“What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?” he asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire.
“What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?” he asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire.
This cultured-class hero fails to ask himself whatwould happen to his cultured self if the working-class vermin were to be wiped out. Manifestly, these vermin have to be allowed to go on working, in order that elegant illuminati from America and England and Italy and France may gather in the great capitals to listen to beautiful music and attend the newest art exhibitions and discuss the newest books. It is necessary that hundreds of millions of peasants should drudge on the rack-rented soil of Europe, it is necessary that mill slaves in New England and sweat-shop slaves in New York and mine slaves in Pennsylvania should wear out their bodies, in order that culture ambassadors may acquire old world subtlety and understanding; may watch the “European scene” and, by reporting it for us, enable us, at least in imagination, to escape the crudity and provinciality of our home lives.
Henry James wrote a biography of Hawthorne, who as a fellow sufferer under Puritanism he greatly admired; and in the course of that biography he drew a picture of the “American scene,” which enables us to understand why a cultured-class novelist fled from it at the age of twenty-six, and came back for only one visit in a long lifetime. Read the list of our deficiencies—and do not read it hurriedly, but stop and, as Henry James would say, “savour” each phrase, realizing the mass of content it has to the aesthetically sensitive mind:
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, no abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, no abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!
We have studied two great novelists of the later Victorian age who failed of wide popularity. We shall not understand that age completely unless we study one who was crowned, not merely by the critics, but by the mass of novel-reading ladies.
Mrs. Humphry Ward was her name, and she takesme back to the days when I was a poor devil of a would-be writer, half starving in a New York lodging-house. What made success in the world of books? I had to know, or die; and the New York “Times” was kind enough to publish a weekly review to give me the information. Every year or two there would appear a new novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward; and always this novel would be the occasion for a grand state review, signed by the name of some eminent pundit, occupying pages one and two, with a large portrait on page one. So I knew that Mrs. Humphry Ward was modern literature, and read each novel as part of my life training.
I read it with a mingling of interest and fear; interest, because it told me about a set of people whom I knew did actually exist, and did actually govern the world in which I lived; and fear, because this set of people, so obviously both predaceous and stupid, were so powerfully buttressed by the prestige of snobbery, and protected by the holy mantle of religion. No novelist every worshipped Mammon-respectability more piously or portrayed it with more patient devotion than Mrs. Humphry Ward in her later years.
She was brought up in the inner circle of culture; her father was an Oxford big-wig, and Matthew Arnold was her “Uncle Matt.” Everything that education could do for a young girl was done for her, and she was writing a history of Spain at the age of twenty. Incidentally, she was dreaming a wonderful dream—that some day she might be presented at court.
Her first novel, “Robert Elsmere,” dealt with the subject of religion. A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy-tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief. Mrs. Ward made her hero one of these new-style clergymen, and somebody persuaded Gladstone to read the novel, and he wrote a long refutation of it, which caused a tremendous fuss. Statesmen in England, as a rule, read only Thucydides and Homer, while in theUnited States they read only the “Saturday Evening Post.” There were a great many people who never saw a modern novel, who hastened to read it when Gladstone called it dangerous. Half a million copies were sold in our country, and Mrs. Ward’s fortune was made.
She had begun, you see, as a radical; and in her next novel, “The History of David Grieve,” she glorifies a young hero who devotes himself to social reform. But in a very few years success and wealth and the applause of the great changed the hue of this lady novelist’s reflections. She wrote “Marcella,” a complete recantation of her unorthodoxy, and a picture of what had gone on in her mind. Leaders of labor and social reformers now turn out to be dangerous demagogs; and a beautiful heroine, who loves one, discovers the error of her way, and comes back to safety as the wife of a nobleman’s son. From which time on Mrs. Humphry Ward was safe for aristocracy.
She moved to a mansion in Grosvenor Place, where she had a view of the garden of Buckingham Palace. She became an intimate of duchesses, and a great figure in society and politics. Her publisher would negotiate with America before breakfast, and get her seven thousand pounds advance on a new novel; so the good lady spent the rest of her life grinding out a series of glorified pot-boilers in support of the Tory principles of government. Each novel was an Anglo-Saxon world event, and the counters of book-stores in the fashionable shopping districts of America were piled to the ceiling with the new volume. Mrs. Ward’s following was the Anglomaniac mob, people who have but one idea in life, to imitate the British governing classes; the sort of people who study those page advertisements and speculate anxiously: “What is Wrong with this Picture?”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “I was in that mob. In our town in Mississippi there was no book-store, but an adventurous Jew who kept a cigar-store had the idea of getting a shelf of modern novels and renting them for ten cents a volume. I was the first young lady in the town who had the courage to go into a cigar-store, and I set all the other young ladies to reading Mrs. Humphry Ward.”
“What did you get out of it?”
“I never could find out. It was all about British political life; people were pulling and hauling and intriguing, but I never could understand what their principles were, or what they expected to do when they got elected.”
“That’s the point exactly; there are no principles, there are only parties. Whichever one gets in constitutes the ‘government,’ and its task is to hold labor by the throat while capital picks its pockets. Labor produces a sovereign a day, and capital takes it, and gives labor four shillings wages, and labor tips its cap and is grateful. And then capital’s favorite lady-novelist comes round with a market basket containing sixpence worth of food and medicine; which is called charity, and is the means of getting labor’s vote at election time.”
Such was the private life of Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was what is called “philanthropic”; that is, she was prominent in those society activities which help the poor by playing upon the vanity and love of display of the rich. Her life consisted in rushing about from one meeting to another, shaking hands and chatting, rushing home to dress and dine with prominent people, and then reading about it in the next day’s newspapers. She was so busy with all this that she could only find half an hour a day in which to read Greek!
The characters in her books are busy with the same kind of activities. The leading man is a handsome young aristocrat, whose occupation is becoming premier. We never have any idea why he wants to be premier, except that as hero that is his function. The idea that the people of England should ask reasons for making an empty-headed noodle into their premier is one that never occurs to anyone in the novels. What interests us is the efforts of the young man’s friends to push him in, and the efforts of his enemies to bar him out.
Success or failure in all such “political novels” depends on one factor, an entanglement of sex. It appears that the English voters insist rigidly upon one requirement—that the statesman who holds them by the throat while their pockets are being picked shall be ostensibly chaste. The law may be summed up by saying that he is permitted to have only one leisure-class female during his life. Of course, if she dies, he is permitted one more leisure-class female; but for the rest, he is required to satisfy his needs with females of lower classes. Political novels derivetheir plots from the fact that occasionally some statesman fails to conform to this law; there is a statesman who wants two ladies, or there are two ladies who want the statesman. Nature has not created man exclusively for the purpose of wearing a top-hat and a frock-coat, and making speeches in Parliament; nor do all women find complete satisfaction, like Mrs. Humphry Ward, in political labors to keep other women from getting the vote. There are women with mischief in them, who endeavor to tempt statesmen from exclusive devotion to “careers.” And the statesmen are tempted; they commit indiscretions, such as taking walks in the moonlight with the evil females; and a thrill runs through all “society,” and the tongues of the gossips wag furiously. Did they? Or did they not? The friends of the statesman rally to save him; and the enemies of the statesman sharpen their tomahawks; and Anglomaniacs, watching the scene, are thrilled as when Blondin on the tight-rope sets out to walk across Niagara Falls.
“We don’t really need to worry,” says Mrs. Ogi; “a hero is always a hero, and in all the books that I got from the little cigar-store in the Mississippi town, I cannot recall that one hero ever failed to become premier.”
“It would be interesting,” says Ogi, “to compile statistics on the question: How many premiers have there been in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward, and how many in the recent history of the British Empire?”
We come now to study America in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The dominating factor in this period was the Civil War, a conflict in which the physical and moral energy of the country was exhausted. There followed the inevitable reaction: Abraham Lincoln was succeeded by the carpetbagger in the South and the tariff-boodler in the North. The very hero who had led the nation to victory, and had said, “Let us have peace,” entered the White House to turn the government over to corruptionists. In the two generations following the Civil War America made enormous material and some intellectual progress, but no moral progress discernible. As I write this book, our political morals are embodied in a post-campaign jest: “The Republicans should have stolen the Washington monument, and then Coolidge would have carried Florida and South Carolina.”
Provincial America in the decades following the Civil War based its religion upon the dogma that it was the most perfect nation upon God’s footstool. The whisky-drinking, tobacco-chewing, obscenity-narrating, Grand Old Party-voting mob would tolerate no criticism, not even that kind implied by living differently. To it an artist was a freak, whom it punished with mockery and practical jokes. There were only two possible ways for him to survive; one was to flee to New York and be lost in the crowd; the other was to turn into a clown and join in laughing at himself, and at everything he knew to be serious and beautiful in life. This latter course was adopted by a man of truly great talent, who might have become one of the world’s satiric masters if he had not been overpowered by the spirit of America. His tragic story has been told in a remarkable study, “The Ordeal of Mark Twain,” by Van Wyck Brooks.
For something like forty years Mark Twain lived as an uncrowned American king; his friends referred to him thus—“the King.” His was a life which seemed to have come out of the Arabian Nights’ enchantment. His slightest move was good for columns in the newspapers; when he traveled about the world he was his country’s ambassador at large—his baggage traveled free under consular dispensation, and in London and Vienna the very traffic regulations were suspended. When he went to Washington to plead for copyright laws, the two houses adjourned to hear him, and the speaker of the House turned over his private office to the king of letters. He made three hundred thousand dollars out of a single book, he made a fortune out of anything he chose to write. The greatest millionaires of the country were his intimate friends; he had a happy family, a strong constitution, inexhaustible energy—what more could a human being ask?
And yet Mark Twain was not happy. He grew less and less happy as time passed. Bitterness and despair began to creep into his writings; sentences like this: “Pityis for the living, envy is for the dead.” Stranger yet, it began to be whispered that America’s uncrowned king was a radical! In times of stress some of us would go to him for help, for a word of sympathy or backing, and always this strange thing was noticed; he was full of understanding, and would agree with everything we said; yes, he was one of us. But when we asked for a public action, a declaration, he was not there.
“The Jungle” was published, and he wrote me a letter. It was burned in the Helicon Hall fire, and I recall only one statement: he had had to put the book down in the middle, because he could not endure the anguish it caused him. Naturally, I had my thoughts about such a remark. What right has a man to refuse to endure the anguish of knowing what other human beings are suffering? If these sufferings cannot be helped, why then perhaps we may flee from them; but think what the uncrowned king of America could have done, in the way of backing a young author who had aimed at the public’s heart and by accident had hit it in the stomach!
Then came the Gorki case. The great Russian writer came to America to plead for freedom for his country, and to raise money for the cause. The intriguers of the tsar set out to ruin him, and turned the bloodhounds of the capitalist press upon him. A dinner in Gorki’s honor had been planned, and Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were among the sponsors. The storm of scandal broke, and these two great ones of American letters turned tail and fled to cover.
A year or two later Mark Twain was visiting Bermuda, and came to see me. He had taken to wearing a conspicuous white costume, and with his snow-white hair and mustache he was a picturesque figure. He chatted about past times, as old men like to do. I saw that he was kind, warm-hearted, and also full of rebellion against capitalist greed and knavery; but he was an old man, and a sick man, and I did not try to probe the mystery of his life. The worm which was gnawing at his heart was not revealed, until in the course of time his letters were given to the public. Now we know the amazing story—that Mark Twain lived a double life; he, the uncrowned king of America, was the most repressed personality, the mostcompletely cowed, shamed, and tormented great man in the history of letters.
He was born in a Missouri River town in 1835. His father was a futile dreamer with a perpetual motion machine. His mother was a victim of patent medicines, who had seen better days, and reared a family of ragged brats in a foul and shabby environment, where a boy saw four separate murders with his own eyes. “Little Sam” was a shy, sensitive child, his mother’s darling, and she raised him in a fierce determination to have him grow up respectable and rich. He became a printer, then a pilot on the Mississippi River. This latter was a great career; the river pilot was the uncrowned king of this western country. He saw all the world in glorious fashion; he was a real artist, and at the same time carried a solemn responsibility.
The Civil War destroyed this career, and Mark Twain went out to Nevada to become a gold miner, promising his mother that he would never return until he had made a fortune. He failed as a miner, and was forced to live by journalism. So he drifted into becoming the world’s buffoon. He always despised it—so much so that he put a pistol to his head. But he lacked the courage to pull the trigger, and had to go on and be a writer. His “Jumping Frog” story went around the world; after which he came East, and wrote “Innocents Abroad,” and made his three hundred thousand dollars.
Shortly after that he exchanged the domination of his mother for that of a wife. He fell in love with the daughter of a wealthy coal-dealer in Elmira, New York. There was a terrible “to do” about it in respectable “up-State” circles, for Samuel Clemens was a wild and woolly westerner, who didn’t know how to handle a knife and fork, while the daughter of the coal-dealer had been brought up on an income of forty thousand dollars a year. However, this strange lover was a “lion,” so they decided to accept him and teach him parlor tricks. They gave the young couple a carriage and coachman, and a house which had cost twenty-five thousand dollars; it wasn’t long before he was completely justifying their faith, by living at the rate of a hundred thousand a year.
The wife was a frail woman, a semi-invalid, and Mark Twain adored her; also, he was awe-stricken before her,because of her extremely high social position. She was ignorant, provincial, rigidly fixed in a narrow church-going respectability; by these standards she brought him up, and raised a couple of daughters to help him. As Clemens phrased it, his wife “edited” him; as his daughters phrased it, they “dusted papa off.”
What these women did to America’s greatest humorist makes one of the most amazing stories in the history of culture. They went over everything he wrote and revised it according to the standards of the Elmira bourgeoisie. They suppressed the greater part of his most vital ideas, and kept him from finishing his most important works. When he wrote something commonplace and conventional they fell on his neck with delight, and helped to spend the fortune which it brought in. When he told the truth about America, or voiced his own conclusions about life, they forced him to burn it, or hide it in the bottom of a trunk. His one masterpiece, “Huckleberry Finn,” he wrote secretly at odd moments, taking many years at the task, and finally publishing it with anxiety. Mrs. Clemens came home from church one day, horrified by a rumor that her husband had put some swear words into a story; she made him produce the manuscript, in which poor Huck, telling how he can’t live in the respectable world, exclaims: “They comb me all to hell.” Now when you read “Huckleberry Finn,” you read: “They comb me all to thunder!”
Mark Twain had in him the making of one of the world’s great satirists. He might have made over American civilization, by laughing it out of its shams and pretensions. But he was not permitted to express himself as an artist; he must emulate his father-in-law, the Elmira coal-dealer. The unhappy wretch turned his attention to business ventures, and started a huge publishing business, to publish his own and other books. He sold three hundred thousand copies of General Grant’s Memoirs, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies of other books, utterly worthless from the literary point of view.
He was always at the mercy of inventors with some new scheme to make millions. For example, there was a typesetting machine; he sunk a huge fortune into that, and would spend his time figuring what he was going to make—so many millions that it almost made a billion. Hewas a wretched business man, and failed ignominously and went into bankruptcy, losing his wife’s money as well as his own. H. H. Rogers, master pirate of Standard Oil, came forward and took charge of his affairs, incidentally playing billiards with him until four o’clock every morning. And then some young radical brought him an exposure of the Standard Oil Company, expecting him to publish this book as a public service!
Going back to Mark Twain’s books, we can read these facts between the lines, and see that he put his balked and cheated self, or some aspect of this self, into his characters. We understand how he poured his soul into Huck Finn; this poor henpecked genius, dressed up and made to go through the paces of a literary lion, yearns back to the days when he was a ragged urchin and was happy; Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer represent all that daring, that escape from the bourgeois world, which Sam Clemens dreamed but never achieved. He put another side of himself into Colonel Sellers, who imagined fortunes; and yet another side into Pudd’nhead Wilson, the village atheist who mocked at the shams of religion. Secretly Mark Twain himself loathed Christianity, and wrote a letter of cordial praise to Robert Ingersoll; but publicly he went to church every Sunday, escorting his saintly wife, according to the customs of Elmira!
The more you read this story the more appalling you find it. This uncrowned king of America built up literally a double personality; he took to writing two sets of letters, one containing what he really wanted to say, and the other what his official public self was obliged to say. He accumulated a volume of “unmailed letters,” one of the weirdest phenomena in literary history. He was indignant at the ending of the Russian-Japanese war, because he believed that if it had continued for a couple of months more the tsar would have been overthrown. When Colonel George Harvey invited him to dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference, he wrote a blistering telegram, in which he declared himself inferior as a humorist to those statesmen who had “turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and blithesome comedy.” But he did not send that telegram; he sent another, full of such enraptured praise of the Russian diplomats that Count Witte sent it to the tsar!
That is only one sample out of many. He wrote a War Prayer, a grim satire upon the Christian custom of praying for victory. “I have told the whole truth in that,” he said to a friend; and then added the lamentable conclusion: “Only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.” He explained the reason—this financier who had fortunes to blow in upon mechanical inventions: “I have a family to support, and I can’t afford this kind of dissipation.” And again: “The silent, colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples—that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin.”
Of course a man who wrote like this despised himself. It was the tragedy of Tolstoi, but in a far more humiliating form; Tolstoi at least wrote what he pleased, and did in the end break with his family. But Mark Twain stayed in the chains of love and respectability—his bitterness boiling and steaming in him like a volcano, and breaking out here and there with glare and sulphurous fumes. “The damned and mangy human race,” was one of his phrases; and again he wrote: “My idea of our civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.”
In the effort to excuse himself, this repressed personality evolved a philosophy of fatalism. Man was merely a machine, and could not help doing what he did. This was put into a book, “What is Man?” But then he dared not publish the book! “Am I honest?” he wrote, to a friend. “I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book, which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it my duty to publish it. There are other difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one.” He did publish the book at last, but anonymously, and with a preface explaining that he dared not sign his name.
He, America’s greatest humorist, had a duty laid upon him; he saw that duty clearly—how clearly we learn from a story, “The Mysterious Stranger,” a ferocious satireupon the human race, published after his death. In this book Satan asks: “Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.” Such was the spiritual tragedy going on in the soul of a man who was going about New York, clad in a fancy white costume, smiled upon and applauded by all beholders, crowned by all critics, wined and dined by Standard Oil millionaires, dancing inexhaustibly until three or four o’clock in the morning, and nicknamed in higher social circles “the belle of New York.”
Mrs. Ogi from Mississippi reads this onslaught upon Mrs. Ogi from Elmira; and her husband wonders a little while he waits. But she only smiles, and remarks: “In our family the men have a traditional saying: ‘It’s all right to be henpecked, but be sure you get the right hen!’”
We come now to an American artist who played the part of his own wife; that is to say, Ogi and Mrs. Ogi combined in one person.
His name was William Dean Howells, and he was born in 1837 in an Ohio town. He began life as a typesetter in a newspaper office, then he became a reporter, and was made United States consul in Venice at the age of twenty-four. It was a job which left time for art, and young Howells trained himself diligently. He became editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” the first non-Bostonian to hold that high ecclesiastical office. For years he presided at the dying bedside of New England literature, and after the patient was buried he came to New York and found a permanent berth with “Harper’s Magazine.” He wrote for sixty years, and published over a hundred volumes of poetry, criticism and fiction. He had ease and grace andcharm, all the drawing-room literary virtues; he displayed the same virtues in real life, and so everybody loved him, and he became, according to Mark Twain, “the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, from whose decisions there is no appeal.”
The principle upon which the success of Howells was based is revealed to us in his autobiography. He tells how as a young reporter on an Ohio newspaper, he was sent to a police court, and he quit. “If all my work could have been the reporting of sermons, with intervals of sketching the graduating ceremonies of young ladies’ seminaries”—why, then he might have become a city editor! He tells of coming upon a sordid tragedy, and resolving that forever after he would avert his eyes from the darker side of life; “the more smiling aspects of life are the more American.” You can see why he needed no Mrs. Ogi from Elmira, or from any other place, to edit his manuscripts.
To dignify this program of portraying the more smiling and therefore more American aspects of life, Howells gave it the name of “realism.” All his life long he published critical articles in defense of this program, and he described these articles as “a polemic, a battle.” Also he wrote novels, which he regarded as pure, undiluted works of art. It never occurred to the dear soul that the novels were merely a continuation of his “polemic,” another phase of his “battle.” Not content with rebuking men who did wrong, Howells wished to provide examples of what was right; therefore he invented characters and contrived situations to exhibit the virtues and charms of that middle-class gentility which was always smiling and therefore always American.
The apologia of this school of “realism” may be formulated as follows: I am a gentleman of placid disposition and quiet feelings, with no devastating passions tormenting me, no cosmic idealisms driving my soul. I am comfortable in the bourgeois world, having always earned a good salary and taken care of my family. I believe this is the proper thing for men to do, and if they fail to do it it is their own fault. I love to read good books, and I cultivate a mild and gentle imagination. I write about my sort of people, and I call such books art. If men persist in having violent and stormy passions and intense andoverwhelming convictions; if they persist in going to extremes, whether base and cruel, or heroic and sublime—then I am disturbed in my literary dignity, and I denounce such writing, and call it romanticism, propaganda, and pose. And since I am “the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, from whose decisions there is no appeal,” it follows that young writers who persist in displeasing me are sentenced to move into garrets and be starved and frozen into submission.
Upon the above formula Howells founded and maintained a school of “local color” in the United States. Men and women who had been brought up in different parts of the country wrote stories describing in detail the peculiarities of speech and costume and manners there prevailing. Confining themselves to the everyday and obvious events of humdrum life, and being content to observe and not to think, they were sure of a cordial reception from Howells, and of publication and payment by the great magazine and publishing house which took the great critic’s advice. By enforcing these standards for half a century, Howells and a group of editors like him put a blight upon American literature from which it is only now escaping.
I do not want to be unfair to a gracious and kindly gentleman. In his later years he fell under the spell of Tolstoi, and took to calling himself a Socialist. He wrote a story, “The Traveler from Altruria,” a gentle and winning satire upon the stupidities of capitalism. I would love him more ardently for having written that book if he had been willing to fight for it; if he had put any trace of social protest into his magazine editing and contributing. But he joined with Mark Twain in deserting poor Gorki, and he continued to hold his comfortable position and to collect his salary and royalties from Harper and Brothers, after that concern went into bankruptcy and was turned into the propaganda department of J. P. Morgan and Company.
I have told in “The Brass Check” the curious story of my own experience with this publishing house; I will repeat it here, so far as it bears on Howells. Ten years ago I was collecting material for my anthology of revolutionary literature, “The Cry for Justice,” and I applied to one or two hundred authors for permission to quote briefly from their writings. Having got the authors’ permission, I then applied to the publishers; whereupon I received from Messrs. Harper and Brothers a letter, forbidding me to quote from any book published by them, even with the author’s permission. I took the trouble to call upon the gentleman who had this matter in charge, and was informed that the firm considered my reputation to be so bad that I would do injury to any author whom I quoted. I had with me a letter from Howells, saying that he would be very glad to be quoted. But no matter; I was not to quote him; neither was I to quote Mark Twain, nor Charles Rann Kennedy, nor H. G. Wells!
It happened that Howells’ editorial office was in that same dingy old Franklin Square building, so I took the matter to him. He was courteous and friendly—but he did not feel that it would be proper for him to oppose the objections of his publishers. My plea, that he owed something to a fellow-Socialist, and still more to the movement, did not avail.
And lest the reader think that I am unduly prejudiced against the publication department of J. P. Morgan & Company, let me quote a couple of sentences from a letter written to the editor of “Harper’s” Magazine by Lafcadio Hearn: “Your firm is a hundred years behind; ignorant, brutal, mean, absurdly ignorant—incredibly ignorant of what art is, what literature is, what good taste is. But it makes money like pork packeries and butcheries and loan offices.”
History has its curious ironies, and this would be one—if it should turn out that Howells, in refusing to be quoted in “The Cry for Justice,” had lost his best chance of being read in the future. And lest this remark be taken for megalomania, let me add that I am not the author of the anthology, merely its editor, and others could have done the job as well, perhaps better. The point is that this is the kind of literature which the future will read. The whirlwinds of social revolution are gathering to sweep the world; and when they have passed, there will be a new generation of clear-eyed young workers, who will look upon the fiction-characters of William Dean Howells with puzzled dismay. Characters so mild and gentle, so tolerant in the presence of intolerable wrong! Characters so very respectable in the getting and spending of their incomes, so anxious in their conformity to pecuniary conventions! The young workers will not be able to imagine themselves in the place of such characters; but will study them as one studies relics in a museum, or queer-shaped insects under a microscope.
Through the latter part of the nineteenth century there existed in the United States a peculiar literary phenomenon, the underground reputation of Ambrose Bierce. The fiction reading public did not know this man; the readers of “yellow” journalism knew him as a Hearst writer, even more brilliant and cynical than the average. But now and then you would come upon an expert in the literary craft, who would tell you that Ambrose Bierce was a short-story writer and satirist without equal in America, the greatest genius our literature had produced. You would set out to look for these obscure writings, and could not find them in the libraries or the book-stores. At last you might get someone to lend you a copy, and then you would join the campaign of whispering.
Now Bierce is coming into his own. The public is hearing about him. He is of especial interest to us here, because he spent his energy in attacking, with the utmost possible fury, the thesis of this book; while at the same time, both in his life and his writings, he vindicated that thesis to the last syllable.
Ambrose Bierce was bom in 1842, the son of a poor farmer in Ohio. At the age of nineteen he enlisted and fought through the Civil war, being twice wounded and brevetted major. Then he became a journalist, first in San Francisco, then in London, finally in Washington and New York.
He was one of the most ethical men that ever lived, a born preacher, as vehement and persistent as Carlyle. He fought for his beliefs, and shrank from no sacrifice in their behalf. He was no man’s man, but said what he thought, no matter how bitter and fierce it might be. He paid the penalty in a host of enemies and a lifetime of struggle.
That such a man should have taken up with art-for-art’s-sake theories is assuredly a quaint incongruity in the history of literature. But so it happened. He looked out upon America, and saw the grafters thriving, he saw corruption enthroned as a political system, and he gave up the human race in despair: “a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions—frothing mad.” These phrases occur in an article, “To Train a Writer”; and you can see what sort of writer it would train! A writer who renounces solidarity, and seeks refuge in his own talent, the one place where a man is master, where he can make beauty, order and dignity. So let us live in the world of art, let us consecrate ourselves to its service, and waste no love upon “the irreclaimable mass of brutality that we know as ‘mankind.’”
This conviction Bierce holds in the fashion of a religious zealot. He has reached the stage of knowing that the rest of the world doubts his faith; therefore he asserts it the more vehemently, and flies into a rage with all who question it. His letters have been published; and in the first one, addressed to a young girl who aspires to write, he storms at the viciousness of those who would use the writer’s craft in the service of human progress. “Such ends are a prostitution of art.” And later on in the letters this champion of the art-for-art’s-sake theory reveals the terror that gnaws at his soul. “If poets saw things as they are they would write no more poetry.”
Some twenty years ago Jack London sent me the first book of a San Francisco poet, and in an inscription he described the author: “I have a friend, the dearest in this world.” The book was “The Testimony of the Suns,” by George Sterling; and friendship being an unlimited thing, I also took over a share of it. For twenty years I have been puzzled at finding in this gracious companion and maker of exquisite verses certain qualities of bitterness and aching despair. When I read these letters of Ambrose Bierce I discovered a plausible explanation; for here is the young poet, submitting his first efforts; and here is the savage misanthropist using his power as a preacher and an elder, in an effort to set the poet’s feet in the paths of futility and waste.
Ambrose Bierce, among his host of antagonisms, had one which amounted to an insanity—his dislike of Socialists; and he saw both London and Sterling lending their influence to the hellish cult. Bierce was one of those subtle opponents who say that they have a certain amount of sympathy with the Socialist ideal, were it not for the fact that the partisans of the cause make themselves so objectionable. Yes; they would truly be willing to see mankind delivered from poverty, crime, prostitution and war, were it not for creatures of the lunatic fringe, who wear their hair long and tie their neck-ties into a bow!
There is something pathological about the ravings of Bierce on this subject, and we are not surprised to learn that in his early days a prominent Socialist writer, Laurence Gronlund, took a girl away from him, and thus excited his animosity. We find him quarreling with one person after another who persists in dallying with Socialist ideas, and in the end he quarreled even with Sterling, and wrote him letters of harsh abuse, which Sterling out of kindness to his memory destroyed.
The published letters are full of literary criticism; it is always consistent—and in every case exactly the opposite of what you find in this book. Ibsen and Shaw are “very small men—pets of the drawing-room and gods of the hour.” Tolstoi is “not an artist,” and Burns is “gibberish”; Gorki is “not only a peasant, but an anarchist and an advocate of assassination.” Bierce was living in Washington, serving the Hearst newspapers, when Gorki came to America. Bierce had never met him, and really knew nothing about him, but he swallowed with greedy eagerness the propaganda emanating from the Russian embassy in Washington; he writes to Sterling mysterious hints from inside information: “It isn’t merely the woman matter. You’d understand if you were on this side of the country.”
All this has become familiar to us with the passage of the years; it is the thing known as hundred percent American boobery. The capitalist system sets up its colossal slander-mills, with a staff of secret agents, forgers and safe-crackers and confidence men, a devil’s crew. The people of course have no conception of this machinery for the manipulating of their minds; and how pitiful to find a haughty intellectual as credulous as the poorest clodhopper! It is one more demonstration of the fact that amodern man who does not understand revolutionary economics is a child wandering in a forest at midnight.
There were other factors in the making of Bierce’s irascibility. He describes himself as “an eminent tankard-man,” and he found in San Francisco plenty of people willing to practice art for art’s sake, not troubling themselves or him with hopes for the human race. There is a tale of a riotous crew, resolving to put an end to Christianity by pulling down a cross which stood upon the highway. They tied themselves to the cross with ropes and pulled their hardest, only to sink down exhausted in drunken slumber. I wonder that some Catholic poet does not take this for a piece of symbolism. Maybe it has been done—I admit there are gaps in my knowledge of Catholic poetry!
What had this man to give the world, if anything? The answer is: love of truth, and loathing of corruption and hypocrisy. He wrote all those things which Mark Twain knew, but suppressed. He was the only one of those who fought through the war to tell the truth about it. And therein lies his power and significance as an artist; he, the art-for-art’s-saker pure and simple, writes tales which make us hate mass-murder.
The formula of these tales is the one with which Maupassant has made us familiar. Men aspire, and fate knocks them down and tramples their faces into the mud. When we see in the chances of battle a son shoot his own father, we may draw the conclusion that all human life is futile, as Bierce wishes us to; or we may elect to draw a different conclusion, and join the League to Outlaw War.
Bierce’s verses were shafts of satire aimed at the social kites and buzzards of his time. They have a quality of personal ferocity seldom equalled in the world’s literature. There are two volumes of them, “Black Beetles in Amber” and “Shapes of Clay.” Readers of “The Brass Check” may remember a sample there quoted, dealing with Mike de Young, publisher of the San Francisco “Chronicle,” and concluding:
A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—A whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!
A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—A whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!
A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—A whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!
Here, as in so much of Bierce’s work, his ignorance of social forces rendered him impotent. He writes about individual scoundrels, but he does not understand what makes them, nor how to remedy them; so his writing is useless to himself, to his victims, and to us.
Once upon a time Ambrose Bierce went to sleep at night on a flat stone in a graveyard. We are not told whether his exploits as “an eminent tankard-man” had anything to do with this, but we are told that as a result he became a lifelong sufferer from rheumatism and asthma. So his old age was bitter, and he found insufficient consolation in producing literary masterpieces for a hypothetical posterity. He wandered off into Mexico and disappeared. “To be a gringo in Mexico at the present time is a cheap form of euthanasia,” he told his friends. So apparently it proved; and so this book has another vindication, provided by a leading opponent.
“Be careful,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the Mexican bandits may not have got him after all.”
“He has already had a few whacks at me. George Sterling sent him an article of mine, published twenty years ago, ‘Our Bourgeois Literature,’ and he ridiculed my thesis that the qualities of American literature are explained by American social conditions: ‘The political and economical situation has about as much to do with it as the direction of our rivers and the prevailing color of our hair.’ Also he read ‘The Journal of Arthur Stirling,’ and called my poor poet ‘the most disagreeable character in fiction.’”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “He did not even trouble to get the poor poet’s name right!”
Her husband answers: “The officers in the British army have a saying: ‘What is fame? To die in battle and have your name misspelled in the “Gazette”.’”
Having considered a fiction writer whom the great public rejected, let us now consider one whom it enthusiastically acclaimed.
Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864. His father was a famous editor, and he was raised among cultured people, with every advantage of prestigeand social position. He was handsome, full of energy, and all his life made hosts of friends. After getting through college, he took a job with Arthur Brisbane on the New York “Evening Sun,” where his brother tells us he underwent “considerable privation,” his salary being only thirty dollars a week at the start, plus his earnings from short stories. During this same period the present writer was living in New York upon four and one-half a week, and never sure of having that; so you see that standards of “considerable privation” vary considerably.
Davis’s first stories dealt with a hero named Van Bibber, a scion of the Fifth Avenue plutocracy, handsome, debonair, wearing his clothes with irreproachable taste, and devoting his abundant leisure to the reforming of New York; Haroun-al-Raschid brought down to date, Sir Galahad in a dress-suit. Happy, care-free, he wanders, with innocent heart and open purse, making things right wherever he finds them wrong. He has the entrée behind the scenes of theatres, but not to seduce the chorus girls—ah, nothing like that, but to rescue a sweet, innocent child and carry her home to a cold, proud, cruel Fifth Avenue father who has refused to acknowledge his wild oat. That done, Van Bibber roams again, and jumps on the neck of a burglar, and kicks his pistol out of his hand, and then gets sorry for him, and buys him a ticket to Montana, where his wife and daughter wait for him to come and reform. Then he wanders to the Bowery, and sees a rowdy insulting a lady; it is not enough for him to demonstrate the natural superiority of the plutocracy by putting this one rowdy to flight, he must crown the demonstration by accepting a challenge from three of “the purest specimens of the tough of the East Side waterfront,” and routing them in the presence of the proud aristocratic beauty. The charm of the story lies in the truly elegant insouciance with which young Van Bibber does all these things—the manner of a juggler keeping six billiard-balls in the air.
Here, you see, is the perfect type of the ruling-class glorifier: Homer and the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote and King Arthur, Dumas, Ouida, Rudyard Kipling and Mrs. Humphry Ward all rolled into one. No wonder our grandfathers were captivated, or that the innocent souls who edited “Harper’s” and “Scribner’s” extended the freedom of their columns to this inspired creator of plutocratic romance! It is interesting to note that our “Dick” came from the most English place in the United States, and looked like an Englishman and, perhaps as a matter of instinct, dressed and talked like an Englishman. In his early writing days he lived for a few months at Oxford, and the students of Balliol College took him in on equal footing, an honor never before accorded to a non-student American.
The English ruling class had taken upon itself the task of colonizing and exploiting the rest of the world, and the American ruling class was following suit, and Richard Harding Davis became the prophet of both. Throughout Central America and the West Indies the process is invariable: American capitalists bribe the governments of these countries and get enormously valuable concessions, then they send in engineers and other handsome young heroes clad in khaki and puttees and with automatics in their belts. These heroes engage the natives of the country to exploit the natural resources and ship out the wealth of the country, to be spent upon monkey dinners at Newport and champagne suppers in Broadway lobster palaces. Sooner or later the natives become irritated at the sight of their natural resources being exported for such purposes, so they revolt against the native government which has sold them to the Yankees. Then the handsome young Yankee heroes draw their automatics and bring up machine guns, and gloriously defend the native government which they have bought and paid for. The ending comes triumphantly with a Yankee gunboat in the harbor, and some marines charging up the slope of a hill waving Old Glory, while the audience leaps from its seats and cheers for five minutes.
“Soldiers of Fortune” was “Dick” Davis’s biggest success. It brought him reservoirs of money, first as a serial, then as a novel, then as a drama, and finally as a movie. His other novels were like it, in that they dealt with members of the ruling class gloriously making or marrying fortunes. The next was called “The Princess Aline,” and told about a young, wealthy, handsome and aristocratic artist—so many elements of good fortune!—who falls in love with the photograph of a German princess. The model for this exquisite heroine was the futureEmpress of Russia; but Davis did not live to write a sequel, showing the final destiny of his heroine, her mangled body dumped into a well along with her husband and four exquisite daughters. Recalling these novels at the present hour, I see the international plutocracy with all its exquisite wives and daughters, crouched trembling upon the top of a mountain of gold and jewels, while all around them the handsome young hired heroes peer out over the sights of machine guns at the massed fury of the exploited millions of mankind—white, black, yellow, brown, red, and mixed.
Davis became a war correspondent and spent his time racing over the earth from one scene of excitement to another. I have run through the volume of his letters and jotted down a few date lines in the order they occur: Cuba, London, Egypt, Gibraltar, Paris, Central America, South America, Moscow, Budapest, Havana, London, Florence, Greece, Havana, Cape Town, Pretoria, Aix-les-Bains, Massachusetts, Madrid, London, San Francisco, Tokio, Manchuria, Havana, the Congo, New York, London, Santiago, Vera Cruz, Belgium, Plattsburg, Paris, Athens, Rome. If you know the history of the world for twenty-five years beginning with 1890 you can connect each of these geographical names with a coronation, a jubilee, a war, or other ruling-class recreation.
All through the letters runs the theme of money, the Aladdin’s tale of a soldier of literary fortune. He gets five thousand dollars for the serial rights of “Soldiers of Fortune” from “Scribner’s Magazine”; he gets five hundred dollars for reporting a foot-ball game; he gets three thousand dollars and expenses for a month’s reporting of the Cuban struggle with Spain, and when America enters the conflict, he gets ten cents a word from “Scribner’s Magazine” and four hundred dollars a week and expenses from the New York “Times.”
Everywhere he goes he is, of course, a lion, and moves only in the highest circles. His letters are full of diplomats and generals and lords and ladies and kings and queens, together with the most famous actors and literary lights. He is presented at Court—and by this, needless to say, I mean the Court of their Majesties the King and Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor and Empress of India. And all through the letters we notedinner-parties and banquets and champagne-suppers and cocktails—interrupted by a siege with sciatica, preparing us for the quick curtain, when our ruling-class hero departs his successful life at the age of fifty-two.
New York is a place of mean and envious gossip, and one of its diversions was telling anecdotes illustrating the snobbery and self-importance of Richard Harding Davis. It appears that in the days of his extraordinary prosperity he did not always recognize his former newspaper cronies when he met them on the street. Perhaps he had noted that so many of these former cronies took the occasion to borrow money from him. Anyhow, I have one anecdote to contribute to the collection.
It was early in 1914, a period of great depression in my own life and fortunes. Davis, of course, never had any depressions; he had just come back from Cuba, where he had turned “Soldiers of Fortune” into a moving picture film, and it was now being launched on Broadway with enormous éclat. I happened to know the manager, and was invited to the opening performance, where in the lobby I was introduced to the great author and lion of the occasion. When he heard my name his face lighted up, and he gave me a warm hand-clasp, exclaiming, “Ah, now! You write books because you really have something to say, while I write only to make money!” It was so different from what I expected that I was completely taken aback, and could only make a deprecating murmur. “It is true,” he said; “I know it, and so do you.”
The reader may say that in telling this story I do more credit to Davis than to myself. But that is not my concern. What I have to do here is to report the statement of America’s leading soldier of literary fortune concerning his own work and its reason for being.
We come now to another one of those unhappy tales of young rebellious geniuses who cannot or will not fit themselves into the bourgeois world. This time it is Stephen Crane, who was the fourteenth child of a Methodist preacher and an evangelist mother, and was born inNewark, New Jersey; which goes to prove that a genius may spring up anywhere in the world.
There is an old saying that a preacher’s son always turns out to be a rake. I don’t suppose that statistically this statement could be justified, but psychologically we should expect such cases; for other children get religion once a week, but the children of clergymen get it all the time. The tragedy of poor “Stevie” Crane reveals to us the folly of attaching fundamental moral principles to incredible fairy tales. When the child grows up and finds that he no longer believes the tales, he is apt to conclude that the moral principles are equally false and superfluous.
Little “Stevie” was a frail and sensitive child. His father died when he was young, and then his evangelist mother died, and he was left to grope his way alone. We find him turning up at a military academy with a reputation as a baseball player, also with six pipes—which was six too many for a lad who was to die from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine. He picked up a living doing odd newspaper jobs, and then he went to Syracuse University. Most singular, prank of history, that James Roscoe Day, D.D., Sc.D., LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D., Chancellor of the University of Heaven (see “The Goose-Step”), should have had in charge the intellectual and moral training of the author of “Maggie: A Girl of the Street”!
This boy had pathetic courage, and absolutely original opinions, even from the beginning. His young verdict was that Tennyson was “swill” and Oscar Wilde “a mildewed chump.” That, of course, was merely calling names; but in addition he had the oddest and most charming gift of humor. Of his mother he said, “You could argue as well with a wave.”
Having got through with college at the age of twenty, he went to New York to live in a garret and starve for the sake of his independence. He chose the Bowery for his school of art; these being the old days of the wicked street, before the respectable, hard-working Jews took possession; the days when all New York gloried in its “toughness,” and when now and again in the filthy old alleys they raked out a human corpse from a pile of ill-smelling rubbish. Here the boy wrote his first novel, “Maggie,” dealing with a girl whose drunken parents beat her and drove her on to the streets. It was an entirelynew note in American literature, because it told the truth about these things quite simply and as a matter of course, without apology or sentimentality.
The young author took it to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the “Century Magazine,” and went back, hungry and shivering with cold, to get the verdict. The “Century” was one of the four great magazines which determined the destiny of American authors; its policy was guided by the fact that it had “half the expectant mothers in America” on its subscription list. Gilder said that he could not publish “Maggie”; and after he had made long-winded explanations, Stephen boiled them down to one sentence, as was his custom. “You mean that the story is too honest?” And Gilder was honest enough to answer that he did.
Reading about this garret existence sends shivers over my skin; because it was only ten years later that I was to live the same life, and have the same experiences in the same editorial offices. I also took manuscripts to Gilder and was turned down. The same publisher who accepted “The Red Badge of Courage,” and made a fortune out of it, accepted also “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” and tricked me into signing a contract out of which I never got a cent.
All his life Stephen Crane had heard the war stories of old soldiers—not what you read in the official history books, but the real things that men had felt and done. He decided upon this theme, and read up his “local color,” and in ten quivering nights he produced “The Red Badge of Courage.” At last he had a success; a newspaper syndicate paid him a hundred dollars for the serial rights! He waited a year or two longer, and then it came out in book form. It sold fairly well, until suddenly the English critics went wild over it, and then New York knew that it had a man of genius.
The realists had been ruling the literary roost, insisting that you must portray life by describing its external details. But this boy had a new idea; the interesting thing to him was the way people felt, and details merely served to reveal the human spirit. He was not afraid to describe emotions as having colors. So here was a new kind of fiction, called “impressionism”; and the realists were laid on the shelf for a while.
“Stevie” made a small fortune, and no longer drank his drinks in the saloons of the Bowery, but in the high-priced cafés on Broadway. He wrote short stories and sketches, and verses without rhyme or rhythm, which puzzled the critics—I remember that in my student days they were the joke of the newspaper paragraphers. The gossips got busy with him, of course, and a legend was built up concerning the extent of his revolt against social conventions. His biographer, Thomas Beer, defends him vigorously against these tales. It seems clear that he did not take drugs; while, as to his drinking, we can only repeat what we said about the pipes—any drinking at all was too much for a man who was to die of tuberculosis in a few years.
As to the women stories, they seem to have been partly blackmail, and partly the young writer’s imprudent notions of chivalry. He was talking with a girl of the streets in a saloon, and a policeman arrested the girl, and Crane came into court to testify in her behalf, and so of course got himself in for a lot of disagreeable publicity. It would have been so easy for him to avoid that, by having the ordinary caution of a man of the world. If only he had been willing to learn from Mark Twain and William Dean Howells how to dodge the shadow of a scandal!
The life of this wayward child of genius is one more illustration of that disagreeable alternative which life so often presents us. You may have self-restraint, plus more or less hypocrisy, and live long and successfully; or you may have do-as-you-please, plus absolute honesty, and undermine your constitution and die at the age of twenty-nine. The mind of Stephen Crane was like an acid which dissolved the shams and pretenses of civilization. But he has nothing to put in the place of these things. In “The Red Badge of Courage” he shows us a hero blind with fear; and the theme of all his short stories and later novels is that life is a matter of accident, and the universe a thing without moral sense or meaning. This belief Crane put also into his conduct; he knew nothing to do with his life, except that he had a childish wish to see a real war with his own eyes. First he tried to get to Cuba, and was shipwrecked; and while he got a good story out of that, “The Open Boat,” he paid with a part of his very small store of vitality. Then he went to Greece, but thecooking made him ill. Finally he saw our war in Cuba, and displayed such indifference to his own fate that the tongues of the gossips wagged faster than ever. He must be seeking death, because of some dark scandal hanging over his head!
He was altogether out of step with the 1890’s; but now a new generation has come, and all our young intellectuals are cold and objective and cynical, agreeing that pity is a mistake and life nothing in particular. They leave to me the unpleasant task of holding uninvited post-mortems over the ardent unhappy dead.
Let me put it briefly: that some day there will be yet another generation, which will realize that no man can get along without a religion, least of all the creative artist. It will not be the Methodist religion, but it will be something that gives young geniuses a reason for taking care of themselves and their gifts.
There was one religion which Stephen Crane adopted for a period of two weeks. He was a Socialist for that long—so he explains in a letter; but he met two other Socialists, who told him his doctrines were wrong, and then fell to quarreling as to which of the two was right. I say: Oh, young Stephen Cranes of the future, judge truth by the tests of truth, and not by our personal frailties and follies!
The mind of America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was controlled by elderly maiden aunts and hired men of privilege; and it seemed that behind the scenes of our national life some evil jinx was operating to keep us in this double thrall. There arose five independent and original-minded artists, and here is what happened to them: Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Norris died of appendicitis at the age of thirty-two, David Graham Phillips was killed by a lunatic at the age of forty-four, O. Henry died of alcoholism at the age of forty-eight, and Jack London killed himself at the age of forty.
Frank Norris was born in California in 1870, the sonof well-to-do parents. All through his childhood and boyhood he liked to tell stories and make sketches; he wasn’t sure which he liked to do best. He studied art in Paris for a couple of years, and published a long narrative poem at the age of twenty. Then he came home and tried to learn something about writing at the University of California, but without success. He took a graduate course at Harvard, and here he wrote “McTeague,” his first successful novel.
He had been absorbing Zola, and set out to apply the Zola method to America. He is going to give you the brutal reality of life, he is going to write about big animal men with heavy muscles and prominent jaws, and broad-bosomed women with large quantities of alluring hair. He is going to give you the great open spaces, and also the sordidness and smells of cities—as much as America can be got to stand. The theme of “McTeague” is avarice, and we see a dentist’s office with a big gold tooth for a sign, and all through the tragic story we run upon the motif of gold in everything from sunsets to decorations.
Then came “The Octopus,” and here we are in outdoor California, dealing with crude people and nature on a large scale. “The Octopus” has two themes. It is the Epic of the Wheat, and we see the great unfenced plains upon which wheat is raised wholesale, and the golden flood of grain on its way to feed the millions in the cities, a torrent of food so vast and heavy that it symbolically suffocates a man on its way. And then there is the railroad, the Octopus which has seized the wheat country and is devouring the settlers. I read this novel before I read anything of Zola’s, and so I got the shock of a great discovery. I was one of many youngsters who were set on fire. Here was power, here was a new grasp of reality; this was the way to write novels!
Also I was horrified and bewildered: could it be that things like this happened in America? Could it be that railroads set themselves up as the ruling power in a community, that they defeated the laws, deprived people of their homes and drove them into exile or outlawry? You see, I was the naive and innocent product of American public schools and of Mr. J. P. Morgan’s university; I really thought that I lived in a democracy, and under the protection of a Constitution. At that very time I wasraising campaign funds and helping to elect the president of our university—mine and Mr. Morgan’s—as a “reform” mayor of New York City!
I tried to find out about this railroad Octopus, and there was no way to find out. It was a dark secret of American life, crushed completely underground. There was no literature about it, nothing in the newspapers or the magazines, no books or pamphlets in the library of the great university. Now, twenty-three years later, I can tell you of a book in which you may read the life-story of one of these men of the San Joaquin, who were driven to outlawry by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The name of the man is Ed Morrell, and Jack London made him the hero of a novel, “The Star Rover.” They caught him finally and put him in prison, and that is the story he tells in his book, “The Twenty-fifth Man,” one of the most appalling narratives ever penned by a human being.
Frank Norris, who taught me something new about my country, had set out deliberately to do that very thing. He explained his ideas in a book, “The Responsibilities of the Novelist”; and I might, if I wanted to take the time, play a trick upon you, by quoting sentences from his book, mixed in with sentences from my book, and you could not tell the difference. For example, who is it that says: “No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation”? Who says: “It is the complaint of the coward, this cry against the novel with a purpose”? Who says: “The muse is a teacher, not a trickster”? Who says: “Truth in fiction is just as real and just as important as truth anywhere else”? It is Frank Norris who says all these things.
He goes on to point out that the pulpit reaches us only on Sundays, and the newspaper is quickly forgotten, but the novel stays with us all the time. And yet, facing this responsibility, there are novelists who admit that they write for money, and “you and I and the rest of us do not consider this disreputable!” Norris goes on to voice his own attitude toward his work: “I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth.”
He qualifies his doctrine by the statement that the novelist must not let his purpose run away with his story. I have an idea he must have let publishers and critics persuade him he had done that in “The Octopus”; for in “The Pit,” the second volume of his proposed trilogy, he is more tame and conventional. He tries to interest us in a grain broker and his wife as human beings—and he cannot do that, because parasites are not and cannot be interesting, except in satire after the fashion of “Babbitt.” We miss the epic sweep and bigness of “The Octopus,” and we are not consoled by the fact that “The Pit” had twice the sale.
The relationship between the novelist’s purpose and his story is very simple; the two things are one, and of equal importance, and the novelist must have them both in hand at every moment of his work. The consequence of losing either is equally fatal. The novelist who loses his grip upon the story and the characters who are living the story, begins at once to write a tract or a sermon—I know all about that, having done it. But equally fatal it is to lose your grip upon your purpose; for then you are doing meaningless reporting, and becoming a camera instead of a creative intellect.
I am prepared to hear it said many times that the author of this book does not know the difference between a tract or sermon and a work of art. But those who read the book, not to get material for ridicule, but to learn the truth about art, will note that I have praised in this book only the artists who were big enough and strong enough to keep both their imaginative impulse and their intellectual control; I have failed to mention a goodly company of artists who fought valiantly for freedom and justice, but who do not belong among the greatest, for precisely the reason that their impulse to teach and to preach ran away with their inspiration. That is why you miss such names as Plato and Sir Thomas More and Ferdinand Lassalle and Bertha von Suttner and John Ruskin and Walter Besant and Charles Kingsley and Charles Reade and Robert Buchanan and John Davidson and Richard Whiteing and Francis Adams and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edward Bellamy.