Introduction
Wearied alike of the sea and the consciousness of her own sophistication, the fairest of all readers dropped her book on the deck.
The man beside her picked it up.
" An old one? " he said. " As old as— that? "
"Why not?"
" There are so many new ones."
" So many, yes ; but new, no."
" You think they can all say, with the returning spirits of men : ' We have been here before ' ? "
" Precisely."
" There remains," he smiled, " the Marconigram for the day. Shall I get it for you? "
" Not for — oceans ! If there is one thing more unoriginal than our literature it is our newspapers."
Whereupon he left her still staring, sophisticated and therefore sad, into the sea, while he communed with himself upon the melancholy case of those who know so much of literature as it is in covers that they cannot find the literature that is in the life about them.
For to those who have eyes and minds to see, the passing hours present such stuff as makes ridiculous the poverty of invention in our modern authors.
One lady of our Central Park Faubourg may choose to exercise her prose and our patience by Jacobite imitations ; this author may re-write the works of Mile, de la Ramee, substituting chauffeurs for guardsmen ; and other wordmongering opportunists may re-tell all the sagas of the vikings with money-bags taking the place of brawn. Granted that all this may make for some disgust, yet we should by no means despair. Invention may dry in those whose metier invention should be ; still is life daily, hourly, coining such material as more than makes up for the fountains that are drained.
The plots, so the tired folk tell us, were all used long ago ; we may find novel variants ; nothing more. There are only so many stories in the world, and most of them unfit to print. And they throw down upon the deck, or the desk, or the drawing-room floor, the disgusting ineptitude of the moment.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, the Man in the Street, if only he knew it, may enjoy from the varicolored life of our town and our time, the most wonderful of literary entertainments. Always, if one would keep one's balance in the world, one must bear in mind that Man in the Street. The moment one shuts the door against him, in any of the arts, one enters a shut chamber, where nothing real can long live, and where one must oneself, sooner or later, die the living death of the scholiast, the theorist or the mere mechanician. You may safely let go, perhaps, both the simple life and the simple spelling, the more so as they become shibboleths and so lose their simplicity ; but you cannot safely let go the Man in the Street. If you do let him go, he finds you out soon enough ; it is not your literature that will satisfy him then; it is only life itself, the life from which your closet-door has shut you.
" Literature," says the small mind that is not yet out of the shibboleth stage, " is my life." When that small mind begins to grow, if ever it does, it finds out that literature, especially to the specialist therein, must, to be at its grandest, play but a tiny role in the cosmic Scheme.
The great masters in all the arts have so builded that in their lives the details of paint, of rhyme, of prose, of tone, have been — but details.
We must all, if we would be worth anything more than the hissing of froth in a pot, look upon life in the large, upon art in the little. In having, however, unconsciously, that large unthinking outlook, the Man in the Street is vastly better off, vastly more fitted to pass judgment, than is the horde of petty pessimists who at times bewail the unoriginality of all things written.
Looking always on the present, as oblivious of the past as is his newspaper, the Man in the Street finds daily the most stimulating feast of Things that Happen. It is in the things that happen — ay, and even in those chronicles of them, the newspapers — that we may find, with the Man in the Street, the optimism of which our hours spent with printed books may have deprived us.
Where, on what shelf bearing the confessions of Jean Jacques, of Marie Bashkirtseff, of Prosper Merimee's Unknown, of the Portuguese Nun, or even of George Moore, will you find anything more poignant than the letters of " Billy Brown " ? This was a young girl in the State of New York whose lover was convicted, some years ago, of having drowned her; if you have already forgotten those letters it is proof that you do not know literature when you see it. What Flaubert ever surpassed the story of Evelyn Thaw? To discover that soul would surely have taken a still greater microscopist than the author of Emma Bovary. To the Man in the Street, in this town and that, both these were figures so typical, so real, that he knew them as we know an old hat. There they were : shapes of real life, that one could see and hear and touch. Familiarity breeds no contempt in the more primitive of us ; about lives so familiar as these the Man in the Street finds their very nearness the most efficacious glamour.
If we decry the stories of this sort as just common, every-day stories of the town, we deny, so doing, our own sense of humanity. Such stories, such lives, are to the forms of literature what some slang phrases are to language, the vitalising elements. If literature really depended on the sterile inventive faculties of professional authors, it would indeed be in poor case. Minimize the melodramatic as the most timid or the most artistically sophisticated of us will, in real life things do happen, and in real life also, despite the bewildering verbiage of the newspapers, things do get written.
Common stories of the town, you say again, — you, sophisticated ones, on sea or land — and you say they are as old as are womankind and mankind. True, exactly true; the womankind and the mankind that jostle us hourly are what, if we be human rather than divine, must interest us more vitally than any other womankind or mankind in any other space of time.
It is only as we are human that we can have interest for men or for gods.
If I venture to believe that the general reader may find interest in this book, which is to be chiefly about literature, it is because I know that my being a critic has never prevented my being human. Unfalteringly mine has been the attitude of one human being discussing the humanities with other human beings. If you prefer scholastic utterances from the closet, this is not the book for you. A critical career that has surveyed the printed wheat and chaff of a score or so of years has not driven me to either the closet or the cloister; it is too late to begin the grand Olympian manner ; for that you must go elsewhere.
To have conserved one's humanity throughout a considerable critical activity is surely somethng of an achievement. Humanity has meant for me optimism, and optimism so impatient of aught save the best that the thoughtless will probably call it pessimism. You will have plenty of opportunity, in the following pages, to decide for yourself. What I am now concerned about driving home to you is that this candid statement of much that is wrong with American literature is by one who has its welfare at heart, one who, in his warfare against things as they are, has always fought in the open, one who pretends to no sort of distinction save that of being able to see clearly and of not being afraid to speak boldly.
You may see, in these pages, many blows struck. All of them will have seemed deserved, and all meant right heartily. My enemies were made long ago ; if this book do nothing else than assure them of my continuing disesteem it will have achieved a success that I shall not despise. Temperamentally I have never been able to distinguish the murder from the murderer; denouncing a crime against literature has never seemed to me so efficacious, or so honest, as denouncing the criminal. If I seem peculiar in that viewpoint, it is because a majority of our critics have been too fond of compromise, too time-serving, to keep the general public on anything like familiar terms with the truth. It is the truth you will find in this book, as I see it. To many men many different things are represented by the word truth; I do not pretend for a moment to give you your notion of truth, or even an abstract, impersonal notion of it. For this, above all else, you are to remember, if you are to come with me at all, on the critical excursion that follows : these are my personal impressions. They pretend to nothing else. If you want the fine impersonal attitude, this is not the shop for you; you will find plenty of others to supply the article. As you will find hereinafter set forth more explicitly, my theory and practice of critisism have never found the slightest value in what was not an individual expression of an individual opinion.
You will find out, soon enough, whether behind these personal opinions of mine there is such personality as to justify my labor in writing and your patience in reading this book. It has seemed to be worth doing because it is something that nobody else has thought fit to do ; the generally accepted critical attitude is the complacent one that avers all to be well with the world and supposes none to be fool enough either to doubt or to cavil. If the suggestion that the book be one with a purpose is like to frighten you off, let me hasten to assure you that it has no other purpose than that of recording a critical career that has led neither to riches nor to fame, but has left me with my eyes and my enthusiasm still open, my humanity still unsoured. There will be many indictments brought, many idols shaken. You are quite at liberty to say that these are evidently the frothings of a failure; you may fling phrases at me, teaching that criticism is the last resort of impotent aspirations ; you shall by nothing diminish the esteem in which I hold myself. Who else should hold me in esteem if I despise myself? Were we not talking of Truth? Let us lay our cards on the table then ; what the points on my cards tell is that these are my personal impressions, put before you as vividily as possible, for you to take or to leave.
I mean to put as clearly as possible what seem to me the Case of American Letters and its Causes. The conclusions have been reached after a good many years of uninterrupted work in critical survey of current letters. To point the argument it has often been necessary to invade the field of Letters in England, and even in tongues other than English; but throughout these pages the central theme is never lost sight of. That same central theme, harboring an honest belief in the decent welfare of Literature in America, has ever been mine in the contributions I have made in years past to our critical periodicals. What is perishable in a periodical, however, need not be so in a book ; so, believing in the greater permanence possible to these present pages, I am taking such pains in preparing my reader now as I never thought fit to take in all the years that I have been writing, mostly anonymously, for the reviews. Into the heart of my contention the reader can plunge soon enough, what I wish to prepare him about is the sort of person the contender is.
Upon the process of the birth or manufacture of poets you shall learn nothing from me, since there is little poetic in me, save perhaps a youthfulness that is an unconscionable time a-dying. Nor can I inform you about the generality of critics, whether born or made, whether like Topsy a growth, or like tenors a disease. My own critical concerns are quite enough trouble to me. I foresee plenty of opportunities for leading the reader into bypaths of personality, of anecdote and experience other than literary ; time enough for all that ; time, now and here, only to insist that, just as no man is altogether bad, so is he not always a critic, nor ever exclusively a critic. Even a critic may live in the philosophy of Candide, and, as each year passes, interpret " II faut cultiver notre jar din " more and more literally ; yet the dunces of our day need not take heart too blithely, since such critic can easily stop pruning a Malmaison and take to cudgeling their maladroitness.
Enough of perorating. If you care for personal impressionism, for a hearty prejudice or so, and even for a little passion, you may find something to interest you. If you believe in the impersonal attitude toward literature, and if you are fond of academic standards, I would bid you good-day; we are not of the same kidney; you would not read me if I cajoled you until Doomsday.
Let us get to our Case.
Chapter One
The case of pure literature in America is comparable to the case of My Lady Parvenu's grand rout: crowded and worthless. Quality is utterly sacrificed for quantity. The rout comprises everybody, which to the discriminating spells Nobody. The finer sort, accidentally coming upon these scenes, must needs murmur : " Bounders, outsiders — no class ! " and proceed elsewhither. The snob may utter that remark too loud, and, so doing, lessen its force; yet even that shoddy preciosity may have its merits, for it at least tries to imitate the finer example, not the example in mere multiplication.
The ambition in both cases lies sheerly toward vast figures. In the one case it is desired to state that so many hundred covers were laid, and so many dollars spent on favors ; in the other all details are subservient to the purely commercial one of the number of books sold in a week, a month, a year. So many millions of dollars were represented at My Lady's rout; so many thousands of this or that novel were sold in such and such a period and place. Before the advance of commercialism all else retreats. Birth and breeding in the one case ; style, workmanship and originality in the other. How often is it the quality, to use that word most narrowly, of our most notorious books that we hear discussed? If we do hear books talked of, how often is not such talk the pure parrot chatter of those who think merely the thoughts of others? If one hears literature talked of at all, is it not mostly in terms of mathematics?
" Jones," we hear, " has built a ten- thousand-dollar cottage from the profits on his new serial." Or, " That new thing of Brown's has gone into six figures."
It was by no means always thus. Let us not deny the material progress we have made. The change has come in the last decade; history will have to note the fact that not until after the war with Spain did American literature, still thinking only in terms of the material, throw away entirely the leading strings that had been held in England. Year after year, before that, we saw the same thing happening, the dreary successions of imported fame, and nothing save foreign writings on our literary bargain counters. Year after year our writers seemed only to clutch the edges and fringes of anything ever so remotely resembling success. There was a success of esteem here and there, perhaps ; in thinking back to that past decade I recall some bright moments amid the gloom ; but the public — the great surging, half-educated public, that likes to parade its occasional acquaintance with the names of books and plays only to ape an appearance of intellectual sprightliness — the great
American public mostly contented itself with reading novels bearino- the hall-mark Made in Eno-land. Long and justly that supercilious question, "Who reads an American book? " rankled unanswerable. Time was when the annual count of books produced in our language showed England first, America a bad second.
Those times are no more.
'Arrogant islanders no longer ask their hateful question. We write, we print, we read, at a devouringly prosperous rate. Never before has our renublic of letters been so prosperous. Dollars are plentiful. Publishers build houses, and authors are Permitted to spread rumors of having built cottages. The presses jrroan as never thev did before — even machinprv, one opines, may have its limits in silent patience. Libraries grow merrilv where once naught flourished save the ravening morto-a^e. Though literature may not yet. be a subiect for general conversation as are -politics, crime and the theatre, vet it is not to be denied, still keeping grimly to the mathematics of the case, that more American books are written, more American books are read to-day than ever before. Indeed, if our tendency toward quantity increase at the prevailing rate, the English publishers will have to reverse the habits of other years, and turn to America for grist to supply their mills.
The mills of the gods, we are often told, grind slowly. Our publishers, then, cannot be accounted godlike, for their mills run mostly to speed and quantity. There are other essentials in which publishers differ from the gods, a difference that might afford some sombre student, of the industrious and melancholy cast, say, of the late George Gissing, material for a tragic fiction to be entitled " The Gulf." For the present purpose, however, it suffices to insist on the already stated difference between the mills of the gods and the mills of the publishers. The speed and the output of the latter increase annually. There must be no stopping of the wheels ; always it must be possible to cry out in public the name of a book that, whatever its quality, is indubitably the newest. Scarcely is one novel become what is called the rage before another crowds it out of the public memory.
If, in the present argument, mere -fiction, the mere novel, seem insisted on to the exclusion of other forms of literature, that is because the period we live in has allowed poetry and such prose as is not fiction to remain wofully subordinate. Publishers, press-agents and the public have vied with one another in spreading the superstition that " a booh " means only " a novel."
Considered commercially, as one considers the growing output of steel, or coal, or cotton, our tendency toward printing the most books in the world may have its merits. A great many more printers are doubtless earning a presumably honest — it all depends on the point of view — living than before ; the rate at which our forests are disappearing to feed the paper-mills and the printingpresses is measurably accelerated; and there must needs be a constantly growing demand for spectacles, a fine thing for the opticians and oculists. No matter how coarse the chaff, it is grist for some mill or other. The art of literature may be suffering, but a number of trades and professions are gaining; in the general computation, then, you ask, should not something be written on the profit side?
I leave that to the economists. It is literature that is at stake ; the fine, fat figures of commerce have nothing to do with literature. Our growth is sheerly a matter for statistics. One might as well argue that because of an increased birth-rate we were a more cultured people. To accept the specious arguments of the booksellers would be equivalent to admitting the superior wisdom of the negro and the rabbit. Prosperous publishing seasons no more imply artistic progress in our literature than do good theatrical years, from the box-office viewpoint, necessarily mean advance in dramatic technics or originality. If the statistics of the publishers and the booksellers mark an increased volume of volumes, that increase deserves record only as does the increase in crime or railway accidents — mere mathematics. The persons who argue otherwise — the marketmen of letters — forget that in literature bulk and permanence have nothing in common.
The literature of an age, a decade, or a year, is to be judged only by the verdict of posterity. And posterity is vastly scornful of aught that lacks the saving grace of quality. The circulation figures of a hundred years ago touch us now not at all ; out of the popularities of that period nothing remains that had not the conserving salt of true art.
Of quality, of arresting genius, of fine technic, what do we find in our contemporary letters? Consider the successes of recent years, the titles most talked about, the authors most mispronounced in the parlor-cars : where will these be when posterity applies its test? In fiction, in poetry, in essays, what have we accomplished? Have we even a tendency that deserves the name? Have we the warfare of rival schools, rival professors of technic, competing methods in the art?
In other years, with the Prosperity flag not yet so flaunted in the breeze, with our cousins overseas still sneering their famed conundrum, " Who reads an American book? " we had at least the storm and stress of skirmishes between realism and impressionism, naturalism and romanticism. Now, not even that. A youthful sickness cured, you say? Wrong! Rivalry on details of art can never harm an art; only when all other concerns are merged in the commercial is the future indeed black.
Find me, if you can, any tendency in our letters save the commercial! Show me any goal save the dollar!
It is true, of course, that literature as a profession appears no longer what it was when Stevenson wrote his memorable Letter to a Young Gentleman. It is now quite possible for the ambitious youth to step from any walk of life and, given a certain amount of luck and a Jesuitic conscience, to achieve as decent financial success in letters as the counting-house or the corner grocery offer. The rewards are undeniably greater and more general than they were. Nothing seems in store for our American writers save prosperity and happiness. The two are synonymous, are they not? Well, for most folk they are; and the world is colored, after all, very largely by what " most folk " think. Yet it is possible to conceive some of our authors, however prosperous, as not happy. Pleasant enough it may be to achieve a modest prosperity in the shadow of the publisher's greater one ; to be listed as " among those present " at this or that watering-place, or aboard this or that fashionable ocean-liner side by side with prominent magnates, merchants and their ladies ; yet, given a conscience still loyal to any ever so slight ideal of literary art, there must surely be some unpleasant moments. Moments in which the mediocrity the public is willing to praise brings a feeling of dis-
M THEIR DAY IN COURT
taste; moments in which the impermanence of to-day's reputation insists on being realized. Moments in which the rottenness of the whole fabric becomes visible through the varnish of prosperity.
Once there was the notion that the true poet must live in a garret before the Muse would favor him ; to-day, in face of the prosperity to be achieved by merely supplying a demand, it would be quixotic, would it not, to inquire further? Why bother oneself as to the nature of the goods demanded? If the demand is there, the thing to do, surely, is to supply it, even if that means cultivating literature on a little terrapin in a Central Park mansion. There, at any rate, is the gate of decision. If we really possess, here in America, authors capable of producing quality as well as quantity, it is simply a question which path they will choose. In the general reckoning, the reckoning by statistics, the decision may not matter much ; the wave of prosperity, the commercial conquests bearing our imprints, will roll on as surely, whether or not the detail of quality be regarded. Yet, in the long run to fame rather than to notoriety, it might be worth our authors' while to try for quality, to lend our vast productiveness the virtues of high and noble art.
The true artists rarely swim with the tide. While some authors taste apparent contemporary success and roll in actual prosperity, the bread and butter of others, quite as accomplished craftsmen, comes by the practice of such writing as, strictly, is not literature at all. Despite the rumor of prosperity that publishers find it profitable to distribute, our most prominent men of letters — I use the popular currency, though these prominent ones are not what I consider worthy banner-bearers ! — do not make both ends meet by literature alone.
The greatest man of letters I know is also the most desperately pessimistic. The most enthusiastic optimist on the subject of literature in my acquaintance is a publisher's salesman ; I presume he is paid by commission.
Quantity, not quality, is what we worship ; I cannot often enough repeat that. With the publishers it is a race to offer the greatest quantity of newest books. With the public it is a race to read the newest just a trifle more speedily than their neighbors. The national temperament, with its tendencies away from conservatism, from allegiance to ascertained merit, its pursuits of constantly changing wills-o-the-wisp, must bear some of the blame. The author, making hay while the sun shines, is willing to produce at a rate that cannot possibly have anything to do with permanent literature. The blame lies between all parties : publisher, public and author.
It is impossible, we have been told, to indict a nation. The impossible, then, the indictment of all those responsible for the fatal prosperity of letters among us, I will not attempt. Yet to accuse, by chapter and verse, the two classes most directly responsible, this book is written.
Those classes are:
Firstly, the Ladies.
Secondly, the Critics.
It is while these were the paramount factors that the plague of book production most devoured our continent. That plague in no wise improved the grammar of the American people as it falls upon our ears ; I know of no surer test to prove culture, education, true or shoddy. Our plain people — their plainness including both the plutocrat and the pauper — still continue in blithesome use of such turns as : " Was you to the beach yesterday ? " and " I thought I seen you there."
For this, we may thank the ladies and the critics.
Before I make way for the ladies, who have done so much for our artistic stature, and to whom I shall presently offer my meed of appreciation, let me remark upon the phenomenon that the ladies could never have so blessed us if we had ever had critics deserving the name. In their campaign of commercialism the publishers have consciously or unconsciously suppressed the critic; they have coddled a breed of reviewer who conceives his mission as that of the barker at Coney Island, rather than as an austere keeper of the Gate of Letters. In the last decade or so American publishers have reached a point where they can treat criticism as if it did not exist. The} r prepare their own " reviews," and "via the newspapers the public swallow them. They go, at any rate, through the form of swallowing, do our readers ; but have they really been deceived? I wonder.
Were there any recognized criticism of letters in America, would it not be possible to name the critics? In a period that has seen and read Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, Edmund Gosse, Walter Lord, Andrew Lang, Arthur Symons, and as many more, who have been our American critics? Have we, to-day, any critics, of acknowledged and deserved eminence?
Writing about another art, Henry James once declared that a society has to be old before it becomes critical. Superficially that seems just and pertinent. But it happens that in a much earlier day than the present we had some American critics who were considerable in their day and memorable thereafter. The entire New England group was of the critic tribe, and is still famous ; Poe was a critic. So that argument fails. The simple truth is that there has been, apparently there is, no man strong enough, fortunate enough, to withstand the full force of the commercialism that is exerted against him the moment he makes it evident he means to be a critic, not a lobbyist. In this place one need only hint at the methods of the commercial cabal (time enough to come to actual instances later) : the hitting at the critic through the advertising department of the periodical he uses ; the invariable editorial surrender to the dollar-worship of the counting-house ; these are the A B C's of the case.
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The end
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