At first glance the flood of moral literature now upon us--s

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DEFINITIONS

ESSAYS IN CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM

BY

HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, Ph.D.

Editor of _The Literary Review_ of _The New York Evening Post_, and a

member of the English Department of Yale University.

NEW YORK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of _The Atlantic

Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The Century Magazine, The Literary

Review of The New York Evening Post, The Bookman, The Nation, and

The North American Review_ for permission to reprint such of

these essays as have appeared in their columns.

PREFACE

The unity of this book is to be sought in the point of view of the

writer rather than in a sequence of chapters developing a single

theme and arriving at categorical conclusions. Literature in a

civilization like ours, which is trying to be both sophisticated

and democratic at the same moment of time, has so many sources and

so many manifestations, is so much involved with our social

background, and is so much a question of life as well as of art,

that many doors have to be opened before one begins to approach an

understanding. The method of informal definition which I have

followed in all these essays is an attempt to open doors through

which both writer and reader may enter into a better comprehension

of what novelists, poets, and critics have done or are trying to

accomplish. More than an entrance upon many a vexed controversy

and hidden meaning I cannot expect to have achieved in this book;

but where the door would not swing wide I have at least tried to

put one foot in the crack. The sympathetic reader may find his own

way further; or may be stirred by my endeavor to a deeper

appreciation, interest, and insight. That is my hope.

New York, April, 1922.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I. ON FICTION

SENTIMENTAL AMERICA

FREE FICTION

A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION TOWARD FICTION

THE ESSENCE OF POPULARITY

II. ON THE AMERICAN TRADITION

THE AMERICAN TRADITION

BACK TO NATURE

THANKS TO THE ARTISTS

TO-DAY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: ADDRESSED TO THE BRITISH TIME'S MIRROR

THE FAMILY MAGAZINE

III. THE NEW GENERATION

THE YOUNG ROMANTICS

PURITANS ALL

THE OLDER GENERATION

A LITERATURE OF PROTEST

BARBARIANS A LA MODE

IV. THE REVIEWING OF BOOKS

A PROSPECTUS FOR CRITICISM

THE RACE OF REVIEWERS

THE SINS OF REVIEWING

MRS. WHARTON'S "THE AGE OF INNOCENCE"

MR. HERGESHEIMER'S "CYTHEREA"

V. PHILISTINES AND DILETTANTE

POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL EYE, EAR, AND MIND

OUT WITH THE DILETTANTE

FLAT PROSE

VI. MEN AND THEIR BOOKS

CONRAD AND MELVILLE

THE NOVELIST OF PITY

HENRY JAMES THE SATIRIC

RAGE OF BUTLER

CONCLUSION

DEFINING THE INDEFINABLE

I

ON FICTION

SENTIMENTAL AMERICA

The Oriental may be inscrutable, but he is no more puzzling than

the average American. We admit that we are hard, keen, practical,

--the adjectives that every casual European applies to us,--and yet

any book-store window or railway news-stand will show that we

prefer sentimental magazines and books. Why should a hard race--if

we are hard--read soft books?

By soft books, by sentimental books, I do not mean only the kind

of literature best described by the word "squashy." I doubt

whether we write or read more novels and short stories of the

tear-dripped or hyper-emotional variety than other nations.

Germany is--or was--full of such soft stuff. It is highly popular

in France, although the excellent taste of French criticism keeps

it in check. Italian popular literature exudes sentiment; and the

sale of "squashy" fiction in England is said to be threatened only

by an occasional importation of an American "best-seller." We have

no bad eminence here. Sentimentalists with enlarged hearts are

international in habitat, although, it must be admitted,

especially popular in America.

When a critic, after a course in American novels and magazines,

declares that life, as it appears on the printed page here, is

fundamentally sentimentalized, he goes much deeper than

"mushiness" with his charge. He means, I think, that there is an

alarming tendency in American fiction to dodge the facts of life--

or to pervert them. He means that in most popular books only red-

blooded, optimistic people are welcome. He means that material

success, physical soundness, and the gratification of the emotions

have the right of way. He means that men and women (except the

comic figures) shall be presented, not as they are, but as we

should like to have them, according to a judgment tempered by

nothing more searching than our experience with an unusually

comfortable, safe, and prosperous mode of living. Every one

succeeds in American plays and stories--if not by good thinking,

why then by good looks or good luck. A curious society the

research student of a later date might make of it--an upper world

of the colorless successful, illustrated by chance-saved collar

advertisements and magazine covers; an underworld of grotesque

scamps, clowns, and hyphenates drawn from the comic supplement;

and all--red-blooded hero and modern gargoyle alike--always in

good humor.

I am not touching in this picture merely to attack it. It has been

abundantly attacked; what it needs is definition. For there is

much in this bourgeois, good-humored American literature of ours

which rings true, which is as honest an expression of our

individuality as was the more austere product of antebellum New

England. If American sentimentality does invite criticism,

American sentiment deserves defense.

Sentiment--the response of the emotions to the appeal of human

nature--is cheap, but so are many other good things. The best of

the ancients were rich in it. Homer's chieftains wept easily. So

did Shakespeare's heroes. Adam and Eve shed "some natural tears"

when they left the Paradise which Milton imagined for them. A

heart accessible to pathos, to natural beauty, to religion, was a

chief requisite for the protagonist of Victorian literature. Even

Becky Sharp was touched--once--by Amelia's moving distress.

Americans, to be sure, do not weep easily; but if they make

equivalent responses to sentiment, that should not be held against

them. If we like "sweet" stories, or "strong"--which means

emotional--stories, our taste is not thereby proved to be

hopeless, or our national character bad. It is better to be

creatures of even sentimental sentiment with the author of "The

Rosary," than to see the world _only_ as it is portrayed by the pens

of Bernard Shaw and Anatole France. The first is deplorable; the

second is dangerous. I should deeply regret the day when a simple

story of honest American manhood winning a million and a sparkling,

piquant sweetheart lost all power to lull my critical faculty and warm

my heart. I doubt whether any literature has ever had too much of

honest sentiment.

Good Heavens! Because some among us insist that the mystic rose of

the emotions shall be painted a brighter pink than nature allows,

are the rest to forego glamour? Or because, to view the matter

differently, psychology has shown what happens in the brain when a

man falls in love, and anthropology has traced marriage to a care

for property rights, are we to suspect the idyllic in literature

wherever we find it? Life is full of the idyllic; and no

anthropologist will ever persuade the reasonably romantic youth

that the sweet and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle

reverence with desire for the object of his affections, is nothing

but an idealized property sense. Origins explain very little,

after all. The bilious critics of sentiment in literature have not

even honest science behind them.

I have no quarrel with traffickers in simple emotion--with such

writers as James Lane Allen and James Whitcomb Riley, for example.

But the average American is not content with such sentiment as

theirs. He wishes a more intoxicating brew, he desires to be

persuaded that, once you step beyond your own experience, feeling

rules the world. He wishes--I judge by what he reads--to make

sentiment at least ninety per cent efficient, even if a dream-

America, superficially resemblant to the real, but far different

in tone, must be created by the obedient writer in order to

satisfy him. His sentiment has frequently to be sentimentalized

before he will pay for it. And to this fault, which he shares with

other modern races, he adds the other heinous sin of

sentimentalism, the refusal to face the facts.

This sentimentalizing of reality is far more dangerous than the

romantic sentimentalizing of the "squashy" variety. It is to be

found in sex-stories which carefully observe decency of word and

deed, where the conclusion is always in accord with conventional

morality, yet whose characters are clearly immoral, indecent, and

would so display themselves if the tale were truly told. It is to

be found in stories of "big business" where trickery and rascality

are made virtuous at the end by sentimental baptism. If I choose

for the hero of my novel a director in an American trust; if I

make him an accomplice in certain acts of ruthless economic

tyranny; if I make it clear that at first he is merely subservient

to a stronger will; and that the acts he approves are in complete

disaccord with his private moral code--why then, if the facts

should be dragged to the light, if he is made to realize the exact

nature of his career, how can I end my story? It is evident that

my hero possesses little insight and less firmness of character.

He is not a hero; he is merely a tool. In, let us say, eight cases

out of ten, his curve is already plotted. It leads downward--not

necessarily along the villain's path, but toward moral

insignificance.

And yet, I cannot end my story that way for Americans. There _must_ be

a grand moral revolt. There must be resistance, triumph, and not only

spiritual, but also financial recovery. And this, likewise, is

sentimentality. Even Booth Tarkington, in his excellent "Turmoil," had

to dodge the logical issue of his story; had to make his hero exchange

a practical literary idealism for a very impractical, even though a

commercial, utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful at

the end of the book. A story such as the Danish Nexo's "Pelle the

Conqueror," where pathos and the idyllic, each intense, each

beautiful, are made convincing by an undeviating truth to experience,

would seem to be almost impossible of production just now in America.

It is not enough to rail at this false fiction. The chief duty of

criticism is to explain. The best corrective of bad writing is a

knowledge of why it is bad. We get the fiction we deserve,

precisely as we get the government we deserve--or perhaps, in each

case, a little better. Why are we sentimental? When that question

is answered, it is easier to understand the defects and the

virtues of American fiction. And the answer lies in the

traditional American philosophy of life.

To say that the American is an idealist is to commit a

thoroughgoing platitude. Like most platitudes, the statement is

annoying because from one point of view it is indisputably just,

while from another it does not seem to fit the facts. With regard

to our tradition, it is indisputable. Of the immigrants who since

the seventeenth century have been pouring into this continent a

proportion large in number, larger still in influence, has been

possessed of motives which in part at least were idealistic. If it

was not the desire for religious freedom that urged them, it was

the desire for personal freedom; if not political liberty, why

then economic liberty (for this too is idealism), and the

opportunity to raise the standard of life. And of course all these

motives were strongest in that earlier immigration which has done

most to fix the state of mind and body which we call being

American. I need not labor the argument. Our political and social

history support it; our best literature demonstrates it, for no

men have been more idealistic than the American writers whom we

have consented to call great. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne,

Whitman--was idealism ever more thoroughly incarnate than in them?

And this idealism--to risk again a platitude--has been in the air of

America. It has permeated our religious sects, and created

several of them. It has given tone to our thinking, and even more

to our feeling. I do not say that it has always, or even usually,

determined our actions, although the Civil War is proof of its

power. Again and again it has gone aground roughly when the ideal

met a condition of living--a fact that will provide the

explanation for which I seek. But optimism, "boosting," muck-

raking (not all of its manifestations are pretty), social service,

religious, municipal, democratic reform, indeed the "uplift"

generally, is evidence of the vigor, the bumptiousness of the

inherited American tendency to pursue the ideal. No one can doubt

that in 1918 we believed, at least, in idealism.

Nevertheless, so far as the average individual is concerned, with

just his share and no more of the race-tendency, this idealism

has been suppressed, and in some measure perverted. It is this

which explains, I think, American sentimentalism.

Consider, for example, the ethics of conventional American

society. The American ethical tradition is perfectly definite and

tremendously powerful. It belongs, furthermore, to a population

far larger than the "old American" stock, for it has been

laboriously inculcated in our schools and churches, and

impressively driven home by newspaper, magazine, and book. I shall

not presume to analyze it save where it touches literature. There

it maintains a definite attitude toward all sex-problems: the

Victorian, which is not necessarily, or even probably, a bad one.

Man should be chaste, and proud of his chastity. Woman must be so.

It is the ethical duty of the American to hate, or at least to

despise, all deviations, and to pretend--for the greater prestige

of the law--that such sinning is exceptional, at least in America.

And this is the public morality he believes in, whatever may be

his private experience in actual living. In business, it is the

ethical tradition of the American, inherited from a rigorous

Protestant morality, to be square, to play the game without

trickery, to fight hard but never meanly. Over-reaching is

justifiable when the other fellow has equal opportunities to be

"smart"; lying, tyranny--never. And though the opposites of all

these laudable practices come to pass, he must frown on them in

public, deny their rightness even to the last cock-crow--

especially in the public press.

American political history is a long record of idealistic

tendencies toward democracy working painfully through a net of

graft, pettiness, sectionalism, and bravado, with constant

disappointment for the idealist who believes, traditionally, in

the intelligence of the crowd. American social history is a

glaring instance of how the theory of equal dignity for all men

can entangle itself with caste distinctions, snobbery, and the

power of wealth. American economic history betrays the pioneer

helping to kick down the ladder which he himself had raised toward

equal opportunity for all. American literary history--especially

contemporary literary history--reflects the result of all this for

the American mind. The sentimental in our literature is a direct

consequence.

The disease is easily acquired. Mr. Smith, a broker, finds himself

in an environment of "schemes" and "deals" in which the quality of

mercy is strained, and the wind is decidedly not tempered to the

shorn lamb. After all, business is business. He shrugs his

shoulders and takes his part. But his unexpended fund of native

idealism--if, as is most probable, he has his share--seeks its

due satisfaction. He cannot use it in business; so he takes it out

in a novel or a play where, quite contrary to his observed

experience, ordinary people like himself act nobly, with a success

that is all the more agreeable for being unexpected. His wife, a

woman with strange stirrings about her heart, with motions toward

beauty, and desires for a significant life and rich, satisfying

experience, exists in day-long pettiness, gossips, frivols,

scolds, with money enough to do what she pleases, and nothing

vital to do. She also relieves her pent-up idealism in plays or

books--in high-wrought, "strong" novels, not in adventures in

society such as the kitchen admires, but in stories with violent

moral and emotional crises, whose characters, no matter how

unlifelike, have "strong" thoughts, and make vital decisions;

succeed or fail significantly. Her brother, the head of a

wholesale dry-goods firm, listens to the stories the drummers

bring home of night life on the road, laughs, says to himself

regretfully that the world has to be like that; and then, in

logical reaction, demands purity and nothing but aggressive purity

in the books of the public library.

The hard man goes in for philanthropy (never before so frequently

as in America); the one-time "boss" takes to picture-collecting;

the railroad wrecker gathers rare editions of the Bible; and tens

of thousands of humbler Americans carry their inherited idealism

into the necessarily sordid experiences of life in an imperfectly

organized country, suppress it for fear of being thought "cranky"

or "soft," and then, in their imagination and all that feeds their

imagination, give it vent. You may watch the process any evening

at the "movies" or the melodrama, on the trolley-car or in the

easy chair at home.

This philosophy of living which I have called American idealism

is in its own nature sound, as is proved in a hundred directions

where it has had full play. Suppressed idealism, like any other

suppressed desire, becomes unsound. And here lies the ultimate

cause of the taste for sentimentalism in the American _bourgeoisie._

An undue insistence upon happy endings, regardless of the premises of

the story, and a craving for optimism everywhere, anyhow, are sure

signs of a "morbid complex," and to be compared with some justice to

the craving for drugs in an alcoholic deprived of liquor. No one can

doubt the effect of the suppression by the Puritan discipline of that

instinctive love of pleasure and liberal experience common to us all.

Its unhealthy reaction is visible in every old American community. No

one who faces the facts can deny the result of the suppression by

commercial, bourgeois, prosperous America of our native idealism.

The student of society may find its dire effects in politics, in

religion, and in social intercourse. The critic cannot overlook

them in literature; for it is in the realm of the imagination that

idealism, direct or perverted, does its best or its worst.

Sentiment is not perverted idealism. Sentiment _is_ idealism,

of a mild and not too masculine variety. If it has sins, they are

sins of omission, not commission. Our fondness for sentiment

proves that our idealism, if a little loose in the waist-band and

puffy in the cheeks, is still hearty, still capable of active

mobilization, like those comfortable French husbands whose plump

and smiling faces, careless of glory, careless of everything but

thrift and good living, one used to see figured on a page whose

superscription read, "Dead on the field of honor."

The novels, the plays, the short stories, of sentiment may prefer

sweetness, perhaps, to truth, the feminine to the masculine

virtues, but we waste ammunition in attacking them. There never

was, I suppose, a great literature of sentiment, for not even "The

Sentimental Journey" is truly great. But no one can make a diet

exclusively of "noble" literature; the charming has its own cozy

corner across from the tragic (and a much bigger corner at that).

Our uncounted amorists of tail-piece song and illustrated story

provide the readiest means of escape from the somewhat uninspiring

life that most men and women are living just now in America.

The sentimental, however,--whether because of an excess of

sentiment softening into "slush," or of a morbid optimism, or of a

weak-eyed distortion of the facts of life,--is perverted. It needs

to be cured, and its cure is more truth. But this cure, I very

much fear, is not entirely, or even chiefly, in the power of the

"regular practitioner," the honest writer. He can be honest; but

if he is much more honest than his readers, they will not read

him. As Professor Lounsbury once said, a language grows corrupt

only when its speakers grow corrupt, and mends, strengthens, and

becomes pure with them. So with literature. We shall have less

sentimentality in American literature when our accumulated store

of idealism disappears in a laxer generation; or when it finds due

vent in a more responsible, less narrow, less monotonously

prosperous life than is lived by the average reader of fiction in

America. I would rather see our literary taste damned forever than

have the first alternative become--as it has not yet--a fact. The

second, in these years rests upon the knees of the gods.

All this must not be taken in too absolute a sense. There are

medicines, and good ones, in the hands of writers and of critics,

to abate, if not to heal, this plague of sentimentalism. I have

stated ultimate causes only. They are enough to keep the mass of

Americans reading sentimentalized fiction until some fundamental

change has come, not strong enough to hold back the van of

American writing, which is steadily moving toward restraint,

sanity, and truth. Every honest composition is a step forward in

the cause; and every clear-minded criticism.

But one must doubt the efficacy, and one must doubt the

healthiness, of reaction into cynicism and sophisticated

cleverness. There are curious signs, especially in what we may

call the literature of New York, of a growing sophistication that

sneers at sentiment and the sentimental alike. "Magazines of

cleverness" have this for their keynote, although as yet the

satire is not always well aimed. There are abundant signs that the

generation just coming forward will rejoice in such a pose. It is

observable now in the colleges, where the young literati turn up

their noses at everything American,--magazines, best-sellers, or

one-hundred-night plays,--and resort for inspiration to the

English school of anti-Victorians: to Remy de Gourmont, to Anatole

France. Their pose is not altogether to be blamed, and the men to

whom they resort are models of much that is admirable; but there

is little promise for American literature in exotic imitation. To

see ourselves prevailingly as others see us may be good for

modesty, but does not lead to a self-confident native art. And it

is a dangerous way for Americans to travel. We cannot afford such

sophistication yet. The English wits experimented with cynicism in

the court of Charles II, laughed at blundering Puritan morality,

laughed at country manners, and were whiffed away because the

ideals they laughed at were better than their own. Idealism is not

funny, however censurable its excesses. As a race we have too much

sentiment to be frightened out of the sentimental by a blase

cynicism.

At first glance the flood of moral literature now upon us--social-

conscience stories, scientific plays, platitudinous "moralities"

that tell us how to live--may seem to be another protest against

sentimentalism. And that the French and English examples have been

so warmly welcomed here may seem another indication of a reaction

on our part. I refer especially to "hard" stories, full of

vengeful wrath, full of warnings for the race that dodges the

facts of life. H. G. Wells is the great exemplar, with his

sociological studies wrapped in description and tied with a plot.

In a sense, such stories are certainly to be regarded as a protest

against truth-dodging, against cheap optimism, against "slacking,"

whether in literature or in life. But it would be equally just to

call them another result of suppressed idealism, and to regard

their popularity in America as proof of the argument which I have

advanced in this essay. Excessively didactic literature is often a

little unhealthy. In fresh periods, when life runs strong and both

ideals and passions find ready issue into life, literature has no

burdensome moral to carry. It digests its moral. Homer digested

his morals. They transfuse his epics. So did Shakespeare.

Not so with the writers of the social-conscience school. They are

in a rage over wicked, wasteful man. Their novels are bursted

notebooks--sometimes neat and orderly notebooks, like Mr.

Galsworthy's or our own Ernest Poole's, sometimes haphazard ones,

like those of Mr. Wells, but always explosive with reform. These

gentlemen know very well what they are about, especially Mr.

Wells, the lesser artist, perhaps, as compared with Galsworthy,

but the shrewder and possibly the greater man. The very

sentimentalists, who go to novels to exercise the idealism which

they cannot use in life, will read these unsentimental stories,

although their lazy impulses would never spur them on toward any

truth not sweetened by a tale.

And yet, one feels that the social attack might have been more

convincing if free from its compulsory service to fiction; that

these novels and plays might have been better literature if the

authors did not study life in order that they might be better able

to preach. Wells and Galsworthy also have suffered from suppressed

idealism, although it would be unfair to say that perversion was

the result. So have our muck-rakers, who, very characteristically,

exhibit the disorder in a more complex and a much more serious

form, since to a distortion of facts they have often enough added

hypocrisy and commercialism. It is part of the price we pay for

being sentimental.

If I am correct in my analysis, we are suffering here in America,

not from a plague of bad taste merely, nor only from a lack of

real education among our myriads of readers, nor from decadence--

least of all, this last. It is a disease of our own particular

virtue which has infected us--idealism, suppressed and perverted.

A less commercial, more responsible America, perhaps a less

prosperous and more spiritual America, will hold fast to its

sentiment, but be weaned from its sentimentality.

FREE FICTION

What impresses me most in the contemporary short story as I find

it in American magazines, is its curious sophistication. Its bloom

is gone. I have read through dozens of periodicals without finding

one with fresh feeling and the easy touch of the writer who writes

because his story urges him. And when with relief I do encounter a

narrative that is not conventional in structure and mechanical in

its effects, the name of the author is almost invariably that of a

newcomer, or of one of our few uncorrupted masters of the art.

Still more remarkable, the good short stories that I meet with in

my reading are the trivial ones,--the sketchy, the anecdotal, the

merely adventurous or merely picturesque; as they mount toward

literature they seem to increase in artificiality and constraint;

when they propose to interpret life they become machines, and

nothing more, for the discharge of sensation, sentiment, or

romance. And this is true, so far as I can discover, of the

stories which most critics and more editors believe to be

successful, the stories which are most characteristic of magazine

narrative and of the output of American fiction in our times.

I can take my text from any magazine, from the most literary to

the least. In the stories selected by all of them I find the

resemblances greater than the differences, and the latter seldom

amount to more than a greater or a less excellence of workmanship

and style. The "literary" magazines, it is true, more frequently

surprise one by a story told with original and consummate art; but

then the "popular" magazines balance this merit by their more

frequent escape from mere prettiness. In both kinds, the majority

of the stories come from the same mill, even though the minds that

shape them may differ in refinement and in taste. Their range is

narrow, and, what is more damning, their art seems constantly to

verge upon artificiality.

These made-to-order stories (and this is certainly not too strong

a term for the majority of them) are not interesting to a critical

reader. He sticks to the novel, or, more frequently, goes to

France, to Russia, or to England for his fiction, as the sales-

list of any progressive publisher will show. And I do not believe

that they are deeply interesting to an uncritical reader. He reads

them to pass the time; and, to judge from the magazines

themselves, gives his more serious attention to the "write-ups" of

politics, current events, new discoveries, and men in the public

eye,--to reality, in other words, written as if it were fiction,

and more interesting than the fiction that accompanies it,

because, in spite of its enlivening garb, it is guaranteed by

writer and editor to be true. I am not impressed by the perfervid

letters published by the editor in praise of somebody's story as a

"soul-cure," or the greatest of the decade. They were written, I

suppose, but they are not typical. They do not insult the

intelligence as do the ridiculous puffs which it is now the

fashion to place like a sickly limelight at the head of a story;

but they do not convince me of the story's success with the

public. Actually, men and women, discussing these magazines,

seldom speak of the stories. They have been interested,--in a

measure. The "formula," as I shall show later, is bound to get

that result. But they have dismissed the characters and forgotten

the plots.

I do not deny that this supposedly successful short story is easy

to read. It is--fatally easy. And here precisely is the trouble.

To borrow a term from dramatic criticism, it is "well made," and

that is what makes it so thin, so bloodless, and so unprofitable

to remember, in spite of its easy narrative and its "punch." Its

success as literature, curiously enough for a new literature and a

new race like ours, is limited, not by crudity, or

inexpressiveness, but by form, by the very rigidity of its

carefully perfected form. Like other patent medicines, it is

constructed by formula.

It is not difficult to construct an outline of the "formula" by

which thousands of current narratives are being whipped into

shape. Indeed, by turning to the nearest textbook on "Selling the

Short Story," I could find one ready-made. (There could be no

clearer symptom of the disease I wish to diagnose than these many

"practical" textbooks, with their over-emphasis upon technique and

their under-estimate of all else that makes literature.) The story

_must_ begin, it appears, with action or with dialogue. A mother packs

her son's trunk while she gives him unheeded advice mingled with

questions about shirts and socks; a corrupt and infuriated director

pounds on the mahogany table at his board meeting, and curses the

honest fool (hero of the story) who has got in his way; or, "'Where

did Mary Worden get that curious gown?' inquired Mrs. Van Deming,

glancing across the sparkling glass and silver of the hotel terrace."

Any one of these will serve as instance of the break-neck beginning

which Kipling made obligatory. Once started, the narrative must move,

move, move furiously, each action and every speech pointing directly

toward the unknown climax. A pause is a confession of weakness. This

Poe taught for a special kind of story; and this a later generation,

with a servility which would have amazed that sturdy fighter,

requires of all narrative. Then the climax, which must neatly,

quickly, and definitely end the action for all time, either by a

solution you have been urged to hope for by the wily author in

every preceding paragraph, or in a way which is logically correct

but never, never suspected. O. Henry is responsible for the vogue

of the latter of these two alternatives,--and the strain of living

up to his inventiveness has been frightful. Finally comes a last

suspiration, usually in the advertising pages. Sometimes it is a

beautiful descriptive sentence charged with sentiment, sometimes a

smart epigram, according to the style of story, or the "line"

expected of the author. Try this, as the advertisements say, on

your favorite magazine. This formula, with variations which

readers can supply for themselves or draw from textbooks on the

short story, is not a wholly bad method of writing fiction. It is,

I venture to assert, a very good one,--if you desire merely

effective story-telling. It is probably the best way of making the

short story a thoroughly efficient tool for the presentation of

modern life. And there lies, I believe, the whole trouble. The

short story, its course plotted and its form prescribed, has

become too efficient. Now efficiency is all that we ask of a

railroad, efficiency is half at least of what we ask of

journalism; but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the

least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature.

In order to make the short story efficient, the dialogue, the

setting, the plot, the character development, have been squeezed

and whittled and moulded until the means of telling the story fit

the ends of the story-telling as neatly as hook fits eye. As one

writer on how to manufacture short stories tells us in discussing

character development, the aspirant must--

"Eliminate every trait or deed which does not help peculiarly to

make the character's part in the particular story either

intelligible or open to such sympathy as it merits;

"Paint in only the 'high lights,' that is...never qualify or

elaborate a trait or episode, merely for the sake of preserving

the effect of the character's full reality." And thus the story

is to be subdued to the service of the climax as the body of man

to his brain. But what these writers upon the short story do not

tell us is that efficiency of this order works backward as well as

forward. If means are to correspond with ends, why then ends must

be adjusted to means. Not only must the devices of the story-

teller be directed with sincerity toward the tremendous effect he

wishes to make with his climax upon you and me, his readers; but

the interesting life which it is or should be his purpose to write

about for our delectation must be maneuvered, or must be chosen or

rejected, not according to the limitation which small space

imposes, but with its suitability to the "formula" in mind. In

brief, if we are to have complete efficiency, the right kind of

life and no other must be put into the short-story hopper. Nothing

which cannot be told rapidly must be dropped in, lest it clog the

smoothly spinning wheels. If it is a story of slowly developing

incongruity in married life, the action must be speeded beyond

probability, like a film in the moving pictures, before it is

ready to be made into a short story. If it is a tale of

disillusionment on a prairie farm, with the world and life

flattening out together, some sharp climax must be provided

nevertheless, because that is the only way in which to tell a

story. Indeed it is easy to see the dangers which arise from

sacrificing truth to a formula in the interests of efficiency.

This is the limitation by form; the limitation by subject is quite

as annoying. American writers from Poe down have been fertile in

plots. Especially since O. Henry took the place of Kipling as a

literary master, ingenuity, inventiveness, cleverness in its

American sense, have been squandered upon the short story. But

plots do not make variety. Themes make variety. Human nature

regarded in its multitudinous phases makes variety. There are only

a few themes in current American short stories,--the sentimental

theme from which breed ten thousand narratives; the theme of

intellectual analysis and of moral psychology favored by the

"literary" magazines; the "big-business" theme; the theme of

American effrontery; the social-contrast theme; the theme of

successful crime. Add a few more, and you will have them all. Read

a hundred examples, and you will see how infallibly the authors--

always excepting our few masters--limit themselves to conventional

aspects of even these conventional themes. Reflect, and you will

see how the first--the theme of sentiment--has overflowed its

banks and washed over all the rest, so that, whatever else a story

may be, it must somewhere, somehow, make the honest American heart

beat more softly.

There is an obvious cause for this in the taste of the American

public, which I do not propose to neglect. But here too we are in

the grip of the "formula," of the idea that there is only one way

to construct a short story--a swift succession of climaxes rising

precipitously to a giddy eminence. For the formula is rigid, not

plastic as life is plastic. It fails to grasp innumerable stories

which break the surface of American life day by day and disappear

uncaught. Stories of quiet homely life, events significant for

themselves that never reach a burning climax, situations that end

in irony, or doubt, or aspiration, it mars in the telling. The

method which makes story-telling easy, itself limits our variety.

Nothing brings home the artificiality and the narrowness of this

American fiction so clearly as a comparison, for better and for

worse, with the Russian short story. I have in mind the works of

Anton Tchekoff, whose short stories have now been translated into

excellent English. Fresh from a reading of these books, one feels,

it is true, quite as inclined to criticize as to praise. Why are

the characters therein depicted so persistently disagreeable, even

in the lighter stories? Why are the women always freckled, the men

predominantly red and watery in the eye? Why is the country so

flat, so foggy, so desolate; and why are the peasants so lumpish

and miserable? Russia before the Revolution could not have been so

dreary as this; the prevailing grimness must be due to some mental

obfuscation of her writers. I do not refer to the gloomy, powerful

realism of the stories of hopeless misery. There, if one

criticizes, it must be only the advisability of the choice of such

subjects. One does not doubt the truth of the picture. I mean the

needless dinginess of much of Russian fiction, and of many of

these powerful short stories.

Nevertheless, when one has said his worst, and particularly when

he has eliminated the dingier stories of the collection, he

returns with an admiration, almost passionate, to the truth, the

variety, above all to the freedom of these stories. I do not know

Russia or the Russians, and yet I am as sure of the absolute truth

of that unfortunate doctor in "La Cigale," who builds up his

heroic life of self-sacrifice while his wife seeks selfishly

elsewhere for a hero, as I am convinced of the essential

unreality, except in dialect and manners, of the detectives, the

"dope-fiends," the hard business men, the heroic boys and lovely

girls that people most American short stories. As for variety,--

the Russian does not handle numerous themes. He is obsessed with

the dreariness of life, and his obsession is only occasionally

lifted; he has no room to wander widely through human nature. And

yet his work gives an impression of variety that the American

magazine never attains. He is free to be various. When the mood of

gloom is off him, he experiments at will, and often with

consummate success. He seems to be sublimely unconscious that

readers are supposed to like only a few kinds of stories; and as

unaware of the taboo upon religious or reflective narrative as of

the prohibition upon the ugly in fiction. As life in any

manifestation becomes interesting in his eyes, his pen moves

freely. And so he makes life interesting in many varieties, even

when his Russian prepossessions lead him far away from our Western

moods.

Freedom. That is the word here, and also in his method of telling

these stories. No one seems to have said to Tchekoff, "Your

stories must move, move, move." Sometimes, indeed, he pauses

outright, as life pauses; sometimes he seems to turn aside, as

life turns aside before its progress is resumed. No one has ever

made clear to him that every word from the first of the story must

point unerringly toward the solution and the effect of the plot.

His paragraphs spring from the characters and the situation. They

are led on to the climax by the story itself. They do not drag the

panting reader down a rapid action, to fling him breathless upon

the "I told you so" of a conclusion prepared in advance.

I have in mind especially a story of Tchekoff's called "The Night

Before Easter." It is a very interesting story; it is a very

admirable story, conveying in a few pages much of Russian

spirituality and more of universal human nature; but I believe

that all, or nearly all, of our American magazines would refuse

it; not because it lacks picturesqueness, or narrative suspense,

or vivid characterization--all of these it has in large measure.

They would reject it because it does not seem to move rapidly, or

because it lacks a vigorous climax. The Goltva swollen in flood

lies under the Easter stars. As the monk Jerome ferries the

traveler over to where fire and cannon-shot and rocket announce

the rising of Christ to the riotous monastery, he asks, "Can you

tell me, kind master, why it is that even in the presence of great

happiness a man cannot forget his grief?" Deacon Nicholas is dead,

who alone in the monastery could write prayers that touched the

heart. And of them all, only Jerome read his "akaphists." "He used

to open the door of his cell and make me sit by him, and we used

to read....His face was compassionate and tender--" In the

monastery the countryside is crowding to hear the Easter service.

The choir sings "Lift up thine eyes, O Zion, and behold." But

Nicholas is dead, and there is none to penetrate the meaning of

the Easter canon, except Jerome who toils all night on the ferry

because they had forgotten him. In the morning, the traveler

recrosses the Goltva. Jerome is still on the ferry. He rests his

dim, timid eyes upon them all, and then fixes his gaze on the rosy

face of a merchant's wife. There is little of the man in that long

gaze. He is seeking in the woman's face the sweet and gentle

features of his lost friend.

The American editor refuses such a story. There is no plot here,

he says, and no "punch." He is wrong, although an imperfect

abstract like mine cannot convict him. For the narrative presents

an unforgettable portrait of wistful hero-worship, set in the dim

mists of a Russian river against the barbaric splendor of an

Easter midnight mass. To force a climax upon this poignant story

would be to spoil it. And when it appears, as it will, in reprint,

in some periodical anthology of current fiction, it will not fail

to impress American readers.

But the American editor must have a climax which drives home what

he thinks the public wants. If it is not true, so much the worse

for truth. If it falsifies the story, well, a lying story with a

"punch" is better than a true one that lacks a fire-spitting

climax. The audience which judge a play by the effect of its

"curtain," will not complain of a trifling illogicality in

narrative, or a little juggling with what might happen if the

story were life. Of what the editor wants I find a typical example

in a recent number of a popular magazine. The story is well

written; it is interesting until it begins to lie; moreover it is

"featured" as one of the best short stories of the year. An

American girl, brought up in luxury, has fed her heart with

romantic sentiment. The world is a Christmas tree. If you are good

and pretty and "nice," you have only to wait until you get big

enough to shake it, and then down will come some present--respect

from one's friends and family, perhaps a lover. And then she wakes

up. Her father points out that she is pinching him by her

extravagance. Nobody seems to want her kind of "nice-ness"; which

indeed does no one much good. There is nothing that she can do

that is useful in the world, for she has never learned. She begins

to doubt the Christmas tree. There enters a man--a young

electrical engineer, highly trained, highly ambitious, but caught

in the wheels of a great corporation where he is merely a cog;

wanting to live, wanting to love, wanting to be married, yet

condemned to labor for many years more upon a salary which perhaps

would little more than pay for her clothes. By an ingenious device

they are thrown together in a bit of wild country near town, and

are made to exchange confidences. So far, no one can complain of

the truth of this story; and furthermore it is well told. Here are

two products of our social machine, both true to type. Suppose

they want to marry? What can we do about it? The story-teller has

posed his question with a force not to be denied.

But I wish we had had a Tchekoff to answer it. As for this author,

he leads his characters to a conveniently deserted house, lights a

fire on the hearth, sets water boiling for tea, and in a few pages

of charming romance would persuade us that with a few economies in

this rural residence, true love may have its course and a

successful marriage crown the morning's adventure. Thus in one

dazzling sweep, the greatest and most sugary plum of all drops

from the very tip of the Christmas tree into the lap of the lady,

who had just learned that happiness in the real world comes in no

such haphazard and undeserved a fashion. Really! have we

degenerated from Lincoln's day? Is it easy now to fool all of us

all of the time, so that a tale-teller dares to expose silly

romance at the beginning of his story, and yet dose us with it at

the end? Not that one objects to romance. It is as necessary as

food, and almost as valuable. But romance that pretends to be

realism, realism that fizzles out into sentimental romance--is

there any excuse for that? Even if it provides "heart interest"

and an effective climax?

The truth is, of course, that the Russian stories are based upon

life; the typical stories of the American magazines, for all their

realistic details, are too often studied, not from American life

but from literary convention. Even when their substance is fresh,

their unfoldings and above all their solutions are second-hand. If

the Russian authors could write American stories I believe that

their work would be more truly popular than what we are now

getting. They would be free to be interesting in any direction and

by any method. The writer of the American short story is not free.

I should like to leave the subject here with a comparison that

any reader can make for himself. But American pride recalls the

past glory of our short story, and common knowledge indicates the

present reality of a few authors--several of them women--who are

writing fiction of which any race might be proud. The optimist

cannot resist meditating on the way out for our enslaved short

story.

The ultimate responsibility for its present position must fall, I

suppose, upon our American taste, which, when taken by and large,

is unquestionably crude, easily satisfied, and not sensitive to

good things. American taste does not rebel against the "formula."

If interest is pricked it does not inquire too curiously into the

nature of the goad. American taste is partial to sentiment, and

antagonistic to themes that fail to present the American in the

light of optimistic romance. But our defects in taste are slowly

but certainly being remedied. The schools are at work upon them;

journalism, for all its noisy vulgarity, is at work upon them. Our

taste in art, our taste in poetry, our taste in architecture, our

taste in music go up, as our taste in magazine fiction seems to go

down.

But what are the writers of short stories and what are the editors

and publishers doing to help taste improve itself until, as Henry

James says, it acquires a keener relish than ever before?