Once upon a time William Dean Howells leveled the keen lance of his
satire against what he called "the monstrous rag baby of romanticism."
In those simple days, literary labels were easily applied. A man who
wrote about Rome, Italy, was a romanticist; a man who wrote about Rome,
New York, was a Realist.
Now, however, a writer who finds his themes in the wholesale business
district of New York City does not disavow the title formerly given
exclusively to makers of drawn-sword-and-prancing-steed fiction.
Montague Glass is a romanticist.
The laureate of the cloak-and-suit trade and biographer of Mr. Abe
Potash and Mr. Mawruss Perlmutter does not believe that romance is a
matter of time and place. A realistic novel, he believes, may be written
about the Young Pretender or Alexander the Great, and a romance
about--well, about Elkan Lubliner, American.
Of course, I asked him to defend his claim to the name of romanticist.
He did so, but in general terms, without special reference to his own
work. For this widely read author has the amazing virtue of modesty.
"I do not think," he said, "that the so-called historical novelists are
the only romanticists. The difference between the two schools of writers
is in method, rather than in subject.
"A romanticist is a writer who creates an atmosphere of his own about
the things with which he deals. He is the poet, the constructive artist.
He calls into being that which has not hitherto existed.
"A realist, however, is a writer who faithfully reproduces an atmosphere
that already exists. He reports, records; one of his distinguishing
characteristics must be his attention to detail. The romanticist is as
truthful as the realist, but he deals with a few large truths rather
than with many small facts."
"And you," I said, determined to make the conversation more personal,
"prefer the romantic method?"
"Yes," said Mr. Glass, "I do. I prefer to use the romantic method, and
to read the works of the writers who use it. I believe that there is
more value in suggestion than in detailed description. For instance, I
do not think that my stories would gain vividness if I should put all
the dialogue--I tell my stories chiefly by means of dialogues, you
know--into dialect. So I do not put down the dialogue phonetically. I
spell the words correctly, not in accordance with the pronunciation of
my characters.
"This is not an invariable rule. When, for instance, Abe or Mawruss has
learned a new long word which he uses frequently to show it off, he
generally mispronounces it. He may say 'quincidence' for 'coincidence.'
Such a mispronunciation as this I reproduce, for it has its significance
as a revelation of character. But I do not attempt to put down all
mispronunciations; I let the dialect be imagined.
"The romanticist, you see, uses his own imagination and expects
imagination in his readers. His method might be called impressionistic;
he outlines and suggests, instead of describing exhaustively. The
romanticist really is more economical than the realist, and he has more
restraint."
"Who are the leading romanticists of the day?" I asked.
"Well," Mr. Glass replied, "my favorite among contemporary romanticists
is Joseph Conrad. There is a man who is certainly no swashbuckling
novelist of the Wardour Street school. He writes of modern life, and yet
he is a romanticist through and through.
"I think that I may justly claim to be one of the first admirers of
Conrad in America. I used to read him when apparently the only other man
in this part of the world to appreciate him was William L. Alden, who
praised him in the columns of the _New York Times Review of Books_.
"I well remember my discovery of Conrad. I went to Brooklyn to hear
'Tosca' sung at the Academy of Music. I had bought my ticket, and I had
about an hour to spend before it would be time for the curtain to rise.
So I went across the street to the Brooklyn Public Library.
"While I was idly looking over the novels on the shelves I came upon
Conrad's _Typhoon_. I sat down and began to read it.
"When I arose, I had finished the book. Also, I had missed the first two
acts of the opera--and I had been eager to hear them. But Conrad more
than compensated for the loss of those two acts.
"Many of the modern English writers are romanticists. Galsworthy surely
is no realist. And William de Morgan, although he writes at great length
and has abundance of detail, is a romanticist. He does not use detail
for its own sake, as the realists use it; he uses it only when it has
some definite value in unfolding the plot or revealing character. He
uses it significantly; he is particularly successful in using it
humorously, as Daudet and Dickens used it. Arnold Bennett is a realist,
and I think that one of the reasons why he is so widely read in the
United States is because the life which he describes so minutely is a
life much like that of his American readers. People like to read about
the sort of life they already know. The average reader wants to have a
sense of familiarity with the characters in his novels."
Mr. Glass is a contrary person. It is contrary for the only novelist who
knows anything about New York's cloak-and-suit trade to be of English
birth and to look like a poet. It is contrary of him to have that
distinctively American play, "Potash and Perlmutter," start its London
run two years ago and be "still going strong." And it was contrary of
him not to say, as he might reasonably be expected to say in view of his
own success, that the encounters and adventures of business must be the
theme of the American novelists of the future.
"No," he said, in answer to my question, "I do not see any reason for
the novelist to confine himself to business life. Themes for fiction are
universal. A novelist should write of the life he knows best, whatever
it may be.
"I do not mean that the novelist should write about his own business. I
mean that he should write about the psychology that he understands. A
man who spends years in the cloak-and-suit business is not, therefore,
qualified to write novels about that business, even if he is qualified
to write novels at all.
"I had no real knowledge of the cloak-and-suit trade when I began to
write about it. I made many technical blunders. For instance, I had
Potash and Perlmutter buying goods by the gross instead of by the piece.
And I received many indignant letters pointing out my mistake.
"I had never been in the cloak-and-suit trade. But my work as a lawyer
had brought me into contact with many people who were in that business,
and I had intimate knowledge of the psychology of the Jew, his religion,
his humor, his tragedy, his whole attitude toward life.
"The trouble with many young writers," said Mr. Glass, "is that they
don't know what they are writing about. They are attempting to describe
psychological states of which they have only third-hand knowledge. Their
ideas have no semblance of truth, and therefore their work is absolutely
unconvincing."
"At any rate," I said, "you will admit that American writers are more
and more inclined to make the United States the scene of their stories.
Do you think that O. Henry's influence is responsible for this?"
"No," said Mr. Glass, "I do not think that this is due to O. Henry's
influence. It was a natural development. You see, O. Henry's literary
life lasted for only about four years, and while he has had many
imitators, I do not think that he can be given credit for directing the
attention of American writers to the life of their own country.
"Probably William Dean Howells should be called the founder of the
modern school of American fiction. He was the first writer to achieve
distinguished success for tales of modern American life. There were
several other authors who began to write about Americans soon after Mr.
Howells began--Thomas Janvier, H. C. Bunner, and Brander Matthews were
among them.
"Kipling's popularity gave a great impetus to the writing of short
stories of modern life. It is interesting to trace the course of the
short story from Kipling to O. Henry.
"Did you ever notice," asked Mr. Glass, "that the best stories on New
York life are written by people who have been born and brought up
outside of the city? The writer who has always lived in New York seems
thereby to be disqualified from writing about it, just as the man in the
cloak-and-suit trade is too close to his subject to reproduce it in
fiction. The writer who comes to New York after spending his youth
elsewhere gets the full romantic effect of New York; he gets a
perspective on it which the native New-Yorker seldom attains. The
viewpoint of the writer who has always lived in New York is subjective,
whereas one must have the objective viewpoint to write about the city
successfully.
"I have been surprised by the caricatures of American life which come
from the pen of writers American by birth and ancestry. Recently I read
a novel by an American who has--and deserves, for he is a writer of
talent and reputation--a large following. This was a story of life in a
manufacturing town with which the novelist is thoroughly familiar. It,
however, appears to have been written to satisfy a grudge and
consequently one could mistake it for the work of an Englishman who had
once made a brief tour of America. For the big manufacturer who was the
principal character in the story was vulgar enough to satisfy the
prejudice of any reader of the _London Daily Mail_. Certainly the
descriptions of the gaudy and offensive furniture in the rich
manufacturer's house and the dialogue of the members of his family and
the servants could provide splendid ammunition for the _Saturday Review_
or _The Academy_. The book appears to be a caricature, and yet that
novelist had lived most of his life among the sort of people about whom
he was writing!
"And how absolutely ignorant most New-Yorkers are of New York. Irvin
Cobb comes here from Louisville, Kentucky, and gets an intimate
knowledge of the city, and puts that knowledge into his short stories.
But a man brought up here makes the most ridiculous mistakes when he
writes about New York.
"I read a story of New York life recently that absolutely disgusted me,
its author was so ignorant of his subject. Yet he was a born New-Yorker.
Let me tell you what he wrote. He said that a man went into an arm-chair
lunch-room and bought a meal. His check amounted to sixty-five cents!
Now any one who knows anything about arm-chair lunch-rooms beyond the
mere fact of their existence knows that the cashier of such an
institution would drop dead if a customer paid him sixty-five cents at
one time. Then, the hero of this story had as a part of his meal in this
arm-chair lunch-room a baked potato, for which he paid fifteen cents!
Imagine a baked potato in such a place, and a fifteen-cent baked potato
at that!"
Mr. Glass did not, like most successful humorists, begin as a writer of
tragedy. His first story to be printed was "Aloysius of the Docks," a
humorous story of an East Side Irish boy, which appeared in 1900. The
lower East Side was for many years the scene of most of his stories. But
he does resemble most other writers in this respect, that he wrote
verse before he wrote fiction. I asked him to show me some of his
poetry, and he demurred somewhat violently. But, after all, a poet is a
poet, and at last I succeeded in persuading him to produce this exhibit.
Here it is--a poem by the author of "Potash and Perlmutter":