THE PLACE OF ACTION IN FICTION
As people progress in culture there is a strong tendency more and
more to consider physical action in fiction crude. This is
unfortunate--and unthinking.
_Action Considered Unliterary_.--The cause, I think, is twofold.
First, most of the crudest published fiction relies to a great extent
on action. It is natural and illogical to construct the following
syllogism:
All crude fiction is action.
Crudity is poor art.
Therefore action is poor art.
Second, as a race develops in civilization and culture it nearly
always tends to lose vigor, drifts further and further away from
physical action and more and more into ease, inactivity and softness.
It also tends more and more to nicety and detail and {206} away from
the elemental. Physical action is elemental and inclined to sweep
nicety and detail aside. Naturally both critics and writers come to
consider action crude, something behind and beneath them.
Consequently, as a rule, only the lower-grade writers use much
action. Consequently action stories as a whole sink to a still lower
level. Consequently readers feel still more justified in considering
action crude. But is it?
_False Culture_.--Things would be vastly simplified and improved if
all who think they know what really constitutes good literature
really did know. Nine out of ten have for sole standard the opinions
of others. The "others" are fallible, many of them distinctly
unreliable. The nine are, of course, unable to tell whose or which
opinions are worth while. None of them does any real thinking of his
own and most of them do not even make the attempt. There are nine of
them who do not to one who does think and does know. The resulting
standard is painful. Also artificial and unsound.
A sad feature is that their methods tend to unify their opinions and
thus give them the preponderating influence in shaping the {207}
opinions of all the people who don't pretend to know. Professional
critics being comparatively few, each critic sways many sheep. Also,
the sheep have been referred, rightly enough, to the _Atlantic_ as
the "most literary magazine in America." They accept its standard
without discrimination or understanding. If a piece of fiction is
different, in any way, from the fiction of the _Atlantic_, they
therefore consider it unliterary. Worst of all, many of those who
judge by _Atlantic_ standards have a bare bowing acquaintance with
that most excellent magazine.
Now the _Atlantic_, for all its scope and splendid humanness, in some
respects savors of the library rather than of the rough world at
large. Critics, being human, and being generally compelled to do a
lot of criticizing, weary of the everlasting fundamentals and seek
relief in attention to the niceties and curlycues, these being, also,
more plentifully at hand. The sheep herded by the critics and by the
_Atlantic_ "habit" naturally come to look down, way down, upon the
action story.
Also, popular demand for action in fiction {208} continues strong.
It is a cardinal tenet of the unliterary literary person's belief
that anything popular is therefore low. I shall not be surprised if
some day all fiction that interests in any way is condemned because
the popular demand is for fiction that interests.
Still another factor is at work. In clinging blindly to the classics
as standards and models many fail to discriminate either in
recognizing just which qualities in a classic entitle it to lasting
place or in allowing for the difference between the time in which it
was written and our own times. Some of its qualities stand forever,
but in many cases other qualities lack that permanence of appeal and
are very distinctly tuned to its own era. Is the verbosity of a
century or two ago, or the sentimentality of the early Victorian
period, in key with the spirit and genius of this century? How could
it be when our whole civilization has rushed us into a hundred fold
greater speed and intensity, surrounded us with a million incentives
to practical activity and hurry? Railroads, steamships, trolleys,
autos, modern newspapers, motion-pictures, telephones, telegraphs,
{209} wireless, electricity and machinery in general, these have
geared us to a far faster pace. We can no longer travel naturally in
stage-coaches. _The Vicar of Wakefield_, allowing it its
excellencies, is no longer geared to living man. Therefore, in that
respect, it is not a classic, not permanent, should not be even a
subconscious model.
And in the choosing of books to be labeled classics the natural
inadaptability of the old generation to the new, together with the
tendency to limit "literature" to products refined away from
elementals instead of merely away from crudities, has still further
cast action into disrepute.
All in all, the action story has a pretty hard time of it nowadays if
it dares plead any claim to being literature.
_Fundamental Tests_.--Yet, if the test of literature be its permanent
appeal to human beings, regardless of changing times, the action
story fares at least as well as the best.
To be permanent an appeal must reach the only things that are
permanent and universal in human beings, the only permanent and
universal things are the elementary, fundamental ones, and "action"
meets that {210} test at least as well as anything else. Undoubtedly
the race was acting before it was psychologizing or even talking.
If proof of this fundamental and everlasting hold is needed, witness
the wide-spread, undying demand for action stories. Also note the
fact that most of the classics that have lived longest are crammed
full of action--Homer, Virgil, any of the epics or sagas. No, they
don't live because of that alone, but could they have lived without
it?
If you think that, for all their culture, the most sophisticated and
literary specimens among us have really grown beyond the reach of the
action appeal, you are much mistaken. Try them, when no one is
looking, with a good action story, even one unsanctified as a
classic. Scratch the skin and you'll find red corpuscles in even the
most anemic blood. Somewhere deep in each of them is the impulse to
do, and the admiration for doing. As children they gave it natural
outlet; has the leopard changed his spots? Neither restraint nor
veneer, neither pose nor inactive living, can eradicate this thing
the child was born with.
I've particular reason to speak on that {211} point. _Adventure_ was
founded with the primary purpose of meeting this action demand on the
part of the more cultured classes, the people whose normal reading is
of the "highbrow" variety but who habitually turn at odd moments to
stories of action, who accept "trashy" stories if no better offer,
but prefer stories sufficiently well done to stand the test of their
sophistication. The fact that the magazine's secondary appeal is to
those of less literary sophistication and franker interest in the
elementals in no way invalidates the primary aim or seems to limit
its success. It is difficult to say which of these classes is
naturally the more given to writing letters to magazines, but it is
difficult to say which of them is the more heavily represented in my
correspondence basket.
The latter, I suppose, depends upon where you attempt to draw a hard
and fast line between the two classes. Professional men of all
classes form a large part of the audience--physicians, lawyers,
educators, scientists, engineers, statesmen, ministers and priests;
letters from those of undoubted culture in the ordinary sense of that
word are very {212} strongly in evidence; more than once the
definite, concrete statement has been volunteered that "I read only
two magazines--_Atlantic_ and _Adventure_." Yet, personally, I find
it not always easy to say that this general class has a keener sense
for what seem to me the essential literary values. More articulate
and with better opportunity for comparisons, yes; but with point of
view more obscured by their sophistication. However, there is no
doubt as to the common action appeal to both extremes of the
audience, and nearly a dozen years have eradicated my last doubt of
action response beneath even the heaviest veneer of culture.
Its audience is about eighty-five per cent. men, but other action
magazines, aimed at both sexes, have audiences nearly equally divided
as to sex. Eliminate sex appeal, the love element, and, even with
women, action appeal will take first place.
_What Is Fiction Elementally?_--Elementally a story is a narrative.
A narrative implies events, is a record of action, not a treatise, a
laboratory record or a post-mortem.
_The Rightful Place of Action in Literature._--In addition to its
claim to place in the best {213} literature because of its
fundamental and permanent appeal and in addition to its being the
essence of narrative, there is one thing more to be said.
In its crudest expression you may consign it to what depths you
please, but in its essence, in its potentialities, I challenge you to
deny it the highest rank of all as material of fiction. For _action
is the crystallization of psychology_. It is the ultimate, final
expression of character, of all a character has thought, felt and
said, of all a character is or can be. Physical action. It need not
be exciting and adventurous. It may be expressed negatively, through
repression. But psychology, character, morals, what you will, none
of these has been really born into the world, has borne recognizable
fruit, until it has in some manner acted physically, or taken
physical shape through action.
It follows that, in literature at its best, action must be the
perfect, logical, inevitable and complete result and register of all
psychology of the characters in relation to all circumstances and
conditions of the story. No other element of literature has so
difficult a test to meet, for, aside from its own {214} demands, it
must be _the final and exact expression of everything else in the
story_.
Yet the action story is sweepingly condemned _as a type_!
_The Place of Action in Practise_.--Nothing can make more plain the
undiscriminating contempt for action as fiction material than the
actual practise of most writers. Action being in its crude form the
simplest material as well as the most natural, the majority of
writers begin with it. Generally, as they gain in skill they
develop, at about equal rate, the idea that all action is crude and
that real progress lies in abandoning it as rapidly as possible. In
many cases the result is merely the absence of fairly good action
stories and the creation of very sad but very "literary" productions.
In nearly all cases the cause of the change is due to failure to
understand action's potentialities and rightful place, and the result
of that lack of understanding is generally failure to produce the
real literature intended.
By all means try to rise above the crude "Diamond Dick" type of
action story, but be sure you can substitute something better, aside
from improved technique. Better a {215} story of rather crude but
convincing action than a miserable mess of half-baked psychology and
falsely glittering "literary finish" whose chief proof of literary
quality must be its freedom from physical action. If you sincerely
intend to do real literature, get firmly into your head the truth
that action should be the perfect crystallization of all else in your
story and then use as much or as little of it as is needed for that
crystallization. If you try that, you will get an extreme test of
all the literary ability you can summon, and if you succeed, you will
have attained what only the comparative few are capable of attaining.
Even to make a start you must rid yourself of the absurd idea that
action _per se_ is unliterary.
_Popular Demand_.--Since the Great War popular demand for action
fiction is stronger than ever, despite the strong antipathy for
material directly connected with it and despite a definite reaction
in favor of quiet, peacefulness and things spiritual.
If it's popular demand you're considering, consider this: Real life,
perhaps now more than ever before, consists very largely of
restraints and inhibitions. Human nature is {216} just as human as
it ever was--there are just as many things in it to be restrained and
inhibited. And, underneath all our civilization, we're just as tired
of having to do it--probably more so, since our civilization is more
civilized and therefore more exacting than its predecessors. If we
can't escape from the fetters in real life, can't be free to follow
our undoubted impulses, as readers we'll all the more welcome a
chance for vicarious freedom.
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