literature of revolt, which is not surprising, but also a
literature characterized by a minute and painful examination of
environment. Youth, in the old days, when it rebelled, escaped to
romantic climes or adventurous experience from a world which some
one else had made for it. That is what the hacks of the movies and
the grown-up children who write certain kinds of novels are still
doing. But true youth is giving us this absorbed examination of
all possible experiences that can come to a boy or girl who does
not escape from every-day life, this unflattering picture of a
world that does not fit, worked out with as much evidence as if
each novel were to be part of a brief of youth against society.
Indeed, the implied argument is often more important than the
story, when there is a story. And the argument consists chiefly of
"_this_ happened to me," "I saw _this_ and did not like it," "I was
driven to _this_ or _that_," until the mass of circumstantial incident
and sensation reminds one of the works of Zola and the scientific
naturalists who half a century ago tried to put society as an organism
into fiction and art.
No better example has been given us than Dos Passos's "Three
Soldiers," a book that would be tiresome (and is tiresome to many)
in its night after night and day after day crammed with every
possible unpleasant sensation and experience that three young men
could have had in the A. E. F. And that the experiences recorded
were unpleasant ones, forced upon youth, not chosen by its will,
is thoroughly characteristic. If it had not been for the
rebellious pacifism in this book, it is questionable whether
readers who had not been in France, and so could not relish the
vivid reality of the descriptions, would have read to the end of
the story.
The cause of all this is interesting, more interesting than some
of the results. The full result we can scarcely judge yet, for
despite signs of power and beauty and originality, only one or two
of these books have reached artistic maturity; but we can prepare
to comprehend it.
Here, roughly, is what I believe has happened, and if I confine my
conclusions to fiction, it is not because I fail to realize that
the effects are and will be far broader.
The youths of our epoch were born and grew up in a period of
criticism and disintegration. They were children when the attack
upon orthodox conceptions of society succeeded the attack upon
orthodox conceptions of religion. We know how "the conflict
between religion and science" reverberated in nineteenth-century
literature and shaped its ends. The new attack was quite
different. Instead of scrutinizing a set of beliefs, it
scrutinized a method of living. Insensibly, the intelligent youth
became aware that the distribution of wealth and the means of
getting it were under attack; that questions were raised as to the
rights of property and the causes and necessity of war. Soon moral
concepts began to be shaken. He learned that prostitution might be
regarded as an economic evil. He found that sex morality was
regarded by some as a useful taboo; psychology taught him that
repression could be as harmful as excess; the collapse of the
Darwinian optimists, who believed that all curves were upward,
left him with the inner conviction that everything, including
principle, was in a state of flux. And his intellectual guides,
first Shaw, and then, when Shaw became _vieux jeu_, De Gourmont,
favored that conclusion.
Then came the war, which at a stroke destroyed his sense of
security and with that his respect for the older generation that
had guaranteed his world. Propaganda first enlightened him as to
the evil meanings of imperialistic politics, and afterward left
him suspicious of all politics. Cruelty and violent change became
familiar. He had seen civilization disintegrate on the
battlefield, and was prepared to find it shaky at home.
Then he resumed, or began, his reading and his writing. His
reading of fiction and poetry, especially when it dealt with
youth, irritated him. The pictures of life in Dickens, in "The
Idylls of the King," in the Henty books, in the popular romantic
novels and the conventional social studies, did not correspond
with his pictures. They in no sense corresponded with the
descriptions of society given by the new social thinkers whose
ideas had leaked through to him. They did not square with his own
experience. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" rang false to a
member of the 26th Division. Quiet stories of idyllic youth in New
England towns jarred upon the memories of a class-conscious
youngster in modern New York. Youth began to scrutinize its own
past, and then to write, with a passionate desire to tell the real
truth, all of it, pleasant, unpleasant, or dirty, regardless of
narrative relevance.
The result was this new naturalism, a propaganda of the experience
of youth, where the fact that mother's face was ugly, not angelic,
is supremely important, more important than the story, just
because it was the truth. And as the surest way to get all the
truth is to tell your own story, every potential novelist wrote
his own story, enriching it, where sensation was thin, from the
biographies of his intimates. Rousseau was reborn without his
social philosophy. Defoe was reincarnated, but more anxious now to
describe precisely what happened to him than to tell an effective
tale.
This is a very different kind of truth-telling from, let us say,
Mrs. Wharton's in "The Age of Innocence" or Zona Gale's in "Miss
Lulu Bett." It does not spring from a desire to tell the truth
about human nature.
These asserters of youth are not much interested in any human
nature except their own, not much, indeed, in that, but only in
the friction between their ego and the world. It is passionate
truth, which is very different from cool truth; it is subjective,
not objective; romantic, not classical, to use the old terms which
few nowadays except Professor Babbitt's readers understand. Nor is
it the truth that Wells, let us say, or, to use a greater name,
Tolstoy was seeking. It is not didactic or even interpretative,
but only the truth about the difference between the world as it is
and the world as it was expected to be; an impressionistic truth;
in fact, the truth about _my_ experiences, which is very different
from what I may sometime think to be the truth about mankind.
It will be strange if nothing very good comes from this impulse,
for the purpose to "tell the world" that my vision of America is
startlingly different from what I have read about America is
identical with that break with the past which has again and again
been prelude to a new era. I do not wish to discuss the alleged
new era. Like the younger generation, it has been discussed too
much and is becoming evidently self-conscious. But if the
autobiographical novel is to be regarded as its literary herald
(and they are all prophetic Declarations of Independence), then we
may ask what has the new generation given us so far in the way of
literary art.
Apparently the novel and the short story, as we have known them,
are to be scrapped. Plot, which began to break down with the
Russians, has crumbled into a maze of incident. You can no longer
assume that the hero's encounter with a Gipsy in Chapter II is
preparation for a tragedy in Chapter XXIX. In all probability the
Gipsy will never be heard from again. She is irrelevant except as
a figment in the author's memory, as an incident in autobiography.
Setting, the old familiar background, put on the story like wall-
paper on a living-room, has suffered a sea change also. It comes
now by flashes, like a movie-film. What the ego remembers, that it
describes, whether the drip of a faucet or the pimple on the face
of a traffic policeman. As for character, there is usually but
one, the hero; for the others live only as he sees them, and fade
out when he looks away. If he is highly sexed, like Erik Dorn, the
other figures appear in terms of sex, just as certain rays of
light will bring out only one color in the objects they shine
against.
The novel, in fact, has melted and run down into a diary, with
sometimes no unity except the personality whose sensations are
recorded. Many of us have wished to see the conventional story
forms broken to bits. It was getting so that the first sentence ofa
short story or the first chapter of a novel gave the whole show
away. We welcomed the English stories of a decade ago that began
to give the complexities of life instead of the conventions of a
plot. But this complete liquidation rather appals us.
The novels I have mentioned so far in this article have all
together not enough plot to set up one lively Victorian novel.
Benet, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald--the flood-gates of each mind have
been opened, and all that the years had dammed up bursts forth in
a deluge of waters, carrying flotsam and jetsam and good things
and mud.
It is not surprising that, having given up plot, these writers
escape from other restraints also. The more energetic among them
revel in expression, and it seems to make little difference
whether it is the exquisite chiaroscuro of Chicago they are
describing, or spots on a greasy apron. The less enthusiastic are
content to be as full of gritty realistic facts as a fig of seeds;
but with all of them everything from end to beginning, from bottom
to top, must be said.
And just here lies the explanation of the whole matter. As one
considers the excessive naturalism of the young realists and asks
just why they find it necessary to be so excessively, so
effusively realistic, the conviction is inborn that they are not
realists at all as Hardy, Howells, even James were realists; they
are romanticists of a deep, if not the deepest, dye, even the
heartiest lover of sordid incident among them all.
I am aware, of course, that "romantic" is a dangerous word, more
overworked than any other in the vocabulary of criticism, and very
difficult to define. But in contrast with its opposites it can be
made to mean something definite. Now, the romanticism of the
juniors is not the opposite of realism; it sometimes embraces
realism too lovingly for the reader's comfort. But it is the
opposite of classicism. It is emotional expansiveness as
contrasted with the classic doctrine of measure and restraint. By
this, the older meaning of romanticism, we may put a tag upon the
new men that will help to identify them. Their desire is to free
their souls from the restraints of circumstance, to break through
rule and convention, to let their hearts expand.
But they do not fly into Byronic melancholy or Wordsworthian
enthusiasm for the mysterious abstract; they are far more likely
to fly away from them. Byron and Wordsworth do not interest them,
and Tennyson they hate. Romantic in mood, they are realistic,
never classical, in their contact with experience. In poetry they
prefer free verse, in prose they eschew grand phrases and sonorous
words. It has been the hard realism of an unfriendly world that
has scraped them to the raw, and they retaliate by vividly
describing all the unpleasant things they remember. Taught by the
social philosophers and war's disillusions that Denmark is
decaying, they do not escape to Cathay or Bohemia, but stay at
home and passionately narrate what Denmark has done to them.
Romantic Zolas, they have stolen the weapons of realism to fight
the battle of their ego. And the fact that a few pause in their
naturalism to soar into idyllic description or the rapture of
beauty merely proves my point, that they are fundamentally
romantics seeking escape, and that autobiographical realism is
merely romanticism _a la mode_.
Let us criticize it as such, remembering that we may be reading
the first characteristic work of a new literary era. Let us give
over being shocked. Those who were shocked by Byron, the apostle
of expansiveness, merely encouraged him to be more shocking. Nor
is it any use to sit upon the hydrant of this new expansiveness.
If a youth desires to tell the world what has happened to him, he
must be allowed to do so, provided he has skill and power enough
to make us listen. And these juniors have power even when skill
has not yet been granted them. What is needed is a hose to stop
the waste of literary energy, to conserve and direct it. Call for
a hose, then, as much as you please, but do not try to stop the
waters with your Moses's rod of conservative indignation.
It is no crime to be a romantic,--it is a virtue, if that is the
impulse of the age,--but it is a shame to be a wasteful romantic.
Waste has always been the romantic vice--waste of emotion, waste
of words, the waste that comes from easy profusion of sentiment and
the formlessness that permits it. Think of "The Excursion," of
Southey, and of the early poems of Shelley, of Scott at his
wordiest. And these writers also are wasteful, in proportion to
their strength.
They waste especially their imagination. Books like "The Three
Soldiers" spill over in all directions--spill into poetry,
philosophy, into endless conversation, and into everything
describable. Books like "The Beginning of Wisdom" are still more
wasteful. Here is the poignant biography of a boy who loves his
environment even when it slays him, plus a collection of prose
idylls, plus a group of poems, plus a good piece of special
reporting, plus an assortment of brilliant letters; and imbedded
in the mass, like a thread of gold in a tangle of yarn, as fresh
and exquisite a love-story as we have had in recent English. Of
course I do not mean that all these elements cannot be woven into,
made relevant to, a theme, a story. Stendhal, himself a romantic,
as these men are romantics, could do it. But our romantics do not
so weave them; they fling them out as contributions to life's
evidence, they fail to relate them to a single interpretation of
living, and half of the best incidents are waste, and clog the
slow-rolling wheels of the story.
They waste their energy also. So keenly do they love their own
conception of true living that their imaginations dwell with a
kind of horrid fascination upon the ugly things that thwart them.
Hence in a novel like "Main Street," the interest slackens as one
begins to feel that the very vividness of the story comes from a
vision strained and aslant, unable to tear eyes from the things
that have cramped life instead of expanding it. The things that
these writers love in life often they never reach until the last
chapter, and about them they have little to say, being exhausted
by earlier virulence.
Waste, of course, is a symptom of youth and vitality as well as of
unbridled romanticism, but that is no reason for praising a book
because it is disorderly. We do not praise young, vigorous states
for being disorderly. Life may not be orderly, but literature must
be. That is a platitude which it seems necessary to repeat.
It is difficult to estimate absolute achievement except across
time, and the time has been too brief to judge of the merits of
the young romanticists. My guess is that some of them will go far.
But the diagnosis at present seems to show an inflammation of the
ego. The new generation is discovering its soul by the pain of its
bruises, as a baby is made aware of its body by pin-pricks and
chafes. It is explaining its dissatisfactions with more violence
than art.
Therefore at present the satirists and the educators hold the best
cards, and most of them are elderly. No one of _les jeunes_ writes
with the skill, with the art, of Mrs. Wharton, Miss Sinclair,
Tarkington, Galsworthy, or Wells. It should not long be so in a
creative generation. In sheer emotion, in vivid protest that is not
merely didactic, the advantage is all with the youngsters. But they
waste it. They have learned to criticize their elders, but not
themselves. They have boycotted the books of writers who were young
just before themselves, but they have not learned to put a curb on
their own expansiveness. We readers suffer. We do not appreciate their
talents as we might, because we lose our bearings in hectic words or
undigested incident. We lose by the slow realization of their art.
Youth is a disease that cures itself, though sometimes too late.
The criticism I have made, in so far as it refers to youthful
impetuosity, is merely the sort of thing that has to be said to
every generation, and very loudly to the romantic ones. But if
these autobiographians are, as I believe, expansive romanticists,
that is of deeper significance, and my hope is that the definition
may prove useful to them as well as to readers who with an amazed
affection persist in following them wherever they lead.
PURITANS ALL
When anything goes wrong in politics the American practice is to
charge it against the Administration. In literature all grievances
are attributed to the Puritans. If a well-written book does not
sell, it is because the Puritans warped our sense of beauty; if an
honest discussion of sex is attacked for indecency, it is the
fault of the Puritan inheritance; if the heroes and heroines of
new narratives in prose or verse jazz their way to destruction or
impotence, it is in protest against the Puritans.
Who is this terrible Puritan? Apparently he is all America's
ancestor, and whether you were born in Delaware or in South
Carolina, in Montana or in Jugoslavia, you must adopt him as
great-great-grandfather or declare yourself alien.
What was he, or rather, what did he stand for, and inflict upon
us, to-day? Here there is some confusion. According to one set of
critics he is not so much a hater of the arts as indifferent to
their charms, not so much a Milton scornful of easy beauty, as a
Philistine, deaf and blind to the aesthetic. But these writers have
apparently confounded Great-great-grandfather Puritan with Grandpa
Victorian, the Victorian that Matthew Arnold scolded and Shaw made
fun of. He is a type as different from the real Puritan as the
slum dweller from the primitive barbarian. "Milton, thou shouldst
be living at this hour" to flay such ignorant traducers of those
who knew at least the beauty of austerity and holiness.
According to a less numerous but more clear-headed group of
enemies the Puritan is to be censured chiefly for the rigidity of
his conscience. He will not let us enjoy such "natural" pleasures
as mirth, love, drinking, and idleness without a bitter antidote
of remorse. He keeps books dull and reticent, makes plays
virtuously didactic, and irritates all but the meek and the godly
into revolt.
I am not an uncritical admirer of the Puritan, although I believe
he is more nearly on the side of the angels than is his opposite.
I deprecate the smug virtuosity which his kind often favor, I
dislike a vinegar morality, and am repelled by the monstrous
egoism of the idea that redeeming one's soul is such a serious
matter that every moment spared from contemplating the sins of
others or the pieties of oneself is irretrievably wasted.
But I object still more strongly to the anti-Puritans. Those
rebels who make unconventionality their only convention, with
their distrust of duty because they see no reason to be dutiful,
and their philosophic nihilism, which comes to this, that all
things having been proved false except their own desires, their
desires become a philosophy, those anti-Puritans, as one sees
them, especially in plays and on the stage, are an obstreperous,
denying folk that seldom know their own minds to the end of the
story. In fiction, distrusting what the Puritans call duty, they
are left gasping in the last chapter, wondering usually what they
are to do next; while the delightful lack of conscience that makes
the flappers audacious and the young men so unremorsefully naughty
leads to nothing at the end but a passionate desire to discover
some new reason for living (which I take to mean, a new
conscience) even if homes and social utility are wrecked in the
attempt.
Why has duty become so unpopular in American literature? Is it
because she is, after all, just what that loftiest if not most
impeccable of Puritans called her, stern daughter of the voice of
God? Is there to be no more sternness in our morals now we
understand their psychology, no voice commanding us to do this or
not to do that because there is a gulf set between worth and
worthlessness? Is it true that because we are not to be damned for
playing golf on Sunday, nothing can damn us? That because the
rock-ribbed Vermont ancestor's idea of duty can never be ours, we
have no duty to acknowledge? Is it true that if we cease being
Puritans we can remain without principle, swayed only by impulse
and events?
When these questions are answered to the hilt, we shall get
something more vital than anti-Puritanism in modern American
literature.
THE OLDER GENERATION
The American Academy of Arts and Letters says a word for the Older
Generation now and then by choosing new academicians from its
ranks. No one else for a long while now has been so poor as to do
it reverence. Indeed, the readers of some of our magazines must
have long since concluded that there are no fathers and mothers in
the modern literary world, but only self-created heralds of the
future who do not bother even to be rebellious against a
generation they condemn.
The older generation is in a difficult situation, because,
apparently, no one knows precisely who and what it is. The younger
generation, of course, is made up of every one who dislikes
Tennyson, believes in realism, reads De Gourmont, and was not
responsible for the war. That is perfectly definite. We are
somewhat puzzled by the uncounted hordes of the youthful in
appearance who support the movies, are stolidly conservative in
the colleges, never heard of De Gourmont, and have forgotten the
war. But perhaps that is some other younger generation which no
one has taken the trouble to write about--yet.
As for the older generation, what actually is it, and who in
reality are they? The general impression seems to be that they are
the Victorians, they are Howells and his contemporaries, they are
the men and women who created the family magazine, invented
morality, revived Puritanism, and tried to impose evolution on a
society that preferred devolution by international combat. But
these men are all dead, or have ceased writing. They are not
_our_ older generation. It is true that they are famous and so
convenient for reference, but it is not accurate nor fair to
drag them from their graves for purposes of argument.
The true older generation, of which one seldom hears in current
criticism except in terms of abuse, remains to be discovered, and
we herewith announce its personnel, so that the next time the
youthful writer excoriates it in the abstract all may know just
whom he means. Among the older generation in American literature
are H. L. Mencken and Mrs. Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington and
Stuart P. Sherman, Miss Amy Lowell and Mr. Frank Moore Colby,
Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay and Carl
Sandburg, Mrs. Gerould and Professor William Lyon Phelps, Edgar
Lee Masters, Joseph Hergesheimer, and most of the more radicaleditors
of New York. Here is this group of desiccated Victorians,
upholders of the ethics of Mr. Pickwick, and the artistic theories
of Bulwer-Lytton. Here are the bogies of outworn conservatism,
numbered like a football team. Mark their names, and know from now
on that most of the books that you have supposed were solid in
artistry and mature in thought, though perhaps novel in tone or in
method, were written by the older generation.
Perhaps when the younger generation pretend to confuse their
immediate predecessors with Ruskin and Carlyle, with Browning,
Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Matthew Arnold, they are
merely strategic. For it is still dangerous to assault the
citadels of the great Victorians with no greater books than the
youthful volumes of 1918-1921, no matter how many breaches the war
has left in the walls of their philosophy. It is far easier to
assume that they are still alive in pallid survival, and to attack a
hypothetic older generation, which, representing nothing real,
can therefore not strike back.
Let the younger generation go back to its muttons, let it attend
to its most pressing business, which is to create. It is vigorous,
prolific, and, to my judgment, full of promise, but so far has
done little or nothing not summarized in these words. It must pay
its debt to time before it grows much older, or go down among
expectations unrealized. It has few hours to waste upon attacking
an older generation which, as it is described, does not exist
except in youthful imagination, a generation actually of the
middle-aged which in the meantime is bearing the burden of
invention, creation, revolution in art while the youngsters are
talking.