We have no desire to be personal for the sake of being personal, but we have every desire to be personal in this discussion for the sake of being impersonal, pointed, helpful and clear. It is time to take a perfectly fresh and perfectly illustrative example of how not to write fiction. We shall take the case of Mr. Owen Johnson and his new novel, Virtuous Wives.
Mr. Johnson will be suspected by the dense and conventional censors of American literature of having written Virtuous Wives to make money. Alackaday, no! If he had a much better book might have come from his typewriter. Mr. Johnson was not thinking primarily of money, as he should have been (prior to the actual writing of the story). He was filled with a moral and uplifting aim. He had been shocked to the marrow by the spectacle of the lives led by some New York women—the kind Alice Duer Miller writes discreetly about. The participation of America in the war had not begun. The performances of an inconsiderable few were unduly conspicuous. Mr. Johnson decided to write a novel that would hold up these disgusting triflers (and worse) to the scorn of sane and decent Americans. He set to work. He finished his book. It was serialized in one of the several magazines which have displaced forever the old Sunday school library in the field of Awful Warning literature. In these forums Mr. Galsworthy and Gouverneur Morris inscribe our present-day chronicles of the Schoenberg-Cotta family, and writ large over their instalments, as part of the editorial blurb, we read the expression of a fervent belief that Vice has never been so Powerfully, Brilliantly and Convincingly Depicted in All Its Horror by Any Pen. But we divagate.
Mr. Johnson’s novel was printed serially and appeared then as a book with a solemn preface—the final indecent exhibition, outside of the story itself, of his serious moral purpose. And as a book it is failing utterly of its purpose. It has sold and is selling and Mr. Johnson is making and will make money out of it—which is what he did not want. What he did want he made impossible when he unmasked his great aim.
The world may be perverse, but you have to take it as it is. The world may be childish, but none of us will live to see it grow up. If the world thinks you write with the honest and understandable object of making a living it attributes no ulterior motive to you. The world says: “John Smith, the butcher, sells me beefsteak in order to buy Mrs. Smith a new hat and the little Smiths shoes.” The world buys the steaks and relishes them. But if John Smith tells the world and his wife every time they come to his shop: “I am selling you this large, juicy steak to give you good red blood and make you Fit,” then the world and his wife are resentful and say: “We think we don’t like your large, juicy steaks. We are red blooded enough to have our own preferences. We will just go on down the street to the delicatessen—we mean the Liberty food shop—and buy some de-Hohenzollernized frankfurters, the well-known Liberty sausage. To hell with the Kaiser!” And so John Smith merely makes money. Oh, yes, he makes money; a large, juicy steak is a large, juicy steak no matter how deadly the good intent in selling it. But John Smith is defeated in his real purpose. He does not furnish the world and his wife with the red corpuscles he yearned to give them.
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At this juncture we seem to hear exasperated cries of this character: “What do you mean by saying that an author must write for money first and last and yet must have a stern moral purpose? How can the two be reconciled? Why must he think of money until he begins to write and never after he begins to write? We understand why the moral object must not obtrude itself, but why need it be there at all?”
Can a man serve two masters? Can he serve money and morality? Foolish question No. 58,914! He not only can but he always does when his work is good.
A painter—a good painter—is a man who burns to enrich the world with his work and is determined to make the world pay him decently for it. A good sculptor is a man who has gritted his teeth with a resolution to give the world certain beautiful figures for which the world must reward him—or he will know the reason why! A good corset manufacturer is a man who is filled with an almost holy yearning to make people more shapely and more comfortable than he found them—and he is fanatically resolved that they shall acknowledge his achievement by making him rich!
For that’s the whole secret. How is a man to know that he has painted great portraits or landscapes or carved lovely monuments or made thousands shapelier and more easeful if not by the money they paid him? How is an author to know that he has amused or instructed thousands if not by the size of his royalty checks? By hearsay? By mind reading? By plucking the petals of a daisy—“They love me. They love me not”?
Every man can and must serve two masters, but the one is the thing that masters him and the other is the evidence of his mastery. Every man must before beginning work fix his mind intently upon the making of money, the money which shall be an evidence of his mastery; every man on beginning work and for the duration of the work must fix his mind intently and exclusively on the service of morality, the great master whose slave he is in the execution of an Invisible Purpose. And no man dare let his moral purpose expose itself in his work, for to do that is to do a presumptuous and sacrilegious thing. The Great Moralizer, who has in his hands each little one of us workers, holds his Purpose invisible to us; how then can we venture to make visible what He keeps invisible, how can we have the audacity to practice a technique that He Himself does not employ?