whole book to prove the contrary, and only succeeded in making his case
absurd. The only art that is capable of reaching the _Homo Boobus_ is
art that is already debased and polluted—band music, official sculpture,
Pears’ Soap painting, the popular novel. What is honest and worthy of
praise in the new poetry is Greek to the general. And, despite much
nonsense, it seems to me that there is no little in it that is honest
and worthy of praise. It has, for one thing, made an effective war upon
the _cliché_, and so purged the verse of the nation of much of its old
banality in subject and phrase. The elegant album pieces of Richard
Henry Stoddard and Edmund Clarence Stedman are no longer in
fashion—save, perhaps, among the democrats that Untermeyer mentions. And
in the second place, it has substituted for this ancient conventionality
an eager curiosity in life as men and women are actually living it—a
spirit of daring experimentation that has made poetry vivid and full of
human interest, as it was in the days of Elizabeth. The thing often
passes into the grotesque, it is shot through and through with
_héliogabalisme_, but at its high points it has achieved invaluable
pioneering. A new poet, emerging out of the Baptist night of Peoria or
Little Rock to-day, comes into an atmosphere charged with subtle
electricities. There is a stimulating restlessness; ideas have a
welcome; the art he aspires to is no longer a merely formal exercise,
like practicing Czerny. When a Henry Van Dyke arises at some college
banquet and begins to discharge an old-fashioned ode to _alma mater_
there is a definite snicker; it is almost as if he were to appear in
Congress gaiters or a beaver hat. An audience for such things, of
course, still exists. It is, no doubt, an enormously large audience. But
it has changed a good deal qualitatively, if not quantitatively. The
relatively civilized reader has been educated to something better. He
has heard a music that has spoiled his ear for the old wheezing of the
melodeon. He weeps no more over what wrung him yesteryear.
Unluckily, the new movement, in America even more than in England,
France and Germany, suffers from a very crippling lack, and that is the
lack of a genuinely first-rate poet. It has produced many talents, but
it has yet to produce any genius, or even the shadow of genius. There
has been a general lifting of the plain, but no vasty and melodramatic
throwing up of new peaks. Worse still, it has had to face hard
competition from without—that is, from poets who, while also emerged
from platitude, have yet stood outside it, and perhaps in some doubt of
it. Untermeyer discusses a number of such poets in his book. There is
one of them, Lizette Woodworth Reese, who has written more sound poetry,
more genuinely eloquent and beautiful poetry, than all the new poets put
together—more than a whole posse of Masterses and Lindsays, more than a
hundred Amy Lowells. And there are others, Neihardt and John McClure
among them—particularly McClure. Untermeyer, usually anything but an
ass, once committed the unforgettable asininity of sneering at McClure.
The blunder, I daresay, is already lamented; it is not embalmed in his
book. But it will haunt him on Tyburn Hill. For this McClure, attempting
the simplest thing in the simplest way, has done it almost superbly. He
seems to be entirely without theories. There is no pedagogical passion
in him. He is no reformer. But more than any of the reformers now or
lately in the arena, he is a poet.
VII. THE HEIR OF MARK TWAIN
Nothing could be stranger than the current celebrity of Irvin S. Cobb,
an author of whom almost as much is heard as if he were a new Thackeray
or Molière. One is solemnly told by various extravagant partisans, some
of them not otherwise insane, that he is at once the successor to Mark
Twain and the heir of Edgar Allan Poe. One hears of public dinners given
in devotion to his genius, of public presentations, of learned degrees
conferred upon him by universities, of other extraordinary adulations,
few of them shared by such relatively puny fellows as Howells and
Dreiser. His talents and sagacity pass into popular anecdotes; he has
sedulous Boswells; he begins to take on the august importance of an
actor-manager. Behind the scenes, of course, a highly dexterous
publisher pulls the strings, but much of it is undoubtedly more or less
sincere; men pledge their sacred honor to the doctrine that his
existence honors the national literature. Moreover, he seems to take the
thing somewhat seriously himself. He gives his _imprimatur_ to various
other authors, including Joseph Conrad; he engages himself to lift the
literary tone of moving-pictures; he lends his name to movements; he
exposes himself in the chautauquas; he takes on the responsibilities of
a patriot and a public man.... Altogether, a curious, and, in some of
its aspects, a caressingly ironical spectacle. One wonders what the
graduate sophomores of to-morrow, composing their dull tomes upon
American letters, will make of it....
In the actual books of the man I can find nothing that seems to justify
so much enthusiasm, nor even the hundredth part of it. His serious
fiction shows a certain undoubted facility, but there are at least forty
other Americans who do the thing quite as well. His public bulls and
ukases are no more than clever journalism—superficial and
inconsequential, first saying one thing and then quite another thing.
And in his humor, which his admirers apparently put first among his
products, I can discover, at best, nothing save a somewhat familiar
aptitude for grotesque anecdote, and, at worst, only the laborious
laugh-squeezing of Bill Nye. In the volume called “Those Times and
These” there is an excellent comic story, to wit, “Hark, From the Tomb!”
But it would surely be an imbecility to call it a masterpiece; too many
other authors have done things quite as good; more than a few (I need
cite only George Ade, Owen Johnson and Ring W. Lardner) have done things
very much better. Worse, it lies in the book like a slice of Smithfield
ham between two slabs of stale store-bread. On both sides of it are very
stupid artificialities—stories without point, stories in which rustic
characters try to talk like Wilson Mizner, stories altogether
machine-made and depressing. Turn, now, to another book, vastly praised
in its year—by name, “Cobb’s Anatomy.” One laughs occasionally—but
precisely as one laughs over a comic supplement or the jokes in _Ayer’s
Almanac_. For example:
There never was a hansom cab made that would hold a fat man
comfortably unless he left the doors open, and that makes him feel
undressed.
Again:
Your hair gives you bother so long as you have it and more bother
when it starts to go. You are always doing something for it and it
is always showing deep-dyed ingratitude in return; or else the dye
isn’t deep enough, which is even worse.
Exactly; it is even worse. And then this:
Once there was a manicure lady who wouldn’t take a tip, but she is
now no more. Her indignant sisters stabbed her to death with
hatpins and nail-files.
I do not think I quote unfairly; I have tried to select honest specimens
of the author’s fancy.... Perhaps it may be well to glance at another
book. I choose, at random, “Speaking of Operations—,” a work described
by the publisher as “the funniest yet written by Cobb” and “the funniest
book we know of.” In this judgment many other persons seem to have
concurred. The thing was an undoubted success when it appeared as an
article in the _Saturday Evening Post_ and it sold thousands of copies
between covers. Well, what is in it? In it, after a diligent reading, I
find half a dozen mildly clever observations—and sixty odd pages of
ancient and infantile wheezes, as flat to the taste as so many crystals
of hyposulphite of soda. For example, the wheeze to the effect that in
the days of the author’s nonage “germs had not been invented yet.” For
example, the wheeze to the effect that doctors bury their mistakes. For
example, the wheeze to the effect that the old-time doctor always
prescribed medicines of abominably evil flavor.... But let us go into
the volume more in detail, and so unearth all its gems.
On page 1, in the very first paragraph, there is the doddering old joke
about the steepness of doctors’ bills. In the second paragraph there is
the somewhat newer but still fully adult joke about the extreme
willingness of persons who have been butchered by surgeons to talk about
it afterward. These two witticisms are all that I can find on page 1.
For the rest, it consists almost entirely of a reference to MM. Bryan
and Roosevelt—a reference well known by all newspaper paragraphists and
vaudeville monologists to be as provocative of laughter as a mention of
bunions, mothers-in-law or Pottstown, Pa. On page 2 Bryan and Roosevelt
are succeeded by certain heavy stuff in the Petroleum V. Nasby manner
upon the condition of obstetrics, pediatrics and the allied sciences
among whales. Page 3 starts off with the old jocosity to the effect that
people talk too much about the weather. It progresses or resolves, as
the musicians say, into the wheeze to the effect that people like to
dispute over what is the best thing to eat for breakfast. On page 4 we
come to what musicians would call the formal statement of the main
theme—that is, of the how-I-like-to-talk-of-my-operation motif. We have
thus covered four pages.
Page 5 starts out with an enharmonic change: to wit, from the idea that
ex-patients like to talk of their operations to the idea that patients
in being like to swap symptoms. Following this there is a repetition of
the gold theme—that is, the theme of the doctor’s bill. On page 6 there
are two chuckles. One springs out of a reference to “light
housekeeping,” a phrase which invariably strikes an American vaudeville
audience as salaciously whimsical. The other is grounded upon the
well-known desire of baseball fans to cut the umpire’s throat. On page 6
there enters for the first time what may be called the second theme of
the book. This is the whiskers motif. The whole of this page, with the
exception of a sentence embodying the old wheeze about the happy times
before germs were invented, is given over to variations of the whiskers
joke. Page 8 continues this development section. Whiskers of various
fantastic varieties are mentioned—trellis whiskers, bosky whiskers,
ambush whiskers, loose, luxuriant whiskers, landscaped whiskers,
whiskers that are winter quarters for pathogenic organisms. Some hard,
hard squeezing, and the humor in whiskers is temporarily exhausted. Page
8 closes with the old joke about the cruel thumping which doctors
perform upon their patients’ clavicles.
Now for page 9. It opens with a third statement of the gold motif—“He
then took my temperature and $15.” Following comes the dentist’s office
motif—that is, the motif of reluctance, of oozing courage, of flight. At
the bottom of the page the gold motif is repeated in the key of E minor.
Pages 10 and 11 are devoted to simple description, with very little
effort at humor. On page 12 there is a second statement, for the full
brass choir, of the dentist’s office motif. On page 13 there are more
echoes from Petroleum V. Nasby, the subject this time being a man “who
got his spleen back from the doctor’s and now keeps it in a bottle of
alcohol.” On page 14 one finds the innocent bystander joke; on page 15
the joke about the terrifying effects of reading a patent medicine
almanac. Also, at the bottom of the page, there is a third statement of
the dentist’s office joke. On page 16 it gives way to a restatement of
the whiskers theme, in augmentation, which in turn yields to the third
or fifth restatement of the gold theme.
Let us now jump a few pages. On page 19 we come to the old joke about
the talkative barber; on page 22 to the joke about the book agent; on
the same page to the joke about the fashionableness of appendicitis; on
page 23 to the joke about the clumsy carver who projects the turkey’s
gizzard into the visiting pastor’s eye; on page 28 to a restatement of
the barber joke; on page 31 to another statement—is it the fifth or
sixth?—of the dentist’s office joke; on page 37 to the katzenjammer
joke; on page 39 to the old joke about doctors burying their
mistakes.... And so on. And so on and so on. And so on and so on and so
on. On pages 48 and 49 there is a perfect riot of old jokes, including
the nth variation of the whiskers joke and a fearful and wonderful pun
about Belgian hares and heirs....
On second thoughts I go no further.... This, remember, is the book that
Cobb’s publishers, apparently with his own _Nihil Obstat_, choose as his
best. This is the official masterpiece of the “new Mark Twain.”
Nevertheless, even so laboriously flabby a farceur has his moments. I
turn to Frank J. Wilstach’s Dictionary of Similes and find this credited
to him: “No more privacy than a goldfish.” Here, at last, is something
genuinely humorous. Here, moreover, is something apparently new.
VIII. HERMANN SUDERMANN
The fact that Sudermann is the author of the most successful play that
has come out of Germany since the collapse of the romantic movement is
the most eloquent of all proofs, perhaps, of his lack of force and
originality as a dramatist. “Heimat,” Englished, Frenched and
Italianized as “Magda,” gave a new and gaudy leading rôle to all the
middle-aged chewers of scenery; they fell upon it as upon a new
Marguerite Gautier, and with it they coaxed the tears of all nations.
That was in the middle nineties. To-day the piece seems almost as
old-fashioned as “The Princess Bonnie,” and even in Germany it has gone
under the counter. If it is brought out at all, it is to adorn the death
agonies of some doddering star of the last generation.
Sudermann was one of the first deer flushed by Arno Holz and Johannes
Schlaf, the founders of German naturalism. He had written a couple of
successful novels, “Frau Sorge” and “Der Katzensteg,” before the
_Uberbrettl’_ got on its legs, and so he was a recruit worth snaring.
The initial fruit of his enlistment was “Die Ehre,” a _reductio ad
absurdum_ of Prussian notions of honor, as incomprehensible outside of
Germany as Franz Adam Beyerlein’s “Zapfenstreich” or Carl Bleibtreu’s
“Die Edelsten der Nation.” Then followed “Sodoms Ende,” and after it,
“Heimat.” Already the emptiness of naturalism was beginning to oppress
Sudermann, as it was also oppressing Hauptmann. The latter, in 1892,
rebounded from it to the unblushing romanticism of “Hanneles
Himmelfahrt.” As for Sudermann, he chose to temper the rigors of the
Schlaf-Holz formula (by Ibsen out of Zola) with sardoodledum. The result
was this “Heimat,” in which naturalism was wedded to a mellow
sentimentality, caressing to audiences bred upon the drama of perfumed
adultery. The whole last scene of the play, indeed, was no more than an
echo of Augier’s “Le Mariage d’ Olympe.” It is no wonder that even Sarah
Bernhardt pronounced it a great work.
Since then Sudermann has wobbled, and in the novel as well as in the
drama. Lacking the uncanny versatility of Hauptmann, he has been unable
to conquer the two fields of romance and reality. Instead he has lost
himself between them, a rat without a tail. “Das hohe Lied,” his most
successful novel since “Frau Sorge,” is anything but a first-rate work.
Its opening chapter is a superlatively fine piece of writing, but after
that he grows uncertain of his way, and toward the end one begins to
wonder what it is all about. No coherent idea is in it; it is simply a
sentimentalization of the unpleasant; if it were not for the naughtiness
of some of the scenes no one would read it. An American dramatist has
made a play of it—a shocker for the same clowns who were entranced by
Brieux’s “Les Avariés.”
The trouble with Sudermann, here and elsewhere, is that he has no sound
underpinnings, and is a bit uncertain about his characters and his
story. He starts off furiously, let us say, as a Zola, and then dilutes
Zolaism with romance, and then pulls himself up and begins to imitate
Ibsen, and then trips and falls headlong into the sugar bowl of
sentimentality. Lily Czepanek, in “Das hohe Lied,” swoons at critical
moments, like the heroine of a tale for chambermaids. It is almost as if
Lord Jim should get converted at a gospel mission, or Nora Helmer let
down her hair.... But these are defects in Sudermann the novelist and
dramatist, and in that Sudermann only. In the short story they conceal
themselves; he is done before he begins to vacillate. In this field,
indeed, all his virtues—of brisk, incisive writing, of flashing
observation, of dexterous stage management, of emotional fire and
address—have a chance to show themselves, and without any wearing thin.
The book translated as “The Indian Lily” contains some of the best short
stories that German—or any other language, for that matter—can offer.
They are mordant, succinct and extraordinarily vivid character studies,
each full of penetrating irony and sardonic pity, each with the chill
wind of disillusion blowing through it, each preaching that life is a
hideous farce, that good and bad are almost meaningless words, that
truth is only the lie that is easiest to believe....
It is hard to choose between stories so high in merit, but surely “The
Purpose” is one of the best. Of all the latter-day Germans, only Ludwig
Thoma, in “Ein bayrischer Soldat,” has ever got a more brilliant reality
into a crowded space. Here, in less than fifteen thousand words,
Sudermann rehearses the tragedy of a whole life, and so great is the art
of the thing that one gets a sense of perfect completeness, almost of
exhaustiveness.... Antonie Wiesner, the daughter of a country innkeeper,
falls in love with Robert Messerschmidt, a medical student, and they sin
the scarlet sin. To Robert, perhaps, the thing is a mere interlude of
midsummer, but to Toni it is all life’s meaning and glory. Robert is
poor and his degree is still two years ahead; it is out of the question
for him to marry. Very well, Toni will find a father for her child; she
is her lover’s property, and that property must be protected. And she
will wait willingly, careless of the years, for the distant day of
triumph and redemption. All other ideas and ideals drop out of her mind;
she becomes an automaton moved by the one impulse, the one yearning. She
marries one Wiegand, a decayed innkeeper; he, poor fool, accepts the
parentage of her child. Her father, rich and unsuspicious, buys them a
likely inn; they begin to make money. And then begins the second chapter
of Toni’s sacrifice. She robs her husband systematically and steadily;
she takes commissions on all his goods; she becomes the houri of his
bar, that trade may grow and pickings increase. Mark by mark, the money
goes to Robert. It sees him through the university; it gives him his
year or two in the hospitals; it buys him a practice; it feeds and
clothes him, and his mother with him. The months and years pass
endlessly—a young doctor’s progress is slow. But finally the great day
approaches. Soon Robert will be ready for his wife. But Wiegand—what of
him? Toni thinks of half a dozen plans. The notion of poisoning him
gradually formulates itself. Not a touch of horror stays her. She is, by
this time, beyond all the common moralities—a monomaniac with no thought
for anything save her great purpose. But an accident saves Wiegand.
Toni, too elaborate in her plans, poisons herself by mischance, and
comes near dying. Very well, if not poison, then some more subtle craft.
She puts a barmaid into Wiegand’s path; she manages the whole affair;
before long she sees her victim safely enmeshed. A divorce follows; the
inn is sold; her father’s death makes her suddenly rich—at last she is
off to greet her lord!
That meeting!... Toni waits in the little flat that she has rented in
the city—she and her child, the child of Robert. Robert is to come at
noon; as the slow moments pass the burden of her happiness seems too
great to bear. And then suddenly the ecstatic climax—the ring at the
door.... “A gentleman entered. A strange gentleman. Wholly strange. Had
she met him on the street she would not have known him. He had grown
old—forty, fifty, a hundred years. Yet his real age could not be over
twenty-eight!... He had grown fat. He carried a little paunch around
with him, round and comfortable. And the honorable scars gleamed in
round, red cheeks. His eyes seemed small and receding.... And when he
said: ‘Here I am at last,’ it was no longer the old voice, clear and a
little resonant, which had echoed and reëchoed in her spiritual ear. He
gurgled as though he had swallowed dumplings.” An oaf without and an oaf
within! Toni is for splendors, triumphs, the life; Robert has “settled
down.” His remote village, hard by the Russian border, is to his liking;
he has made comfortable friends there; he is building up a practice. He
is, of course, a man of honor. He will marry Toni—willingly and with
gratitude, even with genuine affection. Going further, he will pay back
to her every cent that ever came from Wiegand’s till. He has kept a
strict account. Here it is, in a little blue notebook—seven years of
entries. As he reads them aloud the events of those seven years unroll
themselves before Toni and every mark brings up its picture—stolen cash
and trinkets, savings in railroad fares and food, commissions upon
furniture and wines, profits of champagne debauches with the county
councilor, sharp trading in milk and eggs, “suspense and longing, an
inextricable web of falsification and trickery, of terror and lying
without end. The memory of no guilt is spared her.” Robert is an honest,
an honorable man. He has kept a strict account; the money is waiting in
bank. What is more, he will make all necessary confessions. He has not,
perhaps, kept to the letter of fidelity. There was a waitress in Berlin;
there was a nurse at the surgical clinic; there is even now a Lithuanian
servant girl at his bachelor quarters. The last named, of course, will
be sent away forthwith. Robert is a man of honor, a man sensitive to
every requirement of the punctilio, a gentleman. He will order the
announcement cards, consult a clergyman—and not forget to get rid of the
Lithuanian and air the house.... Poor Toni stares at him as he departs.
“Will he come back soon?” asks the child. “I scarcely think so,” she
answers.... “That night she broke the purpose of her life, the purpose
that had become interwoven with a thousand others, and when the morning
came she wrote a letter of farewell to the beloved of her youth.”
A short story of rare and excellent quality. A short story—oh,
miracle!—worth reading twice. It is not so much that its motive is
new—that motive, indeed, has appeared in fiction many times, though
usually with the man as the protagonist—as that its workmanship is
superb. Sudermann here shows that, for all his failings elsewhere, he
knows superlatively how to write. His act divisions are exactly right;
his _scènes à faire_ are magnificently managed; he has got into the
thing that rhythmic ebb and flow of emotion which makes for great drama.
And in most of the other stories in this book you will find much the
same skill. No other, perhaps, is quite so good as “The Purpose,” but at
least one of them, “The Song of Death,” is not far behind. Here we have
the tragedy of a woman brought up rigorously, puritanically, stupidly,
who discovers, just as it is too late, that love may be a wild dance, an
ecstasy, an orgy. I can imagine no more grotesquely pathetic scene than
that which shows this drab preacher’s wife watching by her husband’s
deathbed—while through the door comes the sound of amorous delirium from
the next room. And then there is a strangely moving Christmas story,
“Merry Folk”—pathos with the hard iron in it. And there are “Autumn” and
“The Indian Lily,” elegies to lost youth—the first of them almost a fit
complement to Joseph Conrad’s great paean to youth triumphant.
Altogether, a collection of short stories of the very first rank. Write
off “Das hohe Lied,” “Frau Sorge” and all the plays: a Sudermann remains
who must be put in a high and honorable place, and will be remembered.
IX. GEORGE ADE