To-day we called each other by our given names for the first time.
Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps it will
not be out of place if I tell you a little about him. There are not many
of his kind.
In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We are both agreed that
many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the sorry
leanness of our writing men. We have no Chestertons, no Bellocs. I look
to Don Marquis, to H.L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, to Clayton Hamilton,
and to my friend here portraited, to remedy this. If only Mr. Simeon
Strunsky were stouter! He is plump, but not yet properly corpulent.
My friend is a literary journalist. There are but few of them in these
parts. Force of circumstances may compel him to write of trivial things,
but it would be impossible for him not to write with beauty and
distinction far above his theme. His style is a perfect echo of his
person, mellow, quaint, and richly original. To plunder a phrase of his
own, it is drenched with the sounds, the scents, the colours, of great
literature.
I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publishing business, and try to
bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But what I love
(I use this great word with care) in my friend is that his zeal for
beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh utterly the paltry
considerations of expediency and comfort which sway most of us. To him
his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to the surgeon. He would rather die
than dishonour that chosen instrument.
I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case of my friend has taken in
my mind a large importance quite beyond the exigencies of his personal
situation. I see in him personified the rising generation of literary
critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a deliterated democracy. By some
unknowable miracle of birth or training he has come by a love of beauty,
a reverence for what is fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the
slipshod and insincere.
Such a man is not happy, can never be happy, when the course of his
daily routine wishes him to praise what he does not admire, to exploit
what he does not respect. The most of us have some way of quibbling
ourselves out of this dilemma. But he cannot do so, because more than
comfort, more than clothes and shoe leather, more than wife or
fireside, he must preserve the critic's self-respect. "I cannot write a
publicity story about A.B," he said woefully to me, "because I am
convinced he is a bogus philosopher. I am not interested in selling
books: what I have to do with is that strange and esoteric thing called
literature."
I would be sorry to have it thought that because of this devotion to
high things my friend is stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to work with. He is
unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; in absent-minded
simplicity he has issued forth upon the highway only half-clad, and been
haled back to his boudoir by indignant bluecoats; but in all matters
where absolute devotion to truth and honour are concerned I would not
find him lacking. Wherever a love of beauty and a ripened judgment of
men and books are a business asset, he is a successful business man.
In person, he has the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His shyly
wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant devotion to
cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on topics that
confound the unlettered--these are amiable trifles that endear him to
those who understand.
Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the crass worship of comfort
and ease, here is a man whose ideal is to write essays in resounding
English, and to spread a little wider his love of the niceties of fine
prose.
I have anatomized him but crudely. If you want to catch him in a weak
spot, try him on Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite couplet;
And the men who were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.
Indeed let us hope that they will.