group of English novelists, including Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, W. L.
George and Hugh Walpole, cabled an indignant caveat. This bestirred the
Author's League of America to activity, and its executive committee
issued a minute denouncing the business. Later on a protest of American
_literati_ was circulated, and more than 400 signed, including such
highly respectable authors as Winston Churchill, Percy MacKaye, Booth
Tarkington and James Lane Allen, and such critics as Lawrence Gilman,
Clayton Hamilton and James Huneker, and the editors of such journals as
the _Century_, the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _New Republic_. Among my
literary lumber is all the correspondence relating to this protest, not
forgetting the letters of those who refused to sign, and some day I hope
to publish it, that posterity may not lose the joy of an extremely
diverting episode. The case attracted wide attention and was the theme
of an extraordinarily violent discussion, but the resultant benefits to
Dreiser were more than counterbalanced, I daresay, by the withdrawal of
"The 'Genius'" itself.[28]
§ 7
Dreiser, like Mark Twain and Emerson before him, has been far more
hospitably greeted in his first stage, now drawing to a close, in
England than in his own country. The cause of this, I daresay, lies
partly in the fact that "Sister Carrie" was in general circulation over
there during the seven years that it remained suppressed on this side.
It was during these years that such men as Arnold Bennett, Theodore
Watts-Dunton, Frank Harris and H. G. Wells, and such critical journals
as the _Spectator_, the _Saturday Review_ and the _Athenaeum_ became
aware of him, and so laid the foundations of a sound appreciation of his
subsequent work. Since the beginning of the war, certain English
newspapers have echoed the alarmed American discovery that he is a
literary agent of the Wilhelmstrasse, but it is to the honour of the
English that this imbecility has got no countenance from reputable
authority and has not injured his position.
At home, as I have shown, he is less fortunate. When criticism is not
merely an absurd effort to chase him out of court because his ideas are
not orthodox, as the Victorians tried to chase out Darwin and Swinburne,
and their predecessors pursued Shelley and Byron, it is too often
designed to identify him with some branch or other of "radical"
poppycock, and so credit him with purposes he has never imagined. Thus
Chautauqua pulls and Greenwich Village pushes. In the middle ground
there proceeds the pedantic effort to dispose of him by labelling him.
One faction maintains that he is a realist; another calls him a
naturalist; a third argues that he is really a disguised romanticist.
This debate is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but out of it has
come a valuation by Lawrence Gilman[29] which perhaps strikes very close
to the truth. He is, says Mr. Gilman, "a sentimental mystic who employs
the mimetic gestures of the realist." This judgment is apt in particular
and sound in general. No such thing as a pure method is possible in the
novel. Plain realism, as in Gorky's "Nachtasyl" and the war stories of
Ambrose Bierce, simply wearies us by its vacuity; plain romance, if we
ever get beyond our nonage, makes us laugh. It is their artistic
combination, as in life itself, that fetches us--the subtle projection
of the concrete muddle that is living against the ideal orderliness that
we reach out for--the eternal war of experience and aspiration--the
contrast between the world as it is and the world as it might be or
ought to be. Dreiser describes the thing that he sees, laboriously and
relentlessly, but he never forgets the dream that is behind it. "He
gives you," continues Mr. Gilman, "a sense of actuality; but he gives
you more than that: out of the vast welter and surge, the plethoric
irrelevancies, ... emerges a sense of the infinite sadness and mystery
of human life."...[30]
"To see truly," said Renan, "is to see dimly." Dimness or mystery, call
it what you will: it is in all these overgrown and formless, but
profoundly moving books. Just what do they mean? Just what is Dreiser
driving at? That such questions should be asked is only a proof of the
straits to which pedagogy has brought criticism. The answer is simple:
he is driving at nothing, he is merely trying to represent what he sees
and feels. His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to
expound, to make simple; it is that "obscure inner necessity" of which
Conrad tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist,
standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life,
enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness,
challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of
what passes understanding. And _jenseits von Gut und Böse_. "For
myself," says Dreiser, "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is,
what love is, what hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely and I do
not doubt any one absolutely. I think people are both evil and
well-intentioned." The hatching of the Dreiser bugaboo is here; it is
the flat rejection of the rubber-stamp formulae that outrages petty
minds; not being "good," he must be "evil"--as William Blake said of
Milton, a true poet is always "of the devil's party." But in that very
groping toward a light but dimly seen there is a measure, it seems to
me, of Dreiser's rank and consideration as an artist. "Now comes the
public," says Hermann Bahr, "and demands that we explain what the poet
is trying to say. The answer is this: If we knew exactly he would not be
a poet...."
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Fuller's comparative obscurity is one of the strangest phenomena of
American letters. Despite his high achievement, he is seldom discussed,
or even mentioned. Back in 1899 he was already so far forgotten that
William Archer mistook his name, calling him Henry Y. Puller. _Vide_
Archer's pamphlet, The American Language; New York, 1899.
[17] For example, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, which
runs to fourteen large volumes and a total of nearly 10,000 pages,
Huxley receives but a page and a quarter of notice, and his remarkable
mastery of English is barely mentioned in passing. His two debates with
Gladstone, in which he did some of the best writing of the century, are
not noticed at all.
[18] A Brief History of German Literature; New York, Chas. Scribner's
Sons, 1909.
[19] New York, 1917; reprinted from _The Seven Arts_ for Feb., 1917.
[20] Life, Art and America, p. 5.
[21] The episode is related in A Hoosier Holiday.
[22] A Princess of Arcady, published in 1900.
[23] New York, The Century Co., 1916.
[24] In _The Seven Arts_, May, 1917.
[25] The _Nation_, Dec. 2, 1915.
[26] 1186-1189. So translated by Floyd Dell: "O ye deathward-going
tribes of man, what do your lives mean except that they go to
nothingness?"
[27] The New York _Evening Post_, Dec. 31, 1915.
[28] Despite the comstockian attack, Dreiser is still fairly well
represented on the shelves of American public libraries. A canvas of the
libraries of the 25 principal cities gives the following result, an X
indicating that the corresponding book is catalogued, and a - that is
not:
Sister Carrie
| Jennie Gerhardt
| | The Financier
| | | The Titan
| | | | A Traveler at Forty
| | | | | The "Genius"
| | | | | | Plays of the Natural
| | | | | | | A Hoosier Holiday
| | | | | | | |
New York X - - X X X X X
Boston - - - - X - X -
Chicago X X X X X X X X
Philadelphia X X X X X X X X
Washington - - - - X - X -
Baltimore - - - - X - - -
Pittsburgh - - X X X X - X
New Orleans - - - - - - - -
Denver X X X X X X X X
San Francisco X X X X X - - X
St. Louis X X X X X - X -
Cleveland X X X X - X X -
Providence - - - - - - - -
Los Angeles X X X X X X X X
Indianapolis X X X - X - X X
Louisville X X - X X X X X
St. Paul X X - - X - X X
Minneapolis X X X - X - X -
Cincinnati X X X - X - X X
Kansas City X X X X X X X X
Milwaukee - - - - X - X X
Newark X X X X X X X X
Detroit X X X - X X X X
Seattle X X - - X - X X
Hartford - - - - - - - X
This table shows that but two libraries, those of Providence and New
Orleans, bar Dreiser altogether. The effect of alarms from newspaper
reviewers is indicated by the scant distribution of The "Genius,"
which is barred by 14 of the 25. It should be noted that some of these
libraries issue certain of the books only under restrictions. This I
know to be the case in Louisville, Los Angeles, Newark and Cleveland.
The Newark librarian informs me that Jennie Gerhardt is to be removed
altogether, presumably in response to some protest from local Comstocks.
In Chicago The "Genius" has been stolen, and on account of the
withdrawal of the book the Public Library has been unable to get another
copy.
[29] The _North American Review_, Feb., 1916.
[30] Another competent valuation, by Randolph Bourne, is in _The Dial_,
June 14, 1917.
III
JAMES HUNEKER
§ 1
Edgar Allan Poe, I am fond of believing, earned as a critic a good deal
of the excess of praise that he gets as a romancer and a poet, and
another over-estimated American dithyrambist, Sidney Lanier, wrote the
best textbook of prosody in English;[31] but in general the critical
writing done in the United States has been of a low order, and most
American writers of any genuine distinction, like most American painters
and musicians, have had to wait for understanding until it appeared
abroad. The case of Emerson is typical. At thirty, he was known in New
England as a heretical young clergyman and no more, and his fame
threatened to halt at the tea-tables of the Boston Brahmins. It remained
for Landor and Carlyle, in a strange land, to discern his higher
potentialities, and to encourage him to his real life-work. Mark Twain,
as I have hitherto shown, suffered from the same lack of critical
perception at home. He was quickly recognized as a funny fellow, true
enough, but his actual stature was not even faintly apprehended, and
even after "Huckleberry Finn" he was still bracketed with such laborious
farceurs as Artemus Ward. It was Sir Walter Besant, an Englishman, who
first ventured to put him on his right shelf, along with Swift,
Cervantes and Molière. As for Poe and Whitman, the native recognition of
their genius was so greatly conditioned by a characteristic horror of
their immorality that it would be absurd to say that their own country
understood them. Both were better and more quickly apprehended in
France, and it was in France, not in America, that each founded a
school. What they had to teach we have since got back at second
hand--the tale of mystery, which was Poe's contribution, through
Gaboriau and Boisgobey; and _vers libre_, which was Whitman's, through
the French _imagistes_.
The cause of this profound and almost unbroken lack of critical insight
and enterprise, this puerile Philistinism and distrust of ideas among
us, is partly to be found, it seems to me, in the fact that the typical
American critic is quite without any adequate cultural equipment for the
office he presumes to fill. Dr. John Dewey, in some late remarks upon
the American universities, has perhaps shown the cause thereof. The
trouble with our educational method, he argues, is that it falls between
the two stools of English humanism and German relentlessness--that it
produces neither a man who intelligently feels nor a man who thoroughly
knows. Criticism, in America, is a function of this half-educated and
conceited class; it is not a popular art, but an esoteric one; even in
its crassest journalistic manifestations it presumes to a certain
academic remoteness from the concerns and carnalities of everyday. In
every aspect it shows the defects of its practitioners. The American
critic of beautiful letters, in his common incarnation, is no more than
a talented sophomore, or, at best, a somewhat absurd professor. He
suffers from a palpable lack of solid preparation; he has no background
of moving and illuminating experience behind him; his soul has not
sufficiently adventured among masterpieces, nor among men. Imagine a
Taine or a Sainte-Beuve or a Macaulay--man of the world, veteran of
philosophies, "lord of life"--and you imagine his complete antithesis.
Even on the side of mere professional knowledge, the primary material of
his craft, he always appears incompletely outfitted. The grand sweep and
direction of the literary currents elude him; he is eternally on the
surface, chasing bits of driftwood. The literature he knows is the
fossil literature taught in colleges--worse, in high schools. It must be
dead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant of
what is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate his
consciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purge
it of all its remaining validity and significance before adopting it.
This has been true since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a
man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots,
nevertheless remained a _dilettante_ in both aesthetics and metaphysics
to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never
showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything,
was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and
superficial, and all that remains of his pleasant essays today is their
somewhat smoky pleasantness. He was a Charles Dudley Warner in nobler
trappings, but still, at bottom, a Charles Dudley Warner. As for Poe,
though he was by nature a far more original and penetrating critic than
either Emerson or Lowell, he was enormously ignorant of good books, and
moreover, he could never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity of
taste, so painfully visible in the strutting of his style. The man, for
all his grand dreams, had a shoddy soul; he belonged authentically to
the era of cuspidors, "females" and Sons of Temperance. His occasional
affectation of scholarship has deceived no one. It was no more than
Yankee bluster; he constantly referred to books that he had never read.
Beside, the typical American critic of those days was not Poe, but his
arch-enemy, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, that almost fabulous ass--a Baptist
preacher turned taster of the beautiful. Imagine a Baptist valuing
Balzac, or Molière, or Shakespeare, or Goethe--or Rabelais!
Coming down to our own time, one finds the same endless amateurishness,
so characteristic of everything American, from politics to cookery--the
same astounding lack of training and vocation. Consider the solemn
ponderosities of the pious old maids, male and female, who write book
reviews for the newspapers. Here we have a heavy pretension to culture,
a campus cocksureness, a laborious righteousness--but of sound aesthetic
understanding, of alertness and hospitality to ideas, not a trace. The
normal American book reviewer, indeed, is an elderly virgin, a
superstitious bluestocking, an apostle of Vassar _Kultur_; and her
customary attitude of mind is one of fascinated horror. (The Hamilton
Wright Mabie complex! The "white list" of novels!) William Dean
Howells, despite a certain jauntiness and even kittenishness of manner,
was spiritually of that company. For all his phosphorescent heresies, he
was what the up-lifters call a right-thinker at heart, and soaked in the
national tradition. He was easiest intrigued, not by force and
originality, but by a sickly, _Ladies' Home Journal_ sort of piquancy;
it was this that made him see a genius in the Philadelphia Zola, W. B.
Trites, and that led him to hymn an abusive business letter by Frank A.
Munsey, author of "The Boy Broker" and "Afloat in a Great City," as a
significant human document. Moreover Howells ran true to type in another
way, for he long reigned as the leading Anglo-Saxon authority on the
Russian novelists without knowing, so far as I can make out, more than
ten words of Russian. In the same manner, we have had enthusiasts for
D'Annunzio and Mathilde Serao who knew no Italian, and celebrants of
Maeterlinck and Verhaeren whose French was of the finishing school, and
Ibsen authorities without a single word of Dano-Norwegian--I met one
once who failed to recognize "Et Dukkehjem" as the original title of "A
Doll's House,"--and performers upon Hauptmann who could no more read
"Die Weber" than they could decipher a tablet of Tiglath-Pileser III.
Here and there, of course, a more competent critic of beautiful letters
flings out his banner--for example, John Macy, Ludwig Lewisohn, André
Tridon, Francis Hackett, Van Wyck Brooks, Burton Rascoe, E. A. Boyd,
Llewellyn Jones, Otto Heller, J. E. Spingarn, Lawrence Gilman, the late
J. Percival Pollard. Well-informed, intelligent, wide-eyed men--but only
four of them even Americans, and not one of them with a wide audience,
or any appreciable influence upon the main stream of American criticism.
Pollard's best work is buried in the perfumed pages of _Town Topics_;
his book on the Munich wits and dramatists[32] is almost unknown. Heller
and Lewisohn make their way slowly; a patriotic wariness, I daresay,
mixes itself up with their acceptance. Gilman disperses his talents; he
is quite as much musician as critic of the arts. As for Macy, I recently
found his "The Spirit of American Literature,"[33] by long odds the
soundest, wisest book on its subject, selling for fifty cents on a Fifth
avenue remainder counter.
How many remain? A few competent reviewers who are primarily something
else--Harvey, Aikin, Untermeyer and company. A few youngsters on the
newspapers, struggling against the business office. And then a leap to
the Victorians, the crêpe-clad pundits, the bombastic word-mongers of
the campus school--H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brownell, Paul Elmer More,
William Lyon Phelps, Frederick Taber Cooper _et al._ Here, undoubtedly,
we have learning of a sort. More, it appears, once taught Sanskrit to
the adolescent suffragettes of Bryn Mawr--an enterprise as stimulating
(and as intelligible) as that of setting off fire-works in a blind
asylum. Phelps sits in a chair at Yale. Boynton is a master of arts in
English literature, whatever that may mean. Brownell is both L.H.D. and
Litt.D., thus surpassing Samuel Johnson by one point, and Hazlitt,
Coleridge and Malone by two. But the learning of these august
_umbilicarii_, for all its pretensions, is precisely the sterile,
foppish sort one looks for in second-rate college professors. The
appearance is there, but not the substance. One ingests a horse-doctor's
dose of words, but fails to acquire any illumination. Read More on
Nietzsche[34] if you want to find out just how stupid criticism can be,
and yet show the outward forms of sense. Read Phelps' "The Advance of
the English Novel"[35] if you would see a fine art treated as a moral
matter, and great works tested by the criteria of a small-town
Sunday-school, and all sorts of childish sentimentality whooped up. And
plough through Brownell's "Standards,"[36] if you have the patience, and
then try to reduce its sonorous platitudes to straight-forward and
defensible propositions.
§ 2
Now for the exception. He is, of course, James Gibbons Huneker, the
solitary Iokanaan in this tragic aesthetic wilderness, the only critic
among us whose vision sweeps the whole field of beauty, and whose
reports of what he sees there show any genuine gusto. That gusto of his,
I fancy, is two-thirds of his story. It is unquenchable, contagious,
inflammatory; he is the only performer in the commissioned troupe who
knows how to arouse his audience to anything approaching enthusiasm. The
rest, even including Howells, are pedants lecturing to the pure in
heart, but Huneker makes a joyous story of it; his exposition,
transcending the merely expository, takes on the quality of an
adventure hospitably shared. One feels, reading him, that he is charmed
by the men and women he writes about, and that their ideas, even when he
rejects them, give him an agreeable stimulation. And to the charm that
he thus finds and exhibits in others, he adds the very positive charm of
his own personality. He seems a man who has found the world fascinating,
if perhaps not perfect; a friendly and good-humoured fellow; no frigid
scholiast, but something of an epicure; in brief, the reverse of the
customary maker of books about books. Compare his two essays on Ibsen,
in "Egoists" and "Iconoclasts," to the general body of American writing
upon the great Norwegian. The difference is that between a portrait and
a Bertillon photograph, Richard Strauss and Czerny, a wedding and an
autopsy. Huneker displays Ibsen, not as a petty mystifier of the women's
clubs, but as a literary artist of large skill and exalted passion, and
withal a quite human and understandable man. These essays were written
at the height of the symbolism madness; in their own way, they even show
some reflection of it; but taking them in their entirety, how clearly
they stand above the ignorant obscurantism of the prevailing criticism
of the time--how immeasurably superior they are, for example, to that
favourite hymn-book of the Ibsenites, "The Ibsen Secret" by Jennette
Lee! For the causes of this difference one need not seek far. They are
to be found in the difference between the bombastic half-knowledge of a
school teacher and the discreet and complete knowledge of a man of
culture. Huneker is that man of culture. He has reported more of
interest and value than any other American critic, living or dead, but
the essence of his criticism does not lie so much in what he
specifically reports as in the civilized point of view from which he
reports it. He is a true cosmopolitan, not only in the actual range of
his adventurings, but also and more especially in his attitude of mind.
His world is not America, nor Europe, nor Christendom, but the whole
universe of beauty. As Jules Simon said of Taine: "_Aucun écrivain de
nos jours n'a ... découvert plus d'horizons variés et immenses_."