“He ought to be sent to jail,” said my friend. “He ought to be hung. Any man ought to be hung who doesn’t know any better than to be right when all other decent healthy people in the world are wrong.”
However, let me return to my theme. I am trying to sketch briefly some of the conditions that are at the bottom of what I conceive to be going on nowadays in American writing. When we Americans had got our country pretty well settled and had fought and won our Civil War, something else happened. There came a revolution more widespread and deep in its meaning than any other revolution that has ever happened in the western world. Starting out as we did as an agricultural people we Americans found ourselves suddenly landed in the very midst of the industrial age. From being a nation of farmers, craftsmen and merchants we became, almost within a generation, the leading industrial nation of the world. We became factory hands rather than craftsmen, owners of factories rather than land owners.
We had got into a new age almost over night. What had happened to us?
Standardization, for one thing.
Let me explain. As a natural result of industrial growth came standardization. As anyone will understand, the man who owns a factory for the making of women’s dresses, chewing gum, cigars, automobiles, men’s hats, must, if his factory is to grow to the huge output he desires, create in the public mind a widespread demand for one kind of cigar, one kind of hat, one style of dress, one make of automobile.
Advertising as a force in our American life began to grow and here it is that the present day American writer came into flower.
As a natural result of the demand for standardization of taste and material desires came the modern magazine. The magazine with a circulation of a million or two million became not unusual. The real purpose, as everyone understands, was to create through advertising, a nation-wide demand for certain commodities. The magazines were business institutions run by business men with business ends in view. They have served the purpose for which they were created admirably and taken for what they are, that is to say at bottom merely as propaganda instruments for business expansion, no man can quarrel with them.
However, it happens you see that the advertising medium, put out frankly as an advertising medium, cannot exist. Although the modern man and woman of the streets has been pretty effectually standardized as regards his hat, the cigarette he smokes, the automobile he drives, he cannot in reality be standardized. Few of us will as yet order our wives from a mail order house. Although in America and during the long period during which we have all been so busy conquering the mechanical world we have in general looked upon the poet or the artist as rather a sissy, a nut, a man who had better be brushed aside, we all have something of the poet and lover in us. We cannot, at least not as yet, spend our hours of leisure outside factory and office hours just looking at advertisements of factory products and becoming excited because some man has performed the heroic feat of going from the city of New York to San Francisco, getting there in twenty-four hours in an aeroplane—instead of taking four or five days on a train, has found a machine that will get him there. We are really interested in the man in the machine—not in the machine itself.
Little thoughts leak in. We wonder why the man wanted to go to San Francisco in such a hurry—what he thought and felt as he rushed along—what he was up to. There are all kinds of disturbing little fancies. Our minds will not become standardized. They fly away from the machine to the man. There remains a curious interest in one another. Young men take girls on their arms and wander out at night into the darkness. Young men become friends and spend nights walking and talking together. Nothing that gets settled remains quite settled. When some of us become too old or tired to try any more to think or feel there is always youth coming on. Even marriage doesn’t settle things for us although for a long time our novelists went on the assumption that it did.
We find ourselves having to be intrigued into the pages of the magazines—and if the magazines are to retain the large circulation they require to do their work of standardization writers must be made to serve their purpose.