fairly be assumed, what he can, and I do not wish to discuss here
the responsibility of the public for his deficiencies. The editor
and the publisher, however, stand in a somewhat different
relationship to the American short story. They may assert with
much justice that they are public servants merely; nevertheless
they _do_ control the organs of literary expression, and it is through
them that any positive influence on the side of restriction or
proscription must be exerted, whatever may be its ultimate source. If
a lack of freedom in method and in choice of subject is one reason for
the sophistication of our short story, then the editorial policy of
American magazines is a legitimate field for speculation.
I can reason only from the evidence of the product and the
testimony of authors, successful and unsuccessful. Yet one
conclusion springs to the eye, and is enough in itself to justify
investigation. The critical basis upon which the American editor
professes to build his magazine is of doubtful validity. I believe
that it is unsound. His policy, as stated in "editorial
announcements" and confirmed by his advertisements of the material
he selects, is first to find out what the public wants, and next
to supply it. This is reasonable in appearance. It would seem to
be good commercially, and, as a policy, I should consider it good
for art, which must consult the popular taste or lose its
vitality. But a pitfall lies between this theory of editorial
selection and its successful practice. The editor must really know
what the public wants. If he does not, he becomes a dogmatic
critic of a very dangerous school.
Those who know the theater and its playwrights, are agreed that
the dramatic manager, at least in America, is a very poor judge of
what the public desires. The percentage of bad guesses in every
metropolitan season is said to be very high. Is the editor more
competent? It would seem that he is, to judge from the stability
of our popular magazines. But that he follows the public taste
with any certainty of judgment is rendered unlikely, not only by
inherent improbability, but also by three specific facts: the
tiresome succession of like stories which follow unendingly in the
wake of every popular success; the palpable fear of the editor to
attempt innovation, experiment, or leadership; and the general
complaint against "magazine stories." In truth, the American
editor plays safe, constantly and from conviction; and playing
safe in the short story means the adoption of the "formula," which
is sure to be somewhat successful; it means restriction to a few
safe themes. He swings from the detective story to the tale of the
alien, from the "heart-interest" story to the narrative of "big
business." When, as has happened recently, a magazine experimented
with eroticism, and found it successful, the initiative of itseditor
was felt to be worthy of general remark.
If one reduces this imperfect sketch of existing conditions to
terms of literary criticism, the result is interesting. There are
two great schools of criticism: the judicial and the
impressionistic. The judicial critic--a Boileau, a Matthew
Arnold--bases his criticism upon fundamental principles. The
impressionistic critic follows the now hackneyed advice of Anatole
France, to let his soul adventure among masterpieces, and seeks
the reaction for good or bad of a given work upon his own finely
strung mind. The first group must be sure of the breadth, the
soundness, and the just application of their principles. The
second group must depend upon their own good taste.
The American editor has flung aside as archaic the fundamental
principles of criticism upon which judicial critics have based
their opinions. And yet he has chosen to be dogmatic. He has
transformed his guess as to what the public wants into a fundamental
principle, and acted upon it with the confidence of an Aristotle. He
asserts freely and frankly that, in his private capacity, such and
such a story pleases _him_, is _good_ (privately he is an impressionist
and holds opinions far more valid than his editorial judgment, since
they are founded upon taste and not upon intuition merely); but that
"the public will not like it," or "in our rivalry with seventy other
magazines we cannot afford to print this excellent work." He is
frequently right. He is also frequently wrong.
I speak not from personal experience, since other reasons in my
own case have usually, though not always, led me to agree with the
editor's verdict, when it has been unfavorable; but from the
broader testimony of many writers, the indisputable evidence of
works thus rejected which have later attained success, and the
failure of American short fiction to impress permanently the
reading public. Based upon an intuition of the public mind,
changing with the wind,--always after, never before it,--such
editorial judgment, indeed, must be of doubtful validity; must
lead in many instances to unwise and unprofitable restrictions
upon originality in fiction.
I am well aware that it is useless to consider current American
literature without regard to the multitude of readers who, being,
like all multitude, mediocre, demand the mediocre in literature.
And I know that it is equally foolish to neglect the popular
elements in the developing American genius--that genius which is
so colloquial now, and yet so inventive; so vulgar sometimes, and
yet, when sophistication is not forced upon it, so fresh. I have
no wish to evade the necessity for consulting the wishes and the
taste of the public, which good sense and commercial necessity
alike impose upon the editor. I would not have the American editor
less practical, less sensitive to the popular wave; I would have
him more so. But I would have him less dogmatic. All forms of
dogmatism are dangerous for men whose business it is to publish,
not to criticize, contemporary literature. But an unsound and
arbitrary dogmatism is the worst. If the editor is to give the
people what they want instead of what they have wanted, he must
have more confidence in himself, and more belief in their capacity
for liking the good. He should be dogmatic only where he can be
sure. Elsewhere let him follow the method of science, and
experiment. He should trust to his taste in practice as well as in
private theory, and let the results of such criticism sometimes,
at least, dominate his choice.
In both our "popular" and our "literary" magazines, freer fiction
would follow upon better criticism. The readers of the "literary"
magazines are already seeking foreign-made narratives, and
neglecting the American short story built for them according to
the standardized model. The readers of the "popular" magazines
want chiefly journalism (an utterly different thing from
literature); and that they are getting in good measure in the non-
fiction and part-fiction sections of the magazines. But they also
seek, as all men seek, some literature. If, instead of imposing
the "formula" (which is, after all, a journalistic mechanism--and
a good one--adapted for speedy and evanescent effects), if,
instead of imposing the "formula" upon all the subjects they
propose to have turned into fiction, the editors of these
magazines should also experiment, should release some subjects
from the tyranny of the "formula," and admit others which its cult
has kept out, the result might be surprising. It is true that the
masses have no taste for literature,--as a steady diet; it is
still more certain that not even the most mediocre of multitudes
can be permanently hoodwinked by formula.
But the magazines can take care of themselves; it is the short
story in which I am chiefly interested. Better criticism and
greater freedom for fiction might vitalize our overabundant,
unoriginal, unreal, unversatile,--everything but unformed short
story. Its artifice might again become art. Even the more careful,
the more artistic work leaves one with the impression that these
stories have sought a "line," and found an acceptable formula. And
when one thinks of the multitudinous situations, impressions,
incidents in this fascinating whirl of modern life, incapable
perhaps of presentation in a novel because of their very
impermanence, admirably adapted to the short story because of
their vividness and their deep if narrow significance, the voice
of protest must go up against any artificial, arbitrary
limitations upon the art. Freedom to make his appeal to the public
with any subject not morbid or indecent, is all the writer can
ask. Freedom to publish sometimes what the editor likes and the
public may like, instead of what the editor approves because the
public has liked it, is all that he needs. There is plenty of
blood in the American short story yet, though I have read through
whole magazines without finding a drop of it.
When we give literature in America the same opportunity to invent,
to experiment, that we have already given journalism, there will
be more legitimate successors to Irving, to Hawthorne, to Poe and
Bret Harte. There will be more writers, like O. Henry, who write
stories to please themselves, and thus please the majority. There
will be fewer writers, like O. Henry, who stop short of the final
touch of perfection because American taste (and the American
editor) puts no premium upon artistic work. There will be fewer
stories, I trust, where sentiment is no longer a part, but the
whole of life. Most of all, form, _the_ form, the _formula,_ will
relax its grip upon the short story, will cease its endless tapping
upon the door of interest, and its smug content when some underling
(while the brain sleeps) answers its stereotyped appeal. And we may
get more narratives like Mrs. Wharton's "Ethan Frome," to make us feel
that now as much as ever there is literary genius waiting in America.
A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION TOWARD FICTION
If only the reader of novels would say what he thinks about
fiction! If only the dead hand of hereditary opinion did not grasp
and distort what he feels! But he exercises a judgment that is not
independent. Books, like persons, he estimates as much by the
traditional reputation of the families they happen to be born in
as by the merits they may themselves possess, and the traditional
reputation of the novel in English has been bad.
Poetry has a most respectable tradition. Even now, when the
realistic capering of free verse has emboldened the ordinary man
to speak his mind freely, a reviewer hesitates to apply even to
bad poetry so undignified a word as trash. The essay family is
equally respectable, to be noticed, when noticed at all, with some
of the reverence due to an ancient and dignified art. The sermon
family, still numerous to a degree incredible to those who do not
study the lists of new books, is so eminently respectable that few
dare to abuse even its most futile members. But the novel was
given a bad name in its youth that has overshadowed its successful
maturity.
Our ancestors are much to blame. For centuries they held the novel
suspect as a kind of bastard literature, probably immoral, and
certainly dangerous to intellectual health. But they are no more
deeply responsible for our suppressed contempt of fiction than
weak-kneed novelists who for many generations have striven to
persuade the English reader that a good story was really a sermon,
or a lecture on ethics, or a tract on economics or moral
psychology, in disguise. Bernard Shaw, in his prefaces to the
fiction that he succeeds in making dramatic, is carrying on a
tradition that Chaucer practised before him:
And ye that holden this tale a folye,--
As of a fox, or of a cok and hen,--
Taketh the moralite, good men.
And that was the way they went at it for centuries, always
pretending, always driven to pretend, that a good story was not
good enough to be worth telling for itself alone, but must convey
a moral or a satire or an awful lesson, or anything that might
separate it from the "just fiction" that only the immoral and the
frivolous among their contemporaries read or wrote. Today we pay
the price.
William Painter, her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's clerk of ordnance
in the Tower, is an excellent instance. Stricken by a moral panic,
he advertised that from his delectable "Palace of Pleasure" the
young might "learne how to avoyde the ruine, overthrow,
inconvenience and displeasure, that lascivious desire and wanton
evil doth bring to their suters and pursuers"--a disingenuous sop
to the Puritans. His contemporary,
Geoffrey Fenton, who also turned to story-making, opines that in
histories "the dignitye of vertue and fowelenes of vice appereth
muche more lyvelye then in any morall teachynge," although he knew
that his "histories" were the sheerest, if not the purest, of
fiction, with any moral purpose that might exist chiefly of his
own creating. A century and more later Eliza Haywood, the
ambiguous author of many ambiguous novels of the eighteenth
century, prefaces her "Life's Progress Through the Passions" (an
ambiguous title) with like hypocrisy: "I am enemy to all romances,
novels, and whatever carries the air of them. . . . It is a
_real_, not a _fictitious_ character I am about to present"--which is
merely another instance of fiction disguising itself, this time, I
regret to say, as immorality in real life. And so they all go, forever
implying that fiction is frivolous or immoral or worthless, until it
is not surprising that, as Mr. Bradsher has reminded us, the elder
Timothy Dwight of Yale College was able to assert, "Between the Bible
and novels there is a gulf fixed which few novel-readers are willing
to pass." Richardson was forced to defend himself, so was Sterne, so
was Fielding, so was Goldsmith. Dr. Johnson was evidently making
concessions when he advised romances as reading for youth. Jeffrey,
the critic and tyrant of the next century, summed it all up when he
wrote that novels are "generally regarded as among the lower
productions of our literature." And this is the reputation that the
novel family has brought with it even down to our day.
The nineteenth century was worse, if anything, than earlier
periods, for it furthered what might be called the evangelistic
slant toward novel-reading, the attitude that neatly classified
this form of self-indulgence with dancing, card-playing, hard
drinking, and loose living of every description. It is true that
the intellectuals and worldly folk in general did not share this
prejudice. Walter Scott had made novel-reading common among the
well-read; but the narrower sectarians in England, the people of
the back country and the small towns in America, learned to regard
the novel as unprofitable, if not positively leading toward
ungodliness, and their unnumbered descendants make up the vast
army of uncritical readers for which Grub Street strives and
sweats to-day. They no longer abstain and condemn; instead, they
patronize and distrust.
All this--and far more, for I have merely sketched in a long and
painful history--is the background seldom remembered when we
wonder at the easy condescension of the American toward his
innumerable novels.
The fact of his condescension is not so well recognized as it
deserves to be. Indeed, condescension may not seem to be an
appropriate term for the passionate devouring of romance that one
can see going on any day in the trolley-cars, or the tense
seriousness with which some readers regard certain novelists whose
pages have a message for the world. True, the term will not
stretch thus far. But it is condescension that has made the
trouble, as I shall try to prove; for all of us, even the tense
ones, do patronize that creative instinct playing upon life as it
is which in all times and everywhere is the very essence of
fiction.
How absurd that here in America we should condescend toward our
fiction! How ridiculous in a country even yet so weak and poor and
crude in the arts, which has contributed so little to the world's
store of all that makes fine living for the mind! What a laughable
parallel of the cock and the gem he found and left upon the dung-
heap, if we could be proved not to be proud of American fiction!
For if the novel and the short story should be left out of
America's slender contribution to world literature, the offering
would be a small one. Some poetry of Whitman's and of Poe's, some
essays of Emerson, a little Thoreau, and what important besides?
Hawthorne would be left from the count, the best exemplar of the
fine art of moral narrative in any language; Henry James would be
left out, the master of them all in psychological character
analysis; Poe the story-teller would be missing, and the art of
the modern short story, which in English sterns from him; Cooper
would be lost from our accounting, for all his crudities the best
historical novelist after Scott; Mark Twain, Howells, Bret Harte,
Irving! The attempt to exalt American literature is grateful if
one begins upon fiction.
And how absurd to patronize, to treat with indifferent superiority
just because they are members of the novel family, books such as
these men have left us, books such as both men and women are
writing in America to-day! Is there finer workmanship in American
painting or American music or American architecture than can be
found in American novels by the reader willing to search and
discriminate? A contemporary poet confessed that he would have
rather written a certain sonnet (which accompanied the confession)
than have built Brooklyn Bridge. One may doubt the special case,
yet uphold the principle. Because a novel is meant to give
pleasure, because it deals with imagination rather than with facts
and appeals to the generality rather than to the merely literary
man or the specialist, because, in short, a novel is a novel, and
a modern American novel, is no excuse for priggish reserves in our
praise or blame. If there is anything worth criticizing in
contemporary American literature it is our fiction.
Absurd as it may seem in theory, we have patronized and do
patronize our novels, even the best of them, following too surely,
though with a bias of our own, the Anglo-Saxon prejudice
traditional to the race. And if the curious frame of mind that
many reserve for fiction be analyzed and blame distributed, there
will be a multitude of readers, learned and unlearned, proud and
humble, critical and uncritical, who must admit their share.
Nevertheless, the righteous wrath inspired by the situation shall
not draw us into that dangerous and humorless thing, a general
indictment. There are readers aplenty who, to quote Painter once
more, find their novels "pleasant to avoyde the griefe of a
Winters night and length of Sommers day," and are duly
appreciative of that service. With such honest, if un-exacting,
readers I have no quarrel; nor with many more critical who
respect, while they criticize, the art of fiction. But with the
scholars who slight fiction, the critics who play with it, the
general reader who likes it contemptuously, and the social
enthusiast who neglects its better for its worser part, the issue
is direct. All are the victims of hereditary opinion; but some
should know better than to be thus beguiled.
The Brahman among American readers of fiction is of course the
college professor of English. His attitude (I speak of the type;
there are individual variations of note) toward the novel is
curious and interesting. It is exhibited perhaps in the title by
which such courses in the novel as the college permits are usually
listed. "Prose fiction" seems to be the favorite description, a
label designed to recall the existence of an undeniably
respectable fiction in verse that may justify a study of the baser
prose. By such means is so dubious a term as novel or short story
kept out of the college catalogue!
Yet even more curious is the academic attitude toward the novel
itself. Whether the normal professor reads many or few is not the
question, nor even how much he enjoys or dislikes them. It is what
he permits himself to say that is significant. Behind every assent
to excellence one feels a reservation: yes, it is good enough for
a novel! Behind every criticism of untruth, of bad workmanship, of
mediocrity (alas! so often deserved in America!) is a sneering
implication: but, after all, it is only a novel. Not thus does he
treat the stodgy play in stodgier verse, the merits of which,
after all, may amount to this, that in appearance it is literary;
not thus the critical essay or investigation that too often is
like the parasite whose sustaining life comes from the greater
life on which it feeds. In the eyes of such a critic the author of
an indifferent essay upon Poe has more distinguished himself than
if he had written a better than indifferent short story. Fiction,
he feels, is the plaything of the populace. The novel is "among
the lower productions of our literature." It is plebeian, it is
successful, it is multitudinous; the Greeks in their best period
did not practise it (but here he may be wrong); any one can read
it; let us keep it down, brethren, while we may. Many not
professors so phrase their inmost thoughts of fiction and the
novel.
And in all this the college professor is profoundly justified by
tradition, if not always by common sense. To him belongs that
custody of the classical in literature which his profession
inherited from the monasteries, and more remotely from the
rhetoricians of Rome. And there is small place for fiction, and
none at all for the novel and the short story as we know them, in
what has been preserved of classic literature. The early
Renaissance, with its Sidney for spokesman, attacked the rising
Elizabethan drama because it was unclassical. The later
Renaissance, by the pen of Addison (who would have made an
admirable college professor), sneered at pure fiction, directly
and by implication, because it was unclassical. To-day we have
lost our veneration for Latin and Greek as languages, we no longer
deprecate an English work because it happens to be in English;
nevertheless the tradition still grips us, especially if we happen
to be Brahmanic. Our college professors, and many less excusable,
still doubt the artistic validity of work in a form never
dignified by the practice of the ancients, never hallowed, like
much of English literature besides, by a long line of native
productions adapting classic forms to new ages and a new speech.
The epic, the lyric, the pastoral, the comedy, the tragedy, the
elegy, the satire, the myth, even the fable, have been classic,
have usually been literature. But the novel has never been a
preserve for the learned, although it came perilously near to that
fate in the days of Shakespeare; has ever been written for cash or
for popular success rather than for scholarly reputation; has
never been studied for grammar, for style, for its "beauties"; has
since its genesis spawned into millions that no man can classify,
and produced a hundred thousand pages of mediocrity for one
masterpiece. All this (and in addition prejudices unexpressed and
a residuum of hereditary bias) lies behind the failure of most
professors of English to give the good modern novel its due. Their
obstinacy is unfortunate; for, if they praised at all, they would
not, like many hurried reviewers, praise the worst best.
I will not say that more harm has been done to the cause of the
novel in America by feeble reviewing than by any other
circumstance, for that would not be true; bad reading has been
more responsible for the light estimation in which our novel is
held. Nevertheless it is certain that the ill effects of a
doubtful literary reputation are more sadly displayed in current
criticism of the novel than elsewhere. An enormous effusion of
writing about novels, especially in the daily papers, most of it
casual and conventional, much of it with neither discrimination
nor constraint, drowns the few manful voices raised to a pitch of
honest concern. The criticism of fiction, taken by and large, is
not so good as the criticism of our acted drama, not so good as
our musical criticism, not so good as current reviewing of poetry
and of published plays.