VI
That dreadful winter Corydon went back to her parents, while Thyrsis lived in a garret room, and haunted publishers and editors, and wrote potboilers that he could not sell. He did sell a few jokes and a few sketches, book reviews for the Literary Digest, and articles for the Independent. He wrote a blank-verse narrative called Caradrion, portions of which are in Love’s Pilgrimage; also a novelette, The Overman, an attempt to portray ecstasy and speculate as to its source. Many critics have quarreled with Thyrsis because of so much “propaganda” in his books; but here was a work with no trace of this evil, and the critics never heard of it, and it existed only in the Haldeman-Julius five-cent books.
The literary editor of the Independent, who had the saying of thumbs up or thumbs down on book reviews, was Paul Elmer More, of whom Thyrsis saw a great deal before the days of More’s repute. A man of very definite viewpoint—as oddly different from his young contributor as the fates could have contrived. Thyrsis, always eager to understand the other side, was moved to a deep respect for his cold, calm intelligence, akin to godhead, subsequently revealed to the world in the series of Shelburne Essays. More never made propaganda, nor carried on controversy; he spoke once, and it was the voice of authority. The hothearted young novelist would go off and ponder and wish he could be like that; but there were too many interesting things in the world, and too many vested evils.
There are two factors in the process of growth that we call life; the expanding impulse and the consolidating and organizing impulse. In the literary world these impulses have come to be known, somewhat absurdly, as romanticism and classicism. Both impulses are necessary, both must be present in every artist, and either without the other is futile. Paul Elmer More spoke for the classical tradition and carried it to the extreme of condemning everything in his own time that had real vitality. Many times I pointed out to him that his favorite classical authors had all been rebels and romantics in their own day; but that meant nothing to him. He had understood and mastered these writers, so to him they meant order and established tradition; whereas the new things were uncomprehended and therefore disturbing. It was amusing to see More publish essays in appreciation of writers like Thoreau and Whitman, the revolutionists of their time. What would he say about the same sort of writers of our own day? The answer was, he never mentioned them, he never read them, or even heard of them.
The young wife had her baby, and the young husband sat by and held her hand during the fourteen-hour ordeal. Soon afterward he converted the experience into seven thousand words of horrifying prose. He took these to Paul Elmer More, and the cold Olympian intelligence spoke briefly. “It is well done, supposing one wants to do that kind of thing. But it seems to me one shouldn’t. Anyhow, it is unpublishable, so there is no use saying any more.” Said the young writer: “It will be published, if I have to do it myself.” Eight or nine years later this material appeared as the birth scene in Love’s Pilgrimage, and for some reason the censors did not find out about it. Now, being half a century old, it is presumably a “classic,” and safe.
More gave the congé to his tempestuous young contributor; after that I saw him only once, an accidental encounter in the subway at the height of the excitement over The Jungle. I asked, “May I send you a copy?” The reply was, “Some time ago I made up my mind I was through with the realists.” So there was no more to say. Later, the stern critic was forced to return to the realists; in his book, The Demon of the Absolute, I found him condemning Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. Myself he did not condescend to mention.
The Independent published my paper on “Teaching of Languages” (February 27, 1902) and a follow-up article, “Language Study: Some Facts” (June 19, 1902). I sent a questionnaire to a thousand college graduates, and discovered that among those who had been out ten years, practically none could read the languages they had studied in college. Another article was called “A Review of Reviewers” (February 6, 1902), occasioned by the odd contrast between the reviews of Springtime and Harvest, a pitiful, unattractive little volume published by the author, and the reviews of the same novel when it was issued under the name of King Midas, in conventional costume by an established publishing house. It was, quite unintentionally, a test of book reviewers and their independence of judgment. Springtime and Harvest had a preface, which had crudity and inexperience written all over it; accordingly, the thirteen reviewers of the United States who found the little book worth mentioning employed such phrases as: “proofs of immaturity” ... “this tumult of young blood” ... “a crude one, showing the youth, the inexperience of the writer” ... “betrays the fact that he is a novice in literature” ... “considering his youth,” etc.
But then came King Midas, a stately volume illustrated by a popular artist and bearing the imprint of Funk and Wagnalls. It carried the endorsement of Edwin Markham, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Barrett Wendell, and George Santayana; also a rousing publisher’s blurb: “Full of power and beauty; an American story of today by a brilliant writer; no novel we have ever published equals this in the wonderful reception accorded to it, in advance of publication, in commendations from the critics and in advance orders from the trade.”
In the face of this barrage, what became of the crudity and inexperience? In the first eight weeks after publication, fifty reviews appeared; and setting aside half a dozen that connected the book with Springtime and Harvest, only one critic noted crudity and inexperience! The “novice in literature” had come to display “the mind of a master”; the “tumult of young blood” had become “musical and poetic fervor, at times bordering on the inspired”; the “crude work” had become “a novel of tremendous power”; “the youth, the inexperience of the writer” had developed, according to the Outlook, into “workmanship that may be called brilliant ... sincerity as well as knowledge are apparent on every page”—and so on through a long string of encomiums. The article made amusing reading for the public but cannot have been very pleasing to the critics upon whom a young writer’s future depended.