PREJUDICES
SECOND SERIES
By H. L. MENCKEN
JONATHAN CAPE
11 GOWER STREET
LONDON
1921
CONTENTS
I THE NATIONAL LETTERS, 9
1. Prophets and Their Visions, 9
2. The Answering Fact, 14
3. The Ashes of New England, 18
4. The Ferment Underground, 25
5. In the Literary Abattoir, 32
6. Underlying Causes, 39
7. The Lonesome Artist, 54
8. The Cultural Background, 65
9. Under the Campus Pump, 78
10. The Intolerable Burden, 87
11. Epilogue, 98
II ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY, 102
III THE SAHARA OF THE BOZART, 136
IV THE DIVINE AFFLATUS, 155
V SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATION OF A POPULAR VIRTUE, 172
VI EXEUNT OMNES, 180
VII THE ALLIED ARTS, 194
1. On Music-Lovers, 194
2. Opera, 197
3. The Music of To-morrow, 201
4. Tempo di Valse, 204
5. The Puritan as Artist, 206
6. The Human Face, 206
7. The Cerebral Mime, 208
VIII THE CULT OF HOPE, 211
IX THE DRY MILLENNIUM, 219
1. The Holy War, 219
2. The Lure of Babylon, 222
3. Cupid and Well-Water, 225
4. The Triumph of Idealism, 226
X APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME, 229
1. The Nature of Love, 229
2. The Incomparable Buzzsaw, 236
3. Women as Spectacles, 238
4. Woman and the Artist, 240
5. Martyrs, 243
6. The Burnt Child, 244
7. The Supreme Comedy, 244
8. A Hidden Cause, 245
9. Bad Workmanship, 245
PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES
I. THE NATIONAL LETTERS
1
_Prophets and Their Visions_
It is convenient to begin, like the gentlemen of God, with a glance at
a text or two. The first, a short one, is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's
celebrated oration, "The American Scholar," delivered before the Phi
Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge on August 31st, 1837. Emerson was then
thirty-four years old and almost unknown in his own country:, though
he had already published "Nature" and established his first contacts
with Landor and Carlyle. But "The American Scholar" brought him into
instant notice at home, partly as man of letters but more importantly
as seer and prophet, and the fame thus founded has endured without much
diminution, at all events in New England, to this day. Oliver Wendell
Holmes, giving words to what was undoubtedly the common feeling,
hailed the address as the intellectual declaration of independence of
the American people, and that judgment, amiably passed on by three
generations of pedagogues, still survives in the literature books. I
quote from the first paragraph:
Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the
learning of other lands, draws to a close.... Events,
actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves.
Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age,
as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames
in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the
pole-star for a thousand years?
This, as I say, was in 1837. Thirty-three years later, in 1870, Walt
Whitman echoed the prophecy in his even more famous "Democratic
Vistas." What he saw in his vision and put into his gnarled and gasping
prose was
a class of native authors, literatuses, far different, far
higher in grade, than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern,
fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole
mass of American morality, taste, belief, breathing into
it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting
politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage,
with results inside and underneath the elections of
Presidents or Congress--radiating, begetting appropriate
teachers, schools, manners, and, as its grandest result,
accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches
and their clergy have hitherto accomplished, and without
which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly,
than a house will stand without a substratum,) a religious
and moral character beneath the political and productive and
intellectual bases of the States.
And out of the vision straightway came the prognostication:
The promulgation and belief in such a class or order--a
new and greater literatus order--its possibility, (nay,
certainty,) underlies these entire speculations.... Above
all previous lands, a great original literature is sure to
become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the
sole reliance,) of American democracy.
Thus Whitman in 1870, the time of the first draft of "Democratic
Vistas." He was of the same mind, and said so, in 1888, four years
before his death. I could bring up texts of like tenor in great number,
from the years before 1837, from those after 1888, and from every
decade between. The dream of Emerson, though the eloquence of its
statement was new and arresting, embodied no novel projection of the
fancy; it merely gave a sonorous _Wald-horn_ tone to what had been
dreamed and said before. You will find almost the same high hope, the
same exuberant confidence in the essays of the elder Channing and
in the "Lectures on American Literature" of Samuel Lorenzo Knapp,
LL.D., the first native critic of beautiful letters--the primordial
tadpole of all our later Mores, Brownells, Phelpses, Mabies, Brander
Matthewses and other such grave and glittering fish. Knapp believed,
like Whitman long after him, that the sheer physical grandeur of the
New World would inflame a race of bards to unprecedented utterance.
"What are the Tibers and Scamanders," he demanded, "measured by the
Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illysus or Avon by
the Connecticut or the Potomack? Whenever a nation wills it, prodigies
are born." That is to say, prodigies literary and ineffable as well as
purely material--prodigies aimed, in his own words, at "the olympick
crown" as well as at mere railroads, ships, wheatfields, droves of
hogs, factories and money. Nor were Channing and Knapp the first of
the haruspices. Noah Webster, the lexicographer, who "taught millions
to spell but not one to sin," had seen the early starlight of the same
Golden Age so early as 1789, as the curious will find by examining
his "Dissertations on the English Language," a work fallen long since
into undeserved oblivion. Nor was Whitman, taking sober second thought
exactly a century later, the last of them. Out of many brethren of our
own day, extravagantly articulate in print and among the chautauquas,
I choose one--not because his hope is of purest water, but precisely
because, like Emerson, he dilutes it with various discreet where-ases.
He is Van Wyck Brooks, a young man far more intelligent, penetrating
and hospitable to fact than any of the reigning professors--a critic
who is sharply differentiated from them, indeed, by the simple
circumstance that he has information and sense. Yet this extraordinary
Mr. Brooks, in his "Letters and Leadership," published in 1918,
rewrites "The American Scholar" in terms borrowed almost bodily
from "Democratic Vistas"--that is to say, he prophesies with Emerson
and exults with Whitman. First there is the Emersonian doctrine of
the soaring individual made articulate by freedom and realizing "the
responsibility that lies upon us, each in the measure of his own gift."
And then there is Whitman's vision of a self-interpretative democracy,
forced into high literary adventures by Joseph Conrad's "obscure inner
necessity," and so achieving a "new synthesis adaptable to the unique
conditions of our life." And finally there is the specific prediction,
the grandiose, Adam Forepaugh mirage: "We shall become a luminous
people, dwelling in the light and sharing our light." ...
As I say, the roll of such soothsayers might be almost endlessly
lengthened. There is, in truth, scarcely a formal discourse upon the
national letters (forgetting, perhaps, Barrett Wendell's sour threnody
upon the New England _Aufklärung)_ that is without some touch of this
previsional exultation, this confident hymning of glories to come,
this fine assurance that American literature, in some future always
ready to dawn, will burst into so grand a flowering that history will
cherish its loveliest blooms even above such salient American gifts to
culture as the moving-picture, the phonograph, the New Thought and the
bi-chloride tablet. If there was ever a dissenter from the national
optimism, in this as in other departments, it was surely Edgar Allan
Poe--without question the bravest and most original, if perhaps also
the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have
produced. And yet even Poe, despite his general habit of disgust and
dismay, caught a flash or two of that engaging picture--even Poe, for
an instant, in 1846, thought that he saw the beginnings of a solid
and autonomous native literature, its roots deep in the soil of the
republic--as you will discover by turning to his forgotten essay on J.
G. C. Brainard, a thrice-forgotten doggereleer of Jackson's time. Poe,
of course, was too cautious to let his imagination proceed to details;
one feels that a certain doubt, a saving peradventure or two, played
about the unaccustomed vision as he beheld it. But, nevertheless, he
unquestionably beheld it....
2
_The Answering Fact_
Now for the answering fact. How has the issue replied to these
visionaries? It has replied in a way that is manifestly to the
discomfiture of Emerson as a prophet, to the dismay of Poe as a
pessimist disarmed by transient optimism, and to the utter collapse
of Whitman. We have, as every one knows, produced no such "new and
greater literatus order" as that announced by old Walt. We have given
a gaping world no books that "radiate," and surely none intelligibly
comparable to stars and constellations. We have achieved no prodigies
of the first class, and very few of the second class, and not many of
the third and fourth classes. Our literature, despite several false
starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for
its respectable mediocrity. Its typical great man, in our own time, has
been Howells, as its typical great man a generation ago was Lowell,
and two generations ago, Irving. Viewed largely, its salient character
appears as a sort of timorous flaccidity, an amiable hollowness.
In bulk it grows more and more formidable, in ease and decorum it
makes undoubted progress, and on the side of mere technic, of the
bald capacity to write, it shows an ever-widening competence. But
when one proceeds from such agencies and externals to the intrinsic
substance, to the creative passion within, that substance quickly
reveals itself as thin and watery, and that passion fades to something
almost puerile. In all that mass of suave and often highly diverting
writing there is no visible movement toward a distinguished and
singular excellence, a signal national quality, a ripe and stimulating
flavor, or, indeed, toward any other describable goal. _What_ one
sees is simply a general irresolution, a pervasive superficiality.
There is no sober grappling with fundamentals, but only a shy sporting
on the surface; there is not even any serious approach, such as
Whitman dreamed of, to the special experiences and emergencies of the
American people. When one turns to any other national literature--to
Russian literature, say, or French, or German or Scandinavian--one
is conscious immediately of a definite attitude toward the primary
mysteries of existence, the unsolved and ever-fascinating problems
at the bottom of human life, and of a definite preoccupation with
some of them, and a definite way of translating their challenge into
drama. These attitudes and preoccupations raise a literature above
mere poetizing and tale-telling; they give it dignity and importance;
above all, they give it national character. But it is precisely here
that the literature of America, and especially the later literature,
is most colorless and inconsequential. As if paralyzed by the national
fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath
the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing
with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary
materials. One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of
no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no
organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly
self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability, a
submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble,
uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.
It was so in the great days and it is so to-day. There has always
been hope and there has always been failure. Even the most optimistic
prophets of future glories have been united, at all times, in their
discontent with the here and now. "The mind of this country," said
Emerson, speaking of what was currently visible in 1837, "is taught
to aim at low objects.... There is no work for any but the decorous
and the complaisant.... Books are written ... by men of talent ... who
start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight
of principles." And then, turning to the way out: "The office of the
scholar (_i.e.,_ of Whitman's 'literatus') is to cheer, to raise and to
guide men by showing them _facts amid appearances._" Whitman himself,
a full generation later, found that office still unfilled. "Our
fundamental want to-day in the United States," he said, "with closest,
amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a
class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatuses,
far different, far higher in grade, than any yet known"--and so on, as
I have already quoted him. And finally, to make an end of the prophets,
there is Brooks, with nine-tenths of his book given over, not to his
prophecy--it is crowded, indeed, into the last few pages--but to a
somewhat heavy mourning over the actual scene before him. On the side
of letters, the æsthetic side, the side of ideas, we present to the
world at large, he says, "the spectacle of a vast, undifferentiated
herd of good-humored animals"--Knights of Pythias, Presbyterians,
standard model Ph.D.'s, readers of the _Saturday Evening Post,_
admirers of Richard Harding Davis and O. Henry, devotees of Hamilton
Wright Mabie's "white list" of books, members of the Y. M. C. A. or the
Drama League, weepers at chautauquas, wearers of badges, 100 per cent.
patriots, children of God. Poe I pass over; I shall turn to him again
later on. Nor shall I repeat the parrotings of Emerson and Whitman in
the jeremiads of their innumerable heirs and assigns. What they all
establish is what is already obvious: that American thinking, when
it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself
with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and
superficial--that it evades the genuinely serious problems of life and
art as if they were stringently taboo--that the outward virtues it
undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of
courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and
often very trashy dilettantism.
3
_The Ashes of New England_
The current scene is surely depressing enough. What one observes
is a literature in three layers, and each inordinately doughy and
uninspiring--each almost without flavor or savor. It is hard to say,
with much critical plausibility, which layer deserves to be called
the upper, but for decorum's sake the choice may be fixed upon that
which meets with the approval of the reigning Lessings. This is the
layer of the novels of the late Howells, Judge Grant, Alice Brown and
the rest of the dwindling survivors of New England _Kultur,_ of the
brittle, academic poetry of Woodberry and the elder Johnson, of the
tea-party essays of Crothers, Miss Repplier and company, and of the
solemn, highly judicial, coroner's inquest criticism of More, Brownell,
Babbitt and their imitators. Here we have manner, undoubtedly. The
thing is correctly done; it is never crude or gross; there is in
it a faint perfume of college-town society. But when this highly
refined and attenuated manner is allowed for what remains is next to
nothing. One never remembers a character in the novels of these aloof
and de-Americanized Americans; one never encounters an idea in their
essays; one never carries away a line out of their poetry. It is
literature as an academic exercise for talented grammarians, almost as
a genteel recreation for ladies and gentlemen of fashion--the exact
equivalent, in the field of letters, of eighteenth century painting and
German _Augenmusik._
What ails it, intrinsically, is a dearth of intellectual audacity and
of æsthetic passion. Running through it, and characterizing the work
of almost every man and woman producing it, there is an unescapable
suggestion of the old Puritan suspicion of the fine arts as such--of
the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for good citizens only when
some ulterior and superior purpose is carried into them. This purpose,
naturally enough, most commonly shows a moral tinge. The aim of poetry,
it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it
joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The
essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The
novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim
is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.
The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of æsthetic feeling. He
has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable
of something approaching a purely æsthetic emotion. But he fears this
æsthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business
in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of
conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good
Man may safely have traffic with it only when it is broken to moral
uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it
is purged of gusto. It is precisely this gusto that one misses in all
the work of the New England school, and in all the work of the formal
schools that derive from it. One observes in such a fellow as Dr. Henry
Van Dyke an excellent specimen of the whole clan. He is, in his way,
a genuine artist. He has a hand for pretty verses. He wields a facile
rhetoric. He shows, in indiscreet moments, a touch of imagination.
But all the while he remains a sound Presbyterian, with one eye on
the devil. He is a Presbyterian first and an artist second, which is
just as comfortable as trying to be a Presbyterian first and a chorus
girl second. To such a man it must inevitably appear that a Molière, a
Wagner, a Goethe or a Shakespeare was more than a little bawdy.
The criticism that supports this decaying caste of literary Brahmins
is grounded almost entirely upon ethical criteria. You will spend a
long while going through the works of such typical professors as More,
Phelps, Boynton, Burton, Perry, Brownell and Babbitt before ever you
encounter a purely æsthetic judgment upon an æsthetic question. It
is almost as if a man estimating daffodils should do it in terms of
artichokes. Phelps' whole body of "we church-goers" criticism--the most
catholic and tolerant, it may be said in passing, that the faculty can
show--consists chiefly of a plea for correctness, and particularly
for moral correctness; he never gets very far from "the axiom of the
moral law." Brownell argues eloquently for standards that would bind
an imaginative author as tightly as a Sunday-school super-intendent
is bound by the Ten Commandments and the Mann Act. Sherman tries to
save Shakespeare for the right-thinking by proving that he was an Iowa
Methodist--a member of his local Chamber of Commerce, a contemner of
Reds, an advocate of democracy and the League of Nations, a patriotic
dollar-a-year-man during the Armada scare. Elmer More devotes himself,
year in and year out, to denouncing the Romantic movement, _i. e.,_
the effort to emancipate the artist from formulæ and categories, and
so make him free to dance with arms and legs. And Babbitt, to make
an end, gives over his days and his nights to deploring Rousseau's
anarchistic abrogation of "the veto power" over the imagination,
leading to such "wrongness" in both art and life that it threatens
"to wreck civilization." In brief, the alarms of schoolmasters. Not
many of them deal specifically with the literature that is in being.
It is too near to be quite nice. To More or Babbitt only death can
atone for the primary offense of the artist. But what they preach
nevertheless has its echoes contemporaneously, and those echoes, in the
main, are woefully falsetto. I often wonder what sort of picture of
These States is conjured up by foreigners who read, say, Crothers, Van
Dyke, Babbitt, the later Winston Churchill, and the old maids of the
Freudian suppression school. How can such a foreigner, moving in those
damp, asthmatic mists, imagine such phenomena as Roosevelt, Billy
Sunday, Bryan, the Becker case, the I. W. W., Newport, Palm Beach, the
University of Chicago, Chicago itself--the whole, gross, glittering,
excessively dynamic, infinitely grotesque, incredibly stupendous drama
of American life?
As I have said, it is not often that the _ordentlichen Professoren_
deign to notice contemporary writers, even of their own austere kidney.
In all the Shelburne Essays there is none on Howells, or on Churchill,
or on Mrs. Wharton; More seems to think of American literature as
expiring with Longfellow and Donald G. Mitchell. He has himself hinted
that in the department of criticism of criticism there enters into
the matter something beyond mere aloof ignorance. "I soon learned (as
editor of the pre-Bolshevik _Nation),_" he says, "that it was virtually
impossible to get fair consideration for a book written by a scholar
not connected with a university from a reviewer so connected." This
class consciousness, however, should not apply to artists, who are
admittedly inferior to professors, and it surely does not show itself
in such men as Phelps and Spingarn, who seem to be very eager to prove
that they are not professorial. Yet Phelps, in the course of a long
work on the novel, pointedly omits all mention of such men as Dreiser,
and Spingarn, as the aforesaid Brooks has said, "appears to be less
inclined even than the critics with whom he is theoretically at war
to play an active, public part in the secular conflict of darkness
and light." When one comes to the _Privat-Dozenten_ there is less
remoteness, but what takes the place of it is almost as saddening. To
Sherman and Percy Boynton the one aim of criticism seems to be the
enforcement of correctness--in Emerson's phrase, the upholding of "some
great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or
war, or man"--e. g., Puritanism, democracy, monogamy, the League of
Nations, the Wilsonian piffle. Even among the critics who escape the
worst of this schoolmastering frenzy there is some touch of the heavy
"culture" of the provincial schoolma'm. For example, consider Clayton
Hamilton, M.A., vice-president of the National Institute of Arts and
Letters. Here are the tests he proposes for dramatic critics, _i.
e.,_ for gentlemen chiefly employed in reviewing such characteristic
American compositions as the Ziegfeld Follies, "Up in Mabel's Room,"
"Ben-Hur" and "The Witching Hour":
1. Have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave of Amiens?
2. Have you ever climbed to the Acropolis by moonlight?
3. Have you ever walked with whispers into the hushed
presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini?
What could more brilliantly evoke an image of the eternal Miss Birch,
blue veil flying and Baedeker in hand, plodding along faithfully
through the interminable corridors and catacombs of the Louvre,
the while bands are playing across the river, and young bucks in
three-gallon hats are sparking the gals, and the Jews and harlots
uphold the traditions of French _hig leef_ at Longchamps, and American
deacons are frisked and debauched up on martyrs' hill? The banality of
it is really too exquisite to be borne; the lack of humor is almost
that of a Fifth avenue divine. One seldom finds in the pronunciamentoes
of these dogged professors, indeed, any trace of either Attic or Gallic
salt. When they essay to be jocose, the result is usually simply an
elephantine whimsicality, by the chautauqua out of the _Atlantic
Monthly._ Their satire is mere ill-nature. One finds it difficult to
believe that they have ever read Lewes, or Hazlitt, or, above all,
Saintsbury. I often wonder, in fact, how Saintsbury would fare, an
unknown man, at the hands of, say, Brownell or More. What of his
iconoclastic gayety, his boyish weakness for tweaking noses and pulling
whiskers, his obscene delight in slang?...
4
_The Ferment Underground_
So much for the top layer. The bottom layer is given over to the
literature of Greenwich Village, and by Greenwich Village, of course,
I mean the whole of the advanced wing in letters, whatever the scene
of its solemn declarations of independence and forlorn hopes. Miss Amy
Lowell is herself a fully-equipped and automobile Greenwich Village,
domiciled in Boston amid the crumbling gravestones of the New England
_intelligentsia,_ but often in waspish joy-ride through the hinterland.
Vachel Lindsay, with his pilgrim's staff, is another. There is a third
in Chicago, with _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_ as its Exhibit A; it
is, in fact, the senior of the Village fornenst Washington Square.
Others you will find in far-flung factory towns, wherever there is a
Little Theater, and a couple of local Synges and Chekovs to supply its
stage. St. Louis, before Zoë Akins took flight, had the busiest of
all these Greenwiches, and the most interesting. What lies under the
whole movement is the natural revolt of youth against the pedagogical
Prussianism of the professors. The oppression is extreme, and so the
rebellion is extreme. Imagine a sentimental young man of the provinces,
awaking one morning to the somewhat startling discovery that he is
full of the divine afflatus, and nominated by the hierarchy of hell
to enrich the literature of his fatherland. He seeks counsel and aid.
He finds, on consulting the official treatises on that literature,
that its greatest poet was Longfellow. He is warned, reading More and
Babbitt, that the literatus who lets feeling get into his compositions
is a psychic fornicator, and under German influences. He has formal
notice from Sherman that Puritanism is the lawful philosophy of the
country, and that any dissent from it is treason. He gets the news,
plowing through the New York _Times Book Review,_ the _Nation_ (so far
to the left in its politics, but hugging the right so desperately in
letters!) the _Bookman,_ the _Atlantic_ and the rest, that the salient
artists of the living generation are such masters as Robert Underwood
Johnson, Owen Wister, James Lane Allen, George E. Woodberry, Hamlin
Garland, William Roscoe Thayer and Augustus Thomas, with polite bows
to Margaret Deland, Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow. It slowly dawns
upon him that Robert W. Chambers is an academician and Theodore Dreiser
isn't, that Brian Hooker is and George Sterling isn't, that Henry
Sydnor Harrison is and James Branch Cabell isn't, that "Chimmie Fadden"
Townsend is and Sherwood Anderson isn't.
Is it any wonder that such a young fellow, after one or two sniffs
of that prep-school fog, swings so vastly backward that one finds
him presently in corduroy trousers and a velvet jacket, hammering
furiously upon a pine table in a Macdougal street cellar, his mind
full of malicious animal magnetism against even so amiable an old
maid as Howells, and his discourse full of insane hair-splittings
about _vers libre,_ futurism, spectrism, vorticism, _Expressionismus,
héliogabalisme?_ The thing, in truth, is in the course of nature.
The Spaniards who were outraged by the Palmerism of Torquemada did
not become members of the Church of England; they became atheists.
The American colonists, in revolt against a bad king, did not set up
a good king; they set up a democracy, and so gave every honest man a
chance to become a rogue on his own account. Thus the young literatus,
emerging from the vacuum of Ohio or Arkansas. An early success, as we
shall see, tends to halt and moderate him. He finds that, after all,
there is still a place for him, a sort of asylum for such as he, not
over-populated or very warmly-heated, but nevertheless quite real. But
if his sledding at the start is hard, if the corrective birch finds him
while he is still tender, then he goes, as Andrew Jackson would say,
the whole hog, and another voice is added to the raucous bellowing of
the literary Reds.
I confess that the spectacle gives me some joy, despite the fact
that the actual output of the Village is seldom worth noticing. What
commonly engulfs and spoils the Villagers is their concern with mere
technique. Among them, it goes without saying, are a great many
frauds--poets whose yearning to write is unaccompanied by anything
properly describable as capacity, dramatists whose dramas are simply
Schnitzler and well-water, workers in prose fiction who gravitate
swiftly and inevitably to the machine-made merchandise of the cheap
magazines--in brief, American equivalents of the bogus painters of the
Boul' Mich'. These pretenders, having no ideas, naturally try to make
the most of forms. Half the wars in the Village are over form; content
is taken for granted, or forgotten altogether. The extreme leftists,
in fact, descend to a meaningless gibberish, both in prose and in
verse; it is their last defiance to intellectualism. This childish
concentration upon externals unfortunately tends to debauch the small
minority that is of more or less genuine parts; the good are pulled in
by the bad. As a result, the Village produces nothing that justifies
all the noise it makes. I have yet to hear of a first-rate book coming
out of it, or a short story of arresting quality, or even a poem of
any solid distinction. As one of the editors of a magazine which
specializes in the work of new authors I am in an exceptional position
to report. Probably nine-tenths of the stuff written in the dark dens
and alleys south of the arch comes to my desk soon or late, and I go
through all of it faithfully. It is, in the overwhelming main, jejune
and imitative. The prose is quite without distinction, either in matter
or in manner. The verse seldom gets beyond a hollow audaciousness, not
unlike that of cubist painting. It is not often, indeed, that even
personality is in it; all of the Villagers seem to write alike. "Unless
one is an expert in some detective method," said a recent writer in
_Poetry,_ "one is at a loss to assign correctly the ownership of
much free verse--that is, if one plays fairly and refuses to look at
the signature until one has ventured a guess. It is difficult, for
instance, to know whether Miss Lowell is writing Mr. Bynner's verse, or
whether he is writing hers." Moreover, this monotony keeps to a very
low level. There is no poet in the movement who has produced anything
even remotely approaching the fine lyrics of Miss Reese, Miss Teasdale
and John McClure, and for all its war upon the _cliché_ it can show
nothing to equal the _cliché-free_ beauty of Robert Loveman's "Rain
Song." In the drama the Village has gone further. In Eugene O'Neill,
Rita Wellman and Zoë Akins it offers dramatists who are obviously many
cuts above the well-professored mechanicians who pour out of Prof. Dr.
Baker's _Ibsenfabrik_ at Cambridge. But here we must probably give
the credit, not to any influence residing within the movement itself,
but to mere acts of God. Such pieces as O'Neill's one-acters, Miss
Wellman's "The Gentile Wife" and Miss Akins' extraordinary "Papa" lie
quite outside the Village scheme of things. There is no sign of formal
revolt in them. They are simply first-rate work, done miraculously in a
third-rate land.
But if the rebellion is thus sterile of direct results, and, in more
than one aspect, fraudulent and ridiculous, it is at all events an
evidence of something not to be disregarded, and that something is
the gradual formulation of a challenge to the accepted canons in
letters and to the accepted canon lawyers. The first hoots come from
a tatterdemalion horde of rogues and vagabonds without the gates,
but soon or late, let us hope, they will be echoed in more decorous
quarters, and with much greater effect. The Village, in brief, is an
earnest that somewhere or other new seeds are germinating. Between the
young tutor who launches into letters with imitations of his seminary
chief's imitations of Agnes Repplier's imitations of Charles Lamb, and
the young peasant who tries to get his honest exultations into free
verse there can be no hesitant choice: the peasant is, by long odds,
the sounder artist, and, what is more, the sounder American artist.
Even the shy and somewhat stagey carnality that characterizes the
Village has its high symbolism and its profound uses. It proves that,
despite repressions unmatched in civilization in modern times, there is
still a sturdy animality in American youth, and hence good health. The
poet hugging his Sonia in a Washington square beanery, and so giving
notice to all his world that he is a devil of a fellow, is at least a
better man than the emasculated stripling in a Y. M. C. A. gospel-mill,
pumped dry of all his natural appetites and the vacuum filled with
double-entry book-keeping, business economics and auto-erotism. In
so foul a nest of imprisoned and fermenting sex as the United States,
plain fornication becomes a mark of relative decency.
5
_In the Literary Abattoir_
But the theme is letters, not wickedness. The upper and lower layers
have been surveyed. There remains the middle layer, the thickest and
perhaps the most significant of the three. By the middle layer I mean
the literature that fills the magazines and burdens the book-counters
in the department-stores--the literature adorned by such artists as
Richard Harding Davis, Rex Beach, Emerson Hough, O. Henry, James
Whitcomb Riley, Augustus Thomas, Robert W. Chambers, Henry Sydnor
Harrison, Owen Johnson, Cyrus Townsend Brady, Irvin Cobb and Mary
Roberts Rinehart--in brief, the literature that pays like a bucket-shop
or a soap-factory, and is thus thoroughly American. At the bottom this
literature touches such depths of banality that it would be difficult
to match it in any other country. The "inspirational" and patriotic
essays of Dr. Frank Crane, Orison Sweet Marden, Porter Emerson Browne,
Gerald Stanley Lee, E. S. Martin, Ella Wheeler Wilcox and the Rev. Dr.
Newell Dwight Hillis, the novels of Harold Bell Wright, Eleanor H.
Porter and Gene Stratton-Porter, and the mechanical sentimentalities
in prose and verse that fill the cheap fiction magazines--this stuff
has a native quality that is as unmistakable as that of Mother's Day,
Billy-Sundayism or the Junior Order of United American Mechanics. It
is the natural outpouring of a naïve and yet half barbarous people,
full of delight in a few childish and inaccurate ideas. But it would
be a grave error to assume that the whole of the literature of the
middle layer is of the same infantile quality. On the contrary, a
great deal of it--for example, the work of Mrs. Rinehart, and that
of Corra Harris, Gouverneur Morris, Harold MacGrath and the late O.
Henry--shows an unmistakably technical excellence, and even a certain
civilized sophistication in point of view. Moreover, this literature is
constantly graduating adept professors into something finer, as witness
Booth Tarkington, Zona Gale, Ring W. Lardner and Montague Glass. S. L.
Clemens came out of forty years ago. Nevertheless, its general tendency
is distinctly in the other direction. It seduces by the power of money,
and by the power of great acclaim no less. One constantly observes
the collapse and surrender of writers who started out with aims far
above that of the magazine nabob. I could draw up a long, long list of
such victims: Henry Milner Rideout, Jack London, Owen Johnson, Chester
Bailey Fernald, Hamlin Garland, Will Levington Comfort, Stephen French
Whitman, James Hopper, Harry Leon Wilson, and so on. They had their
fore-runner, in the last generation, in Bret Harte. It is, indeed,
a characteristic American phenomenon for a young writer to score a
success with novel and meritorious work, and then to yield himself to
the best-seller fever, and so disappear down the sewers. Even the man
who struggles to emerge again is commonly hauled back. For example,
Louis Joseph Vance, Rupert Hughes, George Bronson-Howard, and, to
go back a few years, David Graham Phillips and Elbert Hubbard--all
men flustered by high aspiration, and yet all pulled down by the
temptations below. Even Frank Norris showed signs of yielding. The
pull is genuinely powerful. Above lies not only isolation, but also a
dogged and malignant sort of opposition. Below, as Morris has frankly
admitted, there is the place at Aiken, the motor-car, babies, money in
the bank, and the dignity of an important man.
It is a commonplace of the envious to put all the blame upon the
_Saturday Evening Post,_ for in its pages many of the Magdalens of
letters are to be found, and out of its bulging coffers comes much
of the lure. But this is simply blaming the bull for the sins of all
the cows. The _Post,_ as a matter of fact, is a good deal less guilty
than such magazines as the _Cosmopolitan, Hearst's, McClure's_ and
the _Metropolitan,_ not to mention the larger women's magazines. In
the _Post_ one often discerns an effort to rise above the level of
shoe-drummer fiction. It is edited by a man who, almost alone among
editors of the great periodicals of the country, is himself a writer
of respectable skill. It has brought out (after lesser publications
unearthed them) a member of authors of very solid talents, notably
Glass, Lardner and E. W. Howe. It has been extremely hospitable to men
not immediately comprehensible to the mob, for example, Dreiser and
Hergesheimer. Most of all, it has avoided the Barnum-like exploitation
of such native bosh-mongers as Crane, Hillis and Ella Wheeler
Wilcox, and of such exotic mountebanks as D'Annunzio, Hall Caine and
Maeterlinck. In brief, the _Post_ is a great deal better than ever
Greenwich Village and the Cambridge campus are disposed to admit. It
is the largest of all the literary Hog Islands, but it is by no means
the worst. Appealing primarily to the great masses of right-thinking
and unintelligent Americans, it must necessarily print a great deal
of preposterous tosh, but it flavors the mess with not a few things
of a far higher quality, and at its worst it is seldom downright
idiotic. In many of the other great magazines one finds stuff that
it would be difficult to describe in any other words. It is gaudily
romantic, furtively sexual, and full of rubber-stamp situations and
personages--a sort of amalgam of the worst drivel of Marie Corelli,
Elinor Glyn, E. Phillips Oppenheim, William Le Quex and Hall Caine.
This is the literature of the middle layer--the product of the national
Rockefellers and Duponts of letters. This is the sort of thing that the
young author of facile pen is encouraged to manufacture. This is the
material of the best sellers and the movies.
Of late it is the movies that have chiefly provoked its composition:
the rewards they offer are even greater than those held out by the
commercial book-publishers and the train-boy magazines. The point of
view of an author responsive to such rewards was recently set forth
very naively in the _Authors' League Bulletin._ This author undertook,
in a short article, to refute the fallacies of an unknown who ventured
to protest against the movies on the ground that they called only for
bald plots, elementary and generally absurd, and that all the rest of a
sound writer's equipment--"the artistry of his style, the felicity of
his apt expression, his subtlety and thoroughness of observation and
comprehension and sympathy, the illuminating quality of his analysis
of motive and character, even the fundamental skillful development of
the bare plot"--was disdained by the Selznicks, Goldfishes, Zukors and
other such _entrepreneurs,_ and by the overwhelming majority of their
customers. I quote from the reply:
There are some conspicuous word merchants who deal in the
English language, but the general public doesn't clamor
for their wares. They write for the "thinking class."
The élite, the discriminating. As a rule, they scorn the
crass commercialism of the magazines and movies and such
catch-penny devices. However, literary masterpieces live
because they have been and will be read, not by the few, but
by the many. That was true in the time of Homer, and even
to-day the first move made by an editor when he receives a
manuscript, or a gentle reader when he buys a book, or a
T. B. M. when he sinks into an orchestra chair is to look
around for John Henry Plot. If Mr. Plot is too long delayed
in arriving or doesn't come at all, the editor usually sends
regrets, the reader yawns and the tired business man falls
asleep. It's a sad state of affairs and awful tough on art,
but it can't be helped.
Observe the lofty scorn of mere literature--the superior irony at the
expense of everything beyond the bumping of boobs. Note the sound
judgment as to the function and fate of literary masterpieces, e. g.,
"Endymion," "The Canterbury Tales," "Faust," "Typhoon." Give your
eye to the chaste diction--"John Henry Plot," "T. B. M.," "awful
tough," and so on. No doubt you will at once assume that this curious
counterblast to literature was written by some former bartender now
engaged in composing scenarios for Pearl White and Theda Bara. But it
was not. It was written and signed by the president of the Authors'
League of America.
Here we have, unconsciously revealed, the secret of the depressing
badness of what may be called the staple fiction of the country--the
sort of stuff that is done by the Richard Harding Davises, Rex Beaches,
Houghs, McCutcheons, and their like, male and female. The worse of it
is not that it is addressed primarily to shoe-drummers and shop-girls;
the worst of it is that it is written by authors who _are,_ to all
intellectual intents and purposes, shoe-drummers and shop-girls.
American literature, even on its higher levels, seldom comes out of
the small and lonesome upper classes of the people. An American author
with traditions behind him and an environment about him comparable to
those, say, of George Moore, or Hugh Walpole, or E. F. Benson is and
always has been relatively rare. On this side of the water the arts,
like politics and religion, are chiefly in the keeping of persons of
obscure origin, defective education and elemental tastes. Even some
of the most violent upholders of the New England superstition are
aliens to the actual New England heritage; one discovers, searching
"Who's Who in America," that they are recent fugitives from the six-day
sock and saleratus _Kultur_ of the cow and hog States. The artistic
merchandise produced by liberated yokels of that sort is bound to show
its intellectual newness, which is to say, its deficiency in civilized
culture and sophistication. It is, on the plane of letters, precisely
what evangelical Christianity is on the plane of religion, to wit,
the product of ill-informed, emotional and more or less pushing and
oafish folk. Life, to such Harvardized peasants, is not a mystery; it
is something absurdly simple, to be described with surety and in a
few words. If they set up as critics their criticism is all a matter
of facile labeling, chiefly ethical; find the pigeon-hole, and the
rest is easy. If they presume to discuss the great problems of human
society, they are equally ready with their answers: draw up and pass
a harsh enough statute, and the corruptible will straightway put on
incorruption. And if, fanned by the soft breath of beauty, they go into
practice as creative artists, as poets, as dramatists, as novelists,
then one learns from them that we inhabit a country that is the model
and despair of other states, that its culture is coextensive with human
culture and enlightenment, and that every failure to find happiness
under that culture, is the result of sin.
6
_Underlying Causes_
Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps
the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds
of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate
organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence,
but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself
gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate
civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh
and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.
I describe the optimistic, the inspirational, the Authors' League,
the popular magazine, the peculiarly American school. In character
creation its masterpiece is the advertising agent who, by devising
some new and super-imbecile boob-trap, puts his hook-and-eye factory
"on the map," ruins all other factories, marries the daughter of his
boss, and so ends as an eminent man. Obviously, the drama underlying
such fiction--what Mr. Beach would call its John Henry Plot--is false
drama, Sunday-school drama, puerile and disgusting drama. It is the
sort of thing that awakens a response only in men who are essentially
unimaginative, timorous and degraded--in brief, in democrats, bagmen,
yahoos. The man of reflective habit cannot conceivably take any
passionate interest in the conflicts it deals with. He doesn't want
to marry the daughter of the owner of the hook-and-eye factory; he
would probably burn down the factory itself if it ever came into his
hands. What interests this man is the far more poignant and significant
conflict between a salient individual and the harsh and meaningless
fiats of destiny, the unintelligible mandates and vagaries of God. His
hero is not one who yields and wins, but one who resists and fails.
Most of these conflicts, of course, are internal, and hence do not
make themselves visible in the overt melodrama of the Beaches, Davises
and Chamberses. A superior man's struggle in the world is not with
exterior lions, trusts, margraves, policemen, rivals in love, German
spies, radicals and tornadoes, but with the obscure, atavistic impulses
within him--the impulses, weaknesses and limitations that war with his
notion of what life should be. Nine times out of ten he succumbs. Nine
times out of ten he must yield to the dead hand. Nine times out of ten
his aspiration is almost infinitely above his achievement. The result
is that we see him sliding downhill--his ideals breaking up, his hope
petering out, his character in decay. Character in decay is thus the
theme of the great bulk of superior fiction. One has it in Dostoievsky,
in Balzac, in Hardy, in Conrad, in Flaubert, in Zola, in Turgenieff,
in Goethe, in Sudermann, in Bennett, and, to come home, in Dreiser.
In nearly all first-rate novels the hero is defeated. In perhaps a
majority he is completely destroyed. The hero of the inferior--_i. e.,_
the typically American--novel engages in no such doomed and fateful
combat. His conflict is not with the inexplicable ukases of destiny,
the limitations of his own strength, the dead hand upon him, but
simply with the superficial desires of his elemental fellow men. He
thus has a fair chance of winning--and in bad fiction that chance is
always converted into a certainty. So he marries the daughter of the
owner of the factory and eventually gobbles the factory itself. His
success gives thrills to persons who can imagine no higher aspiration.
He embodies their optimism, as the other hero embodies the pessimism of
more introspective and idealistic men. He is the protagonist of that
great majority which is so inferior that it is quite unconscious of its
inferiority.