formation of the creative spirit it is that long infancy to which John
Fiske, rightly or wrongly, attributed the emergence of man from the
lower species. In the childhood of almost every great writer one finds
this protracted incubation, this slow stretch of years in which the
unresisting organism opens itself to the influences of life. It was so
with Hawthorne, it was so with Whitman in the pastoral America of a
century ago: they were able to mature, these brooding spirits, because
they had given themselves for so long to life before they began to
react upon it. That is the old-world childhood still, in a measure;
how different it is from the modern American childhood may be seen if
one compares, for example, the first book (“Boyhood”) of “Pelle the
Conqueror” with any of those innumerable tales in which our novelists
show us that in order to succeed in life one cannot be up and doing too
soon. The whole temper of our society, if one is to judge from these
documents, is to hustle the American out of his childhood, teaching him
at no age at all how to repel life and get the best of it and build up
the defences behind which he is going to fight for his place in the
sun. Who can deny that this racial habit succeeds in its unconscious
aim, which is to produce sharp-witted men of business? But could
anything be deadlier to the poet, the artist, the writer?
Everything in such an environment, it goes without saying, tends to
repress the creative and to stimulate the competitive impulses. A
certain Irish poet has observed that all he ever learned of poetry he
got from talking with peasants along the road. Whitman might have said
almost as much, even of New York, the New York of seventy years ago.
But what nourishment do they offer the receptive spirit to-day, the
harassed, inhibited mob of our fellow-countrymen, eaten up with the
“itch of ill-advised activity,” what encouragement to become anything
but an automaton like themselves? And what direction, in such a
society, does the instinct of emulation receive, that powerful instinct
of adolescence? A certain visitor of Whitman’s has described him as
living in a house “as cheerless as an ash-barrel,” a house indeed “like
that in which a very destitute mechanic” might have lived. Is it not
symbolic, that picture, of the esteem in which our democracy holds the
poet? If to-day the man of many dollars is no longer the hero of the
editorial page and the baccalaureate address, still, or rather more
than ever, it is the “aggressive” type that overshadows every corner
of our civilization; the intellectual man who has gone his own way
and refused to flatter the majority was never less the hero or even
the subject of intelligent interest; at best ignored, at worst (and
usually) pointed out as a crank, he is only a “warning” to youth,
which is exceedingly susceptible in these matters. But how can one
begin to enumerate the elements in our society that contribute to form
a selection constantly working against the survival of the creative
type? By cutting off the sources that nourish it, by lending prestige
to the acquisitive and destroying the glamour of the creative career,
everything in America conspires to divert the spirit from its natural
course, seizing upon the instincts of youth and turning them into a
single narrow channel.
Here, of course, I touch upon the main fact of American history.
That traditional drag, if one may so express it, in the direction
of the practical, which has been the law of our civilization, would
alone explain why our literature and art have never been more than
half-hearted. To abandon the unpopular and unremunerative career of
painting for the useful and lucrative career of invention must have
seemed natural and inevitable to Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse.
So strong is this racial compulsion, so feeble is the hold which
Americans have upon ultimate values, that one can scarcely find to-day
a scientist or a scholar who, for the sake of science or scholarship,
will refuse an opportunity to become the money-gathering president
of some insignificant university. Thus our intellectual life has
always been ancillary to the life of business and organization: have
we forgotten that the good Washington Irving himself, the father of
American letters, thought it by no means beneath his dignity to serve
as a sort of glorified press-agent for John Jacob Astor?
It is certainly true that none of these unfavourable factors of
American life could have had such a baleful effect upon our literature
if there had been others to counteract them. An aristocratic tradition,
if we had ever had it, would have kept open among us the right of
way of the free individual, would have preserved the claims of mere
living. “It is curious to observe,” writes Nietzsche in one of his
letters, “how any one who soon leaves the traditional highway in order
to travel on his own proper path always has more or less the sense of
being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind.” If that
is true in the old world, where society is so much more complex and
offers the individual so much more latitude, how few could ever have
had the strength in a society like ours, which has always placed such
an enormous premium on conformity, to become and to remain themselves?
Is it fanciful indeed to see in the famous “remorse” of Poe the traces
left by this dereliction of the tribal law upon the unconscious mind
of an artist of unique force and courage? Similarly, a tradition of
voluntary poverty would have provided us with an escape from the
importunities of bourgeois custom. But aside from the fact that even so
simple a principle as this depends largely for its life on precedent
(Whitman and the painter Ryder are almost alone among latter-day
Americans in having discovered it for themselves), aside from the fact
that to secede from the bourgeois system is, in America, to subject
oneself to peculiar penalties (did it ever occur to Mark Twain that he
_could_ be honourably poor?)--aside from all this, poverty in the new
world is by no means the same thing as poverty in the old: one has only
to think of Charles Lamb and all the riches that London freely gave
him, all the public resources he had at his disposal, to appreciate
the difference. With us poverty means in the end an almost inevitable
intellectual starvation. Consider such a plaint as Sidney Lanier’s:
“I could never describe to you” (he writes to Bayard Taylor) “what a
mere drought and famine my life has been, as regards that multitude of
matters which I fancy one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art,
or when one is in conversational relationship with men of letters,
with travellers, with persons who have either seen, or written, or done
large things. Perhaps you know that, with us of the younger generation
in the South since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been
merely not dying.” That is what poverty means in America, poverty
and isolation, for Lanier, whose talent, as we can see to-day, was
hopelessly crippled by it, was mistaken if he supposed that there was
anything peculiar to the South in that plight of his: it has been the
plight of the sensitive man everywhere in America and at all times. Add
to poverty the want of a society devoted to intellectual things and we
have such a fate as Herman Melville’s in New York. “What he lacked,”
wrote Mr. Frank Jewett Mather the other day, explaining the singular
evaporation of Melville’s talent, “was possibly only health and
nerve, but perhaps even more, companionship of a friendly, critical,
understanding sort. In London, where he must have been hounded out of
his corner, I can imagine Melville carrying the reflective vein to
literary completion.” Truly Samuel Butler was right when he jotted down
the following observation in his note-book: “America will have her
geniuses, as every other country has, in fact she has already had one
in Walt Whitman, but I do not think America is a good place in which to
be a genius. A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if
he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which
life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.”
To such circumstances as these, I say, the weakness of our literary
life is due. If we had lacked nothing else indeed, the lack of great
leaders, of a strong and self-respecting literary guild, even of an
enlightened publishing system would have sufficed to account for
much of it. To consider the last point first: in the philosophy of
American publishing, popularity has been regarded not only as a
practical advantage but as a virtue as well. Thanks to the peculiar
character of our democracy, our publishers have been able to persuade
themselves that a book which fails to appeal to the ordinary citizen
cannot be good on other grounds. Thus, if we had had to depend on the
established system, the present revival in our letters, tentative as
it is, would have been still more sadly handicapped. The history of
Mr. Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” is enough to suggest what may well have
been the fate of many an incipient author less persistent than he. It
is certain, in any case, that many another, at a critical moment, has
drifted away from literature because of the lack in our publishing
world of those opportunities for a semi-creative hack-work which
have provided countless European writers with a foothold and even a
guideway. The Grub Street of London and Paris is a purgatory, but as
long as it exists, with its humble instrumentalities, translating,
editing, reviewing, one can at least survive until one has either
lost or found oneself: it scarcely needs to be pointed out that the
American magazine, with its mechanical exactions, which levy such a
terrible toll upon one’s individuality, is anything but an advantageous
substitute. Till one has found oneself, the less one is subjected to
such powerful, such essentially depolarizing influences, the better;
the most mediocre institutions, if they enable one at the same time
to maintain one’s contact with literature and to keep body and soul
together, are as life is to death beside them. How many English
writers owe their ultimate salvation to such trivial agencies as
_T. P.’s Weekly_? In America, where nothing of the kind has existed
until lately, or nothing adequate to the number of those who might
have benefitted by it, the literary aspirant is lost unless his powers
mature at once.
But the lack of great leaders, of a strong and self-respecting
literary guild (the one results from the other)--is not this our chief
misfortune? In the best of circumstances, and considering all the
devils that beset the creative spirit, a strong impulse is scarcely
enough to carry one through: one must feel not only that one is doing
what one wishes to do but that what one is doing _matters_. If dozens
of American writers have fallen by the wayside because they have met
with insuperable obstacles, dozens of others have fallen, with all
their gifts, because they have lost interest in their work, because
they have ceased to “see the necessity” of it. This is just the point
where the presence of a leader, of a local tradition, a school, a
guild makes all the difference. “With the masters I converse,” writes
Gauguin in his journal. “Their example fortifies me. When I am tempted
to falter I blush before them.” If that could have been true of
Gauguin, the “Wolf,” who walked by himself as few have walked, what
shall we say of other men whose artistic integrity, whose faith in
themselves, is exposed every day to the corroding influences of a
third-rate civilization? It would be all very well if literature were
merely a mode of “having a good time;” I am speaking of those, the real
artists, who, with Nietzsche, make a distinction (illusory perhaps)
between “happiness” and “work,” and I say that these men have always
fed on the thought of greatness and on the propinquity of greatness. It
was not for nothing that Turgeniev bore in his memory, as a talisman,
the image of Pushkin; that Gorky, having seen Tolstoy once, sitting
among the boulders on the seashore, felt everything in him blending
in one happy thought, “I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as
this man lives on it.” The presence of such men immeasurably raises
the morale of the literary life: that is what Chekhov meant when he
said, “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” and is it not true that the
whole contemporary literature of England has drawn virtue from Thomas
Hardy? The sense that one is _working in a great line_: this, more than
anything else perhaps, renews one’s confidence in the “quaint mania
of passing one’s life wearing oneself out over words,” as Flaubert
called it, in the still greater folly of pursuing one’s ego when
everything in life combines to punish one for doing so. The successful
pursuit of the ego is what makes literature; this requires not only
a certain inner intensity but a certain courage, and it is doubtful
whether, in any nation, any considerable number of men can summon up
that courage and maintain it unless they have _seen the thing done_.
The very notion that such a life is either possible or desirable, the
notion that such a life exists even, can hardly occur to the rank and
file: some individual has to start the ball rolling, some individual
of extraordinary force and audacity, and where is that individual to
be found in our modern American literature? Whitman is the unique
instance, for Henry James, with all his admirable conscience, was at
once an exile and a man of singularly low vitality; and Whitman was not
only essentially of an earlier generation, he was an invalid who folded
his hands in mid-career.
Of those others what can we say, those others whose gifts have fitted
them to be our leaders? Mr. Howells once observed of the American drama
of the last few decades that “mainly it has been gay as our prevalent
mood is, mainly it has been honest, as our habit is, in cases where
we believe we can afford it.” In this gently ironical pleasantry one
seems to discern the true spirit of modern American letters. But it was
Howells himself who, in order to arrive at the doctrine that “the more
smiling aspects of life are the more American,” deliberately, as he has
told us, and professed realist that he was, averted his eyes from the
darker side of life. And Mark Twain suppressed his real beliefs about
man and the universe. And Henry Adams refused to sponsor in public the
novels that revealed what he considered to be the truth about American
society. Thus spake Zarathustra: “There is no harsher misfortune in
all the fate of man than when the mighty ones of earth are not also
the most excellent.” At its very headwaters, as we see, this modern
literature of ours has failed to flow clear: the creative impulse in
these men, richly endowed as they were, was checked and compromised
by too many other impulses, social and commercial. If one is to blame
anything for this it is the immense insecurity of our life, which is
due to its chaotic nature; for one is not entitled to expect greatness
even of those who have the greatest gifts, and of these men Henry Adams
was alone secure; of Howells and Mark Twain, Westerners as they were,
it may be said that they were obliged to compromise, consciously or
unconsciously, in order to gain a foothold in the only corner of the
country where men could exist as writers at all. But if these men were
unable to establish their independence (one has only to recall the
notorious Gorky dinner in order to perceive the full ignominy of their
position), what must one expect to find in the rank and file? Great men
form a sort of wind shield behind which the rest of their profession
are able to build up their own defences; they establish a right of
way for the others; they command a respect for their profession, they
arouse in the public a concern for it, an interest in it, from which
the others benefit. As things are, the literary guild in America is
not respected, nor does it respect itself. In “My Literary Passions”
Howells, after saying that his early reading gave him no standing
among other boys, observes: “I have since found that literature gives
one no more certain station in the world of men’s activities, either
idle or useful. We literary folk try to believe that it does, but
that is all nonsense. At every period of life among boys or men we
are accepted when they are at leisure and want to be amused, and at
best we are tolerated rather than accepted.” Pathetic? Pusillanimous?
Abject? Pathetic, I suppose. Imagine Maxim Gorky or Knut Hamsun or
Bernard Shaw “trying to believe” that literature gives him a certain
station in the world of men’s activities, conceiving for a moment
that any activity could exceed his in dignity! Howells, we observe,
conscientious craftsman as he was, instinctively shared, in regard
to the significance of his vocation, the feeling of our pragmatic
philosophers, who have been obliged to justify the intellectual life by
showing how useful it is--not to mention Mr. R. W. Chambers, who has
remarked that writers “are not held in excessive esteem by really busy
people, the general idea being--which is usually true--that literature
is a godsend to those unfitted for real work.” After this one can
easily understand why our novelists take such pains to be mistaken for
business men and succeed so admirably in their effort. One can easily
understand why Jack London preferred the glory of his model ranch and
his hygienic pigsties to the approval of his artistic conscience.
So much for the conditions, or at least a few of them, that have
prevented our literature from getting its head above water. If
America is littered with extinct talents, the halt, the maimed and
the blind, it is for reasons with which we are all too familiar; and
we to whom the creative life is nothing less than the principle of
human movement, and its welfare the true sign of human health, look
upon this wreckage of everything that is most precious to society and
ask ourselves what our fathers meant when they extolled the progress
of our civilization. But let us look facts in the face. Mr. Sinclair
Lewis asserts that we are in the midst of a revival and that we are
too humble in supposing that our contemporary literature is inferior
to that of England. That we are in the midst of a revival I have no
doubt, but it is the sustained career that makes a literature; without
the evidence of this we can hope much but we can affirm nothing. What
we can see is that, with all its hope, the morale of the literary
profession in this country is just what its antecedents have made
it. I am reminded of the observation of a friend who has reason to
know, that the Catholic Church in America, great as it is in numbers
and organization, still depends on the old world for its models, its
task-masters and its inspiration; for the American priest, as a rule,
does not feel the vocation as the European feels it. I am reminded of
the American labour movement which, prosperous as it is in comparison
with the labour movements of Europe, is unparalleled for the feebleness
of its representatives. I am reminded of certain brief experiences in
the American university world which have led me to believe that the
professors who radiate a genuine light and warmth are far more likely
to be Russians, Germans, Englishmen, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes and
Finns than the children of ’76. That old hostility of the pioneers to
the special career still operates to prevent in the American mind the
powerful, concentrated pursuit of any non-utilitarian way of life:
meanwhile everything else in our society tends to check the growth of
the spirit and to shatter the confidence of the individual in himself.
Considered with reference to its higher manifestations, life itself has
been thus far, in modern America, a failure. Of this the failure of our
literature is merely emblematic.
Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges that the only hope of a
change for the better lies in the development of a native aristocracy
that will stand between the writer and the public, supporting him,
appreciating him, forming as it were a _cordon sanitaire_ between the
individual and the mob. That no change can come without the development
of an aristocracy of some sort, some nucleus of the more gifted,
energetic and determined, one can hardly doubt. But how can one expect
the emergence of an aristocracy outside of the creative class, and
devoted to its welfare, unless and until the creative class itself
reveals the sort of pride that can alone attract its ministrations?
“The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously
is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities.” Thus William
James, in defence of the aristocratic principle; and what he says is
as applicable to literature as to every other department of social
life. But he continues: “Mankind does nothing save through initiatives
on the part of inventors, great and small, and imitation by the rest
of us--these are the sole factors alive in human progress. Individuals
of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then
adopt and follow.” In other words, as I understand it, and so far
as literature is concerned, the burden of proof lies on the writer
himself--which brings one back to a truism: it is not for the public or
any aristocratic minority within the public to understand the writer,
it is for the writer to create the taste by which he is understood. Is
it not by this indeed (in a measure, at least) that we recognize the
creator?
Certainly if our contemporary literature is not respected, if it
has not been able to rally to its support the sensitive public that
already exists in this country, it is partly because this literature
has not respected itself. That there has been every reason for it
makes no difference; that it has begun to respect itself again makes
no difference either, for when a people has lost confidence in its
literature, and has had grounds for losing confidence in it, one cannot
be surprised if it insists a little cynically upon being “shown.”
The public supported Mark Twain and Howells and the men of their
generation, it admired them for what was admirable in them, but it
was aware, if only unconsciously, that there was a difference between
them and the men of the generation before them; and in consequence of
this the whole stock of American literature fell. But those who insist
in our day that America prefers European writers to its own, because
America is still a colony of Europe, cannot ignore the significant fact
that at a time when America was still more truly colonial than it is
now American writers had all the prestige in this country that European
writers have at present; and it is not entirely because at that time
the country was more homogeneous. Poe and Thoreau found little support
in the generation of which I speak, as Whitman found little support
in the generation that followed it. On the other hand, there were no
European writers (and it was an age of great writers in Europe) who
were held in higher esteem in this country than Hawthorne, Emerson,
Motley, and one or two others almost equally distinguished, as well
from a European as from an American point of view; there were few,
if any, European writers, in fact, who were esteemed in this country
as highly as they. How can one explain it? How can one explain why,
at a time when America, in every other department of life, was more
distinctly colonial than it is now, American literature commanded the
full respect of Americans, while to-day, when the colonial tradition is
vanishing all about us, it so little commands their respect that they
go after any strange god from England? The problem is not a simple one,
but among the many explanations of it one can hardly deny that there
were in that period a number of writers of unusual power, who made the
most (who were able to make the most) of their power, who followed
their artistic conscience (who were able to follow it) and who by this
fact built up a public confidence in themselves and in the literature
they represented. Does it matter at all whether to-day we enjoy these
writers or not? They were men of spiritual force, three or four of
them: that is the important point. If the emerging writers of our epoch
find themselves handicapped by the scepticism of the public, which has
ceased to believe that any good thing can come out of Nazareth, let
them remember not only that they are themselves for the most part in
the formative stage, but that they have to live down the recent past of
their profession.