X

FLAWS IN THE SPUR

"Exploits, however splendidly achieved, come, by length of time, to be less known to fame, or even forgotten among posterity. In this manner the renown of many kings has faded, and their deeds have sunk with them into the grave where their bodies lie buried,—deeds that had been performed with great magnificence when unanimous applause set them up as models before the people. The ancient Greeks, aware of this, were wise enough to use the pen as a remedy against oblivion."

10.

Flaws in the Spur

§ 88

Theliterary artist plays, I had said, not merely in such fashions as I had enumerated. He plays, even over and above all this, with the notion that his self-diversions are altruistic and for the large benefit of posterity. This idea is, to the considerate, inexplicable: but nobody need seriously question its potency. "Fame is the spur," as Milton some while since observed, that very often rowels the artist into doing rather objectionably painstaking work.

For custom assumes that time deals very carefully with reading-matter, omnisciently discarding the trash, and preserving to outlast a kingdom or two that which is finest. And probably the notion of this posthumous atonement for the current era's stupidity has heartened, in every era, the creative writer who viewed with a shared seriousness his craft and his income.

One may permissibly wonder, none the less, if time does right all unfailingly, in quite this taken-for-granted fashion. The present generation is the utmost that has thus far been produced in the way of posterity. It seems, at least, remarkable that we who have made the Saturday Evening Post a literary success second only to the Telephone Book should be the clear-eyed cognoscenti to whom dead poets appealed; and that it was in our standards of criticism they invested their life's labor and confidence. ForLes Contes Drolatiqueswere, really, written for the beguilement of Dr. Brander Matthews[11]and it was with an eye upon Mr. H.L. Mencken that à Kempis compiled theImitation of Christ.

§ 89

Now, not as that all-righting posterity do we approach, of course, the books we actually read. Nobody expects that our judgments of current literature be perennially brazen when two or three unbend in talk about that merchandise which is sold in the same "department" as stationery and string and glue. The rub is, rather, that our chief "classics" appear to have been selected and handed down to fame by the long arm of coincidence. That which remains to usof Greek and Roman literature composes by general consent our greatest treasure, the treasure which time has most thoroughly tested and approved. And it is precisely here that one finds least cause to suspect time of any entangling alliance with justice. There is no vaguest reason to suppose that of the Greek and Roman writers we have preserved, by any standards, what was best worth keeping; nor that of such authors as Æschylos and Aristophanes of whom oblivion has spared more than the name we have retained the masterworks. We cherish, instead, each scrap that accident has made peerless by the destruction of its betters.... I might go on to speak, even more tediously, of Sappho and Petronius and Plutarch, and of Virgil's foiled endeavors to destroy the latter part of hisÆneid—and about the dream that revealed the hiding place of Dante's lost cantos, and about John Warburton's cook, and about how the Bible came by its present contents,—to show through what queer accidents the world's chief "classics," the books which are likely always to remain in theory man's finest literary achievements, have been made just what they are. But the point is that they might quite as easily have been something else. The point is that they have not earned their present and probably perpetual rank by their pre-eminence in special qualities, nor by any æsthetic principle whatever. And if the supreme names andmasterpieces of the world's literature have been tagged as such by justice,—which always remains just barely possible,—it was done without removing her bandage, in the hazards of a game of blind man's buff.

But I refrain in charity from such pedantic considerations. Here is real need, though, to point out that before printing became pandemic the only way in which anybody's writing won a chance of survival was by some other person's finding its matter sufficiently congenial to be at pains to make a copy of it. In nature, that which most rapturously recorded the inane struck home to most bosoms, upon the chronic principle that still procures admirers for the philosophy of Dr. Frank Crane,[12]and for the novels of Floyd and Ethel Dell:[13]so, from the first, have long odds favored earnest mediocrity.... To the vitality of the mediocre I shall return. Meanwhile that dangerous invention of Gutenberg's has changed all; and has ensured a fair chance of perpetuity for that which is excellent, provided always this excellence be not swept away unnoted and hidden by the spume and froth of the torrential river it floats in,that ever-passing deluge of the current books. Sometimes befalls a favoring miracle of salvage, and such dissimilar lost argosies as those of Samuel Butler and Herman Melville return upstream with flying colors. But who may say how deep, how irretrievably, their betters may not lie sunken? or can gravely assert that literary permanence is in any very general demand among the buyers or publishers or writers of new books?... Indeed, I know of no class of men which quite whole-heartedly desires the production and formal recognizing of any more "classics": since even those who care for fine literature cannot but obscurely feel that there is already a deal more of it existent than any human being can hope to assimilate; and that already the literary pantheon of the self-respecting is thronged with gods whose virtues we are compelled, in this limited lifetime, to accept as an article of faith. There is, for example, Defoe or Richardson—or, of more recent hierarchs, Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr. Joseph Conrad,—before the shrine of each of whom many are zealous to pass with every form of respect which does not entail stopping. And I suspect, if the persons who cry upDon Quixotewere afforded a choice between silence and reading every line of this world-famous "classic," there would no longer be any need to think an instant before you pronounce its name.

§ 90

But I spoke of the vitality of the mediocre. The quality which makes for acknowledged greatness in a writer is—I know not how many textbooks have assured us,—the universality of his appeal. His ideas are, in brief, the ideas which the majority of persons find acceptable; and Shakespeare has been praised, for once with absolute justice, as "the myriad-minded," because myriads have always had just such a mind as his. The writer of "classics," in short, has need of quite honest and limited thinking, and of an ability to utter platitudes with that wholesome belief in their importance which no hypocrisy nor art can ever mimic.... Of the letters of a foreign nation nobody can speak without some danger of magnifying his everyday folly. But it appears safe here to point out that the main treasures of our national literature, including its British tributaries, really are, when considered in the light of the ideas they express, rather startlingly silly. The "ideas" of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, when once looked at without prejudice, appear to wander sheepishly from the platitudinous to the imbecile, the while that their "stories" rove, in somewhat more the manner of the mountain goat, about the heights of idiocy. And when you compare the reality with the ideas which Scott and Thackerayand Dickens quite gravely expressed about human existence, the incongruity breathes more of pathos than of mirth: for these novelists expressed the usual ideas.

Most persons really do believe, for example, that complete and abiding happiness is to be won by marriage until they have tried it: and, for that matter, widows have been known to carry this romanticism to the extreme of taking a second husband. And most persons do honestly believe that, in the outcome, wickedness is punished and virtue is rewarded (again) with a complete and abiding happiness: and in consequence of this belief most persons make it a point in social intercourse to check their natural, not infrequent impulses toward rape and murder. Most persons do, in fact, for various reasons, think it best to be "good"; and do expect, for equally various reasons, to be happy by and by. Now, with hardly an exception, the concededly "classic" writers have, without any detectable scepticism, set forth such popular notions, with every fit adornment of rhetoric and cunning diction: and their ideas have endured for the plain reason that they were endurable.

§ 91

Yet here again, I am afraid, the fool is answered according to his folly. It is, when you think of it, arather dreadful fate to become a classic. Once the writer is thus deified, his private character is the first burnt offering. He has well hidden himself beneath the effigy he found diverting; he rests thereunder, untroubled: but about his tomb frisk commentators obviously raised, by a superior education, from that troglodytic race which enlivens the public privies with verse. For his cult has need of a legend, and prefers a highly colored epopee of lechery and sexual curiosa, such as affords vicarious outlet to those desires which we imprison fearfully in ourselves, and reveals the demigod to be no better than anybody else. So Mary Fitton and Georgina Hogarth and Mrs. Brookfield are dragged into the saga: stout volumes are devoted to proving that Wordsworth begot a bastard, or that Byron was caught in incest with his sister; nobody appears able to write about Molière without suggesting that his wife was also very probably his daughter: and all our literary gossip becomes a whispered and sniggered ritual of phallic worship.

Nor do many of the auctorially great escape calumny in the form of a Complete Edition, wherein their self-confessed failures at writing, and the chips and rubbish of the workshop, and the rough draughts and notes designed for the waste-basket, and the politic ephemeræ into which most writers are allured by kindness and advertising purposes, are piddlinglyamassed to be bound up, in pompous scavengery, with all the unsigned refuse from the back files of magazines which can be "attributed" to the victim. None other of the dead has even his appointed executors combined to convict him of idiocy. And of course those less put-upon immortals who are recollected, however infrequently, by virtue of one book alone are but too apt to get into some such collection as Everyman's Library, and have the upshot of their existence identified with the twaddle and smug tediums of Trollope and Jane Austen and Mary Cowden Clarke.

And the writer who is raised to the peerage of the remembered dead is likewise granted an estate, commensurate with his dignity, in the fields of human aversion. Luckless typesetters have to read every word of his books; in your library he usurps grudged shelfroom in the bright armor of a binding too handsome to be relegated to the dustheap of any married man; the oppressed young have his loathed archaisms included in their "parallel reading" at school, where also they are sometimes put to thepeine dure et forteof "parsing" him; in women's clubs he incurs the stigma of being quoted with approval from the platform, by persons in the bankruptcy of mind appropriate to that deadly eminence; and dear old bishops likewise quote him in their sermons, utilizing his dreams as hypnotics.... He becomes,in fine, a nuisance, and is thought of with mingled condescension and haziness and dislike. And it appears, to the considerate, a prodigality of currishness, thus in so many ways to "beat the bones of the buried" because their outcast owner once voiced memorably the common beliefs and hopes,—the tonic fallacies, the sustaining delusions,—which keep a vigorous heart in the ribs, and marrow in the bones, of all that are not buried, not yet.

Here is no need to assume, however, that every classic author has from the beginning been commonplace in absolutely everything. It may happen, indeed, that a writer putting forth an unpopularly rational thought may have his heresy so generally assailed and so often controverted as to make it sufficiently hackneyed for wide acceptance: but mediocrity, even in "daringness" and "unconventionality," thrives from the first; and is the firmlier assured of posterity's respectful reprinting. And the display of uncommon mentality is, as a rule, as fatal to the literary life of a book as it is to the physical life of man.

§ 92

For there really does seem to be over all a force—to be labelled what you will,—that is hostile to the undue development, in any direction, of man's mind. Here death is not directly involved: rather, does itappear to be life which is resolute to use men within very inflexible limits.... And so I now incline to dismiss those earlier notions as to nothing being apparent anywhere except the operation and products of death. I begin to play with the fancy that life is indeed aiming at something quite definite; and that the wise man's part therein is to be patient, to cling to mediocrity, and to get bread and children, and presently to die, with no more of active discomfort than may be unavoidable.

It well may be, I reflect, that all is not at loose ends; and that some scheme of happenings is fore-ordained; and that we serve in it, somehow, when we live tranquilly and propagate; since, certainly, the desire to do just these two things is the one human desire encountered everywhere.

And perhaps—I yet further speculate,—the phenomena called "literary genius" and "artistic ability" are vexatious little mishaps, a trifle gone wrong, in the broad working out of a plan which they minutely hamper.... So the contretemps is remedied. The person afflicted with "genius" is removed, be it by his other diseases or by his fellows' natural dislike of him, it hardly matters: either way, there is by ordinary in his removal a smack of haste: and you will note that, whether in polity or mercy, it is somehow provided that his children do not inherit his affliction.... So does life seem to keep her pawns fromerrancy. So does she seem to restrict them, with now and then some show of pettishness, to the arena and service of her large and dim and patient gaming: and wisdom bids us emulate this patience, in the time that we get bread and children, and strive to die with no more of active discomfort than may be unavoidable.

And yet, even so, in the bared teeth of outraged reason, no one of us rests quite content to be a mere transmitter of semen, and to serve as one of many millions of instruments in life's inexplicable labor, used for a little while as such, and then put by, worn out and finished with forever. We appeal against oblivion. And not only does the shatter-pated artist appeal: the Pharaohs have filed pyramidic caveats, the best-thought-of business-men yet enter demurrers in the form of public libraries: there is no tomb-stone however modest but insanely appeals to posterity to keep in mind somebody's dates of birth and death and middle name.

For we will to continue here, in the world known to us, to continue if only as syllables. We all will not to be forgotten utterly by those that must so soon inherit our familiar dear estate of tedium and muddle-headedness and fret and failure; and that in our places will get bread and children; and that after our going will in our beds be striving to die with no more of active discomfort than may be unavoidable.

Yet here is an odd thing: we can pretend to offer no example worth the following, not even any salutary instance of just what to avoid; nor can we, in any of the limbos which have been divinely revealed, thus far, derive from being so remembered one minim of profit. We are spurred by neither altruism nor self-seeking; the counsellor that persuades to the appeal remains anonymous: and it seems that, here again, some power which mocks at reason, or at least at human reason, is moving us to serve unknown but, one suspects, not unappointed ends.

For we do not know, either here or elsewhere, what ends may be appointed: but we do know, I think, that every wise man will avoid too much of guesswork, in the brief while that he gets bread and children, and patiently foreplans to die with no more of active discomfort than is unavoidable.

§ 93

Thus, then, I reflected, now that I approached my summing up, the writer who is sustained by the notion of his books' being perpetual things cannot, after two minutes of honest thought, believe himself to be sustained also by altruism, nor by any faith in the superior discernment of posterity. Upon no ground perceptible to me could reason detect, the instant that reason weighed the present rate and direction ofman's progress, any marked likelihood of posterity's being in anything more logical than is that contemporaneous, so huge and so depressingly unimpressed audience which every artist must perforce contemn. Posterity in its approach to literary matters would probably muddle forward, as man has always done, upon humanity's time-tested crutches of hearsay and stupidity. The men who after our departure inherited the gray tedium of man's daily living would keep some of our books (but not really read them), and others of our books they would destroy, not in any haphazard fashion, but acting always under the adamantean human compulsion to be illogical about everything.

Not any art or painstaking, nor certainly any accident of "genius," could enable a book to live. Chance alone appeared to do that, and then only in a very limited sense. And in this final, frantic, and yet optimistic appeal to posterity—here, too, man clung to his great racial custom of being illogical about everything; and every serious author triumphantly attested himself to be, after all, quite human. That seemed the conclusion of the matter....

So I ran over my enlinked deductions. Man lived, for the major part of his conceded time, a meagre and monotonous and unsatisfying existence: this he alleviated by endlessly concocting fictions which bedruggedand diverted him. The artist, and in particular the literary artist, like every other person animate, attempted to bedrug and divert primarily himself; which end the literary artist gained, as a rule, by picturing himself as figuring enviably in unfamiliar surroundings, and as making sport with the three martinets that he, in common with all men at bottom, most genuinely abhorred,—that is, with common-sense and piety and death. Moreover, he diverted himself by playing with such human ideas as he found entertaining: and he played too with the notion of hoodwinking posterity into accepting and treasuring his highly imaginative portrait of himself. And the outcome of his multifold playing—of that interminable self-diversion which he, quite unsmilingly, called his "work,"—was always unpredictable, always chance-guided, and, in any case, was of no benefit or hurt to him by and by, and was never of grave importance to anybody else. That seemed to be the whole truth about the literary artist. That seemed the gist of the epilogue I had now evolved for the Biography of Dom Manuel's life, and was submitting to myself to-night as the explanation of why I had given over so many years to writing.

Yes, all my premises seemed true: my deductions appeared to hold together. My logic and its upshot, in any event, contented me. What, I had begun by asking, does the author get out of it all? Well, I hadfound that unknown quantity; the equation now was solved; andxamounted to, exactly, nothing. That was the mathematics of it: only, as you may recall, it had been revealed to me, through the aid of my small son, that mathematics too amounted to, exactly, nothing. And, besides, here also, in reaching this negation, I had most gratifyingly attained, in the same moment that I discredited, the aim of every valid author. For I had found, I reflected, even here, some rather interesting ideas to play with.... Yes, and my argument ended, neatly, with the day: for the clock behind me was now striking midnight....

FOOTNOTES:[11]A prominent American littérateur of the period. The titles of many of his books have been preserved, such asHis Father's Son,The Last Meeting,A Secret of the Sea, &c.[12]A newspaper writer of the day. He specialized in very short editorials, so notably preëminent, even in American journalism, for feeble-mindedness that these were published, simultaneously, by some fifty of the leading papers of the United States, and were read everywhere with edification.[13]Novelists of the day; authors ofCharles Rex,Janet March,Greatheart, &c.

[11]A prominent American littérateur of the period. The titles of many of his books have been preserved, such asHis Father's Son,The Last Meeting,A Secret of the Sea, &c.

[12]A newspaper writer of the day. He specialized in very short editorials, so notably preëminent, even in American journalism, for feeble-mindedness that these were published, simultaneously, by some fifty of the leading papers of the United States, and were read everywhere with edification.

[13]Novelists of the day; authors ofCharles Rex,Janet March,Greatheart, &c.

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