The provincial American and other papers

by Meredith Nicholson

A Boston newspaper which I greatly admire once published an editorial in which I was pilloried as a type of writer who basely commercializes his talent. It was a cruel stab; for, unlike my heroes, I do not wear a mail-shirt under my dress-coat. Once, wandering into a church in my own city, at a time when a dramatized version of one of my stories was offered at a local theatre, I listened to a sermon that dealt in the harshest terms with such fiction and drama.

Extravagant or ignorant praise is, to most of us, as disheartening as stupid and unjust criticism. The common practice of invoking great names to praise some new arrival at the portal of fame cannot fail to depress the subject of it. When my first venture in fiction was flatteringly spoken of by a journal which takes its criticisms seriously as evidencing the qualities that distinguish Mr. Howells, I shuddered at the hideous injustice to a gentleman for whom I have the greatest love and reverence; and when, in my subsequent experiments, a critic somewhere gravely (it seemed, at least, to be in a spirit of sobriety!) asked whether a fold of Stevenson’s mantle had not wrapped itself about me, the awfulness of the thing made me ill, and I fled from felicity until my publisher had dropped the heart-breaking phrase from his advertisements. For I may be the worst living author, and at times I am convinced of it; but I hope I am not an immitigable and irreclaimable ass.

American book reviewers, I am convinced from a study of my returns from the clipping bureaus for ten years, dealing with my offerings in two kinds of fiction, are a solid phalanx of realists where they are anything at all. This attitude is due, I imagine, to the fact that journalism deals, or is supposed to deal, with facts. Realism is certainly more favorably received than romance. I cheerfully subscribe to the doctrine that fiction that lays strong hands upon aspects of life as we are living it is a nobler achievement than tales that provide merely an evening’s entertainment. Mr. James has, however, simplified this whole question. He says, “The only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life, and that which has it not”; and if we must reduce this matter of fiction to law, his dictum might well be accepted as the first and last canon. And in this connection I should like to record my increasing admiration for all that Mr. James has written of novels and novelists. In one place and another he has expressed himself fully and confidently on fiction as a department of literature. The lecture on Balzac that he gave in this country a few years ago is a masterly and authoritative document on the novel in general. His “Partial Portraits” is a rich mine of ripe observation on the distinguishing qualities of a number of his contemporaries, and the same volume contains a suggestive and stimulating essay on fiction as an art. With these in mind it seems to me a matter for tears that Mr. James, with his splendid equipment and beautiful genius, should have devoted himself so sedulously, in his own performances in fiction, to the contemplation of cramped foreign vistas and exotic types, when all this wide, surging, eager, laboring America lay ready to his hand.

I will say of myself that I value style beyond most things; and that if I could command it, I should be glad to write for so small an audience, the “fit though few,” that the best-selling lists should never know me again; for with style go many of the requisites of great fiction,—fineness and sureness of feeling, and a power over language by which characters cease to be bobbing marionettes and become veritable beings, no matter whether they are Beatrix Esmonds, or strutting D’Artagnans, or rascally Bartley Hubbards, or luckless Lily Barts. To toss a ball into the air, and keep it there, as Stevenson did so charmingly in such pieces as “Providence and the Guitar,”—this is a respectable achievement; to mount Roy Richmond as an equestrian statue,—that, too, is something we would not have had Mr. Meredith leave undone. Mr. Rassendyll, an English gentleman playing at being king, thrills the surviving drop of mediævalism that is in all of us. “The tired business man” yields himself to the belief that the staccato of hoofs on the asphalt street, which steals in to him faintly at his fireside, is really an accompaniment to the hero’s mad ride to save the king. Ah, the joy in kings dies hard in us!

Given a sprightly tale with a lost message to recover, throw in a fight on the stair, scatter here and there pretty dialogues between the lover and the princess he serves, and we are all, as we breathlessly follow, the rankest royalists. Tales of real Americans, kodaked “in the sun’s hot eye,” much as they refresh me,—I speak of myself now, not as a writer or critic, but as the man in the street,—never so completely detach the weary spirit from mundane things as tales of events that never were on sea or land. Why should I read of Silas Lapham to-night, when only an hour ago I was his competitor in the mineral-paint business? The greatest fiction must be a criticism of life; but there are times when we crave forgetfulness, and lift our eyes trustfully to the flag of Zenda.

But the creator of Zenda, it is whispered, is not an author of the first or even of the second rank, and the adventure story, at its best, is only for the second table. I am quite aware of this. But pause a moment, O cheerless one! Surely Homer is respectable; and the Iliad, the most strenuous, the most glorious and sublime of fictions, with the very gods drawn into the moving scenes, has, by reason of its tremendous energy and its tumultuous drama, not less than for its majesty as literature, established its right to be called the longest-selling fiction of the ages.

All the world loves a story; the regret is that the great novelists—great in penetration and sincerity and style—do not always have the story-telling knack. Mr. Marion Crawford was, I should say, a far better story-teller than Mr. James or Mr. Howells; but I should by no means call him a better novelist. A lady of my acquaintance makes a point of bestowing copies of Mr. Meredith’s novels upon young working-women whom she seeks to uplift. I am myself the most ardent of Meredithians, and yet I must confess to a lack of sympathy with this lady’s high purpose. I will not press the point, but a tired working-girl would, I think, be much happier with one of my own beribboned confections than with even Diana the delectable.

Pleasant it is, I must confess, to hear your wares cried by the train-boy; to bend a sympathetic ear to his recital of your merits, as he appraises them; and to watch him beguile your fellow travelers with the promise of felicity contained between the covers of the book which you yourself have devised, pondered, and committed to paper. The train-boy’s ideas of the essentials of entertaining fiction are radically unacademic, but he is apt in hitting off the commercial requirements. A good book, one of the guild told me, should always begin with “talking.” He was particularly contemptuous of novels that open upon landscape and moonlight,—these, in the bright lexicon of his youthful experience, are well-nigh unsalable. And he was equally scornful of the unhappy ending. The sale of a book that did not, as he put it, “come out right,” that is, with the merry jingle of wedding-bells, was no less than a fraud upon the purchaser. On one well-remembered occasion my vanity was gorged by the sight of many copies of my latest offering in the hands of my fellow travelers, as I sped from Washington to New York. A poster, announcing my new tale, greeted me at the station as I took flight; four copies of my book were within comfortable range of my eye in the chair-car. Before the train started, I was given every opportunity to add my own book to my impedimenta.

The sensation awakened by the sight of utter strangers taking up your story, tasting it warily, clinging to it if it be to their liking, or dropping it wearily or contemptuously if it fail to please, is one of the most interesting of the experiences of authorship. On the journey mentioned, one man slept sweetly through what I judged to be the most intense passage in the book; others paid me the tribute of absorbed attention. On the ferry-boat at Jersey City, several copies of the book were interposed between seemingly enchanted readers and the towers and spires of the metropolis. No one, I am sure, will deny to such a poor worm as I the petty joys of popular recognition. To see one’s tale on many counters, to hear one’s name and titles recited on boats and trains, to find in mid-ocean that your works go with you down to the sea in ships, to see the familiar cover smiling welcome on the table of an obscure foreign inn,—surely the most grudging critic would not deprive a writer of these rewards and delights.

There is also that considerable army of readers who write to an author in various keys of condemnation or praise. I have found my correspondence considerably augmented by the large sales of a book. There are persons who rejoice to hold before your eyes your inconsistences; or who test you, to your detriment, in the relentless scale of fact. Some one in the Connecticut hills once criticized severely my use of “that” and “which,”—a case where an effort at precision was the offense,—and I was involved, before I knew it, in a long correspondence. I have several times been taken severely to task by foes of tobacco for permitting my characters to smoke. Wine, I have found, should be administered to one’s characters sparingly, and one’s hero must never produce a flask except for restorative uses,—after, let us say, a wild gallop, by night, in the teeth of a storm to relieve a beleaguered citadel, or when the heroine has been rescued at great peril from the clutch of the multitudinous sea. Those strange spirits who pour out their souls in anonymous letters have not ignored me. I salute them with much courtesy, and wish them well of the gods. Young ladies whose names I have inadvertently applied to my heroines have usually dealt with me in agreeable fashion. The impression that authors have an unlimited supply of their own wares to give away is responsible for the importunity of managers of church fairs, philanthropic institutions, and the like, who assail one cheerfully through the mails. Before autograph-hunters I have always been humble; I have felt myself honored by their attentions; and in spite of their dread phrase, “Thanking you in advance,”—which might be the shibboleth of their fraternity, from its prevalence,—I greet them joyfully, and never filch their stamps.