MODERN ESSAYS
SELECTED BY
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT. 1921, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.
PREFACE
IT had been my habit, I am now aware, to speak somewhat lightly of the
labors of anthologists: to insinuate that they led lives of bland
sedentary ease. I shall not do so again. When the publisher suggested a
collection of representative contemporary essays, I thought it would be
the most lenient of tasks. But experience is a fine aperitive to the
mind.
Indeed the pangs of the anthologist, if he has conscience, are
burdensome. There are so many considerations to be tenderly weighed;
personal taste must sometimes be set aside in view of the general plan;
for every item chosen half a dozen will have been affectionately conned
and sifted; and perhaps some favorite pieces will be denied because the
authors have reasons for withholding permission. It would be enjoyable
(for me, at any rate) to write an essay on the things I have lingered
over with intent to include them in this little book, but have finally
sacrificed for one reason or another. How many times--twenty at least--I
have taken down from my shelf Mr. Chesterton's _The Victorian Age in
Literature_ to reconsider whether his ten pages on Dickens, or his
glorious summing-up of Decadents and Æsthetes, were not absolutely
essential. How many times I have palpitated upon certain passages in
_The Education of Henry Adams_ and in Mr. Wells's _Outline of History_,
which, I assured myself, would legitimately stand as essays if shrewdly
excerpted.
But I usually concluded that would not be quite fair. I have not been
overscrupulous in this matter, for the essay is a mood rather than a
form; the frontier between the essay and the short story is as
imperceptible as is at present the once famous Mason and Dixon line.
Indeed, in that pleasant lowland country between the two empires lie (to
my way of thinking) some of the most fertile fields of prose--fiction
that expresses feeling and character and setting rather than action and
plot; fiction beautifully ripened by the lingering mild sunshine of the
essayist's mood. This is fiction, I might add, extremely unlikely to get
into the movies. I think of short stories such as George Gissing's, in
that too little known volume _The House of Cobwebs_, which I read again
and again at midnight with unfailing delight; fall asleep over; forget;
and again re-read with undiminished satisfaction. They have no
brilliance of phrase, no smart surprises, no worked-up 'situations'
which have to be taken at high speed to pass without breakdown over
their brittle bridgework of credibility. They have only the modest and
faintly melancholy savor of life itself.
Yet it is a mere quibble to pretend that the essay does not have easily
recognizable manners. It may be severely planned, or it may ramble in
ungirdled mood, but it has its own point of view that marks it from the
short story proper, or the merely personal memoir. That distinction,
easily felt by the sensitive reader, is not readily expressible. Perhaps
the true meaning of the word _essay_--an attempt--gives a clue. No
matter how personal or trifling the topic may be, there is always a
tendency to generalize, to walk round the subject or the experience, and
view it from several vantages; instead of (as in the short story)
cutting a carefully landscaped path through a chosen tract of human
complication. So an essay can never be more than an attempt, for it is
an excursion into the endless. Any student of fiction will admit that in
the composition of a short story many entertaining and valuable
elaborations may rise in the mind of the author which must be strictly
rejected because they do not forward the essential motive. But in the
essay (of an informal sort) we ask not relevance to plot, but relevance
to mood. That is why there are so many essays that are mere marking
time. The familiar essay is easier to write than the short story, but it
imposes equal restraints on a scrupulous author. For in fiction the
writer is controlled and limited and swept along by his material; but in
the essay, the writer rides his pen. A good story, once clearly
conceived, almost writes itself; but essays are written.
There also we find a pitfall of the personal essay--the temptation to
become too ostentatiously quaint, too deliberately 'whimsical' (the word
which, by loathsome repetition, has become emetic). The fine flavor and
genius of the essay--as in Bacon and Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt,
Thackeray, Thoreau; perhaps even in Stevenson--is the rich bouquet of
personality. But soliloquy must not fall into monologue. One might put
it thus: that the perfection of the familiar essay is a conscious
revelation of self done inadvertently.
The art of the anthologist is the art of the host: his tact is exerted
in choosing a congenial group; making them feel comfortable and at ease;
keeping the wine and tobacco in circulation; while his eye is tenderly
alert down the bright vista of tablecloth, for any lapse in the general
cheer. It is well, also, for him to hold himself discreetly in the
background, giving his guests the pleasure of clinching the jape, and
seeking only, by innocent wiles, to draw each one into some
characteristic and felicitous vein. I think I can offer you, in this
parliament of philomaths, entertainment of the most genuine sort; and
having said so much, I might well retire and be heard no more.
But I think it is well to state, as even the most bashful host may do,
just why this particular company has been called together. My intention
is not merely to please the amiable dilettante, though I hope to do that
too. I made my choices, first and foremost, with a view to stimulating
those who are themselves interested in the arts of writing. I have, to
be frank, a secret ambition that a book of this sort may even be used as
a small but useful weapon in the classroom. I wanted to bring it home to
the student that as brilliant and sincere work is being done to-day in
the essay as in any period of our literature. Accordingly the pieces
reprinted here are very diverse. There is the grand manner; there is
foolery; there is straightforward literary criticism; there is pathos,
politics, and the picturesque. But every selection is, in its own way, a
work of art. And I would call the reader's attention to this: that the
greater number of these essays were written not by retired æsthetes, but
by practising journalists in the harness of the daily or weekly press.
The names of some of the most widely bruited essayists of our day are
absent from this roster, not by malice, but because I desired to include
material less generally known.
I should apologize, I suppose, for the very informal tone of the
introductory notes on each author. But I conceived the reader in the
rôle of a friend spending the evening in happy gossip along the shelves.
Pulling out one's favorites and talking about them, now and then reading
a chosen extract aloud, and ending (some time after midnight) by
choosing some special volume for the guest to take to bed with him--in
the same spirit I have compiled this collection. Perhaps the editorial
comments have too much the manner of dressing gown and slippers; but
what a pleasant book this will be to read in bed!
And perhaps this collection may be regarded as a small contribution to
Anglo-American friendliness. Of course when I say Anglo-, I mean Brito-,
but that is such a hideous prefix. Journalists on this side are much
better acquainted with what their professional colleagues are doing in
Britain, than they with our concerns. But surely there should be a
congenial fraternity of spirit among all who use the English tongue in
print. There are some of us who even imagine a day when there may be
regular international exchanges of journalists, as there have been of
scholars and students. The contributions to this book are rather evenly
divided between British and American hands; and perhaps it is not
insignificant that two of the most pleasing items come from Canada,
where they often combine the virtues of both sides.
It is a pleasant task to thank the authors and publishers who have
assented to the reprinting of these pieces. To the authors themselves,
and to the following publishers, I admit my sincere gratitude for the
use of material copyrighted by them:--Doubleday Page and Company for the
extracts from books by John Macy, Stewart Edward White and Pearsall
Smith; Charles Scribner's Sons for Rupert Brooke's _Niagara Falls_; the
New York _Sun_ for Don Marquis's _Almost Perfect State_; the George H.
Doran Company for the essays by Joyce Kilmer and Robert Cortes Holliday;
Mr. James B. Pinker for permission to reprint Mr. Conrad's Preface to _A
Personal Record_; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the essays by H. M.
Tomlinson, A. P. Herbert and Philip Guedalla; Lady Osler for the essay
by the late Sir William Osler; Henry Holt and Company for Thomas Burke's
_The Russian Quarter_; E. P. Dutton and Company for _A Word for Autumn_,
by A. A. Milne; the New York _Evening Post_ for the essays by Stuart P.
Sherman and Harry Esty Dounce; Harper and Brothers for Marian Storm's _A
Woodland Valentine_; Dodd, Mead and Company for Simeon Strunsky's
_Nocturne_, from his volume _Post-Impressions_; the Macmillan Company
for _Beer and Cider_, from Professor Saintsbury's _Notes on a Cellar
Book_; Longmans Green and Company for Bertrand Russell's _A Free Man's
Worship_, from _Mysticism and Logic_; Robert M. McBride and Company for
the selection from James Branch Cabell; Harcourt, Brace and Company for
the essay by Heywood Broun; _The Weekly Review_ for the essays by O. W.
Firkins, Harry Morgan Ayres and Robert Palfrey Utter. The present
ownership of the copyright of the essay by Louise Imogen Guiney I have
been unable to discover. It was published in _Patrins_ (Copeland and
Day, 1897), which has long been out of print. Knowing the purity of my
motives I have used this essay, hoping that it might introduce Miss
Guiney's exquisite work to the younger generation that knows her hardly
at all.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
OCTOBER, 1921
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface iii
AMERICAN LITERATURE _John Macy_ 3
MARY WHITE _William Allen White_ 22
NIAGARA FALLS _Rupert Brooke_ 30
THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE _Don Marquis_ 39
"THE MAN O' WAR'S 'ER 'USBAND" _David W. Bone_ 49
THE MARKET _William McFee_ 60
HOLY IRELAND _Joyce Kilmer_ 67
A FAMILIAR PREFACE _Joseph Conrad_ 81
ON DRAWING _A. P. Herbert_ 94
O. HENRY _O. W. Firkins_ 100
THE MOWING OF A FIELD _Hilaire Belloc_ 113
THE STUDENT LIFE _William Osler_ 128
THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA _Stephen Leacock_ 145
AMERICA AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION _Harry Morgan Ayres_ 153
THE RUSSIAN QUARTER _Thomas Burke_ 160
A WORD FOR AUTUMN _A. A. Milne_ 173
"A CLERGYMAN" _Max Beerbohm_ 177
SAMUEL BUTLER _Stuart P. Sherman_ 187
BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS _H. M. Tomlinson_ 210
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE _Louise Imogen Guiney_ 219
ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT _Stewart Edward White_ 229
A WOODLAND VALENTINE _Marian Storm_ 236
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY _George Santayana_ 241
NOCTURNE _Simeon Strunsky_ 246
BEER AND CIDER _George Saintsbury_ 253
A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP _Bertrand Russell_ 263
SOME HISTORIANS _Philip Guedalla_ 278
WINTER MIST _Robert Palfrey Utter_ 291
TRIVIA _Logan Pearsall Smith_ 297
BEYOND LIFE _James Branch Cabell_ 304
THE FISH REPORTER _Robert Cortes Holliday_ 316
SOME NONSENSE ABOUT A DOG _Harry Esty Dounce_ 331
THE FIFTY-FIRST DRAGON _Heywood Broun_ 338
MODERN ESSAYS
AMERICAN LITERATURE
_By_ JOHN MACY
This vigorous survey of American letters is the first chapter of
John Macy's admirable volume _The Spirit of American Literature_,
published in 1913--a book shrewd, penetrating and salty, which has
unfortunately never reached one-tenth of the many readers who would
find it permanently delightful and profitable. Mr. Macy has no
skill in vaudeville tricks to call attention to himself: no shafts
of limelight have followed him across the stage. But those who have
an eye for criticism that is vivacious without bombast, austere
without bitterness, keen without malice, know him as one of the
truly competent and liberal-minded observers of the literary scene.
Mr. Macy was born in Detroit, 1877; graduated from Harvard in 1899;
did editorial service on the _Youth's Companion_ and the _Boston
Herald_; and nowadays lives pensively in Greenwich Village, writing
a good deal for _The Freeman_ and _The Literary Review_. Perhaps,
if you were wandering on Fourth Street, east of Sixth Avenue, you
might see him treading thoughtfully along, with a wide sombrero
hat, and always troubled by an iron-gray forelock that droops over
his brow. You would know, as soon as you saw him, that he is a man
greatly lovable. I like to think of him as I first saw him, some
years ago, in front of the bright hearth of the charming St.
Botolph Club in Boston, where he was usually the center of an
animated group of nocturnal philosophers.
The essay was written in 1912, before the very real reawakening of
American creative work that began in the 'teens of this century.
The reader will find it interesting to consider how far Mr. Macy's
remarks might be modified if he were writing to-day.
_The Spirit of American Literature_ has been reissued in an
inexpensive edition by Boni and Liveright. It is a book well worth
owning.
AMERICAN literature is a branch of English literature, as truly as are
English books written in Scotland or South Africa. Our literature lies
almost entirely in the nineteenth century when the ideas and books of
the western world were freely interchanged among the nations and became
accessible to an increasing number of readers. In literature nationality
is determined by language rather than by blood or geography. M.
Maeterlinck, born a subject of King Leopold, belongs to French
literature. Mr. Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, is already an English
classic. Geography, much less important in the nineteenth century than
before, was never, among modern European nations, so important as we
sometimes are asked to believe. Of the ancestors of English literature
"Beowulf" is scarcely more significant, and rather less graceful, than
our tree-inhabiting forebears with prehensile toes; the true progenitors
of English literature are Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, and French.
American literature and English literature of the nineteenth century are
parallel derivatives from preceding centuries of English literature.
Literature is a succession of books from books. Artistic expression
springs from life ultimately but not immediately. It may be likened to a
river which is swollen throughout its course by new tributaries and by
the seepages of its banks; it reflects the life through which it flows,
taking color from the shores; the shores modify it, but its power and
volume descend from distant headwaters and affluents far up stream. Or
it may be likened to the race-life which our food nourishes or
impoverishes, which our individual circumstances foster or damage, but
which flows on through us, strangely impersonal and beyond our power to
kill or create.
It is well for a writer to say: "Away with books! I will draw my
inspiration from life!" For we have too many books that are simply
better books diluted by John Smith. At the same time, literature is not
born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage,
and students find it so easy to trace genealogies that much criticism
reads like an Old Testament chapter of "begats." Every novel was suckled
at the breasts of older novels, and great mothers are often prolific of
anæmic offspring. The stock falls off and revives, goes a-wandering, and
returns like a prodigal. The family records get blurred. But of the main
fact of descent there is no doubt.
American literature is English literature made in this country. Its
nineteenth-century characteristics are evident and can be analyzed and
discussed with some degree of certainty. Its "American"
characteristics--no critic that I know has ever given a good account of
them. You can define certain peculiarities of American politics,
American agriculture, American public schools, even American religion.
But what is uniquely American in American literature? Poe is just as
American as Mark Twain; Lanier is just as American as Whittier. The
American spirit in literature is a myth, like American valor in war,
which is precisely like the valor of Italians and Japanese. The
American, deluded by a falsely idealized image which he calls America,
can say that the purity of Longfellow represents the purity of American
home life. An Irish Englishman, Mr. Bernard Shaw, with another falsely
idealized image of America, surprised that a face does not fit his
image, can ask: "What is Poe doing in that galley?" There is no answer.
You never can tell. Poe could not help it. He was born in Boston, and
lived in Richmond, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Professor van Dyke
says that Poe was a maker of "decidedly un-American cameos," but I do
not understand what that means. Facts are uncomfortable consorts of
prejudices and emotional generalities; they spoil domestic peace, and
when there is a separation they sit solid at home while the other party
goes. Irving, a shy, sensitive gentleman, who wrote with fastidious
care, said: "It has been a matter of marvel, to European readers, that a
man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable
English." It is a matter of marvel, just as it is a marvel that Blake
and Keats flowered in the brutal city of London a hundred years ago.
The literary mind is strengthened and nurtured, is influenced and
mastered, by the accumulated riches of literature. In the last century
the strongest thinkers in our language were Englishmen, and not only the
traditional but the contemporary influences on our thinkers and artists
were British. This may account for one negative characteristic of
American literature--its lack of American quality. True, our records
must reflect our life. Our poets, enamored of nightingales and Persian
gardens, have not altogether forgotten the mocking-bird and the woods of
Maine. Fiction, written by inhabitants of New York, Ohio, and
Massachusetts, does tell us something of the ways of life in those
mighty commonwealths, just as English fiction written by Lancashire men
about Lancashire people is saturated with the dialect, the local habits
and scenery of that county. But wherever an English-speaking man of
imagination may dwell, in Dorset or Calcutta or Indianapolis, he is
subject to the strong arm of the empire of English literature; he cannot
escape it; it tears him out of his obscure bed and makes a happy slave
of him. He is assigned to the department of the service for which his
gifts qualify him, and his special education is undertaken by
drill-masters and captains who hail from provinces far from his
birthplace.
Dickens, who writes of London, influences Bret Harte, who writes of
California, and Bret Harte influences Kipling, who writes of India. Each
is intensely local in subject matter. The affinity between them is a
matter of temperament, manifested, for example, in the swagger and
exaggeration characteristic of all three. California did not "produce"
Bret Harte; the power of Dickens was greater than that of the Sierras
and the Golden Gate. Bret Harte created a California that never existed,
and Indian gentlemen, Caucasian and Hindoo, tell us that Kipling
invented an army and an empire unknown to geographers and war-offices.
The ideas at work among these English men of letters are
world-encircling and fly between book and brain. The dominant power is
on the British Islands, and the prevailing stream of influence flows
west across the Atlantic. Sometimes it turns and runs the other way. Poe
influenced Rossetti; Whitman influenced Henley. For a century Cooper has
been in command of the British literary marine. Literature is
reprehensibly unpatriotic, even though its votaries are, as individual
citizens, afflicted with local prides and hostilities. It takes only a
dramatic interest in the guns of Yorktown. Its philosophy was nobly
uttered by Gaston Paris in the Collège de France in 1870, when the city
was beleaguered by the German armies: "Common studies, pursued in the
same spirit, in all civilized countries, form, beyond the restrictions
of diverse and often hostile nationalities, a great country which no
war profanes, no conqueror menaces, where souls find that refuge and
unity which in former times was offered them by the city of God." The
catholicity of English language and literature transcends the temporal
boundaries of states.
What, then, of the "provincialism" of the American province of the
empire of British literature? Is it an observable general
characteristic, and is it a virtue or a vice? There is a sense in which
American literature is not provincial enough. The most provincial of all
literature is the Greek. The Greeks knew nothing outside of Greece and
needed to know nothing. The Old Testament is tribal in its
provinciality; its god is a local god, and its village police and
sanitary regulations are erected into eternal laws. If this racial
localism is not essential to the greatness of early literatures, it is
inseparable from them; we find it there. It is not possible in our
cosmopolitan age and there are few traces of it in American books. No
American poet has sung of his neighborhood with naïve passion, as if it
were all the world to him. Whitman is pugnaciously American, but his
sympathies are universal, his vision is cosmic; when he seems to be
standing in a city street looking at life, he is in a trance, and his
spirit is racing with the winds.
The welcome that we gave Whitman betrays the lack of an admirable kind
of provincialism; it shows us defective in local security of judgment.
Some of us have been so anxiously abashed by high standards of European
culture that we could not see a poet in our own back yard until European
poets and critics told us he was there. This is queerly contradictory to
a disposition found in some Americans to disregard world standards and
proclaim a third-rate poet as the Milton of Oshkosh or the Shelley of
San Francisco. The passage in Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about "The
American Bulwers, Disraelis and Scotts" is a spoonful of salt in the
mouth of that sort of gaping village reverence.
Of dignified and self-respecting provincialism, such as Professor Royce
so eloquently advocates, there might well be more in American books. Our
poets desert the domestic landscape to write pseudo-Elizabethan dramas
and sonnets about Mont Blanc. They set up an artificial Tennyson park on
the banks of the Hudson. Beside the shores of Lake Michigan they croon
the love affairs of an Arab in the desert and his noble steed. This is
not a very grave offence, for poets live among the stars, and it makes
no difference from what point of the earth's surface they set forth on
their aerial adventures. A Wisconsin poet may write very beautifully
about nightingales, and a New England Unitarian may write beautifully
about cathedrals; if it is beautiful, it is poetry, and all is well.
The novelists are the worst offenders. There have been few of them; they
have not been adequate in numbers or in genius to the task of describing
the sections of the country, the varied scenes and habits from New
Orleans to the Portlands. And yet, small band as they are, with great
domestic opportunities and responsibilities, they have devoted volumes
to Paris, which has an able native corps of story-makers, and to Italy,
where the home talent is first-rate. In this sense American literature
is too globe-trotting, it has too little savor of the soil.
Of provincialism of the narrowest type American writers, like other men
of imagination, are not guilty to any reprehensible degree. It is a vice
sometimes imputed to them by provincial critics who view literature from
the office of a London weekly review or from the lecture rooms of
American colleges. Some American writers are parochial, for example,
Whittier. Others, like Mr. Henry James, are provincial in outlook, but
cosmopolitan in experience, and reveal their provinciality by a
self-conscious internationalism. Probably English and French writers may
be similarly classified as provincial or not. Mr. James says that Poe's
collection of critical sketches "is probably the most complete and
exquisite specimen of _provincialism_ ever prepared for the edification
of men." It is nothing like that. It is an example of what happens when
a hack reviewer's work in local journals is collected into a volume
because he turns out to be a genius. The list of Poe's victims is not
more remarkable for the number of nonentities it includes than "The
Lives of the Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, who was hack for a
bookseller, and "introduced" all the poets that the taste of the time
encouraged the bookseller to print. Poe was cosmopolitan in spirit; his
prejudices were personal and highly original, usually against the
prejudices of his _moment and milieu._ Hawthorne is less provincial, in
the derogatory sense, than his charming biographer, Mr. James, as will
become evident if one compares Hawthorne's American notes on England,
written in long ago days of national rancor, with Mr. James's British
notes on America ("The American Scene"), written in our happy days of
spacious vision.
Emerson's ensphering universality overspreads Carlyle like the sky above
a volcanic island. Indeed Carlyle (who knew more about American life and
about what other people ought to do than any other British writer
earlier than Mr. Chesterton) justly complains that Emerson is not
sufficiently local and concrete; Carlyle longs to see "some Event, Man's
Life, American Forest, or piece of creation which this Emerson loves and
wonders at, well _Emersonised._" Longfellow would not stay at home and
write more about the excellent village blacksmith; he made poetical
tours of Europe and translated songs and legends from several languages
for the delight of the villagers who remained behind. Lowell was so
heartily cosmopolitan that American newspapers accused him of
Anglomania--which proves their provincialism but acquits him. Mr.
Howells has written a better book about Venice than about Ohio. Mark
Twain lived in every part of America, from Connecticut to California, he
wrote about every country under the sun (and about some countries beyond
the sun), he is read by all sorts and conditions of men in the
English-speaking world, and he is an adopted hero in Vienna. It is
difficult to come to any conclusion about provincialism as a
characteristic of American literature.
American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, delicate, nicely
finished. There is little of it which might not have appeared in the
_Youth's Companion._ The notable exceptions are our most stalwart men of
genius, Thoreau, Whitman, and Mark Twain. Any child can read American
literature, and if it does not make a man of him, it at least will not
lead him into forbidden realms. Indeed, American books too seldom come
to grips with the problems of life, especially the books cast in
artistic forms. The essayists, expounders, and preachers attack life
vigorously and wrestle with the meaning of it. The poets are thin,
moonshiny, meticulous in technique. Novelists are few and feeble, and
dramatists are non-existent. These generalities, subject to exceptions,
are confirmed by a reading of the first fifteen volumes of the _Atlantic
Monthly_, which are a treasure-house of the richest period of American
literary expression. In those volumes one finds a surprising number of
vigorous, distinguished papers on politics, philosophy, science, even on
literature and art. Many talented men and women, whose names are not
well remembered, are clustered there about the half dozen salient men of
genius; and the collection gives one a sense that the New England mind
(aided by the outlying contributors) was, in its one Age of Thought, an
abundant and diversified power. But the poetry is not memorable, except
for some verses by the few standard poets. And the fiction is naïve.
Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country" is almost the only
story there that one comes on with a thrill either of recognition or of
discovery.
It is hard to explain why the American, except in his exhortatory and
passionately argumentative moods, has not struck deep into American
life, why his stories and verses are, for the most part, only pretty
things, nicely unimportant. Anthony Trollope had a theory that the
absence of international copyright threw our market open too
unrestrictedly to the British product, that the American novel was an
unprotected infant industry; we printed Dickens and the rest without
paying royalty and starved the domestic manufacturer. This theory does
not explain. For there were many American novelists, published, read,
and probably paid for their work. The trouble is that they lacked
genius; they dealt with trivial, slight aspects of life; they did not
take the novel seriously in the right sense of the word, though no doubt
they were in another sense serious enough about their poor productions.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Huckleberry Finn" are colossal exceptions to
the prevailing weakness and superficiality of American novels.
Why do American writers turn their backs on life, miss its intensities,
its significance? The American Civil War was the most tremendous
upheaval in the world after the Napoleonic period. The imaginative
reaction on it consists of some fine essays, Lincoln's addresses,
Whitman's war poetry, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (which came before the war but
is part of it), one or two passionate hymns by Whittier, the second
series of the "Biglow Papers," Hale's "The Man Without a Country"--and
what else? The novels laid in war-time are either sanguine melodrama or
absurd idyls of maidens whose lovers are at the front--a tragic theme if
tragically and not sentimentally conceived. Perhaps the bullet that
killed Theodore Winthrop deprived us of our great novelist of the Civil
War, for he was on the right road. In a general speculation such a
might-have-been is not altogether futile; if Milton had died of whooping
cough there would not have been any "Paradise Lost"; the reverse of this
is that some geniuses whose works ought inevitably to have been produced
by this or that national development may have died too soon. This
suggestion, however, need not be gravely argued. The fact is that the
American literary imagination after the Civil War was almost sterile. If
no books had been written, the failure of that conflict to get itself
embodied in some masterpieces would be less disconcerting. But thousands
of books were written by people who knew the war at first hand and who
had literary ambition and some skill, and from all these books none
rises to distinction.
An example of what seems to be the American habit of writing about
everything except American life, is the work of General Lew Wallace.
Wallace was one of the important secondary generals in the Civil War,
distinguished at Fort Donelson and at Shiloh. After the war he wrote
"Ben-Hur," a doubly abominable book, because it is not badly written and
it shows a lively imagination. There is nothing in it so valuable, so
dramatically significant as a week in Wallace's war experiences.
"Ben-Hur," fit work for a country clergyman with a pretty literary gift,
is a ridiculous inanity to come from a man who has seen the things that
Wallace saw! It is understandable that the man of experience may not
write at all, and, on the other hand, that the man of secluded life may
have the imagination to make a military epic. But for a man crammed with
experience of the most dramatic sort and discovering the ability and the
ambition to write--for him to make spurious oriental romances which
achieve an enormous popularity! The case is too grotesque to be typical,
yet it is exceptional in degree rather than in kind. The American
literary artist has written about everything under the skies except what
matters most in his own life. General Grant's plain autobiography, not
art and of course not attempting to be, is better literature than most
of our books in artistic forms, because of its intellectual integrity
and the profound importance of the subject-matter.
Our dreamers have dreamed about many wonderful things, but their faces
have been averted from the mightier issues of life. They have been
high-minded, fine-grained, eloquent in manner, in odd contrast to the
real or reputed vigor and crudeness of the nation. In the hundred years
from Irving's first romance to Mr. Howells's latest unromantic novel,
most of our books are eminent for just those virtues which America is
supposed to lack. Their physique is feminine; they are fanciful, dainty,
reserved; they are literose, sophisticated in craftsmanship, but
innocently unaware of the profound agitations of American life, of life
everywhere. Those who strike the deeper notes of reality, Whitman,
Thoreau, Mark Twain, Mrs. Stowe in her one great book, Whittier, Lowell
and Emerson at their best, are a powerful minority. The rest, beautiful
and fine in spirit, too seldom show that they are conscious of
contemporaneous realities, too seldom vibrate with a tremendous sense of
life.
The Jason of western exploration writes as if he had passed his life in
a library. The Ulysses of great rivers and perilous seas is a
connoisseur of Japanese prints. The warrior of 'Sixty-one rivals Miss
Marie Corelli. The mining engineer carves cherry stones. He who is
figured as gaunt, hardy and aggressive, conquering the desert with the
steam locomotive, sings of a pretty little rose in a pretty little
garden. The judge, haggard with experience, who presides over the most
tragi-comic divorce court ever devised by man, writes love stories that
would have made Jane Austen smile.
Mr. Arnold Bennett is reported to have said that if Balzac had seen
Pittsburgh, he would have cried: "Give me a pen!" The truth is, the
whole country is crying out for those who will record it, satirize it,
chant it. As literary material, it is virgin land, ancient as life and
fresh as a wilderness. American literature is one occupation which is
not over-crowded, in which, indeed, there is all too little competition
for the new-comer to meet. There are signs that some earnest young
writers are discovering the fertility of a soil that has scarcely been
scratched.
American fiction shows all sorts of merit, but the merits are not
assembled, concentrated; the fine is weak, and the strong is crude. The
stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Howells, James, Aldrich, Bret Harte, are
admirable in manner, but they are thin in substance, not of large
vitality. On the other hand, some of the stronger American fictions fail
in workmanship; for example, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which is still vivid
and moving long after its tractarian interest has faded; the novels of
Frank Norris, a man of great vision and high purpose, who attempted to
put national economics into something like an epic of daily bread; and
Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," a madly eloquent romance of the sea. A
few American novelists have felt the meaning of the life they knew and
have tried sincerely to set it down, but have for various reasons failed
to make first-rate novels; for example, Edward Eggleston, whose stories
of early Indiana have the breath of actuality in them; Mr. E. W. Howe,
author of "The Story of a Country Town"; Harold Frederic, a man of great
ability, whose work was growing deeper, more significant when he died;
George W. Cable, whose novels are unsteady and sentimental, but who
gives a genuine impression of having portrayed a city and its people;
and Stephen Crane, who, dead at thirty, had given in "The Red Badge of
Courage" and "Maggie" the promise of better work. Of good short stories
America has been prolific. Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Mrs. Annie Trumbull
Slosson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rowland Robinson, H. C. Bunner, Edward
Everett Hale, Frank Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, and "O. Henry" are
some of those whose short stories are perfect in their several kinds.
But the American novel, which multiplies past counting, remains an
inferior production.
On a private shelf of contemporary fiction and drama in the English
language are the works of ten British authors, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G.
Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Eden Phillpotts, Mr. George Moore, Mr.
Leonard Merrick, Mr. J. C. Snaith, Miss May Sinclair, Mr. William De
Morgan, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Bernard Shaw, yes,
and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Beside them I find but two Americans, Mrs.
Edith Wharton and Mr. Theodore Dreiser. There may be others, for one
cannot pretend to know all the living novelists and dramatists. Yet for
every American that should be added, I would agree to add four to the
British list. However, a contemporary literature that includes Mrs.
Wharton's "Ethan Frome" and Mr. Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt" both
published last year, is not to be despaired of.
In the course of a century a few Americans have said in memorable words
what life meant to them. Their performance, put together, is
considerable, if not imposing. Any sense of dissatisfaction that one
feels in contemplating it is due to the disproportion between a limited
expression and the multifarious immensity of the country. Our
literature, judged by the great literatures contemporaneous with it, is
insufficient to the opportunity and the need. The American Spirit may be
figured as petitioning the Muses for twelve novelists, ten poets, and
eight dramatists, to be delivered at the earliest possible moment.
MARY WHITE
By WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
Mary White--one seems to know her after reading this sketch written
by her father on the day she was buried--would surely have laughed
unbelievingly if told she would be in a book of this sort, together
with Joseph Conrad, one of whose books lay on her table. But the
pen, in the honest hand, has always been mightier than the grave.
This is not the sort of thing one wishes to mar with clumsy
comment. It was written for the Emporia _Gazette,_ which William
Allen White has edited since 1895. He is one of the best-known,
most public-spirited and most truly loved of American journalists.
He and his fellow-Kansan, E. W. Howe of Atchison, are two
characteristic figures in our newspaper world, both masters of that
vein of canny, straightforward, humane and humorous simplicity that
seems to be a Kansas birthright.
Mr. White was born in Emporia in 1868.
THE Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary White's death
declared that it came as the result of a fall from a horse. How she
would have hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her life.
Horses have fallen on her and with her--"I'm always trying to hold 'em
in my lap," she used to say. But she was proud of few things, and one
was that she could ride anything that had four legs and hair. Her death
resulted not from a fall, but from a blow on the head which fractured
her skull, and the blow came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the
parking.
The last hour of her life was typical of its happiness. She came home
from a day's work at school, topped off by a hard grind with the copy on
the High School Annual, and felt that a ride would refresh her. She
climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother about the work she was
doing, and hurried to get her horse and be out on the dirt roads for the
country air and the radiant green fields of the spring. As she rode
through the town on an easy gallop she kept waving at passers-by. She
knew everyone in town. For a decade the little figure with the long
pig-tail and the red hair ribbon has been familiar on the streets of
Emporia, and she got in the way of speaking to those who nodded at her.
She passed the Kerrs, walking the horse, in front of the Normal Library,
and waved at them; passed another friend a few hundred feet further on,
and waved at her. The horse was walking and, as she turned into North
Merchant Street she took off her cowboy hat, and the horse swung into a
lope. She passed the Tripletts and waved her cowboy hat at them, still
moving gaily north on Merchant Street. A _Gazette_ carrier passed--a
High School boy friend--and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand;
the horse veered quickly, plunged into the parking where the low-hanging
limb faced her, and, while she still looked back waving, the blow came.
But she did not fall from the horse; she slipped off, dazed a bit,
staggered and fell in a faint. She never quite recovered consciousness.
But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she riding fast. A year
or so ago she used to go like the wind. But that habit was broken, and
she used the horse to get into the open to get fresh, hard exercise, and
to work off a certain surplus energy that welled up in her and needed a
physical outlet. That need has been in her heart for years. It was back
of the impulse that kept the dauntless, little brown-clad figure on the
streets and country roads of this community and built into a strong,
muscular body what had been a frail and sickly frame during the first
years of her life. But the riding gave her more than a body. It released
a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in the world. And she
was happy because she was enlarging her horizon. She came to know all
sorts and conditions of men; Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, was one
of her best friends. W. L. Holtz, the Latin teacher, was another. Tom
O'Connor, farmer-politician, and Rev. J. H. J. Rice, preacher and police
judge, and Frank Beach, music master, were her special friends, and all
the girls, black and white, above the track and below the track, in
Pepville and Stringtown, were among her acquaintances. And she brought
home riotous stories of her adventures. She loved to rollick; persiflage
was her natural expression at home. Her humor was a continual bubble of
joy. She seemed to think in hyperbole and metaphor. She was mischievous
without malice, as full of faults as an old shoe. No angel was Mary
White, but an easy girl to live with, for she never nursed a grouch five
minutes in her life.
With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she loved books. On her
table when she left her room were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy,
"Creative Chemistry" by E. E. Slosson, and a Kipling book. She read Mark
Twain, Dickens and Kipling before she was ten--all of their writings.
Wells and Arnold Bennett particularly amused and diverted her. She was
entered as a student in Wellesley in 1922; was assistant editor of the
High School Annual this year, and in line for election to the editorship
of the Annual next year. She was a member of the executive committee of
the High School Y. W. C. A.
Within the last two years she had begun to be moved by an ambition to
draw. She began as most children do by scribbling in her school books,
funny pictures. She bought cartoon magazines and took a course--rather
casually, naturally, for she was, after all, a child with no strong
purposes--and this year she tasted the first fruits of success by having
her pictures accepted by the High School Annual. But the thrill of
delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the Normal Annual, asked her to do
the cartooning for that book this spring, was too beautiful for words.
She fell to her work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings were
accepted, and her pride--always repressed by a lively sense of the
ridiculousness of the figure she was cutting--was a really gorgeous
thing to see. No successful artist ever drank a deeper draught of
satisfaction than she took from the little fame her work was getting
among her schoolfellows. In her glory, she almost forgot her horse--but
never her car.
For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her social life. She never
had a "party" in all her nearly seventeen years--wouldn't have one; but
she never drove a block in the car in her life that she didn't begin to
fill the car with pick-ups! Everybody rode with Mary White--white and
black, old and young, rich and poor, men and women. She liked nothing
better than to fill the car full of long-legged High School boys and an
occasional girl, and parade the town. She never had a "date," nor went
to a dance, except once with her brother, Bill, and the "boy
proposition" didn't interest her--yet. But young people--great
spring-breaking, varnish-cracking, fender-bending, door-sagging carloads
of "kids" gave her great pleasure. Her zests were keen. But the most fun
she ever had in her life was acting as chairman of the committee that
got up the big turkey dinner for the poor folks at the county home;
scores of pies, gallons of slaw; jam, cakes, preserves, oranges and a
wilderness of turkey were loaded in the car and taken to the county
home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she risked her own
Christmas dinner by staying to see that the poor folks actually got it
all. Not that she was a cynic; she just disliked to tempt folks. While
there she found a blind colored uncle, very old, who could do nothing
but make rag rugs, and she rustled up from her school friends rags
enough to keep him busy for a season. The last engagement she tried to
make was to take the guests at the county home out for a car ride. And
the last endeavor of her life was to try to get a rest room for colored
girls in the High School. She found one girl reading in the toilet,
because there was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it
inflamed her sense of injustice and she became a nagging harpie to those
who, she thought, could remedy the evil. The poor she had always with
her, and was glad of it. She hungered and thirsted for righteousness;
and was the most impious creature in the world. She joined the
Congregational Church without consulting her parents; not particularly
for her soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her life, and
would have hooted at a "testimony." But even as a little child she felt
the church was an agency for helping people to more of life's abundance,
and she wanted to help. She never wanted help for herself. Clothes
meant little to her. It was a fight to get a new rig on her; but
eventually a harder fight to get it off. She never wore a jewel and had
no ring but her High School class ring, and never asked for anything but
a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair up; though she was nearly
seventeen. "Mother," she protested, "you don't know how much I get by
with, in my braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up." Above
every other passion of her life was her passion not to grow up, to be a
child. The tom-boy in her, which was big, seemed to loathe to be put
away forever in skirts. She was a Peter Pan, who refused to grow up.
Her funeral yesterday at the Congregational Church was as she would have
wished it; no singing, no flowers save the big bunch of red roses from
her Brother Bill's Harvard classmen--Heavens, how proud that would have
made her! and the red roses from the _Gazette_ force--in vases at her
head and feet. A short prayer, Paul's beautiful essay on "Love" from the
Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, some remarks about her
democratic spirit by her friend, John H. J. Rice, pastor and police
judge, which she would have deprecated if she could, a prayer sent down
for her by her friend, Carl Nau, and opening the service the slow,
poignant movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which she loved,
and closing the service a cutting from the joyously melancholy first
movement of Tschaikowski's Pathetic Symphony, which she liked to hear in
certain moods on the phonograph; then the Lord's Prayer by her friends
in the High School.
That was all.