if it is not
possible that the American short story is liable
to decline in quality and standard of excellence.
And now comes again this question addressed
to certain authors, " Which book do you con-
sider your best?" and a very industrious and
painstaking person is giving the answer to the
world.
To what end it is difficult to see. Who cares
which of the "Waverleys" Sir Walter thought
his best? or which of the Rougon-Maquart
M. Zola favours the most? The author's
point of view is very different from yours —
the reader's. Which one do you think the
best? That's the point. Do you not see that
in the author's opinion the novel he is working
on at the moment, or which is in press and
about to appear — in fine, the last one written —
is for a very long time the best he has done?
He would be a very poor kind of novelist if he
did not think that.
And even in retrospect his opinion as to
"his best book" is not necessarily final. For
he will see good points in "unsuccessful"
novels that the public and critics have never
and will never discover; and also defects in
what the world considers his masterpiece that
for him spoil the entire story. His best novel
is, as was said, the last he has written, or — and
Salt and Sincerity 255
this more especially — the one he is going to
write. For to a certain extent this is true of
every author, whether fiction writer or not.
Though he very often does better than he thinks
he can, he never does so well as he knows he might.
His best book is the one that he never quite
succeeds in getting hold of firmly enough to
commit to paper. It is always just beyond
him. Next year he is going to think it out,
or the next after that, and instead heTcompro-
mises on something else, and his chef d'ceuvre
is always a little ahead of him. If this, too,
were not so, he would be a poor kind of writer.
So that it seems to me the most truthful answer
to the question, "What is your best book?'
would be, "The one I shall never write. "
Another ideal that such of the "people who
imagine a vain thing" have long been pursuing
is an English Academy of letters, and now
that "the British Academy for the promotion
of Historical, Philosophical and Philological
studies" has been proposed, the old discussion
is revived, and especially in England there is
talk of a British Academy, something on the
same lines as the Academie Frangaise, which
shall tend to promote and reward particularly
the production of good fiction. In a word,
it would be a distinction reserved only for the
worthy, a charmed circle that would open only
256 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
to the elite upon the vote of those already
admitted. The proposition strikes one as pre-
eminently ridiculous. Literature is of all arts
the most democratic; it is of, by and for the
people in a fuller measure than even govern-
ment itself. And one makes the assertion
without forgetting that fine mouth-filling
phrase, the "aristocracy of letters." The
survival of the fittest is as good in the evolution
of our literature as of our bodies, and the best
"academy" for the writers of the United
States is, after all, and in the last analysis, to
be found in the judgment of the people, exer-
cised throughout the lapse of a considerable
time. For, give the people time enough, and
they will always decide justly.
It was in connection with this talk about an
"Academy" that Mr. Hall Caine has made the
remark that "no academic study of a thing
so variable, emotional and independent as the
imaginative writer's art could be anything but
mischievous." One is inclined to take excep-
tion to the statement. Why should the aca-
demic study of the principles of writing fiction
be mischievous? Is it not possible to codify
in some way the art of construction of novels
so that they may be studied to advantage?
This has, of course, never been done. But one
believes that, if managed carefully and with a
Salt and Sincerity 257
proper disregard of "set forms" and hampering
conventions, it would be possible to start and
maintain a school of fiction-writing in the
most liberal sense of the word " school. " Why
should it be any more absurd than the painting
schools and music schools ? Is the art of music,
say, any less variable, less emotional, less
independent, less imaginative than the fiction-
writer's. Heretical as the assertion may ap-
pear, one is thoroughly convinced that the art
of novel writing (up to a certain point, bien
entendu) can be acquired by instruction just as
readily and with results just as satisfactory
and practical as the arts of painting, sculpture,
music, and the like. The art of fiction is, in
general, based upon four qualities of mind:
observation, imagination, invention and sym-
pathy. Certainly the first two are " acquired
characters. " Kindergarten children the world
over are acquiring them every day. Invention
is immensely stimulated by observation and
imagination, while sympathy is so universally
a fundamental quality with all sorts and condi-
tions of men and women — especially the latter
— that it needs but little cultivation. Why,
then, would it be impossible for a few of our
older, more seriously minded novelists to
launch a School of Instruction in the Art
of Composition — just as Eougereau, Lefevre,
258 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
Boulanger and Tony Robert Fleury founded
Julien's in Paris ?
At present the stimulus to, and even the
manner of, production of very much of Ameri-
can fiction is in the hands of the publishers.
No one not intimately associated with any one
of the larger, more important "houses'* can
have any idea of the influence of the publisher
upon latter-day fiction. More novels are writ-
ten— practically — to order than the public has
any notion of. The publisher again and again
picks out the man (one speaks, of course, of
the younger generation), suggests the theme,
and exercises, in a sense, all the functions of
instructor during the period of composition.
In the matter of this "picking out of the man"
it is rather curious to note a very radical change
that has come about in the last five years.
Time was when the publisher waited for the
unknown writer to come to him with his manu-
script. But of late the Unknown has so fre-
quently developed, under exploitation and by
direct solicitation of the publisher, into a
"money-making proposition" of such formid-
able proportions that there is hardly a publish-
ing house that does not now hunt him out with
all the resources at its command. Certain
fields are worked with the thoroughness,
almost, of a political canvass, and if a given
Salt and Sincerity 259
State — as, for instance, Indiana — has suddenly
evolved into a region of great literary activity,
it is open to suspicion that it is not because
there is any inherent literary quality in the
people of the place greater than in other States,
but that certain firms of publishers are "work-
ing the ground."
It might not have been altogether out of
place if upon the Victor Hugo monument
which has just been unveiled in Paris there had
been inscribed this, one of the most important
of the great Frenchman's maxims :
"Les livres n'ont jamais faites du mal";
and I think that in the last analysis, this is the
most fitting answer to Mr. Carnegie, who, in
his address before the Author's Club, put him-
self on record as willing to exclude from the
libraries he is founding all books not three years
old. No doubt bad books have a bad influence,
but bad books are certainly better than no
books at all. For one must remember that the
worst books are not printed — the really tawdry,
really pernicious, really evil books. These are
throttled in manuscript by the publishers, who
must be in a sense public censors. No book,
be assured, goes to press but that there is —
oh, hidden away like a grain of mustard —
some bit, some modicum, some tiny kernel of
260 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
good in it. Perhaps it is not that seed of good-
ness that the cultured, the fastidious care much
about. Perhaps the discriminating would call
it a platitude. But one is willing to believe
that somewhere, somehow, this atom of real
worth makes itself felt — and that's a beginning.
It will create after awhile a taste for reading.
And a taste for reading is a more important
factor in a nation's literary life than the birth
of a second Shakespeare.
It is the people, after all, who "make a litera-
ture. " If they read, the few, the " illuminati, "
will write. But first must come the demand —
come from the people, the Plain People, the
condemned bourgeoisie. The select circles of
the elite, the "studio" hangers-on, the refined,
will never, never, clamour they never so loudly,
toil they never so painfully, produce the Great
Writer. The demand which he is to supply
comes from the Plain People — from the masses,
and not from the classes. There is more signifi-
cance as to the ultimate excellence of American
letters in the sight of the messenger boy
devouring his "Old Sleuths" and "Deadwood
Dicks" and " Boy Detectives, " with an earnest,
serious absorption, than in the spectacle of a
"reading circle" of dilletanti coquetting with
Verlaine and pretending that they understand.
By the same token, then, is it not better to
Salt and Sincerity 261
welcome and rejoice over this recent "literary-
deluge" than to decry it? One is not sure
it is not a matter for self-gratulation — not a
thing to deplore and vilify. The "people" are
reading, that is the point ; it is not the point that
immature, untrained writers are flooding the
counters with their productions. The more
the Plain People read the more they will dis-
criminate. It is inevitable, and by and by
they will demand "something better." It is
impossible to read a book without formulating
an opinion upon it. Even the messenger boy
can tell you that, in his judgment, No. 3,666,
"The James Boys Brought to Bay," is more —
or less, as the case may be — exciting than No.
3,667, " The Last of the Fly-by-nights. " Well,
that is something. Is it not better than that
the same boy should be shooting craps around
the corner? Take his dime novel from him,
put him in the "No Book" condition — and
believe me, he will revert to the craps. And
so it is higher up the scale. In the name of
American literature, let the Plain People read,
anything — anything, whether it is three days
or three years old. Mr. Carnegie will not
educate the public taste by shutting his libraries
upon recent fiction. The public taste will
educate itself by much reading, not by restricted
reading. "Books have never done harm,"
262 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
Victor Hugo said it, and a bad book — that is
to say, a poor, cheap, ill- written, " trashy"
book — is not after all so harmful as "no
book" at all.
Later on, when the people have learned dis-
crimination by much reading, it will not be
necessary to bar fiction not three years old
from the libraries, for by then the people will
demand the " something better," and the
writers will have to supply it — or disappear,
giving place to those who can, and then the
literary standards will be raised.
II
IN a recent number of his periodical, the
editor of Harper's Weekly prints a letter
received from a gentleman who deplores the
fact that the participants in the Harvard-
Yale track teams are given a great place in
the daily newspapers while — by implication —
his son, an arduous student and winner of a
"Townsend prize," is completely and definitely
ignored. "I could not but think of my son/'
writes the gentleman, "a Yale Senior who, as
one of the results of nine years' devotion to
study, won a Townsend prize." One will ask
the reader to consider this last statement. The
publicity of the college athletes is not the point
here. The point is "nine years' devotion to
study" and — "a Townsend prize." Nine years
— think of it — the best, the most important
of a boy's life given to devoted study ! — not of
Men, not of Life, not of Realities, but of the
books of Other People, mere fatuous, unrea-
soned, pig-headed absorption of ideas at second-
hand. And the result? Not a well-ordered
mind, not a well-regulated reasoning machine,
263
264 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
not a power of appreciation, not an ability to
create. None of these, but — Great Heavens ! —
a Townsend Prize, a rectangular piece of the skin
of a goat, dried and cured and marked with
certain signs and symbols by means of a black
pigment ; this and a disk of the same metal the
Uganda warrior hangs in his ears. A Townsend
Prize. And for this a young American living
in the twentieth century, sane, intelligent,
healthful, has pored over Other People's books,
has absorbed Other People's notions, has
wearied his brain, has weakened his body, has
shut himself from the wide world, has denied
himself, has restrained himself, has stultified
emotion, has in a word buried his talent in the
earth wrapped carefully in a napkin. "And,"
comments the editor, "the boy who won the
Townsend prize for scholarship, if he keeps on,
will some day be honoured by his fellowmen,
when the athletic prize-winner, if he does
nothing else, will be a director of a gymnasium.
The serious worker comes out ahead every time."
But winning Townsend prizes by nine years
of study is, we submit, not serious work,
but serious misuse of most valuable time and
energy. Scholarship? Will we never learn
that times change and that sauce for the
Renaissance goose is not sauce for the New
Century gander ? It is a fine thing, this scholar-
Salt and Sincerity 265
ship, no doubt; but if a man be content with
merely this his scholarship is of as much use and
benefit to his contemporaries as his deftness in
manicuring his ringer nails. The United States
in this year of grace of nineteen hundred and
two does not want and does not need Scholars,
but Men — Men made in the mould of the
Leonard Woods and the Theodore Roosevelts,
Men such as Colonel Waring, Men such as
Booker Washington. The most brilliant schol-
arship attainable by human effort is not,
to-day, worth nine years of any young man's
life. I think it is Nathaniel Hawthorne who
tells the story of a "scholar" who one day,
when a young man, found the tooth of a mam-
moth. He was a student of fossil remains,
and in his enthusiasm set out to complete the
skeleton. His mind filled with this one idea,
to the exclusion of all else, he traveled up and
down the world, year after year, picking up
here a vertebra, here a femur, here a rib, here
a clavicle. Years passed ; he came to be an old
man; at last he faced death. He had suc-
ceeded. The monstrous framework was com-
plete. But he looked back upon the sixty years
of his toil and saw that it was a vanity. He
had to show for his life-work — the skeleton of
a mammoth. And, believe this implicitly : if —
as the editor and commentator remarks — if
266 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
the Townsend prize-winner keeps on, this will
be the result, a huge thing no doubt, a thing
that looms big in the eye and in the imagina-
tion, but an empty thing, lifeless, bloodless,
dead; yes and more than dead — extinct; a
mere accumulation of dry bones, propped up
lest it fall to the ground, a thing for the wind
to blow through and the vulgar to gape at.
But in connection with this subject one may
cite so high an authority as Doctor Patton of
Princeton, who has recently said that nowa-
days men do not go to colleges to become
scholars, and that it was time and money
wasted to try to make them such. This is a
good saying and should be taken to heart
by every college faculty between the oceans.
Sooner or later there is bound to come a funda-
mental change in the mode of instruction now
in favour in most American colleges. The
times demand it; the character of the student
body, the character of the undergraduate, is
changing. One chooses to believe that the
college of the end of the present century will be
an institution where only specialized work will
be indulged in. There will be courses in engi-
neering, in electricity, in agriculture, in law,
in chemistry, in biology, in mining, etc., and
the so-called general "literary" or "classical"
courses will be relegated to the limbo of Things
Salt and Sincerity 267
No Longer Useful. Any instructor in collegiate
work will tell you to-day that the men in the
special courses are almost invariably the hard-
est, steadiest, most serious workers. The man
who studies law at college finishes his work a
lawyer, he who studies engineering ends an
engineer, the student of biology graduates
a biologist, the student of chemistry, a chemist.
But the student in the "literary" course does
not — no, not once in a thousand instances —
graduate a literary man. He spends the four
years of his life over a little Greek, a little
Latin, a little mathematics, a little literature,
a little history, a little "theme" writing, and
comes out — just what it would be difficult to
say. But he has in most cases acquired a very-
pronounced distaste for the authors whose
work he has studied in class and lecture-room.
Great names such as those of Carlyle, Macaulay
and De Quincey are associated in his mind
only with tedium. He never will go back to
these books, never read with enjoyment what
once was "work." Even his conscientious-
ness— supposing him to be animated with such
a motive — will trap him and trick him. I do
not think that I shall ever forget the spectacle
and impression of a student in my own Alma
Mater — a little lass of seventeen (the college
was co-educational), with her hair still down
268 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
her back and her shoes yet innocent of heels,
rising in her place in the classroom to read
before a half-hundred of raw boys and unde-
veloped girls — not three months out of the
high school — a solemn and quite unintelligible
"theme" on "The Insincerity of Thomas
Babington Macaulay."
Just at the time of the present writing a
controversy has been started in London literary
circles as to the legitimacy of a reviewer pub-
lishing the whole or parts of the same unsigned
article in two or more periodicals. Mr. Arthur
Symons is the reviewer under fire, and his article
a critique of the dramas of Mr. Stephen Phillips.
It was Mr. Phillips, so we are told, who first
started the protest, and he has found followers
and champions. And on first consideration
there does seem to be ground for complaint
here. It has been assumed that the first
publisher of the article has a right to expect
that for the money he pays to the writer this
latter shall give to him all he has to say upon
the subject. If he has very much to say —
enough for another article — is it not the duty
of the scribe to condense and compact so that
the matter may be represented as a unit and
not as a fragment? Moreover, does it seem
fair to Mr. Phillips that three reviews — as was
the case — all unfavourable, should appear in as
Salt and Sincerity 269
many publications, thus giving to the public
the impression that a group of critics, instead
of merely one, was hostile to his work ? Lastly,
it has been urged that it is not honest to sell a
thing twice — that if a horse has been sold by
A to B, A cannot sell it again to C.
But none of the objections seems valid. If
the space allotted to the article in the paper
is not sufficient, that is the fault of the editor,
not the writer. The editor pays only for what
he prints: the surplusage is still the author's
property and can be by him disposed of as
such. As tor the public considering the single —
unfavourable — review as the opinions of three
men, and as such unfair to Mr. Phillips, this
as well is inadequate and incompetent. Another
critic, reviewing Mr. Phillips favourably, is just
as much at liberty to split up his work as the
adverse reviewer. Last of all, it is under
certain circumstances perfectly honest to sell
the same thing twice. Articles, stories, poems
and the like are continually syndicated in
hundreds of newspapers simultaneously, and
in this sense are sold over and over again.
The analogy between the sale of a horse and
the sale of a bit of literature is quite misleading.
For the matter of that, the writer does not sell
the actual concrete manuscript of his work,
but merely the right to print it, and unless the
270 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
word " exclusively" is understood in the agree-
ment he is in no wise bound. The writer is
not selling his copy as the owner sells his horse.
The analogy would be true if A sold to B the
use of the horse. When B had got the "use"
out of the animal no one will deny the right of
A to sell the same "use" to C, D, E, and so on
through the whole alphabet. The reviewer of
books has a hard enough time of it as it is. It
is only fair to give him the same freedom as a
livery stable keeper.
It has often occurred to me as a thing of
some importance and certain significance that
all great travelers are great writers. And the
fact is so well established, the effect flows so
n variably from the cause, that there would
seem to be here a matter for reflection. One
affirms and will maintain that the one is the
direct result of the other, that the faculty of
adequate expression, of vivid presentation, of
forceful and harmonious grouping of words, is
engendered and stimulated and perfected by
wide journeying.
This is not at all an orthodox view, not at
all the theory cherished by our forbears. The
writer, according to unvarying belief, is the man
of the closet, the bookish man, a student, a
sedentary, a consumer of kerosene, a reader
rather than a rover. And the idea is plausible.
Salt and Sincerity 271
The nomad, he without local habitation, has
no leisure, no opportunity, nor even actual
concrete place to write. Would it not seem
that literature is the quiet art, demanding an
unperturbed mind, an unexcited, calm, repose-
ful temperament? This is a very defensible
position, but it is based upon a foundation of
sand. It assumes that the brain of the writer
is a jar full of a precious fluid — a bottle full of
wine to be poured out with care and with a
hand so quiet, so restful and unshaken that not
a drop be spilled. Very well. But when the
jar, when the bottle is emptied — then what?
Believe me, the gods give but one vintage to
one man. There will be no refilling of the ves-
sel ; and even the lees are very flat, be the wine
ever so good. The better the grape, the bitterer
the dregs; and the outpouring of the "best that
is in you" in the end will be soured by that
brackish, fade sediment that follows upon
lavish expenditure, so that the man ends
ignobly and because of exhaustion and deple-
tion, with all the product of his early and mature
richness making more prominent and pitiful
the final poverty and tenuity of his outgiving —
ends the butt of critics, the compassion of the
incompetent, a shard kicked of every scullion.
And in all the world there is nothing more
lamentable than this — the end of a man once
272 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
strong who has used himself up but who decants
lees and not wine. Even when the lees are
spent he absorbs them once more and once
more gives them forth, each time a little staler,
a little thinner, a little feebler, realizing his
exhaustion, yet — urged by some whip of for-
tune— forced to continue the miserable per-
formance till the golden bowl be broken and
the pitcher shattered at the fountain.
But suppose the productive power of the
writer be considered not as a golden bowl to
be emptied and in the end broken, but as a
silver cord of finest temper that only needs to be
kept in tune. True, the cord may be stretched
to the breaking-point. But its end comes at
the very height and in the very consummate
fulness of its capacity, and oh, the grand world-
girdling Note that it sends forth in the breaking !
— the very soul of it at mightiest tension, the
very spirit of it at fiercest strain. What matter
the loosening or the snapping when so noble
an Amen as that vibrates through the nations
to sound at once the Height and the End of
an entire Life — a whole existence concentrated
into a single cry !
Or it may become out of tune. But this is
no great matter, because so easily remedied.
The golden bowl once emptied there will be
no refilling, but by some blessed provision of
Salt and Sincerity 273
heaven nothing is easier than to attune the
cords of being which are also the cords — the
silver singing cords — of expression.
But — and here we come around once more
to the point de depart — the silver cords once
gone discordant, once jaded and slack, will
not, cannot be brought again to harmony in the
closet, in the study, in the seclusion of the cabi-
net. Tinker them never so cunningly, never so
delicately, they will not ring true for you.
Thought will avail nothing, nor even rest,
nor even relaxation. Of oneself, one cannot
cause the Master-note to which they will
respond to vibrate. The cords have been
played on too much. For all your pottering
they will yet remain a little loose, and so long
as they are loose the deftest fingering, the most
skilful touch, will produce only false music.
And the deadly peril is that the cords of
Life and the cords of expression lie so close
together, are so intricately mingled, that the
man cannot always tell that the cords of expres-
sion are singing out of tune. Life and expres-
sion are two parts of the same instrument. If
the whole life be out of tune, how can the man
distinguish the false music from the true?
There is a danger here, but it is not great.
Sooner or later the conviction comes that the
productive power is menaced. A little frank-
274 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
ness with oneself, a little uncompromising
testing of the strings, and the dissonance
begins to impress itself.
And — as was said — the remedy is not to be
found by the taking of thought, but by an
heroic, drastic thrusting out from the grooves
and cogs of the life of other men — of the life
of the city and the comfortable stay-at-home,
hour-to-hour humdrum, and a determined
journeying out into the great wide world itself.
The further a-field the better. The Master-
note will not be heard within "commuting
distance of the city. " The whir of civilization
smothers it. The click of the telegraph, the
hiss of steam and the clatter of the printing-
press drown it out. It is not always and of
necessity a loud note. Though Nansen heard
ft in the thunder of the pack-ice of the Farthest
North, it came to the ear of Stevenson in the
lap of lazy wavelets in the hushed noonday
of a South Sea strand.
Travel is the only way. Travel in any
direction, by any means, so only it be far —
very, very far — is the great attuner of the list-
less cords of the writer's instrument. For
again and again and again his power is not a
bowl to be emptied, but an instrument to be
played on. To be of use it must be sensitive
and responsive and true. And to be kept sensi-
Salt and Sincerity 275
tive and responsive and true it must go once
in so often to the great Tuner — to Nature.
We speak of the Mountains, the Rivers,
Deserts and Oceans as though we knew them.
We know the Adirondacks from a fortnight in a
"summer camp"; the Rivers and the Deserts
in kinetoscopic glimpses from the Pullman's
windows ; the Ocean — God forgive us ! — from
the beach of a "resort" or the deck of an
Atlantic "greyhound." And I think the gods
of the Mountains, Rivers, Deserts and Oceans
must laugh in vast contempt of our credulity
to suppose that we have found their secrets or
heard their music in this timid, furtive peeping
and pilfering. For such little minds as these
the gods have inexhaustible stores of tinkling
cymbals and sounding brasses — Brummagem
ware that they sell us for the price of "commu-
tation tickets" and mileage-books.
The real knowledge, the real experience that
tautens and trims the fibers of being, that tunes
the cords, is a very different matter. The trail
and the tall ship lead to those places where the
Master-note sounds, lead to those untracked,
uncharted corners of the earth, and dull indeed
must be the tympanum that once within ear-
shot cannot hear its majestic diapason. It
sounds in the canyons of the higher mountains,
in the plunge of streams and swirling of rivers
276 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
yet without names — in the wildernesses, the
plains, the wide-rimmed deserts. It sings a
sonorous rhapsody in the rigging of the clipper
ship driven by the trade winds, in the ratlines
and halyards of South Sea schooners, and
drums ''reveille" on the tense, hard sails of the
fishing-boats off the " Banks. " You can hear
it in the cry of the lynx, the chant of the wild
goose, the call of the moose, and in the "break"
of the salmon in the deeper pools below the
cataract. It is in the roar of the landslide and
in the drone of the cicada; in the war-whoop
of the savage and in the stridulating of crickets ;
in the thunder of the tempest and in the faintest
breath of laziest zephyrs.
And the silver cord of our creative faculty —
the thing nearest to perfection in all the make-
up of our imperfect human nature — responds
to this Master-note with the quickness and
sensitiveness of music-mathematics; responds
to it, attunes itself to it, vibrates with its
vibration, thrills with its quivering, beats with
its rhythm, and tautens itself and freshens itself
and lives again with its great pure, elemental
life, and the man comes back once more to the
world of men with a true-beating heart, and a
true-hearing ear, so that he understands once
more, so that his living, sensitive, delicately
humming instrument trembles responsive to
Salt and Sincerity 277
the emotions and impulses and loves and joys
and sorrows and fears of his fellows, and the
Man writes true and clear, and his message rings
with harmony and with melody, with power
and with passion of the prophets interpreting
God's handwriting to the world of men.
Ill
THERE can be no question nor reasonable
doubt that the " language, institutions
and religion" of fiction writers are at
present undergoing the most radical revolution
in the history of literature. And I mean by
that that the men themselves are changing — •
their characters, their attitudes toward life;
even the mode and manner of their own life.
Those who are not thus changing are decaying.
And those others, the Great Unarrived who
do not recognize the Change, who do not
acknowledge the Revolution, will never succeed,
but will perish untimely almost before they
can be said to have been born at all.
Time was when the author was an aristocrat,
living in seclusion, unspotted from the world.
But the Revolution of which there is question
here has meted out to him the fate that Revolu-
tions usually prepared for Aristocrats, and his
successor is, must be, must be — if he is to voice
the spirit of the times aright, if he is to interpret
his fellows justly — the Man of the People, the
Good Citizen.
How the novelists of the preceding genera-
279
280 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
tion played the Great Game is no matter for dis-
cussion here. Times were different then. One
shut oneself in the study; one wore a velvet
coat; one read a great deal and quoted Latin;
one knew the classics ; one kept apart from the
vulgar profane and never, never, never read
the newspapers. But for the novelist of the
next fifty years of this twentieth century these
methods, these habits, this conception of litera-
ture as a cult, as a refinement to be kept invio-
late from the shoulderings and elbowings of
the Common People is a clog, is a stumbling-
block, is a pitfall, a bog, mire, trap — anything
you like that is false, misleading and pernicious.
I have no patience with a theory of literature
— and oh, how often one hears it preached ! —
that claims the Great Man belongs only to the
cultured few. "You must write," so these
theorists explain, "for that small number of
fine minds who because of education, because
of delicate, fastidious taste are competent to
judge. ' ' I tell you this is wrong. It is precisely
the same purblind prejudice that condemned
the introduction of the printing-press because
it would cheapen and vulgarize the literature
of the day. A literature that cannot be vul-
garized is no literature at all and will perish
just as surely as rivers run to the sea. The
things that last are the understandable things
Salt and Sincerity 281
— understandable to the common minds, the
Plain People, understandable, one is almost
tempted to say, to the very children.
It is so in every branch of art: in music,
painting, sculpture, architecture. The great
monuments of these activities, the things that
we retain longest and cherish with the most
care are plain almost to bareness. The most
rudimentary mind can understand them. All
the learning, all the culture, all the refinement
in the world will not give you a greater thrill
on reading your " Iliad" than the boy of fifteen
enjoys. Is the "Marseillaise" a thing of
subtlety or refinement? Are the Pyramids
complex ? Are Angelo's Sibyls involved ? But
the " Iliad," the "Marseillaise," the Pyramids,
the Sibyls will endure and endure and endure
while men have eyes to see, ears to hear and
hearts to be moved. These great things, these
monuments were not written nor composed,
nor builded, nor painted for the select, for the
cultured. When Homer wrote there were no
reading circles. Rouget de Lisle gave no
"recitals." One does not have to "read up"
to understand the message of Cheops, nor take
a course of art lectures to feel the mystery of
the Delphic Sibyl.
And so to come back to the starting place,
the Revolution in the character of the writer of
282 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
fiction. If the modern novelist does not under-
stand the Plain People, if he does not address
himself directly to them intelligibly and simply,
he will fail. But he will never understand
them by shutting himself away from them.
He must be — and here one comes to the con-
clusion of the whole matter — a Man of the
World. None more so. Books have no place
in his equipment, have no right to be there;
will only cumber and confuse him. His prede-
cessor never read the newspapers, but for him
the newspaper is more valuable than all the
tomes of Ruskin, all the volumes of Carlyle.
And more valuable than all are the actual, vital
Affairs of Men. The function of the novelist of
this present day is to comment upon life as he
sees it. He cannot get away from this ; this is
his excuse for existence, the only claim he has
upon attention. How necessary then for him —
of all men — to be in the midst of life ! He can-
not plunge too deeply into it. Politics will
help him, and Religious Controversies, Explora-
tions, Science, the newest .theory of Socialism,
the latest development of Biology. He should
find an interest in Continental diplomacy and
should have opinions on the chances of a
Russo-Japanese war over the Corean question.
He should be able to tell why it is of such
unusual importance for Queen Wilhelmina of
Salt and Sincerity 283
Holland to give birth to an heir, and should
know who ought to be nominated for Governor
of his native State at the next convention.
No piece of information — mere downright
acquisition of fact — need be considered worth-
less. Nothing is too trivial to be neglected.
I know a novelist of international reputation
who told me that the following little bits of
knowledge (collected heaven knows where and
stored up for years in some pigeon-hole of his
memory) had been of use to him in the com-
position of a novel he is now at work upon:
That great cities ten4 to grow to the westward ;
that race-horses are shod with a long and
narrow shoe; and that the usual price charged
by an electrician for winding an armature is
four dollars. And he seemed prouder of the
fact that he had these tiny odds and ends at his
command, when needed, than he was of the
honorary degree just conferred upon him by
Harvard University.
I suppose this is an exaggerated case, and it
is not to be denied that it is better to have a
Harvard degree than to know the shape of a
race-horse's shoe, but it surely goes to prove
the point that, as far as actual material worth
and use were concerned, the fugitive foolish
memory-notes were of more present help than
the university degree, and that so far as infor-
284 The Responsibilities of ike Novelist
mation is concerned the novelist cannot know
too much.
In a recent number of The Bookman there
appears an able article under the title "Attack-
ing the Newspapers." The title is a trifle
misleading, since the author's point and text
are a defense of modern journalism, or rather
let us say an apology. The apology is very
well done. The manner of presentation is
ingenious, the style amusing, but none the less
one cannot let the article pass without protest
or, at the least, comment.
The original function of a newspaper was,
and still should be, to tell the news — and,
if you please, nothing more than that. The
"policy" of the paper was (before the days
of the yellow press) advocated and exploited
in the editorial columns.
The whole difficulty lies in the fact that
nowadays the average newspaper is violently
partizan and deliberately alters news to suit its
partizanship. "Not a very criminal proced-
ure," I hear it said; "for by reading the
opposition papers the public gets the other
side. " But one submits that such a course is
criminal, and that it can be proved to be such.
How many people do you suppose read the
"opposition" papers? The American news-
paper readers have not time to read "both
Salt and Sincerity 285
sides" unless presented to them in one and
the same paper.
Observe now how this partizanship works
injustice and ruin. Let us suppose a given
newspaper is hostile to the Governor of the
State. Now every man — even a journalist —
has a right to his opinions and his hostilities,
and important men in public life must expect
to be abused. There are for them compensa-
tions; their position is too high, too secure to
be shaken by the vituperation of malevolent
journals. But these journals have one favour-
ite form of attacking important public men
which, though it does not always harm the
personage assaulted, may easily ruin the sub-
ordinates with which he surrounds himself.
This is the habit of discrediting the statesman
by defaming his appointees. The Governor,
we will say, has appointed John Smith to be
the head of a certain institution of the State.
But the Governor has incurred the enmity of
the Daily Clarion — the leading newspaper.
Promptly the Clarion seizes upon Smith. His
career as head of the institution has been a
record of misrule (so the Clarion reads), has
been characterized by extravagance, incom-
petency, mismanagement, and even misappro-
priation of the State's money. And here begins
the cruel injustice of the business. The editor
286 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
of that paper will set no bounds upon the
lengths to which he will urge his reporters in
their vilification of Smith. The editor knows
he is a liar, the reporters know they are liars,
but the public, ninety-nine times out of a
hundred, ignoring motives, unable to see that
the real object of attack is the Governor,
unable to understand the brute callousness and
wretched hypocrisy of the whole proceeding,
believes the calumny, believes that Smith is an
incompetent, a spendthrift, even a thief.
And even the better class of readers, even the
more intelligent who make allowances for the
paper's political prejudices, will listen to the
abuse and believe that there "must be some
fire where there is so much smoke." Do you
suppose for one moment that Smith will ever
get a hearing in that paper? Do you suppose
its reporters will ever credit him with a single
honest achievement, a single sincere effort?
If you do, you do not understand modern
journalism.
Ah, but the opposition papers ! They will
defend Smith. They will champion him as
vehemently as the Clarion attacks. That is
all very well, but suppose there are no opposition
papers. Politics are very complicated. The
press of a given community is not always
equally divided between the Republican and
Salt and Sincerity 287
Democratic parties. Time and time again it
happens that all the leading newspapers of a
city, a county, or even a State, Democratic,
Republican, Independent, etc., are banded to-
gether to oppose some one Large Man.
Where then will Smith get his hearing?
He cannot fight all the newspapers at once.
He is not strong enough to retaliate even
upon the meanest. The papers are afraid
of nothing he can do. They hold absolute
power over his good name and reputation.
And for the sake of feeding fat the grudge
they bear the Great One they butcher the
subordinate without ruth and without re-
proach. Believe me, it has been shown
repeatedly that, placed in such a position,
the modern newspaper will check at no lie
however monstrous, at no calumny however
vile. If Smith holds a position of trust he
will be trumpeted from end to end of the
community as a defaulter, gambling away
the public moneys entrusted to his care. He
will be pictured as a race-track follower, a
supporter of fast women, a thief, a blackguard,
and a reprobate. If he holds an administra-
tive office, it will be shown how he has given
and taken bribes; how he has neglected his
duties and ignored his responsibilities till his
office has engendered calamity, ruin, and even
288 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
actual physical suffering. If his work is in the
nature of supervision over one of those State
institutions where the helpless are cared for — •
the infirm, the imbecile, the aged, or sick, or
poor — his cruelty to his wards will be the theme,
and he will be written of and pictured as whip-
ping or torturing old men and little children,
imprisoning, tormenting, making a hell of what
was meant to be a help.
And the man once blackened after this
fashion will never again rehabilitate himself
in the eyes of the public. The people who read
newspapers always believe the worst, and when
an entire press, or even the major part of it,
unite to defame a man there is no help or
redress possible. He is ruined, ruined profes-
sionally and financially, ruined in character,
in pocket, and in the hopes of ever getting
back the good name that once was his.
And all this is done merely as a political move,
merely to discredit the Big Man who put Smith
in his place, merely to hurt his chances of
renomination, merely to cut down the number
of his votes. It is butchery; there is no other
word than this with which to characterize the
procedure, butchery as cruel, as wanton and
as outrageous as ever bloodied the sands of the
Colosseum. It is even worse than this, for the
victim has no chance for his life. His hands
Salt and Sincerity 289
are tied before the beasts are loosed. He is
trussed and downed before the cages are opened,
and the benches thunder for his life, not as
for a victim to be immolated, but as a criminal
to be punished. He is getting only his deserts,
his very memory is an execration, and his
name whenever mentioned is a by-word and
a hissing.
And this in face of the fact that the man
may be as innocent of the charges urged as if
he had never been born.
Yet Doctor Colby in The Bookman article
writes: "If we must attack the newspapers
let it be as critics, not as crusaders, for the
people who write for them are under no
stricter obligations than ourselves. ' ' What ! the
reporter or the editor who by some fillip of
fortune is in a position to make public opinion
in the minds of a million people under no more
obligations than you and I ! If every obliga-
tion bore down with an all but intolerable
weight it is in just his case. His responsibility
is greater than that of the Pulpit, greater than
that of the Physician, greater than that of the
Educator. If you would see the use to which
it is put, you have only to try to get at the real
truth in the case of the next public character
assailed and vilified in the public prints.
Doctor Colby is wrong. It is a crusade and
290 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
not a criticism that will put down the modern
yellow newspaper from the bad eminence to
which the minds of the hysterical, of the violent,
of the ignorant, brutal and unscrupulous have
exalted it.
IV
THERE is a certain journal of the Middle
West of the United States which has
proclaimed, with a great flourish of trumpets,
that Mme. Humbert of Paris would have made
a great "fictionist" if she had not elected to
become a great swindler. This is that Mme.
Humbert who cheated a number of bankers,
capitalists and judges out of a great deal of
money with a story of $20,000,000 in a safe
which for certain reasons she could not open.
Very naturally, when her hand was forced the
safe was empty. And this person, the Middle
West paper claims, is a great novelist manquee,
"a female Dumas or Hugo." The contention
would not be worthy of notice were it not for
the fact that it is an opinion similar to that
held by a great number of people intelligent
enough to know better. In a word, it is the
contention that the personal morality of the
artist (including "fictionists") has nothing
to do with his work, and that a great rascal
may be a good painter, good musician, good
novelist. With painters, musicians and the
291
292 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
like this may or may not be true. With the
novelist one contends, believes and avers that
it is absolutely and unequivocally false, and that
the mind capable of theft, of immorality, of
cruelty, of foulness, or falseness of any kind is
incapable, under any circumstances, or by any
degree of stimulation, of producing one single
important, artistic or useful piece of fiction.
The better the personal morality of the writer,
the better his writings. Tolstoi, for instance:
it is wholly and solely due to the man's vast
goodness and philanthropy that his novels
carry weight. The attitude of the novelist
toward his fellow-men and women is the great
thing, not his inventiveness, his ingenuity,
his deftness, or glibness, or verbal dexterity.
And the mind wholly mean, who would rob a
friend of $40,000 (after the manner of the
Humbert person), or could even wilfully and
deliberately mar the pleasure of a little child,
could never assume toward the world at large
that attitude of sympathy and generosity and
toleration that is the first requisite of the
really great novelist. Always you will find
this thing true: that the best, the greatest
writers of fiction are those best loved of troops
of friends; and for the reason that, like the
Arab philosopher of the poem, they, first of all,
have "loved their fellow-men." It is this that
Salt and Sincerity 293
has made their novels great. Consider Steven-
son, or our own "Dean," or Hugo, or Scott,
men of the simplest lives, uncompromising in
rectitude, scrupulously, punctiliously, Quixoti-
cally honest ; their morality — surely in the cases
of Stevenson and Hugo — setting a new standard
of religion, at the least a new code of ethics.
And thus it goes right down the line, from the
greater lights to the lesser and to the least. It
is only the small men, the "minor" people
among the writers of books who indulge in
eccentricities that are only immortalities under
a different skin; who do not pay their debts;
who borrow without idea of returning; who
live loose, " irregular," wretched, vicious lives,
and call it " Bohemianism," and who believe
that "good work" can issue from the turmoil,
that the honeycomb will be found in the
carcass, and the sweet come forth from the
putrid. So that in the end one may choose to
disagree with the Middle West editor and to
affirm that it is not the ingenious criminal who
is the novelist manque, but the philanthropist,
the great educator, the great pulpit orator, the
great statesman. It is from such stuff that the
important novels are made, not from the
deranged lumber and disordered claptrap of the
brain of a defective.
In the course of a speech made at a recent
294 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
dinner given in London, Sir Donald Mackenzie
Wallace has deplored the fact that our present
generation of English writers has produced no
worthy successors to the great men of the mid-
Victorian period — that there are no names to
place beside Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Brown-
ing, or Keats. But he also brought forward
extenuating circumstances, chief among which
was the fact that the novelists of to-day were
working overtime to supply the demands of an
ever-increasing public, and that, by implication,
their work was therefore deteriorating. One
does not believe that this is so. Rapid work
may cause the deterioration of a commercial
article, but it by no means follows that the
authors who are called upon to produce a very
large number of books are forced into the com-
position of unworthy literature. The writer's
brain does not hold the material for his books.
It is not like a storehouse, from which things
may be taken till nothing remains. The
writer's material is life itself, inexhaustible
and renewed from day to day, and his brain
is only the instrument that adapts life to fiction.
True, this instrument itself may wear out after
awhile, but it usually lasts as long as the man
himself, and is good for more work than the
unthinking would believe possible. As a matter
of fact, the best novelists have, as a rule, been
Salt and Sincerity 295
the most prolific, have been those who had to
write rapidly and much to satisfy, if not the
demands of the public, then at least other
more personal demands, none the less insistent.
Scott and Dickens were unusually prolific, yet
the rapidity with which they accomplished
their work did not hurt the quality of the work
itself. Balzac and Dumas produced whole
libraries of books and yet kept their standards
high. As one has urged before, it is the demand
of the People that produces the great writer,
not reduces the quality and fineness of his work.
If he has the "divine spark," the breath of the
millions will fan rather than extinguish it.
One does not choose to believe that the art of
fiction nor the standards of excellence have
deteriorated since the day of Scott, Dickens
and Thackeray. True, we have no men to
equal them as yet, but they are surely coming.
Time was, at the end of the seventeenth
century, when the dearth of good fiction was
even more marked than "at present. But
one must bear in mind that progress is never
along a direct line, but by action and reaction.
A period will supervene when a group of
geniuses arise, and during the course of their
activities the average of excellence is high,
great books are produced, and a whole New
Literature is launched. Their influence is
296 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
profound ; the first subschool of imitators follow
good enough men but second-rate. These in
turn are followed by the third-raters, and these
by the fourth-raters, and no one is found bold
enough to strike out for himself until the bot-
tom is reached. Then comes the reaction, and
once more the group of giants towers up from
out the mass. We are probably living through
the era of the fourth-raters just now, and one
believes that we are rather near to the end even
of that. The imitators of the romantic school
have imitated to ten places decimals and have
diluted and rediluted till they can hardly go
further without producing something actually
and really new. At any rate, the time is most
propitious for a Man of Iron who can be bent
to no former shape nor diluted to no old-time
essence. Then will come the day of the New
Literature, and the wind of Life itself will blow
through the dry bones and fustian and saw-
dust of the Imitation, and the People will all at
once realize how very far afield the fourth-
raters have drawn them and how very differ-
ent a good novel is from a bad one.
For say what you will, the People, the Plain
People who Read, do appreciate good literature
in the end. One must keep one's faith in the
People — the Plain People, the Burgesses, the
Grocers — else of all men the artists are most
Salt and Sincerity 297
miserable and their teachings vain. Let us
admit and concede that this belief is ever so
sorely tried at times. Many thousands of
years ago the wisest man of his age declared
that "the People imagine a vain thing. " Con-
tinually they are running away after strange
gods; continually they are admiring the fake
and neglecting actual worth. But in the end,
and at last, they will listen to the true note and
discriminate between it and the false. In the
last analysis the People are always right. Some-
how, and after all is said and done, they will
prefer Walter Scott to G. P. R. James, Shak-
spere to Marlowe, Flaubert to Goncourt.
Sometimes the preference is long in forming,
and during this formative period they have
many reversions, and go galloping, in herds of
one hundred or one hundred and fifty thousand
(swelling the circulations), after false gods.
But note this fact: that the fustian and the
tinsel and the sawdust are discovered very
soon, and, once the discovery made, the
sham idol can claim no single devotee.
In other words, it is a comfort to those who
take the literature of the Americans — or even
of the Anglo-Saxons — seriously to remember,
in the long run and the larger view, that a circu-
lation of two hundred, three hundred or four
hundred thousand — judging even by this base-
298 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
scale of "copies sold" — is not so huge after all.
Consider. A "popular" novel is launched
and sells its half-million. Within a certain
very limited period of time, at most five years,
this sale stops definitely and conclusively.
The People have found out that it is not such a
work of genius after all, and will have no more
of it. But how about the circulation of the
works of the real Masters, Scott and Dickens,
say — to be more concrete, let us speak of
"Ivanhoe" and "David Copperfield "— have
not each of these " sold " more than two hundred
thousand since publication? Is not two hun-
dred million nearer the mark? And they are
still selling. New editions are published every
year. Does not this prove that the People
are discriminating; that they are — after all —
preferring the best literature to the mediocre;
that they are not such a mindless herd after all ;
that in the end, in fine, they are always right ?
It will not do to decry the American public;
to say that it has no taste, no judgment ; that
it "likes to be fooled." It may be led away
for a time by clamorous advertising and the
"barking" of fakirs. But there comes a day
when it will no longer be fooled. A million
dollars' worth of advertising would not today
sell a hundred thousand copies of "Trilby."
But "Ivanhoe" and "Copperfield," without
Salt and Sincerity 299
advertising, without reclames for exploitation,
are as marketable this very day as a sack of
flour or a bag of wheat.
Mr. Metcalfe, in a recent issue of Life, has
been lamenting the lack of good plays on the
American stage during the past season, and
surely no one can aver that the distinguished
critic is not right. One cannot forbear a wince
or two at the thought of what future art histori-
ans will say in their accounts of the American
drama at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Frankly and unreservedly the native American
drama is jusl: about as bad as it can be, and
every intelligent-minded person is quite willing
to say so. The causes are not difficult to trace.
Two come to the mind at once, which in them-
selves alone would account for the degeneracy
— i. e., the rage for Vaudeville and the exploita-
tion of the Star. The first has developed in
the last ten years, an importation from English
music halls. Considered at first as a fad by
the better class of theatre-goers, a thing to be
countenanced with amused toleration like
performing bears and the animal circus, it has
been at length boosted and foisted upon the
public attention till, like a veritable cancer, it
has eaten almost into the very vitals of the
Legitimate Comedy (using the word in its tech-
nical sense). Continually nowadays one may
300 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
see a "specialty" — generally in the form of a
dance — lugged in between the scenes of a
perfectly sober, perfectly sane Comedy of
Manners. The moment any one subordinate
feature of a dramatic action is developed at the
expense of vraisemblance and the Probabilities,
and for the sake of amusing the galleries, there is
the first bacillus of decay. Vaudeville is all
very well by itself, and one will even go so far
as to admit that it has its place as much as
an Ibsen problem-play. But it should keep to
that place. It is ludicrously out of place in a
comedy — quite as much so as the " Bible
Incident" in Ebsmith would be in a Hoyt farce.
But because the "specialty," because Vaude-
ville, will "go" with the "gallery" at any time
and at any place, the manager and — the pity
of it !— the author, too, will introduce it when-
ever the remotest possibility occurs, and by
just so much the tone of the whole drama is
lowered. It has got to such a pass by now,
however, that one ought to be thankful if this
same " tone " is not keyed down to the specialty.
But the exploiting of the Star, it would seem,
is, of all others, the great cause of the mediocrity
of present-day dramatic literature. One has
but to glance at the theatre programmes and
bills to see how matters stand. The name of the
leading lady or leading man is "scare-headed"
Salt and Sincerity
so that the swiftest runner cannot fail to see.
Even the manager proclaims his patronymic
in enormous "caps." But the author! — as
often as not his name is not discoverable at all.
The play is nothing — thus it would seem the
managers would have us believe — it is the
actress, her speeches, her scenes, her gowns,
her personality, that are the all-important
essentials. It is notorious how plays are cut,
and readjusted, and dislocated to suit the Star.
Never mind whether or not the scene is artistic,
is vivid, is dramatic. Does the Star get the
best of it? If not, write it over. The Star
must have all the good lines. If they cannot
be built into the Star's part, cut 'em out.
The Probabilities, the construction, artistic
effect, climax, even good, common, forthright,
horse sense, rot 'em ! who cares for 'em ? Give
the Star the lime-light — that's the point.
If the audience is willing to pay its money to
see Miss Marlowe, Miss Mannering or Mrs.
Carter put through her paces, that's another
thing; but let us not expect that good dramas
will issue forth from this state of affairs.
Where are the Books for Girls? Adults'
books there are and books for boys by
the carload, but where is the book for the
young girls? Something has already been
said about literature for the amiable young
302 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
woman, but this, now, is a very different
person. One means the girl of fourteen to
eighteen. The boy passing through this most
trying formative period finds his literature
ready to hand. Boys' books, tales of hunting,
adventure and sport abound. They are good
books, too, sane, "healthy," full of fine spirit
and life. But the girl, where does she read?
Surely the years between fourteen and eighteen
are even more trying to a young girl than to a
boy. She is not an active animal. When the
boy is out-of-doors, pitching curves or " running
the ends, " the girl (even yet in the day and age
of "athletics for women") is in the house, and,
as like as not, reading. And reading what, if
you please? The feeblest, thinnest, most
colourless lucubrations that it is given to the
mind of misguided man to conceive or to per-
petuate. It must be this or else the literature
of the adult; and surely the novels written for
mature minds, for men and women who have
some knowledge of the world and powers of
discrimination, are not good reading, in any
sense of the word, for a sixteen-year-old girl in
the formative period of her life.
Besides Alcott, no one has ever written
intelligently for girls. Surely there is a field
here. Surely a Public, untried and unex-
plored, is wailing for its author; nor is it a
Salt and Sincerity 303
public wanting in enthusiasm, loyalty or
intelligence.
But for all this great parade and prating of
emancipated women it nevertheless remains
a fact that the great majority of twentieth-
century opinion is virtually Oriental in its
conception of the young girl. The world to-day
is a world for boys, men and women. Of all
humans, the young girl, the sixteen-year-old, is
the least important — or, at least, is so deemed.
Wanted : a Champion. Wanted : the Discoverer
and Poet of the Very Young Girl. Unimportant
she may now appear to you, who may yet call
her by her first name without fear and without
reproach. But remember this, you who believe
only in a world of men and boys and women;
the Very Young Girl of to-day is the woman of
to-morrow, the wife of the day after, and the
mother of next week. She only needs to put
up her hair and let down her frocks to become
a very important person indeed. Meanwhile,
she has no literature; meanwhile, faute de
mieux, she is trying to read Ouida and many
other books intended for maturer minds; or,
worse than all, she is enfeebling her mind by
the very thin gruel purveyed by the mild-
mannered gentlemen and ladies who write for
the Sunday-school libraries. Here is a bad
business ; here is a field that needs cultivation.
304 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
All very well to tend and train the saplings,
the oaks and the vines. The flowers — they
have not bloomed vet — are to be thought
about, too.
All the more so that the young girl takes a
book to heart infinitely more than a boy. The
boy — his story once read — votes it "bully,"
takes down his cap, and there's an end. But
the average Very Young Girl does not read her
story: she lives it, lingers over it, weeps over
it, lies awake nights over it. So long as she
lives she will never quite forget the books she
read when she was sixteen. It is not too much
to say that the " favourite" books of a girl at
this age become a part of her life. They influ-
ence her character more than any of us, I
imagine, would suspect or admit. All the
more reason, then, that there should not only
be good books for girls, but plenty of good
books.
THE END.
BIBLIOGRAPHY, ESSAYS, ARTI-
CLES, LETTERS
"Ancient Armour" (first published article), San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, March 31, 1889.
Series of letters from South Africa concerning Uitlander
Insurrection, published in the San Francisco Chronicle:
"A Californian in City of Cape Town," January 19, 1896;
" In the Compound of a Diamond Mine," February 2, 1896 ;
" From Cape Town to Kimberley Mine," January
"In the Veldt of the Transvaal," February 9, 1896; "A
Zulu War Dance," March 15, 1896.
"Types of Western Men," published in San Francisco
Wave, May 2, 1896.
"Western City Types," published in San Francisco
Wave, May 9, 1896.
"The Bivalve at Home," published in San Francisco
Wave, July 16, 1896.
"Italy in California," published in San Francisco
Wave, October 24, 1896.
"A Question of Ideals," published in San Francisco
Wave, December 26, 1897.
" New Year's at San Quentin," published in San Fran-
cisco Wave, January 9, 1897.
"Hunting Human Game," published in San Francisco
Wave, January 23, 1897.
"Passing of Little Pete," published in San Francisco
Wave, January 30, 1897.
"A California Artist," published in San Francisco
Wave, February 6, 1897.
"A Lag's Release," published in San Francisco Wave,
March 12, 1897.
305
306 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
"Among the Cliff- Dwellers," published in San Fran-
cisco Wave, May 15, 1897.
"The Sailing of the ' Excelsior,' " published in San
Francisco Wave, July 31, 1897.
"The Tale and the Truth," published in San Francisco
Wave, September 25, 1897.
"Art Education in San Francisco," published in San
Francisco Wave, September 25, 1897.
"The End of the Act," published in San Francisco
Wave, November 27, 1897.
"Comida," published in Atlantic Monthly, March, 1899.
"With Lawton to Caney," published in Century
Magazine, June, 1899.
"Student Life in Paris," published in Collier's Weekly,
May 12, 1900.
Series of New York letters to Chicago American, com-
mencing May, 1901 — September, 1901.
Series of Articles to Boston Transcript, commencing
November 15 — February 5 (weekly articles).
"The Unknown Author and the Publisher," published
in World's Work, April, 1901.
"True Reward of the Novelist," published in World's
Work, September, 1901.
"Mr. Kipling's 'Kim,'" published in World's Work,
September, 1901.
"Story-Teller vs. Novelist," published in World's Work,
March, 1902.
"The Frontier Gone at Last," published in World's
Work, February, 1902.
"The Need of a Literary Conscience," published in
World's Work, May, 1902.
"The Novel with a Purpose," published in World's
Work, May, 1902.
Series of articles to The Critic, entitled "Salt and
Sincerity," published monthly from May to October, 1902.
"Life in the Mining Region," published in Everybody's
Magazine, September, 1902.
"In Defense of Doctor W. Lawlor," published in San
Francisco Argonaut, August n, 1902.
Bibliography 307
"The Responsibilities of a Novelist," published in
The Critic, December, 1902.
"The Neglected Epic," published in World's Work,
December, 1902.
The "Great American Novelist," syndicated, January
19, 1903.
"The American Public and Popular Fiction," syndi-
cated, February 2, 1903.
"Child Stories for Adults," syndicated, February 9,
1903.
"The Nature Revival in Literature," syndicated,
February 16, 1903.
"Novelists to Order — While You Wait," syndicated,
February 23, 1903.
"Newspaper Criticism and American Fiction," syndi-
cated, March 9, 1903.
"Richard Harding Davis," syndicated, January 26,
1903.
"Chances of Unknown Writers," syndicated, March 2,
1903.
SHORT STORIES
"Babazzouin," published in San Francisco Argonaut,
May, 1891.
"Son of a Sheik," published in San Francisco Argonaut,
June, 1891. . f
"Le Gongleur de Taillebois," published in San Fran-
cisco Wave, December 25, 1891.
"Arachne," published in San Francisco Wave, 1892.
"Lauth," published in Overland Monthly, March, 1893.
"Travis Hallets, Half-Back," published in Overland
Monthly, January, 1894.
"Outward and Visible Signs Series" of short stories,
published in the Overland Monthly, commencing February,
1894— titles as follows: "Thoroughbred," February, 1894;
"She and the Other Fellow," March, 1894; "The Most
Noble Conquest of Man," May, 1894; "Outside the
Zewana," July, 1894; "After Strange Gods, "October, 1894.
308 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
"The Caged Lion," published in San Francisco Argo-
naut, August, 1894.
"A Defense of the Flag," published in San Francisco
Argonaut, October, 1895.
"A Salvation Boom in Matabeleland," published in
San Francisco Wave, April 25, 1896.
"The Heroism of Jonesie," published in San Francisco
Wave, May 16, 1896.
Series of Sketches entitled ' ' Man Proposes," published in
San Francisco Wave, May 23, 1896; May 30, 1896; June 13,
1896; June 27, 1896; July 4, 1896.
"In the Heat of Battle," published in San Francisco
Wave, December 19, 1896.
"His Sister," published in San Francisco Wave, Decem-
ber 28, 1896.
"The Puppets and the Puppy," San Francisco Wave,
May 22, 1897.
"Beer and Skittles," published in San Francisco Wave,
May 29, 1897.
"Through a Glass Darkly," published in San Francisco
Wave, June 12, 1897.
"Little Dramas of the Curbstone," published in San
Francisco Wave, June 26, 1897.
"The Strangest Thing," published in San Francisco
Wave, July 3, 1897.
"This Animal of a Buldy Jones," published in San
Francisco Wave, July 17, 1897.
"Boom," published in San Francisco Wave, August 7,
1897.
" Reversion to Type," published in San Francisco Wave,
August 14, 1897.
"House with the Blinds," published in San Francisco
Wave, August 21, 1897.
"The Third Circle," published in San Francisco Wave,
August 28, 1897.
"The End of the Beginning," published in San Fran-
cisco Wave, September 4, 1897.
"A Case for Lombroso," published in San Francisco
Wave, September n, 1897.
Bibliography 309
"His Single Blessedness," published in San Francisco
Wave, September 18, 1897.
"Execution without Judgment," published in San
Francisco Wave, October 2, 1897.
"Miracle Joyeux," published in San Francisco Wave,
October 9, 1897.
"Judy's Service of Gold Plate," published in San
Francisco Wave, October 16, 1897.
"The Associated Un- Charities," published in San
Francisco Wave, October 30, 1897.
"Fantasie Printaniere," published in San Francisco
Wave, November 6, 1897.
"His Dead Mother's Portrait," published in San
Francisco Wave, November 13, 1897.
"Shorty Stack, Pugilist," published in San Francisco
Wave, November 20, 1897.
"Isabella Regina," published in San Francisco Wave,
November 27, 1897.
"Perverted Tales" (Parodies on several well-known
authors), published in San Francisco Wave, December
25, 1897: "The Rickshaw that Happened," by R — d
K— g; "The Green Stone of Unrest," by S— n Cr— e; "Van
Bubble's Story," by R — d H — g D — s; "Ambrosia Beer,"
by A — e B — e; "I Call on Lady Dotty," by A — y H — e;
"The Hero of Tomato Can," by B — t H — e.
"The Drowned Who Do Not Die," published in San
Francisco Wave, September 24, 1898.
" Miracle Joyeux," republished McClure's Magazine,
December, 1898.
"This Animal of a Buldy Jones," republished in
McClure's Magazine, March, 1899.
"The Riding of Felipe," published in Everybody's
Magazine, March, 1901.
" Buldy Jones, Chef du Claque," published in Everybody's
Magazine, May, 1901.
"Kirkland at Quarter," published in Saturday Evening
Post, December 12, 1901.
"A Memorandum of Sudden Death," published in
Collier's Weekly, January, 1902.
310 The Responsibilities of the Novelist
"A Bargain with Peg-leg," published in Collier's
Weekly, March i, 1902.
" Grettir at Drangey," published in Everybody's Magazine
March, 1902.
"A Statue in an Old Garden," published by Ladies'
Home Journal about April, 1902.
"Dying Fires," published in Smart Set about April,
1902.
"The Passing of Cock-Eye Blacklock," published in
Century Magazine, July, 1902.
"The Guest of Honour," published in the Pilgrim
Magazine, July and August, 1902.
" A Deal in Wheat," published in Everybody's Magazine,
August, 1902.
"Two Hearts That Beat as One," published in Brander
Magazine (unable to ascertain date).
"The Dual Personality of Slick Dick Nickerson," pub-
lished in Collier's Weekly, November, 1902.
"The Ship That Saw a Ghost," published in Overland
Monthly, December, 1902.
"The Wife of Chino," published in Century Magazine,
January, 1903.
"The Ghost in the Cross-Trees," published in New York
Herald, March, 1903.
POEMS PUBLISHED
"Poitier," medieval ballad, published in Berklyian
Magazine, 1891.
" Brunhilda," poem, illustrated by author, published
in California Illustrated Magazine (discontinued), 1891.
" Crepusculum," sonnet, published by Overland Monthly,
April, 1892.
BOOKS PUBLISHED
"Yvernelle," long poem, published by Lippincott &
Company, 1892.
" Moran of the Lady Letty," serialized in San Francisco
Bibliography 311
Wave about January, 1898. Published by Doubleday &
McClure, September, 1898.
"McTeague," published by Doubleday & McClure,
February, 1899.
"Blix," serialized in The Puritan about April, 1899.
Published by Doubleday & McClure, September, 1899.
"A Man's Woman," serialized in New York Evening
Sun about July — October, 1899; in San Francisco
Chronicle, July 23, 1899 — October 8, 1899. Published by
Doubleday & McClure, February, 1900.
"Octopus," published by Doubleday, Page & Company,
April, 1901.
"The Pit," serialized in Saturday Evening Post, Septem-
ber 27, 1902 — January 31, 1903. Published by Doubleday.
Page & Company, January, 1903.
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY