It is this last point—the devious ways of unsuspected preaching—that my profession is concerned with. Either we are altogether silent on the subject of religion in literature, deeming it too ticklish a subject upon which to commit ourselves, or we are zealous in our efforts to perpetuate the tradition that literature must complement the work of the church, only in a less outspoken way. Perhaps we do not do it consciously but the results obtained are the same. We merely advise students as to what subjects may be exploited and what subjects may not. Surely a subject bordering on the atheistic could never be made salable; not more than two or three periodicals would be open to such a story—and these of the obscure, “freaky” kind. Without a doubt even such a mild story as Balzac’s “An Atheist’s Mass” could never have seen the light of publication in an American periodical. The fact that the hero remains unconverted to the end would be fatal. We may write a story about an atheist, and have written such, but in our story, when the dénouement comes, the hero must exclaim to the assembled multitude, that he had tried to live without God and had found it unprofitable. The fact that there might be some poor wretch of a hero in this queer wide world who would not issue such a proclamation does not detract from the urgency of such a dénouement. It is one of our devious ways; without it the story can hope to travel no farther than the return-to-author basket. The characters we create must ultimately come to know God and the church—or they never come to know the reader. It is doubtful if an American Flaubert could hope for as cordial a reception of an atheistic character of his as the French have accorded the mediocre M. Homais of “Madame Bovary” fame.
It is far from my purpose to leave the implication that literature should preach atheism; but neither should it preach religion, theology, or anything else, for that matter, except in so far as life itself is a sermon to whomever it pleases to view it as such. “As a rule we may say that nothing in the world improves one less than sermonizing books and conversations; nothing is more wearisome, quite apart from the fact that nothing is more inartistic.... We do not demand of an author that he should work to make us better.... All that we can demand of him is that he work conscientiously.”[22] The moment an author stoops to uplift us he loses his balance as an artistic observer, recorder, and interpreter.
The attitude of our literature toward religion is based on a churchy interpretation of life and character which was unconsciously but none the less comprehensively expressed in a magazine article by Dr. Frank Crane. “Church people,” he wrote, “as a rule, pay their debts, observe the decencies of life, are clean of mind and body, cultivate those qualities that make for a successful and contented life, and get along together peacefully. And, as a rule, the embezzlers, thugs, drunkards, harlots, rascals, adulterers, gamblers, and swindlers do not cultivate church-going to any great extent.”[23]
This is a safe and sane doctrine to embrace when writing fiction for the popular magazines. Our editors, almost universally, have embraced it, and even though the Reverend Doctor specifically states that he speaks of people “as a rule,” which would permit of exceptions, editors at large will not recognize the existence of such exceptions. Truth does not count and experience is an illusion. If a writer has in his life had the misfortune of coming across a man or woman who was kind, charitable, gentle, moral, and noble and yet instead of being affiliated with a church was a member of the Secular League and a subscriber to the Truth Seeker he would best suppress the latter two points. If a writer has read statistics of extra-generous donations made to various church funds and has found among the names of donors not a few of universally notorious embezzlers, he must ignore the fact, if only in the interests of his career. His motto must be: Never write anything about church that could not be turned into an advertisement of the institution. If the motto conflicts with life, scratch life.
And yet religion, like sex, is one of the basic forces of life; it has helped to shape the course of human history and civilization. To deny the artist the prerogative to touch upon it unless it be in praise is to deny him the means to probe the human soul. To compel him to accept any institution as infallible and therefore beyond question of imperfection is to fetter his spirit. That a man who is a respected member of a respected church cannot be a thief in his business life or a brute at home is a more prostituting doctrine, the more so if not actually believed in but adopted for commercial purposes only, than any harlot was ever guided by, because it is so flagrantly contrary to truth. That the call of sex can never prove stronger than the holiest of religious precepts is a malicious canon of hypocritical dogmatism. This is the natural stuff of literature—the dramatic conflicts and seeming paradoxes, physical, psychic and intellectual, the eternal clash of nature and dogma, of passion and idea, of man and the world.
Puny fledgelings come to us for instruction in aerial literary navigation and we look in the tome of Thou Shalt Nots and clip their weak little wings. “Never dare to lift yourself more than a yard above the earth,” we admonish; “and you’ll find it easier if you use this trick and that,” we add. If, perchance, one of them after awhile finds the fawning breath of the earth too close and spreads its wings and begins to soar up into the clear ether we shrug our shoulders compassionately and say to the rest: “Another young bird gone wrong.” It has broken the limits of our taboos; it has tasted the wine of pure ozone; it has heard the call of exploration; it has turned irreverent. Should it succeed in growing a few dazzling feathers by the time it comes back in sight we may meet it with music and shout to it the hospitality of our gardens—as a mark of our ability to appreciate fine feathers; but more frequently we let it starve to death and keep the music for a touching funeral. During their lifetime we have nothing to do with the irreverent....
4. Social and Political Problems
No literature is more afraid of a courageous presentation of the social welter which America, in common with all the rest of the world, is undergoing in this age of reconstruction, than American literature. Not that it entirely fails to touch upon the mighty problems that have shaken our national life, but it still clings to an ancient sense of delicacy and an orthodox point of view which determines what may and may not be said. Whether a writer really subscribes to the point of view which colors nearly all of our efforts is immaterial; in order to sell his product he must adopt it, irrespective of any protesting personal scruples he might feel. Thus we find our literature, with the exception of a small and highly unprofitable part, expressing no more advanced views on the social phenomena of the day than our forefathers held, and most frequently less advanced.
The editor of The Coming Nation, discussing the kind of stories that are not wanted by film companies, mentions, among others, stories “where the hero arises and makes a soap-box speech on Socialism converting all by-standers.”[24] This statement applies with equal force to our magazine fiction as well. That no respectable editor of a fiction periodical will take such stories is a fact universally known among people acquainted with prevailing policies of our magazines. There would be nothing sinister in this policy, it would even be highly laudable, were it based on the logical assumption that men’s minds are not so easily swayed and that therefore no audience of by-standers can be converted by a single speech. But it is based on no such reasoning. The fact is that the story depicting a speaker converting by a few eloquent phrases, let us say, a body of strikers, to the employer’s point of view, impelling them to forsake their scheming leaders, tainted by European gold, of course, and return to work will and does find a ready market. Even the lack of story values are frequently overlooked where such a fictive incident occurs. The greatest of our national weeklies and monthlies will open their columns to the padded dissertation in story disguise on the unreasonableness of workingmen, or the inefficiency of government control of industries, or the blessings of a Big Business Administration.
What really determines the policy of exclusion of certain topics or angles of presentation is the safe-guarding of the interests of the big advertisers and the personal prejudices of the publishers. Our experienced writers, as well as the instructors of student-writers who know their business, know these prejudices perfectly. They know that popular views “get by” even if the artistry is not so very obstrusive. They know that unless one can fall in with the established views of the great majority it is best to leave social and political problems alone and to write about the South Seas, or Alaska, or the romantic story of John Jones, Jr., a son of a village blacksmith, who, after many thrilling hardships finally married Ivy Van Schyler, the pampered heiress of noble lineage and a huge block of sound railroad stock. They even know such small details as that if a hero uses soap, it is best not to mention it by an existing brand, for it may offend advertisers trying to fasten upon the public rival brands; that “talking machine” is safer than “Victrola” or “Grafonola” or any other patented name; that, in a word, no free advertising be given any company, thus causing other advertisers to complain. They know that it is dangerous to make a character intimate that his health has been impaired as a result of drinking too much ginger-ale, or taking headache powders, or yeast, or tobacco, or anything else, for that matter, that advertisers sell. It makes no difference whether a writer has accumulated a fund of personal observation to corroborate his statement. There are people who are trying to sell these products and will surely lodge a protest with the advertising manager of the publication in which such a story appears. In fact, numerous cases where such inadvertent remarks have resulted in diminished advertising space are on record.