right: we won the war. It cost us nothing in men; it brought us a huge
profit in money; as Europe has gone down, we have gone up. Moreover,
it produced a vast discharge of spiritual electricity, otherwise and
more injuriously dissipated in the countries more harshly beset. The
war was fought ignobly; its first and most obvious effect was to raise
up a horde of cads, and set them in authority as spokesmen of the
nation. But out of that swinishness there was bound to come reaction,
and out of the reaction there was bound to flow a desire to re-examine
the whole national pretension--to turn on the light, to reject old
formulæ, to think things out anew and in terms of reality. Suddenly the
old houses of cards came tumbling down, and the professors inhabiting
them ran about in their night-shirts, bawling for the police. The war,
first and last, produced a great deal more than John Dos Passos’ “Three
Soldiers.” It also produced Lewis’ “Babbitt,” and Cabell’s “Jurgen,”
and Fergusson’s “Capitol Hill,” and O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.” And,
producing them, it ended an epoch of sweetness and light.
2
The young American literatus of today, with publishers ready and eager
to give him a hearing, can scarcely imagine the difficulties which
beset his predecessor of twenty years ago; he is, indeed, far too
little appreciative of the freedom he has, and far too prone to flee
from hard work to the solace of the martyr’s shroud. When I first
began practise as a critic, in 1908, there was yet plenty of excuse
for putting it on. It was a time of almost inconceivable complacency
and conformity. Hamilton Wright Mabie was still alive and still taken
seriously, and all the young pedagogues who aspired to the critical
gown imitated him in his watchful stupidity. This camorra had delivered
a violent wallop to Theodore Dreiser eight years before, and he was
yet suffering from his bruises; it was not until 1911 that he printed
“Jennie Gerhardt.” Miss Harriet Monroe and her gang of new poets were
still dispersed and inarticulate; Miss Amy Lowell, as yet unaware of
Imagism, was writing polite doggerel in the manner of a New England
schoolmarm; the reigning dramatists of the nation were Augustus Thomas,
David Belasco and Clyde Fitch; Miss Cather was imitating Mrs. Wharton;
Hergesheimer had six years to go before he’d come to “The Lay Anthony”;
Cabell was known only as one who provided the text for illustrated
gift-books; the American novelists most admired by most publishers,
by most readers and by all practising critics were Richard Harding
Davis, Robert W. Chambers and James Lane Allen. It is hard indeed, in
retrospect, to picture those remote days just as they were. They seem
almost fabulous. The chief critical organ of the Republic was actually
the Literary Supplement of the New York _Times_. The _Dial_ was down
with diabetes in Chicago; the _Nation_ was made dreadful by the gloomy
humors of Paul Elmer More; the _Bookman_ was even more saccharine and
sophomoric than it is today. When the mild and _pianissimo_ revolt of
the middle 90’s--a feeble echo of the English revolt--had spent itself,
the Presbyterians marched in and took possession of the works. Most of
the erstwhile revoltés boldly took the veil--notably Hamlin Garland. No
novel that told the truth about life as Americans were living it, no
poem that departed from the old patterns, no play that had the merest
ghost of an idea in it had a chance. When, in 1908, Mrs. Mary Roberts
Rinehart printed a conventional mystery story which yet managed to have
a trace of sense in it, it caused a sensation. And when, two years
later, Dr. William Lyon Phelps printed a book of criticism in which
he actually ranked Mark Twain alongside Emerson and Hawthorne, there
was as great a stirring beneath the college elms as if a naked fancy
woman had run across the campus. If Hergesheimer had come into New
York in 1908 with “Cytherea” under his arm, he would have worn out his
pantaloons on publishers’ benches without getting so much as a polite
kick. If Eugene O’Neill had come to Broadway with “The Hairy Ape,” he
would have been sent to Edward E. Rose to learn the elements of his
trade. The devilish and advanced thing, in those days, was for the fat
lady star to give a couple of matinées of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”
A great many men and a few women addressed themselves to the dispersal
of this fog. Some of them were imaginative writers who found it simply
impossible to bring themselves within the prevailing rules; some were
critics; others were young publishers. As I look back, I can’t find
any sign of concerted effort; it was, in the main, a case of each on
his own. The more contumacious of the younger critics, true enough,
tended to rally ’round Huneker, who, as a matter of fact, was very
little interested in American letters, and the young novelists had
a leader in Dreiser, who, I suspect, was quite unaware of most of
them. However, it was probably Dreiser who chiefly gave form to the
movement, despite the fact that for eleven long years he was silent.
Not only was there a useful rallying-point in the idiotic suppression
of “Sister Carrie”; there was also the encouraging fact of the man’s
massive immovability. Physically and mentally he loomed up like a
sort of headland--a great crag of basalt that no conceivable assault
seemed able to touch. His predecessor, Frank Norris, was of much softer
stuff. Norris, had he lived longer, would have been wooed and ruined,
I fear, by the Mabies, Boyntons and other such Christian critics, as
Garland had been wooed and ruined before him. Dreiser, fortunately for
American letters, never had to face any such seduction. The critical
schoolmarms, young and old, fell upon him with violence the moment he
appeared above the horizon of his native steppe, and soon he was the
storm center of a battle-royal that lasted nearly twenty years. The man
himself was solid, granitic, without nerves. Very little cunning was in
him and not much bellicose enterprise, but he showed a truly appalling
tenacity. The pedagogues tried to scare him to death, they tried to
stampede his partisans and they tried to put him into Coventry and get
him forgotten, but they failed every time. The more he was reviled,
sneered at, neglected, the more resolutely he stuck to his formula.
That formula is now every serious American novelist’s formula. They all
try to write better than Dreiser, and not a few of them succeed, but
they all follow him in his fundamental purpose--to make the novel true.
Dreiser added something, and here following him is harder: he tried
to make the novel poignant--to add sympathy, feeling, imagination to
understanding. It will be a long while before that enterprise is better
managed than he managed it in “Jennie Gerhardt.”
Today, it seems to me, the American imaginative writer, whether he
be novelist, poet or dramatist, is quite as free as he deserves to
be. He is free to depict the life about him precisely as he sees it,
and to interpret it in any manner he pleases. The publishers of the
land, once so fearful of novelty, are now so hospitable to it that
they constantly fail to distinguish the novelty that has hard thought
behind it from that which has only some Village mountebank’s desire
to stagger the wives of Rotarians. Our stage is perhaps the freest
in the world--not only to sensations, but also to ideas. Our poets
get into print regularly with stuff so bizarre and unearthly that
only Christian Scientists can understand it. The extent of this new
freedom, indeed, is so great that large numbers of persons appear to be
unable to believe in it; they are constantly getting into sweats about
the taboos and inhibitions that remain, for example, those nourished
by comstockery. But the importance and puissance of comstockery, I
believe, is quite as much overestimated as the importance and puissance
of the objurgations still hurled at sense and honesty by the provincial
professors of American Idealism, the Genius of America, and other
such phantasms. The Comstocks, true enough, still raid an occasional
book, particularly when their funds are running low and there is need
to inflame Christian men, but that their monkeyshines ever actually
_suppress_ a book of any consequence I very much doubt. The flood
is too vast for them. Chasing a minnow with desperate passion, they
let a whole school of whales go by. In any case, they confine their
operations to the single field of sex, and it must be plain that it
is not in the field of sex that the hottest battles against the old
American manner have been fought and won. “Three Soldiers” was far more
subversive of that manner than all the stories of sex ever written
in America--and yet “Three Soldiers” came out with the imprint of
one of the most respectable of American publishers, and was scarcely
challenged. “Babbitt” scored a victory that was still easier, and
yet more significant, for its target was the double one of American
business and American Christianity; it set the whole world to laughing
at two things that are far more venerated in the United States than
the bodily chastity of women. Nevertheless, “Babbitt” went down so
easily that even the alfalfa _Gelehrten_ joined in whooping for it,
apparently on the theory that praising Lewis would make the young of
the national species forget Dreiser. Victimized by their own craft,
the _Gelehrten_ thus made a foul attack upon their own principles, for
if their principles did not stand against just such anarchistic and
sacrilegious books, then they were without any sense whatever, as was
and is, indeed, the case.
I shall not rehearse the steps in the advance from “Sister Carrie,”
suppressed and proscribed, to “Babbitt,” swallowed and hailed. The
important thing is that, despite the caterwauling of the Comstocks
and the pedagogues, a reasonable freedom for the serious artist now
prevails--that publishers stand ready to print him, that critics exist
who are competent to recognize him and willing to do battle for him,
and that there is a large public eager to read him. What use is he
making of his opportunity? Certainly not the worst use possible, but
also certainly not the best. He is free, but he is not yet, perhaps,
worthy of freedom. He lets the popular magazine, the movie and the
cheap-John publisher pull him too hard in one direction; he lets the
vagaries of his politics pull him too hard in another. Back in 1908
I predicted the destruction of Upton Sinclair the artist by Upton
Sinclair the visionary and reformer. Sinclair’s bones now bleach upon
the beach. Beside them repose those of many another man and woman
of great promise--for example, Winston Churchill. Floyd Dell is on
his way--one novel and two doses of Greenwich Village psychology.
Hergesheimer writes novelettes for the _Saturday Evening Post_. Willa
Cather has won the Pulitzer Prize--a transaction comparable to the
election of Charles W. Eliot to the Elks. Masters turns to prose that
somehow fails to come off. Dreiser, forgetting his trilogy, experiments
rather futilely with the drama, the essay, free verse. Fuller renounces
the novel for book reviewing. Tarkington is another Pulitzer prizeman,
always on the verge of first-rate work but always falling short by an
inch. Many of the White Hopes of ten or fifteen years ago perished in
the war, as surely victims of its slaughter as Rupert Brook or Otto
Braun; it is, indeed, curious to note that practically every American
author who moaned and sobbed for democracy between the years 1914 and
1919 is now extinct. The rest have gone down the chute of the movies.
But all this, after all, may signify little. The shock troops have been
piled up in great masses, but the ground is cleared for those that
follow. Well, then, what of the youngsters? Do they show any sign of
seizing their chance? The answer is yes and no. On the one hand there
is a group which, revolving ’round the _Bookman_, talks a great deal
and accomplishes nothing. On the other hand there is a group which,
revolving ’round the _Dial_ and the _Little Review_, talks even more
and does even less. But on the third hand, as it were, there is a
group which says little and saws wood. There seems to be little in
common between its members, no sign of a formal movement, with its
_blague_ and its bombast, but all of them have this in common: that
they owe both their opportunity and their method to the revolution that
followed “Sister Carrie.” Most of them are from the Middle West, but
they are distinct from the Chicago crowd, now degenerated to posturing
and worse. They are sophisticated, disillusioned, free from cant, and
yet they have imagination. The raucous protests of the evangelists
of American Idealism seem to have no more effect upon them than the
advances of the Expressionists, Dadaists and other such café-table
prophets. Out of this dispersed and ill-defined group, I believe,
something will come. Its members are those who are free from the two
great delusions which, from the beginning, have always cursed American
letters: the delusion that a work of art is primarily a moral document,
that its purpose is to make men better Christians and more docile
cannon-fodder, and the delusion that it is an exercise in logic, that
its purpose is to prove something. These delusions, lingering beyond
their time, are responsible for most of the disasters visible in the
national literature today--the disasters of the radicals as well as
those of the 100 per cent. dunderheads. The writers of the future, I
hope and believe, will carefully avoid both of them.
XVII. PEOPLE AND THINGS
1
_The Capital of a Great Republic_
The fourth secretary of the Paraguayan legation.... The chief clerk
to the House committee on industrial arts and expositions.... The
secretary to the secretary to the Secretary of Labor.... The brother to
the former Congressman from the third Idaho district.... The messenger
to the chief of the Senate folding-room.... The doorkeeper outside the
committee-room of the House committee on the disposition of useless
executive papers.... The chief correspondent of the Toomsboro, Ga.,
_Banner_ in the Senate press-gallery.... The stenographer to the
assistant chief entomologist of the Bureau of Animal Industry.... The
third assistant chief computor in the office of the Naval Almanac....
The assistant Attorney-General in charge of the investigation of
postal frauds in the South Central States.... The former wife of the
former secretary to the former member of the Interstate Commerce
Commission.... The brother to the wife of the _chargé d’affaires_ of
Czecho-Slovakia.... The bootlegger to the ranking Democratic member
of the committee on the election of President, Vice-President and
representatives in Congress.... The acting assistant doorkeeper of
the House visitors’ gallery.... The junior Senator from Delaware....
The assistant to the secretary to the chief clerk of the Division of
Audits and Disbursements, Bureau of Stationery and Supplies, Postoffice
Department.... The press-agent to the chaplain of the House.... The
commercial attaché to the American legation at Quito.... The chauffeur
to the fourth assistant Postmaster-General.... The acting substitute
elevator-man in the Washington monument.... The brother to the wife of
the brother-in-law of the Vice-President.... The aunt to the sister of
the wife of the officer in charge of ceremonials, State Department....
The neighbor of the cousin of the step-father of the sister-in-law of
the President’s pastor.... The superintendent of charwomen in Temporary
Storehouse B7, Bureau of Navy Yards and Docks.... The assistant
confidential clerk to the chief clerk to the acting chief examiner of
the Patent Office.... The valet to the Chief Justice.
2
_Ambassadors of Christ_
Fifth avenue rectors with shining morning faces, preaching on Easter
to pews packed with stockbrokers, defendants in salacious divorce
suits, members of the Sulgrave Foundation and former Zionists....
Evangelists of strange, incomprehensible cults whooping and bawling
at two or three half-witted old women and half a dozen scared little
girls in corrugated iron tabernacles down near the railroad-yards....
Mormon missionaries pulling door-bells in Wheeling, W. Va., and Little
Rock, Ark., and handing naughty-looking tracts to giggling servant
girls.... Baptist doctors of divinity calling upon John the Baptist and
John D. Rockefeller to bear witness that the unducked will sweat in
hell forevermore.... Methodist candidates for the sacred frock, sent
out to preach trial sermons to backward churches in the mail-order
belt, proving magnificently in one hour that Darwin was an ignoramus
and Huxley a scoundrel.... Irish priests denouncing the Ku Klux
Klan.... Rabbis denouncing Henry Ford.... Presbyterians denouncing Flo
Zeigfeld.... Fashionable divines officiating at gaudy home weddings,
their ears alert for the popping of corks.... Street evangelists in
Zanesville, O., trying to convince a cop and five newsboys that no
man will be saved unless he be born again.... Missionaries in smelly
gospel-shops along the waterfront, expounding the doctrine of the
atonement to boozy Norwegian sailors, half of them sound asleep....
Cadaverous high-church Episcopalians.... Little fat Lutherans with
the air of prosperous cheese-mongers.... Dunkards with celluloid
collars and no neckties.... Southern Methodists who still believe
in slavery.... Former plumbers, threshing-machine engineers and
horse-doctors turned into United Brethren bishops.... Missionaries
collecting money from the mill children in Raleigh, N. C., to convert
the Spaniards and Italians to Calvinism.... Episcopal archdeacons
cultivating the broad English _a_.... Swedenborgians trying to explain
the “Arcana Cœlestia” to flabbergasted newspaper reporters.... Polish
clergymen leaping out of the windows at Polish weddings in Johnstown,
Pa., hoping that the next half-dozen beer-bottles won’t hit them....
Methodists pulling wires for bishoprics.... Quakers foreclosing
mortgages.... Baptists busy among the women.
3
_Bilder aus schöner Zeit_
The excellent lunch that the illustrious Crispi used to serve at
Delmonico’s at five o’clock in the afternoon.... The incomparable
orange blossom cocktails at Sherry’s, and the plates of salted
nuts.... The tavern cocktails at the Beaux Arts, each with its dash
of absinthe.... The Franziskaner Mai-Bock at Lüchow’s.... Dear old
Sieg’s noble Rhine wines at the Kaiserhof.... The long-tailed clams
and Spring onions at Rogers’, with Pilsner to wash them down.... The
amazingly good American quasi-Pilsner, made by Herr Abner, on the
Raleigh roof in Washington.... The Castel del Remy at the Brevoort,
cheap but perfect.... The very dark Kulmbacher at the Pabst place
in 125th street in the last days of civilization.... The burgundy
from the Cresta Blanca vineyards in California.... Michelob on warm
Summer evenings, with the crowd singing “Throw Out the Lifeline!”...
The old-time Florestan cocktails--50 per cent. London gin, 25 per
cent. French vermouth and 25 per cent. Martini-Rossi, with a dash of
Angostura bitters--drink half, then drink a glass of beer, and then
drink the other half.... That Hoboken red wine, so strangely smooth and
lovely.... The bad red wine (but capital cooking) at the Frenchman’s
in Lexington avenue.... Del Pezzo’s superb Chianti.... The ale at
Keen’s.... Obst’s herrings, with Löwenbraü to slack them.... The
astounding cocktail made by the head waiter at Henri’s.... Drinking
Faust all night in St. Louis in 1904.... The musty ale at Losekam’s
in Washington.... The draft _Helles_ at Krüger’s in Philadelphia.... A
Pilsner luncheon at the old Grand Union, from one to six.... A stray
bottle of perfect sauterne found in Rahway, New Jersey.... A wild
night drinking Swedish punch and hot water.... Two or three hot Scotch
nights.... Twenty or thirty Bass’ ale nights.... Five or six hundred
Pilsner nights....
4
_The High Seas_
The kid who sits in the bucket of tar.... The buxom stewardess who
comes in and inquires archly if one rang.... The humorous piano-tuner
who tunes the grand piano in the music-room in the 15-16ths-tone
scale.... The electric fan which, when a stray zephyr blows in
through the porthole, makes a noise like a dentist’s drill.... The
alien ship’s printer who, in the daily wireless paper, reports a
baseball score of 165 to 3.... The free Christian Science literature
in the reading-room.... The pens in the writing-room.... The elderly
_Grosshändler_ with the young wife.... The red-haired girl in the green
sweater.... The retired bootlegger disguised as a stockbroker....
The stockbroker disguised as a United States Senator.... The
boy who climbs into the lifeboat.... The chief steward wearing
the No. 18³⁄₄ collar.... The mysterious pipes that run along the
stateroom ceilings.... The discovery that one forgot to pack enough
undershirts.... The night watchman who raps on the door at 3.30
A. M. to deliver a wireless message reading “Sorry missed
you. Bon voyage”.... The bartender who adds a dash of witchhazel
to cocktails.... The wilting flowers standing in ice-pitchers and
spittoons in the hallways.... The fight in the steerage.... The old
lady who gets stewed and sends for the doctor.... The news that the
ship is in Long. 43°, 41′, 16″ W, Lat. 40°, 23′, 39″ N.... The report
that the starboard propeller has lost a blade.
5
_The Shrine of Mnemosyne_
The little town of Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands, in a mid-Winter
mist, flat and charming like a Japanese print.... San Francisco and
the Golden Gate from the top of Twin Peaks.... Gibraltar on a Spring
day, all in pastel shades, like the back-drop for a musical comedy....
My first view of the tropics, the palm-trees suddenly bulging out of
the darkness of dawn, the tremendous stillness, the sweetly acid
smell, the immeasurable strangeness.... The Trentino on a glorious
morning, up from Verona to the Brenner Pass.... Central Germany from
Bremen to Munich, all in one day, with the apple trees in bloom....
Copenhagen on a wild night, with the _Polizei_ combing the town for
the American who upset the piano.... Christiania in January, with the
snow-clad statue of Ibsen looming through the gloom like a ghost in a
cellar.... The beach at Tybee Island, with the faint, blood-curdling
rattle of the land-crabs.... Jacksonville after the fire in 1902,
with the hick militiamen firing their machine-guns all night.... The
first inauguration of Woodrow, and the pretty suffragette who drank
beer with me at the Raleigh.... A child playing in the yard of a
God-forsaken town in the Wyoming desert.... Bryan’s farewell speech
at the St. Louis Convention in 1904.... Hampton Court on Chestnut
Sunday.... A New Year’s Eve party on a Danish ship, 500 miles off
the coast of Greenland.... The little pile of stones on the beach of
Watling’s Island, marking the place where Columbus landed.... The moon
of the Caribbees, seen from a 1000-ton British tramp.... A dull night
in a Buffalo hotel, reading the American Revised Version of the New
Testament.... The day I received the proofs of my first book.... A
good-bye on an Hoboken pier.... The Palace Hotel in Madrid.
INDEX
Adams, Samuel, 118
Aggasiz, Alexander, 41
Allen, James Lane, 286
Americanism, 10
American Legion, 10, 38, 163, 195
Anglo-Saxon, 21 _ff._
Anti-Saloon League, 10, 88, 161, 183
Atherton, Gertrude, 21
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 117
Beck, James M., 9
Beers, Henry A., 12
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 240, 251, 263
Bennett, Arnold, 281
Benson, Admiral, 256
Bill of Rights, 99, 100, 226
Bismarck, Otto von, 117
Bonaparte, Charles J., 230
_Bookman_, 286, 292
Boyd, Ernest, 15
Boynton, Percy H., 14
Brahms, Johannes, 251
Brandeis, Louis D., 101
Brann, Otto, 292
Brook, Rupert, 292
Brooks, Van Wyck, 18
Brownell, Wm. C., 9, 14, 16
Browning, Robert, 118
Bryan, Wm. Jennings, 58, 60
Bryant, William Cullen, 16
Bush, Irving T., 214
Butler, Nicholas Murray, 170
Cabell, James Branch, 14, 18, 40, 284, 285
Cather, Willa, 285, 291
Chambers, Robert W., 286
Chaplin, Charlie, 261
Chicago _Literary Times_, 12
Civil Service Reform, 229
Churchill, Winston, 291
Clemens, Samuel L., 15, 17, 19, 138, 279, 280, 286
Cleveland, Grover, 69
Comstock, Anthony, 164
_Congressional Record_, 43, 53, 122
Conrad, Joseph, 141, 276, 281
Coolidge, Calvin, 15, 48, 193, 263
Cooper, James Fenimore, 16, 280
Crane, Frank, 41
Creel, George, 9, 256
Czolgosz, Leon, 185
Daniels, Josephus, 257
D’Annunzio, Gabrielle, 261