generation in literary criticism. It is a fresh subject, scarcely
touched by writers, and full of surprises. The jaded reader should
be told that, in spite of rumors to the contrary, the middle-aged
still exist.
A LITERATURE OF PROTEST
I have pursued the discussions of the new American realism through
university gatherings and literary inquests. Stripped of all
metaphysics and relieved of all subtlety the conclusion of the
matter is inescapable. It is not the realism of the realists, or
the freedom of free verse, or the radicalism of the radical that
in itself offends the critics, it is the growing ugliness of
American literature. The harsh and often vulgar lines of Masters
(so they say) seem to disdain beauty. Vachel Lindsay's shouted
raptures are raucous. Miss Lowell's polyphonies have intellectual
beauty, but the note is sharp, the splendors pyrotechnic. Robert
Frost's restrained rhythms are homely in the single line. The
"advanced" novelists, who win the prizes and stir up talk, are
flat in style when not muddy in their English. They do not lift.
An eighteenth century critic would call American literature ugly,
or at least homely, if he dipped into its realities, rococo if he
did not.
This is the sum of a criticism so strongly felt that it raises a
barrier to appreciation, almost a gate shut against knowledge
between the good American readers and the progressives in our
literature. Sandburg and Lindsay between them will cause more
acrimony in a gathering of English teachers than even Harold Bell
Wright. Miss Lowell carries controversy with her, triumphantly
riding upon it. Their critics wish form as they have known form,
want beauty such as they possess in riper literatures, want
maturity, richness, suavity, grace, and the lift of noble
thinking, nobly expressed. It may be remarked, in passing, that
they also would like to live in English manors in gardened
landscapes and have French cathedrals rise above their perfect
towns!
It ought to be clear that we shall never get beauty of this kind,
or of any absolute kind, in American writing until there is more
beauty in American life. Amidst the vulgarities of signboards,
cries of cheap newspapers, noisy hustle of trivial commercialism,
and the flatness of standardized living, it is hard to feel
spiritual qualities higher than optimism and reform. In general,
wherever we have touched America we have made it uglier, as a
necessary preliminary perhaps to making it anything at all, but
uglier nevertheless. There was more hardship perhaps but also more
clear beauty in Colonial days than in our own. More clear beauty,
we say, because the present has its own vigorous beauty, more
complex than what went before, but not yet clarified from the ugly
elements that are making it. The forests and the skyscrapers are
beautiful in America, but pretty much everything else below and
between is soiled or broken by progress and prosperity.
And it is of the things in between, of America in the making, that
these new writers, whose lack of pure beauty we deplore, and whose
occasional gratuitous ugliness we dislike, are writing. They are
protesting against its sordidness and crudity far more effectively
than the cloistered reader who recites Shelley, saying "Why can't
they write as he does." Like all that is human they share the
qualities of their environment, like all fighters they acquire the
faults of the enemy. They hate, often enough, the ugliness which a
generation of progress has implanted in their own minds. They have
been educated, perhaps, by the movies, Main Street conversation,
formalized schools, and stale Methodism, and they hate their
education. Or like the poets mentioned above they are moved by the
pathos, the injustice, the confused beauty, the promise, not of
some land of the past, but of the country under their feet, and
write of what stirs them in terms that fit.
It is only when one understands this new American writing to be a
literature of protest, that one begins to sympathize with its
purposes, admire its achievements, and be tolerant of its
limitations. For such a literature has very definite limitations.
It is preparative rather than ultimate. The spaciousness of great
imagination is seldom in it, and it lacks those grand and simple
conceptions which generalize upon the human race. It is cluttered
with descriptions of the enemy, it is nervous, or morbid, or
excited, or over-emphatic. That it strikes out occasional sparks
of vivid beauty, and has already produced masterpieces in poetry,
is to be wondered at and praised.
But some one had to begin to write of the United States as it is.
We could not go on with sentimental novels and spineless lyrics
forever. Some writers had to refocus the instrument and look at
reality again. And what the honest saw was not beautiful as
Tennyson knew beauty, not grand, not even very pleasant. It is
their job to make beauty out of it, beauty of a new kind probably,
because it will accompany new truth; but they must have time.
Surprise, shock, experiment, come first. The new literature
deserves criticism, but it also deserves respect. Contempt for it
is misplaced, aversion is dangerous since it leads to ignorance,
wholesale condemnation such as one hears from professional
platforms and reads in newspaper editorials is as futile as the
undiscriminating praise of those who welcome novelty just because
it is new.
BARBARIANS A LA MODE
The liberal mind, which just now is out of a job in politics,
might very well have a look at the present state of literature. A
task is there ready for it.
Our literature is being stretched and twisted or hacked and hewed
by dogmatists. Most of the critics are too busy gossiping about
plots and the private lives of authors to devote much attention to
principles. But the noble few who still can write about a book
without falling into it, or criticize an author's style without
dragging in his taste in summer resorts, are chiefly concerned
with classifications. Is our author conservative or radical? Are
his novels long or short skirted? Does he write for _Harper's_
or _The Dial_? They have divided America chronologically into the old
and the new and geographically into East or West of the Alleghanies,
or North or South of Fourteenth Street in New York. Such creative
writers as have a definite philosophy of composition are equally
categorical. And both are calling upon liberal minds, who are supposed
to have no principles of their own, to umpire the controversy.
The liberal mind, which I believe in, though I hesitate to define
it, has too much work before it to umpire in a dispute over the
relative taste of the decayed and the raw. In literature, as in
pretty much everything else, the central problem is not the
struggle of the old with the new; it is the endless combat of
civilization (which is old _and_ new) against barbarism. Under which
banner our writers are enlisting is the vital question. Whether they
are radical or conservative will always in the view of history be
interesting, but may be substantially unimportant. And the function of
the liberal mind, with its known power to dissolve illiberal
dogmatism, is to discover the barbarian wherever he raises his head,
and to convert or destroy him.
The Greeks had a short way of defining the barbarian which we can
only envy. To them, all men not Greeks were barbarians. By this
they meant that only the Greeks had learned to desire measure in
all things, liberty safeguarded by law, and knowledge of the truth
about life. Men not desiring these things were barbarous, no
matter how noble, how rich, and how honest. The ancient and highly
conservative Egyptians were barbarous; the youthful and new-
fangled Gauls were barbarous. An Egyptian in nothing else
resembled a Gaul, but both in the eyes of the Greek were
barbarians.
Evolution and devolution have intervened. The Gaul has become one
of the standards of civilization; the Egyptian has died of his
conservatism; but the problem of the barbarian remains the same.
There are neo-Gauls to-day and neo-Egyptians.
These gentry do not belong to the welter of vulgar barbarism, the
curse of a half educated, half democratized age. They are found
among the upper classes of the intellect, and can rightly be
called by such names as conservative or radical, which show that
they are part of the minority that thinks. Indeed, they are not
barbarous at all in the harsh modern sense of the word; yet the
Greeks would have condemned them.
The barbarism of the neo-Gaul is unrestraint ("punch" is the
nearest modern equivalent). The neo-Gaul is an innovator and this
is his vice. It is a byproduct of originality and a symptom of a
restless desire for change. The realist who makes a poem, not on
his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a good current example.
The novelist who shovels undistinguished humanity, just because it
is human, into his book is another. The versifier who twists and
breaks his rhythm solely in order to get new sounds is a third. A
fourth is the stylist who writes in disjointed phrases and
expletives, intended to represent the actual processes of the
mind.
The realist poet, so the Greeks would have said, lacks measure. He
destroys the balance of his art by asking your attention for the
strangeness of his subject. It is as if a sculptor should make a
Venus of chewing gum. The novelist lacks self-restraint. Life
interests him so much that he devours without digesting it. The
result is like a moving picture run too fast. The versifier also
lacks measure. He is more anxious to be new than to be true, and
he seeks effects upon the reader rather than forms for his
thought. The bizarre stylist misses truth by straining too much to
achieve it. Words are only symbols. They never more than roughly
represent a picture of thought. A monologue like this, as the
heroine goes to shop: Chapel Street...the old hardware
shop...scissors, skates glittering, moonlight on the ice...old Dr.
Brown's head, like a rink. Rink...a queer word! Pigeons in the air
above the housetops--automobiles like elephants. Was her nose
properly powdered?... Had she cared to dance with him after all? is
not absolutely true: it is not the wordless images that float
through the idle mind, but only a symbol of them, more awkward and
less informative than the plain English of what the heroine felt
and thought.
All these instances are barbarous in the Greek sense, and their
perpetrators, no matter how cultivated, how well-meaning, how
useful sometimes as pioneers and pathbreakers, are barbarians.
Some of them should be exposed; some chided; some labored with,
according to the magnitude and the nature of their offense. The
critics who uphold and approve them should be dealt with likewise.
And it is the reader with the liberal mind who is called to the
task. He is in sympathy, at least, with change, and knows that the
history of civilization has been a struggle to break away from
tradition and yet not go empty-handed; he can understand the
passion to express old things in a new and better way, or he is
not intellectually liberal. It takes a liberal mind to distinguish
between barbarism and progress.
Next there is the _rigor mortis_ of the neo-Egyptians, the barbarism
of the dead hand, called by the unkind and the undiscriminating,
academic barbarism.
Let us humor the Menckenites by so calling it, and then add that
it is by no means confined to the colleges, although it is a vice
more familiar in critics than in creative artists. A Ph.D. is
quite unnecessary in order to be academic in this sense, just as
one does not have to be a scholar in order to be pedantical. To
stand pat in one's thinking (and this is the neo-Egyptian fault)
is to be barbarous, whatever the profession of the thinker. True,
the victims of this hardening of the brain are precisely those men
and women most likely to fling taunts at the moderns, just those
who would rather be charged with immorality than barbarism. And
yet, to be bound to the past is as barbarous in the Greek sense as
to be wholly immersed in the present. The Egyptians for all their
learning were barbarians.
Barbarian is not as rude a word as it sounds. Most of the great
romanticists had strains of the barbarous in them--the young
Shakespeare among them. Indeed, much may be said for sound
barbarian literature, until it becomes self-conscious, though not
much for barbarian criticism. Nevertheless, I do not intend in
this sally against the slavish barbarism of the merely academic
mind to hurl the epithet recklessly. Lusty conservatives who
attack free verse, free fiction, ultra realism, "jazzed" prose,
and the socialistic drama as the diseases of the period have my
respect and sympathy, when it is a disease and not change as
change that they are attacking. And, often enough, these
manifestations _are_ symptoms of disease, a plethoric disease
arising from too high blood pressure. Hard-hitting conservatives
were never more needed in literature than now, when any one can
print anything that is novel, and find some one to approve of it.
But there are too many respectable barbarians among our American
conservatives who write just what they wrote twenty years ago, and
like just what they liked twenty years ago, because that is their
nature. In 1600 they would have done the same for 1579. Without
question men were regretting in 1600 the genius of the youthful
Shakespeare of the '80's, later quenched by commercialism (see the
appeals to the pit and the topical references in "Hamlet"); and
good conservatives were certainly regretting the sad course of the
drama which, torn from the scholars and flung to the mob, had
become mad clowning. What we need in the Tory line is not such
ice-bound derelicts but men who are passionate about the past
because they find their inspiration there, men and women who
belabor the present not for its existence, but because it might
have been better if it had been wiser.
They must, in short, be Greeks, not barbarians. It is the reverse
of barbarous to defend the old, but the man who can see no need,
no good, no hope in change is a barbarian. He flinches from the
truth physical and the truth spiritual that life is motion. I
particularly refer to the literary person who sneers at novels
because they are not epics, and condemns new poems or plays unread
if they deal with a phase of human evolution that does not please
him. I mean the critic who drags his victim back to Aristotle or
Matthew Arnold and slays him on a text whose application Aristotle
or Arnold would have been the first to deny. I mean the teacher
who by ironic thrust and visible contempt destroys the faith of
youth in the literary present without imparting more than a pallid
interest in the past. I mean the essayist who in 1911 described
Masefield as an unsound and dangerous radical in verse, and in
1921 accepts him as the standard "modern" poet by whom his
degenerate successors are to be measured.
All this is barbarism because it is ignorance or denial of the
laws of growth. It belongs anthropologically with totemism,
sacerdotalism, neo-ritualism, and every other remnant of the
terrible shackles of use and wont which chained early man to his
past. It is Egyptian. Its high priests are sometimes learned but
their minds are frozen. Beware of them.
In England, so far as I am able to judge, this variety of
barbarism shows itself usually in a rather snobbish intolerance of
anything not good form in literature. The universities still
protect it, but its home is in London, among the professional
middle class.
In America its symptom is well-disguised fear. Some of us are
afraid of our literary future just as many of us are afraid of
democracy. Poetry and criticism (we feel) which used to be written
by classicists and gentlemen are now in the hands of the corn-fed
multitude, educated God knows how or where. Fiction, once a
profession, has become a trade, and so has the drama. The line
between journalism and literature is lost. Grub Street has become
an emporium. Any one, anything can get into a story or a
sonnet....
The Greek of to-day (as we venture to define him) views all this
with some regret, and more concern. He sees that fine traditions
are withering, that fine things are being marred by ignorant
handling. He fears debasement, he hates vulgarity, and his realist
soul admits the high probability of both in a society whose
standards are broader than they are high. But he also sees new
energies let loose and new resources discovered; he recognizes new
forms of expression, uncouth or colloquial perhaps, but capable of
vitality and truth, and not without beauty. He bends his mind
toward them, knowing that if he ignores them their authors will
ignore him and his kind.
The Egyptian is afraid. He pulls his mantle closer about him and
walks by on the other side.
Here again is work for the liberal mind. If it is really liberal--
which means that training and disposition have made it free to
move through both the past and the present--it can cope with this
Egyptian barbarism; for liberal-minded lovers of literature, by
performing a very simple operation in psychoanalysis, can
understand how love for the good old times may cause fear lest we
lose their fruits, and how fear blinds the critic's eye, makes his
tongue harsh, and his judgment rigid as death.
Liberalism in politics is sulking just now, like Achilles in his
tent, its aid having been invited too early, or too late. But the
liberal spirit can never rest, and we solicit its help in
literature. I have mentioned the Gauls and the Egyptians as the
enemies within the camp of the intellectual, but beyond them lie
the uncounted numbers of the outer barbarians, the mass of the
unillumined, to whom neither tradition nor revolt, nor anything
which moves and has its being in the intellect has any
significance. Here is the common enemy of all, who can be
conquered only by converting him. When the Gaul and the Egyptian
are liberalized, the real job begins.
"If we compose well here, to Parthia."
IV
THE REVIEWING OF BOOKS
A PROSPECTUS FOR CRITICISM
Criticism, in one respect, is like science: there is pure science,
so-called, and applied science; there is pure criticism and
applied criticism, which latter is reviewing. In applied science,
principles established elsewhere are put to work; in reviewing,
critical principles are, or should be, put to work in the analysis
of books, but the books, if they are really important, often make
it necessary to erect new critical principles. In fact, it is
impossible to set a line where criticism ceases and reviewing
begins. Good criticism is generally applicable to all literature;
good reviewing is good criticism applied to a new book. I see no
other valid distinction.
Reviewing in America has had a career by no means glorious. In the
early nineteenth century, at the time of our first considerable
productivity in literature, it was sporadic. The great guns--
Lowell, Emerson--fired critical broadsides into the past; only
occasionally (as in "A Fable for Critics") were they drawn into
discussions of their contemporaries, and then, as in the Emerson-
Whitman affair, they sometimes regretted it. Reviewing was carried
on in small type, in the backs of certain magazines. Most of it
was verbose and much of it was worthless as criticism. The belated
recognition of the critical genius of Poe was due to the company
he kept. He was a sadly erratic reviewer, as often wrong, I
suppose, as right, but the most durable literary criticism of the
age came from his pen, and is to be found in a review, a review of
Hawthorne's short stories.
After the Civil War the situation did not immediately improve. We
had perhaps better reviewing, certainly much better mediums of
criticism, such, for example, as _The Nation_, and, later, _The
Critic_, but not more really excellent criticism. The magazines and
newspapers improved, the weekly, as a medium of reviewing, established
itself, though it functioned imperfectly; the individuals of force and
insight who broke through current comment into criticism were more
plentiful, but not more eminent.
The new era in reviewing, our era, began with two phenomena, of
which the first had obscure beginnings and the second can be
exactly dated.
The first was modern journalism. Just when journalism became
personal, racy, and inclusive of all the interests of modern life,
I cannot say. Kipling exhibits its early effects upon literature,
but Kipling was an effect, not a cause. No matter when it began,
we have seen, in the decade or two behind us, reviewing made
journalistic, an item of news, but still more a means of
entertainment.
The journalistic reviewer, who is still the commonest variety, had
one great merit. He was usually interesting. Naturally so, since
he wrote not to criticize the book that had been given him, but to
interest his readers. Yet by the very nature of the case he
labored under a disadvantage which forever barred him from calling
himself critic as well as reviewer. He was a specialist in
reporting, in making a story from the most unpromising material,
and also in the use of his mother tongue, but a specialist,
usually, in no other field whatsoever. Fiction, poetry, biography,
science, history, politics, theology--whatever came to his mill
was grist for the paper, and the less he knew of the subject and
the less he had read and thought, the more emphatic were his
opinions.
The club and saber work of Pope's day and Christopher North's has
gone--advertising has made it an expensive luxury, and here at
least commercialism has been of service to literature. It was
wholesale and emphatic praise that became a trademark of
journalistic reviewing. First novels, or obscure novels, were
sometimes handled roughly by a reviewer whose duty was to prepare
a smart piece of copy. But when books by the well known came to
his desk it was safer to praise than to damn, because in damning
one had to give reasons, whereas indiscriminate praise needed
neither knowledge nor excuse. Furthermore, since the chief object
was to have one's review read, excessive praise had every
advantage over measured approval. Who would hesitate between two
articles, one headed "The Best Book of the Year," and the other,
"A New Novel Critically Considered"!
Thus, journalism _per se_ has done little for the cause of
American reviewing, and directly or indirectly it has done much
harm, if only by encouraging publishers who found no competent
discussions of their wares to set up their own critics, who poured
out through the columns of an easy press commendations of the new
books which were often most intelligent, but never unbiased.
The newspapers, however, have rendered one great service to
criticism. In spite of their attempts to make even the most
serious books newsy news, they, and they alone, have kept pace
with the growing swarm of published books. The literary
supplement, which proposed to review all books not strictly
technical or transient, was a newspaper creation. And the literary
supplement, which grew from the old book page, contained much
reviewing which was in no bad sense journalistic. Without it the
public would have had only the advertisements and the publishers'
announcements to classify, analyze, and in some measure describe
the regiment of books that marches in advance of our civilization.