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 ancestors had seen in the mind's eye while they were 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 followed 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 internationally, there are few achievements in American literature 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 differentgenres, 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 title 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 eroticism. 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 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. Compare 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 English 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 democracy, and Poe's lonely devotion to beauty, I sometimes 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 in moonlight above a Catskill clove will move him. But the populace will require something more sensational. 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 essential. 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 tradition 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. Nevertheless, 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 emotions 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 American 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. Nevertheless, 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.
It would be a wise American town that gave up paying "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 colonists: 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, Cooper, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Thoreau, Twain, and Howells wrote it, nevertheless, it was more than justified 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. Without 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, theSaturday Evening Post, quick transportation, and the newspaper with its syndicated 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 changing. In poetry the Middle West and New England 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 wayfares 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 comprehend his place in one of the richest streams of history, and graduates to understand their youth. Poole's "The Harbor" (which served both college and city), Owen Johnson's "Stover at Yale," Norris's "Salt," Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise," Stephen Benet's "The Beginning of Wisdom"— these books and many others have, like the opening chapters of Compton Mackenzie'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 therefore 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.
[Footnote: 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.]
The analysis of conditions and tendencies in contemporary 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 generalize 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 English, 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":
I guess the Lord druv down Creation's spiles'Thout nogrethelpin' from the British Isles,An' could contrive to keep things pooty stiffEf they withdrawed from business in a miff;I han't no patience with such swelling fellers ezThink 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, whatever 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 development 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 literature: 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 country, that little has been left to expend in creative imagination. The currents of genius have flowed toward trade, agriculture, and manufacturing, not aesthetics.
This explanation is easy to understand, and is therefore 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 character, has never lacked good blood in the United States. Organization, and organization of a kind requiring the creative intellect, has drawn enormously upon our energies, 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 existence 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 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 traditional 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 orThe Mayflower, The president of a Western university, who himself, as a baby, had been carried across the Alleghenies in a sling, once told me the history of his family. It settled in Virginia in the seventeenth century, 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 community 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 with some depth and solidity to it. The New England civilization of the early nineteenth century, now materially altered, was a definable culture, with five generations 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 congeries 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 possessed 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 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 literature 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 important factors in the intellectual life of America. The writer in Tucson or Minneapolis or Bangor is dependent 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, theverveof 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 civilization 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 provincialism 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 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 aristocratic 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 intelligence, essays that imply a rich background of knowledge and taste, stories dependent upon psychological analysis, poetry which is austere in content or complex in form. I mean Henry James and Sherwood Anderson, Mr. Cabell, Mr. Hergesheimer, and Mrs. Wharton, 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 worn-out literary forms. More people seem to be engaged in occasional production of poetry and fiction—and especially of poetry—in America, than in any single money-making enterprise characteristic of a great industrial nation. The flood pours through every editorial office in the land, trickles into the corners of country newspapers, makes short-lived dilettante magazines, 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 magazines (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 bourgeois 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 civilizations. 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 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 melodrama 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 literature, like the best airplanes, cannot be standardized.
Now the error made by most English critics in endeavoring to estimate the potentialities or the actualities of American literature, is to judge under the influence of this crushing weight of clever, mediocre writing. 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 dilettante 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 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 completely 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 literature 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 today, assumes its importance. That spirit is both idealistic and democratic. Idealistic in the sense that there 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, somewhere, 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 improvement" that has encouraged such a curious outpouring 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 communities, 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 of democratic idealism. It has lacked the self-confidence 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 intellects 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 democracy, 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 literature is expressive of localities and groups in America.
And usually the works of genius that we do possess have been written by converted aristocrats, like Tolstoy, and have a little of the fanaticism and over-emphasis 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 impressed 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 fromgaucherie, 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, 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 conventionality of popular writing. It is rather to crack the smooth and monotonous surface and stir the fire beneath 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 democracy fruitful. We must work with what we have.
Much has been said of the advantage for us, and perhaps for the world, which has come from the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain. Two systems of closely related political thinking, two national characters, have developed and been successful instead of one. Your ancestors opened the door of departure 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 American character, whatever its blood mixture, is formed upon customs and ideals that have the same origin and a parallel development with yours. But this literature, like our political institutions, will not duplicate; like the seedling, it will make another tree and not another branch. In literature we are still pioneers. I think that it may be reserved for us to discover a literature 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 happen, as I believe it may, it would be a just return upon our share of a great inheritance.
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 benefits. The possessors of capital have only one program upon which they agree, a further exploitation of material resources, for the greater comfort of the community 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 philosophy is accounted most original when it accounts for behavior. 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 living, and the secret of real happiness is left to a sentimental 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 psychologists 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 pessimism. It is merely a fact, which is dependent upon our failure to digest the problems that democracy, machinery, 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 movement 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 unprivileged masses catch up with them in material welfare, no one knows and few that are really competent care to inquire.
Now this obsession with material welfare is the underlying premise with which all discussion of contemporary literature, and particularly American literature, 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 environment (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 control of matter for the purposes of fine living.
Therefore, our vital literature is behavioristic, naturalistic, 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 solution 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 significance to living than dwellers in our industrial civilization are now finding.
In the meantime, those who seek literary consolation 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 advised 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 formulate a saving doctrine, and who could give to literature what it chiefly lacks to-day, a core of ethical conviction and a view of man in his worldsub specie aeternitatis. 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.
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 England 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'sandThe Centuryin 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 country is relevant to the discussion to follow. The magazine of those days was vigorous. It was vigorous because, unlike other American publications, it was not oppressed by competition. Until the laws of international 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 American 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 magazine 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 magazine 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 American magazine is indicated by the effect of our atmosphere upon the periodical which the English have always called a review. Import that form, as was done forThe North American,The Atlantic Monthly,The Forum, orThe Yale Review, and immediately the new 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 illustrated, with much fiction, some description, a little serious comment on affairs written for the general reader, occasional poetry, and enough humor to guarantee diversion. This is our national medium for literary expression—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 illustratedliterary magazine(the family magazinepar excellence) must now be differentiated from the illustratedjournalisticmagazine, 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 historian of that period usually gives a different explanation. 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 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 ofMcClure's, cameCollier'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'swas 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 journalism. Read any number ofHarper'sin the 'seventies for proof. And,pari passu, American journalism was eagerly trying to discover some outlet for its finer products, a medium where good pictures, sober afterthoughts, and the finish that comes from careful writing were possible.Harper's Weeklyin 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 article, poetry, picture, humor, could all be harmoniously combined, only a redistribution of emphasis was necessary in order to make broader its appeal. Mr. McClure journalized the family magazine. He introduced financial and economic news in the form of sensational investigations, he bid for stories more lively, more immediate in their interest, more journalistic than we were accustomed to read (Kipling's journalistic stories for example, were first published in America inMcClure'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 excellence, 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 journalistic 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 journalism, it has included real literature when it could get and "get away with it."
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 contain 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 theliteratiand the advanced, which Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer praises so warmly, we are not so well provided with the distributive machinery 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 reinvigorated. The malady is due to no slackening of literary virility in the country; indeed there has probably 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 these excellent magazines has changed, and they have not. Their public always was, and is, the so-called "refined" home public. Homes have changed, especially "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 members 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 uneducated. 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 stirring, 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." Sometimes they feed exclusively upon highly spiced journalism, 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 popular to be profound, less content, in short, with dignity as a substitute for force.
What should be done about it specifically is a question 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 contemporary 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 dignity, 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 doesnotmean 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 generation, if not from those of their own. These demand a new vitality of brain, emotion, and spirit in their literary magazine, and it must be given to them.
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 likeThe Outlook,The Independent,Vanity Fair, which are merely special varieties of the typically American magazine. I refer, of course, toThe New Republic,The Nation,The Freeman,The Weekly Reviewin 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 proportion to their circulation. Like the oldNation, 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-emphasis, 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 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 interested 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 intellectual class who felt themselves politically and socially responsible, has been harder to discover. We had one in the early days of the Republic, whenThe North American Reviewwas founded. It is noteworthy that we are developing another now and have seenThe Yale Review, the late lamentedUnpartisan Review, and others joinThe North American, fringed, so to speak, by magazines of excerpt (of which much might be written), such asThe Review of Reviews,Current Opinion, andThe Literary Digest, in which the function 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 another 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 cheapness 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 specialist writing), and the American specialist cannot usually write well enough to command general intelligent 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 contemporary, 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 serious from every point of view than the specialists 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 cornered the market for clever reporters who tap the reservoirs 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 themselves—and are too often incapable.
Editorial embarrassments are increased, however, by the difficulty of finding these intellectualized old Americans 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 magazines 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 ofThe Atlantic Monthlyin finding a sizable and homogeneous public through the country is interesting in just this connection. It has, so it is generally understood, been very much a question offinding—of going West after the departing New Englander and his children, and hunting him out with the goods his soul desired. One remembers the Yankee peddlers who in the old days penetrated the frontier with the more material products of New England, pans, almanacs, and soap. But an observer must also note a change in the character ofThe Atlanticitself, how it has gradually changed from a literary and political review, to a literary and social magazine, with every element of the familiar American type except illustrations and a profusion of fiction; how in the attempt to become 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 the transformation, but it has undoubtedly proved itself adaptable and therefore alive. This is not an argument that the reviews should become magazines and that the old-line magazine should give up specializing 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, professional 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 environment 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 weakened by amateur mediocrity in the art of writing. The family magazine is like the American short story. It has conventionalized into an often successful immobility. Both must move again, become flexible, vigorous, or their date will be upon them. And the family magazine, the illustrated literary magazine, is the most interesting vehicle of human expression and interpretation 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.
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 novelists, and it has accepted the challenge. The result is a literature which speaks for the younger writers better, 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 autobiography. The older poets, who yesterday were the younger poets, such men as Masters, Robinson, Frost, Lindsay, have passed from lyric to biographic narrative; the younger poets more and more write of themselves. 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 discussing 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 person. The young men, and in a less degree the young women, especially in America, where the youngest generation is, I believe, more vigorous than elsewhere, have taken to biographical fiction. Furthermore, what began as biography, usually of a youth trying to discover how to plan his career, has drifted more and more toward autobiography—an autobiography of discontent.
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 decades 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 novels 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 authors. To a critic they are most interesting, for the 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-controlled 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 realist's detail selected from beauty instead of from ugliness; 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, possibly 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 disillusion. At the age of seven or thereabout he sees 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 appear 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 examination of environment. Youth, in the old days, when it rebelled, escaped to romantic climes or adventurous 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 "thishappened to me," "I sawthisand did not like it," "I was driven tothisorthat," until the mass of circumstantial incident and 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 tiresome (and is tiresome to many) in its night after night and day after day crammed with every possible unpleasant sensation and experience that three young men could have had in the A. E. F. And that the experiences recorded were unpleasant ones, forced upon youth, not chosen by its will, is thoroughly characteristic. 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 of religion. We know how "the conflict between religion 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 intelligent 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 concepts began to be shaken. He learned that prostitution 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, including principle, was in a state of flux. And his intellectual guides, first Shaw, and then, when Shaw becamevieux 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. Propaganda 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 writing. His reading of fiction and poetry, especially when it dealt with youth, irritated him. The pictures of 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 descriptions 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 England towns jarred upon the memories of a class-conscious 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, pleasant, 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 biographies of his intimates. Rousseau was reborn without his social philosophy. Defoe was reincarnated, but more anxious now to describe precisely what happened 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 "MissLulu Bett." It does not spring from a desire to tell the truthabout human nature.
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 different from cool truth; it is subjective, not objective; romantic, not classical, to use the old terms which few nowadays except Professor Babbitt's readers understand. 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 aboutmyexperiences, 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 discussed too much and is becoming evidently self-conscious. But if the autobiographical novel is to be regarded 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 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 preparation for a tragedy in Chapter XXIX. In all probability the Gipsy will never be heard from again. She is irrelevant except as a figment in the author's memory, 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 policeman. 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 ofa 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 complete 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 Victorian novel. Benet, Dos Passos, 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 matter. As one considers the excessive naturalism of the young realists and asks just why they find it necessary to be so excessively, so effusively realistic, the conviction is inborn that they are not realists at all as Hardy, Howells, 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.