told” has a just grievance against any one who asks anything further.
But against the novelist who has endeavored to make his story, however
good, however well told, the vehicle for a human philosophy or a
metaphysical speculation, the reader has a just grievance--if the
endeavor has been unsuccessful or if the philosophy is unsound.
Now as to the soundness or unsoundness of a particular philosophy
every reader must pronounce for himself. The metaphysical idea which
was the basis of Miss Johnston’s novel was this: All gods are one. All
deities are one. Christ, Buddha; it matters not. “There swam upon him
another great perspective. He saw Christ in light, Buddha in light.
The glorified--the unified. _Union._” Upon this idea Miss Johnston
reconciles her two foes.
This perfectly comprehensible mystical conception is the rock on which
the whole story is founded--and the rock on which it goes to pieces.
It will be seen at once that the conception is one which no Christian
can entertain and remain a Christian--nor any Buddhist, and remain
a Buddhist, either. To the vast majority of mankind, therefore, the
philosophy of _Foes_ was unsound and the novel was worthless except
for the superficial incidents and the lovely prose in which they were
recounted.
It might be thought that for those who accepted the mystical concept
Miss Johnson imposed, _Foes_ would have been a novel of the first rank.
No, indeed; and for this reason:
Her piece of mysticism was supposed to be arrived at and embraced by a
dour Scotchman of about the year of Our Lord 1750. It was supposed to
transform the whole nature of that man so as to lead him to give over
a life-long enmity in which he had looked upon himself as a Divine
instrument to punish an evil-doer.
Now however reasonable or sound or inspiring and inspiriting the
mystical idea may have seemed to any reader, he could not but be
fatally aware that, as presented, the thing was a flat impossibility.
Scotchmen of the year 1750 were Christians above all else. They were,
if you like, savage Christians; some of them were irreligious, some of
them were God-defying, none of them were Deists in the all-inclusive
sense that Miss Johnston prescribes. The idea that Christ and Buddha
might possibly be nothing but different manifestations of the Deity
is an idea which could never have occurred to the eighteenth century
Scotch mind--and never did. Least of all could it have occurred to such
a man as Miss Johnston delineates in Alexander Jardine.
The thing is therefore utterly anachronistic. It is a historical
anachronism, if you like, the history here being the history of the
human spirit in its religious aspects. Every reader of the book, no
matter how willing he may have been to accept the novelist’s underlying
idea, was aware that the endeavor to convey it had utterly failed,
was aware that Miss Johnston had simply projected _her_ idea, _her_
favorite bit of mysticism, into the mind of one of her characters, a
Scotchman living a century and a half earlier! But the thoughts that
one may think in the twentieth century while tramping the Virginia
hills are not thoughts that could have dawned in the mind of a Scottish
laird in the eighteenth century, not even though he lay in the
flowering grass of the Roman Campagna.
... And so there, in _Foes_, we have the book in a hundred which called
for something more than the intelligent and accurate work of the
book reporter. Here was a case of a good novelist, and a very, very
good one, gone utterly wrong. It was not sufficient to convey to the
prospective reader a just idea of the story and of the qualities of it.
It was necessary to cut and slash, as cleanly and as swiftly and as
economically as possible--and as dispassionately--to the root of the
trouble. For if Miss Johnston were to repeat this sort of performance
her reputation would suffer, not to speak of her royalties; readers
would be enraged or misled; young writers playing the sedulous ape
would inflict dreadful things upon us; tastes and tempers would be
spoiled; publishers would lose money;--and, much the worst of all, the
world would be deprived of the splendid work Mary Johnston could do
while she was doing the exceedingly bad work she did do.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the blunder in _Foes_ was the
fact that there was no necessity for it. The Christian religion, which
was the religion of Alexander Jardine, provides for reconciliation,
indeed, it exacts it. There was the way for Miss Johnston to bring her
foes together. Of course, it would not have been intellectually so
exciting. But there is such a thing as emotional appeal, and it is not
always base; there are emotions in the human so high and so lofty that
it is wiser not to try to transcend them....
The appearance of part of the foregoing in _Books and the Book World_
of _The Sun_, New York, brought a letter from Kansas which should find
a place in this volume. The letter, with the attempted answer, may as
well be given here. The writer is head of the English department in a
State college. He wrote:
20
“I hope that the mails lost for your college professors of English
subscribers their copies of _Books and the Book World_ [containing the
foregoing observations on _Book Reporting_].... College professors do
not like to be disturbed--and most of us cannot be, for that matter.
The TNT in those pages was not meant for us, perhaps, but it should
have been.
“When I read _Book Reporting_ I dictated three pages of protest, but
did not send it on--thanks to my better judgment.... Then I decided,
since you had added so much to my perturbation, to ask you to help me.
“We need it out here--literary help only, of course. This is the only
State college on what was once known as the ‘Great Plains.’ W. F.
Cody won his sobriquet on Government land which is now our campus.
Our students are the sons and daughters of pioneers who won over
grasshoppers, droughts, hot winds and one crop farms. They are so near
to real life that the teaching of literature must be as real as the
literature--rather, it ought to be. That’s where I want you to help me.
“I am not teaching literature here now as I was taught geology back in
Missouri. That’s as near as I shall tell you how I teach--it is bad
enough and you might not help me if I did. (Perhaps, in fairness to
you, I should say that for several years never less than one-third of
those to whom we gave degrees have majored in English, and always as
many as the next two departments combined.)
“Here’s what I am tired of and want to get away from:
“1. Testing students on reading a book by asking fact questions about
what is in the book--memory work, you see.
“2. Demanding of students a scholarship in the study of literature that
is so academic that it is Prussian.
“3. Demanding that students serve time in literature classes as a means
of measuring their advance in the study of literature.
“Here’s what I want you to help me with in some definite concrete way:
(Sounds like a college professor making an assignment--beg pardon.)
“1. Could you suggest a scheme of ‘book reporting’ for college students
in literature classes? (An old book to a new person is news, isn’t it?)
“2. Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that
should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature.
I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.
“3. What are some of the things which should enter into the training
of teachers of high school English? Part of our work, especially in
the summer, is to give such training to men and women who will teach
composition and literature in Kansas high schools.
“Your help will not only be appreciated, but it will be used.”
21
To answer adequately these requests would take about six months’ work
and the answers would make a slender book. And then they would exhibit
the defects inseparable from a one man response. None of which excuses
a failure to attempt to answer, though it must extenuate failures in
the attempt.
We shall try to answer, in this place, though necessarily without
completeness. If nothing better than a few suggestions is the result,
why--suggestions may be all that is really needed.
And first respecting the things our friend is tired of and wants to get
away from:
1. Fact questions about what is in the book--memory work--are not much
use if they stop with the outline of the story. What is _not_ in the
book may be more important than what is. Why did the author select this
scene for narration and omit that other, intrinsically (it seems) the
more dramatically interesting of the two? See _The Flirt_, by Booth
Tarkington, where a double murder gets only a few lines and a small
boy’s doings occupy whole chapters.
2. Scholarship is less important than wide reading, though the two
aren’t mutually exclusive. A wide acquaintance doesn’t preclude a few
profoundly intimate friendships. Textual study has spoiled Chaucer,
Shakespeare and Milton for most of us. Fifty years hence Kipling and
Masefield will be spoiled in the same way.
3. Time serving over literature is a waste of time. There are only
three ways to teach literature. The first is by directing students
to books for _voluntary_ reading--hundreds of books, thousands.
The second is by class lectures--entertaining, idea’d, anecdoted,
catholic in range and expository in character. The third is by
conversation--argumentative at times, analytic at moments, but mostly
by way of exchanging information and opinions.
Study books as you study people. Mix among them. You don’t take notes
on people unless, perchance, in a diary. Keep a diary on books you
read, if you like, but don’t “take notes.” Look for those qualities in
books that you look for in people and make your acquaintances by the
same (perhaps unformulated) rules. To read snobbishly is as bad as to
practise snobbery among your fellows.
22
We go on to the first of our friend’s requests for help. It is a scheme
for “book reporting” for college students in literature classes and he
premises that an old book to a new reader is news. Of course it is.
Let the student take up a book that’s new to him and read it by
himself, afterward writing a report of it to be read to the class. When
he comes to write his report he must keep in the forefront of his mind
this one thing:
To tell the others accurately enough about that book so that each one
of them will know whether or not _he_ wants to read it.
That is all the book reporter ever tries for. No book is intended for
everybody, but almost every book is intended for somebody. The problem
of the book reporter is to find the reader.
Comparison may help. For instance, those who enjoy Milton’s pastoral
poetry will probably enjoy the long poem in Robert Nichols’s _Ardours
and Endurances_. Those who like Thackeray will like Mary S. Watts.
Those who like Anna Katharine Green will thank you for sending them to
_The Moonstone_, by one Wilkie Collins.
Most stories depend upon suspense in the action for their main effect.
You must not “give away” the story so as to spoil it for the reader. In
a mystery story you may state the mystery and appraise the solution or
even characterize it--but you mustn’t reveal it.
Tell ’em that Mr. Hergesheimer’s _Java Head_ is an atmospheric marvel,
but will disappoint many readers who put action first. Tell ’em that
William Allen White writes (often) banally, but so saturates his novel
with his own bigheartedness that he makes you laugh and cry. Tell ’em
the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as well as you can
make it out--and for heaven’s sake ask yourself with every assertion:
“Is this a fact or is it my personal opinion?” _And a fact, for your
purpose, will be an opinion in which a large majority of readers will
concur._
23
“Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that
should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature.
I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.”
The following list is an offhand attempt to comply with this request.
It is offered merely for the suggestions it may contain. If the ten
year restriction is rigid we ask pardon for such titles as may be a
little older than that. Strike them out.
For Kansans: Willa Sibert Cather’s novels, _O Pioneers!_ and _My
Antonia_, chronicling people and epochs of Kansas-Nebraska. William
Allen White’s _A Certain Rich Man_ and _In the Heart of a Fool_, less
for their Kansas-ness than for their Americanism and humanity.
For Middle Westerners: Meredith Nicholson’s _The Valley of Democracy_.
Zona Gale’s _Birth_. Carl Sandburg’s _Chicago Poems_. Edgar Lee
Masters’s _Spoon River Anthology_. Vachel Lindsay’s longer poems.
Mary S. Watts’s _Nathan Burke_ and _Van Cleve: His Friends and His
Family_. Lord Charnwood’s life of Lincoln. William Dean Howells’s _The
Leatherwood God_. Booth Tarkington’s _The Conquest of Canaan_ (first
published about fourteen years ago) and _The Magnificent Ambersons_.
Gene Stratton-Porter’s _A Daughter of the Land_, her _Freckles_ and her
_A Girl of the Limberlost_. One or two books by Harold Bell Wright.
_The Passing of the Frontier_, by Emerson Hough, and other books in the
Chronicles of America series published by the Yale University Press.
For Americans: Mary S. Watts’s _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_. Owen
Wister’s _The Virginian_ (if not barred under the ten year rule). Booth
Tarkington’s _The Flirt_. Novels with American settings by Gertrude
Atherton and Stewart Edward White. Mary Johnston’s _The Long Roll_
and _Cease Firing_. Willa Sibert Cather’s _The Song of the Lark_.
Edith Wharton’s _Ethan Frome_. Alice Brown’s _The Prisoner_. Ellen
Glasgow’s _The Deliverance_. Corra Harris’s _A Circuit-Rider’s Wife_.
All of O. Henry. Margaret Deland’s _The Iron Woman_. Earlier novels by
Winston Churchill. Ernest Poole’s _The Harbor_. Joseph Hergesheimer’s
_The Three Black Pennys_, his _Gold and Iron_ and his _Java Head_.
Historical books by Theodore Roosevelt. American biographies too
numerous to mention. _From Isolation to Leadership: A Review of
American Foreign Policy_ by Latané (published by the educational
department of Doubleday, Page & Company). Essays, such as those of
Agnes Repplier.
Each of these enumerations presupposes the books already named, or most
of them. Don’t treat them as pieces of literary workmanship. Many of
them aren’t. Those that have fine literary workmanship have something
else, too--and it’s the other thing, or things, that count. Fine art
in a book is like good breeding in a person, a passport, not a Magna
Charta. “Manners makyth man”--yah!
24
We are also asked:
“What are some of the things which should enter into the training of
teachers of high school English?”
We reply:
A regard for literature, not as it reflects life, but as it moulds
lives. A profound respect for an author who can find 100,000 readers, a
respect at least equal to that entertained for an author who can write
superlatively well. For instance: Get it out of your head that you can
afford to condescend toward a best seller, or to worship such a writer
as Stevenson for his sheer craftsmanship.
An instinct for what will nourish the ordinary man or woman as keen
as your perception of what will be relished by the fastidious reader.
Don’t insist that people must live on what you, or any one else,
declare to be good for them. It is not for nothing that they “don’t
know anything about literature, _but know what they like_.”
A confidence in the greater wisdom of the greatest number. Tarkington
got it right. The public wants the best it is capable of understanding;
its understanding may not be the highest understanding, but “the writer
who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.” Neither does the writer who
never concedes anything. The public’s standard can’t always be wrong;
the private standards can’t always be right.
Arnold Bennett says, quite rightly, that the classics are made and
kept alive by “the passionate few.” But the business of high school
teachers of English is not with the passionate few--who will look after
themselves--but with the unimpassioned many. You can lead the student
to Mr. Pope’s Pierian spring, but you cannot make him drink. Unless
you can show him, in the Missourian sense, it’s all off. If you can’t
tell what it is a girl likes in Grace S. Richmond how are you going to
show her what she’ll like in Dickens? Unless you know what it is that
“they” get out of these books they _do_ read you won’t be able to bait
the hook with the things you want them to read. Don’t you think you’ve
got a lot to learn yourself? And mightn’t you do worse than sit down
yourself and read attentively, at whatever personal cost, some of the
best sellers?
It all goes back to the size of the teacher’s share of our common
humanity. A person who can’t read a detective story for the sake of the
thrills has no business teaching high school English. A person who is a
literary snob is unfit to teach high school English. A person who can’t
sense (better yet, share) the common feeling about a popular writer and
comprehend the basis of it and sympathize a little with it and express
it more or less articulately in everyday speech is not qualified to
teach high school English.
25
A word about writing “compositions” in high school English classes.
Make ’em write stories instead. If they want to tackle thumbnail
sketches or abstracter writing--little essays--why, let ’em.
Abstractions in thought and writing are like the ocean--it’s fatally
easy to get beyond your depth, and every one else’s. Read what Sir
Arthur Quiller-Couch says about this in his _Studies in Literature_.
Once in a while a theologian urges us to “get back to the Bible.” Well,
there is one sense, at least, in which the world would do well to get
back to the Bible, or to the Old Testament, at any rate. As Gardiner
points out in his _The Bible as English Literature_, it was the
fortune or misfortune of ancient Hebrew that it had no abstractions.
Everything was stated in terms of the five senses. There was no
such word as “virtue”; you said “sweet smellingness” or “pleasant
tastingness” or something like that. And everybody knew what you meant.
Whereas “virtue” means anything from personal chastity to a general
meritoriousness that nobody can define. The Greeks introduced abstract
thinking and expression and some Germans blighted the world by their
abuse.
What should enter into the training of high school teachers of English?
Only humbleness, sanity, catholicity of viewpoint, humor, a continual
willingness to learn, a continuous faith in the people--and undying
enthusiasm. Only these--and the love of books.
LITERARY EDITORS
BY ONE OF THEM
V
LITERARY EDITORS, BY ONE OF THEM
The very term “literary editor” is a survival. It is meaningless, but
we continue to use it because no better designation has been found,
just as people in monarchical countries continue to speak of “King
George” or “Queen Victoria of Spain.” Besides, there is politeness
to consider. No one wants to be the first to allude publicly and
truthfully to “Figurehead George” or “Social Leader Victoria.”
Literary editors who are literary are not editors, and literary
editors who are editors are no longer literary. Of old there were
scholarly, sarcastic men (delightful fellows, personally) who sat in
cubbyholes and read unremittingly. Afterward, at night, they set down
a few thoughtful, biting words about what they had read. These were
printed. Publishers who perused them felt as if knives had been stuck
in their backs. Booksellers who read them looked up to ask each other
pathetically: “But what does it _mean_?” Book readers who read them
resolved that the publication of a new book should be, for them, the
signal to read an old one. It was good for the secondhand trade.
We’ve changed all that, or, if we haven’t, we’re going to. Take a chap
who runs what is called a “book section.” This is a separate section
or supplement forming part of a daily or Sunday newspaper. Its pages
are magazine size--half the size of newspaper pages. They number from
eight to twenty-eight, depending on the season and the advertising. The
essential thing to realize about such a section is that it requires an
editor to run it.
It does not require a literary man, or woman, at all. The editor of
such a section need have no special education in the arts or letters.
He must have judgment, of course, and if he has not some taste for
literary matters he may not enjoy his work as he will if he has that
taste. But high-browism is fatal.
Can our editor “review” a book? Perhaps not. It is no matter. Maybe he
knows a good review when he sees it, which will matter a good deal.
Maybe he can get capable people to deal with the books for him. Which
will matter more than anything else on earth in the handling of his
book section.
A section will most certainly require, to run it, a man who can tell
a good review (another word-survival) and who can get good reviewers.
It will require a man, or woman, with a sharp, clear and very broad
viewpoint. Such exist. What do we mean--viewpoint?
The right conception, it seems to us, starts with the proposition that
a new book is news (sometimes an old one is news too) and should be
dealt with as such. Perhaps, we are dealing only with a state of mind,
in all this, but states of mind are important. They are the only states
where self-determination is a sure thing. To get on:
Your literary editor is like unto a city editor, an individual whose
desk is usually not so far away but that you can study him in his
habitat. The city editor tries to distinguish the big news from the
little news. The literary editor will wisely do the same. What is big
news in the world of books? Well, a book that appears destined to be
read as widely fifty years hence as it is to-day on publication is big
news. And a book that will be read immediately by 100,000 people is
bigger news. People who talk about news often overlook the ephemeral
side of it. Much of the newsiness and importance of news resides in
its transiency. What is news to-day isn’t news to-morrow. But to-day
100,000 people, more or less, will want to know about it.
Illustration: Two events happen on the same day. One of them will be
noted carefully in histories written fifty years hence, but it affects,
and interests, at the hour of its occurrence very few persons. Of
course it is news, but there may easily, at that hour, be much bigger.
For another event occurring on that same day, though of a character
which will make it forgotten fifty years later, at once and directly
affects the lives of the hundred thousand.
Parallel: Two books are published on the same day. One of them will be
dissected fifty years later by the H. W. Boyntons and Wilson Folletts
of that time. But the number of persons who will read it within the
twelvemonth of its birth is small--in the hundreds. The other book will
be out of print and unremembered in five years. But within six months
of its publication hundreds of thousands will read it. Among those
hundreds of thousands there will be hundreds, and maybe thousands,
whose thoughts, ideas, opinions will be seriously modified and in some
cases lastingly modified--whose very lives may change trend as a result
of reading that book.
No need to ask which event and which book is the bigger news. News is
not the judgment of posterity on a book or event. News is not even the
sum total of the effects of an event or a book on human society. News
is the immediate importance, or interest, of an event or a book to the
greatest number of people.
Eleanor H. Porter writes a new story. One in every thousand persons
in the United States, or perhaps more, wants to know about it, and
at once. Isidor MacDougal (as Frank M. O’Brien would say) writes a
literary masterpiece. Not one person in 500,000 cares, or would care
even if the subject matter were made comprehensible to him. The oldtime
“reviewer” would write three solid columns about Isidor MacDougal’s
work. The present-day literary editor puts it in competent hands for a
simplified description to be printed later; and meanwhile he slaps Mrs.
Porter’s novel on his front page.