That is what he is to-day and likely will remain—a servant of words. And though their servant, he is yet their master, for he is able to assemble them in beauty and in majesty; he can march them rhythmically in single or double file, or in platoons; he can blend them as a kaleidoscope blends colors; he can draw from them a harmony that Rimsky-Korsakoff drew from sounds, that Léon Bakst drew from motion and colour. Indeed, there is a music in his style which, though not classical, is charming. There is a measured flow of words in every sentence; alliterations and rhythms, resonances and luminosities which no contemporaneous American writing exceeds. But its author has a lack and a compulsion. The former is in the ideational field, the latter in the emotional. He lacks capacity for synthesis and integration, and he is obsessed with sex. No one who reads of Nora, and of the high school graduate from an Illinois town who had married a young man of that place and come to Chicago with her husband to make their way in the great world, can fail to interpret his obsession; neither can the reader fail to understand how large it has loomed in Mr, Anderson’s life.
The stories Sherwood Anderson used to hear on every side in stable, work-shop, and factory concerned, he says, one impulse in life. He grew unspeakably weary of hearing them, and gradually a doubt invaded his mind. A similar weariness has come to many readers of his stories; and the doubt that he had of his fellow keg rollers, I have of him.
Few critics will be able to dispose of Sherwood Anderson in as brief space as his friend Mr. Ben Hecht: “I can give you all of Sherwood Anderson in a sentence—the wistful idealisation of the masculine menopause.” Like so many things Mr. Humpty Dumpty Hecht says, there is truth in it.
Sherwood Anderson of manic-depressive temperament is an artist who is a blend of many characteristics, the predominant one of which is a love of beauty, particularly of form. All of them are inherited. Had he been able, or enabled, to bring the unconscious of his make-up into consciousness early in life, he might have earned the immortality of Hawthorne, Howells, or Crane. Had he studied Fielding instead of Whitman, Chekhov instead of Clemens, he might have been the bell-cow of the literary herd of the midwest. The man who first said “It is never too late to mend” has much to answer for.
Bliss Perry, whose reputation for sanity, soundness, and penetration as a literary critic has long been established, says that Mr. Firkins’s study of William D. Howells is a great biography. I feel as a pariah should feel when I cannot share an authority’s conviction and sentiment. But there is a discursiveness, a pretentiousness, a highfalutin tone about it that distract me, and a papal atmosphere about it that I do not breathe easily or invigoratingly. Little annoying flaws of grammar and construction obtrude themselves while one reads it. “I will set down briefly the migrations and occupations of the family.” “The style has a pre-existence in the psychology, is in essence the ingress of that psychology into language.” “When an incident of travel reaches its probe into the sensitiveness of the author’s profoundest and saddest convictions,” etc.
Self-forgetfulness, it has been said, is the beginning of happiness among books; and it is because I cannot get lost to myself that I have found less pleasure in Mr. Firkins’s book than in any save Mr. Bok’s. When I read “the curious strengthening of the position of the amphibious Balzac in our day,” I immediately begin searching for the justification of “curious”—and why “amphibious”? Then there darts into my memory chamber a line from an Essay in Criticism, by Robert Lynd, that I read two or three years ago in The London Mercury: “All criticism is, from one point of view, an impertinence.” Stuart P. Sherman, reviewing recently Mr. Mencken’s latest book, said he was determined to conclude his review with a gesture of amicality. I am equally determined to say that Mr. Firkins’s book would not have received such universal praise from the reviewers had it not deserved it.
We like to read about men of genius and identify our virtues with theirs; we deny ourselves their sins, and we do not recognise our limitations in theirs. Lafcadio Hearn was a man of genius who had tremendous limitations, and undoubtedly the Reverend John Roach Straton would say he wallowed in sin. But he was an interesting human being; he had a most uncommon ancestry; and if there were any occidental and Christian conventions he did not trample upon, transcend and rail at, it was because he did not encounter them.
In one of his letters to Henry E. Krehbiel, he called himself a dreamer of monstrous dreams. The reader who gets information of Hearn from Mr. Tinker’s book will think he should have said “a monster dreamer of monstrous dreams,” for the Hearn depicted in Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days was a monster. He ate like one, he loved like one, he had no family feeling, no capacity for sustained friendship. No hand extended to help him was withdrawn unbitten; no kindness was ever accepted that he did not endeavour to repay with cruelty and abuse; no appreciation and praise were ever accorded him that he did not reciprocate with scurrility and scorn. Exceptions prove the rule: Mr. Courtney’s hand bore no teeth marks and Elwood Hendrick still speaks lovingly of him.