cloak and pistols in a farce-comedy, which should be a take-off on my
own popular performances. Humor being something that no one should
tamper with who is not ready for the gibbet, I was not surprised that
many hasty samplers of the book should entirely miss the joke, or that
a number of joyless critics should have dismissed it hastily as merely
another machine-made romance written for boarding-school girls and the
weary commercial traveler yawning in the smoking-car. Yet this book
also has been a “best-seller”! I have seen it, within a few weeks,
prominently displayed in bookshop windows in half a dozen cities.
It was, I think, Mr. Clyde Fitch who first voiced the complaint that
our drama is seriously affected by the demand of “the tired business
man” to be amused at the theatre. The same may be said of fiction.
A very considerable number of our toiling millions sit down wearily
at night, and if the evening paper does not fully satisfy or social
diversion offer, a story that will hold the attention without too great
a tax upon the mind is welcomed. I should be happy to think that our
ninety millions trim the lamp every evening with zest for “improving”
literature; but the tired brain follows the line of least resistance,
which unfortunately does not lead to alcoves where the one hundred
best books wear their purple in solemn pomp. Even in my present mood
of contrition, I am not sneering at that considerable body of my
countrymen who have laid one dollar and eighteen cents upon the counter
and borne home my little fictions. They took grave chances of my boring
them; and when they rapped a second time on the counter and murmured
another of my titles, they were expressing a confidence in me which I
strove hard never to betray.
No one will, I am sure, deny me the satisfaction I have in the
reflection that I put a good deal of sincere work into those
stories,--for they are stories, not novels, and were written frankly
to entertain; that they are not wholly ill-written; that they contain
pages that are not without their grace; or that there is nothing
prurient or morbid in any of them. And no matter how jejune stories of
the popular romantic type may be,--a fact, O haughty critic, of which
I am well aware,--I take some satisfaction as a good American in the
knowledge that, in spite of their worthlessness as literature, they
are essentially clean. The heroes may be too handsome, and too sure
of themselves; the heroines too adorable in their sweet distress, as
they wave the white handkerchief from the grated window of the ivied
tower,--but their adventures are, in the very nature of things, _in
usum Delphini_.
Some of my friends of the writing guild boast that they never read
criticisms of their work. I have read and filed all the notices of my
stories that bore any marks of honesty or intelligence. Having served
my own day as reviewer for a newspaper, I know the dreary drudgery
of such work. I recall, with shame, having averaged a dozen books an
afternoon; and some of my critics have clearly averaged two dozen,
with my poor candidates for oblivion at the bottom of the heap! Much
American criticism is stupid or ignorant; but the most depressing, from
my standpoint, is the flippant sort of thing which many newspapers
print habitually. The stage, also, suffers like treatment, even in some
of the more reputable metropolitan journals. Unless your book affords a
text for a cynical newspaper “story,” it is quite likely to be ignored.
I cannot imagine that any writer who takes his calling seriously ever
resents a sincere, intelligent, adverse notice. I have never written
a book in less than a year, devoting all my time to it; and I resent
being dismissed in a line, and called a writer of drivel, by some
one who did not take the trouble to say why. A newspaper which is
particularly jealous of its good name once pointed out with elaborate
care that an incident, described in one of my stories as occurring
in broad daylight, could not have been observed in moonlight by one
of the characters at the distance I had indicated. The same reviewer
transferred the scene of this story half-way across the continent, in
order to make another point against its plausibility. If the aim of
criticism be to aid the public in its choice of books, then the press
should deal fairly with both author and public. And if the critics wish
to point out to authors their failures and weaknesses, then it should
be done in a spirit of justice. The best-selling of my books caused
a number of critics to remark that it had clearly been inspired by a
number of old romances--which I had not only never read, but of several
of them I had never even heard.
A Boston newspaper which I greatly admire once published an editorial
in which I was pilloried as a type of writer who basely commercializes
his talent. It was a cruel stab; for, unlike my heroes, I do not wear
a mail-shirt under my dress-coat. Once, wandering into a church in my
own city, at a time when a dramatized version of one of my stories was
offered at a local theatre, I listened to a sermon that dealt in the
harshest terms with such fiction and drama.
Extravagant or ignorant praise is, to most of us, as disheartening
as stupid and unjust criticism. The common practice of invoking
great names to praise some new arrival at the portal of fame cannot
fail to depress the subject of it. When my first venture in fiction
was flatteringly spoken of by a journal which takes its criticisms
seriously as evidencing the qualities that distinguish Mr. Howells, I
shuddered at the hideous injustice to a gentleman for whom I have the
greatest love and reverence; and when, in my subsequent experiments,
a critic somewhere gravely (it seemed, at least, to be in a spirit of
sobriety!) asked whether a fold of Stevenson’s mantle had not wrapped
itself about me, the awfulness of the thing made me ill, and I fled
from felicity until my publisher had dropped the heart-breaking phrase
from his advertisements. For I may be the worst living author, and at
times I am convinced of it; but I hope I am not an immitigable and
irreclaimable ass.
American book reviewers, I am convinced from a study of my returns
from the clipping bureaus for ten years, dealing with my offerings
in two kinds of fiction, are a solid phalanx of realists where they
are anything at all. This attitude is due, I imagine, to the fact
that journalism deals, or is supposed to deal, with facts. Realism is
certainly more favorably received than romance. I cheerfully subscribe
to the doctrine that fiction that lays strong hands upon aspects of
life as we are living it is a nobler achievement than tales that
provide merely an evening’s entertainment. Mr. James has, however,
simplified this whole question. He says, “The only classification of
the novel that I can understand is into that which has life, and that
which has it not”; and if we must reduce this matter of fiction to
law, his dictum might well be accepted as the first and last canon. And
in this connection I should like to record my increasing admiration
for all that Mr. James has written of novels and novelists. In one
place and another he has expressed himself fully and confidently on
fiction as a department of literature. The lecture on Balzac that he
gave in this country a few years ago is a masterly and authoritative
document on the novel in general. His “Partial Portraits” is a rich
mine of ripe observation on the distinguishing qualities of a number
of his contemporaries, and the same volume contains a suggestive and
stimulating essay on fiction as an art. With these in mind it seems to
me a matter for tears that Mr. James, with his splendid equipment and
beautiful genius, should have devoted himself so sedulously, in his own
performances in fiction, to the contemplation of cramped foreign vistas
and exotic types, when all this wide, surging, eager, laboring America
lay ready to his hand.
I will say of myself that I value style beyond most things; and that
if I could command it, I should be glad to write for so small an
audience, the “fit though few,” that the best-selling lists should
never know me again; for with style go many of the requisites of
great fiction,--fineness and sureness of feeling, and a power over
language by which characters cease to be bobbing marionettes and become
veritable beings, no matter whether they are Beatrix Esmonds, or
strutting D’Artagnans, or rascally Bartley Hubbards, or luckless Lily
Barts. To toss a ball into the air, and keep it there, as Stevenson
did so charmingly in such pieces as “Providence and the Guitar,”--this
is a respectable achievement; to mount Roy Richmond as an equestrian
statue,--that, too, is something we would not have had Mr. Meredith
leave undone. Mr. Rassendyll, an English gentleman playing at being
king, thrills the surviving drop of mediævalism that is in all of us.
“The tired business man” yields himself to the belief that the staccato
of hoofs on the asphalt street, which steals in to him faintly at his
fireside, is really an accompaniment to the hero’s mad ride to save the
king. Ah, the joy in kings dies hard in us!
Given a sprightly tale with a lost message to recover, throw in a fight
on the stair, scatter here and there pretty dialogues between the lover
and the princess he serves, and we are all, as we breathlessly follow,
the rankest royalists. Tales of real Americans, kodaked “in the sun’s
hot eye,” much as they refresh me,--I speak of myself now, not as a
writer or critic, but as the man in the street,--never so completely
detach the weary spirit from mundane things as tales of events that
never were on sea or land. Why should I read of Silas Lapham to-night,
when only an hour ago I was his competitor in the mineral-paint
business? The greatest fiction must be a criticism of life; but there
are times when we crave forgetfulness, and lift our eyes trustfully to
the flag of Zenda.
But the creator of Zenda, it is whispered, is not an author of the
first or even of the second rank, and the adventure story, at its
best, is only for the second table. I am quite aware of this. But
pause a moment, O cheerless one! Surely Homer is respectable; and the
Iliad, the most strenuous, the most glorious and sublime of fictions,
with the very gods drawn into the moving scenes, has, by reason of
its tremendous energy and its tumultuous drama, not less than for
its majesty as literature, established its right to be called the
longest-selling fiction of the ages.
All the world loves a story; the regret is that the great
novelists--great in penetration and sincerity and style--do not always
have the story-telling knack. Mr. Marion Crawford was, I should say,
a far better story-teller than Mr. James or Mr. Howells; but I should
by no means call him a better novelist. A lady of my acquaintance
makes a point of bestowing copies of Mr. Meredith’s novels upon young
working-women whom she seeks to uplift. I am myself the most ardent
of Meredithians, and yet I must confess to a lack of sympathy with
this lady’s high purpose. I will not press the point, but a tired
working-girl would, I think, be much happier with one of my own
beribboned confections than with even Diana the delectable.
Pleasant it is, I must confess, to hear your wares cried by the
train-boy; to bend a sympathetic ear to his recital of your merits,
as he appraises them; and to watch him beguile your fellow travelers
with the promise of felicity contained between the covers of the book
which you yourself have devised, pondered, and committed to paper.
The train-boy’s ideas of the essentials of entertaining fiction are
radically unacademic, but he is apt in hitting off the commercial
requirements. A good book, one of the guild told me, should always
begin with “talking.” He was particularly contemptuous of novels that
open upon landscape and moonlight,--these, in the bright lexicon of
his youthful experience, are well-nigh unsalable. And he was equally
scornful of the unhappy ending. The sale of a book that did not,
as he put it, “come out right,” that is, with the merry jingle of
wedding-bells, was no less than a fraud upon the purchaser. On one
well-remembered occasion my vanity was gorged by the sight of many
copies of my latest offering in the hands of my fellow travelers, as
I sped from Washington to New York. A poster, announcing my new tale,
greeted me at the station as I took flight; four copies of my book
were within comfortable range of my eye in the chair-car. Before the
train started, I was given every opportunity to add my own book to my
impedimenta.
The sensation awakened by the sight of utter strangers taking up your
story, tasting it warily, clinging to it if it be to their liking, or
dropping it wearily or contemptuously if it fail to please, is one of
the most interesting of the experiences of authorship. On the journey
mentioned, one man slept sweetly through what I judged to be the most
intense passage in the book; others paid me the tribute of absorbed
attention. On the ferry-boat at Jersey City, several copies of the book
were interposed between seemingly enchanted readers and the towers and
spires of the metropolis. No one, I am sure, will deny to such a poor
worm as I the petty joys of popular recognition. To see one’s tale
on many counters, to hear one’s name and titles recited on boats and
trains, to find in mid-ocean that your works go with you down to the
sea in ships, to see the familiar cover smiling welcome on the table
of an obscure foreign inn,--surely the most grudging critic would not
deprive a writer of these rewards and delights.
There is also that considerable army of readers who write to an
author in various keys of condemnation or praise. I have found
my correspondence considerably augmented by the large sales of a
book. There are persons who rejoice to hold before your eyes your
inconsistences; or who test you, to your detriment, in the relentless
scale of fact. Some one in the Connecticut hills once criticized
severely my use of “that” and “which,”--a case where an effort at
precision was the offense,--and I was involved, before I knew it, in a
long correspondence. I have several times been taken severely to task
by foes of tobacco for permitting my characters to smoke. Wine, I have
found, should be administered to one’s characters sparingly, and one’s
hero must never produce a flask except for restorative uses,--after,
let us say, a wild gallop, by night, in the teeth of a storm to relieve
a beleaguered citadel, or when the heroine has been rescued at great
peril from the clutch of the multitudinous sea. Those strange spirits
who pour out their souls in anonymous letters have not ignored me. I
salute them with much courtesy, and wish them well of the gods. Young
ladies whose names I have inadvertently applied to my heroines have
usually dealt with me in agreeable fashion. The impression that authors
have an unlimited supply of their own wares to give away is responsible
for the importunity of managers of church fairs, philanthropic
institutions, and the like, who assail one cheerfully through the
mails. Before autograph-hunters I have always been humble; I have felt
myself honored by their attentions; and in spite of their dread phrase,
“Thanking you in advance,”--which might be the shibboleth of their
fraternity, from its prevalence,--I greet them joyfully, and never
filch their stamps.
Now, after all, could anything be less harmful than my tales? The
casual meeting of my hero and heroine in the first chapter has always
been marked by the gravest circumspection. My melodrama has never been
offensively gory,--in fact, I have been ridiculed for my bloodless
combats. My villains have been the sort that anyone with any kind
of decent bringing-up would hiss. A girl in white, walking beside a
lake, with a blue parasol swinging back of her head, need offend no
one. That the young man emerging from the neighboring wood should not
recognize her at once as the young woman ordained in his grandfather’s
will as the person he must marry to secure the estate, seems utterly
banal, I confess; but it is the business of romance to maintain
illusions. Realism, with the same agreed state of facts, recognizes
the girl immediately--and spoils the story. Or I might put it thus:
in realism, much or all is obvious in the first act; in romance,
nothing is quite clear until the third. This is why romance is more
popular than realism, for we are all children and want to be surprised.
Why villains should always be so stupid, and why heroines should so
perversely misunderstand the noble motives of heroes, are questions I
cannot answer. Likewise before dear old Mistaken Identity--the most
venerable impostor in the novelist’s cabinet--I stand dumbly grateful.
On the stage, where a plot is most severely tested, but where the
audience must, we are told, always be in the secret, we see constantly
how flimsy a mask the true prince need wear. And the reason for this
lies in the primal and--let us hope--eternal childlikeness of the
race. The Zeitgeist will not grind us underfoot so long as we are
capable of joy in make-believe, and can renew our youth in the frolics
of Peter Pan.
You, sir, who re-read “The Newcomes” every year, and you, madam,
reverently dusting your Jane Austen,--I am sadder than you can be
that my talent is so slender; but is it not a fact that you have
watched me at my little tricks on the mimic stage, and been just a
little astonished when the sparrow, and not the dove, emerged from the
handkerchief? But you prefer the old writers; and so, dear friends, do
I!
Having, as I have confessed, deliberately tried my hand at romance
merely to see whether I could swim the moat under a cloud of
the enemy’s arrows, and to gain experience in the mechanism of
story-writing, I now declare (though with no illusion as to the
importance of the statement) that I have hung my sword over the
fireplace; that I shall not again thunder upon the tavern door at
midnight; that not much fine gold could tempt me to seek, by means
however praiseworthy, to bring that girl with the blue parasol to a
proper appreciation of the young gentleman with the suit-case, who even
now is pursuing her through the wood to restore her lost handkerchief.
It has been pleasant to follow the bright guidon of romance; even now,
from the window of the tall office-building in which I close these
reflections, I can hear the bugles blowing and look upon
“Strangest skies and unbeholden seas.”
But I feel reasonably safe from temptation. Little that men do is,
I hope, alien to me; and the life that surges round me, and whose
sounds rise from the asphalt below, or the hurrying feet on the tiles
in my own corridor of this steel-boned tower,--the faint tinkle of
telephones, the click of elevator doors,--these things, and the things
they stand for, speak with deep and thrilling eloquence; and he who
would serve best the literature of his time and country will not ignore
them.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
FOOTNOTE:
[1] “Heckling the Church,” _The Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1911.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.