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It may be accepted as an axiom that the strong are always audacious,
and so when we hear of any man in literature who is shocking and
rumpling all the susceptibilities of nice, quiet, drowsy people we may
be sure that his capital crime is independence of thought and opinion.
He is looking at life for himself, instead of through the refracted
lenses of old class habit or antiquated religious dogma. And it is
a thousand to one he has the criminal audacity to be young; for the
vision of youth is clearer and more sure, and more pitying than the old
green or crimson goggles of selfish age, that would paint the world as
popes and kings and classes and governments, with rewards and honors to
give, would have it. All men whose life and work make for the uplifting
of human conditions and thought are set in the way of truth before
reaching thirty. If a man is timorous before thirty, he will be an
unmitigable coward, perhaps knave, for the rest of his days. And today
the only profession which demands any active spirit of heroism is the
calling of literature, that has become the _Deus ex machina_ of all
modern civilized life.
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Every truly ambitious writer, or for that matter, every manly writer,
be he a genius or a mediocrity, has certain large ideal aims to serve
in all his literature. It is not enough for a manly man to simply evoke
applause. A nude nymph from the gutter of Paris dancing a can-can on
a cafe table, also lives by popular suffrage, and wins such popular
approbation as is never given to literature--the incoherent cries
in which the whole body emits its tingling void of aching, sensuous
delight, the deep, whole-hearted greed of the flaming instincts and
soul of the race.
There are a thousand arts and tricks that gain applause and good pay,
and have the world’s countenance (and ours, for we are not such rigid
moralists as to try to upset nature); but it is the business of the
artist to gain respect, not for himself as an individual, for in that
capacity we can allow much to temptation, but for his precious art,
which is the voice of all the dumb ones of our kind. Surely, if there
is any thing that Almighty God could forbear in tenderness to destroy,
of all man’s sad attempts to win a home in this inhospitable world, it
is the written pages that hold the highest aspirations of the human
soul--some pages that we, in our overweening pride in the glory of our
fellows, think hold a beauty and breadth that must partake of Divinity
itself. But the wind of deathless Time is rushing even now, and we know
that nothing can escape its touch.
It is the final business of literature to quicken the spirit of
humanity and stir those noblest impulses that make us despise the mere
grovelling life of those who have not learned the irony of _things_.
We hide ourselves like guilty creatures among our dusty, dusty
possessions, afraid to waste time for living and thought, and so the
days and nights that should be ours pass and we enjoy them not. Only a
few poets possess the days and nights, and even they know the sweetness
of life mostly in sorrow.
All literature is trivial that lacks this large relevance to human
life, and so, in looking over the bulk of contemporary American
literature, it is to be feared that neither charity nor policy can make
it out to be very important. It is destitute of any of the spirit of
genius, and it is for the most part merely a travesty of the small talk
of the surface life of so-called “good society.” It nowhere touches
upon the reality of human passion, existent under every mask of custom
and artificial seeming of refinement, and its inspiration is evident in
every hasty line--money and advertising.
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To be quite candid, could any other country boast such an utterly
mediocre, uninspired group of literary artisans as is represented
by the Scratchback Club of New York, which in its membership really
furnishes all that passes for contemporary “American” literature in
our periodicals? They show the intellectual and imaginative poverty of
a people merely pushing and ingenious. They reveal the shallowness of
the prevailing idea that mere education furnishes those deep forces
of personality which have made all true literature, and all true
cultivation, with or without education. There is none of the audacity
of real spontaneous thought in these men and women’s work; it is all
written to order, as mechanically as an auctioneer’s catalogue.
But it is well to have a definite aim in literature, and the pens
concerned in the production of the FLY LEAF are at least inspired by
a sense of the fluidity of this excellent medium of prose, and though
they may fail in the haste of periodical writing to achieve the perfect
ends of art, at least they will not wantonly strive to debase the
public judgment and taste by pandering to the narrow minds of ignorant
prudes, after the fashion of the popular periodical literature of the
day.
The FLY LEAF has a definite aim and purpose in being, and that is, to
get more latitude in literature written in English, and to make the
work of the real writers of our end of the century better known to
the great democracy of readers. These are the younger men and not the
old, fogy carpenters, brought up to write moral tracts under Dr. J. G.
Holland at the close of the fifties. The FLY LEAF looks to the younger
generation to enable it to make its aims a force in our intellectual
and literary life here in America.
There is a revolt and a quickening sense of changes and forces in the
air. The work of any individual writer or worker can effect little
or nothing. But the earnest enthusiasm of a little band of men and
women, inspired with a belief in the impartiality of the good God and
the perpetual renewal of imagination and thought and genius in every
branch of the race, can set such an enthusiasm for better things and
higher ideals in not merely the substance but the spirit of all our
art endeavor as shall bring in a harvest of real, robust literature
from every quarter of this country--largely from the most unsuspected
quarters. It is this scattered interest in a nobler ideal than obtains
in our contemporary periodical literature that the FLY LEAF will
attempt to focus. At present nearly all the writers with any individual
style and force and robustness and largeness of aim are shut out of
American periodical literature, because such qualities in literature
are deemed _too shocking_ nowadays.
The FLY LEAF believes there are still readers who appreciate boldness,
original conceptions, audacity of treatment, and the varied play of
fancy over the whole and not merely a part of human existence. These
are the qualities that gave us our standard English literature, and
in the early days inspired our greatest writers in America. They must
be the impulse and inspiration of today, if Americans are not content
to be represented in literature by snobbish boys trying to write like
“ladies,” and women who write without effort like the deuce knows what.
When we say we appeal to the younger people it must not be thought
that we appeal to the children--although since they are so far
more critical than their grandparents, we shall not dare to forget
them altogether. We mean that we desire to enlist the interests and
sympathies of our own generation--say those born sometime in the
sixties and since. Our grandparents may be very good folk and quite
smart in getting around today, but they were largely brought up on
almanacs, and their literary tastes are narrow and eccentric without
being picturesque. They belong to ancient times without holding the
antique novelties of the really far away ancient times, which were
really more in touch with the intellectual bustle and eager curiosity
of our day than those gray years of smug Anglo-Saxon absorption in a
civilization of mere bread and beer that lie immediately behind us,
and still cast the chill shadow of their prurient morality over all
our literature. Even some of the direct parents of this generation
are a little threadbare in their craniums. They have read domestic
literature all their lives and of course are incapable of thought.
The stirring gray matter is found in the heads of those born not much
further back, say, than ’49, the year of gold. Let us resolve to make
this _fin de siecle_ the golden age of American literature. And if
there are, as I suspect there are, some belated grandparents still on
earth, animated with the spirit and ideals of Milton and the Martyrs,
young at heart in their enthusiasm for the truth, for the art that
touches and ennobles life, and for freedom of thought and expression,
these are of us also, and will gladly find in the FLY LEAF, in its
burst of youth, the ideals that have always permeated robust and honest
literature--especially in the old days when a man might swing or burn
for an audacious pamphlet. With such old fogies we have no bone of
contention. But the old fogies in petticoats, the gingerbread writers,
we shall probably toss up in a blanket nine times as high as the
moon--when we are not so pressed for space and time.
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