Definitions; first series. Essays in contemporary criticism

LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
DAVIS

C K. OGDEN COLLECTION

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE SHORT STORY IN ENGLISH
COLLEGE SONS AND COLLEGE FATHERS
EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE
OUR HOUSE
EVERYDAY AMERICANS

DEFINITIONS

FIRST SERIES

*

Essays in Contemporary Criticism by
HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, Ph.D.

Lecturer in English at Yale University

LONDON

JONATHAN CAPE LTD.
LIBRARY

DIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
DAVIS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of
The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The Cen
tury Magazine, The Literary Review of The New
York Evening Post, The Bookman, The Nation, and
The North American Review for permission to reprint
such of these essays as have appeared in their columns.

PREFACE

THE unity of this book is to be sought in the point
of view of the writer rather than in a sequence of
chapters developing a single theme and arriving at
categorical conclusions. Literature in a civilization
like ours, which is trying to be both sophisticated and
democratic at the same moment of time, has so many
sources and so many manifestations, is so much in
volved with our social background, and is so much
a question of life as well as of art, that many doors
have to be opened before one begins to approach an
understanding. The method of informal definition
which I have followed in all these essays is an attempt
to open doors through which both writer and reader
may enter into a better comprehension of what novel
ists, poets, and critics have done or are trying to ac
complish. More than an entrance upon many a vexed
controversy and hidden meaning I cannot expect to
have achieved in this book; but where the door would
not swing wide I have at least tried to put one foot
in the crack. The sympathetic reader may find his
own way further; or may be stirred by my endeavor
to a deeper appreciation, interest, and insight. That
is my hope.

New York, April, 1922.

CONTENTS

PREFACE
I. ON FICTION

FAGK

SENTIMENTAL AMERICA 3

FREE FICTION 19

A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION TOWARD FICTION . . 40

THE ESSENCE OF POPULARITY 57

II. ON THE AMERICAN TRADITION

THE AMERICAN TRADITION 77

BACK TO NATURE 92

THANKS TO THE ARTISTS 109

TO-DAY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: ADDRESSED TO

THE BRITISH 112

TIME'S MIRROR 128

THE FAMILY MAGAZINE 132

III. THE NEW GENERATION

THE YOUNG ROMANTICS 149

PURITANS ALL 164

THE OLDER GENERATION 167

A LITERATURE OF PROTEST 170

BARBARIANS A LA MODE 174

ix

x Contents

IV. THE REVIEWING OF BOOKS

PAGE

A PROSPECTUS FOR CRITICISM 185

THE RACE OF REVIEWERS 195

THE SINS OF REVIEWING 203

MRS. WHARTON'S "THE AGE OF INNOCENCE" . .212
MR. HERGESHEIMER'S "CYTHEREA" . . . .217

V. PHILISTINES AND DILETTANTE

POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL . . . . . 227

EYE, EAR, AND MIND 243

OUT WITH THE DILETTANTE 246

FLAT PROSE 249

VI. MEN AND THEIR BOOKS

CONRAD AND MELVILLE 257

THE NOVELIST OF PITY 269

HENRY JAMES 278

THE SATIRIC RAGE OF BUTLER . . . . .282

CONCLUSION
DEFINING THE INDEFINABLE 291

I

On Fiction

Sentimental America

THE Oriental may be inscrutable, but he is no more
puzzling than the average American. We admit that
we are hard, keen, practical, — the adjectives that every
casual European applies to us, — and yet any book
store window or railway news-stand will show that we
prefer sentimental magazines and books. Why should
a hard race — if we are hard — read soft books?

By soft books, by sentimental books, I do not mean
only the kind of literature best described by the word
"squashy." I doubt whether we write or read more
novels and short stories of the tear-dripped or hyper-
emotional variety than other nations. Germany is —
or was — full of such soft stuff. It is highly popular
in France, although the excellent taste of French criti
cism keeps it in check. Italian popular literature ex
udes sentiment; and the sale of "squashy" fiction in
England is said to be threatened only by an occasional
importation of an American "best-seller." We have
no bad eminence here. Sentimentalists with enlarged
hearts are international in habitat, although, it must
be admitted, especially popular in America.

When a critic, after a course in American novels
and magazines, declares that life, as it appears on
the printed page here, is fundamentally sentimental
ized, he goes much deeper than "mushiness" with his

3

4 On Fiction

charge. He means, I think, that there is an alarming
tendency in American fiction to dodge the facts of
life — or to pervert them. He means that in most pop
ular books only red-blooded, optimistic people are wel
come. He means that material success, physical sound
ness, and the gratification of the emotions have the
right of way. He means that men and women (except
the comic figures) shall be presented, not as they are,
but as we should like to have them, according to a
judgment tempered by nothing more searching than
our experience with an unusually comfortable, safe, and
prosperous mode of living. Every one succeeds in
American plays and stories — if not by good thinking,
why then by good looks or good luck. A curious society
the research student of a later date might make of it —
an upper world of the colorless successful, illustrated
by chance-saved collar advertisements and magazine
covers; an underworld of grotesque scamps, clowns,
and hyphenates drawn from the comic supplement; and
all — red-blooded hero and modern gargoyle alike —
always in good humor.

I am not touching in this picture merely to attack
it. It has been abundantly attacked; what it needs
is definition. For there is much in this bourgeois,
good-humored American literature of ours which rings
true, which is as honest an expression of our indi
viduality as was the more austere product of ante
bellum New England. If American sentimentality does
invite criticism, American sentiment deserves defense.

Sentiment — the response of the emotions to the ap-

Sentimental America 5

peal of human nature — is cheap, but so are many other
good things. The best of the ancients were rich in it.
Homer's chieftains wept easily. So did Shakespeare's
heroes. Adam and Eve shed "some natural tears"
when they left the Paradise which Milton imagined
for them. A heart accessible to pathos, to natural
beauty, to religion, was a chief requisite for the pro
tagonist of Victorian literature. Even Becky Sharp
was touched — once — by Amelia's moving distress.

Americans, to be sure, do not weep easily; but if they
make equivalent responses to sentiment, that should
not be held against them. If we like "sweet" stories,
or "strong" — which means emotional — stories, our
taste is not thereby proved to be hopeless, or our
national character bad. It is better to be creatures
of even sentimental sentiment with the author of
"The Rosary," than to see the world only as it is
portrayed by the pens of Bernard Shaw and Anatole
France. The first is deplorable; the second is danger
ous. I should deeply regret the day when a simple
story of honest American manhood winning a million
and a sparkling, piquant sweetheart lost all power to
lull my critical faculty and warm my heart. I doubt
whether any literature has ever had too much of honest
sentiment.

Good Heavens! Because some among us insist that
the mystic rose of the emotions shall be painted a
brighter pink than nature allows, are the rest to forego
glamour? Or because, to view the matter differently,
psychology has shown what happens in the brain when

6 On Fiction

a man falls in love, and anthropology has traced mar
riage to a care for property rights, are we to suspect
the idyllic in literature wherever we find it? Life
is full of the idyllic; and no anthropologist will ever
persuade the reasonably romantic youth that the sweet
and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle rever
ence with desire for the object of his affections, is noth
ing but an idealized property sense. Origins explain
very little, after all. The bilious critics of sentiment
in literature have not even honest science behind them.

I have no quarrel with traffickers in simple emotion
— with such writers as James Lane Allen and James
Whitcomb Riley, for example. But the average Ameri
can is not content with such sentiment as theirs. He
wishes a more intoxicating brew, he desires to be per
suaded that, once you step beyond your own experi
ence, feeling rules the world. He wishes — I judge by
what he reads — to make sentiment at least ninety per
cent efficient, even if a dream-America, superficially
resemblant to the real, but far different in tone, must
be created by the obedient writer in order to satisfy
him. His sentiment has frequently to be sentimental
ized before he will pay for it. And to this fault, which
he shares with other modern races, he adds the other
heinous sin of sentimentalism, the refusal to face the
facts.

This sentimentalizing of reality is far more danger
ous than the romantic sentimentalizing of the "squashy"
variety. It is to be found in sex-stories which care
fully observe decency of word and deed, where the

Sentimental America 7

conclusion is always in accord with conventional mo
rality, yet whose characters are clearly immoral, inde
cent, and would so display themselves if the tale were
truly told. It is to be found in stories of "big business"
where trickery and rascality are made virtuous at the
end by sentimental baptism. If I choose for the hero
of my novel a director in an American trust; if I make
him an accomplice in certain acts of ruthless economic
tyranny; if I make it clear that at first he is merely
subservient to a stronger will; and that the acts he
approves are in complete disaccord with his private
moral code — why then, if the facts should be dragged
to the light, if he is made to realize the exact nature
of his career, how can I end my story? It is evident
that my hero possesses little insight and less firmness
of character. He is not a hero; he is merely a tool.
In, let us say, eight cases out of ten, his curve is already
plotted. It leads downward — not necessarily along the
villain's path, but toward moral insignificance.

And yet, I cannot end my story that way for Ameri
cans. There must be a grand moral revolt. There
must be resistance, triumph, and not only spiritual, but
also financial recovery. And this, likewise, is senti
mentality. Even Booth Tarkington, in his excellent
"Turmoil," had to dodge the logical issue of his story;
had to make his hero exchange a practical literary ideal
ism for a very impractical, even though a commercial,
utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful
at the end of the book. A story such as the Danish
Nexo's "Pelle the Conqueror," where pathos and the

8 On Fiction

idyllic, each intense, each beautiful, are made convinc
ing by an undeviating truth to experience, would seem
to be almost impossible of production just now in
America.

It is not enough to rail at this false fiction. The
chief duty of criticism is to explain. The best correc
tive of bad writing is a knowledge of why it is bad.
We get the fiction we deserve, precisely as we get the
government we deserve — or perhaps, in each case, a
little better. Why are we sentimental? When that
question is answered, it is easier to understand the
defects and the virtues of American fiction. And the
answer lies in the traditional American philosophy of
life.

To say that the American is an idealist is to commit
a thoroughgoing platitude. Like most platitudes, the
statement is annoying because from one point of view
it is indisputably just, while from another it does not
seem to fit the facts. With regard to our tradition,
it is indisputable. Of the immigrants who since the
seventeenth century have been pouring into this conti
nent a proportion large in number, larger still in influ
ence, has been possessed of motives which in part at
least were idealistic. If it was not the desire for re
ligious freedom that urged them, it was the desire for
personal freedom; if not political liberty, why then
economic liberty (for this too is idealism), and the
opportunity to raise the standard of life. And of
course all these motives were strongest in that earlier

Sentimental America 9

immigration which has done most to fix the state of
mind and body which we call being American. I need
not labor the argument. Our political and social his
tory support it; our best literature demonstrates it, for
no men have been more idealistic than the American
writers whom we have consented to call great. Emer
son, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman — was idealism
ever more thoroughly incarnate than in them?

And this idealism — to risk again a platitude — has
been in the air of America. It has permeated our re
ligious sects, and created several of them. It has given
tone to our thinking, and even more to our feeling. I do
not say that it has always, or even usually, determined
our actions, although the Civil War is proof of its
power. Again and again it has gone aground roughly
when the ideal met a condition of living — a fact that
will provide the explanation for which I seek. But
optimism, "boosting," muck-raking (not all of its man
ifestations are pretty), social service, religious, muni
cipal, democratic reform, indeed the "uplift" generally,
is evidence of the vigor, the bumptiousness of the in
herited American tendency to pursue the ideal. No one
can doubt that in 1918 we believed, at least, in idealism.

Nevertheless, so far as the average individual is
concerned, with just his share and no more of the race-
tendency, this idealism has been suppressed, and in
some measure perverted. It is this which explains, I
think, American sentimentalism.

Consider, for example, the ethics of conventional
American society. The American ethical tradition is

io On Fiction

perfectly definite and tremendously powerful. It be
longs, furthermore, to a population far larger than the
"old American" stock; for it has been laboriously incul
cated in our schools and churches, and impressively
driven home by newspaper, magazine, and book. I
shall not presume to analyze it save where it touches
literature. There it maintains a definite attitude to
ward all sex-problems: the Victorian, which is not neces
sarily, or even probably, a bad one. Man should be
chaste, and proud of his chastity. Woman must be so.
It is the ethical duty of the American to hate, or at
least to despise, all deviations, and to pretend — for
the greater prestige of the law — that such sinning is
exceptional, at least in America. And this is the public
morality he believes in, whatever may be his private
experience in actual living. In business, it is the ethi
cal tradition of the American, inherited from a rigorous
Protestant morality, to be square, to play the game
without trickery, to fight hard but never meanly.
Over-reaching is justifiable when the other fellow has
equal opportunities to be "smart"; lying, tyranny —
never. And though the opposites of all these laudable
practices come to pass, he must frown on them in
public, deny their Tightness even to the last cock-crow
— especially in the public press.

American political history is a long record of ideal
istic tendencies toward democracy working painfully
through a net of graft, pettiness, sectionalism, and
bravado, with constant disappointment for the idealist
who believes, traditionally, in the intelligence of the

Sentimental America 1 1

crowd. American social history is a glaring instance
of how the theory of equal dignity for all men can
entangle itself with caste distinctions, snobbery, and
the power of wealth. American economic history be
trays the pioneer helping to kick down the ladder which
he himself had raised toward equal opportunity for all.
American literary history — especially contemporary lit
erary history — reflects the result of all this for the
American mind. The sentimental in our literature is
a direct consequence.

The disease is easily acquired. Mr. Smith, a broker,
finds himself in an environment of "schemes" and
"deals" in which the quality of mercy is strained, and
the wind is decidedly not tempered to the shorn lamb.
After all, business is business. He shrugs his shoulders
and takes his part. But his unexpended fund of native
idealism — if, as is most probable, he has his share —
seeks its due satisfaction. He cannot use it in business ;
so he takes it out in a novel or a play where, quite
contrary to his observed experience, ordinary people
like himself act nobly, with a success that is all the
more agreeable for being unexpected. His wife, a
woman with strange stirrings about her heart, with
motions toward beauty, and desires for a significant
life and rich, satisfying experience, exists in day-long
pettiness, gossips, frivols, scolds, with money enough
to do what she pleases, and nothing vital to do. She
also relieves her pent-up idealism in plays or books —
in high-wrought, "strong" novels, not in adventures in
society such as the kitchen admires, but in stories with

12 On Fiction

violent moral and emotional crises, whose characters,
no matter how unlifelike, have "strong" thoughts, and
make vital decisions; succeed or fail significantly. Her
brother, the head of a wholesale dry-goods firm, listens
to the stories the drummers bring home of night life
on the road, laughs, says to himself regretfully that
the world has to be like that; and then, in logical re
action, demands purity and nothing but aggressive
purity in the books of the public library.

The hard man goes in for philanthropy (never before
so frequently as in America) ; the one-time "boss" takes
to picture-collecting; the railroad wrecker gathers rare
editions of the Bible; and tens of thousands of humbler
Americans carry their inherited idealism into the neces
sarily sordid experiences of life in an imperfectly or
ganized country, suppress it for fear of being thought
"cranky" or "soft," and then, in their imagination and
all that feeds their imagination, give it vent. You may
watch the process any evening at the "movies" or the
melodrama, on the trolley-car or in the easy chair at
home.

This philosophy of living which I have called Ameri
can idealism is in its own nature sound, as is proved in
a hundred directions where it has had full play. Sup
pressed idealism, like any other suppressed desire, be
comes unsound. And here lies the ultimate cause of
the taste for sentimentalism in the American bour
geoisie. An undue insistence upon happy endings, re
gardless of the premises of the story, and a craving

Sentimental America 13

for optimism everywhere, anyhow, are sure signs of a
"morbid complex," and to be compared with some
justice to the craving for drugs in an alcoholic deprived
of liquor. No one can doubt the effect of the suppres
sion by the Puritan discipline of that instinctive love
of pleasure and liberal experience common to us all.
Its unhealthy reaction is visible in every old American
community. No one who faces the facts can deny the
result of the suppression by commercial, bourgeois,
prosperous America of our native idealism. The stu
dent of society may find its dire effects in politics, in
religion, and in social intercourse. The critic cannot
overlook them in literature; for it is in the realm of
the imagination that idealism, direct or perverted, does
its best or its worst.

Sentiment is not perverted idealism. Sentiment is
idealism, of a mild and not too masculine variety. If
it has sins, they are sins of omission, not commission.
Our fondness for sentiment proves that our idealism, if
a little loose in the waist-band and puffy in the cheeks,
is still hearty, still capable of active mobilization, like
those comfortable French husbands whose plump and
smiling faces, careless of glory, careless of everything
but thrift and good living, one used to see figured on
a page whose superscription read, "Dead on the field
of honor."

The novels, the plays, the short stories, of sentiment
may prefer sweetness, perhaps, to truth, the feminine
to the masculine virtues, but we waste ammunition in
attacking them. There never was, I suppose, a great

14 On Fiction

literature of sentiment, for not even "The Sentimental
Journey" is truly great. But no one can make a diet
exclusively of "noble" literature; the charming has its
own cozy corner across from the tragic (and a much
bigger corner at that). Our uncounted amorists of
tail-piece song and illustrated story provide the readiest
means of escape from the somewhat uninspiring life
that most men and women are living just now in
America.

The sentimental, however, — whether because of an
excess of sentiment softening into "slush," or of a mor
bid optimism, or of a weak-eyed distortion of the facts
of life, — is perverted. It needs to be cured, and its
cure is more truth. But this cure, I very much fear,
is not entirely, or even chiefly, in the power of the
"regular practitioner," the honest writer. He can be
honest; but if he is much more honest than his readers,
they will not read him. As Professor Lounsbury once
said, a language grows corrupt only when its speakers
grow corrupt, and mends, strengthens, and becomes
pure with them. So with literature. We shall have less
sentimentality in American literature when our accumu
lated store of idealism disappears in a laxer generation;
or when it finds due vent in a more responsible, less
narrow, less monotonously prosperous life than is lived
by the average reader of fiction in America. I would
rather see our literary taste damned forever than have
the first alternative become — as it has not yet — a fact.
The second, in these years rests upon the knees of the
gods.

Sentimental America 15

All this must not be taken in too absolute a sense.
There are medicines, and good ones, in the hands of
writers and of critics, to abate, if not to heal, this
plague of sentimentalism. I have stated ultimate causes
only. They are enough to keep the mass of Americans
reading sentimentalized fiction until some fundamental
change has come, not strong enough to hold back the
van of American writing, which is steadily moving to
ward restraint, sanity, and truth. Every honest com
position is a step forward in the cause; and every clear-
minded criticism.

But one must doubt the efficacy, and one must doubt
the healthiness, of reaction into cynicism and sophisti
cated cleverness. There are curious signs, especially
in what we may call the literature of New York, of a
growing sophistication that sneers at sentiment and the
sentimental alike. "Magazines of cleverness" have this
for their keynote, although as yet the satire is not al
ways well aimed. There are abundant signs that the
generation just coming forward will rejoice in such a
pose. It is observable now in the colleges, where the
young literati turn up their noses at everything Ameri
can, — magazines, best-sellers, or one-hundred-night
plays, — and resort for inspiration to the English school
of anti-Victorians: to Remy de Gourmont, to Anatole
France. Their pose is not altogether to be blamed, and
the men to whom they resort are models of much that
is admirable; but there is little promise for American
literature in exotic imitation. To see ourselves prevail
ingly as others see us may be good for modesty, but

1 6 On Fiction

does not lead to a self-confident native art. And it is
a dangerous way for Americans to travel. We cannot
afford such sophistication yet. The English wits experi
mented with cynicism in the court of Charles II,
laughed at blundering Puritan morality, laughed at
country manners, and were whiffed away because the
ideals they laughed at were better than their own.
Idealism is not funny, however censurable its excesses.
As a race we have too much sentiment to be frightened
out of the sentimental by a blase cynicism.

At first glance the flood of moral literature now
upon us — social-conscience stories, scientific plays, plat
itudinous "moralities" that tell us how to live — may
seem to be another protest against sentimentalism. And
that the French and English examples have been so
warmly welcomed here may seem another indication
of a reaction on our part. I refer especially to "hard"
stories, full of vengeful wrath, full of warnings for
the race that dodges the facts of life. H. G. Wells is
the great exemplar, with his sociological studies
wrapped in description and tied with a plot. In a
sense, such stories are certainly to be regarded as a
protest against truth-dodging, against cheap optimism,
against "slacking," whether in literature or in life.
But it would be equally just to call them another re
sult of suppressed idealism, and to regard their popu
larity in America as proof of the argument which I have
advanced in this essay. Excessively didactic literature
is often a little unhealthy. In fresh periods, when life
runs strong and both ideals and passions find ready

Sentimental America 17

issue into life, literature has no burdensome moral to
carry. It digests its moral. Homer digested his morals.
They transfuse his epics. So did Shakespeare.

Not so with the writers of the social-conscience
school. They are in a rage over wicked, wasteful man.
Their novels are bursted notebooks — sometimes neat
and orderly notebooks, like Mr. Galsworthy's or our
own Ernest Poolers, sometimes haphazard ones, like
those of Mr. Wells, but always explosive with reform.
These gentlemen know very well what they are about,
especially Mr. Wells, the lesser artist, perhaps, as com
pared with Galsworthy, but the shrewder and possibly
the greater man. The very sentimentalists, who go to
novels to exercise the idealism which they cannot use
in life, will read these unsentimental stories, although
their lazy impulses would never spur them on toward
any truth not sweetened by a tale.

And yet, one feels that the social attack might have
been more convincing if free from its compulsory serv
ice to fiction; that these novels and plays might have
been better literature if the authors did not study
life in order that they might be better able to preach.
Wells and Galsworthy also have suffered from sup
pressed idealism, although it would be unfair to say
that perversion was the result. So have our muck-
rakers, who, very characteristically, exhibit the dis
order in a more complex and a much more serious form,
since to a distortion of facts they have often enough
added hypocrisy and commercialism. It is part of the
price we pay for being sentimental.

1 8 On Fiction

If I am correct in my analysis, we are suffering here
in America, not from a plague of bad taste merely, nor
only from a lack of real education among our myriads
of readers, nor from decadence — least of all, this last.
It is a disease of our own particular virtue which has in
fected us — idealism, suppressed and perverted. A less
commercial, more responsible America, perhaps a less
prosperous and more spiritual America, will hold fast
to its sentiment, but be weaned from its sentimentality.

Free Fiction

WHAT impresses me most in the contemporary short
story as I find it in American magazines, is its curious
sophistication. Its bloom is gone. I have read through
dozens of periodicals without finding one with fresh
feeling and the easy touch of the writer who writes be
cause his story urges him. And when with relief I do
encounter a narrative that is not conventional in struc
ture and mechanical in its effects, the name of the
author is almost invariably that of a newcomer, or of
one of our few uncorrupted masters of the art. Still
more remarkable, the good short stories that I meet
with in my reading are the trivial ones, — the sketchy,
the anecdotal, the merely adventurous or merely pic
turesque; as they mount toward literature they seem
to increase in artificiality and constraint; when they
propose to interpret life they become machines, and
nothing more, for the discharge of sensation, sentiment,
or romance. And this is true, so far as I can discover,
of the stories which most critics and more editors be
lieve to be successful, the stories which are most char
acteristic of magazine narrative and of the output of
American fiction in our times.

I can take my text from any magazine, from the most
literary to the least. In the stories selected by all of
them I find the resemblances greater than the differ-

19

2O On Fiction

ences, and the latter seldom amount to more than a
greater or a less excellence of workmanship and style.
The "literary" magazines, it is true, more frequently
surprise one by a story told with original and consum
mate art; but then the "popular" magazines balance
this merit by their more frequent escape from mere
prettiness. In both kinds, the majority of the stories
come from the same mill, even though the minds that
shape them may differ in refinement and in taste. Their
range is narrow, and, what is more damning, their art
seems constantly to verge upon artificiality.

These made-to-order stories (and this is certainly
not too strong a term for the majority of them) are not
interesting to a critical reader. He sticks to the novel,
or, more frequently, goes to France, to Russia, or to
England for his fiction, as the sales-list of any progres
sive publisher will show. And I do not believe that
they are deeply interesting to an uncritical reader. He
reads them to pass the time; and, to judge from the
magazines themselves, gives his more serious attention
to the "write-ups" of politics, current events, new dis
coveries, and men in the public eye, — to reality, in other
words, written as if it were fiction, and more interesting
than the fiction that accompanies it, because, in spite of
its enlivening garb, it is guaranteed by writer and editor
to be true. I am not impressed by the perfervid letters
published by the editor in praise of somebody's story
as a "soul-cure," or the greatest of the decade. They
were written, I suppose, but they are not typical. They
do not insult the intelligence as do the ridiculous puffs

Free Fiction 2f

which it is now the fashion to place like a sickly lime
light at the head of a story; but they do not convince
me of the story's success with the public. Actually,
men and women> discussing these magazines, seldom
speak of the stories. They have been interested, — in
a measure. The "formula," as I shall show later, is
bound to get that result. But they have dismissed the
characters and forgotten the plots.

I do not deny that this supposedly successful short
story is easy to read. It is — fatally easy. And here
precisely is the trouble. To borrow a term from dra
matic criticism, it is "well made," and that is what
makes it so thin, so bloodless, and so unprofitable to
remember, in spite of its easy narrative and its
"punch." Its success as literature, curiously enough for
a new literature and a new race like ours, is limited,
not by crudity, or inexpressiveness, but by form, by
the very rigidity of its carefully perfected form. Like
other patent medicines, it is constructed by formula.

It is not difficult to construct an outline of the "for
mula" by which thousands of current narratives are
being whipped into shape. Indeed, by turning to the
nearest textbook on "Selling the Short Story," I could
find one ready-made. (There could be no clearer
symptom of the disease I wish to diagnose than these
many "practical" textbooks, with their over-emphasis
upon technique and their under-estimate of all else
that makes literature.) The story must begin, it ap-
, with action or with dialogue. A mother packs

22 On Fiction

her son's trunk while she gives him unheeded advice
mingled with questions about shirts and socks; a cor
rupt and infuriated director pounds on the mahogany
table at his board meeting, and curses the honest fool
(hero of the story) who has got in his way; or,
" 'Where did Mary Worden get that curious gown?' in
quired Mrs. Van Deming, glancing across the sparkling
glass and silver of the hotel terrace." Any one of these
will serve as instance of the break-neck beginning which
Kipling made obligatory. Once started, the narrative
must move, move, move furiously, each action and
every speech pointing directly toward the unknown
climax. A pause is a confession of weakness. This
Poe taught for a special kind of story; and this a later
generation, with a servility which would have amazed
that sturdy fighter, requires of all narrative. Then
the climax, which must neatly, quickly, and definitely
end the action for all time, either by a solution you have
been urged to hope for by the wily author in every pre
ceding paragraph, or in a way which is logically cor
rect but never, never suspected. O. Henry is respon
sible for the vogue of the latter of these two alterna
tives, — and the strain of living up to his inventiveness
has been frightful. Finally comes a last suspiration,
usually in the advertising pages. Sometimes it is a
beautiful descriptive sentence charged with sentiment,
sometimes a smart epigram, according to the style of
story, or the "line" expected of the author. Try this,
as the advertisements say, on your favorite magazine.
This formula, with variations which readers can sup-

Free Fiction 23

ply for themselves or draw from textbooks on the short
story, is not a wholly bad method of writing fiction.
It is, I venture to assert, a very good one, — if you de
sire merely effective story-telling. It is probably the
best way of making the short story a thoroughly effi
cient tool for the presentation of modern life. And
there lies, I believe, the whole trouble. The short
story, its course plotted and its form prescribed, has be
come too efficient. Now efficiency is all that we ask of
a railroad, efficiency is half at least of what we ask of
journalism; but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps
the least, important among the undoubted elements of
good literature.

In order to make the short story efficient, the dia
logue, the setting, the plot, the character development,
have been squeezed and whittled and moulded until the
means of telling the story fit the ends of the story-telling
as neatly as hook fits eye. As one writer on how to
manufacture short stories tells us in discussing charac
ter development, the aspirant must —

"Eliminate every trait or deed which does not help
peculiarly to make the character's part in the particular
story either intelligible or open to such sympathy as
it merits;

"Paint in only the 'high lights,' that is ... never
qualify or elaborate a trait or episode, merely for the
sake of preserving the effect of the character's full
reality."

And thus the story is to be subdued to the service
of the climax as the body of man to his brain.

24 On Fiction

But what these writers upon the short story do not
tell us is that efficiency of this order works backward
as well as forward. If means are to correspond with
ends, why then ends must be adjusted to means. Not
only must the devices of the story-teller be directed
with sincerity toward the tremendous effect he wishes
to make with his climax upon you and me, his readers;
but the interesting life which it is or should be his pur
pose to write about for our delectation must be ma-
nceuvered, or must be chosen or rejected, not accord
ing to the limitation which small space imposes, but
with its suitability to the "formula" in mind. In brief,
if we are to have complete efficiency, the right kind of
life and no other must be put into the short-story hop
per. Nothing which cannot be told rapidly must be
dropped in, lest it clog the smoothly spinning wheels.
If it is a story of slowly developing incongruity in mar
ried life, the action must be speeded beyond proba
bility, like a film in the moving pictures, before it is
ready to be made into a short story. If it is a tale of
disillusionment on a prairie farm, with the world and
life flattening out together, some sharp climax must be
provided nevertheless, because that is the only way in
which to tell a story. Indeed it is easy to see the dan
gers which arise from sacrificing truth to a formula
in the interests of efficiency.

This is the limitation by form; the limitation by
subject is quite as annoying. American writers from
Poe down have been fertile in plots. Especially since
O. Henry took the place of Kipling as a literary mas-

Free Fiction 25

ter, ingenuity, inventiveness, cleverness in its American
sense, have been squandered upon the short story. But
plots do not make variety. Themes make variety.
Human nature regarded in its multitudinous phases
makes variety. There are only a few themes in current
American short stories, — the sentimental theme from
which breed ten thousand narratives; the theme of in
tellectual analysis and of moral psychology favored by
the "literary" magazines; the "big-business" theme;
the theme of American effrontery; the social-contrast
theme; the theme of successful crime. Add a few
more, and you will have them all. Read a hundred ex
amples, and you will see how infallibly the authors —
always excepting our few masters — limit themselves to
conventional aspects of even these conventional themes.
Reflect, and you will see how the first — the theme of
sentiment — has overflowed its banks and washed over
all the rest, so that, whatever else a story may be, it
must somewhere, somehow, make the honest American
heart beat more softly.

There is an obvious cause for this in the taste of the
American public, which I do not propose to neglect.
But here too we are in the grip of the "formula," of
the idea that there is only one way to construct a short
story — a swift succession of climaxes rising precipi
tously to a giddy eminence. For the formula is rigid,
not plastic as life is plastic. It fails to grasp innumer
able stories which break the surface of American life
day by day and disappear uncaught. Stories of quiet
homely life, events significant for themselves that never

26 On Fiction

reach a burning climax, situations that end in irony, or
doubt, or aspiration, it mars in the telling. The method
which makes story-telling easy, itself limits our variety.

Nothing brings home the artificiality and the narrow
ness of this American fiction so clearly as a compari
son, for better and for worse, with the Russian short
story. I have in mind the works of Anton Tchekoff,
whose short stories have now been translated into excel
lent English. Fresh from a reading of these books, one
feels, it is true, quite as inclined to criticize as to praise.
Why are the characters therein depicted so persistently
disagreeable, even in the lighter stories? Why are the
women always freckled, the men predominantly red and
watery in the eye? Why is the country so flat, so foggy,
so desolate; and why are the peasants so lumpish and
miserable? Russia before the Revolution could not
have been so dreary as this; the prevailing grimness
must be due to some mental obfuscation of her writers.
I do not refer to the gloomy, powerful realism of the
stories of hopeless misery. There, if one criticizes, it
must be only the advisability of the choice of such sub
jects. One does not doubt the truth of the picture. I
mean the needless dinginess of much of Russian fiction,
and of many of these powerful short stories.

Nevertheless, when one has said his worst, and par
ticularly when he has eliminated the dingier stories of
the collection, he returns with an admiration, almost
passionate, to the truth, the variety, above all to the
freedom of these stories. I do not know Russia or the
Russians, and yet I am as sure of the absolute truth

Free Fiction 27

of that unfortunate doctor in "La Cigale," who builds
up his heroic life of self-sacrifice while his wife seeks
selfishly elsewhere for a hero, as I am convinced of the
essential unreality, except in dialect and manners, of
the detectives, the "dope-fiends," the hard business
men, the heroic boys and lovely girls that people most
American short stories. As for variety, — the Russian
does not handle numerous themes. He is obsessed with
the dreariness of life, and his obsession is only
occasionally lifted; he has no room to wander widely
through human nature. And yet his work gives an im
pression of variety that the American magazine never
attains. He is free to be various. When the mood of
gloom is off him, he experiments at will, and often with
consummate success. He seems to be sublimely uncon
scious that readers are supposed to like only a few
kinds of stories; and as unaware of the taboo upon re
ligious or reflective narrative as of the prohibition upon
the ugly in fiction. As life in any manifestation be
comes interesting in his eyes, his pen moves freely. And
so he makes life interesting in many varieties, even
when his Russian prepossessions lead him far away
from our Western moods.

Freedom. That is the word here, and also in his
method of telling these stories. No one seems to have
said to Tchekoff, "Your stories must move, move,
move." Sometimes, indeed, he pauses outright, as life
pauses; sometimes he seems to turn aside, as life turns
aside before its progress is resumed. No one has ever
made clear to him that every word from the first of

28 On Fiction

the story must point unerringly toward the solution
and the effect of the plot. His paragraphs spring from
the characters and the situation. They are led on to
the climax by the story itself. They do not drag the
panting reader down a rapid action, to fling him breath
less upon the "I told you so" of a conclusion prepared
in advance.

I have in mind especially a story of Tchekoff's called
"The Night Before Easter." It is a very interesting
story; it is a very admirable story, conveying in a few
pages much of Russian spirituality and more of uni
versal human nature; but I believe that all, or nearly
all, of our American magazines would refuse it; not be
cause it lacks picturesqueness, or narrative suspense, or
vivid characterization — all of these it has in large meas
ure. They would reject it because it does not seem to
move rapidly, or because it lacks a vigorous climax.
The Goltva swollen in flood lies under the Easter stars.
As the monk Jerome ferries the traveler over to where
fire and cannon-shot and rocket announce the rising of
Christ to the riotous monastery, he asks, "Can you tell
me, kind master, why it is that even in the presence of
great happiness a man cannot forget his grief?" Dea
con Nicholas is dead, who alone in the monastery could
write prayers that touched the heart. And of them all,
only Jerome read his "akaphists." "He used to open
the door of his cell and make me sit by him, and we
used to read. . . . His face was compassionate and
tender — " In the monastery the countryside is crowd
ing to hear the Easter service. The choir sings "Lift

Free Fiction 29

up thine eyes, O Zion, and behold." But Nicholas is
dead, and there is none to penetrate the meaning of the
Easter canon, except Jerome who toils all night on the
ferry because they had forgotten him. In the morning,
the traveler recrosses the Goltva. Jerome is still on the
ferry. He rests his dim, timid eyes upon them all, and
then fixes his gaze on the rosy face of a merchant's wife.
There is little of the man in that long gaze. He is seek
ing in the woman's face the sweet and gentle features
of his lost friend.

The American editor refuses such a story. There is
no plot here, he says, and no "punch." He is wrong,
although an imperfect abstract like mine cannot con
vict him. For the narrative presents an unforgettable
portrait of wistful hero-worship, set in the dim mists
of a Russian river against the barbaric splendor of an
Easter midnight mass. To force a climax upon this
poignant story would be to spoil it. And when it ap
pears, as it will, in reprint, in some periodical anthology
of current fiction, it will not fail to impress American
readers.

But the American editor must have a climax which
drives home what he thinks the public wants. If it is
not true, so much the worse for truth. If it falsifies
the story, well, a lying story with a "punch" is better
than a true one that lacks a fire-spitting climax. The
audience which judge a play by the effect of its "cur
tain," will not complain of a trifling illogicality in nar
rative, or a little juggling with what might happen if
the story were life. Of what the editor wants I find a

30 On Fiction

typical example in a recent number of a popular maga
zine. The story is well written; it is interesting until
it begins to lie; moreover it is "featured" as one of the
best short stories of the year. An American girl,
brought up in luxury, has fed her heart with romantic
sentiment. The world is a Christmas tree. If you are
good and pretty and "nice," you have only to wait
until you get big enough to shake it, and then down will
come some present — respect from one's friends and
family, perhaps a lover. And then she wakes up. Her
father points out that she is pinching him by her ex
travagance. Nobody seems to want her kind of "nice-
ness"; which indeed does no one much good. There is
nothing that she can do that is useful in the world, for
she has never learned. She begins to doubt the
Christmas tree. There enters a man — a young electri
cal engineer, highly trained, highly ambitious, but
caught in the wheels of a great corporation where he is
merely a cog; wanting to live, wanting to love, wanting
to be married, yet condemned to labor for many years
more upon a salary which perhaps would little more
than pay for her clothes. By an ingenious device they
are thrown together in a bit of wild country near town,
and are made to exchange confidences. So far, no one
can complain of the truth of this story; and further
more it is well told. Here are two products of our so
cial machine, both true to type. Suppose they want
to marry? What can we do about it? The story-teller
has posed his question with a force not to be denied.

Free Fiction 31

But I wish we had had a Tchekoff to answer it. As
for this author, he leads his characters to a conveniently
deserted house, lights a fire on the hearth, sets water
boiling for tea, and in a few pages of charming romance
would persuade us that with a few economies in this
rural residence, true love may have its course and a
successful marriage crown the morning's adventure.
Thus in one dazzling sweep, the greatest and most
sugary plum of all drops from the very tip of the
Christmas tree into the lap of the lady, who had just
learned that happiness in the real world comes in no
such haphazard and undeserved a fashion. Really!
have we degenerated from Lincoln's day? Is it easy
now to fool all of us all of the time, so that a tale-teller
dares to expose silly romance at the beginning of his
story, and yet dose us with it at the end? Not that
one objects to romance. It is as necessary as food, and
almost as valuable. But romance that pretends to be
realism, realism that fizzles out into sentimental ro
mance — is there any excuse for that? Even if it pro
vides "heart interest" and an effective climax?

The truth is, of course, that the Russian stories are
based upon life; the typical stories of the American
magazines, for all their realistic details, are too often
studied, not from American life but from literary con
vention. Even when their substance is fresh, their un-
foldings and above all their solutions are second-hand.
If the Russian authors could write American stories I
believe that their work would be more truly popular
than what we are now getting. They would be free to

32 On Fiction

be interesting in any direction and by any method. The
writer of the American short story is not free.

I should like to leave the subject here with a com
parison that any reader can make for himself. But
American pride recalls the past glory of our short
story, and common knowledge indicates the present
reality of a few authors — several of them women — who
are writing fiction of which any race might be proud.
The optimist cannot resist meditating on the way out
for our enslaved short story.

The ultimate responsibility for its present position
must fall, I suppose, upon our American taste, which,
when taken by and large, is unquestionably crude,
easily satisfied, and not sensitive to good things. Ameri
can taste does not rebel against the "formula." If in
terest is pricked it does not inquire too curiously into
the nature of the goad. American taste is partial to
sentiment, and antagonistic to themes that fail to pre
sent the American in the light of optimistic romance.
But our defects in taste are slowly but certainly being
remedied. The schools are at work upon them;
journalism, for all its noisy vulgarity, is at work upon
them. Our taste in art, our taste in poetry, our taste
in architecture, our taste in music go up, as our taste
in magazine fiction seems to go down.

But what are the writers of short stories and what
are the editors and publishers doing to help taste im
prove itself until, as Henry James says, it acquires a
keener relish than ever before?

Free Fiction 33

It profits nothing to attack the American writer.
He does, it may fairly be assumed, what he can, and I
do not wish to discuss here the responsibility of the
public for his deficiencies. The editor and the pub
lisher, however, stand in a somewhat different relation
ship to the American short story. They may assert
with much justice that they are public servants merely;
nevertheless they do control the organs of literary ex
pression, and it is through them that any positive in
fluence on the side of restriction or proscription must
be exerted, whatever may be its ultimate source. If a
lack of freedom in method and in choice of subject is
one reason for the sophistication of our short story,
then the editorial policy of American magazines is a
legitimate field for speculation.

I can reason only from the evidence of the product
and the testimony of authors, successful and unsuccess
ful. Yet one conclusion springs to the eye, and is
enough in itself to justify investigation. The critical
basis upon which the American editor professes to
build his magazine is of doubtful validity. I believe
that it is unsound. His policy, as stated in "editorial
announcements" and confirmed by his advertisements
of the material he selects, is first to find out what the
public wants, and next to supply it. This is reason
able in appearance. It would seem to be good com
mercially, and, as a policy, I should consider it good
for art, which must consult the popular taste or lose its
vitality. But a pitfall lies between this theory of edi
torial selection and its successful practice. The editor

34 On Fiction

must really know what the public wants. If he does
not, he becomes a dogmatic critic of a very dangerous
school.

Those who know the theater and its playwrights,
are agreed that the dramatic manager, at least in
America, is a very poor judge of what the public de
sires. The percentage of bad guesses in every metro
politan season is said to be very high. Is the editor
more competent? It would seem that he is, to judge
from the stability of our popular magazines. But that
he follows the public taste with any certainty of judg
ment is rendered unlikely, not only by inherent improb
ability, but also by three specific facts: the tiresome
succession of like stories which follow unendingly in
the wake of every popular success; the palpable fear
of the editor to attempt innovation, experiment, or
leadership; and the general complaint against "maga
zine stories." In truth, the American editor plays safe,
constantly and from conviction; and playing safe in
the short story means the adoption of the "formula,"
which is sure to be somewhat successful; it means re
striction to a few safe themes. He swings from the
detective story to the tale of the alien, from the "heart-
interest" story to the narrative of "big business."
When, as has happened recently, a magazine experi
mented with eroticism, and found it successful, the
initiative of its editor was felt to be worthy of general
remark.

If one reduces this imperfect sketch of existing con
ditions to terms of literary criticism, the result is in-

Free Fiction 35

teresting. There are two great schools of criticism:
the judicial and the impressionistic. The judicial critic
— a Boileau, a Matthew Arnold — bases his criticism
upon fundamental principles. The impressionistic
critic follows the now hackneyed advice of Anatole
France, to let his soul adventure among masterpieces,
and seeks the reaction for good or bad of a given work
upon his own finely strung mind. The first group
must be sure of the breadth, the soundness, and the
just application of their principles. The second group
must depend upon their own good taste.

The American editor has flung aside as archaic the
fundamental principles of criticism upon which judicial
critics have based their opinions. And yet he has
chosen to be dogmatic. He has transformed his guess
as to what the public wants into a fundamental prin
ciple, and acted upon it with the confidence of an Aris
totle. He asserts freely and frankly that, in his pri
vate capacity, such and such a story pleases him, is
good (privately he is an impressionist and holds opin
ions far more valid than his editorial judgment, since
they are founded upon taste and not upon intuition
merely) ; but that "the public will not like it," or "in
our rivalry with seventy other magazines we cannot
afford to print this excellent work." He is frequently
right. He is also frequently wrong.

I speak not from personal experience, since other
reasons in my own case have usually, though not
always, led me to agree with the editor's verdict, when
it has been unfavorable; but from the broader testi-

36 On Fiction

mony of many writers, the indisputable evidence of
works thus rejected which have later attained success,
and the failure of American short fiction to impress
permanently the reading public. Based upon an in
tuition of the public mind, changing with the wind, —
always after, never before it, — such editorial judgment,
indeed, must be of doubtful validity; must lead in many
instances to unwise and unprofitable restrictions upon
originality in fiction.

I am well aware that it is useless to consider current
American literature without regard to the multitude
of readers who, being, like all multitude, mediocre, de
mand the mediocre in literature. And I know that it is
equally foolish to neglect the popular elements in the
developing American genius — that genius which is so
colloquial now, and yet so inventive; so vulgar some
times, and yet, when sophistication is not forced upon
it, so fresh. I have no wish to evade the necessity for
consulting the wishes and the taste of the public, which
good sense and commercial necessity alike impose upon
the editor. I would not have the American editor less
practical, less sensitive to the popular wave; I would
have him more so. But I would have him less dog
matic. All forms of dogmatism are dangerous for men
whose business it is to publish, not to criticize, con
temporary literature. But an unsound and arbitrary
dogmatism is the worst. If the editor is to give the
people what they want instead of what they have
wanted, he must have more confidence in himself, and
more belief in their capacity for liking the good. He

Free Fiction 37

should be dogmatic only where he can be sure. Else
where let him follow the method of science, and experi
ment. He should trust to his taste in practice as well
as in private theory, and let the results of such criti
cism sometimes, at least, dominate his choice.

In both our "popular" and our "literary" magazines,
freer fiction would follow upon better criticism. The
readers of the "literary" magazines are already seek
ing foreign-made narratives, and neglecting the Ameri
can short story built for them according to the stand
ardized model. The readers of the "popular" maga
zines want chiefly journalism (an utterly different
thing from literature); and that they are getting in
good measure in the non-fiction and part-fiction sec
tions of the magazines. But they also seek, as all men
seek, some literature. If, instead of imposing the
"formula" (which is, after all, a journalistic mech
anism — and a good one — adapted for speedy and
evanescent effects), if, instead of imposing the "for
mula" upon all the subjects they propose to have turned
into fiction, the editors of these magazines should also
experiment, should release some subjects from the
tyranny of the "formula," and admit others which its
cult has kept out, the result might be surprising. It
is true that the masses have no taste for literature, —
as a steady diet; it is still more certain that not even
the most mediocre of multitudes can be permanently
hoodwinked by formula.

But the magazines can take care of themselves; it is
the short story in which I am chiefly interested. Bet-

38 On Fiction

ter criticism and greater freedom for fiction might
vitalize our overabundant, unoriginal, unreal, un versa
tile, — everything but unformed short story. Its artifice
might again become art. Even the more careful, the
more artistic work leaves one with the impression that
these stories have sought a "line," and found an ac
ceptable formula. And when one thinks of the multi
tudinous situations, impressions, incidents in this fas
cinating whirl of modern life, incapable perhaps of
presentation in a novel because of their very imperma-
nence, admirably adapted to the short story because of
their vividness and their deep if narrow significance,
the voice of protest must go up against any artificial,
arbitrary limitations upon the art. Freedom to make
his appeal to the public with any subject not morbid
or indecent, is all the writer can ask. Freedom to pub
lish sometimes what the editor likes and the public
may like, instead of what the editor approves because
the public has liked it, is all that he needs. There is
plenty of blood in the American short story yet, though
I have read through whole magazines without finding
a drop of it.

When we give literature in America the same oppor
tunity to invent, to experiment, that we have already
given journalism, there will be more legitimate suc
cessors to Irving, to Hawthorne, to Poe and Bret Harte.
There will be more writers, like O. Henry, who write
stories to please themselves, and thus please the ma
jority. There will be fewer writers, like O. Henry,
who stop short of the final touch of perfection because

Free Fiction 39

American taste (and the American editor) puts no
premium upon artistic work. There will be fewer
stories, I trust, where sentiment is no longer a part, but
the whole of life. Most of all, form, the form, the
formula, will relax its grip upon the short story, will
cease its endless tapping upon the door of interest, and
its smug content when some underling (while the brain
sleeps) answers its stereotyped appeal. And we may
get more narratives like Mrs. Wharton's "Ethan
Frome," to make us feel that now as much as ever there
is literary genius waiting in America.

A Certain Condescension Toward
Fiction

IF only the reader of novels would say what he thinks
about fiction! If only the dead hand of hereditary
opinion did not grasp and distort what he feels I But
he exercises a judgment that is not independent.
Books, like persons, he estimates as much by the tra
ditional reputation of the families they happen to be
born in as by the merits they may themselves possess,
and the traditional reputation of the novel in English
has been bad.

Poetry has a most respectable tradition. Even now,
when the realistic capering of free verse has embold
ened the ordinary man to speak his mind freely, a re
viewer hesitates to apply even to bad poetry so undigni
fied a word as trash. The essay family is equally re
spectable, to be noticed, when noticed at all, with some
of the reverence due to an ancient and dignified art.
The sermon family, still numerous to a degree incredi
ble to those who do not study the lists of new books,
is so eminently respectable that few dare to abuse even
its most futile members. But the novel was given a
bad name in its youth that has overshadowed its suc
cessful maturity.

Our ancestors are much to blame. For centuries
they held the novel suspect as a kind of bastard litera-

40

A Certain Condescension 41

ture, probably immoral, and certainly dangerous to in
tellectual health. But they are no more deeply respon
sible for our suppressed contempt of fiction than weak-
kneed novelists who for many generations have striven
to persuade the English reader that a good story was
really a sermon, or a lecture on ethics, or a tract on
economics or moral psychology, in disguise. Bernard
Shaw, in his prefaces to the fiction that he succeeds in
making dramatic, is carrying on a tradition that
Chaucer practised before him:

And ye that holden this tale a folye, —
As of a fox, or of a cok and hen, —
Taketh the moralite, good men.

And that was the way they went at it for centuries,
always pretending, always driven to pretend, that a
good story was not good enough to be worth telling for
itself alone, but must convey a moral or a satire or an
awful lesson, or anything that might separate it from
the "just fiction" that only the immoral and the frivo
lous among their contemporaries read or wrote. To
day we pay the price.

William Painter, her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's
clerk of ordnance in the Tower, is an excellent instance.
Stricken by a moral panic, he advertised that from his
delectable "Palace of Pleasure" the young might
"learne how to avoyde the ruine, overthrow, inconven
ience and displeasure, that lascivious desire and wanton
evil doth bring to their suters and pursuers" — a disin
genuous sop to the Puritans. His contemporary,

42 On Fiction

Geoffrey Fenton, who also turned to story-making,
opines that in histories "the dignitye of vertue and
fowelenes of vice appereth muche more lyvelye then
in any morall teachynge," although he knew that his
"histories" were the sheerest, if not the purest, of fic
tion, with any moral purpose that might exist chiefly
of his own creating. A century and more later Eliza
Haywood, the ambiguous author of many ambiguous
novels of the eighteenth century, prefaces her "Life's
Progress Through the Passions" (an ambiguous title)
with like hypocrisy: "I am enemy to all romances,
novels, and whatever carries the air of them. ... It
is a real, not a fictitious character I am about to pre
sent" — which is merely another instance of fiction dis
guising itself, this time, I regret to say, as immorality
in real life. And so they all go, forever implying that
fiction is frivolous or immoral or worthless, until it is
not surprising that, as Mr. Bradsher has reminded us,
the elder Timothy Dwight of Yale College was able to
assert, "Between the Bible and novels there is a gulf
fixed which few novel-readers are willing to pass."
Richardson was forced to defend himself, so was Sterne,
so was Fielding, so was Goldsmith. Dr. Johnson was
evidently making concessions when he advised ro
mances as reading for youth. Jeffrey, the critic and
tyrant of the next century, summed it all up when he
wrote that novels are "generally regarded as among the
lower productions of our literature." And this is the
reputation that the novel family has brought with it
even down to our day.

A Certain Condescension 43

The nineteenth century was worse, if anything, than
earlier periods, for it furthered what might be called
the evangelistic slant toward novel-reading, the attitude
that neatly classified this form of self-indulgence with
dancing, card-playing, hard drinking, and loose living
of every description. It is true that the intellectuals
and worldly folk in general did not share this prejudice.
Walter Scott had made novel-reading common among
the well-read; but the narrower sectarians in England,
the people of the back country and the small towns in
America, learned to regard the novel as unprofitable,
if not positively leading toward ungodliness, and their
unnumbered descendants make up the vast army of
uncritical readers for which Grub Street strives and
sweats to-day. They no longer abstain and condemn;
instead, they patronize and distrust.

All this — and far more, for I have merely sketched
in a long and painful history — is the background sel
dom remembered when we wonder at the easy conde
scension of the American toward his innumerable
novels.

The fact of his condescension is not so well recog
nized as it deserves to be. Indeed, condescension may
not seem to be an appropriate term for the passionate
devouring of romance that one can see going on any
day in the trolley-cars, or the tense seriousness with
which some readers regard certain novelists whose
pages have a message for the world. True, the term
will not stretch thus far. But it is condescension that
has made the trouble, as I shall try to prove; for all

44 On Fiction

of us, even the tense ones, do patronize that creative
instinct playing upon life as it is which in all times
and everywhere is the very essence of fiction.

How absurd that here in America we should conde
scend toward our fiction ! How ridiculous in a country
even yet so weak and poor and crude in the arts, which
has contributed so little to the world's store of all that
makes fine living for the mind! What a laughable
parallel of the cock and the gem he found and left
upon the dung-heap, if we could be proved not to be
proud of American fiction! For if the novel and the
short story should be left out of America's slender con
tribution to world literature, the offering would be a
small one. Some poetry of Whitman's and of Poe's,
some essays of Emerson, a little Thoreau, and what
important besides? Hawthorne would be left from the
count, the best exemplar of the fine art of moral narra
tive in any language; Henry James would be left out,
the master of them all in psychological character analy
sis; Poe the story-teller would be missing, and the art
of the modern short story, which in English stems from
him; Cooper would be lost from our accounting, for
all his crudities the best historical novelist after Scott;
Mark Twain, Howells, Bret Harte, Irving! The at
tempt to exalt American literature is grateful if one
begins upon fiction.

And how absurd to patronize, to treat with indiffer
ent superiority just because they are members of the
novel family, books such as these men have left us,
books such as both men and women are writing in

A Certain Condescension 45

America to-day! Is there finer workmanship in Ameri
can painting or American music or American architec
ture than can be found in American novels by the
reader willing to search and discriminate? A con
temporary poet confessed that he would have rather
written a certain sonnet (which accompanied the con
fession) than have built Brooklyn Bridge. One may
doubt the special case, yet uphold the principle. Be
cause a novel is meant to give pleasure, because it deals
with imagination rather than with facts and appeals to
the generality rather than to the merely literary man
or the specialist, because, in short, a novel is a novel,
and a modern American novel, is no excuse for prig
gish reserves in our praise or blame. If there is any
thing worth criticizing in contemporary American
literature it is our fiction.

Absurd as it may seem in theory, we have patronized
and do patronize our novels, even the best of them,
following too surely, though with a bias of our own,
the Anglo-Saxon prejudice traditional to the race. And
if the curious frame of mind that many reserve for
fiction be analyzed and blame distributed, there will
be a multitude of readers, learned and unlearned, proud
and humble, critical and uncritical, who must admit
their share. Nevertheless, the righteous wrath inspired
by the situation shall not draw us into that dangerous
and humorless thing, a general indictment. There are
readers aplenty who, to quote Painter once more, find
their novels "pleasant to avoyde the griefe of a Win
ters night and length of Sommers day," and are duly

46 On Fiction

appreciative of that service. With such honest, if un-
exacting, readers I have no quarrel; nor with many
more critical who respect, while they criticize, the art
of fiction. But with the scholars who slight fiction, the
critics who play with it, the general reader who likes
it contemptuously, and the social enthusiast who
neglects its better for its worser part, the issue is direct.
All are the victims of hereditary opinion; but some
' should know better than to be thus beguiled.

The Brahman among American readers of fiction is
of course the college professor of English. His atti
tude (I speak of the type; there are individual varia
tions of note) toward the novel is curious and interest
ing. It is exhibited perhaps in the title by which such
courses in the novel as the college permits are usually
listed. "Prose fiction" seems to be the favorite descrip
tion, a label designed to recall the existence of an un
deniably respectable fiction in verse that may justify
a study of the baser prose. By such means is so dubi
ous a term as novel or short story kept out of the
college catalogue!

Yet even more curious is the academic attitude
toward the novel itself. Whether the normal professor
reads many or few is not the question, nor even how
much he enjoys or dislikes them. It is what he permits
himself to say that is significant. Behind every assent
to excellence one feels a reservation: yes, it is good
enough for a novel! Behind every criticism of un
truth, of bad workmanship, of mediocrity (alas! so
often deserved in America!) is a sneering implication:

A Certain Condescension 47

but, after all, it is only a novel. Not thus does he
treat the stodgy play in stodgier verse, the merits of
which, after all, may amount to this, that in appear
ance it is literary; not thus the critical essay or in
vestigation that too often is like the parasite whose sus
taining life comes from the greater life on which it
feeds. In the eyes of such a critic the author of an
indifferent essay upon Poe has more distinguished him
self than if he had written a better than indifferent short
story. Fiction, he feels, is the plaything of the popu
lace. The novel is "among the lower productions of
our literature." It is plebeian, it is successful, it is
multitudinous; the Greeks in their best period did not
practise it (but here he may be wrong) ; any one can
read it; let us keep it down, brethren, while we may.
Many not professors so phrase their inmost thoughts
of fiction and the novel.

And in all this the college professor is profoundly
justified by tradition, if not always by common sense.
To him belongs that custody of the classical in litera
ture which his profession inherited from the monas
teries, and more remotely from the rhetoricians of
Rome. And there is small place for fiction, and none
at all for the novel and the short story as we know them,
in what has been preserved of classic literature. The
early Renaissance, with its Sidney for spokesman, at
tacked the rising Elizabethan drama because it was un-
classical. The later Renaissance, by the pen of Addi-
son (who would have made an admirable college pro
fessor), sneered at pure fiction, directly and by im-

48 On Fiction

plication, because it was unclassical. To-day we have
lost our veneration for Latin and Greek as languages,
we no longer deprecate an English work because it hap
pens to be in English; nevertheless the tradition still
grips us, especially if we happen to be Brahmanic.
Our college professors, and many less excusable, still
doubt the artistic validity of work in a form never dig
nified by the practice of the ancients, never hallowed,
like much of English literature besides, by a long line
of native productions adapting classic forms to new
ages and a new speech. The epic, the lyric, the pas
toral, the comedy, the tragedy, the elegy, the satire,
the myth, even the fable, have been classic, have usually
been literature. But the novel has never been a pre
serve for the learned, although it came perilously near
to that fate in the days of Shakespeare; has ever been
written for cash or for popular success rather than for
scholarly reputation; has never been studied for gram
mar, for style, for its "beauties"; has since its genesis
spawned into millions that no man can classify, and
produced a hundred thousand pages of mediocrity for
one masterpiece. All this (and in addition prejudices
unexpressed and a residuum of hereditary bias) lies
behind the failure of most professors of English to give
the good modern novel its due. Their obstinacy is un
fortunate; for, if they praised at all, they would not,
like many hurried reviewers, praise the worst best.

I will not say that more harm has been done to the
cause of the novel in America by feeble reviewing than
by any other circumstance, for that would not be true;

A Certain Condescension 49

bad reading has been more responsible for the light
estimation in which our novel is held. Nevertheless it
is certain that the ill effects of a doubtful literary repu
tation are more sadly displayed in current criticism of
the novel than elsewhere. An enormous effusion of
writing about novels, especially in the daily papers,
most of it casual and conventional, much of it with
neither discrimination nor constraint, drowns the few
manful voices raised to a pitch of honest concern. The
criticism of fiction, taken by and large, is not so good
as the criticism of our acted drama, not so good as our
musical criticism, not so good as current reviewing of
poetry and of published plays.

Are reviewers bewildered by the coveys of novels
that wing into editorial offices by every mail? Is the
reviewing of novels left to the novice as a mere rhetori
cal exercise in which, a subject being afforded, he can
practise the display of words? Or is it because a novel
is only a novel, only so many, many novels, for which
the same hurried criticism must do, whether they be
bad or mediocre or best? The reviewing page of the
standard newspaper fills me with unutterable depres
sion. There seem to be so many stories about which
the same things can be said. There seems to be so
much fiction that is "workmanlike," that is "fascinat
ing," that "nobly grasps contemporary America," that
will "become a part of permanent literature," that
"lays bare the burning heart of the race." Of course
the need of the journalist to make everything "strong"
is behind much of this mockery; but not all. Heredi-

£O On Fiction

tary disrespect for fiction has more to do with this flood
of bad criticism than appears at first sight.

Far more depressing, however, is the rarity of real
criticism of the novel anywhere. As Henry James, one
of the few great critics who have been willing to take
the novel seriously, remarked in a now famous essay,
the most notable thing about the modern novel in Eng
lish is its appearance of never having been criticized
at all. A paragraph or so under "novels of the day" is
all the novelist may expect until he is famous, and more
in quantity, but not much more in quality, then. As
for critical essays devoted to his work, discriminating
studies that pick out the few good books from the many
bad, how few they are (and how welcome, now that they
are increasing in number), how deplorably few in com
parison with the quantity of novels, in comparison with
the quality of the best novels!

And what of the general public, that last arbiter in
a democracy, whose referendum, for a year at least,
confirms or renders null and void all critical legislation
good or bad? The general public is apparently on the
side of the novelist; to borrow a slang term expressive
here, it is "crazy" about fiction. It reads so much fic
tion that hundreds of magazines and dozens of pub
lishers live by nothing else. It reads so much fiction
that public libraries have to bait their serious books
with novels in order to get them read. It is so avid for
fiction that the trades whose business it is to cultivate
public favor, journalism and advertising, use almost
as much fiction as the novel itself. A news article or

A Certain Condescension 51

an interview or a Sunday write-up nowadays has char
acter, background, and a plot precisely like a short
story. Its climax is carefully prepared for in the best
manner of Edgar Allan Poe, and truth is rigorously
subordinated (I do not say eliminated) in the interest
of a vivid impression. Advertising has become half
narrative and half familiar dialogue. Household goods
are sold by anecdotes, ready-made clothes figure in epi
sodes illustrated by short-story artists, and novelettes,
distributed free, conduct us through an interesting fic
tion to the grand climax, where all plot complexities
are untangled by the installation of an automatic water-
heater. I am not criticizing the tendency — it has made
the pursuit of material comfort easier and more inter
esting, — but what a light it throws upon our mania for
reading stories!

Alas! the novel needs protection from its friends.
This vast appetite for fiction is highly uncritical. It
will swallow anything that interests, regardless of the
make-up of the dish. Only the inexperienced think
that it is easy to write an interesting story; but it is
evident that if a writer can be interesting he may lack
every other virtue and yet succeed. He can be a bad
workman, he can be untrue, he can be sentimental, he
can be salacious, and yet succeed.

No one need excite himself over this circumstance.
It is inevitable in a day when whole classes that never
read before begin to read. The danger lies in the atti
tude of these new readers, and many old ones, toward
their fiction. For they, too, condescend even when

52 On Fiction

most hungry for stories. They, too, share the inherited
opinion that a novel is only a novel, after all, to be
read, but not to be respected, to be squeezed for its
juices, then dropped like a grape-skin and forgotten.
Perhaps the Elizabethan mob felt much the same way
about the plays they crowded to see; but their respect,
the critics' respect, Shakespeare's respect, for the lan
guage of noble poesy, for noble words and deeds en
shrined in poetry, is not paralleled to-day by an ap
preciation of the fine art of imaginative character rep
resentation as it appears in our novel and in all good
fiction.

Is it necessary to prove this public disrespect? The
terms in which novels are described by their sponsors
is proof enough in itself. Seemingly, everything that is
reputable must be claimed for every novel — good
workmanship, vitality, moral excellence, relative su
periority, absolute greatness — in order to secure for it
any deference whatsoever. Or, from another angle,
how many readers buy novels, and buy them to keep?
How many modern novels does one find well bound,
and placed on the shelves devoted to "standard read
ing"? In these Olympian fields a mediocre biography,
a volume of second-rate poems, a rehash of history,
will find their way before the novels that in the last
decade have equaled, if not outranked, the rest of our
creative literature.

If more proof were needed, the curious predilections
of the serious-minded among our novel-readers would
supply it. For not all Americans take the novel too

A Certain Condescension 53

lightly; some take it as heavily as death. To the school
that tosses off and away the latest comer is opposed
the school which, despising all frivolous stories written
for pleasure merely, speaks in tense, devoted breath
of those narratives wherein fiction is weighted with
facts, and pinned by a moral to the sober side of life.
It is significant that the novels most highly respected
in America are studies of social conditions, reflexes of
politics, or tales where the criticism of morals over
shadows the narrative. Here the novel is an admirable
agent. Its use as a purveyor of miscellaneous ideas
upon things in general is no more objectionable than
the cutting of young spruces to serve as Christmas-
trees. For such a function they were not created, but
they make a good end, nevertheless. The important
inference is rather that American readers who do pre
tend to take the novel seriously are moved not so much
by the fiction in their narratives as by the sociology,
philosophy, or politics imaginatively portrayed. They
respect a story with such a content because it comes
as near as the novel can to not being fiction at all. And
this, I imagine, is an unconscious throw-back to the
old days when serious-minded readers chose Hannah
More for the place of honor, because her stories taught
the moralist how to live and die.

The historically minded will probably remark upon
these general conclusions that a certain condescension
toward some form of literature has ever been predict
able of the general reader; the practically minded may
add that no lasting harm to the mind of man and the

54 On Fiction

pursuit of happiness seems to have come of it. The
first I freely admit; the second I gravely doubt for the
present and distrust for the future. Under conditions
as we have them and will increasingly have them here
in America, under democratic conditions, condescen
sion toward fiction, the most democratic of literary arts,
is certainly dangerous. It is dangerous because it dis
courages good writing. In this reading society that
we have made for ourselves here and in western Eu
rope, where much inspiration, more knowledge, and a
fair share of the joy of living come from the printed
page, good writing is clearly more valuable than ever
before in the history of the race. I do not agree with
the pessimists who think that a democratic civiliza
tion is necessarily an enemy to fine writing for the
public. Such critics underrate the challenge which
these millions of minds to be reached and souls to be
touched must possess for the courageous author; they
forget that writers, like actors, are inspired by a
crowded house. But the thought and the labor and
the pain that lie behind good writing are doubly diffi
cult in an atmosphere of easy tolerance and good-
natured condescension on the part of the readers of the
completed work.

The novel is the test case for democratic literature.
We cannot afford to pay its practitioners with cash
merely, for cash discriminates in quantity and little
more. Saul and David were judged by the numbers of
their thousands slain; but the test was a crude one for
them and cruder still for fiction. We cannot afford to

A Certain Condescension 55

patronize these novelists as our ancestors did before
us. Not prizes or endowments or coterie worship or,
certainly, more advertising is what the American
novelist requires, but a greater respect for his craft.
The Elizabethan playwright was frequently despised
of the learned world, and, if a favorite with the vulgar,
not always a respected one. Strange that learned and
vulgar alike should repeat the fallacy in dispraising the
preeminently popular art of our own times! To Sir
Francis Bacon "Hamlet" was presumably only a play
actor 's play. If the great American story should ar
rive at last, would we not call it "only a novel"?

The Essence of Popularity

You might suppose that popular literature was a mod
ern invention. Cultivated shoulders shrug at the men
tion of "best sellers" with that air of "the world is
going to the devil" which just now is annoyingly
familiar. Serious minded people write of The Satur
day Evening Post as if it represented some new fanati
cism destined to wreck civilization. The excessive
popularity of so many modern novels is felt to be a
mystery.

Of course there are new elements in literary popu
larity. The wave of interest used to move more slowly.
Now thousands, and sometimes millions, read the popu
lar story almost simultaneously, and see it, just a little
later on the films. Millions, also, of the class which
never used to read at all are accessible to print and
have the moving pictures to help them.

But popularity has not changed its fundamental
characteristics. The sweep of one man's idea or fancy
through other minds, kindling them to interest, has
been typical since communication began. The Greek
romances of Heliodorus may be analyzed for their
popular elements quite as readily as "If Winter
Comes." "Pilgrim's Progress" and "The Thousand
and One Nights" could serve as models for success, and
the question, What makes popularity in fiction? be

56

Essence of Popularity 57

answered from them with close, if not complete, refer
ence to the present. However, the results of an inquiry
into popularity will be surer if we stick to modern liter
ature, not forgetting its historical background. Human
nature, which changes its essence so slowly through the
centuries, nevertheless shows rapid alterations of phase.
The question I propose, therefore, is, What makes a
novel popular in our time?

I do not ask it for sordid reasons. What makes a
novel sell 100,000 copies, or a short story bring $1000?
may seem the same query; but it does not get the
same answer, or, apparently, any answer valuable for
criticism. A cloud descends upon the eyes of those
who try to teach how to make money out of literature
and blinds them. Their books go wrong from the
start, and most of them are nearly worthless. They
propose to teach the sources of popularity, yet instead
of dealing with those fundamental qualities of emo
tion and idea which (as I hope to show) make popu
larity, their tale is all of emphasis, suspense, begin
nings and endings, the relativity of characters, dia
logue, setting — useful points for the artisan but not
the secret of popularity, nor, it may be added, of great
ness in literature. Technique is well enough, in fact
some technique is indispensable for a book that is to
be popular, but it is the workaday factor in literature,
of itself it accomplishes nothing.

But technique can be taught. That is the explana
tion of the hundred books upon it, and their justifica
tion. You cannot teach observation, or sympathy, or

58 On Fiction

the background of knowledge which makes possible the
interpretation and selection of experience — not at least
in a lesson a week for nine months. Hence literary
advisers who must teach something and teach it quickly
are drawn, sometimes against their better judgment,
to write books on technique by which criticism profits
little. Technical perfection becomes their equivalent
for excellence and for popularity. It is not an equiva
lent. More than a mason is required for the making
of a statue.

I disclaim any attempt to teach how to be popular
in this essay, although deductions may be made. I am
interested in popularity as a problem for criticism. I
am interested in appraising the pleasure to be got from
such popular novels as "The Age of Innocence," "Miss
Lulu Bett," "If Winter Comes," or "The Turmoil"—
and the not infrequent disappointments from others
equally popular. I am especially interested in the at
tempt to estimate real excellence, an attempt which re
quires that the momentarily popular shall be separated
from the permanently good; which requires that a dis
tinction be made between what must have some excel
lence because so many people like it, and what is good
in a book whether many people like it or not. Such
discrimination may not help the young novelist to
make money, but it can refine judgment and deepen ap
preciation.

As for the popularity and its meaning, there need
be no quarrel over that term. Let us rule out such ac
cidents as when a weak book becomes widely known

Essence of Popularity 59

because it is supposed to be indecent, or because it is
the first to embody popular propaganda, or because its
hero is identified with an important figure of real life,
or for any other casual reason. If a novel, because of
the intrinsic interest of its story, or on account of the
contagion of the idea it contains, is widely read by
many kinds of readers, and if these readers on their
own initiative recommend the book they have read to
others, that is popularity, and a sufficient definition.

Perfection of form is not enough to make a book
popular. A story has to move or few will read it, but
it is doubtful whether a greater technical achievement
than this is required for popularity. "Samson Agon-
istes" is technically perfect, but was never popular,
while, to pass from the sublime to its opposite, "This
Side of Paradise" was most crudely put together, and
yet was popular. The best-built short stories of the
past decade have not been the most popular, have not
even been the best. No popular writer but could have
Been (so I profoundly believe) more popular if he had
written better. But good writing is not a specific for
unpopularity. The excellent writing of Howells could
not give him Mark Twain's audience. The weak and
tedious construction of Shakespeare's "Antony and
Cleopatra," the flat style of Harold Bell Wright's nar
ratives, has not prevented them from being liked.
Form is only a first step toward popularity.

Far more important is an appeal to the emotions,
which good technique can only make more strong. But
what is an appeal to the emotions? "Uncle Tom's

60 On Fiction

Cabin" appealed to the emotions, and so does "Get-
Rich-Quick Wallingford." To what emotions does the
popular book appeal? What makes "Treasure Island"
popular? Why did "Main Street" have such an unex
pected and still reverberating success?

"Treasure Island" is popular because it stirs and
satisfies two instinctive cravings of mankind, the love
of romantic adventure, and the desire for sudden
wealth. This is not true, or rather it is not the whole,
or even the important, truth, in "Main Street." There
the chief appeal is to an idea not an instinct. We left
the war nationally self-conscious as perhaps never be
fore, acutely conscious of the contrasts between our
habits, our thinking, our pleasures, our beliefs, and
those of Europe. When the soldiers oversea talked
generalities at all it was usually of such topics. The
millions that never went abroad were plucked from
their Main Streets, and herded through great cities
to the mingled companionship of the camps. "Main
Street," when it came to be written, found an awak
ened consciousness of provincialism, and a detached
view of the home town such as had never before been
shared by many. Seeing home from without was so
general as to constitute, not a mere experience, but a
mass emotion. And upon this new conception, this
prejudice against every man's Main Street, the book
grasped, and thrived. In like manner, "Uncle Tom's
Cabin" grew great upon its conception of slavery.
"Robert Elsmere" swept the country because of its ex
ploitation of freedom in religious thought. No one of

Essence of Popularity 61

these books could have been written, or would have
been popular if they had been written, before their pre
cise era; no one is likely long to survive it, except as a
social document which scholars will read and historians
quote.

Roughly then, the appeal which makes for popu
larity is either to the instinctive emotions permanent
in all humanity, though changing shape with circum
stances, or to the fixed ideas of the period, which may
often and justly be called prejudice. A book may gain
its popularity either way, but the results of the first are
more likely to be enduring. "Paradise Lost," the least
popular of popular poems, still stirs the instinctive
craving for heroic revolt, and lives for that quite as
much as for the splendors of its verse. Dryden's "Hind
and the Panther," which exploited the prejudices of its
times, and was popular then, is almost dead.

What are these instinctive cravings that seek satis
faction in fiction and, finding it, make both great and
little books popular? Let me list a few without at
tempting to be complete.

First in importance probably is the desire to escape
from reality into a more interesting life. This is a
foundation, of course, of all romantic stories, and is
part of the definition of the romantic, but it applies to
much in literature that is not usually regarded as
romance. A more interesting life than yours or mine
does not mean one we should wish actually to live,
otherwise it would be difficult to account for the taste
for detective stories of many sedentary bank presi-

62 On Fiction

dents; nor does it mean necessarily a beautiful, a wild,
a romantic life. No, we wish to escape to any imagined
life that will satisfy desires suppressed by circum
stance, or incapable of development in any attainable
reality.

This desire to escape is eternal, the variety differs
with the individual and still more with the period.
While youthful love, or romantic adventure as in
"Treasure Island," has been an acceptable mode for
literature at least as far back as the papyrus tales of
the Egyptians, more precise means of delivery from the
intolerable weight of real life appear and disappear in
popular books. In the early eighteen hundreds, men
and women longed to be blighted in love, to be in lonely
revolt against the prosaic well-being of a world of little
men. Byron was popular. In the Augustan age of
England, classic antiquity was a refuge for the dream
ing spirit; in Shakespeare's day, Italy; in the fifteenth
century, Arthurian romance. Just at present, and in
America, the popularity of a series of novels like "The
Beautiful and Damned," "The Wasted Generation,"
"Erik Dora," and "Cytherea," seems to indicate that
many middle-aged readers wish to experience vicari
ously the alcoholic irresponsibility of a society of "flap
pers," young graduates, and country club rakes, who
threw the pilot overboard as soon as they left the war
zone and have been cruising wildly ever since. We re
member that for a brief period in the England of
Charles II, James II, and William and Mary, rakish-
ness in the plays of Wycherley and Congreve had a

Essence of Popularity 63

glamour of romance upon it and was popular. Indeed,
the novel or drama that gives to a generation the escape
it desires will always be popular. Test Harold Bell
Wright or Zane Grey, Rudyard Kipling or Walter
Scott, by this maxim, and it will further define itself,
and ring true.

Another human craving is the desire to satisfy the
impulses of sex. This is much more difficult to define
than the first because it spreads in one phase or an
other through all cravings. Romance of course has its
large sex element, and so have the other attributes to
be spoken of later. However, there is a direct and
concentrated interest in the relations between the sexes
which, in its finer manifestations, seeks for a vivid con
trast of personalities in love; in its cruder forms de
sires raw passion; in its pathological state craves the
indecent. A thousand popular novels illustrate the
first phase; many more, of which the cave-man story,
the desert island romance, "The Sheik" and its com
panions are examples, represent the second; the ever-
surging undercurrent of pornography springs to satisfy
the third.

Many sex stories are popular simply because they
satisfy curiosity, but curiosity in a broader sense is a
human craving which deserves a separate category.
Popular novels seldom depend upon it entirely, but
they profit by it, sometimes hugely. A novel like Dos
Passos's "Three Soldiers," or Mrs. Wharton's "Age of
Innocence," or Mrs. Atherton's "Sleeping Fires," makes
its first, though not usually its strongest, appeal to our

64 On Fiction

curiosity as to how others live or were living. This was
the strength of the innumerable New England, Creole,
mountaineer, Pennsylvania Dutch stories in the flour
ishing days of local color. It is a prop of the historical
novel and a strong right arm for the picture melodrama
of the underworld or the West. Indeed, the pictures,
by supplying a photographic background of real scenes
inaccessible to the audience have gained a point upon
the written story.

Curiosity is a changeable factor, a sure play for im
mediate popularity, but not to be depended upon for
long life. It waxes and wanes and changes its object.
Just now we are curious about Russia, the South Sea
Islanders, and night life on Broadway; to-morrow it
may be New Zealand and Australia, the Argentine
millionaire, and quite certainly the Chinese and China.
Books appealing to the craving for escape have a longer
life, for a story that takes a generation out of itself
into fairyland keeps some of its power for the next.
Nevertheless, the writer who guesses where curious
minds are reaching and gives them what they want,
puts money in his purse.

A fourth craving, which is as general as fingers and
toes, is for revenge. We laugh now at the plays of re
venge before "Hamlet," where the stage ran blood, and
even the movie audience no longer enjoys a story the
single motive of which is physical revenge. Blood for
blood means to us either crime or rowdyism. And yet
revenge is just as popular in literature now as in the
sixteenth century. Only its aspect has changed. Our

Essence of Popularity 65

fathers are not butchered in feuds, our sons are not sold
into slavery, and except in war or in street robberies
we are not insulted by brute physical force. Never
theless we are cheated by scoundrels, oppressed by
financial tyranny, wounded by injustice, suppressed by
self-sufficiency, rasped by harsh tempers, annoyed by
snobbery, and often ruined by unconscious selfishness.
We long to strike back at the human traits which have
wronged us, and the satiric depiction of hateful charac
ters whose seeming virtues are turned upside down to
expose their impossible hearts feeds our craving for
vicarious revenge. We dote upon vinegarish old maids,
self-righteous men, and canting women when they are
exposed by narrative art, and especially when poetic
justice wrecks them. The books that contain them bid
for popularity. It happens that in rapid succession we
have seen three novels in which this element of popular
success was strong: Miss Sinclair's "Mr. Waddington
of Wyck," "Vera," by the author of "Elizabeth in Her
German Garden," and Mr. Hutchinson's "If Winter
Comes." The first two books focus upon this quality,
and their admirable unity gives them superior force;
but it is noteworthy that "If Winter Comes," which,
adds other popular elements in large measure to its re
lease of hate, has been financially the most successful
of the three.

To these deep cravings of the heart must be added
another of major importance. I mean aspiration, the
deep desire of all human without exception sometimes
to be better, nobler, finer, truer. Stories of daring in

66 On Fiction

the face of unconquerable odds, stories of devotion,
above all stones of self-sacrifice are made to gratify
this emotion. They are purges for the restless soul.
Some critic of our short story discovered not long ago
that the bulk of the narratives chosen for reprinting
had self-sacrifice as theme. This is precisely what one
would expect of comfortable, ease-loving peoples, like
the Germans before the empire and the Americans of
our generation. When no real sacrifice of goods, of
energy, of love, or of life is necessary, then the crav
ing for stories of men who give up all and women who
efface themselves is particularly active. The hard, in
dividualistic stories of selfish characters — Ben Hecht's
for example, and Scott Fitzgerald's — have been written
after a war period of enforced self-sacrifice and by
young men who were familiar with suffering for a cause.
But most American readers of our generation live easily
and have always lived easily, and that undoubtedly ac
counts for the extraordinary popularity here of aspir
ing books. Reading of a fictitious hero who suffers for
others is a tonic for our conscience, and like massage
takes the place of exercise. By a twist in the same
argument, it may be seen that the cheerful optimist in
fiction, who Pollyannawise believes all is for the best,
satisfies the craving to justify our well-being. I do not,
however, mean to disparage this element of popularity.
It is after all the essential quality of tragedy where
the soul rises above misfortune. It is a factor in noble
literature as well as in popular success.
So much for some of the typical and instinctive crav-

Essence of Popularity 67

ings which cry for satisfaction and are the causes of
popularity. To them may be added others of course,
notably the desire for sudden wealth, which is a factor
in "Treasure Island" as in all treasure stories, and the
prime cause of success in the most popular of all plots,
the tale of Cinderella, which, after passing through
feudal societies with a prince's hand as reward, changed
its sloven sister for a shopgirl and King Cophetua into
a millionaire, and swept the American stage. To this
may also be added simpler stimulants of instinctive
emotion, humor stirring to pleasant laughter, pathos
that exercises sympathy, the happy ending that makes
for joy. Stories which succeed because they stir and
satisfy in this fashion are like opera in a foreign tongue,
which moves us even when we do not fully understand
the reason for our emotion. They differ from another
kind of popular story, in which a popular idea rather
than an instinctive emotion is crystallized, and which
now must be considered.

Each generation has its fixed ideas. A few are in
herited intact by the generation that follows, a few are
passed on with slight transformation, but most crumble
or change into different versions of the old half-truths.
Among the most enduring of prejudices is the fallacy
of the good old times. Upon that formula nine-tenths
of the successful historical romances are built. That
American wives suffer from foreign husbands, that
capital is. ruthless, that youth is right and age wrong,
that energy wins over intellect, that virtue is always
rewarded, are American conceptions of some endurance

68 On Fiction

that have given short but lofty flights to thousands of
native stories.

More important, however, in the history of fiction are
those wide and slow moving currents of opinion, for
which prejudice is perhaps too narrow a name, which
flow so imperceptibly through the minds of a genera
tion or a whole century that there is little realization
of their novelty. Such a slow-moving current was the
humanitarianism which found such vigorous expression
in Dickens, the belief in industrial democracy which is
being picked up as a theme by novelist after novelist
to-day, or the sense of the value of personality and hu
man experience which so intensely characterizes the
literature of the early Renaissance.

If a novel draws up into itself one of these ideas,
filling it with emotion, it gains perhaps its greatest as
surance of immediate popularity. If the idea is of
vast social importance, this popularity may continue.
But if it is born of immediate circumstance, like the
hatred of slavery in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or if it is
still more transient, say, the novelty of a new invention,
like the airplane or wireless, then the book grows stale
with its theme. The like is true of a story that teaches
a lesson a generation are willing to be taught — it lives
as long as the lesson. What has become of Charles
Kingsley's novels, of the apologues of Maria Edgeworth?
"Main Street" is such a story; so was "Mr. Britling
Sees It Through"; so probably "A Doll's House." De
cay is already at their hearts. Only the student knows
how many like tales that preached fierily a text for the

Essence of Popularity 69

times have died in the past. But I am writing of popu
larity not of permanence. In four popular novels out
of five, even in those where the appeal to the instinctive
emotions is dominant, suspect some prejudice of the
times embodied and usually exploited. It is the most
potent of lures for that ever increasing public which
has partly trained intelligence as well as emotions.

Perhaps it is already clear that most popular novels
combine many elements of popularity, although usually
one is dominant. Among the stories, for instance, which
I have mentioned most frequently, "Main Street" de
pends upon a popular idea, but makes use also of the
revenge motive. It is not at all, as many hasty critics
said, an appeal to curiosity. We know our Main Streets
well enough already. And therefore in England, which
also was not curious about Main Streets, and where
the popular idea that Sinclair Lewis seized upon was
not prevalent, the book has had only a moderate suc
cess. "If Winter Comes" combines the revenge motive
with aspiration. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel made its
strong appeal to curiosity. We had heard of the wild
younger generation and were curious. His second book
depends largely upon the craving for sex experience,
in which it resembles Mr. Hergesheimer's "Cytherea,"
but also plays heavily upon the motive of escape, and
upon sheer curiosity. "Miss Lulu Bett" was a story
of revenge. Booth Tarkington's "Alice Adams" — to
bring in a new title — is a good illustration of a story
where for once a popular novelist slurred over the popu
lar elements in order to concentrate upon a study of

jo On Fiction

character. His book received tardy recognition but it
disappointed his less critical admirers. Mr. White's
"Andivius Hedulio" depends for its popularity upon
curiosity and escape.

The popular story, then, the financially successful,
the immediately notorious story, should appeal to the
instinctive emotions and may be built upon popular
prejudice. What is the moral for the writer? Is he
to lay out the possible fields of emotion as a surveyor
prepares for his blue print? By no means. Unless he
follows his own instinct in the plan, or narrates because
of his own excited thinking he will produce a thinly
clad formula rather than a successful story. There is
no moral for the writer, only some rays of light thrown
upon the nature of his achievement. The way to ac
complish popularity, if that is what you want, is to
write for the people, and let formula, once it is under
stood, take care of itself. As an editor, wise in popu
larity, once said to me, "Oppenheim and the rest are
popular because they think like the people not for
them."

What is the moral of this discussion for the critical
reader? A great one, for if he does not wish to be
tricked constantly by his own emotions into supposing
that what is timely is therefore fine, and what moves
him is therefore great, he must distinguish between the
elements of popularity and the essence of greatness. It
is evident, I think, from the argument that every ele
ment of popularity described above may be made ef
fective upon our weak human nature with only an ap-

Essence of Popularity 71

proximation to truth. The craving for escape may
be, and usually is, answered by sentimental romance,
where every emotion, from patriotism to amorousness,
is mawkish and unreal. Every craving may be played
upon in the same fashion just because it is a craving,
and the result be often more popular for the exaggera
tion. Also it is notorious that a prejudice — or a pop
ular idea, if you prefer the term — which is seized upon
for fiction, almost inevitably is strained beyond logic
and beyond truth, so much so that in rapid years, like
those of 1916 to 1920 which swept us into propaganda
and out again, the emphatic falsity of a book's central
thesis may be recognized before the first editions are
exhausted. It would be interesting to run off, in the
midst of a 1922 performance, some of the war films
that stirred audiences of 1918. It will be interesting
to reread some of the cheaper and more popular war
stories that carried even you, O judicious reader, off
your even balance not five years ago to-day!

We have always known, of course, that a novel can
be highly popular without being truly excellent.
Nevertheless, it is a valuable discipline to specify the
reasons. And it is good discipline also in estimating
the intrinsic value of a novel to eliminate as far as is
possible the temporal and the accidental; and in par
ticular the especial appeal it may have to your own
private craving — for each of us has his soft spot where
the pen can pierce. On the contrary, if the highly
speculative business of guessing the probable circula
tion of a novel ever becomes yours, then you must

72 On Fiction

doubly emphasize the importance of these very quali
ties; search for them, analyze them out of the narra
tive, equate them with the tendencies of the times, the
new emotions stirring, the new interests, new thoughts
abroad, and then pick best sellers in advance.

Yet in eliminating the accidental in the search for
real excellence, it would be disastrous to eliminate all
causes of popularity with it. That would be to assume
that the good story cannot be popular, which is non
sense. The best books are nearly always popular,
if not in a year, certainly in a decade or a century.
Often they spread more slowly than less solid achieve
ments for the same reason that dear things sell less
rapidly than cheap. The best books cost more to
read because they contain more, and to get much out
the reader must always put much in. Nevertheless, the
good novel will always contain one or more of the
elements of popularity in great intensity. I make but
one exception, and that for those creations of the sheer
intellect, like the delicate analyses of Henry James,
where the appeal is to the subtle mind, and the emotion
aroused an intellectual emotion. Such novels are on
the heights, but they are never at the summit of literary
art. They are limited by the partiality of their appeal,
just as they are exalted by the perfection of their ac
complishment. They cannot be popular, and are not.

The "best seller" therefore may be great but does
not need to be. It is usually a weak book, no matter
how readable, because ordinarily it has only the ele
ments of popularity to go on, and succeeds by their

Essence of Popularity 73

number and timeliness instead of by fineness and truth.
A second-rate man can compound a best seller if his
sense for the popular is first-rate. In his books the
instinctive emotions are excited over a broad area, and
arise rapidly to sink again. No better examples can
be found than in the sword-and-buckler romance of
our 'nineties which set us all for a while thinking
feudal thoughts and talking shallow gallantry. Now
it is dead, stone dead. Not even the movies can re
vive it. The emotions it aroused went flat over night.
Much the same is true of books that trade in prejudice,
like the white slave stories of a decade ago. For a
moment we were stirred to the depths. We swallowed
the concept whole and raged with a furious indigestion
of horrible fact. And then it proved to be colic only.
With such a light ballast of prejudice or sentiment
can the profitable ship popularity be kept upright for
a little voyage, and this, prevailingly, is all her cargo.
But the wise writer, if he is able, as Scott, and Dickens,
and Clemens were able, freights her more deeply. As
for the good reader, he will go below to investigate
before the voyage commences; or, if in midcourse he
likes not his carrier, take off in his mental airplane
and seek another book.

II

On the American Tradition

The American Tradition

I REMEMBER a talk in Dublin with an Irish writer
whose English prose has adorned our period. It was
1918, and the eve of forced conscription, and his
indignation with English policy was intense. "I will
give up their language," he said, "all except Shake
speare. I will write only Gaelic." Unfortunately, he
could read Gaelic much better than he could write it.
In his heart, indeed, he knew how mad he would have
been to give up the only literary tradition which, thanks
to language, could be his own; and in a calmer mood
since he has enriched that tradition with admirable
translations from the Irish. He was suffering from
a mild case of Anglomania.

Who is the real Anglomaniac in America? Not the
now sufficiently discredited individual with a monocle
and a pseudo-Oxford accent, who tries to be more
English than the English. Not the more subtly dan
gerous American who refers his tastes, his enthusiasms,
his culture, and the prestige of his compatriots to an
English test before he dare assert them. The real
Anglomaniac is the American who tries to be less Eng
lish than his own American tradition. He is the man
who is obsessed with the fear of "Anglo-Saxon domi
nation."

How many Anglomaniacs by this definition are at

77

78 On the American Tradition

large in America each reader may judge for himself.
Personally, I find them extraordinarily numerous, and
of so many varieties, from the mere borrower of opin
ions to the deeply convinced zealot, that it seems wiser
to analyze Anglomania than to discuss the various
types that possess it. And in this analysis let us
exclude from the beginning such very real, but tem
porary, grievances against the English as spring from
Irish oppressions, trade rivalries, or the provocations
which always arise between allies in war. All such
causes of anti-English and anti-"Anglo-Saxon" senti
ment belong in a different category from the underlying
motives which I propose to discuss.

These new Anglomaniacs, with their talk of Anglo-
Saxon domination, cannot mean English domination.
That would be absurd, although even absurdities are
current coin in restless years like these. At least one
Irishman of my acquaintance knows that King George
cabled Wilson to bring America into the war, and that
until that cable came Wilson dared not act. I can
conceive of an English influence upon literature that
is worth attacking, and also worth defending. I can
conceive of a far less important English influence upon
our social customs. But in neither case, domination.
That England dominates our finance, our industry, our
politics, is just now, especially, the suspicion of a para
noiac, or the idea of an ignoramus.

"Anglo-Saxon domination," even in an anti-British
meeting, cannot and does not mean English domina
tion; it can mean only control of America by the so-

The American Tradition 79

called Anglo-Saxon element in our population. The
quarrel is local, not international. The "Anglo-Saxon"
three thousand miles away who cannot hit back is a
scapegoat, a whipping boy for the so-called "Anglo-
Saxon" American at home.

What is an "Anglo-Saxon" American? Presumably
he is the person familiar in "want" advertisements:
"American family wants boarder for the summer. Ref
erences exchanged." But this does not help us much.
He is certainly not English. Nothing is better estab
lished than the admixture of bloods since the earliest
days of our nationality. That I, myself, for example,
have ancestral portions of French, German, Welsh, and
Scotch, as well as English blood in my veins, makes
me, by any historical test, characteristically more
rather than less American. Race, indeed, within very
broad limits, is utterly different from nationality, and
it is usually many, many centuries before the two
become even approximately identical. The culture I
have inherited, the political ideals I live by, the litera
ture which is my own, most of all the language that I
speak, are far more important than the ultimate race
or races I stem irom, obviously more important, since
in thousands of good Americans it is impossible to
determine what races have gone to their making. There
is no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon American — and so
few English Americans that they are nationally insig
nificant.

An American with a strong national individuality
there certainly is, and it is true that his traditions,

80 On the American Tradition

irrespective of the race of his forbears, are mainly
English; from England he drew his political and social
habits, his moral ideas, his literature, and his language.
This does not make him a "slave to England," as our
most recent propagandists would have it; it does not
put him in England's debt. We owe no debt to Eng
land. Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, and ourselves are deeply in debt to our
intellectual, our spiritual, our esthetic ancestors who
were the molders of English history and English
thought, the interpreters of English emotion, the mas
ters of the developing English mores that became our
mores, and have since continued evolution with a dif
ference. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton,
Wycliffe, Bunyan, Fox, and Wesley, Elizabeth, Crom
well, and the great Whigs, these made the only tra
dition that can be called Anglo-Saxon, and if we have
an American tradition, as we assuredly have, here are
its roots. This is our "Anglo-Saxon domination."

But if the roots of this tradition are English, its
trunk is thoroughly American, seasoned and developed
through two centuries of specifically American history.
As we know it to-day it is no longer "Anglo-Saxon,"
it is as American as our cities, our soil, our accent
upon English. If we are going to discuss "domination"
let us be accurate and speak of the domination of
American tradition. It is against the American tradi
tion that the new Anglomaniac actually protests.

Dominating this American tradition is, dominating,
almost tyrannical, for one reason only, but that a

The American Tradition 81

strong one, a fact not a convention, a factor, not a
mere influence — dominating because of the English
language.

In our century language has become once again as
powerful as in the Roman Empire — and its effects,
thanks to printing and easy transportation, are far
more quickly attained. Hordes from all over Europe
have swarmed into the domain of English. They have
come to a country where the new language was in
dispensable. They have learned it, or their children
have learned it. English has become their means of
communication with their neighbors, with business, with
the state. Sooner or later even the news of Europe
has come to them through English, and sometimes
unwillingly, but more often unconsciously, they have
come under the American, the real "Anglo-Saxon"
domination.

For a language, of course, is more than words. It
is a body of literature, it is a method of thinking, it
is a definition of emotions, it is the exponent and the
symbol of a civilization. You cannot adopt English
without adapting yourself in some measure to the Eng
lish, or the Anglo-American tradition. You cannot
adopt English political words, English literary words,
English religious words, the terms of sport or ethics,
without in some measure remaking your mind on a
new model. If you fail or refuse, your child will not.
He is forcibly made an American, in ideas at least,
and chiefly by language.

I submit that it is impossible for an alien thoroughly

82 On the American Tradition

to absorb and understand Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech
or Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" without working a
slight but perceptible transformation in the brain, with
out making himself an heir of a measure of English
tradition. And the impact of English as a spoken
tongue, and the influence of its literature as the only
read literature, are great beyond ordinary conception.
Communities where a foreign language is read or
spoken only delay the process, they cannot stop it.

The foreigner, it is true, has modified the English
language precisely as he has modified the American
tradition. Continental Europe is audible in the Ameri
can tongue, as it is evident in the American mind;
but it is like the English or the Spanish touch upon
the Gothic style in architecture — there is modification,
but not fundamental change.

Many a foreign-born American has been restless
under this domination. The letters and memoirs of
the French immigrants from revolutionary France ex
press discomfort freely. The Germans of '48, them
selves the bearers of a high civilization, have often
confessed an unwilling assimilation. The Germans of
earlier migrations herded apart like the later Scandi
navians, in part to avoid the tyranny of tongue.

Imagine a German coming here in early manhood.
His tradition is not English; he owes nothing to a
contemporary England that he but dimly knows.
Speaking English, perhaps only English, he grows im
patient with a tongue every concept of which has an
English coloring. The dominance of the language, and

The American Tradition 83

especially of its literature, irks him. He no longer
wants to think as a German; he wants to think as an
American; but the medium of his thought must be
English. His anger often enough goes out against Eng
lish history, English literature. He is easily irritated
by England. But it is the American past that binds
and is converting him. Such consciousness of the
power of environment is perhaps rare, but the fact
is common. In our few centuries of history millions
have been broken into English, with all that implies.
Millions have experienced the inevitable discomfort
of a foreign tradition which makes alien their father
lands, and strangers of their children. This is an
"Anglo-Saxon" domination. But it is useless to struggle
against it.

There is a similar discomfort among certain Ameri
can authors, especially just now, when, for the first
time since the Civil War and the materialism that suc
ceeded it, we are finding our national self once again
in literature. Mr. Mencken and Mr. Dreiser have
vigorously expressed this annoyance with American tra
dition. They wish to break with it — at least Mr.
Dreiser does — break with it morally, spiritually, es-
thetically. Let the dotards, he says, bury their dead.

Mr. Mencken wishes to drive us out of Colonialism.
He says that Longfellow has had his day, and that
it is time to stop imitating Addison, time to be ashamed
of aping Stevenson, Kipling, or John Masefield. He
is right.

But when it comes to disowning English literature

84 On the American Tradition

and the past of American literature (as many a writer
directly or by implication would have us) in order to
become 100 per cent American, let us first take breath
long enough to reflect that, first, such a madcap career
is eminently undesirable, and, second, utterly impossi
ble. It is a literature which by general admission is
now the richest and most liberal in the world of living
speech. English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian,
less fine than French, less homely than German, but
more expressive, more flexible, than these and all others.
Its syntax imposes no burdens, its traditions are weighty
only upon the vulgar and the bizarre. Without its
literary history, American literature in general, and
usually in particular, is not to be understood. That
we have sprung from a Puritanical loin, and been nour
ished in the past from the breast of Victorianism, is
obvious. In this we have been not too much, but too
narrowly, English. We have read Tennyson when it
might have been better to have read Shakespeare or
Chaucer. But to wish to break with English literature
in order to become altogether American is like desiring
to invent an entirely new kind of clothes. I shall
not give up trousers because my fourth great-grand
father, who was a Yorkshireman, wore them, and his
pattern no longer fits my different contour. I shall
make me a pair better suiting my own shanks — yet
they shall still be trousers. But in any case, language
binds us.

Indeed, in this welter of newcomers here in America,
whose children learn, read, write only English, the tra-

The American Tradition 85

dition of Anglo-American literature is all that holds
us by a thread above chaos. If we could all be made
to speak German, or Italian, or Spanish, there would
be cause, but no excuse, for an attempted revolution.
But English is dominant here and will remain so.
Could we hope to make an American literary language
without dependence on English literature, a protective
tariff on home-made writing, or an embargo against
books more than a year old, or imported from across
the Atlantic, would be worth trying; but the attempts
so far are not encouraging. This has not been the
way in the past by which original literatures have been
made. They have sucked nourishment where it could
best be found, and grown great from the strength that
good food gave them.

One can sympathize with the desire to nationalize
our literature at all costs; and can understand lashings
out at the tyranny of literary prestige which England
still exercises. But the real question is: shall the
English of Americans be good English or bad English;
shall a good tradition safeguard change and experi
ment, or shall we have chaotic vulgarity like the Low
Latin of the late Roman Empire?

The truth is that our language is tradition, for it
holds tradition in solution like iron in wine. And here
lie the secret and the power of American, "Anglo-
Saxon" domination.

What is to be done about it? Shall anything be
done about it? The Anglomaniac is helpless before

86 On the American Tradition

the fact of language. The most he can do is to attack,
and uproot if he can, the American tradition.

There is nothing sacrosanct in this American tradi
tion. Like all traditions it is stiff, it will clasp, if we
allow it, the future in the dead hand of precedent.
It can be used by the designing to block progress. But
as traditions go it is not conservative. Radicalism,
indeed, is its child. Political and religious radicalism
brought the Pilgrims to New England, the Quakers
to Pennsylvania; political and economic radicalism
made the Revolution against the will of American con
servatives; political and social radicalism made the
Civil War inevitable and gave it moral earnestness.
Radicalism, whether you like it or not, is much more
American than what some people mean by "Ameri
canism" to-day. And its bitterest opponents in our
times would quite certainly have become Nova Scotian
exiles if they had been alive and likeminded in 1783.

Nor is this American tradition impeccable in the
political ideas, the literary ideals, the social customs
it has given us. We must admit a rampant individ
ualism in our political practices which is in the very
best Anglo-American tradition, and yet by no means
favorable to cooperative government. We admit also
more Puritanism in our standard literature than art
can well digest; and more sentiment than is good for
us; nor is it probable that the traditions and the
conventions which govern American family life are
superior to their European equivalents. We should
welcome (I do not say that we do) liberalizing, broad-

The American Tradition 87

ening, enriching influences from other traditions. And
whether we have welcomed them or not, they have
come, and to our great benefit. But to graft upon
the plant is different from trying to pull up the roots.

We want better arguments than the fear of Anglo-
Saxon domination before the root pulling begins. We
wish to know what is to be planted. We desire to
be convinced that the virtue has gone out of the old
stock. We want examples of civilized nations that
have profited by borrowing traditions wholesale, or by
inventing them. We wish to know if a cultural, a
literary sans-culottism is possible, except with chaos
as a goal. Most of all, we expect to fight for and to
hold our Anglo-American heritage.

It is not surprising that discontent with our own
ultimately English tradition has expressed itself by a
kind of Freudian transformation in anti-English senti
ment. Every vigorous nation strains and struggles with
its tradition, like a growing boy with his clothes, and
this is particularly true of new nations with old tradi
tions behind them. Our pains are growing pains — a
malady we have suffered from since the early eighteenth
century at the latest. Tradition, our own tradition,
pinches us; but you cannot punch tradition for pinch
ing you, or call it names to its face, especially if it proves
to be your father's tradition, or your next-door neigh
bor's. Therefore, since that now dim day when the
Colonies acquired a self -consciousness of their own,
many good Americans have chosen England and the
English to symbolize whatever irked them in their

88 On the American Tradition

own tradition. It is from England and the English
that we have felt ourselves growing away, from which
we had to grow away in order to be ourselves and not
a shadow — imitators, second-bests, Colonials. England
and the English have had our vituperation whenever
the need to be American has been greatest. And when
an English government like Palmerston's, or Salis
bury's, or Lloyd George's, offends some group or race
among us, a lurking need to assert our individuality,
or -prove that we are not Colonials, leads thousands
more to join in giving the lion's tail an extra twist.

This may be unfortunate, but it argues curiously
enough respect and affection rather than the reverse,
and it is very human. It is a fact, like growing, and
is likely to continue until we are fully grown. It will
reassert itself vehemently until upon our English tra
dition we shall have built an American civilization as
definitely crystallized, a literature as rich and self-
sufficing, as that of France and England to-day. Three-
quarters of our national genius went into the creating
of our political system. Three-quarters of our national
genius since has gone into the erecting of our economic
system. Here we are independent — and thick skinned.
But a national civilization and a national literature
take more time to complete.

Cool minds were prepared for a little tail-twisting
after the great war, even though they could not foresee
the unfortunate Irish situation in which a British
government seemed determined to make itself as un-
English as possible. If there had not been the patriotic

The American Tradition 89

urge to assert our essential Americanism more strongly
than ever, there still would have been a reaction against
all the pledging and the handshaking, the pother about
blood and water, the purple patches in every newspaper
asserting Anglo-Saxonism against the world. I remem
ber my own nervousness when, in 1918, after the best
part of a year in England, in England's darkest days,
I came back full of admiration for the pluck of all
England and the enlightenment of her best minds in
the great struggle, to hear men who knew little of
England orating of enduring friendship, and to read
writers who had merely read of England, descanting
of her virtues. I felt, and many felt, that excess of
ignorant laudation which spells certain reaction into
ignorant dispraise. No wonder that Americans whose
parents happened to be Germans, Italians, Jews, or
Irish grew weary of hearing of the essential virtues
of the Anglo-Saxon race. There never was such a
race. It was not even English blood, but English in
stitutions that created America; but Liberty Loan ora
tors had no time to make fine distinctions of that kind.
They talked, and even while the cheers were ringing
and the money rolled in dissent raised its tiny head.
Dissent was to be expected; antagonism against a
tradition made by English minds and perpetuated in
English was natural after a war in which not merely
nationalism, but also every racial instinct, has been
quickened and made sensitive. But tout comprendre,
c'est tout pardonner, is only partly true in this instance.
We should understand, and be tolerant with, the strain-

90 On the American Tradition

ings against tradition of folk to whom it is still partly
alien; we should diagnose our own growing pains and
not take them too seriously. Nevertheless, the better
more violent movements of race and national prejudice
are understood, the less readily can they be pardoned,
if by pardon one means easy tolerance.

It is not inconceivable that we shall have to face
squarely a split between those who prefer the Ameri
can tradition and those who do not, although where
the cleavage line would run, whether between races
or classes, is past guessing. There are among us appar
ently men and women who would risk wars, external
or internal, in order to hasten the discordant day;
although just what they expect as a result, whether
an Irish-German state organized by German efficiency
and officered by graduates of Tammany Hall, or a
pseudo- Russian communism, is not yet clear. In any
case, the time is near when whoever calls himself
American will have to take his stand and do more
thinking, perhaps, than was necessary in 1917. He
will need to know what tradition is, what his own con
sists of, and what he would do without it. He will need
especially to rid himself of such simple and fallacious
ideas as that what was good enough for his grandfather
is good enough for him; or that, as some of our more
reputable newspapers profess to think, the Constitution
has taken the place once held by the Bible, and con
tains the whole duty of man and all that is necessary
for his welfare. He will need to think less of 100 per
cent Americanism, which, as it is commonly used,

The American Tradition 91

means not to think at all, and more of how he himself
is molding American tradition for the generation that is
to follow. If he is not to be a pawn merely in the
struggle for American unity, he must think more clearly
and deeply than has been his habit in the past.

But whatever happens in America (and after the
sad experiences of prophets in the period of war and
reconstruction, who would prophesy), let us cease abus
ing England whenever we have indigestion in our own
body politic. It is seemingly inevitable that the writers
of vindictive editorials should know little more of
England as she is to-day than of Russia or the Chinese
Republic; inevitable, apparently, that for them the
Irish policy of the Tory group in Parliament, Indian
unrest, and Lloyd George, are all that one needs to
known about a country whose liberal experiments in
industrial democracy since the war, and whose courage
in reconstruction, may well make us hesitate in dis
praise. But it is not inevitable that Americans who
are neither headline and editorial writers, nor im
passioned orators, regardless of facts, should continue
to damn the English because their ancestors and ours
founded America.

Back to Nature

No one tendency in life as we live it in America to-day
is more characteristic than the impulse, as recurrent
as summer, to take to the woods. Sometimes it dis
guises itself under the name of science; sometimes it
is mingled with hunting and the desire to kill; often
it is sentimentalized and leads strings of gaping "stu
dents" bird-hunting through the wood lot; and again
it perilously resembles a desire to get back from civi
lization and go aon the loose." Say your worst of it,
still the fact remains that more Americans go back
to nature for one reason or another annually than
any civilized men before them. And more Americans,
I fancy, are studying nature in clubs or public schools
— or, in summer camps and the Boy Scouts, imitating
nature's creatures, the Indian and the pioneer — than
even statistics could make believable.

What is the cause? In life, it is perhaps some sur
vival of the pioneering instinct, spending itself upon
fishing, or bird-hunting, or trail hiking, much as the
fight instinct leads us to football, or the hunt instinct
sends every dog sniffing at dawn through the streets
of his town. Not every one is thus atavistic, if this
be atavism; not every American is sensitive to spruce
spires, or the hermit thrush's chant, or white water
in a forest gorge, or the meadow lark across the

92

Back to Nature 93

frosted fields. Naturally. The surprising fact is that
in a bourgeois civilization like ours, so many are
affected.

And yet what a criterion nature love or nature in
difference is. It seems that if I can try a man by
a silent minute in the pines, the view of a jay pirating
through the bushes, spring odors, or December flush
on evening snow, I can classify him by his reactions.
Just where I do not know; for certainly I do not put
him beyond the pale if his response is not as mine.
And yet he will differ, I feel sure, in more significant
matters. He is not altogether of my world. Nor
does he enter into this essay. There are enough with
out him, and of every class. In the West, the very
day laborer pitches his camp in the mountains for his
two weeks' holiday. In the East and Middle West,
every pond with a fringe of hemlocks, or hill view
by a trolley line, or strip of ocean beach, has its
cluster of bungalows where the proletariat perform
their villeggiatura as the Italian aristocracy did in
the days of the Renaissance. Patently the impulse ex
ists, and counts for something here in America.

It counts for something, too, in American literature.
Since our writing ceased being colonial English and
began to reflect a race in the making, the note of woods-
longing has been so insistent that one wonders whether
here is not to be found at last the characteristic "trait"
that we have all been patriotically seeking.

I do not limit myself in this statement to the pro
fessed "nature writers" of whom we have bred far

94 On the American Tradition

more than any other race with which I am familiar.
In the list — which I shall not attempt — of the greatest
American writers, one cannot fail to include Emerson,
Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, Lowell, and Whitman.
And every one of these men was vitally concerned
with nature, and some were obsessed by it. Lowell
was a scholar and man of the world, urban there
fore; but his poetry is more enriched by its homely
New England background than by its European polish.
Cooper's ladies and gentlemen are puppets merely, his
plots melodrama; it is the woods he knew, and the
creatures of the woods, Deerslayer and Chingachgook,
that preserve his books. Whitman made little distinc
tion between nature and human nature, perhaps too
little. But read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock
ing" or "The Song of the Redwood-Tree," and see how
keen and how vital was his instinct for native soil.
As for Hawthorne, you could make a text-book on
nature study from his "Note-Books." He was an
imaginative moralist first of all; but he worked out
his visions in terms of New England woods and hills.
So did Emerson. The day was "not wholly profane"
for him when he had "given heed to some natural
object." Thoreau needs no proving. He is at the
forefront of all field and forest lovers in all languages
and times.

These are the greater names. The lesser are as
leaves in the forest: Audubon, Burroughs, Muir, Clar
ence King, Lanier, Robert Frost, and many more —
the stream broadening and shallowing through literary

Back to Nature 95

scientists and earnest forest lovers to romantic "nature
fakers," literary sportsmen, amiable students, and tens
of thousands of teachers inculcating this American ten
dency in another generation. The phenomenon asks
for an explanation. It is more than a category of
American literature that I am presenting; it is an
American trait.

The explanation I wish to proffer in this essay may
sound fantastical; most explanations that explain any
thing usually do — at first. I believe that this vast rush
of nature into American literature is more than a mere
reflection of a liking for the woods. It represents a
search for a tradition, and its capture.

Good books, like well-built houses, must have tradi
tion behind them. The Homers and Shakespeares and
Goethes spring from rich soil left by dead centuries;
they are like native trees that grow so well nowhere
else. The little writers — hacks who sentimentalize to
the latest order, and display their plot novelties like
bargains on an advertising page — are just as traditional.
The only difference is that their tradition goes back
to books instead of life. Middle-sized authors — the
very good and the probably enduring — are successful
largely because they have gripped a tradition and fol
lowed it through to contemporary life. This is what
Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," Howells in "The Rise
of Silas Lapham," and Mrs. Wharton in "The House
of Mirth." But the back-to-nature books — both the
sound ones and those shameless exposures of the private
emotions of ground hogs and turtles that call themselves

96 On the American Tradition

nature books — are the most traditional of all. For they
plunge directly into what might be called the adven
tures of the American sub-consciousness.

It is the sub-consciousness that carries tradition into
literature. That curious reservoir where forgotten ex
periences lie waiting in every man's mind, as vivid
as on the day of first impression, is the chief concern
of psychologists nowadays. But it has never yet had
due recognition from literary criticism. If the sub-
consciousness is well stocked, a man writes truly, his
imagination is vibrant with human experience, he sets
his own humble observation against a background of
all he has learned and known and forgotten of civiliza
tion. If it is under-populated, if he has done little, felt
little, known little of the traditional experiences of
the intellect, he writes thinly. He can report what
he sees, but it is hard for him to create. It was
Chaucer's rich sub-consciousness that turned his sim
ple little story of Chauntecleer into a comment upon
humanity. Other men had told that story — and made
it scarcely more than trivial. It is the promptings
of forgotten memories in the sub-consciousness that
give to a simple statement the force of old, un
happy things, that keep thoughts true to experience,
and test fancy by life. The sub-consciousness is the
governor of the waking brain. Tradition — which is
just man's memory of man — flows through it like an
underground river from which rise the springs of
every-day thinking. If there is anything remarkable

Back to Nature 97

about a book, look to the sub-consciousness of the
writer and study the racial tradition that it bears.

Now, I am far from proposing to analyze the Ameri
can sub-consciousness. No man can define it. But
of this much I am certain. The American habit of
going "back to nature" means that in our sub-con
sciousness nature is peculiarly active. We react to
nature as does no other race. We are the descendants
of pioneers — all of us. And if we have not inherited
a memory of pioneering experiences, at least we possess
inherited tendencies and desires. The impulse that
drove Boone westward may nowadays do no more
than send some young Boone canoeing on Temagami,
or push him up Marcy or Shasta to inexplicable hap
piness on the top. But the drive is there. And fur
thermore, nature is still strange in America. Even
now the wilderness is far from no American city.
Birds, plants, trees, even animals have not, as in
Europe, been absorbed into the common knowledge
of the race. There are discoveries everywhere for
those who can make them. Nature, indeed, is vivid
in a surprising number of American brain cells, mark
ing them with a deep and endurable impress. And
our flood of nature books has served to increase her
power.

It was never so with the European traditions that
we brought to America with us. That is why no one
reads early American books. They are pallid, ill-
nourished, because their traditions are pallid. They

98 On the American Tradition

drew upon the least active portion of the American
sub-consciousness, and reflect memories not of experi
ence, contact, live thought, but of books. Even Wash
ington Irving, our first great author, is not free from
this indictment. If, responding to some obscure drift
of his race towards humor and the short story, he
had not ripened his Augustan inheritance upon an
American hillside, he, too, would by now seem juice-
less, withered, like a thousand cuttings from English
stock planted in forgotten pages of his period. It was
not until the end of our colonial age and the rise of
democracy towards Jackson's day, that the rupture
with our English background became sufficiently com
plete to make us fortify pale memories of home by a
search for fresher, more vigorous tradition.

We have been searching ever since, and many emi
nent critics think that we have still failed to establish
American literature upon American soil. The old tradi
tions, of course, were essential. Not even the most
self-sufficient American hopes to establish a brand-new
culture. The problem has been to domesticate Europe,
not to get rid of her. But the old stock needed a graft,
just as an old fruit tree needs a graft. It requires
a new tradition. We found a tradition in New Eng
land; and then New England was given over to the
alien and her traditions became local or historical
merely. We found another in border life; and then
the Wild West reached the Pacific and vanished. Time
and again we have been flung back upon our English
sources, and forced to imitate a literature sprung from

Back to Nature 99

a riper soil. Of course, this criticism, as it stands, is
too sweeping. It neglects Mark Twain and the tradi
tion of the American boy; it neglects Walt Whitman
and the literature of free and turbulent democracy;
it neglects Longfellow and Poe and that romantic tra
dition of love and beauty common to all Western races.
But, at least, it makes one understand why the Ameri
can writer has passionately sought anything that would
put an American quality into his transplanted style.

He has been very successful in local color. But then
local color is local. It is a minor art. In the field
of human nature he has fought a doubtful battle. An
occasional novel has broken through into regions where
it is possible to be utterly American even while writing
English. Poems too have followed. But here lie our
great failures. I do not speak of the "great American
novel," yet to come. I refer to the absence of a school
of American fiction, or poetry, or drama, that has
linked itself to any tradition broader than the romance
of the colonies, New England of the 'forties, or the
East Side of New York. The men who most often
write for all America are mediocre. They strike no
deeper than a week-old interest in current activity.
They aim to hit the minute because they are shrewd
enough to see that for "all America" there is very
little continuity just now between one minute and the
next. The America they write for is contemptuous
of tradition, although worshipping convention, which
is the tradition of the ignorant. The men who write
for a fit audience though few are too often local or

ioo On the American Tradition

archaic, narrow or European, by necessity if not by
choice.

And ever since we began to incur the condescension
of foreigners by trying to be American, we have been
conscious of this weak-rootedness in our literature and
trying to remedy it. This is why our flood of nature
books for a century is so significant. They may seem
peculiar instruments for probing tradition — particularly
the sentimental ones. The critic has not yet admitted
some of the heartiest among them — Audubon's sketches
of pioneer life, for example — into literature at all.
And yet, unless I am mightily mistaken, they are signs
of convalescence as clearly as they are symptoms of
our disease. These United States, of course, are infi
nitely more important than the plot of mother earth
upon which they have been erected. The intellectual
background that we have inherited from Europe is
more significant than the moving spirit of woods and
soil and waters here. The graft, in truth, is less valu
able than the tree upon which it is grafted. Yet it
determines the fruit. So with the books of our nature
lovers. They represent a passionate attempt to accli
matize the breed. Thoreau has been one of our most
original writers. He and his multitudinous followers,
wise and foolish, have helped establish us in our new
soil.

I may seem to exaggerate the services of a group
of writers who, after all, can show but one great name,
Thoreau's. I do not think so, for if the heart of the
nature lover is sometimes more active than his head,

Back to Nature 101

the earth intimacies he gives us are vital to literature
in a very practical sense. Thanks to the modern sci
ence of geography, we are beginning to understand
the profound and powerful influence of physical en
vironment upon men. The geographer can tell you
why Charleston was aristocratic, why New York is
hurried and nervous, why Chicago is self-confident. He
can guess at least why in old communities, like
Hardy's Wessex or the North of France, the inhabitants
of villages not ten miles apart will differ in tempera
ment and often in temper, hill town varying from
lowland village beneath it sometimes more than Kan
sas City from Minneapolis. He knows that the old
elemental forces — wind, water, fire, and earth — still
mold men's thoughts and lives a hundred times more
than they guess, even when pavements, electric lights,
tight roofs, and artificial heat seem to make nature
only a name. He knows that the sights and sounds
and smells about us, clouds, songs, and wind murmur-
ings, rain-washed earth, and fruit trees blossoming, en
ter into our sub-consciousness with a power but seldom
appraised. Prison life, factory service long continued,
a clerk's stool, a housewife's day-long duties — these
things stunt and transform the human animal as noth
ing else, because of all experiences they most restrict,
most impoverish the natural environment. And it is
the especial function of nature books to make vivid
and warm and sympathetic our background of nature.
They make conscious our sub-conscious dependence
upon earth that bore us. They do not merely inform

IO2 On the American Tradition

(there the scientist may transcend them), they enrich
the subtle relationship between us and our environment.
Move a civilization and its literature from one hemi
sphere to another, and their adapting, adjusting services
become most valuable. Men like Thoreau are worth
more than we have ever guessed.

No one has ever written more honest books than
Thoreau's "Walden," his "Autumn," "Summer," and
the rest. There is not one literary flourish in the whole
of them, although they are done with consummate
literary care; nothing but honest, if not always accu
rate, observation of the world of hill-slopes, waves,
flowers, birds, and beasts, and honest, shrewd philoso
phizing as to what it all meant for him, an American.
Here is a man content to take a walk, fill his mind
with observation, and then come home to think. Re
peat the walk, repeat or vary the observation, change
or expand the thought, and you have Thoreau. No
wonder he brought his first edition home, not seriously
depleted, and made his library of it! Thoreau needs
excerpting to be popular. Most nature books do. But
not to be valuable!

For see what this queer genius was doing. Lovingly,
laboriously, and sometimes a little tediously, he was
studying his environment. For some generations his
ancestors had lived on a new soil, too busy in squeezing
life from it to be practically aware of its differences.
They and the rest had altered Massachusetts. Massa
chusetts had altered them. Why? To what? The
answer is not yet ready. But here is one descendant

Back to Nature 103

who will know at least what Massachusetts is — wave,
wind, soil, and the life therein and thereon. He be
gins humbly with the little things; but humanly, not
as the out-and-out scientist goes to work, to classify
or to study the narrower laws of organic development;
or romantically as the sentimentalist, who intones his
"Ah I " at the sight of dying leaves or the cocoon becom
ing moth. It is all human, and yet all intensely prac
tical with Thoreau. He envies the Indian not because
he is "wild," or "free," or any such nonsense, but for
his instinctive adaptations to his background, — because
nature has become traditional, stimulative with him.
And simply, almost naively, he sets down what he has
discovered. The land I live in is like this or that;
such and such life lives in it; and this is what it all
means for me, the transplanted European, for us, Amer
icans, who have souls to shape and characters to mold
in a new environment, under influences subtler than
we guess. "I make it my business to extract from
Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me, though
at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and
the earth." And again: "Surely it is a defect in our
Bible that it is not truly ours, but a Hebrew Bible.
The most pertinent illustrations for us are to be drawn
not from Egypt or Babylonia, but from New England.
Natural objects and phenomena are the original sym
bols or types which express our thoughts and feelings.
Yet American scholars, having little or no root in the
soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine
themselves to the imported symbols alone. All the

104 On the American Tradition

true growth and experience, the living speech, they
would fain reject as 'Americanisms.' It is the old
error which the church, the state, the school, ever com
mit, choosing darkness rather than light, holding fast
to the old and to tradition. When I really know that
our river pursues a serpentine course to the Merrimac,
shall I continue to describe it by referring to some
other river, no older than itself, which is like it, and
call it a meander? It is no more meandering than
the Meander is musketaquiding."

This for Thoreau was going back to nature. Our
historians of literature who cite him as an example
of how to be American without being strenuous, as an
instance of leisure nobly earned, are quite wrong. If
any man has striven to make us at home in America,
it is Thoreau. He gave his life to it; and in some
measure it is thanks to him that with most Americans
you reach intimacy most quickly by talking about "the
woods."

Thoreau gave to this American tendency the touch
of genius and the depth of real thought. After his
day the "back-to-nature" idea became more popular
and perhaps more picturesque. Our literature becomes
more and more aware of an American background.
Bobolinks and thrushes take the place of skylarks;
sumach and cedar begin to be as familiar as heather
and gorse; forests, prairies, a clear, high sky, a snowy
winter, a summer of thunderstorms, drive out the misty
England which, since the days of Cynewulf, our an
cestors had seen in the mind's eye while they were

Back to Nature 105

writing. Nature literature becomes a category. Men
make their reputations by means of it.

No one has yet catalogued — so far as I am aware
— the vast collection of back-to-nature books that fol
lowed Thoreau. No one has ever seriously criticized
it, except Mr. Roosevelt, who with characteristic vigor
of phrase, stamped "nature-faking" on its worser half.
But every one reads in it. Indeed, the popularity of
such writing has been so great as to make us distrust
its serious literary value. And yet, viewed interna
tionally, there are few achievements in American litera
ture so original. I will not say that John Muir and
John Burroughs, upon whom Thoreau's mantle fell,
have written great books. Probably not. Certainly
it is too soon to say. But when you have gathered the
names of Gilbert White, Jeffries, Fabre, Maeterlinck,
and in slightly different genres, Izaak Walton, Hudson,
and Kipling from various literatures you will find few
others abroad to list with ours. Nor do our men owe
one jot or tittle of their inspiration to individuals on
the other side of the water.

Locally, too, these books are more noteworthy than
may at first appear. They are curiously passionate,
and passion in American literature since the Civil War
is rare. I do not mean sentiment, or romance, or erot
icism. I mean such passion as Wordsworth felt for
his lakes, Byron (even when most Byronic) for the
ocean, the author of "The Song of Roland" for his
Franks. Muir loved the Yosemite as a man might
love a woman. Every word he wrote of the Sierras

!lo6 On the American Tradition

is touched with intensity. Hear him after a day on
Alaskan peaks: "Dancing down the mountain to camp,
my mind glowing like the sunbeaten glaciers, I found
the Indians seated around a good fire, entirely happy
now that the farthest point of the journey was safely
reached and the long, dark storm was cleared away.
How hopefully, peacefully bright that night were the
stars in the frosty sky, and how impressive was the
thunder of icebergs, rolling, swelling, reverberating
through the solemn stillness! I was too happy to
sleep."

Such passion, and often such style, is to be found
in all these books when they are good books. Com
pare a paragraph or two of the early Burroughs on
his birch-clad lake country, or Thoreau upon Concord
pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that Eng
lish magazines used to publish, and you will feel it.
Compare any of the lesser nature books of the mid-
nineteenth century — Clarence King's "Mountaineering
in the Sierras," for example — with the current novel
writing of the period and you will feel the greater
sincerity. A passion for nature! Except the New
England passion for ideals, Whitman's passion for de
mocracy, and Poe's lonely devotion to beauty, I some
times think that this is the only great passion that
has found its way into American literature.

Hence the "nature fakers." The passion of one
generation becomes the sentiment of the next. And
sentiment is easily capitalized. The individual can
be stirred by nature as she is. A hermit thrush singing

Back to Nature 107

in moonlight above a Catskill clove will move him.
But the populace will require something more sensa
tional. To the sparkling water of truth must be added
the syrup of sentiment and the cream of romance.
Mr. Kipling, following ancient traditions of the Orient,
gave personalities to his animals so that stories might
be made from them. Mr. Long, Mr. Roberts, Mr.
London, Mr. Thompson-Seton, and the rest, have told
stories about animals so that the American interest
in nature might be exploited. The difference is essen
tial. If the "Jungle Books" teach anything it is the
moral ideals of the British Empire. But our nature
romancers — a fairer term than "fakers," since they do
not willingly "fake" — teach the background and tradi
tion of our soil. In the process they inject sentiment,
giving us the noble desperation of the stag, the startling
wolf-longings of the dog, and the picturesque outlawry
of the ground hog, — and get a hundred readers where
Thoreau got one.

This is the same indictment as that so often brought
against the stock American novel, that it prefers the
gloss of easy sentiment to the rough, true fact, that
it does not grapple direct with things as they are
in America, but looks at them through optimist's
glasses that obscure and soften the scene. Neverthe
less, I very much prefer the sentimentalized animal
story to the sentimentalized man story. The first, as
narrative, may be romantic bosh, but it does give one
a loving, faithful study of background that is worth
the price that it costs in illusion. It reaches my emo-

io8 On the American Tradition

tions as a novelist who splashed his sentiment with
equal profusion never could. My share of the race
mind is willing even to be tricked into sympathy with
its environment. I would rather believe that the
sparrow on my telephone wire is swearing at the robin
on my lawn than never to notice either of them!

How curiously complete and effective is the service
of these nature books, when all is considered. There
is no better instance, I imagine, of how literature and
life act and react upon one another. The plain Ameri
can takes to the woods because he wants to, he does
not know why. The writing American puts the woods
into his books, also because he wants to, although I
suspect that sometimes he knows very well why. Nev
ertheless, the same general tendency, the same impulse,
lie behind both. But reading nature books makes us
crave more nature, and every gratification of curiosity
marks itself upon the sub-consciousness. Thus the
clear, vigorous tradition of the soil passes through us
to our books, and from our books to us. It is the
soundest, the sweetest, if not the greatest and deepest
inspiration of American literature. In the confusion
that attends the meeting here of all the races it is
something to cling to; it is our own.

Thanks to the Artists

IT would be a wise American town that gave up pay
ing "boosters" and began to support its artists. A
country is just so much country until it has been talked
about, painted, or put into literature. A town is just
so many brick and wood squares, inhabited by human
animals, until some one's creative and interpretative
mind has given it "atmosphere," by which we mean
significance.

America was not mere wild land to the early col
onists: it was a country that had already been seen
through the eyes of enthusiastic explorers and daring
adventurers, whose airs were sweeter than Europe's,
whose fruits were richer, where forest and game, and
even the savage inhabitant, guaranteed a more exciting
life, full of chance for the future.

New England was not just so much stony acre and
fishing village for the men of the 'twenties and 'forties.
It was a land haloed by the hopes and sufferings of
forefathers, where every town had its record of struggle
known to all by word of mouth or book.

And when the New Englanders pushed westward, it
was to a wilderness which already had its literature,
along trails of which they had read, and into regions
familiar to them in imagination.

Say what you please, and it is easy to say too much,
of the imitativeness of American literature as Irving,

109

no On the American Tradition

Cooper, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Thoreau, Twain, and
Ho wells wrote it, nevertheless, it was more than justi
fied by the human significance it gave to mere land
in America; and it is richer and more valuable than
much later writing just because of this attempt. With
out Hawthorne and Thoreau, New England would have
lost its past; without Cooper and Parkman the word
"frontier" would mean no more than "boundary" to
most of us.

It is foolish to lay a burden on art, and to say, for
example, that American novelists must accept the same
obligation to cities and country to-day. But we may
justly praise and thank them when they do enrich
this somewhat monotonous America that has been
planed over by the movies, the Saturday Evening Post,
quick transportation, and the newspaper with its syndi
cated features, until it is as repetitive as a tom-tom.

After the Civil War every one began to move in
America, and the immigrants, moving in, moved also,
so that roots were pulled up everywhere and the town
one lived in became as impersonal as a hotel, the farm
no more human than a seed-bed. Literature of the
time shows this in two ways: the rarity of books that
give a local habitation and a name to the familiar,
contemporary scene; and a romantic interest, as of the
half-starved, in local color stories of remote districts
where history and tradition still meant something in
the lives of the inhabitants.

It is encouraging to see how rapidly all this is chang
ing. In poetry the Middle West and New England

Thanks to the Artists ill

have been made again to figure in the imagination.
Rural New Hampshire and Illinois are alive to-day
for those who have read Masters, Lindsay, and Frost.
In prose Chicago, New York, New Haven, Richmond,
Detroit, San Francisco, and the ubiquitous Main Street
of a hundred Gopher Prairies have become way fares
for the memory of the reader, as well as congeries of
amusement and trade. In particular our universities,
which in the 'eighties and 'nineties were darkly lit by
a few flaring torches of mawkish romance, have been
illumined for the imagination by a series of stories
that already begin to make the undergraduate compre
hend his place in one of the richest streams of history,
and graduates to understand their youth. Poolers
"The Harbor" (which served both college and city),
Owen Johnson's "Stover at Yale," Norris's "Salt," Fitz
gerald's "This Side of Paradise," Stephen Benet's "The
Beginning of Wisdom" — these books and many others
have, like the opening chapters of Compton Macken
zie's English "Sinister Street," given depth, color, and
significance to the college, which may not increase its
immediate and measurable efficiency but certainly
strengthen its grip upon the imagination, and there
fore upon life.

Planners, builders, laborers, schemers, executives
make a city, a county, a university habitable, give
them their bones and their blood. Poets and novelists
make us appreciate the life we live in them, give them
their souls. The best "boosters" are artists, because
their boosting lasts.

To-day in American Literature:
Addressed to the British*

THE analysis of conditions and tendencies in contempo
rary American literature which I wish to present in
this lecture, requires historical background, detailed
criticism, and a study of development. I have time
for reference to none of these, and can only summarize
the end of the process. If, therefore, I seem to gen
eralize unduly, I hope that my deficiencies may be
charged against the exigencies of the occasion. But
I generalize the more boldly because I am speaking,
after all, of an English literature; not in a Roman-
Greek relationship of unnaturalized borrowings (for
we Americans imitate less and less), but English by
common cultural inheritance, by identical language,
and by deeply resembling character. Nevertheless, the
more American literature diverges from British (and
that divergence is already wide) the more truly Eng
lish, the less colonial does it become. A Briton should
not take unkindly assertions of independence, even
such ruffled independence as Lowell expressed in "The
Biglow Papers":

*This lecture was, in fact, delivered in the summer of 1918
at Cambridge University as part of a summer session devoted
to the United States of America. It is reprinted in lecture form
in order that the point of view may carry its own explanation.

To-day in American Literature 113

I guess the Lord druv down Creation's spiles

'Thout no gret helpin' from the British Isles,

An' could contrive to keep things pooty stiff

Ef they withdrawed from business in a miff;

I han't no patience with such swelling fellers ez

Think God can't forge 'thout them to blow the bellerses.

I desire neither to apologize for American literature,
nor to boast of it. No apology is necessary now, what
ever Sydney Smith may have thought in earlier days:
and it is decidedly not the time to boast, for so far
literature has usually been a by-product in the develop
ment of American aptitudes. But it may be useful to
state broadly at the beginning some of the difficulties
and the closely related advantages that condition the
making of literature in the United States.

The critic of American literature usually begins in
this fashion: America, in somewhat over a century, has
built up a political and social organization admittedly
great. She has not produced, however, a great litera
ture: great writers she has produced, but not a great
literature. The reason is, that so much energy has been
employed in developing the resources of a great coun
try, that little has been left to expend in creative imagi
nation. The currents of genius have flowed toward
trade, agriculture, and manufacturing, not esthetics.

This explanation is easy to understand, and is there
fore plausible, but I do not believe that it is accurate.
It is not true that American energy has been absorbed
by business. Politics, and politics of a creative char-

114 ®n the American Tradition

acter, has never lacked good blood in the United States.
Organization, and organization of a kind requiring the
creative intellect, has drawn enormously upon our en
ergies, especially since the Civil War, and by no means
all of it has been business organization. Consider our
systems of education and philanthropy, erected for
vast needs. And I venture to guess that more varieties
of religious experience have arisen in America than
elsewhere in the same period. After all, why expect a
century and a half of semi-independent intellectual ex
istence to result in a great national literature? Can
other countries, other times, show such a phenomenon?

No, if we have been slow in finding ourselves
in literature, in creating a school of expression like
the Elizabethan or the Augustan, the difficulties are
to be sought elsewhere than in a lack of energy.

Seek them first of all in a weakening of literary
tradition. The sky changes, not the mind, said Horace,
but this is true only of the essentials of being. The
great writers of our common English tradition —
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and many others — are
as good for us as they are good for you. It is even
whispered that our language is more faithful to their
diction than is yours. But the conditions of life in
a new environment bring a multitude of minor changes
with them. To begin with little things, our climate,
our birds, our trees, our daily contact with nature, are
all different. Your mellow fluting blackbird, your
wise thrush that sings each song twice over, your high-
fluttering larks we do not know. Our blackbird creaks

To-day in American Literature 115

discordantly, our plaintive lark sings from the meadow
tussock, our thrush chimes his heavenly bell from
forest dimness. And this accounts, may I suggest in
passing, for the insistence upon nature in American
writing, from Thoreau down. Our social and economic
experience has been widely different also; and all this,
plus the results of a break in space and time with
the home country of our language, weakened that tradi
tional influence which is so essential for the production
of a national literature. It had to be; good will come
of it; but for a time we vacillated, and we still vacillate,
like a new satellite finding its course.

Again, the constant shift of location within America
has been a strong delaying factor. Moving-day has
come at least once a generation for most American
families since the days of William Penn or The May
flower. The president of a Western university, who
himself, as a baby, had been carried across the Alle-
ghenies in a sling, once told me the history of his
family. It settled in Virginia in the seventeenth cen
tury, and moved westward regularly each generation,
until his father, the sixth or seventh in line, had reached
California. On the return journey he had got as far
as Illinois, and his son was moving to New York!
The disturbing effect upon literature of this constant
change of soils and environment is best proved by
negatives. Wherever there has been a settled com
munity in the United States — in New England of the
'forties and again in the 'nineties, in the Middle West
and California to-day — one is sure to find a literature

n6 On the American Tradition

with some depth and solidity to it. The New England
civilization of the early nineteenth century, now ma
terially altered, was a definable culture, with five gen
erations behind it, and strong roots in the old world.
From it came the most mature school of American
literature that so far we have possessed.

Still another difficulty must be added. The social.
Pessimists, who see in our Eastern states a mere con
geries of all the white races, and some not white, bewail
the impossibility of a real nation in America. But
the racial problem has always been with us, nor has
it by any means always been unsolved. Before the
Revolution, we were English, Scottish, Welsh, Low
German, Huguenot, Dutch, and Swedish. Before the
Civil War, we were the same plus the Irish and the
Germans of '48. And now we add Slavs, Jews, Greeks,
and Italians. I do not minimize the danger. But let
it be understood that while our civilization has always
been British (if that term is used in its broadest sense)
our blood has always been mixed, even in Virginia and
New England. This has made it hard for us to feel
entirely at home in the only literary tradition we pos
sessed and cared to possess. We have been like the
man with a ready-made suit. The cloth is right, but
the cut. must be altered before the clothes will fit him.

And finally, America has always been decentralized
intellectually. It is true that most of the books and
magazines are published in New York, and have always
been published there, or in Boston or Philadelphia.
But they have been written all over a vast country by

To-day in American Literature 117

men and women who frequently never see each other
in the flesh. There has been no center like London,
where writers can rub elbows half-a-dozen times a year.
Boston was such a capital once; only, however, for
New England. New York is a clearing-house of litera
ture now; but the writing is, most of it, done elsewhere.
It is curious to speculate what might have happened if
the capital of the United States had been fixed at New
York instead of Washington!

From this decentralization there results a lack of
literary self-confidence that is one of the most impor
tant factors in the intellectual life of America. The
writer in Tucson or Minneapolis or Bangor is de
pendent upon his neighbors to a degree impossible in
Manchester or Glasgow or York. He is marooned
there, separated in space and time, if not in mind,
from men and women who believe, as he may believe,
in the worth of literary standards, in the necessity of
making not the most easily readable book, but the best.
Here is one cause of the feebleness of many American
"literary" books.

Nevertheless, this very decentralization may have,
when we reach literary maturity, its great advantages.
It is difficult to over-estimate the color, the variety,
the verve of American life. And much of this comes
not from the push and "hustle" and energy of America
— for energy is just energy all the world over — but
is rather to be found in the new adjustments of race
and environment which are multiplying infinitely all
over the United States. It is true that American civili-

Ii8 On the American Tradition

zation seems to be monotonous — that one sees the same
magazines and books, the same moving-picture shows,
the same drug-stores, trolley cars, and hotels on a
New York model, hears the same slang and much the
same general conversation from New Haven to Los
Angeles. But this monotony is superficial. Beneath
the surface there are infinite strainings and divergences
— the peasant immigrant working toward, the well-
established provincial holding to, the wide-ranging mind
of the intellectual working away from, this dead level
of conventional standards. Where we are going, it
is not yet possible to say. Quite certainly not toward
an un-British culture. Most certainly not toward a
culture merely neo-English. But in any case, it is
because San Francisco and Indianapolis and Chicago
and Philadelphia have literary republics of their own,
sovereign like our states, yet highly federalized also
in a common bond of American taste and ideals which
the war made stronger — it is this fact that makes it
possible to record, as American writers are already
recording, the multifarious, confused development of
racial instincts working into a national consciousness.
Localization is our difficulty; it is also the only means
by which literature can keep touch with life in so
huge a congeries as America. If we can escape pro
vincialism and yet remain local, all will be well.

So far I have been merely defining the terms upon
which literature has been written in America. Let me
add to these terms a classification. If one stretches
the meaning of literature to cover all writing in prose

To-day in American Literature 119

or verse that is not simply informative, then four
categories will include all literary writing in America
that is in any way significant. We have an artistocratic
and a democratic literature; we have a dilettante and a
vast bourgeois literature.

In using the term aristocratic literature I have in
mind an intellectual rather than a social category. I
mean all writing addressed to specially trained intelli
gence, essays that imply a rich background of knowl
edge and taste, stories dependent upon psychological
analysis, poetry which is austere in content or com
plex in form. I mean Henry James and Sherwood An
derson, Mr. Cabell, Mr. Hergesheimer, and Mrs. Whar-
ton, Agnes Repplier, Mr. Crothers, Mr. Sherman, and
Mr. Colby.

By democratic literature I mean all honest writing,
whether crude or carefully wrought, that endeavors
to interpret the American scene in typical aspects for
all who care to read. I mean Walt Whitman and
Edgar Lee Masters; I mean a hundred writers of short
stories who, lacking perhaps the final touch of art,
have nevertheless put a new world and a new people
momentarily upon the stage. I mean the addresses of
Lincoln and of President Wilson.

With dilettante literature I come to a very different
and less important classification: the vast company —
how vast few even among natives suspect — of would-be
writers, who in every town and county of the United
States are writing, writing, writing what they hope to
be literature, what is usually but a pallid imitation of

I2O On the American Tradition

worn-out literary forms. More people seem to be en
gaged in occasional production of poetry and fiction —
and especially of poetry — in America, than in any single
money-making enterprise characteristic of a great in
dustrial nation. The flood pours through every edi
torial office in the land, trickles into the corners of
country newspapers, makes short-lived dilettante maga
zines, and runs back, most of it, to its makers. It is
not literature, for the bulk is bloodless, sentimental,
or cheap, but it is significant of the now passionate
American desire to express our nascent soul.

My chief difficulty is to explain what I mean by
bourgeois literature. The flood of dilettante writing
is subterranean; it is bourgeois literature that makes
the visible rivers and oceans of American writing. And
these fluid areas are like the lakes on maps of Central
Asia — bounds cannot be set to them. One finds maga
zines (and pray remember that the magazine is as great
a literary force as the book in America), one finds
magazines whose entire function is to be admirably
bourgeois for their two million odd of readers. And
in the more truly literary and "aristocratic" periodicals,
in the books published for the discriminating, the
bourgeois creeps in and often is dominant. The bour
geois in American literature is a special variety that
must not be too quickly identified with the literary
product that bears the same name in more static civili
zations. It is nearly always clever. Witness our short
stories, which even when calculated not to puzzle the
least intelligence nor to transcend the most modest

To-day In American Literature 12 1

limitations of taste, must be carefully constructed and
told with facility or they will never see the light. And
this literature is nearly always true to the superficies
of life, to which, indeed, it confines itself. Wild melo
drama is more and more being relegated to the
"movies," soft sentimentality still has its place in the
novel, but is losing ground in the people's library, the
magazines. Life as the American believes he is living
it, is the subject of bourgeois literature. But the sad
limitation upon this vast output is that, whether poetry,
criticism, or fiction, it does not interpret, it merely
pictures; and this is the inevitable failure of pages
that must be written always for a million or more of
readers. It is standardized literature; and good litera
ture, like the best airplanes, cannot be standardized.

Now the error made by most English critics in en
deavoring to estimate the potentialities or the actuali
ties of American literature, is to judge under the influ
ence of this crushing weight of clever, mediocre writ
ing. They feel, quite justly, its enormous energy and
its terrible cramping power. They see that the best of
our democratic writers belong on its fringe; see also
that our makers of aristocratic literature and our dilet
tante escape its weight only when they cut themselves
off from the life beat of the nation. And therefore,
as a distinguished English poet recently said, America
is doomed to a hopeless and ever-spreading mediocrity.

With this view I wish to take immediate issue upon
grounds that are both actual and theoretical. There is
a fallacy here to begin with, a fallacious analogy. It

122 On the American Tradition

is true, I believe, in Great Britain, and also in France,
that there are two separate publics; that the readers
who purchase from the news stands are often as com
pletely unaware of literary books for literary people
as if these bore the imprint of the moon. But even
in England the distinction is by no means sharp; and
in America it is not a question of distinctions at all,
but of gradations. In our better magazines are to be
found all the categories of which I have written — even
the dilettante; and it is a bold critic who will assert
that pages one to twenty are read only by one group,
and pages twenty to forty only by another. We are
the most careless readers in the world; but also the
most voracious and the most catholic.

And next, let us make up our minds once for all
that a bourgeois literature — by which, let me repeat,
I mean a literature that is good without being very
good, true without being utterly true, clever without
being fine — is a necessity for a vast population moving
upward from generation to generation in the intellectual
scale, toward a level that must be relatively low in
order to be attainable. Let us say that such a litera
ture cannot be real literature. I am content with that
statement. But it must exist, and good may come of
it.

This is the critical point toward which I have been
moving in this lecture, and it is here that the hopeful
influence of the American spirit, as I interpret it to
day, assumes its importance. That spirit is both ideal
istic and democratic. Idealistic in the sense that there

To-day in American Literature 123

is a profound and often foolishly optimistic belief in
America that every son can be better than his father,
better in education, better in taste, better in the power
to accomplish and understand. Democratic in this
sense, that with less political democracy than one finds
in Great Britain, there is again a fundamental belief
that every tendency, every taste, every capacity, like
every man, should have its chance somehow, some
where, to get a hearing, to secure its deservings, to
make, to have, to learn what seems the best.

A vague desire, you say, resulting in confusion and
mediocrity. This is true and will be true for some
time longer; but instead of arguing in generalities let
me illustrate these results by the literature I have been
discussing.

When brought to bear upon the category of the
dilettante, it is precisely this desire for "general im
provement" that has encouraged such a curious out
pouring from mediocre though sensitive hearts. The
absence of strong literary tradition, the lack of deep
literary soil, has been responsible for the insipidity of
the product. The habit of reference to the taste of
the majority has prevented us from taking this product
too seriously. Without that instinctive distrust of
the merely literary common to all bourgeois com
munities, we might well be presenting to you as typical
American literature a gentle weakling whose manners,
when he has them, have been formed abroad.

Aristocratic literature has suffered in one respect
from the restraints of democracy and the compulsions

124 On the American Tradition

of democratic idealism. It has lacked the self-confi
dence and therefore the vigor of its parallels in the
old world. Emerson and Thoreau rose above these
restrictions, and so did Hawthorne and Poe. But in
later generations especially, our intellectual poetry and
intellectual prose is too frequently though by no means
always less excellent than yours. Nevertheless, thanks
to the influence of this bourgeois spirit upon the intel
lects that in American towns must live with, if not
share it; thanks, also, to the magazines through which
our finer minds must appeal to the public rather than
to a circle or a clique, the nerves of transfer between
the community at large and the intellectuals are active,
the tendons that unite them strong. I argue much from
this.

Now theoretically, where you find an instinctive and
therefore an honest passion for the ideals of democ
racy, you should find a great literature expressing and
interpreting the democracy. I have given already
some reasons why in practice this has not yet become
an actuality in America. Let me add, in discussing the
bearing of this argument upon the third category of
American literature, the democratic, one more.

I doubt whether we yet know precisely what is meant
by a great democratic literature. Democracy has been
in transition at least since the French Revolution; it
is in rapid transition now. The works which we call
democratic are many of them expressive of phases
merely of the popular life, just as so much American lit
erature is expressive of localities and groups in America.

To-day in American Literature 125

And usually the works of genius that we do possess
have been written by converted aristocrats, like Tol
stoy, and have a little of the fanaticism and over-em
phasis of the convert. Or they represent and share the
turgidity of the minds they interpret, like some of the
work of Walt Whitman. All this is true, and yet a
careful reader of American literature must be more im
pressed by such prose as Lincoln's, by such poems as
Whitman's, such fiction as Mark Twain's at his best,
than by many more elegant works of polite literature.
For these — and I could add to them dozens of later
stories and poems, ephemeral perhaps but showing
what may be done when we burst the bourgeois chain
— for these are discoveries in the vigor, the poignancy,
the color of our democratic national life.

I have already hinted at what seems to me the way
out and up for American literature. It will not be by
fine writing that borrows or adapts foreign models,
even English models which are not foreign to us. It
will not come through geniuses of the backwoods,
adopted by some coterie, and succeeding, when they do
succeed, by their strangeness rather than the value of
the life they depict. That might have happened in the
romantic decades of the early nineteenth century; but
our English literary tradition was a saving influence
which kept us from gaucherie, even if it set limits upon
our strength. Our expectation, so I think, is in the
slowly mounting level of the vast bourgeois literature
that fills not excellently, but certainly not discreditably,
our books and magazines. There, and not in coteries,

126 On the American Tradition

is our school of writing. When originality wearies of
stereotypes and conventions, when energy and ability
force the editorial hand, and appeal to the desire of
Americans to know themselves, we shall begin a new
era in American literature. Our problem is not chiefly
to expose and attack and discredit the flat conven
tionality of popular writing. It is rather to crack the
smooth and monotonous surface and stir the fire be
neath it, until the lava of new and true imaginings can
pour through. And this is, historically, the probable
course of evolution. It was the Elizabethan fashion.
The popular forms took life and fire then. The advice
of the classicists, who wished to ignore the crude drama
beloved of the public, was not heeded; it will not be
heeded now. Our task is to make a bourgeois democ
racy fruitful. We must work with what we have.

Much has been said of the advantage for us, and per
haps for the world, which has come from the separa
tion of the American colonies from Great Britain. Two
systems of closely related political thinking, two na
tional characters, have developed and been successful
instead of one. Your ancestors opened the door of de
parture for mine, somewhat brusquely it is true, but
with the same result, if not the same reason, as with
the boys they sent away to school — they made men
of us.

So it is with literature. American literature will
never, as some critics would persuade us, be a child
without a parent. In its fundamental character it is,
and will remain, British, because at bottom the Ameri-

To-day in American Literature 127

can character, whatever its blood mixture, is formed
upon customs and ideals that have the same origin
and a parallel development with yours. But this litera
ture, like our political institutions, will not duplicate;
like the seedling, it will make another tree and not an
other branch. In literature we are still pioneers. I
think that it may be reserved for us to discover a litera
ture for the new democracy of English-speaking peoples
that is coming — a literature for the common people who
do not wish to stay common. Like Lincoln's, it will not
be vulgar; like Whitman's, never tawdry; like Mark
Twain's, not empty of penetrating thought; like
Shakespeare's it will be popular. If this should hap
pen, as I believe it may, it would be a just return upon
our share of a great inheritance.

Time's Mirror

WHAT is the use of criticizing modern literature unless
you are willing to criticize modern life? And how many
Americans are willing to criticize it with eyes wide
open?

The outstanding fact in mass civilization as it exists
in America and Western Europe to-day is that it moves
with confidence in only one direction. The workers,
after their escape from the industrial slavery of the
last century, have only one plan for the future upon
which they can unite, a greater share in material bene
fits. The possessors of capital have only one program
upon which they agree, a further exploitation of ma
terial resources, for the greater comfort of the com
munity and themselves. The professional classes have
only one professional instinct in common, to discover
new methods by which man's comfort may be made
secure.

In this way of life, as the Buddhist might have called
it, all our really effective energy discharges itself. Even
the church is most active in social service, and philoso
phy is accounted most original when it accounts for be
havior. Theology has become a stagnant science, and,
to prove the rule by contraries, the main problem of
man's spiritual relation to the universe, his end in liv-

128

Time's Mirror 129

ing, and the secret of real happiness is left to a senti
mental idealism in which reason, as the Greeks knew
it, has less and less place, and primitive instinct, as the
anthropologists define it, and the Freudian psycholo
gists explain it, is given more and more control.

The flat truth is that, as a civilization, we are less
sure of where we are going, where we want to go, how
and for what we wish to live, than at any intelligent
period of which we have full record. This is not pessi
mism. It is merely a fact, which is dependent upon
our failure to digest the problems that democracy, ma
chinery, feminism, and the destruction of our working
dogmas by scientific discovery, have presented to us.
All these things are more likely to be good than bad,
all bear promise for the future, but all tend to confuse
contemporary men. New power over nature has been
given them and they are engaged in seizing it. New
means of testing preconceived opinion are theirs, and
they are using them. The numbers which can be called
intelligent are tremendously augmented and the race to
secure material comforts has become a mass move
ment which will not cease until the objective is won.

In the meantime, there is only one road which is
clear — the road of material progress, and whether its
end lies in the new barbarism of a mechanistic state
where the mental and physical faculties will decline in
proportion to the means discovered for healing their
ills, or whether it is merely a path where the privileged
leaders must mark step for a while until the unpriv
ileged masses catch up with them in material welfare,

130 On the American Tradition

no one knows and few that are really competent care
to inquire.

Now this obsession with material welfare is the un
derlying premise with which all discussion of con
temporary literature, and particularly American litera
ture, must begin. Ours is a literature of an age without
dogma, which is to say without a theory of living; the
literature of an inductive, an experimental period,
where the really vital attempt is to subdue physical en
vironment (for the first time in history) to the needs
of the common man. It is an age, therefore, interested
and legitimately interested in behavior rather than
character, in matter and its laws rather than in the con
trol of matter for the purposes of fine living.

Therefore, our vital literature is behavioristic, nat
uralistic, experimental — rightly so I think — and must
be so until we seek another way. That search cannot
be long deferred. One expects its beginning at any
moment, precisely as one expects, and with reason, a
reaction against the lawless thinking and unrestrained
impulses which have followed the war. One hopes that
it will not be to Puritanism, unless it be that stoic state
of mind which lay behind Puritanism, for no old solu
tion will serve. The neo-Puritans to-day abuse the
rebels, young and old, because they have thrown over
dogma and discipline. The rebels accuse Puritanism
for preserving the dogma that cramps instead of frees.
It is neither return to the old nor the destruction thereof
that we must seek, but a new religion, a new discipline,
a new hope, and a new end which can give more signifi-

Time's Mirror 131

cance to living than dwellers in our industrial civiliza
tion are now finding.

In the meantime, those who seek literary consola
tion are by no means to be urged away from their own
literature, which contains a perfect picture of our
feverish times, and has implicit within it the medicine
for our ills, if they are curable. But they may be ad
vised to go again and more often than is now the
fashion to the writings of those men who found for
their own time, a real significance, who could formu
late a saving doctrine, and who could give to literature
what it chiefly lacks to-day, a core of ethical convic
tion and a view of man in his world sub specie ceternir-
tails. It is the appointed time in which to read Dante
and Milton, Shakespeare, and Goethe, above all Plato
and the great tragedies of Greece. Our laughter would
be sweeter if there were more depth of thought and
emotion to our serious moods.

The Family Magazine

READERS who like magazines will be pleased, those who
do not like them perhaps distressed, to learn, if they
are not already aware of it, that the magazine as
we know it to-day is distinctly an American creation.
They may stir, or soothe, their aroused emotions by
considering that the magazine which began in Eng
land literally as a storehouse of miscellanies attained
in mid-nineteenth century United States a dignity, a
harmony, and a format which gave it preeminence
among periodicals. Harper's and The Century in
particular shared with Mark Twain and the sewing
machine the honor of making America familiarly known
abroad.

I do not wish to overburden this essay with history,
but one of the reasons for the appearance of such a
dominating medium in a comparatively unliterary coun
try is relevant to the discussion to follow. The maga
zine of those days was vigorous. It was vigorous be
cause, unlike other American publications, it was not
oppressed by competition. Until the laws of interna
tional copyright were completed, the latest novels of
the Victorians, then at their prime, could be rushed
from a steamer, and distributed in editions which were
cheap because no royalties had to be paid. Thackeray
and Dickens could be sold at a discount, where Ameri-

132

The Family Magazine 133

can authors of less reputation had to meet full charges.
And the like was true of poetry. But the magazine, like
the newspaper, was not international; it was national
at least in its entirety, and for it British periodicals
could not be substituted. Furthermore, it could, and
did, especially in its earlier years, steal unmercifully
from England, so that a subscriber got both homebrew
and imported for a single payment. Thus the maga
zine flourished in the mid-century while the American
novel declined.

A notable instance of this vigor was the effect of the
growing magazine upon the infant short story. Our
American magazine made the development of the
American short story possible by creating a need for
good short fiction. The rise of our short story, after
a transitional period when the earliest periodicals and
the illustrated Annuals sought good short stories and
could not get them, coincides with the rise of the family
magazine. It was such a demand that called forth the
powers in prose of the poet, Poe. And as our maga
zine has become the best of its kind, so in the short
story, and in the short story alone, does American
literature rival the more fecund literatures of England
and Europe.

That a strong and native tendency made the Ameri
can magazine is indicated by the effect of our atmo
sphere upon the periodical which the English have
always called a review. Import that form, as was done
for The North American, The Atlantic Monthly, The
Forum, or The Yale Review, and immediately the new

134 On the American Tradition

American periodical begins to be a little more of a
magazine, a little more miscellaneous in its content, a
little less of a critical survey. Critical articles give
place to memoirs and sketches, fiction or near fiction
creeps in. There is always a tendency to lose type and
be absorbed into the form that the mid-century had
made so successful: a periodical, handsomely illus
trated, with much fiction, some description, a little seri
ous comment on affairs written for the general reader,
occasional poetry, and enough humor to guarantee di
version. This is our national medium for literary ex
pression — an admirable medium for a nation of long
distance commuters. And it is this "family magazine"
I wish to discuss in its literary aspects.

The dominance of the family magazine as a purveyor
of general literature in America has continued, but in
our own time the species (like other strong organisms)
has divided into two genres, which are more different
than, on the surface, they appear. The illustrated
literary magazine (the family magazine par excellence)
must now be differentiated from the illustrated journal
istic magazine, but both are as American in origin as
the review and the critical weekly are English.

It was the native vigor of the family magazine that
led to the Great Divergence of the 'nineties, which
older readers will remember well. The literary his
torian of that period usually gives a different explana
tion. He is accustomed to say that the old-time
"quality" magazines, Harper's, Scribner's, and the rest,
were growing moribund when, by an effort of editorial

The Family Magazine 135

genius, Mr. McClure created a new and rebellious type
of magazine, which was rapidly imitated. We called it,
as I remember, for want of a better title, the fifteen-
cent magazine. In the wake of McClure's, came Col
lier's, The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home
Journal, and all the long and profitable train which
adapted the McClurean discovery to special needs and
circumstances.

I do not believe that this is a true statement of what
happened in the fruitful 'nineties. McClure's was not,
speaking biologically, a new species at all; it was only
a mutation in which the recessive traits of the old
magazine became dominant while the invaluable type
was preserved. To speak more plainly, the literary
magazine, as America knew it, had always printed
news, matured news, often stale news, but still journal
ism. Read any number of Harper's in the 'seventies
for proof. And, pari passu, American journalism was
eagerly trying to discover some outlet for its finer prod
ucts, a medium where good pictures, sober after
thoughts, and the finish that comes from careful writ
ing were possible. Harper's Weekly in Civil War days,
and later, was its creation.

And now it was happily discovered that the family
magazine had a potential popularity far greater than
its limited circulation. With its month-long period of
incubation, its elastic form, in which story, special arti
cle, poetry, picture, humor, could all be harmoniously
combined, only a redistribution of emphasis was neces
sary in order to make broader its appeal. Mr. McClure

136 On the American Tradition

journalized the family magazine. He introduced finan
cial and economic news in the form of sensational in
vestigations, he bid for stories more lively, more im
mediate in their interest, more journalistic than we
were accustomed to read (Kipling's journalistic stories
for example, were first published in America in Mc-
Clure's). He accepted pictures in which certainty of
hitting the public eye was substituted for a guarantee
of art. And yet, with a month to prepare his number,
and only twelve issues a year, he could pay for excel
lence, and insure it, as no newspaper had ever been
able to do. And he was freed from the incubus of
"local news" and day-by-day reports. In brief, under
his midwifery, the literary magazine gave birth to a
super-newspaper.

Needless to say, the great increase in the number of
American readers and the corresponding decline in the
average intelligence and discrimination of the reading
public had much to do with the success of the journal
istic magazine. Yet it may be stated, with equal truth,
that the rapid advance in the average intelligence of
the American public as a whole made a market for
a super-newspaper in which nothing was hurried and
everything well done. The contributions to literature
through this new journalism have been at least as great
during the period of its existence as from the "quality"
magazine, the contributions toward the support of
American authors much greater. Like all good jour
nalism, it has included real literature when it could get
and "get away with it."

The Family Magazine 137

Birth, however, in the literary as in the animal world,
is exhausting and often leaves the parent in a debility
which may lead to death. The periodical essay of the
eighteenth century bore the novel of character, and
died; the Gothic tale of a later date perished of the
short story to which it gave its heart blood. The
family magazine of the literary order has been debile,
so radical critics charge, since its journalistic offspring
began to sweep America. Shall it die?

By no means. An America without the illustrated
literary magazine, dignified, respectable, certain to con
tain something that a reader of taste can peruse with
pleasure, would be an unfamiliar America. And it
would be a barer America. In spite of our brood of
special magazines for the literati and the advanced,
which Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer praises so warmly, we
are not so well provided with the distributive machin
ery for a national culture as to flout a recognized agency
with a gesture and a sneer. But the family magazine
has undeniably lost its vigorous appeal, and must be
rein vigor a ted. The malady is due to no slackening of
literary virility in the country; indeed there has prob
ably not been so much literary energy in the country
since the 'forties as now — not nearly so much. Nor is
it due to a lack of good readers. Nor, in my opinion,
to the competition of the journalistic magazine. The
literary magazine does not compete, or at least ought
not to compete, with its offspring, for it appeals either
to a different audience or to different tastes.

Roughly stated, the trouble is that the public for

138 On the American Tradition

these excellent magazines has changed, and they have
not. Their public always was, and is, the so-called
"refined" home public. Homes have changed, espe
cially "refined" homes, and a new home means a new
public.

The refined home nowadays has been to college.
(There are a million college graduates now in the
United States.) Forty years ago only scattered mem
bers had gone beyond the school. I do not propose to
exaggerate the influence upon intelligence of a college
education. It is possible, nay, it is common, to go
through college and come out in any real sense unedu
cated. But it is not possible to pass through college,
even as a professional amateur in athletics or as an
inveterate flapper, without rubbing off the insulation
here and there, without knowing what thought is stir
ring, what emotions are poignant, what ideas are
dominant among the fraction of humanity that leads us.
Refined homes may not be better or happier than they
used to be, but if they are intellectual at all, they are
more vigorously intellectual.

This means at the simplest that home readers of the
kind I have been describing want stimulating food, not
what our grandfathers used to call "slops." Some*
times they feed exclusively upon highly spiced journal
ism, but if they are literary in their tastes they will
be less content with merely literary stories, with articles
that are too solid to be good journalism, yet too popu
lar to be profound, less content, in short, with dignity
as a substitute for force.

The Family Magazine 139

What should be done about it specifically is a ques
tion for editors to answer. But this may be said. If
the old literary omnibus is to continue, as it deserves,
to hold the center of the roadway, then it must be
driven with some vigor of the intellect to match the
vigor of news which has carried its cheaper contempo
rary fast and far. By definition it cannot embrace a
cause or a thesis, like the weeklies, and thank Heaven
for that! It is clearly unsafe to stand upon mere dig
nity, respectability, or cost. That way lies decadence
— such as overcame the old Quarterlies, the Annuals,
and the periodical essayists. Vigor it must get, of a
kind naturally belonging to its species, not violent, not
raucous, not premature. It must recapture its public,
and this is especially the "old American" (which does
not mean the Anglo-Saxon) element in our mingled
nation.

These old Americans are not moribund by any
means, and it is ridiculous to suppose, as some recent
importations in criticism do, that a merely respectable
magazine will represent them. A good many of them,
to be sure, regard magazines as table decorations, and
for such a clientele some one some day will publish a
monthly so ornamental that it will be unnecessary to
read it in order to share its beneficent influences. The
remainder are intellectualized, and many of them are
emancipated from the conventions of the last genera
tion, if not from those of their own. These demand a
new vitality of brain, emotion, and spirit in their liter
ary magazine, and it must be given to them.

140 On the American Tradition

No better proof of all this could be sought than the
renaissance in our own times of the reviews and the
weeklies, probably the most remarkable phenomenon
in the history of American publishing since the birth
of yellow journalism. By the weeklies I do not mean
journals like The Outlook, The Independent, Vanity
Fair, which are merely special varieties of the typically
American magazine. I refer, of course, to The New
Republic, The Nation, The Freeman, The Weekly Re-
view in its original form, periodicals formed upon an
old English model, devoted to the spreading of opinion,
and consecrated to the propagation of intelligence.
The success of these weeklies has been out of propor
tion to their circulation. Like the old Nation, which
in a less specialized form was their predecessor, they
have distinctly affected American thinking, and may
yet affect our action in politics, education, and social
relations generally. They are pioneers, with the faults
of intellectual pioneers, over-seriousness, over-em
phasis, dogmatism, and intolerance. Yet it may be said
fairly that their chief duty, as with the editorial pages
of newspapers, is to be consistently partisan. At least
they have proved that the American will take thinking
when he can get it. And by inference, one assumes
that he will take strong feeling and vigorous truth in his
literary magazines.

The reviews also show how the wind is blowing. The
review, so-called, is a periodical presenting articles of
some length, and usually critical in character, upon the
political, social, and literary problems of the day. The

The Family Magazine 141

distinction of the review is that its sober form and not
too frequent appearance enable it to give matured
opinion with space enough to develop it.

Clearly a successful review must depend upon a
clientele with time and inclination to be seriously in
terested in discussion, and that is why the review, until
recently, has best flourished in England where it was
the organ of a governing class. In America, an in
tellectual class who felt themselves politically and so
cially responsible, has been harder to discover. We
had one in the early days of the Republic, when The
North American Review was founded. It is noteworthy
that we are developing another now and have seen The
Yale Review, the late lamented Unpartisan Review,
and others join The North American, fringed, so to
speak, by magazines of excerpt (of which much might
be written), such as The Review of Reviews, Current
Opinion, and The Literary Digest, in which the func
tion of the review is discharged for the great community
that insists upon reading hastily.

The review has come to its own with the war and
reconstruction; which, considering its handicaps, is an
other argument that the family magazine should heed
the sharpening of the American intellect. But, except
for the strongest members of the family, it is still
struggling, and still dependent for long life upon cheap
ness of production rather than breadth of appeal.

The difficulty is not so much with the readers as the
writers. The review must largely depend upon the
specialist writer (who alone has the equipment for

142 On the American Tradition

specialist writing), and the American specialist cannot
usually write well enough to command general intelli
gent attention. This is particularly noticeable in the
minor reviews where contributions are not paid for
and most of the writing is, in a sense, amateur, but it
holds good in the magazines and the national reviews
also. The specialist knows his politics, his biology,
or his finance as well as his English or French con
temporary, but he cannot digest his subject into words
— he can think into it, but not out of it, and so cannot
write acceptably for publication. Hence in science
particularly, but also in biography, in literary criticism,
and less often in history, we have to depend frequently
upon English pens for our illumination.

The reasons for this very serious deficiency, much
more r^rious from every point of view than the special
ists realize, are well known to all but the specialists,
and I do not propose to enter into them here. My point
is that this very defect, which has made it so difficult
to edit a valid and interesting review (and so creditable
to succeed as we have in several instances succeeded),
is a brake also upon the family magazine in its attempt
to regain virility. The newspaper magazines have cor
nered the market for clever reporters who tap the reser
voirs of special knowledge and then spray it acceptably
upon the public. This is good as far as it goes, but
does not go far. The scholars must serve us them
selves — and are too often incapable.

Editorial embarrassments are increased, however, by
the difficulty of finding these intellectualized old Amer-

The Family Magazine 143

leans who have drifted away from the old magazines
and are being painfully collected in driblets by the
weeklies and the reviews. They do not, unfortunately
for circulation, all live in a London, or Paris. They
are scattered in towns, cities, university communities,
lonely plantations, all over a vast country. Probably
that intellectualized public upon which all good maga
zines as well as all good reviews must depend, has not
yet become so stratified and homogeneous after the
upheavals of our generation that a commercial success
of journalistic magnitude is possible, but it can and
must be found.

The success of The Atlantic Monthly in finding a
sizable and homogeneous public through the country is
interesting in just this connection. It has, so it is gen
erally understood, been very much a question of find-
ing — of going West after the departing New Englander
and his children, and hunting him out with the goods
his soi 1 desired. One remembers the Yankee peddlers
who in the old days penetrated the frontier with the
more material products of New England, pans, alma
nacs, and soap. But an observer must also note a
change in the character of The Atlantic itself, how it
has gradually changed from a literary and political re
view, to a literary and social magazine, with every ele
ment of the familiar American type except illustrations
and a profusion of fiction; how in the attempt to be
come more interesting without becoming journalistic it
has extended its operations to cover a wider and wider
arc of human appeal. It has both lost and gained in

144 ®n the American Tradition

the transformation, but it has undoubtedly proved it
self adaptable and therefore alive. This is not an
argument that the reviews should become magazines
and that the old-line magazine should give up special
izing in pictures and in fiction. Of course not. It is
simply more proof that vigor, adaptability, and a keen
sense of existing circumstances are the tonics they also
need. The weekly lacks balance, the review, profes
sional skill in the handling of serious subjects, the
family magazine, a willingness to follow the best public
taste wherever it leads.

It has been very difficult in this discussion, which I
fear has resembled a shot-gun charge rather than a rifle
bullet, to keep the single aim I have had in mind. The
history of the periodical in American literary thinking
has not yet been written. The history of American
literature has but just been begun. My object has been
to put the spotlight for a moment upon the typical
American magazine, with just enough of its environ
ment to make a background. What is seen there can
best be summarized by a comparison. The American
weekly is like the serious American play of the period.
It has an over-emphasis upon lesson, bias, thesis, point.
The review is like much American poetry. It is worthy,
and occasionally admirable, but as a type it is weak
ened by amateur mediocrity in the art of writing. The
family magazine is like the American short story. It
has conventionalized into an often successful immo
bility. Both must move again, become flexible, vigor
ous, or their date will be upon them. And the family

The Family Magazine 145

magazine, the illustrated literary magazine, is the most
interesting vehicle of human expression and interpreta
tion that we Americans have created. With a new and
greater success, it will draw all our other efforts with
it. If it fails, hope for the interesting review, the well-
balanced weekly, is precarious. If they all submerge,
we who like to read with discrimination and gusto will
have to take to books as an exclusive diet, or make our
choice between boredom and journalism.

HI

The New Generation

The Young Romantics

WE have talked about the younger generation as if
youth were a new phenomenon that had to be named
and described, like a strange animal in the Garden of
Eden. No wonder that our juniors have become self-
conscious and have begun to defend themselves.
Nevertheless, the generation born after the 'eighties
has had an experience unique in our era. It has been
urged, first by men and then by events, to discredit the
statements of historians, the pictures of poets and nov
elists, and it has accepted the challenge. The result is
a literature which speaks for the younger writers bet
ter, perhaps, than they speak for themselves, and this
literature no reader whose brain is still flexible can
afford to neglect; for to pass by youth for maturity is
sooner or later to lose step with life.

In recent decades the novel especially, but also
poetry, has drifted toward biography and autobiog
raphy. The older poets, who yesterday were the
younger poets, such men as Masters, Robinson, Frost,
Lindsay, have passed from lyric to biographic narra
tive; the younger poets more and more write of them
selves. In the novel the trend is even more marked.
An acute critic, Mr. Wilson Follett, has recently noted
that the novel of class or social consciousness, which
only ten years ago those who teach literature were dis-

149

150 The Ne<w Generation

cussing as the latest of late developments, has already
given way to a vigorous rival. It has yielded room, if
not given place, to the novel of the discontented per
son. The young men, and in a less degree the young
women, especially in America, where the youngest gen
eration is, I believe, more vigorous than elsewhere,
have taken to biographical fiction. Furthermore, what
began as biography, usually of a youth trying to dis
cover how to plan his career, has drifted more and more
toward autobiography — an autobiography of discon
tent.

There is, of course, nothing particularly new about
biographical fiction. There is nothing generically new
about the particular kind of demi-autobiographies that
the advanced are writing just now. The last two dec
ades have been rich in stories that need only a set of
notes to reveal their approximate faithfulness to things
that actually happened. But there is an emphasis upon
revolt and disillusion and confusion in these latest nov
els that is new. They are no longer on the defensive,
no longer stories of boys struggling to adapt themselves
to a difficult world (men of forty-odd still write such
stories) ; their authors are on the offensive, and with a
reckless desire to accomplish their objectives, they
shower us with such a profusion of detail, desert the
paths of use and wont in fiction so freely, and so often
disregard the comfort, not to speak of the niceties, of
the reader, that "the young realists" has seemed a fair,
although, as I think, a misleading title, for their au
thors. To a critic they are most interesting, for the

The Young Romantics 151

novel of the alleged young realist is like a fresh country
boy on a football field, powerful, promising, and utterly
wasteful of its strength.

Recent American literature has been especially rich
in such novels. There was, for example, Fitzgerald's
ragged, but brilliant, "This Side of Paradise," which
conducted aimless and expansive youth from childhood
through college. There was the much more impressive
"Main Street," biographic in form, but with teeth set
on edge in revolt. There was the vivid and ill-con
trolled sex novel "Erik Dorn," and Evelyn Scott's "The
Narrow House," in which the miseries of a young girl
caught in the squalid and the commonplace had their
airing. There was Stephen Benet's "The Beginning of
Wisdom," where the revolt was a poet's, and the real
ist's detail selected from beauty instead of from ugli
ness; and Aikman's "Zell," in which youth rubs its sore
shoulders against city blocks instead of university
quadrangles. There was Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers,"
in which the boy hero is crushed by the war machine
his elders have made. These are type examples, pos
sibly not the best, certainly not the worst, drawn from
the workshops of the so-called young realists.

What is the biography of this modern youth? His
father, in the romantic 'nineties, usually conquered the
life of his elders, seldom complained of it, never spurned
it. His son-in-the-novel is born into a world of intense
sensation, usually disagreeable. Instead of a "Peter
Ibbetson" boyhood, he encounters disillusion after dis
illusion. At the age of seven or thereabout he sees

The New, Generation

through his parents and characterizes them in a phrase.
At fourteen he sees through his education and begins
to dodge it. At eighteen he sees through morality and
steps over it. At twenty he loses respect for his home
town, and at twenty-one discovers that our social and
economic system is ridiculous. At twenty-three his
story ends because the author has run through society
to date and does not know what to do next. Life is
ahead of the hero, and presumably a new society of
his own making. This latter, however, does not ap
pear in any of the books, and for good reasons.

In brief, this literature of the youngest generation is
a literature of revolt, which is not surprising, but also
a literature characterized by a minute and painful ex
amination of environment. Youth, in the old days,
when it rebelled, escaped to romantic climes or ad
venturous experience from a world which some one else
had made for it. That is what the hacks of the movies
and the grown-up children who write certain kinds of
novels are still doing. But true youth is giving us this
absorbed examination of all possible experiences that
can come to a boy or girl who does not escape from
every-day life, this unflattering picture of a world that
does not fit, worked out with as much evidence as if
each novel were to be part of a brief of youth against
society. Indeed, the implied argument is often more
important than the story, when there is a story. And
the argument consists chiefly of "this happened to me,"
"I saw this and did not like it," "I was driven to this
or that" until the mass of circumstantial incident and

The Young Romantics 153

sensation reminds one of the works of Zola and the
scientific naturalists who half a century ago tried to
put society as an organism into fiction and art.

No better example has been given us than Dos
Passos's "Three Soldiers," a book that would be tire
some (and is tiresome to many) in its night after night
and day after day crammed with every possible un
pleasant sensation and experience that three young
men could have had in the A. E. F. And that the ex
periences recorded were unpleasant ones, forced upon
youth, not chosen by its will, is thoroughly characteris
tic. If it had not been for the rebellious pacifism in
this book, it is questionable whether readers who had
not been in France, and so could not relish the vivid
reality of the descriptions, would have read to the
end of the story.

The cause of all this is interesting, more interesting
than some of the results. The full result we can
scarcely judge yet, for despite signs of power and
beauty and originality, only one or two of these books
have reached artistic maturity; but we can prepare to
comprehend it.

Here, roughly, is what I believe has happened, and
if I confine my conclusions to fiction, it is not because
I fail to realize that the effects are and will be far
broader.

The youths of our epoch were born and grew up in
a period of criticism and disintegration. They were
children when the attack upon orthodox conceptions of
society succeeded the attack upon orthodox conceptions

The New Generation

of religion. We know how "the conflict between re
ligion and science" reverberated in nineteenth-century
literature and shaped its ends. The new attack was
quite different. Instead of scrutinizing a set of beliefs,
it scrutinized a method of living. Insensibly, the in
telligent youth became aware that the distribution of
wealth and the means of getting it were under attack;
that questions were raised as to the rights of property
and the causes and necessity of war. Soon moral con
cepts began to be shaken. He learned that prostitu
tion might be regarded as an economic evil. He found
that sex morality was regarded by some as a useful
taboo; psychology taught him that repression could be
as harmful as excess; the collapse of the Darwinian
optimists, who believed that all curves were upward,
left him with the inner conviction that everything, in
cluding principle, was in a state of flux. And his in
tellectual guides, first Shaw, and then, when Shaw be
came vieux jeu, De Gourmont, favored that conclusion.

Then came the war, which at a stroke destroyed his
sense of security and with that his respect for the
older generation that had guaranteed his world. Propa
ganda first enlightened him as to the evil meanings of
imperialistic politics, and afterward left him suspicious
of all politics. Cruelty and violent change became
familiar. He had seen civilization disintegrate on the
battlefield, and was prepared to find it shaky at home.

Then he resumed, or began, his reading and his writ
ing. His reading of fiction and poetry, especially when
it dealt with youth, irritated him. The pictures of

The Young Romantics

life in Dickens, in "The Idylls of the King," in the
Henty books, in the popular romantic novels and the
conventional social studies, did not correspond with his
pictures. They in no sense corresponded with the de
scriptions of society given by the new social thinkers
whose ideas had leaked through to him. They did
not square with his own experience. "The Charge of
the Light Brigade" rang false to a member of the 26th
Division. Quiet stories of idyllic youth in New Eng
land towns jarred upon the memories of a class-con
scious youngster in modern New York. Youth began
to scrutinize its own past, and then to write, with a
passionate desire to tell the real truth, all of it, pleas
ant, unpleasant, or dirty, regardless of narrative
relevance.

The result was this new naturalism, a propaganda
of the experience of youth, where the fact that mother's
face was ugly, not angelic, is supremely important, more
important than the story, just because it was the truth.
And as the surest way to get all the truth is to tell your
own story, every potential novelist wrote his own story,
enriching it, where sensation was thin, from the biog
raphies of his intimates. Rousseau was reborn with
out his social philosophy. Defoe was reincarnated,
but more anxious now to describe precisely what hap
pened to him than to tell an effective tale.

This is a very different kind of truth-telling from,
let us say, Mrs. Wharton's in "The Age of Innocence"
or Zona Gale's in "Miss Lulu Bett." It does not spring
from a desire to tell the truth about human nature.

156 The New Generation

These asserters of youth are not much interested in
any human nature except their own, not much, indeed,
in that, but only in the friction between their ego and
the world. It is passionate truth, which is very dif
ferent from cool truth; it is subjective, not objective;
romantic, not classical, to use the old terms which few
nowadays except Professor Babbitt's readers under
stand. Nor is it the truth that Wells, let us say, or, to
use a greater name, Tolstoy was seeking. It is not
didactic or even interpretative, but only the truth about
the difference between the world as it is and the world
as it was expected to be; an impressionistic truth; in
fact, the truth about my experiences, which is very
different from what I may sometime think to be the
truth about mankind.

It will be strange if nothing very good comes from
this impulse, for the purpose to "tell the world" that
my vision of America is startlingly different from what
I have read about America is identical with that break
with the past which has again and again been prelude
to a new era. I do not wish to discuss the alleged new
era. Like the younger generation, it has been dis
cussed too much and is becoming evidently self-con
scious. But if the autobiographical novel is to be re
garded as its literary herald (and they are all prophetic
Declarations of Independence), then we may ask what
has the new generation given us so far in the way of
literary art.

Apparently the novel and the short story, as we have
known them, are to be scrapped. Plot, which began to

The Young Romantics 157

break down with the Russians, has crumbled into a
maze of incident. You can no longer assume that the
hero's encounter with a Gipsy in Chapter II is prep
aration for a tragedy in Chapter XXIX. In all prob
ability the Gipsy will never be heard from again. She
is irrelevant except as a figment in the author's mem
ory, as an incident in autobiography. Setting, the old
familiar background, put on the story like wall-paper
on a living-room, has suffered a sea change also. It
comes now by flashes, like a movie-film. What the
ego remembers, that it describes, whether the drip of
a faucet or the pimple on the face of a traffic police
man. As for character, there is usually but one, the
hero; for the others live only as he sees them, and fade
out when he looks away. If he is highly sexed, like
Erik Dorn, the other figures appear in terms of sex,
just as certain rays of light will bring out only one
color in the objects they shine against.

The novel, in fact, has melted and run down into a
diary, with sometimes no unity except the personality
whose sensations are recorded. Many of us have
wished to see the conventional story forms broken to
bits. It was getting so that the first sentence of a
short story or the first chapter of a novel gave the
whole show away. We welcomed the English stories
of a decade ago that began to give the complexities of
life instead of the conventions of a plot. But this com
plete liquidation rather appals us.

The novels I have mentioned so far in this article
have all together not enough plot to set up one lively

158 The New Generation

Victorian novel. Benet, Dos Passes, Fitzgerald — the
flood-gates of each mind have been opened, and all that
the years had dammed up bursts forth in a deluge of
waters, carrying flotsam and jetsam and good things
and mud.

It is not surprising that, having given up plot, these
writers escape from other restraints also. The more
energetic among them revel in expression, and it seems
to make little difference whether it is the exquisite
chiaroscuro of Chicago they are describing, or spots
on a greasy apron. The less enthusiastic are content
to be as full of gritty realistic facts as a fig of seeds;
but with all of them everything from end to beginning,
from bottom to top, must be said.

And just here lies the explanation of the whole mat
ter. As one considers the excessive naturalism of the
young realists and asks just why they find it neces
sary to be so excessively, so effusively realistic, the con
viction is inborn that they are not realists at all as
Hardy, Ho wells, even James were realists; they are
romanticists of a deep, if not the deepest, dye, even
the heartiest lover of sordid incident among them all.

I am aware, of course, that "romantic" is a dan
gerous word, more overworked than any other in the
vocabulary of criticism, and very difficult to define.
But in contrast with its opposites it can be made to
mean something definite. Now, the romanticism of the
juniors is not the opposite of realism; it sometimes em
braces realism too lovingly for the reader's comfort.
But it is the opposite of classicism. It is emotional ex-

The Young Romantics 159

pansiveness as contrasted with the classic doctrine of
measure and restraint. By this, the older meaning of
romanticism, we may put a tag upon the new men that
will help to identify them. Their desire is to free their
souls from the restraints of circumstance, to break
through rule and convention, to let their hearts expand.

But they do not fly into Byronic melancholy or
Wordsworthian enthusiasm for the mysterious ab
stract; they are far more likely to fly away from them.
Byron and Wordsworth do not interest them, and
Tennyson they hate. Romantic in mood, they are
realistic, never classical, in their contact with experi
ence. In poetry they prefer free verse, in prose they
eschew grand phrases and sonorous words. It has
been the hard realism of an unfriendly world that has
scraped them to the raw, and they retaliate by vividly
describing all the unpleasant things they remember.
Taught by the social philosophers and war's disillusions
that Denmark is decaying, they do not escape to Cathay
or Bohemia, but stay at home and passionately narrate
what Denmark has done to them. Romantic Zolas,
they have stolen the weapons of realism to fight the
battle of their ego. And the fact that a few pause in
their naturalism to soar into idyllic description or the
rapture of beauty merely proves my point, that they
are fundamentally romantics seeking escape, and that
autobiographical realism is merely romanticism a la
mode.

Let us criticize it as such, remembering that we may
be reading the first characteristic work of a new liter-

160 The New Generation

ary era. Let us give over being shocked. Those who
were shocked by Byron, the apostle of expansiveness,
merely encouraged him to be more shocking. Nor is it
any use to sit upon the hydrant of this new expansive-
ness. If a youth desires to tell the world what has
happened to him, he must be allowed to do so, pro
vided he has skill and power enough to make us listen.
And these juniors have power even when skill has not
yet been granted them. What is needed is a hose to
stop the waste of literary energy, to conserve and direct
it. Call for a hose, then, as much as you please, but
do not try to stop the waters with your Moses's rod
of conservative indignation.

It is no crime to be a romantic, — it is a virtue, if
that is the impulse of the age, — but it is a shame to be
a wasteful romantic. Waste has always been the ro
mantic vice — waste of emotion, waste of words, the
waste that comes from easy profusion of sentiment and
the formlessness that permits it. Think of "The Ex
cursion/' of Southey, and of the early poems of Shelley,
of Scott at his wordiest. And these writers also are
wasteful, in proportion to their strength.

They waste especially their imagination. Books like
"The Three Soldiers" spill over in all directions— spill
into poetry, philosophy, into endless conversation, and
into everything describable. Books like "The Begin
ning of Wisdom" are still more wasteful. Here is the
poignant biography of a boy who loves his environment
even when it slays him, plus a collection of prose idylls,

The Young Romantics 161

plus a group of poems, plus a good piece of special re
porting, plus an assortment of brilliant letters; and
imbedded in the mass, like a thread of gold in a tangle
of yarn, as fresh and exquisite a love-story as we have
had in recent English. Of course I do not mean that
all these elements cannot be woven into, made relevant
to, a theme, a story. Stendhal, himself a romantic, as
these men are romantics, could do it. But our ro
mantics do not so weave them; they fling them out as
contributions to life's evidence, they fail to relate them
to a single interpretation of living, and half of the best
incidents are waste, and clog the slow-rolling wheels
of the story.

They waste their energy also. So keenly do they
love their own conception of true living that their im
aginations dwell with a kind of horrid fascination upon
the ugly things that thwart them. Hence in a novel
like "Main Street," the interest slackens as one begins
to feel that the very vividness of the story comes from
a vision strained and aslant, unable to tear eyes from
the things that have cramped life instead of expanding
it. The things that these writers love in life often they
never reach until the last chapter, and about them
they have little to say, being exhausted by earlier
virulence.

Waste, of course, is a symptom of youth and vitality
as well as of unbridled romanticism, but that is no
reason for praising a book because it is disorderly.
We do not praise young, vigorous states for being dis
orderly. Life may not be orderly, but literature must

162 The New Generation

be. That is a platitude which it seems necessary to
repeat.

It is difficult to estimate absolute achievement ex
cept across time, and the time has been too brief to
judge of the merits of the young romanticists. My
guess is that some of them will go far. But the diag
nosis at present seems to show an inflammation of the
ego. The new generation is discovering its soul by the
pain of its bruises, as a baby is made aware of its body
by pin-pricks and chafes. It is explaining its dissatis
factions with more violence than art.

Therefore at present the satirists and the educators
hold the best cards, and most of them are elderly. No
one of les jeunes writes with the skill, with the art, of
Mrs. Wharton, Miss Sinclair, Tarkington, Galsworthy,
or Wells. It should not long be so in a creative genera
tion. In sheer emotion, in vivid protest that is not
merely didactic, the advantage is all with the young
sters. But they waste it. They have learned to criti
cize their elders, but not themselves. They have boy
cotted the books of writers who were young just be
fore themselves, but they have not learned to put a
curb on their own expansiveness. We readers suffer.
We do not appreciate their talents as we might, because
we lose our bearings in hectic words or undigested in
cident. We lose by the slow realization of their art.

Youth is a disease that cures itself, though some
times too late. The criticism I have made, in so far
as it refers to youthful impetuosity, is merely the sort
of thing that has to be said to every generation, and

The Young Romantics 163

very loudly to the romantic ones. But if these auto-
biographians are, as I believe, expansive romanticists,
that is of deeper significance, and my hope is that the
definition may prove useful to them as well as to readers
who with an amazed affection persist in following them
wherever they lead.

Puritans All

WHEN anything goes wrong in politics the American
practice is to charge it against the Administration. In
literature all grievances are attributed to the Puritans.
If a well-written book does not sell, it is because the
Puritans warped our sense of beauty; if an honest dis
cussion of sex is attacked for indecency, it is the fault
of the Puritan inheritance; if the heroes and heroines
of new narratives in prose or verse jazz their way to
destruction or impotence, it is in protest against the
Puritans.

Who is this terrible Puritan? Apparently he is all
America's ancestor, and whether you were born in Dela
ware or in South Carolina, in Montana or in Jugoslavia,
you must adopt him as great-great-grandfather or
declare yourself alien.

What was he, or rather, what did he stand for, and
inflict upon us, to-day? Here there is some confusion.
According to one set of critics he is not so much a
hater of the arts as indifferent to their charms, not so
much a Milton scornful of easy beauty, as a Philistine,
deaf and blind to the esthetic. But these writers have
apparently confounded Great-great-grandfather Puri
tan with Grandpa Victorian, the Victorian that Mat
thew Arnold scolded and Shaw made fun of. He is a
type as different from the real Puritan as the slum

164

Puritans All 165

dweller from the primitive barbarian. "Milton, thou
shouldst be living at this hour" to flay such ignorant
traducers of those who knew at least the beauty of
austerity and holiness.

According to a less numerous but more clear-headed
group of enemies the Puritan is to be censured chiefly
for the rigidity of his conscience. He will not let us
enjoy such "natural" pleasures as mirth, love, drink
ing, and idleness without a bitter antidote of remorse.
He keeps books dull and reticent, makes plays virtu
ously didactic, and irritates all but the meek and the
godly into revolt.

I am not an uncritical admirer of the Puritan,
although I believe he is more nearly on the side of the
angels than is his opposite. I deprecate the smug vir
tuosity which his kind often favor, I dislike a vinegar
morality, and am repelled by the monstrous egoism of
the idea that redeeming one's soul is such a serious
matter that every moment spared from contemplating
the sins of others or the pieties of oneself is irretrievably
wasted.

But I object still more strongly to the anti-Puritans.
Those rebels who make unconventionality their only
convention, with their distrust of duty because they
see no reason to be dutiful, and their philosophic nihil
ism, which comes to this, that all things having been
proved false except their own desires, their desires be
come a philosophy, those anti-Puritans, as one sees
them, especially in plays and on the stage, are an ob
streperous, denying folk that seldom know their own

166 The New, Generation

minds to the end of the story. In fiction, distrusting
what the Puritans call duty, they are left gasping
in the last chapter, wondering usually what they are
to do next; while the delightful lack of conscience that
makes the flappers audacious and the young men so
unremorsefully naughty leads to nothing at the end
but a passionate desire to discover some new reason
for living (which I take to mean, a new conscience)
even if homes and social utility are wrecked in the
attempt.

Why has duty become so unpopular in American
literature? Is it because she is, after all, just what
that loftiest if not most impeccable of Puritans called
her, stern daughter of the voice of God? Is there
to be no more sternness in our morals now we under
stand their psychology, no voice commanding us to
do this or not to do that because there is a gulf set be
tween worth and worthlessness? Is it true that be
cause we are not to be damned for playing golf on Sun
day, nothing can damn us? That because the rock-
ribbed Vermont ancestor's idea of duty can never be
ours, we have no duty to acknowledge? Is it true that
if we cease being Puritans we can remain without prin
ciple, swayed only by impulse and events?

When these questions are answered to the hilt, we
shall get something more vital than anti-Puritanism in
modern American literature.

The Older Generation

THE American Academy of Arts and Letters says a
word for the Older Generation now and then by choos
ing new academicians from its ranks. No one else for
a long while now has been so poor as to do it reverence.
Indeed, the readers of some of our magazines must
have long since concluded that there are no fathers
and mothers in the modern literary world, but only self-
created heralds of the future who do not bother even
to be rebellious against a generation they condemn.

The older generation is in a difficult situation, be
cause, apparently, no one knows precisely who and
what it is. The younger generation, of course, is made
up of every one who dislikes Tennyson, believes in
realism, reads De Gourmont, and was not responsible
for the war. That is perfectly definite. We are some
what puzzled by the uncounted hordes of the youthful
in appearance who support the movies, are stolidly con
servative in the colleges, never heard of De Gourmont,
and have forgotten the war. But perhaps that is some
other younger generation which no one has taken the
trouble to write about — yet.

As for the older generation, what actually is it, and
who in reality are they? The general impression seems
to be that they are the Victorians, they are Howells
and his contemporaries, they are the men and women

167,

1 68 The New Generation

who created the family magazine, invented morality,
revived Puritanism, and tried to impose evolution on a
society that preferred devolution by international com
bat. But these men are all dead, or have ceased writ
ing. They are not our older generation. It is true
that they are famous and so convenient for reference,
but it is not accurate nor fair to drag them from their
graves for purposes of argument.

The true older generation, of which one seldom hears
in current criticism except in terms of abuse, remains
to be discovered, and we herewith announce its person
nel, so that the next time the youthful writer excoriates
it in the abstract all may know just whom he means.
Among the older generation in American literature are
H. L. Mencken and Mrs. Edith Wharton, Booth Tark-
ington and Stuart P. Sherman, Miss Amy Lowell and
Mr. Frank Moore Colby, Robert Frost and Edwin
Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sand
burg, Mrs. Gerould and Professor William Lyon Phelps,
Edgar Lee Masters, Joseph Hergesheimer, and most of
the more radical editors of New York. Here is this
group of desiccated Victorians, upholders of the ethics
of Mr. Pickwick, and the artistic theories of Bulwer-
Lytton. Here are the bogies of outworn conservatism,
numbered like a football team. Mark their names, and
know from now on that most of the books that you have
supposed were solid in artistry and mature in thought,
though perhaps novel in tone or in method, were writ
ten by the older generation.

Perhaps when the younger generation pretend to con-

The Older Generation 169

fuse their immediate predecessors with Ruskin and
Carlyle, with Browning, Emerson, Hawthorne, Long
fellow, and Matthew Arnold, they are merely strategic.
For it is still dangerous to assault the citadels of the
great Victorians with no greater books than the youth
ful volumes of 1918-1921, no matter how many
breaches the war has left in the walls of their philoso
phy. It is far easier to assume that they are still alive
in pallid survival, and to attack a hypothetic older gen
eration, which, representing nothing real, can there
fore not strike back.

Let the younger generation go back to its muttons,
let it attend to its most pressing business, which is to
create. It is vigorous, prolific, and, to my judgment,
full of promise, but so far has done little or nothing
not summarized in these words. It must pay its debt
to time before it grows much older, or go down among
expectations unrealized. It has few hours to waste
upon attacking an older generation which, as it is de
scribed, does not exist except in youthful imagination,
a generation actually of the middle-aged which in the
meantime is bearing the burden of invention, creation,
revolution in art while the youngsters are talking.

I should like to see less about the younger and more
of this older generation in literary criticism. It is a
fresh subject, scarcely touched by writers, and full of
surprises. The jaded reader should be told that, in
spite of rumors to the contrary, the middle-aged still
exist.

A Literature of Protest

I HAVE pursued the discussions of the new American
realism through university gatherings and literary in
quests. Stripped of all metaphysics and relieved of
all subtlety the conclusion of the matter is inescapable.
It is not the realism of the realists, or the freedom of
free verse, or the radicalism of the radical that in it
self offends the critics, it is the growing ugliness of
American literature. The harsh and often vulgar lines
of Masters (so they say) seem to disdain beauty.
Vachel Lindsay's shouted raptures are raucous. Miss
Lowell's polyphonies have intellectual beauty, but the
note is sharp, the splendors pyrotechnic. Robert
Frost's restrained rhythms are homely in the single
line. The "advanced" novelists, who win the prizes
and stir up talk, are flat in style when not muddy in
their English. They do not lift. An eighteenth cen
tury critic would call American literature ugly, or at
least homely, if he dipped into its realities, rococo if
he did not.

This is the sum of a criticism so strongly felt that
it raises a barrier to appreciation, almost a gate shut
against knowledge between the good American readers
and the progressives in our literature. Sandburg and
Lindsay between them will cause more acrimony in a
gathering of English teachers than even Harold Bell

170

A Literature of Protest 171

Wright. Miss Lowell carries controversy with her,
triumphantly riding upon it. Their critics wish form
as they have known form, want beauty such as they
possess in riper literatures, want maturity, richness,
suavity, grace, and the lift of noble thinking, nobly ex
pressed. It may be remarked, in passing, that they
also would like to live in English manors in gardened
landscapes and have French cathedrals rise above their
perfect towns!

It ought to be clear that we shall never get beauty
of this kind, or of any absolute kind, in American writ
ing until there is more beauty in American life. Amidst
the vulgarities of signboards, cries of cheap newspapers,
noisy hustle of trivial commercialism, and the flatness
of standardized living, it is hard to feel spiritual quali
ties higher than optimism and reform. In general,
wherever we have touched America we have made it
uglier, as a necessary preliminary perhaps to making
it anything at all, but uglier nevertheless. There was
more hardship perhaps but also more clear beauty in
Colonial days than in our own. More clear beauty, we
say, because the present has its own vigorous beauty,
more complex than what went before, but not yet clari
fied from the ugly elements that are making it. The
forests and the skyscrapers are beautiful in America,
but pretty much everything else below and between is
soiled or broken by progress and prosperity.

And it is of the things in between, of America in the
making, that these new writers, whose lack of pure
beauty we deplore, and whose occasional gratuitous

172 The New Generation

ugliness we dislike, are writing. They are protesting
against its sordidness and crudity far more effectively
than the cloistered reader who recites Shelley, saying
"Why can't they write as he does." Like all that is
human they share the qualities of their environment,
like all fighters they acquire the faults of the enemy.
They hate, often enough, the ugliness which a genera
tion of progress has implanted in their own minds.
They have been educated, perhaps, by the movies,
Main Street conversation, formalized schools, and stale
Methodism, and they hate their education. Or like
the poets mentioned above they are moved by the
pathos, the injustice, the confused beauty, the promise,
not of some land of the past, but of the country under
their feet, and write of what stirs them in terms that fit.

It is only when one understands this new Ameri
can writing to be a literature of protest, that one be
gins to sympathize with its purposes, admire its achieve
ments, and be tolerant of its limitations. For such a
literature has very definite limitations. It is prepara
tive rather than ultimate. The spaciousness of great
imagination is seldom in it, and it lacks those grand
and simple conceptions which generalize upon the
human race. It is cluttered with descriptions of the
enemy, it is nervous, or morbid, or excited, or over-
emphatic. That it strikes out occasional sparks of
vivid beauty, and has already produced masterpieces
in poetry, is to be wondered at and praised.

But some one had to begin to write of the United
States as it is. We could not go on with sentimental

A Literature of Protest 173

novels and spineless lyrics forever. Some writers had
to refocus the instrument and look at reality again.
And what the honest saw was not beautiful as Tenny
son knew beauty, not grand, not even very pleasant. It
is their job to make beauty out of it, beauty of a new
kind probably, because it will accompany new truth;
but they must have time. Surprise, shock, experiment,
come first. The new literature deserves criticism,
but it also deserves respect. Contempt for it is mis
placed, aversion is dangerous since it leads to ignorance,
wholesale condemnation such as one hears from pro
fessional platforms and reads in newspaper editorials
is as futile as the undiscriminating praise of those
who welcome novelty just because it is new.

Barbarians a la Mode

THE liberal mind, which just now is out of a job in
politics, might very well have a look at the present state
of literature. A task is there ready for it.

Our literature is being stretched and twisted or
hacked and hewed by dogmatists. Most of the critics
are too busy gossiping about plots and the private lives
of authors to devote much attention to principles. But
the noble few who still can write about a book without
falling into it, or criticize an author's style without
dragging in his taste in summer resorts, are chiefly con
cerned with classifications. Is our author conservative
or radical? Are his novels long or short skirted? Does
he write for Harper's or The Dial? They have divided
America chronologically into the old and the new and
geographically into East or West of the Alleghanies,
or North or South of Fourteenth Street in New York.
Such creative writers as have a definite philosophy of
composition are equally categorical. And both are
calling upon liberal minds, who are supposed to have
no principles of their own, to umpire the controversy.

The liberal mind, which I believe in, though I hesi
tate to define it, has too much work before it to umpire
in a dispute over the relative taste of the decayed and
the raw. In literature, as in pretty much everything
else, the central problem is not the struggle of the old

174

Barbarians a la Mode 175

with the new; it is the endless combat of civilization
(which is old and new) against barbarism. Under
which banner our writers are enlisting is the vital ques
tion. Whether they are radical or conservative will
always in the view of history be interesting, but may be
substantially unimportant. And the function of the
liberal mind, with its known power to dissolve illiberal
dogmatism, is to discover the barbarian wherever he
raises his head, and to convert or destroy him.

The Greeks had a short way of denning the barbarian
which we can only envy. To them, all men not Greeks
were barbarians. By this they meant that only the
Greeks had learned to desire measure in all things, lib
erty safeguarded by law, and knowledge of the truth
about life. Men not desiring these things were bar
barous, no matter how noble, how rich, and how honest.
The ancient and highly conservative Egyptians were
barbarous; the youthful and new-fangled Gauls were
barbarous. An Egyptian in nothing else resembled a
Gaul, but both in the eyes of the Greek were barbarians.

Evolution and devolution have intervened. The
Gaul has become one of the standards of civilization;
the Egyptian has died of his conservatism; but the
problem of the barbarian remains the same. There
are neo-Gauls to-day and neo-Egyptians.

These gentry do not belong to the welter of vulgar
barbarism, the curse of a half educated, half democra
tized age. They are found among the upper classes
of the intellect, and can rightly be called by such
names as conservative or radical, which show that they

ij6 The New Generation

are part of the minority that thinks. Indeed, they are
not barbarous at all in the harsh modern sense of the
word; yet the Greeks would have condemned them.

The barbarism of the neo-Gaul is unrestraint
("punch" is the nearest modern equivalent). The neo-
Gaul is an innovator and this is his vice. It is a by
product of originality and a symptom of a restless
desire for change. The realist who makes a poem,
not on his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a
good current example. The novelist who shovels un
distinguished humanity, just because it is human, into
his book is another. The versifier who twists and
breaks his rhythm solely in order to get new sounds is
a third. A fourth is the stylist who writes in disjointed
phrases and expletives, intended to represent the actual
processes of the mind.

The realist poet, so the Greeks would have said,
lacks measure. He destroys the balance of his art
by asking your attention for the strangeness of his
subject. It is as if a sculptor should make a Venus
of chewing gum. The novelist lacks self-restraint.
Life interests him so much that he devours without
digesting it. The result is like a moving picture run
too fast. The versifier also lacks measure. He is more
anxious to be new than to be true, and he seeks effects
upon the reader rather than forms for his thought.
The bizarre stylist misses truth by straining too much
to achieve it. Words are only symbols. They never
more than roughly represent a picture of thought. A
monologue like this, as the heroine goes to shop:

Barbarians a la Mode 177

Chapel Street . . . the old hardware shop . . . scissors,
skates glittering, moonlight on the ice ... old Dr. Brown's
head, like a rink. Rink ... a queer word! Pigeons in the
air above the housetops — automobiles like elephants. Was
her nose properly powdered? . . . Had she cared to dance
with him after all?

is not absolutely true: it is not the wordless images
that float through the idle mind, but only a symbol
of them, more awkward and less informative than the
plain English of what the heroine felt and thought.

All these instances are barbarous in the Greek sense,
and their perpetrators, no matter how cultivated, how
well-meaning, how useful sometimes as pioneers and
pathbreakers, are barbarians. Some of them should
be exposed; some chided; some labored with, accord
ing to the magnitude and the nature of their offense.
The critics who uphold and approve them should be
dealt with likewise. And it is the reader with the
liberal mind who is called to the task. He is in sym
pathy, at least, with change, and knows that the
history of civilization has been a struggle to break
away from tradition and yet not go empty-handed;
he can understand the passion to express old things
in a new and better way, or he is not intellectually
liberal. It takes a liberal mind to distinguish between
barbarism and progress.

Next there is the rigor mortis of the neo-Egyptians,
the barbarism of the dead hand, called by the unkind
and the undiscriminating, academic barbarism.

Let us humor the Menckenites by so calling it, and

178 The New, Generation

then add that it is by no means confined to the colleges,
although it is a vice more familiar in critics than in
creative artists. A Ph.D. is quite unnecessary in order
to be academic in this sense, just as one does not have
to be a scholar in order to be pedantical. To stand
pat in one's thinking (and this is the neo-Egyptian
fault) is to be barbarous, whatever the profession of
the thinker. True, the victims of this hardening of
the brain are precisely those men and women most
likely to fling taunts at the moderns, just those who
would rather be charged with immorality than bar
barism. And yet, to be bound to the past is as bar
barous in the Greek sense as to be wholly immersed
in the present. The Egyptians for all their learning
were barbarians.

Barbarian is not as rude a word as it sounds. Most
of the great romanticists had strains of the barbarous
in them — the young Shakespeare among them. Indeed,
much may be said for sound barbarian literature, until
it becomes self-conscious, though not much for bar
barian criticism. Nevertheless, I do not intend in this
sally against the slavish barbarism of the merely aca
demic mind to hurl the epithet recklessly. Lusty con
servatives who attack free verse, free fiction, ultra
realism, "jazzed" prose, and the socialistic drama as
the diseases of the period have my respect and sym
pathy, when it is a disease and not change as change
that they are attacking. And, often enough, these
manifestations are symptoms of disease, a plethoric
disease arising from too high blood pressure. Hard-

Barbarians a la Mode 179

hitting conservatives were never more needed in litera
ture than now, when any one can print anything that
is novel, and find some one to approve of it. But there
are too many respectable barbarians among our Ameri
can conservatives who write just what they wrote
twenty years ago, and like just what they liked twenty
years ago, because that is their nature. In 1600 they
would have done the same for 1579. Without question
men were regretting in 1600 the genius of the youthful
Shakespeare of the '8o's, later quenched by commer
cialism (see the appeals to the pit and the topical
references in "Hamlet") ; and good conservatives were
certainly regretting the sad course of the drama which,
torn from the scholars and flung to the mob, had be
come mad clowning. What we need in the Tory line
is not such ice-bound derelicts but men who are pas
sionate about the past because they find their inspira
tion there, men and women who belabor the present
not for its existence, but because it might have been
better if it had been wiser.

They must, in short, be Greeks, not barbarians. It
is the reverse of barbarous to defend the old, but the
man who can see no need, no good, no hope in change
is a barbarian. He flinches from the truth physical
and the truth spiritual that life is motion. I particu
larly refer to the literary person who sneers at novels
because they are not epics, and condemns new poems
or plays unread if they deal with a phase of human
evolution that does not please him. I mean the critic
who drags his victim back to Aristotle or Matthew

180 The New, Generation

Arnold and slays him on a text whose application
Aristotle or Arnold would have been the first to deny.
I mean the teacher who by ironic thrust and visible
contempt destroys the faith of youth in the literary
present without imparting more than a pallid interest
in the past. I mean the essayist who in 1911 described
Masefield as an unsound and dangerous radical in
verse, and in 1921 accepts him as the standard "mod
ern" poet by whom his degenerate successors are to
be measured.

All this is barbarism because it is ignorance or denial
of the laws of growth. It belongs anthropologically
with totemism, sacerdotalism, neo-ritualism, and every
other remnant of the terrible shackles of use and wont
which chained early man to his past. It is Egyptian.
Its high priests are sometimes learned but their minds
are frozen. Beware of them.

In England, so far as I am able to judge, this variety
of barbarism shows itself usually in a rather snobbish
intolerance of anything not good form in literature.
The universities still protect it, but its home is in
London, among the professional middle class.

In America its symptom is well-disguised fear.
Some of us are afraid of our literary future just as
many of us are afraid of democracy. Poetry and criti
cism (we feel) which used to be written by classicists
and gentlemen are now in the hands of the corn-fed
multitude, educated God knows how or where. Fic
tion, once a profession, has become a trade, and so
has the drama. The line between journalism and litera-

Barbarians a la Mode 181

ture is lost. Grub Street has become an emporium.
Any one, anything can get into a story or a son
net. . . .

The Greek of to-day (as we venture to define him)
views all this with some regret, and more concern.
He sees that fine traditions are withering, that fine*
things are being marred by ignorant handling. He
fears debasement, he hates vulgarity, and his realist
soul admits the high probability of both in a society
whose standards are broader than they are high. But
he also sees new energies let loose and new resources
discovered; he recognizes new forms of expression,
uncouth or colloquial perhaps, but capable of vitality
and truth, and not without beauty. He bends his mind
toward them, knowing that if he ignores them their
authors will ignore him and his kind.

The Egyptian is afraid. He pulls his mantle closer
about him and walks by on the other side.

Here again is work for the liberal mind. If it is
really liberal — which means that training and disposi
tion have made it free to move through both the past
and the present — it can cope with this Egyptian bar
barism; for liberal-minded lovers of literature, by per
forming a very simple operation in psychoanalysis, can
understand how love for the good old times may cause
fear lest we lose their fruits, and how fear blinds the
critic's eye, makes his tongue harsh, and his judgment
rigid as death.

Liberalism in politics is sulking just now, like Achilles
in his tent, its aid having been invited too early, or

182 The New, Generation

too late. But the liberal spirit can never rest, and
we solicit its help in literature. I have mentioned the
Gauls and the Egyptians as the enemies within the
camp of the intellectual, but beyond them lie the un
counted numbers of the outer barbarians, the mass
of the unillumined, to whom neither tradition nor re
volt, nor anything which moves and has its being in
the intellect has any significance. Here is the common
enemy of all, who can be conquered only by convert
ing him. When the Gaul and the Egyptian are liber
alized, the real job begins.

"If we compose well here, to Parthia."

IV

The Reviewing of Books

A Prospectus for Criticism

CRITICISM, in one respect, is like science: there is
pure science, so-called, and applied science; there is
pure criticism and applied criticism, which latter is
reviewing. In applied science, principles established
elsewhere are put to work; in reviewing, critical prin
ciples are, or should be, put to work in the analysis
of books, but the books, if they are really important,
often make it necessary to erect new critical principles.
In fact, it is impossible to set a line where criticism
ceases and reviewing begins. Good criticism is gener
ally applicable to all literature; good reviewing is good
criticism applied to a new book. I see no other valid
distinction.

Reviewing in America has had a career by no means
glorious. In the early nineteenth century, at the time
of our first considerable productivity in literature, it
was sporadic. The great guns — Lowell, Emerson —
fired critical broadsides into the past; only occasionally
(as in "A Fable for Critics") were they drawn into
discussions of their contemporaries, and then, as in the
Emerson-Whitman affair, they sometimes regretted it.
Reviewing was carried on in small type, in the backs
of certain magazines. Most of it was verbose and much
of it was worthless as criticism. The belated recogni
tion of the critical genius of Poe was due to the com-

185

1 86 The Reviewing of Books

pany he kept. He was a sadly erratic reviewer, as
often wrong, I suppose, as right, but the most durable
literary criticism of the age came from his pen, and
is to be found in a review, a review of Hawthorne's
short stories.

After the Civil War the situation did not imme
diately improve. We had perhaps better reviewing,
certainly much better mediums of criticism, such, for
example, as The Nation, and, later, The Critic, but
not more really excellent criticism. The magazines
and newspapers improved, the weekly, as a medium
of reviewing, established itself, though it functioned
imperfectly; the individuals of force and insight who
broke through current comment into criticism were
more plentiful, but not more eminent.

The new era in reviewing, our era, began with two
phenomena, of which the first had obscure beginnings
and the second can be exactly dated.

The first was modern journalism. Just when journal
ism became personal, racy, and inclusive of all the
interests of modern life, I cannot say. Kipling exhibits
its early effects upon literature, but Kipling was an
effect, not a cause. No matter when it began, we have
seen, in the decade or two behind us, reviewing made
journalistic, an item of news, but still more a means
of entertainment.

The journalistic reviewer, who is still the commonest
variety, had one great merit. He was usually interest
ing. Naturally so, since he wrote not to criticize the

A Prospectus for Criticism 187

book that had been given him, but to interest his
readers. Yet by the very nature of the case he labored
under a disadvantage which forever barred him from
calling himself critic as well as reviewer. He was a
specialist in reporting, in making a story from the
most unpromising material, and also in the use of his
mother tongue, but a specialist, usually, in no other
field whatsoever. Fiction, poetry, biography, science,
history, politics, theology — whatever came to his mill
was grist for the paper, and the less he knew of the
subject and the less he had read and thought, the more
emphatic, were his opinions.

The club and saber work of Pope's day and Chris
topher North's has gone — advertising has made it an
expensive luxury, and here at least commercialism has
been of service to literature. It was wholesale and
emphatic praise that became a trademark of journal
istic reviewing. First novels, or obscure novels, were
sometimes handled roughly by a reviewer whose duty
was to prepare a smart piece of copy. But when bo^ks
by the well known came to his desk it was safer to
praise than to damn, because in damning one had to
give reasons, whereas indiscriminate praise needed
neither knowledge nor excuse. Furthermore, since the
chief object was to have one's review read, excessive
praise had every advantage over measured approval.
Who would hesitate between two articles, one headed
"The Best Book of the Year," and the other, "A New
Novel Critically Considered"!

Thus, journalism per se has done little for the cause

1 88 The Reviewing of Books

of American reviewing, and directly or indirectly it
has done much harm, if only by encouraging publishers
who found no competent discussions of their wares to
set up their own critics, who poured out through the
columns of an easy press commendations of the new
books which were often most intelligent, but never
unbiased.

The newspapers, however, have rendered one great
service to criticism. In spite of their attempts to make
even the most serious books newsy news, they, and
they alone, have kept pace with the growing swarm of
published books. The literary supplement, which pro
posed to review all books not strictly technical or tran
sient, was a newspaper creation. And the literary sup
plement, which grew from the old book page, contained
much reviewing which was in no bad sense journalistic.
Without it the public would have had only the adver
tisements and the publishers' announcements to classify,
analyze, and in some measure describe the regiment
of books that marches in advance of our civilization.

We were not to be dependent, however, upon the
budding supplements and the clever, ignorant review
ing, which, in spite of notable exceptions, characterized
the newspaper view of books. The technical critic
of technical books had long been practising, and his
ability increased with the advance in scholarship that
marked the end of the nineteenth century. The prob
lem was how to make him write for the general in
telligent reader. For years the old Nation, under the
editorship of Garrison and of Godkin, carried on this

A Prospectus for Criticism 189

struggle almost single-handed. For a generation it was
the only American source from which an author might
expect a competent review of a serious, non-technical
book. But the weight of the endeavor was too much
for it. Fiction it largely evaded, as the London Times
Literary Supplement does to-day. And with all the
serious books in English awaiting attention in a few
pages of a single weekly, it is no wonder that the
shelves of its editorial office held one of the best modern
libraries in New York! Or that Christmas, 1887, was
the time chosen to review a gift edition of 1886! The
old Dial had a like struggle, and a resembling diffi
culty.

It was in 1914 that The New Republic applied a
new solution to the problem, and from its pages and
from the other "intellectual weeklies" which have
joined it, has come not merely some of the best review
ing that we have had, but also a distinct lift upwards
in the standard of our discussion of contemporary
books of general interest. After 1914 one could ex
pect to find American reviews of certain kinds of
books which were as excellent as any criticisms from
England or from France.

But the solution applied was of such a character as
to limit definitely its application. The New Republic,
the present Nation, The Freeman, The Weekly Review,
and, in a little different sense, The Dial, were founded
by groups held together, with the exception of The
Dial coterie, not by any common attitude towards lit
erature, or by any specific interest in literature itself,

190 The Reviewing of Books

but rather by a common social philosophy. These
journals, again with the one exception, were devoted
primarily to the application of their respective social
philosophies. Even when in reviews or articles there
was no direct social application, there was a clear irradi
ation from within. When The New Republic is hu
morous, it is a social-liberal humor. When The Free
man is ironic there is usually an indirect reference to
the Single Tax. And The Dial will be modern or
perish.

As a result of all this the space given to books
at large in the social-political journals was small. And
in that space one could prophesy with some exactness
the reviewing to be expected. Books of social philos
ophy, novels with a thesis, poetry of radical emotion,
documented history, and the criticism of politics or
economic theory have had such expert reviewing as
America has never before provided in such quantity.
But there was a certain monotony in the conclusions
reached. "Advanced" books had "advanced" reviewers
who approved of the author's ideas even if they did
not like his book. Conservative books were sure to
be attacked in one paragraph even if they were praised
in another. What was much more deplorable, good,
old-fashioned books, that were neither conservative
nor radical, but just human, had an excellent chance
of interesting no one of these philosophical editors and
so of never being reviewed at all. Irving, Cooper of
the Leatherstocking Series, possibly Hawthorne, and
quite certainly the author of "Huckleberry Finn"

A Prospectus for Criticism 191

would have turned over pages for many a day without
seeing their names at all.

Thus the intellectual weekly gave us an upstand
ing, competent criticism of books with ideas in them —
when the ideas seemed important to the editors; a
useful service, but not a comprehensive one; the criti
cism of a trend rather than a literature; of the products
of a social group rather than the outspeaking of a
nation. Something more was needed.

Something more was needed; and specifically liter
ary mediums that should be catholic in criticism, com
prehensive in scope, sound, stimulating, and accurate.

To be catholic in criticism does not mean to be weak
and opinionless. A determination to discuss literature
honestly and with insight, letting conclusions be what
they must, may be regarded as a sufficient editorial
stock in trade. It is fundamental, but it is not suffi
cient. Just as there is personality behind every gov
ernment, so there should be a definite set of personal
convictions behind literary criticism, which is not a
science, though science may aid it. Sterilized, dehu
manized criticism is almost a contradiction in terms,
except in those rare cases where the weighing of evi
dential facts is all that is required. But these cases
are most rare. Even a study of the text of Beowulf,
or a history of Norman law, will be influenced by
the personal emotions of the investigator, and must be
so criticized. Men choose their philosophy according
to their temperament; so do writers write; and so must
critics criticize. Which is by no means to say that

192 The Reviewing of Books

criticism is merely an affair of temperament, but rather
to assert that temperament must not be left out of
account in conducting or interpreting criticism.

Ideally, then, the editors of a catholic review should
have definite convictions, if flexible minds, established
principles, if a wide latitude of application. But al
though a review may thus be made catholic, it cannot
thus attain comprehensiveness. There are too many
books; too many branches upon the luxuriant tree of
modern knowledge. No editorial group, no editorial
staff, can survey the field competently unless they
strictly delimit it by selection, and that means not to
be comprehensive. Yet if the experts are to be called
in, the good critics, the good scholars, the good sci
entists, until every book is reviewed by the writer
best qualified to review it, then we must hope to attain
truth by averages as the scientists do, rather than by
dogmatic edict. For if it is difficult to guarantee in
a few that sympathy with all earnest books which does
not preclude rigid honesty in the application of firmly
held principles, it is more difficult with the many. And
if it is hard to exclude bias, inaccuracy, over-statement,
and inadequacy from the work even of a small and
chosen group, it is still harder to be certain of complete
competence if the net is thrown more widely.

In fact, there is no absolute insurance against bad
criticism except the intelligence of the reader. He must
discount where discount is necessary, he must weigh the
authority of the reviewer, he must listen to the critic

A Prospectus for Criticism 193

as the protestant to his minister, willing to be in
structed, but aware of the fallibility of man.

Hence, a journal of comprehensive criticism must
first select its reviewers with the greatest care and
then print vouchers for their opinions, which will be
the names of the reviewers. Hence it must open its
columns to rebuttals or qualifications, so that the
reader may form his own conclusions as to the validity
of the criticism, and, after he has read the book, judge
its critics.

All this is a world away from the anonymous, dog
matic reviewing of a century ago. But who shall say
that in this respect our practice is retrograde?

It is a great and sprawling country, this America,
with all manner of men of all manners in it, and the
days of patent medicines have passed, when one bottle
was supposed to contain a universal cure. But in this
matter of reading, which must be the chief concern
of those who support a critical journal, there is one
disease common to most of us that can be diagnosed
with certainty, and one sure, though slow-working, rem
edy, that can be applied. We are uncritical readers.
We like too readily, which is an amiable fault; we
dislike too readily, which is a misfortune. We accept
the cheap when we might have the costly book. We
dislike the new, the true, the accurate, and the beauti
ful, because we will not seek, or cannot grasp, them.
We are afflicted with that complex of democracy — a
distrust of the best. Nine out of ten magazines, nine

194 The Reviewing of Books

out of ten libraries, nine out of ten intelligent American
minds prove this accusation.

And the cure is more civilization, more intellectuality,
a finer and stronger emotion? One might as well say
that the cure for being sick is to get well! This, in
deed, is the cure; but the remedy is a vigorous criti
cism. Call in the experts, let them name themselves
and their qualifications like ancient champions, and
then proceed to lay about with a will. Sometimes the
maiden literature, queen of the tournament, will be
slain instead of the Knight of Error, and often the
spectators will be scratched by the whir of a sword.
Nevertheless, the fight is in the open, we know the
adversaries, and the final judgment, whether to salute
a victor or condemn an impostor, is ours.

Thus, figuratively, one might describe the proper
function in criticism of a liberal journal of catholic
criticism to-day. One thing I have omitted, that its
duty is not limited to criticism, for if it is to be com
prehensive, it must present also vast quantities of ac
curate and indispensable facts, the news of literature.
And one prerequisite I have felt it unnecessary to
dwell upon. Unless its intent is honest, and its editors
independent of influence from any self-interested
source, the literary tournament of criticism becomes
either a parade of the virtues with banners for the
favorites, or a melee where rivals seek revenge. Venal
criticism is the drug and dishonest criticism the poison
of literature.

The Race of Reviewers

•-.

As a reviewer of books, my experience has been lengthy
rather than considerable. It is, indeed, precisely
twenty-two years since I wrote my first review, which
ended, naturally, with the words "a good book to read
of a winter evening before a roaring fire." I remem
ber them because the publishers, who are lovers of
platitudes, quoted them, to my deep gratification, and
perhaps because I had seen them before. Since then
I have reviewed at least twice as many books as there
are years in this record — about as many, I suppose,
as a book-page war-horse in racing trim could do in a
month, or a week. My credentials are not impressive
in this category, but perhaps they will suffice.

As an author, my claim to enter upon this self-con
tained symposium which I am about to present is some
what stronger. Authors, of course, read all the re
views of their books, even that common American vari
ety which runs like the telegraphic alphabet: quote —
summarize — quote — quote — summarize — quote, and so
on up to five dollars' worth, space rates. I have read
all the reviews of my books except those which clipping
bureaus seeking a subscription or kind friends wishing
to chastise vicariously have neglected to send me. As
an author I can speak with mingled feelings, but widely,
of reviews.

195

196 The Reviewing of Books

Editorially my experience has been equally poignant.
For ten years I have read reviews, revised and unre-
vised, in proof and out of it. I have cut reviews that
needed cutting and meekly endured the curses of the
reviewer. I have printed conscientiously reviews that
had better been left unwritten, and held my head bloody
but unbowed up to the buffets of the infuriated authors.
As an editor I may say that I am at home, though
not always happy, with reviewing and reviewers.

And now, when in one of those rare moments of
meditation which even New York permits I ask myself
why does every man or woman with the least stir of
literature in them wish to review books, my trinitarian
self — critic, author, editor — holds high debate. For a
long time I have desired to fight it out, and find, if
it can be found, the answer.

As an author, I have a strong distaste for reviewing.
In the creative mood of composition, or in weary relax
ation, reviewing seems the most ungrateful of tasks.
Nothing comes whole to a reviewer. Half of every
book must elude him, and the other half he must
compress into snappy phrases. I watch him working
upon that corpus, which so lately was a thing of life
and movement — my book — and see that he cannot lift
it; that he must have some hand-hold to grip it by —
my style or my supposed interest in the Socialist Party,
or the fact that I am a professor or a Roman Catholic.
Unless he can get some phrase that will explain the
characters of my women, the length of my sentences,
and the moral I so carefully hid in the last chapter,

The Race of Reviewers 197

he is helpless. Sometimes I find him running for a
column without finding a gate to my mind, and then
giving it up in mid-paragraph. Sometimes he gets
inside, but dashes for the exit sign and is out before
I know what he thinks. Sometimes he finds an idea
to his liking, wraps up in it, and goes to sleep.

I recognize his usefulness. I take his hard raps
meekly and even remember them when next I begin
to write. I do not hate him much when he tells
the public not to read me. There is always the chance
that he is right for his public; not, thank heavens, for
mine. I am furious only when it is clear that he has
not read me himself. But I cannot envy him. It is so
much more agreeable to make points than to find them.
It is so much easier, if you have a little talent, to
build some kind of an engine that will run than to
explain what precise fault prevents it from being the
best. When I am writing a book I cannot understand
the mania for criticism that seems to infect the major
ity of the literary kind.

As a reviewer I must again confess, although as an
editor I may bitterly regret the confession, that the
passion for reviewing is almost inexplicable. Review
ing has the primal curse of hard labor upon it. You
must do two kinds of work at once, and be adequately
rewarded for neither. First you must digest another
man's conception, assimilate his ideas, absorb his imagi
nation. It is like eating a cold dinner on a full stom
ach. And then when you have eaten and digested, you
must tell how you feel about it — briefly, cogently, and

198 The Reviewing of Books

in words that cannot be misunderstood. Furthermore,
your feelings must be typical, must represent what a
thousand stomachs will feel, or should feel, or could
feel if they felt at all, or instead of being hailed as a
critic you will be accused of dyspepsia.

The mere mental labor of picking up the contents
of a book as you proceed with your criticism, and
tucking them in here and there where they fit, is so
great that, speaking as a reviewer, I should give up
reviewing if there were no more compelling reasons than
requests to write criticism. There are, there must be;
and still speaking as a reviewer I begin to glimpse one
or two of them. Revenge is not one. Critics have
written for revenge, quoting gleefully, "O that mine
enemy would write a book!" Pope is our classic ex
ample. But publishers have made that form of lit
erary vendetta unprofitable nowadays, and I am glad
they have done so. Much wit, but little criticism, has
been inspired by revenge. Furthermore, I notice in
my own case, and my editorial self confirms the belief,
that the reviewer craves books to extol, not books to
condemn. He is happiest when his author is sympa
thetic to his own temperament. Antipathetic books
must be forced upon him.

Which leads me to the further conclusion that the
prime motive for reviewing is the creative instinct. We
all of us have it, all of the literary folk who make
up a most surprising proportion of every community
in the United States. It works on us constantly.
Sometimes it comes to a head and then we do a story

The Race of Reviewers 199

or a poem, an essay or a book; but in the meantime
it is constantly alive down below, drawn toward every
sympathetic manifestation without, craving self-expres
sion and, in default of that, expression by others. If
a book is in us we write; if it is not, we seize upon
another man's child, adopt it as ours, talk of it, learn
to understand it, let it go reluctantly with our blessing,
and depart vicariously satisfied. That is the hope, the
ever-renewed hope, with which the besotted reviewer
takes up reviewing.

The creative instinct indeed is sexed, like the human
that possesses it. It seeks a mystical union with the
imaginings of others. The poet, the novelist, the essay
ist, seek the mind of the reader; the critic seeks the
mind of the writer. That we get so much bad review
ing is due to incompatibility of temperament or gross
discrepancy in the mating intellects. Yet reviewers
(and authors), like lovers, hope ever for the perfect
match.

I know one critic who tore his review in pieces be
cause it revealed the charlatanism of his beloved author.
I know an author who burnt his manuscript because
his friend and critic had misunderstood him. I see
a thousand reviews (and have written several of them)
where book and reviewer muddle along together like the
partners of everyday marriages. But next time, one
always hopes, it will be different.

As an editor, I confess that I view all this effusion
with some distrust. One plain fact stands high and
dry above the discussion: books are being published

2OO The Reviewing of Books

daily, and some one must tell the busy and none too
discriminating public what they are worth — not to men
tion the librarians who are so engaged in making out
triple cards and bibliographies and fitting titles to vague
recollections that they have no time left to read. Fur
thermore, if reviewing is a chore at worst, and at best
a desire to gratify a craving for the unappeasable,
editing reviews is still more chorelike, and seeking the
unobtainable — a good review for every good book — is
quite as soul-exhausting as the creative instinct.

And, again as an editor, the perfect marriage of well
attuned minds is well enough as an ideal, but as a
practicable achievement I find myself more often drawn
toward what I should call the liaison function of a re
viewer. The desire to be useful (since we have ex
cluded the desire to make money as a major motive) is,
I believe, an impulse which ver> often moves the re
viewer. The instinct to teach, to reform, to explain,
to improve lies close to the heart of nine out of ten
of us. It is commoner than the creative instinct. When
it combines with it, one gets a potential reviewer.

The reviewer as a liaison officer is a homelier de
scription than soul affinity or intellectual mate, but
it is quite as honorable. Books (to the editor) repre
sent, each one of them, so much experience, so much
thought, so much imagination differently compounded
in a story, poem, tractate on science, history, or play.
Each is a man's most luminous self in words, ready
for others. Who wants it? Who can make use of it?
Who will be dulled by it? Who exalted? It is the

The Race of Reviewers 20 f

reviewer's task to say. He grasps the book, estimates
it, calculates its audience. Then he makes the liaison.
He explains, he interprets, and in so doing necessarily
criticizes, abstracts, appreciates. The service is ines
timable, when properly rendered. It is essential for
that growing literature of knowledge which science and
the work of specialists in all fields have given us. Few
readers can face alone and unaided a shelf of books on
radio-activity, evolution, psychology, or sociology with
any hope of selecting without guidance the best, or
with any assurance that they dare reject as worthless
what they do not understand. The house of the inter
preter has become the literary journal, and its useful
ness will increase.

A liaison of a different kind is quite as needful in
works of sheer imagination. Here the content is hu
man, the subject the heart, or life as one sees it. But
reading, like writing, is a fine art that few master.
Only the most sensitive, whose minds are as quick as
their emotions are responsive, can go to the heart of
a poem or a story. They need an interpreter, a tactful
interpreter, who will give them the key and let them
find their own chamber. Or who will wave them away
from the door, or advise a brief sojourn. To an editor
such an interpreter is an ideal reviewer. He will desire
to be useful, and passionately attempt it. He will feel
his responsibility first to art and next to the public,
and then to his author, and last (as an editor I whisper
it) to the publisher. Reviewers forget the author and
the public. Their mandate comes from art (whose

2O2 The Reviewing of Books

representative in the flesh is, or should be, the editor).
But their highest service is to make a liaison between
the reader and his book.

And the conclusion of this debate is, I think, a
simple one. Reviewing is a major sport, fascinating
precisely because of its difficulty, compelling precisely
because it appeals to strong instincts. For most of
us it satisfies that desire to work for some end which
we ourselves approve, regardless of costs. The editor,
sardonically aware of a world that refuses to pay
much for what men do to please themselves or to
reform others, sees here his salvation, and is thankful.

The Sins of Reviewing

I HAVE known thousands of reviewers and liked most
of them, except when they sneered at my friends or
at me. Their profession, in which I have taken a
humble share, has always seemed to me a useful, and
sometimes a noble one; and their contribution to the
civilizing of reading man, much greater than the credit
they are given for it. We divide them invidiously
into hack reviewers and critics, forgetting that a hack
is just a reviewer overworked, and a critic a reviewer
with leisure to perform real criticism. A good hack
is more useful than a poor critic, and both belong
to the same profession as surely as William Shake
speare and the author of a Broadway "show."

The trouble is that the business of reviewing has
not been sufficiently recognized as a profession. Trades
gain in power and recognition in proportion as their
members sink individuality in the mass and form a
union which stands as one man against the world.
Professions are different. They rise by decentraliza
tion, and by specializing within the group. They gain
distinction not only by the achievements of their in
dividual members but by a curious splitting into sub
types of the species. Law and medicine are admirable
examples. Every time they develop a new kind of
specialist they gain in prestige and emolument.

203

204 The Reviewing of Books

A reviewer, however (unless he publishes a collected
edition and becomes a critic), has so far remained in
the eyes of the public just a reviewer. In fiction we
have been told (by the reviewers) of romancers and
realists, sociologists and ethicists, naturalists and sym
bolists, objectivists and psychologists. Are there no
adjectives, no brevet titles of literary distinction for
the men and women who have made it possible to talk
intelligently about modern fiction without reading it?

My experience with reviewers has led me to classify
them by temperament rather than by the theories they
possess; and this is not so unscientific as it sounds, for
theories usually spring from temperaments. No man
whose eliminatory processes function perfectly is ever
a pessimist, except under the compulsion of hard facts.
No sluggish liver ever believes that joy of living is
the prime quality to be sought in literary art. And
by the same eternal principle, moody temperaments
embrace one theory of criticism; cold, logical minds
another. I identify my classes of reviewers by their
habits, not their dogmas.

But in order to clear the ground let me make first
a larger distinction, into mythical reviewers, bad but
useful reviewers, bad and not useful reviewers, and
good reviewers. Like the nineteenth century preacher
I will dispose of the false, dwell upon the wicked, and
end (briefly) with that heaven of literary criticism
where all the authors are happy and all the reviewers
excellent.

The reviewer I know best never, I profoundly be-

The Sins of Reviewing 205

lieve, has existed, and I fear never will exist. He is the
familiar figure of English novels — moderately young,
a bachelor, with a just insufficient income in stocks.
Oxford or Cambridge is his background, and his future
is the death of a rich aunt or a handsome marriage.
In the meantime, there is always a pile of books wait
ing in his chambers to be reviewed at "a guinea a
page," when he has leisure, which is apparently only
once or twice a week. The urban pastoral thus pre
sented is one which Americans may well be envious of
— otium cum dignitate. But I have never encountered
this reviewer in London. I fear he exists only for the
novelists, who created him in order to have a literary
person with enough time on his hands to pursue the
adventures required by the plot. Yet in so far as
he is intended as a portrait of a critic, he stands as
an ideal of the leisured view of books. There has been
no leisured view of books in America since Thoreau,
or Washington Irving. Even Poe was feverish. Our
books are read on the subway, or after the theater,
and so I fear it is in London — in London as it is.

Coldly, palpably real is the next critic of my ac
quaintance, the academic reviewer. He does not write
for the newspapers, for he despises them, and they
are rather scornful of his style, which is usually lum
bering, and his idea that 1921 is the proper time in
which to review the books of 1920. But you will find
him in the weeklies, and rampant in the technical
journals.

The academic reviewer is besotted by facts, or their

ao6 The Reviewing of Books

absence. The most precious part of the review to him
is the last paragraph in which he points out misspell
ings, bad punctuation, and inaccuracies generally. Like
a hound dog in a corn field, he never sees his books
as a whole, but snouts and burrows along the trail
he is following. If he knows the psychology of primi
tive man, primitive psychology he will find and criti
cize, even in a book on the making of gardens. If
his specialty is French drama, French drama he will
find, even in a footnote, and root it out and nuzzle it.
I remember when a famous scholar devoted the whole
of his review of a two volume magnum opus upon a
great historical period, to the criticism of the text
of a Latin hymn cited in a footnote! The academic
reviewer (by which I do not mean the university re
viewer, since many such are not academic in the bad
sense which I am giving to the word) demands an
index. His reviews usually end with, "There is no
index," or, "There is an excellent index." The reason
is plain. The index is his sole guide to reviewing. If
he finds his pet topics there he can hunt them down
remorselessly. But if there is no index, he is cast
adrift helpless, knowing neither where to begin nor
where to end his review. I call him a bad reviewer,
but useful, because, though incapable of estimating
philosophies or creations of the imagination, he is our
best guarantee that writers' facts are facts.

My acquaintance with the next bad, but occasionally
useful, reviewer is less extensive, but, by the circum
stances of the case, more intimate. I shall call him

The Sins of Reviewing 207

the ego-frisky reviewer. The term (which I am quite
aware is a barbarous compound) I am led to invent
in order to describe the phenomenon of a critic whose
ego frisks merrily over the corpus of his book. He
is not so modern a product as he himself believes.
The vituperative critics of the Quarterlies and, earlier
still, of Grub Street, used their enemies' books as a
means of indulging their needs for self-expression.
But it was wrath, jealousy, vindictiveness, or political
enmity which they discharged while seated on the
body of the foe; whereas the ego-friskish critic has
no such bile in him.

He is in fact a product of the new advertising psy
chology, which says, "Be human" (by which is meant
"be personal") "first of all." He regards his book
(I know this, because he has often told me so) as a
text merely, for a discourse which must entertain the
reader. And his idea of entertainment is to write
about himself, his tastes, his moods, his reactions.
Either he praises the book for what it does to his
ego, or damns it for what it did to his ego. You will
never catch him between these extremes, for modera
tion is not his vice.

The ego-frisky reviewer is not what the biologist
would call a pure form. He (or she) is usually a yellow
journalist, adopting criticism as a kind of protective
coloration. The highly personal critic, adventuring, or
even frolicking among masterpieces, and recording his
experiences, is the true type, and it is he that the ego-
friskish imitate. Such a critic in the jovial person of

208 The Reviewing of Books

Mr. Chesterton, or Professor Phelps, or Heywood
Broun, contributes much to the vividness of our sense
for books. But their imitators, although they some
times enliven, more often devastate reviewing.

Alas, I am best acquainted among them all with the
dull reviewer, who is neither good nor useful. The ex
cellent books he has poisoned as though by opiates!
The dull books he has made duller! No one has cause
to love him unless it be the authors of weak books,
who thank their dull critics for exposing them in re
views so tedious that no one discovers what the criti
cism is about.

The dull reviewer has two varieties: the stupid and
the merely dull. It is the stupid reviewer who exas
perates beyond patience the lover of good books. He
is the man who gets a book wrong from the start, and
then plods on after his own conception, which has no
reference whatsoever to the author's. He is the man
who takes irony seriously, misses the symbolism when
there is any, and invariably guesses wrong as to the
sources of the characters and the plot.

There are not many really stupid reviewers, for the
most indolent editor cleans house occasionally, and the
stupid are the first to go out the back door. But merely
dull reviewers are as plentiful as fountain pens. The
dull reviewer, like Chaucer's drunken man, knows
where he wants to go but doesn't know how to get there.
He (or she) has three favorite paths that lead nowhere,
all equally devious.

The first is by interminable narrative. "When Hilda

The Sins of Reviewing 209

was blown into the arms of Harold Garth at the windy
corner of the Woolworth building, neither guessed at
what was to follow. Beginning with this amusing sit
uation, the author of The Yellow Moon' develops a
very interesting plot. Garth was the nephew of Miles
Harrison, Mayor of New York. After graduating from
Williams, etc., etc., etc." This is what he calls sum
marizing the plot.

Unfortunately, the art of summary is seldom mas
tered, and a bad summary is the dullest thing in the
world. Yet even a bad summary of a novel or a book
of essays is hard to do; so that when the dull reviewer
has finished, his sweaty brow and numbed fingers per
suade him that he has written a review. There is time
for just a word of quasi-criticism: "This book would
have been better if it had been shorter, and the plot is
not always logical. Nevertheless, 'The Yellow Moon'
holds interest throughout." And then, finis. This is
botchery and sometimes butchery, not reviewing.

The dullest reviewers I have known, however, have
been the long-winded ones. A book is talk about life,
and therefore talk about a book is one remove more
from the reality of experience. Talk about talk must
be good talk, and it must be sparing of words. A con
cise style is nearly always an interesting style: even
though it repel by crudity it will never be dull. But
conciseness is not the quality I most often detect in
reviewing. It is luxurious to be concise when one is
writing at space rates; and it is always harder to say
a thing briefly than at length, just as it is easier for

2io The Reviewing of Books

a woman to hit a nail at the third stroke than at the
first.

I once proposed a competition in a college class in
English composition. Each student was to clip a col
umn newspaper article of comment (not facts) and
condense it to the limit of safety. Then editorials gave
up their gaseous matter in clouds, chatty news stories
boiled away to paragraphs, and articles shrank up to
their headlines.

But the reviews suffered most. One, I remember,
came down to "It is a bad book," or to express it
algebraically, (It is a bad book)3. Another disappeared
entirely. On strict analysis it was discovered that the
reviewer had said nothing not canceled out by some
thing else. But most remained as a weak liquor of
comment upon which floated a hard cake of undigested
narrative. One student found a bit of closely reasoned
criticism that argued from definite evidences to a con
crete conclusion. It was irreducible; but this was a
unique experience.

The long-winded are the dullest of dull reviewers,
but the most pernicious are the wielders of cliches and
platitudes. Is there somewhere a reviewer's manual,
like the manual of correct social phrases which some
one has recently published? I would believe it from
the evidence of a hundred reviews in which the same
phrases, differently arranged, are applied to fifty dif
ferent books. I would believe it, except for the known
capacity of man to borrow most of his thoughts and
all of his phrases from his neighbor. I know too well

The Sins of Reviewing 211

that writers may operate like the Federal Reserve
banks, except that in literature there is no limit to
inflation. A thousand thousand may use "a novel of
daring adventure," "a poem full of grace and beauty,"
or "shows the reaction of a thoughtful mind to the facts
of the universe," without exhausting the supply. It is
like the manufacture of paper money, and the effect
on credit is precisely the same.

So much for the various types of reviewers who,
however interesting they may be critically, cannot be
called good. The good reviewers, let an uncharitable
world say what it will, are, thank heaven! more numer
ous. Their divisions, temperamental and intellectual,
present a curious picture of the difficulties and the
rewards of this profession. Yet I cannot enter upon
them here, and for good reasons.

The good reviewer is like the good teacher and the
good preacher. He is not rare, but he is precious.
He has qualities that almost escape analysis and there
fore deserve more than a complimentary discussion.
He must hold his book like a crystal ball in which he
sees not only its proper essence in perfect clarity, but
also his own mind mirrored. He must — ... In
other words, the good reviewer deserves an essay of
his own. He is a genius in a minor art, which some
times becomes major; a craftsman whose skill is often
exceptional. I will not put him in the same apartment
with reviewers who are arid, egoistic, or dull.

Mrs. Wharton's "The Age of
Innocence' '

AMERICA is the land of cherished illusions. Americans
prefer to believe that they are innocent, innocent of
immorality after marriage, innocent of dishonesty in
business, innocent of incompatibility between husbands
and wives. Americans do not like to admit the exist
ence (in the family) of passion, of unscrupulousness,
of temperament. They have made a code for what
is to be done, and what is not to be done, and what
ever differs is un-American. If their right hands offend
them they cut them off rather than admit possession.
They believed in international morality when none ex
isted, and when they were made to face the disagree
able fact of war, cast off the nations of the earth,
and continued to believe in national morality.

In America prostitution is tolerated in practice, but
forbidden in print. All homes are happy unless there
is proof to the contrary, and then they are un-American.
In its wilful idealism America is determined that at
all costs we shall appear to be innocent. And a novel
which should begin with the leaders in social conform
ity, who keep hard and clean the code, and should
sweep through the great middle classes that may escape
its rigors themselves, but exact them of others, might
present the pageant, the social history, the epic of
America.

212

Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" 213

Of course, Mrs. Wharton's novel does nothing of
the sort. This is how Tolstoy, or H. G. Wells, or
Ernest Poole would have written "The Age of Inno
cence." They would have been grandiose, epical; their
stories would have been histories of culture. It would
have been as easy to have called their books broad
as it is to call Mrs. Wharton's fine novel narrow. Ten
dencies, philosophies, irrepressible outbursts would have
served as their protagonists, where hers are dwellers
in Fifth Avenue or Waverly Place — a cosmopolitan
astray, a dowager, a clubman yearning for intellectual
sympathy.

And yet in the long run it comes to much the same
thing. The epic novelists prefer the panorama: she
the drawing-room canvas. They deduce from vast
philosophies and depict society. She gives u^ the Min-
gotts, the Mansnns, the Van dqy kuyffcnsr— society, in
its little brownstone New York of the 'yo's — and lets us
formulate inductively the code of America. A little
canvas is enough for a great picture if the painting is
good.

Indeed, the only objection I have ever heard urged
against Mrs. Wharton's fine art of narrative is that
it is narrow — an art of dress suit and sophistication.
And this book is the answer. For, of course, her art
is narrow — like Jane Austen's, like Sheridan's, like
Pope's, like Maupassant's, like that of all writers who
prefer to study human nature in its most articulate
instead of its broadest manifestations. It is narrow
because it is focussed, but this doesnotjnean that it

214 The Reviewing of Books

is small. Although the story of "The Age of Inno
cence" might have been set in a far broader back
ground, it is the circumstances of the New York society
which Mrs. Wharton knows so well that give it a
piquancy, a reality that "epics" lack. They are like
the accidents of voice, eye, gesture which determine
individuality. Yet her subject is America.

This treating of large themes by highly personal sym
bols makes possible Mrs. Wharton's admirable perfec
tion of technique. Hers is the technique of sculpture
rather than the technique of architecture. It permits
the fine play of a humor that has an eye of irony in
it, but is more human than irony. It makes possible
an approach to perfection. Behold Mrs. Manson Min-
gott, the indomitable dowager, Catherine:

The immense accretions of flesh which had descended on
her in middle life, like a flood of lava on a doomed city had
changed her . . . into something as vast and august as a
natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as
philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme
old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost
unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the
center of which the traces of a small face survived as if
awaiting excavation. . . . Around and below, wave after
wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious
armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the
surface of the billows.

Her art is restrained, focussed upon those points
where America, in its normality and in its eccentricity,

Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" 21$

has become articulate. Therefore it is sharp and con
vincing.

Who is the central figure in this story where the
leaven of intellectual and emotional unrest works in a
society that has perfected its code and intends to live
by it? Is it Newland Archer, who bears the uncom
fortable ferment within him? Is it his wife, the lovely
May, whose clear blue eyes will see only innocence?
Is it the Countess Olenska, the American who has seen
reality and suffered by it, and sacrifices her love for
Newland in order to preserve his innocence? No one
of these is the center of the story, but rather the idea
of "the family," this American "family," which is moral
according to its lights, provincial, narrow — but in
tensely determined that its world shall appear upright,
faithful, courageous, in despite of facts, and regardless
of how poor reality must be tortured until it conforms.
And the "family" as Mrs. Wharton describes it is just
the bourgeois Puritanism of nineteenth century
America.

Was May right when, with the might of innocence,
she forced Newland to give up life for mere living?
Was the Countess right when, in spite of her love
for him, she aided and abetted her, making him live
up to the self-restraint that belonged to his code? The
story does not answer, being concerned with the qual
ities of the "family," not with didacticism.

It says that the insistent innocence of America had
its rewards as well as its penalties. It says, in so

216 The Reviewing of Books

far as it states any conclusion definitely, that a new
and less trammeled generation must answer whether it
was the discipline of its parents that saved the Ameri
can family from anarchy, or the suppressions of its
parents that made it rebellious. And the answer is
not yet.

"The Age of Innocence" is a fine novel, beautifully
written, "big" in the best sense, which has nothing to
\ do with size, a credit to American literature — for if
its author is cosmopolitan, this novel, as much as her
earlier "Ethan Frome," is a fruit of our soil.

November 6, 1920.

Mr. Hergesheimer's "Cytherea"

MRS. WHARTON found the age of innocence in the
1 870*5; Mr. Hergesheimer discovers an age of no inno
cence in the 1 920*5. In "The Age of Innocence," the
lovely May, a creature of society's conventions, loses
her husband and then regains the dulled personality
left from the fire of passion. In "Cytherea" the less
lovely, but equally moral Fanny loses her Lee because
she cannot satisfy his longings and nags when she fails.
But she does not regain him when his love chase is
over, because he is burned out. Athene and Aphrodite,
the graces of the mind, the seductions of the person
of the Countess Olenska, together draw Newland
Archer, husband of May; but it is Aphrodite only,
Cytherean Aphrodite, who, being sex incarnate, is more
than mere temptations of the flesh, that wrecks Fanny's
home.

In the 'yo's the poor innocents of society believed
their code of honor impregnable against sex. They
dressed against sex, talked against sex, kept sex below
the surface. The suppression froze some of them into
rigidity and stiffened all. But they had their compen
sations. By sacrificing freedom for personal desire
they gained much security. Good husbands required
more than a lure of the body to take them off. And
when they gave up a great romance for respectability,

217

21 8 The Reviewing of Books

like Newland Archer, at least they remained gentlemen.
There was a tragedy of thwarted development, of mar
tyred love, of waste; but at least self-respect, however
misguided, remained.

Not so with this trivial, lawless country club set of
the 1920*5, drunk part of the time and reckless all of
it, codeless, dutiless, restless. For the virtuous among
them Aphrodite, a vulgar, shameless Aphrodite, was a
nightly menace; for the weak among them (such as
Peyton Morris), a passion to be resisted only by fear;
for the wayward, like Lee, she was the only illusion
worth pursuing. To resist for a woman was to become
"blasted and twisted out of her purpose," to be
"steeped in vinegar or filled with tallow" ; to resist for
a man was to lose the integrity of his personality.
There were no moral compensations, for there is no
morality but self -development, at least in Mr. Herges-
heimer's town of Eastlake. There is no god for a man
in love but Cytherea.

And this is one way of describing Mr. Hergesheimer's
study of love in idleness in the 1920*5. Another way
would be to call it an essay upon insecurity, although
the word essay is too dry to use in a story which is fairly
awash with alcohol. The war, the story seems to say,
sapped our security of property and comfort and life.
But insecurity is an insidious disease that spreads, like
bacteria, where strength is relaxed. It infects the lives
of those who have lost their certainties and become
doubtful of their wills. In this relaxed society of the
1920*5, where nothing seemed certain but the need of

Mr. Hergesheimer's "Cytherea" 219

money and a drink, insecurity spread into married life.
Not even the well-mated were secure in the general
decline of use and wont. A home wrecked by vague
desires running wild — that is the theme of "Cytherea."

Or take a third view of this provocative book. The
triangle we have had tiresomely with us, but it is
woman's love that is, perversely, always the hero.
Hergesheimer studies the man, studies him not as will,
or energy, or desire a-struggle with duty or morality,
but merely as sex. Man's sex in love, man's sex domi
nated by Cytherea, is his theme. This is new, at least
in fiction, for there man is often swept away, but seldom
dominated by sex. And indeed Hergesheimer has to
find his man in the relaxed society to which I have
referred, a society wearied by unchartered freedom,
where business is profitable but trivial, where duty and
religion exist only as a convention, disregarded by the
honest, upheld by the hypocritical, a society where
Cytherea marks and grips her own. Even so, it is an
achievement.

Cytherea in the story is a doll with a glamorous
countenance, bought and cherished by Lee Randon as
a symbol of what he did not find in his married life,
what no man finds and keeps, because it is an illusion.
Cytherea is Lee Randon 's longing for emotional satis
faction, a satisfaction that is not to be of the body
merely. And when he meets Savina Grove, a patho
logical case, whose violent sex emotions have been
inhibited to the bursting point, he thinks (and fears)
that he has found his heart's desire. In the old, old

220 The Reviewing of Books

stories their elopement would have been their grand,
their tragic romance. In this cruel novel it is tragic,
for she dies of it; but she is not Cytherea; she is
earthly merely; it is felt that she is better dead.

It is a cruel story, cruel in its depiction of an almost
worthless society with just enough of the charm of the
Restoration to save it from beastliness; cruel in its un
sparing analyses of man's sex impulses (by all odds the
most valuable part of the story); cruel particularly
because the ruined Lee Randon is a good fellow, hon-
ester than most, kinder than he knows to individuals,
although certain that there is no principle but selfish
ness, and that it is folly to limit desire for the sake
of absolutes, like righteousness, or generalities, like the
human race. It is a cruel study of women, for Fanny,
the model of the domestic virtues, has lost her innocent
certainties of the triumph of the right and at the first
conflict with Cytherea becomes a common scold; cruel
to Savina Grove, who, in spite of her exquisiteness, is
only a psychoanalyst's problem; cruel to us all in ex
posing so ruthlessly how distressing it is to live by
stale morality, yet how devastating to act with no
guide but illusory desire.

All this is not new in outline. One can find the es
sence of this story in monkish manuals. There the
menace of Cytherea was not evaded. There the weak
nesses of man's sex were categoried with less psychol
ogy but more force. What is new in Hergesheimer's
book is merely the environment in which his characters
so disastrously move and an insight into the mechanism

Mr. Hergesheimer's "Cytherea" 221

of their psychology which earlier writers lacked. I
have called it a story of the age of no innocence, but
that would be the author's term, not mine; for indeed
his characters seem to display as nai've an innocence
as Mrs. Wharton's of the laws of blood and will, and
they know far less of practical morality. The "Age
of Moral Innocence" I should rechristen Hergesheimer's
book.

Critics will raise, and properly, a question as to the
worth of his materials. He is not studying a "ripe"
society, as was Mrs. Wharton, but the froth of the
war, the spume of country clubs, the trivialities of
the strenuous but unproductive rich. This is a just
criticism as far as it goes, and it lessens the solidity,
the enduring interest, of his.achievement. True, it was
hi such a society that he could best pursue the wiles
of Cytherea. He has a right to pitch his laboratory
where he pleases, and out of some very sordid earth
he has contrived some beauty. Nevertheless, you can
not make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, skilled though
you may be.

I should be more inclined, however, in a comparison
with Mrs. Wharton, to criticize his lack of detachment.
That able novelist, who is bounded so exclusively in
her little social world, nevertheless stands apart from
it and sees it whole. Mr. Hergesheimer has his feet
still deep in the soil. He is too much a part of his
country club life. He means, perhaps, to be ironical,
but in truth he is too sympathetic with the desires,

222 The Reviewing of Books

emotional and esthetic, that he expresses to be ironical
until the close. There is a surprise, too sharp a sur
prise, at the end of his novel, when one discovers that
the moral is not "do and dare," but "all is vanity."
He is so much and so lusciously at home with cock
tails, legs, limousine parties, stair-sittings, intra-matri-
monial kissings (I mention the most frequent refer
ences) that one distrusts the sudden sarcasm of his
finale. It would have been better almost if he had been
a Count de Gramont throughout, for he has a flair
for the surroundings of amorous adventure and is sel
dom gross; better still to have seen, as Mrs. Wharton
saw, the picture in perspective from the first. His book
will disgust some and annoy others because its art is
muddied by a lingering naturalism and too highly col
ored by the predilections of the artist.

It is a skilful art, nevertheless, and "Cytherea" con
firms a judgment long held that Mr. Hergesheimer is
one of the most skilful craftsmen in English in our day.
And this I say in spite of his obvious failure to grasp
inevitably the structure of the English sentence. He
is one of the most honest analysts of a situation, also;
one of the most fearless seekers of motives; one of
the ablest practisers of that transmutation of obscure
emotion into the visible detail of dress, habit, expres
sion, which is the real technique of the novelist. His
fault is a defect in sympathy, a lack of spiritual appre
ciation, if I may use and leave undefined so old-fash
ioned a term. His virtue lies* in the rich garment of
experience which careful observation and skilful writ-

Mr. Hergesheimer's "Cytherea" 223

ing enable him to wrap about his imaginative concep
tions. It is this which makes his novels so readable for
the discriminating at present, and will make them useful
historical records in the future. One aspect of a trou
blesome period when the middle generation achieved
the irresponsibility without the earnestness of youth
he has caught in "Cytherea." It is unfortunate that it
is a partial portrait of important motives in people who
themselves are of little importance; and it is doubly un
fortunate that he has been too much a part of his
muddy world to be as good an interpreter as he is a
witness of its life.
January 21, 1922.

y

Philistines and Dilettante

Poetry for the Unpoetical

I HAVE looked through more essays upon poetry than
I care to remember without finding anywhere a discus
sion of poetry for the unpoetical. A recent writer, it
is true, has done much to show that the general reader
daily indulges in poetry of a kind without knowing it.
But the voluminous literature of poetics is well-nigh all
special. It is written for students of rhythm, for in
stinctive lovers of poetry, for writers of verse, for
critics. It does not treat of the value of poetry for
the average, the unpoetical man — it says little of his
curious distaste for all that is not prose, or of the
share in all good poetry that belongs to him.

By the average man, let me hasten to say, I mean
in this instance the average intelligent reader, who has
passed through the usual formal education in literature,
who reads books as well as newspapers and magazines,
who, without calling himself a litterateur, would be will
ing to assert that he was fairly well read and reasonably
fond of good reading. Your doctor, your lawyer, the
president of your bank, and any educated business
man who has not turned his brain into a machine, will
fit my case.

Among such excellent Americans, I find that there

exists a double standard as regards all literature, but

227

228 Philistines and Dilettante

especially poetry. Just as the newspapers always write
of clean politics with reverence — whatever may be the
private opinions and practices of their editorial writers
— so intelligent, though unpoetic, readers are accus
tomed to speak of poetry with very considerable re
spect. It is not proper to say, "I hate poetry," even
if one thinks it. To admit ignorance of Tennyson or
Milton or Shakespeare is bad form, even if one skimmed
through them in college and has never disturbed the
dust upon their covers since. I have heard a whispered,
sneering remark after dinner, "I don't believe he ever
heard of Browning," by one who had penetrated about
as far into Browning's inner consciousness as a fly
into the hickory-nut it crawls over. I well remember
seeing a lady of highly respectable culture hold up her
hands in horror before a college graduate who did not
know who Beowulf was. Neither did she, in any true
sense of knowing. But her code taught her that the
"Beowulf," like other "good poetry," should be upon
one's list of acquaintances.

What these Americans really think is a very different
matter. The man in the trolley-car, the woman in the
rocking-chair, the clerk, the doctor, the manufacturer,
most lawyers, and some ministers would, if their hearts
were opened, give simply a categorical negative. They
do not like poetry, or they think they do not like it;
in either case with the same result. The rhythm an
noys them (little wonder, since they usually read it
as prose), the rhyme seems needless, the inversions,
the compressions perplex their minds to no valuable

Poetry for the Unpoetlcal 229

end. Speaking honestly, they do not like poetry. And
if their reason is the old one,

I do not like you, Dr. Fell;
The reason why I cannot tell,

it is none the less effective.

But the positive answers are no more reassuring.
Here in America especially, when we like poetry, we
like it none too good. The "old favorites" are almost
all platitudinous in thought and monotonous in rhythm.
We prefer sentiment, and have a weakness for slush.
Pathos seems to us better than tragedy, anecdote than
wit. Longfellow was and is, except in metropolitan
centres, our favorite "classical" poet; the poetical cor
ner and the daily poem of the newspapers represent
what most of us like when we do go in for verse. The
truth is that many of the intelligent in our population
skip poetry in their reading just because it is poetry.
They read no poetry, or they read bad poetry occa
sionally, or they read good poetry badly.

This sorry state of affairs does not trouble the lit
erary critic. His usual comment is that either one
loves poetry or one does not, and that is all there is
to be said about it. If the general reader neglects
poetry, why then he belongs to the Lost Tribes and
signifies nothing for Israel.

I am sure that he is wrong. His assertion is based
on the theory that every man worthy of literary salva
tion must at all times love and desire the best literature,
which is poetry — and this is a fallacy. It is as absurd

230 Philistines and Dilettante

as if he should ask most of us to dwell in religious ex
altation incessantly, or to live exclusively upon moun
tain peaks, or to cultivate rapture during sixteen hours
of the twenty-four. The saints, the martyrs, the seers,
the seekers, and enthusiasts have profited nobly by such
a regime, but not we of common clay. To assume in
advocating the reading of poetry that one should sub
stitute Pope for the daily paper, Francis Thompson for
the illustrated weekly, The Ring and the Book for
a magazine, and read "The Golden Treasury" through
instead of a novel, needs only to be stated to be dis
proved. And yet this is the implication of much lit
erary criticism.

But the sin of the general reader who refuses all
poetry is much more deadly, for it is due not to en
thusiasm, but to ignorance. It is true that the literary
diet recommended by an esthetic critic would choke a
healthy business man; but it is equally true that for
all men whose emotions are still alive within them,
and whose intelligence permits the reading of verse,
poetry is quite as valuable as fresh air and exercise.
We do not need fresh air and exercise constantly. We
can get along very comfortably without them. But
if they are not essential commodities, they are impor
tant ones, and so is poetry — a truth of which modern
readers seem to be as ignorant as was primitive man of
fire until he burned his hand in a blazing bush.

I do not mean for an instant to propose that every
one should read poetry. The man whose imagination
has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose

Poetry for the Unpoetical 231

brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the
surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unrespon
sive to ideas, and limited in his emotions — such a man
in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an
excellent citizen, lives happily, makes a good husband,
and may save the state. But he should not (no danger
that he will) read poetry. And for another class there
is nothing in poetry. The emotionally dying or dead;
the men who have sunk themselves, their personalities,
their hopes, their happiness, in business or scholarship
or politics or sport — they, too, are often useful citizens,
and usually highly prosperous; but they would waste
their time upon literature of any variety, and especially
upon poetry.

There are a dozen good arguments, however, to prove
that the reading of poetry is good for the right kind
of general reader, who is neither defective nor dead
in his emotions; and this means, after all, a very large
percentage of all readers. If I had space I should use
them all, for I realize that the convention we have
adopted for poetry makes us skip, in our magazines,
as naturally from story to story over the verse between
as from stone to stone across the brook. However, I
choose only two, which seem to me as convincing for
the unpoetical reader (the dead and defective excepted)
as the ethical grandeur of poetry, let us say, for the
moralist, its beauty for the esthete, its packed knowl
edge for the scholar.

The first has often been urged before and far more
often overlooked. We everyday folk plod year after

232 Philistines and Dilettante

year through routine, through fairly good or fairly bad,
never quite realizing what we are experiencing, never
seeing life as a whole, or any part of it, perhaps, in
complete unity. Words, acts, sights, pass through our
experience hazily, suggesting meanings which we never
fully grasp. Grief and love, the most intense, perhaps,
of sensations, we seldom understand except by compari
son with what has been said of the grief and love of
others. Happiness remains at best a diffused emotion
— felt, but not comprehended. Thought, if in some
moment of intense clarity it grasps our relationship to
the stream of life, in the next shreds into trivialities.
Is this true? Test it by any experience that is still
fresh in memory. See how dull, by comparison with
the vivid colors of the scene itself, are even now your
ideas of what it meant to you, how obscure its rela
tions to your later life. The moment you fell in love,
the hour after your child had died, the instant when
you reached the peak, the quarrel that began a mis
understanding not yet ended, the subtle household
strain that pulls apart untiringly though it never sun
ders two who love each other — all these I challenge
you to define, to explain, to lift into the light above
the turbid sea of complex currents which is life.

And this, of course, is what good poetry does. It
seizes the moment, the situation, the thought; drags
it palpitating from life and flings it, quivering with its
own rhythmic movement, into expression. The thing
cannot be done in mere prose, for there is more than
explanation to the process. The words themselves, in

Poetry for the Unpoetlcal 233

their color and suggestiveness, the rhythms that carry
them, contribute to the sense, even as overtones help
to make the music.

All this may sound a little exalted to the com
fortable general reader, who does not often deal in
such intense commodities as death and love. And
yet I have mentioned nothing that does not at one
time or another, and frequently rather than the oppo
site, come into his life, and need, not constant, certainly,
but at least occasional, interpretation. Death and love,
and also friendship, jealousy, courage, self-sacrifice,
hate — these cannot be avoided. We must experience
them. So do the animals, who gain from their experi
ences blind, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes
and distrusts. There are many ways of escaping from
such a bovine acquiescence, content to have felt, not
desirous to grasp and know and relate. Poetry, which
clears and intensifies like a glass held upon a distant
snowpeak, is one of the best.

But there is another service that poetry, among all
writing, best renders to the general reader, when he
needs it; a service less obvious, but sometimes, I think,
more important. Poetry insures an extension of youth.

Men and women vary in their emotional susceptibil
ity. Some go through life always clouded, always dull,
like a piece of glass cut in semblance of a gem, that
refracts no colors and is empty of light. Others are
vivid, impressionable, reacting to every experience.
Some of us are most aroused by contact with one an
other. Interest awakens at the sound of a voice; we

234 Philistines and Dilettante

are most alive when most with our kind. Others, like
Thoreau, respond best in solitude. The veery thrush
singing dimly in the hemlocks at twilight moves them
more powerfully than a cheer. A deep meadow awave
with headed grass, a solemn hill shouldering the sky,
a clear blue air washing over the pasture slopes and
down among the tree-tops of the valley, thrills them
more than all the men in all the streets of the world.
It makes no difference. To every one, dull and vivid,
social and solitary, age brings its changes. We may
understand better, but the vividness is less, the emo
tions are tamer. They do not fully respond, as the
bell in the deserted house only half tinkles to our pull
ing.

Si jeunesse savait,
Si vielliesse pouvait.

But to be able comes before to know. We must
react to experiences before it is worth while to com
prehend them. And after one is well enmeshed in
the routine of plodding life, after the freshness of the
emotions (and this is a definition of youth) is gone,
it is difficult to react. I can travel now, if I wish,
to the coral islands or the Spanish Main, but it is too
late.

Few willingly part with the fresh impressionability
of youth. Sometimes, as I have already suggested, the
faculties of sensation become atrophied, if indeed they
ever existed. I know no more dismal spectacle than
a man talking shop on a moonlit hill in August, a

Poetry for the Vnpoetlcal 23$

woman gossipping by the rail of a steamer plunging
through the sapphire of the Gulf Stream, or a couple
perusing advertisements throughout a Beethoven sym
phony. I will not advance as typical a drummer I
once saw read a cheap magazine from cover to cover
in the finest stretch of the Canadian Rockies. He
was not a man, but a sample-fed, word-emitting ma
chine. These people, emotionally speaking, are senile.
They should not try to read poetry.

But most of us — even those who are outwardly com
monplace, practical, unenthusiastic, "solid," and not
"sensitive" — lose our youthful keenness with regret.
And that is why poetry, except for the hopelessly sod
den, is a tonic worthy of a great price. For the right
poetry at the right time has the indubitable power to
stir the emotions that experience is no longer able to
arouse. I cannot give satisfactory instances, for the
reaction is highly personal. What with me stirs a
brain cell long dormant to action will leave another
unmoved, and vice versa. However, to make clear my
meaning, let us take Romance, the kind that one capi
talizes, that belongs to Youth, also capitalized, and
dwells in Granada or Sicily or the Spanish Main. The
middle-aged gentleman on a winter cruise for his
jaded nerves cannot expect a thrill from sights alone.
If it is not lost for him utterly, it is only because Keats
has kept it, in —

. . . Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,

236 Philistines and Dilettante

and Nashe in —

Brightness falls from the air ;
Queens have died young and fair.

Or consider the joy of travel renewed in Kipling's —

Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,

And the shouting seas drive by,

And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and
swing,

And the Southern Cross rides high!
Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,

That blaze in the velvet blue.

Or the multitudinous experiences of vivid life that
crowd the pages of men like Shakespeare, or Chaucer,
who thanked God that he had known his world as in
his time. Even in these shopworn quotations the power
still remains.

Somewhere in poetry, and best in poetry because
there most concentrated and most penetrative, lies crys
tallized experience at hand for all who need it. It is
not difficult to find, although no one can find it for
you. It is not necessarily exalted, romantic, passion
ate; it may be comfortable, homely, gentle or hearty,
vigorous and cheerful; it may be anything but common
place, for no true emotion is ever commonplace. I
have known men of one poet; and yet that poet gave
them the satisfaction they required. I know others
whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of

Poetry for the Unpoetical 237

beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet with
out poetry they would be less alive, their minds would
be less young. As children, most of us would have
flushed before the beauty of a sunrise on a tropic ocean,
felt dimly if profoundly — and forgotten. The poet —
like the painter — has caught, has interpreted, has pre
served the experience, so that, like music, it may be
renewed. And he can perform that miracle for greater
things than sunrises. This, perhaps, is the best of
all reasons why every one except the emotionally senile
should sometimes read poetry.

I know at least one honest Philistine who, unlike
many Philistines, has traveled through the Promised
Land — and does not like it. When his emotional
friends talk sentimentalism and call it literature, or
his esthetic acquaintances erect affectations and call
them art, he has the proper word of irony that brings
them back to food, money, and other verities. His
voice haunts me now, suggesting that, in spite of the
reasons I have advanced, the general reader can
scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and that
therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He
would say that most modern poetry is unreadable, at
least by the average man. He would say that if the
infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that
lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson,
or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the harsh
virility of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensifica
tion and clarification of experience, he begs to be ex
cused. He would say that if the lyrics of subtle and

238 Philistines and Dilettante

passionate emotion and the drab stories of sex experi
ence that make up so many pages of modern anthol
ogies represent a renewal and extension of youth, it
was not his youth. He prefers to be sanely old rather
than erotically young. He will stick to the daily paper
and flat prose.

Well, it is easy to answer him by ruling out modern
poetry from the argument. There was more good
poetry, neither complex, nor erotic, nor esoteric, written
before our generation than even a maker of anthologies
is likely to read. But I am not willing to dodge the
issue so readily. There is modern poetry for every
reader who is competent to read poetry at all. If there
is none too much of it, that is his own fault. If there
is much that makes no appeal to him, that is as it
should be.

It is true that a very large proportion of contemporary
poetry is well-nigh unintelligible to the gentleman
whose reading, like his experience, does not often ven
ture beyond the primitive emotions. Why should it
not be? The modern lyric is untroubled by the social
conscience. It is highly individual, for it is written
by men of intense individuality for readers whose im
aginations require an intimate appeal. Such minds de
mand poetry prevailingly, just as the average reader
demands prose prevailingly. They profit by prose now
and then, just as, occasionally, he profits by poetry.
We talk so much of the enormous growth of the mass
of average readers in recent years that we forget the
corresponding growth in the number of individualities

Poetry for the Unpoetlcal 239

that are not average. Much modern poetry is written
for such readers, for men and women whose minds
are sensitive to intricate emotional experience, who can
and do respond to otherworldliness, to the subtly ro
mantic, the finely esthetic, and the intricately ideal.
They deserve whatever poetry they may desire.

The important point to note is that they do not get
it. It is they — far more than the Philistines — who
complain that modern poetry is insufficient for their
needs. The highly personal lyric is probably more
perfected, more abundant, and more poignant in its
appeal to living minds now than ever before in the
history of our civilization. But it occupies only one
province of poetry. A lover of poetry desires, far more
keenly than the general reader, to have verse of his
own day that is more Shakespearian, more Miltonic,
more Sophoclean than this. He wants poetry that lifts
spacious times into spacious verse, poetry that "en-
lumynes," like Petrarch's "rhetorike sweete," a race
and a civilization. He desires, in addition to what he
is already getting, precisely that poetry so universal
in its subject-matter and its appeal, which the general
reader thinks he would read if he found it instead of
"lyrical subtleties" in his pages.

Well, they do not get it very abundantly to-day, let
us admit the fact freely. But the fault is not altogether
the poets'. The fault is in the intractable mediocrity
of the age, which resists transference into poetry as
stiff clay resists the hoe of the cultivator. The fault
lies in the general reader himself, whose very opposi-

240 Philistines and Dilettante

tion to poetry because it is poetry makes him a difficult
person to write for. Commercialized minds, given over
to convention, denying their sentiment and idealism,
or wasting them upon cheap and meretricious litera
ture, do not make a good audience. Our few poets in
English who have possessed some universality of ap
peal have had to make concessions. Kipling has been
the most popular among good English poets in our
time? but he has had to put journalism into much of
his poetry in order to succeed. And Kipling is not
read so much as a certain American writer who dis
covered that by writing verse in prose form he could
make the public forget their prejudice against poetry
and indulge their natural pleasure in rhythm and rime.
A striking proof of all that I have been writing is
to be found in so-called magazine verse. Sneers at
magazine poetry are unjust because they are unintelli
gent. It is quite true that most of it consists of the
highly individualistic lyric of which I have spoken
above. But in comparison with the imaginative prose
of the typical popular magazine, it presents a most in
structive contrast. The prose is too frequently sensa
tional or sentimental, vulgar or smart. The verse, even
though narrow in its appeal, and sometimes slight, is
at least excellent in art, admirable in execution, and
vigorous and unsentimental in tone. Regarded as lit
erature, it is very much more satisfactory than the bulk
of magazine prose. Indeed, there is less difference
between the best and the worst of our magazines than
between the verse and the prose in any one of them.

Poetry for the Unpoetlcal 241

And if this verse is too special in its subject-matter
to be altogether satisfactory, if so little of it appeals
to the general reader, is it not his fault? He neglects
the poetry from habit rather than from conviction
based on experience. Because he skips it, and has
skipped it until habit has become a convention, much
of it has become by natural adaptation of supply to
demand too literary, too narrow, too subtle and com
plex for him now. The vicious circle is complete.

This circle may soon be broken. A ferment, which
in the 'nineties stirred in journalism, and a decade later
transformed our drama, is working now in verse. The
poetical revival now upon us may be richer so far in
promise than in great poetry, but it is very significant.
For one thing, it is advertising poetry, and since poetry
is precisely what Shakespeare called it, caviare to the
general — a special commodity for occasional use — a
little advertising will be good for it. Again, the verse
that has sprung from the movement is much of it
thoroughly interesting. Some of it is as bizarre as
the new art of the futurists and the vorticists; some
is merely vulgar, some merely affected, some hopelessly
obscure; but other poems, without convincing us of
their greatness, seem as original and creative as were
Browning and Whitman in their day. Probably, like
the new painting, the movement is more significant than
the movers.

Nevertheless, if one is willing to put aside prejudice,
suspend judgment, and look ahead, vers libre, even
when more libre than vers, is full of meaning — poetic

242 Philistines and Dilettante

realism, even when more real than poetry, charged with
possibility. For with all its imperfections much of
this new poetry is trying to mean more than ever be
fore to the general reader. I am not sure that the
democracy can be interpreted for him in noble poetry
and remain the democracy he knows. And yet I think,
and I believe, that, in his sub-consciousness at least, he
feels an intense longing to find the everyday life in
which we all live — so thrilling beneath the surface —
interpreted, swung into that rhythmic significance that
will make it part of the vast and flowing stream of all
life. I can tolerate many short, rough words in poetry,
and much that we have been accustomed to regard
as prose, on the way to such a goal.

For I honestly believe that it is better to read fan
tastic poetry, coarse poetry, prosaic poetry — anything
but vulgar and sentimental poetry — than no poetry
at all. To be susceptible to no revival of the vivid
emotions of youth, to be touched by no thoughts more
intense than our own, to be accessible to no imaginative
interpretation of the life we lead — this seems to me
to be a heavy misfortune. But to possess, as most
of us do, our share of all these qualities, and then at
no time, in no fitting mood or proffered opportunity,
to read poetry — this can only be regarded as deafness
by habit and blindness from choice.

Eye, Ear, and Mind

OUR eyes are more civilized than our ears, and much
more civilized than our minds; that is the flat truth,
and it accounts for a good deal that puzzles worthy
people who wish to reform literature.

Consider the musical comedy of the kind that runs
for a year and costs the price of two books for a good
seat. Its humor is either good horseplay or vulgar
farce, and its literary quality nil. Its music is better,
less banal than the words, and, sometimes, almost ex
cellent. But its setting, the costumes, the scenic effects,
the stage painting, and, most of all, the color schemes
are always artistic and sometimes exquisite. They
intrigue the most sophisticated taste, which is not sur
prising; yet, at the same time, the multitude likes them,
pays for them, stays away if they are not right. Eye is
an esthete, ear is, at least, cultivated, mind is a gross
barbarian, unwilling to think, and desirous only of a
tickle or a prod.

Or to localize the scene and change the angle a trifle,
compare the New York ear for music with the New
York taste for reading. The audiences who hear
good concerts, good operas, good oratorios, and thor
oughly appreciate them, far outrun in number the read
ers of equally artistic or intellectual books. Ear is

243

244 Philistines and Dilettante

more cultivated than mind, musical appreciation keener
than literary taste. A good stage set on a first night
in this same metropolis of the arts, will get a round of
applause, when not only often, but usually, perfection
of lines, or poignancy of thought in the dialogue, will
miss praise altogether. Eye detects sheer beauty in
stantly, mind lags or is dull to it.

This is a fact; the cause of it let psychologists ex
plain, as they can, of course, very readily. It is a
rather encouraging fact, for it seems to indicate that
our members educate themselves one at a time, and yet,
as parts of a single body corporate, must help each
other's education. If we grow critical of the sped-up
background of a movie scene, we may grow critical of
its sped-up plot. Eye may teach the ear, ear lift the
mind to more strenuous intellectual efforts.

And, of course, it explains why the literary reformers
have such difficulties with the multitude. Why, they
say, do these women, whose dress is admirably de
signed and colored, whose living rooms are propor
tioned and furnished in taste, who know good music
from bad, and enjoy the former — why do they read
novels without the least distinction, without beauty
or truth, barely raised above vulgarity? Why, they
say, does this man who cooperates with his architect
in the building of a country house which would have
been a credit to any period, who is a connoisseur in
wine and cigars, and unerring in his judgment of pic
tures, why does he definitely prefer the commonplace
in literature? Eye, ear, and tongue are civilized; in-

Eye, Ear, and Mind 245

tellect remains a gross feeder still. Good reading comes
last among the arts of taste.

This is not an essay in reform; it is content to be
a question mark; but one bit of preaching may slip
in at the end. Why give eye and ear all the fine ex
periences? Why not do something for poor, slovenly
mind? The truth is that we are lazy. In a stage full
of shimmering beauty, in a concert of chamber music,
in a fine building, or an admirable sketch, others do
the work, we have only to gaze or listen in order to
pluck some, at least, of the fruits of art. But fine
novels take fine reading; fine essays take fine thinking;
fine poetry takes fine feeling. We balk at the effort,
and ask, like the audience at the movies, that eye
should take the easier way. And hence the American
reader still faintly suggests the Fiji Islander, who wears
a silk hat and patent leathers on a tattooed naked body.

For all we can tell, that may be the direction of
Progress. In 2021 New Yorkers may be gazing at a
city beautiful, where even the subways give forth sweet
sounds; and reading novelized movies in words of one
syllable. Eye may win the race and starve out the
other members. It would be a bad future for pub
lishers and authors; and I am against it, even as a pos
sibility. Hence my energies will be devoted to poking,
thrilling, energizing, tonicking that lazy old organism,
half asleep still — Mind.

Out with the Dilettante

A FEW years ago drums and trumpets in American
magazines and publishers' advertisements announced
that the essay was coming to its own again. We were
to vary our diet of short stories with pleasing disqui
sitions, to find in books of essays a substitute for the
volume of sermons grown obsolete, and to titillate
our finer senses by graceful prose that should teach
us without didacticism, and present contemporary life
without the incumbrance of a plot.

The promise was welcome. American literature has
been at its very best in the essay. In the essay, with
few exceptions, it has more often than elsewhere
attained world-wide estimation. Emerson, Thoreau,
Oliver Wendell Holmes were primarily essayists. Haw
thorne and Irving were essayists as much as romancers.
Franklin was a common sense essayist. Jonathan Ed
wards will some day be presented (by excerpt) as a
moral essayist of a high order. And there was Lowell.

Have they had worthy successors? In the years
after the Civil War certainly none of equal eminence.
But it is too early to say that the trumpets and drums
of the last decade were false heralds. The brilliant
epithets of Chesterton, the perfect sophistication of
Pearsall Smith (an American, but expatriated), the

placid depth of Hudson's nature studies, are not paral-

246

Out with the Dilettante 247

leled on this side of the water, yet with Crothers,
Gerould, Repplier, Colby, Morley, Strunsky, we need
not fear comparison in the critical genre, unless it be
with the incomparable Max Beerbohm.

Two kinds of expository writing are natural for
Americans. The first is a hard-hitting statement,
straight out of intense feeling or labored thought. That
was Emerson's way (in spite of his expansiveness),
and Thoreau's also. You read them by pithy sentences,
not paragraphs. They assail you by ideas, not by in
sidious structures of thought. The second is an easy
going comment on life, often slangy or colloquial and
frequently so undignified as not to seem literature.
Mark Twain and Josh Billings wrote that way; Ring
Lardner writes so to-day.

When the straight-from-the-shoulder American takes
time to finish his thought, to mold his sentences, to
brain his reader with a perfect expression of his tense
emotion, then he makes literature. And when the easy
going humorist, often nowadays a column conductor,
or a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, takes
time to deepen his observation and to say it with real
words instead of worn symbols, he makes, and does
make, literature. More are doing it than the skeptical
realize. The new epoch of the American essay is well
under way.

But the desire to "make literature" in America is
too often wasted. The would-be essayist wastes it in
pretty writing about trivial things — neighbors' back
yards, books I have read, the idiosyncrasies of cats,

248 Philistines and Dilettante

humors of the streets — the sort of dilettantish comment
that older nations writing of more settled, richer civili
zations can do well — that Anatole France and occa
sional essayists of Punch or The Spectator can do well
and most of us do indifferently. We are a humorous
people, but not a playful one. Light irony is not our
forte. Strength and humorous exaggeration come more
readily to our pens than grace. We are better inspired
by the follies of the crowd, or the errors of humanity,
than by the whims of culture or aspects of pleasant
leisure. And when we try to put on style in the manner
of Lamb or Hazlitt, Stevenson or Beerbohm, we seldom
exceed the second rate.

When the newspaper and magazine humorists of
democracy learn to write better; when the moralists
and reformers and critics of American life learn to
mature and perfect their thought until what they write
is as good as their intentions — then the trumpets and
drums may sound again, and with justification. Many
have; may others follow.

And perhaps then we can scrap a mass of fine writing
about nothing in particular, that calls itself the Ameri
can literary essay, and yet is neither American in in
spiration, native in style, nor good for anything what
soever, except exercise in words. Out with the dilet
tantes. We are tired of the merely literary; we want
real literature in the essay as elsewhere.

Flat Prose

SOME time ago a writer protested against the taboo
on "beautiful prose." He asserted that the usual or
gans of publication, especially in America, reject with
deadly certainty all contributions whose style suggests
that melodious rhythm which De Quincey and Ruskin
made fashionable for their generations, and Stevenson
revived in the 'nineties. He complained that the writer
is no longer allowed to write as well as he can; that
he must abstract all unnecessary color of phrase, all
warmth of connotation and grace of rhythm from his
style, lest he should seem to be striving for "atmos
phere," instead of going about his proper business,
which is to fill the greedy stomach of the public with
facts.

Unfortunately, this timely fighter in a good cause
was too enamored of the art whose suppression he was
bewailing. He so far forgot himself as to make his
own style "beautiful" in the old-time fashion, and thus
must have roused the prejudice of the multitude, who
had to study such style in college, and knew from sad
experience that it takes longer to read than the other
kind.

But there are other and safer ways of combating
the taste for flat prose. One might be to print parallel
columns of "newspaper English" (which they threaten

249

250 Philistines and Dilettante

now to teach in the schools) until the eye sickened of
its deadly monotony. This is a bad way. The average
reader would not see the point. Paragraphs from a
dozen American papers, all couched in the same utili
tarian dialect, — simple but not always clear, concise
yet seldom accurate, emphatic but as ugly as the clank
of an automobile chain, — why, we read thousands of
such lines daily! We think in such English; we talk
in it; to revolt from this style, to which the Associated
Press has given the largest circulation on record, would
be like protesting against the nitrogen in our air.

Books and magazines require a different reckoning.
The author is still allowed to let himself go occasionally
in books — especially in sentimental books. But the
magazines, with few exceptions, have shut down the lid,
and are keeping the stylistic afflatus under strict com
pression. No use to show them what they might pub
lish if, with due exclusion of the merely pretty, the
sing-song, and the weakly ornate, they were willing to
let a little style escape. With complete cowardice, they
will turn the general into the particular, and insist
that in any case they will not publish you. Far better,
it seems to me, to warn editors and the "practical pub
lic" as to what apparently is going to happen if ambi
tious authors are tied down much longer to flat prose.

It is not generally known, I believe, that post-im
pressionism has escaped from the field of pictorial art,
and is running rampant in literature. At present, Miss
Gertrude Stein is the chief culprit. Indeed, she may
be called the founder of a coterie, if not of a school.

Flat Prose 2$i

Her art has been defined recently by one of her
admirers, who is also the subject, or victim, of the
word-portrait from which I intend later to quote in
illustration of my argument. "Gertrude Stein," says
Miss Dodge, "is doing with words what Picasso is do
ing with paint. She is impelling language to induce
new states of consciousness, and in doing so language
becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror
of history." This, being written in psychological and
not in post-impressionist English, is fairly intelligible.
But it does not touch the root of the matter. Miss
Stein, the writer continues, uses "words that appeal to
her as having the meaning they seem to have [that is,
if "diuturnity" suggests a tumble downstairs, it means
a tumble downstairs] . To present her impressions she
chooses words for their inherent quality rather than
their accepted meaning."

Let us watch the creative artist at her toil. The
title of this particular word-picture is "Portrait of
Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia." As the portrait
itself has a beginning, but no middle, and only a faintly
indicated end, I believe — though in my ignorance of just
what it all means I am not sure — that I can quote at
random without offense to the impressions derivable
from the text.

Here then are a few paragraphs where the inherent
quality of the words is said to induce new states of
consciousness: —

"Bargaining is something and there is not that suc
cess. The intention is what if application has that

252 Philistines and Dilettante

accident results are reappearing. They did not darken.
That was not an adulteration. . . . There is that par
ticular half of directing that there is that particular
whole direction that is not all the measure of any com
bination. Gliding is not heavily moving. Looking is
not vanishing. Laughing is not evaporation.

"Praying has intention and relieving that situation
is not solemn. There comes that way.

"There is all there is when there has all there has
where there is what there is. That is what is done
when there is done what is done and the union is won
and the division is the explicit visit. There is not all
of any visit."

After a hundred lines of this I wish to scream, I
wish to burn the book, I am in agony. It is not be
cause I know that words cannot be torn loose from
their meanings without insulting the intellect. It is
not because I see that this is a prime example of the
"confusion of the arts." No, my feeling is purely phys
ical. Some one has applied an egg-beater to my brain.

But having calmed myself by a sedative of flat prose
from the paper, I realize that Miss Stein is more sinned
against than sinning. She is merely a red flag waved
by the Zeitgeist.

For this is the sort of thing we are bound to get if
the lid is kept down on the stylists much longer. Re
pression has always bred revolt. Revolt breeds ex
travagance. And extravagance leads to absurdity.
And yet even in the absurd, a sympathetic observer
may detect a purpose which is honest and right. Miss

Flat Prose 253

Stein has indubitably written nonsense, but she began
with sense. For words have their sound-values as
well as their sense- values, and prose rhythms do convey
to the mind emotions that mere denotation cannot give.
Rewrite the solemn glory of Old Testament diction
in the flat colorless prose which just now is demanded,
and wonder at the difference. Translate "the multi
tudinous seas incarnadine" into "making the ocean
red," — or, for more pertinent instances, imagine a Car-
lyle, an Emerson, a Lamb forced to exclude from his
vocabulary every word not readily understood by the
multitude, to iron out all whimseys, all melodies from
his phrasing, and to plunk down his words one after
the other in the order of elementary thought!

I am willing to fight to the last drop of ink against
any attempt to bring back "fine writing" and ornate
rhetoric into prose. "Expression is the dress of
thought," and plain thinking and plain facts look best
in simple clothing. Nevertheless, if we must write
our stories, our essays, our novels, and (who knows)
our poems in the flat prose of the news column, — if the
editors will sit on the lid, — well, the public will get
what it pays for, but sooner or later the spirit of style
will ferment, will work, will grow violent under re
straint. There will be reaction, explosion, revolution.
The public will get its flat prose, and — in addition — not
one, but a hundred Gertrude Steins.

VI

Men and Their Books

Conrad and Melville

THE appearance of the definitive edition of Joseph
Conrad, with his interesting critical prefaces included,
was a provocation to read and reread his remarkable
series of books, the most remarkable contribution to
English literature by an alien since the language began.
But is it a reason for writing more of an author already
more discussed than any English stylist of our time?
For myself, I answer, yes, because I have found no ade
quate definition of the difference between Conrad and
us to whom English thinking is native, nor a definition
of his place, historically considered, in the modern
scheme; no definition, that is, which explains my own
impressions of Conrad. And therefore I shall proceed,
as all readers should, to make my own.

If you ask readers why they like Conrad, two out
of three will answer, because he is a great stylist, or
because he writes of the sea. I doubt the worth of
such answers. Many buy books because they are
written by great stylists, but few read for just that
reason. They read because there is something in an
author's work which attracts them to his style, and
that something may be study of character, skill in nar
rative, or profundity in truth, of which style is the
perfect expression, but not the thing itself. Only con-

257

258 Men and Their Books

noisseurs, and few of them, read for style. And, fur
thermore, I very much doubt whether readers go to
Conrad to learn about the sea. They might learn as
much from Cooper or Melville, but they have not gone
there much of late. And many an ardent lover of
Conrad would rather be whipped than go from New
York to Liverpool on a square-rigged ship.

In any case, these answers, which make up the sum
of most writing about Conrad, do not define him. To
. say that an author is a stylist is about as helpful as
to say that he is a thinker. And Conrad would have
had his reputation if he had migrated to Kansas instead
of to the English sea.

Tn point of fact, much may be said, and with justice,
against Conrad's style. It misses occasionally the Eng
lish idiom, and sometimes English grammar, which is
a trivial criticism. It offends more frequently against
the literary virtues of conciseness and economy, which
is not a trivial criticism. Conrad, like the writers of
Elizabethan prose (whom he resembles in ardency and
in freshness), too often wraps you in words, stupefies
you with gorgeous repetition, goes about and about and
about, trailing phrases after him, while the procession
of narrative images halts. He can be as prolix in his
brooding descriptions as Meredith with his intellectual
vaudeville. Indeed, many give him lip service solely
because they like to be intoxicated, to be carried away,
by words. A slight change of taste, such as that which
has come about since Meredith was on every one's
tongue, will make such defects manifest. Meredith lives

Conrad and Melville 259

in spite of his prolixities, and so will Conrad, but neither
because they are perfect English stylists.

I am sure also that Conrad, at his very best, is not
so good as Melville, at his best, in nautical narrative;
as Melville in, say, the first day of the final chase
of Moby Dick; I question whether he is as good in
sea narrative as Cooper in the famous passage of Paul
Jones's ship through the shoals. Such comparisons are,
of course, rather futile. They differentiate among ex
cellences, where taste is a factor. Nevertheless, it is
belittling to a man who, above almost all others in our
language, has brooded upon the mysteries of the mind's
action, to say that he is great because he describes so
well the sea.

We must seek elsewhere for a definition of the pecul
iar qualities of Conrad. And without a definition it is
easy to admire but hard to estimate and understand
him.

I believe, first of all, that Conrad has remained
much more a Slav than he, or any of us, have been
willing to admit. A friend of mine, married to a Slav,
told me of her husband, how, with his cab at the door,
and dinner waiting somewhere, he would sit brooding
(so he said) over the wrongs of his race. It is danger
ous to generalize in racial characteristics, but no one
will dispute a tendency to brood as a characteristic
of the Slav. The Russian novels are full of characters
who brood, and of brooding upon the characters and
their fates. The structure of the Russian story is deter
mined not by events so much as by the results of pas-

260 Men and Their Books

sionate brooding upon the situation in which the imag
ined characters find themselves.

So it is with Conrad, always and everywhere. In
"Nostromo" he broods upon the destructive power of
a fixed idea; in "The Rescue" upon the result of fling
ing together elemental characters of the kind that life
keeps separate; in "Youth" upon the illusions, more
real than reality, of youth. No writer of our race had
ever the patience to sit like an Eastern mystic over
his scene, letting his eye fill with each slightest detail
of it, feeling its contours around and above and be
neath, separating each detail of wind and water, mood
and emotion, memory and hope, and returning again
and again to the task of description, until every im
pression was gathered, every strand of motive threaded
to its source.

Henry James, you will say, was even more patient.
Yes, but James did not brood. His work was active
analysis, cutting finer and finer until the atom was
reached. His mind was Occidental. He wished to
know why the wheels went round. Conrad's, in this
respect, is Oriental. He wants to see what things essen
tially are. Henry James refines but seldom repeats.
Conrad, in such a story as "Caspar Ruiz" for example,
or in "Chance," gives the impression of not caring to
understand if only he can fully picture the mind that
his brooding imagination draws further and further
from its sheath. It is incredible, to one who has not
counted, how many times he raises the same situation
to the light — the Garibaldean and Nostromo, Mrs.

Conrad and Melville 261

Travers marveling at her knowledge of Lingard's heart
— turns it, opens it a little further, and puts it back
while he broods on. Here is the explanation of Con
rad's prolixity; here the reason why among all living
novelists he is least a slave to incident, best able to
let his story grow as slowly as life, and still hold the
reader's interest. As we read Conrad we also brood;
we read slowly where elsewhere we read fast. Turns
of style, felicities of description, as of the tropic ocean,
or the faces of women, have their chance. And, of
course, the excellence, the charm of Conrad's style is
that in its nuances, its slow winding paragraphs, its
pausing sentences, and constant suggestion of depths
beyond depths, it is the perfect expression of the brood
ing mind that grasps its meaning by the repetition of
images that drop like pebbles, now here, now there,
in a fathomless pool.

This is to define Conrad in space, but not in time.
In time, he may be Slav or English, but certainly is
modern of the moderns. The tribute of admiration
and imitation from the youth of his own period alone
might prove this. But it is easier to prove than to
describe his modernity. To say that he takes the imag
ination afield into the margins of the world, where life
still escapes standardization and there are fresh aspects
of beauty, is to fail to differentiate him from Kipling
or Masefield. To say that he strikes below the act
and the will into realms of the sub-conscious, and
studies the mechanism as well as the results of emotion,
is but to place him, where indeed he belongs, among

262 Men and Their Books

the many writers who have learned of Henry James or
moved in parallels beside him.

To get a better perspective of Conrad's essential
modernity I should like to propose a more cogent com
parison, and a more illuminating contrast, with a man
whose achievements were in Conrad's own province,
who challenges and rewards comparison, Herman Mel
ville.

It may be that others have set "Moby Dick" beside
the works of Conrad. Some one must have done it,
so illuminating in both directions is the result. Here
are two dreamers who write of the sea and strange
men, of the wild elements and the mysterious in man;
two authors who, a half century apart, sail the same
seas and come home to write not so much of them
as what they dream when they remember their ex
periences. Each man, as he writes, transcends the sea,
sublimates it into a vapor of pure imagination, in which
he clothes his idea of man, and so doing gives us not
merely great literature, but sea narrative and descrip
tion unsurpassed:

And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical
seas, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by
exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding
from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely
hiding the wretched hideousness of his jaw.

Melville, writer of vivid descriptions of the South
Seas, "Typee," "Omoo," which were perfect of their

Conrad and Melville 263

kind, but still only superlative travel books, distin
guished in style but seldom lifting beyond autobiog
raphy, began another reminiscent narrative in "Moby
Dick." In spite of his profound intellectual growth
away from the cool and humorous youth who paddled
the Marquesan lake with primitive beauties beside him,
he seems to have meant in "The White Whale" to go
back to his earlier manner, to write an accurate though
highly personal account of the whaler's life, and to
that end had assembled a mass of information upon
the sperm whale to add to his own memories. Very
literally the story begins as an autobiography; even
the elemental figure of the cannibal, Queequeg, with
his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford
lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But
even before the Pequod leaves sane Nantucket an un
dercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative.
This brooding captain, Ahab (for Melville also broods,
though with characteristic difference), and his ivory
leg, those warning voices in the mist, the strange crew
of all races and temperaments — the civilized, the bar
barous, and the savage — in their ship, which is a micro
cosm, hints that creep in of the white whale whose
nature is inimical to man and arouses passions deeper
than gain or revenge — all this prepares the reader for
something more than incident. From the mood of
Defoe one passes, by jerks and reversions, to the at
mosphere of "The Ancient Mariner" and of "Man
fred."
When Conrad could not manage his story he laid

264 Men and Their Books

it aside, sometimes for twenty years, as with "The
Rescue." But Melville was a wilder soul, a greater
man, and probably a greater artist, but a lesser crafts
man. He lost control of his book. He loaded his
whaling story with casks of natural history, deck loaded
it with essays on the moral nature of man, lashed to
its sides dramatic dialogues on the soul, built up a
superstructure of symbolism and allegory, until the
tale foundered and went down, like the Pequod. And
then it emerged again a dream ship searching for a
dream whale, manned by fantastic and terrible dreams;
and every now and then, as dreams will, it takes on an
appearance of reality more vivid than anything in life,
more real than anything in Conrad — the meeting with
the Rachel and her captain seeking his drowned son,
the rising of Moby Dick with the dead Par see bound
to his terrible flank, the grim dialogues of Ahab. . . .
In this bursting of bounds, in these epic grandeurs
in the midst of confusion, and vivid realities mingled
with untrammeled speculation, lies the secret of Mel
ville's purpose, and, by contrast, the explanation of
Conrad's modern effect beside him. Melville, friend
of Hawthorne and transcendentalist philosopher on his
own account, sees nature as greater and more terrible
than man. He sees the will of man trying to control
the universe, but failing; crushed if uncowed by the
unmeasured power of an evil nature, which his little
spirit, once it loses touch with the will of God, vainly
encounters. Give man eyes only in the top of his head,
Booking heavenward, says Ahab, urging the blacksmith,

Conrad and Melville 265

who makes him a new leg buckle, to forge a new
creature complete. He writes of man at the beginning
of the age of science, aware of the vast powers of
material nature, fretting that his own body is part of
them, desirous to control them by mere will, fighting
his own moral nature as did Ahab in his insensate
pursuit of Moby Dick, and destroyed by his own am
bitions, even as Ahab, the Pequod, and all her crew
went down before the lashings and charges of the
white whale.

"Oh, Life," says Ahab, "here I am, proud as a Greek
god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead [the
carpenter] for a bone to stand on! ... I owe for the
flesh in the tongue I brag with." And yet as they
approach the final waters "the old man's purpose in
tensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vise;
the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like overladen
brooks; in his very sleep his ringing cry ran through
the vaulted hull: 'Stern all! The white whale spouts
thick blood!'"

Conrad comes at the height of the age of science.
The seas for him are full of dark mysteries, but these
mysteries are only the reflections of man. Man domi
nates the earth and sea, man conquers the typhoon,
intelligent man subdues the savage wills of the bar
barians of the shallows, man has learned to master all
but his own heart. The center of gravity shifts from
without to within. The philosopher, reasoning of God
and of nature, gives place to the psychologist brood
ing over an organism that is seat of God and master

266 Men and Their Books

of the elements. Melville is centrifugal, Conrad cen
tripetal. Melville's theme is too great for him; it
breaks his story, but the fragments are magnificent.
Conrad's task is easier because it is more limited; his
theme is always in control. He broods over man in a
world where nature has been conquered, although the
mind still remains inexplicable. The emphasis shifts
from external symbols of the immensities of good and
evil to the behavior of personality under stress. Mel
ville is a moral philosopher, Conrad a speculative psy
chologist.

The essentially modern quality of Conrad lies in
this transference of wonder from nature to the be
havior of man, the modern man for whom lightning is
only electricity and wind the relief of pressure from
hemisphere to hemisphere. Mystery lies in the per
sonality now, not in the blind forces that shape and
are shaped by it. It is the difference, in a sense, be
tween Hawthorne, who saw the world as shadow and
illusion, symbolizing forces inimical to humanity, and
Hardy, who sees in external nature the grim scientific
fact of environment. It is a difference between eras
more marked in Conrad than in many of his contem
poraries, because, like Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe,
he avoids the plain prose of realism and sets his ro
mantic heroes against the great powers of nature —
tempests, the earthquake, solitude, and grandeur. Thus
the contrast is marked by the very resemblance of
romantic setting. For Conrad's tempests blow only
to beat upon the mind whose behavior he is studying;

Conrad and Melville 267

his moral problems are raised only that he may study
their effect upon man.

If, then, we are to estimate Conrad's work, let us
begin by defining him in these terms. He is a Slav
who broods by racial habit as well as by necessity of
his theme. He is a modern who accepts the growing
control of physical forces by the intellect and turns
from the mystery of nature to brood upon personality.
From this personality he makes his stories. External
nature bulks large in them, because it is when beat
upon by adversity, brought face to face with the ele
mental powers, and driven into strange efforts of will
by the storms without that man's personality reaches
the tensest pitch. Plot of itself means little to Conrad
and that is why so few can tell with accuracy the stories
of his longer novels. His characters are concrete.
They are not symbols of the moral nature, like Mel
ville's men, but they are nevertheless phases of per
sonality and therefore they shift and dim from story
to story, like lanterns in a wood. Knowing their hearts
to the uttermost, and even their gestures, one neverthe
less forgets sometimes their names, the ends to which
they come, the tales in which they appear. The same
phase, indeed, appears under different names in several
stories.

Melville crossed the shadow line in his pursuit of
the secret of man's relation to the universe; only mag
nificent fragments of his imagination were salvaged
for his books. Conrad sails on an open sea, tamed by
wireless and conquered by steel. Mystery for him lies

268 Men and Their Books

not beyond the horizon, but in his fellow passengers.
On them he broods. His achievement is more complete
than Melville's; his scope is less. When the physicists
have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this
earthy matter where now with our implements and our
machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious
force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new
transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task.
The sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving
therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of
Moby Dick be renewed. But now, for a while, science
has pushed back the unknown to the horizon and given
us a little space of light in the darkness of the universe.
There the ego is for a time the greatest mystery. It is
an opportunity for the psychologists and, while we
are thinking less of the soul, they have rushed to study
the mechanics of the brain. It was Conrad's oppor
tunity also to brood upon the romance of personality
at the moment of man's greatest victory over dark ex
ternal force.

The Novelist of Pity

To those interested in the meaning of the generation
that has now left us quivering on the beach of after
war, Thomas Hardy's books are so engrossing that to
write of them needs no pretext; yet the recent publica
tion of an anniversary edition with all his prefaces in
cluded is a welcome excuse for what I propose to make,
not so much an essay as a record of a sudden under
standing. Long familiarity with Hardy's novels had
led to an afternoon of conversation with the author
himself in the mildness of old age. But he remained
for me a still inexplicable figure, belonging to an earlier
century, yet in other respects so clearly abreast, if not
ahead, of the emotions of our own times, that at eighty
he saw the young men beginning to follow him. It was
a reading of "The Dynasts," in the tall, red volumes of
the new edition, that suddenly and unexpectedly
seemed to give me a key.

The danger, so I had thought and think, is that
Hardy bids fair to become a legendary figure with an
attribute, as is the way with such figures, better known
than the man himself. "Hardy, oh, yes, the pessimist"
threatens to become all the schoolboy knows and all
he needs to know of him, and his alleged philosophy
of gloom is already overshadowing the man's intense
interest in strong and appealing life. It has been the

269

270 Men and Their Books

fate of many a great artist to get a nickname, like a
boy, and never be rid of it.

I do not wish by any ingenious fabrication to prove
that Hardy was not a pessimist. He is the father of
the English school that refuse to be either deists or
moralists, and, like them, pushes his stories to an end
that is often bitter. His temperament is cast in that
brooding, reflective mood that concerns itself less
readily with jollity than with grief, and is therefore ever
slanting toward pessimism. This, even his style indi
cates. Like the somber Hawthorne's, his style is brood
ing, adumbrative, rather than incisive or brilliant, and
it often limps among the facts of his story like a man
in pain. Indeed, Hardy is seldom a stylist, except when
his mood is somber; therefore it is by his sadder
passages that we remember him. Yet the most impor
tant fact about Hardy is not that he is pessimistic.

His manner of telling a story, however, helps to con
firm the popular impression. Hardy's plots are a series
of accidents, by which the doom of some lovely or
aspiring spirit comes upon it by the slow drift of mis
fortune. Tess, Grace, Eustacia, Jude — it is clear
enough to what joys and sorrows their natures make
them liable. But the master prepares for them trivial
error, unhappy coincidence, unnecessary misfortune,
until it is not surprising if the analytic mind insists
that he is laboring some thesis of pessimism to be
worked out by concrete example.

Nevertheless, this is incomplete definition, and it is
annoying that the dean of letters in our tongue should

The Novelist of Pity 271

be subjected to a sophomoric formula in which the em
phasis is wrongly placed. The critics, in general, have
denned this pessimism, stopped there, and said, this is
Hardy. But youth that does not like pessimism reads
Hardy avidly. More light is needed.

Mr. Hardy himself does not suggest the simple and
melancholy pessimist. A mild old man, gentleness is
the first quality one feels in him, but at eighty he still
waxed his mustache tips, and his eyes lit eagerly. I
remember how earnestly he denied knowledge of sci
ence, piqued, I suppose, by the omniscient who had
declared that his art consisted of applying the results
of scientific inquiry to the study of simple human
nature. If his treatment of nature was scientific, as I
affirmed, his wife agreed, and he did not deny, then,
he implied, his knowledge came by intuition, not by
theory. The war was still on when I talked with him.
It had lifted him to poetry at first, but by 1918 no
longer interested him vitally. "It is too mechanical,"
he said. His novels, where fate seems to operate me
chanically sometimes, he was willing that day to set
aside as nil. Poetry, he thought, was the only proper
form of expression. The novel was too indirect; too
wasteful of time and space in its attempt to come at
real issues. Yet these real issues, it appeared as we
talked, were not theories. Ideas, he said, if empha
sized, destroy art. Writers, he thought, in the future
would give up pure fiction (serious writers, I suppose
he meant). Poetry would be their shorthand; they
would by intenser language cut short to their end.

272 Men and Their Books

What was his end? Not mechanical, scientific
theories, that was clear. Not mere realistic descrip
tion of life. He told me he had little faith in mere ob
servation, except for comic or quaint characterization.
He had seldom if ever studied a serious character from
a model. One woman he invented entirely (was it
Tess?) and she was thought to be his best. What,
then, was this essence which the novelist, growing old,
would convey now in concentrated form by poetry
which to him, so he said, was story-telling in verse.

It is easier to understand what he meant if one
thinks how definitely Hardy belongs to his age, the lat
ter nineteenth century, in spite of his Teachings for
ward. On the one hand, his very gentleness is charac
teristic of a period that was above all others humane.
On the other, his somber moods sprang from a genera
tion that was the first to understand the implications
of the struggle for life in the animal world all about
them. They, to be sure, deduced from what they saw
a vague theory of evolution in which the best (who
were themselves) somehow were to come out best hi
the end. He, though gentle as they were, deduced
nothing so cheerful, saw rather the terrible discrepan
cies between fact and theory, so that his very gentle
ness made him pessimistic, where Browning was op
timistic. Then, like Hawthorne in the generation be
fore him, Hardy went back to an earlier, simpler life
than his own, and there made his inquiries. Haw
thorne, who did not accept the theology of Puritanism,
was yet strangely troubled by the problem of sin.

The Novelist of Pity 273

Hardy, accepting the implacability of evolution with
out its easy optimism, was intensely moved to pity.
This is his open secret.

The clearest statement is in his poetry, where again
and again, in our conversation that day, he seemed to
be placing it — most of all, I think, in "The Dynasts."

"The Dynasts" was published too soon. We Eng
lish speakers, in 1904-1906, were beginning to read
plays again, under the stimulus of a dramatic revival,
and the plays we read were successful on the stage.
As I recollect the criticism of "The Dynasts," much
of it at least was busied with the form of the drama,
its great length and unwieldiness. We thought of it
not as a dramatic epic, but as a dramatized novel — a
mistake. We thought that Hardy was taking the long
way around, when in truth he had found a short cut
to his issues. That "The Dynasts," considering the
vastness of its Napoleonic subject, was far more con
cise, more direct, clearer than his novels, did not be
come manifest, although the sharper-eyed may have
seen it.

In "The Dynasts" I find all of Hardy. The Im
manent Will is God, as Hardy conceives Him, neither
rational nor entirely conscious, frustrating His own
seeming ends, without irony and without compassion,
and yet perhaps evolving like His world, clearing like
men's visions, moving towards consistency. The Sin
ister Angel and the Ironic Angel are moods well known
to Hardy, but not loved by him. The Spirit of the
Years that sees how poor human nature collides with

274 Men and Their Books

accident, or the inevitable, and is bruised, is Hardy's
reasoned philosophy. The Spirit of Pities (not always,
as he says, logical or consistent) is Hardy's own desire,
his will, his faint but deep-felt hope. I quote, from the
very end of the great spectacle, some lines in which the
Spirits, who have watched the confused tragedy of the
Napoleonic age, sum up their thoughts:

AFTER SCENE

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Thus doth the Great Foresightless mechanize
Its blank entrancement now as evermore
Its ceaseless artistries in circumstance. . . .
Yet seems this vast and singular confection
Wherein our scenery glints of scantest size,
Inutile all — so far as reasonings tell.

SPIRIT OF PITIES

Thou arguest still the Inadvertent Mind. —
But, even so, shall blankness be for aye? . . .

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
What wouldst have hoped and had the Will to be? . . .

SEMI-CHORUS I OF THE PITIES

Nay; — shall not Its blindness break?
Yea, must not Its heart awake,

Promptly tending

To Its mending
In a genial germing purpose, and for loving-kindness' sake?

The Novelist of Pity 27$

SEMI-CHORUS II

Should It never
Curb or cure
Aught whatever
Those endure

Whom It quickens, let them darkle to extinction swift and
sure.

CHORUS

But — a stirring thrills the air
Like to sounds of joyance there
That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts

that were,

Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashions all things
fair!

The Spirit of the Years (which is another name for
Hardy's reflections upon life and history) planned in
sad conviction of the "blank entrancement" of the
Great Foresightless Will, those sad narratives in which
innocence, as in "Tess of the d'Ubervilles," is crushed,
or vivid personality frustrated, as in "The Return of
the Native." It is the Spirit of Pities in Hardy which
wrote the stories. Philosophy constructed them, but
pity worked them out.

The characters that Hardy loved — Grace, Marty
South, Jude, Tess — are life, brooding, intense, poten
tial, and lovely, struggling against a fate which they

276 Men and Their Books

help to draw upon themselves, but which is, neverthe
less, not necessary, not rational. The cruelty of this
fate he assumes and depicts, but the stories are not
told to describe it. It is his creatures that get the
color, the interest; they are valuable to us, and would
be to him, whatever the truth of his philosophy. But
because he loves life, the living thing, even the lizard
in the woods, he broods upon their frustrations.

Pessimistic Hardy is, as any gentle heart would be
who chose to study misfortune; yet pessimist is not
the right term for him. Realist he is clearly, in the
philosophic sense of one who is willing to view things
as they are without prejudice. I seek a term for a
mild spirit who sees clearly that the sufferer is more
intelligible than his fate, and so is pitiful even when
most ruthless in the depiction of misfortune. Pity for
the individual, not despair of the race, is his motive.
And pity makes his gentle style, pity makes him re
gardless of artifice, and gives his often clumsy novels
an undercurrent which sweeps them beyond technical
masterpieces whose only merit is sharpness of thought.
It is instructive to compare the relative fortunes of
Hardy and Meredith, once always bracketed — the
apostle of pity in comparison with the most subtle and
brilliant mind of his time. Hardy has outranked him.

Already it begins to appear that the inconsistent,
half-conscious Will that was the sum and substance of
Hardy's pessimism was given certain attributes of
gloom that scarcely belonged to it. The ruthless strug
gle for life by which the fittest for the circumstances

The Novelist of Pity 277

of the moment, and by no means the best, survive at
the expense of the others is no longer conceived as the
clear law of human life. Science, with the rediscovery
of Mendelism and its insistence upon psychological
factors has submitted important qualifications to this
deduction which Hardy, in common with others in
tellectually honest of his age, was forced to make. But
it is not Hardy's philosophy, sound or unsound, that
counts in his art, except in so far as it casts the plan
of his stories, or sometimes, as in "Tess," or "The
Woodlanders," gives too much play to cruel accident,
and therefore an air of unreality to the tenser moments
of the plots. Our critical emphasis in the past has
been wrong. It should, to follow Hardy's own words,
be set not upon the idea, the suggested explanation of
misfortune, but upon the living creatures in his novels
and poems alike. It is the characters he wrought in
pity, and, it would appear, in hope, that make him a
great man in our modern world, although only once
did he pass beyond the bounds of his primitive Wessex.
The novelist of pity and its poet, not the spokesman
for pessimism, is the title I solicit for him.

Henry James

IT has always surprised Europeans that Henry James,
the most intellectual of modern novelists, should have
been an American; for most Europeans believe, as does
Lowes Dickinson, that we are an intelligent but an
unintellectual race. Was the fact so surprising after
all? The most thoroughgoing pessimists come from
optimistic communities. Henry James, considered as
a literary phenomenon, represented a sensitive mind's
reaction against the obviousness of the life that one
finds in most American "best sellers." I suppose that
he reacted too far. I feel sure of it when he is so un-
obvious that I cannot understand him. And yet every
American writer must feel a little proud that there was
one of our race who could make the great refusal of
popularity, sever, with those intricate pen strokes of
his, the bonds of interest that might have held the
"general reader," and write just as well as he knew
how.

Whether his novels and short stories gained by this
heroic "highbrowism," is another question. Certainly
they did not always do so. To get a million of readers
is no sure sign of greatness; but to find only thousands,
as did Henry James in his later books, is to be deplored.
In "Daisy Miller" and "The Bostonians" he was a pop
ular novelist of the best kind, a novelist who drew the

278

Henry James 279

best people to be his readers. But men read "The
Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove" because
they were skilful rather than because they were inter
esting. They were novelists' novels, like the profes
sional matinees that "stars" give on Tuesday aft
ernoons for the benefit of rivals and imitators in art.

But to stop here would be to misunderstand totally
the greatest craftsman that has come out of America.
The flat truth is that Henry James was not a novelist
at all, at least in the good, old-fashioned sense that we
usually give to the word. He was primarily a critic;
the greatest American critic since Poe. Sometimes he
criticized literature with supreme success, as in his
"Notes on Novelists" of 1914; but ordinarily he criti
cized life. His later novels are one-fifth story, one-
fifth character creation, and the rest pure criticism
of life.

There is a curious passage in his "A Small Boy and
Others" — the biography of the youth of William
James and himself — telling how as a child in the hotels
and resorts of Europe he spent his time in looking on
at what was happening about him. He never got into
the game very far, because he preferred to think about
it. That is what Henry James did all his life long. He
looked on, thought about life with that wonderfully
keen, and subtle, and humorous mind of his, turned it
into criticism; then fitted the results with enough plot
to make them move, — and there was a so-called novel.
Every one knows how in his last edition he rewrote
some of his early stories to make them more subtle. It

280 Men and Their Books

would have been amusing if he had seen fit to rewrite
them altogether as critical essays upon international
life! I wonder how much they would have suffered by
the change.

This is why so many readers have been very proud
of Henry James, and yet unable to defend him suc
cessfully against critics who pulled out handfuls of
serpentine sentences from his latest novel, asking, "Do
you call this fiction?" It was not fiction, not fiction
at least as she used to be written; it was subtle, grace
ful, cunning analysis of life. Fiction is synthesis-
building up, making a Becky Sharp, inventing a Meg
Merrilies, constructing a plot. Criticism is analysis —
taking down. Henry James was not so good at putting
together as at taking to pieces. He was able in one art,
but in the other he was great.

The current tendency to make every new figure in
world literature conform to Greatness of a recognized
variety or be dismissed, is unfortunate and mislead
ing. We are to be congratulated that the greatness of
Henry James was of a peculiar and irregular kind, a
keen, inventing greatness, American in this if in noth
ing else. Unnumbered writers of the day, of whom
Mr. Kipling is not the least eminent, have profited by
his influence, and learned from him to give the final,
subtle thought its final form. If that form in his own
case was tortuous, intricate, difficult, why so was the
thought. If it makes hard reading, his subject at least
got hard thinking. Before you condemn that curious
style of his — so easy to parody, so hard to imitate —

Henry James 281

ask whether such refinement of thought as his could
be much more simply expressed. Sometimes he could
have been simpler, undoubtedly; it was his fault that
he did not care to be; but that "plain American" would
usually have served his purpose, is certainly false.

Henry James must yield first honors as a novelist, it
may be, to others of his century if not of his genera
tion. As a writer, above all as a writer of fine, im
aginative criticism of the intellect as it moves through
the complexities of modern civilization, he yields to
no one of our time. Whether he has earned his dis
tinction as an American writer I do not know, although
I am inclined to believe that he is more American than
the critics suspect; but as a master of English, and as
a great figure in the broad sweep of international Eng
lish literature, his place is secure.

The Satiric Rage of Butler

SAMUEL BUTLER'S "Erewhon" has passed safely into
the earthly paradise of the so-called classics. It has
been recommended by distinguished men of letters, re
printed and far more widely read than on its first ap
pearance; it has passed, by quotation and reference,
into contemporary literature, and been taught in col
lege classes. "Erewhon Revisited," written thirty
years after "Erewhon," is less well known.

Mr. Moreby Acklom (whose name, let me assure
the suspicious reader, is his own and not an Ere-
whonian inversion), in a most informing preface to a
new edition, makes two assertions which may serve as
my excuse for again endeavoring to explain the fasci
nation for our generation of the work of Samuel Butler.
College professors, he avers, have an antipathy for
Samuel Butler; the chief interest of Butler, he further
states, was in theology. Now I am a college professor
without antipathy to Samuel Butler, with, on the con
trary, the warmest admiration for his sardonic genius.
And furthermore Butler's antipathy for college pro
fessors, which is supposed to have drawn their fire in
return, is based upon a ruling passion far deeper than
his accidental interest in theology, a passion that gives
the tone and also the key to the best of his writings

282

The Satiric Rage of Butler 283

and which brought him into conflict with the "vested
interests" of his times. It is his passion for honest
thinking. If Butler's mark had been theology merely,
his books would have passed with the interest in his
target. He would be as difficult reading to-day as
Swift in his "Tale of a Tub."

Like most of the great satirists of the world, Butler's
saeva indignatio was aroused by the daily conflicts be
tween reason and stupidity, between candor and dis-
ingenuousness, with all their mutations of hypocrisy,
guile, deceit, and sham. In "Erewhon" it was human
unreason, as a clever youth sees it, that he was attack
ing. We remember vividly the beautiful Erewhonians,
who knew disease to be sin, but believed vice to be
only disease. We remember the "straighteners" who
gave moral medicine to the ethically unwell, the musi
cal banks, the hypothetical language, the machines that
threatened to master men; as in the war of 1914-1918
and in the industrial system of to-day they have mas
tered men and made them their slaves. There was a
youthful vigor in "Erewhon," a joyous negligence as
to where the blow should fall, a sense of not being re
sponsible for the world the author flicked with his
lash, which saved the book from the condemnation that
would have been its fate had the Victorians taken it
seriously. It was an uneven book, beginning with vivid
narrative in the best tradition of Defoe, losing itself
finally in difficult argument, and cut short in mid-
career.

"Erewhon Revisited" is much better constructed.

284 Men and Their Books

The old craftsman has profited by his years of labor
in the British Museum. He has a story to tell, and tells
it, weighting it with satire judiciously, as a fisherman
weights his set line. If his tale becomes unreal it is
only when he knows the author is ready to hear the
author in person. If the Erewhon of his first visit
does not fit his new conception he ruthlessly changes
it. One misses the satiric tours de force of the first
"Erewhon." There is nothing so brilliant as the chap
ters on disease and machines which for fifty years since
life has been illustrating. But "Erewhon Revisited" is
a finished book; it has artistic unity.

And why does Butler revisit Erewhon? Not be
cause he was trained as a priest and must have an ex
cuse to rediscuss theology, although the story of the
book suggests this explanation. Higgs, the mysterious
stranger of "Erewhon," who escaped by a balloon, has
become a subject for myth. In Erewhon he is de
clared the child of the sun. Miracles gather about the
supreme miracle of his air-born departure. His "Say
ings," a mixture of Biblical quotation and homely
philosophy, strained through Erewhonian intellects,
become a new ethics and a new theology. His clothes
are adopted for national wear (although through un
certainty as to how to put them on one part of the
kingdom goes with buttons and pockets behind).
Sunchildism becomes the state religion. The musical
banks, which had been trading in stale idealism, take
it over and get new life; and the professors of Bridge-
ford, the intellectuals of the kingdom, capitalize it, as

The Satiric Rage of Butler 285

we say to-day, and thus tighten their grip on the pub
lic's mind and purse.

Butler's purpose is transparent. It is not, as Long
mans, who refused the work, believed, to attack Chris
tianity. It is rather to expose the ease with which a
good man and his message (Higgs brought with him
to Erewhon evangelical Christianity) can become
miraculous, can become an instrument for politics and
a cause of sham. Indeed, Butler says in so many words
to the Anglicans of his day: "Hold fast to your Chris
tianity, for false as it is it is better than what its ene
mies would substitute; but go easy with the miracu
lous, the mythical, the ritualistic. These 'tamper with
the one sure and everlasting word of God revealed to
us by human experience/ "

All this is permanent enough, but I cannot believe,
as most commentators do, that it is the heart of the
book; or if it is the heart of the book, it is not its fire.
The satiric rage of Butler, who in the person of Higgs
returns to Erewhon to find himself deified, does not fall
upon the fanatic worshipers of the sunchild, nor even
upon the musical banks who have grown strong through
his cult. It kindles for the ridiculous Hanky and
Panky, professors respectively of worldly wisdom and
worldly unwisdom at Bridgeford, and hence, according
to Mr. Acklom, the antipathy toward Butler of all col
lege professors.

But it is not because they are professors that Butler
hates Hanky and Panky; it is because they represent
that guaranteed authority which in every civilization

286 Men and Their Books

can and does exploit the passions and the weaknesses
of human nature for its own material welfare. Butler
had been conducting a lifelong warfare against
scholars who defended the status quo of the church
and against scientists who were consolidating a
strategic (and remunerative) position for themselves
in the universities. He saw, or thought he saw, Eng
lish religion milked for the benefit of Oxford and Cam
bridge graduates needful of "livings"; and Darwinism
and the new sciences generally being swept into the
maw of the same professionally intellectual class. A
free lance himself, with a table in the British Museum,
some books and a deficit instead of an income from his
intellectual labors, he attacked the vested interests of
his world.

He exposed the dangers which wait upon all miracu
lous religions, the shams which they give birth to. But
not because he was obsessed with theology. If he
had lived in the nineteen hundreds he would have
studied, I think, sociology and economics instead of
theology and biology. He would have attacked, in
England, the House of Lords instead of Oxford, and
had an eye for the intellectuals who are beginning to
sway the mighty power of the labor unions. He would
have been a Radical-Conservative and voted against
both the British Labor party and the Coalition. In
America he would have lashed the trusts, execrated the
Anti-Saloon League, admired and been exasperated by
Mr. Wilson, hated the Republican party, and probably
have voted for it lest worse follow its defeat. He would

The Satiric Rage of Butler 287

have been, in short, a liberal of a species very much
needed just now in America, a bad party man, de
structive rather than constructive, no leader, but a
satirist when, God knows, we need one for the clearing
of our mental atmosphere.

And unless I am wrong throughout this brief analy
sis, Samuel Butler, who mentally and spiritually is
essentially our contemporary, would not, if he were
writing now, concern himself with theology at all,
but with the shams and unreasons which are the vested
tyrannies set over us to-day. Erewhon, when we last
hear of it, is about to become a modern colonial state.
Its concern is with an army and with economics.
Chow-Bok, the savage, now become a missionary
bishop, is about to administer its ecclesiastical system.
Its spiritual problems no longer center upon the
validity of miraculous tradition and the logic of a
theological code. But the vested interests (repre
sented by Pocus, the son of Hanky) remain. These
Butler would attack in the needed fashion. These re
main the enemy.

VII

Conclusion

Defining the Indefinable

I AM well aware that literature or even such an incon
siderable part of literature as this gay book on my desk
or the poem on the printed page, as a whole is indefin
able. Every critic of literature from Aristotle down
has let some of it slip between his fingers. If he de
scribes the cunning form of a play or a story, then the
passion in it, or the mood behind it, eludes him. If he
defines the personality of the writer, the art which
makes all the difference between feeling and expres
sion escapes definition. No ten philosophers yet agree
as to whether beauty is an absolute quality, or simply
an attribute of form, whether a poem is beautiful be
cause it suggests and approaches an archetype, or
whether it is beautiful because it perfectly expresses
its subject.

And yet when the ambition to explain and describe
and define everything is humbly set aside there re
mains a good honest job for the maker of definitions,
and it is a job that can be done. I may not be able to
tell what art is, but I can tell what it isn't. I may
fail to make a formula for literature, but I can try at
least to tell what Thomas Hardy has chiefly accom
plished, define Conrad's essential quality, point out
the nature of romantic naturalism, and distinguish be
tween sentiment and sentimentality. And if such

291

292 Conclusion

things were ever worth doing they are worth doing now.

Only a prophet dares say that we are at the begin
ning of a great creative period in the United States,
but any open-eyed observer can see that an era of
American literary criticism is well under way. The
war, which confused and afterward dulled our think
ing, stirred innumerable critical impulses, which are
coming to the surface, some like bubbles and others
like boils, but some as new creations of the American
intellect. The new generation has shown itself acri
moniously critical. It slaps tradition and names its
novels and poetry as Adam named the animals in the
garden, out of its own imagination. The war shook it
loose from convention, and like a boy sent away to
college, its first impulse is to disown the Main Street
that bore it. Youth of the go's admired its elders and
imitated them unsuccessfully. Youth of the nineteen
twenties imitates France and Russia of the yo's, and
contemporary England. It may eventually do more
than the go's did with America; in the meantime,
while it flounders in the attempt to create, it is at least
highly critical. Furthermore, the social unrest, begin
ning before the war and likely to outlast our time, has
made us all more critical of literature. Mark Twain's
"Yankee in King Arthur's Court" turned the milk of
Tennyson's aristocratic "Idylls" sour. The deep drawn
undercurrent of socialistic thinking urges us toward a
new consideration of all earlier writing, to see what may
be its social significance. The "churl," the "hind," the

Defining the Indefinable 293

"peasant," the "first servant" and "second country
man," who were the mere transitions of earlier stories
now are central in literature. They come with a chal
lenge, and when we read Galsworthy, Wells, Sinclair,
Dreiser, Hardy's "The Dynasts," Bennett — we are con
scious of criticizing life as we read. The pale cast of
thought has sicklied modern pages. The more serious
works of art are also literary criticism.

Again, there is the mingling of the peoples, greatest
of course in America. Our aliens used to be sub
servient to the national tradition. They went about
becoming rich Americans and regarded the Anglo-
American culture as a natural phenomenon, like the
climate, to which after a while they would accustom
themselves. Their children were born in it. But now
it is different. The Jews particularly, who keep an
Oriental insistence upon logic even longer than a racial
appearance, have passed the acquisitive stage and be
gin to throw off numerous intellectuals, as much at
home in English as their fellow Americans, but criti
cal of the American emotions, and the American way
of thinking, as only a brain formed by different tradi
tions can be. Soon the Mediterranean races domiciled
here will pass into literary expressiveness. It is as im
possible that we should not have criticism of the
national tradition expressed in our literature as that
an international congress should agree upon questions
of ethics or religion.

And of course the new internationalism, which is far
more vigorous than appears on the surface, favors such

294 Conclusion

criticism. The war brought America and Europe two
thousand miles closer, and the habit of interest in what
Europeans are thinking, once acquired, is not likely to
be lost. No American writer of promise can hope now
to escape comparison with the literatures of Western
Europe, and comparison means a new impulse to
criticism.

Fundamental, creative criticism — like Sainte-
Beuve's, Matthew Arnold's, Walter Pater's, like Dry-
den's, Brunettere's, De Gourniont's, or Croce's — will
presumably come. The conditions, both of publication
and of audience, are ripe for it now in the United
States. But there is a good deal of spade work in the
study of literature to be done first, and still more edu
cation of the reading American mind. One reason why
Lowell was not a great critic was because his scholar
ship was defective, or, to put it more fairly, because
the scholarship of his contemporaries, with whose
knowledge he might have buttressed his own, was in
complete. And if a twentieth century Sainte-Beuve
should begin to write for general American readers, it
is doubtful whether they would accept his premises.
Says the intellectual, why should he write for the gen
eral public? I answer that if he writes for coteries
only, if he is disdainful of the intelligent multitude, he
will never understand them, and so will not compre
hend the national literature which it is his function to
stimulate, interpret, and guide.

The spade work of criticism is research, investiga
tion into the facts of literature and into its social back-

Defining the Indefinable 295

ground. The scholar is sometimes, but not often, a
critic. He finds out what happened, and often why
it happened. He analyzes, but he does not usually
make a synthesis. He writes history, but he cannot
prophesy, and criticism is prophecy implied or direct.
Few outside the universities realize the magnitude of
American research into literature, even into American
literature, which has been relatively neglected. A
thousand spades have been at work for a generation.
We are getting the facts, or we are learning how to
get them.

But before we may expect great criticism we must
educate our public, and ourselves, in that clear vision
of what is and what is not, which from Aristotle down
has been the preliminary to criticism. A humble, but
a useful, way to begin is by definition.

I use definition in no pedantic sense. I mean, in
general, logical definition where the class or genus of
the thing to be described — whether best-selling novel
or sentimental tendency — is first made clear, and then
its differentia, its differences from the type analyzed
out and assorted. But this process in literature cannot
be as formal as logic. Good literature cannot be bound
by formulas. Yet when a poem charged with hot emo
tion, or a story that strays into new margins of experi
ence, is caught and held until one can compare it with
others, see the curve on which it is moving, guess its
origin and its aim, forever after it becomes easier to
understand, more capable of being thought about and
appreciated. And when the current of taste of some

296 Conclusion

new generation that overflows conventions and washes
forward, or backward, into regions long unlaved, is
viewed as a current, its direction plotted, its force esti
mated, its quality compared, why that is definition,
and some good will come of it.

Some general definition of that intellectual emotion
which we call good reading is especially needed in
America. Most of us, if we are native born, have been
educated by a set of literary conventions arranged in
convenient categories. That is more or less true of all
literary education, but it is particularly true in the
United States, where the formal teaching of English
literature per se began, where, as nowhere else in the
world, there was a great and growing population eager
to become literate and with no literary traditions be
hind it. The student from a bookless home learned to
think of his literature as primarily something to be
studied; the teacher who had to teach thousands like
him was forced to reduce living literature to dead
categories in order that a little of it at least should be
taught. Thousands of Americans, therefore, of our
generation emerged from their training with a set of
literary definitions which they assumed to be true and
supposed to be culture. Only true definitions of what
literature really is can break up such fossilized de
fining.

On the other hand, that large proportion of our best
reading population which is not native in its traditions
offers a different but equally important problem. How

Defining the Indefinable 297

can the son of a Russian Jew, whose father lived in a
Russian town, who himself has been brought up in
clamorous New York, understand Thoreau, let us say,
or John Muir, or Burroughs, or Willa Gather, without
some denning of the nature of the American environ
ment and the relation between thought and the soil?
How is an intelligent German-American, whose cultural
tradition has been thoroughly Teutonic, to make him
self at home in a literature whose general character,
like its language, is English, without some denning of
the Anglo-American tradition? Lincoln must be de
fined for him; Milton must be defined for him; most
of all perhaps Franklin must be defined for him. I
have chosen elementary examples, but my meaning
should be sufficiently clear.

And the American critic — by which I mean you, O
discriminating reader, as well as the professional who
puts pen to paper — is equally in need of the art of
definition. The books we read and write are on differ
ent planes of absolute excellence or unworthiness.
There is — to take the novel — the story well calculated
to pass a pleasant hour but able to pass nothing else;
there is the story with a good idea in it and worth
reading for the idea only; there is the story worthless
as art but usefully catching some current phase of ex
perience; and there is the fine novel which will stand
any test for insight, skill, and truth. Now it is folly
to apply a single standard to all these types of story.
It can be done, naturally, but it accomplishes nothing
except to eliminate all but the shining best. That is

298 Conclusion

a task for history. In the year in which we live — and
it is sometimes necessary to remind the austerer critic
that we always live in the present — there are a hun
dred books, of poetry, of essays, of biography, of fic
tion, which are by no means of the first rank and yet
are highly important, if only as news of what the world,
in our present, is thinking and feeling. They cannot
be judged, all of them, on the top plane of perfect ex
cellence; and if we judge them all on any other plane,
good, better, best get inextricably mixed.

For example, consider once more a novel which at
the moment of this writing is a best-seller, and which
with reference to its popularity I have discussed in an
earlier essay. I mean Mr. Hutchinson's "If Winter
Comes." This book is essentially the tragedy of a
good and honest soul thrown by harsh circumstance
into an environment which is bound to crush him. He
has the wrong wife, he has the wrong business associ
ates, the girl he loves is separated from him by moral
barriers. If he breaks through these he injures irrepar
ably his own sense of what is due to his God and his
fellow man. His instincts of charity, humor, and love
rebound upon him. He is too Christian for England,
and too guileless for life. This is a worthy theme, and
yet if we judge this novel on the highest plane it fails
miserably. For Mr. Hutchinson stacks the cards. He
gives his hero his way and his salvation, after much
suffering, by a series of lucky accidents. He destroys
the problem he creates, by forging an answer.

But this novel should not be finally judged on the

Defining the Indefinable 299

highest plane. It is not a tragedy, it is a romance. It
belongs on the plane below, the plane of stories told to
meet the secret desires of humanity, which have little
to do with reality, and are quite oblivious to fact. On
this plane "If Winter Comes" ranks highly, for it is
poignantly told, there is life in its characters, and truth
in the best of its scenes. Definition saves us from call
ing a good novel great; it spares us the unnecessary
error of calling a good and readable story bad because
it is not a triumph of consistent art.

It is hard enough in all conscience to see that a given
book is good for this but not good for that; may be
praised for its plot, but certainly has not character
enough to get long life. But when the difficulty of
adjusting standards is increased by the irresponsible
hullabaloo of commercial appreciation, no wonder that
sensible people estimate foolishly, and critics of stand
ing are induced to write for publication remarks that
some day will (or should) make them sick. For the
publishers' "blurb" confuses all standards. Every
book is superlative in everything. And the hack re
viewer, when he likes a book, likes everything and ap
plies Shakespearian adjectives and Tolstoyan at
tributes to creatures of dust and tinsel, or blunders
helplessly into dispraise of scholarship, restraint, sub
tlety, taste, originality — anything that he does not un
derstand.

There is no help except to set books upon their planes
and assort them into their categories — which is merely
to define them before beginning to criticize. This is

300 Conclusion

elementary work as I have said, which may lead the
critic only so far as the threshold, and cannot always
give the reader that complete and sympathetic compre
hension of what he has read which is the final object
of literary criticism. However, in an age when over
emphasis has been commercialized, and where the
powerful forces of print can be mobilized and sent
charging everywhere to bowl down contrary opinions,
it is indispensable.

Scholarly books have been dispraised because they
were not exciting; fine novels have been sneered at be
cause they were hard to read; cheap stories have been
proclaimed great because they wore a pretense of seri
ousness; sentimentality has been welcomed because it
was warm hearted; indecency has been condemned for
immorality; immorality has slipped through as ro
mance; daring has been mistaken for novelty; pains
taking dulness, for careful art; self-revelation, for
world knowledge; pretty writing, for literature; vio
lence, for strength; and warped and unhealthy egoism
for the wise sincerity which is the soul of literature.
In all such instances definition is the prophylactic, and
often the cure.

Writers, most of all, need to define their tasks. I
do not mean their technical problems merely, although
I cannot conceive that a dramatist or playwright, who
has his subject well in mind, can possibly be hurt by
thinking out his methods with the most scrupulous
care. Lubbock's recent book on "The Craft of Fic
tion" has emphasized an art of approach and point of

Defining the Indefinable 301

view in the great novelists which was thoroughly con
scious, even though they may never have tried to for
mulate it in words. I mean particularly the defining
of their themes, their objectives. Many modern novels
of the better class, and a great many modern poems,
seem to me awash and wallowing like derelicts on the
high seas. They are successful enough in this, excel
lent in that, but they get nowhere, because the writers
had felt the emotion that made them, or suffered the
experience, but never defined it in terms of all emotion,
all experience, never considered its end. The three
dots ... of modern literature are significant. We
break off our efforts, partly no doubt because we seek
effects of impressionism, more often because imagina
tion went no further. Near things are sharp and ex
pressed with remarkable vividness, ultimate objectives
are blurred, which is to say, they lack definition.

May the shades of Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Em
erson, and all great individualists protect us from bad
definitions, and especially from rigid or formal ones!
Bad definitions destroy themselves, for if they are
thoroughly bad no one believes them, and if they con
tain those pleasing half truths which a generation loves
to suckle upon, why then after their vogue they will
wither into nothingness. Such definitions are of the
letter, and die by it, but stiff, clumsy definitions kill
the spirit. To define a great man by a rigid formula is
to sink to the lowest practice of the worst class rooms.
To define a tendency so sharply that it cannot flow

302 Conclusion

without breaking the definition, is a lecturer's trick
for which audiences should stone him. Solemn gen
eralizations which squat upon a book like an ostrich on
a goose egg and hatch out vast moral philosophies are
to be dreaded like the devil, as are, equally, the critics
with pet theories, who, having defined them, make
everything from a squib to an epic fit their definition.

Definitions which classify without margins are a
special evil: the division into literature and journalism
for example, with no allowance for interlocking; or the
confident separation of all books into categories of good
or bad. Wholesale definitions are also objectionable,
where having defined a poem as magazine verse, or a
collection of articles as a magazine, or a book as a sex
story, or a man as a journalist, or a tendency as erratic
or erotic, you think you have said something. May
the muse of clear thinking, and the little humorous
gods who keep the sense of proportion balancing, pro
tect us from these also.

It occurs to me that I have made but a lame attempt
to define definition. This, however, is as it should be.
For definition, in the sense in which I am using it, like
literature, has much of the indefinable. It is a tool
merely, or better still, because broader, a device by
which the things we enjoy and that profit us may be
placed in perspective, ranged, compared, sorted, and
distinguished. It is what Arnold meant by seeing
steadily and seeing whole. It is the scientist's micro
scope that defines relationship, and equally the paint
er's brush that by a touch reveals the hidden shapes

Defining the Indefinable 303

of nature and the blend of colors. It is, like these in
struments, a means and not an end. May pedants,
scholiasters, formalists, and dilettantes take to heart
this final description of literary definition!

Quite unconsciously for the most part, but occasion
ally with purpose aforethought, the essays in this book
have been written as literary definitions. Its unity lies
in the attempt, which at least has been sincere, to
grasp, turn, study in a serious, humorous, ironical, any
thing but a flippant mood, the living forms of literature
as they have risen into consciousness and challenged
definition.

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