I
A NOTE ON ALCOVES
"Such is the present state of the world: and the nature of the animated beings which exist upon it, is hardly in any degree less worthy of our contemplation than its other features. Yet our first attention is justly due to Man, for whose sake all other things appear to have been produced by Nature; though with so great and severe penalties for the enjoyment of her bounteous gifts, that it is far from easy to determine whether she has proved to him a kind parent or a merciless step-mother."
"Such is the present state of the world: and the nature of the animated beings which exist upon it, is hardly in any degree less worthy of our contemplation than its other features. Yet our first attention is justly due to Man, for whose sake all other things appear to have been produced by Nature; though with so great and severe penalties for the enjoyment of her bounteous gifts, that it is far from easy to determine whether she has proved to him a kind parent or a merciless step-mother."
I.
A Note on Alcoves
§ 9
"Theliterary artist plays: and the sole end of his endeavor is to divert himself...."
Seated now at my desk, I weighed the phrase. All valid artists in letters might or might not with justice be describable as life's half-frightened playboys. I, in any event, knew that, whatever other motives might now and then have prompted me, the Biography had been written in chief for my own diversion. Whenever people had unfavorably criticised my writing—I now perceived,—my first emotion had been, always, surprise at their imagining I had especially tried to give pleasure to them. I had, instead, for nearly a quarter of a century, been trying with the Biography to divert myself. That might or might not be the correct principle upon which to write novels: it was most certainly a principleto which I was committed in any justifying of the form and scope of the Biography.
So I tapped out upon my typewriter, first of all, as a self-obvious axiom, "The literary artist labors primarily to divert himself...."
§ 10
It is surprising, though, what protean gifts a theme develops once you attempt to grapple with it. When I was just now moved to set down on paper my personal notions as to the form and scope and aim of the novel, as these notions are illustrated in the Biography, the affair seemed simple. With the task actually begun, the typewriter-bell may hardly tinkle thrice (for my machine is of a venerable model) before one sees that the guide to further composition must be that once celebrated chapter, in I forget whose Natural History, upon The Snakes of Iceland. It read, as you recall, "There are no snakes in Iceland." For one perceives that the form and scope of the novel, if not similarly non-existent, at least stay indeterminable in lands wherein the form and the scope of prose fiction stay limitless.
The aim, however, of the written, printed and formally labeled novel is, I take it, to divert. Such is (one may assume with in any event quite reputable backing) the only aim of creative writing, and ofall the arts. But much the same sort of diversion seems to be the purpose of a staggering number of human endeavors: and it is when one considers the novels which are not formally labeled, that the theme evasively assumes all manner of shapes, and the field of prose fiction is revealed as limitless.
I do not hunt paradox. I wish in real sincerity to acknowledge that our trade of novel writing and publishing is an ineffably minor evincement of the vast and pride-evoking truth, that human beings are wiser than reason. Pure reason—I mean, as pure as human reason assays,—reveals out of hand that the main course of daily living is part boredom, part active discomfort and fret, and, for the not inconsiderable rest, a blundering adherence to some standard derived from this or that hearsay. But human beings, in this one abnegation infinitely wise, here all discard the use of their reasoning powers, which are perhaps felt here to be at least as gullible as usual: and brave men cheerily deny their immersion in the futile muddle through which they toil lip-deep.... Pinned to the wall, the more truthful of flesh and blood may grant that this current afternoon does, by the merest coincidence, prove answerable to some such morbid and over-colored description by people bent on being "queer": but in the admitter's mind forgetfulness is already about its charitable censorship of the events of the morning, to the intentthat this amended account be placed on file with many expurgated editions of yesterday and the most brilliant romances about to-morrow.... For human memory and human optimism are adepts at the prevarications which everybody grasps, retails and tirelessly reiterates: these two it is who coin the fictions which every person weaves into the interminable extravaganza that he recites to himself as an accurate summing-up of his own past and future: and everywhere about this earth's revolving surface moves a circulating library of unwritten novels bound in cloth and haberdashery.
The wholesome effect of these novels is patent. It is thanks to this brace of indefatigable romancers, it is due to the lax grasp of memory and to the perennation of optimism, that nobody really needs to notice how the most of us, in unimportant fact, approach toward death through gray and monotonous corridors. Besides, one finds a number of colorful alcoves here and there, to be opened by intoxication or venery, by surrender to the invigorating lunacy of herd action, or even by mental concentration upon new dance-steps and the problems of chess and auction bridge. One blunders, indeed, into a rather handsome number of such alcoves which, when entered, temporarily shut out the rigidity and the only exit of the inescapable corridor. Life thus becomes for humankind a far different matter fromwhat it would seem to any merely reasonable creature, since life's monotonous main tenor is thus diversified by an endless series of slight distracting interests and of small but very often positive pleasures in the way of time-wasting and misdemeanor. And in addition, as we go, all sorts of merry tales are being interchanged, about what lies beyond the nearing door and the undertaker's little black bag.
§ 11
These are not, though, the only anæsthetics. The human maker of fiction furnishes yet other alcoves, whether with beautiful or shocking ideas, with many fancy-clutching toys that may divert the traveller's mind from dwelling on the prevalent tedium of his journey and the ambiguity of its end. I have not yet, of course, come to consideration of the formally labeled novel, for this much is true of every form of man-made fiction, whether it be concocted by poets or statesmen, by bishops in conclave or by advertisers in the back of magazines. And since memory and optimism, as has been said, are the archetypal Homer and St. John, the supreme and most altruistic of all deceivers, the omnipotent and undying masters of omnipresent fictive creation, their "methods" are in the main pursued by the great pair's epigoni; who likewise tend to deal with thelarge deeds of superhuman persons seen through a glow of amber lucency, not wholly unakin to that of maple syrup.
Of the romances which make for business prosperity and religious revivals and wars to end war forever, here is no call to speak. Nor need I here point out that well-nigh everyone who anywhere writes prose to-day, whether it take form as a tax return or a magazine story or a letter beginning "My dear So-and-so," is consciously composing fiction: and in the spoken prose of schoolrooms and courts of law and social converse, I think, no candid person will deny that expediency and invention collaborate. It may be true that lies have short legs, but civilization advances upon them.
§ 12
I, in any event, get daily bewilderment from considering how deep-rooted seem all life's serious and practical endeavors in implausible fictions. The most long-headed of us, for instance, may reasonably confess to some faith in money and in mathematics: these things at least are stable realities, these are the pillars, the very Bohas and Jakin in the Temple of Common-Sense. And yet, here also, is disclosed by two minutes' consideration another side.
Money I regard, I hope, with all appropriategravity. I know that I now and then accept without derisory outcry, even thankfully, small metal disks disfigured with a remarkably unaquiline eagle and the fat-jowled head of a female criminal very neatly guillotined. Nor am I here deceived by appearances. These things suggest extremely rococo poker-chips, they look like counters to be used in playing some sort of game, for the sound reason that this is precisely what they are. And we play. We all play quite gravely, at every hour in our lives, at the game wherein these disks, which in themselves no mortal could regard with æsthetic pleasure or employ for any imaginable practical purpose, are supposed to be worth something. In time we get quite used to these horary excursions of fancy: and indeed we so enter into the spirit of the game as very often to "buy" things with a feeling that the clerk is swindling us, rather than we him.
But, as an even more remarkable fiction, I consider the new five-dollar bill which I chance this morning to possess. In itself, like the metal disks, it is worth nothing: and its glazed surface chills the thought of devoting it to the one use suggested by its general dimensions. It bears, though, I find, an engraved assurance that to the bearer of this paper the People's National Bank of Strasburg, Virginia, will pay five dollars.
Since, as it happens, the president and the cashierof that institution have not signed in the spaces reserved for them, the assurance comes unsupported: for it nobody, so far as I can see, assumes any least responsibility. Yet, in any event, if the unsponsored statement be true, such is the sole value of this paper rectangle: its only virtue is that in Strasburg, Virginia, you can exchange it for five dollars.
I have no intention of going to Strasburg, Virginia: I shall instead buy something with this note, under the romantic pretence that the shopkeeper is going to exchange it, in Strasburg, Virginia, for five dollars. And he will part with it to somebody else on the same imaginative terms. And that make-believe will continue until this note is worn out. Meanwhile this bit of paper will gravely be exchanged, in varied surroundings, for every sort of commodity.... It will be transmuted into dinners, it will tread the pavements of remote outlandish cities in the form of a pair of shoes, and as pajamas it will pass beyond the proper scope of my meditations. It will flower into orchids, it will blaze as coal. Not without ostentation will it fall into the collection plate, nor toward Christmas flutter into the kettle of the Salvation Army: more furtively will it, thrice-folded, slip into the top of the feminine stocking. Darkness will sometimes engulf it like a pocket. Very deep will it descend, as fares the sewer rat, into grim social underworlds; as most inferiorwhiskey it will be swallowed up; and in the manner of the dead that are laid away, will it go down into the steel catacombs beneath banking houses. Thence presently it will arise. It will arise unchanged, a trifle deteriorate in crispness perhaps, yet very potent to aid in lifting mortgages, in raising children, and in elevating many households, I would like to think, in the avatar of two of my books.... But never on any forenoon in Strasburg, Virginia, will it be exchanged for five dollars: and the one purpose for which this paper is so precisely designed is precisely the one to which it will not ever be put.
What will in point of fact become of it, I learn after serious inquiry into this mystery—in financial circles, wherein I was humored as a harmless lunatic,—is that, when the note gets sufficiently dirty and decrepit, "some bank will turn it in, at Washington," in exchange for a fresh paper rectangle; and the senior note will then be destroyed by Treasury employees. But nobody will ever convey to Strasburg, Virginia, this representation of Benjamin Harrison looking like a dishonest Santa Claus, and of the Pilgrims putting ashore at Plymouth Rock to investigate the phenomena of a wind that blows two ways and of a tree growing from the ocean. Nobody will ever deal logically with all this intricate engraving: and if anybody ever did, he would, as the very cream of this monetary fiction, bethought "queer." At worst, his sanity would become a matter of medical investigation: at best, he would be given for this paper rectangle another banknote, and the romancing would now gild a different Carcassonne.
And similarly outrageous seem to any calm considering the fictions of mathematics. This fact, indeed, was recently pointed out to me by my small son, in whom his governess was endeavoring to implant the conviction that two and two make four. But the child stayed sceptical. He was reservedly polite about a rational "Suppose you had two apples, and I gave you two more apples, how many apples would you have then?" He conceded with readiness, not unflavored with resignation to the obtuseness of grown-up persons, that in such circumstances he would have four apples, but could not eat that many without being real sick. Yet that two and two, in consequence, make four, he excluded as a logical inference: and he depreciated that inference by stating it did not mean anything. He was, of course, quite right.
For that "two and two make four" becomes, the very instant that you play this familiar axiom the childish trick of thinking about it, at best an unprovable hypothesis. That two apples and two more apples compose four apples is, as my son admitted, plain enough. Or, you may change your unit to apenny, a match, a pencil, or to a bungalow, and still produce convincing evidence to prove your arithmetic. But the mathematician requests us to consider an abstract "two," to believe in two apples with the pomaceousness removed: his incorporal and incorporeal "two" has never existed and never can exist. His "two" is not merely a fiction, but an inconceivable fiction which the human mind can no more, really, imagine than it can his "four." You need only for one moment attempt to form some rational and clear-cut idea of this "two" to perceive that the governess in fact was (with all respect to her) talking about incredible fictions, just as my son affirmed.... And when the mathematician goes on from "two" and "four" into the higher branches of his romance weaving, and postulates as yet other realities his "lines" that have length but no breadth or thickness, or his "points" that have not even length, you face the choice between fleeing from his self-evident lunacy and accepting his insane but very useful fictions.
§ 13
So do we all exist as if in a warm grateful bath, submerged and soothed by fiction. In contrast to the inhabitants of the Scilly Islands, who are reputed to have lived by taking in one another's washing, so do we live by interchanging tales that will not wash.There seems to be no bound, no frontier trading-post appointed anywhere to this barter of current fiction, not in the future nor in the years behind.... Men have been, almost cynically, shown with what ease the romance which we call history may be recast throughout, now that America rejoices in an amended past which has all been painstakingly rewritten with more care of the King's English, and wherein the War of the Revolution takes its proper place as the latest addition to the list of German outrages. State legislatures dispose of man's arboreal ancestry by passing a law against it: and Congress, by bestowing upon non-intoxicating beverages an illegal alcoholic content, at once repeats and repudiates the miracle of Cana. Our newspapers continue the war-time economizing of intelligence, and still serve patriotic substitutes in serials, wherein Black and Yellow and Red perils keep colorful the outlook, and fiends oppose broad-minded seraphim in every political difference. Our clergy are no less prolific in their more futuristic school of art, and on every Sabbath morning discourse engagingly of paradise and of that millennium of which the arrival is at present being furthered by the more "modern" of our prelates bringing fearlessly to bear upon the mystery of the Incarnation the intellect of a midwife.... The past, the present and the future are thus everywhere presented in the terms of generallydiverting prose fictions: and life is rendered passable by our believing in those which are most to our especial liking.
§ 14
Man is, they say, the only animal that has reason; and so he must have also, if he is to stay sane, diversions to prevent his using it. Man, always nearing and always conscious of approaching death with its unpredictable sequel, and yet bored beyond sufferance by the routine of his daily living, must in this predicament have playthings to divert him from bringing pitiless reason to bear upon his dilemma: and he must have too the false values which he ascribes to these playthings.
The lines of Pope that I have quoted elsewhere dwell truthfully enough upon life's endless playing,—upon the playing of the child with straws and rattles, of the young man with his mistresses, of the mature with wealth and worldly honors, and of the aged with rosaries and prayer-books. But the solace, the true virtue, of these playthings arises from the fiction that the player tells to himself about them. No child plays with a straw: he brandishes a sword that has just chopped off a dragon's head. The young man, exultant, terrified, touches and uncovers, not an expanse of epidermis and small hairs and sweat glands, but the body of a goddess. Thebanker is reveling in that romance about Strasburg, Virginia: and the aged clasp not a prayer-book but the key to eternal bliss. Everywhere, in fine, the creating romantic who lives in every human being is either composing or else borrowing the kind of romance which most potently diverts him, and prevents his going mad.
§ 15
Well, it is the privilege of the novelist—I mean, at last, the novelist who is frankly listed as such in Who's Who—to aid according to his abilities in this old world-wide effort, so to delude mankind that nobody from birth to death need ever really bother about his, upon the whole, unpromising situation in the flesh. It is the privilege of the novelist who happens also to be an artist, to blaze a trail upon which his readers may follow, and be delighted by the by-products of his hedonism. For it is his higher privilege to divert his own thoughts from unprofitable and rational worrying; and to lead such as may choose to follow him in one more desperate sortie from that ordered living and from the selves of which all men are tired.
So I suspect there must always be, to the last digit, precisely as many "methods" as there are novelists. For the endeavor of the novelist, even by the lowestand most altruistic motives, is to tell untruths that will be diverting: and of their divertingness he needs, and in fact can have (prior to the receipt of royalty statements), no touchstone save only the response which these untruths evoke from him. His primary endeavor must therefore, upon merely rational and sordid grounds, be to divert, not any possible reader, but himself.
By the novelist who is more tradesman than artist, and who is guided by ideals rather than selfishness, this truth is not recognised: and he often commits the deadly error of succumbing to praiseworthy motives. He, as a rule, indeed, wrong-headedly begins by considering his public's real virtues and aspirations; he endeavors to strengthen these by finding for them vicarious exercise: and he thus allows himself to be misled into evanescence through philanthropy. Now it is the privilege of the public (which, to be sure, has an alternative) to consider the artist: but the artist who for one half second during his hours of play with ink and paper considers anybody except himself is contriving a suicide without dignity. For the one really ponderable sort of writer—the writer who communicates to us something of his own delight and interest in his playing, and who thus in the end contributes to our general human happiness,—has been influenced while about this playing by none save selfish considerations. Hehas written wholly to divert himself: he has for that moment been inclavated to pleasure-seeking with somewhat the ruthlessness of a Nero and all the tenacity of a débutante: and if I seem unduly to emphasise this obvious fact, it is merely because the man afterward so often lies about it.
Some tale-tellers find themselves most readily bedrugged by yearning toward loveliness unknown and unobtainable: these are, we say, our romanticists. To them are, technically, opposed such Pollyannas among fiction writers as Mr. Theodore Dreiser and Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who can derive a species of obscure æsthetic comfort from considering persons even less pleasantly situated than themselves,—somewhat as a cabin passenger on a sinking ship might consider the poor devils in the steerage,—and so turn rhyparographer, and write "realism." The process is not unnatural, and has been more or less profitable since at least the time of Piræicus.
But, either way, the inspiring principle remains unchanged: you think of that which is above or below you in order to avoid thinking of what is about you. So it really does not greatly matter whether you travel with Marco Polo to Cathay or with the Kennicotts to Gopher Prairie. The excursion may be for the purpose of looking at beautiful things wistfully or at ugly things contemptuously: the pointis that it is an excursion from the place where you regard over-familiar things with a yawn.
When one considers these truisms,—and fails to see why they need be disputed by anybody not actually engaged in the physical labor of teaching or of contributing to the more successful periodicals,—then the form and scope of even the formally labeled novel seems, plainly, fluctuating and indeterminable. The novelist, it is apparent, will write in the form—with such dramatic, epic or lyric leanings as his taste dictates,—which he personally finds alluring: his rhythms will be such as caress his personal pair of ears: and the scope of his writing will be settled by what he personally does or does not find interesting. For the serious prose craftsman will write primarily to divert himself,—with a part thrifty but in the main a philanthropic underthought of handing on, at a fair price, the playthings and the games which he contrives, for the diversion of those with a like taste in anodynes. And to do this will content him. For he will believe that he may win to fame by brewing oblivion, he will hope to invent, if he prove thrice lucky, some quite new form of "let's pretend." But he will not believe that anybody with a valid claim to be considered a post-graduate child can gravely talk about affixing limits to the form and scope of that especial pastime.
§ 16
And so his "creed," to my experience, stays troublingly nebulous. At most he will admit but general tenets to himself, conceding very secretly:
Imprimis, I play, when all is said, with common-sense and piety, as my fellows appraise these matters, and with death also. I have embarked in a gaming in which to win is not possible: and every sensible person of course thinks this extremely foolish. Yet I know that, for my purpose, the opinions of all other persons are negligible. My own opinions, if indeed I have the patience and the temerity to unearth them, are, as I know also, erroneous; they are unstable: but they remain, none the less, the only reliable guides to my intended goal, diversion.... And my rational standards can be adhered to, I consider, with more safety if they are kept concealed.
Item, I must find out what are, in reality, my real beliefs: and I must set these forth to the best possible advantage; and I must be zealous, above all, not ever to regard my beliefs quite seriously. Human ideas are of positive worth in that they make fine playthings for the less obtuse of mankind. That seems to be the ultimate lean value of all human ideas, even of my ideas. I must carefully conceal my knowledge of this humiliating fact.
Item, I must cherish my ideas as I do my children, with a great love commingled with admitted inability to foresee what they may be like to-morrow. For my ideas and my impressions, in the moment that these visit and pass away from the consciousness which is I, from the fragment of consciousness which insecurely lurks inside this skull, are the only realities known to me in the brief while wherein I am, as yet, permitted to play with common-sense and piety and death. I will to enjoy and play with and, it may be, to perpetuate after my flickering from this skull, these true realities: if I succeed in perpetuating them, that is well; if I fail, I shall not at all worry about this failure once I am dead, and I am fairly certain to be dead by and by. At worst, the ability and the body and the life which transiently were at my disposal will have been really used, both to make something and to divert me.... And at best, it would be foolhardy not to keep such intentions concealed.
Item, with human life as a whole I have no grave concern, and I am beguiled by no notion of "depicting" it. My concern is solely with myself. I have no theory of what we call "life's" cause or object; nor can I detect in material existence any general trend. The stars and the continents, the mountains and these flustering hordes of men, every mole-hill and the diligent dancing of gnat swarms,—all appearsto blend in a vagrant and very prettily tinted and generally amusing stream by which I too am swept onward. If but for my dignity's sake, I prefer to conceal my knowledge of this fact.
Item, there is upon me a resistless hunger to escape from use and wont: I seem more utterly resolved than are my fellows, not to be bored: and it is in my endeavor to evade the tediousness of familiar things that I am playing—playing, as I know, quite futilely,—with common-sense and piety and death. Such levity tends, it well may be, to no applaudable outcome: meanwhile this playing diverts me.... And meanwhile, my fellows being what they are, my amusement is a matter very profitably concealed.
Item, I really must, in the teeth of all solicitation, refuse to plagiarize anything from what people call "nature" and "real life." My playing, which I term my "art," has no concern with things which, in any case, are too ill-managed to merit imitation. For, still adhering to that simile of the prettily tinted stream, I am persuaded my art need not pretend to be a treatise upon hydrodynamics: my art is well content to be the autobiography of an unvalued straw adrift in this sparkling and babbling stream that hastens toward an unguessable ocean. Let us avoid guesswork, since it is profitless. Let us avoid, too, no reasonable pains to conceal this fact.
Item, let us avoid, also, the narcotizing perils of reverence,—even for our juniors, who are in all æsthetic matters invariably in the right,—or of being quite as serious about ourselves and our doings in collusion with printers and publishers as if mankind and the books of men were of grave and demonstrable importance. And let us, above all, avoid disastrous candors, and say boldly none of these things. Let us who "write" protest that we have no concealments, that we expose ourselves entire, and that our unselfish aim is to benefit and entertain other persons, the while that we play ceaselessly with common-sense and piety and death.