FLAWS IN THE SPUR

"Exploits, however splendidly achieved, come, by length of time, to

be less known to fame, or even forgotten among posterity. In this

manner the renown of many kings has faded, and their deeds have sunk

with them into the grave where their bodies lie buried,--deeds that

had been performed with great magnificence when unanimous applause

set them up as models before the people. The ancient Greeks, aware of

this, were wise enough to use the pen as a remedy against oblivion."

_10._

_Flaws in the Spur_

§ 88

The literary artist plays, I had said, not merely in such fashions as I

had enumerated. He plays, even over and above all this, with the notion

that his self-diversions are altruistic and for the large benefit of

posterity. This idea is, to the considerate, inexplicable: but nobody

need seriously question its potency. "Fame is the spur," as Milton some

while since observed, that very often rowels the artist into doing

rather objectionably painstaking work.

For custom assumes that time deals very carefully with reading-matter,

omnisciently discarding the trash, and preserving to outlast a kingdom

or two that which is finest. And probably the notion of this posthumous

atonement for the current era's stupidity has heartened, in every era,

the creative writer who viewed with a shared seriousness his craft and

his income.

One may permissibly wonder, none the less, if time does right all

unfailingly, in quite this taken-for-granted fashion. The present

generation is the utmost that has thus far been produced in the way of

posterity. It seems, at least, remarkable that we who have made the

Saturday Evening Post a literary success second only to the Telephone

Book should be the clear-eyed cognoscenti to whom dead poets appealed;

and that it was in our standards of criticism they invested their

life's labor and confidence. For _Les Contes Drolatiques_ were,

really, written for the beguilement of Dr. Brander Matthews[11] and

it was with an eye upon Mr. H.L. Mencken that à Kempis compiled the

_Imitation of Christ_.

§ 89

Now, not as that all-righting posterity do we approach, of course,

the books we actually read. Nobody expects that our judgments of

current literature be perennially brazen when two or three unbend in

talk about that merchandise which is sold in the same "department" as

stationery and string and glue. The rub is, rather, that our chief

"classics" appear to have been selected and handed down to fame by

the long arm of coincidence. That which remains to us of Greek and

Roman literature composes by general consent our greatest treasure,

the treasure which time has most thoroughly tested and approved. And

it is precisely here that one finds least cause to suspect time of

any entangling alliance with justice. There is no vaguest reason to

suppose that of the Greek and Roman writers we have preserved, by any

standards, what was best worth keeping; nor that of such authors as

Æschylos and Aristophanes of whom oblivion has spared more than the

name we have retained the masterworks. We cherish, instead, each scrap

that accident has made peerless by the destruction of its betters.... I

might go on to speak, even more tediously, of Sappho and Petronius and

Plutarch, and of Virgil's foiled endeavors to destroy the latter part

of his _Æneid_--and about the dream that revealed the hiding place

of Dante's lost cantos, and about John Warburton's cook, and about how

the Bible came by its present contents,--to show through what queer

accidents the world's chief "classics," the books which are likely

always to remain in theory man's finest literary achievements, have

been made just what they are. But the point is that they might quite

as easily have been something else. The point is that they have not

earned their present and probably perpetual rank by their pre-eminence

in special qualities, nor by any æsthetic principle whatever. And if

the supreme names and masterpieces of the world's literature have

been tagged as such by justice,--which always remains just barely

possible,--it was done without removing her bandage, in the hazards of

a game of blind man's buff.

But I refrain in charity from such pedantic considerations. Here is

real need, though, to point out that before printing became pandemic

the only way in which anybody's writing won a chance of survival was

by some other person's finding its matter sufficiently congenial

to be at pains to make a copy of it. In nature, that which most

rapturously recorded the inane struck home to most bosoms, upon the

chronic principle that still procures admirers for the philosophy of

Dr. Frank Crane,[12] and for the novels of Floyd and Ethel Dell:[13]

so, from the first, have long odds favored earnest mediocrity.... To

the vitality of the mediocre I shall return. Meanwhile that dangerous

invention of Gutenberg's has changed all; and has ensured a fair

chance of perpetuity for that which is excellent, provided always this

excellence be not swept away unnoted and hidden by the spume and froth

of the torrential river it floats in, that ever-passing deluge of the

current books. Sometimes befalls a favoring miracle of salvage, and

such dissimilar lost argosies as those of Samuel Butler and Herman

Melville return upstream with flying colors. But who may say how deep,

how irretrievably, their betters may not lie sunken? or can gravely

assert that literary permanence is in any very general demand among

the buyers or publishers or writers of new books?... Indeed, I know of

no class of men which quite whole-heartedly desires the production and

formal recognizing of any more "classics": since even those who care

for fine literature cannot but obscurely feel that there is already a

deal more of it existent than any human being can hope to assimilate;

and that already the literary pantheon of the self-respecting is

thronged with gods whose virtues we are compelled, in this limited

lifetime, to accept as an article of faith. There is, for example,

Defoe or Richardson--or, of more recent hierarchs, Mr. Thomas Hardy or

Mr. Joseph Conrad,--before the shrine of each of whom many are zealous

to pass with every form of respect which does not entail stopping. And

I suspect, if the persons who cry up _Don Quixote_ were afforded

a choice between silence and reading every line of this world-famous

"classic," there would no longer be any need to think an instant before

you pronounce its name.

§ 90

But I spoke of the vitality of the mediocre. The quality which makes

for acknowledged greatness in a writer is--I know not how many

textbooks have assured us,--the universality of his appeal. His ideas

are, in brief, the ideas which the majority of persons find acceptable;

and Shakespeare has been praised, for once with absolute justice,

as "the myriad-minded," because myriads have always had just such a

mind as his. The writer of "classics," in short, has need of quite

honest and limited thinking, and of an ability to utter platitudes

with that wholesome belief in their importance which no hypocrisy nor

art can ever mimic.... Of the letters of a foreign nation nobody can

speak without some danger of magnifying his everyday folly. But it

appears safe here to point out that the main treasures of our national

literature, including its British tributaries, really are, when

considered in the light of the ideas they express, rather startlingly

silly. The "ideas" of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, when once

looked at without prejudice, appear to wander sheepishly from the

platitudinous to the imbecile, the while that their "stories" rove, in

somewhat more the manner of the mountain goat, about the heights of

idiocy. And when you compare the reality with the ideas which Scott and

Thackeray and Dickens quite gravely expressed about human existence,

the incongruity breathes more of pathos than of mirth: for these

novelists expressed the usual ideas.

Most persons really do believe, for example, that complete and abiding

happiness is to be won by marriage until they have tried it: and,

for that matter, widows have been known to carry this romanticism to

the extreme of taking a second husband. And most persons do honestly

believe that, in the outcome, wickedness is punished and virtue

is rewarded (again) with a complete and abiding happiness: and in

consequence of this belief most persons make it a point in social

intercourse to check their natural, not infrequent impulses toward

rape and murder. Most persons do, in fact, for various reasons, think

it best to be "good"; and do expect, for equally various reasons, to

be happy by and by. Now, with hardly an exception, the concededly

"classic" writers have, without any detectable scepticism, set forth

such popular notions, with every fit adornment of rhetoric and cunning

diction: and their ideas have endured for the plain reason that they

were endurable.

§ 91

Yet here again, I am afraid, the fool is answered according to his

folly. It is, when you think of it, a rather dreadful fate to become a

classic. Once the writer is thus deified, his private character is the

first burnt offering. He has well hidden himself beneath the effigy he

found diverting; he rests thereunder, untroubled: but about his tomb

frisk commentators obviously raised, by a superior education, from

that troglodytic race which enlivens the public privies with verse.

For his cult has need of a legend, and prefers a highly colored epopee

of lechery and sexual curiosa, such as affords vicarious outlet to

those desires which we imprison fearfully in ourselves, and reveals the

demigod to be no better than anybody else. So Mary Fitton and Georgina

Hogarth and Mrs. Brookfield are dragged into the saga: stout volumes

are devoted to proving that Wordsworth begot a bastard, or that Byron

was caught in incest with his sister; nobody appears able to write

about Molière without suggesting that his wife was also very probably

his daughter: and all our literary gossip becomes a whispered and

sniggered ritual of phallic worship.

Nor do many of the auctorially great escape calumny in the form of a

Complete Edition, wherein their self-confessed failures at writing,

and the chips and rubbish of the workshop, and the rough draughts and

notes designed for the waste-basket, and the politic ephemeræ into

which most writers are allured by kindness and advertising purposes,

are piddlingly amassed to be bound up, in pompous scavengery, with

all the unsigned refuse from the back files of magazines which can

be "attributed" to the victim. None other of the dead has even

his appointed executors combined to convict him of idiocy. And of

course those less put-upon immortals who are recollected, however

infrequently, by virtue of one book alone are but too apt to get

into some such collection as Everyman's Library, and have the upshot

of their existence identified with the twaddle and smug tediums of

Trollope and Jane Austen and Mary Cowden Clarke.

And the writer who is raised to the peerage of the remembered dead

is likewise granted an estate, commensurate with his dignity, in the

fields of human aversion. Luckless typesetters have to read every word

of his books; in your library he usurps grudged shelfroom in the bright

armor of a binding too handsome to be relegated to the dustheap of any

married man; the oppressed young have his loathed archaisms included in

their "parallel reading" at school, where also they are sometimes put

to the _peine dure et forte_ of "parsing" him; in women's clubs he

incurs the stigma of being quoted with approval from the platform, by

persons in the bankruptcy of mind appropriate to that deadly eminence;

and dear old bishops likewise quote him in their sermons, utilizing

his dreams as hypnotics.... He becomes, in fine, a nuisance, and is

thought of with mingled condescension and haziness and dislike. And

it appears, to the considerate, a prodigality of currishness, thus in

so many ways to "beat the bones of the buried" because their outcast

owner once voiced memorably the common beliefs and hopes,--the tonic

fallacies, the sustaining delusions,--which keep a vigorous heart in

the ribs, and marrow in the bones, of all that are not buried, not yet.

Here is no need to assume, however, that every classic author has from

the beginning been commonplace in absolutely everything. It may happen,

indeed, that a writer putting forth an unpopularly rational thought

may have his heresy so generally assailed and so often controverted as

to make it sufficiently hackneyed for wide acceptance: but mediocrity,

even in "daringness" and "unconventionality," thrives from the first;

and is the firmlier assured of posterity's respectful reprinting.

And the display of uncommon mentality is, as a rule, as fatal to the

literary life of a book as it is to the physical life of man.

§ 92

For there really does seem to be over all a force--to be labelled what

you will,--that is hostile to the undue development, in any direction,

of man's mind. Here death is not directly involved: rather, does it

appear to be life which is resolute to use men within very inflexible

limits.... And so I now incline to dismiss those earlier notions as

to nothing being apparent anywhere except the operation and products

of death. I begin to play with the fancy that life is indeed aiming

at something quite definite; and that the wise man's part therein is

to be patient, to cling to mediocrity, and to get bread and children,

and presently to die, with no more of active discomfort than may be

unavoidable.

It well may be, I reflect, that all is not at loose ends; and that

some scheme of happenings is fore-ordained; and that we serve in it,

somehow, when we live tranquilly and propagate; since, certainly, the

desire to do just these two things is the one human desire encountered

everywhere.

And perhaps--I yet further speculate,--the phenomena called "literary

genius" and "artistic ability" are vexatious little mishaps, a trifle

gone wrong, in the broad working out of a plan which they minutely

hamper.... So the contretemps is remedied. The person afflicted with

"genius" is removed, be it by his other diseases or by his fellows'

natural dislike of him, it hardly matters: either way, there is by

ordinary in his removal a smack of haste: and you will note that,

whether in polity or mercy, it is somehow provided that his children

do not inherit his affliction.... So does life seem to keep her pawns

from errancy. So does she seem to restrict them, with now and then

some show of pettishness, to the arena and service of her large and dim

and patient gaming: and wisdom bids us emulate this patience, in the

time that we get bread and children, and strive to die with no more of

active discomfort than may be unavoidable.

And yet, even so, in the bared teeth of outraged reason, no one of us

rests quite content to be a mere transmitter of semen, and to serve

as one of many millions of instruments in life's inexplicable labor,

used for a little while as such, and then put by, worn out and finished

with forever. We appeal against oblivion. And not only does the

shatter-pated artist appeal: the Pharaohs have filed pyramidic caveats,

the best-thought-of business-men yet enter demurrers in the form of

public libraries: there is no tomb-stone however modest but insanely

appeals to posterity to keep in mind somebody's dates of birth and

death and middle name.

For we will to continue here, in the world known to us, to continue

if only as syllables. We all will not to be forgotten utterly by

those that must so soon inherit our familiar dear estate of tedium

and muddle-headedness and fret and failure; and that in our places

will get bread and children; and that after our going will in our

beds be striving to die with no more of active discomfort than may be

unavoidable.

Yet here is an odd thing: we can pretend to offer no example worth

the following, not even any salutary instance of just what to avoid;

nor can we, in any of the limbos which have been divinely revealed,

thus far, derive from being so remembered one minim of profit. We are

spurred by neither altruism nor self-seeking; the counsellor that

persuades to the appeal remains anonymous: and it seems that, here

again, some power which mocks at reason, or at least at human reason,

is moving us to serve unknown but, one suspects, not unappointed ends.

For we do not know, either here or elsewhere, what ends may be

appointed: but we do know, I think, that every wise man will avoid too

much of guesswork, in the brief while that he gets bread and children,

and patiently foreplans to die with no more of active discomfort than

is unavoidable.

§ 93

Thus, then, I reflected, now that I approached my summing up, the

writer who is sustained by the notion of his books' being perpetual

things cannot, after two minutes of honest thought, believe himself

to be sustained also by altruism, nor by any faith in the superior

discernment of posterity. Upon no ground perceptible to me could reason

detect, the instant that reason weighed the present rate and direction

of man's progress, any marked likelihood of posterity's being in

anything more logical than is that contemporaneous, so huge and so

depressingly unimpressed audience which every artist must perforce

contemn. Posterity in its approach to literary matters would probably

muddle forward, as man has always done, upon humanity's time-tested

crutches of hearsay and stupidity. The men who after our departure

inherited the gray tedium of man's daily living would keep some of our

books (but not really read them), and others of our books they would

destroy, not in any haphazard fashion, but acting always under the

adamantean human compulsion to be illogical about everything.

Not any art or painstaking, nor certainly any accident of "genius,"

could enable a book to live. Chance alone appeared to do that, and

then only in a very limited sense. And in this final, frantic, and

yet optimistic appeal to posterity--here, too, man clung to his great

racial custom of being illogical about everything; and every serious

author triumphantly attested himself to be, after all, quite human.

That seemed the conclusion of the matter....

So I ran over my enlinked deductions. Man lived, for the major part of

his conceded time, a meagre and monotonous and unsatisfying existence:

this he alleviated by endlessly concocting fictions which bedrugged

and diverted him. The artist, and in particular the literary artist,

like every other person animate, attempted to bedrug and divert

primarily himself; which end the literary artist gained, as a rule, by

picturing himself as figuring enviably in unfamiliar surroundings, and

as making sport with the three martinets that he, in common with all

men at bottom, most genuinely abhorred,--that is, with common-sense

and piety and death. Moreover, he diverted himself by playing with

such human ideas as he found entertaining: and he played too with

the notion of hoodwinking posterity into accepting and treasuring

his highly imaginative portrait of himself. And the outcome of his

multifold playing--of that interminable self-diversion which he, quite

unsmilingly, called his "work,"--was always unpredictable, always

chance-guided, and, in any case, was of no benefit or hurt to him by

and by, and was never of grave importance to anybody else. That seemed

to be the whole truth about the literary artist. That seemed the gist

of the epilogue I had now evolved for the Biography of Dom Manuel's

life, and was submitting to myself to-night as the explanation of why I

had given over so many years to writing.

Yes, all my premises seemed true: my deductions appeared to hold

together. My logic and its upshot, in any event, contented me. What, I

had begun by asking, does the author get out of it all? Well, I had

found that unknown quantity; the equation now was solved; and _x_

amounted to, exactly, nothing. That was the mathematics of it: only, as

you may recall, it had been revealed to me, through the aid of my small

son, that mathematics too amounted to, exactly, nothing. And, besides,

here also, in reaching this negation, I had most gratifyingly attained,

in the same moment that I discredited, the aim of every valid author.

For I had found, I reflected, even here, some rather interesting ideas

to play with.... Yes, and my argument ended, neatly, with the day: for

the clock behind me was now striking midnight....