II

Our slow advance in artistic achievement has been defended on the plea

that we have no background, no perspective, and that our absorption

in business affairs leaves no time for that serene contemplation of

life that is essential to the highest attainments. To omit the obvious

baccalaureate bromide that we are inheritors of the lore of all the

ages, it may be suggested that our deficiencies in the creative arts

are overbalanced by the prodigious labors of a people who have lived

a great drama in founding and maintaining a new social and political

order within little more than a century.

Philosophers intent upon determining the causes of our failure to

contribute more importantly to all the arts have suggested that our

creative genius has been diverted into commercial and industrial

channels; that Bell and Edison have stolen and imprisoned the

Promethean fire, while the altars of the arts have been left cold.

Instead of sending mankind whirling over hill and dale at a price

within the reach of all, Mr. Henry Ford might have been our enlaurelled

Thackeray if only he had been born beneath a dancing star instead of

under the fiery wheels of Ezekiel’s vision.

The preachiness of our novels, of which critics complain with some

bitterness, may be reprehensible, but it is not inexplicable. We are

a people bred upon the Bible; it was the only book carried into the

wilderness; it still has a considerable following among us, and all

reports of our depravity are greatly exaggerated. We are inured to much

preaching. We tolerate where we do not admire Mr. Bryan, because he is

the last of the circuit-riders, a tireless assailant of the devil and

all his works.

I am aware of growls from the Tory benches as I timidly venture the

suggestion--fully conscious of its impiety--that existing cosmopolitan

standards may not always with justice be applied to our literary

performances. The late Colonel Higginson once supported this position

with what strikes me as an excellent illustration. “When,” he wrote,

“a vivacious Londoner like Mr. Andrew Lang attempts to deal with that

profound imaginative creation, Arthur Dimmesdale in _The Scarlet

Letter_, he fails to comprehend him from an obvious and perhaps

natural want of acquaintance with the whole environment of the man. To

Mr. Lang he is simply a commonplace clerical Lovelace, a dissenting

clergyman caught in a shabby intrigue. But if this clever writer had

known the Puritan clergy as we know them, the high priests of a Jewish

theocracy, with the whole work of God in a strange land resting on

their shoulders, he would have comprehended the awful tragedy in this

tortured soul.”

In the same way the exalted place held by Emerson in the affections of

those of us who are the fortunate inheritors of the Emerson tradition

can hardly be appreciated by foreign critics to whom his writings

seem curiously formless and his reasoning absurdly tangential. He may

not have been a great philosopher, but he was a great philosopher for

America. There were English critics who complained bitterly of Mark

Twain’s lack of “form,” and yet I can imagine that his books might

have lost the tang and zest we find in them if they had conformed to

Old-World standards.

On the other hand, the English in which our novels are written must

be defended by abler pens than mine. Just why American prose is so

slouchy, so lacking in distinction, touches questions that are not for

this writing. I shall not even “think aloud” about them! And yet, so

great is my anxiety to be of service and to bring as much gaiety to the

field as possible, that I shall venture one remark: that perhaps the

demand on the part of students in our colleges to be taught to write

short stories, novels, and dramas--and the demand is insistent--has

obscured the importance of mastering a sound prose before any attempt

is made to employ it creatively. It certainly cannot be complained

that the literary impulse is lacking, when publishers, editors, and

theatrical producers are invited to inspect thousands of manuscripts

every year. The editor of a popular magazine declares that there are

only fifteen American writers who are capable of producing a “good”

short story; and this, too, at a time when short fiction is in greater

demand than ever before, and at prices that would cause Poe and De

Maupassant to turn in their graves. A publisher said recently that

he had examined twenty novels from one writer, not one of which he

considered worth publishing.

Many, indeed, are called but few are chosen, and some reason must be

found for the low level of our fiction where the output is so great.

The fault is not due to unfavorable atmospheric conditions, but to

timidity on the part of writers in seizing upon the obvious American

material. Sidney Lanier remarked of Poe that he was a great poet, but

that he did not know enough--meaning that life in its broad aspects

had not touched him. A lack of “information,” of understanding and

vision, is, I should say, the fundamental weakness of the American

novel. To see life steadily and whole is a large order, and prone as we

are to skim light-heartedly the bright surfaces, we are not easily to

be persuaded to creep to the rough edges and peer into the depths. We

have not always been anxious to welcome a “physician of the iron age”

capable of reading “each wound, each weakness clear,” and saying “thou

ailest here and here”! It is not “competent” for the artist to plead

the unattractiveness of his material at the bar of letters; it is his

business to make the best of what he finds ready to his hand. It is

because we are attempting to adjust humanity to new ideals of liberty

that we offer to ourselves, if not to the rest of the world, a pageant

of ceaseless interest and variety.

It may be that we are too much at ease in our Zion for a deeper

probing of life than our fiction has found it agreeable to make. And

yet we are a far soberer people than we were when Mr. Matthew Arnold

complained of our lack of intellectual seriousness. The majority has

proved its soundness in a number of instances since he wrote of us.

We are less impatient of self-scrutiny. Our newly awakened social

consciousness finds expression in many books of real significance, and

it is inevitable that our fiction shall reflect this new sobriety.

Unfortunately, since the passing of our New England Olympians,

literature as a vocation has had little real dignity among us; we

have had remarkably few novelists who have settled themselves to the

business of writing with any high or serious aim. Hawthorne as a

brooding spirit has had no successor among our fictionists. Our work

has been chiefly tentative, and all too often the experiments have

been made with an eye on the publisher’s barometer. Literary gossip is

heavy with reports of record-breaking rapidity of composition. A writer

who can dictate is the envy of an adoring circle; another who “never

revises” arouses even more poignant despair. The laborious Balzac

tearing his proofs to pieces seems only a dingy and pitiable figure.

Nobody knows the difference, and what’s a well-turned sentence more or

less? I saw recently a newspaper editorial commenting derisively on a

novelist’s confession that he was capable of only a thousand words a

day, the point being that the average newspaper writer triples this

output without fatigue. Newcomers in the field can hardly fail to be

impressed by these rumors of novels knocked off in a month or three

months, for which astonishing sums have been paid by generous magazine

editors. We shall have better fiction as soon as ambitious writers

realize that novel-writing is a high calling, and that success is to be

won only by those who are willing to serve seven and yet seven other

years in the hope of winning “the crown of time.”

In his happy characterization of Turgenieff and his relation to the

younger French school of realists, Mr. James speaks of the “great

back-garden of his Slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into

which the door constantly stood open, and the grandsons of Balzac

were not, I think, particularly free to accompany him.” I am further

indebted to Mr. James for certain words uttered by M. Renan of the big

Russian: “His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature

had been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience

of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years;

infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths

of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a

whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries,

speechless, came through him to life and utterance.”

I make no apology for thrusting my tin dipper again into Mr. James’s

bubbling well for an anecdote of Flaubert, derived from Edmond de

Goncourt. Flaubert was missed one fine afternoon in a house where he

and De Goncourt were guests, and was found to have undressed and gone

to bed to _think_!

I shall not give comfort to the enemy by any admission that our

novelists lack culture in the sense that Turgenieff and the great

French masters possessed it. A matter of which I may complain with more

propriety is their lack of “information” (and I hope this term is

sufficiently delicate) touching the tasks and aims of America. We have

been deluged with “big” novels that are “big” only in the publishers’

advertisements. New York has lately been the scene of many novels,

but the New York adumbrated in most of them is only the metropolis as

exposed to the awed gaze of provincial tourists from the rubber-neck

wagon. Sex, lately discovered for exploitation, has resulted only in

“arrangements” of garbage in pink and yellow, lightly sprinkled with

musk.

As Rosinante stumbles over the range I am disposed to offer a few

suggestions for the benefit of those who may ask where, then, lies the

material about which our novelists are so deficient in “information.”

No strong hand has yet been laid upon our industrial life. It has been

pecked at and trifled with, but never treated with breadth or fulness.

Here we have probably the most striking social contrasts the world has

ever seen; racial mixtures of bewildering complexity, the whole flung

against impressive backgrounds and lighted from a thousand angles.

Pennsylvania is only slightly “spotted” on the literary map, and yet

between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, nearly every possible phase and

condition of life is represented. Great passions are at work in the

fiery aisles of the steel mills that would have kindled Dostoiefsky’s

imagination. A pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night marks

a limitless field for the earnest fictionist. A Balzac would find

innumerable subjects awaiting him in the streets of Wilkesbarre!

At this point I must bemoan the ill-fortune that has carried so many

American fiction writers to foreign shores. If Hawthorne had never

seen Italy, but had clung to Salem, I am disposed to think American

literature would be the richer. If fate had not borne Mr. Howells to

Venice, but had posted him on the Ohio during the mighty struggle of

the ’60’s, and if Mr. James had been stationed at Chicago, close to the

deep currents of national feeling, what a monumental library of vital

fiction they might have given us! If Mrs. Wharton’s splendid gifts had

been consecrated to the service of Pittsburgh rather than New York and

Paris, how much greater might be our debt to her!

Business in itself is not interesting; business as it reacts upon

character is immensely interesting. Mineral paint has proved to be an

excellent preservative for _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, which remains

our best novel of business. But if paint may be turned to account, why

not cotton, wool, and the rest of the trade catalogue, every item with

its own distinct genesis? In _The Turmoil_ Mr. Tarkington staged, under

a fitting canopy of factory smoke, a significant drama of the conflict

between idealism and materialism.

Turning to our preoccupation with politics, we find another field

that is all but fallow. Few novels of any real dignity may be

tendered as exhibits in this department, and these are in a sense

local--the comprehensive, the deeply searching, has yet to be done.

Mr. Churchill’s _Coniston_, and Mr. Brand Whitlock’s _The Thirteenth

District_ are the happiest experiments I recall, though possibly

there are others of equal importance. Yet politics is not only a

matter of constant discussion in every quarter, but through and by

politics many thousands solve the problem of existence. Alone of

great national capitals Washington has never been made the scene

of a novel of distinction. Years ago we had Mrs. Burnett’s _Through

One Administration_, but it failed to establish itself as a classic.

George Meredith would have found much in Washington life upon which to

exercise his ironic powers.

With all our romantic longings it is little short of amazing that we

are not more fecund in schemes for romantic drama and fiction. The

stage, not to say the market, waits; but the settings are dingy from

much use and the characters in threadbare costumes strut forth to speak

old familiar lines. Again, there is an old superstition that we are a

humorous people, and yet humor is curiously absent from recent fiction.

“O. Henry” knew the way to the fountain of laughter, but contented

himself with the shorter form; _Huckleberry Finn_ seems destined to

stand as our nearest approach to a novel of typical humor. We have had

David Harums and Mrs. Wiggses a-plenty--kindly philosophers, often

drawn with skill--but the results are character sketches, not novels.