"But I don't think it has ever appeared that the real reason why Henry James did not attemptTrilbywas that he possessed no musical sense; Mr. James himself told me this, and without a sense of music the material was useless toany one. I discussed the incident with him some ten years ago and he added, in connection withTrilbyand Du Maurier, other interesting facts.
"Trilbydid not at first make a signal success in England. Its first big hit was made inHarper's Magazine. Not realizing the American possibilities, Mr. du Maurier, when offered by Harper & Brothers a choice between royalties and five thousand dollars outright for the book rights, took the lump sum as if it were descended straight from heaven. When the news of the extraordinary success of the book in this country reached him, he realized his serious mistake, and in the family circle there was keen depression over it. But further surprises were in store for him. To their eternal credit, the house of Harper & Brothers—honorable then as now—in view of the unfortunate situation in which their author had placed himself, voluntarily canceled the first contract and restored Du Maurier to a royalty basis. The fear in the English home then was that this arrangement would come too late to bring in anything. Not only, however, did the book continue to sell, but the play came on, and together the rights afforded George du Maurier a competency that banished further worry from the home."
The novel is doomed. If the automobile, the aeroplane, and the moving picture continue to develop during the next ten years as they have developed during the last ten, people will cease almost entirely to take interest in fiction.
It was not Henry Ford who told me this. Neither was it Mr. Wright, nor M. Pathé. The man who made this ominous prophecy about the novel is himself a successful novelist. He is Will N. Harben, author ofPole Baker,Ann Boyd,The Desired Woman, and many other widely read tales of life in rural Georgia.
Although he is so closely associated with the Southern scenes about which he has written, Mr. Harben spends most of his time in New York nowadays. He justifies this course interestingly—but before I tell his views on this subject I willrepeat what he had to say about this possible extinction of the novel.
"You have read," he said, "of the tremendous vogue ofPickwick Paperswhen it was first published. No work of fiction since that time has been received with such enthusiasm.
"In London at that time you would find statuettes of Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, and Sam Weller in the shop windows. There were Pickwick punch-ladles, Pickwick teaspoons, Pickwick souvenirs of all sorts.
"Now, when you walk down Broadway, do you find any reminders of the popular novels of the day? You do not, except of course in the bookshops. But you do find things that remind you of contemporary taste. In the windows of stationers and druggists you find statuettes not of characters in the fiction of the day, but of Charlie Chaplin.
"Of course the moving picture has not supplanted the novel. But people all over the country are becoming less and less interested in fiction. The time which many people formerly gave to the latest novel they now give to the latest film.
"And the moving picture is by no means the only thing which is weaning us away from thenovel. The automobile is a powerful influence in this direction.
"Take, for instance, the town from which I come—Dalton, Georgia. There the people who used to read novels spend their time which they used to give to that entertainment riding around in automobiles. Sometimes they go on long trips, sometimes they go to visit their friends in near-by towns. But automobiling is the way in which they nowadays are accustomed to spend their leisure.
"Naturally, this has its effect on their attitude toward novels. Years ago, when Dalton had a population of about three thousand, it had two well-patronized bookshops. Now it has a population of about seven thousand and no bookshops at all!
"I suppose one of the reasons is that people live their adventures by means of the automobile, and therefore do not care so much about getting adventures from the printed page. But the chief reason is one of time—the fact is that people more and more prefer automobiling to reading.
"Now, if the aeroplane were to be perfected—as we have every reason to believe it will be—so that we could travel in it as we now do in theautomobile, what possible interest would we have in reading dry novels? It seems likely that in a hundred years we will be able to see clearly the surface of Mars—do you think that people will want to read novels when this wonderful new world is before their eyes?
"The authors themselves are beginning to realize this. They are becoming more and more nervous. They are not the placid creatures that they were in Sir Walter Scott's day. They feel that people are not as interested in them and their works as they used to be. I doubt very much if any publisher to-day would be interested, for example, in an author who produced a novel as long asDavid Copperfieldand of the same excellence."
"But do you think," I asked, "that the fault is entirely that of the public? Haven't the authors changed, too?"
"I think that the authors have changed," said Mr. Harben, reflectively. "The authors do not live as they used to live.
"The authors no longer live with the people about whom they write. Instead, they live with other authors.
"Nowadays, an author achieves success bywriting, we will say, about the people of his home in the Far West. Then he comes to New York. And instead of living with the sort of people about whom he writes, he lives with artists. That must have its effect upon his work."
"But is not that what you yourself did?" I asked. "A New York apartment-house is certainly the last place in the world in which to look for the historian ofPole Baker!"
Mr. Harben smiled. "But I don't live with artists," he said. "I try to live with the kind of people I write about. I resolved a long time ago to try to avoid living with literary people and to live with all sorts of human beings—with people who didn't know or care whether or not I was a writer.
"So I have for my friends and acquaintances sailors, merchants—people of all sorts of professions and trade. And people of that sort—people who make no pretensions to be artists—are the best company for a writer, for they open their hearts to him. A writer can learn how to write about humanity by living with humanity, instead of with other people who are trying to write about humanity."
"But at any rate you have left the part of thecountry about which you write," I said. "And wasn't that one of the things for which you condemned our hypothetical writer of Western tales?"
"Not necessarily," said Mr. Harben. "It sometimes happens that an author can write about the scenes he knows best only after he has gone away from them. I know that this is true of myself.
"It's in line with the old saws about 'distance lends enchantment' and 'emotion remembered in tranquillity,' you know. I believe that Du Maurier was able to write his vivid descriptions of life in the Latin Quarter of Paris because he went to London to do it.
"You see, I absorbed life in Georgia for many years. And in New York I can remember it and get a perspective on it and write about it."
"Then," I said, "you would go to Georgia, I suppose, if you wanted to write a story about life in a New York apartment?"
Mr. Harben thought for a moment. "No," he said, slowly, "I don't think that I'd go to Georgia to write about New York. I think that a novel about New York must be written in New York—while a novel about Dalton, Georgia, must be written away from Dalton, Georgia."
"How do you account for that?" I asked.
"Well," said Mr. Harben, "for one thing there is something bracing about New York's atmosphere that makes it easier to write when one is here. Once I tried to write a novel in Dalton, and I simply couldn't do it.
"And the reason why a novel about New York must be written in New York is because you can't absorb New York as you might absorb Georgia, so to speak, and then go away and express it. New York is so thoroughly artificial that there is nothing about it which a writer can absorb.
"New York hasn't the puzzles and adventures and surprises that Georgia has. Everybody knows about apartment-houses and skyscrapers and subways and elevators and dumb-waiters—there's nothing new to say about them.
"I sometimes think that the reason why the modern novel about New York City is so uninteresting is because everybody tries to write about New York City. And their novels are all of one pattern—necessarily, because life in New York City is all of one pattern.
"In bygone days this was not true of New York. For instance, Mr. Howells's novels about New York City were about a community in whichpeople lived in real houses and had families and friends. In those days life in New York had its problems and surprises and adventures; it was not lived mechanically and according to a set pattern.
"What I have said about the advisability of an author's leaving the scenes about which he is to write is not universally true. There are writers who do better work by staying in the place where the scenes of their stories are laid. For instance, Joel Chandler Harris did better work by staying in the South than he would have done if he had gone away."
"But wasn't that because his negro folk-tales were a sort of 'glorified reporting' rather than creative work?" I asked.
"No," said Mr. Harben; "they were creative work. Joel Chandler Harris remembered just the bare skeleton of the stories as the negro had told them to him. And he developed them imaginatively. That was creative work. And he did most of his writing, and the best of his writing, in the office ofThe Constitution."
"In view of what you said about the difficulty of absorbing New York life," I suggested, "I suppose that, in your opinion, the great American novel will not be written about New York."
"What do you mean by the great American novel?" asked Mr. Harben. "So far as I know there is no great English novel or great Russian novel."
"I suppose that the term means a novel inevitably associated with the national literature," I said. "You cannot think of English literature without thinking ofVanity Fair, for instance. Certainly there is no American novel so conspicuously a reflection of our national life as that novel is of English life."
"Well," said Mr. Harben, "it is difficult to think of American literature or of American life without thinking of the novels of William Dean Howells. But the great American novel, to use that term, would be less likely to come into being than the great English novel.
"You see, the United States is not as compact as England. London, it may be said, is England; it has all the characteristics of England, and in the season all England may be met there."
Mr. Harben is not in sympathy with the theories of some of our modern realists.
"The trouble with the average realist," he said, "is that he doesn't believe that the emotions are real. As a matter of fact, the greatestsource of material for the novelist is to be found in the emotional and spiritual side of human nature. If writers were more receptive to spiritual and emotional impressions they would make better novels. It is the soul of man that the greatest novels are written about—there is Dostoievski'sCrime and Punishment, for example!"
In spite of his criticisms of some of the methods of the modern realists, Mr. Harben believes strongly in the importance of one realistic dogma, that which has to do with detailed description.
"Why is it thatPepys's Diaryis interesting to us?" he asked. "It is because of its detail.
"But if Pepys had been a Howells—if he had been as careful in describing great things as he was in describing small things—then hisDiarywould be ten times more valuable to us than it is. And so Howells's novels will be valuable to people who read them a thousand years from now to get an idea of how we live.
"That is, Howells's novels will be valuable if people read novels in the years that are to come! Perhaps they will not be reading novels or anything else. For all we know, thought-transference may become as common a thing as telephony is now. And if this comes to pass nobody will read!"
Brown of Harvard is no more. The play of that name may still be running, but of Harvard life it is now about as accurate a picture asTrelawney of the Wellsis of modern English life. At Harvard, and at all the great American universities, the dashing, picturesque young athlete is no longer the prevailing type of the undergraduate ideal.
Of course, undergraduate athletics and undergraduate athletes persist—it would be a tragedy if they did not—but the type of youth that has been rather effectively denominated the "rah-rah boy" is increasingly difficult to find. His place has been taken, not by the "grind," the plodding, prematurely old student, caring only for his books and his scholastic record, but by a normal young man, aware that the campus is not themost important place in the world; aware, in fact, that the university is not the universe.
This young man knows about class politics, but also about international politics; about baseball, but also about contemporary literature. He is much more a citizen than his predecessor of ten years since, less provincial, less aristocratic. And he not only enjoys literature, but actually desires to create it.
The chief enthusiasm at Harvard seems to be the drama; indeed, the Brown of Harvard to-day must be represented not as a crimson-sweatered gladiator but as a cross between Strindberg and George M. Cohan. At Columbia—I have Prof. John Erskine's word for it—there has lately developed a genuine interest in—what do you suppose? Poetry!
I interviewed the bulletin-board outside Hamilton Hall before I interviewed Professor Erskine, and it, too, surprised me. It was not the bulletin-board of my not altogether remote undergraduate days. It bore notices telling of a meeting of the "Forum for Religious Discussion," of an anti-militaristic mass-meeting, of a rehearsal of an Elizabethan drama. It was a sign of the times.
Professor Erskine said that undergraduate idealshad greatly changed during the last few years. I asked him how this had come to pass.
"Well," he replied, "I think that college life reflects the ordinary life of the world more closely than is usually believed. This is a day of general cultural and spiritual awakening. The college student is waking, just as everybody else is waking; like everybody else, he is becoming more interested in the great things of life. There is no reason why the college walls should shut him in from the hopes, ambitions, and problems of the rest of humanity.
"It isn't only the boys that have changed—the parents have changed too. Time was when the father and mother wanted their son to go to college so that he could join a group of pleasant, nice-mannered boys of good family. Now they have a definite idea of the practical value of a college education, they send their son to college intelligently.
"Also, the whole theory of teaching has changed. The purely Germanic system has been superseded by something more humane. The old idea of scholarship for its own sake is no longer insisted upon. Instead, the subjects taught are treated in their relation to life, the only way in which they can be of real interest to the students.
"You will look in vain in the modern university for the old type of absent-minded, dry-as-dust professor. He has been superseded by the professor who is a man as well as a scholar. And naturally he approaches his subject and his classes in a different spirit from that of his predecessor.
"We have a new sort of teacher of English. He is not now (as was once often the case) a retired clergyman, or a specialist recruited from some unliterary field. He is, in many cases, a creative artist, a dramatist, a novelist, or a poet.
"When I was in college this was not generally true. Then such a professor as George Edward Woodberry or Brander Matthews was unique. Now the college wants poets and creative writers."
These are Professor Erskine's actual words. I asked him to repeat his last statement and he said, apparently with no sense of the amazement which his words caused in me, "The college wants the poets!" The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.
But, then, there are poets and poets. There is, for example, Prof. Curtis Hidden Page. There is also one John Erskine, author ofActæon and Other Poems, and Adjunct Professor of English at Columbia University. There is also Prof.Alfred Noyes. But there are also some thousand or so poets in the United States who will be surprised to know that the college wants them. Academic appreciation of poets has generally consisted of a cordial welcome given their collected works two hundred years after their deaths.
"English as a cultural finish," Professor Erskine continued, "has gone by the board. English is taught nowadays with as much seriousness as philosophy or history. Art in all its forms is considered as the history of the race, and treated seriously by the student as well as by the professor. To-day the students regard Shakespeare and Tennyson as very important men. They study them as in a course in philosophy they would study Bergson. Literature, philosophy, and history have been drawn together as one subject, as they should be."
"What," I asked, "are some of the extra-curricular manifestations of literary interest among the students?"
"In the first place," he answered, "the extraordinary amount of writing done by the students. It is not at all unusual now for a Columbia student to sell his work to the regular magazines. The student who writes for the magazines andnewspapers is no longer a novelty. Randolph Bourne, who was recently graduated, contributed a number of essays to theAtlantic Monthlyduring his junior and senior years.
"Many of the students write for the newspapers. The better sort of newspaper humorists have had a strong influence on the undergraduate mind; they have shown the way to writing things that are funny but have an intellectual appeal. This has resulted in the production of some really excellent light verse. Also, Horace's stock has gone up.
"During the last two years some remarkable plays have been handed into the Columbia University Dramatic Association. Not only were they serious, but also they were highly poetic.
"And this," said Professor Erskine, "marks what I hope is the distinguishing literary atmosphere at Columbia. The trend of the plays written by Columbia students is strongly poetic. This is not true, perhaps, of the plays written by students of other institutions. The writers of plays want to write poetic plays, and—what is perhaps even more surprising—the other students do not consider poetic drama 'high-brow stuff.'
"Philolexian, the oldest of the Columbia literarysocieties, has been producing Elizabethan plays. These plays have been enthusiastically received, and the enthusiasm does not seem to show any signs of dying down. The students come to the study of these plays with a feeling of familiarity, for they have seen them acted."
"Does this enthusiasm for literature show itself in the college magazine?" I asked.
"It shows itself," answered Professor Erskine, "by the absence of a literary magazine. The literary magazine has completely collapsed. In small colleges, far away from the cities where the regular magazines are published, the college magazine is the only available outlet for the work of the students who can write. But here in New York the students know the condition of the literary market, and the more skilful writers among them do not care to give their writings to an amateur publication when they can sell them off the campus. So theColumbia Monthlygot only second-best material. The boys who really could write would not sacrifice their work by burying it in a college publication, so theColumbia Monthlydied.
"The history of a literary club we have up here, called Boar's Head, is significant. It wasstarted as a sort of revival of an older organization called King's Crown. At first the program consisted of an address at each meeting by some prominent writer. For a while the meetings were well attended, but gradually the interest died down.
"At length I found what the trouble was—the boys wanted to do their own entertaining. Now work by the members is read at every meeting; there are no addresses by outsiders.
"And here again the poetic trend of the undergraduate mind at Columbia is displayed. The Scribblers' Club, which consisted of short-story writers, is dead—there were not enough short-story writers to support it. And at the meetings of Boar's Head there have been read, during the past two years, only one or two short stories.
"The boys bring plays and poems to the Boar's Head meetings, but not short stories. Last year most of the poems which were read were short lyrics. Toward the end of last year and during the present year longer poems have been read. They are not poems in the Masefield manner; they are modeled rather on Keats and Coleridge. This fact has interested me because the magazines, as a rule, have not been buying long poems.I was interested to see that William Stanley Braithwaite, in his excellentAnthology of Magazine Verse and Year-Book of American Poetry, calls attention to the increasing popularity of the longer poem.
"Last year Boar's Head decided to bring out a little book containing the best of the poems that were read at its meetings. A number of subscribers at twenty-five cents each were procured, andQuad Rippleswas published. It contained only short poems. This year Boar's Head has publishedOdes and Episodes, a collection of light verse by one of its former members, Archie Austin Coates. It soon will publish a collection of poems read at its meetings, and all these poems are long. Some of these poems are so good that it is a real sacrifice for the boys to have them printed in this book instead of in some magazine.
"Of course, there were always 'literary men' at Columbia, but they were considered unusual. Now they no longer even form a class by themselves. One of our best writers of light verse is the captain of the baseball team.
"Speaking of light verse and baseball," continued Professor Erskine, "there is a certain connection between theColumbia Monthlyand football,besides the obvious parallel which lies in the fact that both have ceased to exist. Some of the boys express eagerness to revive the college magazine, just as they express eagerness to revive football. But it is, I believe, merely a matter of pride with them. They are eager to have football and to have a college magazine; they are not so eager to contribute to the support of either institution.
"One proof of the literary renascence of Columbia is that the essays written in the regular course of the work in philosophy and in English are better than ever before."
"Do you believe," I asked, "that being in the city has had a good effect on literary activity among Columbia students?"
He answered: "I do think so, decidedly. It has produced an extreme individualism and has given the boys enterprising minds. It is true that it has its disadvantages, it has made the student, so to speak, centrifugal, and has destroyed collegiate co-operation of the old sort. But it has produced an original, independent type of student.
"The older type of college student was interested in football because he knew that peopleexpected him to be interested in football. The Columbia student of to-day is interested in poetry, not because it is a Columbia tradition to be interested in poetry, but because his tastes are naturally literary."
Several of the causes of this poetic renascence at Columbia had been mentioned in the course of our conversation, but Professor Erskine had ignored one of the most important of them. So I will mention it now. It is John Erskine.
"Well," said John Burroughs, "she doesn't seem to want us out here, so I guess we'll have to go in." So we left the little summer-house overlooking the Hudson and went into the bark-walled study.
Now, "she" was a fat and officious robin, and her nest was in a corner of the summer-house just over my head, as I sat with the poet-naturalist. The nest was full of hungry and unprepossessing young robins, and the mother robin seemed to be annoyed in her visits to it by our talk. As we walked to the study, leaving to the robin family undisputed possession of the summer-house, I heard John Burroughs say in tones of mild indignation, half to himself and half to me:
"I won't stand this another year! This is the third year she's taken possession of that summer-house,and next May she simply must build her nest somewhere else!"
Nevertheless, I think that this impudent robin will rear her 1917 brood in John Burroughs's summer-house, if she wants to.
When I walked up from the station to Riverby—John Burroughs's twenty-acre home on the west shore of the Hudson—I was surprised by the agility of my seventy-nine-year-old companion. He walked with the elastic step of a young man, and his eyes and brain were as alert as in the days when he showed Emerson and Whitman the wild wonders of the hills.
"Living in the city," he said, "is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city is a place to which one goes to do business; it is a place where men overreach one another in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.
"Years ago, I think, it was possible to have a home in the city. I used to think that a home in Boston might possibly be imagined. But no one can have a home in New York in all that noise and haste.
"Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on cominggenerations. All this grind and rush and roar of the Subway and the surface cars must have some effect on the children of New-Yorkers. And that effect cannot be good.
"And what effect can it have on our literature? It might produce, I suppose, in the writer's mind, a sense of the necessity of haste, a passionate desire to get his effect as quickly as possible. But can it give him sharpness of intellect and keenness of æsthetic perception! I'd like to think so, but I can't. I don't see how literature can be produced in the city. Literature must have repose, and there is no repose in New York so far as I can see.
"Of course I have no right to speak for other writers. Some people can find repose in the city—I can't. I hear that people write on the trains, on the omnibus, and in the Subway—I don't see how they do it!"
"Have you noticed," I asked, as we left the lane and walked down a grassy slope toward the study, "that the city has not as yet set its mark on our literature?"
"I think," said John Burroughs, "that much of our modern fiction shows what I may call a metropolitan quality; it seems made up of showy streets and electric light. But I don't know. Idon't read much fiction. I turn more to poetry and to meditative essays. Some poets find beauty in the city, and they must, I suppose, find repose there. Richard Watson Gilder spent nearly all his life in a city and reflected the life of the city in his poems. And Edmund Clarence Stedman was thoroughly a poet of the city. I don't think that any of Emerson's poems smack of the city. They smack of the country, and of Emerson's study in the country, his study under the pines, where, as he wrote:
the sacred pine-tree addsTo the leaves her myriads.
the sacred pine-tree addsTo the leaves her myriads.
"Of the younger poets, John James Piatt has written beautifully of the city. He wrote a very fine poem called 'The Morning Street,' which appeared in theAtlantic Monthlysome years ago. In it he describes vividly the hush of early morning in a great city, when the steps of a solitary traveler echo from the walls of the sleeping houses. I don't suppose Piatt is known to many readers of this generation. He was a friend of Howells, and was the co-author with Howells ofPoems by Two Friends, published in the early sixties. This was Howells's first venture."
We were in the bark-walled study now, seated before the great stone fireplace, in which some logs were blazing. On the stone shelf I saw, among the photographs of Carlyle and Emerson and other friends of my host, a portrait of Whitman.
"Your friend, Walt Whitman," I said, "got inspiration from the city."
"Yes," said John Burroughs, "he got inspiration from the city, but you wouldn't call his poems city poetry. His way of writing wasn't metropolitan, you know; you might say that he treated the city by a country method. What he loved about the city was its people—he loved the throngs of men, he loved human associations.
"But he was a born lover of cities, Whitman was. He loved the city in all its phases, mainly because he was such a lover of his kind, of the 'human critter,' as he calls him. Whitman spent most of his life in the city, and was more at home there than in the country. He came to Brooklyn when he was a boy, and there he worked in a law-office, and as a printer and on theEagle.
"For a while, I remember, he drove a 'bus up and down Broadway when the driver, who was a friend of his, was sick. That's where he gotthe stuff he put inThe Funeral of an Old Omnibus-driver. He put in it all the signs and catch-words of the 'bus-drivers."
John Burroughs pointed his steady old hand at a big framed photograph on the wall. It is an unusual portrait of Walt Whitman, showing him seated, with his hands clasped, with a flaring shirt collar, like a sailor's.
"Whitman," John Burroughs continued, "seems to be appealing more and more to young men. But in the modern Whitmanesque young poets I don't see much to suggest Whitman, except in form. They do clever things, but not elemental things, not things with a cosmic basis. Whitman, with all his commonness and nearness, reached out into the abysmal depths, as his imitators fail to do. I think Robert Frost has been influenced by Whitman. HisNorth of Bostonis very good; it is genuine realism; it is a faithful, convincing picture of New England farm life. When I first saw the book I didn't think I'd read three pages of it, but I read it all with keen interest. It's absolutely true.
"I used to see Whitman often when he and I were working in Washington. And he came up to see me here. When I was in WashingtonWhitman used to like to come up to our house for Sunday morning breakfast. Mrs. Burroughs makes capital pancakes, and Walt was very fond of them, but he was always late for breakfast. The coffee would boil over, the griddle would smoke, car after car would go jingling by, and no Walt. But a car would stop at last, and Walt would roll off it and saunter up to the door—cheery, vigorous, serene, putting every one in good humor. And how he ate! He radiated health and hopefulness. This is what made his work among the sick soldiers in Washington of such inestimable value. Every one who came into personal relations with him felt his rare, compelling charm.
"Very few young literary men of Whitman's day accepted him. Stedman did, and the fact is greatly to his credit. Howells and Aldrich were repelled by his bigness. All the Boston poets except Emerson hesitated. Emerson didn't hesitate—unlike Lowell and Holmes, he kept open house for big ideas."
I asked Mr. Burroughs what, in his opinion, had brought about the change in the world's attitude toward Whitman.
"Well," he replied, looking thoughtfully intothe radiant depths of the open fire, "when Whitman first appeared we were all subservient to the conventional standards of English literature. We understood and appreciated only the pretty and exact. Whitman came in his working-man's garb, in his shirt sleeves he sauntered into the parlor of literature.
"We resented it. But the young men nowadays are more liberal. More and more Whitman is forcing on them his open-air standards. Science supplemented by the human heart gives us a bigger and freer world than our forefathers knew. And then the European acceptance of Whitman had had its effect. We take our point of view so largely from Europe. And a force like Whitman's must be felt slowly; it's a cumulative thing."
"You believe," I said, "that Whitman is our greatest poet?"
"Oh yes," he replied, "Whitman is the greatest poet America has produced. He is great with the qualities that make Homer and the classic poets great. Emerson is more precious, more intellectual. Whitman and Emerson are our two greatest poets."
While we strolled over the pleasant turf andwatched a wood-thrush resting in the cool of the evening above her half-built nest among the cherry blossoms, John Burroughs returned to the subject that we had discussed on our way from the station—the city's evil effect on literature.
"Business life," he said, "is inimical to poetry. To write poetry you must get into an atmosphere utterly different from that of the city. And one of the greatest of all enemies of literature is the newspaper. The style of writing that the newspaper has brought into existence is as far as possible from art and literature. When you are writing for a daily paper, you don't try to say a thing in a poetic or artistic way, but in an efficient way, in a business-like way. There is no appeal to the imagination, no ideality. A newspaper is a noisy thing that goes out into the street and shouts its way into the attention of people.
"If you are going to write poetry you must say to certain phases of the newspapers, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' A poet can't be developing his gossiping faculty and turning everything hot off the griddle. The daily paper is a new institution, and it has come to stay. But it has bad manners, and it is the enemy of all meditation, all privacy, all things that make for great art.
"It's the same way with nature and writing about nature. From nature we get not literature, but the raw material for literature. It is very important for us to remember that the bee does not get honey from the flowers; it makes honey from what it gets from the flowers. What it gets from the flowers is nothing but sweet water. The bee gets its sweet water, retires, thinks it over, and by a private process makes it into honey.
"So many nature-writers fail to profit by the example of the bee. They go into the woods and come out again and write about their experience—but they don't give us honey. They don't retire and subject what they find in the woods to a private process. They don't give us honey; they give us just a little sweet water, pretty thoroughly diluted.
"In my own work—if I may mention it in all humbleness—I have tried for years not to give the world just a bare record, but to flavor it, so to speak, with my own personality, as the bee turns the sweet water that it gets into honey by adding its own formic acid.
"If I lived in the city I couldn't do any writing, unless I succeeded in obliterating the city from my consciousness. But I shouldn't try to forcemy standards on every one. Other men live in the cities and write—Carlyle did most of his work in London. But he lived a secluded life even in the city, and he had to have his yearly pilgrimage to Scotland."
It is some years since John Burroughs has written poetry, although all his prose is clearly the work of a poet. And it is safe to say that better known than any of his intimate prose studies of the out-of-door world—better known even thanWake Robinand that immortalA Hunt for the NightingaleandIn Fresh Fields—is one of his poems,Waiting, the poem that begins:
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,For lo! my own shall come to me.
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,For lo! my own shall come to me.
"I wroteWaiting," he said, "in 1862, when I was reading medicine in the office of a country physician. It was a dingy afternoon, and I was feeling pretty blue. But the thought came to me—I suppose I got it from Goethe or some of the Orientals, probably by way of Emerson—that what belonged to me would come to me in time, if I waited—and if I also hustled. So I waited and I hustled, and my little poem turned out tobe a prophecy. My own has come to me, as I never expected it to come. The best friends I have were seeking me all the while. There's Henry Ford; he had read all my books, and he came to me—that great-hearted man, the friend of all the birds, and my friend.
"The poem first appeared in theKnickerbocker Magazine. That magazine was edited by a Cockney named Kinneha Cornwallis. It ran long enough to print one of Cornwallis's novels, and then it died. I remember that theKnickerbocker Magazinenever paid me forWaiting, and the poem didn't attract any attention until Whittier printed it in hisSongs of Three Centuries.
"It has been changed and tampered with and had all sorts of things done to it. It was found among the manuscripts of a poet down South after his death, and his literary executor was going to print it in his book. He wrote to me and asked if I could show a date for it earlier than 1882. I said, 'Yes, 1862!' and that settled that matter.
"There was a man in Boston that I wanted to kick! He wrote to me and asked if he could printWaitingon a card and circulate it among his friends. I told him he could, and sent himan autographed copy to make sure he'd get it straight. He sent me a package of the printed cards, and I found that he had added a stanza to it—a religious stanza, all about Heaven's gate! He had left out the second stanza, and added this religious stanza. He was worried because God had been left out of my poem—poor God, ignored by a little atom like me!
"When people ask me where I got the idea in it, I generally say that my parents were old-school Baptists and believed in foreordination, and that's the way that foreordination cropped out in me—it's a sort of transcendental version of foreordination. I think the poem is true—like attracts like; it's the way in which we are constituted, rather than any conscious factor, that insures success. It's that that makes our fortunes, it's that that is the 'tide in the affairs of men' that Shakespeare meant."
A few rods from John Burroughs's riverside house a brown thrush is building her nest in a cherry-tree. She is a bird of individual ideas, and is thoroughly convinced that paper, not twigs and leaves, forms the proper basis for her work. It is pleasant to think of John Burroughs seated in his study communing with the memoriesof Whitman and Emerson, and his other great dead friends. But it is pleasanter to think of him, as I saw him, anxious and intent, his great white beard mingled with the cherry blossoms, as he strolled over to fix the paper base of the thrush's nest so that the wind could not destroy it.
What is the matter with American literature? There are many answers that might be made to this often-asked question. "Nothing" might be one answer. "Commercialism" might be another. But the answer given by Ellen Glasgow, whose latest successful novel of American manners and morals isLife and Gabriella, is "evasive idealism."
I found the young woman who has found in our Southern States themes for sympathetic realism rather than picturesque romance temporarily resident, inappropriately enough, in a hotel not far from Broadway and Forty-second Street. And I found her to be a woman of many ideas and strong convictions. One strongly felt and forcibly expressed conviction was that the "evasive idealism" which is evident in so much of ourpopular fiction is in reality the chief blemish on the American character, manifesting its baleful influence in our political, social, and economic life. Miss Glasgow first used the term "evasive idealism" in an effort to explain why contemporary English novels are better than contemporary American novels.
"Certainly," she said, "the novels written by John Galsworthy and the other English novelists of the new generation are better than anything that we are producing in the United States at the present time. And I think that the reason for this is that in America we demand from our writers, as we demand from our politicians, and in general from those who theoretically are our men of light and leading, an evasive idealism instead of a straightforward facing of realities. In England the demand is for a direct and sincere interpretation of life, and that is what the novelists of England, especially the younger novelists, are making. But what the American public seems to desire is the cheapest sort of sham optimism. And apparently our writers—a great many of them—are ready and eager to meet this demand.
"You know the sort of book which takes best in this country. It is the sort of book in whichthere is not from beginning to end a single attempt to portray a genuine human being. Instead there are a number of picturesque and attractive lay figures, and one of them is made to develop a whimsical, sentimental, and maudlinly optimistic philosophy of life.
"That is what the people want—a sugary philosophy, utterly without any basis in logic or human experience. They want the cheapest sort of false optimism, and they want it to be uttered by a picturesque, whimsical character, in humorous dialect. Books made according to this receipt sell by the hundreds of thousands.
"I don't know which is the more tragic, the fact that a desire for this sort of literary pabulum exists, or the fact that there are so many writers willing to satisfy that desire. But I do know that the widespread enthusiasm for this sort of writing is the reason for the inferiority of our novels to those of England. And, furthermore, I think that this evasive idealism, this preference for a pretty sham instead of the truth, is evident not only in literature, but in every phase of American life.
"Look at our politics! We tolerate corruption; graft goes on undisturbed, except for some sporadicattacks of conscience on the part of various communities. The ugliness of sin is there, but we prefer not to look at it. Instead of facing the evil and attacking it manfully we go after any sort of a false god that will detract our attention from our shame. Just as in literature we want the books which deal not with life as it is, but with life as it might be imagined to be lived, so in politics we want to face not hard and unpleasant facts, but agreeable illusions.
"Nevertheless," said Miss Glasgow, "I think that in literature there are signs of a movement away from this evasive idealism. It is much more evident in England than in America, but I think that in the course of time it will reach us, too. We shall cease to be 'slaves of words,' as Sophocles said, and learn that the novelist's duty is to understand and interpret life. And when our novelists and our readers of novels appreciate the advisability of this attitude, then will the social and political life of the United States be more wholesome than it has been for many a year. The new movement in the novel is away from sentimental optimism and toward an optimism that is genuine and robust."
"Then a novel may be at once optimistic andrealistic?" I said. "That is not in accord with the generally received ideas of realism."
"It is true of the work of the great realists," answered Miss Glasgow. "True realism is optimistic, without being sentimental."
"What realists have been optimistic?" I asked.
"Well," said Miss Glasgow, "Henry Fielding, one of the first and greatest of English realists, surely was an optimist. And there was Charles Dickens—often, it is true, he was sentimental, but at his best he was a robust optimist.
"But the greatest modern example of the robust optimistic realist, absolutely free from sentimentality, is George Meredith. Galsworthy, who surely is a realist, is optimistic in such works asThe FreelandsandThe Patricians. And Meredith is always realistic and always optimistic.
"The optimism I mean, the optimism which is a distinguishing characteristic of George Meredith's works, does not come from an evasion of facts, but from a recognition of them. The constructive novelist, the novelist who really interprets life, never ignores any of the facts of life. Instead, he accepts them and builds upon them. And he perceives the power of the will to control destiny; he knows that life is not what you getout of it, but what you put into it. This is what the younger English novelists know and what our novelists must learn. And it is their growing recognition of this spirit that makes me feel that the tendency of modern literature is toward democracy."
"What is the connection between democracy and the tendency you have described?" I asked.
"To me," Miss Glasgow answered, "true democracy consists chiefly in the general recognition of the truth that will create destiny. Democracy does not consist in the belief that all men are born free and equal or in the desire that they shall be born free and equal. It consists in the knowledge that all people should possess an opportunity to use their will to control—to create—destiny, and that they should know that they have this opportunity. They must be educated to the use of the will, and they must be taught that character can create destiny.
"Of course, environment inevitably has its effect on the character, and, therefore, on will, and, therefore, on destiny. You can so oppress and depress the body that the will has no chance. True democracy provides for all equal opportunities for the exercise of will. If you hang a man,you can't ask him to exercise his will. But if you give him a chance to live—which is the democratic thing to do—then you put before him an opportunity to exercise his will."
"But what are the manifestations of this new democratic spirit?" I asked. "Is not the war, which is surely the greatest event of our time, an anti-democratic thing?"
"The war is not anti-democratic," Miss Glasgow replied, "any more than it is anti-autocratic. Or rather, I may say it is both anti-democratic and anti-autocratic. It is a conflict of principles, a deadly struggle between democracy and imperialism. It is a fight for the new spirit of democracy against the old evil order of things.
"Of course, I do not mean that the democracy of France and England is perfect. But with all its imperfections it is nearer true democracy than is the spirit of Germany. We should not expect the democracy of our country to be perfect. The time has not come for that. 'Man is not man as yet,' as Browning said inParacelsus.
"The war is turning people away from the false standards in art and letters which they served so long. The highly artificial romantic novel and drama are impossible in Europe to-day.The war has made that sort of thing absolutely absurd. And America must be affected by this just as every other nation in the world is affected. To our novelists and to all of us must come a sense of the serious importance of actual life, instead of a sense of the beauty of romantic illusions. There are many indications of this tendency in our contemporary literature. For instance, in poetry we have the Spoon River Anthology—surely a sign of the return of the poet to real life. But the greatest poets, like the greatest novelists, have always been passionately interested in real life. Walt Whitman and Robert Browning always were realists and always were optimistic. Whitman was a most exultant optimist; he was optimistic even about dying.
"Among recent books of verse I have been much impressed by Masefield'sGood Friday. There is a work which is both august and sympathetic; Mr. Masefield's treatment of his theme is realistic, yet thoroughly reverent. There is one line in it which I think I never shall forget. It is, 'The men who suffer most endure the least.'
"Good Fridayis a sign of literature's strong tendency toward reality. It seems to me to be a phase of the general breaking down of the barriersbetween the nations, the classes, and the sexes. But this breaking down of barriers is something that most of our novelists have been ignoring. Mary Watts has recognized it, but she is one of the very few American novelists to do so."
"But this sort of consciousness is not generally considered to be a characteristic of the realistic novelist," I said. And I mentioned to Miss Glasgow a certain conspicuous American novelist whose books are very long, very dull, and distinguished only by their author's obsession with sex. He, I said, was the man of whom most people would think first when the word realist was spoken.
"Of course," said Miss Glasgow, "we must distinguish between a realist and a vulgarian, and I do not see how a writer who is absolutely without humor can justly be called a realist. Consider the great realists—Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith—they all had humor. What our novelists need chiefly are more humor and a more serious attitude toward life. If our novelists are titanic enough, they will have a serious attitude toward life, and if they stand far enough off they will have humor.
"I hope," Miss Glasgow added, "that America will produce better literature after the war. Ihope that a change for the better will be evident in all branches of literary endeavor. We have to-day many novelists who start out with the serious purpose of interpreting life. But they don't interpret it. They find that it is easier to give the people what they want than to interpret life. Therefore this change in the character of our novels must come after the people themselves are awakened to a sense of the importance of real life, instead of life sentimentally and deceptively portrayed.
"I think that our novels to-day are better than they were twenty-five years ago. Of course, we have no Hawthorne to-day, but the general average of stories is better than it was. We have so many accomplished writers of short stories. There is Katharine Fullerton Gerould. What an admirable artist she is! Mary E. Wilkins has written some splendid interpretations of New England life, and Miss Jewett reflected the mind and soul of a part of our country."
Only a few years ago Fannie Hurst's name was unknown to most readers. But in a surprisingly short time Miss Hurst's short stories, especially her sympathetic and poignantly realistic studies of the life of the Jewish citizens of New York, have earned for her popular as well as critical approval.
Fannie Hurst's fame has been won almost entirely through the most widely circulated weekly and monthly magazines. And yet when I talked to this energetic young woman the other morning in her studio in Carnegie Hall, I found her attitude toward the magazines anything but friendly. She accused them of printing what she called "chocolate-fudge" fiction. And she said it in a way which indicated that chocolate fudge is not her favorite dish.
"I do not feel," she said, "that the American magazine is exerting itself toward influencing our fiction for the better. In most cases it is content to pander to the untutored public taste instead of attempting anything constructive.
"The magazine public is, after all, open to conviction. But phlegm and commercialism on the part of most of our magazines lead them to give the public what it wants rather than what is good for it.
"'If chocolate-fudge fiction will sell the magazine, give 'em chocolate fudge!' say editors and publishers. Small wonder that American fiction-readers continue bilious in their demands. Authors, meanwhile, who like sweet butter on their bread—it is amazing how many do—continue to postpone that Big Idea, and American fiction pauses by the wayside."
"What is the remedy for this condition, Miss Hurst?" I asked. "Would matters be better if the writers did not have to comply with the demands of the magazines—if they had some other means of making a living than writing?"
Miss Hurst did not answer at once. At length she said, thoughtfully:
"It would seem that to escape this almost inevitableoverlapping of bread and sweet butter the writer of short stories should not depend upon the sale of his work for a living, but should endeavor to provide himself with some other source of income.
"Theoretically, at least, such a condition would eliminate the pot-boilers and safeguard the serious worker from the possibility of 'misshaping' his art to meet a commercial condition.
"I say theoretically because from my own point of view I cannot conceive of short-story writing as an avocation. The gentle art of short fiction consumes just about six hours of my day at the rate of from twenty to twenty-five days on a story of from eight to ten thousand words. And since I work best from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., I can think of no remunerative occupation outside those hours except cabaret work or night clerking."
"What about present-day relationship between American publishers and authors?" I asked, "Do you think they are all they should be?"
"American publishers and authors," Miss Hurst replied, "to-day seem to be working somewhat at cross-purposes, owing partially, I think, to the great commercial significance that has become attached to the various rights, such as motion-picture,serial, dramatic, book, etc., and which are to be reckoned with in the sale of fiction.
"There is little doubt that authors have suffered at the hands of publishers on these various scores, oftener than not the publisher and not the author reaping the benefits accruing from the author's ignorance of conditions or lack of foresight.
"The Authors' League has been formed to remedy just that evil—and it was a crying one.
"On the other hand, it is certain that fiction-writers are better paid to-day than ever in the history of literature, and if a man is writing a seventy-five-dollar story there is a pretty good reason why.
"I feel a great deal of hesitancy about the present proposed affiliation of authors with labor. There is so much to be said on both sides!
"If the publisher represents capital and the author labor, my sympathies immediately veer me toward labor. But do they? That same question has recently been thrashed out by the actors, and they have gone over to labor. Scores of our most prominent American authors are of that same persuasion.
"I cannot help but feel that for publisher andauthor to assume the relationship of employer and employee is a dangerous step. All forms of labor do not come under the same head. And I am the last to say that writing is not hard labor. But Cellini could hardly have allied himself with an iron-workers' guild. All men are mammals, but not all mammals are men!
"It seems doubly unfortunate, with the Authors' League in existence to direct and safeguard the financial destiny of the author, to take a step which immediately places the author and publisher on the same basis of relationship that exists between hod-carrier and contractor.
"As a matter of fact, I am almost wont to question the traditional lack of business acumen in authors. On the contrary, almost every successful author of my acquaintance not only is pretty well able to take care of himself, but owns a motor-car and a safety-deposit box at the same time. And I find the not-so-successful authors prodding pretty faithfully to get their prices up.
"The Authors' League is a great institution and fills a great need. It was formed for just the purpose that seems to be prompting authors to unionize—to instruct authors in their rights and protect them against infringements.
"Why unionize? Next, an author will find himself obliged to lay aside his pen when the whistle blows, and publishers will be finding themselves obliged to deal in open-shop literature."
"And what effect are the moving pictures going to have on fiction?" I asked. "Will it be good or bad?"
"Up to the present," Miss Hurst replied, "moving pictures have, in my opinion, been little else than a destructive force where American fiction is concerned. Picturized fiction is on a cheap and sensational level. Even classics and standardized fiction are ruthlessly defamed by tawdry presentation. With the mechanics of the motion picture so advanced, it is unfortunate that the photoplay itself is not keeping pace with that advancement.
"Motion pictures are in the hands of laymen, and they show it. The scenario-writers, so-called 'staff writers,' have sprung up overnight, so to speak, and, from what I understand, when authors venture into the field they are at the mercy of the moving-picture director.
"Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett could not endure to sit through the picture presentation ofLittle Lord Fauntleroy, so mutilated was it.
"Of course, scenario-writing is a new art, and this interesting form of expression has hardly emerged from its infancy. Except perhaps in such great spectacles as 'The Birth of a Nation,' where, after all, the play is not the thing."
I asked Miss Hurst if she agreed with those who believe that Edgar Allan Poe's short stories have never been surpassed. I found that she did not.
"I should say," she said, "that since Poe's time we have had masters of the short story who have equaled him. Poe is, of course, the legitimate father of the American short story, and, coupled with that fact, was possessed of that kind of self-consciousness which enabled him to formulate a law of composition which has not been without its influence upon our subsequent short fiction.
"But in American letters there is little doubt that in the last one hundred years the short story has made more progress than any other literary type. We are becoming not only proficient, but pre-eminent in the short story. I can think off-hand of quite a group of writers, each of whom has contributed short-story classics to our literature.
"There are Robert Louis Stevenson, HenryJames (if we may claim him), Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, O. Henry, Richard Harding Davis, Jack London, and Booth Tarkington. And I am sure that there are various others whose names do not occur to me at this moment."
"You mentioned O. Henry," I said. "Then you do not share Katharine Fullerton Gerould's belief that O. Henry's influence on modern fiction is bad?"
"I decidedly disagree," said Miss Hurst, with considerable firmness, "with the statement that O. Henry wrote incidents rather than short stories, and is a pernicious influence in modern letters. That his structural form is more than anecdotal can be shown by an analysis of almost any of his plots.
"But it seems pedantic to criticize O. Henry on the score of structure. Admitting that the substance of his writings does rest on frail framework, even sometimes upon the trick, he built with Gothic skill and with no obvious pillars of support.
"Corot was none the less a landscape artist because he removed that particular brown tree from that particular green slope. O. Henry'sfacetiousness and, if you will, his frail structures, are no more to be reckoned with than, for instance, the extravagance of plot and the morbid formality we find in Poe.
"The smiting word and the polished phrase he quite frankly subordinated to the laugh, or the tear with a sniffle. Just as soon call red woolen underwear pernicious!
"The Henry James school has put a super-finish upon literature which, it is true, gives the same satisfying sense of wholeness that we get from a Greek urn. But, after all, chastity is not the first and last requisite. O. Henry loved to laugh with life! It was not in him to regard it with a Mona Lisa smile."
Miss Hurst has confined her attention so closely to American metropolitan life that I thought it would be interesting to have her opinion as to the truth of the remark, attributed to William Dean Howells, that American literature is merely a phase of English literature. In reply to my question she said:
"I agree with Mr. Howells that American literature up to now has been rather a phase of English literature. His own graceful art is an example of cousinship. American literature probablywill continue to be an effort until our American melting-pot ceases boiling.
"David CopperfieldandVanity Faircome from a people whose lineage goes back by century-plants and not by Mayflowers. Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Poole, sometimes more or less inarticulately, are preparing us for the great American novel. When we reach a proper consistency the boiling is bound to cease, and, just as inevitably, the epic novel must come."