Books have been written before now in the interest of reform. They tell us that Justice set the Home Secretary to thinking. Well: Marcus Clarke actually caused the reform of the Australian penal settlements by his now forgotten novel, For the Term of His Natural Life. The hero of Marcus Clarke's book was innocent and unjustly condemned; the hero of Justice is guilty. Wanton cruelty is wicked whether the victim be a bad man or a good one; but the difference between these two heroes is not so purely accidental as, at first blush, it may seem. The author of His Natural Life starting out to capture sympathy, showed the brutal system wreaking itself on an innocent man, of good family, condemned for another's guilt. Mr. Galsworthy, equally eager to capture sympathy, makes his protagonist guilty of the theft, having tried in vain to incriminate an innocent person. Each writer depended, doubtless, on public sentiment for his effect. In Marcus Clarke's time, public sentiment—however unfortunate the fact may be—simply could not have been aroused to such a pitch by the sufferings of a liar and a thief as by the sufferings of an innocent man who is consciously paying another person's penalty. The Humanitarian Hero had not come into fashion—nor yet the guttersnipe. But Marcus Clarke's book did its work—proof that even in the '50's we were not so callous as we seemed.
I said earlier that in life, as well as in literature, men had changed. One's instances, obviously, must be from books, and not from one's acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philanthropy is the latest social ladder, but it would not be so if the people on the top rung were not interested in philanthropy. There has been, for whatever reason, a tremendous spurt of interest in sociological questions. Our hard-headed young men, of high ideals, find themselves fighting, of necessity, on a different battlefield from any that strategists would have chosen thirty years ago. Moreover, philanthropy being woman's way into politics, women have been giving their calm, or hysterical, attention to problems which, thirty years since, did not, as problems, exist for them. I said that the change of taste in women would probably account for much of the change of fashion in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing me some years since of her engagement, said (in nearly these words), 'He is tremendously interested in city missionary work; it wouldn't have been quite perfect if we hadn't had that in common.' Both were spoiled darlings of fortune, but the statement was quite sincere. Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have been 'quite perfect' in the eyes of either.
The mere conversation of the marriageable young has changed past belief. 'Social service' has usurped so many subjects! Have many people stopped to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological novel and the 'problem' play (in the old sense) have gone out of date? The psychology of hero and heroine, their emotional attitudes to each other, are largely worked out now in terms of their attitudes to impersonal questions, their religious or their sociological 'principles.' The individual personal reaction counts less and less. If they agree on the same panacea for the social evils, the author can usually patch up a passion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, for the most part, are the pages of intimate analysis. No intimate analysis is needed any longer. As for the 'problem play,' we have it still with us, but in another form. The Doll's House and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray are both antiquated: we do not call a drama a problem play now unless it preaches a new kind of legislation. And as for sex,—in its finer aspects it no longer interests us.
There was a great deal more sex, in its subtler manifestations, in the old novels and plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, a novel was a love story; and it was of supreme importance to a hero whether or not he could make the heroine care for him. It was also of supreme importance to the heroine. The romance was all founded on sex; and yet sex was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and heroines still marry; but when they consider sex at all, they are apt to consider it biologically, not romantically. We, as a public, are more frankly interested in sex than ever; but we think of it objectively, and a little brutally, in terms of demand and supply. And so we get often the pathetic spectacle of the hero and heroine having no time to make love to each other in the good old-fashioned way, because they are so busy suppressing the red-light district and compiling statistics of disease. Much of the frankness, doubtless, is a good thing; but beyond a doubt, it has cheapened passion. For passion among civilized people is a subtle thing: it is wrapped about with dreams and imaginings; and can bring human beings to salvation as well as to perdition. But when it is shown to us as the mere province of courtesans, small wonder that we turn from it to the hero who will have difficulty in feeling or inspiring it. Especially since we are told, at the same time, that even the courtesan plies her trade only from direst necessity.
After all, the only safe person to fall in love with nowadays is a reformer: socially, financially, and sentimentally. And most women, at least, could (if they would) say with the Princesse Mathilde, 'Je n'aime que les romans dont je voudrais être l'héroïne.' Certainly, unless for some special reason, no novel of which one would not like to be the heroine—in love with the hero—will reach the hundred thousand mark. If there are any of us left who regret the gentlemen of old—who still prefer our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliser—we must write our own novels, and divine our own heroes under the protective coloring of their conventional breeding. For they are not being 'featured,' at present, either in life or in literature.
A Confession in Prose
By Walter Prichard Eaton
UNLIKE M. Jourdain, who had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, I have been writing it nearly all of mine, quite consciously, and earning my living thereby since I was twenty-one years old. I am now thirty-four. I have been a professional writer of prose, then, for thirteen years—or shall I say a writer of professional prose? Much of this writing has been done for various American magazines; still more has been done to fill the ravenous columns of American newspapers; some, even, has been immured between covers. I have tried never to write sloppily, though I have of necessity often written hastily. I can honestly say, too, that I have tried at times to write beautifully, by which I mean rhythmically, with a conscious adjustment of sound and melody to the sense, with the charm of word-chiming further to heighten heightened thought. But I can also as honestly say that in this latter effort I have never been encouraged by a newspaper editor, and I have been not infrequently discouraged by magazine editors. Not all magazines compel you to chop up your prose into a maximum paragraph length of ten lines, as does a certain one of large circulation. Not all newspapers compel you to be 'smart,' as did one for which I worked compel us all. But the impression among editors is prevalent, none the less, that a conversational downrightness and sentence and paragraph brevity are the be-all and end-all of prose style, or at least of so much of prose style as can be grasped by the populace who read their publications; and that beautiful writing must be 'fine writing,' and therefore never too much to be avoided. So I started out from the classroom of Professor Lewis E. Gates, one of the keenest and most inspiring analysts of prose beauties this country has produced, to be a professional writer of prose, and dreamed, as youth will, of wrapping my singing robes about me and ravishing the world. I was soon enough told to doff my singing robes for the overalls of journalism, and I have become a writer of professional prose instead.
These remarks have been inspired by a long and wistful evening just spent in perusing Professor Saintsbury's new book, called The History of English Prose Rhythm. I shall hold no brief for the good professor's method of scansion. It matters little to me, indeed, how he chooses to scan prose. What does matter to me is that he has chosen to scan it at all, that he has brought forward the finest examples in the stately procession of English literature, and demonstrated with all the weight of his learning, his authority, his fine enthusiasm, that this prose is no less consciously wrought to pleasing numbers than is verse. We who studied under Professor Gates knew much of this before, if not in so detailed and would-be methodical a fashion. Charles Lamb knew it when he wrote, 'Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best measured cadences (prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors"; or the wild sweep of winds at midnight.' Sir Thomas Browne was not exactly unaware of it as he prepared his Urn Burial for the printer; nor the authors of the King James Version of the Bible when they translated—or if you prefer, paraphrased—the rhapsodic chapters of Isaiah. But it is pleasant, and not unimportant, to be once more reminded, in a generation when written speech has sunk to the conversational level of the man in the street, that 'prose has her cadences'; and to me, at least, it is melancholy, also. For I would strive to write such prose, in my stumbling fashion, were I permitted.
Writing about a fine art, as I am so often called upon to do, I would endeavor with what might lay in me to write about it finely. Suppose that art chances to be the drama. Why, when some compact, weighty, and worthily performed example comes to our stage, should I be expected to toss off a description of it in a style less compact and weighty and worthily conducted? On the rare occasions when a new play chances to be poetic, am I not justified in writing of it in poetic prose? How else, indeed, can I truly render back to my readers the subtler aspects of its charm? But for such writing there is little room in our hurrying and 'conversational' press, though now and then a despised dramatic editor is found who understands. Even the drama itself strives to be 'conversational' at all costs, under the banner of 'realism,' and profanity flourishes on our stage in what we must infer to be a most life-like manner, while we have almost forgotten that the spoken word can be melodious or imaginative. Criticism cries at its heels, and helps with flippant jest and broken syntax and cacophonous combinations of our poorest vernacular, in the general debasement. Do not tell me that men do not exist who could write differently of the stage, as men exist who can, and do, write differently for it. Every worthy dramatist can be paralleled by at least one worthy critic, and more probably by three or four, since the true creative instinct in drama is perhaps the rarest of human attributes, save only charity. But the editors appear to have determined that the public does not want such critics—and perhaps the editors are right. At least, the public does not often get them.