Once upon a time William Dean Howells leveled the keen lance of his satire against what he called "the monstrous rag baby of romanticism." In those simple days, literary labels were easily applied. A man who wrote about Rome, Italy, was a romanticist; a man who wrote about Rome, New York, was a Realist.
Now, however, a writer who finds his themes in the wholesale business district of New York City does not disavow the title formerly given exclusively to makers of drawn-sword-and-prancing-steed fiction. Montague Glass is a romanticist.
The laureate of the cloak-and-suit trade and biographer of Mr. Abe Potash and Mr. Mawruss Perlmutter does not believe that romance is a matter of time and place. A realistic novel, he believes, may be written about the Young Pretenderor Alexander the Great, and a romance about—well, about Elkan Lubliner, American.
Of course, I asked him to defend his claim to the name of romanticist. He did so, but in general terms, without special reference to his own work. For this widely read author has the amazing virtue of modesty.
"I do not think," he said, "that the so-called historical novelists are the only romanticists. The difference between the two schools of writers is in method, rather than in subject.
"A romanticist is a writer who creates an atmosphere of his own about the things with which he deals. He is the poet, the constructive artist. He calls into being that which has not hitherto existed.
"A realist, however, is a writer who faithfully reproduces an atmosphere that already exists. He reports, records; one of his distinguishing characteristics must be his attention to detail. The romanticist is as truthful as the realist, but he deals with a few large truths rather than with many small facts."
"And you," I said, determined to make the conversation more personal, "prefer the romantic method?"
"Yes," said Mr. Glass, "I do. I prefer to use the romantic method, and to read the works of the writers who use it. I believe that there is more value in suggestion than in detailed description. For instance, I do not think that my stories would gain vividness if I should put all the dialogue—I tell my stories chiefly by means of dialogues, you know—into dialect. So I do not put down the dialogue phonetically. I spell the words correctly, not in accordance with the pronunciation of my characters.
"This is not an invariable rule. When, for instance, Abe or Mawruss has learned a new long word which he uses frequently to show it off, he generally mispronounces it. He may say 'quincidence' for 'coincidence.' Such a mispronunciation as this I reproduce, for it has its significance as a revelation of character. But I do not attempt to put down all mispronunciations; I let the dialect be imagined.
"The romanticist, you see, uses his own imagination and expects imagination in his readers. His method might be called impressionistic; he outlines and suggests, instead of describing exhaustively. The romanticist really is more economical than the realist, and he has more restraint."
"Who are the leading romanticists of the day?" I asked.
"Well," Mr. Glass replied, "my favorite among contemporary romanticists is Joseph Conrad. There is a man who is certainly no swashbuckling novelist of the Wardour Street school. He writes of modern life, and yet he is a romanticist through and through.
"I think that I may justly claim to be one of the first admirers of Conrad in America. I used to read him when apparently the only other man in this part of the world to appreciate him was William L. Alden, who praised him in the columns of theNew York Times Review of Books.
"I well remember my discovery of Conrad. I went to Brooklyn to hear 'Tosca' sung at the Academy of Music. I had bought my ticket, and I had about an hour to spend before it would be time for the curtain to rise. So I went across the street to the Brooklyn Public Library.
"While I was idly looking over the novels on the shelves I came upon Conrad'sTyphoon. I sat down and began to read it.
"When I arose, I had finished the book. Also, I had missed the first two acts of the opera—and I had been eager to hear them. But Conradmore than compensated for the loss of those two acts.
"Many of the modern English writers are romanticists. Galsworthy surely is no realist. And William de Morgan, although he writes at great length and has abundance of detail, is a romanticist. He does not use detail for its own sake, as the realists use it; he uses it only when it has some definite value in unfolding the plot or revealing character. He uses it significantly; he is particularly successful in using it humorously, as Daudet and Dickens used it. Arnold Bennett is a realist, and I think that one of the reasons why he is so widely read in the United States is because the life which he describes so minutely is a life much like that of his American readers. People like to read about the sort of life they already know. The average reader wants to have a sense of familiarity with the characters in his novels."
Mr. Glass is a contrary person. It is contrary for the only novelist who knows anything about New York's cloak-and-suit trade to be of English birth and to look like a poet. It is contrary of him to have that distinctively American play, "Potash and Perlmutter," start its London runtwo years ago and be "still going strong." And it was contrary of him not to say, as he might reasonably be expected to say in view of his own success, that the encounters and adventures of business must be the theme of the American novelists of the future.
"No," he said, in answer to my question, "I do not see any reason for the novelist to confine himself to business life. Themes for fiction are universal. A novelist should write of the life he knows best, whatever it may be.
"I do not mean that the novelist should write about his own business. I mean that he should write about the psychology that he understands. A man who spends years in the cloak-and-suit business is not, therefore, qualified to write novels about that business, even if he is qualified to write novels at all.
"I had no real knowledge of the cloak-and-suit trade when I began to write about it. I made many technical blunders. For instance, I had Potash and Perlmutter buying goods by the gross instead of by the piece. And I received many indignant letters pointing out my mistake.
"I had never been in the cloak-and-suit trade. But my work as a lawyer had brought me intocontact with many people who were in that business, and I had intimate knowledge of the psychology of the Jew, his religion, his humor, his tragedy, his whole attitude toward life.
"The trouble with many young writers," said Mr. Glass, "is that they don't know what they are writing about. They are attempting to describe psychological states of which they have only third-hand knowledge. Their ideas have no semblance of truth, and therefore their work is absolutely unconvincing."
"At any rate," I said, "you will admit that American writers are more and more inclined to make the United States the scene of their stories. Do you think that O. Henry's influence is responsible for this?"
"No," said Mr. Glass, "I do not think that this is due to O. Henry's influence. It was a natural development. You see, O. Henry's literary life lasted for only about four years, and while he has had many imitators, I do not think that he can be given credit for directing the attention of American writers to the life of their own country.
"Probably William Dean Howells should be called the founder of the modern school of Americanfiction. He was the first writer to achieve distinguished success for tales of modern American life. There were several other authors who began to write about Americans soon after Mr. Howells began—Thomas Janvier, H. C. Bunner, and Brander Matthews were among them.
"Kipling's popularity gave a great impetus to the writing of short stories of modern life. It is interesting to trace the course of the short story from Kipling to O. Henry.
"Did you ever notice," asked Mr. Glass, "that the best stories on New York life are written by people who have been born and brought up outside of the city? The writer who has always lived in New York seems thereby to be disqualified from writing about it, just as the man in the cloak-and-suit trade is too close to his subject to reproduce it in fiction. The writer who comes to New York after spending his youth elsewhere gets the full romantic effect of New York; he gets a perspective on it which the native New-Yorker seldom attains. The viewpoint of the writer who has always lived in New York is subjective, whereas one must have the objective viewpoint to write about the city successfully.
"I have been surprised by the caricatures ofAmerican life which come from the pen of writers American by birth and ancestry. Recently I read a novel by an American who has—and deserves, for he is a writer of talent and reputation—a large following. This was a story of life in a manufacturing town with which the novelist is thoroughly familiar. It, however, appears to have been written to satisfy a grudge and consequently one could mistake it for the work of an Englishman who had once made a brief tour of America. For the big manufacturer who was the principal character in the story was vulgar enough to satisfy the prejudice of any reader of theLondon Daily Mail. Certainly the descriptions of the gaudy and offensive furniture in the rich manufacturer's house and the dialogue of the members of his family and the servants could provide splendid ammunition for theSaturday RevieworThe Academy. The book appears to be a caricature, and yet that novelist had lived most of his life among the sort of people about whom he was writing!
"And how absolutely ignorant most New-Yorkers are of New York. Irvin Cobb comes here from Louisville, Kentucky, and gets an intimate knowledge of the city, and puts that knowledgeinto his short stories. But a man brought up here makes the most ridiculous mistakes when he writes about New York.
"I read a story of New York life recently that absolutely disgusted me, its author was so ignorant of his subject. Yet he was a born New-Yorker. Let me tell you what he wrote. He said that a man went into an arm-chair lunch-room and bought a meal. His check amounted to sixty-five cents! Now any one who knows anything about arm-chair lunch-rooms beyond the mere fact of their existence knows that the cashier of such an institution would drop dead if a customer paid him sixty-five cents at one time. Then, the hero of this story had as a part of his meal in this arm-chair lunch-room a baked potato, for which he paid fifteen cents! Imagine a baked potato in such a place, and a fifteen-cent baked potato at that!"
Mr. Glass did not, like most successful humorists, begin as a writer of tragedy. His first story to be printed was "Aloysius of the Docks," a humorous story of an East Side Irish boy, which appeared in 1900. The lower East Side was for many years the scene of most of his stories. But he does resemble most other writers in this respect,that he wrote verse before he wrote fiction. I asked him to show me some of his poetry, and he demurred somewhat violently. But, after all, a poet is a poet, and at last I succeeded in persuading him to produce this exhibit. Here it is—a poem by the author of "Potash and Perlmutter":
FERRYBOATS
FERRYBOATS
There sounds aloft a warning scream,The jingling bell gives tongue below,She breasts again the busy stream,And cleaves its murky tide to snow.Bereft of burnished glittering brass,Ungainly bulging fore and aft,Slowly from shore to shore they pass—The matrons of the river craft.
There sounds aloft a warning scream,The jingling bell gives tongue below,She breasts again the busy stream,And cleaves its murky tide to snow.Bereft of burnished glittering brass,Ungainly bulging fore and aft,Slowly from shore to shore they pass—The matrons of the river craft.
Mr. Glass believes that humorous writing in America has changed more than any other sort. But he does not, as I thought he would, attribute this change to the increased cosmopolitanism of the country, to the influx of people from other lands.
"Certainly our ideas of what is funny have changed," he said. "Humor is an ephemeral thing. A generation ago we laughed at what to-day would merely make us ill. The subjects and the methods of the humorists are different.Who nowadays can find a laugh in the pages of Artemus Ward, Philander Q. Doesticks, or Petroleum V. Nasby? Yet in their time these men set the whole continent in a roar.
"Contrast two humorists typical of their respective periods—Bill Nye and Abe Martin. I remember many years ago reading a story by Bill Nye which every one then considered tremendously funny. He told how he went downtown and got a shave and put on a clean collar and as he said, 'otherwise disguised himself.' When he got home his little dog refused to recognize him, and several pages were devoted to his efforts to persuade the dog of his identity. Then, failing to convince the dog that he was really the same Bill Nye in spite of his shave and clean collar, he impaled it on a pitchfork and buried it, putting over it the epitaph, 'Not dead, but jerked hence by request.'
"Now contrast with that a good example of modern American humor—a joke by Abe Martin which I recently saw. There was a picture of two or three men looking at a tattered tramp, and one of them was represented as saying: 'You wouldn't think to look at him that that man played an elegant game of billiards ten years ago!'
"It is an entirely different form of humor, you see. Bill Nye and the writers of his school got their effects by grotesque misspelling, fantastic ideas, and by the liberal use of shock and surprise. The modern humor is subtler, more delicate, and more likely to endure.
"I do not think that the fact that America has become more cosmopolitan has anything to do with this altered sense of humor. The American humorists do not select cosmopolitan themes; the best of them are distinctively American in their subject. Irvin Cobb, George Fitch, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Edna Ferber Stewart, who wroteThe Fugitive Blacksmith—all these people draw their inspiration from purely American phases of the life around them."
"What is it, then," I asked, "that has changed American humor?"
"Leisure," answered Mr. Glass. "Philander Q. Doesticks and other humorists of his time wrote to amuse pioneers, people rough and elemental in their tastes. Their audience consisted of men who worked hard most of the time, and therefore had to be hit hard by any joke that was to entertain them at all. But as Americans grew more leisurely, and therefore had time to read,see plays, and look at pictures, they lost their taste for crude and violent horseplay, and the new sort of humor came in. Undoubtedly the same thing occurs in every newly settled country—Australia, for example. It is unlikely that the Australian of one hundred years from now will be amused by the things that amuse Australians to-day.
"But the humor that entertains the citizens of a country of which the civilization is well established is likely to retain its charm through the years. Mark Twain's stories do not lose their flavor. But Mark Twain was not exclusively a humorist; he was a student of life and he reflected the tragedy of existence as well as its comedy. So does Irvin Cobb, who is the nearest approach to Mark Twain now living.
"One source of Mark Twain's strength is his occasional vulgarity. That surely is something that we should have in greater abundance in American humor. I do not mean that our humorists should be pornographic and obscene; I mean merely that they should be allowed great freedom in their choice of themes. There is no humor without vulgarity. Our humorists have been so limited and restrained that we have nopaper fit to be compared withSimplicissimusorLe Rire.
"You see, a vulgar thing is not offensive if it is funny. Fun for fun's sake is a much more important maxim than art for art's sake. The humorists have a greater need for freedom in choice of themes than the serious writers, especially the realistic writers, who are always demanding greater freedom."
Mr. Glass returned to the subject of the failure of cosmopolitanism to influence American literature by calling attention to the fact that very few American writers find their themes among their foreign-born fellow-citizens. "Where," he asked, "are the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans? No writer knows these foreign-born citizens well enough to write about them. The best American stories are about native Americans. I admit that my stories are not about people peculiar to New York—you can find counterparts of 'Potash and Perlmutter' in Berlin, Paris, and London. But mine are not among the best stories of American character. The best story of American character is 'Daisy Miller.'"
Mr. Glass believes that the technique of the short story has improved greatly during the lastscore of years, but he is not so favorable in his view of the modern novel, especially of the "cross-section of life" type of work. He believes that the war will produce a great revival of literary excellence in Europe, just as the Franco-Prussian War did; and he called attention to something which has apparently been neglected by most people who have discussed the subject—the tremendous inspiration which Guy de Maupassant found in the Franco-Prussian War. But he said, in conclusion:
"But any man who sits down to judge American literature in the course of a few minutes' talk is an ass for his pains. Literary snap judgments are foolish things. Nothing that I have said to you has any value at all."
Even the most prejudiced opponent of the moving pictures will admit that they are becoming more intellectually respectable. Crude farce and melodrama are being replaced by versions of classic plays and novels; literature is elevating the motion picture. And Mr. Rex Beach believes that the motion picture is benefiting literature.
This author of widely read novels had been talking to me about the departments of literature—the novel, the short story, and the rest—and among them he named the moving picture. I asked him if he believed that moving pictures were dangerous for novelists, leading them to fill their books with action, with a view to the profits of cinematographic reproduction. He said:
"Well, authors are human beings, of course. They like to make money and to have their workreach as large an audience as possible. I suppose that the great majority of them keep their eyes on the screen, because they know how profitable the moving picture is and because they want their work seen by more people than would read their novels."
"Do you think that this harms their work?" I asked.
"It might if the novelists overdid it," he answered. "It would harm their work if they became nothing but scenario writers. But so far the result has been good.
"The tendency of the moving picture has been to make authors visualize more clearly than ever before their characters and scenes that they are writing about. Their work has become more realistic. I do not mean realistic in the sense in which this word is used of some French writers; I do not mean erotic or morbid. I mean actual, convincing, clearly visualized.
"Literature has elevated the moving picture, keeping it out, to a great extent, of melodrama and slap-stick comedy. And in return, the moving picture has done a service to fiction, making the authors give more attention to exact visualization."
"Has American fiction been lacking in visualization?" I asked.
"No," said Mr. Beach. "American novelists visualize more clearly to-day than they did four or five years ago, before the moving picture had become so important, but they always were strong in visualization. This sort of realism is America's chief contribution to fiction."
"Then you believe that there is a distinctively American literature?" I asked. "You do not agree with the critic who said that American literature was 'a condition of English literature'?"
"I do not agree with him," Mr. Beach replied. "American writers use the English language, so I suppose that what they write belongs to English literature. But there is a distinctively American literature; Americans talk in their own manner, think in their own manner, and handle business propositions in their own manner, and naturally they write in their own manner. American literature is different from other kinds of literature just as American business methods are different from those of Europe.
"Fiction written in America must necessarily be tinged with American thought and American action. I have no patience with people who saythat America has no literature. They say that nothing we are writing to-day will live. Well, what if that is true? It's true not only of literature, but of everything else.
"Our roads won't last forever; they're built in a hurry to be used in a hurry. But they're better roads to drive and motor over than those old Roman roads of Europe. Our office-buildings won't last as long as the Pyramids, but they're better for business purposes.
"Personally, I've never been enthusiastic over things that have no virtues but age and ugliness. I'd rather have a good, strong, serviceable piece of Grand Rapids furniture than any ramshackle, moth-eaten antique."
"But don't you think," I asked, "that the permanence of a book's appeal is a proof of its greatness?"
"I don't see how we can tell anything definite about the permanence of the appeal of books written in our time. And I don't mean by literature writings that necessarily endure through the ages. I believe that literature is the expression of the mind, the sentiment, the intellectual attitude of the people who live at the time it is written. I admit that our literature is ephemeral—likeeverything else about us—but I believe that it is good."
Mr. Rex Beach was not pacing his floor nervously; he was crossing the room with the practical intention of procuring a cigarette. Nevertheless, his firm tread lent emphasis to his remarks.
"There is a sort of literary snobbery," he said, "noticeable among people who condemn contemporaneous literature just because it is contemporaneous. The strongest proof that there is something good in the literature of the day is that it reaches a great audience. There must be something in it or people wouldn't read it.
"The people are the final judges; it is to them that authors must appeal. Take any big question of public importance—after it has been discussed by politicians and newspapers, it is the people who at last decide it.
"A man may have devoted his life to some tremendous achievement, and have left it as a monument to his fame. But it is to public opinion that we must look for the verdict on the value of his life's work.
"Take Carnegie, for example; when he dies, you bet people will have his number! His ideas are a tremendous menace, and the people whobelieve as he does about peace will find themselves generally execrated one of these days.
"It may seem to you that this has nothing to do with literature. But it has a good deal to do with it. I know that many things have been said about the effect on literature of the war. But I want to say that the war will have, I hope, one admirable effect on American writers—it will make them stir up the American conscience to a sense of the necessity for national defensive preparation. The writers must educate the people in world politics and show them the necessity for defensive action. Americans have a sort of mental inertia in regard to public questions, and the writers must overcome this inertia.
"The writers must stir up the politicians and the people. There's been a whole lot of mush written about peace. There always will be war. We can't reform the world.
"The pacifists say that it is useless to arm because war cannot be prevented by armaments. The obvious answer to that is that neither can the failure to arm prevent war. And the verdict after the war will be better if we are prepared for it. The writers must call our attention to the folly of leaving ourselves open to attack.
"It's hard to reach the conscience of the American people on any big issue. We are too independent, too indifferent, too ready to slump back. That's one of the penalties of democracy, I suppose; the national sense of patriotism becomes atrophied. It needs some whaling-big jolt to wake it up. Every American writer can help to do this.
"The trouble is that we have too many men with feminine minds, too many of these delicate fellows with handkerchiefs up their sleeves. I can't imagine any women with ideas more feminine than those of Bryan—could any woman evolve anything more feminine than his peace-at-any-price idea?"
Mr. Beach smiled. "I suppose I should not be talking about world politics," he said. "There are so many men who have specialized in that subject and are therefore competent to talk about it. I am only a specialist in writing."
"Do you think," I asked, "that writers should be specialists in writing? Some people believe that the best fiction, for example, is produced by men who do some other work for a living."
"I certainly believe that a writer should devote himself to writing," said Mr. Beach. "This isan age of specialization, and literature is no exception to the general rule. Literature is like everything else—you must specialize in it to be successful."
"This has not always been the case, has it?" I asked. "Has literature been produced by people who made writing only an avocation?"
"Surely," said Mr. Beach. "It is only within the last few years that writers have been able to write for a living and make enough to keep the fringe off their cuffs."
I asked what had caused this change.
"It has been caused chiefly by the magazines. The modern magazines have done two important things for fiction—they have brought it within every one's reach, and they have increased the prices paid to the authors, thus enabling them to make a living by devoting themselves exclusively to writing."
"But it has been said," I ventured, "that a writer, no matter how talented he may be, cannot make a comfortable living out of writing fiction unless he is most extraordinarily gifted with ideas, and that, therefore, a writer takes a tremendous risk if he throws himself upon literature for support."
"How is a writer going to get ideas for stories," asked Mr. Beach, in turn, "unless he uses ideas? The more ideas a man uses, the more ideas will come to him.
"The imaginative quality in a man is like any other quality; the more it is functioned the better it is functioned. If you fail to use any organ of your body, nature will in time let that organ go out of commission.
"It is just the same with imagination as with any organ of the body. If a writer waits for ideas to come to him and ceases to exercise his imagination, his imagination will become atrophied. But if he uses his imagination it will grow stronger and ideas will come to him with increasing frequency."
Mr. Beach is an enthusiastic advocate of the moving picture. In the course of his discussion of it he advanced an interesting theory as to the next stage of its development.
"The next use of the moving picture," he said, "will be the editorial use. We have had the moving picture used as a comic device, as a device to spread news, and as an interpreter of fiction. But as yet no one has endeavored to use it as a means to mold public opinion in great vital issues of the day.
"Of course, it has been used educationally, and as part of various propaganda schemes. But it will be used in connection with great political problems. It will become the most powerful of all influences for directing public opinion in politics and in everything else.
"It will play a mighty part in the thought of the country and of the world.
"I have seen men and women coming from a great moving-picture show almost hysterical with emotion. I have heard them shout and stamp and whistle at what they saw flashed before them on a white sheet as they never did in any theater.
"What a strong argument 'The Birth of a Nation' presents! Now, suppose that same art and that same equipment were used to present arguments about some political issue of our own time, instead of one of our fathers' time. What a force that would be!"
Sentimental Tommy's great predecessor in the relentless pursuit of the "right word" was, teachers of literature tell us, the unsentimental Gustave Flaubert. But these academic gentlemen, who insist that the writer shall spend hours, even days, if necessary, in perfecting a single sentence, seldom produce any literature. I asked Robert W. Chambers, who has written more "best sellers" than any other living writer, what he thought of Flaubert's method of work.
He looked at me rather quizzically. "I think," he said, with a smile, "that Flaubert was slow. What else is there to think? Of course he was a matchless workman. But if he spent half a day in hunting for one word, he was slow, that's all. He might have gone on writing and then have come back later for that inevitable word."
"But what do you think of Flaubert's method,as a method?" I asked. "Do you think that a writer who works with such laborious care is right?"
"It's not a question of right or wrong," said Mr. Chambers, "it's a question of the individual writer's ability and tendency. If a man can produce novels like those of Flaubert, by writing slowly and laboriously, by all means let him write that way. But it would not be fair to establish that as the only legitimate method of writing.
"Some authors always write slowly. With some of them it's like pulling teeth for them to get their ideas out on paper. It's the same way in painting. You may see half a dozen men drawing from the same model. One will make his sketch premier coup; another will devote an hour to his; another will work all day. They may be artists of equal ability. It is the result that counts, not the method or the time."
"And what is it that makes a man an artist, in pigments or in words?" I asked. "Do you believe in the old saying that the poet—the creative artist—is born and not made?"
"No," said Mr. Chambers, "I do not think that that is the truth. I think that with regard to the writer it is true to this extent, that there mustexist, in the first place, the inclination to write, to express ideas in written words. Then the writer must have something to express really worthy of expression, and he must learn how to express it. These three things make the writer—the inclination to say something, the possession of something worth saying, and the knowledge of how to say it."
"And where does genius come in?" I asked.
"What is genius?" asked Mr. Chambers, in turn. "I don't know. Perhaps genius is the combination of these three qualities in the highest degree.
"Of course," he added, with a laugh, "I know that all this is contrary to the opinion of the public. People like to believe that writers depend entirely upon an inspiration. They like to think that we are a hazy lot, sitting around and posing and waiting for some sort of divine afflatus. They think that writers sit around like a Quaker meeting, waiting for the spirit to move them."
"But have there not been writers," I asked, "who seem to prove that there is some truth in the inspiration theory? There is William de Morgan, for example, beginning to write novels in his old age. He spent most of his life in working in ceramics, not with words."
"On the contrary," said Mr. Chambers, "I think that William de Morgan proves my theory. He really spent all his life in learning to write—he was in training for being a novelist all the while. The novelist's training may be unconscious. He must have—as William de Morgan surely always has had—keen interest in the world. That is the main thing for the writer to have—a vivid interest in life. If we are to devote ourselves to the production of pictures of humanity according to our own temperaments, we must have this vivid interest in life; we must have intense curiosity. The men who have counted in literature have had this intense, never-satiated curiosity about life.
"This is true for the romanticists as well as the realists. The most imaginative and fantastic romances must have their basis in real life.
"I know of no better examples of this truth than the gargoyles which one sees in Gothic architecture in Europe. These extraordinary creatures that thrust their heads from the sides of cathedrals, misshapen and grotesque, are nevertheless thoroughly logical. That is, no matter how fantastic they may be, they have backbones and ribs and tails, and these backbones and ribs and tailsare logical—that is, they could do what backbones and ribs and tails are supposed to do.
"In real life there are no creatures like the gargoyles, but the important thing is that the gargoyles really could exist. This is a good example of the true method of construction. The base of the construction must rest on real knowledge. The medieval sculptors knew the formation of existing animals; therefore they knew how to make gargoyles."
"How does this theory apply to poets?" I asked.
"I don't know," answered Mr. Chambers, "but it seems to me to apply to all creative work. The artist must know life before he can build even a travesty on life."
I called Mr. Chambers's attention to the work of certain ultra-modern poets who deliberately exclude life from their work. He was not inclined to take them seriously.
"There always have been aberrations," he said, "and there always will be. They're bound to exist. And there is bound to be, from time to time, attitudinizing and straining after effect on the part of prose writers as well as poets. And it is all based on one thing—self-consciousness.It is self-consciousness that spoils the work of some modern writers."
I asked Mr. Chambers to be more specific in his allusions. "I cannot mention names," he said, "but there are certain writers who are always conscious of the style in which they are writing. Sometimes they consciously write in the style of some other men. They are thinking all the while of their technique and equipment, and the result is that their work loses its effect. A writer should not be convinced all the while that he is a realist or a romanticist; he should not subject himself deliberately to some special school of writing, and certainly he should not be conscious of his own style. The less a writer thinks of his technique the sooner he arrives at self-expression.
"It's just like ordinary conversation. A man is known by the way in which he talks—that is his 'style.' But he is not all the while acutely conscious of his manner of talking—unless he has an impediment in his speech. So the writer should be known by his untrammeled and unembarrassed expression."
I asked Mr. Chambers what he thought of the idea that the popularity of magazines has vitiated the public taste and lowered the standard of fiction.
"I do not think that this is the case," he said. "I do not see that the custom of serial publication has harmed the novel. It is not a modern innovation, you know. The novels of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot had serial publication. But I do believe that the American public reads less fiction than it did a generation ago, and that its taste is not so good as it was."
This was a surprising statement to come from an author whom the public has received with such enthusiasm, so I asked Mr. Chambers to explain.
"In the days of our forefathers," he said, "this was an Anglo-Saxon country. Then the average intelligence of the nation was higher and the taste in literature better. But there came the great rush of immigration to the United States from Europe, and the Anglo-Saxon culture of the country was diluted.
"You see signs of this lowered standard of taste in fiction and on the stage. The demand is for primitive and childish stuff, and the reason for this is that the audience has only a sort of backstairs intelligence. If we had progressed along the lines in which we were headed before this wave of immigration, we would not be satisfied with the books and magazines that are given us to-day.
"Of course the magazines are mechanically better to-day than they were a generation ago. Then we had not the photogravure and the half-tone and the other processes that make our magazines beautiful. But we had better taste and also we had more leisure.
"I remember when one of the most widely read of our magazines was a popular science monthly, which printed articles by great scientists on biological and other topics. That was in the days when Darwin was announcing his theory of evolution—the first great jolt which orthodoxy received. People would not take time to read a magazine of that sort now. They are so occupied with business and dancing and all sorts of occupations that they have little leisure for reading."
Mr. Chambers stopped talking suddenly and laughed. "I'm not a good man for you to bring these questions to," he said, "because I never have had any special reverence for books or literature as such. I reverence the books that I like, not all books."
"And have you such a thing as a favorite author?" I asked.
"Yes," said Mr. Chambers. "Dumas."
During the 1870's Mr. Chambers was an artstudent in Paris, and he has many interesting memories of the French and English writers and painters who have made that period memorable. He knew Paul Verlaine (whose poetry he greatly admires), Charles Conder, and Aubrey Beardsley.
"One day," he said, "I was out on a shooting-trip—I think it was in Belgium—and I met a young English poet, a charming fellow, whose work I was later to know and like. It was the poet who wrote at least one great poem—'Cynara'—it was Ernest Dowson.
"I knew many of the Beaux Arts crowd, because my brother was a student of architecture at the Beaux Arts. And they were a decent, clean crowd—they were not 'decadents.' I do not take much stock in the pose of 'decadence,' nor in the artistic temperament. I never saw a real artist with the artistic temperament. I always associated that with weakness."
Mr. Chambers, although he has intimate knowledge of the Quartier Latin, has little use for "Bohemia."
"What is Bohemia?" he asked. "If it is a place where a number of artists huddle together for the sake of animal warmth, I have nothing to say against it. But if it is a place where a numberof artists come to scorn the world, then it is a dangerous thing. The artist should not separate himself from the world.
"These artistic and literary cults are wrong. I do not believe in professional clubs and cliques. If writers form a combination for business reasons, that is all right, but a writer should not associate exclusively with other writers; he should do his work and then go out and see and talk to people in other professions. We should sweep the cobwebs from the profession of writing and not try to fence it in from the public."
To the somewhat trite question as to the effects of the war on literature, Mr. Chambers made first his usual modest answer, "I don't know." But when I told him of the author who had dogmatically stated that war always stops literature, and that the Civil War had produced no writing worthy of preservation, Mr. Chambers reconsidered.
"Did he say that the Civil War had produced no literature worthy of preservation?" he said. "He must have forgotten that the Civil War caused one man to make contributions to our literature as valuable as anything we possess. He must have forgotten Abraham Lincoln."
Before I left, I mentioned to Mr. Chambers thetheory that literature is better as a staff than as a crutch, as an avocation than as a vocation. This, like the "inevitable word" theory, is greatly beloved by college professors. Mr. Chambers said:
"I disagree utterly with that theory. Do you remember how Dr. Johnson wroteRasselas? It was in order to raise the money to pay for his mother's funeral. I believe that the best work is done under pressure. Of course the work must be enjoyed; a man in choosing a profession should select that sort of work which he prefers to do in his leisure moments. Let him do for his lifework the task which he would select for his leisure—and let him not take himself too seriously!"
That Edgar Allan Poe, in spite of his acknowledged genius, has had practically no influence on the development of the short story in America, and that the current short story written in America is inferior to that written during the years between 1870 and 1895, these are two remarkable statements made to me by James Lane Allen, the distinguished author ofThe Choir Invisible,The Mettle of the Pasture, and many another memorable novel.
I found Mr. Allen in the pleasant workroom of his New York residence. Himself a Southerner, he is an enthusiastic admirer of the poet whose name is inseparably linked with Southern letters. But I was soon to find that he does not share the opinion of those who consider Poe the originator of the modern short story, nor does he rate Poe's influence in fiction as very wide.
"There is always much interest in short stories," he said, "among authors, and in the great body of readers. You say that Mr. Gouverneur Morris believes that except Poe almost no writer before our generation could write short stories.
"I do not wish to be placed in a position of publicly criticizing Mr. Gouverneur Morris's opinion of the short story. But it may not seem antagonistic to the opinion of any one to call attention to the fact that, of all American short stories yet written, the two most widely known in and outside our country were written independently of Poe. These areThe Man Without a CountryandRip Van Winkle.
"As the technique of the American short story is understood and applied to-day, neither of these two stories can be regarded as a work of impeccable art. But flaws have not kept them from fame. By a common verdict the flawless short stories of the day are fameless. Certainly, also, Hawthorne was uninfluenced by Poe in writing short stories that remain secure among brief American classics.
"This, of course, is limiting the outlook to our own literature. Beyond our literature, what of Balzac? In the splendor of his achievements with the novel, Balzac has perhaps been slighted as amaster of the short story. Think, for instance, of such a colossal fragment asThe Atheists Mass.
"And what of Boccaccio? For centuries before Poe, theDecameronshone before the eyes of the world as the golden treasury of model forms for the short story.
"And centuries before Boccaccio, flashing from hand to hand all over the world, there was a greater treasury still, the treasury ofThe Arabian Nights.
"It is no disparagement to Poe to say that his genius did not originate the genius of the short story. His true place, his logical place, in the development of the short story is that of a man with ancestors—naturally!
"Since there is a breath of nativity blowing through his stories, I think it is the breath of far distant romance from somewhere. Certainly his stories are as remote from our civilization and from all things American as are Oriental tales."
Mr. Allen showed he had given much thought to Edgar Allan Poe's place among the American fiction writers, so I thought that he might also have some interesting things to say about Poe as a poet. He had. He mentioned a quality of Poe's verse which for some reason or other seemsheretofore to have escaped the notice of students of American poetry.
"It may be worth while calling attention," he said, "to the fact that nearly all of Poe's poems belong to the night. Twelve o'clock noon never strikes to his poetic genius. His best poems are Poe's Nights, if notArabian Nights.
"There is a saying that the German novel long ago died of the full moon. To Poe the dead moon was the orb of life. The sun blotted him out."
Great as is his admiration for Poe's genius, Mr. Allen does not believe he has greatly influenced American prose. He said:
"As to the influence of Poe's short stories in our country, this seems to be a tradition mainly fostered by professors of English in American universities and by the historians of our literature. The tradition does not prevail among American writers. Actually there is no traceable stamp of the influence of his prose writings on the work of any American short-story writer known to me, save one. That one is Ambrose Bierce."
"Why is it," I asked, "that Poe's influence on American fiction has been so slight?"
"The main reason," Mr. Allen answered, "whyPoe's stories have remained outside American imitation or emulation is perhaps because they are projected outside American sympathies. They lie to-day where they lay when they were written—beyond the confines of what the German calls the literature of the soil.
"Poe and Ambrose Bierce are at least to be linked in this: that they are the two greatest and the two coldest of all American short-story writers. Any living American fictionist will perhaps bear testimony to the fact that he has never met any other writer who has been influenced by the stories of Poe."
"Mr. Allen," I said, "you believe that the American short story has not been influenced by Poe; has the American short story, however, improved since his time?"
"The renascence of the American short story," said Mr. Allen, thoughtfully, "its real efflorescence as a natural literary art form, took place after the close of the Civil War. The historians of our literature have, perhaps, as is customary with them, held to the strict continuity of tradition as explaining this renascence. If so, they have omitted one of the instinctive forces of human nature, which invariably act in nations that haveliteratures and act ungovernably at the termination of all wars.
"After any war spontaneity in story-telling is one of the ungovernable impulses of human nature. This can be traced from modern literature back to primitive man returning from his feuds. When he had no literature, he carved his story on the walls of his cave or on a bone to tell the glory of the fight. Before he could even carve a bone he hung up a row of the heads of the defeated. Perhaps the original form of the war short story was a good, thick volume of heads. Within our own civilization the American Indian told his short stories in this way—with American heads or tufts of scalps—a sad way of telling them for our forefathers.
"At the close of the American Civil War the atmosphere, both North and South, was charged with stories. The amazing fact is not that short stories should have begun at that time, but that they should have begun with such perfection. This perfection expressed itself more richly during the period, say, from 1870 to 1895—twenty-five years—than it has ever done since.
"The evidence is at hand that the best of the American short stories written during that periodoutweigh in value those that have been written later—with the exception of those of one man. And this evidence takes this form—that these stories were collected into volumes, had an enormous sale, had the highest critical appreciation, have passed into the histories of literature written since, have gone into the courses of English literature now being taught in the universities, and are still steadily being sold.
"Is this true of the best short stories being written now? Are any of the short stories written since that period being bound into volumes and extensively sold? Do the professors of English literature recommend them to their classes? That is the practical test.
"The one exception is O. Henry. He alone stands out in the later period as a world within himself; as much apart from any one else as are Hawthorne and Poe."
Mr. Allen did not express an opinion as to the probable effects on literature of the war. He said:
"Now, the North and the South in the renascence of the short story after the Civil War divide honors about equally. But it is impossible to speak of the Southern short story, or indeed of Southern literature at all, without being broughtto the brink of a subject which lies back of the whole philosophy of Southern literature."
Mr. Allen paused for a moment. Then he continued, speaking with an intensity which reminded me of his Southern birth and upbringing:
"Suppose that at the end of the present European war Germany should be victorious and France defeated. And suppose that in France there should not be left a single publishing-house, a single literary periodical, a single literary editor, a single critic, and scarcely even a single buyer of books.
"And suppose that the defeated French people wanted to cry out their soul over their defeat and against their conquerors. And suppose that in order to do this every French novelist, short-story writer, or poet, unable to keep silent, should begin to write and begin to send his novel or his short story or his poem over into Germany to be read by a German editor, published by a German publisher, and sold in a German bookshop to a German reader. What kind of French literature of the war do you think would appear in Germany and be fostered there?
"But this is exactly what happened after the war between the North and the South.
"The few voices that began to be sent northward across the demolished battle-line could only be the voices that would be listened to and welcomed on the other side. That is the reason why that first literature was so mild, so tempered, so thin, so devitalized, that it seemed not to come from an enraged people, but from the memories of their ghosts.
"As a result of finding war literature inexpressible in such conditions, the young generation of Southerners dropped the theme of war altogether and explored other paths. So that perhaps the most original and spontaneous fragments of this new Southern post-bellum literature are in the regions of the imagination, where no note of war is heard.
"It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that if Joel Chandler Harris, a young Southerner, had possessed full freedom to wreak his genius on the war, the world might never have heard of 'Uncle Remus.' The world might never have known that among the cotton-plantations there dwelt a brother to Æsop and to La Fontaine."
From the Pacific Coast—from what is enthusiastically termed "the Golden West"—from that section of the United States which is large and chivalrous and gladly suffers suffrage—comes a voice, replying to my question: "What is the matter with contemporary fiction?"
And the voice says, "Cherchez la femme!"
It is the voice of Mr. Harry Leon Wilson, author ofBunker Bean,Ruggles of Red Gap, and many another popular novel, and co-author with Mr. Booth Tarkington of several successful plays. Mr. Wilson believes that the dullness and insincerity of our novels are due to the taste of most of their readers—that is, to the taste of the women.
I asked Mr. Wilson what, in his opinion, was the influence most harmful to the development of literature in America.
"I know little about literature," Mr. Wilsonreplied, "but if you mean the novel, I should say the intense satisfaction with it as it is, of the maker, the seller, and the buyer. And to trace this baneful satisfaction to its source, I should say it lies in the lack of a cultivated taste in our women readers of fiction.
"Publishers are agreed, I believe, that women buy the great bulk of their output. The current novel is as deliberately planned to please the woman buyer as is any other bit of trade goods. The publisher knows what she wants to read, the writer finds out from the publisher, and you can see the result in the advertisements—and the writer's royalty statements.
"'We want,' says the publisher, 'a stunning girl for the cover and a corking good love interest to catch the women.' (Publishers do talk that way when they have safely locked themselves in their low dens.)
"This love interest is always said to be wholesome and sweet. I don't know. Certainly it is sweet enough. In the trade novel it's as if you took a segment of rich layer cake, the chocolate-and-jelly kind, poured over it a half-pint of nice thick molasses, and then, just to make sure, sprinkled this abundantly with fine sugar.
"Anyway, that's what the publisher has found—and he has the best means of knowing—that the American woman will buy year in and year out. And you can't blame him for printing it. A publisher with ideals of his own couldn't last any longer than a grocer with ideals of his own, or a clergyman.
"And least of all can you blame the author for writing this slush, because nine times out of ten he doesn't know any better. How should he, with no one to tell him?
"And that," said Mr. Wilson, "is another evil almost as great in its influence as the undeveloped taste of our women readers. I mean our lack of authoritative criticism. Now we really do get a good novel once in a blue moon, but one who has been made wary by the mass of trade novels would never suspect it from reading our book reviews. The good novel, it is true, is praised heartily, but then so are all the bad novels—and how is one to tell?
"At least eighty-five per cent. of our book reviews are mere amiable, perfunctory echoes of the enthusiastic 'canned' review which the publisher obligingly prints on the paper jacket of his best seller. I sometimes suspect this task is allottedto a member of the staff who is known to be 'fond of reading.'
"Another evil influence is often alleged—the pressure the business office puts on the reviewer to be tender with novels that are lavishly advertised, but I have never thought there was more than a grain of truth in this.
"Perhaps a publisher wouldn't continue to patronize a sheet that habitually blurted out the truth about his best sellers, but I really doubt that this was ever put to an issue. I don't believe the average book-reviewer knows any better than the average novelist the difference between a good and a bad novel.
"It isn't so with the other arts. We have critics for those. Music, sculpture, painting—we know the best and get the best.
"But, then, the novel is scarcely considered to be an art form. Any one can—and does—write a novel, if he can only find the time. It isn't supposed to be a thing one must study, like plumbing or architecture.
"The novelist who wants to write a best seller this year studies the best seller of last year, and wisely, because that is what the publisher wants—something like his last one that sold big. Heis looking for it night and day and for nothing else. He wants good carpenters who have followed the design that women have liked. Fiction is the one art you don't take seriously, and there is no one to tell us we should; there are no critics to inform the writers and the readers and make the publishers timid.
"True, we have in this country two or three, possibly four, critics who can speak with authority, men who know what the novel has been, what it is with us, what it ought to be. One of them is a friend of mine, and I reproached him lately for not speaking out in meeting oftener.
"His defense was pathetic. First, that ninety out of a hundred of our novels are beneath criticism. Second, as to the remaining ten that would merit the rapier instead of the bludgeon—'criticism is harder to sell than post-meridian virtue. I have tried.'
"And he has to eat as often as any publisher. So there you are! People are not going to pay him for finding fault with something they are intensely satisfied with. It all comes back to the women. When their taste is corrected we shall have better novels. But not before then!"
"Mr. Wilson," I said, "do you believe that thedevelopment of the magazine, with its high prices and serialization, has been harmful or beneficial to fiction?"
"In the first place, the magazine hasn't developed," he answered. "It has merely multiplied—the cheap ones, I mean. And prices have not increased except to about a dozen of our national favorites. Where there is one writer who can get fifteen hundred dollars for a short story, or fifteen thousand dollars for the serial rights to a novel, there are a thousand who can get not more than a fifteenth of those prices.
"On the whole, I think that the effect of the cheap monthlies has been good. They are the only ones that welcome the new writer. They try him out. Then, if the public takes to him, the better magazines find it out after a while and form an alliance with him—that is, if his characters are so sweet and wholesome that the magazine can still be left on the center-table where Cuthbert or Berryl might see it after school.
"Nowadays I never expect to find a good short story in any of the cheap magazines. Of course, it does happen now and then, but not often enough to make me impatient for their coming. And, of course, the cheap monthlies do print, for themost part, what are probably the worst short stories that will ever be written in the world—the very furthest from anything real.
"These writers, too, like the novelists, study one another instead of life. We will say one of them writes a short story about a pure young shopgirl of flower-like beauty who, spending an evening of innocent recreation in a notorious Tenderloin dive (one of those places that I, for one, have never been able to find), is insulted by the leader of Tammany Hall, who is always hanging around there for evil purposes. At the last moment she is saved from his loathsome advances by a dashing young stranger in a cute-cut blue serge suit, who carries her off in a taxicab and marries her at 2A.M.And he, of course, proves to be the great traction magnate who owns all the city's surface-car lines.
"The other writers, and some new ones that never before thought of writing, read this story, which is called 'All for Love,' and learn to do the 'type'—the pure young shopgirl, a bit slangy in spite of her flower-like beauty; the abhorrent politician (some day he will have a distressing mix-up with his very own daughter in one of these evil places—see if he doesn't!), the low-browed dive-keeper,and the honest young traction magnate. They will learn with a little practice to do these as the dupes of the 'Be-a-cartoonist!' schools learn to draw 'An Irishman,' 'A German,' 'A Jew,' and the dental façade of Colonel Roosevelt.
"But we must remember that O. Henry came to us from the cheap magazines, never did get into the higher-priced ones, and was, by the way, wretchedly paid for his stories. True, he received good prices in his later days, but I doubt if they raised the average for his output to two hundred dollars a story. He neglected to come to the feast in a wedding garment, so the more pretentious magazines would have none of him.
"For one O. Henry, then, we can forgive the lesser monthlies for the bulk of their stuff that can be read only by born otoliths. The more magazines, the better our chance of finding the new man, and only in the cheap ones can he come to life."
Many dogmatic statements have been made concerning the great American novel. I have been told that it would come from the South, that it would come from the West, that it would never be written. But Mr. Wilson has a new and revolutionary theory.
"Will there," I asked, "ever be the great American novel? That is, will there ever be a novel which reflects American life as adequately asVanity Fairreflects English life?"
"There have already been dozens of them!" was Mr. Wilson's emphatic reply. "To go no farther back, Booth Tarkington wrote one the other day, and so did Theodore Dreiser. (Dreiser's story, 'The "Genius,"' of course couldn't have appeared in any American magazine. Trust your canny publisher not to let his magazine hand know what his book hand is doing!)
"But let us lay forever that dear old question that has haunted our literary columns for so many years. The answer, of course, is that there is no novel that reflects English life any more adequately thanThe Turmoil, or 'The Genius,' orThe Virginian, orPerch of the Devil, orUnleavened Bread, orThe Rise of Silas Laphamreflects American life.
"CertainlyVanity Fairdoesn't do this. It reflects but a very narrow section of London life. For the purposes of fictional portrayal England is just as big and difficult—as impossible in one novel—as the United States.
"To know England through fiction one mustgo to all her artists, past and present, getting a little from each. Hardy gives us an England that Thackeray never suspected, and Galsworthy gives us still another, not to go on to the England of George Moore, Phillpotts, Quiller-Couch, Wells, Bennett, Walpole, George, or Mackenzie. I hope at the proper time that a tasteful little tablet will be erected to my memory for having laid this ancient and highly respectable apparition."
In his interesting contribution to a symposium of opinions as to what are the six best novels in the English language, Mr. Wilson had some things to say about Dickens which were not likely to bring him a vote of thanks from the Dickens Fellowship. I wished to have his opinion of Dickens stated more definitely, and so, basing my question on a statement he had made in the symposium, I asked, "What qualities in the work of Charles Dickens make him a bad model for novelists to follow?"
Mr. Wilson replied: "Dickens has been a blight to most writers who were susceptible to his vices. He was a great humorist, but an inferior novelist, and countless other inferior novelists have believed that they could be great humorists by following his childishly easy formula.
"That is, those who were influenced by him copy his faults. Witness our school of characterization based on the Dickens method, a school holding that 'character' is a mere trick of giving your creation exaggerated mannerisms or physical surfaces—as with Dickens it was rarely anything else.
"Dickens created vaudeville 'characters'—unsurpassed for twenty-minute sketches, deadly beyond that to the mentally mature. His stock in trade was the grotesque make-up. In stage talk he couldn't create a 'straight' part.
"Strip his people of their make-ups, verbal, hirsute, sartorial, surgical, pathological, what not—and dummies remain. Meet them once and you know them for the rest of the tale, the Micawbers, Gamps, Pecksniffs, Nicklebys; each has his stunt and does it over and over at each new meeting, to the—for me, at least—maddening delay of the melodrama. I like melodrama as well as any one, badgered heroines, falsely accused heroes, missing wills, trap-doors, disguised philanthropists, foul murders, and even slow-dying children who are not only moralists, but orators; and I like to see the villain get his at last, and get it good; but I can't read Dickens any more, becausethe tale must be held up every five minutes for one of the funny 'characters' to do his stunt.
"How many years will it take us—writers, I mean—to realize that there are no characters in Dickens in the sense that Dmitri inThe Brothers Caramazovis a character? How few of our current novelists can distinguish between the soulless caricaturing of Dickens and the genuine character-drawing of a Turgenieff or a Dostoievski!
"How few of us can see how the soul of Dmitri is slowly unfolded to the reader with never a bit of make-up! To this moment, I don't know if he wore a beard or not; but I know the man. Dickens would have given him funny whiskers, astigmatism, a shortened leg, a purple nose, and still to make sure we wouldn't mistake him a catch phrase for his utterance.
"Any novelist who has mastered the rudiments of his craft, even though he hasn't an atom of humor in his make-up, can write a Dickens novel, and any publisher will print it for the Christmas trade if it's fairly workman-like, and it will be warmly praised in the reviews. That happens every season.
"And that's why Dickens is a bad model. If one must have a model, why not Hall Caine, infinitelythe superior of Dickens as a craftsman? Of course, having no humor, he can't be read by people who have, but he knows his trade, where Dickens was a preposterous blunderer."
Charles Belmont Davis once told me that a novelist should have some other regular occupation besides writing. I asked Mr. Wilson his opinion on this subject.