rather than afford the more material benefits. Nothing could be vainer
than putting either of them to the rude uses of life; they are the
essence of aristocracy; and the indifference, the contempt really, with
which the mass of people regard poetic measures, and conversely, the
disdain of charm for the whole common body of opinion, show clearly the
wide separation between prosaic fact and fancy. The former has the
allegiance of the mob, as it should, since, without imaginative
sensibility, the mechanical process of existence is a stupid
multiplication of similar instincts; while fancy, poetry, beauty, the
properties of delicate minds and aspirations, are, by the very qualities
necessary to their being, limited to a select few.
There were ages, long submerged now by the obliterating tide of
progress, when poetry was, generally, a force in men’s lives; and then,
as well, women’s beauty was held above their mere animality; but the
levelling democracy of Christian religions, lending a new power to the
resentment and suspicions of congregations of the inferior, ended
perhaps for ever reigns of distinction. Yet, ironically, while sects
vanished over night and fanatics were denied even the final distinction
of martyrdom, while great empires sank leaving no ripple on the surface
of memory, stray lines of wanton poetry, the record of lovely bodies,
remained imperishable.
They were deathless—such frivolities as the Trojan Helen and the words
Sappho strung from her loneliness—because they were the inalienable
property of the heart ... the clamorous dogmas were nothing more than
the pretentions of anthropomorphic vanity. But that, with its tinsel
promises and brimstone threats, a sentimental melodrama, gathered the
audiences, the credulity, of humanity, and left unattended the heroic
performance of naked beauty. This, at its best, was a sheer cool cutting
of marble; but there was another beauty, hardly inferior, where
embroidered garments and carmine and jade, both hid and revealed less
simple but scarcely less significant emotions.
For this reason, while Ionic Greece is no longer a part of modern
consciousness, the poem written by the sixth emperor of the Han dynasty,
perhaps two thousand years ago, is identical with the present complex
troubled mind: an autumn wind rises and white clouds fly, the grass and
trees wither, geese go south—sadly he remembers his love and the
pagoda-boat on the Fēn River. That, particularly, is the singular
validity of the Chinese poems translated by Mr. Waley; page after page
they are the mirror of the splintered colours, the tragic apprehensions
and sharp longing, of a later unhappiness. Already, then, China was old
and civilized, its philosophers had analysed hope into maxims of stoical
and serene conduct; and its poetry was written in an unsurpassable
dignity of repression.
The latest imagery, nothing in the world if not visual in perceptions of
utmost fragile truth, is not so acute in observation and artifice as the
song, in the second century, of Sung Tzu-hou. (She sees the fruit trees
in blossom and, forgetting about her silkworms, begins to pluck the
branches.) And no contemporary, it may be no Western, poet has
approached the reflective cadences, the refrain of memory steeped in
longing, that gives the lines of Po Chü-i their magic semblance to the
wistful and fleet realities of mind. He has, but in greater degree,
Verlaine’s power to invest lovely frivolities with permanence; an
ability Arthur Symons occasionally brushed. His Old Harp, of cassia-wood
and jade stops and rose-red strings, neglected for the Ch’iang flute and
the Ch’in flageolet, vibrates with a tenderness of ancient forgotten
melodies beyond any evocation of the Fêtes Galantes.
The poetry of those dynasties and men, however, aside from everything
else, is made timeless, for us, by the celebration of its women, the
wives, the concubines, the dancers of Hantan. They were, objectively,
inconceivably different from the woman of today; yet the passions, the
fidelity, they inspired, a little attenuated by the dust of centuries,
are precisely the same which the heart retains. The Chinese women have
always served an ideal of personal beauty, of correct formality,
transcending any other: in May their satins are worked with the blossoms
of spring and in October with chrysanthemums. Socially they occupied the
women’s gardens—a position now regarded with contempt—but they were not,
because of that, inferior. They dominated the masculine imagination and
provided, together with music, the recompense of existence checkered by
the dark squares of fate.
There are, too, as many wives praised as dancers summoned, as much
constancy as there is incontinent pleasure. An emperor sends to all
parts of China for wizards, hoping that they may bring back the spirit
of his mistress. The General Su An, absent on service, begs the woman
with whom his hair was plaited not to forget the time of their love and
pride. Indeed, on the other side, in the poetry there is a marked
restraint: the dancers are a stiff frieze in peacock blues and orange
and gold behind the fragrant vapours of incense.
All is tranquillized, even the battle pieces are softened as though in
distance, and the satire, often pungent and universal, is subdued by the
realization of its uselessness. There is wine, in cups and jars, and
drunkenness: Po Chü-i returns home, leaning heavily on a friend, at
yellow dusk; but there are no raised voices or disturbance; and, soothed
by the swallows about the beams, a candle flame in the window, the moon
crowning the tide, he hears only the music of flutes and strings. There
are roc and phoenix and red jungle fowl, ibis and cranes and wild swan
along the river; women with bright lips sway to the silver tapping of
their bells, ladies, long of limb, enter with side glances under moth
eye-brows, and after them others with faces painted white, their deep
sleeves reeking with scent. But they are only momentary; they are left,
plucking vainly at the coats of those who will not stay, and the pure
dawn holds a mango-bird singing among flowers.
They are poems that dwell on the green of mulberry trees and fields of
hemp, on the oxen in the village streets, the burnished pools of carp,
the lotus banks and rice furrows and glittering fret of snow. And there,
equally, they are completely in the mood, or, rather, perfections of the
attempted mood, of the present. In English lyrical poetry alone, and
that, except for John Masefield, the beauty of yesterday and not today,
have the settings of life been so beautifully refashioned. An ability of
long habited lands; for its power is not in described nature, but the
love of a particular soil—feathery bamboo at the door, a hollow of
daffodils, are symbols not so much of recurrent seasons as of a
deep-rooted passionate attachment for the city of Lo-yang or for the
Devon sod. Without sincerity of human emotion words are no better than
broken coloured glass.
WILLA CATHER
_By H. L. Mencken_
If the United States ever becomes civilized and develops a literature,
no doubt the Middle West will be the scene of the prodigy. The two
coasts are washed by too many paralysing and distracting waves. Boston,
after three hundred years, remains a mere suburb of London, timorous,
respectable and preposterous—a sort of ninth-rate compound of Putney and
Maida Vale. New York is simply a bawdy free port, without nationality or
personality. As for San Francisco, New Orleans, Philadelphia and
Baltimore, once so saliently individual, they scarcely exist any longer,
save for banking, political and census purposes. But in the Middle West
the authentic Americano is still a recognizable mammal, and shows all
his congenital spots, particularly upon the psyche. More, he has become
introspective and a bit conscience-stricken, and so begins to analyse
and anatomize himself. The fruits are “The Spoon River Anthology,” the
novels of Norris and Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson’s terrific tales, the
Little Theatre business, Lindsay and his uneasy college yells, George
Ade and his murderous satire, Willa Cather and her poignant evocation of
the drama of the prairie. Count out Hergesheimer and Cabell and you will
scarcely find an imaginative writer doing genuinely sound work—that is,
an imaginative writer of the generation still squarely on its legs—who
is not from beyond the Alleghenies. Chicago is the centre of the new
writing fever, as it is the centre of nearly all other native fevers.
[Illustration: Willa Cather]
[Illustration: Sydney Nyburg]
Four or five years ago, though she already had a couple of good books
behind her, Willa Cather was scarcely heard of. When she was mentioned
at all, it was as a talented but rather inconsequential imitator of Mrs.
Wharton. But today even campus-pump critics are more or less aware of
her, and one hears no more gabble about imitations. The plain fact is
that she is now discovered to be a novelist of original methods and
quite extraordinary capacities—penetrating and accurate in observation,
delicate in feeling, brilliant and charming in manner, and full of a
high sense of the dignity and importance of her work. Bit by bit,
patiently and laboriously, she has mastered the trade of the novelist;
in each succeeding book she has shown an unmistakable advance. Now, at
last, she has arrived at such a command of all the complex devices and
expedients of her art that the use she makes of them is quite concealed.
Her style has lost self-consciousness; her grasp of form has become
instinctive; her drama is firmly rooted in a sound psychology; her
people relate themselves logically to the great race masses that they
are parts of. In brief, she knows her business thoroughly, and so one
gets out of reading her, not only the facile joy that goes with every
good story, but also the vastly higher pleasure that is called forth by
first-rate craftsmanship.
I know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the western farmlands
more real than “My Antonía” makes them, and I know of none that makes
them seem better worth knowing. Beneath the tawdry surface of Middle
Western barbarism—so suggestive, in more than one way, of the vast,
impenetrable barbarism of Russia—she discovers human beings bravely
embattled against fate and the gods, and into her picture of their dull,
endless struggle she gets a spirit that is genuinely heroic, and a
pathos that is genuinely moving. It is not as they see themselves that
she depicts them, but as they actually are. And to representation she
adds something more—something that is quite beyond the reach, and even
beyond the comprehension of the average novelist. Her poor peasants are
not simply anonymous and negligible hinds, flung by fortune into lonely,
inhospitable wilds. They become symbolical, as, say, Robinson Crusoe is
symbolical, or Faust, or Lord Jim. They are actors in a play that is far
larger than the scene swept by their own pitiful suffering and
aspiration. They are actors in the grand farce that is the tragedy of
man.
Setting aside certain early experiments in both prose and verse, Miss
Cather began with “Alexander’s Bridge” in 1912. The book strongly
suggested the method and materials of Mrs. Wharton, and so it was
inevitably, perhaps, that the author should be plastered with the
Wharton label. I myself, ass-like, helped to slap it on—though with
prudent reservations, now comforting to contemplate. The defect of the
story was one of locale and people: somehow one got the feeling that the
author was dealing with both at second-hand, that she knew her
characters a bit less intimately than she should have known them. This
defect, I venture to guess, did not escape her own eye. At all events,
she abandoned New England in her next novel for the Middle West, and
particularly for the Middle West of the great immigrations—a region
nearer at hand, and infinitely better comprehended. The result was “O
Pioneers” (1913), a book of very fine achievement and of even finer
promise. Then came “The Song of the Lark” (1915)—still more competent,
more searching and of even finer promise. Then came “The Song of the
Lark” (1915)—still more competent, more searching and convincing, better
in every way. And then, after three years, came “My Antonía,” and a
sudden leap forward. Here, at last, an absolutely sound technique began
to show itself. Here was a novel planned with the utmost skill, and
executed in truly admirable fashion. Here, unless I err gravely, was the
best piece of fiction ever done by a woman in America.
I once protested to Miss Cather that her novels came too far apart—that
the reading public, constantly under a pressure of new work, had too
much chance to forget her. She was greatly astonished. “How could I do
any more?” she asked. “I work all the time. It takes three years to
write a novel.” The saying somehow clings to me. There is a profound
criticism of criticism in it. It throws a bright light upon the
difference between such a work as “My Antonía” and such a work as—....
But I have wars enough.
VAN VECHTEN
_By Philip Moeller_
Carl Van Vechten’s mental gesture is more or less unique in American
literature. His work has about as much relation to what might be
considered the “serious classical output” of writing today as
irresistible footnotes have to filling an all too fulsome history.
Whereas the bulk of the intellectual page of contemporary American
writing is for the most part of transitional importance Mr. Van
Vechten’s essays are replete with the delightful essence of what is
importantly transitory.
As a critic of the fine arts and other things, his range is not so
immense as it is extraordinary. How can one keep on the hat of
appreciation before the work of a writer who improvises as adroitly
about cats as about prima donne, who in one book tells the only
authoritative story of the music of Spain, in another makes or breaks
the fame of some famous player and in still another goes far afield to
bring into the glow of his praise some hidden personage from some remote
and delicious byway of life and letters? If he mounts into his garret to
unopen ancient chests and write of olden things, he doesn’t neglect at
the same time to look from his high window at what is going on about
him. In the midst of the gorgeous hurry of New York he hears the quieter
melody of far off places. He is a cosmopolitan critic and at the same
time a critic of cosmopolis.
[Illustration]
Music is never very far from his pages. He is acknowledged as one of the
most important of the musical critics in America because he has had the
wise wisdom of not writing about music at all. He is one of the few
musically informed who has sensibly refrained from any vacant analysis
of tonal mysteries, one of the very few indeed who realizes the futility
of filling soundless books with sounding but empty treatises on sound.
He has had the rare and modest grace of letting music sing or play or
“symphonize” for itself. His chief concern has been with interpretations
and interpreters. Taking the one or the other as his theme he has
written critical variations and the result has been critical creation.
His work has the quality of rare, spontaneous and intriguing talk. There
is about his writing an air of delicate and urbane gossip, a knowledge
and thought that does not take itself in any sense or at any moment as
too profound to admit of a digression into gaiety. It is not so much
what he knows as the very particular and personal way in which he knows
it. His one cliché is a desperate detestation of all critical clichés.
The woof of his thought is a charming destroyal of all accepted
standards, the web of his thinking is a delicate but constructive
anarchy. When he builds up we are grateful, when he tears down we are
equally grateful because he always leaves behind him the intricate,
infernally informed and fascinating machinery of his annihilation.
ON H. L. MENCKEN
_By George Jean Nathan_
In the monthly department, “Répétition Générale,” which we jointly
conduct in _The Smart Set Magazine_, there was some months ago
incorporated the following paragraph:
“When one of us, in the course of his critical writings, indulges
himself in polite words about the other, it is a common antic of the
newspaper literary supplement professors to observe that this
encomium is merely by way of mutual log-rolling, that it is based
upon no sounder critical ground than our friendship for each other
and our commercial alliance, and that it is perhaps not honestly
believed in by either the one or the other. This, of course, is
idiotic. We are friends and partners, not because we admire each
other’s beauty, or each other’s conversation, or each other’s
waistcoats or wives, but because we respect each other
professionally, because each to the other seems to know his work in
the world, and how to do it, and how to do it—it may be—just a
little bit better than the next nearest man. This, obviously, is the
soundest of all bases for friendship. It is not friendship that
makes men approve one another; it is mutual approval that makes them
friends.”
[Illustration: H. L. Mencken]
[Illustration: George Jean Nathan]
Let me add a word about Mencken in particular. I respect him, and am his
friend, because he is one of the very few Americans I know who is
entirely free of cheapness, toadyism and hypocrisy. In close association
with him for more than twelve years, I have yet to catch him in a lie
against himself, or in a compromise with his established faiths. There
have been times when we have quarrelled and times, I dare say, when we
have hated each other: but when we have met again it has been always on
a ground of approval and friendship made doubly secure and doubly
substantial by the honesty of his point of view (however wrong I have
held it), by the wholesomeness of his hatred, and by his frank and ever
self-doubting conduct at our several Appomattoxes.
Perhaps no man has ever been more accurately mirrored by his writings
than this man. He has never, so far as I know, written a single line
that he hasn’t believed. He has never sold a single adjective—and there
have been times when opulent temptations have dangled before him. And on
certain of these occasions he could have used the money. There may be
times when he is wrong and when his opinions are biased—I believed that
there are not a few such times—yet if he is wrong, he is wrong honestly,
and if he is biased, he neither knows it in his own mind nor feels it in
his own heart. He is the best fighter I have ever met. And he is the
fairest, the cleanest, and the most relentless.
But does he accept himself with forefinger to temple, with professorial
wrinkles, as an Uplifting Force, a Tonic Influence? Not on your
ball-room socks! No critic has ever snickered at him as loudly and
effectively as he snickers at himself. “What do you think of your new
book?” I usually ask him when he has finished one. And his reply
generally is, “It’s got some good stuff in it—and a lot of cheese. What
the hell’s the use of writing such a book, anyway? My next one....”
Life to him is a sort of Luna Park, and he gets the same sort of
innocent, idiotic fun out of it. He would rather drink a glass of good
beer than write; he would rather talk to a pretty girl than read; he
would rather wallop the keys of a piano than think; he would rather eat
a well-cooked dinner than philosophize. His work, which so clearly
reflects him spiritually, represents him equally clearly in helpless
revolt against his corporeal self.
This; a snapshot of Henry Mencken, for ever applying the slapstick to
his own competence, constantly sceptical of his own talents, and ever
trying vainly to run away from the pleasure that his temperament
rebelliously mocks. I am happy to know him, for knowing him has made the
world a gayer place and work a more diverting pastime. I am glad to be
his partner, his collaborator, his co-editor, his drinking companion,
and his friend. For after all these many years of our friendship and
professional alliance, there is only one thing that I can hold against
him. For ten years he has worn the damndest looking overcoat that I’ve
ever seen.
A SKETCH
_By Sidney L. Nyburg_
Many years ago it was my privilege to know a sturdy, forthright Judge
who had, in his own youth, faced a jury upon a charge of murder. He had
attempted no shifty, technical defence, but admitted frankly that he had
killed a man, and had the best of reasons for having done so. The jury
agreed with him and set him free, to sentence many another less
fortunate creature, during his long and honoured career on the bench. I
remember how often I used to wonder as I watched him meting out
punishments whether he ever meditated upon his own narrow escape. If he
did, it never seemed to temper his severity. He was there to deal out
what he felt sure was justice, and the closed pages of his own personal
history had nothing at all to do with his appraisement of the degrees of
guilt or innocence of the culprits who stood before him.
Every one who, like myself, has committed the crime of authorship and
afterwards presumes to sit in judgment upon the art of fiction is in a
position somewhat analogous to that of my old friend, the Judge. It is
true my own sins of this character have been few and obscure.
Nevertheless, they must have been marked by the Recording Angel, and
underscored with a sinister emphasis, since the Recording Angel has also
for many generations coquetted with the business of professional
book-making.
And my plea must be precisely that of this same militant Judge. After
all, it’s not a bad excuse. Today’s criminal is no less red-handed
because of the indelible stain we succeed in hiding so neatly under our
own well-fitting glove.
One can afford carelessly to ignore the cheap jibes of those who insist
on the obvious and meaningless taunt: “Why don’t you write as you say
you would have other American fictionists write?” with the equally
obvious retort that, if any author really succeeded in writing the book
of which he dreamed, it would mean no more than that his dream was a
tawdry, worthless thing.
It is enough for me, at least, to know what I wish to embody in my own
writings, no matter how far short of success I may fall in the
endeavour, or how certainly my adherence to my own beliefs may cost me
the interest of a public in whose commendation I would find a healthy,
human enjoyment, provided always, I could have it without compromise.
I believe, then, that fiction is something vastly more than a medium of
amusement. I believe it has been, in all countries and ages, that art
best fitted to interpret life to the human beings who share that life. I
think it can be and should be made a revelation of man’s emotion,
impulse and character. To me, it seems that any and every phase of human
life, any and every choice of scene and dramatis personae is worthy of
the fictionist’s study, and his only inflexible obligation is to paint
life as he sees it instead of sophisticating his tints and outlines to
portray what he would prefer seeing, or to depict what he thinks his
readers would like to see, or, worst of all, to prove some pet thesis. I
hold it as fundamental that, if one can give an understanding picture of
any phase of life, no matter how trivial it may be intrinsically, he has
contributed something to the comprehension of the most important of all
things—Men and Women.
By his very choice of fiction as his mode of expression, the author is
committed to some sense of form. He has acknowledged also the duty of
telling some kind of a story which shall not prove unbearably dull to
the sensitive and alert reader. If he has no story at all, he is an
essayist in an ill-fitting disguise. If he cannot or will not endeavour
to interest some portion of the public, he might as well keep a diary
and secure it under lock and key; but the writer holds himself and his
art too cheaply who makes no demands whatever upon his reader. A
fictionist’s public has no right to a predigested diet, or to a menu
skilfully arranged to give it only what it happens to enjoy.