CERTAIN NOVELISTS
My friendship with Thackeray and Dickens was an evolution rather than a
discovery. Once having read "Vanity Fair" or "Nicholas Nickleby," the
book became not so much a book but a state of mind--and, as is sometimes
felt about a friend--it is hard to remember a time when we did not know
him!
Mark Twain was a discovery. "The Jumping Frog of Calavaras" and that
chuckling scene in "Innocents Abroad," where the unhappy Italian guide
introduces Christopher Columbus to the American travellers, were joys
indeed. These were more delightful and satisfying than the kind of
humour that preceded them--they seemed better than the whimsicalities of
Artemus Ward, and not to be compared to the laboured humour of Mrs.
Partington. But, leaving out these amusing passages, my pleasure in the
works of Mark Twain faded more and more as I came to the age of reason,
which is somewhat over twenty-five. It was hard to laugh at Mark after a
time. Compared to him, the "Pickwick Papers" had an infinite variety.
There were other things in Dickens which were finer than anything in
"Pickwick," but the humour of Pickwick had a softness about it, a human
interest, a lack of coarseness, which placed it immeasurably above that
of Mark Twain.
The greatest failure of Dickens was "A Tale of Two Cities." And the
greatest failure of Mark Twain is his "Joan of Arc." But Dickens
redeemed himself in a hundred ways, while Mark Twain sank deeper and
deeper into coarseness and pessimism. As Mark Twain is by all odds
apparently the national American author, it is heresy to say this; and I
know persons who have assumed an air of coldness as long as they could
in my presence, because I declined to look on "Joan of Arc" as a
masterpiece.
It shows some faults of Mark Twain's philosophy of life, it suggests his
narrow and materialistic point of view, and makes plain his lack of
knowledge of the perspectives of history. It is all the worse for an
appearance of tenderness. Mark Twain was neither mystical nor spiritual.
That does not mean that he was not a good husband and father, a kind
friend and a man very loyal to all his engagements. There are many other
authors who had not all these qualities, but who would have more easily
understood the character of Joan than did Mark Twain.
Dickens's failure in "A Tale of Two Cities" was from very different
causes. It was not through a failure of tenderness, a lack of an
understanding of the real pathos of life, or through the want of a
spirituality without which no great work can be effective. It was
because Dickens relied very largely on Carlyle for the foundation of his
study of the historical atmosphere of that novel--the best, from the
point of view of style, except "Barnaby Rudge," that he ever wrote,
probably due to the fact that, treading as he did on ground that was new
to him, he had to guide his steps very carefully. The novel is
nevertheless a failure because it is untrue; it concerns itself with a
France that never existed seen through as artificial a medium as the
mauve tints through which certain artists see their figures and
landscapes. It was not with Dickens a case of defect in vision, but a
lack of knowledge. It was not lack of perception or the absence of a
great power of feeling. It was pure ignorance. He was without that
training which would have enabled him to go intelligently to the sources
of French history.
In Mark Twain's case it was not a lack of the power to reach the
sources; it was an inability to understand the character of the woman
whom he reverenced, so far as he could feel reverence, and an invincible
ignorance of the character of her time. Mark Twain was modern; but
modern in the vulgarest way. I know that "Huckleberry Finn" and the
other young Americans--whom our youth are expected to like, if not to
imitate--are looked on as sacred by the guardians of those libraries who
recommend typical books to eager juvenile readers. But let that pass for
the moment. To take a case in point, there is hardly any man or woman of
refinement who will hold a brief in defense of the vulgarity of "A
Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur."
It may be said that the average reader of Mark Twain's books--that is,
the average American reader--for Mark Twain is read the world
over--cares nothing for his philosophy of life. The average American
reads Mark Twain only to be amused, or to recall the adventures of a
time not far away when we were less sophisticated. Still, whether my
compatriots are in the habit of looking into books for a philosophy or
not, or of considering the faiths or unfaiths of the writer in hand, it
does not follow that it is to their credit if they neglect an analysis
which cultivated readers in other countries seldom omit.
If I thought that any words of mine would deprive anybody of the gaiety
which Mark Twain has added to life, I should not write these words; but
as this little volume is a book of impressions, and sincere impressions,
I may be frank in the full understanding that the average American
reader will not take seriously what I say of Mark Twain, since he has
become an integral part of American literature. There may perhaps come a
time when his works will be sold in sets, carefully arranged on all
self-respecting bookshelves, pointed to with pride as a proof of
culture, and never read. They will perhaps one day be the Rogers's
statuettes of literature. But that day is evidently far off. I do not
think that any jester of the older day--the day of Touchstone or of
Rigoletto, with a rooted sorrow in his heart, could have been more
pessimistic and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To change the words of
Autolycus--"For the life to come, I jest out the thought of it!"
"You who admire Don Quixote," said an infuriated Mark Twainite, "should
not talk of coarseness. There are pages in that romance of Cervantes
which I would not allow my son or daughter to read."
One should give both sides of an argument, and I give this other side to
show what may be said against my views. But the coarseness of Cervantes
is, after all, a healthy coarseness. Modern ideas of purity were not
his. Ignorance in those days--the days of Cervantes--did not mean
innocence. Even the fathers of the Church were quite willing to admit
that the roots of water lilies were in the mud, and there was no
conspiracy to conceal the existence of the mud. Mark Twain's coarseness,
however, is more than that of Cervantes or Shakespeare. Neither
Cervantes nor Shakespeare is ever irreverent.
To them, even the ordinary things of life have a certain sacerdotal
quality; but Mark Twain abhorred the sacerdotal quality as nature abhors
a vacuum. To say that he has affected the American spirit or the
American heart would be to go too far--for Americans are irreverent only
on the surface. It seems to me that they are the most reverent people in
the world toward those essential qualities which make up the spiritual
parts of life. Curiously enough, however, Mark Twain is just at present
the one author to whom all Europe and all outlanders point as the great
typical American writer!
That a delightful kind of American humour may exist without
exaggeration, or the necessity of debasing the moral currency, many
joyous books in our literature show. There are a few, of course, that
are joyous without self-consciousness; but for real joyousness and charm
and innocent gaiety, united to a knowledge of the psychology of the
American youth, none so far has equalled Booth Tarkington's "Penrod,"
or, what is better, "Seventeen."
Now nobody has yet done anything so delightful, so mirth provoking, so
pathetic, in a way, as "Seventeen." In my youth I was deprived of the
knowledge of this book, for when I swam into the tide of literature,
Booth Tarkington was in that world from which Wordsworth's boy came,
bringing rainbows, which moved to all the music of the spheres. It was
during the late war that "Seventeen" was cast on the coasts of Denmark,
at a time when American books scarcely reached those coasts at all. St.
Julian, the patron of merry travellers, must have guided it through the
maze and labyrinths of bombs and submarines in the North Sea. It arrived
just when the world seemed altogether upside down; when death was the
only real thing in life, and pain as much a part of the daily routine as
the sunshine, and when joy seemed to have been inexplicably crushed from
the earth, because sorrow was ever so recurrent that it could not be
forgotten for a moment. Then "Seventeen" arrived.
Booth Tarkington may have his ups and downs in future, as he has had in
the past. "The Gentleman from Indiana" seemed to me to be almost one of
the most tiresome books ever invented, while "Monsieur Beaucaire" was
one of the most fascinating, charming. You can hardly find a better
novel of American life than "The Turmoil," unless it is Judge Grant's
"Unleavened Bread."
But the best novels of American life seem to be written in order to be
forgotten. Who reads "The Breadwinners" now? Or who, except the
professional "teacher" of literature, recalls "Prue and I"? Or that
succession of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels, almost unequalled as
pictures of a section of our life, each of which better expresses her
talent than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? The English and the French have longer
memories. Mrs. Oliphant's "Chronicles of Carlingford"--some of us
remember "Miss Majoribanks" or "Phoebe Junior"--finds a slowly
decreasing circle of readers. And while "Sapho" is almost forgotten,
"Les Rois en Exil['e]" and "Jack" are still parts of current French
literature. But "Unleavened Bread" or "The Damnation of Theron Ware" or
"Elsie Venner" or the "Saxe Holm's Stories" are so much of the past as
to be unread.
To the credit of the gentle reader, Miss Alcott's stories perennially
bloom. And, for some strange reason, the weird "Elsie Dinsmore" series
is found under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody gives the Rollo
books to anybody. Why? One may begin to believe that that degeneracy
which the prevalence of jazz, lip-sticks, and ballet costumes adapted to
the subway is supposed to indicate, is a real menace when one discovers
that "Penrod" or "Seventeen" has ceased to be read!
We may read Mark Twain and wallow in vulgarity, but it is my belief that
Sodom and Gomorrah would have escaped their fate, if a Carnegie of that
time had made it possible to keep books like "Penrod" and "Seventeen" in
general circulation!
It was once said of Anthony Trollope that as long as English men and
women of the upper and middle classes continued to exist, he might go on
writing novels with ever-increasing zest. And the same thing might be
said of Booth Tarkington in relation to his unique chronicles of
youth--that is, the youth of the Middle West, with a universal Soul. His
types are American, but there are Americas and Americas. Usage permits
us to use a term for our part of the continent to which our Canadian and
South and Central Americans and Mexicans might reasonably object; but
while the young Americans of Booth Tarkington are typically American,
they personally could belong only to the Middle West. The hero of
"Seventeen" would not be the same boy if he had been born in
Philadelphia or New York or Boston. Circumstances would have made him
different. The consciousness of class distinction would have made him
old before his time; and though he might be just as amusing--he would
not have been amusing quite in the same way.
And this is one of the fine qualities of Mr. Tarkington's imaginative
synthesis. He is individual and of his own soil; he knows very well that
it is unnecessary to exaggerate or even to invent; he has only to
perceive with those rare gifts of perception which he possesses. It all
seems so easy until you try to do it yourself!
The state of mind of Penrod, when he is being prepared for the pageant
of the "Table Round," is inexpressibly amusing to the adult reader; but
no child can look on it as entirely amusing, because every child has
suffered more or less, as Penrod suffered, from the unexplainable
hardness of heart and dullness of mind of older people. Something or
other prevents the most persecuted boy from admitting that his parents
are bad parents because they force impositions which tear all the fibres
of his soul and make him helpless before a jeering world. When Penrod
has gone through horrors, which are nameless because they seem to be so
unreasonable, he murmurs aloud, "_Well, hasn't this been a day!_"
Because of the humour in "Penrod" there is a pathos as true and real as
those parts in the "Pickwick Papers" where fortunately Dickens is
pathetic in a real sense because he did not strive for pathos. Everybody
admits now that Dickens becomes almost repellent when he wilfully tries
to be pathetic.
One could pick out of "Seventeen" a score of delightful situations which
seem to ripple from the pen of Booth Tarkington, one of the best being
the scene between the hero and his mother when that _esprit terrible_,
his sister, seems to stand between him and the lady of his thoughts. And
"Penrod" is full of them. The description of that young gallant's
entrance into society is of Mr. Tarkington's best. Penrod is expected to
find, according to the rules of dancing academies, a partner for the
cotillion. It is his duty to call on the only young lady unengaged, who
was Miss Rennsdale, aged eight. Penrod, carefully tutored, makes his
call.
A decorous maid conducted the long-belated applicant to her where
she sat upon a sofa beside a nursery governess. The decorous maid
announced him composedly as he made his entrance.
"Mr. Penrod Schofield!"
Miss Rennsdale suddenly burst into loud sobs.
"Oh!" she wailed. "I just knew it would be him!"
The decorous maid's composure vanished at once--likewise her
decorum. She clapped her hand over her mouth and fled, uttering
sounds. The governess, however, set herself to comfort her
heartbroken charge, and presently succeeded in restoring Miss
Rennsdale to a semblance of that poise with which a lady receives
callers and accepts invitations to dance cotillons. But she
continued to sob at intervals.
Feeling himself at perhaps a disadvantage, Penrod made offer of his
hand for the morrow with a little embarrassment. Following the form
prescribed by Professor Bartet, he advanced several paces toward
the stricken lady and bowed formally.
"I hope," he said by rote, "you're well, and your parents also in
good health. May I have the pleasure of dancing the cotillon as
your partner t'-morrow afternoon?"
The wet eyes of Miss Rennsdale searched his countenance without
pleasure, and a shudder wrung her small shoulders; but the
governess whispered to her instructively, and she made a great
effort.
"I thu-thank you fu-for your polite invu-invu-invutation; and I
ac----" Thus far she progressed when emotion overcame her again.
She beat frantically upon the sofa with fists and heels. "Oh, I did
want it to be Georgie Bassett!"
"No, no, no!" said the governess, and whispered urgently, whereupon
Miss Rennsdale was able to complete her acceptance.
"And I ac-accept wu-with pu-pleasure!" she moaned, and immediately,
uttering a loud yell, flung herself face downward upon the sofa,
clutching her governess convulsively.
Somewhat disconcerted, Penrod bowed again.
"I thank you for your polite acceptance," he murmured hurriedly;
"and I trust--I trust--I forget. Oh, yes--I trust we shall have a
most enjoyable occasion. Pray present my compliments to your
parents; and I must now wish you a very good afternoon."
Concluding these courtly demonstrations with another bow he
withdrew in fair order, though thrown into partial confusion in the
hall by a final wail from his crushed hostess:
"Oh! Why couldn't it be anybody but him!"
Dickens would not have done the scene quite this way; he could not have
so conceived it, and he might have overdone it, but Booth Tarkington
gets it just right. He has created boy characters which will live
because they are alive. One of the most detestable books, after Mark
Twain's "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," is Dickens's "Child's
History of England." The two books have various gross faults in common
and these faults are due to colossal ignorance. Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
says that one of Dickens's is due to
the application of a plain rule of right and wrong to all
circumstances to which it was applied. It is not that they wrongly
enforce the fixed principle that life should be saved; it is that
they take a fire-engine to a shipwreck and a life-boat to a house
on fire. The business of a good man in Dickens's time was to bring
justice up to date. The business of a good man in Dunstan's time
was to toil to ensure the survival of any justice at all.
It seems to me that if all the works of Dickens were lost we might do
very well with the "Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby." To these,
one is tempted to add "Our Mutual Friend."
When I was young enough to assist at meetings of Literary Societies,
where papers on Dickens were read, I was invariably informed that
"Charles Dickens could not paint a lady or a gentleman." There was no
reason given for this censure. It was presumed that the authors of the
papers meant an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever
defined what an English gentleman or lady was. When one considers that
for a long period an English gentleman's status was determined by the
fact that he owned land, had not even a remote connection with "trade"
or that he was instructed at Eton or Harrow, in Oxford or Cambridge, the
more modern definition would have been very different from what the
English of the olden time would have called a gentleman. Even now, when
a levelling education has rather blurred the surface marks of class in
England, it might be difficult for an American to define what was meant
by this criticism of Dickens. It seems to me that no one could define
exactly what was meant. The convention that makes the poet in
Pennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wissahickon were peopled by
thrushes, or orchestrated by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes him
often to borrow words from the English vocabulary of England without
analyzing their exact meaning. There can be no doubt that Don Quixote
was a gentleman but not exactly in the English conventional sense. And,
if he was a gentleman, why are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller
gentlemen? An interesting thesis might be written on the application of
Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and Sam
Weller. Why not?
There is a truth about the English people, at least the lower classes,
which Mr. Chesterton in his illuminating "Appreciations and Criticisms
of the Works of Charles Dickens"--one of his best books--brings out,
though he does not accentuate it sufficiently: this is that the lower
classes of the English are both witty and humorous. Witty because they
are satirical and humorous because they are ironical. Sam Weller
represents a type--a common type--more exactly than Samuel Lover's
"Handy Andy" or any of Charles Lever's Irish characters. When one
examines the foundation for the assertion that Dickens could not draw a
lady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies and gentlemen, in the
English sense, are deadly dull. It is very probable that all
conventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to be
a cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. Doctor
Johnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to say
it, not so greatly impressed by class distinctions as Dickens was.
Dickens had the art of making insupportable bores most interesting. This
was an art in which the delicate Miss Austen excelled, too; but
Dickens's methods compared to hers are like those of a scene painter
when compared to those of an etcher in colours. There are times when
Dickens is consciously "common," and then he is almost unbearable; but
this objection cannot be made to the "Pickwick Papers." This book is
inartistic; it is made up of unrelated parts; the characters do not
grow; they change. But all this makes no difference. They are
spontaneous. You feel that for once Dickens is doing the thing he likes
to do--and all the world loves a lover who loves his work.
There are doubtless some people still living who can tolerate the
romantic quality in "Nicholas Nickleby." There are no really romantic
qualities in the "Pickwick Papers"--thank heaven!--no stick of a hero,
no weeping willow of a heroine. The heroic sticks of Dickens never bloom
suddenly as the branch in "Tannh[:a]user" bloomed. Even Dickens can work no
miracle there.
It increases our admiration of him to examine the works of those
gentlemen who are set down in the textbooks of literature as his
predecessors. Some of these learned authors mention Sterne's "Tristram
Shandy," a very dull and tiresome narrative; and "Tom Jones," very
tiresome, too, in spite of its fidelity to certain phases of
eighteenth-century life. And later, Pierce Egan's "Tom and Jerry." I was
brought up to consider the renown of the two Pierce Egans with reverence
and permitted to read "Tom and Jerry; or The Adventures of Corinthian
Bob" as part of the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulous
analysis of a German research-worker to find any real resemblance
between the artificial dissipations of "Tom and Jerry" and the
adventures of the peerless Pickwick.
If the elder Pierce Egan had the power of influencing disciples, he
ought to have induced his son to produce something better than "The Poor
Boy; or, The Betrayed Baffled," "The Fair Lilias," and others too
numerous to mention.
The voracious reader of Dickens, as he grows older, perhaps becomes a
student of Dickens, and is surprised to find that the development of
Dickens is much more marked and easily noted than the development of
Thackeray. In fact, Thackeray, like his mild reflector, Du Maurier,
sprang into the public light fully equipped and fully armed. Both these
men had wide experience and a careful training in form and proportion
before they attempted to write seriously. They were educated in art and
life and letters. The education of Dickens, on the other hand, was only
begun with "Pickwick," which knew neither method nor proportion; and he
who reads "Barnaby Rudge" for the flavour of Dickens finds a new and
good perspective and proportion, and even self-restraint. Artistically,
it is the best of all Dickens's novels. For that reason it lacks that
flavour which we find in the earlier books. I could not get such
thorough enjoyment from it as from "Nicholas Nickleby." In it Dickens
sacrificed too much to his self-restraint, and there is no moment in it
that gives us the joy of the discovery of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles
or of 'Tilda Price.
Anthony Trollope, in his "Autobiography," which ought to be a textbook
in all those practical classes of literature that work to turn out
self-supporting authors, tells us that the most important part of a
novel is the plot. This may be true, but the inefficiency of the plot in
the works of Charles Dickens may easily be shown in an attempt to
summarize any of them, except "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."
Still, when all is said for Dickens, one cannot even in old age begin to
read him over and over again, as one can read Thackeray. But who reads
an American book over and over again? Hawthorne never wearies the elect,
and one may go back to Henry James, in order to discover whether one
thinks that he means the same thing in 1922 one thought he meant in
1912. But who makes it a practice in middle age to read any novel of
Mrs. Wharton's or Mrs. Deland's or Mr. Marion Crawford's or Mr. Booth
Tarkington's at least once a year? There are thousands of persons who
find leisure to love Miss Austen, that hardiest of hardy perennials;
and during the war, when life in the daytime became a nightmare, there
was a large group of persons who read Trollope from end to end! This is
almost incredible; but it is true. And I must confess that if I do not
read Miss Austen's novels once every year, preferably cozily in the
winter, or "Cranford," or parts of Froissart--whose chronicle takes the
bad taste of Mark Twain's "Joan of Arc" from my memory--I feel as if I
had had an ill-spent year. It makes me seem as slothful as if I omitted
a daily passage from "The Following of Christ" or, at least, a weekly
chapter from the Epistles of St. Paul!
George Eliot I had known even before the time I had begun to read. No
well-brought-up child could escape "Adam Bede" and the drolleries of
Mrs. Poyser. As I grew older, however, "Romola" attracted me most. The
heroine is perhaps a little too good for human nature's daily food, but
she is a great figure in the picture. I suspect that the artificiality
of Kingsley's "Hypatia," which I read at almost the same time, made me
admire, if I did not love, Romola, by way of contrast. No youth could
ever love Romola as Walter Scott made him love Mary Stuart or Catherine
Seton. But as it happened that just at this time I was labouring with
Blackstone (Judge Sharswood's Notes), with a volume of scholastic
philosophy "on the side"--I think it was Jourdain's _consomm['e]_ of St.
Thomas Aquinas in French--Romola was a decided relief, and she seemed
truer and more interesting in every way than Hypatia, who was as
_papier-mach['e]_ as her whole environment is untrue to the history of the
time. An historical novel ought not necessarily to be true to history,
but it ought to be illuminating and interesting, as "Hypatia" is not and
as "Romola" is. So it makes no difference whether George Eliot's reading
of Savonarola is correct or not, though it ought to be correct, of
course. Then there is Tito, the delicious and treacherous Tito! and the
scene in the barber shop! And if you want a good, mouth-filling novel,
give me "Middlemarch." Few persons read it now, and probably fewer will
read it in the future. It is nevertheless a great monument to the genius
of a woman who had such an infinite quality for taking pains, that it
almost defeated the end for which she worked.