sword, and the republic descends into hell, some literary don of Oxford
or Mittel-Europa proceeds to the predestined autopsy upon our Complete
Works, one of the things he will surely notice, reviewing our literary
history, is the curious persistence with which the dons native to the
land have overlooked its emerging men of letters. I mean, of course, its
genuine men of letters, its salient and truly original men, its men of
intrinsic and unmistakable distinction. The fourth-raters have fared
well enough, God knows. Go back to any standard literature book of ten,
or twenty, or thirty, or fifty years ago, and you will be amazed by its
praise of shoddy mediocrities, long since fly-blown and forgotten.
George William Curtis, now seldom heard of at all, save perhaps in the
reminiscences of senile publishers, was treated in his day with all the
deference due to a prince of the blood. Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby
and half a dozen other such hollow buffoons were ranked with Mark Twain,
and even above him. Frank R. Stockton, for thirty years, was the delight
of all right-thinking reviewers. Richard Henry Stoddard and Edmund
Clarence Stedman were eminent personages, both as critics and as poets.
And Donald G. Mitchell, to make an end of dull names, bulked so grandly
in the academic eye that he was snatched from his tear-jugs and his
tea-pots to become a charter member of the National Institute of Arts
and Letters, and actually died a member of the American Academy!
Meanwhile, three of the five indubitably first-rate artists that America
has produced went quite without orthodox recognition at home until
either foreign enthusiasm or domestic clamor from below forced them into
a belated and grudging sort of notice. I need not say that I allude to
Poe, Whitman and Mark Twain. If it ever occurred to any American critic
of position, during Poe’s lifetime, that he was a greater man than
either Cooper or Irving, then I have been unable to find any trace of
the fact in the critical literature of the time. The truth is that he
was looked upon as a facile and somewhat dubious journalist, too
cocksure by half, and not a man to be encouraged. Lowell praised him in
1845 and at the same time denounced the current over-praise of lesser
men, but later on this encomium was diluted with very important
reservations, and there the matter stood until Baudelaire discovered the
poet and his belated fame came winging home. Whitman, as every one
knows, fared even worse. Emerson first hailed him and then turned tail
upon him, eager to avoid any share in his ill-repute among blockheads.
No other critic of any influence gave him help. He was carried through
his dark days of poverty and persecution by a few private enthusiasts,
none of them with the ear of the public, and in the end it was Frenchmen
and Englishmen who lifted him into the light. Imagine a Harvard
professor lecturing upon him in 1865! As for Mark Twain, the story of
his first fifteen years has been admirably told by Prof. Dr. William
Lyon Phelps, of Yale. The dons were unanimously against him. Some
sneered at him as a feeble mountebank; others refused to discuss him at
all; not one harbored the slightest suspicion that he was a man of
genius, or even one leg of a man of genius. Phelps makes merry over this
academic attempt to dispose of Mark by putting him into Coventry—and
himself joins the sanctimonious brethren who essay the same enterprise
against Dreiser....
I come by this route to George Ade—who perhaps fails to fit into the
argument doubly, for on the one hand he is certainly not a literary
artist of the first rank, and on the other hand he has long enjoyed a
meed of appreciation and even of honor, for the National Institute of
Arts and Letters elevated him to its gilt-edged purple in its first
days, and he is still on its roll of men of “notable achievement in art,
music or literature,” along with Robert W. Chambers, Henry Sydnor
Harrison, Oliver Herford, E. S. Martin and E. W. Townsend, author of
“Chimmie Fadden.” Nevertheless, he does not fall too far outside, after
all, for if he is not of the first rank then he surely deserves a
respectable place in the second rank, and if the National Institute
broke the spell by admitting him then it was probably on the theory that
he was a second Chambers or Herford, or maybe even a second Martin or
Townsend. As for the text-book dons, they hold resolutely to the
doctrine that he scarcely exists, and is not worth noticing at all. For
example, there is Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee, author of “A History of
American Literature Since 1870.” Prof. Pattee notices Chambers, Marion
Harland, Herford, Townsend, Amélie Rives, R. K. Munkittrick and many
other such ornaments of the national letters, and even has polite bows
for Gelett Burgess, Carolyn Wells and John Kendrick Bangs, but the name
of Ade is missing from his index, as is that of Dreiser. So with the
other pedagogues. They are unanimously shy of Ade in their horn-books
for sophomores, and they are gingery in their praise of him in their
innumerable review articles. He is commended, when at all, much as the
late Joseph Jefferson used to be commended—that is, to the accompaniment
of reminders that even a clown is one of God’s creatures, and may have
the heart of a Christian under his motley. The most laudatory thing ever
said of him by any critic of the apostolic succession, so far as I can
discover, is that he is clean—that he does not import the lewd
buffooneries of the barroom, the smoking-car and the wedding reception
into his books....
But what are the facts? The facts are that Ade is one of the few
genuinely original literary craftsmen now in practice among us; that he
comes nearer to making literature, when he has full steam up, than any
save a scant half-dozen of our current novelists, and that the whole
body of his work, both in books and for the stage, is as thoroughly
American, in cut and color, in tang and savor, in structure and point of
view, as the work of Howells, E. W. Howe or Mark Twain. No single
American novel that I can think of shows half the sense of nationality,
the keen feeling for national prejudice and peculiarity, the sharp and
pervasive Americanism of such Adean fables as “The Good Fairy of the
Eighth Ward and the Dollar Excursion of the Steam-Fitters,” “The
Mandolin Players and the Willing Performer,” and “The Adult Girl Who Got
Busy Before They Could Ring the Bell on Her.” Here, amid a humor so
grotesque that it almost tortures the midriff, there is a startlingly
vivid and accurate evocation of the American scene. Here, under all the
labored extravagance, there are brilliant flashlight pictures of the
American people, and American ways of thinking, and the whole of
American _Kultur_. Here the veritable Americano stands forth, lacking
not a waggery, a superstition, a snuffle or a wen.
Ade himself, for all his story-teller’s pretense of remoteness, is as
absolutely American as any of his prairie-town traders and pushers,
Shylocks and Dogberries, beaux and belles. No other writer of our
generation, save perhaps Howe, is more unescapably national in his every
gesture and trick of mind. He is as American as buckwheat cakes, or the
Knights of Pythias, or the chautauqua, or Billy Sunday, or a bull by Dr.
Wilson. He fairly reeks of the national Philistinism, the national
respect for respectability, the national distrust of ideas. He is a
marcher, one fancies, in parades; he joins movements, and movements
against movements; he knows no language save his own; he regards a
Roosevelt quite seriously and a Mozart or an Ibsen as a joke; one would
not be surprised to hear that, until he went off to his fresh-water
college, he slept in his underwear and read the _Epworth Herald_. But,
like Dreiser, he is a peasant touched by the divine fire; somehow, a
great instinctive artist got himself born out there on that lush Indiana
farm. He has the rare faculty of seeing accurately, even when the thing
seen is directly under his nose, and he has the still rarer faculty of
recording vividly, of making the thing seen move with life. One often
doubts a character in a novel, even in a good novel, but who ever
doubted Gus in “The Two Mandolin Players,” or Mae in “Sister Mae,” or,
to pass from the fables, Payson in “Mr. Payson’s Satirical Christmas”?
Here, with strokes so crude and obvious that they seem to be laid on
with a broom, Ade achieves what O. Henry, with all his ingenuity, always
failed to achieve: he fills his bizarre tales with human beings. There
is never any artfulness on the surface. The tale itself is never novel,
or complex; it never surprises; often it is downright banal. But
underneath there is an artfulness infinitely well wrought, and that is
the artfulness of a story-teller who dredges his story out of his
people, swiftly and skillfully, and does not squeeze his people into his
story, laboriously and unconvincingly.
Needless to say, a moralist stands behind the comedian. He would teach;
he even grows indignant. Roaring like a yokel at a burlesque show over
such wild and light-hearted jocosities as “Paducah’s Favorite Comedians”
and “Why ‘Gondola’ Was Put Away,” one turns with something of a start to
such things as “Little Lutie,” “The Honest Money Maker” and “The
Corporation Director and the Mislaid Ambition.” Up to a certain point it
is all laughter, but after that there is a flash of the knife, a show of
teeth. Here a national limitation often closes in upon the satirist. He
cannot quite separate the unaccustomed from the abominable; he is unable
to avoid rattling his Philistine trappings a bit proudly; he must prove
that he, too, is a right-thinking American, a solid citizen and a
patriot, unshaken in his lofty rectitude by such poisons as aristocracy,
adultery, _hors d’œuvres_ and the sonata form. But in other directions
this thoroughgoing nationalism helps him rather than hinders him. It
enables him, for one thing, to see into sentimentality, and to
comprehend it and project it accurately. I know of no book which
displays the mooniness of youth with more feeling and sympathy than
“Artie,” save it be Frank Norris’ forgotten “Blix.” In such fields Ade
achieves a success that is rare and indubitable. He makes the thing
charming and he makes it plain.
But all these fables and other compositions of his are mere sketches,
inconsiderable trifles, impromptus in bad English, easy to write and of
no importance! Are they, indeed? Do not believe it for a moment. Fifteen
or twenty years ago, when Ade was at the height of his celebrity as a
newspaper Sganarelle, scores of hack comedians tried to imitate him—and
all failed. I myself was of the number. I operated a so-called funny
column in a daily newspaper, and like my colleagues near and far, I
essayed to manufacture fables in slang. What miserable botches they
were! How easy it was to imitate Ade’s manner—and how impossible to
imitate his matter! No; please don’t get the notion that it is a simple
thing to write such a fable as that of “The All-Night Seance and the
Limit That Ceased to Be,” or that of “The Preacher Who Flew His Kite,
But Not Because He Wished to Do So,” or that of “The Roystering Blades.”
Far from it! On the contrary, the only way you will ever accomplish the
feat will be by first getting Ade’s firm grasp upon American character,
and his ability to think out a straightforward, simple, amusing story,
and his alert feeling for contrast and climax, and his extraordinary
talent for devising novel, vivid and unforgettable phrases. Those
phrases of his sometimes wear the external vestments of a passing slang,
but they are no more commonplace and vulgar at bottom than Gray’s “mute,
inglorious Milton” or the “somewheres East of Suez” of Kipling. They
reduce an idea to a few pregnant syllables. They give the attention a
fillip and light up a whole scene in a flash. They are the running
evidences of an eye that sees clearly and of a mind that thinks
shrewdly. They give distinction to the work of a man who has so well
concealed a highly complex and efficient artistry that few have ever
noticed it.
X. THE BUTTE BASHKIRTSEFF
Of all the pseudo-rebels who have raised a tarletan black flag in These
States, surely Mary MacLane is one of the most pathetic. When, at
nineteen, she fluttered Vassar with “The Story of Mary MacLane,” the
truth about her was still left somewhat obscure; the charm of her
flapperhood, so to speak, distracted attention from it, and so concealed
it. But when, at thirty-five, she achieved “I, Mary MacLane,” it emerged
crystal-clear; she had learned to describe her malady accurately, though
she still wondered, a bit wistfully, just what it was. And that malady?
That truth? Simply that a Scotch Presbyterian with a soaring soul is as
cruelly beset as a wolf with fleas, a zebra with the botts. Let a spark
of the divine fire spring to life in that arid corpse, and it must fight
its way to flame through a drum fire of wet sponges. A humming bird
immersed in _Kartoffelsuppe_. Walter Pater writing for the London _Daily
Mail_. Lucullus traveling steerage.... A Puritan wooed and tortured by
the leers of beauty, Mary MacLane in a moral republic, in a Presbyterian
diocese, in Butte....
I hope my figures of speech are not too abstruse. What I mean to say is
simply this: that the secret of Mary MacLane is simply this: that the
origin of all her inchoate naughtiness is simply this: that she is a
Puritan who has heard the call of joy and is struggling against it
damnably. Remember so much, and the whole of her wistful heresy becomes
intelligible. On the one hand the loveliness of the world enchants her;
on the other hand the fires of hell warn her. This tortuous conflict
accounts for her whole bag of tricks; her timorous flirtations with the
devil, her occasional outbreaks of finishing-school rebellion, her
hurried protestations of virginity, above all her incurable
Philistinism. One need not be told that she admires the late Major
General Roosevelt and Mrs. Atherton, that she wallows in the poetry of
Keats. One knows quite as well that her phonograph plays the “Peer Gynt”
suite, and that she is charmed by the syllogisms of G. K. Chesterton.
She is, in brief, an absolutely typical American of the transition stage
between Christian Endeavor and civilization. There is in her a definite
poison of ideas, an æsthetic impulse that will not down—but every time
she yields to it she is halted and plucked back by qualms and doubts, by
the dominant superstitions of her race and time, by the dead hand of her
kirk-crazy Scotch forebears.
It is precisely this grisly touch upon her shoulder that stimulates her
to those naïve explosions of scandalous confidence which make her what
she is. If there were no sepulchral voice in her ear, warning her that
it is the mark of a hussy to be kissed by a man with “iron-gray hair, a
brow like Apollo and a jowl like Bill Sykes,” she would not confess it
and boast of it, as she does on page 121 of “I, Mary MacLane.” If it
were not a Presbyterian axiom that a lady who says “damn” is fit only to
join the white slaves, she would not pen a defiant Damniad, as she does
on pages 108, 109 and 110. And if it were not held universally in Butte
that sex passion is the exclusive infirmity of the male, she would not
blab out in meeting that—but here I get into forbidden waters and had
better refer you to page 209. It is not the godless voluptuary who
patronizes leg-shows and the cabaret; it is the Methodist deacon with
unaccustomed vine-leaves in his hair. It is not genuine artists, serving
beauty reverently and proudly, who herd in Greenwich Village and bawl
for art; it is precisely a mob of Middle Western Baptists to whom the
very idea of art is still novel, and intoxicating, and more than a
little bawdy. And to make an end, it is not cocottes who read the
highly-spiced magazines which burden all the book-stalls; it is
sedentary married women who, while faithful to their depressing husbands
in the flesh, yet allow their imaginations to play furtively upon the
charms of theoretical intrigues with such pretty fellows as Francis X.
Bushman, Enrico Caruso and Vincent Astor.
An understanding of this plain fact not only explains the MacLane and
her gingery carnalities of the chair; it also explains a good part of
latter-day American literature. That literature is the self-expression
of a people who have got only half way up the ladder leading from moral
slavery to intellectual freedom. At every step there is a warning tug, a
protest from below. Sometimes the climber docilely drops back; sometimes
he emits a petulant defiance and reaches boldly for the next round. It
is this occasional defiance which accounts for the periodical
efflorescence of mere school-boy naughtiness in the midst of our
oleaginous virtue—for the shouldering out of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_
by magazines of adultery all compact—for the provocative baring of calf
and scapula by women who regard it as immoral to take Benedictine with
their coffee—for the peopling of Greenwich Village by oafs who think it
a devilish adventure to victual in cellars, and read Krafft-Ebing, and
stare at the corset-scarred nakedness of decadent cloak-models.
I have said that the climber is but half way up the ladder. I wish I
could add that he is moving ahead, but the truth is that he is probably
quite stationary. We have our spasms of revolt, our flarings up of
peekaboo waists, free love and “art,” but a mighty backwash of piety
fetches each and every one of them soon or late. A mongrel and inferior
people, incapable of any spiritual aspiration above that of second-rate
English colonials, we seek refuge inevitably in the one sort of
superiority that the lower castes of men can authentically boast, to
wit, superiority in docility, in credulity, in resignation, in morals.
We are the most moral race in the world; there is not another that we do
not look down upon in that department; our confessed aim and destiny as
a nation is to inoculate them all with our incomparable rectitude. In
the last analysis, all ideas are judged among us by moral standards;
moral values are our only permanent tests of worth, whether in the arts,
in politics, in philosophy or in life itself. Even the instincts of man,
so intrinsically immoral, so innocent, are fitted with moral
false-faces. That bedevilment by sex ideas which punishes continence, so
abhorrent to nature, is converted into a moral frenzy, pathological in
the end. The impulse to cavort and kick up one’s legs, so healthy, so
universal, is hedged in by incomprehensible taboos; it becomes stealthy,
dirty, degrading. The desire to create and linger over beauty, the sign
and touchstone of man’s rise above the brute, is held down by doubts and
hesitations; when it breaks through it must do so by orgy and explosion,
half ludicrous and half pathetic. Our function, we choose to believe, is
to teach and inspire the world. We are wrong. Our function is to amuse
the world. We are the Bryan, the Henry Ford, the Billy Sunday among the
nations....
XI. SIX MEMBERS OF THE INSTITUTE
1
_The Boudoir Balzac_
The late Percival Pollard was, in my nonage, one of my enthusiasms, and,
later on, one of my friends. How, as a youngster, I used to lie in wait
for the _Criterion_ every week, and devour Pollard, Huneker, Meltzer and
Vance Thompson! That was in the glorious middle nineties and savory pots
were brewing. Scarcely a week went by without a new magazine of some
unearthly _Tendenz_ or other appearing on the stands; scarcely a month
failed to bring forth its new genius. Pollard was up to his hips in the
movement. He had a hand for every débutante. He knew everything that was
going on. Polyglot, catholic, generous, alert, persuasive, forever
oscillating between New York and Paris, London and Berlin, he probably
covered a greater territory in the one art of letters than Huneker
covered in all seven. He worked so hard as introducer of intellectual
ambassadors, in fact, that he never had time to write his own books. One
very brilliant volume, “Masks and Minstrels of New Germany,” adequately
represents him. The rest of his criticism, clumsily dragged from the
files of the _Criterion_ and _Town Topics_, is thrown together ineptly
in “Their Day in Court.” Death sneaked upon him from behind; he was gone
before he could get his affairs in order. I shall never forget his
funeral—no doubt a fit finish for a critic. Not one of the authors he
had whooped and battled for was present—not one, that is, save old
Ambrose Bierce. Bierce came in an elegant plug-hat and told me some
curious anecdotes on the way to the crematory, chiefly of morgues,
dissecting-rooms and lonely church-yards: he was the most gruesome of
men. A week later, on a dark, sleety Christmas morning, I returned to
the crematory, got the ashes, and shipped them West. Pollard awaits the
Second Coming of his Redeemer in Iowa, hard by the birthplace of Prof.
Dr. Stuart P. Sherman. Well, let us not repine. Huneker lives in
Flatbush and was born in Philadelphia. Cabell is a citizen of Richmond,
Va. Willa Sibert Cather was once one of the editors of _McClure’s
Magazine_. Dreiser, before his annunciation, edited dime novels for
Street & Smith, and will be attended by a Methodist friar, I daresay, on
the gallows....
Pollard, as I say, was a man I respected. He knew a great deal. Half
English, half German and wholly cosmopolitan, he brought valuable
knowledges and enthusiasms to the developing American literature of his
time. Moreover, I had affection for him as well as respect, for he was a
capital companion at the _Biertisch_ and was never too busy to waste a
lecture on my lone ear—say on Otto Julius Bierbaum (one of his friends),
or Anatole France, or the technic of the novel, or the scoundrelism of
publishers. It thus pains me to violate his tomb—but let his shade
forgive me as it hopes to be forgiven! For it was Pollard, I believe,
who set going the doctrine that Robert W. Chambers is a man of talent—a
bit too commercial, perhaps, but still fundamentally a man of talent.
You will find it argued at length in “Their Day in Court.” There Pollard
called the roll of the “promising young men” of the time, _circa_ 1908.
They were Winston Churchill, David Graham Phillips—and Chambers! Alas,
for all prophets and their prognostications! Phillips, with occasional
reversions to honest work, devoted most of his later days to sensational
serials for the train-boy magazines, and when he died his desk turned
out to be full of them, and they kept dribbling along for three or four
years. Churchill, seduced by the uplift, has become an evangelist and a
bore—a worse case, even, than that of H. G. Wells. And Chambers? Let the
New York _Times_ answer. Here, in all sobriety, is its description of
the heroine of “The Moonlit Way,” one of his latest pieces:
She is a lovely and fascinating dancer who, before the war, held
the attention of all Europe and incited a great many men who had
nothing better to do to fall in love with her. She bursts upon the
astonished gaze of several of the important characters of the
story when she dashes into the ballroom of the German Embassy
_standing upon a bridled ostrich_, which she compels to dance and
go through its paces at her command. She is dressed, Mr. Chambers
assures us, _in nothing but the skin of her virtuous youth,
modified slightly by a yashmak and a zone of blue jewels about her
hips and waist_.
The italics are mine. I wonder what poor Pollard would think of it. He
saw the shoddiness in Chambers, the leaning toward “profitable
pot-boiling,” but he saw, too, a fundamental earnestness and a high
degree of skill. What has become of these things? Are they visible, even
as ghosts, in the preposterous serials that engaud the magazines of Mr.
Hearst, and then load the department-stores as books? Were they, in
fact, ever there at all? Did Pollard observe them, or did he merely
imagine them? I am inclined to think that he merely imagined them—that
his delight in what he described as “many admirable tricks” led him into
a fatuity that he now has an eternity to regret. Chambers grows sillier
and sillier, emptier and emptier, worse and worse. But was he ever more
than a fifth-rater? I doubt it. Let us go back half a dozen years, to
the days before the war forced the pot-boiler down into utter
imbecility. I choose, at random, “The Gay Rebellion.” Here is a specimen
of the dialogue:
“It startled me. How did I know what it might have been? It might
have been a bear—or a cow.”
“You talk,” said Sayre angrily, “like William Dean Howells!
Haven’t you _any_ romance in you?”
“Not what _you_ call romance. Pass the flapjacks.” Sayre passed
them.
“My attention,” he said, “instantly became riveted upon the
bushes. I strove to pierce them with a piercing glance. Suddenly—”
“Sure! ‘Suddenly’ always comes next.”
“Suddenly ... the leaves were stealthily parted, and—”
“A naked savage in full war paint—”
“Naked nothing! a young girl in—a perfectly fitting gown stepped
noiselessly out.”
“Out of what, you gink?”
“The bushes, dammit!... She looked at me; I gazed at her.
Somehow—”
“In plainer terms, she gave you the eye. What?”
“That’s a peculiarly coarse observation.”
“Then tell it in your own way.”
“I will. The sunlight fell softly upon the trees of the ancient
wood.”