The late J. Pierpont Morgan writing sonnet sequences, Rockefeller
regarding oil as useful only when mixed with pigment and spread upon
canvas by his own deft hand, Carnegie designing libraries instead of
paying for them--these are some of the entertaining visions that occur
to the mind of Frank H. Spearman when he contemplates in fancy a
civilization in which business no longer draws the master minds away
from art.
I asked the author of _Nan of Music Mountain_ if he thought that the
trend of present-day American life--its commercialism and
materialism--affected the character of our literature. He replied:
"Let us take commercialism first: By it you mean the pursuit of
business. Success in business brings money, power, and that public
esteem we may loosely term fame--the admiration of our fellow-men and
the sense of power among them.
"Commercialism, thus defined, affects the character of our literature in
a way that none of our students of the subject seems to have
apprehended. We live in an atmosphere of material striving. Our great
rewards are material successes. The extremely important consequence is
that our business life through its greater temptations--through its
being able to offer the rewards of wealth and mastery and esteem--robs
literature and the kindred arts of our keenest minds. We have, it is
true, eminent doctors and lawyers, but the complaint that commercialism
has invaded these professions only proves that they depend directly on
business prosperity for a substantial portion of their own rewards.
"I am not forgetting the crust and garret as the traditional setting for
the literary genius; but, when this state of affairs existed, the genius
had no chance to become a business millionaire within ten years--or, for
that matter, within a hundred. And while poverty provides an excellent
foundation for a career, it is not so good as a superstructure--at
least, not outside the ranks of the heroic few who renounce riches for
spiritual things.
"More than once," continued Mr. Spearman, "in meeting men among our
masters of industry, I have been struck by the thought that these are
the men who should be writing great books, painting great pictures, and
building great cathedrals; their tastes, I have sometimes found, run in
these directions quite as strongly as the tastes of lesser men who give
themselves to literature, painting, or architecture. But the present-day
market for cathedrals is somewhat straitened, and a great ambition may
nowadays easily neglect the prospective rewards of literature for those
of steel-making.
"Business success--not achieved in literature and the arts--comes first
with us; in consequence, the ranks of those who follow these professions
are robbed of the intellect that should contribute to them. This is the
real way in which commercialism--our pursuit of business--affects our
literature. It depletes, too, in the same way, the quality of men in our
public life.
"Charles G. Dawes has called my attention more than once to the falling
off in caliber among men from whose ranks our politicians and public men
are drawn. It is not that our present administration is so conspicuously
weak; go to any of the Presidential conventions this year and note the
falling off in quality among the politicians. In one generation the
change has been startling. The sons of the men that loomed large in
public life twenty-five years ago to-day are masters of business.
"Business takes everything. We have had really magnificent financiers,
such as the elder Morgan, who should be our Michael Angelo. I have known
railroad executives who might have been distinguished novelists, and
bankers who would have been great artists were the American people as
obsessed with the painting of pictures and the making of statues as
those of Europe once were.
"In Michael Angelo's day public interest in solving problems in
manufacture and transportation did not overshadow that in painting and
sculpture. Leonardo in our day would be building railroads, digging
canals, or inventing the aeroplane--and doing better, perhaps, at these
things than any man living; he came perilously close to doing all of
them in his own day.
"Before you can bring our steel-founders and business men into
literature you must make success in literature and its kindred arts
esteemed as the greatest reward. As it is, I fear it is likely to be
chiefly those who through lack of capacity, inclination, or robust
health are unequal to the heat and burden of great business that will be
left for the secondary callings, among which we must at present rank
literature. It would be interesting, too, to consider to what extent
this movement of men toward business rewards has been compensated for by
the opportunities afforded to women in the field thus deserted; we
certainly have many clever women cultivating it."
"But what," I asked, "about materialism--not specifically commercialism,
but materialism? Do you think that its evil effects are evident in
contemporary literature?"
"Materialism--you mean the philosophy--has quite a different effect on
any literature--a poisonous, a baneful effect, rather than a merely
harmful one," Mr. Spearman answered. "Can you possibly have, at any time
or anywhere, great art without a great faith? Since the era of
Christianity, at any rate, it seems to me that periods of faith, or at
least periods enjoying the reflexes and echoes of faith, have afforded
the really nourishing atmosphere for artistic development. Spirituality
provides that which the imagination may seize upon for the substance of
its creative effort; without spirituality the imagination shrivels, and
the materialist, while losing none of his characteristic confidence,
shrinks continually to punier artistic stature."
Something in what Mr. Spearman had said reminded me of Henry Holt's
criticisms of the modern magazines. So I asked Mr. Spearman what effect
the development of the American magazine, with its high prices for
serials and series of stories, had had upon our fiction. He answered:
"Good, I think. Our fiction must compete in its rewards with those of
business. One of the rewards of either--even if you put it, in the first
case, the lowest--is the monetary reward, and the more substantial that
can be made, the more chance fiction will have of holding up its head.
"I have had occasion to watch pretty closely the development of the
inclinations and ambitions of a number of average American boys--boys
that have had fairly intimate opportunities to consider both literature
and business. I have been startled more than once to find that as each
of them came along and was asked what he wanted to do, the substance of
his answer has been, 'Something to make money.'
"If you question your own youthful acquaintances, you will receive in
most cases, I dare say, similar answers. I am afraid if Giotto had been
a Wyoming shepherd-boy he would want to be a steel-maker. Anything that
tends to attract the young to the pursuit of literature as a calling
strengthens our fiction, and the magazine should have credit for an
'assist' in this direction. Don't forget, of course, that the magazine
itself derives directly, by way of advertising, from business."
"Do you think, then," I asked, "that our writers are producing work as
likely to endure as that which is being produced in England?"
Mr. Spearman smiled whimsically. "Your question suggests to me," he
replied, "rather than any judgment in the case, the reflection that the
average English writer has possessed over our average American writer
the very great advantage of an opportunity to become really educated; to
this extent their equipment is appreciably stronger than ours. If you
will read the ordinary run of English fiction or play-writing and
compare it with similar work of ours, you cannot fail to note the better
finish in their work. And in expressing a conviction that our writers
are somewhat handicapped as to this factor in their equipment, I do not
indict them for wasted opportunities; I indict our own substantial
failure in educational methods. For a generation or more we have
experimented, and from the very first grade in our grammar-schools up to
the university courses there have resulted confusion and ineptitude. I
instance specifically our experimentation with electives and our
widespread contempt for the classics. To attempt to master any of the
arts and not to be intimately familiar with what the Greeks and the
Romans have left us of their achievement--not to speak of those, to us,
uncharted seas of medieval achievement in every direction following the
twelfth century--is to make the effort under a distinct disadvantage.
"The average English writer has had much more of this intimacy, or at
least a chance at much more of it, than the average American writer. In
the sphere of literary criticism I have heard Mr. Brownell speak of the
better quality of even the anonymous English literary criticism so
frequently to be found in their journals when compared with similar
American work. There is only one explanation for these things, and it
lies in the training. All of this not implying, in indirect answer to
your question, that the English writer is to bear away the prize in the
competition for literary permanence. American Samsons may, despite
everything, burst their bonds; but if they win it will often be without
what their teachers should have supplied.
"Mr. Brownell, in his definitive essay on Cooper, in comparing the
material at Balzac's hand with that at Cooper's, remarks on the fact
that Cooper's background was essentially nature. 'Nothing, it is true,
is more romantic than nature,' adds Mr. Brownell, 'except nature plus
man. But the exception is prodigious.' Europe measures behind her
writers almost three thousand years of man.
"We have in this country no atmosphere of Christian tradition such as
that which pervades Europe--English-speaking people parted with historic
Christianity before they came here. But, willingly or unwillingly, the
English and the Continental writers are saturated with this magnificent
background of Christianity--they can't escape it. And what I note as
striking evidence of the value to them of this brooding spirit of twenty
European centuries is the fact that their very pagans choose Christian
material to work with. Goethe himself, fine old pagan that he was,
turned to Christian quarries for his _Faust_. The minor pagans turn in
likewise, though naturally with slighter results. But to all of them,
Christianity, paraphrasing Samson, might well say: 'If ye had not plowed
with my heifer, ye had not read--your own riddle of longed-for
recognition.'"
"Why is it that the art of fiction is no longer taken as seriously as it
was, for example, in the time of Sir Walter Scott?"
"I don't know how seriously," countered Mr. Spearman, "you mean your
question to be taken. It suggests that in the day of Walter Scott the
field of novel-writing was still so new that only bolder spirits
ventured into it. It was not a day when the many could attempt the novel
with any assurances of success in marketing their wares. In consequence
we got then the work of only big men and women. Pioneers--though not
necessarily respectable--are a hardy lot.
"Still--touching on your other question about the great American
novel--if I wished to develop great musicians I should start every one
possible at studying music, and I can't help thinking that the more
there are among us who attempt novels the greater probability there will
be for the production of a masterpiece. A man's mind is a mine. Neither
he nor any one else knows what is in it. Possessing the property in fee
simple, he has, of course, certain valuable proprietary rights. But the
only way I know of to find out to a certainty just what lies within the
property is persistently to tunnel and drift, or, as Mr. Brownell says,
'to get out what is in you.' And I am in complete accord with him in the
belief that temperament is the best possible endowment for a
novelist--and temperament comes, if you are a Christian, from God; if a
pagan, from the gods."
Mr. Spearman returned to his theme of the effect of materialism on
literature in the course of a discussion of the French novel of the day
as compared to the novel of Zola and his imitators. He said:
"I think the important thing for Zola was that his day coincided with a
materialistic ascendency in the thought of France. He lived at a time
admirably suited to a man of his type. Zola found a France weak and
contemptible in its government, and in consequence a soil in which
grossness could profitably be cultivated.
"He was by no means a great artist; he was merely a writer writhing for
recognition when he turned to filth. He took it up to commercialize it,
to turn it into money and reputation. Men such as he are continually, at
different times and in different countries, lifting their heads. But
unless they are sustained by what chances to be a loose public attitude
on questions of decency, they are clubbed into silence.
"And just why should the exploitation of filth assume to monopolize the
word 'realism'? To define precisely what realism should include and
exclude would call for hard thinking. But it doesn't take much thought
to reach the conclusion that mere annalists of grossness have no proper
monopoly of the term. Grossness is no adequate foundation for a literary
monument; it is not even a satisfactory corner-stone. The few writers
one thinks of that constitute exceptions would have left a better
monument without it.
"But if you wish to realize how fortunate Zola was in coinciding with a
period when the chief effort of the ruling spirits of France was to war
on all forces that strove to conserve decency, try to imagine what sort
of a reception _L'Assommoir_ would be accorded to-day by the tears of
France stricken through calamity to its knees.
"France is experiencing now realism of quite another sort from that
propagated by Zola--a realism that is wringing the souls and turning
the thoughts of a great and unhappy people back once more to the eternal
verities; in these grossness never had a place.
"And if you don't want to think in grossness, don't read in it; if you
don't want to act in grossness, don't think in it. To exploit it is to
exaggerate its proper significance in the affairs of life.
"Twenty-five years ago an American writer set out as a Zola disciple to
give us something American along Zola's lines. He made a failure of
it--so complete that he was forced to complain that later efforts in
which he returned to paths of decency were refused by editors and
publishers. He had spoiled his name as an asset. If you are curious to
note how far the bars have been let down in his direction in twenty-five
years, contemplate what passes to-day among us with quite a footing of
magazine and book popularity. It means simply that we are falling into
those conditions of public indifference in which moral parasites may
flourish. But if one were forced to-day to choose in France between the
material taken up by Zola after his failure to cultivate successfully
cleaner fields, and that chosen by Rene Bazin and the new and hopeful
French school of spirituality, there could be no question that the
latter would afford the better opportunity. And there can be no real
question but that the exponents of grossness are likewise opportunists,
looking first of all for a market for their names--as most men are
doing. But some men, by reason of inclination or voluntary restraint,
have restricted themselves in their choice of literary materials."
Mr. Spearman has recently given much of his time to moving-picture work,
with the result that his name is nearly as familiar to the devotees of
the flickering screen as to habitual magazine readers. I asked him how
the development of the moving picture is likely to affect literature. He
replied:
"What I can say on this point will perhaps be more directly of interest
to writers themselves; the development of the moving picture broadens
their market. It has, if you will let me put it in this way, increased
the number of our theaters in their capacity for absorbing material for
the drama a thousandfold. Inevitably a new industry developing with such
amazing rapidity is still in the experimental stages, and those who know
it best say its possibilities are but just beginning. What I note of
interest to the literary worker is that men advanced and in authority
in the production of pictures have reached this conclusion: Behind every
good picture there must be a good story. The slogan to-day is 'The story
is the thing.' And those close to the 'inside' of the industry say
to-day to the fictionist: 'Hold on to your stories. Within a year or two
they will command from the movies much higher prices than to-day,
because the supply is fast becoming exhausted.'"
It was in the course of his remarks about the rewards of literature that
Mr. Spearman told an interesting story concerning Henry James and George
du Maurier. He said:
"The recent death of Henry James is bringing out many anecdotes
concerning him. At the time of George du Maurier's death it was recalled
that he had once given the material for _Trilby_ to Henry James with
permission to use it; and the story ran that, resolving to use it
himself, Mr. James returned the material to Du Maurier, who wrote the
novel from it.
"But I don't think it has ever appeared that the real reason why Henry
James did not attempt _Trilby_ was that he possessed no musical sense;
Mr. James himself told me this, and without a sense of music the
material was useless to any one. I discussed the incident with him some
ten years ago and he added, in connection with _Trilby_ and Du Maurier,
other interesting facts.
"_Trilby_ did not at first make a signal success in England. Its first
big hit was made in _Harper's Magazine_. Not realizing the American
possibilities, Mr. du Maurier, when offered by Harper & Brothers a
choice between royalties and five thousand dollars outright for the book
rights, took the lump sum as if it were descended straight from heaven.
When the news of the extraordinary success of the book in this country
reached him, he realized his serious mistake, and in the family circle
there was keen depression over it. But further surprises were in store
for him. To their eternal credit, the house of Harper &
Brothers--honorable then as now--in view of the unfortunate situation in
which their author had placed himself, voluntarily canceled the first
contract and restored Du Maurier to a royalty basis. The fear in the
English home then was that this arrangement would come too late to bring
in anything. Not only, however, did the book continue to sell, but the
play came on, and together the rights afforded George du Maurier a
competency that banished further worry from the home."
_THE NOVEL MUST GO_