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But I am forgetting my other candidates—for example, the American university president. I mean, of course, the university president of the new six-cylinder, air-cooled, four-wheel-brake model—half the quack, half the visionary, and wholly the go-getter—the brisk, business-like, confidential, button-holing, regular fellow who harangues Rotary and Kiwanis, extracts millions from usurers by alarming them about Bolshevism, and so builds his colossal pedagogical slaughter-house, with its tens of thousands of students, its professors of cheese-making, investment securities and cheer-leading, its galaxy of football stars, and its general air of Barnum’s circus. Why has this astounding mountebank not got into a book? He fairly yells for loving embalming à la Babbitt. He is not only stupendously picaresque and amusing in himself—the final heir, at once, of Abelard, Cagliostro, Increase Mather, the Fox sisters, Pestalozzi, Dr. Munyon, Godey of the Ladies’ Book, and Daniel Drew—; he is also thoroughly and magnificently characteristic of the great land we live in. No other country has ever produced anything quite like him. No other country, I suspect, would tolerate him. But here he lives and flourishes, a superb and perfect American—and yet our novelists all neglect him.
Worse and more incredible still, they neglect the most American of all Americans, the very Ur-Amerikaner—to wit, the malignant moralist, the Christian turned cannibal, the snouting and preposterous Puritan. Where is there the American novel in which he is even half limned? There are, to be sure, glimpses of him in “The Song of the Lark,” by Willa Cather, and in “Babbitt,” and there is a more elaborate but still incomplete sketch in E. W. Howe’s “The Story of a Country Town.” But Howe, unfortunately, had other fish to fry: he slapped in his bucolic wowser brilliantly, and then passed on to melodrama and the agonies of young love. So, too, with Lewis and Miss Cather. Thus, though the Puritan Father lies embalmed magnificently in the pages of Hawthorne, his heir and assign of the present day, the high-powered uplifter, the prophet of harsh and unenforceable laws, the incurable reformer and nuisance—this sweet fellow yet awaits his anatomist.
What a novel is in him! Indeed, what a shelf of novels! For he has as many forms as there are varieties of human delusion. Sometimes he is a tin-pot evangelist, sweating to transform Oklahoma City or Altoona, Pa., into the New Jerusalem. Sometimes he is a hireling of the Anti-Saloon League, sworn to Law Enforcement. Sometimes he is a strict Sabbatarian, bawling for the police whenever he detects his neighbor washing bottles or varnishing the Ford on Sunday morning. Again he is a vice-crusader, chasing the scarlet lady with fierce Christian shouts. Yet again he is a comstock, wearing out his eyes in the quest for smut. He may even be female—a lady Ph.D. in a linoleum hat, patrolling the cow towns and the city slums, handing out edifying literature, teaching poor Polish women how to have babies. Whatever his form, he is tremendously grotesque and tremendously amusing—and always he drips with national juices, always he is as thoroughly American as a bootlegger or a college yell. If he exists at all in other lands, it is only in rudimentary and aberrant forms. Try to imagine a French Wayne B. Wheeler, or a Spanish Billy Sunday, or a German William Jennings Bryan. It is as impossible as imagining a Coolidge in the Rome of Julius.
Since the earliest days, as everyone knows, American jurisprudence has been founded upon the axiom that it is the first duty of every citizen to police his neighbors, and especially those he envies, or otherwise dislikes. There is no such thing, in this grand and puissant nation, as privacy. The yokels out in Iowa, neglecting their horned cattle, have a right, it appears—nay, a sacred duty!—to peek into my home in Baltimore, and tell me what I may and may not drink with my meals. An out-at-elbow Methodist preacher in Boston sets himself up to decide what I may read. An obscure and unintelligent job-holder in Washington, inspired by God, determines what I may receive in the mails. I must not buy lottery tickets because it offends the moral sentiment of Kansas. I must keep Sunday as the Sabbath, which is in conflict with Genesis, because it is ordered by persons who believe that Genesis can’t be wrong. Such are the laws of the greatest free nation ever seen on earth. We are all governed by them. But a government of laws, of course, is a mere phantasm of political theorists: the thing is always found, on inspection, to be really a government of men. In the United States, it seems to me, the tendency is for such men to come increasingly from the class of professional uplifters. It is not the bankers who run the ostensible heads of the state, as the Liberals believe, nor the so-called bosses, as the bosses themselves believe, but the wowsers. And what is a wowser? What does the word mean? It means precisely what you think of inevitably when you hear it. A wowser is a wowser. He bears a divine commission to regulate and improve the rest of us. He knows exactly what is best for us. He is what Howe calls a Good Man. So long as you and I are sinful, he can’t sleep. So long as we are happy, he is after us.
I throw off the guess that there are at least forty novels in the wowser—that is, forty good ones. He has, as I have said, as many forms as the demons who ride him, and every one of them should make a competent novelist, authentically called to the vocation, leap in air with loud hosannas, and spit upon his hands. His psychology remains mysterious. The Freudians, I believe, have misunderstood him, and the psychiatrists have avoided him. What are the springs of his peculiar frenzy to harass and punish his fellow men? By what process of malign eugenics is he hatched? And what is his typical life history? Here is work for the novelist, which is to say, for the professional anatomist of character. I believe that Frank Norris, had he lived, would have tackled it with enthusiasm, and made a great success of its execution. Norris, like Dreiser after him, had a romantic and even a mystical inclination, but at bottom he was a satirist—and the American Puritan was made for satirists as catnip was made for cats. It is easy to laugh at him, but it is hard to hate him. He is eternally in the position of a man trying to empty the ocean with a tin-dipper. He will be mauled, and the chance he offers thrown away, if the novelist who attempts him in the end forgets the tragedy under his comedy. I have known many American wowsers in my time, some of them intimately. They were all intensely unhappy men. They suffered as vastly as Prometheus chained to his rock, with the buzzards exploring his liver. A novelist blind to that capital fact will never comprehend the type. It needs irony—but above all it needs pity.