“The bushes, dammit!... She looked at me; I gazed at her. Somehow—”
“In plainer terms, she gave you the eye. What?”
“That’s a peculiarly coarse observation.”
“Then tell it in your own way.”
“I will. The sunlight fell softly upon the trees of the ancient wood.”
“Woodn’t that bark you!”
And so on, and so on, for page after page. Can you imagine more idiotic stuff—“pierce and piercing,” “you gink,” “she gave you the eye,” “woodn’t that bark you?” One is reminded of horrible things—the repartees of gas-house comedians in vaudeville, the whimsical editorials in Life, the forbidding ghoul-eries of Irvin Cobb among jokes pale and clammy in death.... But let us, you may say, go back a bit further—back to the days of the Chap-Book. There was then, perhaps, a far different Chambers—a fellow of sound talent and artistic self-respect, well deserving the confidence and encouragement of Pollard. Was there, indeed? If you think so, go read “The King in Yellow,” circa 1895—if you can. I myself, full of hope, have tried it. In it I have found drivel almost as dull as that, say, in “Ailsa Page.”
2
A Stranger on Parnassus
The case of Hamlin Garland belongs to pathos in the grand manner, as you will discover on reading his autobiography, “A Son of the Middle Border.” What ails him is a vision of beauty, a seductive strain of bawdy music over the hills. He is a sort of male Mary MacLane, but without either Mary’s capacity for picturesque blasphemy or her skill at plain English. The vision, in his youth, tore him from his prairie plow and set him to clawing the anthills at the foot of Parnassus. He became an elocutionist—what, in modern times, would be called a chautauquan. He aspired to write for the Atlantic Monthly. He fell under the spell of the Boston aluminados of 1885, which is as if one were to take fire from a June-bug. Finally, after embracing the Single Tax, he achieved a couple of depressing story-books, earnest, honest and full of indignation.
American criticism, which always mistakes a poignant document for æsthetic form and organization, greeted these moral volumes as works of art, and so Garland found himself an accepted artist and has made shift to be an artist ever since. No more grotesque miscasting of a diligent and worthy man is recorded in profane history. He has no more feeling for the intrinsic dignity of beauty, no more comprehension of it as a thing in itself, than a policeman. He is, and always has been, a moralist endeavoring ineptly to translate his messianic passion into æsthetic terms, and always failing. “A Son of the Middle Border,” undoubtedly the best of all his books, projects his failure brilliantly. It is, in substance, a document of considerable value—a naïve and often highly illuminating contribution to the history of the American peasantry. It is, in form, a thoroughly third-rate piece of writing—amateurish, flat, banal, repellent. Garland gets facts into it; he gets the relentless sincerity of the rustic Puritan; he gets a sort of evangelical passion. But he doesn’t get any charm. He doesn’t get any beauty.