II
Our slow advance in artistic achievement has been defended on the plea that we have no background, no perspective, and that our absorption in business affairs leaves no time for that serene contemplation of life that is essential to the highest attainments. To omit the obvious baccalaureate bromide that we are inheritors of the lore of all the ages, it may be suggested that our deficiencies in the creative arts are overbalanced by the prodigious labors of a people who have lived a great drama in founding and maintaining a new social and political order within little more than a century.
Philosophers intent upon determining the causes of our failure to contribute more importantly to all the arts have suggested that our creative genius has been diverted into commercial and industrial channels; that Bell and Edison have stolen and imprisoned the Promethean fire, while the altars of the arts have been left cold. Instead of sending mankind whirling over hill and dale at a price within the reach of all, Mr. Henry Ford might have been our enlaurelled Thackeray if only he had been born beneath a dancing star instead of under the fiery wheels of Ezekiel’s vision.
The preachiness of our novels, of which critics complain with some bitterness, may be reprehensible, but it is not inexplicable. We are a people bred upon the Bible; it was the only book carried into the wilderness; it still has a considerable following among us, and all reports of our depravity are greatly exaggerated. We are inured to much preaching. We tolerate where we do not admire Mr. Bryan, because he is the last of the circuit-riders, a tireless assailant of the devil and all his works.
I am aware of growls from the Tory benches as I timidly venture the suggestion—fully conscious of its impiety—that existing cosmopolitan standards may not always with justice be applied to our literary performances. The late Colonel Higginson once supported this position with what strikes me as an excellent illustration. “When,” he wrote, “a vivacious Londoner like Mr. Andrew Lang attempts to deal with that profound imaginative creation, Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, he fails to comprehend him from an obvious and perhaps natural want of acquaintance with the whole environment of the man. To Mr. Lang he is simply a commonplace clerical Lovelace, a dissenting clergyman caught in a shabby intrigue. But if this clever writer had known the Puritan clergy as we know them, the high priests of a Jewish theocracy, with the whole work of God in a strange land resting on their shoulders, he would have comprehended the awful tragedy in this tortured soul.”
In the same way the exalted place held by Emerson in the affections of those of us who are the fortunate inheritors of the Emerson tradition can hardly be appreciated by foreign critics to whom his writings seem curiously formless and his reasoning absurdly tangential. He may not have been a great philosopher, but he was a great philosopher for America. There were English critics who complained bitterly of Mark Twain’s lack of “form,” and yet I can imagine that his books might have lost the tang and zest we find in them if they had conformed to Old-World standards.
On the other hand, the English in which our novels are written must be defended by abler pens than mine. Just why American prose is so slouchy, so lacking in distinction, touches questions that are not for this writing. I shall not even “think aloud” about them! And yet, so great is my anxiety to be of service and to bring as much gaiety to the field as possible, that I shall venture one remark: that perhaps the demand on the part of students in our colleges to be taught to write short stories, novels, and dramas—and the demand is insistent—has obscured the importance of mastering a sound prose before any attempt is made to employ it creatively. It certainly cannot be complained that the literary impulse is lacking, when publishers, editors, and theatrical producers are invited to inspect thousands of manuscripts every year. The editor of a popular magazine declares that there are only fifteen American writers who are capable of producing a “good” short story; and this, too, at a time when short fiction is in greater demand than ever before, and at prices that would cause Poe and De Maupassant to turn in their graves. A publisher said recently that he had examined twenty novels from one writer, not one of which he considered worth publishing.
Many, indeed, are called but few are chosen, and some reason must be found for the low level of our fiction where the output is so great. The fault is not due to unfavorable atmospheric conditions, but to timidity on the part of writers in seizing upon the obvious American material. Sidney Lanier remarked of Poe that he was a great poet, but that he did not know enough—meaning that life in its broad aspects had not touched him. A lack of “information,” of understanding and vision, is, I should say, the fundamental weakness of the American novel. To see life steadily and whole is a large order, and prone as we are to skim light-heartedly the bright surfaces, we are not easily to be persuaded to creep to the rough edges and peer into the depths. We have not always been anxious to welcome a “physician of the iron age” capable of reading “each wound, each weakness clear,” and saying “thou ailest here and here”! It is not “competent” for the artist to plead the unattractiveness of his material at the bar of letters; it is his business to make the best of what he finds ready to his hand. It is because we are attempting to adjust humanity to new ideals of liberty that we offer to ourselves, if not to the rest of the world, a pageant of ceaseless interest and variety.
It may be that we are too much at ease in our Zion for a deeper probing of life than our fiction has found it agreeable to make. And yet we are a far soberer people than we were when Mr. Matthew Arnold complained of our lack of intellectual seriousness. The majority has proved its soundness in a number of instances since he wrote of us. We are less impatient of self-scrutiny. Our newly awakened social consciousness finds expression in many books of real significance, and it is inevitable that our fiction shall reflect this new sobriety.
Unfortunately, since the passing of our New England Olympians, literature as a vocation has had little real dignity among us; we have had remarkably few novelists who have settled themselves to the business of writing with any high or serious aim. Hawthorne as a brooding spirit has had no successor among our fictionists. Our work has been chiefly tentative, and all too often the experiments have been made with an eye on the publisher’s barometer. Literary gossip is heavy with reports of record-breaking rapidity of composition. A writer who can dictate is the envy of an adoring circle; another who “never revises” arouses even more poignant despair. The laborious Balzac tearing his proofs to pieces seems only a dingy and pitiable figure. Nobody knows the difference, and what’s a well-turned sentence more or less? I saw recently a newspaper editorial commenting derisively on a novelist’s confession that he was capable of only a thousand words a day, the point being that the average newspaper writer triples this output without fatigue. Newcomers in the field can hardly fail to be impressed by these rumors of novels knocked off in a month or three months, for which astonishing sums have been paid by generous magazine editors. We shall have better fiction as soon as ambitious writers realize that novel-writing is a high calling, and that success is to be won only by those who are willing to serve seven and yet seven other years in the hope of winning “the crown of time.”
In his happy characterization of Turgenieff and his relation to the younger French school of realists, Mr. James speaks of the “great back-garden of his Slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into which the door constantly stood open, and the grandsons of Balzac were not, I think, particularly free to accompany him.” I am further indebted to Mr. James for certain words uttered by M. Renan of the big Russian: “His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance.”
I make no apology for thrusting my tin dipper again into Mr. James’s bubbling well for an anecdote of Flaubert, derived from Edmond de Goncourt. Flaubert was missed one fine afternoon in a house where he and De Goncourt were guests, and was found to have undressed and gone to bed to think!
I shall not give comfort to the enemy by any admission that our novelists lack culture in the sense that Turgenieff and the great French masters possessed it. A matter of which I may complain with more propriety is their lack of “information” (and I hope this term is sufficiently delicate) touching the tasks and aims of America. We have been deluged with “big” novels that are “big” only in the publishers’ advertisements. New York has lately been the scene of many novels, but the New York adumbrated in most of them is only the metropolis as exposed to the awed gaze of provincial tourists from the rubber-neck wagon. Sex, lately discovered for exploitation, has resulted only in “arrangements” of garbage in pink and yellow, lightly sprinkled with musk.
As Rosinante stumbles over the range I am disposed to offer a few suggestions for the benefit of those who may ask where, then, lies the material about which our novelists are so deficient in “information.” No strong hand has yet been laid upon our industrial life. It has been pecked at and trifled with, but never treated with breadth or fulness. Here we have probably the most striking social contrasts the world has ever seen; racial mixtures of bewildering complexity, the whole flung against impressive backgrounds and lighted from a thousand angles. Pennsylvania is only slightly “spotted” on the literary map, and yet between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, nearly every possible phase and condition of life is represented. Great passions are at work in the fiery aisles of the steel mills that would have kindled Dostoiefsky’s imagination. A pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night marks a limitless field for the earnest fictionist. A Balzac would find innumerable subjects awaiting him in the streets of Wilkesbarre!
At this point I must bemoan the ill-fortune that has carried so many American fiction writers to foreign shores. If Hawthorne had never seen Italy, but had clung to Salem, I am disposed to think American literature would be the richer. If fate had not borne Mr. Howells to Venice, but had posted him on the Ohio during the mighty struggle of the ’60’s, and if Mr. James had been stationed at Chicago, close to the deep currents of national feeling, what a monumental library of vital fiction they might have given us! If Mrs. Wharton’s splendid gifts had been consecrated to the service of Pittsburgh rather than New York and Paris, how much greater might be our debt to her!
Business in itself is not interesting; business as it reacts upon character is immensely interesting. Mineral paint has proved to be an excellent preservative for The Rise of Silas Lapham, which remains our best novel of business. But if paint may be turned to account, why not cotton, wool, and the rest of the trade catalogue, every item with its own distinct genesis? In The Turmoil Mr. Tarkington staged, under a fitting canopy of factory smoke, a significant drama of the conflict between idealism and materialism.
Turning to our preoccupation with politics, we find another field that is all but fallow. Few novels of any real dignity may be tendered as exhibits in this department, and these are in a sense local—the comprehensive, the deeply searching, has yet to be done. Mr. Churchill’s Coniston, and Mr. Brand Whitlock’s The Thirteenth District are the happiest experiments I recall, though possibly there are others of equal importance. Yet politics is not only a matter of constant discussion in every quarter, but through and by politics many thousands solve the problem of existence. Alone of great national capitals Washington has never been made the scene of a novel of distinction. Years ago we had Mrs. Burnett’s Through One Administration, but it failed to establish itself as a classic. George Meredith would have found much in Washington life upon which to exercise his ironic powers.
With all our romantic longings it is little short of amazing that we are not more fecund in schemes for romantic drama and fiction. The stage, not to say the market, waits; but the settings are dingy from much use and the characters in threadbare costumes strut forth to speak old familiar lines. Again, there is an old superstition that we are a humorous people, and yet humor is curiously absent from recent fiction. “O. Henry” knew the way to the fountain of laughter, but contented himself with the shorter form; Huckleberry Finn seems destined to stand as our nearest approach to a novel of typical humor. We have had David Harums and Mrs. Wiggses a-plenty—kindly philosophers, often drawn with skill—but the results are character sketches, not novels.