When I was twenty-two years old, and had just become the associate
literary editor of a Chicago newspaper, I had a painful experience.
The year was 1909, and in that year Hamilton Mabie, Richard Watson
Gilder, and Henry van Dyke still set the standards to which American
literary culture conformed; Dreiser had been suppressed and was, by
all but a few, forgotten; Mencken was just beginning to be heard of as
the writer of a caustic column in the Baltimore “Sun”; Sinclair Lewis
had just graduated from Yale and got a job as a reporter somewhere;
and Sherwood Anderson was an advertising man who dreamed of writing a
novel. In those days Winston Churchill represented the sober dignity
of literature to the American public. And in poetry--well, nobody
paid much attention to poetry anyway, in those days; there were real
poets, such as Vaughn Moody and Anna Hempstead Branch, but they were
overshadowed by the colossal fame of James Whitcomb Riley. The voices
of Vachel Lindsay, Louis Untermeyer, Ezra Pound, Edgar Lee Masters,
Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, were yet to be heard. And it
was in connection with poetry that the painful incident I am about to
tell happened to me.
There was an American poet--and I hope he will forgive me for telling
the story--who shared the universal neglect accorded to poetry at
that time, and yet, or so it was said among those who knew, was an
authentically great poet. He had been acclaimed abroad. Foreign praise
has always weighed heavily in the American scale of critical opinion;
it weighed with me. It happened that I had not read any of this great
poet’s works; but I was prepared to be his American discoverer.
At this point, through a friend, the poet himself heard of my interest
in him, and sent me a complete set of his works, each volume being
inscribed: “From an older to a younger poet.” Here I must confess that
the poet had been shown some of my youthful verses, and was reported
to have praised them; and perhaps it was his good opinion of my poetry
which made me so ready to have a good opinion of his.
Then--alas--I read his works. They represented, to my mind, the banal
old; and, whether or not they were as banal as I thought, they were
certainly unlike what I wanted American poetry to be. And I found
myself in a painful situation. If I wrote what I thought about this
poet, it would be bad manners; if I refrained from writing anything
at all, that would be cowardly; and if I wrote anything less than the
truth, I would be in league with error.
The result was that, with a feeling of desperate heroism, I wrote the
whole truth, as I saw it--mercilessly, and at considerable length; two
columns of damnation, as bitter and incisive as only a young critic in
a virtuous mood could make it. I hate to think how the poet must have
felt, reading that review without any preliminary warning!
I can find many excuses for my young cruelty; but they amount to a
plea of ignorance. Not that I think I was wrong about the poet; at
least, the younger generation of critics agreed with me, and among us
we blazed a way for the new American poetry. I do not go back on my
youthful opinions; but I do regret my youthful manners, and I make in
my behalf the plea of ignorance.
I did not know how it hurts to be criticized like that, for one thing.
I have learned since then. Furthermore, I did not know how great an
advantage a reviewer has over an author. The young reviewer feels--at
least I did--that he is St. George attacking the Dragon. But that is
scarcely the case. The Dragon of Error is usually a well meaning old
Dragon; and St. George is not merely, as he thinks of himself, a boy
from the provinces who must needs exert all his powers--he has, in his
newspaper, a modern machine of efficient destruction, and he is really
firing from a battleship upon helpless villages. The authors haven’t
newspapers to fight back in; and besides, it is not their business to
fight back.
I did not realize, then, that it is no crime against truth and beauty
to write bad poetry or bad fiction. Goodness knows, the bad writers,
no less than the good ones, are usually dedicated to truth and beauty,
as sincerely as any young critic. They are doing the best they can.
Who--including Harold Bell Wright--would not be glad to write a book
which the young critics would place in the pantheon of literature? And
who--including the late Henry James--would not have been glad to be
able to write a best seller? One writes what one can.
This is not an argument for the abolition of criticism, nor for a false
and sickly tolerance of bad writing. Sincerity in criticism helps to
produce sincerity in creative art, and I flatter myself that my own
young critical brutalities, of which I have given an instance, have had
their share in the bringing to birth of a new and more sincere American
literature. At the same time, I think that all criticism is motivated
by jealousy and envy: the critic is a critic, usually, because he has
not yet had the opportunity to do creative work himself; and he is able
to be generous to creative artists only when he recognizes in their
work something akin to what he wants to do himself, so that he can
feel in such a writer an ally and not an enemy in his own prospective
campaign. These motives are, of course, hidden deep below the level
of consciousness; but they are there--and they have their origin in
fear. The established writer fears the emergence of a new taste which
will reject his work and leave him without an audience; he fears the
younger generation that comes knocking at the door, and, with honorable
exceptions, he sneers at the younger generation’s queer and different
literary beginnings. But in precisely the same way, the younger
generation fears the older--fears that the public taste will never
change, that its own talents will never be recognized and rewarded, and
that the Old Gods will reign forever; hence, in every organ of opinion
which it can initiate or capture, it sneers at the older generation,
and calls the productions of that generation by every bad name in the
critical vocabulary.
It is human nature to be afraid; I am not complaining of that; but what
I object to is the “rationalizing” of these fears, their elaborate
justification by critical theory. It would be much better if we
admitted the fact, and proceeded to deal with it as we deal with other
fears, by social methods which tend to mitigate them. These social
processes all fall into the general category of manners.
It is desirable, in the first place, that writers should, to some
extent, know each other personally. It is sometimes objected that
personal acquaintance makes honest criticism impossible. That is not
true; it merely makes ill mannered criticism more unlikely. One
cannot recklessly impute all sorts of vicious motives to a writer
with whom one may presently have lunch; one is, in fact, required to
criticize, and not merely malign, his works. It is my opinion that
honest criticism, of the most unfavorable sort, is consistent with a
degree of courtesy which would not interfere with agreeable personal
relations between author and critic. Every writer has the experience of
finding that some of his best friends do not like what he writes; but
their friendship usually remains unimpaired, because the traditions of
friendly intercourse require that this dislike shall be expressed in
a friendly way. Your friend, in giving you his opinion in private, is
under no obligation--as the unknown newspaper critic seems to be--to
make you out a complete ass or an utter scoundrel. As a matter of fact,
you are neither, and the friendly criticism is usually far more to the
point than the newspaper denunciation.
The generations move swiftly in these days, and I, who am still a
member of a younger generation which has just begun to get a foothold
in the citadel of public taste, find myself denounced by a still
younger generation as one of that gang of tyrants and oppressors whose
authority must be destroyed if literature in America is ever to come
into its own. I dare say I have incurred some of these denunciations by
my critical airs of owning, together with my gang, the earth and the
fulness thereof; but these airs were merely intended to impress a still
older gang whom I had been in the habit of regarding as tyrants and
oppressors. It is also true, doubtless, that I have sneered at some of
these younger writers; certainly they have annoyed me by their tricks,
especially by what seems to me a wilful unintelligibility; but even so,
I ought not to have sneered. That is simply a bad critical habit which,
once acquired, it is hard to get over.
In the pages of +The Bookman+ recently I was guilty of sneering at
two writers of a “generation” younger than my own. I did not realize
that I had done so until one of them called my attention to it in a
letter. “Why”, he asked, “did you say that I had no point of view?” I
apologized to him warmly, remarking that when critics said that about
my own novels it always made me angry. An author, of course, always has
a point of view, and it is absurd, as well as ill mannered, to assert
that he is such a fool as to think that he can write a novel without
one. He may fail to convey to his readers, or to some of them, what
that point of view is; and the critic is perfectly within his rights
in saying as much. But the critic has no right to assume that a novel
which seems to him an inchoate collection of materials is anything
worse than a failure on the part of the author, who certainly believed
that he was presenting the public with an orderly and significant work
of art. Moreover, it is honorable to fail in such an attempt; and it is
the critic’s business, rather than to assume that the author has been
too lazy to try to write a good novel, to discover why he has failed.
It is merely easier for the critic to believe the worst; and it is
generally the critic who is lazy, and not the novelist.
It is, of course, an imposition upon a poor devil who wants to write
novels of his own to put him at a desk before a pile of other people’s
novels and ask him to criticize them. No wonder he is often impatient;
and no wonder, either, that lacking as yet the opportunity to make
himself known to the public by novels of his own, he should seize the
occasion to shine at the expense of the authors whom he is supposed
to be criticizing. I have done that often enough myself to have no
hesitation in attributing it as a natural impulse to other reviewers.
And when I read one of those reviews of one of my own novels, I address
the reviewer in imagination thus: “Young man, you have my sympathy.
It is a shame that you should have to spend your precious hours, which
should be dedicated to your own first novel, upon a book of mine in
which you are obviously not interested in the least. This is a hard
world for beginning novelists. But have patience--remember that some
of us have gone through the same mill. And besides--I am really not to
blame for your predicament. _I_ did not ask you to review my novel. And
it is not quite fair of you to punish me for it. I do not want to keep
you from writing your novels; all I want is the privilege of writing
my own--a privilege which you seem to wish to take away from me. All
right--you’ll get a taste of your own medicine some day! Who do you
think is going to review that great book of yours when you do write
it? Several dozen young men who want to write their own books, and who
will consider your novel merely one more affliction to be impatiently
suffered. Then you’ll see how it feels!”
The reviewing of books, regardless of the quality of the books, is
likely to be for the young critic an agony that, to be endured, must be
mitigated by some opportunity for presenting _himself_ to the public.
That’s all right: if the book is not, in some sense, about himself,
he has no business to be reading it; and if it _is_ about himself--as
the most interesting novels are--he is quite right in saying so. The
most entertaining, if not always the most informative, reviews are
accounts of “the adventures of a soul among masterpieces”. But accounts
of the misadventures of a soul among books that are not felt to be
masterpieces can be very dreary and very offensive reading. If a book
makes the critic angry, that is something; but if it merely bores him,
why should he trouble to tell us so? A history of a critic’s boredom
is itself a bore; and the critic who is bored by almost everything in
the world lacks the essential ingredient of the critical faculty--a
sensitiveness so acute that the critic can become excited over things
which other people are too dull to notice for themselves. A habitual
falling back upon the critic’s own experiences may or may not be a sign
of æsthetic boredom; it all depends on whether the “I” thus placed
in the foreground is relevant to the literary topic nominally under
discussion. Every young newspaper man has tried the trick of handing
the city editor a story of his failure to get an interview, instead of
the interview. But no newspaper man has yet had the nerve to hand in
a story of how he preferred to sit in the park and watch the pigeons
rather than talk to the man he was sent to interview. A good deal of
“brilliant” “young” “criticism” is like that.
But while there are many excuses to be made for bad manners in the
young critic to whom book reviewing is an unwelcome chore, these
excuses scarcely apply to the established novelist, who is presumably
not reviewing books to keep the wolf from the door. The only good
reason for one novelist’s reviewing a book by another is a genuine
desire to say something about it. And he is dealing here with an equal
whom he is under every obligation of civilized human intercourse to
treat with courtesy.
I have already given an instance of my own failure to behave according
to these standards, so I shall take the liberty of mentioning a similar
failure on the part of another. One would not need to look far for
instances. But as a most glaring example, I post up for consideration
some excerpts from a review by a prominent American woman novelist,
whom I prefer not to name here; though for purposes of incredulous
reference I don’t mind stating that the review appeared in the initial
number of “The Literary Digest International Book Review.”
I have always found ---- peculiarly interesting, for the reason
that she is one of the few women writers of fiction with intellect
as well as talent; and it has diverted me to speculate on what
she would have been if she had married and had a brood of
flesh-and-blood children, or if she had elected to study life and
men at first hand after the manner of Georges Sand and other gifted
ladies rather more discreet but no less thorough....
As I have intimated before, I have often wondered how Miss ----
would have treated sex, if, instead of being a woman of impeccable
virtue, she had chosen to be a _dame gallante_. Writers of
first-hand experience with the vital, but nevertheless commonplace,
facts of life, generally avoid erotic scenes, partly because a
suggestion and an appeal to the reader’s imagination is more
esthetic, partly because, their own curiosity satisfied, they have
no repressions or inhibitions to gratify in the act of writing.
The creative faculty takes a wider range. Sex plays its part in
their work as in Life. It is a mighty force, but it is not the
whole thing. Therefore, I do not hesitate to believe that if Miss
---- were as adventurous personally as she is imaginatively, her
striking talent would have a freer sweep....
Enough!
I see that I am a member of the older generation after all. But not
in my wildest youthful days as a critic would I have considered it
decent to taunt a woman novelist with her presumed virginity--or a man
novelist, either, for that matter! When criticism opens its gates
to such personal gossip as this about living writers, anything is
possible--all standards of critical propriety are destroyed--there is
no longer any protection for writers from the vulgar curiosity of a
public less interested in literature than in “life”. And what will it
all lead to, I ask, but red ruin and the breaking up of homes?
There are, as I can call to mind, a number of quaint facts alleged
about the private lives of certain prominent contemporary writers,
American as well as English; and speculations as to whether, if these
facts had been otherwise, the prose or the poetry of these writers
would be better or worse--such speculations would doubtless be more
interesting to the general reader, trained in Sunday Supplement taste,
than what has heretofore passed for criticism. Are we to expect this
sort of thing? I hope not!
_Zona Gale_
As a person, Zona Gale is thoroughly entertaining in two distinct
moods. At one moment she speaks with the accents of “Pollyanna”, the
next with those of her own “Grandma Bett”. She is slight, delicate,
pretty, shy but firm. She is quiet in her gestures and her voice
is soft. She will allow herself the great pleasure of an emotional
experience such as helping a crippled boy to write, and finding in
him something which is, presumably, quite beyond his actual talents.
Yet she has a dry, detached manner of viewing life. While she has
forced herself to believe that life is sweet and beautiful, her work
often shows that she knows better than that. She was born in Portage,
Wisconsin, and she has lived there most of her life, except while she
was at the University of Wisconsin, and in New York City working on a
newspaper. She is eager, ambitious, sympathetic. She has the ability to
dramatize the optimistic side of events. She is the type that champions
pacifism avidly and has principles about kindness to animals. She
worked night and day in New York until she had succeeded in gaining
the attention of various editors for her poems and short stories.
She then returned to Wisconsin, where she remains. Occasionally she
arrives suddenly in town, sees her friends, produces a play (there
are two waiting in the Broadway offing now), indulges in a round
of gaieties, then turns again to the native state and her charming
mother. Her earlier books betrayed her most sentimental mood. “Miss
Lulu Bett” and “Birth” show her at her truest. Perhaps she has been
too cloistered ever to go beyond mild cynicism and surface realism.
When she characterizes, she rings true, but when her characters
require great emotional experience she finds herself at a loss. A
writer of distinction, she has yet reached no stable ground. She is
an artist only in part. Perhaps she is too much the woman to be the
uncompromising craftsman.