And so on, and so on, for page after page. Can you imagine more idiotic
stuff—“pierce and piercing,” “you gink,” “she gave you the eye,”
“_woodn’t_ that bark you?” One is reminded of horrible things—the
repartees of gas-house comedians in vaudeville, the whimsical editorials
in _Life_, the forbidding ghoul-eries of Irvin Cobb among jokes pale and
clammy in death.... But let us, you may say, go back a bit further—back
to the days of the _Chap-Book_. There was then, perhaps, a far different
Chambers—a fellow of sound talent and artistic self-respect, well
deserving the confidence and encouragement of Pollard. Was there,
indeed? If you think so, go read “The King in Yellow,” _circa_ 1895—if
you can. I myself, full of hope, have tried it. In it I have found
drivel almost as dull as that, say, in “Ailsa Page.”
2
_A Stranger on Parnassus_
The case of Hamlin Garland belongs to pathos in the grand manner, as you
will discover on reading his autobiography, “A Son of the Middle
Border.” What ails him is a vision of beauty, a seductive strain of
bawdy music over the hills. He is a sort of male Mary MacLane, but
without either Mary’s capacity for picturesque blasphemy or her skill at
plain English. The vision, in his youth, tore him from his prairie plow
and set him to clawing the anthills at the foot of Parnassus. He became
an elocutionist—what, in modern times, would be called a chautauquan. He
aspired to write for the _Atlantic Monthly_. He fell under the spell of
the Boston _aluminados_ of 1885, which is as if one were to take fire
from a June-bug. Finally, after embracing the Single Tax, he achieved a
couple of depressing story-books, earnest, honest and full of
indignation.
American criticism, which always mistakes a poignant document for
æsthetic form and organization, greeted these moral volumes as works of
art, and so Garland found himself an accepted artist and has made shift
to be an artist ever since. No more grotesque miscasting of a diligent
and worthy man is recorded in profane history. He has no more feeling
for the intrinsic dignity of beauty, no more comprehension of it as a
thing in itself, than a policeman. He is, and always has been, a
moralist endeavoring ineptly to translate his messianic passion into
æsthetic terms, and always failing. “A Son of the Middle Border,”
undoubtedly the best of all his books, projects his failure brilliantly.
It is, in substance, a document of considerable value—a naïve and often
highly illuminating contribution to the history of the American
peasantry. It is, in form, a thoroughly third-rate piece of
writing—amateurish, flat, banal, repellent. Garland gets facts into it;
he gets the relentless sincerity of the rustic Puritan; he gets a sort
of evangelical passion. But he doesn’t get any charm. He doesn’t get any
beauty.
In such a career, as in such a book, there is something profoundly
pathetic. One follows the progress of the man with a constant sense that
he is steering by faulty compasses, that fate is leading him into paths
too steep and rocky—nay, too dark and lovely—for him. An awareness of
beauty is there, and a wistful desire to embrace it, but the confident
gusto of the artist is always lacking. What one encounters in its place
is the enthusiasm of the pedagogue, the desire to yank the world up to
the soaring Methodist level, the hot yearning to displace old ideas with
new ideas, and usually much worse ideas, for example, the Single Tax and
spook-chasing. The natural goal of the man was the evangelical stump. He
was led astray when those Boston Brahmins of the last generation,
enchanted by his sophomoric platitudes about Shakespeare, set him up as
a critic of the arts, and then as an imaginative artist. He should have
gone back to the saleratus belt, taken to the chautauquas, preached his
foreordained perunas, got himself into Congress, and so helped to save
the republic from the demons that beset it. What a gladiator he would
have made against the Plunderbund, the White Slave Traffic, the Rum
Demon, the Kaiser! What a rival to the Hon. Claude Kitchin, the Rev. Dr.
Newell Dwight Hillis!
His worst work, I daresay, is in some of his fiction—for example, in
“The Forester’s Daughter.” But my own favorite among his books is “The
Shadow World,” a record of his communings with the gaseous precipitates
of the departed. He takes great pains at the start to assure us that he
is a man of alert intelligence and without prejudices or superstitions.
He has no patience, it appears, with those idiots who swallow the
buffooneries of spiritualist mediums too greedily. For him the
scientific method—the method which examines all evidence cynically and
keeps on doubting until the accumulated proof, piled mountain-high,
sweeps down in an overwhelming avalanche.... Thus he proceeds to the
haunted chamber and begins his dalliance with the banshees. They touch
him with clammy, spectral hands; they wring music for him out of locked
pianos; they throw heavy tables about the room; they give him messages
from the golden shore and make him the butt of their coarse,
transcendental humor. Through it all he sits tightly and solemnly, his
mind open and his verdict up his sleeve. He is belligerently agnostic,
and calls attention to it proudly.... Then, in the end, he gives himself
away. One of his fellow “scientists,” more frankly credulous, expresses
the belief that real scientists will soon prove the existence of spooks.
“I hope they will,” says the agnostic Mr. Garland....
Well, let us not laugh. The believing mind is a curious thing. It must
absorb its endless rations of balderdash, or perish.... “A Son of the
Middle Border” is less amusing, but a good deal more respectable. It is
an honest book. There is some bragging in it, of course, but not too
much. It tells an interesting story. It radiates hard effort and earnest
purpose.... But what a devastating exposure of a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters!
3
_A Merchant of Mush_
Henry Sydnor Harrison is thoroughly American to this extent: that his
work is a bad imitation of something English. Find me a second-rate
American in any of the arts and I’ll find you his master and prototype
among third, fourth or fifth-rate Englishmen. In the present case the
model is obviously W. J. Locke. But between master and disciple there is
a great gap. Locke, at his high points, is a man of very palpable merit.
He has humor. He has ingenuity. He has a keen eye for the pathos that so
often lies in the absurd. I can discover no sign of any of these things
in Harrison’s 100,000 word Christmas cards. They are simply sentimental
bosh—huge gum-drops for fat women to snuffle over. Locke’s grotesque and
often extremely amusing characters are missing; in place of them there
are the heroic cripples, silent lovers, maudlin war veterans and angelic
grandams of the old-time Sunday-school books. The people of “V. V.’s
Eyes” are preposterous and the thesis is too silly to be stated in plain
words. No sane person would believe it if it were put into an affidavit.
“Queed” is simply Locke diluted with vast drafts from “Laddie” and
“Pollyanna.” Queed, himself, long before the end, becomes a marionette
without a toe on the ground; his Charlotte is incredible from the start.
“Angela’s Business” touches the bottom of the tear-jug; it would be
impossible to imagine a more vapid story. Harrison, in fact, grows more
mawkish book by book. He is touched, I should say, by the delusion that
he has a mission to make life sweeter, to preach the Finer Things, to
radiate Gladness. What! More Gladness? Another volt or two, and all
civilized adults will join the Italians and Jugo-Slavs in their headlong
hegira. A few more amperes, and the land will be abandoned to the Jews,
the ex-Confederates and the Bolsheviki.
4
_The Last of the Victorians_
If William Allen White lives as long as Tennyson, and does not reform,
our grandchildren will see the Victorian era gasping out its last breath
in 1951. And eighty-three is no great age in Kansas, where sin is
unknown. It may be, in fact, 1960, or even 1970, before the world hears
the last of Honest Poverty, Chaste Affection and Manly Tears. For so
long as White holds a pen these ancient sweets will be on sale at the
department-store book-counters, and they will grow sweeter and sweeter,
I daresay, as he works them over and over. In his very first book of
fiction there was a flavor of chewing-gum and marshmallows. In “A
Certain Rich Man” the intelligent palate detected saccharine. In “In the
Heart of a Fool,” his latest, the thing is carried a step further. If
you are a forward-looker and a right-thinker, if you believe that God is
in His heaven and all is for the best, if you yearn to uplift and like
to sob, then the volume will probably affect you, in the incomparable
phrase of Clayton Hamilton, like “the music of a million Easter-lilies
leaping from the grave and laughing with a silver singing.” But if you
are a carnal fellow, as I am, with a stomach ruined by alcohol, it will
gag you.
When I say that White is a Victorian I do not allude, of course, to the
Victorianism of Thackeray and Tennyson, but to that of Felicia Hemens,
of Samuel Smiles and of Dickens at his most maudlin. Perhaps an even
closer relative is to be found in “The Duchess.” White, like “The
Duchess” is absolutely humorless, and, when he begins laying on the
mayonnaise, absolutely shameless. I daresay the same sort of reader
admires both: the high-school girl first seized by amorous tremors, the
obese multipara in her greasy kimono, the remote and weepful farm-wife.
But here a doubt intrudes itself: is it possible to imagine a woman
sentimental enough to survive “In the Heart of a Fool”? I am constrained
to question it. In women, once they get beyond adolescence, there is
always a saving touch of irony; the life they lead infallibly makes
cynics of them, though sometimes they don’t know it. Observe the books
they write—chiefly sardonic stuff, with heroes who are fools. Even their
“glad” books, enormously successful among other women, stop far short of
the sentimentality put between covers by men—for example, the aforesaid
Harrison, Harold Bell Wright and the present White. Nay, it is the male
sex that snuffles most and is easiest touched, particularly in America.
The American man is forever falling a victim to his tender feelings. It
was by that route that the collectors for the Y. M. C. A. reached him;
it is thus that he is bagged incessantly by political tear-squeezers; it
is precisely his softness that makes him the slave of his women-folk.
What White gives him is exactly the sort of mush that is on tap in the
chautauquas. “In the Heart of a Fool,” like “A Certain Rich Man” is
aimed deliberately and with the utmost accuracy at the delicate gizzard
of the small-town yokel, the small-town yokel _male_, the horrible
end-product of fifty years of Christian Endeavor, the little red
schoolhouse and the direct primary.
The White formula is simple to the verge of austerity. It is, in
essence, no more than a dramatization of all the current political and
sociological rumble-bumble, by Roosevelt out of Coxey’s Army, with music
by the choir of the First Methodist Church. On the one side are the Hell
Hounds of Plutocracy, the Money Demons, the Plunderbund, and their
attendant Bosses, Strike Breakers, Seducers, Nietzscheans, Free Lovers,
Atheists and Corrupt Journalists. On the other side are the great masses
of the plain people, and their attendant Uplifters, Good Samaritans,
Honest Workingmen, Faithful Husbands, Inspired Dreamers and tin-horn
Messiahs. These two armies join battle, the Bad against the Good, and
for five hundred pages or more the Good get all the worst of it. Their
jobs are taken away from them, their votes are bartered, their mortgages
are foreclosed, their women are debauched, their savings are looted,
their poor orphans are turned out to starve. A sad business, surely. One
wallows in almost unendurable emotions. The tears gush. It is as
affecting as a movie. Even the prose rises to a sort of gospel-tent
chant, like that of a Baptist Savonarola, with every second sentence
beginning with _and_, _but_ or _for_.... But we are already near the
end, and no escape is in sight. Can it be that White is stumped, like
Mark Twain in his mediæval romance—that Virtue will succumb to the
Interests? Do not fear! In the third from the last chapter Hen Jackson,
the stagehand, returns from the Dutchman’s at the corner and throws on a
rose spot-light, and then an amber, and then a violet, and then a blue.
One by one the rays of Hope begin to shoot across the stage, Dr.
Hamilton’s Easter-lilies leap from their tomb, the _dramatis personæ_
(all save the local J. Pierpont Morgan!) begin “laughing with a silver
singing,” and as the curtain falls the whole scene is bathed in
luminiferous ether, and the professor breaks into “Onward, Christian
Soldiers!” on the cabinet-organ, and there is a happy, comfortable
sobbing, and an upward rolling of eyes, and a vast blowing of noses. In
brief, the finish of a chautauqua lecture on “The Grand Future of
America, or, The Glory of Service.” In brief, slobber....
It would be difficult to imagine more saccharine writing or a more
mawkish and preposterous point of view. Life, as White sees it, is a
purely moral phenomenon, like living pictures by the Epworth League. The
virtuous are the downtrodden; the up and doing are all scoundrels. It
pays to be poor and pious. Ambition is a serpent. One honest Knight of
Pythias is worth ten thousand Rockefellers. The pastor is always right.
So is the _Ladies’ Home Journal_. The impulse that leads a young yokel
of, say, twenty-two to seek marriage with a poor working-girl of, say,
eighteen, is the most elevating, noble, honorable and godlike impulse
native to the human consciousness.... Not the slightest sign of an
apprehension of life as the gaudiest and most gorgeous of spectacles—not
a trace of healthy delight in the eternal struggle for existence—not the
faintest suggestion of Dreiser’s great gusto or of Conrad’s penetrating
irony! Not even in the massive fact of death itself—and, like all the
other Victorians, this one from the Kansas steppes is given to wholesale
massacres—does he see anything mysterious, staggering, awful,
inexplicable, but only an excuse for a sentimental orgy.
Alas, what would you? It is ghastly drivel, to be sure, but isn’t it,
after all, thoroughly American? I have an uneasy suspicion that it
is—that “In the Heart of a Fool” is, at bottom, a vastly more American
book than anything that James Branch Cabell has done, or Vincent
O’Sullivan, or Edith Wharton, or even Howells. It springs from the heart
of the land. It is the æsthetic echo of thousands of movements, of
hundreds of thousands of sentimental crusades, of millions of ecstatic
gospel-meetings. This is what the authentic American public, unpolluted
by intelligence, wants. And this is one of the reasons why the English
sniff whenever they look our way....
But has White no merit? He has. He is an honest and a respectable man.
He is a patriot. He trusts God. He venerates what is left of the
Constitution. He once wrote a capital editorial, “What’s the Matter With
Kansas?” He has the knack, when his tears are turned off, of writing a
clear and graceful English....
5
_A Bad Novelist_
As I have said, it is not the artistic merit and dignity of a novel, but
often simply its content as document, that makes for its success in the
United States. The criterion of truth applied to it is not the criterion
of an artist, but that of a newspaper editorial writer; the question is
not, Is it in accord with the profoundest impulses and motives of
humanity? but Is it in accord with the current pishposh? This accounts
for the huge popularity of such confections as Upton Sinclair’s “The
Jungle” and Blasco Ibáñez’s “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
Neither had much value as a work of art—at all events, neither was
perceptibly superior to many contemporary novels that made no stir at
all—but each had the advantage of reënforcing an emotion already
aroused, of falling into step with the procession of the moment. Had
there been no fever of muck-raking and trust busting in 1906, “The
Jungle” would have died the death in the columns of the _Appeal to
Reason_, unheard of by the populace in general. And had the United
States been engaged against France instead of for France in 1918, there
would have been no argument in the literary weeklies that Blasco was a
novelist of the first rank and his story a masterpiece comparable to
“Germinal.”
Sinclair was made by “The Jungle” and has been trying his hardest to
unmake himself ever since. Another of the same sort is Ernest Poole,
author of “The Harbor.” “The Harbor,” judged by any intelligible
æsthetic standard, was a bad novel. Its transactions were forced and
unconvincing; its central character was shadowy and often
incomprehensible; the manner of its writing was quite without
distinction. But it happened to be printed at a time when the chief
ideas in it had a great deal of popularity—when its vague grappling with
insoluble sociological problems was the sport of all the weeklies and of
half the more sober newspapers—when a nebulous, highfalutin Bolshevism
was in the air—and so it excited interest and took on an aspect of
profundity. That its discussion of those problems was superficial, that
it said nothing new and got nowhere—all this was not an influence
against its success, but an influence in favor of its success, for the
sort of mind that fed upon the nebulous, professor-made politics and
sociology of 1915 was the sort of mind that is chronically avid of
half-truths and as chronically suspicious of forthright thinking. This
has been demonstrated since that time by its easy _volte face_ in the
presence of emotion. The very ideas that Poole’s vapid hero toyed with
in 1915, to the delight of the novel-reading _intelligentsia_, would
have damned the book as a pamphlet for the I. W. W., or even, perhaps,
as German propaganda, three years later. But meanwhile, it had been
forgotten, as novels are always forgotten, and all that remained of it
was a general impression that Poole, in some way or other, was a
superior fellow and to be treated with respect.
His subsequent books have tried that theory severely. “The Family” was
grounded upon one of the elemental tragedies which serve a novelist most
safely—the dismay of an aging man as his children drift away from him.
Here was a subject full of poignant drama, and what is more, drama
simple enough to develop itself without making any great demand upon the
invention. Poole burdened it with too much background, and then killed
it altogether by making his characters wooden. It began with a high air;
it creaked and wobbled at the close; the catastrophe was quite without
effect. “His Second Wife” dropped several stories lower. It turned out,
on inspection, to be no more than a moral tale, feeble, wishy-washy and
irritating. Everything in it—about the corrupting effects of money-lust
and display, about the swinishness of cabaret “society” in New York,
about the American male’s absurd slavery to his women—had been said
before by such gifted Balzacs as Robert W. Chambers and Owen Johnson,
and, what is more, far better said. The writing, in fact, exactly
matched the theme. It was labored, artificial, dull. In the whole volume
there was not a single original phrase. Once it was put down, not a
scene remained in the memory, or a character. It was a cheap, a hollow
and, in places, almost an idiotic book....
At the time I write, this is the whole product of Poole as novelist:
three novels, bad, worse, worst.
6
_A Broadway Brandes_
I have hitherto, in discussing White de Kansas, presented a fragile
dahlia from the rhetorical garden of Clayton Hamilton, M.A. (Columbia).
I now print the whole passage:
Whenever in a world-historic war the side of righteousness has
triumphed, a great overflowing of art has followed soon upon the
fact of victory. The noblest instincts of mankind—aroused in
perilous moments fraught with intimations of mortality—have surged
and soared, beneath the sunshine of a subsequent and dear-bought
peace, into an immeasurable empyrean of heroic eloquence. Whenever
right has circumvented might, Art has sprung alive into the world,
with the music of a million Easter-lilies leaping from the grave
and laughing with a silver singing.
With the highest respect for a _Magister Artium_, a pedagogue of
Columbia University, a lecturer in Miss Spence’s School and the
Classical School for Girls, and a vice-president of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters—Booh!
XII. THE GENEALOGY OF ETIQUETTE
Barring sociology (which is yet, of course, scarcely a science at all,
but rather a monkeyshine which happens to pay, like play-acting or
theology), psychology is the youngest of the sciences, and hence chiefly
guesswork, empiricism, hocus-pocus, poppycock. On the one hand, there
are still enormous gaps in its data, so that the determination of its
simplest principles remains difficult, not to say impossible; and, on
the other hand, the very hollowness and nebulosity of it, particularly
around its edges, encourages a horde of quacks to invade it,
sophisticate it and make nonsense of it. Worse, this state of affairs
tends to such confusion of effort and direction that the quack and the
honest inquirer are often found in the same man. It is, indeed, a
commonplace to encounter a professor who spends his days in the
laborious accumulation of psychological statistics, sticking pins into
babies and platting upon a chart the ebb and flow of their yells, and
his nights chasing poltergeists and other such celestial fauna over the
hurdles of a spiritualist’s atelier, or gazing into a crystal in the
privacy of his own chamber. The Binét test and the buncombe of mesmerism
are alike the children of what we roughly denominate psychology, and
perhaps of equal legitimacy. Even so ingenious and competent an
investigator as Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud, who has told us a lot that is
of the first importance about the materials and machinery of thought,
has also told us a lot that is trivial and dubious. The essential
doctrines of Freudism, no doubt, come close to the truth, but many of
Freud’s remoter deductions are far more scandalous than sound, and many
of the professed Freudians, both American and European, have
grease-paint on their noses and bladders in their hands and are
otherwise quite indistinguishable from evangelists and circus clowns.
In this condition of the science it is no wonder that we find it wasting
its chief force upon problems that are petty and idle when they are not
downright and palpably insoluble, and passing over problems that are of
immediate concern to all of us, and that might be quite readily solved,
or, at any rate, considerably illuminated, by an intelligent study of
the data already available. After all, not many of us care a hoot
whether Sir Oliver Lodge and the Indian chief Wok-a-wok-a-mok are happy
in heaven, for not many of us have any hope or desire to meet them
there. Nor are we greatly excited by the discovery that, of twenty-five
freshmen who are hit with clubs, 17¾ will say “Ouch!” and 22⅕ will say
“Damn!”; nor by a table showing that 38.2 per centum of all men accused
of homicide confess when locked up with the carcasses of their victims,
including 23.4 per centum who are innocent; nor by plans and
specifications, by Cagliostro out of Lucrezia Borgia, for teaching poor,
God-forsaken school children to write before they can read and to
multiply before they can add; nor by endless disputes between
half-witted pundits as to the precise difference between perception and
cognition; nor by even longer feuds, between pundits even crazier, over
free will, the subconscious, the endoneurium, the functions of the
corpora quadrigemina, and the meaning of dreams in which one is pursued
by hyenas, process-servers or grass-widows.