CONTENTS

PAGE
Preface[ix]
I.Decency in Literature[3]
II.Originality in Literature[47]
III.The Cult of the Natural[91]
IV.The Cult of the Contemporary[137]
V.The Characters Proper to Literature[187]

PREFACE

The following chapters were first published serially in The North American Review, from November, 1922, to March, 1923. For their reappearance in this volume I have made slight changes in them all, and have inserted in the fourth chapter a few paragraphs written for The Bookman of July, 1922. The editors of both magazines have my thanks for permission to reprint.

The title of the book will disclose at once the critical theory underlying these essays; they are studies in the discipline which literature imposes on those who cultivate it as an art, and their doctrine is that language as a medium of expression has certain limitations which the writer must respect, and that the psychology of his audience limits him also in what he may say, if he would gain a wide hearing and keep it. To know what can be said in words, and what effect it will have on your readers, is the inward art of writing, much more important even than the management of a sentence or the shaping of a paragraph.

I write here of literature as an art. Since I mean to exclude, as not art, many books of undoubted importance and of wide appeal, I must attempt at least to defend a distinction that to certain readers will seem arbitrary. A book may tell us of a life we already know about, or of a life we as yet do not know; the pleasure it gives us will be of recognition or of curiosity satisfied. Of course no books fall absolutely into one or the other of such extremes, but it is fairly accurate to say that every successful book does give us information, a new experience, or brings back an old experience to recognize. Though both kinds of books may be equally well written, we are inclined to ask only instruction from the one kind, but permanent enjoyment from the other. One is a document in history or sociology, in ethics or psychology; the other, as I understand it, is a work of art. If our country has not proved a favorable birth-place for literary works of art, the reason probably lies in our history rather than in lack of able writers. Ours has always been, and still is, an unknown land; the reader of American works has primarily been looking for information about America. The early visitors from Europe wrote us up for the enlightenment of their friends at home, and since our world has changed rapidly, we still write up ourselves, for our own enlightenment. The too brief flourishing of literature as an art in New England was possible only because life there for one moment in our history was so stable that a considerable body of readers had much experience in common; having had their curiosity satisfied as to their own life, they could recognize it and reflect upon the literary portrait of it. But the New England moment in our literature proved an exception, and we are so accustomed now to read novels and poems, not as art, but as bulletins of information from the west, the northwest, the middle west or the south, that we are losing the sense of living art in the New England writers themselves, and are considering them more and more as documents in a past civilization. Since we have so great need of documents, I realize that I prejudice myself with many readers when I say that my chief interest is in literature as art—in the books which reflect the unchanging aspects of human experience, rather than in the reports of our temporary condition.

If literature in our country has suffered from our passion for information, I believe it has also been damaged in our day by a bad philosophy of esthetics which has encouraged the writer to think much of himself and little of his audience. Literature is an art of expression, we say in the old phrase, and it expresses life. But whose life? The writer’s, of course, replies the philosophy I happen not to like. No; if a book ever becomes famous, it is because it expresses the experience of the reader. The writer’s personality will pervade it, but we must be able to recognize ourselves in it before we can admit that it portrays life truly.