The Apotheosis of Pettiness
One Man, by Robert Steele. New York: Mitchell Kennerley.
“There is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its virtues”—from Ben Hecht’s “Phosphorescent Gleams” in the May Little Review. I have pondered over this maxim while reading Mr. Steele’s novel which is hailed by the critics as “the essence of America.” The hero is essentially American, horribly so. If the “average” type of any nation is repulsive, the American “Average” is a thousandfold more so. For he is more petty than vicious. The “one man” gives a confession of his life, full of puny deeds, from committing petty larceny to “picking up” a girl in the street and taking her to a “swell” hotel. The nauseating details have the flavor of the adventure stories which you may hear at a gathering of travelling salesmen in a provincial hotel lobby. What makes the boring Odyssey intolerably loathsome is its note of syrupy Christian penitence which the hero expresses after each penny-crime by falling on his knees and praying to his convenient god for forgiveness.
The book has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is as far from a masterpiece as a lewd “photo” is from art. The facts may be true, even autobiographical, as some critics presume; the confessions will furnish good material for Billy Sunday and his lesser brethren. But photography, even if it be pornography, is not art. Let me quote the ever-new Edgar Poe: “Art is the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’ ... We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little—but then always they see too much.” I blush at the necessity of digging up ancient truths, but, my dear friends, read the reviews of Mr. Steele’s novel and you will admit with me the crying need of teaching the American critics the A-B-C of art.