something much more mellow and virtuous. Either they argue that they
are moved by a yearning to spread the enlightenment and save the world,
or they allege that what steams them and makes them leap is a passion
for beauty. Both theories are quickly disposed of by an appeal to the
facts. The stuff written by nine authors out of ten, it must be plain
at a glance, has as little to do with spreading the enlightenment as
the state papers of the late Dr. Warren Gamaliel Harding. And there is
no more beauty in it, and no more sign of a feeling of beauty, than
you will find in a hotel dining-room or a college yell. The impulse
to create beauty, indeed, is rather rare in literary men, and almost
completely absent from the younger ones. If it shows itself at all, it
comes as a sort of afterthought. Far ahead of it comes the yearning to
make money. And after the yearning to make money comes the yearning
to make a noise. The impulse to create beauty lingers far behind;
not infrequently there is a void where it ought to be. Authors, as a
class, are extraordinarily insensitive to beauty, and the fact reveals
itself in their customary (and often incredibly extensive) ignorance
of the other arts. I’d have a hard job naming six American novelists
who could be depended upon to recognize a fugue without prompting, or
six poets who could give a rational account of the difference between
a Gothic cathedral and a Standard Oil filling-station. The thing
goes even further. Most novelists, in my experience, know nothing of
poetry, and very few poets have any feeling for the beauties of prose.
As for the dramatists, three-fourths of them are unaware that such
things as prose and poetry exist at all. It pains me to set down such
inconvenient and blushful facts. They will be seized upon, I daresay,
by the evangelists of Kiwanis, and employed to support the doctrine
that authors are public enemies, and ought to be deported to Russia. I
do not go so far. I simply say that many who pursue the literary life
are less romantic and high-toned than they might be--that communion
with them is anything but the thrilling thing that provincial club
ladies fancy. If the fact ought to be concealed, then blame my babbling
upon scientific passion. That passion, to-day, has me by the ear.
4
_Want Ad_
The death of William Dean Howells in 1920 brought to an end a decorous
and orderly era in American letters, and issued in a sort of anarchy.
One may best describe the change, perhaps, by throwing it into
dramatic form. Suppose Joseph Conrad and Anatole France were still
alive and on their way to the United States on a lecture tour, or to
study Prohibition or sex hygiene, or to pay their respects to Henry
Ford. Suppose they were to arrive in New York at 2 P. M. to-day. Who
would go down the bay on a revenue-cutter to meet them--that is, who
in addition to the newspaper reporters and baggage-searchers--who to
represent American Literature? I can’t think of a single fit candidate.
So long as Howells kept to his legs he was chosen almost automatically
for all such jobs, for he was the dean of the national letters, and
acknowledged to be such by everyone. Moreover, he had experience at the
work and a natural gift for it. He looked well in funeral garments. He
had a noble and ancient head. He made a neat and caressing speech. He
understood etiquette. And before he came to his growth, stretching back
into the past, there was a long line precisely like him--Mark Twain,
General Lew Wallace, James Russell Lowell, Edmund Clarence Stedman,
Richard Watson Gilder, Bryant, Emerson, Irving, Cooper, and so on back
to the dark abysm of time.
Such men performed a useful and highly onerous function. They
represented letters in all public and official ways. When there was a
grand celebration at one of the older universities they were present
in their robes, freely visible to the lowliest sophomore. When there
was a great banquet, they sat between generals in the Army and members
of the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. When there was a solemn petition
or protest to sign--against fiat money, the massacres in Armenia,
municipal corruption, or the lack of international copyright--they
signed in fine round hands, not for themselves alone, but for the
whole fraternity of American literati. Most important of all, when a
literary whale from foreign parts was sighted off Fire Island, they
jumped into their frock coats, clapped on their plug-hats and made the
damp, windy trip through the Narrows on the revenue-cutter, to give the
visitor welcome in the name of the eminent living and the illustrious
dead. It was by such men that Dickens was greeted, and Thackeray, and
Herbert Spencer, and Max O’Rell, and Blasco Ibáñez, and Matthew Arnold,
and James M. Barrie, and Kipling, and (until they found his bootleg
wife under his bed) Maxim Gorky. I name names at random. No worthy
visitor was overlooked. Always there was the stately committee on the
revenue-cutter, always there was the series of polite speeches, and
always there was the general feeling that the right thing had been done
in the right way--that American literature had been represented in a
tasteful and resounding manner.
Who is to represent it to-day? I search the country without finding
a single suitable candidate, to say nothing of a whole posse. Turn,
for example, to the mystic nobles of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. I pick out five at random: William C. Brownell, Augustus
Thomas, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister and Henry van Dyke. What is wrong
with them? The plain but dreadful fact that no literary foreigner has
even heard of them--that their appearance on the deck of his incoming
barge would puzzle and alarm him, and probably cause him to call for
the police. These men do not lack the homely virtues. They all spell
correctly, write neatly, and print nothing that is not constructive.
In the five of them there is not enough sin to raise a Congressman’s
temperature one-hundredth of a degree. But they are completely devoid
of what is absolutely essential to the official life: they have, so to
speak, no stage presence. There is nothing rotund and gaudy about them.
No public and unanimous reverence bathes them. What they write or say
never causes any talk. To be welcomed by them, jointly or severally,
would appear to Thomas Hardy or Gabriel D’Annunzio as equal to being
welcomed by representatives of the St. Joe, Mo., Rotary Club. Nor do I
find any better stock among their heirs and apprentices in the National
Institute. Put Henry Sydnor Harrison, say, against Howells: it is a
wart succeeding Ossa. Match Clayton Hamilton with Edmund Clarence
Stedman: Broadway against Wall Street. Shove Robert W. Chambers or
Herman Hagedorn into the coat of Lowell: he would rattle in one of its
pockets.
Worse, there are no better candidates outside the academic cloister.
I daresay that most literate foreigners, asked to name the principal
American novelist in practice to-day, would nominate Theodore Dreiser.
He would get probably seventy-five per cent of the votes, with the rest
scattered among Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Cabell, Hergesheimer
and Sherwood Anderson. But try to imagine any of these gentlemen togged
out in a long-tailed coat, shivering on the deck of a revenue-cutter
while Gerhart Hauptman got a grip on himself aboard the _Majestic_!
Try to imagine Cabell presiding at a banquet to Knut Hamsun, with Dr.
A. Lawrence Lowell to one side of him and Otto Kahn to the other!
Try to picture Sinclair handing James Joyce a wreath to put upon the
grave of James Whitcomb Riley! The vision, indeed, is more dismal
than ludicrous. Howells, the last of his lordly line, is missed
tremendously; there is something grievously lacking in the official
hospitality of the country. The lack showed itself the instant he
was called away. A few weeks later Columbia University gave a soirée
in honor of the centenary of Lowell. The president of Columbia, Dr.
Nicholas Murray Butler, is a realist. Moreover, he is a member of the
American Academy himself, elected as a wet to succeed Edgar Allan Poe.
He was thus privy to the deficiencies of his colleagues. To conceal the
flabbiness of the evening he shoved them into back seats--and invited
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Tex Rickard, General Pershing and the board
of governors of the New York Stock Exchange to the platform!
I believe that, of living masters of letters, H. G. Wells was the first
to feel the new chill. When he last visited the Republic he was made
welcome by a committee of ship-news reporters. It was as if one of the
justices of the King’s Bench, landing in America, had been received by
a committee of police-court lawyers from Gary, Ind. Later on American
literature bestirred itself and gave Wells a banquet in New York. I was
present at this feast, and a singular one it was. Not a single author
read in Iowa or taught at Harvard was present. The principal literatus
at the board was the late Frank A. Munsey, author of “Derringforth” and
“The Boy Broker,” and the principal address was made by Max Eastman,
formerly editor of the _Masses_!...
I come to a constructive suggestion. Let the literati of America meet
in their respective places of social relaxation, each gang determining
the credentials of its own members, and elect delegates to a national
convention. Then let the national convention, by open ballot, choose
ten spokesmen and ten alternates to represent the national letters
on all formal occasions--not only when an eminent foreigner is to
be made welcome, but also when Columbia University holds memorial
services, when a President is inaugurated, when Harvard meets Yale,
when monuments are unveiled--in brief at all times of solemn public
ceremonial. Let these representatives practice deportment and
elocution. Let them employ good tailors and trustworthy bootleggers. I
have, alas, no candidates for the committee. As I have said, there is a
dreadful dearth of them. Does Dr. Frank Crane wear whiskers? If so, I
nominate him.
5
_Literature and the Schoolma’m_
With precious few exceptions, all the books on style in English are
by writers quite unable to write. The subject, indeed, seems to
exercise a special and dreadful fascination over schoolma’ms, bucolic
college professors, and other such pseudo-literates. One never hears
of treatises on it by George Moore or James Branch Cabell, but the
pedagogues, male and female, are at it all the time. In a thousand
texts they set forth their depressing ideas about it, and millions of
suffering high-school pupils have to study what they say. Their central
aim, of course, is to reduce the whole thing to a series of simple
rules--the over-mastering passion of their melancholy order, at all
times and everywhere. They aspire to teach it as bridge whist, the
American Legion flag-drill and double-entry bookkeeping are taught.
They fail as ignominiously as that Athenian of legend who essayed to
train a regiment of grasshoppers in the goose-step.
For the essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to
rules--that it is a living and breathing thing, with something of
the devilish in it--that it fits its proprietor tightly and yet ever
so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as securely
an integral part of him as that skin is. It hardens as his arteries
harden. It has _Katzenjammer_ on the days succeeding his indiscretions.
It is gaudy when he is young and gathers decorum when he grows old. On
the day after he makes a mash on a new girl it glows and glitters. If
he has fed well, it is mellow. If he has gastritis it is bitter. In
brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and
it cannot be anything else. To attempt to teach it is as silly as to
set up courses in making love. The man who makes love out of a book
is not making love at all; he is simply imitating someone else making
love. God help him if, in love or literary composition, his preceptor
be a pedagogue!
The schoolma’m theory that the writing of English may be taught is
based upon a faulty inference from a sound observation. The sound
observation is that the great majority of American high-school pupils,
when they attempt to put their thoughts upon paper, produce only a
mass of confused and puerile nonsense--that they express themselves
so clumsily that it is often quite impossible to understand them at
all. The faulty inference is to the effect that what ails them is
a defective technical equipment--that they can be trained to write
clearly as a dog may be trained to walk on its hind legs. This is
all wrong. What ails them is not a defective technical equipment but
a defective natural equipment. They write badly simply because they
cannot think clearly. They cannot think clearly because they lack
the brains. Trying to teach them is as hopeless as trying to teach
a dog with only one hind leg. Any human being who can speak English
understandably has all the materials necessary to write English
clearly, and even beautifully. There is nothing mysterious about the
written language; it is precisely the same, in essence, as the spoken
language. If a man can think in English at all, he can find words
enough to express his ideas. The fact is proved abundantly by the
excellent writing that often comes from so-called ignorant men. It is
proved anew by the even better writing that is done on higher levels by
persons of great simplicity, for example, Abraham Lincoln. Such writing
commonly arouses little enthusiasm among pedagogues. Its transparency
excites their professional disdain, and they are offended by its use
of homely words and phrases. They prefer something more ornate and
complex--something, as they would probably put it, demanding more
thought. But the thought they yearn for is the kind, alas, that they
secrete themselves--the muddled, highfalutin, vapid thought that one
finds in their own text-books.
I do not denounce them because they write so badly; I merely record the
fact in a sad, scientific spirit. Even in such twilight regions of the
intellect the style remains the man. What is in the head infallibly
oozes out of the nub of the pen. If it is sparkling Burgundy the
writing is full of life and charm. If it is mush the writing is mush
too. The late Dr. Harding, twenty-ninth President of the Federal Union,
was a highly self-conscious stylist. He practiced prose composition
assiduously, and was regarded by the pedagogues of Marion, Ohio, and
vicinity as a very talented fellow. But when he sent a message to
Congress it was so muddled in style that even the late Henry Cabot
Lodge, a professional literary man, could not understand it. Why?
Simply because Dr. Harding’s thoughts, on the high and grave subjects
he discussed, were so muddled that he couldn’t understand them himself.
But on matters within his range of customary meditation he was clear
and even charming, as all of us are. I once heard him deliver a brief
address upon the ideals of the Elks. It was a topic close to his heart,
and he had thought about it at length and _con amore_. The result
was an excellent speech--clear, logical, forceful, and with a touch
of wild, romantic beauty. His sentences hung together. He employed
simple words, and put them together with skill. But when, at a public
meeting in Washington, he essayed to deliver an oration on the subject
of the late Dante Alighieri, he quickly became so obscure and absurd
that even the Diplomatic Corps began to snicker. The cause was plain:
he knew no more about Dante than a Tennessee county judge knows about
the Institutes of Justinian. Trying to formulate ideas upon the topic,
he could get together only a few disjected fragments and ghosts of
ideas--here an ear, there a section of tibia, beyond a puff of soul
substance or other gas. The resultant speech was thus enigmatical,
cacophonous and awful stuff. It sounded precisely like a lecture by a
college professor on style.
A pedagogue, confronted by Dr. Harding in class, would have set him
to the business of what is called improving his vocabulary--that is,
to the business of making his writing even worse than it was. Dr.
Harding, in point of fact, had all the vocabulary that he needed, and
a great deal more. Any idea that he could formulate clearly he could
convey clearly. Any idea that genuinely moved him he could invest
with charm--which is to say, with what the pedagogues call style. I
believe that this capacity is possessed by all literate persons above
the age of fourteen. It is not acquired by studying text-books; it is
acquired by learning how to think. Children even younger often show
it. I have a niece, now eleven years old, who already has an excellent
style. When she writes to me about things that interest her--in other
words, about the things she is capable of thinking about--she puts her
thoughts into clear, dignified and admirable English. Her vocabulary,
so far, is unspoiled by schoolma’ms. She doesn’t try to knock me out by
bombarding me with hard words, and phrases filched from Addison. She
is unaffected, and hence her writing is charming. But if she essayed
to send me a communication on the subject, say, of Balkan politics or
government ownership, her style would descend instantly to the level of
that of Dr. Harding’s state papers.
To sum up, style cannot go beyond the ideas which lie at the heart
of it. If they are clear, it too will be clear. If they are held
passionately, it will be eloquent. Trying to teach it to persons who
cannot think, especially when the business is attempted by persons who
also cannot think, is a great waste of time, and an immoral imposition
upon the taxpayers of the nation. It would be far more logical to
devote all the energy to teaching, not writing, but logic--and
probably just as useless. For I doubt that the art of thinking can be
taught at all--at any rate, by school-teachers. It is not acquired, but
congenital. Some persons are born with it. Their ideas flow in straight
channels; they are capable of lucid reasoning; when they say anything
it is instantly understandable; when they write anything it is clear
and persuasive. They constitute, I should say, about one-eighth of one
per cent. of the human race. The rest of God’s children are just as
incapable of logical thought as they are incapable of jumping over the
moon. Trying to teach them to think is as vain an enterprise as trying
to teach a streptococcus the principles of Americanism. The only thing
to do with them is to make Ph.D.’s of them, and set them to writing
handbooks on style.
6
_The Critic and his Job_
The assumption that it may be scientific is the worst curse that
lies upon criticism. It is responsible for all the dull, blowsy,
“definitive” stuff that literary pedagogues write, and it is
responsible, too, for the heavy posturing that so often goes on among
critics less learned. Both groups proceed upon the theory that there
are exact facts to be ascertained, and that it is their business to
ascertain and proclaim them. That theory is nonsense. There is,
in truth, no such thing as an exact fact in the whole realm of the
beautiful arts. What is true therein to-day may be false to-morrow, or
vice versa, and only too often the shift is brought about by something
that, properly speaking, is not an æsthetic consideration at all.
The case of Whitman comes to mind at once. Orthodox criticism, in his
own time, was almost unanimously against him. At his first appearance,
true enough, a few critics were a bit dazzled by him, notably Emerson,
but they quickly got control of their faculties and took to cover.
Down to the time of his death the prevailing doctrine was that he was
a third-rate poet and a dirty fellow. Any young professor who, in the
seventies or even in the early eighties, had presumed to whoop for
him in class would have been cashiered at once, as both incompetent
and immoral. If there was anything definitively established in those
days, it was that old Walt was below the salt. To-day he is taught
to sophomores everywhere, perhaps even in Tennessee, and one of the
most unctuously respectable of American publishing houses brings out
“Leaves of Grass” unexpurgated, and everyone agrees that he is one
of the glories of the national letters. Has that change been brought
about by a purely critical process? Does it represent a triumph of
criticism over darkness? It does not. It represents, rather, a triumph
of external forces over criticism. Whitman’s first partisans were
not interested in poetry; they were interested in sex. They were
presently reënforced by persons interested in politics. They were
finally converted into a majority by a tatterdemalion horde of persons
interested mainly, and perhaps only, in making a noise.
Literary criticism, properly so-called, had little if anything to do
with this transformation. Scarcely a critic of any recognized authority
had a hand in it. What started it off, after the first furtive, gingery
snuffling over “A Woman Waits for Me” and the “Calamus” cycle, was
the rise of political radicalism in the early eighties, in reaction
against the swinish materialism that followed the Civil War. I am
tempted to say that Terence V. Powderly had more to do with the
rehabilitation of Whitman than any American critic, or, indeed, than
any American poet. And if you object to Powderly, then I offer you
Karl Marx, with William Jennings Bryan--no less!--peeping out of his
coat-pocket. The radicals made heavy weather of it at the start. To the
average respectable citizen they seemed to be mere criminals. Like the
Bolsheviki of a later era, they were represented by their opponents
as the enemies of all mankind. What they needed, obviously, was some
means of stilling the popular fear of them--some way of tapping the
national sentimentality. There stood Whitman, conveniently to hand.
In his sonorous strophes to an imaginary and preposterous democracy
there was an eloquent statement of their own vague and windy yearnings,
and, what is more, a certificate to their virtue as sound Americans. So
they adopted him with loud hosannas, and presently he was both their
poet and their philosopher. Long before any professor at Harvard dared
to mention him (save, perhaps, with lascivious winks), he was being
read to tatters by thousands of lonely Socialists in the mining-towns.
As radicalism froze into Liberalism, and so began to influence the
intelligentsia, his vogue rose, and by the end of the century even
school-teachers had begun to hear of him. There followed the free verse
poets, _i. e._, a vast herd of emerging barbarians with an itch to make
an uproar in the world, and no capacity for mastering the orthodox
rules of prosody. Thus Whitman came to Valhalla, pushed by political
propagandists and pulled by literary mountebanks. The native Taines and
Matthew Arnolds made a gallant defense, but in vain. In the remoter
denominational colleges some of them still hold out. But Whitman is now
just as respectable at Yale as Martin Tupper or Edmund Clarence Stedman.
The point is that his new respectability is just as insecure as his old
infamy--that he may be heaved out, on some bright to-morrow, just as
he was heaved in, and by a similar combination of purely non-literary
forces. Already I hear rumors of a plan to make Dr. Coolidge King. If
his conscience stays him, then the throne may go to William Wrigley,
Jr., or Judge Elbert H. Gary, LL.D. Democracy, indeed, begins to sicken
among us. The doctors at its bedside dose it out of a black bottle, and
make sinister signals to the coroner. If it dies, then Whitman will
probably die with it. Criticism, of course, will labor desperately to
save him, as it once labored to dispose of him, but such struggles
are nearly always futile. The most they ever accomplish is to convert
the author defended into a sort of fossil, preserved in a showcase to
plague and puzzle schoolboys. The orthodox literature books, used in
all schools, are simply such showcases. They represent the final effort
of pedants to capture zephyrs and chain torrents. They are monuments
to the delusion that criticism may be definitive--that appeals to the
emotions, which shift and change with every wind, may be appraised and
sorted out by appeals to the mind, which is theoretically unchangeable.
Certainly every reflective student of any of the fine arts should know
that this is not so. There is no such thing as a literary immortality.
We remember Homer, but we forget the poets that the Greeks, too,
forgot. You may be sure that there were Shakespeares in Carthage, and
more of them at the court of Amenophis IV, but their very names are
lost. Our own Shakespeare, as year chases year, may go the same way; in
fact, his going the same way is quite as certain as anything we can
imagine. A thousand years hence, even five hundred years hence, he may
be, like Beowulf, only a name in a literature book, to be remembered
against examination day and then forgotten.