6
But the strangest thing about the proceedings in the Critical Court is their lack of contemporary interest. Rarely, indeed, is anything decided here until it has been decided everywhere else. For the great decisions are the decisions of life and not decisions on the past. A man has written twenty books and he is dead. He is ripe for consideration by the Critical Court. A man has written two novels and has eighteen more ahead of him. The Critical Court will leave him alone until he is past all helping. It seems never to occur to the critic-judge that a young man who has written two novels is more important than a dead man who has written twenty novels. For the young man who has written two novels has some novels yet to be written; he can be helped, strengthened, encouraged, advised, corrected, warned, counselled, rebuked, praised, blamed, presented with bills of particulars, and—heartened. If he has not genius nothing can put it in him, but if he has, many things can be done to help him exploit it. And a man who is dead cannot be affected by anything you say or do; the critic-judge has lost his chance of shaping that writer’s work and can no longer write a decree, only an epitaph.
To be brutally frank: Nobody cares what the Critical Court thinks of Whitman or Poe or Longfellow or Hawthorne. Everybody cares what Tarkington does next, what Mary Johnston tackles, what the developments are in the William Allen White case, what becomes of Joseph Hergesheimer, whether Amy Lowell achieves great work in that contrapuntal poetry she calls polyphonic prose. On these things depend the present era in American literature and the possibilities of the future. And these things are more or less under our control.
The people of America not only believe that there is an independent American literature, but they believe that there will continue to be. Some of them believe in the past of that literature, some of them believe in its future; but all of them believe in its present and its presence. Their voice may be stifled in the Critical Court (silence in the court!) but it is audible everywhere else. It is heard in the bookshops where piles of new fiction melt away, where new verse is in brisk demand, where new biographies and historical works are bought daily and where books on all sorts of weighty subjects flake down from the shelves into the hands of customers.
The voice of the American people is articulate in the offices of newspapers which deal with the news of new books. It makes a seismographic record in the ledgers of publishing houses. It comes to almost every writer in letters of inquiry, comment and commendation. What, do you suppose, a writer like Gene Stratton-Porter cares whether the Critical Court excludes her work or condemns it? She can re-read hundreds and thousands of letters from men and women who tell her how profoundly her books have—tickled their fancy? pleased their love of verbal beauty? taxed their intellectuals to understand? No, merely how profoundly her books have altered their whole lives.
Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! The Critical Court is in session. All who have business with the court draw near and give attention!
IN THE CRITICAL COURT
III
IN THE CRITICAL COURT
THE Critical Court being in session, William Dean Howells, H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brownell, Wilson Follett and William Marion Reedy sitting, the case of Booth Tarkington, novelist, is called.
Counsel for the Prosecution: If it please the court, this case should go over. The defendant, Mr. Tarkington, is not dead yet.
Mr. Howells: I do not know how my colleagues feel, but I have no objection to considering the work of Mr. Tarkington while he is alive.
Mr. Follett: I think it would be better if we deferred the consideration of Mr. Tarkington until it is a little older.
Counsel for the Defense (in this case Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, biographer of Tarkington): “It”?
Mr. Follett: I mean his work, or works. Perhaps I should have said “them.”
Mr. Holliday: “They,” not “them.” Exception. And “are” instead of “is.” Gentlemen, I have no wish to prejudice the case for my client, but I must point out that if you wait until he is a little older he may be dead.
Mr. Boynton: So much the better. We can then consider his works in their complete state and with reference to his entire life.
Mr. Holliday: But it would then be impossible to give any assistance to Mr. Tarkington. The chance to influence his work would have passed.
Mr. Brownell: That is relatively unimportant.
Mr. Holliday: I beg pardon but Mr. Tarkington feels it rather important to him.
Mr. Boynton: My dear Mr. Holliday, you really must remember that it is not what seems important to Mr. Tarkington that can count with us, but what is important in our eyes.
Mr. Holliday: Self-importance.
Mr. Boynton (stiffly): Certainly not. Merely self-confidence. But on my own behalf I may say this: I am unwilling to consider Mr. Tarkington’s works in this place at this time; but I am willing to pass judgment in an article for a newspaper or a monthly magazine or some other purely perishable medium. That should be sufficient for Mr. Tarkington.
Mr. Follett: I think the possibility of considering Mr. Tarkington must be ruled out, anyway, as one or more of his so-called works have first appeared serially in the Saturday Evening Post.
Mr. Holliday (noting the effect of this revelation on the members of the court): Very well, I will not insist. Booth, you will have to get along the best you can with newspaper and magazine reviews and with what people write to you or tell you face to face. Be brave, Tark, and do as you aren’t done by. After all, a few million people read you and you make enough to live on. The court will pass on you after you are dead, and if you dictate any books on the ouija board the court’s verdict may be helpful to you then; you might even manage the later Henry James manner.
Clerk of the Court (Prof. William Lyon Phelps): Next case! Mrs. Atherton please step forward!
Mrs. Atherton (advancing with composure): I can find no one to act for me, so I will be my own counsel. I will say at the outset that I do not care for the court, individually or collectively, nor for its verdict, whatever it may be.
Prof. Phelps: I must warn you that anything you say may, and probably will, be used against you.
Mrs. Atherton: Oh, I don’t mind that; it’s the things the members of the court have said against me that I purpose to use against them.
Mr. Brownell: Are you, by any chance, referring to me, Madam?
Mrs. Atherton: I do not refer to persons, Mr. Brownell. I hit them. No, I had Mr. Boynton particularly in mind. And perhaps Gene Stratton-Porter. Is she here? (Looks around menacingly). No. Well, go ahead with your nonsense.
Mr. Howells (rising): I think I will withdraw from consideration of this case. Mrs. Atherton has challenged me so often——
Mr. Boynton: No, stay. I am going to stick it out——
Mr. Follett: I think there is no question but that we should hold the defendant in contempt.
Mrs. Atherton: Mutual, I assure you. (She sweeps out of the room and a large section of the public quietly follows her.)
Clerk Phelps: Joseph Hergesheimer to the bar! (A short, stocky fellow with twinkling eyes steps forward.) Mr. Hergesheimer?
Mr. Hergesheimer: Right.
Mr. Reedy: Good boy, Joe!
Mr. Follett: It won’t do, it won’t do at all. There’s only The Three Black Pennys and Gold and Iron and a novel called Java Head to go by. Saturday Evening Post. And bewilderingly unlike each other. Seem artistic but are too popular, I fancy, really to be sound.
Mr. Hergesheimer: With all respect, I should like to ask whether this is a court of record?
Mr. Howells: It is.
Mr. Hergesheimer: In that case I think I shall press for a verdict which may be very helpful to me. I should like also to have the members of the court on record respecting my work.
Mr. Boynton: Just as I feared. My dear fellow, while we should like to be helpful and will endeavor to give you advice to that end it must be done unobtrusively ... current reviews ... we’ll compare your work with that of Hawthorne and Hardy or perhaps a standard Frenchman. That will give you something to work for. But you cannot expect us to say anything definite about you at this stage of your work. Suppose we were to say what we really think, or what some really think, that you are the most promising writer in America to-day, promising in the sense that you have most of your work before you and in the sense that your work is both popular and artistically fine. Don’t you see the risk?
Mr. Hergesheimer: I do, and I also see that you would make your own reputation much more than you would make mine. I write a story. I risk everything with that story. You deliver a verdict. Why shouldn’t you take a decent chance, too?
Mr. Follett: Why should I take any more chances than I have to with my contemporaries? I pick them pretty carefully, I can tell you.
Mr. Hergesheimer: I shall write a novel to be published after my death. There was Henry Adams. He stipulated that The Education of Henry Adams should not be published until after his death; and everybody says it is positively brilliant.
Mr. Follett (relieved): That is a wise decision. But don’t be disheartened. I’ll probably be able to get around to you in ten years, anyway. (Mr. Hergesheimer bows and retires.)
Clerk Phelps: John Galsworthy!
Mr. Follett (brightening): Some of the Englishmen! This is better! Besides, I know all about Galsworthy.
Mr. Galsworthy (coming forward): I feel much honored.
Counsel for the Prosecution: If the court please, I must state that for some time now Mr. Galsworthy has been published serially in a magazine with a circulation of one digit and six ciphers. Or one cipher and six digits, I cannot remember which.
Mr. Brownell: What, six? Then he has more readers than can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are only five fingers on a hand. I think this is conclusive.
Mr. Boynton: Oh, decidedly.
Mr. Follett: But I put him in my book on modern novelists, all of whom were hand picked.
Mr. Galsworthy (with much calmness for one uttering a terrible heresy): Perhaps that’s the difficulty, really. All hand picked. Do you know, I rather believe in literary windfalls. But I beg to withdraw. (And he does.)
The Clerk: Herbert George Wells!
Mr. Wells (sauntering up and speaking with a certain inattention): Respecting my long novel, Joan and Peter, there are some points that need to be made clear. Peter, you know, is called Petah by Joan. Petah is a sapient fellow. He is even able to admire the Germans because, after all, they knew where they were going, they knew what they were after, their education had them headed for something. It had, indeed. I think Petah overlooks the fact that it had headed them for Paris in 1914.
The point that Oswald and I make in the book is that England and the Empire, in 1914 and prior thereto, had not been headed for anything, educationally or otherwise, except Littleness in every field of political endeavor, except Stupidity in every province of human affairs. And the proof of this, we argue, is found in the first three years of the Great War. No doubt. The first three years of the war prove so many things that this may well be among them; don’t you think so?
Without detracting from the damning case which Oswald and I make out against England it does occur to me, as I poke over my material for a new book, that as the proof of a pudding is in the eating so the proof of a nation at war is in the fighting. Indisputable as the bankruptcy of much British leadership has been, indisputable as it is that General Gough lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds of guns and vast stores of ammunition, it is equally indisputable that the Australians who died like flies at the Dardanelles died like men, that the Tommies who were shot by their own guns at Neuve Chapelle went forward like heroes, that the undersized and undernourished and unintellectual Londoners from Whitechapel who fell in Flanders gave up their immortal souls like freemen and Englishmen and kinsmen of the Lion Heart.
And if it comes to a question as to the blame for the war as distinguished from the question as to the blame for the British conduct of the war, the latter being that with which Joan and Peter is almost wholly concerned, I should like to point out now, on behalf of myself and the readers of my next book, that perhaps I am not entirely blameless. Perhaps I bear an infinitesimal portion of the terrible responsibility which I have showed some unwillingness to place entirely and clearly on Germany.
For after all, it was Science that made the war and that waged it; it was the idolatry of Science that had transformed the German nation by transforming the German nature. It was the proofs of what Science could do that convinced Prussia of her power, that made her confident that with this new weapon she could overstride the earth. I had a part in setting up that worship of Science. I have been not only one of its prophets but a high priest in its temple.
And I am all the more dismayed, therefore, when I find myself, as in Joan and Peter, still kneeling at the shrine. What is the cure for war? I ask. Petah tells us that our energies must have some other outlet. We must explore the poles and dig through the earth to China. He himself will go back to Cambridge and get a medical degree; and if he is good enough he’ll do something on the border line between biology and chemistry. Joan will build model houses. And the really curious thing is that the pair of them seem disposed to run the unspeakable risks of trying to educate still another generation, a generation which, should it have to fight a war with a conquering horde from Mars, might blame Peter and Joan severely for the sacrifices involved, just as they blame the old Victorians for the sacrifice of 1914-1918.
Mr. Howells: In heaven’s name, what is this tirade?
Mr. Brownell: Mr. Wells is merely writing his next book, that’s all.
(As it is impossible to stop Mr. Wells the court adjourns without a day.)
BOOK “REVIEWING”
IV
BOOK “REVIEWING”
ON the subject of Book “Reviewing” we feel we can speak freely, knowing all about the business, as we do, though by no means a practitioner, and having no convictions on the score of it. For we point with pride to the fact that, though many times indicted, a conviction has never been secured against us. However, it isn’t considered good form (whatever that is) to talk about your own crimes. For instance, after exhausting the weather, you should say pleasantly to your neighbor: “What an interesting burglary you committed last night! We were all quite stirred up!” It is almost improper (much worse than merely immoral) to exhibit your natural egoism by remarking: “If I do say it, that murder I did on Tuesday was a particularly good job!”
For this reason, if for no other, we would refrain, ordinarily, from talking about book “reviewing”; but since Robert Cortes Holliday has mentioned the subject in his Walking-Stick Papers and thus introduced the indelicate topic once and for all, there really seems no course open but to pick up the theme and treat it in a serious, thoughtful way.