academic reviewer. He does not write for the newspapers, for he
despises them, and they are rather scornful of his style, which is
usually lumbering, and his idea that 1921 is the proper time in
which to review the books of 1920. But you will find him in the
weeklies, and rampant in the technical journals.
The academic reviewer is besotted by facts, or their absence. The
most precious part of the review to him is the last paragraph in
which he points out misspellings, bad punctuation, and
inaccuracies generally. Like a hound dog in a corn field, he never
sees his books as a whole, but snouts and burrows along the trail
he is following. If he knows the psychology of primitive man,
primitive psychology he will find and criticize, even in a book on
the making of gardens. If his specialty is French drama, French
drama he will find, even in a footnote, and root it out and nuzzle
it. I remember when a famous scholar devoted the whole of his
review of a two volume _magnum opus_ upon a great historical
period, to the criticism of the text of a Latin hymn cited in a
footnote! The academic reviewer (by which I do _not_ mean the
university reviewer, since many such are not academic in the bad
sense which I am giving to the word) demands an index. His reviews
usually end with, "There is no index," or, "There is an excellent
index." The reason is plain. The index is his sole guide to
reviewing. If he finds his pet topics there he can hunt them down
remorselessly. But if there is no index, he is cast adrift
helpless, knowing neither where to begin nor where to end his
review. I call him a bad reviewer, but useful, because, though
incapable of estimating philosophies or creations of the
imagination, he is our best guarantee that writers' facts are
facts.
My acquaintance with the next bad, but occasionally useful,
reviewer is less extensive, but, by the circumstances of the case,
more intimate. I shall call him the ego-frisky reviewer. The term
(which I am quite aware is a barbarous compound) I am led to
invent in order to describe the phenomenon of a critic whose ego
frisks merrily over the corpus of his book. He is not so modern a
product as he himself believes. The vituperative critics of the
Quarterlies and, earlier still, of Grub Street, used their
enemies' books as a means of indulging their needs for self-
expression. But it was wrath, jealousy, vindictiveness, or
political enmity which they discharged while seated on the body of
the foe; whereas the ego-friskish critic has no such bile in him.
He is in fact a product of the new advertising psychology, which
says, "Be human" (by which is meant "be personal") "first of all."
He regards his book (I know this, because he has often told me so)
as a text merely, for a discourse which must entertain the reader.
And his idea of entertainment is to write about himself, his
tastes, his moods, his reactions. Either he praises the book for
what it does to his ego, or damns it for what it did to his ego.
You will never catch him between these extremes, for moderation is
not his vice.
The ego-frisky reviewer is not what the biologist would call a
pure form. He (or she) is usually a yellow journalist, adopting
criticism as a kind of protective coloration. The highly personal
critic, adventuring, or even frolicking among masterpieces, and
recording his experiences, is the true type, and it is he that the
ego-friskish imitate. Such a critic in the jovial person of Mr.
Chesterton, or Professor Phelps, or Heywood Broun, contributes
much to the vividness of our sense for books. But their imitators,
although they sometimes enliven, more often devastate reviewing.
Alas, I am best acquainted among them all with the dull reviewer,
who is neither good nor useful. The excellent books he has
poisoned as though by opiates! The dull books he has made duller!
No one has cause to love him unless it be the authors of weak
books, who thank their dull critics for exposing them in reviews
so tedious that no one discovers what the criticism is about.
The dull reviewer has two varieties: the stupid and the merely
dull. It is the stupid reviewer who exasperates beyond patience
the lover of good books. He is the man who gets a book wrong from
the start, and then plods on after his own conception, which has
no reference whatsoever to the author's. He is the man who takes
irony seriously, misses the symbolism when there is any, and
invariably guesses wrong as to the sources of the characters and
the plot.
There are not many really stupid reviewers, for the most indolent
editor cleans house occasionally, and the stupid are the first to
go out the back door. But merely dull reviewers are as plentiful
as fountain pens. The dull reviewer, like Chaucer's drunken man,
knows where he wants to go but doesn't know how to get there. He
(or she) has three favorite paths that lead nowhere, all equally
devious.
The first is by interminable narrative. "When Hilda was blown into
the arms of Harold Garth at the windy corner of the Woolworth
building, neither guessed at what was to follow. Beginning with
this amusing situation, the author of 'The Yellow Moon' develops a
very interesting plot. Garth was the nephew of Miles Harrison,
Mayor of New York. After graduating from Williams, etc., etc.,
etc." This is what he calls summarizing the plot.
Unfortunately, the art of summary is seldom mastered, and a bad
summary is the dullest thing in the world. Yet even a bad summary
of a novel or a book of essays is hard to do; so that when the
dull reviewer has finished, his sweaty brow and numbed fingers
persuade him that he has written a review. There is time for just
a word of quasi-criticism: "This book would have been better if it
had been shorter, and the plot is not always logical.
Nevertheless, 'The Yellow Moon' holds interest throughout." And
then, finis. This is botchery and sometimes butchery, not
reviewing.
The dullest reviewers I have known, however, have been the long-
winded ones. A book is talk about life, and therefore talk about a
book is one remove more from the reality of experience. Talk about
talk must be good talk, and it must be sparing of words. A concise
style is nearly always an interesting style: even though it repel
by crudity it will never be dull. But conciseness is not the
quality I most often detect in reviewing. It is luxurious to be
concise when one is writing at space rates; and it is always harder
to say a thing briefly than at length, just as it is easier
for a woman to hit a nail at the third stroke than at the first.
I once proposed a competition in a college class in English
composition. Each student was to clip a column newspaper article
of comment (not facts) and condense it to the limit of safety.
Then editorials gave up their gaseous matter in clouds, chatty
news stories boiled away to paragraphs, and articles shrank up to
their headlines.
But the reviews suffered most. One, I remember, came down to "It
is a bad book," or to express it algebraically, it is a bad book.
Another disappeared entirely. On strict analysis it was discovered
that the reviewer had said nothing not canceled out by something
else. But most remained as a weak liquor of comment upon which
floated a hard cake of undigested narrative. One student found a
bit of closely reasoned criticism that argued from definite
evidences to a concrete conclusion. It was irreducible; but this
was a unique experience.
The long-winded are the dullest of dull reviewers, but the most
pernicious are the wielders of cliches and platitudes. Is there
somewhere a reviewer's manual, like the manual of correct social
phrases which some one has recently published? I would believe it
from the evidence of a hundred reviews in which the same phrases,
differently arranged, are applied to fifty different books. I
would believe it, except for the known capacity of man to borrow
most of his thoughts and all of his phrases from his neighbor. I
know too well that writers may operate like the Federal Reserve
banks, except that in literature there is no limit to inflation. A
thousand thousand may use "a novel of daring adventure," "a poem
full of grace and beauty," or "shows the reaction of a thoughtful
mind to the facts of the universe," without exhausting the supply.
It is like the manufacture of paper money, and the effect on
credit is precisely the same.
So much for the various types of reviewers who, however
interesting they may be critically, cannot be called good. The
good reviewers, let an uncharitable world say what it will, are,
thank heaven! more numerous. Their divisions, temperamental and
intellectual, present a curious picture of the difficulties and
the rewards of this profession. Yet I cannot enter upon them here,
and for good reasons.
The good reviewer is like the good teacher and the good preacher.
He is not rare, but he is precious. He has qualities that almost
escape analysis and therefore deserve more than a complimentary
discussion. He must hold his book like a crystal ball in which he
sees not only its proper essence in perfect clarity, but also his
own mind mirrored. He must--... In other words, the good reviewer
deserves an essay of his own. He is a genius in a minor art, which
sometimes becomes major; a craftsman whose skill is often
exceptional. I will not put him in the same apartment with
reviewers who are arid, egoistic, or dull.
MRS. WHARTON'S "THE AGE OF INNOCENCE"
America is the land of cherished illusions. Americans prefer to
believe that they are innocent, innocent of immorality after
marriage, innocent of dishonesty in business, innocent of
incompatibility between husbands and wives. Americans do not
like to admit the existence (in the family) of passion, of
unscrupulousness, of temperament. They have made a code for what
is to be done, and what is not to be done, and whatever differs is
un-American. If their right hands offend them they cut them off
rather than admit possession. They believed in international
morality when none existed, and when they were made to face the
disagreeable fact of war, cast off the nations of the earth, and
continued to believe in national morality.
In America prostitution is tolerated in practice, but forbidden in
print. All homes are happy unless there is proof to the contrary,
and then they are un-American. In its wilful idealism America is
determined that at all costs we shall appear to be innocent. And a
novel which should begin with the leaders in social conformity,
who keep hard and clean the code, and should sweep through the
great middle classes that may escape its rigors themselves, but
exact them of others, might present the pageant, the social
history, the epic of America.
Of course, Mrs. Wharton's novel does nothing of the sort. This is
how Tolstoy, or H. G. Wells, or Ernest Poole would have written
"The Age of Innocence." They would have been grandiose, epical;
their stories would have been histories of culture. It would have
been as easy to have called their books broad as it is to call
Mrs. Wharton's fine novel narrow. Tendencies, philosophies,
irrepressible outbursts would have served as their protagonists,
where hers are dwellers in Fifth Avenue or Waverly Place--a
cosmopolitan astray, a dowager, a clubman yearning for
intellectual sympathy.
And yet in the long run it comes to much the same thing. The epic
novelists prefer the panorama: she the drawing-room canvas. They
deduce from vast philosophies and depict society. She gives us the
Mingotts, the Mansons, the Van der Luydens--society, in its little
brownstone New York of the '70's--and lets us formulate
inductively the code of America. A little canvas is enough for a
great picture if the painting is good.
Indeed, the only objection I have ever heard urged against Mrs.
Wharton's fine art of narrative is that it is narrow--an art of
dress suit and sophistication. And this book is the answer. For,
of course, her art is narrow--like Jane Austen's, like Sheridan's,
like Pope's, like Maupassant's, like that of all writers who
prefer to study human nature in its most articulate instead of its
broadest manifestations. It is narrow because it is focussed, but
this does not mean that it is small. Although the story of "The
Age of Innocence" might have been set in a far broader background,
it is the circumstances of the New York society which Mrs. Wharton
knows so well that give it a piquancy, a reality that "epics"
lack. They are like the accidents of voice, eye, gesture which
determine individuality. Yet her subject is America.
This treating of large themes by highly personal symbols makes
possible Mrs. Wharton's admirable perfection of technique. Hers is
the technique of sculpture rather than the technique of
architecture. It permits the fine play of a humor that has an eye
of irony in it, but is more human than irony. It makes possible an
approach to perfection. Behold Mrs. Manson Mingott, the
indomitable dowager, Catherine:
The immense accretions of flesh which had descended on her in
middle life, like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed
her... into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.
She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her
other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by
presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink
and white flesh, in the center of which the traces of a small face
survived as if awaiting excavation.... Around and below, wave
after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious
armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the
surface of the billows.
Her art is restrained, focussed upon those points where America,
in its normality and in its eccentricity, has become articulate.
Therefore it is sharp and convincing.
Who is the central figure in this story where the leaven of
intellectual and emotional unrest works in a society that has
perfected its code and intends to live by it? Is it Newland
Archer, who bears the uncomfortable ferment within him? Is it his
wife, the lovely May, whose clear blue eyes will see only
innocence? Is it the Countess Olenska, the American who has seen
reality and suffered by it, and sacrifices her love for Newland in
order to preserve his innocence? No one of these is the center of
the story, but rather the idea of "the family," this American
"family," which is moral according to its lights, provincial,
narrow--but intensely determined that its world shall appear
upright, faithful, courageous, in despite of facts, and regardless
of how poor reality must be tortured until it conforms. And the
"family" as Mrs. Wharton describes it is just the bourgeois
Puritanism of nineteenth century America.
Was May right when, with the might of innocence, she forced
Newland to give up life for mere living? Was the Countess right
when, in spite of her love for him, she aided and abetted her,
making him live up to the self-restraint that belonged to his
code? The story does not answer, being concerned with the
qualities of the "family," not with didacticism.
It says that the insistent innocence of America had its rewards as
well as its penalties. It says, in so far as it states any
conclusion definitely, that a new and less trammeled generation
must answer whether it was the discipline of its parents that
saved the American family from anarchy, or the suppressions of its
parents that made it rebellious. And the answer is not yet.
"The Age of Innocence" is a fine novel, beautifully written, "big"
in the best sense, which has nothing to do with size, a credit to
American literature--for if its author is cosmopolitan, this
novel, as much as her earlier "Ethan Frome," is a fruit of our
soil.
November 6, 1920.
MR. HERGESHEIMER'S "CYTHEREA"
Mrs. Wharton found the age of innocence in the 1870's; Mr.
Hergesheimer discovers an age of no innocence in the 1920's. In
"The Age of Innocence," the lovely May, a creature of society's
conventions, loses her husband and then regains the dulled
personality left from the fire of passion. In "Cytherea" the less
lovely, but equally moral Fanny loses her Lee because she cannot
satisfy his longings and nags when she fails. But she does not
regain him when his love chase is over, because he is burned out.
Athene and Aphrodite, the graces of the mind, the seductions of
the person of the Countess Olenska, together draw Newland Archer,
husband of May; but it is Aphrodite only, Cytherean Aphrodite,
who, being sex incarnate, is more than mere temptations of the
flesh, that wrecks Fanny's home.
In the '70's the poor innocents of society believed their code of
honor impregnable against sex. They dressed against sex, talked
against sex, kept sex below the surface. The suppression froze
some of them into rigidity and stiffened all. But they had their
compensations. By sacrificing freedom for personal desire they
gained much security. Good husbands required more than a lure of
the body to take them off. And when they gave up a great romance
for respectability, like Newland Archer, at least they remained
gentlemen. There was a tragedy of thwarted development, of
martyred love, of waste; but at least self-respect, however
misguided, remained.
Not so with this trivial, lawless country club set of the 1920's,
drunk part of the time and reckless all of it, codeless, dutiless,
restless. For the virtuous among them Aphrodite, a vulgar,
shameless Aphrodite, was a nightly menace; for the weak among them
(such as Peyton Morris), a passion to be resisted only by fear;
for the wayward, like Lee, she was the only illusion worth
pursuing. To resist for a woman was to become "blasted and twisted
out of her purpose," to be "steeped in vinegar or filled with
tallow"; to resist for a man was to lose the integrity of his
personality. There were no moral compensations, for there is no
morality but self-development, at least in Mr. Hergesheimer's town
of Eastlake. There is no god for a man in love but Cytherea.
And this is one way of describing Mr. Hergesheimer's study of love
in idleness in the 1920's. Another way would be to call it an
essay upon insecurity, although the word essay is too dry to use
in a story which is fairly awash with alcohol. The war, the story
seems to say, sapped our security of property and comfort and
life. But insecurity is an insidious disease that spreads, like
bacteria, where strength is relaxed. It infects the lives of those
who have lost their certainties and become doubtful of their
wills. In this relaxed society of the 1920's, where nothing seemed
certain but the need of money and a drink, insecurity spread into
married life. Not even the well-mated were secure in the general
decline of use and wont. A home wrecked by vague desires running
wild--that is the theme of "Cytherea."
Or take a third view of this provocative book. The triangle we
have had tiresomely with us, but it is woman's love that is,
perversely, always the hero. Hergesheimer studies the man, studies
him not as will, or energy, or desire a-struggle with duty or
morality, but merely as sex. Man's sex in love, man's sex
dominated by Cytherea, is his theme. This is new, at least in
fiction, for there man is often swept away, but seldom dominated
by sex. And indeed Hergesheimer has to find his man in the relaxed
society to which I have referred, a society wearied by unchartered
freedom, where business is profitable but trivial, where duty and
religion exist only as a convention, disregarded by the honest,
upheld by the hypocritical, a society where Cytherea marks and
grips her own. Even so, it is an achievement.
Cytherea in the story is a doll with a glamorous countenance,
bought and cherished by Lee Randon as a symbol of what he did not
find in his married life, what no man finds and keeps, because it
is an illusion. Cytherea is Lee Randon's longing for emotional
satisfaction, a satisfaction that is not to be of the body merely.
And when he meets Savina Grove, a pathological case, whose violent
sex emotions have been inhibited to the bursting point, he thinks
(and fears) that he has found his heart's desire. In the old, old
stories their elopement would have been their grand, their tragic
romance. In this cruel novel it is tragic, for she dies of it; but
she is not Cytherea; she is earthly merely; it is felt that she is
better dead.
It is a cruel story, cruel in its depiction of an almost worthless
society with just enough of the charm of the Restoration to save
it from beastliness; cruel in its unsparing analyses of man's sex
impulses (by all odds the most valuable part of the story); cruel
particularly because the ruined Lee Randon is a good fellow,
honester than most, kinder than he knows to individuals, although
certain that there is no principle but selfishness, and that it is
folly to limit desire for the sake of absolutes, like
righteousness, or generalities, like the human race. It is a cruel
study of women, for Fanny, the model of the domestic virtues, has
lost her innocent certainties of the triumph of the right and at
the first conflict with Cytherea becomes a common scold; cruel to
Savina Grove, who, in spite of her exquisiteness, is only a
psychoanalyst's problem; cruel to us all in exposing so ruthlessly
how distressing it is to live by stale morality, yet how
devastating to act with no guide but illusory desire.
All this is not new in outline. One can find the essence of this
story in monkish manuals. There the menace of Cytherea was not
evaded. There the weaknesses of man's sex were categoried with
less psychology but more force. What is new in Hergesheimer's book
is merely the environment in which his characters so disastrously
move and an insight into the mechanism of their psychology which
earlier writers lacked. I have called it a story of the age of no
innocence, but that would be the author's term, not mine; for
indeed his characters seem to display as naive an innocence as
Mrs. Wharton's of the laws of blood and will, and they know far
less of practical morality. The "Age of Moral Innocence" I should
rechristen Hergesheimer's book.
Critics will raise, and properly, a question as to the worth of
his materials. He is not studying a "ripe" society, as was Mrs.
Wharton, but the froth of the war, the spume of country clubs, the
trivialities of the strenuous but unproductive rich. This is a
just criticism as far as it goes, and it lessens the solidity, the
enduring interest, of his achievement. True, it was in such a
society that he could best pursue the wiles of Cytherea. He has a
right to pitch his laboratory where he pleases, and out of some
very sordid earth he has contrived some beauty. Nevertheless, you
cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, skilled though you
may be.
I should be more inclined, however, in a comparison with Mrs. Wharton,
to criticize his lack of detachment. That able novelist,
who is bounded so exclusively in her little social world,
nevertheless stands apart from it and sees it whole. Mr.
Hergesheimer has his feet still deep in the soil. He is too much a
part of his country club life. He means, perhaps, to be ironical,
but in truth he is too sympathetic with the desires, emotional and
aesthetic, that he expresses to be ironical until the close. There
is a surprise, too sharp a surprise, at the end of his novel, when
one discovers that the moral is not "do and dare," but "all is
vanity." He is so much and so lusciously at home with cocktails,
legs, limousine parties, stair-sittings, intra-matrimonial
kissings (I mention the most frequent references) that one
distrusts the sudden sarcasm of his finale. It would have been
better almost if he had been a Count de Gramont throughout, for he
has a _flair_ for the surroundings of amorous adventure and
is seldom gross; better still to have seen, as Mrs. Wharton saw,
the picture in perspective from the first. His book will disgust
some and annoy others because its art is muddied by a lingering
naturalism and too highly colored by the predilections of the
artist.