man somewhere beyond the Wabash announcing that he had lately completed
a very powerful novel and hinting that my critical judgment upon it
would give him great comfort. Such notifications, at that time, reached
me far too often to be agreeable, and so I sent him a form-response
telling him that I was ill with pleurisy, had just been forbidden by my
oculist to use my eyes, and was about to become a father. The aim of
this form-response was to shunt all that sort of trade off to other
reviewers, but for once it failed. That is to say, the unknown kept on
writing to me, and finally offered to pay me an honorarium for my labor.
This offer was so unusual that it quite demoralized me, and before I
could recover I had received, cashed and dissipated a modest check, and
was confronted by an accusing manuscript, perhaps four inches thick, but
growing thicker every time I glanced at it.
One night, tortured by conscience and by the inquiries and reminders
arriving from the author by every post, I took up the sheets and settled
down for a depressing hour or two of it.... No, I did _not_ read all
night. No, it was _not_ a masterpiece. No, it has _not_ made the far-off
stranger famous. Let me tell the story quite honestly. I am, in fact,
far too rapid a reader to waste a whole night on a novel; I had got
through this one by midnight and was sound asleep at my usual time. And
it was by no means a masterpiece; on the contrary, it was inchoate,
clumsy, and, in part, artificial, insincere and preposterous. And to
this day the author remains obscure.... But underneath all the
amateurish writing, the striving for effects that failed to come off,
the absurd literary self-consciousness, the recurrent falsity and
banality—underneath all these stigmata of a neophyte’s book there was
yet a capital story, unusual in content, naïve in manner and enormously
engrossing. What is more, the faults that it showed in execution were,
most of them, not ineradicable. On page after page, as I read on, I saw
chances to improve it—to get rid of its intermittent bathos, to hasten
its action, to eliminate its spells of fine writing, to purge it of its
imitations of all the bad novels ever written—in brief, to tighten it,
organize it, and, as the painters say, tease it up.
The result was that I spent the next morning writing the author a long
letter of advice. It went to him with the manuscript, and for weeks I
heard nothing from him. Then the manuscript returned, and I read it
again. This time I had a genuine surprise. Not only had the unknown
followed my suggestions with much intelligence; in addition, once set up
on the right track, he had devised a great many excellent improvements
of his own. In its new form, in fact, the thing was a very competent and
even dexterous piece of writing, and after re-reading it from the first
word to the last with even keener interest than before, I sent it to
Mitchell Kennerley, then an active publisher, and asked him to look
through it. Kennerley made an offer for it at once, and eight or nine
months later it was published with his imprint. The author chose to
conceal himself behind the _nom de plume_ of Robert Steele; I myself
gave the book the title of “One Man.” It came from the press—and
straightway died the death. The only favorable review it received was
mine in the _Smart Set_. No other reviewer paid any heed to it. No one
gabbled about it. No one, so far as I could make out, even read it. The
sale was small from the start, and quickly stopped altogether.... To
this day the fact fills me with wonder. To this day I marvel that so
dramatic, so penetrating and so curiously moving a story should have
failed so overwhelmingly....
For I have never been able to convince myself that I was wrong about it.
On the contrary, I am more certain than ever, re-reading it after half a
dozen years, that I was right—that it was and is one of the most honest
and absorbing human documents ever printed in America. I have called it,
following the author, a novel. It is, in fact, nothing of the sort; it
is autobiography. More, it is autobiography unadorned and shameless,
autobiography almost unbelievably cruel and betraying, autobiography
that is as devoid of artistic sophistication as an operation for
gall-stones. This so-called Steele is simply too stupid, too ingenuous,
too moral to lie. He is the very reverse of an artist; he is a born and
incurable Puritan—and in his alleged novel he draws the most faithful
and merciless picture of an American Puritan that has ever got upon
paper. There is never the slightest effort at amelioration; he never
evades the ghastly horror of it; he never tries to palm off himself as a
good fellow, a hero. Instead, he simply takes his stand in the center of
the platform, where all the spotlights meet, and there calmly strips off
his raiment of reticence—first his Sunday plug-hat, then his long-tailed
coat, then his boiled shirt, then his shoes and socks, and finally his
very B. V. D.’s. The closing scene shows the authentic _Mensch-an-sich_,
the eternal blue-nose in the nude, with every wart and pimple glittering
and every warped bone and flabby muscle telling its abhorrent tale.
There stands the Puritan stripped of every artifice and concealment,
like Thackeray’s Louis XIV.
Searching my memory, I can drag up no recollection of another such
self-opener of secret chambers and skeletonic closets. Set beside this
pious babbler, the late Giovanni Jacopo Casanova de Seingalt shrinks to
the puny proportions of a mere barroom boaster, a smoking-car Don Juan,
an Eighteenth Century stock company leading man or whiskey drummer. So,
too, Benvenuto Cellini: a fellow vastly entertaining, true enough, but
after all, not so much a psychological historian as a liar, a yellow
journalist. One always feels, in reading Benvenuto, that the man who is
telling the story is quite distinct from the man about whom it is being
told. The fellow, indeed, was too noble an artist to do a mere portrait
with fidelity; he could not resist the temptation to repair a
cauliflower ear here, to paint out a tell-tale scar there, to shine up
the eyes a bit, to straighten the legs down below. But this Steele—or
whatever his name may be—never steps out of himself. He is never
describing the gaudy one he would _like_ to be, but always the
commonplace, the weak, the emotional, the ignorant, the third-rate
Christian male that he actually is. He deplores himself, he distrusts
himself, he plainly wishes heartily that he was not himself, but he
never makes the slightest attempt to disguise and bedizen himself. Such
as he is, cheap, mawkish, unæsthetic, conscience-stricken, he depicts
himself with fierce and unrelenting honesty.
Superficially, the man that he sets before us seems to be a felonious
fellow, for he confesses frankly to a long series of youthful larcenies,
to a somewhat banal adventure in forgery (leading to a term in jail), to
sundry petty deceits and breaches of trust, and to an almost endless
chain of exploits in amour, most of them sordid and unrelieved by
anything approaching romance. But the inner truth about him, of course,
is that he is really a moralist of the moralists—that his one
fundamental and all-embracing virtue is what he himself regards as his
viciousness—that he is never genuinely human and likable save in those
moments which lead swiftly to his most florid self-accusing. In brief,
the history is that of a moral young man, the child of God-fearing
parents, and its moral, if it has one, is that a strictly moral
upbringing injects poisons into the system that even the most steadfast
morality cannot resist. It is, in a way, the old story of the preacher’s
son turned sot and cutthroat.
Here we see an apparently sound and normal youngster converted into a
sneak and rogue by the intolerable pressure of his father’s abominable
Puritanism. And once a rogue, we see him make himself into a scoundrel
by the very force of his horror of his roguery. Every step downward is
helped from above. It is not until he resigns himself frankly to the
fact of his incurable degradation, and so ceases to struggle against it,
that he ever steps out of it.
The external facts of the chronicle are simple enough. The son of a
school teacher turned petty lawyer and politician, the hero is brought
up under such barbaric rigors that he has already become a fluent and
ingenious liar, in sheer self-protection, at the age of five or six.
From lying he proceeds quite naturally to stealing: he lifts a few
dollars from a neighbor, and then rifles a tin bank, and then takes to
filching all sorts of small articles from the storekeepers of the
vicinage. His harsh, stupid, Christian father, getting wind of these
peccadilloes, has at him in the manner of a mad bull, beating him,
screaming at him, half killing him. The boy, for all the indecent
cruelty of it, is convinced of the justice of it. He sees himself as one
lost; he accepts the fact that he is a disgrace to his family; in the
end, he embraces the parental theory that there is something strange and
sinister in his soul, that he couldn’t be good if he tried. Finally,
filled with some vague notion of taking his abhorrent self out of sight,
he runs away from home. Brought back in the character of a felon, he
runs away again. Soon he is a felon in fact. That is to say, he forges
his father’s name to a sheaf of checks, and his father allows him to go
to prison.
This prison term gives the youngster a chance to think things out for
himself, without the constant intrusion of his father’s Presbyterian
notions of right or wrong. The result is a measurably saner philosophy
than that he absorbed at home, but there is still enough left of the old
moral obsession to cripple him in all his thinking, and especially in
his thinking about himself. His attitude toward women, for example, is
constantly conditioned by puritanical misgivings and superstitions. He
can never view them innocently, joyously, unmorally, as a young fellow
of twenty or twenty-one should, but is always oppressed by
Sunday-schoolish notions of his duty to them, and to society in general.
On the one hand, he is appalled by his ready yielding to those hussies
who have at him unofficially, and on the other hand he is filled with
the idea that it would be immoral for him, an ex-convict, to go to the
altar with a virgin. The result of these doubts is that he gives a good
deal more earnest thought to the woman question than is good for him.
The second result is that he proves an easy victim to the discarded
mistress of his employer. This worthy working girl craftily snares him
and marries him—and then breaks down on their wedding night, unwomaned,
so to speak, by the pathetic innocence of the ass, and confesses to a
choice roll of her past doings, ending with the news that she is
suffering from what the vice crusaders mellifluously denominate a
“social disease.”
Naturally enough, the blow almost kills the poor boy—he is still, in
fact, scarcely out of his nonage—and the problems that grow out of the
confession engage him for the better part of the next two years. Always
he approaches them and wrestles with them morally; always his search is
for the way that the copy-book maxims approve, not for the way that
self-preservation demands. Even when a brilliant chance for revenge
presents itself, and he is forced to embrace it by the sheer magnetic
pull of it, he does so hesitatingly, doubtingly, ashamedly. His whole
attitude to this affair, indeed, is that of an Early Christian Father.
He hates himself for gathering rosebuds while he may; he hates the woman
with a double hatred for strewing them so temptingly in his path. And in
the end, like the moral and upright fellow that he is, he sells out the
temptress for cash in hand, and salves his conscience by handing over
the money to an orphan asylum. This after prayers for divine guidance. A
fact! Don’t miss the story of it in the book. You will go far before you
get another such illuminating glimpse into a pure and righteous mind.
So in episode after episode. One observes a constant oscillation between
a pharisaical piety and a hoggish carnality. The praying brother of
yesterday is the night-hack roisterer of to-day; the roisterer of to-day
is the snuffling penitent and pledge-taker of to-morrow. Finally, he is
pulled both ways at once and suffers the greatest of all his tortures.
Again, of course, a woman is at the center of it—this time a
stenographer. He has no delusions about her virtue—she admits herself,
in fact, that it is extinct—but all the same he falls head over heels in
love with her, and is filled with an inordinate yearning to marry her
and settle down with her. Why not, indeed? She is pretty and a nice
girl; she seems to reciprocate his affection; she is naturally eager for
the obliterating gold band; she will undoubtedly make him an excellent
wife. But he has forgotten his conscience—and it rises up in revenge and
floors him. What! Marry a girl with such a Past! Take a fancy woman to
his bosom! Jealousy quickly comes to the aid of conscience. Will he be
able to forget? Contemplating the damsel in the years to come, at
breakfast, at dinner, across the domestic hearth, in the cold, blue
dawn, will he ever rid his mind of those abhorrent images, those
phantasms of men?
Here, at the very end, we come to the most engrossing chapter in this
extraordinary book. The duelist of sex, thrust through the gizzard at
last, goes off to a lonely hunting camp to wrestle with his intolerable
problem. He describes his vacillations faithfully, elaborately, cruelly.
On the one side he sets his honest yearning, his desire to have done
with light loves, the girl herself. On the other hand he ranges his
moral qualms, his sneaking distrusts, the sinister shadows of those
nameless ones, his morganatic brothers-in-law. The struggle within his
soul is gigantic. He suffers as Prometheus suffered on the rock; his
very vitals are devoured; he emerges battered and exhausted. He decides,
in the end, that he will marry the girl. She has wasted the shining
dowry of her sex; she comes to him spotted and at second-hand; snickers
will appear in the polyphony of the wedding music—but he will marry her
nevertheless. It will be a marriage unblessed by Holy Writ; it will be a
flying in the face of Moses; luck and the archangels will be against
it—but he will marry her all the same, Moses or no Moses. And so, with
his face made bright by his first genuine revolt against the archaic,
barbaric morality that has dragged him down, and his heart pulsing to
his first display of authentic, unpolluted charity, generosity and
nobility, he takes his departure from us. May the fates favor him with
their mercy! May the Lord God strain a point to lift him out of his
purgatory at last! He has suffered all the agonies of belief. He has
done abominable penance for the Westminster Catechism, and for the moral
order of the world, and for all the despairing misery of back-street,
black bombazine, Little Bethel goodness. He is Puritanism incarnate, and
Puritanism become intolerable....
I daresay any second-hand bookseller will be able to find a copy of the
book for you: “One Man,” by Robert Steele. There is some raciness in the
detail of it. Perhaps, despite its public failure, it enjoys a measure
of _pizzicato_ esteem behind the door. The author, having achieved its
colossal self-revelation, became intrigued by the notion that he was a
literary man of sorts, and informed me that he was undertaking the story
of the girl last-named—the spotted ex-virgin. But he apparently never
finished it. No doubt he discovered, before he had gone very far, that
the tale was intrinsically beyond him—that his fingers all turned into
thumbs when he got beyond his own personal history. Such a writer, once
he has told the one big story, is done for.
XIX. JACK LONDON
The quasi-science of genealogy, as it is practiced in the United States,
is directed almost exclusively toward establishing aristocratic descents
for nobodies. That is to say, it records and glorifies decay. Its
typical masterpiece is the discovery that the wife of some obscure
county judge is the grandchild, infinitely removed, of Mary Queen of
Scots, or that the blood of Geoffrey of Monmouth flows in the veins of a
Philadelphia stockbroker. How much more profitably its professors might
be employed in tracing the lineage of truly salient and distinguished
men! For example, the late Jack London. Where did he get his hot
artistic passion, his delicate feeling for form and color, his
extraordinary skill with words? The man, in truth, was an instinctive
artist of a high order, and if ignorance often corrupted his art, it
only made the fact of his inborn mastery the more remarkable. No other
popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in
“The Call of the Wild,” or in parts of “John Barleycorn,” or in such
short stories as “The Sea Farmer” and “Samuel.” Here, indeed, are all
the elements of sound fiction: clear thinking, a sense of character, the
dramatic instinct, and, above all, the adept putting together of
words—words charming and slyly significant, words arranged, in a French
phrase, for the respiration and the ear. You will never convince me that
this æsthetic sensitiveness, so rare, so precious, so distinctively
aristocratic, burst into abiogenetic flower on a San Francisco sand-lot.
There must have been some intrusion of an alien and superior strain,
some _pianissimo_ fillup from above; there was obviously a great deal
more to the thing than a routine hatching in low life. Perhaps the
explanation is to be sought in a Jewish smear. Jews were not few in the
California of a generation ago, and one of them, at least, attained to a
certain high, if transient, fame with the pen. Moreover, the name,
London, has a Jewish smack; the Jews like to call themselves after great
cities. I have, indeed, heard this possibility of an Old Testament
descent put into an actual rumor. Stranger genealogies are not unknown
in seaports....
But London the artist did not live _a cappella_. There was also London
the amateur Great Thinker, and the second often hamstrung the first.
That great thinking of his, of course, took color from the sordid misery
of his early life; it was, in the main, a jejune Socialism, wholly
uncriticised by humor. Some of his propagandist and expository books are
almost unbelievably nonsensical, and whenever he allowed any of his
so-called ideas to sneak into an imaginative work the intrusion promptly
spoiled it. Socialism, in truth, is quite incompatible with art; its
cook-tent materialism is fundamentally at war with the first principle
of the æsthetic gospel, which is that one daffodil is worth ten shares
of Bethlehem Steel. It is not by accident that there has never been a
book on Socialism which was also a work of art. Papa Marx’s “Das
Kapital” at once comes to mind. It is as wholly devoid of graces as “The
Origin of Species” or “Science and Health”; one simply cannot conceive a
reasonable man reading it without aversion; it is as revolting as a
barrel organ. London, preaching Socialism, or quasi-Socialism, or
whatever it was that he preached, took over this offensive dullness. The
materialistic conception of history was too heavy a load for him to
carry. When he would create beautiful books he had to throw it overboard
as Wagner threw overboard democracy, the superman and free thought. A
sort of temporary Christian created “Parsifal.” A sort of temporary
aristocrat created “The Call of the Wild.”
Also in another way London’s early absorption of social and economic
nostrums damaged him as an artist. It led him into a socialistic
exaltation of mere money; it put a touch of avarice into him. Hence his
too deadly industry, his relentless thousand words a day, his steady
emission of half-done books. The prophet of freedom, he yet sold himself
into slavery to the publishers, and paid off with his soul for his
ranch, his horses, his trappings of a wealthy cheese-monger. His volumes
rolled out almost as fast as those of E. Phillips Oppenheim; he simply
could not make them perfect at such a gait. There are books on his
list—for example, “The Scarlet Plague” and “The Little Lady of the Big
House”—that are little more than garrulous notes for books.
But even in the worst of them one comes upon sudden splashes of
brilliant color, stray proofs of the adept penman, half-wistful
reminders that London, at bottom, was no fraud. He left enough, I am
convinced, to keep him in mind. There was in him a vast delicacy of
perception, a high feeling, a sensitiveness to beauty. And there was in
him, too, under all his blatancies, a poignant sense of the infinite
romance and mystery of human life.
XX. AMONG THE AVATARS
It may be, as they say, that we Americanos lie in the gutter of
civilization, but all the while our eyes steal cautious glances at the
stars. In the midst of the prevailing materialism—the thin incense of
mysticism. As a relief from money drives, politics and the struggle for
existence—Rosicrucianism, the Knights of Pythias, passwords, grips,
secret work, the 33rd degree. In flight from Peruna, Mandrake Pills and
Fletcherism—Christian Science, the Emmanuel Movement, the New Thought.
The tendency already has its poets: Edwin Markham and Ella Wheeler
Wilcox. It has acquired its romancer: Will Levington Comfort....
This Comfort wields an easy pen. He has done, indeed, some capital
melodramas, and when his ardor heats him up he grows downright eloquent.
But of late the whole force of his æsthetic engines has been thrown into
propaganda, by the Bhagavad Gītā out of Victorian sentimentalism. The
nature of this propaganda is quickly discerned. What Comfort preaches is
a sort of mellowed mariolatry, a humorless exaltation of woman, a flashy
effort to turn the inter-attraction of the sexes, ordinarily a mere
cause of scandal, into something transcendental and highly portentous.
Woman, it appears, is the beyond-man, the trans-mammal, the nascent
angel; she is the Upward Path, the Way to Consecration, the door to the
Third Lustrous Dimension; all the mysteries of the cosmos are
concentrated in Mystic Motherhood, whatever that may be. I capitalize in
the Comfortian (and New Thought) manner. On one page of “Fate Knocks at
the Door” I find Voices, Pits of Trade, Woman, the Great Light, the Big
Deep and the Twentieth Century Lie. On another are the Rising Road of
Man, the Transcendental Soul Essence, the Way Uphill, the Sempiternal
Mother. Thus Andrew Bedient, the spouting hero of the tale:
I believe in the natural greatness of Woman; that through the
spirit of Woman are born sons of strength; that only through the
potential greatness of Woman comes the militant greatness of man.
I believe Mothering is the loveliest of the Arts; that great
mothers are handmaidens of the Spirit, to whom are intrusted God’s
avatars; that no prophet is greater than his mother.
I believe when humanity arises to Spiritual evolution (as it once
evolved through Flesh, and is now evolving through Mind) Woman
will assume the ethical guiding of the race.
I believe that the Holy Spirit of the Trinity is Mystic
Motherhood, and the source of the divine principle is Woman; that
the prophets are the union of this divine principle and the higher
manhood; that they are beyond the attractions of women of flesh,
because unto their manhood has been added Mystic Motherhood....
I believe that the way to Godhood is the Rising Road of Man.
I believe that, as the human mother brings a child to her husband,
the father—so Mystic Motherhood, the Holy Spirit, is bringing the
world to God, the Father.