It is true that most of the books and magazines are published in
New York, and have always been published there, or in Boston or
Philadelphia. But they have been written all over a vast country
by men and women who frequently never see each other in the flesh.
There has been no center like London, where writers can rub elbows
half-a-dozen times a year. Boston was such a capital once; only,
however, for New England. New York is a clearing-house of
literature now; but the writing is, most of it, done elsewhere. It
is curious to speculate what might have happened if the capital of
the United States had been fixed at New York instead of
Washington!
From this decentralization there results a lack of literary self-
confidence that is one of the most important factors in the
intellectual life of America. The writer in Tucson or Minneapolis
or Bangor is dependent upon his neighbors to a degree impossible
in Manchester or Glasgow or York. He is marooned there, separated
in space and time, if not in mind, from men and women who believe,
as he may believe, in the worth of literary standards, in the
necessity of making not the most easily readable book, but the
best. Here is one cause of the feebleness of many American
"literary" books.
Nevertheless, this very decentralization may have, when we reach
literary maturity, its great advantages. It is difficult to over-
estimate the color, the variety, the _verve_ of American life. And
much of this comes not from the push and "hustle" and energy of
America--for energy is just energy all the world over--but is rather
to be found in the new adjustments of race and environment which are
multiplying infinitely all over the United States. It is true that
American civilization seems to be monotonous--that one sees the same
magazines and books, the same moving-picture shows, the same drug-
stores, trolley cars, and hotels on a New York model, hears the same
slang and much the same general conversation from New Haven to Los
Angeles. But this monotony is superficial. Beneath the surface there
are infinite strainings and divergences--the peasant immigrant working
toward, the well-established provincial holding to, the wide-ranging
mind of the intellectual working away from, this dead level of
conventional standards. Where we are going, it is not yet possible
to say. Quite certainly not toward an un-British culture. Most
certainly not toward a culture merely neo-English. But in any
case, it is because San Francisco and Indianapolis and Chicago and
Philadelphia have literary republics of their own, sovereign like
our states, yet highly federalized also in a common bond of
American taste and ideals which the war made stronger--it is this
fact that makes it possible to record, as American writers are
already recording, the multifarious, confused development of
racial instincts working into a national consciousness.
Localization is our difficulty; it is also the only means by which
literature can keep touch with life in so huge a congeries as
America. If we can escape provincialism and yet remain local, all
will be well.
So far I have been merely defining the terms upon which literature
has been written in America. Let me add to these terms a
classification. If one stretches the meaning of literature to
cover all writing in prose or verse that is not simply
informative, then four categories will include all literary
writing in America that is in any way significant. We have an
aristocratic and a democratic literature; we have a dilettante
and a vast bourgeois literature.
In using the term aristocratic literature I have in mind an
intellectual rather than a social category. I mean all writing
addressed to specially trained intelligence, essays that imply a
rich background of knowledge and taste, stories dependent upon
psychological analysis, poetry which is austere in content or
complex in form. I mean Henry James and Sherwood Anderson, Mr.
Cabell, Mr. Hergesheimer, and Mrs. Wharton, Agnes Repplier, Mr.
Crothers, Mr. Sherman, and Mr. Colby.
By democratic literature I mean all honest writing, whether crude
or carefully wrought, that endeavors to interpret the American
scene in typical aspects for all who care to read. I mean Walt
Whitman and Edgar Lee Masters; I mean a hundred writers of short
stories who, lacking perhaps the final touch of art, have
nevertheless put a new world and a new people momentarily upon the
stage. I mean the addresses of Lincoln and of President Wilson.
With dilettante literature I come to a very different and less
important classification: the vast company--how vast few even
among natives suspect--of would-be writers, who in every town and
county of the United States are writing, writing, writing what
they hope to be literature, what is usually but a pallid imitation
of worn-out literary forms. More people seem to be engaged in
occasional production of poetry and fiction--and especially of
poetry--in America, than in any single money-making enterprise
characteristic of a great industrial nation. The flood pours
through every editorial office in the land, trickles into the
corners of country newspapers, makes short-lived dilettante
magazines, and runs back, most of it, to its makers. It is not
literature, for the bulk is bloodless, sentimental, or cheap, but
it is significant of the now passionate American desire to express
our nascent soul.
My chief difficulty is to explain what I mean by bourgeois
literature. The flood of dilettante writing is subterranean; it is
bourgeois literature that makes the visible rivers and oceans of
American writing. And these fluid areas are like the lakes on maps
of Central Asia--bounds cannot be set to them. One finds magazines
(and pray remember that the magazine is as great a literary force
as the book in America), one finds magazines whose entire function
is to be admirably bourgeois for their two million odd of readers.
And in the more truly literary and "aristocratic" periodicals, in
the books published for the discriminating, the bourgeois creeps
in and often is dominant. The bourgeois in American literature is
a special variety that must not be too quickly identified with the
literary product that bears the same name in more static
civilizations. It is nearly always clever. Witness our short
stories, which even when calculated not to puzzle the least
intelligence nor to transcend the most modest limitations of
taste, must be carefully constructed and told with facility or
they will never see the light. And this literature is nearly
always true to the superficies of life, to which, indeed, it
confines itself. Wild melodrama is more and more being relegated
to the "movies," soft sentimentality still has its place in the
novel, but is losing ground in the people's library, the
magazines. Life as the American believes he is living it, is the
subject of bourgeois literature. But the sad limitation upon this
vast output is that, whether poetry, criticism, or fiction, it
does not interpret, it merely pictures; and this is the inevitable
failure of pages that must be written always for a million or more
of readers. It is standardized literature; and good literature,
like the best airplanes, cannot be standardized.
Now the error made by most English critics in endeavoring to
estimate the potentialities or the actualities of American
literature, is to judge under the influence of this crushing
weight of clever, mediocre writing. They feel, quite justly, its
enormous energy and its terrible cramping power. They see that the
best of our democratic writers belong on its fringe; see also that
our makers of aristocratic literature and our dilettante escape
its weight only when they cut themselves off from the life beat of
the nation. And therefore, as a distinguished English poet
recently said, America is doomed to a hopeless and ever-spreading
mediocrity.
With this view I wish to take immediate issue upon grounds that
are both actual and theoretical. There is a fallacy here to begin
with, a fallacious analogy. It is true, I believe, in Great
Britain, and also in France, that there are two separate publics;
that the readers who purchase from the news stands are often as
completely unaware of literary books for literary people as if
these bore the imprint of the moon. But even in England the
distinction is by no means sharp; and in America it is not a
question of distinctions at all, but of gradations. In our better
magazines are to be found all the categories of which I have
written--even the dilettante; and it is a bold critic who will
assert that pages one to twenty are read only by one group, and
pages twenty to forty only by another. We are the most careless
readers in the world; but also the most voracious and the most
catholic.
And next, let us make up our minds once for all that a bourgeois
literature--by which, let me repeat, I mean a literature that is
good without being very good, true without being utterly true,
clever without being fine--is a necessity for a vast population
moving upward from generation to generation in the intellectual
scale, toward a level that must be relatively low in order to be
attainable. Let us say that such a literature cannot be real
literature. I am content with that statement. But it must exist,
and good may come of it.
This is the critical point toward which I have been moving in this
lecture, and it is here that the hopeful influence of the American
spirit, as I interpret it today, assumes its importance. That
spirit is both idealistic and democratic. Idealistic in the sense
that there is a profound and often foolishly optimistic belief in
America that every son can be better than his father, better in
education, better in taste, better in the power to accomplish and
understand. Democratic in this sense, that with less political
democracy than one finds in Great Britain, there is again a
fundamental belief that every tendency, every taste, every
capacity, like every man, should have its chance somehow,
somewhere, to get a hearing, to secure its deservings, to make, to
have, to learn what seems the best.
A vague desire, you say, resulting in confusion and mediocrity.
This is true and will be true for some time longer; but instead of
arguing in generalities let me illustrate these results by the
literature I have been discussing.
When brought to bear upon the category of the dilettante, it is
precisely this desire for "general improvement" that has
encouraged such a curious outpouring from mediocre though
sensitive hearts. The absence of strong literary tradition, the
lack of deep literary soil, has been responsible for the
insipidity of the product. The habit of reference to the taste of
the majority has prevented us from taking this product too
seriously. Without that instinctive distrust of the merely
literary common to all bourgeois communities, we might well be
presenting to you as typical American literature a gentle weakling
whose manners, when he has them, have been formed abroad.
Aristocratic literature has suffered in one respect from the
restraints of democracy and the compulsions of democratic
idealism. It has lacked the self-confidence and therefore the
vigor of its parallels in the old world. Emerson and Thoreau rose
above these restrictions, and so did Hawthorne and Poe. But in
later generations especially, our intellectual poetry and
intellectual prose is too frequently though by no means always
less excellent than yours. Nevertheless, thanks to the influence
of this bourgeois spirit upon the intellects that in American
towns must live with, if not share it; thanks, also, to the
magazines through which our finer minds must appeal to the public
rather than to a circle or a clique, the nerves of transfer
between the community at large and the intellectuals are active,
the tendons that unite them strong. I argue much from this.
Now theoretically, where you find an instinctive and therefore an
honest passion for the ideals of democracy, you should find a
great literature expressing and interpreting the democracy. I have
given already some reasons why in practice this has not yet become
an actuality in America. Let me add, in discussing the bearing of
this argument upon the third category of American literature, the
democratic, one more.
I doubt whether we yet know precisely what is meant by a great
democratic literature. Democracy has been in transition at least
since the French Revolution; it is in rapid transition now. The
works which we call democratic are many of them expressive of
phases merely of the popular life, just as so much American
literature is expressive of localities and groups in America.
And usually the works of genius that we do possess have been
written by converted aristocrats, like Tolstoy, and have a little
of the fanaticism and over-emphasis of the convert. Or they
represent and share the turgidity of the minds they interpret,
like some of the work of Walt Whitman. All this is true, and yet a
careful reader of American literature must be more impressed by
such prose as Lincoln's, by such poems as Whitman's, such fiction as
Mark Twain's at his best, than by many more elegant works of
polite literature. For these--and I could add to them dozens of
later stories and poems, ephemeral perhaps but showing what may be
done when we burst the bourgeois chain--for these are discoveries
in the vigor, the poignancy, the color of our democratic national
life.
I have already hinted at what seems to me the way out and up for
American literature. It will not be by fine writing that borrows
or adapts foreign models, even English models which are not
foreign to us. It will not come through geniuses of the backwoods,
adopted by some coterie, and succeeding, when they do succeed, by
their strangeness rather than the value of the life they depict.
That might have happened in the romantic decades of the early
nineteenth century; but our English literary tradition was a
saving influence which kept us from _gaucherie_, even if it set limits
upon our strength. Our expectation, so I think, is in the slowly
mounting level of the vast bourgeois literature that fills not
excellently, but certainly not discreditably, our books
and magazines. There, and not in coteries, is our school of
writing. When originality wearies of stereotypes and conventions,
when energy and ability force the editorial hand, and appeal to
the desire of Americans to know themselves, we shall begin a new
era in American literature. Our problem is not chiefly to expose
and attack and discredit the flat conventionality of popular
writing. It is rather to crack the smooth and monotonous surface
and stir the fire beneath it, until the lava of new and true
imaginings can pour through. And this is, historically, the
probable course of evolution. It was the Elizabethan fashion. The
popular forms took life and fire then. The advice of the
classicists, who wished to ignore the crude drama beloved of the
public, was not heeded; it will not be heeded now. Our task is to
make a bourgeois democracy fruitful. We must work with what we have.
Much has been said of the advantage for us, and perhaps for the
world, which has come from the separation of the American colonies
from Great Britain. Two systems of closely related political
thinking, two national characters, have developed and been
successful instead of one. Your ancestors opened the door of
departure for mine, somewhat brusquely it is true, but with the
same result, if not the same reason, as with the boys they sent
away to school--they made men of us.
So it is with literature. American literature will never, as some
critics would persuade us, be a child without a parent. In its
fundamental character it is, and will remain, British, because at
bottom the American character, whatever its blood mixture, is formed
upon customs and ideals that have the same origin and a
parallel development with yours. But this literature, like our
political institutions, will not duplicate; like the seedling, it
will make another tree and not another branch. In literature we
are still pioneers. I think that it may be reserved for us to
discover a literature for the new democracy of English-speaking
peoples that is coming--a literature for the common people who do
not wish to stay common. Like Lincoln's, it will not be vulgar;
like Whitman's, never tawdry; like Mark Twain's, not empty of
penetrating thought; like Shakespeare's it will be popular. If
this should happen, as I believe it may, it would be a just return
upon our share of a great inheritance.
TIME'S MIRROR
What is the use of criticizing modern literature unless you are
willing to criticize modern life? And how many Americans are
willing to criticize it with eyes wide open?
The outstanding fact in mass civilization as it exists in America
and Western Europe to-day is that it moves with confidence in only
one direction. The workers, after their escape from the industrial
slavery of the last century, have only one plan for the future
upon which they can unite, a greater share in material benefits.
The possessors of capital have only one program upon which they
agree, a further exploitation of material resources, for the
greater comfort of the community and themselves. The professional
classes have only one professional instinct in common, to discover
new methods by which man's comfort may be made secure.
In this way of life, as the Buddhist might have called it, all our
really effective energy discharges itself. Even the church is most
active in social service, and philosophy is accounted most
original when it accounts for behavior. Theology has become a
stagnant science, and, to prove the rule by contraries, the main
problem of man's spiritual relation to the universe, his end in
living, and the secret of real happiness is left to a sentimental
idealism in which reason, as the Greeks knew it, has less and less
place, and primitive instinct, as the anthropologists define it,
and the Freudian psychologists explain it, is given more and more
control.
The flat truth is that, as a civilization, we are less sure of
where we are going, where we want to go, how and for what we wish
to live, than at any intelligent period of which we have full
record. This is not pessimism. It is merely a fact, which is
dependent upon our failure to digest the problems that democracy,
machinery, feminism, and the destruction of our working dogmas by
scientific discovery, have presented to us. All these things are
more likely to be good than bad, all bear promise for the future,
but all tend to confuse contemporary men. New power over nature
has been given them and they are engaged in seizing it. New means
of testing preconceived opinion are theirs, and they are using
them. The numbers which can be called intelligent are tremendously
augmented and the race to secure material comforts has become a
mass movement which will not cease until the objective is won.
In the meantime, there is only one road which is clear--the road
of material progress, and whether its end lies in the new
barbarism of a mechanistic state where the mental and physical
faculties will decline in proportion to the means discovered for
healing their ills, or whether it is merely a path where the
privileged leaders must mark step for a while until the
unprivileged masses catch up with them in material welfare, no one
knows and few that are really competent care to inquire.
Now this obsession with material welfare is the underlying premise
with which all discussion of contemporary literature, and
particularly American literature, must begin. Ours is a literature
of an age without dogma, which is to say without a theory of
living; the literature of an inductive, an experimental period,
where the really vital attempt is to subdue physical environment
(for the first time in history) to the needs of the common man. It
is an age, therefore, interested and legitimately interested in
behavior rather than character, in matter and its laws rather than
in the control of matter for the purposes of fine living.
Therefore, our vital literature is behavioristic, naturalistic,
experimental--rightly so I think--and must be so until we seek
another way. That search cannot be long deferred. One expects its
beginning at any moment, precisely as one expects, and with
reason, a reaction against the lawless thinking and unrestrained
impulses which have followed the war. One hopes that it will not
be to Puritanism, unless it be that stoic state of mind which lay
behind Puritanism, for no old solution will serve. The neo-
Puritans to-day abuse the rebels, young and old, because they have
thrown over dogma and discipline. The rebels accuse Puritanism for
preserving the dogma that cramps instead of frees. It is neither
return to the old nor the destruction thereof that we must seek,
but a new religion, a new discipline, a new hope, and a new end
which can give more significance to living than dwellers in our
industrial civilization are now finding.
In the meantime, those who seek literary consolation are by no
means to be urged away from their own literature, which contains a
perfect picture of our feverish times, and has implicit within it
the medicine for our ills, if they are curable. But they may be
advised to go again and more often than is now the fashion to the
writings of those men who found for their own time, a real
significance, who could formulate a saving doctrine, and who could
give to literature what it chiefly lacks to-day, a core of ethical
conviction and a view of man in his world _sub specie aeternitatis_.
It is the appointed time in which to read Dante and Milton,
Shakespeare, and Goethe, above all Plato and the great tragedies of
Greece. Our laughter would be sweeter if there were more depth of
thought and emotion to our serious moods.
THE FAMILY MAGAZINE
Readers who like magazines will be pleased, those who do not like
them perhaps distressed, to learn, if they are not already aware
of it, that the magazine as we know it to-day is distinctly an
American creation. They may stir, or soothe, their aroused
emotions by considering that the magazine which began in England
literally as a storehouse of miscellanies attained in mid-
nineteenth century United States a dignity, a harmony, and a
format which gave it preeminence among periodicals. _Harper's_ and
_The Century_ in particular shared with Mark Twain and the sewing
machine the honor of making America familiarly known abroad.