is the chief hallmark of the American novel. Whenever one encounters
a novel that rises superior to it the thing takes on a subtle but
unmistakable air of foreignness--for example, Frank Norris' "Vandover
and the Brute," Hergesheimer's "The Lay Anthony" and Miss Cather's
"My Antonia," or, to drop to short stories, Stephen Crane's "The Blue
Hotel" and Mrs. Wharton's "Ethan Frome." The short story is commonly
regarded, at least by American critics, as a preëminently American
form; there are even patriots who argue that Bret Harte invented it.
It meets very accurately, in fact, certain characteristic demands of
the American temperament: it is simple, economical and brilliantly
effective. Yet the same hollowness that marks the American novel also
marks the American short story. Its great masters, in late years, have
been such cheese-mongers as Davis, with his servant-girl romanticism,
and O. Henry, with his smoke-room and variety show smartness. In the
whole canon of O. Henry's work you will not find a single recognizable
human character; his people are unanimously marionettes; he makes
Mexican brigands, Texas cowmen and New York cracksmen talk the same
highly ornate Broadwayese. The successive volumes of Edward J.
O'Brien's "Best Short-Story" series throw a vivid light upon the
feeble estate of the art in the land. O'Brien, though his æsthetic
judgments are ludicrous, at least selects stories that are thoroughly
representative; his books are trade successes because the crowd is
undoubtedly with him. He has yet to discover a single story that even
the most naïve professor would venture to mention in the same breath
with Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," or Andrieff's "Silence," or
Sudermann's "Das Sterbelied," or the least considerable tale by Anatole
France. In many of the current American makers of magazine short
stories--for example, Gouverneur Morris--one observes, as I have said,
a truly admirable technical skill. They have mastered the externals of
the form. They know how to get their effects. But in content their work
is as hollow as a jug. Such stuff has no imaginable relation to life
as men live it in the world. It is as artificial as the heroic strut
and romantic eyes of a moving-picture actor.
I have spoken of the air of foreignness that clings to certain
exceptional American compositions. In part it is based upon a
psychological trick--upon the surprise which must inevitably seize upon
any one who encounters a decent piece of writing in so vast a desert
of mere literacy. But in part it is grounded soundly enough on the
facts. The native author of any genuine force and originality is almost
invariably found to be under strong foreign influences, either English
or Continental. It was so in the earliest days. Freneau, the poet of
the Revolution, was thoroughly French in blood and traditions. Irving,
as H. R. Haweis has said, "took to England as a duck takes to water,"
and was in exile seventeen years. Cooper, with the great success of
"The Last of the Mohicans" behind him, left the country in disgust
and was gone for seven years. Emerson, Bryant, Lowell, Hawthorne and
even Longfellow kept their eyes turned across the water; Emerson, in
fact, was little more than an importer and popularizer of German and
French ideas. Bancroft studied in Germany; Prescott, like Irving,
was enchanted by Spain. Poe, unable to follow the fashion, invented
mythical travels to save his face--to France, to Germany, to the Greek
isles. The Civil War revived the national consciousness enormously,
but it did not halt the movement of _émigrés._ Henry James, in the
seventies, went to England, Bierce and Bret Harte followed him, and
even Mark Twain, absolutely American though he was, was forever pulling
up stakes and setting out for Vienna, Florence or London. Only poverty
tied Whitman to the soil; his audience, for many years, was chiefly
beyond the water, and there, too, he often longed to be. This distaste
for the national scene is often based upon a genuine alienness. The
more, indeed, one investigates the ancestry of Americans who have won
distinction in the fine arts, the more one discovers tempting game for
the critical Know Nothings. Whitman was half Dutch, Harte was half
Jew, Poe was partly German, James had an Irish grand-father, Howells
was largely Irish and German, Dreiser is German and Hergesheimer is
Pennsylvania Dutch. Fully a half of the painters discussed in John G.
van Dyke's "American Painting and Its Tradition" were of mixed blood,
with the Anglo-Saxon plainly recessive. And of the five poets singled
out for encomium by Miss Lowell in "Tendencies in Modern American
Poetry" one is a Swede, two are partly German, one was educated in the
German language, and three of the five exiled themselves to England
as soon as they got out of their nonage. The exiles are of all sorts:
Frank Harris, Vincent O'Sullivan, Ezra Pound, Herman Scheffauer, T.
S. Eliot, Henry B. Fuller, Stuart Merrill, Edith Wharton. They go to
England, France, Germany, Italy--anywhere to escape. Even at home the
literatus is perceptibly foreign in his mien. If he lies under the
New England tradition he is furiously colonial--more English than the
English. If he turns to revolt, he is apt to put on a French hat and a
Russion red blouse. _The Little Review,_ the organ of the extreme wing
of _révoltés,_ is so violently exotic that several years ago, during
the plupatriotic days of the war, some of its readers protested. With
characteristic lack of humor it replied with an American number--and
two of the stars of that number bore the fine old Anglo-Saxon names of
Ben Hecht and Eisa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
This tendency of American literature, the moment it begins to show
enterprise, novelty and significance, to radiate an alien smell is not
an isolated phenomenon. The same smell accompanies practically all
other sorts of intellectual activity in the republic. Whenever one
hears that a new political theory is in circulation, or a scientific
heresy, or a movement toward rationalism in religion, it is always
safe to guess that some discontented stranger or other has a hand in
it. In the newspapers and on the floor of Congress a new heterodoxy is
always denounced forthwith as a product of foreign plotting, and here
public opinion undoubtedly supports both the press and the politicians,
and with good reason. The native culture of the country--that is,
the culture of the low caste Anglo-Saxons who preserve the national
tradition--is almost completely incapable of producing ideas. It is
a culture that roughly corresponds to what the culture of England
would be if there were no universities over there, and no caste of
intellectual individualists and no landed aristocracy--in other words,
if the tone of the national thinking were set by the non-conformist
industrials, the camorra of Welsh and Scotch political scoundrels,
and the town and country mobs. As we shall see, the United States has
not yet produced anything properly describable as an aristocracy, and
so there is no impediment to the domination of the inferior orders.
Worse, the Anglo-Saxon strain, second-rate at the start, has tended to
degenerate steadily to lower levels--in New England, very markedly.
The result is that there is not only a great dearth of ideas in the
land, but also an active and relentless hostility to ideas. The chronic
suspiciousness of the inferior man here has full play; never in modern
history has there been another civilization showing so vast a body of
prohibitions and repressions, in both conduct and thought. The second
result is that intellectual experimentation is chiefly left to the
immigrants of the later migrations, and to the small sections of the
native population that have been enriched with their blood. For such a
pure Anglo-Saxon as Cabell to disport himself in the field of ideas is
a rarity in the United States--and no exception to the rule that I have
just mentioned, for Cabell belongs to an aristocracy that is now almost
extinct, and has no more in common with the general population than
a Baltic baron has with the indigenous herd of Letts and Esthonians.
All the arts in America are thoroughly exotic. Music is almost wholly
German or Italian, painting is French, literature may be anything from
English to Russian, architecture (save when it becomes a mere branch
of engineering) is a maddening phantasmagoria of borrowings. Even
so elemental an art as that of cookery shows no native development,
and is greatly disesteemed by Americans of the Anglo-Saxon majority;
any decent restaurant that one blunders upon in the land is likely
to be French, and if not French, then Italian or German or Chinese.
So with the sciences: they have scarcely any native development.
Organized scientific research began in the country with the founding
of the Johns Hopkins University, a bald imitation of the German
universities, and long held suspect by native opinion. Even after its
great success, indeed, there was rancorous hostility to its scheme of
things on chauvinistic grounds, and some years ago efforts were begun
to Americanize it, with the result that it is now sunk to the level
of Princeton, Amherst and other such glorified high-schools, and is
dominated by native savants who would be laughed at in any Continental
university. Science, oppressed by such assaults from below, moves out
of the academic grove into the freer air of the great foundations,
where the pursuit of the shy fact is uncontaminated by football and
social pushing. The greatest of these foundations is the Rockefeller
Institute. Its salient men are such investigators as Flexner, Loeb and
Carrel--all of them Continental Jews.
Thus the battle of ideas in the United States is largely carried on
under strange flags, and even the stray natives on the side of free
inquiry have to sacrifice some of their nationality when they enlist.
The effects of this curious condition of affairs are both good and
evil. The good ones are easily apparent. The racial division gives the
struggle a certain desperate earnestness, and even bitterness, and so
makes it the more inviting to lively minds. It was a benefit to the
late D. C. Gilman rather than a disadvantage that national opinion
opposed his traffic with Huxley and the German professors in the early
days of the Johns Hopkins; the stupidity of the opposition stimulated
him, and made him resolute, and his resolution, in the long run, was of
inestimable cultural value. Scientific research in America, indeed, was
thus set securely upon its legs precisely because the great majority
of right-thinking Americans were violently opposed to it. In the same
way it must be obvious that Dreiser got something valuable out of
the grotesque war that was carried on against him during the greater
war overseas because of his German name--a _jehad_ fundamentally
responsible for the suppression of "The 'Genius.'" The chief danger
that he ran six or seven years ago was the danger that he might be
accepted, explained away, and so seduced downward to the common level.
The attack of professional patriots saved him from that calamity.
More, it filled him with a keen sense of his isolation, and stirred
up the vanity that was in him as it is in all of us, and so made him
cling with new tenacity to the very peculiarities that differentiate
him from his inferiors. Finally, it is not to be forgotten that,
without this rebellion of immigrant iconoclasts, the whole body of the
national literature would tend to sink to the 100% American level of
such patriotic literary business men as the president of the Authors'
League. In other words, we must put up with the æsthetic Bolshevism of
the Europeans and Asiatics who rage in the land, for without them we
might not have any literature at all.
But the evils of the situation are not to be gainsaid. One of them I
have already alluded to: the tendency of the beginning literatus, once
he becomes fully conscious of his foreign affiliations, to desert the
republic forthwith, and thereafter view it from afar, and as an actual
foreigner. More solid and various cultures lure him; he finds himself
uncomfortable at home. Sometimes, as in the case of Henry James, he
becomes a downright expatriate, and a more or less active agent of
anti-American feeling; more often, he goes over to the outlanders
without yielding up his theoretical citizenship, as in the cases of
Irving, Harris, Pound and O'Sullivan. But all this, of course, works
relatively light damage, for not many native authors are footloose
enough to indulge in any such physical desertion of the soil. Of much
more evil importance is the tendency of the cultural alienism that I
have described to fortify the uncontaminated native in his bilious
suspicion of all the arts, and particularly of all artists. The news
that the latest poet to flutter the dovecotes is a Jew, or that the
last novelist mauled by comstockery has a German or Scandinavian
or Russian name, or that the critic newly taken in sacrilege is a
partisan of Viennese farce or of the French moral code or of English
literary theory--this news, among a people so ill-informed, so horribly
well-trained in flight from bugaboos, and so savagely suspicious of
the unfamiliar in ideas, has the inevitable effect of stirring up
opposition that quickly ceases to be purely æsthetic objection, and
so becomes increasingly difficult to combat. If Dreiser's name were
Tompkins or Simpson, there is no doubt whatever that he would affright
the professors a good deal less, and appear less of a hobgoblin to
the _intelligentsia_ of the women's clubs. If Oppenheim were less
palpably levantine, he would come much nearer to the popularity of
Edwin Markham and Walt Mason. And if Cabell kept to the patriotic
business of a Southern gentleman, to wit, the praise of General Robert
E. Lee, instead of prowling the strange and terrible fields of mediæval
Provence, it is a safe wager that he would be sold openly over the
counter instead of stealthily behind the door.
In a previous work I have discussed this tendency in America to
estimate the artist in terms of his secular character. During the
war, when all of the national defects in intelligence were enormously
accentuated, it went to ludicrous lengths. There were then only authors
who were vociferous patriots and thus geniuses, and authors who kept
their dignity and were thus suspect and without virtue. By this gauge
Chambers became the superior of Dreiser and Cabell, and Joyce Kilmer
and Amy Lowell were set above Sandburg and Oppenheim. The test was
even extended to foreigners: by it H. G. Wells took precedence of
Shaw, and Blasco Ibáñez became a greater artist than Romain Rolland.
But the thing is not peculiar to war times; when peace is densest it
is to be observed. The man of letters, pure and simple, is a rarity
in America. Almost always he is something else--and that something
else commonly determines his public eminence. Mark Twain, with only
his books to recommend him, would probably have passed into obscurity
in middle age; it was in the character of a public entertainer, not
unrelated to Coxey, Dr. Mary Walker and Citizen George Francis Train,
that he wooed and won his country. The official criticism of the land
denied him any solid literary virtue to the day of his death, and even
to-day the campus critics and their journalistic valets stand aghast
before "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" Emerson passed
through almost the same experience. It was not as a man of letters that
he was chiefly thought of in his time, but as the prophet of a new
cult, half religious, half philosophical, and wholly unintelligible to
nine-tenths of those who discussed it. The first author of a handbook
of American literature to sweep away the codfish Moses and expose
the literary artist was the Polish Jew, Leon Kellner, of Czernowitz.
So with Whitman and Poe--both hobgoblins far more than artists. So,
even, with Howells: it was as the exponent of a dying culture that he
was venerated, not as the practitioner of an art. Few actually read
his books. His celebrity, of course, was real enough, but it somehow
differed materially from that of a pure man of letters--say Shelley,
Conrad, Hauptmann, Hardy or Synge. That he was himself keenly aware of
the national tendency to judge an artist in terms of the citizen was
made plain at the time of the Gorky scandal, when he joined Clemens in
an ignominious desertion of Gorky, scared out of his wits by the danger
of being manhandled for a violation of the national pecksniffery.
Howells also refused to sign the Dreiser Protest. The case of Frank
Harris is one eloquently in point. Harris has written, among other
books, perhaps the best biography ever done by an American. Yet his
politics keep him in a sort of Coventry and the average American critic
would no more think of praising him than of granting Treitschke any
merit as an historian.
7
_The Lonesome Artist_
Thus falsely judged by standards that have no intelligible appositeness
when applied to an artist, however accurately they may weigh a
stock-broker or a Presbyterian elder, and forced to meet not only
the hunkerous indifference of the dominant mob but also the bitter
and disingenuous opposition of the classes to which he might look
reasonably for understanding and support, the American author is forced
into a sort of social and intellectual vacuum, and lives out his days,
as Henry James said of Hawthorne, "an alien everywhere, an æsthetic
solitary."
The wonder is that, in the face of so metallic and unyielding a front,
any genuine artists in letters come to the front at all. But they
constantly emerge; the first gestures are always on show; the prodigal
and gorgeous life of the country simply forces a sensitive minority to
make some attempt at representation and interpretation, and out of many
trying there often appears one who can. The phenomenon of Dreiser is
not unique. He had his forerunners in Fuller and Frank Norris and he
has his _compagnons du voyage_ in Anderson, Charles G. Norris and more
than one other. But the fact only throws up his curious isolation in a
stronger light. It would be difficult to imagine an artist of his sober
purpose and high accomplishment, in any civilized country, standing
so neglected. The prevailing criticism, when it cannot dispose of him
by denying that he exists--in the two chief handbooks of latter-day
literature by professors he is not even mentioned!--seeks to dispose
of him by arraying the shoddy fury of the mob against him. When he
was under attack by the Comstocks, more than one American critic gave
covert aid to the common enemy, and it was with difficulty that the
weight of the Authors' League was held upon his side. More help for
him, in fact, came from England, and quite voluntarily, than could be
drummed up for him at home. No public sense of the menace that the
attack offered to free speech and free art was visible; it would have
made a nine-days' sensation for any layman of public influence to
have gone to his rescue, as would have certainly happened in France,
England or Germany. As for the newspaper-reading mob, it probably went
unaware of the business altogether. When Arnold Bennett, landing in
New York some time previously, told the reporters that Dreiser was the
American he most desired to meet, the news was quite unintelligible to
perhaps nine readers out of ten: they had no more heard _of_ Dreiser
than their fathers had heard of Whitman in 1875.
So with all the rest. I have mentioned Harris. It would be difficult
to imagine Rolland meeting such a fate in France or Shaw in England as
he has met in the United States. O'Sullivan, during the war, came home
with "A Good Girl" in his pocket. The book was republished here--and
got vastly less notice than the latest piece of trade-goods by Kathleen
Norris. Fuller, early in his career, gave it up as hopeless. Norris
died vainly battling for the young Dreiser. An Abraham Cahan goes
unnoticed. Miss Cather, with four sound books behind her, lingers
in the twilight of an esoteric reputation. Cabell, comstocked, is
apprehended by his country only as a novelist to be bought by stealth
and read in private. When Hugh Walpole came to America a year or two
ago he favored the newspapers, like Bennett before him, with a piece
of critical news that must have puzzled all readers save a very small
minority. Discussing the living American novelists worth heeding, he
nominated three--and of them only one was familiar to the general
run of novel-buyers, or had ever been mentioned by a native critic of
the apostolic succession. Only the poets of the land seem to attract
the notice of the professors, and no doubt this is largely because
most of the more salient of them--notably Miss Lowell and Lindsay--are
primarily press-agents. Even so, the attention that they get is seldom
serious. The only professor that I know of who has discussed the
matter in precise terms holds that Alfred Noyes is the superior of
all of them. Moreover, the present extraordinary interest in poetry
stops short with a few poets, and one of its conspicuous phenomena is
its lack of concern with the poets outside the movement, some of them
unquestionably superior to any within.
Nor is this isolation of the artist in America new. The contemporary
view of Poe and Whitman was almost precisely like the current view of
Dreiser and Cabell. Both were neglected by the Brahmins of their time,
and both were regarded hostilely by the great body of right-thinking
citizens. Poe, indeed, was the victim of a furious attack by Rufus W.
Griswold, the Hamilton Wright Mabie of the time, and it set the tone
of native criticism for years. Whitman, living, narrowly escaped going
to jail as a public nuisance. One thinks of Hawthorne and Emerson
as writers decently appreciated by their contemporaries, but it is
not to be forgotten that the official criticism of the era saw no
essential difference between Hawthorne and Cooper, and that Emerson's
reputation, to the end of his life, was far more that of a theological
prophet and ethical platitudinarian, comparable to Lyman Abbott or
Frank Crane, than that of a literary artist, comparable to Tennyson
or Matthew Arnold. Perhaps Carlyle understood him, but who in America
understood him? To this day he is the victim of gross misrepresentation
by enthusiasts who read into him all sorts of flatulent bombast,
as Puritanism is read into the New Testament by Methodists. As for
Hawthorne, his extraordinary physical isolation during his lifetime was
but the symbol of a complete isolation of the spirit, still surviving.
If his preference for the internal conflict as opposed to the external
act were not sufficient to set him off from the main stream of American
speculation, there would always be his profound ethical skepticism--a
state of mind quite impossible to the normal American, at least of
Anglo-Saxon blood. Hawthorne, so far as I know, has never had a single
professed follower in his own country. Even his son, attempting to
carry on his craft, yielded neither to his meticulous method nor to his
detached point of view. In the third generation, with infinite irony,
there is a grand-daughter who is a reviewer of books for the New York
_Times,_ which is almost as if Wagner should have a grand-daughter
singing in the operas of Massenet.